The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  “I’m so sorry to interrupt your interview of me,” Verdade intervened. “But our detractors are attached to the Latin derivation of Barba because the word barbarian, conveniently, means a great deal else.”

  “Yeah,” said Edgar, running his finger across the pad, “uncivilized, uncultured. Later, savage, rude, cruel, and inhuman—OED. Or should I say, QED?”

  “You see? In Barba, even etymology is political.” Verdade seemed amused.

  “Hey, if the shoe fits.” Edgar glared.

  “But I interrupted!” Verdade apologized facetiously, nodding at Edgar’s fat notes.

  “Napoleon, same story.” This was overkill, but a guy who shoveled shit at everyone else deserved a few turds tossed in his own yard. “Your proponents maintain that Teodósso o Terrível overcame French troops and Napoleon turned tail. But according to Bonaparte’s diaries, he only set foot in Barba once. He found the land barren, the people one evolutionary inch from sand fleas, and o vento insano ‘an insufferable affliction.’ The emperor never even tried to annex this peninsula. I found the same disparity in accounts of the reign of Salazar: Creamies boast that O Creme itself began as an underground resistance to Salazar’s ruthless dictatorship. But I can’t find a trace of this secret organization outside books with your people’s fingerprints on them. To the contrary, Cinziero city councilors had an ongoing competition over who could rat out the highest number of their friends to the Gestapo-trained national police force.

  “Mr. Verdade—or can I call you Tom? Even the Gulf Stream avoids this place! If SOB thugs would stop bombing the bejesus out of strangers, I bet you’d win Barba independence in a heartbeat. Because nobody wants it! In fact, you should find North African immigration flattering. You’ve finally found someone else who wants to live here. The only reason Lisbon hangs on to this peninsula is that they don’t want to cave to terrorist blackmail in front of the rest of the world, it’s too humiliating. But they sure don’t keep it for selfish reasons. The province is an economic liability. It sucks up more social welfare than any other region of the country. It produces nothing but fruit it can’t export and cheap souvenir ashtrays. Hell, even in the Age of Discovery Barba was notorious for constructing ships that sank. I’m sorry if I sound insulting, but people are being murdered over your patriotism, and as far as I can tell the ‘culture’ you’re protecting comes down to bitter beer and bad wind—neither of which strikes me as endangered.”

  Verdade had smiled patiently through this monologue as if listening to a passionate if misguided student whose thesis was cockeyed but brassy.

  “No country’s record,” he began, “is spotless. Your United States—”

  “Please let’s not get into the Indians,” Edgar cut him off. “Or Vietnam, or slavery, or police brutality in Los Angeles, okay? You just said yourself that everyone’s dirty. So a pot has to be able to call the kettle black, or we all surrender the right to make moral judgments of anyone, anywhere, ever.”

  “In a polarized society, there are no ‘nonpartisan historians,’ ” Verdade regrouped. “You have been reading the slander of revisionists. Barbans have long been treated as second-class citizens in Portugal. We’re dismissed as stupid and, as you noted yourself, shiftless. Well, we shall see how stupid, how shiftless. I believe O Creme’s drive for freedom demonstrates both acuity and enterprise. Yet many northern Portuguese seek to discredit my people. Smear campaigns come and go, and I would expect an intelligent man like yourself to recognize propaganda for what it is. To accept it at face value is intellectually torpid, as well as disrespectful of the fallen heroes who have died for the glory of Barba.”

  “You don’t seem too respectful of the foreigners who’ve died for the glory of Barba. Though you could hardly call them volunteers.”

  “War is hell,” Verdade returned flippantly. “Have many Americans lost sleep over the hundred thousand Iraqi civilians killed—or murdered, to use your word—in the Gulf War? Any liberty has its price. Sometimes you pay that price yourself; sometimes others pay it for you.”

  Drooping from exhaustion, Edgar couldn’t be bothered to take issue with that hundred-thousand-casualty figure—informed estimates ran more like two thousand—which had been bandied about by the American left wing often enough to substantiate that sheer repetition could make anything true. Dolefully, he noted that he hadn’t got halfway through his list of questions. “Of course the Cream and the SOB are totally separate,” he resumed with fatigued sardonicism. “But any theories as to why the SOB has lain low since April?”

