The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  2” Er;vp,r Yp Yjr
  The text was no more edifying:

  Vpmhtsyi;syopmd@ Nu mpe upi ,idy jsbr dryy;rf om/ O fp jp[r upi gomf yjr svvp,pfsyopmd dioysn;r/ . . .

  Placing the cursor below the first clump of rubbish, Edgar followed Vpmhtsyi;syopmd@ and hunted down each nonsense letter, striking the key to its adjacent left on the keyboard. Slowly beneath Barrington’s balderdash emerged, C-o-n-g-r-a-t-u-l-a-t-i-o-n-s!

  Chapter 20

  Edgar Earns His Savvy

  WHEN EDGAR TORE downstairs again, he found Barrington snoozing in front of the smoldering fire, hands clasped on his crimson cummerbund. Edgar kicked Saddler in the shin. “Rise and shine,” Edgar snarled. “We have to talk.”

  Barrington looked fuzzy and perplexed, as if for a moment honest nonexistence had beckoned.

  “What do you mean, there’s no SOB?” Edgar demanded.

  “Oh, that.” Barrington rubbed an eye, prizing out a speck of sleep. “If from this rude awakening I can construe that you’ve finally cracked my first-former’s cryptology, what’s to prevent you from decoding your heart out? My journal entries are sufficiently explicit to more than sate your thus far paltry curiosity.” He lolled aside. “Meantime, I could get a few minutes’ kip.”

  Edgar grabbed a lapel and wrenched the laggard upright. “I can’t believe this! The international media has been covering this story for years! Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian have permanent bureaus here!”

  “As I anticipated.” Barrington smoothed his released lapel. “It’s hardly unreasonable for me to have organized a spot of company.” As he sat up, disarranged hair flopped fecklessly into his eyes. It was endearing, and Edgar was in no mood to be disarmed.

  “Special reports on Sixty Minutes!” Edgar railed, hands thrashing. “Regular updates on MacNeil/Lehrer, photo features in Esquire! Visits to Cinziero from Mary Robinson and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Jimmy Carter and Richard Holbrooke!”

  “You needn’t tell me,” said Barrington, fishing out a fresh cigar. “I interviewed those pious twats. Made for bloody po-faced features as well.”

  “Tom Clancy has plotted his new novel around the SOB, William H. McNeill has plunged into a definitive history of southern Portugal, and the villains in the latest James Bond film are from Barba! The University of Texas Conflict Studies Department has started a doctoral extension program in Cinziero, the U.S. State Department is sending a peace envoy to Lisbon, the Rockefeller Foundation is sponsoring a weeklong conference called ‘Unity from Division’ here next month!”

  “I do keep up,” said Barrington, lighting up.

  “I’ve been sent to cover a hoax!” In his rage, Edgar tore the cigar from Barrington’s hand and threw it in the fire, though doubtless the apparition would effortlessly generate another, as it did pink gin. “My first assignment is a joke! I finally publish a piece in a national broadsheet, all about the ‘SOB’ and whether they whacked you or not, and now you’ve made me look like a jerk, a fall guy, a dupe, a—what do you limeys say—a prat!”

  “Only if you squeal,” Barrington admonished.

  “I am—floored!” Edgar raved, pacing the Oriental carpet. “What got into you? You just heard about a bomb on the radio and thought, gosh, I don’t have anything else on the docket today, maybe I’ll call in and say I did it?”

  Barrington shrugged. “That first bomb, at Filene’s Basement? I waited a couple of days. But not a peep from the usual suspects. Nothing from the Palestinian Whose-its, the Irish Bog-Standard Army, or the Islamic Globo-Omni-Panto-Front. No one claimed it! Such a waste, Eddie. All those Boston shoppers done in, not to mention a first-chop selection of discount tweeds—just for common, shite-happens badness. To what indignation could relatives cling, to what Peace Fund could they send donations? Whom could survivors forgive?”

  “You did them a favor,” Edgar proposed incredulously.

  “Entirely,” Barrington protested. “I gave them a bull’s-eye for their darts, an acronym to sling on Washington Week. Besides, I’ve never understood the logic of unclaimed terrorism. Why not get credit for a job well done? And aren’t your targets meant to be afraid of someone in particular, and not just the dark, bad karma, or the bogeyman? Of course, since I don’t know any proper terrorists, I’ve never been able to ask.”

