The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  “Tell me,” she went on, and somehow the fact that she kept her voice low and steady instead of screaming made the drubbing harder to take. “Are there any limits? If someone released smallpox on the New York subway, would you claim that? Or if bubonic plague were dropped from airplanes all over Europe, would you claim that?”

  “The SOB was supposed to be harmless!” he protested. “No one would get killed who—”

  “Yes, you explained all that—several times. But you’re aware that two Muslims were murdered in Novo Marrakech last night? In an anti-immigration riot?”

  Edgar bundled the crocheted pillow against his stomach like a teddy bear. So that was the “big story.” “No,” he said forlornly. “I switched off the BBC last night. Lately the news makes me ill.”

  “I can see why. It’s hard to imagine those immigrants would have been lynched if your ‘harmless’ prank hadn’t got, as you say, ‘out of hand.’ And is it surprising? In fact, isn’t an incident like that positively overdue?”

  “How was I to know!”

  “Oh, you mightn’t have been able to determine what, exactly, would come of those phone calls. But you should have known for certain that if anything came of them it would be bad!”

  Edgar groped to reconstruct all those copacetic justifications his tempter had supplied. “It does a favor for victims’ families . . .” (How did that go?) “It’s better to have some object . . . somebody to blame, you know, instead of it just being, like, a drag . . .” Barrington’s phrasing had evidenced more flash.

  “My husband is better off having his family’s tragedy turned into a ‘ha-ha’?”

  “He’d only feel lousy if, you know, he found out, and, in the meantime, he’s got, like, an enemy, to, you know, hang on to—”

  “The world suffers from a scarcity of enemies. In your view.”

  “Well, I was trying, especially since, you know, Madrid, to make these guys who really do this shit, well, pissed off. I figured, if those bombs and all didn’t boost their own pet causes . . . maybe they’d give up.” If anyone was going to give up soon, it was Edgar. This wasn’t going over well, as Barrington would say, a-tall, a-tall.

  “Your terrorist affiliates have handed in their notice? Out of frustration, your colleagues in the FARC have formed a book club instead.”

  “No, but—”

  “To the contrary, haven’t there been more bombings in the last few years than ever?”

  “Well, maybe—”

  “And wouldn’t watching Tomás Verdade incrementally get everything he wants inspire other groups to use the same disgusting tactics?”

  Edgar retreated. “The SOB was Barrington’s idea!”

  “Maybe, but no one forced you to keep making his ‘ha-ha’ phone calls, did they?”

  “He left instructions! The code phrase! The gloves!”

  “So in your version of Genesis, Eve eats the apple at gunpoint.”

  Edgar didn’t care for her girly metaphor. “It was an interesting experiment, right? A social, I don’t know, psychology thing. I thought it was worth finding out what happens next.”

  “I see. We’re not toys. We’re lab rats. Well, you’ve found out what happens. And you’ll keep finding out.”

  “Nick, I said I was sorry. And if I had it all to do over again I’d . . .” Edgar pulled up short. He didn’t want to lie to her anymore, not even in the hypothetical.

  “You’d what?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure. For a little while,” Edgar confessed sheepishly, “it was fun.”

  “Yes, it was Barrington’s brand of fun, but I am floored it was yours!” She could no longer sit, and paced. “When you first got here, you must have noticed how screwed up this place had become. How Barbans had fallen in love with the idea of themselves as dangerous. How a whole new political party had started here that would never have got off the ground without your SOB ‘ha-ha’—a party that does nothing but goad its followers to glory in their own murderousness! Wasn’t that enough evidence to demonstrate that what you found on Barrington’s floppy disks was poison?”

  “Maybe I didn’t think it through,” said Edgar morosely. “When I first got here, nobody had been hurt, really—”

  “People were badly hurt in that riot you and I got caught up in. Though now I see why you were so extravagantly glad no one was killed. Their blood would have been on your hands, wouldn’t it?”

  Chin dropped, Edgar nodded.

  Nicola flapped her hands in the air with uncharacteristic jerkiness. “I—I don’t understand. You have to help me out here. I don’t get it. I cannot for the life of me grasp why you would do such a thing. Can you explain? Please?” She really did appear to be begging, if only for some small scrap to hang on to that could keep her from detesting him.

