This Shared Dream (38 page)

She recalled that her father had been in many such pubs during the Blitz, and it was always the same: The buzz overhead, then complete silence in the pub the instant gas flow to the engine stopped, and everyone waited for death to come or pass overhead. And then it landed. Somewhere else. The explosion sometimes rocked the room, in which case plaster might rain into the ale, or it might land a few blocks off, muffled but still clear. But unless it was a direct hit and set everything ablaze, the patrons instantly resumed their conversations, not discussing the by-now-routine fact that death had skipped them once again.

Well. She would take a cue from that behavior. This was another good thing for a former resident of the loony bin not to mention to anyone. Perhaps a few molecules of the Game Board lingered here on the side porch, where the whole family had once played an epic game on it with Wink, and the Game Board had taken them for a ride in a very unusual airplane.

She took a deep breath and drained her coffee cup.

She went out and chatted with a few people from Georgetown about her dissertation, which concentrated on postwar Russia.

*   *   *

Bette had closely observed the party preparations from her perch, and through her listening devices. She’d watched as U Street Liquors pushed dollies holding ponies of various beers and cases of wines up the sidewalk and local groceries delivered foodstuffs.

Her own nexus-sensing cues, some kind of new sense developed by proximity to the Device for so many years, gathered, like ozone before a thunderstorm, clear as lightning on a ridgetop or black clouds roiling overhead. But for the life of her she still couldn’t pin it down to sounds, like Sam and Wink, or with the seemingly deliberate poise of Hadntz, who seemed to Bette to just walk down a hallway of time, turn a particular doorknob, and pass from one timestream to another.

Instead, it invaded her being like the aura of a migraine zigzagged across vision, like a snake poised to strike, unavoidable, on the rocky path before her. Something was going to change.

While guests arrived downstairs, Bette readied herself. She donned the clothing in which she’d arrived—her WAC uniform, and prepared for the worst with passports, the currency of many countries, cigarettes for herself and for bribes, as well as jewelry.

As the line of inevitable storm clouds cleared the ridgetop, as a series of dots floated across her vision, as the rattlesnake’s head descended, she descended the back stairs.

She slipped into the nexus through the kitchen door, where dozens of people crushed around the table and leaned against the countertops. She heard Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” issue from the screened-in porch, past the dining room, and made her way to the open French doors, where Wink sat, waiting. No surprise. Just relief. Information at last.

She glimpsed Jill way down the porch, and turned her back to her, tears welling in her eyes. “Where’s Sam?”

She felt a crushing weight on her chest when Wink replied, helpless pain in his eyes, “I don’t know.”

The tears welled over. She turned on her heel, slipped out the screen door, and stumbled blindly downhill to the grotto and curled up on the bench Sam had built for her. Mercifully, no one else was there, and her sobs were drowned by the rush of fast water over stones, and by music.

She jumped at a hand on her shoulder.

*   *   *

Megan was impressed by Jill’s party, despite herself. She wouldn’t have believed that the place could be brought up to speed so quickly, and decided that Jill really could work wonders—with a lot of help from Cindy and Brian—and felt a twinge of guilt that she’d been too busy to lend a hand. Jill seemed to have come through what could only be called a breakdown with flying colors.

She overheard a tall, bearded blond man who wore shorts, loafers, and talked past a pipe held between his teeth. “It is just a marvelous example of sixties lines. I mean, the color, the shape, everything!” Megan peered over his shoulder. He held the teal Bakelite ashtray Bette had kept next to her reading chair, a bit marred and melted from extreme wear. He caressed it with reverence and set it back down very carefully.

Megan rolled her eyes and moved on.

She glimpsed Jill, who was trying desperately not to be too busy. This meant a lot of glancing around and strange facial expressions as she suppressed her impulse to get someone a drink or direct them to food, all of which the caterers, Cindy, and several of Brian’s multipurpose workers, adept at throwing impressive cocktail parties for the heads of corporations, were doing without breaking a sweat.

