Authors: Donald Hamilton
There was a little murmur of anger, as Frechette paused dramatically. I remembered that he’d had a phony-Frenchy accent at Inanook. Apparently it had been a disguise; he certainly didn’t have it now.
“The case of the female prisoner is a little less clear-cut, but only a little,” he went on. “But before we take up the question of her guilt, let us review the great popular movement we represent, and remind ourselves of what is at stake here that transcends all considerations of sentiment and bourgeois humanitarianism…”
Then he was off. It was quite a speech. He went back to the death of the tyrant Caesar at the hands of that great people’s liberator, Brutus, and took it from there. We heard about the IRA, the PLO, FLQ, the SLA, and numerous other initials that meant nothing to me. The Weathermen and the Muslims each got a patronizing pat on the head along with protest movements I’d never heard of on continents I’d never visited and was fairly sure he hadn’t, either. We got Bolívar and Juarez, Guevara and Arafat…
There was a crash as Joan Market struck the flimsy table with both fists, rising. The room was suddenly silent.
“What are you trying to do to me?” she whispered. “
What are you trying to do to me?
”
I felt the barge shift positions minutely against the dock in response to wind or current. I could hear the faint sound of a radio or TV set operating down in the hold under my feet, and I wondered how much reception they could get surrounded by all that metal. I wondered absently what kind of a miserable, dank, dark metal cave of a dormitory they had down there. The above-deck accommodations were bad enough. Frechette stirred in an embarrassed way and looked up at the woman standing tall above him with her wild hairdo making her look even taller.
“Now, Joanie,” he said mildly.
“You left out Jesus Christ and George Washington,” she sneered. “Don’t give me that now-Joanie shit! You know what today is. You know what I have to do today. What the hell do you think I am? Making me sit here and listen to this crap when you know I’ve got to make myself
right
about it before I do it, killing people isn’t just a natural function like going to the can!”
He cleared his throat. “Certain decisions must be made—”
“They don’t must be made today! I asked you to put it off; what’s the goddamned rush? Corny speeches don’t must be made today and I don’t must listen to a lot of bullshit before I… Damn you, Jake, what is it with you these days, anyway? We had it all settled a long time ago, you and Danny and I. We were going to have a
real
revolutionary movement, not just another goddamned yak-yak group-therapy outfit. No goddamned wild-eyed speeches. No goddamned military titles. No crappy secret-agent code names. No goddamned secret guerilla armies or delusions of grandeur, no corny secret headquarters where we could be trapped, just a small bunch of dedicated underground fighters moving fast, moving silently, striking where it would hurt the bastards worst—and it was working, damn you, it was
working
! We had them running scared, by God. And now look at us, blasted out of that fucking crazy-house hideout, penned up in this weirdo floating pigsty! Who the hell needs a headquarters, anyway? Who needs all that rat-tat-tat guns? What’s it all for except a goddamned ego trip—”
Frechette said stiffly, “It has been clearly demonstrated that an organization like ours must have efficient administration and strong defensive capabilities.”
“Defensive bullshit!” she said. “We don’t defend, we attack. And we were attacking damned successfully until you—”
“Were we?” he snapped, interrupting her. His voice was sharp. “Well, I suppose you’re right up to a point, my dear. We
were
attacking successfully until your husband Danny blew himself up with one of his homemade bombs, a martyr to the Cause or to his own clumsiness, I’ve never quite figured out which!”
She had swung to face him. “Don’t you sneer at Danny! Don’t you
dare
sneer at Danny!”
“My apologies. I forgot. Dan Market bungled a simple job so he is now one of the brightest saints of our movement. Of course, I’ll admit he did manage to take the Davidson girl’s weakling husband with him, let’s give him credit for that. Even if he did it by accident instead of according to our prearranged plan, he silenced
that
traitor in time, which is more than can be said for the way his wife was handled. I told you she wasn’t to be trusted, remember? I told you she suspected the truth, she had to suspect the truth about how her husband died and why. I told you it was all just a trick—”
“And then you said we should let the bitch in anyway so we could keep an eye on her, remember?”