  “So you just—dialed, what. A newspaper. And they believed you?”

  “Not at first. Eddie, after all that reading, you should know your SOB history. For months the Sobs were written off as kooks. No forensic evidence connected Barbans to a single atrocity. But in the end, the world rewards stick-to-itiveness. I always used the same code phrase, and these little furnishing touches can be persuasive. After about a year—there was a providently sturdy crop of anonymous incidents at the time—the FBI baptized the SOB as the genuine article. The reasoning went—surely you remember—that no trail linked bombs to Barba not because these claims were spurious, but because we were dealing with a new brand of truly professional terrorists who covered their tracks. Hence the fact that the coppers couldn’t find a trace of the organization became veritable proof of its existence. Clearly, the culprits were too ingenious to get caught. I recall being struck by the admirable modesty of the agents on the case, though at the same time a little worried about your country’s security. In all, a compelling experiment, don’t you think?” Barrington had opened a jar of beluga from the pyramid of jars in the pantry, and mounded a cracker so gluttonously that caviar tumbled onto the trunk.

  “So all those SOB ‘statements’—you made them up.”

  “Quite.” Barrington dabbed his mouth with monogrammed linen. “A challenging creative writing assignment. All journalists weary of nonfiction. After a time, reality seems so undefendedly on offer, so available, that in merely reiterating it you don’t feel you’re doing your part. The urge to make a contribution becomes a matter of civic pride.”

  “What about the Creams, are they on the payroll? When I walked out of Verdade’s office today, did he bust a gut? Is that why Serio’s so expressionless, because he’s literally trying to keep a straight face?”

  “Eddie, Eddie, you’re taking this all wrong!” Barrington made a peace offering of a loaded cracker and held it out, but Edgar refused to accept. “Why so offended? The joke’s not on you, for pity’s sake. It’s on Tomás.”

  “What are you saying—that O Creme is for real?”

  “They seem to think so.”

  “But before your so-called SOB there was no Creme de Barbear—”

  “Correct.” Barrington made a project of tidying the trunk, dabbing egg by egg with his fingertip.

  “And the only reason O Creme snags a column inch is its implied alliance with—”

  “Correct.”

  An hour earlier Edgar had been nodding off. Now he was revved, feverishly decoding his recent past, much as he’d translated Barrington’s microfloppy—only instead of converting gibberish to intelligible English he was converting the intelligible to gibberish.

  “What about all that national self-determination bunk?”

  “My idea,” Barrington admitted.

  “Jesus, you could have done better.”

  “You’re new to the fourth estate. Once you’ve been around the houses a few times, you’ll twig that originality would have marked my fictive terrorists as suspicious. Same stuporific cause, all over the world. I was obliged to opt for verisimilitude over flourish.”

  “The immigration gambit, that’s your invention, too?”

  Barrington raised his fishy hands humbly. “Not a-tall. Why should I do all the work? When I arrived there was more than enough prejudice against the towel-heads in Barba to power a small political party. Attaching the SOB to immigration was Verdade’s idea.” Saddler added appreciatively, “Thought it showed spunk.”

  “Verdade thinks there is an SOB,” Edgar worked out, and Barrington nodded encouragingly. “He just can’t find it. In the meantime, he makes pol
itical hay—”

  “When you finally get round to putting a few pieces together, Eddie, at least you work the puzzle pronto.”

  “No, there’s a piece missing. Why? What was the point?”

  Barrington sighed. “Presently, would you consider this peninsula stimulating?”

  “I wouldn’t call it an amusement park,” Edgar grunted. A proud New Yorker, he was too embarrassed to confess that so far in this bumpkin burg he’d had a wonderful time.

  “In comparison to the Barba to which I was exiled, modern-day Barba is Euro Disney. At least this is now a province where something is believed to have happened once and where most residents suppose something may happen again. No such great expectations colored popular visions of the future when I stepped off the bus. The bus. Without the SOB, Cinziero didn’t even have a sodding airport.”

  “You claimed atrocities for a fictitious insurgency because you were bored?”

  “I’m a journalist, and journalists need news. Deprive them of it, and they go a bit barking. Deprive them of news long enough, and they’ll make their own—much the way the starving will eventually turn to cannibalism.”

  “Shit.” Edgar plopped on the ottoman. “This will make an incredible story.”

