“This bunch of losers?” Walker gave a harsh laugh. “Who’d want you? What I said is that you’re no longer in charge of this so-called revolution. Now I’ve said what I came for.” Walker turned on his booted heel and left.
The man in the tie-dyed shirt turned slowly to Guevara. “Wha’s that all about?”
“I don’t know,” said Guevara. “But I guess it means we got a problem. Americans. Again.” Guevara spat a phlegmy chunk so heavy it landed on his steel-toed boot.
*
Why can’t we ever meet somewhere classy? Walker wondered, clattering down the rickety stairs into the basement of a factory built to be abandoned.
Tiny. Mid-thirtyish. Slicked-sideways hair and a humming-bird’s intensity. With a flickering pen-light, he picked his way through broken girders and pooled filth.
“Yo, who that?” someone asked from shadows.
“Walker.”
“Yeah, come on.” Something rustled. Something thunked. “Yo, it’s Walker!”
He was escorted into a dim room. Around a table covered in maps and notepads, several damned souls craned their necks, making sure he was who he claimed. A red-tinged lantern swung slightly on its ceiling chain: back and forth, back and forth.
“How’d Che react?” asked Saul Alinsky, darling of American leftist reform in the third quarter of the twentieth century.
“Does our committee really care?” Walker retorted.
“Give him a little respect,” said Alinsky. “He was something in his time, you know.”
“Was he, much?” asked Eric Blair, also known as George Orwell, who didn’t think anybody was ‘much.’
“He did kill a lot of people,” Maximilian Robespierre said.
“He was a melodramatic failure in life,” said Walker. “He’s equally pathetic in afterlife. Didn’t understand what was happening.”
Noise from the outside. In came a crew-cut black man with a billy-goat tuft on his chin, carefully shutting the door behind him.
“Ah, Patrice. What did Bolivar say?”
Lumumba shrugged. “Wasn’t interested. Didn’t even hear me out. Said he was sick of being badgered by people wanting him to lead them to freedom.”
“Who said anything about leadership?” asked Walker.
“Who said anything about freedom?” asked Blair.
*
“What went wrong?” Guevara asked, blinking, outside his shack. The baleful glow of Paradise above couldn’t dispel the miasma over the camp’s rusted vehicles, half-built shanties and listing tents. Guevara’s head hurt and, he badly wanted a drink already. When he couldn’t manage to be a wet drunk, he was a dry drunk. Alcohol was unpredictable in perdition and it tasted like … hell. But he kept trying to get drunk enough not to care….
“You fucked up. Good. You deserve it,” said Giuseppe Garibaldi, fair-haired boy of the Italian revolutionary Carbonari in life.
“It? You mean I deserve him? Walker? Gringo swaggers in and says – screw you; we, the whitest – the best and the brightest – will take it from here?”
“I said, you damn well deserve it,” his old friend interrupted. “In life we were expected to drink, get morose, go all poetic. But this is afterlife and drunks in hell get drunk on water, or can’t get drunk at all. You’re an old dog and the ones who want revolution are right to want new tricks. Not because of that ‘effectiveness’ drivel – define ‘winning,’ in hell! – but because nobody in their right mind is going to die for a self-pitying ass.”
Defensively: “I haven’t been asking them to die.”
“And you don’t see anything wrong with that? The revolution hasn’t drifted away from you: you’ve abandoned it. You’ve been in a stupor over that bitch, Tania, for how long now? Get over it all: the whore; being doomed to hell where the booze is full of glass and sand and shit – or I’m going to find new associates.”
“You say – you think I’ve abandoned the revolution?” Guevara said.
“Done anything revolutionary lately? Tried to do anything besides slouching between irrelevant camps in the middle of netherworld nowhere?”
“Don’t make this about me. I was your compadre yesterday, and a thousand days before that, and you weren’t complaining. Now this little cabrone walks right in and says his gang’s taking over. So I’m to blame –?”
Garibaldi bitch-slapped him, open-handed, back and forth. “I.” Slap. “Did.” Slap. “Tell.” Slap. “You.”
Hard enough that Guevara staggered, his face blazing, stinging, going numb while his eyes teared.
