Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) (20 page)

In an adjoining room I saw two pretty Chinese
girls—both my age, or a little younger—at a dining table.
 
A man and a woman, beyond my restricted line
of vision, were talking.
 

“This cousin of yours in China, my
dear—do you suppose he’s still safe?”

“Chen Phiang?” the man asked in a
distressed voice.
 
“No, they would
dispose of him now.”
 

“But you sent all that money so
faithfully for so many years!”

“Blackmail.
 
Chen Phiang is no use to them any
longer.
 
We did all we could to help him;
we must remember that.
 
Perhaps they were
kind enough to give him a merciful death.”
 

I stole away, dazed and sick at heart
from what I had heard.
 
This was my
cousin; I could no longer doubt that.
 
He
had paid party blood money in order to help me, a stranger he had never
met.
 
To help me!—and now I stood at his
door in the uniform of the conqueror.
 
I
felt the anguish of shame and dishonor.
 

I reached the oceanfront close to the
palace.
 
Two Russian sentries, armed
with automatic rifles, challenged me.
 
I
fumbled blindly for words.
 
One of them
jerked
open
my tunic and looked at my identification
disc.
 
Their military manner
relaxed.
 

“Out on the prowl,
soldier?”

“Everything was—locked up,” I
stammered.
 
I motioned toward the men in
front of the big house.
 
“What’s all this
for?”

“Command headquarters.
 
General Zergoff.”
 
The sentry said.
 

“There’s another reason for the guard,”
the second sentry put in, to make sure I’d be properly impressed.
 
“We have twenty-five prisoners inside.
 
American intellectuals.
 
After the Comrade General finishes their
re-education, they’ll sing their song to our tune.”
 

“I thought all intellectuals were
enemies of the people.”
 

“They’re for the firing squad; you can
be sure of that.”
 
The Russian
grinned.
 
“After we’re
through with them.”
 

We heard a roar of planes.
 
Every eye turned toward the sky.
 
Anti-aircraft guns in the harbor began to
spit angrily.
 
One of the sentries cried,
“A Fascist raid!”
 
They began to run for
cover.
 

I stood where I was, paralyzed with
inner horror and disgust, the last bitter ash of shame.
 

Then a phosphorous shell from an
attacking plane burst over the harbor and in the white glare I saw the rows
upon rows of Soviet submarines.
 

Since the Soviet submarines were already
in the American port, they must have left their Asiatic pens more than a week
ago, under orders to begin the invasion.
 
That had been at least four days before the crisis began.
 

Built upon that fact, everything else
formed a single, terrifying pattern:
 
the
English they made us learn; our practice jumps over a plain marked with the
streets of Los Angeles; the new, elaborately camouflaged Siberian bases, where
the invasion troops had been safely concealed from American bombers.
 
Protesting humanitarianism, screaming peace
and brotherhood, we had planned this war for years.
 

Somewhere a soldier shouted at me, “Take
cover,
fool
!”

I was behind the headquarters mansion,
in a narrow alley.
 
The guards were
gone.
 
I was alone.
 

Suddenly a plane soared directly
overhead, out of control.
 
A bomb
exploded under the bluff and the earth rocked.
 
Another hit the headquarters palace.
 
Debris and dust and flying plaster flew in my face, flinging me back
against a wall.
 
I saw a tongue of fire
licking at the gapping hole torn in the side of the house.
 
The plane crashed in the street; the fuel
tank caught fire.
 

In the orange glare I saw two men
stumble through the broken wall.
 
One was
so badly wounded his face was unrecognizable; the second man was carrying
him.
 
They were not in uniform.
 
They must, then, be two of the intellectuals
imprisoned in the house.
 

I leaped toward them.
 
They shrank away, trying to run.
 
I caught the arm of the man who was
unhurt.
 
“Are you Americans?” I demanded.
 

Instead of replying, the man swung his
fist at me weakly.
 

“My name is Chen Phiang,” I said.
 
“I am Chinese; I want to help you.
 
