The Blancs had seen us, of course, and a well-armed reception party was waiting when we emerged from the ruins and into the street across which their checkpoint sat. Abalain pushed me forward, then raised his hands above his head. A Blanc in stained coveralls gestured for me to do the same.
“I hope you guys can help me,” Abalain said when we reached the Blancs. His English was almost completely unaccented, and I gave him points for that. A resourceful fellow, our sergeant. “I’ve been a prisoner of those bastards for months,” he continued. “This is one of them. His name’s Abalain. He’s my gift to you if you’ll call my embassy and get me out of here.”
That set everyone to babbling. I smiled. “Thanks,” I said to Abalain. “I always wanted to be famous.” He didn’t break character, not that I’d expected him to.
An officer showed up. His uniform was tailored, clean and crisply pressed. He wore aviator sunglasses and carried a swagger-stick. No wonder you guys can’t retake the city, I thought. “So this is the infamous Sergeant Abalain,” he said to me.
“‘Fraid not,” I told him. “But that is.” I nodded at Abalain.
His face spasmed in pretty convincing outrage. “He lies!” he shouted. “He kidnapped me and killed my friends! You can’t let him get away with this!”
“Oh, come on” I said. I turned to the officer. “Isn’t there anyone here who’s seen a picture of Abalain?” I already knew the answer to that—like many of his erstwhile companions, Abalain had been pretty thorough about avoiding cameras—but I was playing a role now myself.
The officer smiled, obviously pleased with himself. “Perhaps the thing to do is to try the both of you. You can’t both be Abalain, but on the chance that one of you is… ”
It was time. I unbuttoned my jacket. “We can settle this easily,” I said, and unbuckled Abalain’s wearable. Abalain’s jaw dropped along with his new persona. I paused, savoring the moment. This was no substitute for Sissy, or even for the weeks he’d ripped from my life. But it was all I was likely to get, so I wanted it to last.
I showed the wearable to the officer. “Retinal lock” I said.
“If you want to see your cousin again, m’ser, stop now.”
That pissed me off. “You pathetic son of a bitch,” I said. I pulled the flimsies—the list of inductees and the bunk assignments—from my pocket. I held them up in his face. “Where’s the Canadian female, Francois? Look,” I stabbed the flimsy as though it were Abalain’s heart. “She was inducted—now look here,” I rattled the bunk assignments. “No bunk—what happened to her, M’ser le sergeant? Sent to Montmarte? Target practice?” A note of hysteria crept into my voice. I swallowed, balled up the flimsies and tossed them against his chest.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t like that—”
I didn’t let him finish. Smacking the wearable up against my face, I thumbed the power switch. The computer farted its displeasure. “How sad,” I said. “Sergeant Abalain’s computer doesn’t like the look in my eye.” I turned it toward Abalain, who backed away. “Gentlemen?” I said to the Blancs. Two of them grabbed Abalain by the shoulders. He tried to twist his head away, but the wearable was more flexible than his neck was. A second later, the computer chirped and lit up all christmas.
I dropped the wearable to the ground and emptied my pockets onto it. “You should be able to have some fun with all of this,” I said. Abalain babbled something I didn’t hear. The officer slapped him in the face—whether in response or just on general principle, I didn’t care. Then they were all hitting him.
I used the last of my steri-wipes to get his blood off my hands.
Day 63: It’ll All End in Tears
“France thanks you for the service you have rendered her, monsieur.” I figured the Blanc general was speaking more for the benefit of the news weasels on the other side of the mirrorwall than he was for me, but I nodded my head with what I hoped looked like sagacity. “Bringing the beast Abalain to justice will show the world the true face that lies behind the mask of the Commune de Paris.”
I tried to be blasé about it. But looking at this guy, I couldn’t help but wonder about the arithmetic of Paree: how in the world did you add up the folks on my street, the ones I played baseball with, and the ones who sold me bread and sausage and wine—and end up with assholes like Abalain or this prat? What variable in the goddamn equation made people stop thinking and let their emotions do all the heavy lifting?
