Contraband

by George Foy

  A friend of his father’s who lived in Jackson Heights had introduced him to the Schweik Club. It was a glorified bierhall, a fifties ginmill decorated with cheap and varnished wood and pictures of Slotj Castle and the High Tatras. The neighborhood it stood in once was solid Middle European. It had been taken over by newer, more miserable waves of immigrants since the club was founded but the old men still came here every night to drink and tell lies to each other in Czech or Slovak or Sudeten German.

  The pilot got to the club shortly before ten. He ordered a Budweiser – the original kind, from Bohemia – and listened to the hard ‘r’s of the first languages he had ever known. A white-haired man in a green trilby hat got up and announced that the secretary of the Masaryk Society had a report to make. Another codger stood up in his booth and stated that the society had conducted four more interviews of former Czech government officials since the last meeting, without coming any closer to verifying the identity of the mysterious individual with a broken nose who was spotted leaving the presidential palace around the time of the Czech president’s alleged suicide in 1947.

  ‘What do you mean, “alleged suicide”?’ a chubby man with bubblegum-pink cheeks shouted from the bar. ‘Surely our great and noble allies would never have stooped to anything so underhanded. The Russians are our friends!’

  ‘So are the Germans,’ someone said.

  ‘The Germans love us!’ another voice agreed.

  ‘The World War is over.’

  ‘So is the Cold War.’

  A tall man got to his feet. He wore a thick wool cap. His eyebrows were very bushy and his nose was running.

  ‘Truly we have much to be thankful for,’ he said in a deep and measured voice. ‘The European Union annexed Silesia to take pressure off our northern borders. Everyone knows what a threat the Polish tanks were to Prague.’

  He cleared his throat, and wiped his nose with one sleeve.

  ‘Nasty tongues among us would point out that the EC troops were in fact seventy percent German. For shame! The Germans have never had anything but the best interests of all Czechs at heart.’

  ‘Same with the Russians,’ the chubby man insisted, banging his stein on the table.

  ‘And if they did deal with Masaryk,’ another pointed out, ‘surely they used only the most gentle persuasion, like a mother’s touch?’

  ‘In any case they did us a favor,’ a third chimed in. ‘Who needs trouble and strife? Masaryk would have ended up causing no end of problems; that much is obvious.’

  ‘I knew Molotov personally,’ the chubby man added. ‘A charming fellow. He actually danced with the Pole, Berman, cheek to cheek they danced, while Stalin wound the gramophone. Molotov wanted to warn Berman what Stalin had in store for the Jews. Stalin grinning and grinding away at the handle while the men danced with each other. They played waltzes, I think.’

  The fellow in the trilby ignored the chubby man. He would accept donations, he announced. The society needed more funds, he concluded, for search engines; some of the old NKVD files could be accessed through the ’nets, if you knew where to look. Money also was required to buy medication for interviewees, most of whom were old, and sick. That was the end of the report.

  The pilot went back outside. Even the Schweik Club had too much going on tonight. He got in the Chevy, then changed his mind. He decided to walk, and took his chartcase and the boxful of tools back to the Schweik Club for safekeeping. The ECM-pak he kept on his shoulder. You did not leave anything in cars in this part of Queens. In fact, you did not even leave cars, unless they were as old and beat-up as his Chevy.

  Everything seemed stark and frozen here after the highway, the bayou, the blue Gulf seas. The houses stood in right-angled ruins of black brick. The half inch of snow already fallen only hardened the edges of the black. Fire escapes looked like grids erected to measure soot and darkness. Flames roaring in metal trash cans consumed color faster than they created it. Shapes flickered in and out of the chiaroscuro; kids wearing motorized rollerblades with walkie-talkie headsets; men in threes, standing next to all-terrain jeeps. A tee-dee danced by himself, eyes closed on a street corner, the thirteen radios, Walkmen, and portable TVs strung around his neck all going at once.

  A woman clad only in a cheap ski jacket lurched out of the shadows. Occasionally, the sharp ripping of automatic weapons sounded in the distance.

