The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  Naturally, they hadn’t seen the “lady” in question. Tell, it was a big restaurant. And I knew one couple who wouldn’t be coming back—they were probably packing for their homeworld even now.

  For my part, I was drinking my Coke, eating my steak sandwich, and gazing at my darling Clarissa who was gazing back at me over her oriental chicken salad, probably wondering how I managed to get into—and out of—these messes. I’d survived again, grateful I hadn’t had to set off the .41 in a small, enclosed, tile-lined space. That meant I could still hear her. Things couldn’t have been better—keeping the Bear Curse in mind—and I was reluctant to spoil them by going back to work prematurely.

  My would-be client—who’d gotten into, and out of, plenty of messes herself over the years—insisted: “Politicos to the right of center justify their trespasses against privacy an’ personal freedom in the name of ‘decency’ or ‘national security.’ Those to the left suppress individual economic self-determination an’ the right to own and carry weapons in the name of ‘public safety’ or ‘social justice,’ but it’s all a pack of lies meant to put a pretty face on thuggery an’ armed robbery.”

  “All individual behavior is about getting laid.” I finally offered the most cynical words I knew, impatiently. “And all group behavior is about eating.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Lucy demanded. “Is it original?” She always had an ear for an aphorism.

  I shrugged. “Just something I’ve been mulling over.”

  “We’ll talk about it later. It may even mean something. But just now, let’s examine what the stakes are—”

  “Mine’s medium rare,” I said, enjoying the expression it put on her face. “I’d like to finish it while it’s hot, if you don’t mind.”

  “The danger is that there’s gonna be enough of these artificial calamities that people’ll start listenin’ t’Williams an’ anybody else who thinks we oughta have a government.”

  “It was the stated purpose of various leftist terror groups,” Will observed around a bite of his cheeseburger, “in versions of Europe Win and I both know, to create spectacularly violent incidents that would force existing governments to clamp down, making life so miserable the average person would revolt—presumably in a Marxist direction.”

  I decided to make up for my initial flippancy. “It always works, too. Not just for the left, but for anybody interested in running the lives of others. That’s how we wound up with the Brady Bill and metal detectors in high schools. All you have to do is arrange for enough telegenic shootings, and—”

  “Then you’re both aware from bitter experience,” said Lucy, “that if a Continental Congress gets convened in the present circumstances, the ‘duration of the emergency’ that made it possible will likely last forever, an’ the unrestricted liberty that makes life worth livin’ in the Confederacy’ll be lost, probably never t’be regained!”

  “So what you’re saying, Lucy,” Will asked, “is, suspect anyone who stands to gain by reducing or eliminating individual freedom.”

  “That’s what I’m sayin’, all right.”

  “And we’ve just had a visit with the first and foremost of the breed,” I added, mentally calculating whether Bennett had been as big as the guy in the bathroom. Surreptitiously I felt to see if my pants were dry. They were, but somebody was going to pay a cleaning bill, anyway.

  Lucy nodded. “Leavin’ a pretty small handful of others.”

  “Native authoritarians, maybe. There can’t be many of them. But immigrants—you saw that bunch of stupes this morning in the Hanging Judge …” I interrupted myself briefly to tell Will about the Anti—Vending Machine Society. “Now, this couple of … of …”

  “Pisswits,” Lucy supplied.

  “Pisswits. Despite the humiliating circumstances, consider it stolen. We may have thousands of pisswits to wade through before this is over, and I’m supposed to be—”

  “Working on another case!” Both Lucy and Will finished for me. Clarissa gave me a sympathetic look.

  “Well, it’s true!”

  “An’ it means,” Lucy said, “you have an excuse t’wade through some of those immigrant suspects you were tellin’ us about, doesn’t it? While Willie, here, checks out the homegrown authoritarians.”

  “I’ll help,” Clarissa volunteered. She was the helpy type.

  “We’ll all help,” Will responded. Win, I want you with me when we confront Slaughterbush.”

  Lucy chirped, “Don’t forget Jerse Fahel!”

  “Believe me, I won’t,” he replied. “And I’ll come along with you and help you with your interviewees. With that arm, you need some backup. Is it a deal?”