“You didn’t,” Guevara snarled.
Garibaldi raised his hand for another round of blows. “Che, you wouldn’t listen, didn’t care. Now you want this revolution back, because someone else wants it? Fine. You want to lead? Fine. If you’re serious. But I need to know: do you want to be just another unshaven loser in a beret, or do you really want justice and glory?”
Guevara nodded once. “Justice. Revolutionary justice. Above all else. You?”
“All the fucking time. Let’s start by doing something about these upstarts. This isn’t going up against Satan and his Fallen Angels, or even the Devil’s Children. Walker’s guys are only power-hungry pussies. No better than us. Take this.”
Tentatively, Guevara accepted the fragmentation grenade that Garibaldi held out. It felt cold and unfamiliar, heavier than he remembered. How long since he’d lobbed one? Too long.
Since forever. Time was the enemy in hell: eternal penance wore you out, tore you up, filed you down to a quivering nub: fucking up was the way of the afterlife.
“Now throw that grenade in there, fearless leader.” Garibaldi pointed to an open trailer nearby. “Do some damned thing, so you know you’re alive and we know you’ve got your cojones back.” Garibaldi waved again at Guevara’s personal supply trailer: pocked aluminum; its tires sunk into waterlogged ground.
“Man – but everything’s in there. All the best rum in hell’s in there.”
Guevera caressed the grenade’s pineapple-curves. The right weapon. For destruction. For power and anger and conflict and significance.
“That’s the point, Che. Ready?”
Followers were gathering; whispers rattled on the still, fetid air. Garibaldi’s men, neat in mottled green jungle fatigues, with their feathered hats and clean bolt-action rifles, kept the crowd respectful.
I used to have troops like that, he thought. Before –
He fingered the ring around the pin, then – in a wave of anger – yanked it off and hurled the grenade into the trailer, hard. The grenade hit the mildewed carpet and bounced, then rolled out of sight.
One of Garibaldi’s men swung the door closed. The grenade exploded inside, the trailer’s aluminum walls bulging and prickling with its shrapnel. Guevara thought he could hear glass breaking.
“Viva Guevara!” Garibaldi shouted, raising both fists.
“Up the Revolution!” Garibaldi’s troops shouted. “Viva Guevara!”
“We’ll stick this revolution right up Satan’s ass,” Guevara thundered in a voice he hadn’t used since he’d had motorcycles. Maybe he’d get another motorcycle, roar across hell’s blasted wastes….
Guevara grinned at Garibaldi, looked across the crowd, and raised his own fists.
“Viva Guevara!”
*
Walker picked his way down a cobbled street, through a dockside neighborhood where it always seemed to be night. There’d been flooding in New Hell recently, and thick puddles of foul water still blocked the road in places. Something with gleaming eyes and sharp teeth scurried away and glared at him from a clogged drain.
Here and there came noise from taverns; not as much as there’d been before the floods and the plague. People were scared; the rumors, always thick, were at high tide now.
Walker didn’t believe the rumors, himself. He hadn’t been here too long – a certain firing squad in Trujillo was still a painful memory – but he’d learned that Satan was the undisputed ruler of
the modern hells.
So, why revolution? Why bother? Everyone here had already lost the most important battle – for ownership of their eternal souls. Rumor said hell was changing for the worse. Could hell get worse?
Perhaps hell would change, perhaps it wouldn’t. But … revolution. Struggle. Overthrow. For the joy of it: to fight a good fight; something a man like Walker could battle and try to win. Even if Mithridates had failed and men like Caesar were afraid to risk….
A foursome of tipsy medievals came by, singing a war song in Occitan: ‘old dead,’ the moderns called them. Walker gave them extra room as they passed but one of them glared at him anyway. Likely, from Walker’s suit and gun-belt, they mistook him for Authority.
He wasn’t. Yet.
Walker turned onto a street along the docks. Things splashed and hissed in furious, dark water. A grey-haired woman in robes and a tricorne leaned against one of the big steel bollards, absorbed in a deck of cards: dealing herself a hand, studying it, reshuffling the cards.
More diviners out, too.