Come, I will show you a place to hide.”
 

My shame and dishonor diminished a
little.
 
This my paternal grandparent
approved; one small thing to make amends for the red nightmare that had so long
swallowed up the soul of China.
 

IV
.
 
The
Valley—Friday
afternoon Boris Yorovich

TWENTY minutes after we picked up the
wounded Negro, Pat Thatcher pulled the Cadillac to a stop in the village of Big
Bear.
 
It was the first American town I
had ever seen.
 

We stopped in front of a drug
store.
 
Pat Thatcher got out and pounded
on the door, while Jerry Bonhill and I lifted the Negro out of the car.
 

Having raised no one by his knocking,
Thatcher wrapped the tail of his shirt around his fist and smashed open the
window in the door.
 
He slipped his hand
through the glass and turned the lock.
 
Bonhill and I carried the Negro into the building.
 
The old man shoved a display of stuffed toys
from a table and we lay the Negro on it.
 

Cheryl Fineberg and Mrs. Bonhill came
in with Jim Riley.
 
Dr. Clapper remained
outside on the step, watching us but refusing to have any part in our invasion
of private property.
 
The women cut away
the clothing from the Negro’s arms, while Thatcher brought jars of salve from
a side shelf.
 

“People,” the Negro whispered in a
choked voice barely audible.
 
“I found
people?”

“You’ll be all right now.”
 

“There are others.
 
Help…”
 
His voice trailed off.
 
Mrs.
Bonhill stooped beside him and slipped her arm under his head.
 
After a moment he spoke again, his thick,
torn lips close to her ear.
 
“They’re
back on the hill.
 
On
the hill.
 
All right except—except
tired.
 
Please help them.
 
They need…”

 Artist Unknown

His head slumped forward.
 
Mrs. Bonhill bent over his chest.
 
Then she stood up slowly, her eyes filmed
with tears.
 
“He’s dead.”
 

“Put up your hands.”
 
A voice sounded behind us.
 

We swung around to face a small, plump,
white-haired woman wearing a gingham dress and ankle-high mountain boots, gray
with dust.
 
She held a hunting rifle
aimed at us unwaveringly.
 

“Sorry, ma’am,” Thatcher
apologized.
 
“We didn’t know anyone was
here.”
 
He gestured toward the
Negro.
 
“We were trying to get drugs
for—”

“You’re from the city?”

“We’ll pay for what we’ve used.”
 

“This isn’t my store.
 
You’re welcome to it.”
 

The plump woman seemed less
suspicious.
 
She shot a glance suddenly
at Cheryl, demanding her name and her street address.
 
The woman asked Mrs. Bonhill the same
question.
 
The two answers seemed to
satisfy her.
 
She nodded and muttered,
“That fits.”
 
Abruptly she lowered her
gun.
 
“I had to make sure you weren’t
Reds.”
 

“These people are subversives,” Clapper
hissed from the door.
 
He pointed at
me.
 
“That man’s a Russian officer.
 
They stole my car.
 
If you’ll make Thatcher give me my keys—”

“Dr. Clapper was the only one of you I
recognized.
 
If he says you’re
subversives, that makes
you fine in my book.”
 

Clapper turned and stormed off down the
street.
 
The woman laughed.
 
“He won’t go far.”
 
She told us her name was Virginia Grant.
 
She was a retired high school history
teacher.
 

“You’re the only one who stayed?”

“No, Henry Jenkins is here, too.
 
Hank, we call him.
 
An old loafer who has an idea he’s going to
strike gold over in Holcomb Valley.
 
As
soon as it dawned on him this morning that we were alone, he started out to
drink up all the liquor in Big Bear.
 
He’s still in one of the saloons, I imagine.”
 

“The Negro told us there were survivors
somewhere in the hills,” Cheryl Fineberg put in.
 
“We’ll have to try to find them.”
 

“We might pick up his trail and
back-track on it,” Jerry Bonhill suggested.
 

“You men do that,” the teacher
decided.
 
