The Land Across (11 page)

The next night I never got to sleep. They had given me a bed that had
ARMY
written all over it, a steel-frame bed with flat wire springs and a thin mattress. It was not as good as my bed at Kleon’s had been, but a ton better than sleeping on deck, which I had done out on the lake. I undressed and washed up as well as I could, then put on my clothes—the jeans and cool shirt I had been so happy to take out of my suitcase—and lay down and pulled the thin cotton blanket they had given me over me. I was thinking of the big dining room at the Hotel Sacher and how nice it would be to eat there again when I heard shots.

I jumped up and ran to the door of my room. It was locked and there was wire over the windows, which would not open anyway. The door was old and I had always thought it probably was not as strong as it looked. I kicked it a couple of times, knowing that would bring Vest in if he was still out there. Nobody came, so I hit it three or four times with my shoulder and it flew open.

The first thing I saw was a cop with a gun. He fired, and right then I thought he had missed me. Later I found out he had not.

I turned and ran, only not back into the room where they had kept me locked up. I got out into a big, dark place where they must have had a couple of hundred sewing machines in the old days. It would have been a good place to hide in, only getting shot at like that had put a real scare into me and I just wanted to get away.

Which I did. The cops had the place surrounded, or thought they did, but I guess they had not seen the door I found. It opened on a stack of old steel drums like you might ship diesel in, with just room enough for me to wiggle between the drums and the wall. When I got out of there, I saw a couple of police cars with searchlights aimed at the building, and soldiers, too, holding the kind of rifles soldiers have.

You can guess what I did next. I got out of there as fast as I could, you know it! I had not gone far when I saw a poster. It was half torn off and somebody had spray painted a short word I could not read on what was left. But it was a picture of the third border guard wearing a suit. Part of the face was gone and there was some spray paint on the rest, but it was him. After that I saw at least two others, not painted and not torn. They did not seem important; still I wondered about them. You would have, too.

The city was mostly dark, but I got lucky and found the district where the bars and clubs and so forth were. They call it the Mousukos. (I found that out later.) There were a lot of places I would have liked to see, only I did not have any money.

Also I was bleeding just above my belt. It was not all that bad until my side started to stiffen up. The bullet had almost missed me clean, just not quite. After I found out I had been hit, looking around the Mousukos was not as much fun as it had been, and it had not been a whole lot of fun then. Pretty soon I was just looking for any workable place where I could hole up. There were streets that were no better than alleys, but they stunk and there were rats in them. If I had been in New York or even New Orleans—in LA or Chicago or someplace like that—I might have been able to find a car somebody had forgotten to lock. Then I would have crawled into the back and gone to sleep there, and anybody who found me would just think I had gone over my limit and chase me out. Only this was not New York or New Orleans either, or even Chicago or LA. Those people in the bars and clubs had walked to get there, or maybe ridden in one of the wagons with long benches that would take you downtown for a little change.

I kept looking, but after a while the crowd thinned out and it started to get light. So I went up to a guy who looked pretty decent and asked the way to the park. His German was not as good as mine, but it was better than a lot of people’s and he told me.

There would be bushes in the park is what I thought, and I could hide in them and get some sleep. After I had rested up, I might be able to find something to eat. And after that I would start looking for the American embassy.

It seemed to me like a good plan, only I never even got started on it. A cop spotted the bloodstain on my shirt. When he found out I did not speak his language, he put cuffs on me, steel ones like Raincoat’s, and marched me off to a police station. By then I was so tired I could not walk fast for more than three or four steps. Pretty soon I would start lagging and he would hit me with his club. Cops here in the U.S. call that a baton, only it is really a club and not anything anybody would conduct an orchestra with.

In a way it was good that we had to walk, because it gave me time to think. I decided the way to handle things was to pretend I did not understand German. Or French, either, although my French is really pretty good.

So when we got to the station, I would talk nothing but English. They tried German on me, and a couple of languages I could not identify, maybe Polish and Russian, or Romanian and Hungarian. They were all Greek to me, and Greek might be a pretty good guess, too. How about Greek and Turkish?

