Waiting for the Galactic Bus (14 page)

“Precisely, Ned. One wouldn’t mind your Shakespeare lit by flashes of lightning —”

“Just so.” Kean’s intensity softened with satisfaction. One’s better reviews were delights evergreen. “Coleridge did say that.”

“Were it not for all the darkness in between.”

“Take care.” Kean’s sword flashed again from the scabbard. “I might school you in earnest.”

“You?” Booth derided. “The bawdy-house school of fencing?”

“Oh, did I tax you beyond competence?”

“Beyond patience, Kean. You know the disengage one-two-three always comes before the parry-quatre-thrust-lunge and you
always
forget. Not to mention that you lunged when I was out of my light.”

“Allowance must be made for colonials. Let us rehearse once more,” Kean said. “And whilst we do, remember who was called in his day the very Sun’s Bright Child-and who merely assassin.”

“Oh, base prompter’s boy!” Booth recoiled, wounded. “Come you over me still with that? I shot
one
Republican. Have at you, villain.”

Ned Kean crouched
en garde-
then lowered his point. “Stay, it’s no fun without an audience. She sorrowed with heart, that girl, and raged with natural fire. But that accent...?”

“Allegheny,” Booth agreed. “Eerie, isn’t it?”

“Nor did I recognize your death music.”

“Oh, that? Walton: the passacaglia from the film
Henry V.
Falstaffs death.”

“The death of a clown; how apt,” Kean sniped. “Now my choice was Shostakovich.”

Booth sniffed. “Bit much on the kettles and brass.”

“It likes me well. The ghost and duel music from
Hamlet.
Ah, those minor thirds in the horns-ominous, fated. I say, Dimitri?” Ned Kean petitioned the dark overhead. “Could I hear my entrance again, old boy? Rather fancied it. And, Wilksey, do shorten those pauses when you die. One tends to nap.”

Together in their universe, the circle of light, the actors listened to the reprise of music and were stirred.

    15   

Aryans in the fast lane

No pain, nothing clear except terror.

When Roy could think straight, he found himself in a small chamber inviting as a dentist’s waiting room. Table, lamp, modern chair, a copy of
Soldier of Fortune,
a worn book with no dust jacket-and to Roy’s huge relief a cotton bathrobe hanging on the coat rack. He put it on immediately; he found it hard to feel secure fully clothed, but naked was unbearable.

Time, if there was such a thing for him now, passed and kept on passing. Nothing. No sound. No one came. His tension began to ebb to the point where he could relate to his surroundings. Dr. Corbett once had a waiting room just like this, and the magazines were just as out-of-date. The copy of
Soldier of Fortune
was six months old. Roy paged through the book’s first leaves.
Mein Kampf by
Adolf Hitler, who was one of his gods along with George Lincoln Rockwell and Rambo.

“Never knew he wrote a book.”

He tried a few pages and gave up. Hitler was an unappreciated hero of the race struggle, but whoever wrote it in English made it boring as hell. Suffice to say, Roy never spent an evening trapped with the inexhaustible Austrian.

More waiting. Roy thought of Charity: where did they take her? More to the point right now: what would they do to him?

The very silence was oppressive. “If this is it for eternity,” he judged aloud to shatter it, “I think I can handle it.”

When the door opened behind him, he jumped clear out of the chair, clutching the bathrobe around him.

“Roy Stride? I’m Drumm.”

“I didn’t do anyth —”

Roy caught himself, not knowing whether to be scared or plain laugh. A squat, unimposing little man, Drumm was decked — stuffed, rather, into the dress finery of the White Paladins: tailored camouflage fatigues, white silk scarf and red beret, web belt under a double strain to contain his girth and support the heavy Magnum revolver in its tooled holster. With all the authority these might have lent, Drumm didn’t make it. His paunch betrayed the military intentions of his blouse. His glasses were thick enough to make his eyes look like small, distant clams within concentric rings. The vague mustache added no character, merely coexisted with his upper lip. Drumm removed his beret with the care of a cardinal divesting after Mass to reveal a toupee neither subtly matched nor firmly allied with his sparse indigenous hair. He greeted Roy with the fervor of adoration.

“At last the day. We’ve been waiting, sir.”

Roy backed away, trying to keep the bathrobe closed. “Hey, look, I just got here.”

“On a trumped-up charge.”

“I’m innocent... who are you?”

“My cause is yours,” Drumm said with dramatic urgency.

“You with the Paladins?”

“We’re everywhere.” Drumm patted the toupee for evidence of wanderlust since last contact. The two clams fixed on Roy. “We know you; we intercept the dossiers. And Charity? Was she pure?”

“We’re gonna get married,” Roy maintained, but the tense was obviously wrong. “Were gonna get married.”

“I mean was she Aryan?”

“One hunnert percent pure White American Aryan like me. The purest.”

“And like so many capable men, you are here through the judgment of inferiors.” Drumm rubbed his pudgy hands together. “As myself. I was with Rockwell in Arlington.”

Roy regarded Drumm with new respect. “The American Nazi Party.” The last of his fear vanished. Drumm was no threat but an ally with major-league credentials.

“With me to guide him, George Rockwell formed and headed the ANP. He saw the merit and the truth in the plays I wrote that no one would produce; that no one
here
will do anything but throw back at me, thanks to Jason Blythe, our pristine prime minister. The truth of the world was in my work, Roy Stride. And that truth is the God-ordained and inevitable supremacy of the White Race.”

Roy even found the composure to grin. “Right on.”

“Your hand, sir.”

“Gimme five.”

“There are those who guide, those who lead, many who follow. I am a prophet; you may be much more than that. Wait.” Drumm peered suspiciously about the chamber with an air of habitual caution, bent to inspect the inside of the lampshade and under the table, ample rump presented to Roy, who quelled a profitless urge to boot it.