  But then, maybe she was doing Edgar a favor, since this was a question he’d never answered to his own satisfaction. As a stopgap theory, he could have bowed to Saddler’s charge that, in perpetuating the SOB, Edgar was planning to wow Nicola with his unsuspected dark side. But frankly, her recoil was no surprise. He’d known she’d go ballistic. Edgar hadn’t been trying to impress Nicola. He’d been trying to impress Barrington.

  Chapter 34

  The Tooth Fairy Leaves Behind a Bigger Surprise than a Quarter

  EDGAR BEGAN HALTINGLY, stroking the salamander on his mug. “When I was fat . . .” He hadn’t expected to get into this area, but instinct dictated that he eschew a grandiose rationale, à la Saddler, for an explanation that was maximally pathetic. “Sorry. This is roundabout.”

  “I have time.” Nicola sat back down, scissoring her legs to the side in a pose of grim tolerance. The froth on her cold coffee had died; the cocoa looked like dirt.

  “Anyway, I thought, if I lost the weight, I’d be like everybody else. Or, strike that. Not like everybody else, since that’s not what I’ve ever wanted. I told you about that kid, Toby Falconer? He was like, from another planet. I was pretty sure I wasn’t a fag, since all the other guys seemed to think Falconer was, you know, anointed, too. They couldn’t keep their eyes off him. He was surrounded by a force field, a glow. And everything he did was perfect.”

  Edgar sighed. “So I ate almost nothing but celery for six months. After which, Edgar the frog was supposed to turn into a prince.” He checked for signs of impatience, but this was a gracious woman. She’d hear him out.

  “Except I only shrunk into a scrawnier frog. Oh, I’d clambered a few rungs on the social ladder. But I was still craning my neck at the top until it gave me a crick. Ditto in college, in law school, at the firm. There was always someone else who was the bee’s knees. All my life I’ve wondered what it was like to be extraordinary. Not to be the second-in-command, the trusty adjutant, but the Big Man, the ne plus ultra. The guy who leaves regular people slack-jawed, who slays them with his throwaway one-liners, who never wishes he could be somebody else because everyone else he knows wishes they could be him.

  “Then I ship here—and I land smack in the middle of another fucking cult of personality. Except that Saddler himself has vamoosed. And he’s left everything behind, like a do-it-yourself kit. His clothes, his house, his car, his friends, his woman—which you were, even if you never sealed the deal. He’s even left me his idea of amusing himself. Maybe that amusement involved dicking people around—his readers, his editor, his colleagues, his for-all-practical-purposes lover. But I figured that ignoring the rules that apply to proles, abiding by different principles or maybe by no principles at all, had to be part of the kit. A little shady business obviously came with the territory. In fact, an awesome obliviousness to consequences seemed like the very source of Saddler’s genius.”

  “Having tried on this ‘genius,’ ” asked Nicola, “you’re finally a prince? A free spirit? You shrug off whatever mess you leave behind as a squalid matter for the little people to clean up.”

  “I don’t seem to have the knack,” said Edgar glumly. “I get anxious. I’m afraid Saddler thinks—I mea
n, if he were here, Saddler would think—that I’m a candy-ass.”

  “And are you?” she asked point-blank. “A candy-ass?”

  Edgar didn’t hesitate. “Yup.”

  “Good.” Apparently, his first right answer of the afternoon. “Barrington couldn’t leave behind what you really wanted.”

  “I know. Though that do-it-yourself kit? It did work, for moments. I’ve had glimpses. Of another life.”

  “You saw a wonderland. A paradise.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never gawked into Saddler’s garden long enough to tell. Still, if Saddler had confessed, about the SOB, would you be this irate? Would you despise him?”

  “Barrington did all sorts of dreadful things that I did know about, Edgar. But I’m determined to believe that I loved him, not because of, but in spite of the way he was always testing people—who liked him so much more powerfully than he thought they ought to.”

  “That’s just another way of saying that different rules apply to Saddler,” Edgar grumbled. “Barrington initiates a con of international proportions, and it’s, Isn’t he a sly dog. Alternatively, Isn’t Bear misunderstood, isn’t he tortured, look at what he’s been driven to, isn’t it tragic that everybody LIKES him so much. Smitten lackeys buzzing about his head like flies around a cow.”

