by Alan Rodgers
Green paused in the middle of setting his coffee on the table between them, and looked Graham in the eye long and deep and hard. After a moment he’d nodded, finished setting down his coffee, and sighed.
“I think I can understand that, Perkins,” he said. “Hell — I can see that, if you know what I mean.”
Graham didn’t know what he meant, but he smiled anyway, warmly as he could, and nodded in agreement.
Paul Green’s grin was almost bashful. “I remember — I remember . . .” he said. “When I was just a boy, I always said to my Momma, I said, ‘Momma, it’s an evil world out there. And somebody’s got to do something about it. And Momma, that somebody is gonna be me.’ That’s what I said. And my Momma, she’d smile warm enough to light up the whole room, ‘cause I was her boy Paul. I’ll tell you, Perkins — ain’t no woman can smile like my Momma could. All my life I been watching, and I ain’t never seen a one could do it. Not a woman out there can hold a candle to my Momma.” As he spoke he took out a thick, vile-looking black cigar and lit the thing. The smoke it gave off smelled, somehow, a little worse than the cigar looked.
Graham coughed. “Do you really think the world is that bad a place, Paul? Honestly, I’d be the last man in the world to say that we lived in Eden . . . But evil. . . ? I don’t know.”
Paul Green’s tiny eyes seemed to grow even smaller. And angry; the effect made Graham think of a rough New England storm, welling up on the horizon. He sighed. “Perkins — how can you say a thing like that? You’re a bright man, and you’re not a bad man, I don’t think. You’ve been living in this world a good fifty years. Have your eyes been closed all that time?”
Green paused a long moment, waiting for an answer, but Graham didn’t know what to say. There was invective in Green’s voice, so much of it that he was half afraid Green was going to put his hands around his neck and throttle him. He frowned, and worked hard to keep the anger and the fear he felt from showing on his face. “No, Paul. I wouldn’t say my eyes had been closed. But I can tell you: the world I live in isn’t an evil one. It may have its faults, but it isn’t evil.”
“You’re wrong, Perkins. Bad-wrong. Have you ever read your Bible? Have you noticed how much this nation — this whole damned world — is like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah? This world needs cleansing, Perkins. The kind of cleansing that only the fire of righteousness can bring!”
Cleansing by fire?
Green had cleared his throat, and flushed, as though he’d said much more than he’d intended to. And then he’d changed the subject completely, and steered conversation as far from the subject as he could.
But Graham had heard what he’d said. Just as he heard half a dozen more times over that day and the next, when Green had let himself slip. By the time their “getting to know each other” time was over, Graham was more than half convinced that the man was crazy enough to start a nuclear war.
Damn it, the idea was crazy — too crazy to believe. No one in his right mind wanted to blow up the world. And how could anyone who wasn’t sane get as far through the political process as Green had? And Graham had already accepted the nomination. Sure, he could pull himself out of the race — but doing that would almost certainly put an end to his political career.
Looking back, Graham knew that had been what had really stopped him. Cowardice. Two thirds of his life, now, he’d been in politics, and he hadn’t had the courage to leave that much of his life behind him.
The knowledge shamed him.
Outside his window the mob roared, surging in the street. It was Paul Green’s blood that they wanted, and not Graham’s; if he told himself so often enough and hard enough, Graham thought, he might actually begin to believe it.
Paul Green.
Green had been . . . well, stable wasn’t a word that could really apply to a man like Paul Green. But it almost might; in the first fifteen months of his Presidency Green had proven himself capable and not nearly the lunatic Graham had feared he might be. And then, three months ago. . . .
When he thought about it Graham could almost find himself sympathizing with the man. His wife had gone off to Russia — ostensibly on a “good will” mission, though the fact of the matter was that the woman was using her position to travel as a VIP tourist — and she’d fallen ill. Some minor thing; food poisoning or some such.
Senseless — so senseless!
And the Russian doctor who was treating her had made a terrible, terrible error, given her penicillin against the possibility of infection. Which would have been no problem at all, if not for that fact that the First Lady had been allergic to penicillin. Severely allergic; the reaction had killed her within twenty minutes.
Paul Green hadn’t been the same man since. Bellicose, belligerent, constantly trying to provoke the Russians into . . . into God knew what. And now this: sending a friend into Russia on a suicide mission. Sending him into the country as a tourist, carrying a portable nuclear device.
The Russians had caught the man, of course. They weren’t stupid; they took reasonable precautions. And what had Paul Green done? Had he acted ashamed for attempting something vile? No. Just the opposite. He’d demanded that they set his friend loose.
Now he was threatening to send the whole world to kingdom come if they didn’t do as he asked. There wasn’t much chance of that. Or so the Intelligence people had said this afternoon when they’d briefed Graham. The Pentagon had a firm hold over the people in the silos, and there was no way Paul Green was going to be allowed to call a first strike while impeachment proceedings were underway.
The man from Intelligence had seemed relatively certain on that critical point, but even so he hadn’t managed to convince Graham — not beyond doubt, at any rate.
