The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  The door to headquarters was heavily fortified, with a mirror instead of a window—probably two-way. Edgar buzzed, waving at the closed-circuit camera. The intercom crackled with static, but no one spoke. Edgar mobilized the skeletal Portuguese he’d been practicing in the car: entrevista, jornalista.

  After a full five minutes, the door creaked open. A massive plug of flesh stopped up the whole stairwell. Edgar shit-eatingly reiterated his business—Entrevista! Jornalista! But Bebê Serio’s face remained stolidly blank while the vibrations in his ear were transported to his brain one letter at a time by carrier pigeon. Finally the paramilitary Pillsbury Doughboy grunted, “You go,” and jerked his head toward the stairs.

  The upstairs office was ostentatiously proletarian. Curling linoleum was patterned with a rusty spatter, as if pulled up from an inner-city emergency room. Aluminum baseboards bent off the wall. Merciless fluorescent tubes recalled police stations, and Edgar’s own juvenile indiscretions. One desk leg rested on painstakingly folded cardboard, while metal straight-backs were upholstered in diarrheal vinyl; the seat Edgar took was ripped. As Bebê Serio stood guard with menacing idiocy, Edgar’s thigh sweat and the rip made his leg itch. He felt dirty, out of his element.

  As in the Barking Rat, the walls were thumbtacked with potato-heads in balaclavas blithely poking assault rifles about, as if no one had ever warned them that those things could hurt somebody. Over the desk hung a batik of the Barban flag, an invention of the last five years: local patriots had reversed the red and green panels of the Portuguese flag, and replaced the crest with the noble pera peluda. Its hairy tendrils swept to the right, as if the fruit withstood an easterly gale.

  On the opposite wall splayed a map of Iberia. Gazing into the Atlantic as if still searching for returning ships from the Age of Discovery, Portugal formed the aquiline profile of a patriarch, over which Spain coifed a leonine head of hair. Lisbon nestled into the nostril, O Porto dented the brow, and the Barban peninsula trailed off the chin like a wispy beard. Now that Edgar had seen the country as a face, he couldn’t stop seeing it, and as time ticked on the severe-looking profile made Edgar feel watched.

  “Senhor Kellogg? João Pacheco, Presidente Verdade’s press officer.” A scrawny tough in a black turtleneck had swept in from the back room after forty-five minutes to shake Edgar’s hand. Fucking prima donnas. The smarm had been back there the whole time. “I am sorry that o presidente is delayed on important party business, esta bem? Of course, we are most grateful to your newspaper for helping us spread the word of our struggle. You like coffee?”

  “Não, obrigado.” Edgar instantly regretted the Portuguese. A gesture of goodwill in touristy circumstances, here it sounded fawning. What he really wanted to say was get your hands off me. After slapping Edgar’s shoulder, the flack had left his hand there, squeezing the jacket sleeve in a gesture of oozy Latinate camaraderie.

  “O Creme has many supporters in your country,” said João, perching on the desk. “And many American journalists take up the cause of our people. You see Presidente Verdade in February’s Vanity Fair?” He grinned.

  “I don’t read Vanity Fair,” said Edgar stonily.

  “O presidente has many letters and visitors from America. Some ladies, they propose marriage! Of course, Tomás is only married to our struggle. One American lady now writes a book. A bigo— what is this word?”

  “An authorized biography. Oh, it’s sure to sell. Ask Oliver Stone: Americans are suckers for serial killers.”

  João stiffened. But Edgar preferred João’s fish-eyed glare to his fellow-freedom-fighter buddy-buddyism. The operative assumption when you walked into this office obviously ran that you were in these scumbags’ pocket. Besides, if they clapped your shoulder and offered you coffee, and their president took time from his busy schedule to pour out his heart, and then you went off and wrote nasty, ungrateful things about their hardworking terrorist friends, why, you had clearly gained entrance to this inner sanctum and inveigled yourself into the confidence of their leadership under false pretenses.

