Keith’s voice came squawking over the walkie-talkie. “So would you call that a safer accident than, um, one next week?”
“Safer, yes. Relatively speaking,” Duncan said. “Nobody enjoys slipping off a wall—but think about it, Keith. The face you’re climbing today is relatively smooth, there’s not much on it to catch an arm or a leg. Not so next week. That’s why I talk about keeping your lead short. You don’t want to fall more than a few feet off that climb.”
“Let’s haul if you’re ready, Phil,” Marty radioed.
“Right, I’m okay now.”
“Ground team south is ready to go.”
“Ground team north ready.”
“Chris, are you on?”
Christopher fumbled for the instrument’s talk button. “Ready,” he said. To himself, at least, his voice sounded shaky. There was something out-of-body about standing in clear sight of the others but being entirely alone.
The women on the ground had quit paying out static line to the climbers once they attained elevation, and tied off slack before they clipped in the weighted bags. On Christopher’s signal, Marty and Phil started reeling in, and the lower climbers coiled cords that they’d been trailing up the cliff, the other ends tied to the bottom of the mock banner. Marty was pulling in line a little faster than Phil, causing the two ends of the payload to drift apart.
“Spotter to north, slow it down just a little,” Christopher said into the microphone. On the day of the action he would keep an eye on the furled banner’s position and tilt, helping the teams to keep the weight balanced.
“Marty, watch your lean,” Duncan said. The leads were supposed to push into the wall while they hauled rope in overhand.
“Thanks, Dunc, roger that.”
“Both sides slow,” Christopher said, “we’re passing the lower climbers.”
Laura and Keith, on either side of the mock banner, guided the loaded sacs past their positions, pushing them away from the cliff face as the upper climbers inched the payload higher.
“Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me,” Marty sang out into the on-air silence.
“Banner is past the lower team. Laura and Keith, confirm you’ve got bottomside cords in hand.”
“North lower, paying out bottomside cord.”
“South lower, ditto.”
“Okay, fellas, you can pick up the pace again.”
“Aye, he’s a hard master,” Phil grumbled.
“Sure, it ain’t a job for shirkers.”
“You guys can file grievances,” Christopher said. “After next week.”
Once they got the load all the way up, Marty and Phil tied it to topside anchors. Then they rehearsed the unfurling, paying out line that in the actual event would weave through grommeted eyelets spaced so the banner could open in folds, like a roman shade. Keith and Laura would tie the bottom of the banner to the bridge, stretching the synthetic fabric as flat as they could without risking a tear. Even with wind holes, the banner would pull at the ropes like an enormous sail.
Nora’s whistleblower hadn’t come through after all. Or, to be precise, he had, but his photos of a failed breed of GMO tomato were visually indistinguishable from strangely shaped organic heirlooms. For the banner they were falling back on Photoshopped caricatures of mutant produce. Obvious fakes, rhetoric that they intended to read like cartoons—not evidence. As he watched his comrades rehearse, and imagined their action on the bridge a week from that morning, Christopher could practically hear Marshall’s sneer. Stack your tatty little banner against a single week’s output of the biotech lobby, his brother might say. Every venture you and your bleeding-heart friends pull off amounts to chickenshit and chump change.
“South, you’re getting ahead now. Both sides slow down, the lower team’s falling behind.” A breeze soughed through the treetops above him, and Christopher shivered at the thought of the wind up on the cliff face.
He didn’t need Marshall’s arguments. He had plenty of his own. Political slush funds and planted news, slanted science, highly paid professionals convincing shoppers that GMOs are perfectly safe. That was biotech’s side of the scale. On the other pan, a raggedy band of activists, a traffic jam, and a few visual metaphors.
“Better,” he radioed once Laura and Keith caught up, the bottom lines no longer sagging.
