Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Why?”

  “Because William’s in advertising. If she slipped and let William know, the whole world would know. It’s going to get out, you know. They can’t keep a lid on this. Still, I’d just as soon the leak didn’t get traced back to me.”

  And, at last, Carolyn phoned Stace. Stace hadn’t said a word about Luce since that long-ago Monday. At least now she could know that she wasn’t alone. And Luce was used to keeping secrets.

  Stace seethed and steamed and muttered, all rather halfheartedly.

  “Talk to me,” Carolyn demanded. “Are you angry? Are you scared?”

  Long silence. “Mom, I’ve lost a couple of bra sizes. Luce is also smaller in the … reproductive department. I’ve stopped menstruating; either that or my period’s like six months late.”

  “Maybe you’re pregnant?”

  “I thought I was for a while, but no, Mom, I’m not pregnant.” She sighed deeply. “I’ve asked around, my friends, people my age or younger. None of the women are menstruating anymore. Some of them have been to doctors for tests, some haven’t. Some thought they were pregnant, some didn’t. There’s this one friend of mine, had boobs like the front of a truck. Forty double-D, hanging out there like headlights. All of a sudden she’s almost flat. She’s delighted. She said her chest always overbalanced her, made her look top-heavy, she was always spilling food on it. Ill wind and all that, huh?”

  She hung up. Carolyn lay back on the bed, the phone still in her hand. Strangeness on strangeness. Libido epidemics and Sophy still around and Elder Sister’s medicine bag, and Gaia, and, according to the millenarians, the world was coming to an end. But if that was so, why was this stupid trial still progressing, point to point, join the dots, as though it made any kind of picture? What would Jagger do when he found out what she knew?

  Hal appeared in the doorway. “What’s going on? All these whispered conversations?”

  She told him.

  “My God.” He fell into a chair, mouth open.

  “Yeah. I wonder if He had something to do with it.”

  Hal had talked for years about putting an electronically controlled gate at the entrance to the farm, just to avoid the hassle of people who turned into the driveway and came all the way down to the house before realizing they were in the wrong place. He had never got to it, but the men he had talked to on Saturday had promised to do the installation on Monday when they came to wire the house against intruders. Just because one pimply youth was dead, it didn’t mean there weren’t more where he had come from.

  There were a dozen No Trespassing signs in the barn Hal had never got around to putting up, partly because Carolyn had thought posting the place would only draw attention to it. Now, however, it seemed attention was to be drawn, willy-nilly, so Hal sent Carlos out with a handful of signs to be posted every hundred feet along the front fence.

  “You have a little trouble?” Carlos asked.

  “Carlos, we had a lot of trouble. Friday night the dogs caught a burglar in the kitchen.”

  Carlos turned to Carolyn. “You been doin’ somethin notty?”

  She shook her head at him. “What makes you ask that?”

  “I hear things. Down at the bar, this kid askin’ questions. Spotty-face kid.”

  “Could be him, Carlos. What did he want to know?”

  “Oh, all about you, you live alone or not, who comes see you, who the family is, you know. Real nosy. You remember Emilia? Teofilo’s mama, she use to work for you?”

  “I remember her.” Oh, God. She’d forgotten about Emilia.

  “Teofilo’s brothers, they tell the spotty-face kid he shut his mouth or they shut it.”

  Carolyn cringed mentally. Emilia must have told her sons that Carolyn had promised to do something about Teo. She bit her cheek, making a mental note. Carlos interrupted her line of thought.

  “You got that little house out there, one I use to lib in before so many kids.”

  “Right.” Carlos and his wife had lived in the old bunkhouse until the third child had come along. There were now seven children, a fact that Carolyn tried not to let color her opinion of Carlos, who was otherwise both sensible and hardworking. In Carlos’s opinion men had been created to make babies, women to bear them, and what happened to them afterward was God’s problem.

  He shrugged a question. “What you say my brothers lib in the house for a while? They sabe on rent, you got somebody here at night.”

  “Which brothers?” Hal asked, eyebrows raised.

  He laughed. “Not Cippio, not Jaime. They get drunk too much. I think maybe Fidel and Arturo.”

