“Zack?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re probably going to die, aren’t we?”
“We’re positively going to die.” She stiffened almost imperceptibly under his fingers. “But I could have told you that yesterday, or last week.” She relaxed again. “Difference is, yesterday I couldn’t have told you positively that we’d die together.”
Zack would have sworn they were inextricably entwined, but somehow she rolled round into his arms in one fluid motion, then pulled him on top of her with another. Their embrace was eight-legged and whole-hearted and completely nonsexual, and about a minute of it was all their muscles would tolerate. Then they drew apart just far enough to meet each other’s eyes. They shared that, too, for a long minute, and then Zack smiled.
“Have you ever noticed that there is no position or combination of positions in which we do not fit together like nesting cups?”
She giggled, and in the middle of the giggle tears leaked from her laughing eyes. “Oh, Zack,” she cried, and hugged him again. “I love you so much.”
“I know, baby, I know,” he murmured in her ear, stroking her hair. “It’s not every day that you find something worth dying for—and something worth living for. Both at the same time. Christ, I love you.”
They both discovered his rigid erection at the same instant, and an instant later they discovered her sopping wetness, and for the first time in their relationship their loins joined without manual aid from either of them. Together they sucked air slowly through their teeth, and then he began to pull his head back to meet her eyes and she stopped him, grabbing his head with her hands and pushing her tongue into his ear. His hips arched reflexively, his hands clutched her shoulders, her legs locked round his, and the oldest dance began again. It was eleven A.M. before they finally slept, and by that time they were in someone else’s car, heading, ironically enough, north by northwest.
It’s the best way out of Halifax.
The reader wishing a detailed account of Zack and Jill’s activities over the next month can find it at any library with a good newstape and newspaper morgue. The reader is advised to bring a lunch. At any time of the year the individual stories that the two folksingers sowed behind them like depth charges would have been hot copy—but God had ordained that Wesley George drop dead in August, smack in the middle of Silly Season. The news media of the entire North American Confederation went into grateful orgasmic convulsions.
Not all the stories made the news. The events involving the Rev. Schwartz in Montreal, for instance, were entirely suppressed at the time, by the husbands involved, and have only recently come to light. When militant radical leader Mtu Zanje, the notorious “White Mau Mau,” was found in Harlem with bullets from sixteen different unregistered guns in him, there was at that time nothing to connect it with the other stories, and it got three inches on page forty-three.
Indeed, the most incredible thing in retrospect is that no one, at the time, connected any of the stories. Though each new uproar was dutifully covered in detail, not one journalist, commentator or observer divined any common denominator in them until the month was nearly up. Confronted with the naked truth, the people of North America did not recognize it.
But certainly every one of them saw it or heard about it, in living color stereo and thirty-six point type and four-channel FM, in weekly news magazines and on documentary shows, in gossip columns and radio talk shows, in political cartoons and in comedians’ routines. Zack and Jill strongly preferred to examine their results from a distance, and so they tended to be splashy.
In St. John, New Brunswick, they hit an elderly and prominent judge who had more wrinkles than a William Goldman novel, while he was sitting in open court on a controversial treason case. After an astonishing twenty-seven-minute monologue, the aged barrister died in a successful attempt to cover, with the sidearm he had snatched from his bailiff, the defendant’s escape. Zack and Jill, sitting in the audience, were considerably startled, but they had to agree that only once had they seen a man die happier: the judge’s dead face was as smooth as a baby’s.
In Montreal (in addition to the Rev. Schwartz), they managed to catch a Conservative MP on his way into a TV studio and shake his hand. The program’s producer turned out to have seen the old movie Network—he kept the politician on the air, physically knocking down the programming director when that became necessary. The MP had been—er—liberally dosed; after forty-five minutes of emotional confession he began specifically outlining the secret dreams he had had ever since he first took office, the really good programs he had constructed in his imagination but never dared speak aloud, knowing they could never be implemented in the real world of power blocs and interest groups. He went home that night a broken but resigned man, and woke up the next morning to confront a landslide of favorable response, an overwhelming mandate to implement his dreams. To be sure, very very few of the people who had voted for him in the last election ever did so again. But in the next election (and every subsequent election involving him) the ninety percent of the electorate who traditionally never vote turned out almost to a person. The producer is now his chief aide.
In Ottawa they tried for the Prime Minister, but they could not get near him or near anything that could get near him. But they did get the aging Peter Gzowski on 90 Minutes Live. He too chanced to have seen Network, and he had much more survival instinct than its protagonist: the first thing he did upon leaving the studio was to make an extensive tape recording and mail several dubs thereof to friends with instructions for their disposal in the event of his sudden death. Accordingly he is still alive and broadcasting today, and there are very few lids left for him to tear off these days.
