The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  By contrast, the explosion at Sea World was irresistible. Permanently establishing the SOB’s reputation as cutthroat, the Orlando bomb produced nationwide outrage—indeed, a far more abiding public outcry than the foofaraw following BA-321. Though the Sea World device only injured a few tourists, it did kill “Bubbard” and three of his adorable dolphin friends. (Much was made of dolphins’ reputed intelligence, which raised the question of how highly Americans rated the average IQ of airline passengers.) All through November, CNN reporters announced gloomily that the FBI had made no progress in the “Bubbard Bombing,” but that a fund established to ensure the survival of Bubbard’s traumatized offspring had swelled to $1.5 million.

  The Orlando device was professional, efficiently obliterating any forensic evidence linking its designers to the blast. Successful anonymity was crucial, since bunglers who left clues imperiled the credibility of the SOB. Were a trail to lead to the real agents, subsequent SOB “atrocities” were bound to be greeted with dubiety. Why, choosing which incidents to claim was far more complex than it had first appeared, and Edgar surfed the Internet for hours before committing Os Soldados Ousados to anything rash.

  Edgar did patriotically incline toward appropriating ructions on U.S. soil, whereas Barrington had displayed a natural European preference for “the” Continent. A fresh proliferation of U.S. targets translated into a much-remarked shift in SOB strategy. But Edgar’s Yankee predilections proved surprisingly unrestrictive. Owing to the spread of mischief-making pages on the Web, any boil-faced teen could access recipes for homemade explosives, many of which could be concocted from ingredients in his mom’s kitchen.

  Consequently, domestic bombings in the States had tripled in the last decade to over three thousand a year. (Using Tomás Verdade’s percentage-of-increase linear projection, in ten years that figure would necessarily multiply to nine thousand, in a hundred years to about 180 million, or half a million criminal explosions every day.) While Edgar disdained piddly stuff (pipe bombs, nail bombs) and tried to avoid isolated rural communities (where everyone would know that ’course, Crazy Bob Rafter did it), the number of incidents on offer was sumptuous. Best of all, U.S. authorities seemed grateful to write off a few craters around City Hall as the evil doings of foreign agitators, since the notion of such a large proportion of America’s citizenry festively blowing up their own backyards was far more unsettling.

  Barrington had a point. To a degree, Edgar was performing a service. Unclaimed, all these incidents had a bereftness about them, as if they were wandering friendless in the wilderness, or left in baskets on his doorstep waiting to be adopted. Their sheer arbitrariness cried out for redress. Edgar was in league with the forces of meaning against the forces of chaos. Fine, best if bad things never happened. But once they had, better they did so for a reason, even an inane reason like Barban independence, than for no reason at all. Hence Edgar was conscientious and kept the claims coming, until he came to regard his lisping phone calls not as elective entertainment but as his job.

  Yet despite the teleological benevolence of giving purpose to what was otherwise witless anarchy, Edgar had encountered one difficulty that, were his paramilitary doppelgänger to continue to be taken seriously, he would need to overcome. Irrationally, he shied from claiming atrocities with fatalities that, unlike Bubbard, once stood on two legs. When that Japanese tourist died, Edgar felt funny. Rotten-funny. Over and over he assured himself that the hapless fellow would have taken a dirt nap even if Edgar had never reached for the El Terra do Cão pay phone, but his very repetition of these assurances revealed that they didn’t work. Meantime, the SOB was reluctantly applauded for its recent resort to “nonlethal pressure tactics.” Barrington had started wheedling as Edgar rushed in and out, “Weak stomach, have we?” And maybe the honest answer was: Hell, yes.

  Chapter 25

  Portugal Denies Immigration Overhaul Is SOB Appeasement

  EDGAR KELLOGG, BARBA CORRESPONDENT

  LISBON—After six years, the Lisbon government is running short of fresh obloquy to denounce the international atrocities claimed by Os Soldados Ousados de Barba, intent on an independent Barban peninsula. Stock adjectives like “imoral,” “diabólico,” or “escandaloso” having depreciated, Lisbon legislators vilify the SOB with increasing flamboyance. One MP’s recent press statement began, “The SOB has once again plunged into the fetid cesspool of mindless animals . . . .” A goulash of subsequent mixed metaphors made for queasy reading.

