First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “Get in there!” I growled and made a strangler’s grip that he could see. Joe shrugged and waded in. Inside of nine seconds, he had bought twenty-seven percent of Palo Verde, ninety percent of all five units at San Onofre, and eighty-two percent of Diablo Canyon—for a total of 9,300 megawatts in nuclear power.

  “Good show!” murmured the broker to my left and signaled his own Pool man to sell. Then Joe bought all of Hoover Dam, big chunks of Bonneville, Grand Coulee, and the Sierra hydro systems—another 2,000 or 3,000 megawatts at least.

  “Daring, that,” someone said behind me in the gallery. I barely turned my head. Other Pool men were now gathering around Dark. He was picking up antique fossil plants, all of The Geysers and the new projects with geothermal brines, half a dozen solar towers, and even the first-generation wind farms. All of this was on three- to seven-day delivery, counted in hours. For some reason, the sharks were dumping on him. Fast.

  “You’re going long,” one of their handlers crooned past my ear. As Joe finally went after any of the out-of-region power contracts that might be lying around, my insides suddenly sagged. Was something about to happen, I wondered, that everyone could see but me? An imminent change in the weather? Maybe a black cloud or storm front coming in? Were the other brokers planning to run me up and then gut me for a novice? It had happened before. And I was catching dirty looks from Joe over his shoulder as he went on buy, buy, buying contracts.

  Then my spine stiffened. “Keep going, man,” I whispered into the mike. “Take it all.”

  Within two hours I owned 24.7 gigawatts of dispatchable capacity and another 13.6 in simple energy, all for delivery sometime in the next week. All bought at top dollar, or so near the top—an average of about thirty-two cents per kilowatthour—that the only way for that electricity to cost more would be to pay the secretary of the Exchange to rub two sticks together. I owned the southwestern energy market for the next week. Since there wasn’t but a handful of resources left to buy in that timeframe, the Pool’s action immediately moved on to long-term futures.

  The other brokers lining the gallery windows all looked at me with grim chuckles. One even patted my shoulder, telling me exactly what to expect. A shift in that high-pressure zone or five minute’s worth of cold rain that week could break me. I mean, the payments would go on for years!

  When I went out to lunch, I turned a hard stare up at the sky. That same silver glare shone down, only turning a softer, smoggy yellow just above the peaks that surrounded the city. The Exchange building’s air conditioner roared above me. A bead of sweat rolled down the inside of my leg. “Maintain, baby, maintain,” I said to myself.

  By four in the afternoon, I was sitting in my Vegas condo with the air conditioner turned all the way off and still shivering in reaction. Visions of a cold snap, sleet, a hailstorm … flash floods were passing through my brain, washing acres of greenbacks down the scraggly valleys. I stayed in that night, praying for the wind to die.

  Then the following morning, Wednesday, San Onofre’s Unit 4 developed a steam leak and had to trip. The operators ended up paying me—and triple for breach of contract. Thursday, a minor temblor in the Mono Lake area weakened the dam impounding Lake Wishon at the top of the Kings River hydro system. The State inspectors ruled there was no alternative but to spill the water all down that stairway of reservoirs and powerhouses. The operators had to do it by day and by night—when their energy wasn’t under contract. Another triple indemnity for me and a further squeeze on the region’s electric resources.

  God heard my prayers and raised the temperature three more degrees, average, all across the Southwest. And the wind died in the mountain passes, stilling those second-generation wind farms that Joe Dark had missed out on buying for me. We ended up unloading all that power at about a six-cent profit on every kilowatthour, of which there are a million in a gigawatthour. Paid in every hour. For a week. My take was N$390 million, just on two hours’ trading one sticky morning in August. The pace was that fast.

  As I say, it was my best day ever. But the action was all secondhand. More to Joe Dark’s credit than to mine. And after a few years of it, even trading on the S.W.E.E.P. seemed to go pretty stale. However, at the end of that week I went back to San Francisco feeling pretty good about myself. Then I walked into a fine old Italian tragedy.

