The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  “You seem to be disliked by your fellow immigrants,” Will went on without waiting for Stonesoup’s nod. “Many of them gave everything up to escape from countless tyrannies and come to a free world. Frankly, I’ve heard from some of them that you and your friends here are the only newcomers ever to be rounded up by their own government, hauled to the nearest probability broach, and pushed through. Is that really what happened?”

  Gasps from the “audience.” Wooley blinked in slow motion. I’d never seen that done before. “Why, Captain Sanders, I’m surprised you’d ask me a question like that.”

  Will laughed. “Yeah, but it did happen?”

  Stonesoup took over at that point, and it became perfectly clear, if it hadn’t been before, that he was the real brains, heart, and soul of the Byzantine Pope’s little “court.” For the life of me, I can’t remember a goddamned thing he said—I’ve tried—but if there were five positions that could be taken on any given issue, he appeared capable of advocating each and every one of them in the same sentence, almost in the same breath, without upsetting a single listener on any side. What he said (I tried afterward to reconstruct the form, if not the actual content) went something like this: “Believe me my dear and good friends I can personally assure you on the basis of firsthand knowledge that the sun will definitely rise in the east tomorrow morning, have I ever lied to you, and we’ll all enjoy watching it rise in the west so much when it rises, absolutely, you can trust me on this and take it to the bank, in the north and south and of course it won’t come up at all.”

  My guess was that his usual victims—gullible idiots anxious to have their own beliefs validated by him—never even noticed his remarkable talent. Here was a guy who could have given lessons to Bill Clinton.

  Will ignored Stonesoup and pressed on. “To be perfectly truthful, Mr. Wooley, whenever Win or I or any of our associates ask around about you and your, er …”

  “Hangers-on?” I offered to resentful muttering out in shadowland.

  Will glared at me; I convinced myself he didn’t mean it. “You’re invariably compared to ‘gypsy roofers’ in the worlds we all fled, who come around each spring to separate suggestable people from hundreds of dollars to ‘tar’ their roofs or ‘repave’ their driveways with cheap recycled fuel oil—and then disappear before they can be arrested on bunco charges.”

  I could see that Stonesoup was trying very hard not to get mad. He was a con-man, all right. We’d heard he’d given up a promising career doing kitchen appliance infomercials for politics. If it’d been me, with nothing to sell, I’d simply have cold-cocked Will. Instead, Stonesoup kept up that nervous, perpetual-motion gameshow host manner of his. He took a deep breath. “What Baje did, Captain Sanders, in the ungrateful world we were all forcibly exiled from, was to offer himself generously, unselfishly, indeed, self-sacrificingly, to a nation that desperately needed him as Chief Executive, a nation that coldly rejected him and the Freedom-Loving Party because they were the ignorant products of the public education system who didn’t understand what was best for them.”

  “Well I’m certainly glad to have that cleared up, because I heard differently.” Will stubbornly addressed Wooley instead of Stonesoup. “I heard that what you and your friends did, back in the States, was to pretend to run for Chief Executive, when in fact none of you have any real convictions. You extracted millions from poor saps who only wanted to live in a free country, for political campaigns that somehow never quite solidified. And then you doled it out to yourselves as ‘consulting fees.’”

  “Legitimate expenses!” So Wooley had hot-buttons, after all.

  Will said, “I gotta tell you, Mr. Wooley, the most amazing thing to me is that your Freedom-Loving Party rank and file appears to have consisted entirely of suckers on whom the same old tired con worked year after year.”

  “No doubt,” I observed, unable to stay out of it any longer, “if you hadn’t stumbled upon such a lucrative modus operandi, you’d still be back in our own continuum, working the Badger Game, the Spanish Prisoner, or the Pigeon Drop on an entirely different gaggle of hapless marks.”

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” shrieked a voice from behind. We turned. Forrest stood between us and the door with a long-barrelled stainless steel revolver in his hand. “You can’t say that kind of thing and just walk out of here!”

