MONDAY MORNING EARLY, OPHY CALLED the chiefs office and said she was on her way to see him. He was on the phone when she got there, talking to Lotte Epstein, or, rather, grunting replies to questions or information coming from the other end. He hung up with a frown.
“She says they’ve got a new directive from the White House. Federal marshals are being sent to every media outlet: papers, TV, radio. No one is to even hint that there’s anything going around. The President has declared a secret national emergency, if that makes sense. She says to tell you domestic violence is down. She says way down. What’s that about?”
Ophy laughed, a high-pitched, almost hysterical, giggle. “It’s sex, chief.”
“Sex what?”
“Sex. It isn’t depression. Or it isn’t depression as a cause. It’s sex as a cause. Loss of interest in same. Which results in depression in some cases, which results in suicide in some cases. Or did.”
“What the hell?”
“Just listen.” She sat down opposite him and gave him a terse account of Simon’s investigation. “So when the shotgun says sex, we both realize, right, it’s sex. I mean, I feel like the stupidest ass in the world! God, I should have seen it. Wouldn’t you think somebody would have? Only excuse I can offer is most of us who were looking for reasons aren’t all that young anymore, and people don’t always talk about their own sexuality, you know? Not truthfully, at least.”
“But, Ophy, what could’ve happened? What does it mean?”
“I’m not a prophet. How should I know?”
“You say sex? What about you and Simon?”
“What about us? We’re not immune. What about you?”
“Since Joy died, I haven’t … I guess I hadn’t noticed.…”
“See, that’s what I mean! You hadn’t noticed! Simon said it’s like your nose—if it doesn’t itch, you don’t know it’s there.” She giggled again, almost hysterically. “I had kind of a notion, right after the meeting we had here, way before Simon and I started looking. I called Lotte, asked her to check rates of domestic violence.…”
“So what does it mean, domestic violence is down?”
“Testosterone, chief. Sex and dominance, lust and violence, all implemented by the same hormonal stew! If sex is down, logically dominance and violence should also be down. I don’t know about serotonin. Nobody’s looked, but I’m betting it’s up. Rape went up for a while: Men were feeling insecure and they blamed women; but now people should be feeling pretty good about themselves. If I’m right, assaults and murders will be down, gang wars over turf will be down. People should have lost interest in violent team sports—soccer, football, hockey. Simon thinks maybe not baseball, maybe not tennis or golf or skiing, though I’m not so sure. We’ll have to wait and see. And the bottom’s going to fall out of the birth rate.”
“When?”
“Nine months from right now. From this last few weeks, as a matter of fact. This effect has been building slowly for a long time, years, two or three at least. Just recently it reached the total saturation point.”
“What am I going to tell the staff! I mean, what am I allowed to tell the staff?”
She left him there, staring at the wall, and went to her own office to call Jessamine. As far as she was concerned, the no-talk order didn’t include family, and the DFC was family. It was two hours earlier in Utah, so she got Jess out of bed.
“Jess? It’s Ophy. You awake? You want me to hang up, call you back in an hour?”
“Do I only call you when something’s wrong? Right! I only call you when something’s wrong. Listen, Jess, the weirdest thing …” She explained briefly, concisely.
“I be swoggled,” muttered Jessamine when Ophy’s voice trailed off. “What in hell?”
“That’s what my boss wants to know. That’s what the CDC people want to know. Where has this come from?”
“Out of Africa,” muttered Jessamine. “Like AIDS? Of course, there’ve been rumors of biological warfare, maybe something Saddam used a decade ago, during the war, or something the Serbs got from the Russians. I wouldn’t put it past them.”
“You think it’s a disease?”
“If it cuts off all sexual desire, it’d be a self-limiting disease. Can’t get far that way. Explains a lot, though.”
“Like?”
“Like what’s the matter with Patrick. He’s left me, or is in the process of leaving—I’m not sure which since he keeps coming back to get things. Maybe he’s just confused. Don’t say you’re sorry to hear he’s going.”
“All right,” Ophy answered soberly. “If you’re not sorry, I’m not sorry.”
Jessamine laughed, not amused. “Are you scared? You sound a little scared.”
“Damn it, Jessy. Of course I’m scared, in a sort of relaxed way. I keep stoking myself into a panic, then in five minutes I’m all relaxed again. Whatever it is, maybe it short-circuits the adrenals or something. When I look around, most people are sort of going along, not bothered very much.”
“There used to be a researcher here at the labs talked about this happening.”
“This? This what?”
“This—no more human beings. He believed in Gaia. He said we’d go too far, populate too much, destroy too much, and the planet would strike back at us.”
“Is he still around?”
“He moved to Australia, oh, a year or so ago. He was serious, though. He really meant it.” She took a deep breath. “Are you going to call the others? Carolyn? Aggie?”
“Carolyn, probably. Are you going to help her with the trial, Jess?”
“Our meeting’s scheduled concurrent with the trial. I told her I’d take some extra time, just to be available. Are you?”
“I’m planning on it. If you haven’t read her account of her interview with the girl, the rape scene, read it. In the light of this whole business, it’s very revealing.”
Ophy called Carolyn, got no answer, tried the other number she had for Carolyn, and this time the phone was picked up.
“Have you heard about the epidemic?” she asked.
“What epidemic, Ophy?”
“The libido-loss epidemic. There is one.” She explained, words tumbling over one another.
“So that’s what’s going on,” said Carolyn, thinking of Stace and Luce. “I couldn’t figure out …” She’d have to call Stace right away.
“Do you suppose some biological-warfare experiment got loose or something?” Ophy wondered.
“God knows,” said Carolyn. “Maybe Sophy’s story was real and Elder Sister decided it was time to put sex back in the medicine bag.” She laughed rackingly.
After a painful silence Ophy said, “All her stories were real, Carolyn. That’s why they hurt so much. What happened to her? I ask myself a hundred times a week, what happened to her?”
“Oh, God, Ophy. So do I.”
A thousand miles away Ophy took a sobbing breath. “Carolyn, do you ever have the feeling she’s back?”
Long silence; then, “Do you?”
“All the time. She’s suddenly there, just behind me. I talk to her over my shoulder. Time goes away. Then I wake up, ten minutes, half an hour later, and I’m somewhere else, doing something else.”
Carolyn made a sound, halfway between a moan and a chuckle. “With me it’s when I go down to feed the sheep. I feel this body bumping me, very softly. Or I feel soft lips nibbling the palm of my hand. Nothing’s there, but something was. Or, at night, I have the feeling there’s someone in the room.…”
“Do you suppose … the others?” Ophy sniffled and gulped. Why was she crying?
“I’ll ask Faye. You ask Jessamine.”
Faye was touchy on the subject. “All right, all right, Carolyn. Don’t push! Yes, damn it! I did a full-size sculpture of Sophy right after she disappeared—that is, after we knew she’d disappeared. Kind of a frenzy I went through, trying to sublimate grief, I guess. I had it cast, and now it’s here, in the studio. Lately it’s been up to tricks. Vanishing. Talking to me. Dressing itself up when I’m not looking.”
“Is it a nude statue?” Carolyn asked after a thoughtful pause. “Remember how she always used to insist that you not make her recognizable. And remember that whole thing about being lusted after. Sophy wouldn’t have liked being a nude, not if it looked like her.”
Silence at the other end, then, “Damn. You’re right. Of course she wouldn’t.”
“Something else, Faye.…” Carolyn told her about the libido epidemic.
“So that’s it,” muttered Faye. “Good lord, Carolyn!”
“You knew something was wrong, Faye? You’ve lost interest in girls?”
