by Gene Wolfe
“I’m about blind, and my head hurts.”
“Blind?”
“They took my specs.” The waxen-faced little detective rubbed his eyes, then his temple. “Or maybe they just dropped off when Cliff sapped me. Wait till I get that son of a bitch alone.”
“You must tell me what befell you.”
“Madame S., I’m about to puke. Right now I don’t have to do one other damn thing.”
“It is important, or at least it may be so. Tell me!”
“Wait a minute.” Shakily, Stubb got to his feet, one hand at his throat. “Well, I’ve had it.”
“Had what, you fool?”
“The gold watch, the handshake, the testimonial dinner, the scroll signed by our chairman, the stucco bungalow in Florida, the whole damned schmeer. Point me at a toilet.”
“There is none. If you are sick you must swallow it.”
“I was talking about me. You know, climb in, pull the handle. Hey, what the hell!” His forearm had brushed the breast of his trenchcoat. Reaching inside, he drew out his glasses. “Son of a bitch.” He wiped the thick lenses on his sleeve. “Cliff must have stuck them in there. Or the girl did. Sure, I bet it was her.” He put them on with an expression of satisfaction and looked around at the bare room, the rusty tin chairs, and the witch. “Say, what happened to your eyes? Have you been crying?”
“Mr. Stubb, you are the most irritating man I have ever encountered, and I have encountered a great many such men. Forget my eyes—they are plants that must be watered if they are to grow. Will you please tell me what happened to you? I repeat that it may be of importance, and I remind you that you are in my employ.”
“Madame S., except for expenses, you’ve never given me a nickel.”
“I have very little money, but I assure you that you will be paid. Though it is doubtful now, very doubtful, that you will ever be in a position to render me the slightest service.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Then let me hear no more complaints. Tell me!”
“I did already. I got the gold watch—the all-day thirtybuck tour. I got shanghied. I got—”
“Yes?”
Stubb pulled one of the folding chairs across the gray, splintered floor and sat down. “I got the case I’ve been waiting for all my life, I guess. The big time. Rich, lovely girl not even as tall as I am.” Suddenly his face twisted into a snarl as real as any savage little beast’s. “Don’t you sneer at me, sister. She was!”
“I was not ridiculing you,” the witch told him. “Nor did I look at you in any way different from the way I now look.”
“Okay.” He relaxed, taking off his glasses and polishing them automatically on his sleeve. “Only maybe she wasn’t really rich. Maybe somebody was slipping her the bread to put up a front. She’d gone to some good schools, though. She talked like it.”
“You loved her.”
“I wanted to,” Stubb said. “But it was … Hell, you’d never understand, Madame S.”
“I would try.”
“It was like … I don’t know. The Late, Late Show when you get up and yawn and empty the ashtrays because you know it will be over in a minute. Everything was perfect, just perfect, except I knew—oh, hell!”
“What is it?”
“I should have told you right off. Free’s dead.”
“You are certain?” The witch’s eyes opened so wide that for an instant Stubb could see the fires behind them.
“Pretty sure. They said so, and they showed me a picture. He was lying on a concrete floor, and there was a lot of blood.”
“But you did not see him.”
“No, I didn’t actually see the body. So yeah, it could have been faked. I don’t think it was.”
“Perhaps not. Yet those like Free so often reappear long after they have been counted among the dead. Someone struck you, I think.”
“Cliff Rebic. You don’t know him. I’ve worked for him, off and on. He sapped me too. He’d told the kid, the bellhop, to come back with tea for the girl. I forgot about that. I looked around, and Cliff sapped me.”
“Unfortunate.”
“You bet. When I came to, he had cuffs on me, and a blindfold, and he was sitting with me in the back of a car. I could smell his aftershave. The girl was driving. She had great perfume, and anyway, every so often they said something. He was working for her, or at least working for the people she worked for. Okay, that’s how they suckered me. What’s your story?”