  “Pay no attention to Endie.” Stonesoup turned his back on the man and made yawning gestures. “He’s completely harmless. Endie was the original founder of the Freedom-Lover’s Party, did you know that? He’s a bit less than happy about being exiled with us. Somewhere along the line, in one last pathetic attempt to bring his tiny, insignificant third party out of the utter obscurity which is all it achieved after thirty years of struggle, he chose to shut his eyes to what you clearly regard as our shortcomings and let us take the party over, in exchange for a salaried position as its figurehead-in-chief.”

  Will nodded. “That’s consistent with my understanding. He took his country’s last, best hope for liberty and let you guys, Stonesoup and Wooley and their flunkies, deliberately corrupt and destroy it. Now everything he created has turned to garbage, in which he’s forced to wallow every day.”

  “The irony is that he never got a chance to collect that salary.” Stonesoup shrugged negligently, as if he hadn’t heard what Will had said about him. “He’s a gofer, the court jester. We call him ‘Endie’ because he’s the butt of everybody’s jokes around here. Isn’t that right, Endie? Put that thing down immediately, and come here! All this man did was say things. If you shoot him, you’ll be initiating force against him.”

  Forrest’s shoulders slumped. He shoved the sixgun in his waistband and came to the foot of the dais.

  “That’s Endie,” Stonesoup said mockingly. “An absolute sucker for the Nonaggression Principle.”

  Wooley stirred again. “An undesirable litmus test.”

  Forrest shrieked incoherently, pulled his revolver out, levelled it at Wooley, and before anybody could reach him, pulled the trigger six times.

  The noise was horrific; .357 Magnum, at a guess. Suddenly, the air was filled with the odor of double-based nitro powder. Wooley, totally unhurt, looked confused. Eight feet to his right, one of his followers I’d noticed before—a tall, dignified, attorneyesqe, vaguely Irish individual with short gray hair—slumped to the dirty carpet and expired in a pool of blood.

  Meanwhile Stonesoup, standing beside me, was trying to conceal a big, wet, rapidly spreading dark spot across the front of his gray preppie trousers.

  24 THERE’LL NEVER BE ANOTHER YOU

  The most dangerous and successful conspiracies usually take place in public, in plain sight, under the clear, bright light of day—often with cameras focused on them.

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin

  For some reason, hockey players and figure skaters don’t seem to like watching each other work. I suppose that’s why there was a big, thick partition—about sixty feet from side to side—between the two oversized sheets of cold, wet, slippery stuff at the Confederation Ice and Pool Esplanade on (where else?) Confederation Boulevard, a mile or so south of Laporte University, Ltd.

  Within that wall were a score of locker rooms, a fully equipped weight room, a first-aid station with its own surgery and CAT scanner, and a pro-shop full of colorful jerseys and frilly dresses hanging side by side along the walls. There were also steel and titanium blades (with and without toepicks), helmets, sticks, hip and butt pads, three weights of pucks, unmounted boots of both denominations, and at least a carload and a half of assorted painkillers, blister pads, tape for several different purposes, plastic splints, air-casts, and bandages.

  Surprisingly, figures skaters buy their full, fair share of the medical stuff.

  Atop the partition was a restaurant and bar, which made being here very pleasant in and of itself. Back in the States, in the seventies, I’d once arrested a would-be child kidnapper at South Suburban ice rink in Littleton. I hadn’t seen
ice skating of either kind since then, not for twenty years. I hadn’t even known that they played hockey here in the Confederacy. But it had developed that Clarissa had a client—a pretty little prodigy of an eight-year-old girl—with cruel bone spurs growing out of both feet that almost appeared to be a natural hazard in this particular environment.

  On one side of the partition, the ice was kept relatively soft and the air inside was almost balmy. The place had a breathtaking skylight high overhead, spanning the entire building, and mirrors on every surface where there weren’t enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. The restaurant and bar were divided in half by a transparent partition only half an inch thick. I happened to be on the figure-skating side at the moment, filling my lungs with the clean, cool air, looking down at half a hundred little girls as they swirled and twirled around.

  I’d already contacted the Gables. Now that we knew the source of the movies they disliked so much, it was up to their lawyers to make the next move. I knew and they knew—I could see it in their eyes over the’Com—that there probably wasn’t much that could be done. It was still a free country and I was now free to help Will Sanders keep it that way.

