20

Slade’s Place

 

 

Sept 24

S

lade’s Place was marked by a subtle neon glow on the corner of Hicks and Montague Streets in Brooklyn Heights. Streetlight slanted through the window into the penumbra of darkness tracing the forms of people pensively relaxing over their food and drink. The place had the look and feel of a millennial yuppie fern bar. The waiters in their waistcoats and fezzes seemed picked out of central casting for Rick’s American Cafe in Casablanca They would have not been so shocked—shocked! — to find out if there were gambling going in the back rooms.

Slade’s Place was also the kind of establishment that was above the pay grade of most BlueShirts, though there could have been some under-cover PRICE agents there. I was of such a “fuck-it” kind of attitude, anyway, that if a PRICE goon came up to me, I’d have run him through with a Slade’s Place steak knife. Sylvia must have sensed my anxiety though the tension of my silence. “Calm down, honey,” she soothed as she took my arm. “You’re still kind of new to all this, and like we would say: your slip is showing. I promise we will do something.”

Aileen led us into the plush, oak and leather safe room. It smelled of cultured leather, brandy, and cigars. A husky blond man in a business suit—strictly Ivy League—rose from his chair behind a rich-looking desk. The desk chair was like something he’d picked up from the gilded age a hundred and fifty years before. He acted like he owned the place, which he did. He smiled amicably and extended a beefy hand to me. “You must be Bob Bryant. I’m Tom Roebling.”

“Okay,” I said cautiously as I shook his hand. His grasp was dry and tight.

“He works with Karen. Sort of,” Aileen told me as she closed the door.

I stole another look at him. “Of course he does.”

“And you’re Silvia Morales? I’ve heard a lot about you.” She looked nervously at Aileen who shrugged her shoulders, then back at this Roebling fellow. “S’okay,” he assured her. “This is my cafe, and it isn’t bugged, or tagged.” He looked around at all of us. “You’re safe in every square inch of Slade’s Place.” Sylvia smiled a nervous acknowledgment. “And, Aileen, of course I know you.” He looked the two of us over, and then motioned for us to sink down into the office couch and easy chair. “Aileen and I had a nice chat during our four-hour flight back from Denver.”

“Okay, Tom,” Sylvia said as she eased down next to me on the couch. She looked with no little apprehension at Aileen. “So. You know who we are. Who are you?”

He looked at Aileen. “You haven’t told them anything about all this?”

“There hasn’t been a hell of a lot of time, Tom. And we’ve been a little busy.”

He relaxed forward, and then lit a cigar. “Fair question, then. And don’t be too shocked by my answer, but I’m a believer in getting to the point.” He took a languorous draw on his cigar. He leveled a glance at me. “Oh. My manners, sorry. You want one of these?”

“I don’t smoke,” I passed.

“I’ll take one,” Sylvia said.

“No shit? Really?”

“Really, Tom. No shit,” she answered him.

He took one from his humidor, handed it to her, and then pushed his heavy desk lighter forward. “Anyway, I do like to get to the point. I’m one of Premier Kenton’s chief security men.”

“What the fuck!” I gasped, thinking Karen had made us.

Sylvia held the cigar in halfway to her lips and glared at Aileen who stared dumb founded ahead. “God dammit, Allie! What have you done?”

“Now, calm down, just calm down,” Tom said. “I’m with you guys, okay?”

“How? How do I know you’re not with PRICE?” Sylvia challenged.

He let a poignant silence weigh down the moment, and then looked at me again. “Well, for one thing, I arranged for the release of your daughter.”

“How? How and why the fuck would some Kentonite do that?” Sylvia challenged.

“Okay. Let’s get this straight. I am not a Kentonite, as you say. I am an American—a constitutionalist through and through—and former CIA, so I know the score. That guy in his tower just happens to pay my check, and like you, I’m fed up with the son of a bitch. As to the how...” another pause as he stared me down, not in a challenge, but oddly reassuringly. “The how, Bob?” He sighed. “I bought her.”

