by Algis Budrys
* * *
Garvin pointed the Glock at his chest and fired twice. The man held his hands against himself and fell into the living room.
Garvin sprang forward and looked down at him. He was dead.
“Matt!” The door of the hall closet rebounded against the wall, and Margaret clasped her arms around Garvin. She buried her teeth in his shoulder for a moment. “I heard him fumbling with the key. I knew it wasn’t you, and it was too far to the bedroom.”
Garvin slipped his gun into its holster and held her, feeling the spasmodic shake of her body as she cried. The hall closet was almost directly opposite the door to the small bedroom. She hadn’t even dared warn him as he came in.
He looked down at the man again, over Margaret’s shoulder. One of the man’s hands were tightly clasped around a Colt that must have been looted from a policeman’s body.
“You poor bastard,” Garvin said to the corpse. “You trusted me too far.”
Margaret looked up, as pale as the man had been when he stepped out to meet Garvin’s fire. “Matt! Hush! There wasn’t anything else you could do.”
“He was a man—a man like me. He was scared, and he was begging for his life,” Garvin said. “He wanted me to trust him, but I was too scared to believe him.” He shook himself sharply. “I still can’t believe him.”
“There wasn’t anything else to do, Matt,” Margaret repeated insistently. “You didn’t have any way of knowing whether I was all right or not. You’ve said it yourself. We live the way we have to—by rules we had to make up. He was in another man’s house. He broke the rules.”
Garvin’s mouth shaped itself into a twisted slash He couldn’t take his eyes off the dead man. “We’re good with rules,” he said. “The poor guy heard somebody—so he took a shot at me.
“And what could I do? Somebody tried to kill me in my own home. It didn’t really matter, after that, what he said or did, or what I thought. I had to kill him. Any way at all.”
He pulled away from Margaret and stood beside the corpse for a moment, his arms swinging impatiently as he tried to decide what to do. Then he moved forward, as though abruptly breaking out of an invisible shell. His footsteps echoed loudly in the hall, and then he was back from the bedroom, a sheet dangling out of his clenched hand.
“Matt, what’re you going to do?” Margaret asked, her voice almost a whisper as her puzzled eyes tried to read his face.
He bent and caught the dead man under the arms. “I’m putting up a ‘No Trespassing’ sign.” He dragged the corpse to the living room window, knotted one end of the sheet to the metal centerpost, and slung the remainder of the sheet around the dead man’s chest, leaving just enough slack so his lolling head would hang out of sight. Then he lowered the corpse through the open window.
Garvin turned. Suddenly, all his muscles seemed to twist. “I hope this keeps them away! I hope I never have to do this again.” Even with the distance between them, Margaret could easily see him trembling.
“I’ll do it again, if I have to,” he went on. “If they keep coming, I’ll have to kill them. After a while, I’ll be used to it. I’ll shoot them down with children in their arms. I’ll use their own white flags to hang them up beside this one. I’ll ignore the sound of their voices. Because they can’t be trusted. I know they can’t be trusted, because I know I can’t be trusted.”
He stopped, turned, and looked at Margaret. “You realize what that poor guy wanted? You know who he sounded like? Like me, that’s who—like me, Matt Garvin, the guy who just wanted a place to live in peace.”
“Matt, I know what he said he—”
“Hey! Hey, you, in there!” The muffled voice came blurredly into the apartment, followed by a series of sharp knocks on the other side of the wall that separated this apartment from the next.
Margaret stopped, but Garvin slid forward, his boots making no sound on the floor as he moved quietly over to the wall. The knocking started again. “You! Next door. What’s all that racket?”
Garvin heard Margaret start to say something. His hand flashed out in a silencing gesture, and he put his ear to the wall. His right hand came down and touched the Glock’s holster.
“I’m warning you.” He could hear the voice more clearly. “Speak up, or you’ll never come out of there alive. I’m mighty particular about my neighbors, and if you’ve knocked off the ones I had, I’ll make damn sure you don’t enjoy their place very long.”