  “Oh, I might hypothesize that Os Soldados are providing O Creme a window—an unofficial ceasefire, if you will—to pursue a political resolution with Lisboa. Perhaps this is a test, to see if we might win our freedom through peaceful means.”

  “Why couldn’t you negotiate a settlement without any violence at all?”

  “I fear that, as ever, diplomacy is only effective—” Verdade shot a wry glance at Bebê Serio—“if backed by a credible threat of physical force. Would you be conducting this interview, Edgar, if the SOB were a meek and unsung political movement in a part of Europe you’d never heard of? Before the rise of the SOB, the Cinziero city council sent a delegation to the Lisboan government to address our concerns about unchecked immigration and to demand stricter border controls on the southern coast. The delegation was ignored. We could not even secure an appointment with a minister, after coming so far with hats in hand. Now, Edgar, if I phone?” Verdade smiled. “I am assured of cabinet-level contact in a matter of minutes.”

  By the time Edgar slumped into the Turbo’s bucket seat, he was weary enough that his mind had loosened into a quirky, associative freefall. He sat stupefied for a moment, staring at the dashboard. Saab. The Sobs. The SOB. Barrington was famously sloppy, but only apropos of his obligations to other people. In matters of style, his personal effects, Abrab Manor betrayed the man as meticulous. The homonym Sob-Saab wouldn’t be an inadvertent coincidence but a droll allusion.

  To confirm as much, Edgar rifled the papers in the glove compartment to check when the car had been purchased. Oddly, Barrington had bought his coupe shortly after assignment to Barba, and two months previous to the first atrocity claimed by the SOB, when existence of the organization initially emerged. SOB. Hmm.

  On arrival back home, Edgar was wiped out, but his brain revved into overdrive. Had he got Verdade to admit anything, to stick his foot in it once besides that telling malapropism “balaclava”? Damn, Edgar had meant to press the guy on the fact that independence didn’t even have majority support in Barba itself. But then, after swallowing so much Creamie bilge, Edgar could cough up the answer himself: My people are waking from a great sleep, and shaking off the apathy of oppression takes time . . . That old Marxist dodge of false consciousness.

  Restlessly, Edgar reached for the study phone.

  “Nicola? . . . Yeah, it went fine. I guess. Gotta give the guy this. He may be an unprincipled sack of shit, but he’s fucking good at his job. Hardly a hiccough. In fact, I hate to admit it, but I kinda liked the son of a bitch. He’s quick, he’s articulate, and he’s dangerously convincing. It’s a bitch to catch him out. But listen, that’s not why I called. Just wanted to ask you one question. What’s Barrington’s middle name?”

  Nicola laughed. “Now I know you’re hooked. What was the second name of your public school idol?”

  “Gimme a break. That interview lasted forever, and I’m shot. You know it, or not?”

  “Why—Owen, I think. Yes. Owen.”

  Edgar assured her they’d get together soon, and hung up. Barrington Owen Saddler. BOS. Jesus.

  Chapter 19

  Saab Stories

  BARRINGTON HAD DRESSED for dinner. Having stormed downstairs, Edgar found the baron of Abrab Manor in a stylishly retro cutaway and white tie sipping pink gin in the sunken living room, where he’d expropriated the emerald velveteen wingchair. His legs were crossed, black cordovans shined for the occasion, elbows resting regally on the s
crolled arms.

  “Okay, lardass,” Edgar barked. “Time to come clean.”

  Barrington peered over his paper-thin martini glass. “Whatever are you on about?”

  “Saab-as-in-car, Sob-as-in-‘freedom fighter.’ S-O-B is your own initials in reverse. I don’t find much Dickensian coincidence in real life.”

  “My dear boy. Perhaps I would buy a Saab Turbo tongue-in-cheek. But the purchase date’s too early. As for the initials, the birth of Barrington O. Saddler precedes SOB terrorism by decades.”

  “That’s exactly the point. You could only have arranged these dopey, self-congratulatory little in-jokes if you were in on the formation of the outfit from the ground up. I’m sure commanding your own private army’s a hoot. But I’ve seen enough pictures—of dismembered victims, stricken mothers, orphaned kids . . .”