Satisfied, Drumm beckoned him close. “I don’t think we’re bugged, but Blythe’s spies are everywhere. All of us are marked. We must move soon. You may be the leader we have waited for. Rockwell was shot, cut down in his prime. His followers wait even here to carry on his cause, needing only the day and the man. Are you fit for it? A leader seizes the moment. Will you?”

Will I
? Roy felt ambition surge in him like a shot of whiskey.
Damned, no chance at all, call that a trial we had? All of you just watch. Just one chance, all I ask, and he’s handing it to me. Get set up, find Charity, and won’t be any son of a bitch on two legs big enough to fuck me over anymore
.

“Okay. Your people ready?”

“And waiting. A coup,” Drumm said. “A purge. One lightning strike.”

This wasn’t hell but heaven. “Weapons?”

“All we need, the latest. AR rifles, ammo, C-4 plastic, LAW rockets, men in the right place ready to move. The government has a rotted will; the danger is in fanatics and interference from Topside. But the time and stars are right, Roy Stride!”

“Lead me to it.” Roy felt marvelous — until second thoughts nudged him. “No, wait. I gotta get some decent clothes.” Not even Hitler could conquer in a bathrobe.

“Before all else.” Drumm clicked his heels and flung open the door. “The Whip & Jackboot will furnish all you need. Run by a nigger and a Jew, but we can’t purge them all.”

“Yet,” Roy corrected with the first overtones of authority.

“Well put, sir.” Drumm motioned Roy first through the door. “I was not mistaken in you. You show genius.”

The Whip & Jackboot: the glories of the display window alone convinced Roy that Drumm knew his taste to a T, his brightest fantasies. Within the window there were many metal-studded styles and a great deal of leather.

“I’ll leave you here.” Drumm searched the mall both ways with his perpetual air of secrecy. “Remember, you’re being watched. I’ll get word to the others and to you when it’s safe to meet.”

“Yeah, cool.” Roy wanted to get off the sidewalk. The bathrobe didn’t do anything for a man of destiny.

“The code word for the takeover is Case White. Leader, the pistol is cocked.” The metaphor pleased Drumm. “You will pull the trigger.
Auf Wiedersehen.”

“Stay cool. No, wait a minute.” Roy found he was thinking clearer and more confidently with each passing minute. Never mind the people on the sidewalk; they didn’t seem to think a man in a bathrobe was ridiculous or even interesting. Looked like a bunch of stuck-up yuppies, didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. “You said you know everybody that comes here.” “Everyone,” Drumm confirmed. “We make it our business to know. Not hard, a few favors here and there. Now and then for the right person an agreeable girl in the right motel. I mean — that is to say...” Drumm looked away, awkwardly conscious of a gaffe. “Excuse me, Leader, I —”

“That’s okay, just watch it. Pass an order to the troops.”

Click! “Immediately, Leader.”

“Find Charity Stovall for me. I don’t give a shit who you put in what bed with his own mother even. Charity’s my woman and I want her, understand? That’s General Order
numero uno,
got it?”

“Sir.” Click! “Until then, may I suggest A Son Goût, just down the mall? Adrian the sommelier personally extends his invitation.”

“Adrian the what?”

“In charge of the girls.” Click! “Until later, my Fuhr — my Leader.” Drumm bustled away. He had very little military bearing and digging in his nose destroyed that.

Roy entered the Whip & Jackboot. Before him stretched rows of gleaming, studded jackets and matched uniforms, shelves of precisely arranged peaked caps like a squad on parade, racks of leather whips, whole tack sections of leather strapping. Midway down one row, a balding black man with bulging eyes and enormous white teeth fussed over an item on a rack. Seeing Roy, he shuffled forward with a servility that warmed the customer’s heart.

“Mistuh Roy Stride, suh! Lan’, it
good
to see you in a gent’man’s shop where y’all belong.”

Roy felt better already. He straightened up. The demeaning rag of a bathrobe took on regality. He liked a nigger who knew his place; didn’t have anything against that kind at all. Tell them a Mandy and Rastus joke, they’d laugh hard as you did.

“Well, now, first we gone take you back to this li’l old booth, get you some trousers and shirt while Jacob measures you. Come’long, Mistuh Roy.”

The black man shuffled classically, using a great deal of graceful effort to cover very little distance. Hell, they all had rhythm.

“What’s your name, boy?”

“Washington Moonlight Jones, suh.” He revealed again the vast expanse of gossamer teeth. “Mama call me Moonlight’cause that when Daddy done his bes’ work among de neighborin’ stills.”

Roy swelled with pleasure and ventured a Rhett Butler grin of roguish but patrician understanding. “Moonlight, you black rascal, give me the best you got.”

“Don’ fret. We gone get you lookin’ fine.”

In a few moments Roy was in and out of the booth, the silly robe traded for shirt and trousers. There were several small holes in the shirtfront and faded stains around them, but he wouldn’t have them on for that long.

Moonlight gestured like a majordomo. “Now, y’all come’long with me in the back. We got Jacob. He trash but he do know what a mil’tary gent’man need for wear. Jacob? Gent’man need some outfittin’ right now.” Moonlight lowered his voice in confidence. “He try to Jew you on price, old Moonlight set him straight. Been took care of. Jacob?”

Moonlight thrust aside a curtain. “G’wan in, Mistuh Roy.”

The dingy back room was rack-lined with uniforms in various stages of completion. At the end of a long table, tape measure draped about his oddly twisted neck, a bearded Jew of indeterminate age hunched over a thick book. Bespectacled and ringleted, the fringes of a prayer shawl splayed from beneath the hem of his shabby vest.