‘Yep.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘I’m hoping it means the same thing here as it does everywhere else,’ he said. ‘Ever hear of pawnbrokers, Sandy?’
‘Of course I have, people who pay for—Damn it, that’s a pawnbroker’s sign, isn’t it? The three balls.’
Carl nodded. ‘That’s right. I saw it a couple of times yesterday on other buildings, out near the UN site, when we were going to Washington Square. Think, Sandy. A pawnbroker makes sense if there are people still in the city, going through buildings and stealing things. They need someone to sell to, someone who’ll give them something in return.’
‘And what are we selling?’
He took her hand and walked across the street. ‘We’re in the market to buy. A trip off Manhattan island, to be exact.’
The front of the building was a mess, littered with faded beer cans, torn paper, and other debris, but nothing compared to the other streets. There was a massive wooden door in the center of the building, painted black, and it looked in good shape. He leaned back and looked up at the windows. ‘See there, Sandy, the windows?’
‘They’re all covered with wood.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘This place is under management, that’s for sure.’
He reached to the doorknob, which was polished brass and didn’t budge.
She noticed the look on his face. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Door’s locked.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and then she smiled slyly. ‘Maybe this has something to do with it.’
He went over to where she was standing. There was a portal of some sort near the stairs, which might have held a mailbox at one time. Now, it contained a wooden sign with neat, block lettering:
GREENWICH SQUARE TRADERS
OPEN DUSK TO MIDNIGHT
WEAPONS MUST BE HOLSTERED
Carl looked around. After seeing the Jeeps and soldiers and Cullen Devane at work earlier, the deserted street here in Greenwich Village looked downright friendly.
‘We need to find a place to hole up for a while,’ he said. ‘Those soldiers and dogs...’
She ran a hand through her hair. ‘Oh, please shut up. I used to think I hated rats most of all, until I heard those dogs, barking because of us.’
~ * ~
They were in an apartment across the street from the pawn shop. It was in foul condition and nearly everything had been smashed or looted. They sat on the living room floor, on chairs that were torn and stained. The windows had been broken and a cool breeze blew in as they shared another sandwich. There was one more left for tomorrow. They had blankets wrapped around their legs and Sandy said, ‘It’s going to cost us a hell of a lot to get out of Manhattan, isn’t it.’
He swallowed, thinking how good a roast chicken would taste. ‘Yeah, it is. How much money do you have with you?’
She rummaged through her purse for a minute and said, ‘Thirty dollars American, and about twenty pounds. Do you think they’ll take the pounds?’
‘They just might,’ he said. ‘I’ve got about twenty-five dollars, so that gives us fifty-five.’ He looked over at his knapsack and said, ‘Trade goods.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Trade goods. This is probably a barter society. We might do better by offering them something valuable. Do you think the Times will mind giving up a 35 millimeter camera?’
‘If a camera will get us out, that’s cheap enough,’ she said, opening her water canteen and taking a sip. Then she changed the subject. ‘What does it mean, that your Army censor is out with the rest of those soldiers?’
‘I think it means that the story I did back in Boston, the one about the old guy getting killed, has a Manhattan connection. Something big enough to get the oversight editor down here. And to answer your next question, I don’t know what the connection is. Yet.’
‘Here’s another one. Tell me what happens when we get to New Jersey.’
If we get to New Jersey, he thought. ‘Well, let’s worry right now about getting off Manhattan, Sandy, and—’
Her voice was brisk. ‘Don’t be coy with me, Carl. It’s going to be tough, isn’t it?’
He looked into her sharp brown eyes and said, ‘You’re right. It might be very tough. We might be robbed along the way. Those soldiers with the dogs might find us first. Hell, the pawnbroker down there might have been closed for years. I don’t know. But if the pawnbroker is open and is relatively honest, this might work. And that’s the only chance we’ve got.’
‘All right. Let’s say it works. What then?’
‘Then we’re in the middle of the New Jersey Restricted Zone. And we’ll worry about that when we get there.’
In the distance, a sound of a helicopter engine.
‘Well, get me out of New Jersey, Carl, and I’ll make sure this story about our ambush and the paras in Manhattan gets to the Times. I’ll get it sent out through diplomatic pouch if I have to. I’m sorry, and I know if it sounds self-righteous, but I don’t like being chased, I don’t like being lied to, and I certainly don’t like being shot at.’
He kept looking at her, the fine and proper Englishwoman in a dead city, with armed men looking for her and her companion. Carl said, ‘Your grandmama would be very proud of you.’
She blushed. ‘That’s high praise indeed, Carl. She was quite a woman. I wish she were still alive so you could meet her. She smoked cigars and was a suffragette and she caused a number of scandals in her time, but her husband was a British army officer who loved her dearly, even though it caused problems in his career.’
‘I think when we get out of New York, you’ll have a story to match her tale of the Mafeking siege.’
‘I haven’t thought about that. Did you know who she got to know at Mafeking when the Boers were attacking?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Lord Baden-Powell, the man who founded the Boy Scout movement.’
‘And what did your grandmama say about him?’