  The cab from the airport dropped me off in midafternoon along the seawall of the Embarcadero and I crossed to our apartment building in the South of Market. It was one of the new buildings with three levels of fancy townhouses on the roof, seventeen stories up. The elevator opened on a series of hidden gardens. Around them were balconies, window walls, rounded arches on private pathways, grilled gates, fountains doing double duty as cooling sprays for the building’s air conditioning, and ground lights tucked into the ivy. I had to walk through this twisting jungle to get to our door.

  The first thing I heard was the music. Loud music. Our music. Modo reggae. The first thing I saw was the door to our apartment. It was open six inches. Waves of that heavy modo beat were almost visible coming out of it.

  At first, I thought Tracy was throwing a party. I pushed on the door with my face working up a big smile for our old friends and the new ones Tracy was sure to have found. But the foyer was empty, neat as always except for the scatter of handbag, keys, and scarf Tracy usually dumped on the table there. Just the music coming through that space.

  I climbed the six steps to the living room. It was empty, too, except for a weasel-faced man who was wearing one of my checkered silk robes, tied loosely, with his hairy chest sticking out one end and his hairy legs sticking out the other. He was sitting on the couch, grooving on the music, and drinking my scotch. Haig & Haig Twenty. From the bottle.

  “Who are—?” I started to shout over the music.

  Then from the upper balcony leading to the bedroom I heard: “Gran! Help!”

  Weasel Face did a double take and started to get up. I nailed him. Ten years of soft living and making money hadn’t rotted my body. I ran through the katas every other day, working out in a clear space at the resident’s gym. My edge had lost nothing.

  I nailed him. From a standing start at the top of the stairs I was across the living room in three giant steps and a quarter turn that brought my heel—six layers of Italian leather and one of hardened callus—straight onto the point of his chin. He did a backflip over the couch and balled up in the corner by the window. It probably broke his neck, although I didn’t hear the telltale crick.

  There had to be more of them. Right? They had to be upstairs. Right? So I took the risers three at a time, shrugging out of my suit jacket and clawing at my tie.

  Number Two, a scrufbum with half a week’s growth of beard, naked as a hairy ape, stood in the bedroom doorway. I put three stiff ringers six inches deep in his solar plexus. But I didn’t finish him off. Somebody had to be around for the S.F.P.D. to book.

  On the bed, were Tracy and Number Three, who was looking over his shoulder with slack- jawed surprise. He seemed about as clean as his partners. Tracy and he were both naked. That is, from what I could see: They were under the satin sheets. On the top of the sheets was a smattering of fresh blood. Coming from Tracy’s nose. I was ready to leap on the bed and stomp him. But that might have hurt Tracy more: He was kind of on top of her. Instead, I grabbed his foot and pulled—except in the tangle of satin I got her ankle and she yelped. On my second try, the foot was his. Sensei Kan always said, “Strike clean, never grapple. That’s judo, and I don’t teach it.” But there I was, pulling 190 pounds of wife-molester down-bed, against the tuck of the sheets, going slower and slower all the time. What else could I do? It was a big bed, and I wanted to get at him to pound him.

  Tracy was screaming, the modo was still thumping, and the guy was saying things like “Hey! Wait a minute! I can explain!” Just what you’d expect, and I had no reason to listen. But finally I had to listen. The disc player ran out of music, Tracy ran out of screams, and the friction—even wit
h satin sheets—finally caught up with my tugging. I let go and he sat up in a pile of shiny white cloth.

  Tracy used a corner of it to wipe her still-dribbling nose. She was giving bruised looks alternately to the guy and to me.

  “That’s better,” he said. “My leg was comin’ off.”

  “Better?” I felt my face go stiff again. “I come home, find three guys raping my wife, and you’re worried about your leg? You should see your friends.”

  “Hey! What rape?” he protested. “She invited us in. I’m the engineer for this building. They’re the gardeners. We got contracts to be here.”

  “Contracts? To rape my—?”