Garvin’s mouth opened. He’d known there was someone in there, of course, but, up to now, there had never been any break in the silence.
“Well?” The voice was impatient. “I’ve got the drop on you. My wife’s in the hall right now, with a gun on your door. And I can get some dynamite in a big hurry.”
Garvin hesitated. It meant giving the other man an advantage.
“Hurry up!”
But there-was nothing else he could do. “It’s all right,” he finally said, speaking loudly enough for the other man to hear. “There was somebody in here, but we took care of it.”
“That’s better,” the other man said, but his voice was still suspicious. “Now let’s hear your wife say something.”
Margaret moved up to the wall. She looked at Garvin questioningly, and he reluctantly nodded. “Go ahead,” he said.
“This is Margaret Garvin. We’re—we’re all right.” She stopped, then seemed to reach a decision and went on with a rush. “My husband’s name is Matt. Who are you?”
That wasn’t right. Garvin frowned. She was getting too close to an infringement on the silent privacy that had existed for so long, now. Men were no longer brothers. They were distant nodding acquaintances.
Surprisingly, the other man did not hesitate a perceptible length of time before answering. “My name’s Gustav Berendtsen. My wife’s name is Carol.” The tone of his voice had changed, and now Garvin thought he could make out the indistinct trace of a pleased chuckle in Berendtsen’s voice. “Took care of it, did you? Good. Damn good! Nice to have neighbors you can depend on.” The voice lost some of its clarity as Berendtsen obviously turned his head away from his side of the wall. “Hey, Toots, you can put that cannon down now. They straightened it out themselves.”
Out in the hall, a safety-catch clicked, and no-longer-careful footsteps moved back from the Garvins’ door. Then Berendtsen’s door opened and shut, and, after a moment, there was a shy voice from beside Berendtsen on the other side of the wall.
“Hello. I’m Carol Berendtsen. Is—” She stopped, as though she too was as unsure of herself as Margaret and Garvin were, here in this strange situation that had suddenly materialized from beyond the rules. But she stopped only for a moment, “Is everything all right?”
“Sure, everything’s all right, Toots!” Berendtsen’s voice cut in from behind the wall. “I’ve been telling you those were damn sensible people living in there. Know how to mind their own business. People who know that, know how to make sure nobody else tries minding it, either.”
“All right, Gus, all right,” Garvin and Margaret heard her say, her low voice still carrying well enough to be heard through the masonry. “I just wanted to hear them say it.” And then she added something in an even lower voice. “It’s been a long time since I heard people just talking,” and Garvin’s hand tightened on Margaret’s as they heard her.
“Sure. Toots, sure. But I kept telling you it wasn’t always going to be that way. I—” His voice rose up to a louder pitch. “Hey, Garvins! I gotta idea. Also got a bottle of Haig and Haig in here. Care for some? We’ll come over,” he added hurriedly.
Garvin looked at Margaret’s strained face and trembling lips. He could feel his own face tightening.
“Please, Matt?” Margaret asked.
She was right. It was too big a chance not to take.
“Sure, Hon,” he said. “But get my rifle and cover the door from the hall,” he added softly.
“All right,” he said, raising his voice. “Come over.”
&nb
sp; “Right,” Berendtsen answered. “Be a minute.”
The words were jovial enough, Garvin thought.
He heard Margaret move back into the hall, and his mind automatically registered the slight creak of the sling’s leather as she lifted the rifle to cover the door.
And then he heard Carol Berendtsen’s voice faintly through the wall.
“I—I don’t know,” she was saying to Gus, her voice uncertain. “Will it be all right? I mean, I haven’t talked to another woman in… What’ll she think? I haven’t got any good clothes. And there’s a strange man in there… Gus, I look so—I’m ashamed!”