“Mr. Chairman!” It was the young black man in the green coveralls. “Mr. Chairman, General, sir, can we please get back to the subject of the meeting and skip the recriminations, sir?” His voice wasn’t nearly as respectful as his words.
“Point well taken,” Frechette said after a moment’s pause. “You hear the man, Joanie. The subject is—”
“I know what the subject is,” Joan Market snapped. “The real subject is one of the fancy remote-controlled explosive fucking devices we’re using these days. It was planted this morning by Ruthie and me. It’s now going to have to be fired on schedule by somebody. Who wants the job? Here!”
The cabin was silent once more as she dug into one of the big pockets of her skirt and brought out a black plastic object that seemed to be a diminutive transistor radio. She laid it on the table and flicked a switch with her thumb. I heard the girl with the red headband, closest to me, suck in her breath sharply as a tiny red light appeared in a corner of the plastic case.
“It’s really very simple,” Joan Market said. “Just turn it on like a radio, remember? You can even get AM programs on it, so keep the volume all the way down when the time comes unless you want to do it to a country-and-western accompaniment. Or the goddamned news. It
is
a radio and nobody can tell different without taking it apart. But if you’re in the right area, anywhere within a quarter of a mile, and press the button—here—that says DIAL LIGHT, it will come in louder than any radio you ever heard. It will sound like the end of the world, and that’s just what it will be for a lot of people. Since you’ve made it clear you don’t want to leave me in peace to do it my way, there it is. All yours, General Frechette.”
She pushed it towards him. He didn’t move to take it. She made an angry sound in her throat.
“What’s the matter, General Jake?” she demanded. “Here’s your chance to do it your way. Ruthie’ll brief you. She’ll show you where to wait, where you’ll be safe from the blast but close enough, and she’ll handle the kids for camouflage—see that dirty hippie family wouldn’t you think they’d take a bath sometimes—and get them the hell out of the area before it’s time. Robbie’s very good about having to go pee on cue, and Sissy likes spraying the paint around. And Ruthie’ll tell you the signal you’ll be given by a sanctified messenger, of that great friend of humanity and social reform, Mr. Emilio Brassaro.” The woman started to turn away, and glanced back. “Oh, you’d better switch it off now or you’ll run down the batteries. Good luck, General.”
Frechette reached out and caught her arm. “Where are you going?”
“Anywhere!” she said harshly. “Any fucking where away from this bunch of phony playacting revolutionaries. Come see the boys and girls in that great dramatic masterpiece Frechette’s Last Stand. Rat-tat-tat, ratatatat, boom, bang. I should have split long ago. I should have split the day we got tied up with that crummy New York gangster and his coldeyed gunmen, and I do mean you Mr. Ovid or whatever the hell your real name is. We should have told the bastard to go fuck himself right at the start.”
“You talk as if we had a choice!” Frechette protested. “You know there was no choice, Joanie. With Danny dead we had no way of getting the explosives we needed and nobody who knew how to construct… Anyway, Brassaro had us cold. He’d have tipped off the authorities if we hadn’t agreed to cooperate.”
“So we took his tricky bombs, and his shitty secondhand machineguns, and used the Grade B movie sets he fixed up for us to hide in—”
“Mr. Brassaro has been very helpful, and our weapons and hideouts were provided at my request and to my specifications. I’ll have you know I have given a great deal of thought to our needs, Joanie, and while I don’t expect gratitude I think you could at least refrain from criticizing other people’s administrative efforts until you’ve faced a few of the problems yourself.”
The woman jerked herself free. “I know. All I do is make the stuff go bang while you march around at the head of your ten-man army. Well,
you
try pushing the bang-button for a change and see what it’s like. Face that problem for a change. Even if I wasn’t sick of listening to you, I’m tired of trying to kid myself that we can struggle for human freedom and dignity and deal with a parasite like Brassaro at the same time.”
I glanced towards the little man with the shotgun, but he seemed unmoved by the reference to his current employer. Frechette threw him an uneasy glance, also.
“Maybe Mr. Brassaro’s motives aren’t as pure as we’d like them to be,” he said stiffly, “but he is fighting the same establishment enemy that we face. To that extent he is a logical ally, and if we’re too delicate to use help that’s offered us…”
“You sound as if it were handed out free of charge.”
