First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  The local laws were a bramble thicket with long thorns everywhere: too much amputation of hands and heads. Not the kind of place to run a stable of young girls or deal in cocaine. Boys, maybe, if they were good Arabs and said their Koran or whatever while being reamed. So I planned to live quietly, fly where they told me, and leave on June 15, 1995, like it said on my visa.

  The very first run was trouble. To start with, the night before I had partied in the Petramin Compound. Our host was a ground mechanic claiming to be the only American in the Middle East who knew how to mix an authentic Long Island iced tea—and the only man in Saudi Arabia with the right booze to do it. He must have had six hundred dollars’ worth of contraband alcohol. And even then, he was using an off-brand Iranian vodka and a rum distilled in the Seychelles that had the flavor and consistency of JP-4.

  The trouble with Long Island iced tea is, it does not look or taste like liquor. It tastes just like a tall, cold glass of iced tea, which is exactly what my throat wanted after five days of walking around in the hot sun getting my papers signed and my eyeballs scorched by more white plaster and concrete than they ever wanted to look at again in my life.

  I was slurping up my third glass and smacking my lips in appreciation when the first glass took effect. Like a hypodermic full of curare while malefic spirits play tippy-tap on your skull with little silver hammers. My first coherent thought was for the glass and a half that was still in my system and waiting to pounce. If I moved fast, if I could move at all, I would get to the pad, fire up a chopper, and stick my head up among the blades as a merciful alternative to what was surely coming. I briefly considered asking someone for a gun to shoot myself with, but my mouth would not work.

  The ground mechanic thought I was asking for another hit, so he handed it over and even helped me tip it back. Kind soul. It was one hungover brave that showed up at the pad on the outskirts of Riyadh the next morning, squinting at sun-blazed stones and sand with hurt-filled eyes.

  I warmed up one of the new Bell Counter 101s with the blue Petramin shield on its side panels. The ship had a single turbine with a split transmission that drove two disks side-by-side and counter-rotating. The design was supposed to neutralize torque and make the ship easier to handle. Actually, it was designed merely to fascinate armchair pilots in procurement departments in Houston.

  The Mixmaster, which is what the real pilots called it, flew like a spooked horse in a field full of gopher holes. And those blades meshing right over my head, with maybe the clutch on one of those trannies drifting out of sync by a half-rev or so ... I had a lot to think about while going over the console.

  The copilot was a Saudi-subsidized trainee, Prince Abd el Faisal Something, a grinning, slick-skinned kid who could care less about driving a helicopter. He had papers, but I did not trust them, being written in Arabic. It was obvious from the linen and gold that he made three times the take-home I did and was sitting in the cockpit only because the Royal Family currently thought some of the poor-relation princes should be fully employed. He was holding a Louis L’Amour paperback and looking out the window. No help there.

  Our passenger was late. We were expecting an executive type, listed as an associate in the Law Department, Houston office. “Granville J. Corbin” sounded silver-haired, about sixty, fighting a paunch with Saturday and Sunday tennis sets. He would be wearing a deep tan that extended to the vee at his neck and mid-thigh, where the tennis whites started. He would probably talk like a New Englander with a corncob up his nose. He would be out to inspect the oil fields because, after forty years in the business, one must—just once—see where the stuff comes out of the ground.

  So when the Citation IV taxied over toward the pad and popped the hatch on a baby lawyer with more elbows than stomach, I was set up for my first surprise. He was not a bad-looking kid. Hair red-blond and curly, a strong nose, for a white man, twinkling eyes that missed very little, a grim-smiling mouth that turned up at the corners like a recurve bow. It was hard to read anything from that mouth except an honorary good will that might not go deeper than his teeth.

  “Hi, are you Petramin?” he asked above the whine of the Counter’s turbine. He rested his overnighter on the lip of the port-sice passenger door.

  “Right here. You Corbin?”

