The Distance Beacons (7 page)

The youngest and prettiest of the women looked up finally and noticed me. "Walter!"

"Hi, Ann." She was Henry's daughter, a dark-eyed girl of about seventeen; despite the genetic influences on her, the only thing that made her angry was her name. Her full name, she had confessed to me once, was Anarchy, and every time she heard it she felt a profound urge to murder her father. "Is the AMA in?"

Ann laughed and stood up. "I'll go get him." She thought Linc's title for her father, and especially its abbreviation, were hilarious. I admired her figure as she walked through some dark curtains into the back room.

A few minutes later a little bald man with thick glasses perched on the end of his nose stuck his head through the curtains. "Walter Sands," he said. "What are you doing here?"

He sounded angry. "I've come to ask for your daughter's hand in marriage," I said.

"Phooey," he replied.

"Well then, how about a friendly conversation with my old pal?"

He looked put out. "I can spare you a few minutes, I suppose."

"Thanks."

The salesman opened a section of the counter and let me pass through. Beyond the curtains, Ann was standing next to her father. "Come on," Henry said to me. "And you get back to work," he growled at Ann.

"Yes, master." Ann grinned at me as she walked past.

Henry led me up a flight of stairs, then down a short hallway to his study.

The study looked a bit like my third-floor library, but I had a feeling there was no overlap between the contents of his groaning bookshelves and my own. "Have you ever read a novel?" I asked him.

"No time," he snapped. He sat down at a table piled high with papers. On the wall behind him, a couple of old Sierra Club posters showed the world as it once was. I sat in an uncomfortable ladder-back chair opposite him. "I haven't seen you in a while," he said. He sounded like a probation officer in one of the novels he had never read.

"I was away. I came back."

"So I heard."

"And Charlestown isn't my favorite place."

"That's not my fault."

Conversation with Henry isn't easy. I changed the topic. "So, how's the book coming?"

Henry eyed me suspiciously, as if probing for some ulterior motive. I tried to look interested. "Slowly," he admitted finally. "It's vital that I get everything right. It's vital that I make people
understand
." He bent over and picked up a large stack of paper from the floor. "I do have an extra copy of what I've completed so far," he said, "if you'd like to—"

"No, no, that's okay," I said quickly. "I'd prefer to wait for your final word on the subject."

Henry put the stack down. I tried not to look relieved. I don't think I succeeded. "You're never going to read it, are you?" he said.

"Of course I am," I lied.

He shook his head. "You just don't care. Remember, Walter, those who ignore the past—"

"—are condemned to listen to people who are obsessed by it."

"I may be obsessed," Henry said, "but it's an important obsession."

"Depends on the outcome," I replied. I thought back over the years I had known Henry and watched his stacks of paper grow. "I may never start your book, Henry, but have you considered that you may never finish it? I think your anger means too much to you; you can't let it go."

"You don't think I have reason to be angry? The governments of the world have poisoned us and all our descendants, and you expect maybe cheerfulness? I should whistle a happy tune and thank God they haven't exploded the rest of their bombs yet?"

"I just think your anger could be more productive," I said. "If the world never sees your book, how is it going to learn from its mistakes?"

"The world will see it all right," Henry replied, "if people would only stop interrupting me. Now, what can I do for you, Walter?"

I smiled my ingratiating smile. "I have a favor to ask."

I shouldn't have made him angry, of course, given the nature of the favor. But that would've been next to impossible. And I really didn't want to read his book. "Did you see the
Globe
this morning?"

Henry made a face. "The president is coming."

"And there's been a threat already."

He nodded. "Your friend Gwen's story."

"Right. She got her information from me. The Feds have hired me to track down this group called The Second American Revolution." I kept smiling. "I thought maybe you might be able to help."

Henry erupted. "You want me to help you save the skin of the president of the United States, for God's sake? What do you think I've been doing for the past twenty-three years—writing a love letter to the government? Those people in Atlanta want to do it all over again—build up the nation-state so that they can have wars with other nation-states, so that people like you and me can end up rotting in a ditch from radiation poisoning or starving to death after another nuclear winter. I don't want to help you track down The Second American Revolution, Walter; I want to join it."

"Pretty please," I said.

Henry glowered at me. I knew what he was thinking. And he knew I knew.

He owed me.

I met Henry shortly after the Federal troops came up from Atlanta and put an end to the worst of that awful time called the Frenzy. Gwen and I were about fifteen, and we had just moved into our house in Louisburg Square and started to live some semblance of a normal life. It was a hopeful period for many people, but not for Henry Fisher. When I met him, he was in the process of trying to get himself shot to death.

Darkness was falling, and I was rushing home along Boylston Street in the Back Bay. The Feds had imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the city, and they weren't interested in excuses if they caught you on the streets at night. So when I heard the shouted "Halt!" followed immediately by a gunshot, I wasted no time ducking into the shadows of an abandoned storefront, cursing my stupidity for staying out so late.

