Downslope, at the bottom of the hill, a starting engine screeched. It coughed and choked, time and again, as somebody too anxious to start up one of the buggies flooded the engine. A brief hesitation, and Keith began running down the hillside, in long, rapid strides, heedless of the risk of falling. Branches whipped across his face, leaving raw welts, and he did not notice.
Keith burst out of the trees and was among the buggies just as the engine caught. A short sprint brought him beside the correct vehicle, and he was shoving his rifle into the frightened face of a Mummer assassin.
“Cut it off,” he said quietly.
The Mummer obeyed, and the night filled with silence. Up close Keith could see that the assassin was just a kid, even younger than Keith himself. For an instant he didn’t recognize the face—his subconscious demanded a gargoyle, an ogre, a monster that reality refused to provide. Yet it was a familiar face, one he had seen before.
“Surprised to see me, Tony?”
The kid squinted at his face, puzzled. Then a wide grin split his thin features, and he relaxed visibly. “Keith! Hey, man—” Keith cut off his words by jabbing the cold rifle muzzle into his face, just below one eye. The smile collapsed into surprise, then fear.
“How many of you are left?” Keith asked. He watched scared eyes try to focus on the rifle.
“None, Keith, just me. I’m the only one.” Keith said nothing. Tony tried again. “You killed them all—I can show you the bodies. You killed the captain …” He broke off when Keith moved the rifle gently, massaging the boy’s cheek in a small circular motion.
“Good.” He spoke quietly, a part of his mind occupied with pushing away the memory of Fletch’s death. It was like shoveling back the ocean. “Any of your brothers among the dead?”
“No.” Tony would have added more, but Keith silenced him again, by lightly brushing his eyelashes with the rifle tip.
“Okay. Now we come to the good question.” Keith paused. “Why?”
Tony blinked. His forehead was slick with sweat. “Why?” he echoed weakly.
“Yes, why?” Keith’s voice was calm, controlled. “Why did you and your friends track us out here? Why were you sent to kill us?”
“I don’t know.”
An instant’s rage possessed Keith, an urge to finish this horror by killing the kid where he sat. He controlled the impulse, but something of it must have shown in his face, for Tony shut his eyes and looked as if he were bracing himself to die. “You don’t kill people just for the hell of it,” Keith said. “You have a reason—a fucking good reason. And when the nice man asks you why, you smile polite and answer sweet. Understand?”
The kid began to cry quietly, slow tears squeezing out of the corners of his eyes and sliding down his cheeks. “Honest, Keith, I don’t know. The captain knew, but he didn’t tell us. He just said we have to bang the woman. He said that anyone with her bought it too, but that the woman was the dangerous one, and we had to bang her.”
“Kill her,” Keith said. “The word is ‘kill.’ Let’s hear you say it.”
“K-kill.” Tony almost choked on the word, struggled on. “But that was all we were told, honest, that was all I ever knew.”
Keith drew back the rifle, and smiled an insincere smile. “Tell you what. I’m going to let you live. I want you to go back to Philly and give your old man a message. Can you do that?”
The kid nodded.
“I thought you could. Tell Gambiosi that I’m sending him back his son—alive. Tell him that I had you cold, but I sent you back as a gift. You got that so far?”
Another nod. The kid’s cheeks were wet.
“And tell him that you didn’t kill the woman.” Tony looked at him. “I did.”
Keith still held Fletch’s binoculars, jammed up under one armpit. He dropped them in Tony’s lap. “Tell that to your owners. Tell Gambiosi that I did your dirty work for you, and there’s the proof.”
He backed off a few paces, said, “Well? What are you waiting for?”
The kid’s hands fumbled with the ignition. The motor caught and he pulled out onto the road wildly. Keith stood watching him leave.
By dawn he had dragged both Bear’s and Fletch’s bodies up to the smoldering remains of the cabin. He laid them side by side, then hesitated. It seemed like a violation of the dead. But he had to have an answer.