  As far as she knew, Fidel and Arturo, though recent arrivals, were reliable and reasonably sober. She looked at Hal, who nodded his okay.

  “Good idea,” she said. “But no parties.”

  He nodded. “No parties. Arturo, he has this big dog, his name is Leonegro. Bery black, this dog. Bery smart, too.”

  Carolyn nodded. If she kept her dogs in the house, it made sense to have another one around outside, particularly at night. “Carlos, tell them not to talk about where they’re staying, okay? If somebody comes here, let it be a surprise.”

  He grinned at her and went off with Hal.

  At ten she drove into Santa Fe to her former law office. Mary, the office manager, located in about thirty seconds flat the notes Carolyn remembered. The notes were as Carolyn remembered them. Swinter had got off on immortalizing his scribbles, passing out copies by the ream. She took the map from her wallet, spread it on the table, and placed the Swinter copies beside it. The map had obviously been traced from the property survey that was available in the county clerk’s office. The words “road,” “farm,” “house,” and “barn” were written on the tracing, the o’s with tight little anal-retentive loops, the d and b, the h and f, all with a single vertical upstroke, an idiosyncratic rendering of the r’s. The letters were written exactly as Swinter wrote them. If Swinter had not drawn the map, he had at least labeled it.

  She took the copies to Jerry’s office and asked him if he had a minute.

  “Anytime for you, Carolyn! What’s going on?”

  She told him, laying out the pages.

  Jerry took off his glasses and polished them on his tie. “Why on earth would Emmet Swinter send somebody to prowl your house?”

  “I’m defending the mother of the baby in the Dumpster, Jer. I think the DA’s office was counting on Harmston doing the job.”

  Jerry blinked slowly, thinking out the implications of that. “How’d you get involved?”

  “Someone asked me to.”

  He rubbed his hands over his head. “You sure picked one hell of a case to bring you out of retirement. What do you want me to do with this?”

  “I want you to know about it. I’m putting these two pieces of paper in your custody. This one is the copy I made last night, in the presence of a deputy sheriff, of an original found in the pocket of a man who broke into my house. The original was retained by the deputy as evidence. The deputy signed this copy and dated it at my request; there’s his signature. This other paper contains samples of Swinter’s writing. I believe both were written by the same hand, and I suggest that be verified by a graphanalyst.”

  “And then?”

  “Then you hang on to them. Just in case something happens to me.”

  He got up, moved around in an agitated fashion. “In case something happens to you? Carolyn! For God’s sake, you’re talking about respectable members of the bar.…”He collapsed back into his chair, shaking his head.

  She leaned across the desk and put her hand on his, making him look directly at her. “I’m not talking about respectable members of the bar. I’m talking about Jake Jagger. The kid that broke into my house supposedly hanged himself in his cell. Would a kid do that over a minor break-in?”

  He sat back, mouth slightly open, removing his glasses, going through the polishing ritual, taking a moment before he could say, “People do strange things.”

 
; “Remember the Greta Wilson case, Jer? Back before Jagger was DA? Greta was an abused wife. She filed for divorce because her husband was beating on her and the kids. Her husband hired Jagger. Jagger was married to Greta’s sister Helen, mind you, but that didn’t stop him. Jagger brought in perjured evidence, said she was a satanist, got her locked up. Next morning there she was, hanged in her cell. I know damn well she wouldn’t have done it.”

  He said again, “People do strange—”

  She pounded on his desk, snarling at him, “She was a devout Catholic, Jer! She knew I was going to get her out. Jagger knew it, too. I know she was murdered. I know the kid that broke into my house was murdered.”

  He got up again, making fussy motions with his hands, pushing the idea away, with all its implications. “But it makes no sense! Why would anyone want to prowl your house?”

  “All Hal and I can come up with is they’re looking for something to discredit me somehow.” Carolyn cleared her throat. She didn’t want to talk about Albert. “At one time or another I’ve gone on record as a feminist. I’ve supported abortion rights. I’d call myself a conservative fiscally, but on most women’s issues, like equal pay and the need for child care, I’m a liberal, which is a dirty word to the Alliance, and therefore to Jake Jagger.”