Now it was our turn to cast out a silence. “You what?” I seethed.

Aileen leaned forward and placed her hand on my knee. “Hear him out, Bob. It sounds horrible, but it isn’t. “

“How could it be worse?” I said.

“It could have been,” Tom said. “Much, believe me.”

“I don’t think I can trust you enough to believe anything you tell me, agent Roebling,” Sylvia said.

“I’m not a Kenton regime agent,” he insisted. “I’m Neo-Pub. Have been practically since you first helped start it, Sylvia, so don’t go bullshitting me around with your legendary self-righteous platitudes, okay? I get it. Now, is that clear enough?”

Sylvia pursed her lips as she tried hiding her anger.

“Okay. I and some others are ready to mobilize the Cause.”

“Others?” Sylva said. “Other Kenton guards, you mean.”

“Right. Other former CIA. I’ve worked closely with them since I graduated Yale in oh-nine. The first thing we learned was to trust one another with our lives. So, yeah, there are three of us. May not sound like enough, but with us three you’ve got a hole to the inside. A big, silent, hole.”

“So, Tom,” I said. “Now you want me to buy my daughter back from you? Is that it?”

“No, Bob. You’ve paid plenty enough, already. And forget all that about me buying her, it’s just kind of a matter of expression.”

“It’s a pretty wicked one.”

“I’ll tell you about it later.” He took another draw from his cigar and slowly exhaled as he leaned back in his chair. “But now, let me tell you about how these gulags handle their young women inmates.”

I definitely did not want to hear that. “It’s okay, Tom. I have my daughter back, that’s enough for now.”

Aileen took my hand and squeezed it. “No Bob, there’s more you need to know, because it won’t all be fine by the time you wake up tomorrow. Really. So, hon, you need to hear Tom out. As much as it might hurt you to listen to it, it’s for Emily’s own good. And yours. She’s been through so much, and you need to know this to help her.”

Sylvia squeezed my other hand and smiled the kind of smile meant to defend against tears. “Allie and Karen told me some things you have to know, Bob. You can only imagine how damaged she must be. Our life together just turned around today, and this can only help us all to mend.”

At least Sylvia hadn’t reminded about the gulag hell she went through, but she didn’t exactly keep it to herself, either. I had seen it through the way she would toss in her sleep and wake up sweating from yet another nightmare. I let that sink in for a moment—long enough to realize how hellish it all might have been in the mind of a seventeen-year-old girl who’d been in a gulag for over two years. I reluctantly reasoned it was more than only fair for me to know. I squeezed their hands. They didn’t let go. “Okay,” I said.

“You should be proud, Bob,” Tom said. “You’ve got one tough kid, there. She’s been through more than any of us can imagine, so here’s what I know...” He told us about how when a young girl, especially a pretty teenager, is sent to a gulag, she is examined, then—depending on how pretty and unviolated she is—sent to a higher-up PRICE official in the camp. Virgins, of course, were considered premium.”

I remembered how the nurse, and then that fucking PRICE Lieutenant, took Emily into that office when he had chosen her. The look of panic and fear on my then fifteen-year-old daughter’s face when she escaped that office continued to carry my nightmares over into cold sweats.

Tom Roebling went on about how once the higher PRICE official was done with her, the girl might be sent down the line. If there was a bright side to this, the teen, now probably eighty-percent broken, was never sent out to work the fields, mines, whatever. Nothing to scar her body, which was the only thing keeping her alive. One of three things might have happened: the girl would have developed a sort of mind-out-of-body Stockholm Syndrome. In that case, she might have been toughened into expecting her sexual treatment, as might a whore. The lower guards liked this, and could be as rough as they wanted with them. Or, most likely, the girl would have committed suicide. Suicide rates among teens at gulags hovered around seventy-percent. Here, Tom broke for a minute as my imagination sizzled again over how my Emily might have been treated. By now, in a real world, she would have been a high-school senior coming home from cheerleading practice; dating the first—and of course, only—love of her life; going to the prom; experimenting with liquor, God forbid, no drugs; and choosing what college to go to. She may or may not have remained a virgin, but Tricia and I would have been the last to know. That might have been in the real world—a long-ago place, and Real-America was far from the real world.