Then a guy came in and looked at my wound. He could have been a doctor, but my guess is he was an ambulance attendant or something. He gave me shots and probed it a little, then he sewed up both holes.

When he had finished they shoved me in a cell. There were two other guys there already and no bunks, but one guy was asleep anyway, just lying on the floor. Which is what I did. The other guy was sitting in a corner and looking deep blue. He did not try to talk to me, and I did not try to talk to him, not even English.

I went to sleep, and pretty fast.

When I woke up it was afternoon, I think. My wound hurt again because the shots had worn off, and I had to pee. A slop jar took care of the peeing, but nothing stopped my wound from hurting. It just kept on and after a while I sort of got used to it.

Then they marched me out and put me in a car and drove me to a big gray building that might have been a couple of miles outside the city. Pretty soon I was sitting in a real honest-to-God waiting room with beat-up chairs, and old magazines I could not read, and a cop to make sure I did not run. He put cuffs on me, too, but with my hands in front instead of in back. That was really nice of him, and I tried to show him I appreciated it.

After about an hour I was taken to a little meeting room, and there was a red-headed guy in there who smiled at me and said, “How about a cigarette? Want one?” He was maybe two years older than I was, and he said it in English.

I said no thanks and asked if he was American.

“Nope. I did my growing up in Saint Louis, though. Went to high school there and all that crap.” He offered his hand. “Demetrios Bobokis—Butch Bobokis. How about some coffee?”

I shook and said I would love some, and something to eat if he could arrange for it. So he went to the door and talked to somebody out there, then came back and sat down. “It will be a while. Where you from?”

I said I had lived all over, which was the truth.

“Here?”

“No, that’s why I came here. I’d never been here before and I wanted to see it. Listen, I’m not a spy or anything like that.”

“You’re a revolutionary.” He grinned at me. “You were broadcasting for them, that crazy religion.”

“They made me, and that’s the absolute truth. I was under arrest in Puraustays. I was supposed to live with a guy there, and they were going to shoot him if I didn’t. Only I could go out in the daytime and take pictures for the travel book I’m going to write about your country. I found this very big, run-down old house, the Willows. I wanted to take a lot of pictures there. There were painted ceilings and lots of other neat stuff, and it’s supposed to be haunted.”

“You get any pictures of ghosts?”

“No.” After I said that I pulled up short to think. “You know, I really don’t know. Sometimes ghosts will show up in a picture even if you didn’t see them when you took it. I read a thing about that once, and I never had a chance to look at mine. Three guys knocked on the door, I opened it up to see what they wanted, and they grabbed me.”

He nodded to that.

“They put me in a boat and took me across the lake—”

“Up the lake.”

“Okay, up the lake to here. After that they held me in an old factory where they used to make shirts or dresses or something.”

He nodded again. “Go on.”

“They gave me a copy of their holy book that had been translated on somebody’s computer. And they—”

“Wait a minute. Is English the only language you know?”

“Huh-uh. I know German and French pretty well. A little Japanese, too, only not very much.”

“The report I got on you said that you only spoke English.”

“Yeah.” My mind was working so fast it damned near flew apart. “That’s what I pretended, okay? Put yourself in my shoes. I’m from America and I’m in big trouble. Do I want to talk to somebody who knows German or somebody who knows English?”

He nodded, slowly this time. “I’ve got it. Was this with the Legion of the Light, too?”

“No. They knew I spoke German, because that’s how I talked to them when I answered the door.”

He got out a little notebook and made a note in it. “Okay, I want you to think about this and think hard. Did you ever hear any of them speak English? Just one word, maybe?”

I shook my head. “Absolutely not. Believe me, I’d have jumped all over him if anybody had.”

“What they gave you was a computer translation? Did they say so?”

“No, it just read like one. What’s so big about this?”

“It’s my job to ask the questions. Your job is to answer them.”