I’d hoped to feel cleansed at having done for Abalain, but I didn’t.
“Good for you,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’d love to stay and watch, but I have to go home now. I’m going to take a forty-eight-hour shower, and then I’m going to sleep for a week.”
“I believe the people from your embassy want to talk to you, monsieur Rosen,” the general said warily.
“Have them call my service,” I said. That’s me: Mister How to Make Friends and Influence People.
“The photographers say they’re not finished yet.”
That’s just great, I thought. Is there anybody in this city who isn’t working an angle?
Sissy hadn’t been working anything except maybe her hormones.
I’d been able to store her carefully in the back of my mind while working up my escape plan. But she was clamoring to get out of my head now. Being away from the Commune didn’t make me any more free than if I’d still been Abalain’s pet ferret: I still had to face up to the fact that she was gone. How was I going to explain this to my aunt?
The door behind me slammed open.
“Lee!”
I turned around so fast I fell over. That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it. Then she was down on the carpet with me and hugging me and crying and I guess I got kind of sloppy too. But I swear the first words out of my mouth were: “Where the fuck have you been?”
She slapped me, lightly. “I worried about you too.”
“Jesus,” I said, sitting up. “I was convinced you were—” I couldn’t say it, not now. It seemed it could still happen; I might be imagining this. “What happened to you? How did you get away?”
“It was Eddie,” she said.
“Not true, Lee.” Eddie flowed into the room, graceful in spite of his bulk. “She’s the one who did it. I just got her back across the lines.”
“Will you two stop negotiating credits and just tell me what happened?”
“When they separated us when the bus stopped I was so scared,” Sissy said. “Everyone was scared. But then I thought about what you’d said. You said not to worry. And you always looked after me, Lee.” She smiled, and even though her eyes looked dead with fatigue I still felt better for seeing that. “I figured you knew what you were talking about. So I didn’t worry. Instead, I tried to guess what you’d do, and I decided that you’d watch and wait for a chance to do something.”
I looked at Sissy more closely. It wasn’t just fatigue I was seeing in her eyes. There was something else, something sort of calm and understanding. This wasn’t the girl I’d lost back at the Dialtone. Of course, being kidnapped can do that to a person.
“So I’m watching what happens, and what happens is that everybody’s so scared that they all just stand there gibbering and crying all over one another,” she said. “They must have been doing that all along, but I never noticed it. Until I sat back and made myself look.
We were all just crying like babies. And the guards must have noticed too, because when I looked I saw that they weren’t really paying any attention to us. They were all watching the guys being rounded up.” We were the ones making the fuss, I remembered. Some of us, anyway. Some of us were still trying to think of a way of finessing ourselves out of that jam.
“So it was really pretty simple.” Sissy smiled artlessly, and for a moment she was my kid cousin again. “I just kind of shuffled my feet and moved back without trying to move too much. And when I was at the back of the crowd I just sort of slipped out of it. It was dark and nobody noticed me. But you know,
I don’t think they were all that smart, Lee. We just let ourselves think they were ’cause we were all so scared. As soon as I started trying to think like you do, it was easy to get away.” She hugged me fiercely. “I saw you trying to distract their attention from me, Lee.” Now she was crying again. “What you did for me—I couldn’t have done that for you.” She dug her face into my shoulder and sobbed, and I felt like the stupidest idiot outside of a corporate boardroom. I had out-clevered myself into eight weeks or more of slavery, and she was smart enough to just walk away—and she was giving me the credit?
“And that’s when Eddie saved me.”
“I followed the bus,” Eddie said with a shrug. “Probably not the smartest thing in the world, but hey. I should have seen it coming, and I didn’t. I felt responsible, you know?” I knew. “Soon as I saw you all being off-loaded and sorted I figured I was screwed, and I was making my way back to the lines when I come across Sissy here. And damned if she didn’t want to take me back and try to spring you. Took me ten minutes to persuade her we’d only get ourselves killed.”