  “Call me Jay.” He slung the bag through, climbed in, and put a hand forward between my seat and the copilot’s, above my left shoulder. It was an awkward grip to take with my right hand, being strapped in by my shoulder harness with the cyclic live between my knees, so I reached up and shook backhanded with my left. And offside handshake like that is supposed to be bad luck. I guess it was, on that trip.

  He plopped into the bucket behind Faisal then, pulled the door shut, and fumbled with the lap and shoulder belts. While I was adjusting for takeoff, a woman came running from the Citation, or possibly just from that side of the runway—I did not see, being too busy staring at gauges right then. But when I looked up, staring at her was more rewarding.

  She was the reason the Saudis veil their women. A heavy fall of black-black hair bounced around her shoulders. Her eyes were arched and outlined like something out of an Egyptian tomb. She had painted her mouth the bold red that goes so well with olive coloring—not the peach and pink that washes out on an Eastern woman. Very un-Saudi, she was wearing high heels that made her calves stand out and a gray wool mini-suit that made everything else stand out.

  Our copilot, Faisal, seemed to share my assessment of this bobbling houri. Before I could move, he was out of the left-hand seat and opening the door. That was lousy protocol, as I was technically captain of the ship and we were airworthy if not actually in the air at the time. I turned toward him and was about to raise my voice to object when he put a gun barrel in my left ear.

  In the second before he ordered my eyes front I caught, through the side-plex of the cockpit, a last glimpse of the girl. She was still running but had pulled a stubby weapon out of her suit jacket and now held it in a professional double-handed grip. It had to be a big weapon—looked like an Ingram MAC-10 or an Uzi automatic pistol—to seem that huge at a distance of fifteen feet or so. Something with punch, anyway. I realized that her silhouette had been too good to be true.

  “Clear with Air Control and take off,” she said as she scrambled through the doorway and pushed past the baby lawyer, Corbin. “Fly east-southeast, one-twenty degrees.”

  “But our flight plan says north.”

  “We have changed your flight plan. You will take us to Juwara. In the Sultanate of Oman.” Her English was perfect, lilting and accentless. The weapon she held was really some kind of derringer sawed from the action of a double-barreled shotgun. It would mess up the cockpit badly if she fired it.

  But I knew the map. “Juwara is over eight hundred miles from here,” I said carefully. “That is beyond the operational range of this helicopter. There is nothing to the southeast within our range, except the Rub’ al Khali. The Great Sandy Desert.”

  “Fly!” She glanced at Faisal. “You will pilot us, or we will fly ourselves.”

  I shrugged, picked up the collective, and twisted on the throttle. It was going to be a long flight into nowhere.

  Chapter 4

  Granville James Corbin: Seeds of Vendetta

  By the time I graduated from high school, life in the mock-adobe just outside the Asilomar center was getting pretty raggedy.

  That summer, Mother was admitted to the Drylands Farm, a kind of resort up north in the Napa Valley. She referred to her stay as “a rest.” Father called it “dehydration.” Drylands catered to nonviolent alcoholics and drug abusers.

  Mother wrote to me faithfully, once a week to start with, mostly about the fog in the hills, the afternoon heat, and the prospects for the wine, uh, grape harvest. Over the years, she faded into a husky voice that whispered from slightly scented letters scrawled in thin blue ink. For some reason, she had a fixation on caterpillars and the birds that ate them. She rarely wrote about butterflies.
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  That August, as I packed to leave for the University of California at Berkeley, my father was reassigned to the Pacific—Indonesia or Malaysia. Oil at eight dollars a barrel, down from forty-two a year earlier, had knocked the Oil Patch on its tailbone. Petramin was no better off than anyone else. Father’s staff had been cut back to just one man, him, so he was off to taste the drilling mud in Sumatra or wherever.

  During the preparations for departure, he sold the mock-adobe right out from under Mother and me. He would be gone for three years, Father said, and to save the high cost of transoceanic air fare, he planned to take his leaves in Sydney and Hong Kong. So he, too, turned into paper for me: a checkbook and a handful of polaroid snaps, some of them decorated with strange, dusky women.