Outside Toronto Zack and Jill made their most spectacular single raid, at the Universal Light and Truth Convocation. It was a kind of week-long spiritual olympics: over a dozen famous gurus, swamis, reverends, Zen masters, Sufis, priests, priestesses and assorted spiritual teachers had gathered with thousands of their followers on a donated hundred-acre pasture to debate theology and sell each other incense, with full media coverage. Zack and Jill walked through the Showdown of the Shamen and between them missed not a one. One committed suicide. One went mad. Four denounced themselves to their followers and fled. Seven denounced themselves to their followers and stayed. Four wept too hard to speak, the one the others called The Fat Boy (although he was middle-aged) bit off his tongue, and exactly one teacher—the old man who had brought few followers and nothing for sale—exhibited no change whatsoever in his manner or behavior but went home very thoughtfully to Tennessee. It is now known that he could have blown the story then and there, for he was a telepath, but he chose not to. The single suicide bothered Jill deeply; but only because she happened to know of and blackly despise that particular holy man, and was dismayed by the pleasure she felt at his death. But Zack challenged her to name one way in which his demise either diminished the world or personally benefited her, and she came tentatively to accept that her pleasure might be legitimate.
They happened to arrive in Detroit just before the annual meeting of the Board of Directors of General Motors. Madame President absentmindedly pocketed the cigar she found on the back seat of her Rolls that morning, though it was not her brand, and it had been saturated with enough odorless, tasteless TWT to dose Madison Square Garden. It is of course impossible to ever know exactly what transpired that day in that most sacrosanct and guarded and unpublic of rooms—but we have the text of the press release that ensued, and we do know that all GM products subsequent to 1994 burn alcohol instead of gasoline, and exhibit a sharp upward curve in safety and reliability.
In Chicago Zack and Jill got a prominent and wealthy realtor-developer and all his tame engineers, ecologists, lawyers and other promotion experts in the middle of a public debate over a massive rezoning proposal. There are no more slums in Chicago, and the developer is, of course, its present mayor.
In Cleveland they got a used car salesman, a TV repairma
n, a plumber, an auto mechanic, and a Doctor of Philosophy in one glorious afternoon.
In New York they got Mtu Zanje, quite by accident. The renegade white led a force of sixteen New Black Panthers in a smash-and-grab raid on the downtown club where Zack and Jill were playing. Mtu Zanje personally took Jill’s purse, and smoked a cigar which he found therein on his way back uptown. Zack and Jill never learned of his death or their role in it, but it is doubtful that they would have mourned.
In Boston they concentrated on policemen, as many as they could reach in two mornings and afternoons, and by the time they left that town it was rocking on its metaphorical foundations. Interesting things came boiling up out of the cracks, and most of them have since decomposed in the presence of air and sunlight.
In Portland, Maine, Zack figured a way to plant a timed-release canister in the air-conditioning system of that city’s largest Welfare Center. A great many people voluntarily left the welfare roll over the ensuing month, and none have yet returned—or starved. There are, of course, a lot of unemployed caseworkers…
And then they were on their way home to Halifax.
But this is a listing only of the headlines that Zack and Jill left behind them—not of everything that happened on that trip. Not even of everything important; at least, not to Zack and Jill.
In Quebec a laundry van just missed killing them both, then roared away.
In Ottawa they went out for a late night walk just before a tremendous explosion partially destroyed their motel. It had apparently originated in the room next to theirs, which was unoccupied.
In Toronto they were attacked on the streets by what might have been a pair of honest muggers, but by then they were going armed and they got one apiece.
In Detroit the driver of the cab they had taken (at ruinous expense) to eliminate a suspected tail apparently went mad and deliberately jumped a divider into high-speed oncoming traffic. In any car crash, the Law of Chaos prevails, and in this instance it killed the driver and left Zack and Jill bruised and shaken but otherwise unharmed.
They knew enemy action when they saw it, and so they did the most confusing thing they could think of: stopped showing up for their scheduled gigs, but kept on following the itinerary. They also adopted reasonably ingenious disguises and, with some trepidation, stopped travelling together. Apparently the combination worked; they were not molested again until they showed up for the New York gig to break the pattern, and then only by Mtu Zanje, which they agreed was coincidence. But it made them thoughtful, and they rented several hours of complete privacy in a videotape studio before leaving town.
And on the road to Boston they each combed their memory for friends remembered as One Of The Nice Ones, people they could trust, and in that city they met in the Tremont Street Post Office and spent an hour addressing and mailing VidCaset Mailer packs. Each pack contained within it, in addition to its program material, a twenty-second trailer holding five hundred hits of TWT in blotter form—a smuggling innovation of which Zack was sinfully proud.
They had not yet taken TWT themselves, but their decision was made. They agreed at the end of that day to take it together when they got back to Halifax. They would do it in the Scorpio, alone together, in the dressing room where Wesley George had died.
They waited until well after closing, after Finnegan and the Shadow had locked up behind them and driven away the last two cars in the parking lot. Then they waited another hour to be sure.
The night was chill and still, save for the occasional distant street sounds from more active parts of town. There was no moon and the sky was lightly overcast; darkness was total. They waited in the black together, waiting not for any particular event or signal but only until it felt right, and they both knew that time without words. They were more married already than most couples get to be in a lifetime, and they were no longer in any hurry at all.
When it was time they rose from their cramped positions behind the building’s trash compactor and walked stealthily around to the front of the building to the descending stairway that led to the outer door of the dressing room. Like all of Finnegan’s regulars they knew how to slip its lock, and did so with minimal noise.
As soon as the door clicked shut behind them, Jill heaved a great sigh, compounded of relief and fatigue and déjà vu. “This is where it all started,” she breathed. “The tour is over. Full circle.”
Zack looked around at pitch blackness. “From the smell in here, I would guess that it was Starship Earth played here tonight.”
Jill giggled. “Still living on soybeans, too. Zack, can we put the light on, do you think?”
“Hmmm. No windows, but this door isn’t really tight. I don’t think it’d be smart, hon.”
“How about a candle?”
“Sold. Let me see—ouch!—if the Starship left the—yeah, here’s a couple.” He struck the light, and started both candles. The room sprang into being around them, as though painted at once in broad strokes of butter and chocolate. It was, after a solid month of perpetually new surroundings, breathtakingly familiar and comfortable. It lifted their hearts, even though both found their eyes going at once to the spot on which Wesley George had fallen.
“If your ghost is here, Wesley, rest easy, man,” Zack said quietly. “It got covered. And we’re both back to do truth ourselves. They killed you, man, but they didn’t stop you.”
After a pause, Jill said, “Thank you, Wesley,” just as quietly. Then she turned to Zack. “You know, I don’t even feel like we need to take the stuff, in a place.”
“I know, hon, I know. We’ve been more and more honest with each other, opened up more every day, like the truth was gonna come sooner or later so we might as well get straight now. I guess I know you better than I’ve ever known any human, let alone any woman. But if fair is fair and right is right we’ve got to take the stuff. I wouldn’t have the balls not to.”
“Sure. Come on—Wesley’s waiting.”
Together they walked hand in hand, past the cigar-burn in the rug, to Wesley’s dying place. The whisper of their boots on the rug echoed oddly in the soundproof room, then faded to silence.
“The door was open that night,” Jill whispered.
“Yeah,” Zack agreed. He turned the knob, eased the door open and yelped in surprise and fright. A bulky figure sat on the stage ten feet away, half-propped against an amp, ankles crossed before it. It was in deep shadow, but Zack would have known that silhouette in a coal cellar. He pushed the door open wider, and the candlelight fell on the figure, confirming his guess.
“Finnegan!” he cried in relief and astonishment. “Jesus Christ, man, you scared me. I swear I saw you leave an hour ago.”
“Nope,” said the barkeep. He was of medium height and stocky, bald as a grape but with fuzzy brown hair all over his face and neck. It was the kind of face within which the unbroken nose was incongruous. He scratched his crinkly chin with a left hand multiply callused from twenty years of guitar and dobro and mandolin and fiddle, and grinned what his dentist referred to as the Thousand Dollar Grin. “You just thought you did.”
“Well shit, yeah, so it seems. Look, we’re just sort of into a little head thing here if that’s cool, meant to tell you later…”
“Sure.”
A noise came from behind Zack, and he turned quickly to Jill. “Look, baby, it’s Finn—”
Jill had not made the noise, nor did she make one now. Sziller had made the noise as he slipped the lock on the outside door, and he made another one as he snapped the hammer back on the silenced Colt. It echoed in the dressing room. Zack spun back to Finnegan, and the barkeep’s right hand was up out of his lap now and there was a .357 Magnum in it.
Too tired, Zack thought wearily, too frigging tired. I wasn’t cautious enough and so it ends here.
“I’m sorry, Jill,” he said aloud, still facing Finnegan.
“I,” Finnegan said clearly and precisely, “am a bi-federal agent, authorized to act in either the American or the Canad
ian sector. Narcotics has been my main turf for years now.”
“Sure,” Zack agreed. “What better cover for a narc than a musician?”
“This one,” Finnegan said complacently. “I always hated being on the road. Halifax has always been a smuggler’s port—why not just sit here and let the stuff come to me? All the beer I can drink—”
Sziller was going through the knapsack Jill had left by the door, without taking his eyes or his gun off them for an instant.
“So how come you’re in bed with Sziller?” Zack demanded. Sziller looked up and grinned, arraying his massive beard like a peacock’s tail.
“George blew my cover,” Finnegan said cheerfully. “He knew me from back when and spilled the soybeans. If he’d known you two were regulars here he’d likely have warned you. So after Sziller did him in and then…found out he had not adequately secured the goods…he naturally came straight to me.”
“Finnegan’s got a better organization than we do,” Sziller chuckled. His voice was like a lizard’s would sound if lizards could talk. “More manpower, more resources, more protection.”
“And Sziller knew that TWT would mean the end of me too if it got out. He figured that our interest coincided for once—in a world of truth, what use is a narc? How can he work?”
Much too goddam tired, Zack told himself. I’m hallucinating. Finnegan appeared to be winking at him. Zack glanced to see if Jill were reacting to it, but her eyes were locked on Sziller, whose eyes were locked on her. Zack glanced swiftly back, and Finnegan still appeared to be winking, and now he was waving Zack toward him. Zack stood still; he preferred to die in the dressing room.
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