“It is really not much different from your own. Today I defrauded a certain one, the namesake of one who possesses much authority, below. This I did knowing his name, yet thinking nothing of it. He sent—”
The door flew open; and Barnes, still naked except for a bandage over his eyes, staggered blindly through it. The man who had pushed him from behind tossed a bundle of clothing after him. He tripped over one of the tin chairs and fell.
“What the hell,” Stubb said. “How’d you get so screwed up?”
“Is that you, Stubb?”
“Sure it’s me. Hold still a minute.” Stubb’s short, dirty fingernails scrabbled at the adhesive tape, ripping it away with much of Barnes’s eyebrows.
Barnes yelped.
“Best way to do it. Get it over with fast. Now wait till I get my pocket knife out and I’ll cut you loose.”
The witch said, “They permitted you to keep such a thing?”
“Sure. What could I do with it? It wouldn’t cut those cuffs, and anyway I couldn’t get at it.”
“And they permitted me to reclaim my handbag. But poor Ozzie has been stripped to the skin.”
“They threw his stuff in with him,” Stubb pointed out.
“I guess I did it myself,” Barnes said. “I mean, mostly I took off my own clothes.” He was rubbing his wrists.
The witch observed, “You have a tale to tell.”
“All right, but I want to get something on my tail first. Jesus, can’t you at least shut your eyes?”
“As you wish. See, I hold my bag before them.”
Barnes picked up a pair of check pants and swore.
“They rip you off?”
“I’ll say they did. These are mine.”
“Hey, you’re right. Your old suit. Didn’t you lose it in that hospital?”
Barnes nodded. “A sailor named Reeder took it.”
“And you went out while the blackout was still on and rolled some other guy for his.”
“No, I didn’t. I got it from a store. Hey, look—Fruit of the Loom! They even found my old underwear.”
“Nifty. I hope they washed it. Put it on.” Stubb stroked his chin. “You know, Ozzie, they’re not as smart as they think they are, or they would only have bandaged one eye.”
Barnes was feeling the pockets of his suit. “Yeah, I lost my glass one, and it’s not here, either. You could tell, huh? When I read the label?”
“I could tell whether you looked at the label or not. Now put the damn clothes on—Madame S.’s getting tired of holding up her bag. They must have gotten their hands on this Reeder. That or he was working for them all along. You haven’t seen him since we skipped the hospital?”
“Hell, yes, I saw him. I tagged him a good one in the lobby of the Consort for taking my stuff.”
“No problem, then. They knew we were in the Consort. A house dick spotted me eating breakfast there this morning. He told Cliff Rebic, and Cliff would have told them. They might have known it even earlier—”
“But they did!” The witch interrupted, speaking from behind her purse. “That girl—she worked for Illingworth. He brought me here.”
“You mean Sandy?” Stubb asked.
“Yes. That Alexandra Duck.” The witch hesitated. “Perhaps she did not know. I would have sensed it, I think, and I did not.”
“Illingworth’s the guy that publishes those magazines?”
“He says so, yes.”
Stubb said, “I doubt if he was working for them himself before this morning. She said they cal
led him then. But they knew to call him—hell!”
“You have thought of something?”
“Just Mrs. Baker. They put a tail on her. Maybe even one of Cliff’s guys. The two girls went to grill her, and he watched to see where she’d go. Or they staked her out themselves. She went to the Consort to talk to us. You can put down your bag now—Ozzie’s got his pants on.”
The witch lowered it. “And now you, Ozzie. Why were you brought in naked?”
“I don’t think I’m going to tell you that.”
“Oh, really?” The witch’s face twisted in the suggestion of a smile. “Mr. Stubb has told his story.”
“I didn’t hear it.”
“You will, if you wish—from me, if not from Mr. Stubb himself. But from Mr. Stubb surely.”
“I’m still not going to tell you what happened to me. That’s my business!”
“If you will answer just one question, I will desist, at least for the time being. Was it something you are now ashamed of?”
Barnes nodded.
“So for Mr. Stubb also. He was given—might I call it the opportunity of a lifetime?”
Stubb said nothing.