  This was Fisk Avenue, aka 69th Street, locally known as Ice Alley. People in this neighb had not discovered or could not afford the laid-back delights of jisi yomo and still relied on cooked synthetic cocaine to snap their minds off where they lived. The ’hood was currently in the throes of a turf dispute between an Ecuadorian ice gang called the Putamadres and a general drugs-and-guns cartel run by Kurdish tribesmen. The pilot walked purposefully, without looking right or left, and the ice lookouts watched him, pulled their bulletproof baseball caps lower over their brows, mumbled in their headsets, and left him alone, because any white man who walked by himself in this area after midnight was either an undercover cop, or too crazy to mess with in any case.

  After a mile or so of walking, the chemicals of risk and exercise brought him some kind of relaxation. The snow helped, filling in sidevision so you got the illusion of drunkenness, without the motor problems.

  But the inchoate anger that had spawned his highway dreams continued to rage inside him. It still fed on grief; it still had nowhere to go; it still asked questions he could not answer.

  Like, How had there been a cutter at the rendezvous at the Double Headed Shots?

  He went into a Korean bodega and bought a bag of Sausalito cookies with milk chocolate and macadamia nuts. He opened the bag and stashed it in one of the secret pockets of his denim jacket for easy access.

  He munched on the cookies as he walked.

  His anger about Eltonjohn felt better than the guilt he used to feel over Roberto, however it brought a separate problem. Guilt always furnished a scapegoat. Anger was directed outward, but against what? The BON, a semi-covert arm of a secretive committee within the massive federal bureaucracy of Washington?

  Or Bokon – Bokon Taylay – whom nobody really knew but who might, or might not, be one of the unknown people in the secret arm of the faceless committee?

  The pilot kept walking. Fisk Avenue turned into Northern Boulevard which ran under the elevated subway line. The tracks towered high on cast-iron beams that once had been beautifully scrolled but were now encrusted with ropes of rust. Beside the tracks stood rows of what had been fancy nineteenth-century brick town houses. The French windows of the town houses, that long ago framed soft still lifes of silk and crystal and trays of fruit tarts, were all broken or blown out. Candles and lanterns moved in the dark doorways. Fires dimmed and glowed under sculpted mantelpieces that first were blocked when central heating was installed and until recently had not seen a real flame in seventy years. But the gas and electricity were shut off now, the fireplaces needed again for light, and heat.

  As the pilot walked through the shadows of the El supports, he saw people standing in the doorways beside the stairs. They were dressed in layers to withstand the cold: head and shoulders cloaked in blankets, feet wrapped in plastic and rags. The scene seemed familiar, a square set-piece from his childhood. He suddenly remembered where he’d seen it before – in black-and-white lithographs of London from an old leatherbound hard-copy of David Copperfield that lived in his parents’ bookshelf. New York now, like London then, had spawned whole neighborhoods where everybody who was too poor or too sick – too fucked up or drugged out to slot into the chain reaction of ‘normal’ society – came to pass the winter. No UCC-card for these people, with the bar codes that held your bank and Visa account and office key code; no credit or reference for these men and women to bootstrap themselves into sudden productivity. The forms changed but the substance remained the same. Far from heralding a new world, the coming of the millennium had shipped large portions of the American population straight back to the 1800s.


  A train crawled over the El from the Flushing end of the line. It was so covered with soot and the new Alstick graffiti-paint that it was black. Its two headlights shone like jack-o’-lantern eyes. As it passed overhead, the ground shook and the rotten beams groaned. Flakes of rust rained onto the street. Because it was so cold every wheel of the subway cars, as it hit the bolted connections between lengths of track, bridged a gap of temperature and voltage, causing huge showers of sparks to explode from the joints like fireworks. People in the town houses moved to their second-floor windows to watch the free show. The sparks burst right at window level and beneath hooded blankets the people’s faces shone yellow, pink, blue. The children were silent but some of their mothers laughed like kids. Others gestured wildly.

  It looked like a scene from hell.