  The good news (one of those ill wind things) was that the single individual most responsible for the video researching and importing on behalf of the Byzantine Pope and his menagerie was the same individual we’d left lying in a pool of surprise, with Civil Liberties Association birddogs (not the same couple we’d met at Paulchinsky’s) sniffing around him. It appeared that poor Endie had slowed the flow of otherworldly entertainment in his own way, and helped to solve the Gables’ problem, at least for a little while. The CLA folks had gently escorted him to a place where, according to Napoleon XVII, anyway, life is beautiful all the time.

  The Gables had said that the check was in the mail; I’d said that I believed them. Pappy had said they were pleased it had only taken a few days to “solve” their case. Janie invited me to visit the set of their current project, a nifty little murder mystery (so she said) involving reincarnation. I told her I’d bring Clarissa with me. She’d be absolutely thrilled. And it would be wealthier around the Bear estate for a while, too. Always a good feeling.

  So who would be my next celebrity client, Bettie Page?

  One could only hope.

  For our little get-together this afternoon, I’d originally thought that we might have a picnic over in the park—what the hell was its name?—a few blocks north of here, where I’d first landed on my head in the Confederacy.

  “Nah,” Will had said. “It’s too hot—besides, the way our luck is going, we’d get lost.” He hadn’t solved his case yet, and he was feeling cranky about it.

  “No we wouldn’t,” Clarissa had told him. “We’d simply follow the advice first set forth by the estimable Brothers Grimm, and leave a trail of breadcrumbs.”

  Lucy had shaken her head. “Say, don’cha remember the rest of that story, dearie? Birds’d eat the breadcrumbs an’ then we’d be lost worse’n ever!”

  “Then what you want to do, of course, is drop poisoned breadcrumbs,” Fran had answered her, grinning villainously, “and follow the trail of dead birds!

  “ARE YOU COMING, darling?” Clarissa was standing in the transparent doorway, waiting for me to come to the table we’d reserved over on the hockey side, where her small client, armored like a fireplug-sized samurai, was trying the new skates her Healer had designed for her. On that side it was ten degrees colder, and the air smelled not very faintly of ammonia from the jerseys the players took a perverse pride in not washing until the season was over.

  Some things aren’t necessarily better in the Confederacy.

  I lit a cigar by way of self-defense and made the trek across the restaurant, mostly empty at this relatively early hour, to join my lovely and talented spouse and our good friends. We were having a meeting of sorts, trying to figure out what to do next about Will’s case. Clarissa and Lucy had come with me. Will had brought Mary-Beth and Fran.

  The carpet—and the escalator treads we’d ridden to get up here—were a softer rubber than the sidewalks outside, so that skaters from both rinks could come up to the restaurant for a meal or a snack without having to unlace their accoutrements. “I’ll have a scotch and scotch,” I told the waiter before I sat down, “with a little extra scotch for flavor.”

  The waiter, a young chimpanzee who’d informed us proudly that he played hockey here on the weekends for the Rocky Mountain Oysters’ farm club—the Boulevard Barnacles—started reading me a whole long list of different whiskies the restaurant offered. I interrupted, “A single malt, if you please. Glenfiddich will do nicely, or even Glenlivet.” I wasn’t being trendy; I’d been drinking Laphroaigh for more than thirty years.

  The chimpanzee nodded his approval, and with the remainder of our party’s order, went back to wherever it is that waiters go. I sat down next to my lovely Clarissa and listened to her as—keeping an eye on her young Rockette Richard some forty or fifty feet below us—she communicated with the kid by’Com, the little girl’s tranceiver being a part of her helmet.

  Step by step, Clarissa put her through her paces—right and left crossovers in forward and reverse, slapshots made on the fly, T-stops and hockey stops, and even showstops ordinarily done by figure skaters, and finally a spectacular jump where the little girl did a three-sixty in mid-air. At last Clarissa folded up her’Com. “Well, I think that new boot liner’s going to work!” She beamed. “Now we’ll just let the bone spurs dissolve by themselves.”