The big house throbbed with conversation, and cooler air wafted up from the creek. Megan went out to her car and fetched a sweater. She turned to go back in and saw Halcyon House as it was meant to be seen by the architect who had designed it in 1902: brightly lit, overflowing with guests who sat on the porch or stood on the lawn. She watched through the windows as a couple on the side porch began to foxtrot to a Benny Goodman piece. His lilting, complex clarinet tune perfectly complemented the party’s celebratory atmosphere.

Something caught her eye in the library, but she wasn’t sure what, at first. She watched through the open window as she walked back to the house. There it was. Over the heads of about ten chatting people, she saw the rolling ladder move from right to left. A blond man wearing a light-colored suit climbed the first three rungs and reached up, removed a book from a high shelf. He riffled through it, replaced it, riffled through another, removed a third, riffled through it, and carried it down the ladder. She walked a little more quickly. Of course, guests such as these would be interested in books. But these were her parents’ books, and she didn’t want any of them walking out of the house. Besides, how many people would actually be moved to climb a ladder and take one down?

She took the front steps two at a time, smiling at a couple sitting and smoking on the middle step, and opened the front door.

“Megan! It is you, isn’t it? How nice to see you!”

Startled, it took Megan a moment to recognize Albert Treemain, a distinguished-looking black gentleman whose beard was now white. He had lived four doors down for—how many decades now?

“Al! You haven’t changed a bit!” They hugged, and Megan stepped back. “Really. Except for this.” She tugged on his beard and he laughed. “Remember how I used to do that when I was little? I bet it annoyed the hell out of you. You’re retired now, right?”

He snorted. “Pushed out the door, more like it. Gave me a few plaques for teaching our African-American youth for decades.”

“Is Eloise here?”

He nodded. “Saw her last in the dining room, talking with Jill. We’re so glad to have her back. We do miss your folks.”

Megan angled around so that she could see into the library. To her relief, she saw the man climb back up the ladder and replace the book. Another man, his hair gray, reading while sitting in a leather chair, determinedly kept his head down while she stared at him, trying to figure out where she had seen him before.

Then the book-riffling man sauntered from the library, chatting, and passed Megan.

He had a hundred-dollar haircut. His clothes were equally stylish and perfect. His light blue bow tie might seem a bit different, but Megan noticed that they were just on the cutting edge of incoming style, and his lightweight beige linen suit was perfectly pressed, as if he had not sat down for hours. He wore a faint cologne. The light tan on his ruggedly lined face gave him an outdoorsy look. Probably just this side of his sixties. His sharp blue eyes, which seemed expressionless when he glanced at her in passing, let her know that she had just been as fully appraised and categorized as he had been by her.

Another man bumped into her as he headed toward the front door, and apologized. Unkempt gray hair flared from his large, squarish head like an inconvenient afterthought. His wrinkled short-sleeved shirt and the nasty cigarette-smoke trail he left behind were a complete contrast to the blond man’s couture. He lifted high four glasses he held in one hand and jerked his head to indicate that the blond man join him on the porch to partake of the almost-full bottle of whiskey he gripped by the bottle’s neck in his other hand. He had a most unparty-like air of determination as he opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch.

Megan went to the dining room and made herself a gin-and-tonic with just a whisper of gin. With the icy, squat glass in one hand, she made her way back toward the library through knots of people and saw two other people head purposefully onto the porch.

Megan poked her head out the door and saw that the gray-haired man had pulled a large, round table to the very end of the porch and was gathering a few wicker chairs, helped by the blond man. A tall woman with short, dark hair, wearing a shantung-silk gunnysack from which poked extremely long, bony arms and legs walked her clanky-earringed self out the door and joined them.

The library had cleared out. While they gathered more chairs on the porch, Megan shut the pocket doors, dimmed the lights in the library to near-darkness, tipped the blinds a bit, then curled up in a wing chair only a foot away from the table outside on the porch, where she could eavesdrop. She pulled a heavy book about Kandinsky onto her lap from the coffee table so she could pretend to peruse it, and cradled her drink in one hand.

They settled into their chairs with scooting sounds. “Just a bit of that Scotch, if you don’t mind”—a glug and a slosh, then another—“Well, a little bit more wouldn’t hurt. Anyone else? Another round for us all, sure.” After a moment, she realized that her book was unnecessary; they were so completely involved in one another and in their conversation that they did not realize that anyone was listening, and did not seem to notice that their voices were raised, and often, as they argued.

