XVIII

 

 

“I guess that’s the place,” Lora said doubtfully, slowing the car alongside a vacant parking-bay and pointing across the street to an ugly old building with a hoverhalt on its roof.

“Yes!” she added, craning to read a sign pointing to it. “I remember the name. Right first time—not bad, hm?”

She backed into the bay and jumped out. Copying her, Sheklov stared at the building. It was shabby, with great cracks in its walls that were only prevented from spreading by the reinforced concrete beams doing double duty as supports for the steel stairs up to the hoverhalt. They had arrived at the same moment as a hovercar, and he could see the walls trembling under the extra load.

He shook his head. He hoped he wasn’t going to have to spend long in this paradoxical country: so rich, yet with so many people in it prepared to suffer intolerable indignities!

Having stuffed five bucks into the nearby meter—the regular fee for two hours’ parking on a Sunday—Lora caught his arm and hurried him across the street. On the steep stairs of the hoverhalt he lost sight of her as the hovercar discharged a crowd of people numbering only about twenty but blocking the width of the steps as efficiently as a small army, then caught up with her again on the landing outside the topmost apartment, where she was already ringing the bell.

Shortly, the door was opened to a security stop by a woman with a strong face and coarse black hair, who could have been any age from thirty to fifty, wearing a casual red sweater and tan pants. Her expression, resigned at first, changed in a moment to one of welcome.

“Oh! I wasn’t expecting anyone, so I thought it might be the pigs—or one of my clients turning up without an appointment. But you’re Lora Turpin, aren’t you? Come on in!”

She released the security stop and flung the door wide.

Lora hesitated, while Sheklov’s eyes seized greedily on what details of the interior of the apartment he could make out from where he stood. Books—twenty times as many as in the whole of the Turpins’ home! A ouija board, hung from the wall on a bit of string! Visible on a low table, abandoned presumably when the bell rang, a tarot pack!

It was like coming home.

So who was this woman, anyway—Danty’s mistress? That seemed unlikely. Vaguely he heard Lora asking whether Danty was in; equally vaguely, he registered the reply: “No, but he could be back at any time. Please come in and wait if you’d like to.”

“Well …” Lora looked to Sheklov for guidance.

“That’s very kind!” he exclaimed, and this time took her arm, encouraging her over the threshold. “Apparently you know Lora,” he added. “I’m Don Holtzer.”

“Oh, yes. Danty said he met you at the Turpins’. I’m Magda Hansen.” Shutting the door and waving them to chairs. “Do sit down. Maybe you’d like some coffee?”

“Please,” Sheklov said firmly.

“I’ll go plug the percolator in. Just a moment.” And she headed for the miniature kitchen in the corner.

Out of the side of her mouth, looking ill-at-ease, Lora whispered, “But that’s the—uh—the girl Danty’s living with. I saw her when I woke up this morning. That was why I …”

“Turned tail?” Sheklov supplied equally softly, finally putting two and two together. “Well, she doesn’t seem to mind your coming to call, does she?”

And that was all he had the chance to say before she was back and sitting down on one of the built-in couches, facing them. Recollecting her tarot cards, she leaned forward to gather them up. Sheklov decided to risk commenting on them.

“That’s an unusual deck you have there. Is it what they call—uh—tarrot?” Mispronouncing it deliberately.

“Yes.” Collapsing the cards with strong, thick fingers into a neat pile. “Haven’t you seen them before? Like to look?”

“Well, thanks,” Sheklov said, reaching to the full stretch of his arms to take them from her. He realised at once they were a design he didn’t know. But good. The hanged man, in particular: a black surrounded by hooded Klansmen. Very apt. He gave them back, and Magda turned to park them on a vacant section of one of the many book-shelves at her back.

“Did you say you thought it might be police at the door?” he inquired, since Lora appeared to be tongue-tied.

“Could have been,” Magda said with a sigh. “Those radiated pigs are on a harassment kick right now—come crashing in, mostly on Sundays or in the middle of the night—just to turn everything over and make a mess. If they break a few things, so much the better.”

“But—uh—what excuse do they have for …?” Sheklov let the question trail away, thinking of the days when that had been the perennial nightmare of anyone on the other side who had dared to reveal an original turn of mind.

Magda gave a shrug. “Oh, they always say ‘suspicion of illegal drugs,’ you know. But that’s so much shit. It’s just the thing they don’t need a warrant for. Fact is, they hate rebs, and that’s all there is to it.”