I turned to see a couple of soldiers, rifles raised, walking down the middle of the street. But they weren't walking toward me. They were headed toward a bald man, who held his ground as they approached. "Who do you guys think you are?" he demanded. "Is your only response to any situation to use your rifles? That's precisely the mentality that got us into this mess. I'm out here trying to find my child, and all you want to do is kill me. Can't you see that it's got to stop? How can you be so stupid?"

He kept talking like that, working himself up into his own frenzy. And then he started walking toward the soldiers. I could tell that this was a mistake. Even back then, before I had been a soldier, I could sense their fear and indecision. Here was a crazy man in a crazy city where they definitely did not want to be, and he was coming toward them, his right hand hidden beneath something (it turned out to be a bolt of fabric), and any second they could die a stupid, useless, painful death. It would be so easy to shoot the guy and get it all over with. No one would mind. No one would question them....

"We just want to be left alone," he ranted. "Haven't you done enough to us? Can't you just go away and let us solve our own problems? Can't you just go away?"

The soldiers would have liked nothing better. But they were here, for better or worse. They raised their rifles, but the bald man didn't notice, lost in his own furious world.

"Daddy!"

The bald man stopped his harangue. The soldiers lowered their rifles. "Daddy! I've been looking all over for you!" I ran out of the shadows and into Henry Fisher's arms. "Shut up, you dope," I whispered.

He looked at me. His glazed eyes seemed to refocus. He did as he was told.

"Better get your father indoors, kid," one of the soldiers said. "You don't know how close he came."

"Yes, sir. He gets excited sometimes, sir. Won't happen again, sir." I dragged the Angriest Man in America into the abandoned store and kept him there all night, despite his insistence that he had to go out and find his daughter. In the morning we went to the police station on Berkeley Street and found Anarchy happily playing with a holster in a pleasant cell where the nice men had put her until someone came for her. Henry managed to swallow his rage long enough to thank me for saving his life. I had made a grouchy but true friend.

So what are friends for? Sitting across from me in his study eight years later, Henry knew. "You're making a big mistake, Walter," he said.

"I know," I replied. "But here I am, asking for your help. What do you say?"

Henry shrugged. "How can I help? I can't tell you where to find The Second American Revolution. I've never heard of them."

Swell. "Do you think you would've heard of them, if they existed?"

"Any crazy person can give himself a name and make a threat," Henry pointed out. "But if the group is real, and their threat is serious, I think I'd have heard something about them."

I recalled the suggestion Gwen's editor had made. "Maybe some group is using a new name to keep the Feds from tracking them down."

Henry nodded, and thought for a moment. "If you want to assume that a group is really trying to disrupt the president's visit and the referendum, and they're using a pseudonym, I suppose you have to consider who has the intelligence and the resolve to pull it off. That narrows the choice down considerably. There's a lot of grumbling in this world, Walter, but precious little done about it."

I refrained from pointing out that he might be considered one of the inactive grumblers. "What groups would you suggest, then?"

"The only one that comes to mind is the Church of the New Beginning," Henry replied. "I don't think much of Flynn Dobler, but he has a following. And he isn't stupid."

I considered Henry's suggestion. I knew a little bit about the Church of the New Beginning. "I thought those people just ignored the government and everything associated with it."

"Correct. But that's a very foolish strategy, Walter. Because what happens if this referendum is successful? Before long the government is in Charlestown and Concord and all the places it stays away from now. And then it'll demand taxes from Dobler's people, and force their children to go to public schools, and draft their young men, and then what's left of Dobler's new beginning? He knows all this. He knows he has a stake in what happens during the next couple of weeks. It wouldn't surprise me if he decided to do something about it."

Henry made sense. It wasn't much of a lead, maybe, but it was worth looking into. I stood up. "Thanks for your help, Henry. If you hear of anything, will you let me know?"

Henry didn't seem happy. "I suppose," he said. "But we're even now. Don't expect me to compromise my principles like this again."

"You're a sweetheart, Henry. I'll let myself out."

Henry grunted a good-bye, and I made my way back downstairs. Ann waved to me from her sewing machine. "How was he?" she asked.

"The usual. When are you going to run away from him and move in with a nice guy like me?"

She considered. "As soon as he finishes his book." I rolled my eyes. "What a waste. No wonder he's never going to finish it."

"Someday," she said. "Don't be a stranger, Walter."

"I won't."

I went out through the shop, unlocked my bicycle, and got on.

I hadn't pedaled fifty feet before I knew I was in big trouble.

Chapter 5

Rounding the corner on foot were two of O'Malley's lieutenants: Pete Santoro and Eddie Grimes. They recognized me as soon as I recognized them. They smiled. I turned and started pedaling in the opposite direction.

The opposite direction was uphill, however, and I didn't get very far before a large hand grabbed the back of my jersey and pulled me off my bike.

The hand belonged to Santoro. He was a big man with a black beard, glittering eyes, and a gap-toothed grin. With an earring and a sword he would have made an excellent pirate. His friend Eddie Grimes was also big—O'Malley liked the brawny type—but he had red hair and so many freckles they looked like a disease. Maybe they were a disease. He stood in front of me while Santoro twisted the neck of my jersey. "What're you doing here, asshole?" he said.