“Did you authorize this operation?” the plans chief asked.
“Hell, no. He was supposed to hit the fuel depot and the security force’s motor pool. Son of a bitch. This is three years’ work in the crapper. I swear to God, we should have put our Force 40 people there. Amateurs. Goddamned amateurs.”
“Are we compromised?”
Kendrew shook his head. “The weapons were clean. It’s fully deniable.”
“Get me something on paper to pass up the line.”
“You’ll have it in half an hour.”
A familiar-looking oak bed frame lay disassembled in the cargo area of the truck parked in front of the Meridian Arms apartment tower. Upstairs, Wallace found the mattress and box spring standing on edge in the doorway to 12-E, blocking him from entering.
“Yo,” Wallace called through the gap.
Arens appeared by the kitchen. “Ray,” he said. “Glad to see you. Can you give me a hand with that?”
“Sure.”
“We have to go down the service stairs with it. It’s too big to fit in the elevator. I guess they didn’t make beds playground-sized when this place was built.”
“You’re moving out?”
“Yep. The place is yours and Gary’s as of today. Don’t worry, I’m not stripping it to the walls first. The place was furnished. I’m just taking a few things that I bought. Important things, like the bed. I didn’t buy it to share with another guy, you know.”
“Television going, too?”
“Yeah. It was a blow to Gary when I told him. I think he’s going to hit you up to split the cost of a replacement.”
“I don’t suppose the Guard will pop for a supplemental draw to pay for it.”
Arens grinned. “That’s how I got mine. ‘Tools and supplies’—check? But things have sure tightened up. I think we’re spending the green as fast as they can print it. Here, let’s get the mattress first. That’s the tough one, it’s so damned floppy.”
“I don’t suppose you’d consider dropping it off the balcony.”
“The fairy tale involved flying
carpets
.”
Wallace crouched and felt for a handle on the bottom edge. “Let’s go, then.”
The stairwells had been drawn with the same architect’s template as the elevators. The only way to make progress proved to be to slide the mattress on edge down each flight of stairs, then flop it over the railing to the next. Surveying the gray-black streaks of grime on the side after the first flight, Arens clucked and shook his head.
“I guess that’s why we put sheets on, eh? So we don’t have to look at the sweat circles and other assorted stains.”
“Sounds good to me,” Wallace said with a grunt as he pulled the mattress along. “So, where are you going?”
Flip. “Ah-ah,” Arens said as a parent to a child. “You don’t want me to break the rules, do you? ‘The disposition, residence, and assignment of field agents is restricted on a need-to-know basis.’ ”
“Moving in with your bedwarmer, aren’t you.”
Flip. “I’m shocked. What kind of women do you think live here?”
“The kind that sleep with strangers, unless you’ve just been bragging.”
Flip. “Bragging? I thought I’d been very discreet. Tell me my ladyfriend’s name. Or if she’s tall or short, or anything else about her.”
“She fucks.”
Flip. “And you think that tells you everything you need to know.”
“It tells me a lot.”
“Women are different here, Ray. Even classy ones know what they have between their legs.” Flip. “Besides, we weren’t strangers. I cultivated her for all of a month.”
The mattress seemed to be getting heavier and the stairwell air stuffier with each flight of stairs. Beads of perspiration broke out on Wallace’s forehead, and he paused to wipe away the moisture on the sleeve of his shirt. “How in the world did you ever get this beast up?”
“Didn’t. Bought it from another tenant on the twelfth floor.”
“You think if we die in here, anyone will ever find us?”
“Sure—when we get ripe. Come on, the box spring is waiting.”
Flip. “You think maybe
it
can fly?” Wallace said with a grunt.
By the time the mattress was secure in the back of the truck, both men were flush-faced, panting, and grateful for the bracing air. “You better make sure you have a heaping bowlful of fun on this thing,” Wallace said, leaning against the side of the truck.
“I will,” Arens said, retrieving a slightly crushed cigarette from a back pocket. He cupped his hands around a match until the cigarette glowed in sympathetic combustion. “So how’s the family? Or is that still off-limits.”