“I see,” Sheklov said, for want of any better comment. He felt at a loss. This woman, much older than Danty, had a similar disconcerting quality in her dark gaze and in her tone of voice. He could almost imagine himself saying something to her, as he had done to Danty, that would be a betrayal of his cover, and without being able to help it even though he realised it was happening.

Still, he had to put some questions about Danty because of what had already happened. He said, “Ah …! Well, if it’s Danty they’re after, I can’t see why. I talked to him a bit at the party last night, and he seemed to be very—uh—serious. Sort of thoughtful. And well-read, too,” he added as an afterthought.

“Yes!” Lora chimed in. “That’s why Don wanted to see him again. Wasn’t it, Don?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

There was a dead silence, during which Magda looked—not discourteously, just searchingly—at both of them in turn for long seconds. She said at last, “And, of course, the pigs don’t like foster-rebs, either.”

Meaning herself, Sheklov deduced. The term had been included in his briefings. It applied to an older person who actively encouraged the young to drop out of society in search of some allegedly superior truth. A few states had incorporated it into their criminal codes, making such encouragement an offence for which the parents of minors could sue by analogy with “alienation of affection” in the old British common law.

Shades of Socrates and the hemlock! “Corrupting our youth!”

“I get the impression,” Sheklov said slowly, not looking directly at Magda, “that over the border we—you know I’m Canadian?”

“Danty did mention it.”

Was there mockery in those dark eyes? Had she seen through his pretence? He couldn’t tell. He ploughed doggedly on.

“Well, we seem to understand something different by the word reb. I mean, it’s not something the police would—uh …” A wave of his hand.

“Down here the police pounce on anyone who’s in the slightest degree different,” Magda said. “Anyone who tries to think for himself, to begin with—they’re the most dangerous of all. Every loyal citizen is convinced that the government is right, even if today it says the exact opposite of what it said yesterday. Not that that happens so much any more. We’ve decayed into what they call a consensus.” She made the word sound fairly obscene.

“You mean—” Lora began. Magda cut her short.

“What I mean is that the government of this country is killing us. Stone-dead. By slow strangulation.”

She jolted forward on her couch, her face suddenly animated, and Sheklov realised with a start that she was beautiful—not in the conventional American, or even the conventional Russian, sense, which had more to do with mere glamour, but in the ancient sense of the Gioconda or the Venus di Milo. It was as though a light had been switched on inside her head that illuminated her true personality. Also, in contrast with the shrill whine of almost every other woman he had met since his arival—most notably, Sophie Turpin and her mother—her voice was a resonant contralto, cello-forceful.

“And it’s a tough job for them,” she said. “Because in every generation you get a handful of people who won’t just be crushed into the regulation mould. Don’t you? The ones who want to be—oh—inventors rather than engineers, or poets rather than copywriters, or architects rather than building-contractors. Peg it?”

“I guess so,” Sheklov said, and added wryly, “likewise, ecologists rather than timber-salesmen.”

“You peg,” she said, and this time smiled at him—just with her eyes, wrinkling the lids humorously. “So what happens when you block off all their opportunities to explore and experiment as they want to? You get rebs. Hell, you’re bound to.”

“Well—sure you are!” Sheklov said, blinking. “So …?”

“So they get stamped on,” Magda said. “Like I said.”

“But—”

“But why? Oh, I know it’s crazy. I know we’re so rich we ooze money like—like fat dripping off roast pork. I know we ought to be able to tolerate a fraction of 1 per cent of young people who’d rather sit and think than fit into the machine. But people seem to resent their need to do that, don’t they?”

Sheklov swallowed hard, wondering what Holtzer ought to say and was saved the trouble. Lora spoke up.

“I know just what you mean!” she exclaimed. “Lots of times I think inside my head there’s something going on that isn’t in the books they make you read in school. It makes me want to do crazy things now and then, really crazy, just to shake everybody up. And they don’t even notice!” The last word was almost a cry.

“So what do you do about it?” Magda said.

“I …” She licked her lips. Eventually she shook her head and stared down at her hands, folded in her lap.

“See, Don?” Magda said. “That’s what a foster-reb like me is trying to stop. Someone like Lora ought to be able to—to go somewhere, do something, stack up new experience and dig around among it in case the answer’s somewhere underneath.”