  Perhaps – so the pilot fantasized as he watched the Number Seven train spark and clatter into the distance – perhaps that train did not run from Flushing, Queens, to lower Manhattan on a sort-of-regular schedule established by the Transit Authority. Perhaps this El – or at least certain trains, certain unlisted, unscheduled departures – formed a special line that hooked together not different streets but different centuries; something to take a ride on when you got fooled into thinking your own era, with its multiplexed ’nets and space stations, had somehow managed to evade the hard realities of social physics. From the cold tread of the nomad hunt to Dachau, from the slave camps of Sparta to Mao’s purges, from the Inquisition to Babi Yar, that train roared and rattled, late on a cold night, the hand of a skeleton on the deadman, the graffiti of hatred, of hunger, of despair spray-painted on every surface, the ancient engines humming and glowing and smoking on a third rail of genetic destiny, the rhythm of a curse in its wheels; showering the helpless, fascinated humans beneath with sparks that held no warmth, and light that held no fire, till its sound had faded, and the train was gone, and they stood once more alone and helpless – the reality, then, now, and forever.

  The cookies were almost finished. He ate the last one as he walked down Hunter’s Point Avenue toward Manhattan. Above the massed towers of the city he saw the spotlit spire of his building, the steel griffins and dragons, the great plated ‘T’ crossed by a golden lightning bolt that was the logo of TransCom.

  He was still sucking fudge chips from between his teeth when he saw Rocketman’s missile burn its way into the sky over the UN headquarters, pulling a bright tail of fire behind it.

  He stood and watched as it rose higher and higher, over the East River, over Brooklyn.

  Snow fell and melted in his open mouth.

  He stood, helpless, as at approximately three thousand feet the bright fire seemed to jerk, and expand, and shroud itself in a wide noiseless circular flash that stopped the rise – flared, faded, and dived in a thousand tiny bits, hope exploded, possibilities dead, dying embers trailed by white smoke that drifted down the grainy night and ended, right in line with the little glow where the Number Seven train rattled and sparked its way into the East River tunnel.

  A light ‘boom’ rose out of the night, faded with the wind, was gone.

  The pilot knew what it was, deep down in the pit of instinct where the ten million probabilities that formed the mathematics of his life were assessed.

  He went to Bellevue anyway, catching the next train, to check.

  By the time he got there the police had cordoned off the hospital entrances. Fire department helicopters were dropping foam onto a small blaze atop the South Mental Health Tower. TV eyewitness-news teams were already filing reports. Lights strobed, sirens yelped. The spectators rarely looked at what was going on at the tower’s summit. Instead they watched, mesmerized, as three different reporters blew steam at the video lights and talked about mystery rockets and UFOs, excitement high in their cheeks and voices. This was top-of-the-line news; bizarre, exciting, sexy with exploding technology; devoid of the least hint of meaning or implication to dampen the entertainment; no pull-back or analysis to mar the moment’s thrill.

  The people clapped, and called out gaily to their favorite news-persons.

  The pilot tried to get through the police lines, and was turned back. He ran full tilt toward the TransCom Building to fetch his surgeon’s outfit. Adrenaline could suppress or bypass the general buildup of fatigue in his muscles but could not prevent its effects from surfacing in his brain in the form of chemical anguish and odd worries. As he ran, he found himself wondering wildly if he had become some sort of human jinx, spreading death or madness to anyone who cared for or followed him. Roberto, Carmelita, Eltonjohn, Rocketman. His lungs tore with the strain of breath, his chest seized up, his shirt was soaked, his throat knotted. His legs were still sore from Miss Benthol. The ECM-pak banged painfully at his left thigh and he had to steady it with both hands. The pain of accumulated losses ate like lye at the core of him.

  He braked abruptly as he turned onto Lexington Avenue, a block away from the TransCom. The weight of the ECM pulled him in a half circle as he stopped.

  Red and white, blue and orange lights flashed, just like Bellevue, near the entrance. Here, too, barricades blocked the doors.

  A mobile command center was parked next to the marquee, its satellite dishes aimed at an AG-440 satellite beaming down pictures of the command center from two hundred miles up.

  Looking overhead, the pilot spotted the tiny blinking lights of UAVs circling in tight formation around the spotlit griffins of his apartment.

  Numbness spread around the pilot’s hypothalamus. There was only so much emotion the brain could take. He pulled the collar of his travel jacket around his ears. He wiped his face and tried to control his chest. He approached the building cautiously, though shock was making his ears ring.