  Like I said, I was shorthanded. “It’s a deal.” I sighed.

  “Then ‘All for one …’” Will quoted.

  “‘An’ One for all!’” responded Lucy.

  “‘And every man for himself,’” I said. “Who’s Jerse Fahel?”

  13: THE JAVA JIVE

  Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Government is from Uranus.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  “Pass me another one of those sausage patties, will you?”

  Under what historians will surely refer to as the Bear-Sanders Agreement of 220 A.L., it had been decided that Will would help me with my case and I would help him with his. It didn’t seem like a particularly equal exchange to me. Will’s case was about the cowardly, cold-blooded murders of more than two thousand innocent victims. Mine was about … well, the movies.

  “Sure, Winnie—y’want some more of this omelette, too?”

  As an historical footnote, my lovely Clarissa and our old friend (and I do mean old friend) Lucy would help us both. Having a medical doctor along for the ride seemed like a good idea until I thought about the implications. So far, in three days, I’d managed to break my left arm twice, have my car blown up, get shot at, and be assaulted in a public bathroom. The only bright (if thoroughly humiliating) aspect was that it had been the same arm both times. Stumbling around with both arms immobilized would have been too much to take.

  “Are there any more of those sliced peaches left?” Clarissa asked.

  All in all, it’d been a very long day. Thinking back, it seemed more like several very long days. By the time we left the underground shopping mall, the sun was already down behind Pistol Sight Mountain (absurdly known where I came from as “Horsetooth”), giving us one of those boringly predictable glorious Rocky Mountain sunsets, with a few sparse clouds brilliantly underlit in red-gold, orange-scarlet, and azure-purple. Will answered, “There will be for the next few picoseconds. Please pass the cantelope juice, will you?”

  Will had called his car, which met us in the parking structure. He took Lucy back to the Zone to the Hanging Judge, where she was staying in an apartment over the bar. Clarissa and I went home and—in what we both hoped would be a lifelong study—got to know each other a little better. Note: Merlot is Cabernet Sauvignon with the heartburn removed.

  BRIGHT AND EARLY the next morning, the four of us detective types met briefly and deliciously at Max and Yolanda’s place for breakfast and a strategy session. It was decided that we’d check out a couple of my leads before we checked out one of Will’s native authoritarians. Conveniently enough, the place I wanted to go first was right across the street, in an almost United Statesian glass-windowed storefront. Getting up from the kind of breakfast the Wizard and his wife served was an exercise of character, and my reflexes were a bit slow getting across the street, so it was a good thing traffic was slower in the Zone. When I got to the other side, I saw a familiar sight.

  “Excuse me, sir!” Damned if it wasn’t the little old “lady” I’d encountered twice before, tall, broad, and stooped over, clutching a small wicker basket to her person and ostensibly collecting for the Spaceman’s Fund. “She” even wore the same broad-brimmed hat and a dark veil. “Sir?”

  The Model 58 was out and in “her” face before I was conscious that I’d d
rawn it.

  All right, asshole!” I growled. “Now let’s see what’s under that mosquito netting!”

  The “lady” protested, “I’m afraid I don’t quite—”

  “Drop the basket! Lose the hat and veil! Now!” I levered the revolver’s hammer back to underline the point. Individuals walking past us gave us some very strange looks and I was beginning to worry that one or more of them might decide to come to the “lady’s” defense. It certainly would have happened in an instant anyplace outside the Zone.

  The basket droppd to the sidewalk, spilling coins. Gloved hands rose carefully to lift the hat and veil at the same time—and a cold chill traveled down my spine. This was definitely not the tough guy I’d drawn down on in Mr. Meep’s bathroom. She looked a bit like Nancy Culp, or that little old lady Jonathan Higgins used to have tea with on Magnum P.I.

  Magically, I made the revolver disappear, trying desperately to think of where to start an explanation and apology. By any decent definition, I was the criminal now, and I was really worried about helpful passersby.

  She started the conversation for me. “I’m just collecting for the Spaceman’s Fund,” she complained as she stooped down to pick her coins up. I stooped with her and tried to help. “I wasn’t exactly trying to hold you up, young man!”