Keith opened Fletch’s robe, and deftly undid the buttons of her shirt. The flesh underneath was an ugly black, massive bruising that had followed her death. Tucked into her belt, protruding over her stomach, was a leather portfolio. He lifted it out, flipped her robe shut.
Standing away from the corpses, his back not quite turned to them, he examined the portfolio’s contents. They were handwritten manuscripts, clearly stories Fletch had been working on, cluttered with marginal notes and corrections. They were wrinkled from being carried under her belt and sewn into the lining of her saddlebags before that, but readable nonetheless.
Keith riffled through thin bundles of paper labeled “Drift Communities,” “Mutations/Disease,” “Mutagenic Offspr.” and the like. Halfway through, he hit pay dirt: a bundle labeled “Phila/Drift.” He returned the other papers to their sheath, and began reading.
It’s the best kept secret in Philadelphia. The infant mortality rate is not a matter of public record. People disappear into the hospitals and the word filters out that they died of “pneumonia” or “flu” or “superflu.” Not one person in a thousand suspects that Philadelphia lies within the Drift.
Keith stopped reading. He had his answer. Here were the words that had sealed Fletch’s fate, the words that by themselves could destroy Philadelphia.
A single thicker piece of paper was enclosed in the bundle. Keith thumbed it out from the rest. It was a copy of the map of the Drift that had been drawn up almost a century ago for the first official reports on the Meltdown. Long curving oblongs had been drawn around the reactor site, the outermost just barely grazing Philadelphia. Fletch had jotted a dozen radiation counts onto the map, and redrawn the outermost line. There was no doubt that she had done her homework, no chance of her being mistaken.
Keith tried to imagine the damage the article could do, if published. There were over a million people in Philadelphia, all in mortal dread of the Drift, all superstitiously clinging to their city as a safe haven, clean and free of radiation. He tried to picture these million people, most of them on foot, streaming out of Philadelphia in a panic, clogging the bridges to New Jersey, swooping on the lands beyond like a plague of locusts. The United States was no longer a rich nation; all its fat had been lost in the turbulent post-Meltdown years. There would be no refugee camps for the new fugitives, only guns to mow down this sudden threat to a precarious economy.
It was literally unimaginable. And the only thing that held back this nightmare was the Mummers, with its embargo on high-tech artifacts such as ionization counters, its spies, and its quiet terrorism.
Keith checked his rifle, paced thirty yards downhill, and raised it to his shoulder. He squinted at the hillside just above the ruins of the cabin. Something crippled flew by.
One after the other he shot the projectiles into the earth, until the clip was emptied, and the hillside—whether from the projectiles themselves or from their thundering reverberations—collapsed over the bodies of his former companions.
There were no words worth saying. His duty done, Keith dropped the papers on the ground, and started to trudge down past the corpses of the fallen Mummer assassins. He hadn’t gone far before a thought occurred to him, and he returned to scoop up the stories again.
He weighed them in his hand. There was power here, if he knew how to use them. He didn’t kid himself. Politics and the acquisition of power were total unknowns to him. But he could learn.
As he started the buggy, Keith became aware again of the irritation his nucleopore caused. He pulled it off and dropped it on the seat beside him. It hardly mattered now.
He shifted gears, and began th
e long trip home to Philadelphia.
Mummers Day was sunny and blue-skied. Keith stood in the crowd, slapping his arms against his jacket from time to time to keep warm. He was not surprised when the Center City Fancy Club stopped in front of him, not at all anxious when King Clown strode straight at him.
The Clown’s gloved hands rested on his shoulders, and Keith looked into the man’s bloodshot eyes. He could smell the liquor on the captain’s breath. There was a still instant, and then whapwhapwhap! he had been tapped out, and King Clown was striding away. Keith ran to join the ragtag band in mufti that was strutting happily after the troupe. The crowd cheered.
He was a Mummer now.
II
Nigger Night
The night Jimmy Bowles died, Keith Piotrowicz had to work late in his taproom. A sign on the door read “Closed for Inventory,” and half the basement had been dragged out onto the floor. A methane lamp spattered blue light over the countertop, fading to gloom before reaching the walls.