“I could use a drink,” Tom announced. “Anyone else?”

Of course we all could, and he placed an inter-club call to the bartender. The drinks were delivered within ten minutes, and Tom lit up his second cigar. Sylvia, her face ashen, glanced sourly at the end of hers and tamped it out.

“Working as I did in Kenton’s upper echelon security, I could gain access to certain inmate records. Karen told me last July about your situation and had me look it up. In Emily’s case...” he sketched out how she was first sent to Qatapica, in south Texas. She hadn’t been passed too far down the chain of command until six months later, when she was, uh…” —he stopped short of saying “sold”— “transferred to Arapaho in Montana. She was there for about a year and was worn down fully by the time she was sent to Montehaute in Southern Colorado, from where she finally had been rescued a week before. Tom let out another sigh as he looked toward me, then leaned forward. “As you can imagine, Bob, Emily was nearly broken by then...useless to even the BlueShirts. When the girls reach that point, they usually put them up for auction.”

“Auction,” I said in a croak.

“Uh, yeah. To the highest bidder, be shanghaied to places like Saudi Arabia, China, or Iran. The ones who retained some balance of beauty, usually those who’d developed those whorish attitudes, would be sent to the Soviets, as Kenton’s ‘gifts’ to his good friend Premier Vladovkov to do with as he pleases.”

I remained numbed as I looked toward Sylvia, who had pursed her lips against crying. She abruptly turned to me, buried her head into the crook of my shoulder, and burst into tears. “Those FUCKING sons of bitches!” she sobbed. “Oh, God, Bob! I’m sorry. So sorry.”

All I could do was woodenly embrace her back.

“About a two weeks ago, Karen found out through her —lets call them what they are: mafia connections—that there was going to be an auction at Montehaute, where I knew your daughter been sent. Through no less nefarious channels than Karen’s—that would be Kenton’s—I found out that Emily was up for being auctioned. I flew out there immediately on the excuse of going to a security convention in Boulder. Karen met me there and we had a Neo-Pub bush pilot out of Tucson fly us south to Salida, where I went to Montehaute for the auction. Then, as I told you, I made the highest offer in a bidding war between some Saudi and myself. I did what I could, and bid high. I got Emily out of there and we flew back here. All the way home, she clung to Karen. I knew she was in good hands. Protected.”

“How did you know who to find in the first place?” I asked.

“The gulag’s admin keeps lousy records,” he said. “But the inmates they keep for sale are a commodity, so Emily had been on file since she got to Qatapica two years ago. She’s been easy to track by following the money.”

Now I found it hard to choke back my own tears. “Thank you, Tom, thank you. I take back all that stuff I said earlier.”

“No problem.”

I felt Sylvia’s quick stir. “Bush pilot? Out of Tucson?” she said. “Do you remember his name?”

“Oh, yeah. It was a guy named Denton...Devon.”

“Jackson?” Sylvia said. Her voice was shaking as though she’d heard a ghost. “Devon Jackson?”

“Yeah, that was it. A black guy. Hell of a pilot.”

Sylvia let out an opened-mouth sigh. “That, he is.”

Her reaction had been abrupt enough to even draw me from my funk. “You know this pilot, Syl?” I said.

She smiled broadly. “Good old Devon Jackson!”

“Who the hell is he?” I pressed.

“He flew me out of Unqutuck.” She let out a little laugh. “Then he taught me how to fly.”

“Well, he got you all back to Denver to meet me, sure enough,” Aileen quipped. “Just in time. We damn near missed our flight back home.”

Tom let another silence soak in as he took a slow puff off his cigar. “You, uh...any more questions for me? Like about my loyalty to the Neo-Publica? Any more doubts?”