He’d never believed in anything but his own ability. Brilliant – a lot of people thought they were, but he’d proven he was. Summa cum laude graduate of the University of Nashville at fourteen; medical doctor at nineteen. He’d co-owned a newspaper, practiced both medicine and law, and fought three duels by the time he was twenty-five.
The year 1848, though, had decided the course of his life. He’d been studying medicine in Europe during that year of revolutions – in Heidelberg where Germany’s first parliament had been organized, and then in Paris as the Second Republic tottered into existence. The violence, the excitement, the importance of those events had given him a direction.
His first foray had led him into the Mexican state of Baja California. There, with forty-five men, he had captured the state capital of La Paz and created the Republic of Lower California. The Mexican Army had moved against him too fast, with too much force, and he’d eventually been driven back into California, where the Federal government had charged him with conducting an illegal war. That was the era of Manifest Destiny. His patriotic intentions had been clear: a jury had taken all of eight minutes to acquit him.
“Yo, Mister?” An emaciated, shirtless, one-eyed man lurched out of an alley, bare chest covered in slashes and half-healed scabs. “Cut your palm, Mister? Cut your palm and tell you ’bout the days to come?”
Walker’s hand moved to his gun.
“No.”
“Dark days coming, Mister. Dark days coming for all souls. You know your fortune through it, Mister?”
“I create my fortune,” Walker told the freak, and increased his pace.
Something big howled or screamed, way out in the thrashing dark ocean. The scream reechoed from the waterfront buildings.
Two years after his Mexican adventure, he’d found another opportunity in a civil war between the two political parties of Nicaragua. Walker had set sail from San Francisco with fifty-eight men to join the Democratic side. More had joined him on arrival.
The American press had named his small army ‘the Immortals.’ They weren’t, yet a quick series of battles led to his taking the national capital and, before long, setting himself up as president.
In six months, Walker’s government was recognized as legitimate by the United States. In eight, double-crossing robber barons got that legitimacy withdrawn. Costa Rica declared war on him, repelling his invasion at Santa Rosa and eventually besieging his capital at Grenada. His men had burned that ancient capital to the ground during their retreat and evacuation, and once again he’d found himself Stateside.
Failure: if you survive failure, you learn from it and try again. Four times, Walker tried returning to Nicaragua. On his fourth attempt, the captain of a British warship handed him over to the Honduran government.
He’d really thought he’d meet his end – on a humid, overcast September day before a firing squad: Listo … a blindfold sticky on his face … Objetivo … ropes chafing his wrists as he desperately tried to think of anything to save himself … Fuego, and the crackle of musketry.
And you really don’t feel it….
He woke, some timeless duration later, here. Here in hell, where chances and challenges seemed infinite; where he could test himself against history’s greatest on a playing field laughably level. That Guevara, the legend, saw neither chance nor challenge disgusted and disappointed Walker.
More bars. Too many bars and restaurants, serving unpalatable food and acid drink that no man could stomach…. It was humanity’s habit in life to congregate and fight and fornicate (or try to) and fabricate all manner of dirty dealing. So they did the same in afterlife, no better than they’d been before: no smarter, no more inventive, with eternity beckoning and Paradise shining its unattainable light…. Either they couldn’t get drunk, or they were drunk all the time, these hellions, souls accursed with just deserts.
One of the damned lay in the gutter with his throat slashed, somehow still alive and moaning slightly. From another alley came grunts and moans. Walker scanned the cheap facades; worn brass, paint crackling over an infernity of rot; flickering neon here and there. Old dead, new dead: souls not quite either – here where the worst scum in all the hells came to meet and scheme and hate and kill and die, again and again.
Walker’s hand was never far from his gun; every so often he settled the rapier on his left hip, making sure it was free in its scabbard. Too often in this place, guns failed. Steel could too, but less often.
His destination was a brick building, set slightly apart from the others, its facade pitted and corroded by the sea’s salt spray. Shattered windows seeped fumes from the darkness within, and a thuggish bouncer with a spiked club stood outside.
“Some say the Gracchi brothers hang out here. They in tonight?” Walker asked.
The bouncer lazily looked up, then spat something green – something that moved and writhed when it hit the ground – before answering: “They’re always in. Can’t leave.”
