Big If
Page 34
“What’s the status?” Peta asked.
“We’re getting there,” said Anthony Bordique, talking over the sounds of table saws and nail guns, a gazebo with a sea view going up in record time.
“I have a call in to the client now,” said Peta. “Tell me you’ll be done by noon.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Anthony Bordique, “but it won’t be dry, the stain. Don’t let her touch it, whatever you do.”
“I’ll handle it,” said Peta.
As Peta talked gazebo with Anthony Bordique, Jens walked around her new and spacious office, Peta’s reward for dealing with the madness at the Dental Building. Jens remembered when Peta was a junior broker for Noel Moss, camping in a cubicle, flogging unattractive fixer-uppers and vacant bodegas in North Portsmouth. He would come into town after an all-nighter at BigIf, or a double back-to-backer, forty hours at a terminal, writing rivers, moons, and monsters. He’d call Peta from a pay phone and say, “Let’s go somewhere.” They would sneak back to The Bluffs in the era before Kai, spend an hour in the bed in the afternoon. Later, as Peta climbed the ladder as a realtor, it was harder for her to slip away without a reason, so Jens would call Moss Properties posing as a client, doing funny voices, doing accents, using code names (Mr. Twillis was a favorite name), setting up an appointment to see a house. She would meet him at the listing (empty for a showing, Peta had the keys). They made love, made the bed, often without speaking, kissed and dressed and separated, Peta going back to Moss, Jens returning to his code. The houses grew bigger over time. They went to bed in palaces, almost, and this was how Jens knew that his wife was a success.
Peta finished with the carpenter. “Try Lauren at the fight gym,” she told Claus. “I think she had a three-round bout against Chappie Xing this morning. Jens and I are going out for coffee. Beep me if you need me.”
“Ya,” said Claus. He marched back to his desk.
Peta was pulling on her raincoat, patting her hips to make sure she had her beeper.
“I think I’m getting close,” she said.
Jens said, “Close to what?”
“To closing, babe, what else? Tell you what: if I get Lauren to commit, we’ll find a sitter and go out for a steak. I’ll wear that tight dress with the zipper up the armpit, the one that makes me look like a bargirl in Hong Kong.”
“Yes,” said Jens. He knew the dress.
He followed his wife out the door and into Market Square.
From the window of her room at the inn, Vi looked down on Market Square to the south and east. Vi was showered from the jog and semidressed. She wore a plain blue skirt, a red longjohn top, and a level three kevlar vest, standard-issue body armor for the agents on the ropes. The vest hung from her shoulders like a smock, white nylon velcro straps loose at her sides. Vi scratched her cheekbone absently, watching a crowd take shape below, people streaming up the alleys and the sidewalks, converging on the square from ten directions.
Bobbie was sitting on the bed in pantyhose and camisole. She said, “Can I ask you something, Vi?”
“Sure,” said Vi. “Help me with the vest.”
Vi and Bobbie always dressed each other on the road, Vi first because she kept her gear in better order.
Bobbie stood behind Vi, cinching the vest tight. The vest was slate gray and smelled like damp putty. Vi hated the smell.
Bobbie said, “Too tight?”
If they wore the armor loose, it rubbed them raw all day. They wore it very tight.
Vi said it was good. She wiggled in the vest, getting it to sit right.
Bobbie said, “You ever have like—premonitions?”
Vi was buttoning her blouse over the vest. “Sure,” she said.
“Really?”
“Sure—like once I was hiking with my dad. We were in the Whites, coming down Jim Liberty, and through the trees I saw these dry white boulders in a streambed, and I knew that I had seen this exact thing before.”
Bobbie said, “That’s déjà vu. Premonition’s different. Déjà vu is when you see the past, premonition is the future.”
“How do you know?”
“What do you mean, how do I know? That’s the definition, look it up.”
“But how do you know which one you’re having? If I see white boulders in a streambed, does it mean that I was once there, or that I will be someday?”
“Did you ever go down that trail again?”
“No.”
“Then it’s déjà vu.”