  “Oh, brother! What you don’t know! You think that little bit of blood makes it rape? She popped herself on the schnoz two seconds after we heard the door slammin’ open. This is purely a setup. And if you’ve hurt those gardeners, you’ll have assault and battery charges comin’ out of your ears. Not to mention a union grievance.”

  Tracy was strangely quiet. I looked at her. She was making no move to cover herself, even though my hauling had pulled the sheet down to her knees. Instead, she was working her face up to the right state of outrage.

  “It was too rape!” she screamed after a second. “You guys forced your way in here. Knocked me around. You put on the disc player to cover the yells. Then you stripped me and carried me, biting and scratching, up here!”

  “Oh come on, bitch!” he said tiredly. “Where are the bites? Where are the scratches?” He showed me his arms, mugged his face left and right. “And, about the music, she said she liked to fuck to that reggae beat. Mister, we’ve both been had!”

  It was Tracy’s word against his. And against the fact that, for a scene where three guys had set on her, the apartment was strangely neat. The men’s denims were folded or hung over chairs. Her clothes seemed to have been put away.

  Tracy’s words and the blood on her nose were giving me a convenient reason to side with her. I could press charges against these guys and not a judge in the city would fail to arraign them. Except for the fact that it would be a huge scandal, smeared all over the media: the Case of the Penthouse Pests. I could read those headlines on the front screen of my mind. And except that Tracy might pull the same stunt the next time I went away on business. I understood all this just standing there.

  “Get out,” I told him quietly.

  “Granny!” Tracy half-screamed, half-pleaded.

  “Take your friends,” I said, still talking to him. “If I hear one word about lawsuit or grievance, you’re going to see some disappearing acts you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Hey, I got rights,” he whined.

  “Not in my house. Get out.”

  So he went, taking the other two, Bruised Belly and the Undead One from the living room. On the way, he gathered their clothes; they also got away with my robe and my scotch. I never heard a peep from them afterward, and maintenance on the grounds didn’t seem to suffer—for the little bit of time we continued to live there.

  “Well, you certainly embarrassed me, Gran.” Tracy slowly pulled the blood-spattered satin up around her breasts.

  “Three at a party, Tracy? With the gardeners?”

  “I guess you don’t believe me. It was rape. They forced me.”

  “Damned considerate, putting your clothes away like that.”

  “They wanted to make it look like something else.”

  “Clever fellas.”

  “They were!”

  “Pardon me if I don’t believe you. It’s really nothing personal. Just—this puts me in a very bad situation. A man in my position, who does the deals I must, has to give his word sixteen times a day. People rely on what, I guess, you could call my honor. So, I really can’t be vulnerable to blackmail. Or even to the snickerings of people who think they know what’s going on behind my back. Not even discreetly.”

  “You cold-blooded bastard!”

  “No, Tracy. It’s simply that my wife—”

  “You prancing freak!”

  “—has to be above suspicion.”

  “Do you think I don’t know about your boys?”

  Poor Tracy thought she had a stopper there. Fact was, she didn’t know anything and was only guessing wildly. And if I were doing anything, I’d be one hell of a lot more discreet than she had been. Christ, leaving the door hanging open! And her guesses were truly irrelevant, because the issue in question was not what I might have done, but what I found her doing. However, like a wise old woods wolf, I knew that the best policy with a discovered trap is to spring it, harmlessly, from the outside.

  “Doing what with boys, dear wife?” I countered.

  “You’ll swing with anything, Gran, provided it hasn’t been dead three days. And I’ll bet you’ve tried that, too.”

  “Homosexuality, pedophilia, necrophilia—that’s quite a catalog of fantasies. Do you want to add bestiality or just leave it to be presumed? You have quite a few unfounded allegations, but not one of them backed by evidence or even hearsay.”

  “Don’t wrap me up in lawyer’s words, Gran.”

  “I’ll wrap you in a bill of divorce, you hussy. I caught you in flagrante delicto.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Getting reamed and liking it.”