“Carolyn, I don’t need you dissin’ my private life, but, yes, I suppose I have lost the impulse, sort of, but that’s not what I was thinking. I was thinking about this little girl model I’ve been using. Curvy little thing, juicy as a bunch of grapes. She has a real macho boyfriend, handsome little Lah-tino—you know how they look when they’re young, all that whippy muscle, all that fire and sizzle before they go to guts and guzzle the way they do. Well, lately she’s been crying on my shoulder he doesn’t take her to bed anymore. Doesn’t knock her around, either, which is probably more surprising. I couldn’t figure what happened to him, but this sure explains it. My lord, girl. What in the name of heaven is going on?”
“Jessamine thinks it may be Gaia. My first thought was Sophy’s story about Elder Sister, remember?”
“Oh, I sure do. You think maybe that’s it? After all these generations she finished the medicine bag and bottled us up?”
“What’ll this do to Bettiann?”
“You think she’ll put on mourning for her dead clit?”
“Faye!”
“Well, hey, sister. You want me to go all reverent or something? You know damn well sex was mostly torture for Bettiann. Bettiann won’t mind. Wish I could say that much for William.”
“You’re right. Bettiann won’t mind nearly as much as William. I don’t want to tell Aggie at all, but she’ll probably know about it by the time we all get together. The government can’t keep the lid on forever.”
“This’ll be a meeting to end all meetings!”
Finally, resolved not to mention the epidemic, Carolyn called Bettiann. Did she ever feel Sophy was, somehow, still with them?
“Oh, Carolyn … yes,” said Bettiann with a low laugh, almost of relief. “She’s here in this house most of the time. Like in the next room. Or just coming up the walk. I write things down without knowing what I’m doing, and when I read it, it sounds like her. Not her words, but her ideas in my words, you know.”
“Have you kept it?”
“Kept? You mean the writing?”
“Have you kept it, them?”
“Yes, I have. I’ve kept them all.”
“Bring them, with you, Bettiann. Bring them to the meeting. For show-and-tell.”
The final score, when Ophy and Carolyn talked again, was that five of them had seen or heard or experienced Sophy.
“Maybe all six,” said Ophy. “We haven’t asked Agnes.”
“She’s been so touchy.”
“She’s thinking of resigning. I’ve heard it in her voice.”
“Has she declined and fallen?”
“She doesn’t think so. Maybe she thinks the rest of us have. Did you tell Faye about the epidemic?”
“Yes. I didn’t tell Bettiann, though.”
“Why?”
“Because William’s in advertising. If she slipped and let William know, the whole world would know. It’s going to get out, you know. They can’t keep a lid on this. Still, I’d just as soon the leak didn’t get traced back to me.”
And, at last, Carolyn phoned Stace. Stace hadn’t said a word about Luce since that long-ago Monday. At least now she could know that she wasn’t alone. And Luce was used to keeping secrets.
Stace seethed and steamed and muttered, all rather halfheartedly.
“Talk to me,” Carolyn demanded. “Are you angry? Are you scared?”
Long silence. “Mom, I’ve lost a couple of bra sizes. Luce is also smaller in the … reproductive department. I’ve stopped menstruating; either that or my period’s like six months late.”
“Maybe you’re pregnant?”
“I thought I was for a while, but no, Mom, I’m not pregnant.” She sighed deeply. “I’ve asked around, my friends, people my age or younger. None of the women are menstruating anymore. Some of them have been to doctors for tests, some haven’t. Some thought they were pregnant, some didn’t. There’s this one friend of mine, had boobs like the front of a truck. Forty double-D, hanging out there like headlights. All of a sudden she’s almost flat. She’s delighted. She said her chest always overbalanced her, made her look top-heavy, she was always spilling food on it. Ill wind and all that, huh?”
She hung up. Carolyn lay back on the bed, the phone still in her hand. Strangeness on strangeness. Libido epidemics and Sophy still around and Elder Sister’s medicine bag, and Gaia, and, according to the millenarians, the world was coming to an end. But if that was so, why was this stupid trial still progressing, point to point, join the dots, as though it made any kind of picture? What would Jagger do when he found out what she knew?
Hal appeared in the doorway. “What’s going on? All these whispered conversations?”
She told him.
“My God.” He fell into a chair, mouth open.
“Yeah. I wonder if He had something to do with it.”
Hal had talked for years about putting an electronically controlled gate at the entrance to the farm, just to avoid the hassle of people who turned into the driveway and came all the way down to the house before realizing they were in the wrong place. He had never got to it, but the men he had talked to on Saturday had promised to do the installation on Monday when they came to wire the house against intruders. Just because one pimply youth was dead, it didn’t mean there weren’t more where he had come from.
There were a dozen No Trespassing signs in the barn Hal had never got around to putting up, partly because Carolyn had thought posting the place would only draw attention to it. Now, however, it seemed attention was to be drawn, willy-nilly, so Hal sent Carlos out with a handful of signs to be posted every hundred feet along the front fence.
“You have a little trouble?” Carlos asked.
“Carlos, we had a lot of trouble. Friday night the dogs caught a burglar in the kitchen.”
Carlos turned to Carolyn. “You been doin’ somethin notty?”
She shook her head at him. “What makes you ask that?”
“I hear things. Down at the bar, this kid askin’ questions. Spotty-face kid.”
“Could be him, Carlos. What did he want to know?”
“Oh, all about you, you live alone or not, who comes see you, who the family is, you know. Real nosy. You remember Emilia? Teofilo’s mama, she use to work for you?”
“I remember her.” Oh, God. She’d forgotten about Emilia.
“Teofilo’s brothers, they tell the spotty-face kid he shut his mouth or they shut it.”
Carolyn cringed mentally. Emilia must have told her sons that Carolyn had promised to do something about Teo. She bit her cheek, making a mental note. Carlos interrupted her line of thought.
“You got that little house out there, one I use to lib in before so many kids.”
“Right.” Carlos and his wife had lived in the old bunkhouse until the third child had come along. There were now seven children, a fact that Carolyn tried not to let color her opinion of Carlos, who was otherwise both sensible and hardworking. In Carlos’s opinion men had been created to make babies, women to bear them, and what happened to them afterward was God’s problem.
He shrugged a question. “What you say my brothers lib in the house for a while? They sabe on rent, you got somebody here at night.”
“Which brothers?” Hal asked, eyebrows raised.
He laughed. “Not Cippio, not Jaime. They get drunk too much. I think maybe Fidel and Arturo.”
As far as she knew, Fidel and Arturo, though recent arrivals, were reliable and reasonably sober. She looked at Hal, who nodded his okay.
“Good idea,” she said. “But no parties.”
He nodded. “No parties. Arturo, he has this big dog, his name is Leonegro. Bery black, this dog. Bery smart, too.”
Carolyn nodded. If she kept her dogs in the house, it made sense to have another one around outside, particularly at night. “Carlos, tell them not to talk about where they’re staying, okay? If somebody comes here, let it be a surprise.”
He grinned at her and went off with Hal.
At ten she drove into Santa Fe to her former law office. Mary, the office manager, located in about thirty seconds flat the notes Carolyn remembered. The notes were as Carolyn remembered them. Swinter had got off on immortalizing his scribbles, passing out copies by the ream. She took the map from her wallet, spread it on the table, and placed the Swinter copies beside it. The map had obviously been traced from the property survey that was available in the county clerk’s office. The words “road,” “farm,” “house,” and “barn” were written on the tracing, the o’s with tight little anal-retentive loops, the d and b, the h and f, all with a single vertical upstroke, an idiosyncratic rendering of the r’s. The letters were written exactly as Swinter wrote them. If Swinter had not drawn the map, he had at least labeled it.
She took the copies to Jerry’s office and asked him if he had a minute.
“Anytime for you, Carolyn! What’s going on?”
She told him, laying out the pages.
Jerry took off his glasses and polished them on his tie. “Why on earth would Emmet Swinter send somebody to prowl your house?”
“I’m defending the mother of the baby in the Dumpster, Jer. I think the DA’s office was counting on Harmston doing the job.”
Jerry blinked slowly, thinking out the implications of that. “How’d you get involved?”
“Someone asked me to.”
He rubbed his hands over his head. “You sure picked one hell of a case to bring you out of retirement. What do you want me to do with this?”
“I want you to know about it. I’m putting these two pieces of paper in your custody. This one is the copy I made last night, in the presence of a deputy sheriff, of an original found in the pocket of a man who broke into my house. The original was retained by the deputy as evidence. The deputy signed this copy and dated it at my request; there’s his signature. This other paper contains samples of Swinter’s writing. I believe both were written by the same hand, and I suggest that be verified by a graphanalyst.”
“And then?”
“Then you hang on to them. Just in case something happens to me.”
He got up, moved around in an agitated fashion. “In case something happens to you? Carolyn! For God’s sake, you’re talking about respectable members of the bar.…”He collapsed back into his chair, shaking his head.
She leaned across the desk and put her hand on his, making him look directly at her. “I’m not talking about respectable members of the bar. I’m talking about Jake Jagger. The kid that broke into my house supposedly hanged himself in his cell. Would a kid do that over a minor break-in?”
He sat back, mouth slightly open, removing his glasses, going through the polishing ritual, taking a moment before he could say, “People do strange things.”
“Remember the Greta Wilson case, Jer? Back before Jagger was DA? Greta was an abused wife. She filed for divorce because her husband was beating on her and the kids. Her husband hired Jagger. Jagger was married to Greta’s sister Helen, mind you, but that didn’t stop him. Jagger brought in perjured evidence, said she was a satanist, got her locked up. Next morning there she was, hanged in her cell. I know damn well she wouldn’t have done it.”
He said again, “People do strange—”
She pounded on his desk, snarling at him, “She was a devout Catholic, Jer! She knew I was going to get her out. Jagger knew it, too. I know she was murdered. I know the kid that broke into my house was murdered.”
He got up again, making fussy motions with his hands, pushing the idea away, with all its implications. “But it makes no sense! Why would anyone want to prowl your house?”
“All Hal and I can come up with is they’re looking for something to discredit me somehow.” Carolyn cleared her throat. She didn’t want to talk about Albert. “At one time or another I’ve gone on record as a feminist. I’ve supported abortion rights. I’d call myself a conservative fiscally, but on most women’s issues, like equal pay and the need for child care, I’m a liberal, which is a dirty word to the Alliance, and therefore to Jake Jagger.”
He nodded soberly. “I still think you’re being paranoid, Carolyn.”
She left the papers in his hands, nonetheless.
Monday afternoon Jagger got a call from Keepe.
“Mr. Webster is getting some disturbing information from our foreign allies. There seems to be some kind of epidemic going on.”
“So?” said Jagger, wondering what the hell that had to do with him.
“He’s asked me to speak personally to a number of our people to see if they have heard anything.”
“Anything about what, Keepe? About an epidemic? You mean like the hantavirus we have out here?”
“My sources aren’t sure. It seems to be a psychological epidemic. The CDC is asking about assaults, rapes, suicides …”
Jagger took a deep breath and held it. What was this? “I’m sure you know the Alliance authorizes squads of dedicated men to … ah …”
“To enforce purity among women, yes. Sons of Allah, and the Black Brigade, and some other offshoots of the Army of God. But evidently whatever the CDC is looking at doesn’t involve any of our people.”
Jagger grew testy. “Can you be a little more specific, Keepe? You’re not giving me the picture.”
“This is not to be repeated, Jagger. Our Iranian friends are concerned that some disease may have been let loose, maybe during the Gulf War. They’re having trouble getting men out for their political demonstrations; they seem to be afflicted with … well, it’s a kind of lassitude! Also, Public Health people in Washington have been trying to identify some kind of contagion. They’ve been asking questions about depression and suicides.”
“I haven’t heard anything like that.”
“Ask around.”
“How shall I reach you?”
“We’ll be in touch.” The line went dead.
Jagger hung up the phone and stood staring at it, deep in thought. Keepe had sounded furious, reining it in, but barely. Naturally, the flap would have started with the Iranians, or with Libya, or Iraq, or Morocco. The religious groups were the weak links in the Alliance. You couldn’t count on men who preferred martyrdom to survival. If one of the theocratic countries flared up, it could threaten the Alliance as a whole!
In Jagger’s opinion it was rumor, one in an endless series. Ever since the Gulf War people had claimed that sicknesses were caused by Iraqi weapons, or by U.S. countermeasures that had gone wrong. AIDS could take ten years to manifest itself, however, so it wasn’t impossible that something from the Gulf War was just coming to the surface. Still, it was damned unlikely! Both Iraq and the Pentagon were members of the Alliance. If either of them had used some kind of disease as a weapon, the Alliance would know about it!
Jake made a short list of people to call, including some of the militias in Utah and Montana, where there’d been nervegas testing decades back. Maybe they’d come up with something.
In the wee hours of Tuesday morning Carolyn heard Sophy saying very clearly, “Carolyn. Wake up.”
Carolyn sat up suddenly, all at once aware of the darkness around her, the breathing of the dogs on the floor, the light curtains moving almost imperceptibly in the light of a late moon. It hadn’t been a dream that had wakened her; it had been a definite voice saying sensible words. She held her breath, struggling to hear. She couldn’t hear anything, but still she knew there was someone moving outside her window. And there’d been someone in the house.
She eased herself over the edge of the bed and sat there, pajama clad, reaching for the drawer pull in the bedside table, feeling for the flat chill of the automatic at the back of it. Hector sensed her motion and groaned, turning over, half opening one eye. She could see the reflected light, a tiny mirror, blinking moonlight at her. “Shhh,” she said.
His eyes opened wide; his head came up, ears up, listening as she was listening. When she got to her feet and moved toward the door, he moved with her, silent, stepping over Fancy and Fandango as though they were inanimate lumps in the path. They didn’t move, were not aware.
Her door was shut. She eased it open, laying her hand on Hector’s shoulder. He stayed with her as she moved silently through the kitchen, as she tested the outside door, still tightly locked. They went the other way, back down the hall past the bedroom, toward the open door of Hal’s study.
They were in the study doorway when all hell broke loose outside: a bay like the Hound of the Baskervilles; growling, yelling, a receding pother of animal and man. Carolyn stumbled toward the door but arrived on the scene of battle too late to see the conflict. Carlos’s brothers, bare-chested, holding up their trousers, sprinted toward the sound that came from outside the new gate: a revving engine, spinning wheels. They were too late. The car sped off when they were only halfway down the drive. When they returned, Leonegro was beside them, carrying a sizable piece of denim, which he shook like a rat, growling.
She said, “What a good dog!” Leonegro had to be part mastiff. One of those Italian mastiffs that end up weighing close to two hundred pounds. He wasn’t any taller than a Great Dane, but he was much heavier, with a head like a trip hammer and a loose, heavily furred skin that looked designed for battle.
“Where did you get him?” she asked Fidel, forcing her voice to remain at a sensible level.
“My father in Mesico, he gib him to me. He was onny so big, como un’ chivito.”
“He got bigger.”
“He is bery espensib to feed,” said Fidel, with a sideways look at her.
She swallowed deeply. “If you’ll get that piece of cloth away from him, I’ll buy him some dog food. Unless he’d rather have half a dozen live goats.”
“Dog food is good.”
The huge dog looked up at her and grinned a dog grin, tongue flopping out to clean his muzzle. Dog food would be fine, the grin said. In ten- or twenty-pound lots. Fidel managed to get the cloth away from him and gave it to Carolyn. It had blood on it, not a lot. If the prowler hadn’t been maimed, he’d at least been punctured.
She gathered her robe around her, feeling the weight of the handgun in the pocket, as she went back into the study.
Hal, from the hallway, asked, “Is this going to be a daily thing?” He took the stained fragment from her, looking at it closely, turning it, sniffing it. “I think we’ll send this to Mike. Be nice to have something to do a DNA match on, just in case.”
“Whatever,” she said, depressed. The envelope between the books was still there. She drew it out and opened it, knowing before the flap came up that it was empty. Even Leonegro had missed the incoming, though he’d been in time to pursue the outgoing.
“Fredo talked,” she said.
“Maybe he just mentioned it to his partner.”
“Lots of law-enforcement types belong to the Alliance, Carolyn.”
She dropped into the old leather chair and shuddered, unable to stop. This had been no bungling teenager. Some very skillful person had been in here, and how had he managed that?
Hal was asking himself the same question. Two minutes’ search turned up a small round hole cut in the glass of one window, near the window latch. “Two days later we’d have had the place wired. Even now, if I hadn’t been looking, I’d never have seen it.”
She sighed. “If I hadn’t been looking, I wouldn’t have known the envelope was empty. I wouldn’t have been looking if something hadn’t wakened me.”
“What?”
“Sophy, who has quit playing sheep and is now playing guard dog!”
He raised his eyebrows. “A protective phantom? Good for her! You realize it could have been months before we knew anyone had been here.”
“Well, no. I’d have checked the envelope sooner than that.”
“Come on back to the big bed. You don’t want to be alone.”
She didn’t want to be alone. She went with him, snuggled up against him, heard the dog’s claws rattle across the brick floor on their way to the rug, where they turned around and around before settling. Hal’s breathing became calm and steady. She lay there, warm and presumably safe, yet unable either to rest or to sleep. Shadowy prowlers edged along her consciousness, making sudden sorties that startled her awake. At six she gave up, eased herself out of the bed, and followed the dogs to the kitchen.
Carlos came in as she was fixing coffee, handed her the daily paper, and said, “You got peoples out there in the road.”
“What kind of people?”
“With signs. Much yelling when I climb over the new gate.” He sounded slightly hurt as he said, “You din gib me a key.”
“You weren’t here when they gave me the keys, Carlos. There’s one hanging by the kitchen door with your name on it. Put the dogs in the pen, will you, on your way out?”
She fetched binoculars from her bedroom and took a look at the people by the gate. There were about a dozen, wearing flimsy, windblown tabards that identified the Army of God. The signs they carried, obviously prepared for some other contingency, didn’t make much sense in their present context. Evidently the demonstration had been hastily assembled. And why?
Hal came in, yawning. While having coffee and breakfast and reading the paper, they looked out at dark clouds, driven by high winds, and counted the cars that passed, only five in the next two hours. People with jobs were already at work, and the neighbors didn’t need to use this stretch of road at all. There were a dozen ways to reach the highway without passing this place, and she was sure the grapevine had suggested to everyone that they do precisely that.
Hal remarked, “We could clear them out of there. The new harassment law’s specific about that.”
“I know. But why waste our time? What would be the point? You always told me the Army of God is made up of rank-and-file zealots, interchangeable mob-components, spitters, and stone throwers.”
“Even mob-components can be dangerous. It’s good the alarm guys will be here to finish wiring the house this afternoon.”
The men showed up about eleven, just as the picketers were departing. With no audience, with rain squalls passing through every few minutes and grit-laden winds gusting up to forty and fifty miles per hour, the Army of God had had enough.
The security men worked through the afternoon. As he was leaving that evening, the foreman commented to Carolyn, “I hate to tell you, or maybe you know. Your phone is bugged.”
“My phone!”
“The one in that office there, and all the extensions. It’s got a real good little gadget hooked up where the line comes into the house. You want me to remove it?”
He seemed sympathetic about it, but only slightly curious. For him it was all-routine, she supposed. In his world people spied on people all the time. Carolyn shook her head slowly. “No. Leave it. I’d rather find out who did it, and I can do that best by leaving it in place.”
“You’re sure?”
“I believe so. That’s not the line I use much, anyhow. Would you check the other phone for me?”
“I only saw one line—”
“I know. The other one was the original house phone fifty years ago, before they put in the new cables. It comes into the back of the house from across the river.”
He checked the phone in the room Carolyn was using and declared it clean, then sold her a little gadget that would tell her if anyone fooled with it. When he left, she sat staring at the needle on the dial, musing for a long time. How long ago had the house phones been bugged? During the visit that Leonegro had almost put an end to? Or before that? When the spotty-faced kid had broken in? He could have installed the gadget, then decided to try a break-in. Possibly. What had she said over that phone during the last few days? Not much. There’d been the call from Jessamine. She’d said what? Libido epidemic, something. Would the mysterious phone bugger be interested in the fact she knew there was such a thing? She’d talked about Sophy’s still being around. And she’d had a call from an old friend in Chicago who’d wanted information on the Santa Fe Opera. Did the bugger care about that? And they’d called Mike Winter, at the FBI! Where had Hal called from?
Her throat loosened after a moment. Hal had made the call from her bedroom phone. And why hadn’t she herself thought of being bugged? Out of desire not to appear paranoid, perhaps. She’d been aware of danger, but too self-consciously diffident to take strong action!
No more, she promised herself, blood hammering painfully in her temples. No more.
Stace told Luce about the epidemic when he got home from work Tuesday night.
After a long silence he licked his lips. “How long has it been going on?”
“Mom said maybe for two or three years. But only recently everywhere. Like that curve, you know, the one that starts out shallow and all of a sudden goes through the top of the graph.”
“An asymptote,” he murmured. “Once you’re halfway, you’re as good as there.” He shook his head in disbelief.
She said, “Somebody’d better be figuring out what’s happened before it’s too late to make babies anymore.”
He laughed, a hacking gasp, without humor. “It’s like hard science fiction.” He gestured upward, at his tightly packed bookshelves. “You got a problem? Somebody better figure it out, maybe build a machine to solve it. You got a situation? Somebody’ll invent something to handle it. That’s the plot of a thousand stories. Like the Manhattan Project, back during World War Two. Or NASA, putting a man on the moon.”
“Luce.…”
“You know, Stace. I’m part of a generation of kids, boys mostly, that was raised to believe there’s no problem we can’t solve; that somebody—some elite—will always come up with something. Population’s outgrowing food supply? Someone will think of something. Got an epidemic? Someone will find a way to cure it. We don’t need to change people so long as somebody can come up with a technical fix!”
Her lips twisted, almost a sneer. “Of course you mean someone else?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. It’s got to be somebody else, some elite. The people who create the problem won’t solve it. Maybe they could, but they won’t. Miners and manufacturers and lumbermen believe destroying the earth is acceptable because it means jobs. Every mommy and daddy thinks it’s other people who are overpopulating the world, not their third and fourth and fifth kids. Half the world’s species are extinct; the rest soon will be. Not their worry. Someone else has to solve things.”
“But, my God, Luce. It does have to be somebody else. I can’t solve problems like that. We can’t.”
“I know,” he whispered. “I knew in my gut it was something like this! I knew! All of us, we’ve got ourselves into a mess, so we’re expecting somebody else to get us out. But what if it’s like AIDS? What if they can’t?”
So far, at least, they couldn’t. Luce was quite right. Around the world a thousand labs went on the equivalent of a wartime footing, around-the-clock shifts doing genetic analysis, attempting to determine what had happened to mankind. Tight-lipped people everywhere were asking the same questions. Pathologists were doing exhaustive studies of every dead body they could lay hands on, looking for difference. There were some obvious changes. Women’s breasts had shrunk, leaving only gentle curves to indicate femininity. External genitalia, both male and female, were much smaller. Women’s hips and thighs had become less fleshy. Though neither ovaries nor testes showed any signs of atrophy, neither were they making reproductive cells, and erectile tissue no longer functioned. Men previously bald were now growing hair. If there were brain changes, they were too small to be easily detected in persons living or dead. Was it a virus? A retrovirus? Was it a genetic change? A spontaneous mutation? In response to what? Had individuals changed hormonally, biologically, chemically? To find genetic changes, current men would have to be compared to their former selves, but full genetic inventories did not exist for their former selves. There were, however, lots of men and a few women in tanks. Some of them were biopsied, then wakened, then assayed again a few weeks later, but answers could not be expected to come quickly. With all those allelic variations, one’s genome might be quite eccentric and still be within the range of normalcy. Even with computers, comparing total genomes could take one hell of a long time and then yield only equivocal results.
Hormone replacement was tried, without success. Recipients had serious, life-threatening allergic reactions to testosterone or estrogen. Whoever, whatever, was playing with humanity was at least one move ahead.
While the laboratory staffs sweated and cursed, most of the world’s people either didn’t know or pretended not to. Those who suspected were tiptoeing through their days, hoping they were wrong. Some, the less noticing among humankind, those for whom sex had always been a sometime thing, thought they might be suffering from a touch of flu or a lack of sleep, a little indigestion, a fit of depression, each believing himself alone in that regard. Some, for whom sex had been a duty, felt relieved that the duty was no longer expected. One stand-up comic skated perilously close to mentioning it on nationwide TV, only to be shackled and led off by federal marshals, off camera.
The ignorance wasn’t total. Certain groups seemed to know something! Bag ladies knew something! The armies of marching men knew something! What they knew and what they intended were obscure, however, and seemed to bear little relationship to day-to-day life. It was almost as though those two groups were moved by something outside the everyday world, by some alien or spiritual force that was playing checkers across the earth, immune to the malaise felt by the rest of mankind.
The rest of mankind, for whom the machinery of life ground on. Consumers went on consuming, though the pattern of their consumption was changing. Even without the depredations of the bag ladies, extreme fashions were not moving. Uncomfortable apparel or shoes were not selling. Auto showrooms suffered from a glut of expensive cars. More books were being read as many TV shows lost their audiences, particularly the trashy talk shows, the sexy soaps and sitcoms, and the late-night porns. The 900-number sex-talk lines were as dead as the spotted owl, the sea turtle, the elephant, the rhino, the gorilla …
Individual sports equipment was in big demand; team competitive sports were sagging. The baseball season was in full swing, but stadiums were uncrowded and TV coverage went largely unwatched. Advertising was in chaos. Barbie and G.I. Joe had suffered a fatal decline; teddy bears, building blocks, roller blades, and bicycles went on as ever.
Simon’s boss, after a behind-closed-doors conference with Simon, sent him on an around-the-world jaunt to investigate how far the plague had spread: from where, starting when. Nothing could be printed yet, but much could be learned that would be printed later.
Simon’s nose led him almost immediately to one symptom of change: the divorce rate had skyrocketed. Couples were splitting by the hundreds of thousands. They were dispassionately, casually, going their separate ways without rancor. Men who had beaten their wives regularly, constantly, who had threatened them with death if they tried to escape, now yawned as they watched them go. In India arranged marriages had simply ceased, as had the burning of brides. In the Sudan parents were not having their daughters’ external genitalia cut off, as had been the tradition for centuries.
Among some religious groups all these changes, those that were known and those that were suspected, were cause for grave concern. For millennia religious power and prestige had been built on a foundation of sexual proscription. Now the sudden absence of sex came like the surgeon’s knife, abbreviating both doctrine and doctrinaire. What were sin fighters to do without the favorite sin? Without traditional lusts, what good were traditional values? There were secret meetings, covert assemblies, men working deep into the night as they sought to confound whatever devil had been so presumptuous as to purify humanity without first asking permission from its moral advisers.
In India a Hindu prophet claimed that in the future all men would be reborn as something other than humans because men had been too destructive of other life and now must learn to respect other forms by living in other shapes. Since all humans were to be reincarnated in other forms, human babies were no longer needed. The Hindu prophet was assaulted by a Muslim prophet, who claimed that the Hindus had caused whatever was going on. The Muslim prophet was counterattacked by a Buddhist, and everyone retired bloody from the field of battle with injuries more symbolic than fatal. Accounts of this brouhaha were heavily censored before publication.
June moved toward its end. The Vatican, with much pious misdirection, canceled planned visits of His Holiness to various parts of the world and announced instead a conference of all bishops for early autumn, the first in many years. The cardinals, still conservative but now neuter to a man, were at a loss. Everywhere the Church was preoccupied, even in Louisiana, where the archbishop was too busy worrying about survival to think about the oyster farms. The question of support for the Church’s secret project was not renewed.
The date for the trial of Lolly Ashaler was only days away. According to the quickie phone-in TV polls, long a staple of the twitchy titillations that had taken the place of the evening news, the vast majority of persons felt Lolly Ashaler should be found guilty and executed. Carolyn, hearing this nonsense, wondered whether people had been paid to call in anti-Lolly responses or whether the station had been paid to announce a totally false result. According to the media, feeling was running high against Lolly, but Carolyn hadn’t noticed any such run of opinion. The rumored hostility and anger was only reported, not apparent.
One aspect of the coverage, however, Carolyn found deeply disturbing. According to some editorial pages and some talk shows, Lolly had killed not just a baby but “the future of mankind.” The Santa Fe paper editorialized that “the current desperation of humanity” had been Lolly’s fault, she had committed “the final sin,” had added “the spiritual last straw” to the sin burden of mankind. While “the current desperation” was undefined, Sodom and Gomorrah were mentioned in passing, along with the Flood. Carolyn saw a coordinated effort in all this, no doubt on Jagger’s behalf. Seemingly, even if the world died tomorrow, Jagger intended to stand with one foot atop the corpse declaring himself victorious.
“The world situation was the girl’s fault?” asked Ophy when Carolyn called her—on the bedroom phone—to discuss testimony and strategy. “Where do they get that idea?”
“The morning paper printed it, but I imagine Jagger or one of his minions came up with the idea: Lolly has so offended God by killing her child that God is punishing the entire human race by withholding babies. This time it won’t be by flood, or by fire. It’ll just be extinction. Which, if you’re an environmentalist, must seem like divine retribution. Maybe the Gaia hypothesis has some truth to it.”
Carolyn rubbed at her forehead, staring at the papers on her desk, which would be exhibit something or other in the upcoming trial. She was so tired she couldn’t think.
“I suppose the guilt can be wiped away by blood sacrifice,” Ophy growled.
“That may be the reasoning behind Jagger’s going for murder one with the possibility of the death penalty. He wants to prove she intended all along to kill the baby. She’s to be the scapegoat: If we spill the blood of this bad, bad woman, God will relent.”
“You sound weary, Carolyn.”
“Lately I feel that I’m living in a badly written, badly directed foreign movie that’s running on late-night TV in black-and-white with lots of static and inadequate subtitles. It’s extremely difficult to follow, just like this trial.”
“What is he pushing it for?”
“I don’t know. Before this libido plague came up, I thought I knew what Jagger was up to: pure ambition. Now I can’t figure the guy. If he knows what’s going on—and even with the news blackout he has to know what’s going on!—why does he want public office? I can’t imagine any sane person wanting public office right now. Being in charge of anything would be hell.”
Ophy laughed. “Didn’t we read something in college about preferring to rule in hell rather than serve in heaven? And then, too, I keep thinking about Sophy’s story where Elder Sister was supposed to be weaving a new medicine bag.…”
“Carolyn?”
“I’m here. If one weren’t modern and scientific and skeptical, one could certainly believe somebody was fixing us.”
The following morning Carolyn was finally overrun by the media. The TV stations couldn’t get their trucks past the new electric gate, but they came trudging down the driveway, nonetheless, cameras and recorders at the ready. The assault turned into a rout when Hector, Fancy, and Fandango came boiling out of the house in full cry, to be joined by Leonegro. The resultant reportorial scatter bore some resemblance, Carolyn thought, to a flock of startled leghorn hens, taking off in all directions.
“Down at the road, they ask for somebody. What I say?” asked Carlos when he arrived for work.
Carolyn had spent several sleepless nights thinking her way through this question. “Say Ms. Crespin will send a statement to the gate in a few minutes.”
“Ms. Crespin?”
“My lawyer name, Carlos. Here on the farm I’m Mrs. or Ms. Shepherd, but when I’m a lawyer, I’m Ms. Crespin.”
“You don’t have to say anything, you know,” Hal commented.
“I know. But if I don’t at least make a statement, I’ll come across as hiding something. Better get it over with.”
She went into the office and took a few moments to write out a statement: Lolly Ashaler felt she would be more comfortable with a female attorney; the American system presumes innocence until proof of guilt; Ms. Crespin presumed her client was, indeed, innocent. She ran a dozen copies of it and sent Carlos to distribute them to the newsmen.
The statement, reduced to a fifteen-second bite, was on the evening news, followed by an oleaginous Jagger, who said it was rumored that some feminist organization had hired Ms. Crespin to defend the baby killer. Everyone knew that’s what feminists were interested in. Ms. Crespin, so he said, was from a big eastern liberal Catholic family, but it was rumored she’d repudiated the faith in which she’d been reared. She’d belonged to a reportedly subversive group, too, he’d been told. Of course, that’s when she was younger, and it might not mean anything.
There was also an interview with Emmet Swinter, who said he knew for a fact that Ms. Crespin had been picketed by the Army of God for her unholy secular-humanist views. Which explained the reason for that.
“Wow,” Stace commented when Carolyn phoned her. “Now you’re a backsliding Catholic, a feminist, a liberal, and a subversive who’s been picketed by the righteous.”
“It’s no more than I expected,” Carolyn replied dully. It was no more than she’d expected, but it still hurt, in the way a sudden blow hurts, as much from surprise as from trauma. “Actually, the tone is somewhat milder than I feared. Someone must have told Jagger to tone it down. By the way, the office phone is bugged, so when you need me, call me on the one in my bedroom.”
“Bugged? When? Had you talked to Ophy and Jessamine before you knew?”
“Yes.”
“So now Jagger could know what you plan for the case!”
“I never discussed the case on the bugged phone.”
“But if Jagger knows who’s going to be testifying …”
“He’d know anyhow. Jagger is entitled to my list of witnesses just as I’m entitled to his.”
“This is a mess. I’m sorry I ever asked you.”
“Actually, Stace, I’m not thrilled about it, either. Jagger scares the hell out of me.”
“Of course he scares you. He gets people killed!”
“Well, I’m not about to kill myself or let someone sneak in and do it to me. I’ve even felt, during my more optimistic moments, that if we could have been assigned to some other judge than Rombauer, we would have had a chance of winning the case.”
“But not with him.”
“No. Not very likely. We can appeal, however, and that’s what I’m counting on.”
She hung up the bedroom phone, then went purposefully into Hal’s study, where she made herself comfortable before making a prearranged call to Ophy on the bugged phone. They chatted briefly and inconsequentially about the upcoming meeting.
When this had gone on long enough, Carolyn took a deep breath, enunciated very clearly, and said, “I’m fairly sure Lolly’s mother was an alcoholic even when she was carrying Lolly.”
“You’re thinking of fetal alcohol syndrome,” said Ophy, also speaking very clearly.
“Oh, it’s a very good possibility. FAS victims are very much like Lolly. One of the characteristics of the disease is that victims are unable to see the consequences of their actions. They don’t reason from cause to effect.”
“Is that scientifically established?”
“Very much so. The disease has been known for about fifteen years. It’s not dissimilar to fetal crack addiction. Certain centers in the brain are destroyed.”
“But if she’d had some other environment—”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. FAS victims raised in fine, supportive environments do very little better than others. They simply don’t understand cause and effect.”
“Hell, Ophy, rats understand cause and effect!”
“Rats have to, in order to survive. What I’m saying is, FAS victims don’t, and they can’t survive unless someone takes care of them. They don’t know if they go out without clothing, they’ll freeze. They don’t know if they don’t eat, they’ll die. They don’t understand that if they set fire to the house, they can burn up. They can be trained to do some things, just as you’d train a dog—or a rat—to do them, but they are not human persons. Not by our definition, Carolyn.”
“Well, you don’t convict nonhumans of murder.”
“Not since the Middle Ages,” said Ophy. “I think it’s an excellent defense.”
Carolyn thanked her and hung up, then sat smiling grimly at the bugged phone. There, Jagger. Chew on that.
Jake Jagger had a late, quiet meeting with Martin, his chief snoop, driver, pilot, and occasional assassin. Jagger’s office windows looked down on a street almost bare of traffic, a few late diners strolling back to their hotels past closed shops.
“I need to ask,” the snoop said a little stiffly. “You not satisfied with the way I been doin’ the work?”
Jake’s head came up. “Why would you ask that?”
“There was this kid arrested out there. I already had the bug on her phone line. I told you—”
“I did not send anyone,” Jake snarled. “If someone else went out there, they did it on their own.”
“Well, I’m just saying I don’t need backup. I tell you I did something, I did it.” The snoop simmered briefly, then referred to his notes. “The bug I put outside on the phone line’s working okay. This doctor from New York told this scientist from Utah that there’s some kind of a beedolus something. The woman in Utah called your subject and told her about it.”
Jagger shook his head impatiently. “Never mind that, Martin. Skip across everything that doesn’t pertain to the trial. I need only trial information right now.”
Martin shifted to the next page. “She, the lawyer, she’s going to say the girl is crazy.”
“Insane?” asked Jake Jagger.
“She’s got some kind of alcohol something. Her ma was a drunk. Here, I’ll play the section.”
He did so, and Jagger smiled his thin, predatory smile. “Fetal alcohol syndrome. Fortunately, I’ve had the girl’s mother drying out down in Albuquerque, just in case we need her. Another few days, she’ll say whatever we need her to say. What else will the doctor testify to?”
“That’s about all for her, but this other dame, the one from Utah, she’s a what they call it, geneticist. She’s on the witness list, but the lawyer hasn’t talked to her yet. When she does, we’ll find out what she’s planning on.”
Jagger nodded slowly. “Well, stay on it. Let me know the minute they talk. We need to find out where she’s coming from.”
The snoop shuffled his tapes together and whacked them into an even stack.
“Two things I need you to do,” said Jagger. “Since these witnesses are coming to the Crespin woman’s house, the phone bug you put in won’t pick up their conversations. See if you can bug the house itself, the places they’ll be talking, at least.”
“It’ll mean drugging that damn dog! Damn near took my butt off when I went to get that paper! Easier to shoot him.”
“If you shoot him, she’ll know you’ve been there.”
The man of all work sighed. “I ordered some special gimmicks that’ll do the job, and they’re coming in FedEx on Friday. Friday night the women’ll all be talking up a storm with each other, probably stay up late, be really sleepy. Everybody’ll be asleep, except the dog. I’ll tranquilize the dog and get the bugs in then. Kitchen, dining room, living room, I guess. That’s where they’ll mostly hang out.”
“I thought they had the place wired since you were there.”
Martin sniggered. “I know the system. It’s not much. I’ve got through tighter ones than that.”
Jagger nodded slowly, thinking. “You know, Martin, if anyone was responsible for that kid going out there, it was probably Swinter. He’s getting to be an embarrassment, doing stupid things like that. I think Mr. Swinter should have some kind of accident that would stop his doing such things.”
The snoop raised his eyebrows, just enough to indicate he’d heard Jagger speak. That was enough. Jagger handed him a thick stack of bills and then walked beside him as he went into the outer office and from there into the hallway that led to the street, making sure he left the building. He did not want Martin running into Keepe, who was due to arrive shortly.
When he did so, Jagger offered his hand and a drink.