Wallace shrugged. “We fought again. I just don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand what she wants.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“Aw—” Wallace looked away toward the river. “I guess it just happens. How many really happy couples do you know?”
Arens blew smoke skyward. “Not many. Seems like everybody settles for less than they thought they were going to get.”
“I thought we were going to be different.”
“Everybody does,” Arens said. He took another puff, then dropped the half-consumed cigarette to the sidewalk and ground it out with his foot. “So when are you going to go?”
“Huh?”
“You’re ripe for it. That’s why we all do it—the what-if game.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Going home. To where you grew up. Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about it.”
“Did you?”
“Think about it or go?”
“Go.”
“That’s against the rules, too.”
“I thought you were the one who said we make our own rules.”
Arens smiled. “Yeah. I went.”
“And?”
The other man’s face clouded over. “It was worth doing—once.”
“That’s it?”
“You want me to try to talk you into going? Forget it. I wasn’t trying to put ideas in your head. If it matters to you, you’ll go. If it doesn’t, you won’t,” Arens said with a shrug.
Wallace pushed himself away from the truck and stood upright. “Well, you’re right. I have been thinking about going home,” he said. “And it feels—dangerous.”
“That’s because it is,” Arens said. “ ‘Time turns the old days to derision, our loves into corpses or wives—and marriage and death and division make barren our lives.’ ”
“Is that from something?”
Smiling wryly, Arens clapped Wallace on the shoulder. “From the heart, my friend. From the heart. You ready to finish this job?”
“Yah, coach. Let’s get ’em.”
“I’m disappointed,” Robinson said shortly, discarding the one-page report onto the top of his desk. He folded his hands, elbows supported by the armrests, and looked up at Rodman. “I want them to know it, too. Poor judgment, poor planning, poor execution. We look like idiots, again. Ineffectual.
Very
disappointed.”
“It’s going to be awkward for us now, down there.”
“Oh, I don’t give a damn about South Africa. I never saw much promise there, about as much as throwing a penny in a well to make a wish. And we’re on a different timetable now. But there’s something worthwhile that’s come out of it, for all that.”
“I don’t see it, myself.”
Robinson stood. “A lesson. Bill. A lesson about what can happen when you trust other people to handle your business, people who don’t care about it as much as you do. I’ve made a decision about the initiative. We’re going to do it ourselves and keep it to ourselves. London and Reykjavik can find out about it when Moscow does. I don’t want it all coming apart because some dim-brained bit player fucked up or mouthed off. It’s our play, and we’ll rise or fall with our own people.”
“I’ll tell Madison,” Rodman said with a nod “You can tell him something else, too. I don’t want anyone who had anything to do with that Walvis Bay fiasco working on our initiative. Incompetence is contagious.”
Rodman shook his head. “It’s already too late for that, I think. Madison said something about Xhumo’s controller being with the logistics team.”
“Tell Madison to lose him,” Robinson said coldly. “This is the endgame. Bill. Red’s playing king, queen, and rook against us. We can’t afford mistakes.”
As President Brandenburg and his staff head north to their Seneca Lake retreat for the holidays, they leave behind a Washington that is still groping to understand the man whom the American people sent here a year ago to take over the helm of government. Reportedly, a major purpose of this “working vacation” will be to begin drafting Brandenburg’s first State of the Union address. We would urge that that be put aside in favor of a hard look at the state of this strange and less-than-wonderful administration.
Beginning with William Wirt and his Anti-Masonic Party in 1832, American politics has endured a parade of one-issue third parties whose entire existence was predicted on virulent negativism: antislavery, anti-immigrant, antiliquor, antitariff, anti-integration, anti-internationalism. Until last year, the American public had never had the occasion to learn the consequences of electing such a candidate.
The lesson has been sobering, at least to veteran Washingtonians. Far beyond the carping about Brandenburg’s refusal to aid and abet the traditional orgy of balls, Christmas parties, and greater and lesser revelry are serious questions about Brandenburg’s refusal or inability to articulate a clear, positive vision of the future. In blocking (for the moment) natural geopolitical evolution by barring American participation in the United Nations Confederation, Brandenburg and his chimerical National Party seem to have exhausted their fund of ideas.
