Star Chamber Brotherhood (24 page)

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It was a quarter past eight when Frank Werner arrived at the Somerset Club. He had left the van in a parking garage in the Theater District to be picked up the next day by one of Hector’s men. He changed quickly into his white bartender’s jacket, starchedfront shirt and bow tie, and joined Steve behind the bar.

To Werner’s surprise, the Club was nearly packed, though very few of his usual customers were in the crowd. This puzzled him until he recalled that this was the night that Jake had decided to experiment with hiring live entertainment in an effort to attract a younger clientele. According to Jake, the talent he had booked had also helped boost traffic at a friend’s club in Cambridge. The talent was available tonight, Jake’s friend told him, because the Cambridge club had been booked for a wedding.

Werner scanned the faces of the guests and saw an unusual number of academic and intellectual types in corduroys and tweeds, along with a dozen or so in the skinny black pants, bulky sweaters, and long, striped scarves favored by artists like the ones Werner had seen outside Franz Meier’s office in the Leather District. The remaining customers appeared to be graduate students and undergraduates above the drinking age.

Werner checked in with Steve, who ran the bar during his increasingly frequent absences, and asked whether the new crowd appeared to be competent drinkers.

“Not like our regulars,” Steve replied after a moment’s thought. “But that’s not to say they’re tight with their money. They’re drinking more than their share of white wine, highballs, and rum-and-cokes. They’re no teetotalers, that’s for sure.”

“How about the music? Is it helping us?”

“Hard to say,” Steve mused. “The folksinger, who just finished, didn’t amount to much more than background noise. This next group is amplified, so they may be different. You know, I heard they had to leave their last gig because their songs got a bit too political.”

“Funny, Jake didn’t say anything about that,” Werner remarked.

“Oh, yeah, they caused quite a stir. I didn’t see anything in the local news, but word has it their fans followed them here tonight in hope of more fireworks.”

“Too hot for Cambridge and they’ve come here?” Werner questioned. “I don’t like that at all. Is Jake upstairs?”

“He took off early. Something about his family. He wanted me to tell you he left you in charge.”

At that moment Werner saw someone waving at him from a stool at the far end of the bar. It was Harvey Konig. In his brown tweeds, he blended in well with the other academics in attendance. Konig smiled and held up his drink in greeting. Werner could see immediately that he was drunk. Then he noticed the two linebacker types in cheap gray suits standing only a meter or two behind Konig. One of them, a stocky bullet of a man with a crew cut and a bulldog face, followed Konig’s glance to Werner and caught his eye, as if in warning. Of all nights to have government agents on premises, Werner muttered under his breath, why did it have to be tonight?

Werner went back to fixing drinks while keeping an eye on the low wooden platform across the room where the band was setting up their drums, synthesizer, and electric guitar. The band’s two lead singers, who conferred quietly behind the platform, consisted of a spindly youth in his mid-twenties with burning eyes and a three-day growth of beard, and a willowy female undergraduate whose wavy reddish brown hair, dreamy eyes, and knowing smile appeared to Werner sufficient to melt a man’s heart before she sang a single note. Werner wondered how so young a couple had managed to attract a following among this crowd.

The first song was a Leonard Cohen ballad sung by the male lead that, though beautifully rendered, made no special impact on Werner. The next number, also by the male lead, was the rollicking Vietnam-era crowd-pleaser from the Woodstock festival, Country Joe’s “Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag.” That song woke up the audience and had the older members singing along.

Well come on all of you big strong men,
 

Uncle Sam needs your help again,

He got himself in a terrible jam,
 

Way down yonder in Vietnam,

Put down your books and pick up a gun,
 

We’re gonna have a whole lot of fun.

And its 1,2,3. What are we fightin’ for?

Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn,
 

The next stop is Vietnam,

And its 5,6,7. Open up the pearly gates.
 

Well there ain’t no time to wonder why

Whoopee, we’re all gonna die.

But the crowd came fully alive when the female lead came on stage and joined her partner in “Back on the Chain Gang,” the sentimental 1980s favorite by the Pretenders. Werner watched closely and saw the crowd’s response peak when the lyrics railed against ‘circumstances and powers beyond our control.’

Back on the chain gang

The powers that be

That force us to live like we do

Bring me to my knees

When I see what they’ve done to you

But I’ll die as I stand here today

Knowing that deep in my heart

They’ll fall to ruin one day

For making us part.

Werner suppressed a smile. Could this generation be the one that would at last question what had happened to America under the Unionist regime? How ironic for the
nomenklatura
and the New Class to face the same rhetoric that was directed against Johnson and Nixon during the Vietnam War. But before Werner could take this train of thought any further, the band struck up the next tune. Werner recognized it as Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” and watched the audience howl with delight at its cynicism, delivered in silky tones by the shapely girl with reddish brown hair:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows that the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows

By the end of the song, the reason for the group’s popularity was becoming clear. They voiced the distrust and doubt that others dared not express. Their youth, their talent, and their casual sense of knowing, free of bitterness or rancor, did not mark them as rebels or dissidents, but as artists offering up their individual vision of American life. And what they saw did not match the official version from the state-run media.
 