“But how do I know that I never will? What if I went back and checked to make sure my déjà vu was accurate? Then I’ve turned it into premonition.”
“You just know,” Bobbie said. “Some things you just know.”
Vi felt a little edgy and was hoping that Bobbie would shut up for a while, so she could clear her head for the ropelines in the square. She tucked the blouse and longjohn top into her skirt, popped a clip into her Uzi, racked it once, and buckled it into the holster.
“I’ve been having premonitions,” Bobbie said. “I’m in a crowd. I scan the hands, I see the muzzle coming up, I throw myself at the shooter and I take it in the face.”
Bobbie clipped the comm set to the back of Vi’s skirt, pressing a pair of thin black wires flat against Vi’s spine.
Vi shivered a bit. She said, “It’s just the stress, Bobbie. That’s the job.”
“Oh sure and I’m a hero and I go down in history, all the way down to a footnote probably, but what the fuck? I took the bullet like a good girl, and that’s the fucking job—we plot against the plotters, right? Plan and counterplan. Only we didn’t stop this plot, Vi, because the real target of the shooter was me. They planned that I would throw myself in front of the bullet.”
The wires on Vi’s body comm ran to a plastic brace on the back of her blouse collar. Bobbie fed the mike line over Vi’s shoulder, under her arm, to a clip on Vi’s right cuff. The comm, like the armor, was fitted to each agent by the Equipment Section, Beltsville. Vi plugged the receiver line into the earbud.
“Well?” said Bobbie.
“Well what?”
“Well what do you think it means?”
Vi could see that Bobbie was scared. Bobbie was always scared in the morning before a big outdoor event, a big crowd behind ropelines. Crowds were easier once you were inside them, scanning, vacant, ready. The hard part was getting ready to be ready, because you had to think about it. Vi considered Bobbie’s premonition. It had a familiar ring, and Vi wondered if Bobbie had told her about this particular premonition at some point in the past. Bobbie averaged two or three premonitions per deployment and usually had four or more recurrent dreams recurring in a cycle at any given time. She also had hot flashes, sudden intuitions, many different déjà vus, and what she called the Creepy-Crawlies. Most of these involved her death, except her déjà vus, which usually involved ex-husbands. Vi brought her suit jacket from the closet, brushed the lint from the arms, and put it on.
“Wasn’t that a movie?” she asked Bobbie. “’Cause, you know, it’s sounds familiar. I really think it was a movie.”
“What movie?” Bobbie said. “What’s the title of this alleged movie that no one has ever seen but you?”
“I never said I saw it, Bobbie. But I think I might’ve seen the coming attractions.”
“For my premonition? What are you, on crack?”
Vi was dressing Bobbie, the armor and the harness and the comm. Bobbie’s comm was always snarled. Vi got it straightened out and draped the wires through the brace and down Bobbie’s arm.
“See, there’s this female agent, right?”
“In the movie?”
“Right. She’s tied to a chair by this evil torture expert guy in the old abandoned oil refinery on the outskirts of town, and she has to shoot her way to freedom. She kills like fifty judo guys in turtlenecks. She can’t get her hands free, so she has to shoot the gun with her mouth. She ulled the igga ike ith.”
“That’s preposterous,” said Bobbie. “Was
she pretty?”
“Really pretty.”
“Did she die?”
“Nope,” said Vi. “She survived and so will you.”
Vi plugged Bobbie’s earbud in. They were armored, armed, and all comm’d up. They left the room and started down the corridor.
“Maybe it wasn’t a movie after all,” said Vi. “Maybe they just did the coming attractions and never got around to making the rest. I’ll bet that happens.”
Bobbie said, “My second husband was like that.”
“See?” said Vi. “It’s nothing to freak out about.”
Outside the VP’s suite, the detail was assembling, the SWAT guys and the comm techs, Tashmo and Elias. O’Teen leaned against the wall, his florid face inside a book.
Bobbie said, “What’s happening, O’T?”
“Waiting on Miz Gretchen,” said O’Teen.
O’Teen was handicapping one of the major book awards, reading all the nominees. The book he was reading had a picture on the cover, a woman in the sunlight with two happy-looking pandas.