“While you’re gone, we’ll work
out some sort of housing arrangement.”
 

“I wish we could get some news,” she
continued.
 
“Ben Canster had all sorts of
fancy equipment in his appliance shop, but I can’t seem to get it hitched up
right.
 
Ben didn’t use regular electric
outlets.
 
He has his own Delco plant, and
I don’t know how to make the thing go.”
 

I volunteered, “Maybe I could help, Miss
Grant.
 
We had a good deal of basic
electronics in our training for—
”
 
I
caught the slip.
 
“That is, in the school I was attending.”
 

“Stay here and see what you can do,”
Thatcher suggested.
 
“Jerry and I can
round up the survivors.”
 

Before they left, Thatcher drove the
Negro’s body to a pine-sheltered knoll overlooking the lake, where Virginia
Grant said we could bury him.
 
While I
scooped a shallow grave in the soft earth, she sent Jim Riley to carry stones
up from the lakeside and pile them into a pyramided marker.
 
With a teacher’s eye for detail, she made two
legible copies of the Negro’s name and address from the driver’s license she
found in his wallet.
 

“We must keep an accurate record,” she
said.
 
“Someday his family may want to
locate the body.”
 

Cheryl Fineberg and I were alone by the
grave.
 
Cheryl helped me tramp the soil
over the body.
 

Virginia Grant rejoined us then.
 
We finished the Negro’s grave and walked back
to the village.
 
The teacher took us to
Ben Canster’s appliance shop, where she had earlier broken open the display
room door.
 
In a back room I found an
elaborate, all-frequency-receiving apparatus.
 
It was easy to put it in operation.
 
The receiver was powered by a Delco electric unit, driven by a gas
motor, which made the receiver independent of the regular electric supply.
 

Jim Riley and I explored the back of the
appliance shop.
 
In a separate, frame
building we found a radio transmitter.
 
Ben Canster spared nothing for his hobby.
 
It was a magnificent transmitter in excellent
order, and powered like the receiver by the independent Delco unit.
 
While I was testing it, we heard uncertain
footsteps on the gravel outside.
 
A tall,
thin, old man, his white hair uncombed and a gray stubble on his chin,
staggered to the door.
 
He was wearing
khaki trousers, a frayed, cotton shirt, and very battered boots; he stank of
sweat and liquor.
 

“That you, Ben?” he asked, peering into
the semi-darkness.
 

“It must be Hank Jenkins,” Jim Riley
whispered to me.
 

I held out my hand.
 
“My name’s Yorovich.”
 

“Russian!
 
You guys got here damn fast.
 
Might know you’d smell out
all this liquor.”
 

The boy said, “No, we’re refugees from
Los Angeles—”

“All the worse.
 
City people!
 
Always drink up everything in sight.
 
No moderation.
 
Well, I got the
Double Seven staked out; you ain’t gettin’ in there.”
 

He stumbled away, weaving down the
street and humming an off-key melody.
 

It was after one o’clock that afternoon
when Jim Riley came running over from the hotel to tell us Bonhill and
Thatcher were back.
 
“And we’re going to
have dinner right away.”
 

“Did they find the survivors?”

“Sure.
 
Two ladies and a colored boy.”
 
Jim’s eyes sparkled.
 
“His name is Ted Fisher and he’s just my age
and he wasn’t hurt at all!”

The two women Bonhill and Thatcher had
rescued were both in their thirties.
 

The taller of the two, a slim blonde,
whose name was Janice Gage, was very attractive—except for the shadow of horror
in her gray eyes.
 
The other refugee,
small, brown-haired, pert-faced, was Lola Donne, a buxom, sensuous woman who
seemed on the verge of overflowing the tight dress she wore.
 

While we ate, they told us what had
happened on the desert.
 
The two women
were strangers.
 
Each of them, in
separate cars, had been among the first evacuees to leave Los Angeles.
 

Near Lucerne Valley they were caught in
the frantic exodus of automobiles coming down the east highway out of Big
Bear.
 
Janice Gage’s car was pushed off
the shoulder of the road.
 
