“They can smash up the village. We’d take to the hills; we’ll have to sooner or later, in any case.”
“You called him bait, Pat. Maybe that’s not such a bad idea. Let the men come. We’ll pull the same thing we did today.”
He took a cigar from his pocket and jammed it into my mouth. “It’s your world, Jerry. If I’d been giving the orders this afternoon, they’d all be dead.”
“Tonight we’ll set up a watch in the hotel lobby. You and Yorovich and I.”
“It looks as if we’ll have to trust that Russian,” Pat admitted. “You were right about him, Jerry.”
“We’ll give him the first watch, up to midnight. I’ll take it from there until four. You cover the rest.”
“You’re biting off the tough part for yourself.”
“I know that.” I pulled on my cigar. “It’s my world, you tell me. I’m ready to fight for it.”
We had our community bedded down inside the hotel by eight o’clock. Cheryl and I rounded up Hank Jenkins; he was willing to call it a day when we let him take a bottle to his room. The four Russians we put into two storage rooms on the first floor back of the lobby. It seemed the safest place to keep them, since Thatcher, Yorovich and I were sleeping in the lobby. The men still had to be considered prisoners; I had no illusions about that.
Boris Yorovich shouldered a submachine gun and posted himself on the walk in front of the hotel. Pat Thatcher lay on a leather lounge under a woolen blanket. Moonlight slanted through a window on the old man’s face; I saw the deep lines of exhaustion. Pat had given us everything he had. I began to understand why he had made such an effort to wake me up to my responsibilities. When Pat thrust the cigar between my teeth, he was resigning a leadership he hadn’t the energy to hold. The act had been a symbol to him, perhaps more so than it was to me. When Pat was asleep, I walked to the front window and stood looking at the street. Fifty feet away I saw Yorovich’s shadow, grotesquely lengthened by the angle of moonlight. The window was open. I heard the far cry of an animal in the forest above the village; I heard the wind in the pines.
And I felt terribly alone—a hollow, empty solitude. I realized how many decisions Pat had made for us. That job had become mine. I couldn’t run back into my boyhood because I wasn’t ready for anything else. I had to be ready. The Soviet invasion, whether I liked it or not, had made me a man.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and saw Cheryl in the darkness behind me. “I want to talk, Jerry,” she whispered. “Let’s go outside. We mustn’t waken Pat.”
I picked up a rifle and stuffed cartridges in my shirt pocket. “In case we meet Willie Clapper,” I explained.
Cheryl and I passed Yorovich and walked toward the lake. The moon was very bright; stars blazed in the sky with the special brilliance given them by mountain heights. Cheryl drew me down on the pine needles beside her.
“I was so sure of it in my room, Jerry, but now—” She took my hand. Her fingers were hot and trembling. “I was thinking about my parents. Objectively. I haven’t done that before. I knew I was alone. Everything is gone. We’re never going back to it again.”
“You grew up, Cheryl. We can’t be school kids any more.”
“Growing up—but even more than that, Jerry.” She waved her hand toward the hills. “Out there is death and horror, a world falling apart. So little of it has touched us really, but I feel it like a terrible nightmare.”
“We have to build a new world on—”
“I’m not talking about a world, Jerry.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, like the gentle lapping of the lake water on the stony beach. “Tonight I became a woman, and a woman makes the abstract into something personal. It’s the way we are. The world is screaming death in my soul. Death; death! And inside of me is a cry of life—far stronger, far more real. Let the politicians tear the world down; a woman brings it alive again.”
Suddenly she pressed her lips on mine. I felt a surge of excitement—like ice; like fire—blaze through my body. My arms tightened around her. “You’re sure, Cheryl?” I asked. “You’ve made up your mind?”
“Not by the old standards, Jerry. Not love—the way my father had it in the movies he made.”
We lay back on the knoll. The moon glowed above us, making a scarlet halo of her red hair. Her hands fumbled at my shirt. I felt the caress of her fingers on my chest…
Afterward Cheryl lay in my arms, the filmy web of her hair against my cheek.