And Gus Berendtsen’s voice, clumsy but gentle, its power broken into softness. “Aw, look, Toots, they’re just people like us. You think they’ve got any time for frills? I bet you’re dressed just fine. And what’s to be ashamed of in being a woman?” And then there was a moment’s silence. “I’ll bet you’re prettier than she is, too.”
“You’d better think so, Gus.”
Something untied itself in Garvin. “I think you can put that rifle away, Hon,” he said to Margaret. He saw her look of uncertainty, and nodded to emphasize the words. “I’m pretty sure.”
* * *
Garvin poured out another finger of the Scotch. He raised his glass in a silent mutual toast with Berendtsen, who grinned and lifted his own glass in response. Gus chuckled, the soft, controlled sound rumbling gently up through his thick chest. The glass was almost out of sight in his spade of a hand, huge even in proportion to the rest of his body. He sat easily in the chair that should have been too small for him, the shaped power of his personality reflected in his body’s casual poise.
“Ought to be able to set up a pretty good combo,” he said. “One of us stays home to hold the fort while the other one goes out for the groceries. Take turns. Might try knocking a hole through this wall, too. Be easier.” He slapped the plaster with his hand.
Garvin nodded. “Good idea.” They both smiled at the drift of women’s voices that came from one of the bedrooms. “Make it easier on the baby-sitter, too.”
“My gal was a little worried,” Berendtsen agreed. He grinned again. “You know, we may have something here.” He raised his glass again, and Garvin, catching his train of thought, matched the gesture. “To the Second Republic,” Berendtsen said.
“All six-and-two-halves rooms of it,” Garvin affirmed. Then his glance reached the living room window, and he realized that there was still something undone. He got up to loosen the sheet and let the body fall to join the others that lay scattered among the dark buildings.
But he stopped before his hand touched the sheet. No one would know, now, how much honesty there had been within the fear of the intruder’s voice. But it was time somebody in the world got the benefit of the doubt. They’d carry him down to the ground, Gus and he, and give him a burial, like a man.
CHAPTER THREE
It was winter again, and seven years since the plague. December snow lay deep between Stuyvesant’s buildings, under the frosty night, while Manhattan raised its blunt stone shoulders up and, here and there, silent figures in the department stores took time from their normal foraging and climbed the prostrate escalators to the toy counters.
A delegation from the next building in the block made a gingerly meeting with Matt Garvin and Gus Berendtsen, out on one of the windswept playgrounds.
Garvin watched the delegation leader carefully. It was an older man, fat and small-eyed—a man who’d been somebody before the plague, he guessed.
Matt knew he was being nervous for no clear reason. But he didn’t like dealing with older people. There was no telling how much they had time to learn—how many little tricks they remembered from the old days.
The man smiled affably, proffering his hand. “Charlie Conner,” he boomed. “I guess I run that shebang back there,” he said deprecatingly, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder toward his own building. But the young, wolfish riflemen with him did not twitch their eyes to follow the gesture.
“Matt Garvin. And this is Gus Berendtsen,” Matt noticed Gus was looking at Conner the same way he’d looked over each member of each new family they’d found in the apartments of their building. “I guess between us we do your job for our building.”
Conner grinned. “Tough, isn’t it? What’d you do—just spread out gradual, sweating it out every time you made contact with a different family?”
“Something like that,” Gus cut in. “Make your point.”
Conner’s eyes shifted. “Don’t get jumpy,” he soothed. “All I am is figuring now we’ve got our whole buildings organized, it’s time we joined up together. The more people we’ve got, the more we can control things. The idea is to make sure your own rules get followed in your own territory, right? Nobody wants any wild hares fouling things up. You want to be sure that as long as you follow the rules, everything’s all right, right? You want to know your family’s protected while you’re out someplace. You want to be sure there’s a safe store of food, right? Well, the bigger the community, the more sure you can be. Right?”
Garvin nodded. “Uh-huh.”