  Yet while one set of Lisbon functionaries decries Tomás Verdade, President of O Creme de Barbear, the reputed political wing of the SOB, as base-minded, blackmailing, and blood-thirsty, another set is ordering tea sandwiches for tête-à-têtes with the man.

  Officially, negotiations between O Creme and Lisbon cabinet ministers have been covert. Yet Portugal is as small a country as Mr. Verdade’s Latinate braggadocio is sizable. Between government leaks and O Creme boasting, the frequent hush-hush meetings have become an open secret.

  Talk is cheap. Should concessions at effective gunpoint have stopped at dialogue, Lisbon’s implicit capitulation to terrorism would remain nominal. Indeed, many argue that the tantalizing prospect of negotiating an SOB cease-fire is well worth the indignity of engaging with so-called “thugs in suits,” whom most lawful northern Portuguese consider beneath contempt.

  Moreover, Lisbon is under severe American pressure to resolve the dispute. In the last year, the United States has borne the brunt of SOB terrorism.

  But concessions to O Creme demands have gone far beyond tea service. Despite a recent Iberia Trust poll documenting that 73% of Barbans have no interest in home-rule, Lisbon is now tendering the province more devolved autonomy than any other sector of Portugal.

  Thus far Mr. Verdade has ridiculed the proposals, deriding the regional powers on offer as little more than granting Barbans the privilege to “collect their own trash and bury their own dead.” O Creme continues to hold out for a fully independent Barban state.

  To date, Lisbon has resisted outright accedence to the fringe group’s primary agenda of statehood. However, each of the government’s denunciatory rhetorical salvos at O Creme has heralded another package of “confidence-building measures”—known in the Barban vernacular as “Creamie-pleasers.”

  In addition to seeking the sovereignty that Barban nationalists claim is the only answer to the peninsula’s racial and religious tensions, O Creme is fighting to stem largely Muslim immigration from North Africa. The party maintains that Moroccans and Algerians are migrating to the province in such numbers that they will soon overwhelm Barba’s dominant Catholic culture.

  Previous to the rise of the SOB, Barban objections to unchecked immigration went unheeded. Since the mobilization of the SOB’s armed campaign, Portuguese immigration laws have been drastically overhauled:

  • Portugal’s annual ceiling on newcomers has been halved;

  • In three separate, widely publicized asylum cases this last year, Algerian villagers fleeing Islamic fundamentalist murder gangs were all deported, though such political refugees’ admission to Portugal would have been assured six years ago;

  • The residency period for citizenship has been extended from five to ten years;

  • Tourist visas have been reduced from six to three months;

  • Work permits have grown scarce, and Barban Muslims charge that the Portuguese equivalent of the American green card is now routinely denied all North African applicants;

  • As of last month, the required documentation for all foreigners working legally in Portugal has become oppressively Byzantine.

  Portuguese Prime Minister Otelo Delgado flatly denies that any of his government’s initiatives are concessions to SOB violence. Mr. Delgado insists that immigration laws have been tightened in the interests of Portugal as a whole—to protect jobs nationwide, and to assert administrative autonomy in the post-Maastricht European Union.

  Official denials betray official embarrassment. The dog
s in the street in Portugal see recent moves as more than coincidental. A lethal insurgency demands closed borders. Simultaneously, this sparsely populated Iberian nation erects more barriers to foreign residents than Switzerland. Though underdeveloped Portugal rates as one of the least attractive destinations for immigrants in all of Europe, its naturalization policy is now nearly as prohibitive as that of Japan.

  In its most aggressive accommodation of O Creme demands so far, Lisbon has tripled its spending on immigration enforcement, beefing up a formerly underfunded, languid arm of the national police dedicated to checking ships for stowaways, riffling passports at airports, and running to ground delinquent guests with expired visas. Though the peninsula constitutes only 18% of the country’s land mass and contains only 11% of Portugal’s people, three-quarters of the expanded and revamped sting force has been deployed to Barba.