  Skipping up the stairs, at last Verdade burst in the office door, followed by a chunky goon who was puffing to keep up. Verdade was an energetic man, and seemed in better shape than most Portuguese, their diet greasy, their schedule stuporous with siestas. “Edgar, how very good to meet you!” He pumped Edgar’s hand, though refrained from apologizing for being over an hour late. “Please sit down, Edgar. Fernando,” he said to the goon. “Serio esta aqui, sim?”

  The musclebound bodyguard eyed Edgar up and down before leaving; presumably the reporter didn’t look like much of a threat. Edgar was stung.

  “E tu, João,” added the avuncular president to his press officer. “Edgar and I have much to talk about. Please have your dinner.”

  João muttered something surly in Portuguese, flicking his eyes at Edgar.

  Verdade chuckled. “I’m not so concerned,” he said in English. “Edgar has much to learn, as I have much to learn about him. That is why we spend time together.”

  So thug #2 departed as well, leaving Bebê Serio standing propped against the wall. Unblinking, immobile, and expressionless, he no more constituted a third party than a cigar-store Indian.

  Verdade glided into the desk chair while Edgar tested the level on his recorder. Boy, this guy was a piece of work. He was forty or so but well-kept; thick black hair swept back from his brow. The push-broom mustache was distinguished, but his chin was clean-shaven. His garb struck a calculated compromise of social class: he wore a tie and navy suit trousers, but a workingman’s windbreaker over the crisp white shirt. Verdade’s posture was straight though not stiff, and for a renowned orator he was surprisingly soft-spoken. His enormous brown eyes always looked slightly pained. Exuding a reserve, even urbanity, he’d earned a doctorate in political science from Harvard and his English was superb.

  What made this character oily, then, wasn’t so much style as intent. He aimed below the belt. Verdade’s appeal—even to men—was fundamentally sexual. Those huge tawny eyes fixed a TV camera with seductive restraint, as if the secrets he kept were burdensome to him and he yearned to confess. By combining his own phrase-book Portuguese and the girls’ patchily recalled school English, Edgar had tried to draw out numerous grocery checkout clerks in Cinziero, several of whom professed to find Verdade’s support for the SOB offensive and his obsession with an independent Barba a big snore. Yet every local woman Edgar had met so far was dying to be the one lucky senhora to whom Verdade could finally, fully bare his breast.

  “You must be very tired, Edgar,” said Verdade, “of colleagues warning you how hard it will be to follow in Mr. Saddler’s footsteps.”

  “Are you warning me, too?”

  “I doubt you will find it so difficult. You strike me as a capable young man. Mr. Saddler—” He paused. “There are those who know more than they say. Others say more than they know. Your predecessor impressed me as the latter. In poker, how do you say? A bluffer.”

  The how do you say? seemed an affectation; a Harvard PhD knew the word without having to grope. Likewise, Verdade laid on the accent a little thick.

  “You must be pretty tired of my first question yourself,” Edgar ventured. “But I have to ask it. Is O Creme merely a flag of convenience for the SOB?”

  “O Creme de Barbear is a legal political party,” Verdade asserted, looking hurt that Edgar would assume anything unseemly about his brethren. “Our representatives sit on Cinziero’s city council, and they are democratically elected. We command a sufficient mandate to also have numerous representatives in a regional assembly, but Barba doesn’t have one—much to my despair. Nor of course do we have the government of our own that my people ache for. A few of my supporters believe that I myself might assume the presidency of our new country, though of course,” he demurred, “I would only accept the honor of such an office were it awarded by the ballot box.”

  Edgar couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned. Ask Verdade a direct question, get
back unruffled, perfectly pat, and exquisitely evasive twaddle. “Are you telling me that O Creme has no connection to the SOB?”

  “O Creme and Os Soldados Ousados de Barba share the common aim of an independent Barban state. My constituency is most thankful for the sacrifice that SOB volunteers have made for their country.”

  “Seems to me that it’s mostly SOB victims who’ve sacrificed for your country. The terrorists have sacrificed zip.”

  “Terrorist,” said Verdade, “is merely an ugly label. It is what you call soldiers whom you do not like, who oppose you. It is a depersonalizing term, and I avoid it.”

  “I can see why,” said Edgar. “Since it’s what we call people who use innocent civilians for wallpaper.”