  Edgar lurched up and ranged the room. “But Kellogg picks up where Saddler left off? Does a bang-up job, keeps his mouth shut, makes the SOB bigger and more notorious, and even tries—whether or not you think it backfired—tries to rearrange the grand shell game into something beneficial by sticking it to cretins. Is Kellogg a sly dog? Or is Kellogg misunderstood, a heartbreaker? No, he’s just a terrible person! Some kind of scurrilous, immoral—loser!”

  “Edgar, you’re being incredibly self-indulgent.” Despite the sternness of her tone, when Nicola turned away it was to hide the fact that he was making her laugh.

  Encouraged, he hammed it up. “Not only is he a despicable cur, the lowest of the low—” Edgar pitched the Barking Rat pillow thwap into the couch—“but he’s a phony! An off-brand knock-off! A mediocre understudy for the Great Barrington—”

  “Edgar, stop it!” Nicola pleaded, seeming to recognize that on some level he was serious. “Yes, I think you’re misguided, that you’ve made a dreadful mistake—I don’t get the impression you appreciate yet how dreadful. But I don’t despise you.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Anyway.” Edgar thumped to the couch. “I’ve resigned from the SOB. No more claims.”

  “This is like listening to an alcoholic promise he’ll never take another drink when he’s still stewed.” When Edgar looked blank, Nicola prodded, “This afternoon. You must have claimed it shortly before you came here. So you’ll forgive me if I’m underwhelmed.”

  Edgar squinted. “Claimed what?”

  Nicola tilted her head. “The news said they used a recognized code phrase. Didn’t you bother to get the details before you leapt to take ‘credit’ for it? Fertilizer—not too big; and crude, the radio said. It only partially exploded. A few people hurt, no one killed. At a peace rally, of all things. But after what you’ve told me . . . It doesn’t make sense.” Her gaze went middle-distance.

  “Why?”

  “That’s why it’s a big story. Not because the device was so large. But because the fertilizer, it was for peras peludas. For the first time, a bomb’s gone off in Barba.”

  The hairs rose on Edgar’s arms in a domino ripple. He’d vowed to come clean with Nicola, to be honest to a fault. But Edgar had assured her there was no such thing as the SOB, and once more, if unwittingly, he’d lied. There didn’t used to be an SOB.

  There was now.

  The next few minutes tested the limits of Nicola’s political acuity. It took too long for Edgar to connect the dots for her, though maybe Nick just didn’t like the looks of the picture.

  Hurriedly, Edgar described yesterday’s break-in, his rebuff at the Times foreign desk early this morning. So the Creams had the code phrase, and were in on the ruse. They were no longer afraid of leprechauns. They’d done their market research, so they could be sure of a sizable constituency with a stomach for armed revolt. More than stomach. Appetite. If neither Edgar nor Barrington had ever claimed bombs he actually planted, nothing prevented the company’s new owners from diversifying. Thousands of column inches may have been wasted on distinguishing the two, but for all practical purposes there’d been a merger, and O Creme de Barbear and Os Soldados Ousados de Barba were now one and the same. As of the last eighteen hours, the Creamie-Sob alliance was actually dangerous.

  “Well, why—why don’t you declare a ceasefire?” Nicola proposed desperately.

  “For one thing, I don’t have the current code phrase.”

  “You could get it. You’re a journalist. Ring Guy Wallasek. Say that since there are now bombs going off in Barba—” she was already using the plural—“you need to know the SOB’s code, in case they ring your office to deliver a warning.”

  “Nick, who cares if some renegade Sob announces a ceasefire if it’s not observed?”

  “I don’t understand the point of blowing up your own turf anyway! If Verdade wants to stem immigration because he loves his own country so much, why plant bombs in it?”

  The kid was naive. This was Terrorism 101. “Because for all his seeming cosmopolitanism, Verdade is provincial. He’s been to the States, but it’s only Barba that counts. This is the only place he can blow up and feel the earth move under his feet.

  “Why do you think the SOB was given credit for being so smart? Because they didn’t shit in their own bed. Because they appeared to exploit larger geopolitics: they unnerved the G-8, not just no-account Portugal. Sobs defied the ironclad law that all politics are local. As an abstraction, the SOB displayed a rationality that real terrorists almost never do. Real terrorists are lunatics, Nick. They don’t care about killing their own people, because it’s the folks nearest to hand whom they most want to control. What Verdade has started may be broadly self-destructive, but it’s not bizarre. It’s totally normal.”