  Its uniforms having been redesigned in loud cardinal red, the immigration contingent of the police force has been reincarnated as a Brigada Encarnada da Imigração Portuguesa (BEIP).

  Liberal Lisboners decry the BEIP as a recrudescence of the much-hated Polícia Internacional e de Defensa do Estado (PIDE), the goose-stepping militia of António Salazar, the widely despised dictator deposed in 1974. Consumed with seizing communists and dissidents, consciously modeled on and initially trained by Germany’s Gestapo, the PIDE tyrannized Portugal’s citizenry into informing on one another.

  Similarly, posses of BEIP officers troop conspicuously around Barba’s provincial capital of Cinziero, occupy the airport, and patrol Barban beaches. Naval BEIP squadrons cruise the Atlantic scanning for boats smuggling immigrants from Tangier.

  The force is offering a 5,000 escudo ($300) reward to citizens who report illegal aliens. More, any illegal immigrant who turns in three of his fellows earns immunity from prosecution and deportation. Such incentives encourage the widespread fearfulness, distrust, and painful personal betrayals common to the Salazar era.

  Yet Mr. Verdade has charged that BEIP sweeps for illegal aliens are all show. He asserts that the BEIP has deported only a handful of North Africans, most of whom would immigrate successfully to Barba on a second attempt.

  As gestures of appeasement from Lisbon accumulate, O Creme’s rhetoric has grown only more belligerent. “The pallid nature of these placations,” Mr. Verdade objects, “is a slap in the face.” Without serious moves toward full independence, warns Mr. Verdade, there is “no telling what the SOB might do.”

  In response to such vague but ominous threats, the Delgado administration has called for more rigorous enforcement techniques from the BEIP. Heads rolled last month when the local Lisbon press caught the State Department inflating its figures for returned illegals.

  Opinions about Mr. Delgado’s “confidence-building measures” among northern Portuguese are deeply split. Some see “Creamie-pleasers” as an insult to democracy, the direct rewards of airline sabotage, like the infamous bombing of British Airways Flight 321 five years ago.

  Embarrassed by the reputation for barbarity that the SOB is building for the Portuguese internationally, others maintain that tightening immigration regulations and enforcing these laws more strictly is a small price to pay for the violence to stop.

  Unfortunately, Mr. Delgado’s carrots seem to whet more than sate the O Creme leadership’s appetite for concessions. All fat cats are alike, in politics and commerce. The more Mr. Verdade gains, the more he wants.

  * * *

  Though once it was finished Edgar was pleased with the article, drafting the very first paragraph he’d hit a wall. Fingers frozen over the keys, Edgar realized that if he had to type “Os Soldados Ousados de Barba, intent on an independent Barban peninsula” or “Tomás Verdade, President of O Creme de Barbear, the reputed political wing of the SOB” one more time he was going to shoot himself. Though anyone in the U.S. unfamiliar with the SOB and its president by now clearly lived in a survivalist underground bunker eating canned Spaghetti-Os and rereading curling Time magazines from the 1960s, the Record style guidelines required that this information be repeated in every piece Edgar filed. Only when he had programmed the phrases into his computer as two-keystroke macros could Edgar finish the piece, normal blood pressure restored.

  The article’s inspiration was Edgar’s own inconvenience. The most recent “Creamie-pleaser” required Edgar, himself a legal alien, to furnish paycheck stubs, a full bio going back to high school, original paste-ups of his journalism, a letter from Wallasek confirming his employment, a copy of his birth certificate posted from Wilmington, three passport-size photos, a police background check both in Delaware and Cinziero, a medical report covering everything from hemorrhoids to HIV, a thirty-five-page application form demanding the names, postal and e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, and titles of his every acquaintance in Portugal, and twenty thousand fucking escudos in order to justify his remaining in Cinziero. Running around collecting this absurd stack of nuisance documents, Edgar felt as if Tomás Verdade had personally sent him on a scavenger hunt.