  Barrington despaired, “All those manly press-ups every morning, and still another member of the hankie set.”

  “Saddler,” Edgar challenged, arms akimbo. “Are you a terrorist?”

  Barrington waved his free hand modestly over his person. “Do I look like one?”

  “Meaning your head isn’t stuffed in a sock and you’re not waving an Uzi? I’m not sure I know what a real terrorist looks like. Maybe outside of posters they wear tuxes and mix martinis. You’ll have to tell me.”

  “Eddie, I don’t have to tell you anything,” Barrington exhaled wearily. “Heavens, I’d hoped you’d show more get-up-and-go.”

  “Fine, there’s some dispute about the nuances of the term ‘terrorist,’ according to your pal Tommy Truthful. Bottom line, then. You ever murder anybody, Saddler? Even indirectly, by making arrangements. Are you a killer?”

  Barrington smiled genially. “Eddie, you’ve the distinction of being the first to ask me such a thing. Have you ever been grilled point-blank on whether you’re a murderer? Gives a chap pause. The mind roils with withering digs and unreturned phone messages—the thousand myriad ways in which we slay one another every day.”

  “I knew it,” Edgar declared with disgust. “You and Verdade are kissing cousins.”

  “Well, if you insist on being pedantic,” said Barrington distastefully, “no.”

  “No, what?”

  “Perhaps I misinterpreted your frustration, but I gathered you craved a simple answer to a direct question—which the wily Tomás may never have provided in his life. I picture him as a small boy, responding to his mother’s query about whether he cut down the cherry tree with a three-page treatise on modern innovations in horticulture. Although here, of course, it would be a pera peluda tree. In which case any boy who cut one down should be given a medal.”

  Edgar locked eyes with his landlord. Barrington appeared to have no trouble meeting Edgar’s gaze, though he did seem bored by the exercise.

  “No-you’ve-never-killed-anyone,” Edgar spelled out distinctly. “No-you’ve-never-blown-anyone-up. No-you’ve-not-helped-some-other-lowlife-blow-anyone-up.”

  “No, no, and no,” Barrington recited, making a face. “Satisfied?”

  Edgar had no cause to believe the man. Still, the evidence for the prosecution was scant.

  “Scout’s honor?” Edgar asked in a squeezed voice.

  Barrington crooked his little finger. “Pinkie swear.”

  Edgar sank onto the ottoman. He was relieved.

  Which surprised him. There sat Cinziero’s social darling, everything that Edgar was not. What a vindication, should Saddler have proved a homicidal brute. So Edgar wasn’t a laugh riot at parties? At least he wasn’t pond scum. Maybe Dudley Do-Right rectitude was indeed a turn-off, and maybe he cherished his own delinquent side, but he drew the line at seriously bad shit. Had Barrington been a killer, they could never be friends.

  “Then what’s with the Saab-Sob stuff?” asked Edgar uncertainly. “The initials?”

  “Must I lead you by the hand like a child?” Barrington parted with his drink for emphasis, sliding the glass onto the trunk. “I needn’t have dropped any crumbs behind, you know. That was sportsmanlike on my part. Show some initiative on yours.”

  “What, like you?” Edgar muttered, rising to toss some logs on cold coals. “You’ve got squat to do all day. You could’ve at least built a fire.”

  “What for? No one ever calls by. In fact, unless I’ve been napping inopportunely, you haven’t got laid since you arrived.”

  “Your dyke friend at the Times claims you don’t care about sex.”

  “Shagging itself? Perhaps not. But then, the same might be said of ingestion, itself. I adore the way Nicola arranges whatnots on a plate, and the little pop of caviar eggs between my teeth. But I’m not fussed about their travel down my gullet, or about the juices of digestion. Most pleasures are window-dressing, Eddie, and that goes doubly for the delights of love. Yet we were talking about you, my boy. And doesn’t your sort set a great deal of store by the old in-out?”

  “What’s ‘my sort’?” asked Edgar, painstakingly constructing a teepee of kindling.

  “You laddish chaps. Football. Mafia films. Hairy-pear beer.”

  “Damned if I understand why everyone thinks you’re so hail-fellow-well-met when all you do is give people a hard time,” Edgar grumbled, poking at a ball of damp newspaper. Its flame trembled to an unpromising purple.