“You know where, in here?”
Contempt twisted the bouncer’s thick lips. “Where they always are, fuck-head. Behind the bar, serving the poor.”
*
Even in the semi-darkness, Walker could tell this place was filthier than the worst sailors’ dive on the Barbary Coast. The floor’s carpet of putrid spills, vomit, blood and shit sucked at his boots as he walked. Oil-lamps flickered and smoked, hung from the ceiling of the half-empty common room. Fewer people than he’d expected; not a problem. They clustered in knots, muttering or gambling or just quietly (out of lifelong habit and the hope that this time it might work) trying to get themselves wasted. Individuals lay here and there, dead or unconscious and always with their pockets turned inside-out.
A wide bar ran along the side of the room farthest from the door, a grimy surface punctuated by the occasional broken tap-handle. Behind it were two bartenders and rows of liquor bottles, many cracked and empty.
“There’s broken glass in my beer,” a big ponytailed man was growling at one of the two bartenders. He wore dirty, torn workman’s overalls and there was blood in the gobbet that he spat on the floor.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” said one of the bartenders in a tone that made you know he wasn’t. The bartender was short, with a narrow aristocratic face and a spill-stained toga. “They come from the brewery with the broken glass already in the bottle – no extra charge.”
“Bless you. You sold me shitty beer, and we got a problem.”
Good, thought Walker, heading toward the bar. First impressions counted, and this was his chance to make an ideal one, if the disagreement escalated. His hand closed around his rapier’s hilt.
“Ran out of the shitty beer last night,” the bartender said. “All we have is the broken-glass beer and the dog-vomit beer. Selection’s on that chalkboard – can’t you read?”
“No,” said the customer flatly. He glared at the bartender, who met his eyes and said nothing. After a moment, the custom
er threw down a coin. “Screw it, just gimme another one.” The customer snatched his foul-smelling drink and stumbled back to his table.
Drat. Walker let the half-drawn sword slide back into its scabbard.
“Which do you want?” the bartender asked, as Walker reached the counter. “You look like you can read.”
“Tiberius Gracchus?” asked Walker.
“I’m Gaius.” He gestured at the other bartender, bearded and a few years older. “That’s Tiberius. What can I get you, sir?”
“Do you have a minute to talk? You two have a reputation, you know. A famous name.” Romans. Nobles. Reformers.
“Ssh. None of the damned who come in here know it, or need to,” Gaius sighed. “But yes, we were something. Fought for the downtrodden. Tried to do some good. If I’d known what some of them were actually like –” he gestured around the dive “– I’d have reconsidered.”
“Maybe you weren’t wrong. There are people who remember what you tried to do. Maybe we can pull strings to get you out of here. And maybe there’s something you can do for us.”
*
Across the room from Walker, a half-naked whore with a client atop her rolled her head sideways on the table and squinted at the little man just arrived, who was dressed like he actually had some money: new dead. Looked a lot like –
“Get off me,” she said to her customer.
“Ain’t done yet.” He kept working at her, or trying to, buttocks straining.
“Ain’t gonna be. Never.” She reached for a derringer, pressed it to his throat.
“Not gonna pay you,” the customer said, arching back as she cocked the gun.
“Someone else gonna pay me more’n you’ll scratch in a year. Now sod off.”
Muttering something, the customer got off her. She yanked up her dungarees. With another careful glance at Walker, still talking with the two bartenders, she made for the door.
*
Nouveau Paris, or at least this part of it, had degentrified rapidly since Guevara had last been here. Once-dignified terrace houses were papered with peeling, faded posters for shows, movies or disc releases; handbills stapled over them advertised lower-level shows or amateur releases. The street teemed with hippies, beatniks, goths, flappers and a hundred other types; their self-absorption was, after what Guevara had seen trekking here, almost refreshing in its honest naiveté. After all, what did any damned soul have left but its self? OK, so they should have been looking at him, not at themselves, but at least they weren’t nervously looking up at the sky for signs of Erra and his pitiless Seven, sent from Above to punish guilty and innocent alike.
Lawyers in Hell Page 9