—
They ran the ersatz banner up and down the cliff several times, to take full advantage of the climb. Christopher felt low. Nothing had gone awry since Phil regained the cliff face, but he couldn’t see past the mess of contingencies they had to cover on the day of the action, contingencies that precision rehearsals and quality equipment couldn’t prevent. If the fog came in, or the banner got hung up, or wind ripped the Tyvek sheet away from its ropes and grommets—would they be able to spin the press coverage anyway? What if one of the cars broke down, or if highway patrol merged into their ranks?
And if everything went right there was still the big picture. How likely was it that even Chagall could advance the issues at a scale that would matter? Even if he made good on his promise, even if he delivered an action that soared past banners hung on bridge towers. Even if Christopher’s own polemic were successfully hacked into a hundred thousand e-mailboxes, onto dozens of newspaper sites. Then what?
Novartis would chuck a million more into campaign coffers.
Monsanto could double the size of its PR budget.
DuPont? They’d sponsor a score of studies to shore up claims that mutant corn syrup and cloned burgers yield longer, happier lives.
Christopher had to force his attention to the job at hand. There was no going back now. He’d written to the saboteur, accepting that his work should be kept under wraps until Chagall released it. Taking in the landscape, the soaring granite, the undergrowth budding into springtime, he recalled words he’d written into the manifesto:
It’s a pitched battle, and we’re all losing. Even those who profit from genetic engineering are going down to crushing defeat.
Perhaps that doesn’t matter in the grandest of schemes. Relative to the age and vastness of the universe, perhaps poisoning our own little planet doesn’t count for much. But morally, if we allow life on Earth to be destroyed by human negligence?
Morally the human race will have failed.
The sun shone bright into the sparkle and white of the river, glinting off enduring stone, warming the brittle duff.
“Payload’s on the ground, north and south,” he said into the walkie-talkie. “Climbers, you’re cleared to descend.”
What else could they do? Give up?
The bridge blockade would work or it wouldn’t. Ditto for whatever Chagall had in the pipeline.
They would take all the risk they could tolerate, and resist the unbearable for a little while longer.
TWENTY-FOUR
Brendan descended the back stairs stealthily, though no one was home to notice: Chris and Marty were drilling the banner action on a cliff face near Placerville; Jonah was still in school at two-thirty on a Tuesday; the others were at work. He hopped the fence, squeezed through a gap between adjacent buildings on Sanchez Street, then circled and backtracked his way up to Waller. He owed it to Adolfo to take precautions. Brendan stopped in a doorway to watch the street, busying himself with a cigarette. A few minutes later the 24-Divisadero rounded a curve and coasted toward the intersection. He jogged over to the opposite corner and boarded the bus.
When he reached the address given over the phone, the Prince Albatross didn’t look like much. The pub’s windows were shuttered and flyspecked, a weatherworn sign hung from a bent, wrought-iron scroll. Inside, the single room was deep and inscrutably dim. As his eyes adjusted Brendan took in an old fellow at the near end of the bar wearing dentures and a watch cap, nursing a watery draft. The short, round barman leaned against his cash register, staring at a television.
The walls had been papered over with book jackets, tacked in overlapping layers and no apparent order. Brendan hadn’t expe
cted the whiff of literary North Beach from a bar at the western edge of the city. A lot of poetry, he saw, and only about half in English. Brendan recognized a García Lorca volume that he’d once owned himself. Goethe and Rilke and Hegel in German; a strong representation in French.
He distracted the bartender from his soccer match for long enough to draw a pint of pilsner. Brendan could see into the room now. Adolfo had already arrived. Even in shadow, his hatchet-faced profile was unmistakable. At an alcove table next to a sorry little bank of pinball machines he was sitting with somebody else, a stranger.
That hadn’t been the plan.
Heat pulsed through Brendan’s body, and receded. He stared at the two men, feeling a knot in his belly grow heavy and hard.
The man who’d sent him into Mexico looked over and gave a subtle nod. Brendan approached, taking slow, deliberate steps, and sat opposite Adolfo’s companion, his back to the bar. “I didn’t realize our discussion would be so well attended,” he said in an undertone.