The two young singers seemed to sense that the audience was in their power. The girl brushed the hair back from her eyes and directed the band with a nod to start the next number, another by Leonard Cohen entitled “The Future.” This one was powered by a driving beat and its opening lyrics promised an edgy romp of black humor:

Give me back the Berlin wall

Give me Stalin and St. Paul

I’ve seen the future, brother,
 

It is murder.

Destroy another fetus now

We don’t like children anyhow

Give me peace
 

Or give me Hiroshima

Give me crack and anal sex

Take the only tree that’s left

And stuff it up the hole
 

In your culture

But as the verses went on, Werner detected that the lyrics were no longer Cohen’s but new ones that the couple had penned to reflect contemporary events. And the new lyrics weren’t just edgy; they were raw. As the stanzas grew more stinging, the crowd’s response grew more raucous.

Give me back Islamic Law

Beards and burkas for Ma and Pa

And stone me if I don’t

Bow down to Allah

Go slit my throat, lop off my head

Just make it quick, so I’ll be dead

I’d rather die than face their

Propaganda

Give me back the Russian War

I’ll freeze to death in bloody snow

To keep the Yellow Peril

From our borders

I’ll fight on those Far Eastern shores

Drink Russian vodka, screw Russian whores

Take on the Chinese Army

For our Leader

Alarm bells clanged in Frank Werner’s head so loud that they hurt. This was beyond political. By Unionist standards it was seditious. And it was happening in his club, with DSS agents right in the audience. Werner glanced toward the end of the bar where Harvey Konig gazed at the singers with mouth agape. Behind him, the government linebackers were bulldozing through the crowd toward the stage. Before the duo could launch their next verse, the DSS men had flashed their badges at the sound engineers and forced them to kill the amplifiers. All at once the music stopped. For a moment the room was silent.

Then the agent with the crew cut and bulldog face mounted the stage and addressed the crowd.
 

“Okay, folks, listen up. The show is over due to technical difficulties,” he announced in a thick South Boston accent. “But stay where you are, the next round of drinks is on the house.”
 

Then, as a ridiculous afterthought, he added, “Now, let’s put our hands together for the band!”

The applause was tepid and confused, as if the audience regretted having lost control and revealed too much about themselves. And indeed they had, for the second government agent was already on his two-way radio, doubtless calling in the police or the Unionist militia. Werner had seen this before. The government agents would secure the doors and the police would scan the identification of every person in the club before they could leave. For anyone with a prior record of political dissent, it could be the first step on the road leading to the camps.

“Bulldog” left the stage and headed toward the front door while his partner covered the emergency exit. Werner looked for Harvey Konig, but he had apparently recognized his chance to escape and was gone. Bulldog stopped at the bar on his way toward the door and waved Werner closer.

“Keep pouring, barman,” Bulldog ordered. “It may be a while before these folks can leave. But when they do, don’t go away. You and I are going to have a little chat.”

“Good. I’ll have your tab ready,” Werner replied with a genial grin. “Because that round of drinks you ordered for everyone is going on the credit card you gave me, Big Shot. You can call it a government stimulus.”

“This could get interesting,” the agent replied menacingly on his way to the door.

Werner gathered his wits. Showing up on the DSS’s radar screen for his acquaintance with Harvey Konig was bad enough. Having hosted an anti-Unionist protest songfest could put him directly under their spotlight. On the other hand, he now possessed an ironclad alibi for the evening. He could count on Bulldog and his partner for that. And by morning he expected to know whether he would need it.

Chapter 14

Flashback: Late June, 2024
Kamas, Utah

The midsummer sun was high in the sky and shone hard on the Kamas Valley, driving the temperatures into the mid-nineties. More than five thousand prisoners of the Kamas corrective labor camp, survivors of an armored assault just after dawn, sat Indian-style on the Division Four parade ground waiting to be assigned for transport to other camps throughout the western United States and Canada. Most had not seen food or drink since the night before. Many had kept vigil through the night awaiting the attack, and had fought hard to repel the heavily armed attackers. Though the seriously wounded had already been evacuated to a field hospital outside the camp perimeter, some on the parade ground refused treatment and still bore untreated wounds.

Frank Werner shifted from sitting cross-legged to kneeling to revive the circulation in his legs. His wrists were already raw from the self-locking plastic restraint loop that tied his hands behind his back. But these discomforts were trivial compared to his splitting headache and the pain that radiated from his ribs, back, and shoulders. Though he had not fought the attackers, they had beaten him with clubs and rifle butts when government troops overran his forward observer position atop the inner perimeter wall. Later that morning he had been forced at gunpoint to stand for nearly two hours while the other prisoners were brought to the parade ground from other parts of the camp.
 

A fine reddish-brown dust, stirred up during the tank attack, covered Werner from head to toe. With the continuous rumbling of trucks and armored personnel carriers in and out of the camp, the dust continued to blow through the gaps in the perimeter walls and across the camp’s open spaces. From time to time he coughed up brown goo from the depths of his lungs, but by now he could barely generate enough saliva to spit.

Werner looked from side to side and saw that the other prisoners were arranged in blocks of twenty on a side, each man positioned three paces from those to his front, back and sides. Lanes ten paces wide separated each block from the next. He could see that the entire formation was four blocks wide, and guessed that the parade ground held at least a dozen blocks of twenty men, though he could not be certain since he was unable to count the rows behind him. Having been among the first prisoners captured, Werner sat near the middle of the first rank of blocks.