  Most of the lights came from City police cruisers, but there were a couple of carloads of Safety Volunteers as well. The Safety vigilantes pushed rubberneckers clear of the entrance and zapped tazers against the necks of anyone poor-looking. When the pilot, walking carefully behind the screen of crowd, checked some of the other double-parked vehicles, he found three unmarked brown vans with federal plates. All three tags began with the letters ‘ZD.’

  He did not have to consult the Smuggler’s Bible to find out what those letters meant.

  BON.

  A thin line of spectators drifted around the barricades. An ambulance pulled up. A squad of men burst out of the corporate entrance, rolling a stretcher. A body lay on the stretcher. The men wore polyester suits and latex gloves. Short MP5K machine-pistols hung around their shoulders. The sheets over the body bore red stains. An intravenous bottle swung over its head. The clear fluid looked pink in the police lights. The pilot pulled back into the crowd.

  A powerful hand grabbed his left arm, and twisted it behind his back.

  The pilot gasped. He swung around on reflex, kicking and chopping to escape. Another hand clamped on his right arm.

  ‘Cool it, baby,’ Rocketman whispered. ‘Cool it.’

  ‘Dag!’ the pilot shrieked. Rocketman jammed a fist over his mouth and looked around nervously. ‘Shut up!’ he hissed. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ He pulled the pilot down the street, away from the crowd, stopping between a truck and a rental van. ‘Aaah,’ he said, ‘it’s so weird, to be able to just walk down the street like this!’

  Rocketman’s voice was happy but, after four years of living in the South Mental Health Unit, his eyes struggled to hold the horizon.

  ‘Jesus, shit, Rocketman.’ The pilot had trouble getting his breath back again. The big man looked at his shoes. ‘But I thought you were dead!’ the pilot whispered, finally.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ Rocketman replied, gesturing at the scene down the street.

  ‘But the – that rocket,’ the pilot stuttered. ‘I mean, that’s what it was, right? It was your capsule?’

  ‘Aaah,’ the big man said. ‘I dunno. Lots of single-stage launchers takin’ off from Bellevue these days. What do you think?’

  ‘So you parachute
d, before—’

  Rocketman hesitated. He looked at the slush now.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually. ‘I had a hunch. You know? Something in my head wasn’t resolved – even though I’d done the figures a hundred times. The valves, the rams, the thrust chamber. Aaah. Anyway, I chickened out.’

  ‘You fired it off empty?’

  ‘I guess.’ The big man still would not look up. ‘Billy was so disappointed.’

  ‘Billy?’

  ‘It’s a long story. Anyway, yeah. I put on those doctor’s clothes you snuck in for me. Lobo came too. You remember Lobo. Billy wouldn’t come. Lobo an’ me, we just walked out, down the emergency stairs. We used the skeleton keys. They were all confused, wondering how come their beautiful roof was on fire. I’m really sorry, Skid, I know you worked so hard, for the orbital smugg—’ His sentence was chopped short as the pilot threw his arms around Rocketman and hugged him tight.

  ‘Who cares,’ he said, ‘man, I’m just happy you’re alive.’

  ‘Aaah,’ Rocketman sighed. ‘I guess.’ He pulled out a pack of Kents. ‘But I sure disappointed young Billy.’

  A siren wound up. The ambulance pulled away, BON men clearly visible through the windows, bending over the wounded man. ‘I guess I’m pretty happy too,’ Rocketman went on. ‘I was sure that was gonna be you.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t.’

  They both thought about this fact for a minute.

  ‘But if it wasn’t,’ the pilot continued, ‘who was it? Oh, dag,’ he added, remembering the security schedules, ‘Obregon. Dag, Obregon!’

  The pilot stepped into the street, looking up at the TransCom spire. From 898 feet higher up, half obscured in the swirling snow, the Krupp steel griffins peered back at him. He started to walk backward, away from the main entrance.

  ‘Where you going?’ Rocketman hissed urgently. ‘Hey!’

  ‘I gotta go up.’

  ‘You can’t!’

  ‘There’s a way.’

  ‘Wait,’ the big man called after him. ‘Those aren’t ordinary cops, man! The Trilaterals are in this somehow. TransCom did deals with Microsoft – the multinationals . . .’