“And he failed. He was brave, yes. And intelligent too, though he would call it smart. But at the crucial moment, distracted. It was not so much different for me. I too …”
“You looked the wrong way too?” Stubb patted his pockets. “Anybody got a cigarette?”
“No. But I failed. I was shown deities—the ultimate deities, so was I told. And they were as I had always believed they would be, Phra the Sun; Khepri, who is Life; Ked, God of Earth; Nu of the Waters, of the Waters of Chaos. But it was all wind.”
“I never believed in religion myself,” Barnes said. “But if they hurt you, I’m sorry.”
“You sacrifice to Kuvera, the Lord of Treasure,” the witch told him. “Also to Isis of Erech. And because you know nothing of them, they drive you as with scourges.”
Stubb said, “It doesn’t sound like you did so well yourself.”
“I did not. The worst thing is not to be ignorant of the gods. The worst is to mistake those who are not gods for them. At the very moment when I thought to be elevated, I found myself mocked and reviled. If it had been only the laughter of men and women, I should not have cared. I have heard that many times, and it is but the rattle of pebbles in an empty jar. But I heard the voices of the gods—of Mana and Skarl and Kib, and Sish, the Destroyer of Hours. Or of whatever the true gods may be.”
Barnes touched a finger to his lips. “Somebody’s coming.”
All three fell silent, listening to the footsteps. The door opened, and a middle-aged man in a duffel coat came in. He looked cold—there was snow on his shoes, and the white touch of winter on his cheeks, and a little frost had begun to form on the barrel of the Thompson submachine gun he carried.
“Good evening,” he said. “I thought you might appreciate an explanation of what’s happened to you and where you’re going.”
In Vino, Incertus
“It’s about time,” Stubb said. “Who was Free?”
Barnes snapped, “Where’s my kid?”
“I said I was going to explain,” the man in the duffel coat told them. “I didn’t say I was going to let you people quiz me, and I won’t.” The index finger of his right hand found the trigger of the Thompson.
Ignoring what he had just said, the witch asked, “Are you going to kill us?”
“We’re going to do what we’re told to do with you,” the man in the duffel coat answered a trifle wearily.
(Stubb polished his glasses and put them back on, leaning forward in his chair.)
“If our orders are to eliminate you, then you will be eliminated, yes. If we’re told to do something else with you, then we’ll do that.” He cleared his throat and spat into a corner. “The trouble with you people is that you won’t do what you’re ordered to. You can never see that when you do what the leader says, everything works out, and when you don’t, it all breaks down. Everything breaks down.”
“You are mad!” the witch said.
“I am the leader,” the man in the duffel coat told her.
“He’s just a little blasted,” Stubb said. “Don’t you smell the booze?” To the man in the duffel coat he added, “I wouldn’t mind a shot myself, sir. How about it?”
“You think you’re going to throw it in my eyes and take my gun.” The man in the duffel coat shook the Thompson, making the cartridges in its drum magazine rattle.
“Hell, I don’t want to throw it—I want to drink it.”
Barnes was shrugging into his checked jacket. “You said you were going to explain. Get on with it. I’d like to hear it.”
The man in the duffel coat chuckled. “So would I. I can’t wait to hear what I’m going to say. That’s Groucho, I think. Groucho Marx.”
“I know. I used to be a stand-up comic myself.”
“So you did. All right, I’ll start with you.” The man in the duffel coat looked from Barnes to the witch, and from her to Stubb, the muzzle of the Thompson following his eyes. “But first, I think it would be best if all three of you were sitting down.”
Barnes dropped into a chair.
“Good. Let me begin with the founding of our great nation—”
“Are you really crazy?” Stubb glared at him.
“No, I’m our leader, as I told you. Our country was founded on the principle of the destruction of the wild by the civilized. Let me—just for a moment, if Mr. Stubb will excuse it—go back thirty thousand years before Christ, when the ancestors of the Indians crossed what are now the Bering Straits to occupy what some people have called an empty land. Those Indians represented civilization. The beavers felled trees and built lodges, but the Indians killed the beavers and skinned them.”