  “I’m chuffed you thought I was a proper terrorist. Flattering, really.”

  “That skank Hulbert said you were too lazy to be a terrorist. Had a ring of truth to it. Though nobody’s described you as too benign.” The teepee collapsed; the flame expired.

  “For God’s sake, man, must you do everything like a Girl Guide?” Barrington lumbered to a stand, treating himself to the rest of his gin as reward for his effort. He craned for a bottle from the bar, and splashed it into the fireplace. When he tossed a match, the fire ignited with a small explosion.

  “That’s my Noah’s Mill!” Edgar wailed, leaping back. “Hundred proof!”

  “My Noah’s Mill is wasted on you—trickling dribs, glancing furtively about as if someone is watching—”

  “Apparently, someone is,” said Edgar hotly.

  “You just don’t get it, do you Eddie? Take the scullery. I find rice cakes. Fat-free cheese food and Weight Watchers lasagna. And you want to be a Great Character.”

  “Great as in estimable, not great as in fat.”

  “Best you gained a few stone.” Barrington wiggled his eyebrows. “Anything to start you thinking on a larger scale.”

  “Enough already,” Edgar snapped, tired of being taunted. “I endured a girlfriend for two years who thought being enigmatic was sexy.”

  “You thought it was sexy, that was the whole problem. Think, Eddie,” Barrington prodded. “You pick up clues, only to toss them to the carpet. Why is the SOB an inversion of my initials?”

  “You said you never killed anybody. I’m doing you the courtesy of taking your word for it. In return, I don’t expect to be trashed for my credulity.” Edgar uncapped a warm Choque to spite his host.

  “How did you find Verdade?” Barrington inquired conversationally.

  “Smooth operator,” said Edgar tersely.

  “Is he a liar?”

  “He’s the type who gets seduced by his own rhetoric. Buys his own shtick. I doubt he’d know the truth if it bit him on the ass.”

  “He’s an opportunist,” Barrington provided. “But opportunists require opportunities.”

  Edgar kneaded his temples, closing his eyes to banish this officious poltergeist, who once conjured came and went as he pleased. Maybe a little imagination was a dangerous thing. Apparently just because you could think someone up didn’t mean you could think him away again. Edgar squeezed his eyes and visualized a vacant wingchair. But once he looked up, all that had changed was that Barrington’s martini glass was brimming with pink gin again, without his having risen for a refill. In Edgar’s head, then, Saddler simply came with a full glass, like a rental car with a topped-up tank.

  “I’ve had a very l
ong day,” Edgar objected.

  “Sometimes being knackered is an assist. You make leaps, lucky mistakes. That’s how the telephone was invented. Eddie, you’re so close. And it’s so simple.”

  “Get off my case!” Edgar trudged toward the kitchen. “I’m gonna warm up that lasagna.”

  “Eddie!” Barrington cried from the living room as Edgar pried off the cardboard top. “How’s the touch-typing coming?”

  “I stink,” Edgar called.

  “Go practice.”

  “I’m famished!”

  “Doesn’t hunger always make you feel safe?”

  With nothing better to do while the lasagna warmed, Edgar shuffled upstairs to his computer. Don’t look at the keys.

  Edgar rewound his Verdade interview, which he needed to transcribe. To force himself to make his way by feel, Edgar closed his eyes and transcribed blind, My constituency is most thankful for the sacrifice that SOB volunteers have made for their country.

  Yet when he checked the screen, he read,
  After laboring at touch-typing nightly, he couldn’t be that hopeless. Edgar tried the line once more, eyes shut: My constituendy is most thankful for the sarccritfice that SOB volunterrs made for their countru.

  Okay, not perfect. But not gobbledygook, either.

  Resituating his hands, Edgar realized that on that botched effort he must have displaced his fingers’ ready position one key to the right. His motions were roughly correct, but the corresponding letters were not.

  As Edgar kept transcribing,
  In fact, he could visualize pages and pages of an identical sort of drivel.

  Rooting in the upper right-hand drawer, Edgar located “SOB STORIES” and inserted the microfloppy in his computer. He selected the directory’s first file, titled: