Exiles (25 page)

Spiegel slowed his pace so that he could drop back in the line of march. He wanted to talk to the Worm. Maybe the Worm could shed some light on Hyde’s insinuations. But the Worm, it seemed, had fallen well behind the ARMS contingent. Trailing the Americans was a group calling for Macedonian independence, then a small but energetic squad of Basque separatists. Spiegel stood to the side and let them pass. If he didn’t find the Worm, he would either jog ahead to the deserters or keep pace with one of the “Greens,” the Whole Earth enthusiasts who were the wagging tail at the shaggy end of the parade. That’s where he saw the Worm, marching beneath a street-wide banner that depicted a breeching whale.

The Worm waved to Spiegel. “Why’d you end up here?” Spiegel asked him.

“I believe in ecology,” the Worm said. “It’s everywhere.”

“No, man, you fell back when those two dudes squeezed in next to me.”

The Worm looked straight ahead. Around them, tall blond people, healthy-looking even for Swedes, chanted
Norge, Nej
! It had something to do with the Norwegian whaling fleet, Spiegel assumed. Someone a few steps ahead of them wore a tall hat shaped like a smokestack. Every twenty steps or so, a puff of gray smoke belched from his chimney, and the spectators cheered and applauded.

“Answer me,” Spiegel said.

“I just thought they wanted to talk to you alone is all,” the Worm answered.

“Do you know Hyde?”

“Sure. Been in ARMS since before I got here. He’s from Oakland. Claims he grew up with Bobby Seale, but who knows.”

“So why did you disappear when he showed up? Did somebody warn you or something?”

“Warn me? What about?”

“I think they meant to give me some shit is all. Not me, exactly, but that fucking Aaronson. They want to know why he hasn’t been running meetings, where he’s been since he came back from Germany, other stuff, too, that I didn’t understand. I think you do. I think you know that someone’s going to try to clip Aaronson, and since they think I’m him they’re gonna end up clipping me.”

“I only know some of the guys wanna have a meeting. They think you, I mean Aaronson, ought to resign. They want someone with credentials, I mean a real deserter, to run the group. Not everyone agrees.”

“Do you agree?”

“I don’t care, except the group’s about broke, you know. They’re gonna kick us out of the warehouse, and we’ll have to move into like a church basement, or a fucking rectory.”

“What’s so bad about that?” Spiegel asked.

“No smoking, man.”

“I’m thinking,” Spiegel said, “that I can only hold out so long, waiting for Aaronson. I can give it maybe another week. Then, I’ll have to level with the guys, tell them what I’ve been doing to run interference for him while he ran his mission. But right now, I don’t know where the fuck he is. Maybe he’s being held somewhere, or maybe his travels took him farther than he let on to us.”

“Do you know,” the Worm said, “exactly what his mission is all about? ’Cause I suspect it involves more than bringing deserters back to Uppsala.”

He looked around to make sure that no one could hear what he was saying to Spiegel. No one could. The march, at least at its tail end, had broken down into disorder. People from the sidewalk crowds had joined the flow, and the once-disciplined ranks had degenerated. The squads by now were so intermingled that when a leader called a number through a megaphone some people would be chanting about Vietnam, some about apartheid, and others about British coal miners. Spiegel noticed that the pace had slowed and the crowd thickened as the procession approached the narrow pedestrian bridge that crossed the river.

“I can tell you that there’s other stuff involved,” the Worm said. “I don’t know what. Maybe drugs, maybe guns. I don’t know how he’s moving them. But I think he’s paid well for his troubles, and that the money finds its way to our treasury. Some of it finds its way out, too. Maybe that’s what they were asking you?”

“Maybe,” Spiegel said. He was thinking that, if the Worm was right, it could explain why nobody had heard from Aaronson. Tracy had said something about Aaronson’s handling a shipment of material to the church. Maybe he had been captured while he was smuggling arms or drugs, and the police really thought he was Spiegel. Maybe they were keeping it quiet, waiting for Aaronson to start talking, to reveal the network of his contacts on both sides of the border. Spiegel suspected that Aaronson would crack. Spiegel bit down on his lip, shook his head in worry. I’m dead if he starts talking, he thought. But how lucky for Aaronson, if luck it was, to be out of the crosshairs when the shooting was about to start. Once again, Spiegel would find himself pinned to the target while his doppelgänger danced away, floating off the range and out of view.