  “Noncombatants killed in other wars are usually guilty of something?” Verdade countered calmly. “Deserve their fate? Because I cannot cite a war that has had no civilian casualties, or in which every individual death was just. War contemplates a larger justice.”

  Edgar made one more approach, like a plane in bad weather that was running out of fuel. “So you have nothing to do with the SOB. Journalists who ask you for statements about SOB strategy are barking up the wrong tree. Where’d they get that idea?”

  “O Creme is a legal political party,” Verdade repeated fluidly. But his eyes glittered, and one corner of his mouth curled ever so slightly. The bastard did everything but wink. He wanted it both ways. And got it.

  “So if I asked you to arrange for me to interview an SOB ‘volunteer,’ even with his anonymity guaranteed, you’d insist that you couldn’t do it.”

  “If you’re intent on such a mission, you should track down your colleague Mr. Saddler, who claimed excellent connections with so-called terrorists. Myself,” said Verdade, looking Edgar unflinchingly in the eye, “I can honestly say that I do not wittingly know a single member of the SOB.”

  Incredible. If he was lying, the man was sociopathic.

  “But you do support SOB methods?” Edgar pressed.

  “Each casualty of this conflict has filled me with a powerful and very personal grief. I deeply regret any loss of life that has resulted from our fight for freedom. Yet the solution must be to resolve the core political problem itself, much as a doctor must cure the disease and not simply treat the symptoms.”

  Stagily (this was on tape), Edgar scribbled on his pad. “So I’ll record your answer as yes.” Brooking no argument, he plowed on. “Next, you must be aware that a lot of people regard your party’s obsession with stemming North African immigration—in fact, I gather that you plan, on ‘liberation,’ to send most of them back—that tolerantly-minded onlookers regard this platform as racist?”

  “Under international law—” Verdade leaned back with his hands clasped behind his head—“one legitimate reason to go to war is to defend your borders. Look at Kuwait, whose invasion by Iraqi forces was at least the ostensible reason for the Gulf War. We’ll leave aside America’s protection of oil interests in the region; the formal pretext for taking up arms was the violation of a sovereign domain by another state. The wholesale invasion of Barba by illegal Muslim immigrants is little different from the attack of a foreign army. It’s increasingly difficult to find a traditional carne de porco à alentejana or torta de uvas peludas in Cinziero. Yet local restaurants serve plenty of couscous and balaclava—”

  Edgar laughed. “Sorry. I think you mean baklava.”

  For the first time in the interview, Verdade looked rattled. “Yes, of course.” He blushed. “As I was saying, our country is living proof that you needn’t wear a uniform to usurp territory—”

  “That’s not what I asked. To repeat—”

  “Bear with me, Edgar,” Verdade overrode, reasserting paternal authority. “At current rates of immigration, Muslims will constitute a majority of the Barban population within ten years. In that instance, because we are a democratic country, these new arrivals could nudge indigenous Barbans out of office and vote their own people in. They could take responsibility for immigration enforcement—or lack of it. The more powerful and numerous our North African visitors, the more readily they can assist their friends and family in occupying my nation.”

  “But the Lisbon government—”

  “Is doing nada. Most of our uninvited southern guests do not make it as far north as Lisboa, and so don’t take Lisboan jobs. Barba has a distinct and distinguished history that by itself calls out for nationhood. We are a separate ‘people’ entitled to self-determination under the UN charter. Yet this unchecked African tide raises the stakes. Your own country may be on its way to becoming majority Spanish-speaking. Once that, yes, racial ratio inverts, will the congressmen this new majority elects—other Spanish-speakers, you can be sure—will they limit immigration from Mexico? Couldn’t these congressmen, if they wished, change your national language from English to Spanish? And if you don’t want this to happen, does that make you a racist?”

  “We don’t have a national language,” said Edgar, irritated because he saw Verdade’s point.

  “In practice, you do—and in practice it is being overthrown. You see, I am sympathetic with white Americans, though I myself am Latino. Once Portuguese explorers set out to master the globe. Were we to do so now, armed with millions of fertile women, your country could justifiably repel our advances, even if we came as ‘immigrants’ and not as soldiers.”