  Berkeley may once have been the western world’s center of dissent and anti-fascist, anti-imperialist rhetoric. But by the time I arrived, the careerists and academics were back in control. The Associated Students were again selling book covers illustrated with a winking, grinning humanoid California Bear. The political shouters at Sather Gate were replaced by skateboarders and falafel stands. The coffee houses of South Side, with their beansprout crépes and guerrilla theater, gave way to the nouveau-cuisine delicatessens of North Side’s gourmet ghetto, serving open-face sandwiches of prosciutto and fig jam on seven-grain bread. Radical action was out. Gelato was in.

  It was at Berkeley that I first crossed paths with Gordon Pollock.

  He was a beautiful young man, tall and well-muscled, with a headful of curly brown hair and with heavy, sleepy eyelids over smoky hazel eyes that missed nothing. He was an athlete, an aesthete, a scholar, a natural attraction. People pooled around him. In three years, he would be class president, associate editor of the campus paper, The Daily Californian, and captain of the gymnastics team.

  His father was something in the current Washington Administration, a dollar-a-year man who floated between the Department of Energy and the defense industry. He later became ambassador to Egypt and died in the Matruh massacre that took out Hosni Mubarak and half his general staff.

  The younger Pollock and I first shared a class in my freshman year, a survey course in astronomy which satisfied a pesky science requirement in my pre-law curriculum. One sweet spring afternoon, in a roomful of restless young bodies, I heard his high, slightly mocking voice drift down from the rows of seats behind me.

  “Corbin is wrong, sir. Johann Kepler enlarged upon the works of Nicolaus Copernicus, and not the other way around. You see, Copernicus had been dead twenty-eight years when Kepler was born.”

  The professor smiled up at Pollock. Most people who saw and heard him in those days smiled with a kind of inner appreciation, as if gratified to have so perfect a being on the face of this humble Earth.

  “You’re right, Mr. Pollock. Of course. Thank you for correcting the error.”

  Right then, I hated Pollock. I glanced over my shoulder and caught him looking down at me. It was not the cheerful face of a fellow scholar happy to have resolved a doubtful question on the side of truth. It was the intent, gleaming stare of a cat that has just mangled a bird.

  From that day forward, I marked him. As he rose in the campus politics and athletics, I kept track and took mental notes. Where others saw a young Adonis, the grace of youth, the beauty of such obvious talent, I remembered that gleaming stare of malice. I knew something about Gordon Pollock that others did not: Beneath his smooth pelt there was a were-cat, a fiddlestring madness, and it sometimes needed to lash out. Gordon Pollock was my summertime, Sunday psychology exercise. I collected him the way other people kept odd facts about Napoleon or Ramses II.

  But it was not until two years later that we would really clash.

  I can’t say my years at U.C. Berkeley were very well spent. There was too much to see and do in San Francisco—which seemed to be Cannery Row writ large—to keep me hunched over a book at midnight. And I was openly a creature of pleasure.

  In my first Halloween parade, I dressed as a chimney sweep, a ragged urchin boy in top hat, tails, and soot. The costume fitted my mood—abandoned by the breakup in PAcific Grove. Everyone loved it.

  The San Francisco scene was probably a bad place for an adolescent boy. Adults would worry about the risks of violence done to my person, but it never worried me because I had a black belt and could kill with either hand. Venereal infections and AIDS—which had by then reached the sexually active hetero population—were not much of a concern because, as a young stud, I could be fussy about things like condoms. Everyone humored me.

  More affecting than death and disease was the terrible loneliness. San Francisco was a city of lost souls. Every man and woman, in the bars and coffee houses, on the street at dusk and after dark, searched your face with that hopeful and haunted look, asking: “Are you the one? Are you my true love?”