  Otherwise, Edgar’s private reaction to Lisbon’s groveling before his own fantasy acronym was schizoid. It was gratifying to dick around a whole country like that, to dictate its headlines, to alter its laws, and to recontour its political landscape with a few prank phone calls. But as much as Edgar was tickled, he was disquieted. Not because the SOB didn’t exist, but because as far as the rest of the world was concerned it did. That conversation with Ansel P. Henwood on the plane kept coming back to him, about how “the assholes had always won and the assholes were still winning.” Much as Edgar cherished his own cynicism, it also depressed him. Watching Lisbon contort itself to satisfy the “SOB” was a hoot, but at the end of the day the fact that appearing to blow people up meant you got your way wasn’t altogether funny.

  “I’m shit-canning your piece.”

  “Why?” Edgar wailed into the receiver. “I worked—”

  “It’s too long by a factor of two,” Wallasek snarled. “I don’t have the time to edit it down to the three paragraphs it deserves. You buried the lead up to your knees. That is, if there was one. And since when are the dogs in the street cited as an informed source?”

  “That’s just an expression!”

  “A moronic expression. No reader has to strain his brain to figure out that our perceptive dog goes by the name of Kellogg. You’re a reporter. This copy is baldly editorial.”

  “Get out! The whole paper—any paper—is manipulative. You only invoke that old saw about objective reporting when it suits you. You and I both know there’s no such thing.”

  “Are you in secret cahoots with Saddler, Kellogg? Because I’ve heard this line before, and believe you me, I don’t like it. It’s hard to be objective, you betcha. That it’s difficult makes it that much more important to try. Nobody gives a shit what you think, Kellogg. They only want to read what you know.”

  Edgar decided this was not the time to get into a philosophical discussion about whether what you think and what you know amount to roughly the same thing. “You just disagree with my angle on the story,” Edgar charged.

  “What story? The trouble isn’t that I disagree with your ‘story,’ I don’t care about it. The whole approach is too inside, Kellogg.”

  “I know the nitty-gritty’s a little tedious, but the devil’s in the details!” Okay, Edgar was spoiled. Other Record stringers—even super-stringers—had their work spiked all the time. But SOB stories enjoyed high priority, and every article he’d written for months had run. Day-rate checks were piling up nicely, more than compensating for Edgar’s derisory retainer.

  “Damn straight it’s tedious! Our readers are titillated by terrorist saber-rattling, maybe. The bombs, they eat up. But small-print readjustments of wetback policy in some European jerkwater are a big yawn. Stick to the big picture, got it?” Wallasek hung up.

  The dial tone blaring, Edgar wouldn’t be able to make his editor understand that in the complex mosaic of Portugal’s hastily re
vised immigration law was a motherfucking big picture, and a dark one.

  Chapter 26

  Every Former Fat Boy’s Dream

  THE NATIONAL RECORD correspondent was provided an office in the center of town, though for his first few weeks with so little to do there—like, nothing—Edgar had mostly puttered at his computer in the tower, writing unposted letters to Angela, whom nowadays he gave no more thought than a returned library book that he hadn’t bothered to finish. Once the SOB’s campanha militar resumed, however, Edgar needed to protect Abrab Manor as a haven from the badgering imprecations of visiting journalists (could he pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top introduce them to a real live Sob?), so he’d begun to conduct business from the office.

  The Record bureau was on the third floor of another flimsily constructed savings-and-loan-style chunk of brown-painted aluminum called Casa Naufragada (inexplicably, “Shipwreck House”). At least Barrington had copped the largest and least drafty suite along the hall, its speckled lino blanketed in Persian carpet, the prosaic metal and wood-grain-appliqué furnishings provided by the management replaced with sandalwood antiques, and the walls boastfully decorated with Nicola’s pen-and-inks, over which Edgar was prone to moon.

  His favorite was an exterior of Abrab Manor niggled in rapidographs of various thicknesses, some no wider than a hair. Each roof tile and walkway slate was painstakingly detailed, their hues hinted at with a tracery of colored pencil. The drawing must have taken her a week, though a pleasant week, making the end product that much more entrancing. Himself, Edgar would never have drafted such a delectable little landscape and then parted with it, but would have clung to it eternally as proof of what a clever fellow he was.