The organizer had a Russian accent, which surprised Megan. “I’m glad you could all make it.”

“It’s ground zero, Lev,” said a woman with a gravelly voice. “Light?” Megan heard the snap of a cigarette lighter. “Wouldn’t miss this opportunity for the world.”

Ground zero?

“What’s all this about setting up some kind of controls?” This speaker had a lighter, higher voice than Smoking Woman, and was probably Anorexic Woman, whose legion of bangles raced, clinking, up and down her bony arm as she took a drink.

Lev said, “We need to be seriously thinking about what to do, now that we’re getting closer.”

Closer?

The blond man said, “I’m sure you have ideas about how to set up that kind of system.” He sounded completely middle-of-the-road American.

“I’m sure
you
do,” rejoined Smoking Woman, in a gravelly voice. “You have a very distinctive—and, I might add, distasteful—philosophy.”

Megan gulped her drink to subdue the tickle in her throat, wishing she had made it a tad stronger.

“You are completely mistaken about me,” said the blond man.

“Excuse me,” said a man whom Megan had not seen. He had a faint French accent. “We all have reasons of our own for participating in this endeavor. No matter what each of us professes, we all must realize that we are a very loose affiliation, and that the ties that have held us together for the past decades may well have changed. I agree that we need to reexamine them at some point, and reassess our goals. But perhaps this is not the time and place? It’s very public here, and I was not, even, actually invited to this party. I’ve never seen this man before.”

Blond Man said, “Nor I you.”

“Seriously,” the Frenchman said, “who is qualified to be a master of history? Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

Smoking Woman said, “I think that any sort of power like this needs to be equally distributed.”

Blond Man said, “All the illiterate, unintelligent, unfit people in the world have a say?”

“She means among us,” said Anorexic Woman.

“I can speak for myself,” said Smoking Woman. “That’s not at all what I mean.”

Blond Man said, “Such power should not be equally distributed. Perhaps it could be according to educational levels?”

“Something like the three-fifths law?” asked Smoking Woman.

Lev said, “Maybe it just doesn’t work that way. It’s probably more like Q. It makes itself available. Which is why it is so important that we intercept it as soon as possible. That is why all of us are working together. Each of us has a different past, but we agree on the need to find this.”

“I agree,” said Smoking Woman. “We’re the third generation of people working on locating the source. If it exists, it’s getting much more embedded.”

Anorexic Woman spoke: “I agree with Bill.”

Megan surmised that Blond Man’s name was Bill.

She continued, “It’s much too important to let the wrong people get hold of it. For instance, Jill is taking over a long-term project to electrify large chunks of rural Africa and put running water in about a zillion villages. If she really had
this
kind of power, she’d use it, believe me. She’d pass it out like hotcakes. Ergo, she doesn’t. Or if she does, she doesn’t know about it, and that’s why we need to find it as quickly as possible.”

Smoking Woman said, “She can do all that? You’ve worked at the Bank for years. You haven’t done anything of that magnitude, have you?”

“My main function is to observe and keep tabs. I have no idea what you’re doing at the State Department, but I’m not questioning that. I’d like the same respect, if you don’t mind.” She cleared her throat. “Jill has the power. She can get together loans, determine policy. She works hard. Did you notice all those people following her around like chicks from room to room? She’s their boss. They worship her, for some reason. She has a bug about schools, now. More education, less disease, more economic opportunity—pretty soon women will start having less children, because more of the kids will live to grow up, and you’ll have a whole new viable educated workforce on your hands—African women. Millions of them.”

State-Department Smoking Woman said, “I don’t understand. What’s wrong with that?”

Blond Man said, “I’m at the Bank as well, as you might recall. As I see it, this is going to cause great economic imbalance, worldwide, an upheaval. It’s conceivable that Africa could very quickly move to a position where it could control world markets. Africa has vast, untapped natural resources. A well-fed, disease-free, educated population in Africa will eventually economically endanger Europe and Asia. And us. We need to decisively move on this, as soon as possible.”