“This is … José,” Adolfo said. The other man was small and stocky, with a broad nose and dark, sad eyes. A Mayan, Brendan assumed. The stranger’s expression didn’t change when he nodded a greeting; he could have been wearing a mask. “José is part of my organization. I vouch for him.”
“I mean no disrespect, José,” Brendan said across the worn wooden table. He wasn’t certain the Mayan understood, but the arrangement was to speak in English. Brendan turned to his right. “I thought we agreed to a frank discussion. That’s only possible between old friends.”
“Of course.” Adolfo scrutinized him carefully. “In a few minutes, José will step away for a smoke, maybe a little walk. Then we can have a talk between old friends. I can explain why we are three instead of two.”
Brendan didn’t reply, and José kept silent.
“You look thin,” Adolfo said.
“I’ve been in a place where there was little to eat.”
“You made a great sacrifice. Only a man of great honor would endure such a sacrifice silently.”
“I was sorry to lose touch with my friends.”
“Your friends were sorry, too. Their attempts to establish contact were refused.”
Brendan sipped from his pilsner and set the glass back on the table, taking his time. “After no word for many long and difficult weeks, one loses confidence that old friends can be trusted.”
“And yet a man of honor keeps his secrets.”
“He does, yes.”
“These secrets are kept even from a man of honor’s attorney, would you agree?”
“Of course,” Brendan said, permitting himself a bitter smile. “Especially from such a man’s attorney. One wonders whether an attorney is a man of honor himself.”
The Mayan appeared to answer Brendan with the barest flicker of amusement in his eyes. Lawyer jokes were the same all over. José placed both hands on the table—blunt peasant hands with rough-edged nails—and gestured toward the street. He hadn’t uttered a word. If Adolfo had given a signal, Brendan missed it. José walked slowly away from their table, pulling a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket as he neared the door.
“He will give us a few minutes,” Adolfo said. “Perhaps—”
“I’d like to start with some questions,” Brendan interrupted.
Adolfo watched while José pulled the door shut behind him, then nodded.
“Why was I stopped in … that particular place, so far past the border?”
Adolfo answered carefully. “There was no tip-off,” he said. “Just bad luck. The Federale chingadero who stopped you, we found out he has a reputation, very rough, very suspicious of norteamericanos.”
“No tip-off you know about. What happened to the escort?”
“Did you see him?”
“I saw a white truck, a Dodge. Picked me up just outside Puebla. He was keeping pretty close, but I didn’t see him in the mirror when the Federales pulled me over.”
Adolfo frowned. “A Dodge? Are you sure it wasn’t a Chevy?”
“Yes, right—a Chevy,” Brendan deadpanned.
Adolfo let a few seconds pass, acknowledging Brendan’s distrust. “Sí, that was him. He saw you with the Federales, and kept driving until he could get off the road, to hide. When you didn’t drive past, he went back. You were gone, and the truck was guarded by police.”
“I didn’t see him pass.”
“I don’t know why,” Adolfo said. “Maybe the police made you face a different way?”
“How long did he wait before turning around?”
“Twenty or thirty minutes. That is what he told us.”
“How do you know he wasn’t working with the police?”
“This compañero was checked very carefully, before and after. He did not betray us.”
Brendan saw that Adolfo would continue to act as if he and his organization were above suspicion. “Okay, let’s put that aside. What was I carrying?”
Adolfo leaned in to speak more softly. “There were only the things we discussed.”
“How do you know?”
“You paid a very great price for what happened, my friend, but this was difficult for us too.” He scanned the room nervously. “There was an investigation. We found out everything. The contents of the truck, we went over it many times. There was not one weapon. Everyone knows how it is when a norteamericano brings even ammunition across the border. We would not risk it. If someone wanted to move this kind of cargo, there are Mexicanos who could drive.”
“Then the government made up evidence?”
“Sí.”
“Porqué?”