“Any good?” asked Vi.
O’Teen said, “It’s going out at six to one on the Vegas line.” He turned a page and sighed. “I’m not sure I’ll make it until baseball.”
Gretchen emerged from the VP’s room. She saw Vi in the hallway and said, “Just the body I’ve been looking for. Come on, Violet, let’s go prep the square.”
Vi and Gretchen took the freight lift to the loading dock behind the inn and started up the sidewalk toward the square. Vi waited for Gretchen to say something about Vi’s trip to C.E. the night before. Vi assumed that Gretchen knew about the trip—little happened on the detail without Gretchen knowing it, especially the petty derelictions which made the agents human and not robots, but which always put you on the wrong end of a blasting, Gretchen’s famous rages, and sometimes got the people near you blasted too, Gretchen’s rages being somewhat indiscriminate. Vi had heard Gretchen curse Tashmo over two stupid roadblocks, which Tashmo hadn’t even been in charge of, and Vi’s offense, flouting orders, going AWOL, was a lot more serious.
It was two blocks from the hotel to the square. They cut across a parking lot. Mounted cops cantered past. It had been raining off and on since the downpour of the morning. Now the rain had stopped, though it felt more like a pause than a stop.
“Go somewhere last night?” asked Gretchen.
The tone was chatty, but Vi was not deceived. Gretchen often started chatty, got her facts established, toyed with you a bit, before exploding.
Vi said, “Yes I did. I went to see my brother. I told you all this yesterday.”
“You asked me. I said no. Or did I hallucinate?”
“No, I asked you.”
“And what did I say?”
Vi said, “Just get it over with. Rip me ten vacation days. Fuck it, take ’em all. Dock my pay, hose me on my bonus, stick me on the ropelines until Christmas, I don’t care. I’m sick of the cat-and-mouse. Every morning I get up, dress myself, dress Bobbie, then convince her that she’s not going to die today, and only then can we leave the goddamn room. I caught O’Teen in the hallway reading about pandas. It’s crazy, Gretchen. We’re all going crazy.”
Gretchen nodded and they walked along. She said, “What’s your brother’s name?”
Vi said, “What do you care?”
“Is it Jojo? It is Freddy? Is it Nick?”
Vi said, “It’s Jojo. Jojo Asplund. Don’t fuck around with me.”
“Well okay,” said Gretchen, “here’s to good old Jojo. I rip you two vacation days. Next time I give an order, Vi, obey it for me, huh?”
They passed through a choke point onto the secured area behind the prefab stage. The stage was ten yards wide, plywood and tube steel, covered and enclosed on three sides by a canvas canopy, stripes of green and white, like a wedding tent. Hanging pieces of the tent were flapping in the breeze, the big sides filling like a sail, then going slack and sucking in, with each shift in wind. There were folding metal chairs against the back wall, half-filled with local dignitaries running through their speeches, some mouthing words in practice (eyes closed, it looked like prayer), others having sudden thoughts and scribbling on index cards. A podium stood out alone at the stage’s edge, like a diving board—beyond it was a drop-off, space, and then the crowd.
Gretchen was conferring with a Portsmouth Parks Department supervisor. The stage had stairs at both ends, and Gretchen was explaining to the Parks guy why this wouldn’t fly. They would bring the VP in by motorcade behind the stage when the rally was in progress, keeping his moments of exposure to a minimum. When he was introduced by the second or third speaker (Vi hadn’t seen a program, but there were rarely fewer than three introductions at these rallies), balloons would be released as the agents walked the VP in a cordon a short distance through the crowd and up the right-side stairs. He would give his speech and exit by the same route. This made the stairs on the left Gretchen’s blind side, in effect—not a blind side really, but she would have to mass her agents on the right, and she didn’t need an extra access point. The Parks guy, bellyaching, said that the left-side stairs were bolted to the post supports, and he wasn’t sure he had the tools to remove them. He started throwing around Parks Department terminology, like anybody gives a damn, Vi thought. Gretchen, who was paid to flatten all resistance to the Dome, told the guy that if the stairs weren’t gone in three minutes, she’d call her welders, have the stairs cut off and delivered to his office in a heap. The Parks guy bought the threat, apparently thinking that Gretchen traveled with a team of metalworkers. He hurried off the stage to find his tools.