Barnes said, “Then the whites came and skinned the Indians.”
“Precisely. But the frontiersmen who destroyed the Indians and their culture were destroyed themselves, with their culture, by the settlers who followed. Those settlers lost their farms to the banks, and the banks sold them to companies who have brought the advantages of corporate existence—immortality and amorality—to agriculture.
“In the cities, the same thing occurred. The early city of independent shops and restaurants is properly being displaced by one of chain outlets, so that progressively greater control is exercised. Perhaps none of you has ever understood before why they are called that—chain outlets.”
None of the three spoke.
“You see the progress? The old stores had to sell things their customers wanted. As they’re eliminated, the need for their kind of slavery is eliminated too, and the chains can sell whatever they want. Their customers have to buy it because there’s nothing else to buy. I ask you, all of you—how often have you gone into W. T. Grant’s and found there was nothing at all you wanted?”
They stared at him. Stubb said softly, “Sometimes I feel like I’m in the wrong movie. You’re Wolfe Barzell, and you’re about to turn us over to Mike Mazurki.”
“And you are Elisha Cook, Jr. in glasses,” the man in the duffel coat told him. “You don’t have to look at me like that, I’m sure you must have thought of it yourself. Where was I?”
The witch said, “You were about to tell us our part in all this.”
He laughed, throwing back his head and taking two unsteady steps to the rear until he leaned against the door jamb. “Your part? My dear, demonic, dumb bitch, I can’t have been about to tell you that. You don’t have one. Like Short there says, you’re in the wrong picture. There are no parts for any of you in this one. It’s the truth. You’ve been extras and bit players, all of you, all your lives. Now you can’t even do that.”
One hand left the Thompson and groped in the side pocket of his duffel coat. In a moment it reappeared holding a silver flask. Clamping the Thompson under his arm, he unscrewed the top and drank. “Who said he wanted some?”
“Me, sir,” Stubb told him. “Short.�
��
“Catch!” He tossed the open flask. It left a narrow streak of whiskey on the floor.
Stubb drank and handed the flask to Barnes, who offered it to the witch, then drank too when she refused.
“Let me put it like this,” the man in the duffel coat said. “The Indians used to be Americans—that’s what an American was. Then the trappers were Americans, the Americans of their day. Then the farmers, with their buggies and plow horses and white clapboard houses. Even today when you look at a picture of Uncle Sam, you’re seeing what those farmers were like dressed up to go to the county fair. Only farmers aren’t real Americans any more. Neither are Indians. Poor bastards of Indians aren’t even foreigners, and we like foreigners more than Americans, because foreigners are the Americans of the future. The trappers are gone, and pretty soon you’ll be gone too.”
He felt in his pocket for the flask, then seemed to remember he had thrown it to Stubb.
“You aren’t Americans either.” His voice grew angry and a little deeper. “There isn’t one of you, not a God-damned one, that owns a designer sheet. Or a set of matched towels. You don’t wear anybody’s jeans, and you don’t jog. You’re shit. You’re just shit.”
“I would sooner die!” The witch’s vehemence startled all three men. “I would sooner die than wear your blue jeans and be seen!”
“You’re not American,” the man in the duffel coat repeated. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”
“And have I ever claimed to be? Or wished to be? I am a Gypsy and a princess. And a dupe, because you have made me one. But I will speak for the Indians too, because they were nomads when they were shaped by their own thoughts and not by yours, and we are nomads now, who will remain so though you slay us.” She gasped for breath; it was almost a sob.
“You have overcome us, but you have not conquered us. To conquer us you must beat us fairly, and you have not beaten us fairly, and so you have struck us to the earth, but you have not won. To conquer us, you must have dignity too, and for that reason you have not conquered us. A man may flee from a wasp and be stung by the wasp, but he has not been conquered by the wasp; it remains an insect, and he is still a man. You deck yourselves like fools and chatter and hop like apes, and your princes marry whores. That is why even those you have crushed to dust will not call you master, and none will ever call you master until you meet a nation more foolish than yourselves.”