  “Or stories,” Barrington advised slyly. “That’s up to you.”

  “Man, at least Wallasek won’t treat me like a telephone solicitor for once. The chump’s gonna have a fucking heart attack when he hears.”

  “Perhaps,” said Barrington noncommittally. “Though of course the Record will look rather shabby. We’ve led this story from the start. And his own reporter . . .”

  “You’re not my fault.”

  “No; though the bearer of bad tidings . . . And of course you’ll be recalled. There won’t necessarily be another slot open. Besides, if I don’t miss my guess Wallasek won’t be too keen to see your face. As a reminder of the egg on his. That is, if Wallasek isn’t sacked himself, or, having compromised its authority, the Record doesn’t go to the wall. Yes, I dare say that after breaking your big scoop, you’ll be out of a job.”

  “I’ll get another one,” said Edgar irritably.

  “But naturally you will. Unless, well—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless your tall tale is dismissed as cock-and-bull. After all, the gullible public, the FBI, the Barban police, Interpol: no one ends up looking very clever.”

  “Except you,” Edgar supposed sourly.

  “There’s not much in it for anybody, this turn of the wheel, is there? The hoax, as you said yourself, is incredible. And your evidence is thin. The gloves, the stationery—”

  “Hold on. What were they all about?”

  Barrington whinnied. “I’ve gone to such pains to concoct a bit of diversion for us both. You could at least give my clues the old school try.”

  Edgar was in no mood to play games, but Saddler appeared adamant that his pupil add his two plus two. “. . . The SOB statements,” Edgar groped. “You printed them on local hotel stationery—suggesting authenticity, without giving your whereabouts away. The rubber gloves . . . They kept your fingerprints off the page. But that stupid pipe, with the wax paper?” He glowered. “I don’t get it.”

  “Two out of three gives you a score of sixty-seven percent, a passing mark only in our era of plummeting educational standards. You never tried talking into the pipe’s open end, did you? It gives you a buzz, so to speak. It’s a kazoo.”

  “For calling in atrocity claims,” Edgar filled in, annoyed he hadn’t figured it out by himself. “Voice distortion.”

  “A crude yet surprisingly effective device, so long as the call is not professionally recorded. Still, you see my point. Your evidence is trifling, circumstantial.”

  “You forgot. Mr. Preening Twit kept a journal of the whole farce.”

  “Yes, the disk! But you could have written those entries, couldn’t you? There’s no handwriting to verify. The keyboard code, well, that might have been your idea, to make the files appear genuine.”

  “There’s the minor matter of the truth,” Edgar retorted. “Like, there is no SOB, no one has ever met a real Sob, and their atrocity claims have stopped.”

  “Yes, for now,” Barrington said doubtfully, rubbing his chin. “But then, there being no SOB hasn’t prevented anyone from assuming there is one up till now. And you don’t really know where I am, do you? As you are constantly reminding yourself, my current manifestation is confabulated; I’m a hologram of hearsay. What if I’m alive elsewhere? I mightn’t care for your having peed on my parade. I’m in possession of my own code phrase. Should there be another bombing, I could ring in a statement. After you’ve charged that the SOB was bogus, you’d appear caught out. Perhaps I’m dead, or I’ve had it up to my oxters with the whole affair, but that may not be a risk you want to take.

  “Then there’s the matter of all your new little friends,” Barrington ruminated sorrowfully. “Henry would have to shift to Bosnia, and his faithful wife would follow. Honestly, I’m not sure when you three would meet again.”

  This warning hit home. No more triangular dinners with exorbitant cabernet. No more handwringing visits from the guileless Nicola. No more brow-furrowed powwows over her mangled marriage, all leading up to a tragic shake of the head, in reluctant agreement that what’s broken will never be good as new . . .

  “What are you driving at?” asked Edgar warily.

  “Blow the whistle, and you’re certain to make headlines, but in the same papers that swallowed the original story hook, line, and sinker. They’ll not dwell on the scandal for long. You might flog your yarn to the tabloids, though popular culture is so ravenous lately, no flavor of the month lasts thirty days. You could write your memoirs, but they’ll be short. In sum, ring Wallasek, and the party’s over.”

  “What’s the alternative?” Edgar grumbled. “Keep the scam under my hat? With no more Sob stories, Wallasek is sure to scrap this bureau by the end of the year. At least once I pull the plug I can capitalize on my fifteen minutes, maybe snag a job with another rag.”