  I stood. “Lady, somebody dressed just like you took a shot at me not too long ago, and tried to mug me in a restaurant bathroom. I swear to you on my mother’s—”

  She scowled. “And you fought them off with that ridiculous toy you pointed at me?” She drew her own weapon, a brand-new Bussjaeger .04 Hypersonic, titanium purple, and shiny. “Don’t bother swearing on your mother’s anything, young man. Just be more careful in the future—and get yourself a gun that was designed and manufactured sometime in this century!”

  Needless to say, the Spaceman’s Fund did very well that morning. Having emptied my pockets (and come pretty close to emptying other things, I ducked my head, anxious to get out of public sight, and hurried into the store.

  The sign had simply said:

  NEWS FROM HOME

  Not bad for an immigrant quarter, I thought, short and direct. I stepped into the store carefully, not exactly trying to be invisible, but reaching up and silencing the little hanging bell out of prudence of some kind. I’d convinced my overly eager associates to let me handle this first one alone.

  The store’s owner, one David Fitzdavid, was right after Karl “Papa” LeMat (late of British North America) on my list of bluebacks who made a living importing unusual items from various versions of the United States and other places people were coming into the Confederacy from. Research indicated that he dealt mostly in paperback books, dead-tree newspapers, and magazines from the Old Country of your choice. But he didn’t limit himself. I was especially interested in something he sold here that they hadn’t invented back where I came from, Hollywood movies recorded on little compact laser disks, in an electronic format called “DVD.”

  I moved quietly. I didn’t want to question Fitzdavid in front of a customer who’d promptly go out and spread the joyous news of my advent throughout the next dozen square blocks of beautiful downtown LaPorte, blowing whatever cover my investigation had. While they were talking at the counter in the back, I stayed toward the front of the store pretending to examine the most current issues of The Confederate Enquirer and Sapients magazine, both local publications, cosmically speaking.

  I HOPED DAGGETT the knifemonger had been exaggerating my celebrity status here in the Zone. I was supposed to be a private detective. Private detectives are supposed to be stealthy, or at the very least, inconspicuous. Maybe Lucy throve on being the belle of everybody’s ball, but it was going to be a pain in the ass for me if I couldn’t go here, there, and everywhere unrecognized. Maybe what I needed was a trenchcoat and some of those Groucho Marx nose-glasses, with the big, fuzzy mustache.

  In the back, a whiny voice complained, “I tell you, Fitz, I don’t even know how to do business here!”

  It turned out that the guy I’d been mistaking for a customer was just another storekeeper, apparently from the next place over. The two of them were enjoying a nicotine and caffeine break together and—literally—talking shop. The guy from next door was waving his cigarette around and bitching: “A customer you don’t know comes in and pays you with a personal check. Naturally, you ask him for his ID—and then he looks like he doesn’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”

  “Or if he does know,” Fitzdavid added in an understanding tone and a heavy Brooklyn accent, “he looks like he wants t’remove yer tonsils—wit’ a choichkey?”

  “That’s what he does, all right!” The other guy shuddered, took a great big drag on his coffin nail, and tried to drown his sorrows with an even bigger gulp of java. Suddenly I wanted a cigarette, too—and another cup of coffee—but decided to remain in stealth mode as long as I could stand it.

  The guy with the Brooklyn accent nodded from behind his counter and made a sort of an east coast spreading gesture with both of his hands. “’Cause it ain’t really a check, don’cha understand? It’s more like … like … well, like a warehouse invoice, payable on demand in da precious metal of yer cherce.”

  He tapped the bottom of an inverted pack of filtered Gallatins in the way only Americans—of one stripe or another—have mastered, pulled out the single cigarette that had obediently emerged, put it between his lips, and lit it with one of his imported Bics, reflexively cupping his hands around the flame. His guest was about to reply, but the owner took the first satisfying drag on his cigarette, exhaled, and went on. “Lookie, Mac: dese people here take everyt’ing real poisonal-like. Dey don’t do group-t’ink. Hell, dey don’t do group-do! Y’tell yer customer y’wanna see his bona fides before you’ll do business wit’ him, y’ain’t tellin’ him y’been boined before, by udders. He wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about dat, anyway. What does dat have t’do wit’ him? Nuttin’! He ain’t udders, see? What yer tellin’ him is dat y’don’t trust him!”