Vi looked out at the crowd. The rally, like the morning jog, was a high-threat event. Outdoor operations in a city center were generally bad. Shops and restaurants, offices and parking lots—the Service couldn’t freeze all life for a mile square. In theory, they could do it. They had done it for the president in Pakistan (Islamabad a ghost town for two hours), but for that you’d need a thousand agents and a junta for a government. They would do as much for Market Square as you could do in such a place, overflights suspended from the county airport, the Coast Guard on patrol in Portsmouth Harbor, traffic detoured, a second gunship added for the morning. The troopers had the choke points, four of them arrayed around the square, designated red (north), blue (east), green (by the church), and gold (by the stage). The comm techs were on standby with the jammers; cops were working down the rooftops (checking each, posting guards to keep them sealed); a sniper team was climbing to the steeple of the church.
A yellow rent-a-truck backed into the area behind the stage. Two men in jeans and jeans jackets jumped from the cab and went to work unloading the balloons, four great rafts of balloons held together in four floating fish-net bags. Vi heard bluegrass music from the speakers. It was a cue. They were ready to begin.
The first speaker at the rally, the warmup to the warmup, introduced herself to sputtering applause as the state representative from Greenland-Belvedere, a straddle district down the shore. She thanked the sponsors of the rally, her good friend Tommy Monahan (the county party chair), the office of the mayor, and the Portsmouth Parks Department. She was swinging into her remarks when the PA system died, a shriek of feedback, followed by dead air.
Jens and Peta heard the PA die as they left Moss Properties a hundred yards down the square. They crossed the street together, walking side by side, close enough to hold hands, though they didn’t.
Jens said, “How was volunteering?”
Peta said, “A clusterfuck. Someone owes me major chits. You vote already?”
Jens said, “This morning.”
“Correctly, I assume.”
“I couldn’t vote for either of them, Pet.”
Jens explained what he had done in the booth, how he had stared at the buttons by the names, trying to decide between the VP and the senator, and how, finally, unable to decide, he had pulled the big iron lever back without pressing either button.
Pe
ta said, “What lever? I’m confused.”
Jens started to explain again, but Peta cut him off. “Just tell me, did you vote or not?”
Jens said, “I voted, but for no one. I don’t believe in either of those guys. If I picked one, I’d just be going the motions. It wouldn’t mean a thing.”
Peta said, “So instead you stood there and basically wasted an hour of your day. I’m sorry, Jens, but that’s just sad.”
“Sad how?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“No—sad how? I can’t go the motions, Pet.”
“Yes,” said Peta, looking down the square.
They were heading toward the new tabouli restaurant, which had eleven different coffees on its menu, counting the decafs. Jens had planned to wait until they were comfy in a booth, then have a short, important conversation with his wife. He was going to describe the conversation with Vi the night before, and with Meredith this morning, and how he felt certain now that his slump, his rough patch, was coming to an end. He had told her something like this several times before, but this time he was confident.
They got the PA up again, and the woman from the straddle district introduced the next introducer, a veteran state senator from Eatontown, who grabbed the mike and in a boomed voice thanked the party chair, Tommy Monahan (and his lovely wife Irene), the rep from Greenland-Belvedere (for her gracious introduction), and God, for the break in the weather.
“Fold up your umbrellas, folks,” he said, “because I think I see the sun!”
This mention of the sun brought the first real clapping of the rally, though the sun was nowhere visible.
Jens and Peta walked along the street. Market Square was packed by then, late-comers arriving through the gates. The tabouli place was down by the stage, past the bagelry, the wine shop, and the specialty tobacconist’s. On the sidewalk, to the right, Jens saw a man in a postal worker’s uniform, the sky-blue shirt, the blue-gray pants, and the white pith helmet. Jens had to look twice before he recognized Vaughn Naubek.