Conner spread his hands. “All right. Now, I’ve got my place organized nice as pie. Ought to. Fifteen years District Captain in this ward. Lots of experience. Now, I’m sure you boys have things going pretty well, but maybe there’s one or two things you could stand to have better. Okay, here I am. My people’re satisfied. Right, boys?” he asked his riflemen.
“Right, boss.”
Gus said: “What you mean is, we should join you.”
Conner chuckled. “Well, now, look, I’m not likely to want to join you, now, am I?”
He leaned negligently against the crudely painted sign Gus and Matt had seen planted through the playground’s asphalt: “Meet me here tomorrow, and we’ll talk joining up together. —Charlie Conner.”
Gus and Matt exchanged glances. “We’ll think about it,” Gus said.
“You do that,” Conner said. “Oh, look, I know you think you’ve been doing all right. And you have—no question about it. But now you’re ready to spread out into more than one building, and you’ve got to figure sooner or later you have to meet somebody with more experience, running things. It just figures, that’s all. You didn’t hope you could start a whole city government, did you? I mean, you boys weren’t going to run one of you for Mayor or anything, were you?” Conner chuckled uproariously.
“We’ll think about it,” Gus repeated. “You’ll hear from us.”
Conner’s eyes narrowed. “When?”
Matt said: “When we’re ready.”
Conner looked thoughtfully at the two of them. “Don’t stall me too long, now.”
“You worried you might die of old age?” Gus asked. They turned around and walked away. Conner looked after them, turned, and stalked back toward his own building. The rifle parties of both sides waited until everyone else was gone, and then they backed away from each other. Finally, the playground stood empty again.
In their apartment, Matt put his rifle down softly. “Well, now we know,” he said. “I thought we’d been running into too many rival foraging parties. They had to come from someplace nearby.”
“What do you think about Conner?”
“I think he’s lost more people than we have, or he would have let things go on the way they have been, with his foraging parties and ours leaving each other alone unless they were both set on picking up the same thing.”
“So what do we do?”
“I think we’ve got the upper hand. I think we can stick it out without him longer than he can without us.”
“And meanwhile we keep losing people?”
Garvin looked up sharply. “Not as many as he does. That’s the key. He’s hurting worse than we are.”
“You tell that to our widows.”
“I don’t have to tell our widows anything. All anybody can promise a woman these days is that her man’s safe as long as he stays inside his own four wal
ls. Of course, that way they both starve, and so do their kids.”
“Look, if we make a deal with Conner, nobody dies.”
“You’re sure. You’re sure Conner means all he wants is to be the big frog in a bigger puddle. He’s not looking for extra women, or extra food for his own people. He keeps those gunmen of his in line by promising them no more than new friends to play gin rummy with.”
“All right—maybe. We can’t be sure.”
“We don’t have to be sure of anything. We just have to keep as alive as we can. Look, Gus—I’m not saying we should forget Conner. Or his offer, I’m saying that two or three weeks from now, he may not be so bossy. If we’re going to trade something with him, I want a 50-50 chance of an even deal. Right now, we don’t have that.”
“So we wait.”
“Well, we can try breaking into his building. How many widows do you figure that’ll make for us?”
“Okay. We’ll let it ride.”
A week later, the sign in the playground said:
NOTICE! Anyone Not A Member Of The East Side Mutual Protective Association, (Charles G. Conner, Pres.) is Hereby Declared An Outlaw, and is subject to trial under due authority. By The Authority Invested In Me By The Democratic Party Of The State Of New York, United States Of America.
(signed) Charles G. Conner
“Oh, yeah, huh?” Matt Garvin said.
* * *
The little group of men returned to Stuyvesant from the east, cutting across the playground and access drives in the courtyards. As he led them back home, Matt Garvin shivered and hunched up his heavy collar to protect his ears. The wind was light, just strong enough to cover the quiet crunch of footsteps with its whispering, but he and the men had been out all afternoon, and the chill was beginning to sink deep into their bones.