  Being young and superior, I could take or give, walk or stay. I owed the bars and the street nothing but a good time. On my terms. But for others, the narrow boundaries of the city defined their whole world. They were trapped. It was this creepy loneliness that, regular as the tides, drove me back across the Bay to the pot parties, beer bashes, and golden, bare girls of Berkeley.

  Although Pollock and I were both pre-law, we didn’t share another course until my junior year. That was not unusual at a university as large as Cal, with hundreds of students in the same major. The two of us might pass in the computerized list of standings but not meet in the flesh for years. In truth, I had almost forgotten about him. Better we had remained strangers forever.

  The course we shared was political economy, a seminar in current problems. Professor Ballenger took us all over late-twentieth-century economics: the Federal deficit as negative investment, the social functions of defense spending, entitlements as an economic lever—ah?—the idea of “entitlements” may need some explaining now. ...

  You see, the laws at the time guaranteed State and Federal payments, usually in perpetuity, to arbitrarily selected classes of people such as the aged, the “unemployed,” veterans, farmers, mothers of unsupported children, and others who fell outside a narrow spectrum that had been pre-defined as economically able-bodied. These people were said to be “entitled” to these “transfer payments,” which were thought to redistribute the country’s wealth along “equitable” lines. At one point, the monies involved were as much as forty percent of all Federal disbursements, incredible as that may seem.

  Many people at the time argued that the economy depended on these transfer payments and the consumer spending they made possible, that to dispossess the holders of entitlements would have destroyed the American manufacturing and marketing base. Of course, they ignored the damage this negative investment was causing in the capital markets. And they missed the most important characteristic of money: It is inherently non-fluid. No matter how fast you pump it, some always sticks to the sides of the pipe and the hands of the pump-turners. It’s much more efficient for the recipient to obtain money directly, through work or wealth or stealth.

  Anyway, Professor Ballenger covered all of this with a certain grim wit. After fifteen weeks of discussion, he announced that our only grade would be from the final exam, which would be in essay form, three hours, on a topic of his choosing. A chorus of groans met this news.

  When the day came, the professor’s topic was: “Define the constitutional implications and restraints upon a repudiation of the national debt.”

  As luck would have it, I was exceptionally well prepared on this question. Actually, it was not a matter of luck but astute guesswork. Proposals for a repudiation were even then in the air, and Ballenger had mentioned them repeatedly, and favorably, in class. He also had spent an inordinate amount of time on the negative side of a $5 trillion debt, which is where it hovered that year. Any child, or a resident of any one of a half dozen Latin American countries, could see the drift of his thoughts. So I came to the final armed with four or five constitutional sections penciled in my mind and at least three argu
ments for and against the repudiation. As a contingency. The whole preparation took me fifteen minutes. Really.

  In the wrap-up seminar, where a professor usually returned the exam papers and discussed them, Ballenger presided with the face of the thunder god. All the happy, malevolent wit had withered away. He told us not even to look at the papers he had handed back. We were all a bunch of time-serving ninnies who would one day find out how ignorant we were, how incapable of any coherent thought that had not been spoon-fed down our slender throats. We would certainly find this out in law school—if any of us ever were accepted—and met some real professors. All of us, that is, but one. Mr. Corbin. Mr. Granville James Corbin, to be specific, whose final essay was exemplary, whose reasoning was exquisite, whose facts were extraordinary. This paragon, Mr. Corbin, should stand up and take a bow so that all the lesser mortals in the room could see what a truly adept legal mind was fashioned from ... except ...

  “Except even in the case of Mr. Corbin do I have my doubts.” The ginger beard and lion’s mane of hair that Ballenger combed back from his forehead shook sadly.

  “Sir?” I quavered from the second row—the last row in a tiny seminar room filled with sixteen undergraduate bodies.

  “Do you want to explain to me why,” Ballenger rumbled, “with your normal classroom discussion bordering on the moronic, you were able to prepare a nearly brilliant response to my left-fielded question?”