She raised herself on her elbow and looked into my face, laughing softly. “You know, Jerry, I don’t think I can truthfully say I picked you for looks.” With her finger she traced the muscle football had built across my chest and belly. I felt no embarrassment, as I would have a week before.
The ecstasy burned in me again and I drew Cheryl against my breast.
And then our dream was shattered. Far away we heard a pistol shot and the high hum of an automobile motor. I pulled Cheryl to her feet and snatched up my rifle. We ran over the uneven ground toward the hotel.
VII. The City—Saturday morning Chen Phiang
I WALKED slowly away from my cousin’s home, carrying his strange gift in my hands.
I stopped in an alleyway where none of our men could see what I did, and I broke open a bottle by cracking the cap against a wall. The brown fluid was refreshing, sweet, in no way unpleasant. I drank it slowly, savoring the unfamiliar tang. This was a small thing, compared to the enormous crime I committed in rescuing the two intellectuals, yet the American drink had more meaning to me. It was a tangible act of defiance.
Nonetheless, it seemed an odd gift. Had my cousin understood the feeling of independence it would give me? Perhaps. But his eyes had said more than his words. “Drink no water.” For some reason that was important.
As I walked back to my hotel I passed the Soviet headquarters house. The sidewall was broken and burned, but there was no other damage. General Zergoff was still stationed there, for the heavy guard was still around the house. A red ambulance stood in the street. The rear door was open. Three doctors in Russian uniforms were examining a man strapped to a wheeled stretcher.
I saw General Zergoff storm out of the house, trailing a retinue of clerks. The General looked at the man on the stretcher. He issued orders to the doctors, chopping the air with his hand in the assertive gesture so typical of the political commissar. The doctors bundled the man back into the ambulance. The vehicle shot down the boulevard, its siren screaming.
I went into a dark booth far at the back and I opened another bottle of Coke. I drank it slowly and again I had that feeling of wellbeing that came with honest defiance. I was one of them and I was not afraid.
Sound trucks came through the streets, blasting an official bulletin issued by the Soviet High Command. We were not to be alarmed by the large number of casualties. The men were not victims of an American poison—the Fascist enemies of the people hadn’t that much ingenuity—but of their own conscientiousness. Some troops during the night had come down too close to the bombed areas. They were suffering minor radioactive burns. But they would be given expert care by Soviet physicians, and each man was automatically awarded the Order of Lenin for his courage.
The confusion in the streets was the situation I wanted. As another red ambulance swung past the door, I suddenly realized how I could get my two intellectuals out of the city.
I left the saloon and ran toward my cousin’s house.
VIII. The Valley—Saturday morning. Jerry Bonhill
BORIS YOROVICH lay on the walk, blood spilling over his shirt from a bullet wound in his shoulder. The Cadillac was gone. I bent over the Russian. “Clapper!” he whispered. He pointed weakly toward the door of the hotel.
“Take care of him, Cheryl,” I snapped. She nodded.
In the lobby I groped for the matches and lighted the oil lamp we had left as an emergency light on the registration desk. I saw Pat Thatcher. His skull was smashed. His shirt had been ripped open in Clapper’s eagerness to get the keys t
o the Cadillac.
Numbly I pulled the blanket over Pat’s face. For a moment I was paralyzed by grief. Thatcher’s murder had more meaning to me than the death of my own father.
I heard voices in the upper hall and I shook the weight of grief from my mind. One of the storage room doors burst open and Feodor Psorkarian hobbled across the threshold. The Cossack’s feet and hands were tied. He was working his head furiously to free himself from the yellow scarf gagging him. I cut him free. He cried his excited, Russian anger. Then, remembering, I wouldn’t understand him, he said in almost equally chaotic English,
“After him we go! That spy; that saboteur! He came; he threatened—like the secret police. Always the fear. Always the guns!” The Cossack pulled me toward the door. “Our jeep. You have the keys, my American friend. We still have time to stop them!”
I looked in his eyes. What I saw made my decision for me. I threw him my rifle. “O.K., Cossack, let’s go.”