Though the President continues to wave his campaign flags of “self-reliance” and “independent action,” the only reliable feature of his administration to date has been its inaction. Brandenburg has vetoed more bills (and, thanks to a hopelessly divided Congress, sustained more of his vetoes) than any first-year President. The bureaucracy staggers on like a beheaded chicken, its stubborn autonomic functions creating the illusion of life.
Perversely, word of these problems does not seem to have spread beyond the District of Columbia. Eyes still glazed by nationalism, the electorate perceives a dog-jowled sixty-six-year-old divorcé as “the nation’s most eligible bachelor,” credits this grandfatherly man with a wisdom he has not yet demonstrated, and narrowmindedly applauds Brandenburg’s defense of yesterday’s status quo.
But morning walks through the White House grounds, however homey and picaresque, do not a legislative program make. Does Brandenburg have an agenda? More to the point, does the United States have a President? The chances are that our nation can endure without lasting harm a self-indulgent four-year holiday from grappling with change and responsibility. It remains to be seen whether Brandenburg can muster the vigor and vision to save us from having to find out.
—Editor-in-Chief Malcolm Briss
Wallace took the old roads home.
Though the automated highway, A-40 east to Ohio, would have taken him speedily to within a few miles of Hagerstown, the old roads were the roads of his memories. Paper-thin black asphalt ribbons draped across Indiana farmland, they decorated rather than altered its gentle contours.
Narrow gravel shoulders. Faded dividing lines chalking into invisibility. Roads laid out on the section lines of 19th-century county surveys, shaped by the refusal of long-dead farmers to have their fields divided. Roads where lumbering harvesters became the heads of segmented metal worms crawling across the countryside. Roads that swallowed up the beams of headlights in black-night drizzle.
They tunneled through groves of trees, widened to become the main streets of one- and two-stoplight towns, then shrank back to their natural size of two narrow lanes, one coming, one going. Except there had always seemed to be more going than coming, familiar faces that took the roads to Muncie and Richmond and never came back.
He drove past silos standing in ranks of four and across tiny bridges spanning sluggish green-brown rivers. He drove through communities he knew only for the teams their high schools had fielded. The Warrington Blazers. The Ashland Tigers. The Millville Panthers, 1965 Sectional Champions.
And yet he knew them, knew every town he drove through. There were no surprises a hundred years in any direction. Tin roofs and porch swings, children in mittens and mufflers. With every passing mile, the tightness in his chest and the queasiness in his stomach grew. The deep breaths he took to calm himself threatened to turn into sobs.
It all looked as it should—brown grass and brown earth, fields of corn stubble, sagging wooden fences, roadside farm markets with hand-stenciled signs saying CLOSED FOR THE SEASON. How could it be so much the same and yet not be real, not be the same little circle of the world in which he had spent nearly all of his first twenty years?
Even the signs were the same. The Lions Club and Kiwanis emblems hanging together on the outskirts of town. A placard proclaiming “Trust Deschlingers—Champion SPF Hamps.” When Wallace came around the last curve west of Hagerstown and saw Roger Eash’s barn it was all he could do to keep the Magic on the road, for the side of the structure bore the same stem reminder:
Just like home. The same faded black lettering that he and Donald Bash had plastered with wet snowballs until their ten-year-old arms were tired. The same barn with the same musty-smelling loft full of disintegrating leather tack dating from when the Bashes had plowed with horse or ox instead of a noisy gasoline-burning tractor.
How could there be two of them? Like some sort of county-fair funhouse trickery, making you think you were one place when you were really somewhere else. How could it be so real? Like a stage set for the play of his life. Was there a real Roger Eash inside the farmhouse, round-bellied and bald-headed, his wide-brimmed blue Sheriff’s Posse hat hanging on the peg by the kitchen door? How would he like to hear about the son Donald he had never had?