  “Then you’ve no choice, Edgar, you’ll have to discredit Verdade by—” Nicola’s jaw clapped shut.

  “Henry!” Edgar hailed weakly.

  Durham looked from one to the other. “Don’t let me interrupt. You were saying?”

  “Nothing,” said Nicola. “It wasn’t important.”

  “Didn’t mean to break up the party!”

  Nicola risked a beseeching look at Edgar. Edgar shook his head, just. He didn’t know how to get out of this hole with the Creams yet, but as for spreading his secret further afield, Edgar’s butt was on the line, and Henry was hardly the soul of discretion.

  “We were just talking about the bomb at the peace rally,” Edgar said heartily. “Why the Sobs would switch the campaign to Barba itself.” Which was indeed what they’d been talking about, but which felt like a cover-up, since it sounded like one. What were the chances that Henry’s arrival had poured cold water on a conversation about politics?

  “That so?” said Henry, smacking gum. “What about it?”

  “Self-destruction,” Edgar condensed lamely. “Never mind, Henry, it would bore you.”

  “But Nicky here. She wasn’t bored, was she?”

  Henry having developed a keen nose for conspiracy, Edgar was now treated to the triangulation that Barrington had found so intoxicating: the jumpy glances, double meanings, and over-obvious gropes for any feeble excuse to get off alone with Nicola.

  Well, Saddler could have it. Begging off dinner, Edgar fled.

  Edgar puttered toward Abrab Manor, in no great hurry to return to the ruin of his violated hideaway. Yet despite the day’s aura of urgency, there was nothing else to do but head home and pray there was still a lasagna left in the freezer.

  Looming on his tail, a chunky, top-heavy truck filled Edgar’s rearview mirror—one of those rickety, wooden-slatted haulers brimming with crates o
f peras peludas, and probably headed for the port, where the noxious crop would be forklifted onto ships bound for unsuspecting Guinea-Bissau. The truck was gaining on him, and Edgar motioned out his window for the vehicle to pass. For this wind, it was perilously overloaded, and he wanted the weaving hulk safely out of his vicinity.

  The truck pulled to his bumper, but didn’t overtake. Edgar motioned again, his wave impatient. The fucking thing reeked. Bad enough that it was billowing black exhaust; where the hell did all that EU money go, anyway? But you couldn’t even smell the fumes for the overpowering stench of the hairy pears themselves.

  Pointedly, Edgar touched the brake. At last, gears groaning, the truck drew alongside. Edgar looked over to make grateful eye contact, but the driver was wearing one of those newly popular full-face welding masks. The road was only two-lane, and those trucks had lousy acceleration. In consideration, Edgar eased up on the gas.

  But the truck didn’t pass. It hovered right next to the Saab, slowing as Edgar slowed. What’s more, the truck had pressed over the yellow meridian, nudging the Turbo over to the extreme right until its tires traced the road’s perimeter. Edgar blasted his horn. In response, the truck edged over another foot. To avoid being sideswiped, Edgar had to steer the Turbo onto the rocky shoulder.

  “You fucking maniac!” Edgar screamed, as his left-hand tires, too, juddered onto rubble. “Are you trying to kill me?”

  As if in answer, the thick trunk of a roadside pera peluda tree hurtled toward his windshield. Yanking the steering wheel hard right, Edgar missed the tree by inches. The Saab bumped down a slope to plow into a flauta ventosa in a Barban’s front yard. The stout wooden pole breathed hoo as it went down.

  Edgar mopped his forehead as the truck chugged past. Now, don’t be silly, he told himself. You’re prone to fanciful thinking right now, because you’re jittery, you’re hungry, you’re overwrought. Barbans are terrible drivers. Those trucks are hard to control. The guy could have hit a diagonal headwind—couldn’t pull forward, and the wind bore him into the Saab. Right? That could be it. Right? But as Edgar craned his neck out the window, he could see the back of the driver’s head as the truck barreled away—suddenly, no problem, the vehicle keeping to its lane. That head: it was massive. It was round. And it looked really, really stupid.