We leaped into the jeep. I drove. Psorkarian steadied my rifle on the hood while he held his eye on the road ahead of us.
He was calm enough then to give a coherent picture of what had happened. Willie Clapper broke into the storage room, which the Cossack shared with Andrei Trenev. Clapper was armed with a pistol he had stolen from a village sporting goods shop that afternoon. He asked their help to escape. The Cossack refused.
After persuasion failed, Clapper tried threats. He said he would turn all the prisoners over to the secret police, but if the Cossack and Trenev would help him he promised them leniency. The Cossack had heard Russian promises before; he wasn’t buying any. Trenev, of course, was frightened into obedience. He stood at attention and saluted Clapper. Psorkarian swung his fist at Trenev, but Clapper struck the Cossack with the handle of his pistol.
We were two hundred yards behind the Cadillac when Clapper first spotted us. Andrei Trenev opened fire with his rifle. Feodor Psorkarian adjusted his sights casually. He muttered, “try to outrun a Cossack, will you?” He took deliberate aim and fired. The rear window of the Cadillac shattered.
He fired twice in rapid succession. Both rear tires on the Cadillac blew. The car lurched into the embankment, slid along the granite, and spun off the highway. We heard the crash of rending metal and glass as I jammed on the brakes.
The wreckage lay precariously suspended on a narrow ledge forty feet below the road. We heard no sound except the slow turning of a wheel suspended in space. The Cossack and I climbed down the rocks. Clapper was dead, the post of the steering column rammed like a lance through his chest. Andrei Trenev lay face up on the ledge, his right leg bent grotesquely beneath him. He was conscious; his face was twisted with pain and terror.
The Cossack stood over him, holding the rifle like a club. “Shall I finish him?”
“No!” I threw the back of my arm against his wrist. In his surprise Psorkarian almost lost his balance. “We’ll take him back to the village.”
We made a stretcher of our shirts and carried him back to the jeep. There was flask of vodka in the pocket; Psorkarian tipped it against Trenev’s lips and the pain washed slowly out of his eyes. The fear went with it.
“You’re helping me,” the boy whispered.
It was close to midnight when we returned to the hotel. We carried Trenev into the lobby and lay him on a lounge. The others were all waiting for us. Boris Yorovich sat propped in a chair, his shoulder wrapped with gauze. Janice Gage was beside him, holding his hand.
Hank said he would sit up with his patients. This was important for the restoration of his ego.
The next morning we buried Pat Thatcher beside the Negro’s grave, on the knoll overlooking the lake.
We were all there; even Andrei Trenev had been carried to the knoll on a stretcher. I was acutely aware of my own position. Subtly each of them acknowledged my leadership, the choice Pat had made. They were watching me, wondering if I could carry it off. I knew that, too. A kid of nineteen!—I felt one moment of cold panic, and Cheryl’s hand was in mine and I was a man again.
In dead silence I shook the hand of each of the Russians. I turned very deliberately and, with Cheryl beside me, walked back toward the hotel.
“Was that wise?” she asked. “So soon?”
“There’s nothing else we can do, Cheryl. Pat told me Clapper was bait as long as we kept him here. He’s dead; we can’t get rid of him, now. The Russians will keep sending men after him. We have to trust the ones we have. A military stand is ridiculous.”
And we didn’t have long to wait. Less than half an hour after the others returned to the hotel, we heard a motor on the road east of the village. I told Yorovich to give our Russians their submachine guns; we’d try the same type of ambush that had worked so successfully the day before.
I heard the truck motor. I heard Yorovich’s shout and the burst of gunfire. A confusion of voices. More gunfire. Then silence. Slow footsteps on the marble tile of the lobby. Feodor Psorkarian stood at the coffee shop door. He held the submachine gun at an angle in his hand. Smoke still curled from the barrel. Blood trickled from a wound in his arm.
“We didn’t do this as neatly as you did, Jerry,” he said. “Five we killed; only nine surrendered.”
“And our people?”
“Just this scratch.” He touched his wound negligently. “Andrei fought like a demon.