It was a hole-in-the-wall bar, big enough to have a ladies’ entrance, but too small for a name or a ladies’ parlor. The women shared three tables to the rear of the room. “A regular little gold mine,” its previous owner had sarcastically called it, and then had it taken away from him when he shaved the Mummers’ share too thin.
“There’s a ten-gallon jug of caramel missing since last March,” Keith said. The caramel was mixed with alcohol and water, to make the booze for the hard liquor drinkers. That and the beer—which he bought from whom he was told—were all he had to serve customers.
His night man, Jay, flashed a gap-toothed grin. “Yeah, I been wondering when you’d notice that one.”
“Well?”
“Well what? It’s missing. Maybe somebody walked in the back room one night and lifted it from the shelf. It’s gone.”
“Oh sure,” Keith said. “Somebody walked in the back room and ignored the white entirely and lifted a jug of caramel. Right.”
Somebody rattled the door. “Closed!” Jay said. “So I musta ate it, right? You can take it out of my pay.”
“Damn it, it’s not a question of money, it’s a question of trust. You—”
The door-rattler tried again. He began hammering loudly on the door. “Closed, damn it!” Jay picked up a length of broom handle that had been drilled out at one end and poured full of molten lead. But Keith waved him down, saying, “I’ll do it.”
He unlocked the door, peered out. “Hello, Smiley,” he said.
The man came in and sat down at the bar. He slid off his hat and laid it down beside his elbow. “Beer,” he told Jay. Then, “Big night tonight, eh?”
“You know how these Council meetings are,” Keith replied. “Lots of sound and fury, but everything’s always decided in advance.”
“Well, what I hear is that Gambiosi is going to take it in the ear.” He drank down half his beer in a single long draught. “Ouch,” he said, placing a hand against his side.
“You planning on paying for that beer?”
Smiley’s eyes took on the mournful, betrayed look of a favored dog who has just been kicked by his master. “Now, Keith, I thought we were friends.”
“All I’m saying is—you don’t pay for the beer, you don’t complain about it either.”
Smiley cheered right up. “That’s just the old kidneys speaking. They act up real bad in this weather.”
Keith jabbed a finger at the ledger. “Is this a six or an eight?”
“A nine.”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“How’s your nigger doing?” Smiley asked suddenly. “Still in Jefferson, is he?” He took a gingerly sip of his remaining beer.
“The doctors say he’s doing just fine for a man in his condition. His age. But you know how these things go.” Keith shrugged. “Who can say?”
“You and him was pretty close, huh?”
“I guess.” Keith ran a pencil down a column of figures, checked off twenty items in rapid succession, turned the page.
“How’d you and him get together in the first place?” Smiley was like that. He gathered information continuously, even obsessively, in the firm belief that it would do him some good someday. Only he didn’t have the faintest idea how to use it, so that he amassed an enormous clutter of fact and speculation, to no purpose whatsoever. But people tolerated him because it was always possible to shake that same information out of him later, and sometimes it was useful. So maybe it did do him some good after all.
Keith corrected a figure and said without looking up, “Well, he took an interest in me when I was just starting out—tried to help me, gave me a lot of advice. None of it any good. So when I started making good, I had to give him a hand, right?”
Smiley nodded. He could understand that; it was the way his world ran, on favor and friendship and shared opportunity. “They say that old man practically worships you. I hear he got drunk last month and went around crying and talking how you were his son.” He laughed.
“Yeah, well, Jimmy can be a sentimental slob.”
Someone else began rattling the door and hammering on its panels. The sound echoed and reverberated in the dark room. Smiley looked puzzled. “Now what kind of asshole—can’t he see that we’re closed?”
“Just … drink your beer, Smiley.” Keith got up and went to the door again.
A black man stood there, a skinny, proud-looking creature in a chauffeur’s uniform with a cluster of feathers on the breast pocket. In the alley behind him was an American flag. There were only twenty such cars in all of Philadelphia, and they all belonged to the Mummers. “Compliments of Mr. Gambiosi.” The chauffeur touched his cap lightly. “He was concerned that you arrive at the Council meeting on time.”