“You can always trust Fat Eddie,” I said. “He knows three ways around every angle there is. Listening to him definitely saved your life.” I decided then that I was never going to tell Sissy the full story of my service to the Commune. Even if it seemed that the Sissy who was smiling at me now wasn’t the same kid who’d wanted to see the sights back in the great Before.
“She could have gone home, you know,” Fat Eddie said. “Her mom sure as hell wanted her to. Instead, we’ve spent the last eight weeks nagging the shit out of anybody who’d listen, trying to find you. And now we have.”
“And now I want a shower,” I said. “I want some clean clothes.”
“I want to go back to the Dialtone and finish my drink,” Sissy said. I stared at her. “You’re joking, right?”
“Oh, you can shower and change first, if you want.” She stood up, then grabbed my hands and pulled me to my feet. “Come on, Lee. It’s a glorious time to be in Paree.”
Paree—where snipers lurked in the high windows and unwashed thugs stared blindly at castrated video lottery terminals. Paree, where, on the pavé before a rusting Citroëen, I had decided to die. The fatal anguish surged through me—
—and out. I was a dead man, dead many times over in the past eight weeks, and yet, miraculously, alive. Alive, in Gay Paree, where famèd Dialtone yet stood, where the bartender would mix me a Manhattan and my cousin Sissy would dance while I watched approvingly from a side table, chewing on my work-problems and swapping ironic glances with Fat Eddie.
I extended an arm and Sissy took it at the elbow. Fat Eddie shouldered us a path through the crowd, over the epoxy cobblestones, and down the boulevard toward the Dialtone.
A Good Start
Barry Graham
I don’t feel bad about it. I wish I did. I know I should. But I don’t, though I kind of feel bad about not feeling bad. Like when one of your relatives dies and you don’t feel bad because they’re dead, you feel bad because you don’t really care that they’re dead. That’s kind of how I feel.
I don’t even feel all that happy, though I thought I would. I just kind of feel like it was right, like he got what he deserved. Maybe not exactly right, but fair. It feels like it was fair.
And I’m looking forward to more.
Greaves thought he was God’s Gift. That was as much the fault of the girls at the bank as it was his fault. They thought his bullshit was funny. I couldn’t believe them. I’m not a feminist or anything, but I couldn’t believe women would find it funny, a jerk like that doing things to women they worked with.
I’m a temp typist. My agency said I’d be needed at the bank for six weeks, but it turned into four months. That was fine by me. I liked it there. A lot of the time there was hardly any work to do and I could just read or draw pictures on the computer. Funny, considering that this was the bank’s head office and I was doing the typing for four different managers. And you should see what they were getting paid. The more important your job is, the more money you get and the less work you have to do.
Greaves didn’t work any harder than the other managers, so he didn’t give me any more work than they did. But he was a total asshole. He was just a horrible, arrogant asshole. Sometimes if you asked him a question he’d throw his head back and give this long, nasty laugh like you were dirt and there was something funny about you. And he wouldn’t answer the question.
Once I asked him what time he needed some memos typed by, and he did that—haw-haw-HAW—and put his dirty hand on my shoulder and then just walked away.
I was angry at him doing that, him thinking he could do that to me because I was only twenty and female and only a temp. So, next time he walked past my desk, I had another question for him.
“Mr Greaves, what are you going to use for a face when Quasimodo wants that one back?”
All the other typists and even my supervisor laughed, but this time Greaves didn’t. I thought he’d do something about it, maybe complain to my agency and ask for another temp to replace me. He didn’t. But I soon realized he wasn’t letting it go.
About a week after I said that to him, I sent a memo to all four managers, telling them I was taking Friday afternoon off, so if they had any typing for me to do they’d better give it to me first thing on Friday morning, and if they had anything really big they should give it to me the day before.