“There’s something else, Jerry. Three of the prisoners—and I’ll swear not a bullet touched them—are lying in the road spitting up blood. A couple of others look damn sick.”
I ran toward the street. “Where’s Hank Jenkins?”
“He’s already out there.”
IX. The Valley—Saturday afternoon. Dr. Stewart Roswell
BEFORE noon on the second day of the war George Knight and I escaped Los Angeles. Chen Phiang developed an amazing ingenuity.
Originally, the Communist soldier planned to take only Knight and myself out of Los Angeles. But Lin Yeng’s family went with us as well. “By tomorrow this will be a city of death. We have no reason to stay,” Lin said.
Six of us crowded into the body of the panel truck. It was hot and it became unbearably stuffy.
We remained locked in the back of the truck until we reached the Arrowhead highway at Running Springs. Chen Phiang got out, then, and opened the rear door. “I think there will be no more guard posts,” he said. “But perhaps it is not wise to stop here. I do not know your mountains.”
“By tomorrow it won’t matter,” Lin Yeng told him.
“The sickness?” his cousin asked. “Is it truly an American poison or—”
“A poison, yes. But it’s something they did to themselves.” Lin Yeng described the effect of radiation on the city water supply. The Chinese soldier grimaced. He looked at his uniform, wiping his hands over the rough cloth. Suddenly he ripped off the tunic and flung it away. He kicked off his boots and removed the paratrooper’s trousers. He stood naked on the deserted road, a powerful man having the muscular grace of a tiger. With his uniform gone, I seemed to see his face for the first time—the handsome, strongly intelligent face of a boy. His hair was shaved close. His eyes glowed with the hope of youth—the same idealism I had seen in my classrooms for as long as I had been teaching.
The Orientals did not have our western mores about modesty, and the Chinese family was undisturbed by what Chen Phiang had done.
Knight got out of the truck and hobbled a short distance, exercising his muscles. But I saw that it was very painful to him. His face went white and it was beaded with sweat. I helped him back to the truck. He leaned against the door, breathing hard.
“Stewart,” he said, “I told you this catastrophe gives us a magnificent opportunity. We mustn’t lose it.”
“Not all of us, I’m afraid, are going to see it quite the way you do.”
“If I could only persuade people to know the good that is in their own hearts! If I could talk to them—” He put his hand on my arm. “By tomorrow, Stewart, the troops in Los Angeles will be at our me
rcy. Sick men dying in agony. There are two things our people could do. We could take revenge. We could kill them all. But suppose for the first time in human history we met force and hatred with love!”
“You might pull off your miracle, Knight, if you could speak to every individual in Los Angeles as you have to me.”
Chen Phiang appeared wearing jeans and a plaid shirt. Back in the truck Lin Yeng and I rode in front with Chen, to give the others more room. Lin wanted us to drive as far as Big Bear; since it was larger than any other mountain resort, he thought we might have a chance of finding people there.
Once we stopped to round up some refugees. It was three hours before we found them all and helped them back to the truck.
Because we had stopped so long on the road, it was five o’clock in the afternoon—Saturday, the second day of the war—before our panel truck entered the village of Big Bear. A tall, broad-shouldered boy of nineteen—with the penetrating gaze of a man; a frightening kind of maturity—met us in front of the hotel. His name was Jerry Bonhill.
X. The Valley—Sunday night Jerry Bonhill.
THE water, as cold as a mountain spring, lashed over my body from the showerhead. Clean water, good water: we had it in our valley, while the city below the mountain stank with poison and death.
In the adjoining bedroom I heard static from my portable radio, and suddenly the clear, quiet voice of George Knight. It was nearly dusk Sunday night, the third day of the war. For twelve hours the Quaker had been broadcasting from the transmitter in the frame building behind Canster’s appliance shop.
Cheryl banged on the bathroom door. “They have it going again, Jerry!”
I grabbed a towel from the rack and went into the bedroom, mopping off the cold water while I listened to the broadcast. The Quaker’s patient, reasoned plea came in perfectly. I hoped to God the reception was as clear in Los Angeles.
Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) Page 16