Somewhere out in the riot outside his window, a woman was screaming with rage.
³ ³ ³
Chapter Five
FRIDAY
July Fifteenth
Leigh Doyle was a would-be.
A would-be writer.
Oh, she made her living writing, all right. Made a good living, too; good enough to send her to Moscow for her vacation this year, just as it had sent her to Kenya last year and to Rio de Janeiro the year before. But the living she made came from writing the worst possible sort of trash for a supermarket tabloid, the National Interlocutor.
Leigh didn’t harbor any illusions about the National Interlocutor. It was a rag, a godawful rag, and the work she did for it had no value whatsoever. None outside the wage that it paid her. Sure: she was one of the paper’s best correspondents. She had a real knack for sifting through the news, sifting through the British and South American papers to find those unlikely stories that were the Interlocutor’s grist. She had a knack for tracking down and following up those stories, too; she always managed to find fresh material and fresh angles that the other tabloids missed. Still, ephemera was ephemera, and Leigh didn’t have a problem being honest with herself about the fact.
Just the same it pained her. Leigh had ambition to be a poet or a novelist or maybe both. Despite that ambition she’d finished neither a single short story nor even a poem in the ten years since she’d left college. Whatever success she had as a writer of warped facts only added bitterness to her failure as a real writer.
A month ago it’d finally occurred to her that there was something childish about getting bitter at her own failure when the essence of that failure was the fact that she needed to sit down and get to work. What she needed to do, she’d decided, was take some time away from the Interlocutor, away from the world, and sit down and write. Vacation was the natural time to do it, but by then she’d already made plans for Moscow. Worse: she’d already made the kind of bargain-rate reservations that can’t be canceled. And she’d already paid for them. That’d been a long, hard, moment — her career as a serious writer pitted inside her against the vacation to Moscow she’d been planning fo
r years, the vacation that’d already cost two months’ pay. And then it’d occurred to her that there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t have both. She had her laptop computer; more than once she’d used it to write up Interlocutor stories on planes or in hotel rooms, stories that she couldn’t get over the phone. You couldn’t get much farther away from the Interlocutor than Moscow, it seemed to Leigh. The paper’s owner, Bill Kerrigan, was a crusty old Reformer who liked to wander around the office lecturing anyone who’d sit still on the virtues of capitalism and the American way.
And certainly if she could write garbage while she traveled — certainly there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t write something serious on that little machine.
That was what she told herself. She hadn’t even started anything on the long plane ride from New York. Hadn’t written a word in the two days since she’d arrived. And here she was in a fashionable hard-currency restaurant called Tovarich, struggling to find a story to write as she ate breakfast at the very table where the First Lady had come down with food poisoning two months before.
There were stories all around her, she thought. None of them were anything she could do justice to.
Over there, two tables away in the direction of the door, was a Pakistani couple — or were they Indian? For that matter, they could be Afghans. No, they had to be Indian. She was berating him quietly, talking to him sternly in low, harsh tones. No Moslem wife could talk to her husband that way. Not if she planned a long life. And the husband (were they married? Leigh thought so, but there was no way to be certain) the husband was this big barrel-chested giant of a man, six-foot-four in his stocking feet if he was an inch, and he looked as much like a small animal cornered and under the lash as a man possibly could while he sat in a chair.
And over there — near the big window by the door. Four men dining alone at small tables. Each of them darker, more furtive, more suspicious than the one beside him. Where am I, she asked herself, a guest at a convention for spies?
That was a story, all right. But what did Leigh know about spy novels? And anyway, spy novels were just thrillers, or mysteries, or whatever they were. They weren’t poetry. No; their story wasn’t the story she wanted to tell.
Sitting beside the wall at the table to her right was another man, a man nothing like the suspicious ones in the front. He was alone, just as each of the others were, but where the others seethed with dark intentions and half-hidden motivations — this man was sad looking. Lonely, even. Leigh felt for him; she had an urge to speak to him, to try to drag him out of whatever it was that put that soulful ache into his eyes. . . . No. She mustn’t do that, she realized after only a moment. The thing that caused that sadness in him was something darker and more dangerous than anything inside the spies.
Spies? Whatever they were. It was the KGB in this country, wasn’t it? An organization like the CIA, the FBI, and some dictator’s secret police, all at once. Those men had to be KGB agents, unless they really were spies from some other country. Which didn’t seem likely; any spy as obvious as those men were would get himself arrested in short order.
The sad-looking man closed the book he’d been reading. Turned to Leigh and looked her in the eye. Had he seen her watching him? She was being obvious herself, she realized. Obviously what? She hoped that no one would mistake her for a spy.
She had to stop thinking like this. She was becoming paranoid as if she were a spy.
“Do you have the time?” the sad man asked. “I think my watch has stopped.”
His accent was American. With the faintest drawl — the kind of accent you hear in the voices of people in southern Indiana.