Smiley looked on with considerable interest. Keith could practically see the wheels spinning. The Council meeting was not for another two hours. It was possible to walk to Mummer Hall twice over in that time. “Gambiosi must be getting pretty nervous,” Smiley said, “if he’s—”
Jay rolled his eyes upward. “Smiley,” Keith said, “did you ever stop to think that being a fool might not protect you all your life?”
“I—”
“Just shut up,” Keith advised. He turned to leave.
Mummer Hall was almost empty. Calder’s mobile Ghost hung motionless over the great stairs. Slowly Keith climbed between the twin rows of mannequins in the costumes of Mummers Clubs of years gone by. These were the great bands, from before the corrupting touch of politics: Ferko, Fralinger, Liberty Clowns, Trilby, Hog Island, Golden Sunrise, Aqua, Strutters, Ukrainian-American, Top Hat, Fancy Dans, Downtowners … all in feathers and glitter, instruments in hand, frozen into silence for all eternity.
Keith’s office was small, little more than a cubby. It held a desk and two chairs, one for visitors. But it had a painting and electric lighting. The electricity came from the low-head generator at the old Waterworks dam on the Schuylkill, just above Mummer Hall. The painting was by Chagall; Keith did not have the status for a Monet or a Rembrandt. It was called “The Trough,” and it showed a woman and a pig both drinking from the same coffinlike trough of blood. The blood was purple-red, with bubbles of light rising from its depths. The pig had a knowing look on its face.
Keith unlocked his desk, removed a thick file from one drawer, and began to leaf through it. He was buried in a list of Southern Manufacturing and Biotech products being shipped to the Drift, when two pudgy black hands laid themselves on his desk. Fat gold rings dug into the flesh, and diamonds shone from them.
“Captain Moore,” Keith said, rising. But Jason Moore waved him down, with a wide, self-deprecating gesture. He reversed the visitor’s chair and sat astraddle it, leaning over the back. At that, he was uncomfortably close, halfway over the desk.
Moore was captain of the North Philadelphia String Band. There were more powerful men than he, but no one could afford to ignore the head of the largest black Mummers Club in the city.
“I’ve been to Jeffers
on, visiting your man, Bowles.” Moore shook his head heavily. “I fear that he is not long for this world.”
“He’s old, Jimmy is,” Keith agreed. “But he’s led a long, productive life.”
“Praise Jesus.” Moore folded his two great hands, one into the other. “I wanted you to know that it has not gone unnoticed in the black community, the care—yes, and even love—you have shown one of our own.”
Keith bowed his head. “Jimmy’s a good man,” he said, feeling a twinge of disgust at himself. “A very good man.”
“Amen to that, brother! Amen to that! But what I came here to tell you was that I’ve arranged for there to be a runner waiting at Jefferson around the clock, to let you know if there’s any change in Mr. Bowles’ condition.”
“Well, that’s very generous of you,” Keith said carefully.
“No, no, not at all.” Those pudgy hands moved forward, leeched onto Keith’s shoulders, squeezed, and were gone. Moore rocked back, and then heaved himself up out of his chair. “I do it because I’d like to think of myself as your friend.”
Keith stood. He recognized the gambit. “Thank you, sir. I’d like to think of myself as your friend too.”
Moore’s shoe-button eyes gleamed. He nodded and turned to leave, and almost collided in the doorway with Gambiosi.
The two men drew back from each other, like serpents recoiling before striking. They studied each other’s eyes, and circled slightly, in the manner of boxers.
Moore was the first to disengage. “Good to see you, Joe,” he said. “I expect we’ll meet again in Council.”
“Yeah, I’m looking forward to it,” Gambiosi replied.
But when Moore was gone, he collapsed heavily into the chair. “Jesus.” He took out a large, white handkerchief, mopped his brow. “That son of a bitch. He’s going to throw me to the fucking wolves tonight.”
“Look,” Keith said. “I’ve been over this with you. It’s in the bag. We’ve got answers for anything they might bring up. You’re going to come out of this smelling like roses.”
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