She struck
Lola Donne’s coupe and both machines were wrecked.
 

Then the bombs had fallen.
 
With eyes glazed Janice relived the
horror.
 
Only she, Lola, the boy Ted and
his father survived.
 
The Negro was hurt
worse than any of them.
 

With the force of his personality alone
the Negro kept them going throughout the night.
 
The road above them was impassable for a mile or more.
 
They had to climb through mesquite and
manzanita.
 
They might have returned to
the highway above the slide, but by that time the Negro must have lost his
sight.
 
He led them by instinct, knowing
they had to move constantly upward and feeling out their path by the
inclination of the land.
 
At dawn the
women were too exhausted to go any farther.
 
The Negro said he’d get help.
 
In
the pale light they saw his face and hands for the first time—the skin was in
ribbons of burned flesh.
 
And he still
did not let them know he was blind.
 
By
sheer animal strength he managed to reach the highway, where we found him.
 

We lingered over the meal, under no
compulsion of time.
 
We had no
appointments to keep.
 
Hank Jenkins wandered
in and joined us, bringing a half-empty fifth of liquor.
 
Virginia Grant made a place for him at the
table and piled his plate with food.
 
Mrs. Bonhill made a pleasant ceremony of giving Jerry and me new
clothes, which she had taken from a sporting goods shop.
 

Jerry and I went into a storage room
behind the registration desk and put on the clothes.
 
I winced when I felt the wool against my
back.
 
Bonhill laughed and said I had a
touch of sunburn.
 
As I went back to the
lobby, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror on the door, and the man I saw
was a stranger.
 

An American.
 
The clothes symbolically completed my
transformation, from Soviet paratrooper to American in eight hours.
 
I belonged.
 
And I understood, then, that America was not a nation, but a state of
mind.
 

Cheryl Fineberg came and slid on the
lounge between us.
 
Bonhill tipped his
cigar at a jaunty angle, grinning at her.
 

“I saw Willie Clapper go out right after
dinner,” she said, in a low voice.
 
“He
hasn’t come back yet.
 
I don’t want to
get everybody stirred up over nothing, but I think we should know what he’s up
to.”
 

“We’ll find him,” Bonhill said.
 

Outside the hotel, he went east on the
village street and I turned west.
 
I saw
Clapper a minute later, a hundred yards ahead of me.
 
He slithered out of a sporting goods shop,
jamming something into his coat pocket, and went into the drugstore where the
Negro died.
 

As I ran toward the store, I saw him
enter a telephone booth and drop a coin into the slot.
 
After a moment, he began to jiggle the
receiver hook.
 
He didn’t make his
connection—fortunately, for it was a reasonable guess that he was trying to
contact the invasion headquarters in Los Angeles.
 
He met me at the door of the store.
 
He shrugged noncommittally when I asked why
he was telephoning.
 

Far away, on the road west of the
village, we heard the hum of a motor.
 
It
stopped occasionally, and then moved toward us again.
 

“More refugees?”
I asked.
 

Clapper threw back his handsome head and
laughed uproariously.
 
“Bonhill’s car was
the last one over the road last night before the fire closed the highway.
 
Your pretty dream is finished, Lieutenant—and
so soon, too.
 
Academically, it would
have been amusing to see just how much trash they could make you swallow.”
 
He put his hand on my shoulder and with the
other pointed toward the sound of the approaching vehicle.
 
“That will be our mutual friends from Los
Angeles.
 
If I couldn’t get back to them,
they had to come looking for me—obviously.”
 

In blind rage I smashed my fist into his
face—again and again, until he fell against the door and collapsed inside the
shop.
 

We weren’t licked.
 
We couldn’t be.
 
And we had found a secret weapon, the stuff
of the spirit that no arms could reach.
 
I turned and ran back toward the hotel, signaling Jerry Bonhill with my
hand.
 
We had five minutes, perhaps less,
before the Soviet car would be in the village.
 
But we were Americans.
 
That was
all the time we needed.