  She smiled at that, the slow, lazy smile of a satisfied woman. “Go ahead and sue. Do it now, and you can make the Examiner’s evening edition. We can be on the Ten O’Clock News. ‘Prominent Dog-Faced Boy and Socialite Wife Wrangle Over Billion-Dollar Estate.’ I like it!”

  Actually, the money was now more than two billion, with the latest S.W.E.E.P. transactions, but I wasn’t going to tell Tracy that. Let her attorney dig through layer on layer of holding companies, joint ventures, stock options, and poison pills. Like Schliemann digging at Troy, he was never going to find the real treasure. But this matter wasn’t going to get that far.

  “Ride’s over, Trace. I want you out of here in twenty-four hours. You can take what you like. Hint, hint: There’s probably three hundred thou in Bophuthatswana’s new gold rands hidden behind the bookcases. Keep whatever you can find. I’m turning my back now. If you disappear without a scene, I will make out a cashier’s check for fifteen million for you. If you try to make a fuss, you will disappear without a sign.”

  “That’s a threat! My lawyer will hear about it. It’s mental cruelty!”

  “Your lawyer will take half of that fifteen mill if you’re not careful. See? I’m looking the other way. Take what you can and get out. Now!” I really did turn my back on her.

  From the rustling and the banging—of bedsheets, bare feet, clothes, and finally the closet door—she cleared out in nineteen seconds. I vacated the apartment for a few days and when I came back, it had been stripped. Empty. Everything gone including the runner in the hallway and the light fixtures in the bathroom.

  Let her have it. I never heard another word from Tracy Starrett Corbin, her lawyer, or her kin. The check I had left in her name at the bank was picked up inside of thirty-six hours. This time around, it was I who filed divorce papers in absentia. And like Anne Caheris, I did it from Mexico, too, but I didn’t go there just for a legal dodge.

  I went to war.

  You see, ever since I was a kid, Mexico had been a country on the edge of disaster, in terrible economic shape, dying, dying, and not dead yet. Transfusions of cash and technology from the United States had done nothing to revive the comatose economy. Oil and mineral wealth beyond the dreams of sheikh or shah had done nothing to improve the life of the people. But that year, in 2009, it finally happened. The banditos, the petty revolutionaries, and the peasants finally got together and kicked the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, out of power. Like a dried skeleton in a sandy crypt, the country just fell apart.

  Within weeks, Yucatan was trying to be an independent communist state and laid claim to the oil fields in the Gulf of Campeche. The west coast and Baja set themselves up as a free state with tourism and drugs th
e mainstay of their economy. The rest of the country was balkanized in similar fashion with a dozen family parties and warring factions scrambling for the few pesos left in the cashbox. The process was fearful and wonderful and wholly predictable.

  The confusion raised anxieties in the United States, of course. The border States of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, which had grown into a loose confederation known as the TENMAC, were the most concerned. For decades, they had absorbed—and, frankly, capitalized on—a trickle of hungry brown people seeping across the border, a few hundred each day at each crossing point. Now that trickle had turned into a torrent; thousands of human locusts were streaming north. Everywhere. Every hour. Many of them were armed and most of them understood democracy and a free market economy not at all. It was the Southwest’s worst nightmare come awake.

  The TENMAC petitioned Congress for intervention. The States took their authority from the Mexican government’s last series of requests for U.S. aid. They took their cause from the plight of the Walt Whitman School, an American institution in Monterrey which the local People’s Revolutionary Socialist Council, or CRSP, had taken under its “protection.” Rumor had it they were holding the teachers, mostly U.S. citizens who had come down to work and play in the sun, and the strudents, mostly the children of local industrial managers, also American-based, hostage to extract concessions from their companies.

  The image of helpless white women and children being held in ruthless brown hands played well in Baltimore. The House Subcommittee on International Strategy granted the TENMAC’s request to form nearly independent militia units, formally known as the Gentlemen Volunteers, to intervene in Monterrey. In a further move, also inspired by the TENMAC, Congress put forward a resolution annexing the entire country. That passed by a four-vote majority. The date was February 8, 2010.