Which was when it finally occurred to her: That’s what I’d look like. If I were a spy and I didn’t want to be obvious, I’d make myself seem like this man does. And I’d ask questions as innocent as that one. And I’d keep my eyes open, and I’d watch.
She looked at her watch, flustered. It read nine-thirty; for a moment Leigh couldn’t remember whether or not she’d ever reset it to local time. She must have. It looked like nine-thirty in the morning outside. And she was eating breakfast, wasn’t she?
“Half past nine,” she said. “But I wouldn’t set your watch on my say-so if I were you. I’m still not sure which day it is.”
The man smiled, and when he did most of the sadness seemed to fall away from him. “Oh, it’s Friday morning, all right. No question about that.”
He was a story, Leigh decided. Just not any story she wanted to tell. Something down in her gut told Leigh that telling this man’s story would be a powerful and unwelcome intrusion.
A waiter came by, refilled her coffee, refilled the man’s. When he was gone the man reached out, extended his hand to Leigh. She hesitated only a moment before shaking hands with him.
“I’m Jack Hightower,” he said. “Here on business from Cincinnati. Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise. Leigh Doyle. Here on vacation from White Plains. In Westchester, north of New York City.”
The man cocked an eyebrow. “Vacation? Here and now? You are one brave lady.”
Leigh smiled. “I like to think so.”
The man pursed his lips. He looked worried — too worried to be a spy. “Did you manage to catch the news this morning?” And suddenly it occurred to Leigh that there was no way he could be a spy. No spy could ever look that worried. Not over a question that simple. “Is the President still talking like a lunatic?”
What? The President talking like a lunatic?
Leigh made her living reading and reworking news, but she didn’t tend to concern herself overmuch with the kind of news you find in the headlines; the front page was the one part of the papers that didn’t concern her directly. It was the one part of the paper she could afford to ignore, and she ignored it with a passion born of reading too much copy.
The only news she could ever remember having read for pleasure, in fact, was very old news indeed. A year ago she’d picked up a hardcover collection of Hemingway’s dispatches from the Spanish civil war — back in the thirties. Beautiful stuff, Leigh thought. More like stories than they were like news reports. If all news were written like that she might even get a measure of satisfaction from her work. None of it was, of course. No one wrote like Hemingway. And no one in the papers even tried to.
Every once in a while her ignorance caught up with her in the worst possible way. Leigh had a sudden sinking feeling that this was just such a time.
The truth was, of course, that her situation was much worse than that. In fact, it was even worse than the warnings of her friends. People had kept telling her that this was no time when anyone in her right mind ought to be taking a vacation in Russia. She’d ignored them, of course. Most of her friends were Reformers. They always talked like that about Russia.
“No,” she said, “I didn’t manage to catch the news. What’s the latest you’ve heard?”
“I ran into someone from the Embassy on my way here,” he said. His voice was very quiet. “The President’s declared a state of unlimited nuclear emergency.”
A phone rang somewhere not too far away. Somewhere over in the direction of the kitchen.
Unlimited nuclear emergency.
The man was planning to start a nuclear war. And here Leigh was, on the wrong side of the shooting gallery.
I should have gone to Australia this year. I knew it. Knew it.
That was when it finally began to occur to Leigh exactly what the story was she had to tell. Just a moment before the five KGB agents at the front of the restaurant got up and crossed the room and took her and the sad-eyed man into custody.
³ ³ ³
They took Leigh and the sad-faced man in a great, dark car that looked like a limousine from the nineteen-fifties. Two of the KGB men came with them, and all the while as they drove quickly through the twisted Moscow streets they kept
their guns leveled at Leigh’s heart. And at Jack Hightower’s.
The guns didn’t shake Leigh, because she did not see them. Not for more than a moment. She saw only the streets and structures that were the city of Moscow. And beyond the city she saw her world, balanced at the edge of war and self destruction.
And she thought of Hemingway.
How would he see this? she asked herself. What would Hemingway write if he were here and now, writing dispatches from the front lines of a war that was everywhere in the world all at once?
When she held herself still and quiet as she could, Leigh thought that she could hear his voice. Writing the story of the world she lived in; telling the tale of the city of Moscow poised at the edge of thermonuclear annihilation.
They took her and the sad-eyed man to a barracks somewhere in a high, wide-windowed building. And left them there with a hundred other Americans. Others, too; Germans, British, French. She hardly noticed any of them; she went directly to the window, where she stood and watched and listened for hours.
Until it grew dark.
And then she looked around her, and saw that sometime during the day someone had brought the bags she’d left in her hotel room into the barracks that was their prison. She went to them, took her laptop computer from its case, and wrote the story that she’d heard all day.
It wasn’t Hemingway, and Leigh knew that it wasn’t, but all the same it was work she was proud of. And right there at the end of the world that was all that was necessary.
When she was done she saw that their jailers had supplied them with phones, and saw from the fact that most of them were in use that the phones were working.
And because the story that had told itself to her cried desperately to be told as soon as it possibly could, she called the office of the Interlocutor, back in White Plains, and used her computer to send the story to them over the telephone wire.