“I—uh—I guess I can see you have a case there,” Sheklov said cautiously. “But what one hears about the result …”

“You mean the popular picture of a reb?” Magda interrupted. “I guess if you’re Canadian” (did she lay too much stress on that or was his imagination working overtime?) “you’ve been fooled by the media. I’m not talking about fakes, phoneys, borderline psychopaths, what they used to wrap up under one handy label like ‘beat’ or ‘hippie.’ That went out of style when the courts started holding that long hair was prima-facie proof of vagrancy because it meant you couldn’t pay the barber, and the pigs grunted with joy and reached for their guns!”

Reflexively Sheklov touched his chin. Back There he’d sported a beard. Why not, in an area where the winter temperatures regularly dipped to —30° Centigrade?

“Yeah, beards too,” Magda agreed. “And when that happened the phoneys folded up and went home. Leaving just the few, just the handful, who couldn’t be folded up. And what can they do? If they apply for a passport, the pigs come running and turn over their homes, grill their families, their friends, until no one wants to know them any more. ‘Everything’s great here, why should you want to leave?’—that’s the principle, and saying you’re curious about the rest of the world is no excuse. You’ve been told all your life that this country is the best, the finest, the most wonderful. So they want to know why you aren’t satisfied. And how can you say why you aren’t? You haven’t done the things that might tell you!”

“But if you do try and leave, you have to leave for good!” Lora burst out. “I’ve thought about it, and—and I just daren’t! I might get shot at the border!”

“A lot of people do,” Magda sighed. “Which is why most rebs go exploring in a different direction altogether.”

Sheklov looked at the ouija board, the tarot deck, various other significant items on display. He said at last, “You must mean—inside their heads.”

“Yes.” Magda gave him a puzzled look. “I usually have to spell that out to people when I’m defending the rebs. I guess north of the border you aren’t quite so calcified, hm? But that’s the long and short of it, yes.”

“How did you get involved with these rebs?” Sheklov queried. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

Magda seemed to be overcome with a fit of self-consciousness. She said, avoiding his eyes, “Oh …! Oh, I guess I was one of the half-and-half cases. Sometimes I felt I ought to stand up for what I believed in, and sometimes I was just lazy enough to coast along with the gang, and I drifted into a marriage on that basis. Which turned sour, and taught me—much too late—that my laziness was a crime against myself. And, too, I found out that I have …”

“Yes?” Sheklov prompted.

“I have a talent,” Magda said after a brief hesitation, and pointed at the card in the window. It was so thin the word CONSULTATIONS could be read on it, backwards, against the light sky of late afternoon. “You see,” she continued, licking her lips, “I do have more—uh—empathy than some people. I trained as a nurse when I quit college, thinking maybe I’d go to work for the Red Cross or some other international aid organisation, in some broken-backed poverty-stricken country. It turned out I wasn’t allowed to, because—well, because I’d been kind of wild as a kid and they wouldn’t give a passport to anyone with a drug-bust on their record. Smoking pot was all, but quite enough. So here I am, a professional shoulder to weep on in an age when most people won’t admit they can cry. Won’t even confide in their best friends. It doesn’t require a licence, so that’s cool.”

Sheklov was framing his next question when Lora spoke up again unexpectedly. She said, “Say—uh—Magda! Does Danty have any kind of talent? I kind of wondered when. … Did he tell you how we met? He saved my life!”

Sheklov rounded on her in astonishment. There was something so brittle and superficial about this girl, hearing her utter a statement like that jolted him.

But Magda was nodding as though it was perfectly natural to say such things. “Oh, that Danty!” she said, in a tone that cross-bred cynicism with affection. “He has a talent, sure has. Know what he always says about himself?”

Lora shook her head, her eyes hungry.

“Ever read The Sword in the Stone? Yes? Remember Merlin the magician?”

“Yes, of course!”

“Well, Danty always says he’s in the same mess, born at the wrong end of time. You see, he—”

There came a scratching at the door, the sound of a key being fumbled into the lock. She broke off and swung around to face that way. So did the others. The door flew wide.

Danty stood there, swaying drunkenly, lips drawn back in a grimace of pain, eyes almost closed, a crusting cut on his forehead, and a great blood-gushing slash on his left arm that now, letting fall his key, he struggled again to staunch with his red right hand.

“Help me,” he whispered faintly, and fell headlong.