  “But this paranoia about Muslims, as if they’re mongrel hordes—it doesn’t sound good, Mr. Verdade. Like, you’ve got to keep your bloodlines pure. What’s the difference between O Creme and the Michigan Militia, the National Front, the BNP, or neo-Nazis?”

  Verdade shook his head sorrowfully. “In the United States, it’s never considered racist to protect the ethnic integrity of minorities, is it? Your universities now have special departments for African-American, or Native-American studies—”

  “New college courses are a far cry from nerve gas on subways!”

  Verdade was accustomed to shrill interruptions, and continued undeterred. “Even Jews, since you called me a ‘Nazi,’ are distressed that their race is dwindling. To counteract low birthrates, intermarriage, and secularization, observing Jews are campaigning to keep their culture alive, to raise more Jews as Jews. As well they should. Any people’s most primitive drive is to endure. Israel has understandably refrained from fully enfranchising the West Bank, lest Jews be outnumbered by Palestinians in a conceptually Jewish state. Must indigenous Barbans wait to become a minority in their own country before they can justifiably defend their Catholic culture? Do majorities have no rights? Must a heritage be endangered before we come to its aid? Must we be prevented from taking action until it’s too late?”

  Verdade’s rhythmic rhetorical questions were mesmerizing. Locked in the politician’s fervid gaze, Edgar found the man’s arguments unsettlingly sensible. He had to shake himself, to force himself to recall photos from that grisly dime-store paperback, Forced Landing!—of the unsuspecting passengers of BA-321, including Henry’s family: arms missing, faces frozen in bewilderment, clothing snagged on the branches of trees.

  “I can’t help but find it ironic that you identify with Jews,” said Edgar, paging his notes. “Especially since you describe Barba’s history as so ‘distinguished.’ Oh, and ‘distinctive,’ which it is, though the Poles give you a run for your money. Portugal proper has a patchy record on the Semitic front. But Barba’s is appalling!”

  Victoriously, Edgar found the right page. “During the Spanish Inquisition, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled sixty thousand Jews to Portugal, but the hapless handful that headed for Barba were all sent back. To Torquemada! During the Portuguese Inquisition, even more enthusiastic than Spain’s if that’s possible, fifteen hundred Jews were garroted or burned at the stake, a full third of them in Barba. This province persecuted its Jews with such industry that for the duration of the seventeenth century Barbans shook off their stereotype as lazy. During World War Two, despite Salazar’s refusal to accept Jews flee
ing Hitler into Portugal, a sympathetic consul general in Bordeaux issued a thousand Portuguese visas to Jews; the three-hundred-some who ended up in Barba were all hunted down and turned in. To Nazis. Oh, and as for Africans, Barba did ‘distinguish’ itself in the slave trade, by selling and shipping millions of African captives to Brazil. Seems to me that one of the central indigenous traditions you’re so all-fired keen to preserve is bigotry.”

  Edgar was breathing hard. He glanced edgily at Bebê Serio, who had taken one giant step forward from the wall as if playing Simon Says. With his Tarzan English (“You go”), Serio couldn’t have been offended by Edgar’s history lesson, though he mustn’t have cared for Edgar’s tone.

  Yet Verdade’s expression was kindly. “You’ve been doing your homework, Edgar. I’m pleased the National Record has at last hired a reporter who’s so diligent.”

  Though he no more relished Verdade’s tag of diligent than Barrington’s scornful stamp of earnest, Edgar wasn’t finished. “And I’ve been doing some cross-checking between your sympathizers’ literature and the work of nonpartisan historians. Creams claim that a ragtag army led by Duarte o Estupendo rebuffed the legions of the Roman Empire. In truth, the Romans never invaded Barba. They stopped short in Algarve, which is one reason civic development was retarded here. In fact, classical historians believe the very word Barba isn’t derived from the Middle English meaning ‘beard,’ since accurate maps of Portugal on which the peninsula appears beard-like weren’t drafted when the region’s name first appears. Instead it’s probably rooted in the Latin balbus, meaning ‘stammering.’ Romans thought foreigners talked funny. Later balbus gave rise to barbarian, which specifically meant,” Edgar read from his notes, “pertaining to those outside the Roman Empire—”