“All right, I’ll take a stab at it. It seems like hardly anybody has computers here.”

I waited for him, but he did not say a word.

“It’s not like that in America. Suppose you were in America and somebody told you to go find a guy who owned a computer, it would take you about five minutes. Only not here. I’ve met quite a few of you, none of you seemed like you had a computer.” As soon as I had said that, I got the feeling it was not quite true. I could have named one guy who might have had one, and I wanted to kick myself for not having braced him on it.

“Go on.”

“So you can go looking for somebody who’s got one and software to translate your language into English.”

“Or German into English. We know they’ve got a German translation already, and we know who did that one.”

“Want to tell me?”

“Hell, no. Or anyway, not yet. You were forced to broadcast for the Legion?”

“Right.”

“Would you call them friends of yours?”

“No way!” I shook my head.

“Would you consider working for us? Coming over to our side?”

I did not say anything for a minute or two.

“Well? A straight answer.”

“Okay. The straight answer is that I’d have to think about it. For one thing I came over to your side already. I wrote all the things I said in my broadcasts. Did you know that? I wrote my own scripts.”

“I assumed it.”

“They gave me the book, like I said, and they lectured me a lot about the Light of Stability. After that I wrote myself a script. I’d found out we were in an old factory, and there was a room there with a million kinds of buttons in wooden boxes, so they’d been making clothes. Probably a lot of different kinds. I put that in a broadcast and you guys came like I knew you would.”

“We rescued you.”

I raised my shoulders and let them drop. “I’ve been in jail, and I’ve seen enough of this building to tell it’s a prison. If you want more, one of the cops I tipped off shot me. Want to see the place?”

He waved that one away. “I’ll get our doctor to take a look at it. What else can I do for you?”

“You can let me talk to somebody at the American embassy.”

“If I can.” He sounded tired. “I can let them know you’re here, and I will. They probably won’t come.”

“Why not?”

“Ask them. I don’t know. If you’ll work with us, you won’t be in prison. That’s a promise.”

“What if I quit?”

“Get real! What do you think?”

There was more, but I do not want to write it and you would not want to read it. We talked about America and the European Union, and he did not know as much as I wanted him to, and I did not know as much as he wanted me to. So after a while a guard—not the cop I had before—came and took me to a cell.

It was not as bad as I expected, which was something Butch had promised over Danish and coffee, a nice cell. There were two bunks in it, but no other prisoner. Right away I figured there would be somebody shoved in with me pretty soon, and he would be a plant.

Do you want more? There was a little window with wire over it, low enough for me to look through. That was bad in winter until they put a cover over it, but when I got there the nights were pretty warm and it was not bad at all. There was a toilet and a washbowl, too. There was no hot water, but I used my hands and my shirttail for a washrag and cleaned up as well as I could, telling myself that if I ever saw Butch Bobokis again I would ask him for soap.

The bunk was better than the one in the old factory, and the blanket was wool. I was more than ready for both of them.

I slept all night and half the morning. Probably they had called the prisoners for breakfast, but I slept right through it. When I sat up, there was a big guy in my cell sitting on the other bunk and looking at me. So I told him, “Good morning,” in German.

He said, “I don’t suppose you understand English?” It was in English, and you could tell he had about given up hope by the sound of his voice.

I said, “Sure I do. Where you from?”

“Cincinnati. We call it the Queen City.” He sighed. “And I wish to God I was back there.”

We talked some more, and I found out that his name was Russ Rathaus and he was sixty-three. He looked quite a bit younger than that to me, maybe fifty or fifty-five tops.

“I had a neat little novelty business,” he said. “We made voodoo dolls and sold them all over the country. I don’t mean we dealt with customers direct. We wholesaled them to novelty shops, the kind of stores where they sell souvenirs and plates with the presidents on them. All that junk. My partner invented the process, and I bankrolled him, running the business out of my garage at first. You looked at me funny when I said voodoo dolls. I guess anybody would.”