It took a moment for me to remember my next obvious question. “You found out about Emily, Tom. Did you find out anything about my wife, Tricia, and my other two kids, Steven and Michael? Uh, Steven’s on the mental disability spectrum, he’s a special case.” Sylvia softened her hold on me on my mention of Tricia.

“I have a pretty good idea where he might be, Bob, at least I know where they put defective kids. The regime calls it a ‘storage facility,’ like some sorta warehouse. I’ve got to tell you. On that one, there might not be much hope. As far as all of it, though, I’ll try to look into it.”

“Would you?”

“Sure. Have you got anything I can go on? A photo, maybe?”

“Yeah,” I said, then rummaged through my wallet for the snapshot I’d carried around. I hadn’t looked at the photo of Tricia and the kids since around February—too painful. I fished out the ceased, folded photo I’d taken of my family back in 2024, when we were in St. Martin, and handed it to him.

He glanced at it. “Okay, I’ll try, Bob.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, another thing,” Tom said. “Emily does not know her name is Emily anymore. What I bought was a number. What they do is, they change the girls’ names each time they’re sent to another gulag, until they become just a number, with no other identity. By then, they don’t remember who they were. So don’t be surprised if she doesn’t respond to her name.”

“What can we do about all this, Tom?” Aileen asked. “How can we bring these people down?”

“We’ll talk about that later, Allie,” Sylvia hushed, and then sniffled away the last of her tears as she held closer on to me again.

“Listen,” Tom said with a new type of gravitas. “I know about that rally you’ve been planning in Denver. Maybe not the best idea, but a necessary one for a show of force. But I gotta tell you. The Kenton shitheads know about it, too. And there will be a big PRICE contingent there, most of them in plain clothes, to look for you all. So, watch your backs. I’ve already purposed myself as the Kenton’s head of security there. I made sure of that. Neo-Publica can’t survive on rhetoric alone, anymore. It needs outside muscle from the inside, if you get my drift. I can do that for you.”

“Yeah, Tom,” Sylvia said. “Absolutely.”

“Good. I’ll take care of us. Maybe come up with some sort of excuse to keep my BlueShirts out of the rally arena at Mile High. Can’t account for the PRICE assholes, though. They circulate on their own, or under Chancellor Randy Montefiore’s bidding, now that Stan Saunders has been disappeared. But I might be able to spot them out.”

“Thanks, Tom,” Aileen said. “Is that what you think? That Saunders has been ‘disappeared’?”

“I know so, on the best authority. Kenton couldn’t have asked for a better means as an excuse to go after Neo-Publica. Anyway, “ he said toward Aileen, “don’t thank me, Allie. Thank Karen. You’ve got yourselves a true trooper, there.”

“We know.” Sylva said. She took another one of his cigars. “For the road.”

He smiled. “Why not? Oh yeah, and as if your brains haven’t been addled enough, there are a couple of more things.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Well, first. Consider this place absolutely safe if you want to meet here. I’ll have Fred, my bartender, make you up a key to this office, because I’m not here all the time, as you can well imagine. And with Kenton cracking down on us, and all. Well, you know.”

“Jesus, thanks, Tom,” Sylvia said.

“Just doing my duty...as an American. And Bob—one more thing for you to know. I didn’t buy Emily’s freedom. I have a big expense account in the organization, so money was no object. I can write it off to a couple of RPG’s or some such I bought at the so-called convention I went to. So, I leave you with this irony.” His mouth bloomed into another smile. “It was Kenton organization money that freed your daughter.”

He waved us to stand. “Okay. It’s getting late you all, and I’m sure, Bob, you want to be with Emily. Just handle her carefully, but like I said in the beginning, you should be proud. You have one tough kid, there.

“I’ll leave whatever messages I have with Fred at the bar, and you can reach me through him. He’s one of us, too. I’ll keep you posted. And, oh yeah, your drinks are on the house, but any dinners are on you. I gotta make some sorta profit, here. I recommend the lamb.

“Now get outta here. All this makes me want to go home and hug my own daughter.”