  “Yech,” I told her, not for the first time. It’s amazing what the human body is capable of doing, to and for itself. Bones, especially those of kids, are a hell of a lot less rigid and fixed than most people think. They’re not even really solid, they’re just the thickest part of the soup. “Do you have something to drink?”

  She was about to answer me when an all-too familiar figure came shambling toward us across the rubbery restaurant carpet. It was the little old lady with the great big hat again, collecting for the Spaceman’s Fund.

  The question was, which little old lady.

  Fran and Mary-Beth were on their feet in an instant, their hands on the grips of their pistols. From the corner of my eye, I watched as Clarissa drew her weapon underneath the table. Will sat where he was, but I knew he was fast when he needed to be, and I knew that Lucy was even faster.

  As she reached our table, my heart was pounding and my right hand found its way to the worn rubber handle of my .41 Magnum. But she held her own hand out, toward me, and her fist was too small to conceal any kind of weapon.

  “Lieutenant Bear,” she said in a horrible, quavery voice, “you were exceptionally generous the other day.”

  “Well,” I answered, grinning up at her and swallowing a little, “I hope it helped the spacemen.” I’d been feeling pretty stupid—and confused—about this woman all week long. Was she the one who’d shot at me, attacked me in the bathroom, and put holes in my partner? Or was she the one who’d lectured me on the size (how very embarrassing) of my gun? “Two whole ounces of silver.” Her voice was like fingernails on a blackboard—ten stainless steel fingernails, on a diamond blackboard a mile long. “I wanted to thank you, young man—and to bring you your change.”

  “But I don’t want—”

  She put her gloved hand over mine and dropped something, round and cold and very heavy, into my palm. It was another of the thick golden coins with an engraved picture of Sam Houston on one side. The old lady’s painfully cracked, ancient voice immediately gave way to a smooth, ominously familiar-sounding male baritone. “To be perfectly truthful, I don’t know any spacemen, but I’ve been trying to get this to you, for days!”

  “She” lifted her broad-brimmed hat and heavy veil, and I was looking straight into the face—only one of them, as it turned out—of Bennett Williams. The unmistakable sound of half a dozen pistol hammers being thumbed back simultaneously to full cock was a lot like steel ball bearings rattling down a flight of metal st
airs. You could also hear an ominous hum as an equal number of energy weapons came up to full power. I looked down and found my hands full of sixgun and autopistol. The poor guy was surrounded by about one hundred thousand foot-pounds of potential schrecklichheit.

  To give him credit, he didn’t flinch. “Dr. Benjamin Wilhelmsohn at your service, dear ladies, Captain, Lieutenant, late of the philosophy department on the scenic Baton Rouge campus of the Texas University of Agriculture and Mechanics, where I held the George F. Will Chair in Sophistry.”

  UNLIKE ANY BENNETT Williams I knew so far, Benjamin Willhelmsohn had spoken in a southern accent about as thick and sweet as molasses. The professor lowered his ladylike veil again and looked all around as if he were afraid that somebody might decide to drop a car on him. It was a possibility. The ceiling overhead was perfectly transparent, a vast, arching, unbroken pane of that remarkable stuff Confederates call glass.

  “I strongly suggest that if Clarissa is finished with her patient—pardon me, her client—we take this colloquium somewhere a little less public,” Will said, thinking the same paranoid thoughts that I was, as he rose from the table and patted the holstered automatic on his hip.

  Clarissa nodded, and stood up, as well. “Stick me with a fork, I’m done!” She loved that expression.

  Lucy said, “The manager here’s an old friend of mine, an’ I think I can arrange somethin’ for us.”

  Of course.

  The manager, a limber-limbed gibbon who’d once played forward for the Atlanta Atlatls was more than happy to oblige his old friend Lucy, who, astonishingly, had managed the team for some length of time. In less than five minutes—with the enthusiastic assistance of the star goalie of the Boulevard Barnacles—we’d been comfortably reinstalled in one of the several party rooms downstairs that were a part of the section that divided hockey territory from figure skating country. These rooms were at rink level, and had big windows that looked out directly onto the ice. “Hockey or figure skating?” Will had asked me what side of the CIPE building we should be on for the meal and meeting that was about to follow.