  He nodded soberly. “I still think you’re being paranoid, Carolyn.”

  She left the papers in his hands, nonetheless.

  Monday afternoon Jagger got a call from Keepe.

  “Mr. Webster is getting some disturbing information from our foreign allies. There seems to be some kind of epidemic going on.”

  “So?” said Jagger, wondering what the hell that had to do with him.

  “He’s asked me to speak personally to a number of our people to see if they have heard anything.”

  “Anything about what, Keepe? About an epidemic? You mean like the hantavirus we have out here?”

  “My sources aren’t sure. It seems to be a psychological epidemic. The CDC is asking about assaults, rapes, suicides …”

  Jagger took a deep breath and held it. What was this? “I’m sure you know the Alliance authorizes squads of dedicated men to … ah …”

  “To enforce purity among women, yes. Sons of Allah, and the Black Brigade, and some other offshoots of the Army of God. But evidently whatever the CDC is looking at doesn’t involve any of our people.”

  Jagger grew testy. “Can you be a little more specific, Keepe? You’re not giving me the picture.”

  “This is not to be repeated, Jagger. Our Iranian friends are concerned that some disease may have been let loose, maybe during the Gulf War. They’re having trouble getting men out for their political demonstrations; they seem to be afflicted with … well, it’s a kind of lassitude! Also, Public Health people in Washington have been trying to identify some kind of contagion. They’ve been asking questions about depression and suicides.”

  “I haven’t heard anything like that.”

  “Ask around.”

  “How shall I reach you?”

  “We’ll be in touch.” The line went dead.

  Jagger hung up the phone and stood staring at it, deep in thought. Keepe had sounded furious, reining it in, but barely. Naturally, the flap would have started with the Iranians, or with Libya, or Iraq, or Morocco. The religious groups were the weak links in the Alliance. You couldn’t count on men who preferred martyrdom to survival. If one of the theocratic countries flared up, it could threaten the Alliance as a whole!

  In Jagger’s opinion it was rumor, one in an endless series. Ever since the Gulf War people had claimed that sicknesses were caused by Iraqi weapons, or by U.S. countermeasures that had gone wrong. AIDS could take ten years to manifest itself, however, so it wasn’t impossible that something from the Gulf War was just coming to the surface. Still, it was damned unlikely! Both Iraq and the Pentagon were members of the Alliance. If either of them had used some kind of disease as a weapon, the Alliance would know about it!

  Jake made a short list of people to call, including some of the militias in Utah and Montana, where there’d been nervegas testing decades back. Maybe they’d come up with something.

  In the wee hours of Tuesday morning Carolyn heard Sophy saying very clearly, “Carolyn. Wake up.”

  Carolyn sat up suddenly, all at once aware of the darkness around her, the breathing of the dogs on the floor, the light curtains moving almost imperceptibly in the light of a late moon. It hadn’t been a dream that had wakened her; it had been a definite voice saying sensible words. She held her breath, struggling to hear. She couldn’t hear anything, but still she knew there was someone moving outside her window. And there’d been someone in the house.

  She eased herself over the edge of the bed and sat there, pajama clad, reaching for the drawer pull in the bedside table, feeling for the flat chill of the automatic at the back of it. Hector sensed her motion and groaned, turning over, half opening one eye. She could see the reflected light, a tiny mirror, blinking moonlight at her. “Shhh,” she said.

  His eyes opened wide; his head came up, ears up, listening as she was listening. When she got to her feet and moved toward the door, he moved with her, silent, stepping over Fancy and Fandango as though they were inanimate lumps in the path. They didn’t move, were not aware.

  Her door was shut. She eased it open, laying her hand on Hector’s shoulder. He stayed with her as she moved silently through the kitchen, as she tested the outside door, still tightly locked. They went the other way, back down the hall past the bedroom, toward the open door of Hal’s study.