Adolfo gave an unhappy shrug. “We don’t know why. Maybe the Federales stole those things, from a drug gangster or some other police. They need to keep it secret, so they pretend the guns are from you. Now they can do what they want. Sell them, use them, give them to grupos paramilitares. Or maybe they don’t want to admit they stop medical supplies and radios, that even these simple things must be smuggled to the comunidades. Any of these could be true.”
“So why did it take so goddamned long to attempt contact?”
Adolfo looked down at the table. “We were not ready for trouble in Oaxaca. Chiapas, yes. At the border, of course. This was a place we failed you. My friends and I feel very bad for this.”
Brendan stared fixedly at the other man. Adolfo looked up only when the bar’s door opened. The Mayan had returned. “José has come from very high up,” Adolfo said, explaining quickly. “He is here to thank you for helping our effort in this very hard circumstance.”
Brendan didn’t bother to reply. So José was an emissary. Did that matter to him? He didn’t know much more than he had when he walked into the place. Bad luck, Adolfo said. What would José add? Whatever the Mayan acknowledged implicated him in a smuggling ring. José hadn’t come to explain why they’d left him to shit fourteen months down the pit latrines at Tlaxitlán. They’d shown up to make sure he hadn’t squealed.
José resumed his seat across the table from Brendan. He looked to Adolfo. Adolfo nodded. “We do not exist without our friends,” José began, speaking through a thick accent. His voice was pitched low but seemed somehow reedy, projected from high in his throat. “You are our very great friend. El Comité is knowing your sacrifice and your—lealtad—”
“Loyalty,” Adolfo prompted.
The envoy had abridged the full name of the Zapatistas’ central command. The Committee. Brendan shifted in his chair.
“—is knowing your loyalty,” José continued. “We are struggle to make better life for poor indígenas. But we cannot same time make hard life for our friend. Our struggle, your struggle. We are same.”
José looked to Adolfo, who reached inside his jacket and pulled out a thick manila envelope. Adolfo set the envelope down on the table. Brendan broke out in a mortified sweat.
“You must make life here in Estados Unidos,” José said. “Is hard after long time away. This is for help you, very sma
ll, and show our thanking.”
Brendan’s mouth felt as if it were filled with paste. “I am honored that our friends in the South are concerned about my small, unimportant life.” While Adolfo murmured a translation, Brendan took a long pull of pilsner. Adolfo turned back to him. Brendan set his pint back on the table. The knock of glass on wood rippled out over the television’s shapeless murmur. “The envelope is … ?”
“Three thousand,” Adolfo said softly. “A small token—”
Brendan held up his hand. “I do not want anything—not anything—taken from the hands and mouths of my friends in the South,” he said, addressing both men. “That is not the reason I asked to speak with you.”
Again, Adolfo whispered a translation, though the Mayan seemed to have caught the gist. José nodded. “We know you are not asking this. We see you are very loyalty to our struggle.”
Adolfo picked up the thread for his comrade. “Our friends know you helped us from political commitment. But also they see you must build a life here, from many broken pieces. This is respect for your part in our work. El Comité does not abandon its friends.”
José nodded approval. “You must take.”
“We have great sorrow that this must be our last meeting,” Adolfo continued formally. “So we can continue forward without each one putting the other in danger.”
Brendan raised an eyebrow, astonished. “The purpose of meeting should be to discover why this happened—why our work last year put us at risk. If we don’t figure that out we’ll repeat the same failure, again and again.”
Adolfo looked to José, who remained silent. “Our investigation was complete,” he said.
They were shutting him out. The money wasn’t a gesture of respect. José was handing him severance pay. By taking this envelope you agree to vacate the premises. Don’t call us, we won’t call you back.
The other men watched him realize what was happening. Brendan examined the stranger with open suspicion. Maybe José wasn’t with the Zapatistas at all. Maybe there had been guns in the truck. Maybe Adolfo had known ahead of time and maybe he hadn’t. How had the other contact fit in, the chunky, hard-faced Central American who had been with Adolfo when they first proposed the run to Chiapas? “Tell me,” Brendan said, his voice now rimed with icy control. “What ever happened to César?”
Consequence Page 19