“We fulfill certain conditions,” Frechette said with a show of patience. “We’re told the time and place and signal instead of operating at random as we did when Danny was alive. Is that so important? The psychological effect on our enemies is the same, isn’t it? We’re still softening them up for the day we present our demands. In return for weapons to defend ourselves with, suitable places to hide from their Gestapo, and bombs that fire when they’re supposed to instead of blowing us up by mistake, we sacrifice only a small freedom of choice.”
The woman made a sharp gesture. “Well, I’m taking what freedom of choice I’ve got left and getting to hell out of here. And I still say you’d better turn that thing off before the batteries go dead on you.” She watched Frechette’s hand go out towards the radio and stop. She laughed shrilly. “What’s the matter? The stuff is miles away. Are you scared of a little bitty crummy radio?” She reached out and pushed the switch, extinguishing the pinpoint of red light. She looked down the table towards Sally and me, but her eyes seemed to be focused far beyond us. Without looking down, she spoke to Frechette: “You’d louse it up, wouldn’t you, Jake? After all the trouble we’ve had setting this one up, you’d go in there and try to fire at the wrong time or from the wrong distance, anything to make it easy and safe. If there’s a way to fuck it up, you’ll fuck it. Because you’re bombshy, aren’t you, Jake? That time Danny’s bomb went off too soon and almost got you, too. You’ve been scared of them ever since, haven’t you?”
The man surprised me. Instead of becoming indignant, he said quite gently, “I’ll happily admit that, Joanie, if you’ll reconsider. You know we all have tremendous faith in you. We need you.”
It sounded a little phony and overdone to me, but the woman thought about it quite seriously, frowning. When she spoke, her voice had changed oddly, becoming higher, almost childlike.
“You haven’t left me much time.”
“You have several hours yet, dear,” said Frechette.
“You don’t know what I go through,” Joan Market said plaintively, in that soft, high, new voice. “You never seem to understand that I mustn’t be distracted on these special days. You always argue with me and it isn’t right, Jake. It isn’t right!”
“I’m sorry, Joanie.”
“I have to have this time to myself in order to… do you think it’s silly for me to say I must purify myself?”
“I don’t think it’s silly at all, my dear.”
“Those people.” She was still staring at us without seeing us. “In the corner. They’re not really worth arguing about, are they? They deserve whatever… Anything you want to do with them is all right. Get rid of them any way you like. I’m sorry I made such a fuss but… It’s a
sacrifice
, don’t you see? I consider myself… maybe I’m being silly again, but I think of myself as sort of a priestess and all these distractions just tear me apart when I… when I want to get everything straight in my head so I can do it gently and
right
and with great
respect
for those who have to die at our hands in order that we may eventually achieve…” She stopped abruptly. She pocketed the radio and turned towards the door. Over her shoulder she said in a perfectly normal voice, “Get the brats, Ruthie, while I warm up the van.”
She squeezed past Frechettes’ chair and strode past Ovid, at the door; a moment later the outer door to the galley opened and closed. We could hear her stride away along the dock although we couldn’t see her because of the dingy curtains covering the shoreward windows.
I realized belatedly that we hadn’t been listening to an argument at all. It had been a ritual playlet serving some murky psychological need. The diagnosis was confirmed when I heard the girl with the headband whisper to Manny:
“Jeez, how many times do we have to watch that crazy bitch psych herself up? She always picks a fight with somebody and scares hell out of everybody with that gadget of hers. You’d think just once she’d go out and push that crazy button without all the preliminary crap, wouldn’t you?”
Manny nudged her. “Shut up, here comes Fatso.”
It was hard to take them seriously. They reminded me of a rather ineffectual, bickering camera club of which I’d briefly been a member in my younger photographic days. It was hard to keep clearly in mind that these particular club members dealt in firearms and high explosives and violent protest instead of cameras and films and vague aesthetic theories. There were three submachineguns and a shotgun currently visible in this rustic clubhouse, not to mention the minor artillery that might be worn out of sight and probably was. I reminded myself again that you can be killed just as dead by a mad amateur as by a sane pro.