  They were in the study doorway when all hell broke loose outside: a bay like the Hound of the Baskervilles; growling, yelling, a receding pother of animal and man. Carolyn stumbled toward the door but arrived on the scene of battle too late to see the conflict. Carlos’s brothers, bare-chested, holding up their trousers, sprinted toward the sound that came from outside the new gate: a revving engine, spinning wheels. They were too late. The car sped off when they were only halfway down the drive. When they returned, Leonegro was beside them, carrying a sizable piece of denim, which he shook like a rat, growling.

  She said, “What a good dog!” Leonegro had to be part mastiff. One of those Italian mastiffs that end up weighing close to two hundred pounds. He wasn’t any taller than a Great Dane, but he was much heavier, with a head like a trip hammer and a loose, heavily furred skin that looked designed for battle.

  “Where did you get him?” she asked Fidel, forcing her voice to remain at a sensible level.

  “My father in Mesico, he gib him to me. He was onny so big, como un’ chivito.”

  “He got bigger.”

  “He is bery espensib to feed,” said Fidel, with a sideways look at her.

  She swallowed deeply. “If you’ll get that piece of cloth away from him, I’ll buy him some dog food. Unless he’d rather have half a dozen live goats.”

  “Dog food is good.”

  The huge dog looked up at her and grinned a dog grin, tongue flopping out to clean his muzzle. Dog food would be fine, the grin said. In ten- or twenty-pound lots. Fidel managed to get the cloth away from him and gave it to Carolyn. It had blood on it, not a lot. If the prowler hadn’t been maimed, he’d at least been punctured.

  She gathered her robe around her, feeling the weight of the handgun in the pocket, as she went back into the study.

  Hal, from the hallway, asked, “Is this going to be a daily thing?” He took the stained fragment from her, looking at it closely, turning it, sniffing it. “I think we’ll send this to Mike. Be nice to have something to do a DNA match on, just in case.”

  “Whatever,” she said, depressed. The envelope between the books was still there. She drew it out and opened it, knowing before the flap came up that it was empty. Even Leonegro had missed the incoming, though he’d been in time to pursue the outgoing.

  “Fredo talked,” she said.

  “Maybe he just mentioned it to his partner.”

  “Then h
is partner talked.”

  “Lots of law-enforcement types belong to the Alliance, Carolyn.”

  She dropped into the old leather chair and shuddered, unable to stop. This had been no bungling teenager. Some very skillful person had been in here, and how had he managed that?

  Hal was asking himself the same question. Two minutes’ search turned up a small round hole cut in the glass of one window, near the window latch. “Two days later we’d have had the place wired. Even now, if I hadn’t been looking, I’d never have seen it.”

  She sighed. “If I hadn’t been looking, I wouldn’t have known the envelope was empty. I wouldn’t have been looking if something hadn’t wakened me.”

  “What?”

  “Sophy, who has quit playing sheep and is now playing guard dog!”

  He raised his eyebrows. “A protective phantom? Good for her! You realize it could have been months before we knew anyone had been here.”

  “Well, no. I’d have checked the envelope sooner than that.”

  “Come on back to the big bed. You don’t want to be alone.”

  She didn’t want to be alone. She went with him, snuggled up against him, heard the dog’s claws rattle across the brick floor on their way to the rug, where they turned around and around before settling. Hal’s breathing became calm and steady. She lay there, warm and presumably safe, yet unable either to rest or to sleep. Shadowy prowlers edged along her consciousness, making sudden sorties that startled her awake. At six she gave up, eased herself out of the bed, and followed the dogs to the kitchen.

  Carlos came in as she was fixing coffee, handed her the daily paper, and said, “You got peoples out there in the road.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “With signs. Much yelling when I climb over the new gate.” He sounded slightly hurt as he said, “You din gib me a key.”

  “You weren’t here when they gave me the keys, Carlos. There’s one hanging by the kitchen door with your name on it. Put the dogs in the pen, will you, on your way out?”

  She fetched binoculars from her bedroom and took a look at the people by the gate. There were about a dozen, wearing flimsy, windblown tabards that identified the Army of God. The signs they carried, obviously prepared for some other contingency, didn’t make much sense in their present context. Evidently the demonstration had been hastily assembled. And why?