  “I know, Fitz, I know …” The other merchant sighed and shook his head resignedly. He ground his mostly unsmoked cigarette out in a big tray on the counter and accepted another. At least he hadn’t lit it off the first.

  “Anyway,” interrupted his host and colleague, pausing for a drink of coffee, then stirring it around and peering into it suspiciously. “How many of yer customers wanna pay dat way, by check? One in fifty? One in a hundred? Everybody I deal wit’ pays cash!”

  “Yes, well that’s another problem,” his neighbor replied, taking a long drag on his second cigarette. “If it were real cash—paper currency—I might be able to deal with it. Believe it or not, I managed to bring my cash register with me from Oxnard! But no—it’s always in big, thick, heavy coins! Now what the hell am I going to do with big, thick, heavy coins?”

  I almost interrupted right then, jarred to the bone by the dumbest phrase I’d ever heard, “real cash—paper currency.” But I bit my tongue, instead. It hurt.

  “Be grateful, Mac, be grateful! What precious metal coins mean is no inflation, damn little counterfeitin’, no taxes at all! Din’cha ever have the Nixon-Ford-Carter currency soiplus in yer woild?”

  “‘Wimp Inflation Now!’” his neighbor deliberately misquoted.

  They both laughed. “You got it, Mac! Distributors and jobbers was sendin’ out new price sheets every udder day! An’ dat was one of history’s milder inflationary episodes! Lemme tell you somet’in’, Mac, inflation’s nuttin’ but government counterfeitin’. An’ hard money—especially private-issue coins like dey got here—makes it impossible!”

  The neighbor was persistent. He waved his arms, spilling cigarette ash. “But with all that anonymous hard cash around, what if somebody decides to rob you?”

  “When’s da last time y’seen somet’in’ like dat on da’Com, Mac?” Pouring himself another cup of black coffee from the carafe on the counter, the storekeeper chuckled. “Ever notice how everybody here is
packin’?”

  “Packing?” the neighbor sounded perplexed.

  “Carries a piece.” Fitzdavid slapped the automatic pistol he was wearing low on his hip, over his apron. “Well, dere’s a reason for dat. If some lowlife scumbag’s stupid enough t’try an’ rob’em—an’ it don’t happen often—dey don’t gotta wait no forty-five minutes for da cops to get dere.”

  The other guy delivered a sort of outraged gulp. “Even the women and the children?”

  “Especially da women an’ children, Mac! Da smaller an’ weaker y’happen t’be, da more need y’got for a weapon, don’cha? Dat’s what guns’re for, t’protect da weak from da strong! Sheesh! It just makes sense.”

  “But women … children!” It was almost a wail of despair.

  “Mac, lemme tellya da kinda woild you’ve come to: In da Nort’ American Confederacy—fer reasons of religious conscience—da Amish will only carry revolvers!”

  There was a long, quiet pause.

  Then: “But I don’t want to carry a gun, Fitz! I’ve got other, better things to do with my time. I don’t want to spend every waking minute defending my life and property!”

  His host laughed. “Y’got better t’ings t’do wit’ your time dan eatin’? Sleepin’? Takin’ a crap? How’bout sex, Mac, y’wanna let somebody else take care a dat for youse?”

  Mac cleared his throat. “What does that have to do with—?”

  “Everyt’in’! It has t’do wit’ everyt’in’!” He waggled his eyebrows at the carafe, got a nod for a reply, and freshened his neighbor’s cup. “Seems t’me like y’want somet’in’ for nuttin’. Self-defense is whatcha call yer individual bodily function. Y’can’t palm it off on nobody else. Every time people try dat, everybody winds up payin’ a price—oppressive government, brutal, corrupt cops, a violent crime rate da natives here always t’ink we’re lyin’ about.” His neighbor opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted.