At the same time, partway across the City, Carla Bierhoff hosted Frings and three other men at the apartment she lived in with her husband, Gerhard, a wealthy physicist at the Tech, one of the City’s best-known intellectuals. Frings knew Carla from years back, at a time when she was a labor organizer and agitator. She hadn’t aged much since then; her hair was longer and she was a little heavier, a little fuller, but she still had that something, not beauty exactly, but an exoticism with her dark hair and complexion and her turquoise eyes. She’d settled down when she married Gerhard, no longer putting herself in harm’s way; no longer openly agitating. Now she did it behind closed doors. Partly this was because she no longer had the recklessness of her youth, but part was because of her marriage to Gerhard and the attendant acceptance in his circles; acceptance that wouldn’t likely survive an arrest.
Carla’s apartment was in a building at the peak of a hill overlooking the City, and her windows revealed, through a gray heat haze, the sprawl beneath them. The men at this meeting were professionals who believed that part of the responsibility that came with their success was to help the poor and the disadvantaged of the City. It wasn’t exactly a group, more a loose conglomeration, in constant flux, of people who could be called on to help with left-leaning causes on the condition of anonymity. There was no profit in the public knowing your politics. Over the years these businessmen had begun to identify each other and meet semiclandestinely in plain sight—at cocktail parties, dinners, small gatherings like this. They had become a recognizable clique, but no one knew the common purpose that united them. Or so they hoped.
The small group meeting tonight was intended to work out the details for providing a number of Community needs: clothing, medical examinations, certain types of food, and the like. These things were necessary to keep the Uhuru Community, the impoverished utopia, functioning.
Gerhard was working at the Tech tonight. He supported Carla’s endeavors but did not generally participate himself. He kept a distance to spare the Tech some headaches.
The men drank whiskey. Carla sipped wine. As usual, there was music on—some horn-heavy jazz—because it was supposed to help beat the bugs. Frings didn’t actually believe that this music would mask their conversation in the unlikely event the apartment was bugged, but people seemed to find comfort in the effort.
Carla pitched them on the urgency of the matter. The men—two businessmen, Spencer and Wright, who would donate money for food and clothing, and Berdych, a doctor who would conduct medical exams and round up medicines and vaccines—drank and listened. They were committed; it was only a matter of logistics.
The whiskey bottle circulated again. The men gave estimates of the time it would take to secure the needed supplies and arrange for their delivery. Carla listened and pushed. Could they do it quicker? Frings watched silently. He was there for support, to put another name in the room. He’d smoked a reefer on the way over, calming down after the meeting with Panos and Deyna. Deyna was a potential problem, but Frings knew that overreacting would be the worst possible move. He had to see how things played out. It was a nervy game and he knew that the reefer was masking a real fear.
Things wound down. The three men caught the hint and left, animated conversation receding in the hallway. Carla’s husband, Gerhard, would return soon from the Tech.
“I had a sit-down with your buddy Father Womé today,” Frings said.
This seemed to surprise Carla. “Going straight to the source?”
“To hear you tell it, the source would be Mel Washington.”
“Mel’s my source, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that Womé’s just a figurehead and Mel and his people run the show. Nine out of ten people in the Community, they’ll tell you they’re there because of Womé. They’ve probably never even heard of Mel. Have you ever been in the Community?”
“No.”
“You should go. I can take you or get Mel.”
Frings smiled. “I don’t think being seen with Mel helps my carefully crafted reputation for impartiality too much.”
Carla heard the irony and laughed. “That’s probably true. Let me take you around. Tomorrow? The next day?”
“Well,” Frings said, getting to his original point, “I do want to look around. Womé mentioned that there have been attacks on Community people in the night. Have you heard anything about that?”
“I haven’t seen any of the people who were assaulted, but I’ve heard. I know one of the boys. You want to see him?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Okay. Not tomorrow. The day after. You want to meet outside the shanties at eleven?”