Keepe ignored the hand but accepted a light Scotch.
“I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again so soon,” said Jagger.
“You left a message about that matter Mr. Webster is interested in. He feels it’s extremely important.”
The words carried an implicit threat. What Jagger knew had better be urgent. Jagger, annoyed at Keepe’s tone, rose from his desk and walked to the open window, breathing deeply. “I spoke with some militia people in Utah and Montana. They’re convinced somebody has been testing some kind of nerve gas on them.”
Keepe narrowed his eyes. “Nerve gas? Why did they call you?”
Jake turned angrily. “For crisake, Keepe! You told me to ask around, remember? I remembered there had been some nerve-gas episodes in that area way back, after World War Two. Army testing that got out of hand or something, so I asked them if there’s any current trouble.”
Keepe ruminated on this, his eyes watchful. “Who did you talk with? The United Aryans? Howard’s American Patriots bunch in Montana? Or that militia of Mason’s? What you call it?”
“Vigilance Force. I spoke with Ralph Howard, but he says he’s talking for Mason and for Rilliet, too.”
“Rilliet?”
“He’s prime elder of the Reinstituted Congregation of the Saints. When I started with the Alliance, they were on my contact list, kind of an offshoot bunch. He’s got most of those polygamists hiding out back in the mountains allied with him. Idaho, Montana, Utah, that bunch. The United Aryans are talking about a coup, and they’ve got the Saints interested, and Mason’s militia’s providing the armament.”
Keepe spoke through his teeth. “The Alliance needs many things, Jagger, but at this moment we don’t need oddball little armed cults with delusions of grandeur attempting highly unrealistic local coups. Even though the NRA is one of our best supporters, armed conflict just now is not needed. The Alliance takeover is already planned and moving. All the Aryans and polygamists and militiamen need to do is be patient. Once we’re in power, they can lynch all the blacks and rape all the lesbians and kill all the government men they like.”
For a moment Jagger was silent, startled by Keepe’s words. Such acts were implicit in what the movement stood for, but they were usually referred to as “cleansings,” or “purifications.” It wasn’t Alliance policy to be as specific as Keepe had just been.
Jake cleared his throat. “He was talking about threats to his manhood, which could mean anything.”
“I suggest you calm him down.”
Jake forgot his own rule and pushed. “You think something did get loose? Maybe something from the Gulf War?”
“We don’t know, Jake. Obviously, if we knew, we wouldn’t need all this chitchat!”
Again that strangeness of tone. That remote … displeasure.
Jake pressed again. “Is there something else, Keepe? Something wrong?”
The other man was coldly angry. “Don’t be an idiot, Jake. Of course something’s wrong. When Mr. Webster is annoyed, so are the people who work for him, and Mr. Webster is extremely annoyed at all this. The Alliance has agents planted in most Washington bureaus, including the Centers for Disease Control, but our people can’t get a handle on this! It’s said to be some kind of suicide epidemic, but in times of stress people often commit suicide—it’s nothing new. Suicide cults at the turn of a millennium or century aren’t new, either. Why should the CDC be involved? Why should the Alliance suddenly be full of people blaming each other? Iran thinks Iraq did it. Did what? we ask. Put something in their water, they say. What is the something? What does it do? They don’t say. Libya thinks the Israelis did it. Did what? Polluted their soil, maybe. The Orthodox think the Reform Jews did it. The Reformed think the Orthodox did it. The Mormons! You’ve only talked to the offshoot groups, you should hear the elders on the subject!”
“What’s going on?”
“I think it almost has to be a purposeful campaign of misinformation, designed to disrupt the Alliance. Rumormongering. Webster agrees. He says his opponents would like nothing better than to throw the Alliance off course by manufacturing some crisis.…”
“Opponents? I wasn’t aware we had any organized resistance. You can’t mean those old ladies.…”
Keepe gnawed at his lip, nibbling. “Mr. Webster said his opponents. He didn’t specify who the opponents are, and whatever Mr. Webster sees fit to keep to himself, I do not intrude upon. I merely stand ready to change ground as needed. Flexibility, that’s the key. At present we’ll continue as planned.”
“We’re going on with the case? With the trial?”
“As of today, as of this hour, we are proceeding with the trial. The media people are in our pocket. The talk shows are full of us; the editorials have been written, many of them have already been printed. The TV movie has already been produced except for the sequences dealing with the trial itself. The Sin of Gomorrah will appear on two consecutive nights on NBC the week the trial ends. The minute the trial opens, we’ll move into the national debate. Law versus lawlessness. Morality versus immorality. Womenfolk being properly protected at home by armed male family members, versus letting them out onto the streets to be victimized, turned into prostitutes and baby killers …” His voice faded, and he frowned.
“You sound doubtful,” said Jake, surprised. The man actually sounded unsure of himself.
Keepe said fretfully, “It’s the campaign we planned, and there’s nothing wrong with it.”
Jake glared at him. “Then what? What the hell’s going on?”
Keepe glared back. “It’s a perfectly sound campaign but it’s not working. People aren’t responding to it. I’ve got a boiler shop working full-time calling in to the talk shows, but there hasn’t been but a handful of genuine calls. I’ve got a mailing house generating letters to the editor, but nothing’s coming from the public! We’ve announced the results of polls that should have people screaming for blood, but nobody out there seems to give a damn!”
Jake bit down angry words. “Is my campaign in jeopardy?”
Keepe teetered on his toes, up down, up down. “Not necessarily. I haven’t gotten where I am by hanging on to a losing strategy just because it’s worked before. At any point we can switch to a nonspecific campaign that stays well away from any controversy at all. If we have to, we’ll base your campaign on name recognition alone, on your smiling face, and on feel-good commercials.”
“You mean throw the trial away?”
“It’s too early to decide.”
It was Jagger’s turn to frown. “Either way, you don’t want me to talk about the end of the world? I thought that’s why we were getting into office, because of what’s coming.”
Keepe straightened his papers, frowning. “What’s coming is reality. Politics has nothing to do with reality!”
“And ten years from now?”
Keepe grimaced. “Ten years from now the world will be dying. All the little signs that people have been arguing about for decades will suddenly become huge and unmistakable. Remember the Japanese nerve-gas bunch that went belly up a few years back? We have a hundred other groups like that. At a signal from Webster they’ll all put their plans into motion. They don’t expect to survive, but they do expect to rule in the next life, so they come in handy as suicide assassins. We figure on a billion deaths from them alone.”
“But we will survive! Keepe and Jagger, you and me, we will!”
“Thee and me and a million or so others on the A list, and we’ll stay on the A list just so long as we do what’s required and avoid all disturbances! Webster told you that. Don’t do anything except what we tell you. Leave it to us!”
He stood and buttoned his rumpled suit coat, all the time making little jaw motions, chewing the cud of their conversation. “I’ll tell Webster about the people you’ve talked to.”
Jagger rose. “I’ll do what I can to calm them down.”
When the outer door closed behind Keepe, Jagger stood thoughtfully for a long time, thinking about “disturbances.” The situation with the Aryans wasn’t the only one that might turn into a disturbance. Besides that and Swinter, there was at least one other item of unfinished business.
He locked his office behind him, went down to the mail room, and borrowed a couple rolls of strapping tape. Then he got into his car and drove to the market, getting there just before closing. He bought a few staples, taking them off the shelves almost at random, plus several boxes of garbage sacks. When he got home, he opened the door into his game room, turned on the lights, went in briefly, then came out and left the door wide open. She was in the kitchen, fixing supper.
“There are groceries in the car,” he told her. “See that they’re put away. I want the plastic sacks and the tape in my trophy room, for packing meat.” He did not see her look of astonishment as he went down the hall toward his own room.
She was completely baffled. Jake had never let her go into his trophy room. Never, in all the years they’d lived there. And why stuff for packing meat now? It wasn’t hunting season. She didn’t ask; she merely obeyed. At the car she sorted out the boxes of garbage bags and the tape. The garage door stood ajar, light pouring out, and with sudden clarity she saw it as a hinged jaw waiting to swallow her.
The curtain at the window twitched. He was watching her. Her mouth was suddenly dry with an absolute certainty of danger. She took the other groceries and carried them into the house, setting them on the kitchen counter.
“I’ll put the other things away in a moment,” she said, turning from him and going down the hall toward her bedroom, her bathroom. Her bathroom was the one place he would not follow her. The one taboo place, to him. She shut the door firmly behind her, locked it, opened the bathroom window, and went through it onto the low junipers planted below. They cushioned any sound she might have made.
She couldn’t go across the driveway. He would look there. She couldn’t go down the hill toward populated areas. He would look there, too. Purposefully, quickly, without taking time for thought, she darted down the driveway to the road, up the road for a hundred yards or so, and then away from it onto the slope of the hill among the low junipers and crouching piñons. She began to climb upward, toward the mountains.
Jake waited in the hallway. He opened the front door and peered out to be sure the steel trophy-room door stood wide open, light pouring out. He had put a card on the bulletin board, her name in red, in letters large enough to see from the door. He counted on it drawing her into the room if she should hesitate for any reason. He stepped outside and looked at her bathroom window, curtained, lighted.
He could wait. He was patient. He went back into the house and sat in the living room with a book, alert to her return down the hall. It was almost half an hour before he began to suspect she might be gone.
Helen managed to get over a mile into the hills before stepping on a stone that twisted beneath her foot, throwing her to the ground. It was full dark, with a crescent moon hanging low in the west, giving just enough light to make out the blackness of junipers and piñons, not enough to show the footing.
She looked back the way she had come, seeing the lights of houses here and there, thinking of Jake’s helicopter, which she had never seen but had always visualized as a vehicle in Jake’s image, with eyes that could see through walls and weapons that could kill. He would come soon. He would follow her. He would chase her into the hills and kill her there. Someone would find her bones, in a year or ten or a hundred. Well, let them. She had done what Carolyn had asked. That much, at least, she had been capable of.
She went on climbing, limping, pain in her ankle jabbing at her relentlessly. Higher on these slopes, the piñon forest gave way to ponderosa pines, and under the shelter of those trees, one could hide like a little animal, crouched against some trunk, invisible from the air.
She heard a sound and ignored it. It was far away; it was meaningless. Still, it was persistent, like the buzz of an insect trapped behind glass. Unfamiliar. Strange.
She stopped, stood up tall, looked around herself. It was still there, a kind of humming. She got onto her hands and knees and crawled to the nearest juniper, squirming in beneath it to crouch there, her head on her raised knees, making herself a stone, a blot, a shadowed nothing. The humming went on and on, seeming to grow no nearer, and after a time she looked up, puzzled. It wasn’t the thwack, thwack, thwack of a helicopter. It was a different sound altogether.
She peered out at the night, up the hill, down the hill, across the valley. There was a light across the valley, and it was moving. Helicopters, at least the ones she had seen on TV, had glaring lights, like searchlights. This was an amber glow, a bubble of firelight on the hills, low, next to the ground, where no bubble of light should be.
The amber bubble moved slowly, making no threat. Up a hill and down again, disappearing into the valley. Appearing again at the crest and dipping once more, finally achieving the slope on which she sat huddled beneath the tree.
Whatever it was, it hummed its way purposefully toward her, gradually becoming visible. A school bus. An old, beat-up yellow school bus, rumbling along as though it were on a road. Which it wasn’t!
The bus came up the long slope toward her, swerving around chamiza and piñons, passing her to swing around in a gentle arc and pull up beside the juniper where she hid. The door opened. An old voice, quite kindly, said, “You need a ride, lady?”
She was having a dream. Either that, or she’d lost her mind. In either case it was silly to hide. He obviously knew where she was. She crawled from beneath the tree, rose to her feet, flinching as weight came on the twisted ankle.
“Here,” he said. “I help you.” He came down the step, a very old man, wrinkled and brown, wearing a soft shirt and baggy trousers and boots that were worn into shapelessness.
She felt herself slipping into hysteria. “Who?” she giggled. “Who are you? Why are you here?”
“My name is Padre Josephus,” he said, patting her shoulder, taking her arm. “I hear from a friend of yours maybe you need some help.”
At the prison, in the visiting room, Lolly began the visit by shouting at Carolyn. “She knock me down, an’ I get all cut up.”
“She who?” asked Carolyn, completely lost.
“That woman in the kitchen. I ask her does she wan’ me to do, you know, an’ it’s like she goes nuts an’ breaks this whole tray full of bottles, an’ she knock me down, an’ I get all cut up on the glass.”
“I’m sorry. Is it healing?”
The girl extended her bandaged hand. “Yeah. They put in four stitches, though. She went nuts. She says somebody stole her nature from her. Some bruja. Some witch. Was it some witch stole it?”
“I don’t believe so, Lolly. It’s just something that’s happening.” Something that was happening so universally that the secrecy about it was ripping at the seams. “Don’t worry about it right now. The trial’s next week. This weekend I’ll be bringing two women to see you. One of them’s a doctor. She’ll want to talk to you, examine you. I’ve arranged for her to use the infirmary here. They’re going to be witnesses for you.”
“Is my mama gone be a witness?”
“Why do you ask?” Carolyn said softly, stopping herself from casting a surreptitious look at the light fixture above her. She was ninety percent sure there was a microphone there. Maybe even a camera.
“My aunty came. Mama tell my aunty, she gone be a witness. They put her in the hospital, so she can’t get drunk before then.”
Bingo, thought Carolyn. They’d picked up on the fetal alcohol defense. Good. “Well, if she wants to be a witness, we’ll certainly use her, Lolly. It’s good that she’s drying out. Maybe she can quit drinking. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Wouldn’t that be nice! She sounded like a kindergarten teacher. She sounded like an idiot. Well, the more idiotic, the better. She left Lolly, patting her on the shoulder.
From the hallway she spotted Josh through the window in the vault-room door. He was showing something off to a visitor. Carolyn waited until he was alone, then slipped in through the double doors. “Josh, I need a favor.”
“Anything I can do.”
“This girl I’m defending. It’s important I get her looking halfway decent for the trial. I don’t want her to look like a hooker, and something hookerish is what she’s going to want to wear.”
“They don’t never learn, do they?”
“No, they don’t. If I bring some clothes, can you be sure they’re the ones she has on for the trial?”
“I can try. Couple of those women guards back there, I’d say they’re bein’ paid off.”
“If it takes money, I’ll pay.”
“That legal?”
“It’s not suborning a witness, Josh. Greasing the skids a little, maybe.”
“Won’t promise, Ms. Crespin, but I’ll see what I can do. Hey, didja hear what happened at the courthouse?”
“What’s that, Josh?”
“Lately, the whole calendar’s been messed up, people droppin’ cases, cancelin’ appearances, cases bein’ settled out of court, whatever. Anyhow, Judge Loretta Frieze, she’s the chief judge, she’s been reschedulin’ stuff, movin’ it up, reassignin’ the cases. So she had this big fight with Rombauer.”
“Judge Frieze told him he better watch it because he’s gettin’ too many cases reversed on appeal.”
“You’re kidding,” said Carolyn again, slack-jawed.
“He said he’d be more careful. The way my friend tells it, he looked like he’d been kicked by a horse when he left there.”
Carolyn went outside, trying to figure out how she felt about all this. She’d been depending on Judge Rombauer being just what Rombauer always was. If he actually tried to appear impartial, she might have a hard time on appeal. Damn. Double damn. Another of life’s little uncertainties working itself out.
On the other hand, if Rombauer started being careful, she might have a chance of winning the case on her own, first time around.
It should have been a comforting thought, but it wasn’t.