Spiegel stepped ahead of the Worm onto the footbridge. He was nervous about crossing the water. He wondered if the crowd might be testing the old bridge to its capacity, or beyond. The copper railings, green with age, looked flimsy and malleable. The pavement itself seemed to buckle and to undulate as the marchers stomped across, in rhythm to the pounding of a bass drum that could be heard coming from the park on the far bank. Spiegel looked over the railing to the swirling river below. The snowmelt and the late-spring rains had raised the water level high up the embankments, so the surface of the river nearly kissed the girders beneath the bridge.

Just as Spiegel reached the apex of the bridge, the procession halted. The crowd had filled the near end of the square where the rally was to be held, and the police had started to direct the last of the marchers down a side street, toward a less populated section of the plaza, distant from the grandstands. Spiegel felt the footbridge sway as the advancing crowd pressed ahead. The marshals, whistling and shouting, telling the squads at the rear to halt, to back up, could not prevail. The procession continued to roll forward like a tide. Spiegel was locked into place, between opposing forces. He knew that he would have to begin to move, in one direction or the other. To stay put would be to risk being crushed, like a rock beneath a glacier. He looked back to see if he could find the Worm, but the crowd had swallowed him.

The shrill whistles from the leaders of the squadrons piped from both sides of the river. The sounds seemed to bounce off the factory walls, to echo one another, to reverberate with a continuous increase of intensity. Far away, Spiegel could hear the electronic screaming of the loudspeakers that had been set up to broadcast the speeches at the rally. If he went back to the embankment, he might be able to walk through the city to the auto bridge and cross the river in time to hear Zeke. But the crowd behind him seemed to have become thicker. There was a real chance that the throng would burst the railings and people would tumble into the rushing water. Spiegel decided that his best chance was to find within the crowd a rivulet that was flowing forward, to join in, and to press ahead toward the site of the rally. He craned his neck to get a better view, then leaned out dangerously over the railing to see if he could detect any movement. His heart stopped. There, at the far end of the bridge, scanning the crowd, stood a tall man with a jagged red scar across his jaw.

He had been looking across the water, trying to scan the marchers who were retreating from the footbridge. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, edgy, even frantic, like a caged animal. As soon as he recognized him, Spiegel turned and burrowed into the crowd. He shouldered and shoved against the wall of marchers, working his way inch by inch off the bridge. He could feel the crowd parting behind him, making way for someone in pursuit. Ahead of him a young woman held a peace sign aloft on a bamboo pole. Spiegel grabbed the pole from her.
Djävla
! (hell!) she screamed as he called to her,
Förlat
(sorry). Now people got out of his way as he pushed through, swinging the pole. He bullied his way in retreat, and he could hear behind him a steady rumble, the sound of his pursuer working his way up the ramp of the footbridge, fighting against the tide.

Spiegel fought, too. He had no time to assess the damage he might be inflicting, no time to think about that. He swung the pole, and the crowd parted. He had to work like an automaton, a threshing machine. If he was in pain or injured, he hadn’t yet noticed. If he injured others, he would suffer the consequences later. Whistles blew, and horns and sirens, but he didn’t hear. People shouted at him, but he couldn’t understand. He thought he heard a scream behind him, a crash of metal, a shattering of glass, but he did not pause to look. He told himself that he must keep swinging the pole until he reached the embankment. Then, he would drop the peace banner on the grass and run, lose himself among the alleyways of the Old City.

The last of the marchers, sensing that something had gone terribly wrong up ahead, halted at the foot of the bridge. Through the crowd, Spiegel could see a patch of green, a corner of the sloping parkway alongside the river. He dropped his pole and sliced his way into the clear. He felt a shock of dizziness and relief, like a diver who has been submerged too long breaking out to the surface and gasping for air, as he sprinted down a cinder pathway toward the city streets. And then he saw why the crowd had stopped moving. The police had arrived, on both banks of the river. Their sirens howled and screamed across the water, calling to each other. A police wagon—Spiegel was surprised at how much it resembled an American ice-cream truck—had pulled onto the paved turnaround at the far end of the footbridge. Its horn blasted as the heavy notes of the national anthem, broadcast from the loudspeakers at the rally site, rolled over the water and echoed off the stanchions of the bridge and against the glass walls of the city’s office buildings and the stone face of the castle, high above them on the hill.