  “That wouldn’t keep Nicola in your backyard.”

  “I’ll get posted to Bosnia, then!”

  “A gamble. One other course is surefire.” Barrington snapped a Bremner wafer neatly in two. “And far more diverting.”

  “You lost me,” said Edgar stubbornly.

  “Lord, we don’t go to the head of the class today. You did find the code phrase?”

  “Aw, get out!” Edgar stood up. “You’re not proposing I use it!”

  “You’ll have to bide your time. But nowadays there’s always one petulant group or another ready to throw a wobbly. It wouldn’t have to be a seven-forty-seven. A letter bomb?” Barrington mused, nibbling, “You know, even a bomb scare would do.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Edgar began to fidget, fixing himself a caviar cracker. And another. There was something a touch contrived about his own disgust. In fact, he had to keep stuffing his mouth with crackers to keep from smiling. “This is your brand of fun,” he charged through crumbs. “You and I aren’t cut from the same—”

  “Yet when people find the contrast between us too stark, you’re offended.”

  “The main difference between us is that I have a conscience! And only a total degenerate would carry on this asinine stunt.” But Edgar couldn’t muster convincing indignation any more than he could keep his mouth from tugging into a grin.

  “Who suffers who wouldn’t suffer anyway, or who doesn’t deserve it?” Barrington proposed, as Edgar knew he would. “All those bombs and gas canisters, they’d have gone off without the SOB. What does it matter which daft acronym gets credit? As for the miscreants who did plant Semtex in Filene’s Basement, they failed to advance their purpose a jot, and only raised the profile of a phantom. So a few self-important journalists are sent to cover a dust bowl where nothing happens. So a tosser like Tomás keeps searching the Barban underbrush for borrowers in balaclavas. Where’s the harm?”<
br />
  Barrington leaned forward, his voice grown so deep and quiet that it rumbled in Edgar’s gut. “Meanwhile, you’ll be the only hack who’s sussed. Remember Falconer and ‘Special K,’ Angela and Jamesie? You’re always the shat-upon git kept in the dark. Turn the tables! A seasoned reporter like Win Pyre or a hotshot insider like Roland Ordway could never pull rank on you again. Ordway stamps out of the Barking Rat once more, because you’re insufficiently in awe of Big Bad Barba, whose laugh would be last? Eddie, Eddie. You’ve always wanted to be the social center of some brown-nosing rabble. But how preferable to rise above one!

  “Degenerate?” Barrington purred, cigar smoke snaking about his head. “For a casual agnostic, your categories are frightfully Protestant. But there’s a whole world outside heaven and hell. My SOB fiddle falls into much the same camp as I do myself: not especially wicked. Just not especially good.”

  “Nuts!” A dark haze wafted from the foyer. “My lasagna!”

  Edgar didn’t really care about his lasagna, though he did rush to the kitchen and shut the door. Barrington was so classically understated, so pip-pip-here-here, so British. Edgar didn’t want the dry Yorkshireman to hear him whoop.

  Chapter 21

  One Less Ugly Landmark

  THIS TIME WHEN the zomboid Bebê Serio stood blocking the doorway, Edgar launched straight into the slab of super-ball flab, knocking the Cream backward. Serio staggered into the Rat with his elbows lifted and arms dangling, like the robot on Lost in Space flailing its coiled limbs and droning, Danger! Danger! Deep in the tar pits of Serio’s eyes stirred the beginnings of surprise. No one had slammed into that gut for a while.

  “Desculpe-me, amigo,” said Edgar in a wide, careless Yankee drawl. He was chewing gum. “Thought for a minute there you were gonna get outta my fucking way.”

  Jingling the keys to the kingdom on Rua da Evaporação in his pocket, and figuratively the keys to a great deal else, Edgar sauntered directly to the bar. He wasn’t about to be roped into another full round for that table. “Choque,” he ordered tersely, skipping his practiced, Quero uma cerveja de pera peluda, por favor. Still, Edgar left a generous two-hundred-escudo tip. All those SOB bumper stickers plastered around the register could as well have been decals scored from special-offer boxes of Cocoa Puffs. Edgar felt a funny flush of sympathy for the politically infatuated barkeep, much as he could be touched by the credulous enthusiasm of little boys for the A-Team.