On the Thursday, Greaves walked up to my desk, the memo in his hand. “Hey, Ruth. I’ve got something big. Do you want it now?”
“Okay,” I said. “When do you need it done?”
“Oh, I don’t have any typing for you to do. I just said I’ve got something big. That’s what you asked in your memo.”
I stood up and made to say something or do something, but then the other girls—even Linda, my supervisor—started laughing. Laughing at that. Christ.
“Grow up,” I muttered, and sat down again.
“It’s probably too big for you,” Greaves said. “You probably couldn’t handle it.” Then he walked away and went into his office as the girls all started laughing again.
“I want something done about him,” I told Linda.
“Come on. He was only joking. He’s not doing you any harm.”
I wrote a memo to Greaves, telling him that if he ever spoke to me that way again, I’d report him for sexual harassment. He didn’t reply. I thought that might be it, that he might get me fired, but he never said anything. I could have just left. That’s why I like being a temp—if you don’t like a place you can just leave and get your agency to put you somewhere else. But it was a couple weeks before Christmas and things are always slow around then. If I left, I might not be able to get anything else until after New Year. Besides, it was the easiest job I’d had, and I wasn’t going to let one buttfuck manager drive me out.
He did it, though.
The bank had a no-smoking policy. You couldn’t smoke anywhere in the building. That was fair enough; there was hardly anybody who smoked. But I smoke like a crematorium. So I used to grind my teeth or chew gum until my lunch break and my morning and afternoon breaks, then go outside and get enough nicotine inside me to keep me going.
One morning I got a memo from Greaves telling me not to leave the building during my short breaks. I went into his office and asked him what he was playing at.
“None of the other typists go outside during their breaks. Why should you?”
“None of the other typists smoke. I do.”
“We have a no-smoking policy.”
“I know. That’s why I go outside.”
He smiled at me. “Not anymore. You can conduct yourself like everybody else. You can leave during your lunch break. During your other breaks, you stay in the building.”
“You can’t tell me what to do on my break. My break is mine. I’m not at work then.”
“No, but you’re being paid. You’re still paid for your time. So I want you to remain in the buildin
g in case you’re needed.”
I couldn’t handle that. I used the thought of the breaks to keep me going through the mornings and afternoons of cold turkey. Without it, I’d start sniffing white-out.
I tried to fight Greaves, but nobody else was interested—not the other managers, not my supervisor, not the other typists. I was just an obnoxious little temp with a big mouth and no sense of humor.
So I left. I got lucky and my agency found me another job, starting the next day. But I didn’t feel any better. I felt as if anybody with plenty of money and no dress sense could do what they liked to me and I couldn’t do anything except give in and walk out.
The day I walked out of the bank, I went to Tony’s house and told him what had happened. He went nuts. Then he calmed down and said, “What does this Greaves look like?”
“Why?”
“‘Cause I’m gonna wait outside the bank and kick his fucking ass when he comes out.”
“No, you’re not.” Tony’s settled down now, but he used to be wild. He was in a gang for a while. I didn’t want him going back to that bullshit. “I don’t need you getting in trouble. With your record, you only need to slap somebody and they’d lock you up.”
He laughed. “I know. I’d love to fuck him up, though. Prick.”
“So would I. But I don’t want you doing it.”
He looked at me. “Serious?”
“About what?”
“Fucking him up?”
At first I wasn’t sure. Then I was. “Yeah. Why?”
“I know how to find guys who’d do it. You’d have to pay them, but they come cheap.”
I waited to see if I was still sure, and I was.
“How cheap?”
They did it for a hundred and fifty. Seventy-five each. That wasn’t in the newspaper. The rest of it was.
They got Greaves outside the bank and started kicking him. He fought back and shouted for help. One of them stuck a knife in his back and then they ran away. Greaves’s lungs filled up with blood and he died just after the ambulance got him to the hospital.
Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! Page 34