Ahead of Spiegel, at the end of the cinder pathway, a black Volvo jumped the curb and slammed to a stop, cutting slashes in the grass. Two policemen leaped out and stood shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk, blocking Spiegel’s way. He thought of trying to barrel through them, but he knew that he no longer had the strength, or the momentum. The policemen were huge, and planted as firmly as trees. He would bounce off them like a football scrub crashing into the tackle dummy. So at the last second Spiegel pulled up short. His lungs were burning, and he felt a pain in his side as if someone had stabbed him with a sword. He leaned forward, as if to vomit, and he thought he might drop to the ground, but a big hand gripped his shoulder and held him aright.

“Hello, Aaronson,” a voice said.

Had the Uppsala police been following him all through the march? Or for much longer? Spiegel tried to steady his breathing enough so that he could speak. “I didn’t do anything,” he protested. “You can’t put me under arrest.”

“You’re not under arrest,” the policeman said.

“Come, let’s go,” said the bigger of the two. Spiegel had no choice. Nor did he desire to resist. To go with them could be no worse than waiting on the bridge to confront his fate, his accuser, his demon.

The Volvo whipped through the city, the wail of its siren streaming behind them like a long ribbon of sound, a pennant trailing in a breeze. Spiegel leaned back in the hard leather seat. He caught his breath. He felt comfortable, and surprisingly relaxed. It was as if he had been placed inside a capsule and lifted above the noisy discord and partisan bickering of the day’s events. He knew that he had narrowly escaped what might have been a mortal threat, but he felt strangely removed from the experience, as if he could set his chin on his palm, gaze out the tinted window, and watch the narrative of his life unfold, like an astronaut staring bemusedly at the watery globe from the weightless silence of space.

Crowds parted before them as they rolled along the main thoroughfare, like a pinball shot from a chute. As they approached each intersection, uniformed police officers held back traffic and waved the unmarked Volvo on its way.

Spiegel’s head was spinning with questions: Why had the Uppsala police suddenly materialized and pulled him to safety? Were they planning to arrest him? And if so, what for? He had done nothing wrong. He was being chased, and he’d run. If he had created a disturbance, if anyone had been injured, that was not his fault.

But Spiegel knew that if the Uppsala police learned his true identity, they would turn him over to the American authorities in Stockholm. Then, anything might happen. If the Americans learned that he had given up his passport so that Aaronson could travel illegally to Germany, Spiegel could be deported and held on federal charges. He could even be linked to Aaronson’s attack on the draft board, and charged with conspiracy. It would hardly matter that he hadn’t known Aaronson at the time of the sabotage. Conspiracy charges, especially in federal courts, were tremendously elastic and could stretch to include the most disparate and nebulous of actions, as anyone who had followed the Chicago Seven trial knew all too well.

The radio crackled, and one of the Uppsala cops barked something back into the speaker, orders, a location check, Spiegel couldn’t tell. The words were coming at him in short, static-filled blasts, apparently reports on the march and demonstrations from around the city. Spiegel wondered if the rally would come off and if Zeke would get to give his speech. He wondered about Tracy, how she would learn that he had been taken by the police. No doubt the Worm would tell her. He must have seen everything from his vantage on the bridge. Would she bail him out? It might be better, though, if Tracy didn’t show up at police headquarters too soon. Spiegel didn’t want her saying anything before they had a clear picture of the battlefield, or at least of the face of their antagonist.

Lost in his ruminations, Spiegel barely noticed as the Volvo pulled into the basement garage beneath police headquarters. “Here we are,” said the driver. “Special delivery.” The other cop grabbed Spiegel roughly by the arm, and led him into the building. Spiegel was not afraid, but he was tired. Perhaps he had been half-asleep in the car. The whole day seemed to him like a dream. It was only early afternoon, but he felt as if he had been awake for many hours. That incessant sunlight had been eating through his sleep.