Sandy smiled. ‘It’s like your official and unofficial story about how you were wounded in California. Well, the official story about Lord Baden-Powell is that he was the boyish, stiff-upper-lipped, ingenious defender of a British garrison that held out for nearly seven months against the Boers. The unofficial story, told to me by Grandmama Price, is that he was a cruel man who made up his rules as he went along and killed starving natives for stealing food. I suppose that’s the mark of this century, Carl, isn’t it? Official and unofficial stories, and trying to find out which one is true.’
‘And living to tell about them, Sandy. Living to tell about them.’
~ * ~
The afternoon dragged on and Sandy went through a pile of magazines and old newspapers that she found, most of which had faded away to a musty sludge. Then she pulled out a pamphlet and wordlessly passed it over to Carl.
“‘What you should know and what you should do,”‘ he read aloud, looking at the faded cardboard cover. “‘How to survive a nuclear attack and live for your country’s recovery.’”
Sandy was hunched over, her arms around her knees. ‘They really thought they could survive, didn’t they?’
‘We all did,’ he said quietly. ‘We all did. Maybe a few hundred people in all the world knew what a nuclear explosion looked like, and they weren’t working in the White House or the Kremlin. I don’t think anyone could have even comprehended what was going to happen, what could happen with just a few dozen bombs. So why not plan for survival? It probably wouldn’t happen, but it would make you feel good.’
Sandy nodded slowly. ‘There are friends of my father, old Tory types, who thought that Great Britain should have its own nuclear capabilities. But after the Cuban War. everyone was happy to give everything up to the UN. Everyone.’
He looked back at the pamphlet and said, ‘A few days ago I was talking to an old man who had been a peace activist, back before the war. He was saying that some of his friends thought that we were lucky. In the United Sta
tes, that is. Lucky that the war had occurred in 1962 instead of five or ten or fifteen years later.’
‘That’s a horrible thought,’ she said.
‘True, but it does make a crazy sort of sense,’ he said, rubbing at the rough cardboard cover of the pamphlet. ‘If nothing had happened, then both the United States and the Soviet Union would have acquired tens of thousands more bombs. Other countries would have the technology as well. Could you imagine the Israelis and the Arabs, both with nuclear weapons? Or India and Pakistan? Or El Salvador and Guatemala? We could have bombed ourselves back so far in time that cockroaches would rule the earth.’
Her voice was quiet. ‘It might not have happened that way. The UN might have found a way for all the countries to give up their nukes.’
‘A nice thought,’ he said, leaving his doubts to himself. He read more of the pamphlet:
The purpose of this booklet is to help save lives if a nuclear attack should ever come to America. The foreign and defense policies of your Government make such an attack highly unlikely, and to keep it unlikely is their most important aim. It is for this reason that we have devoted so large an effort to creating and maintaining our deterrent forces. However, should a nuclear attack ever occur, certain preparations could mean the difference between life and death for you…
There is no escaping the fact that nuclear conflict would leave a tragic world. The areas of blast and fire would be scenes of havoc, devastation and death. For the part of the country outside the immediate range of explosions, it would be a time of extraordinary hardship—both for the nation and for the individual. The effects of fallout radiation would be present in areas not decontaminated. Transportation and communication would be disrupted. The nation would be prey to strange rumors and fears. But if effective precautions have been taken in advance, it need not be a time of despair.
Unbelievable. It need not be a time of despair, he thought, looking around the empty apartment, looking out at the dead city. Who would have thought that the despair would continue, year after year, until it just became part of life, part of the landscape. You try to secure and defend what you can, but how can you defend against despair? He closed the pamphlet. Another artifact to join the old New York Times in his knapsack. He found that he was having difficulty keeping his eyes open. ‘Sandy, do you mind if I take a nap?’
‘A nap? You think you can sleep?’
‘I’m sure I can, if only for an hour. You’ll wake me when it gets dark?’
She smiled, pulled the blanket up around his chest. ‘You bet I will.’
He put the pamphlet down and closed his eyes and Sandy was by his side, snuggling and kissing his cheek. ‘Carl?’ she murmured.
‘Hmmm?’
‘Just one question, before you go to sleep?’
‘What’s that?’
‘The old vet that got killed, the one you did a story about. Why do you think he was murdered?’
‘Sandy, I don’t know. But I intend to find out.’
And then he closed his eyes and suddenly found that he wasn’t quite as tired as he had been, because as hard as he tried to remember, he was quite sure that he had never told Sandy that Merl Sawson was a veteran. Her body in his arms, which only a few seconds ago had been a comfortable joy to him, now felt like a dead weight.
He kept his eyes closed but was wide awake. The danger had seemed blocks away, with the barking dogs and the soldiers and Cullen Devane.
Sandy shifted in his arms and sighed.
But now the danger felt much closer.
~ * ~
NINETEEN
Sandy’s voice was in his ear: ‘Carl, there are people out there.’
He opened his eyes and was quickly awake. He had slept neither deeply nor well, worried as he was about the next few hours, about where they would spend the night, and most of all, about what Sandy had told him just an hour or so ago. The old vet. So. How did she know?
How sure was he that he hadn’t told her? They had talked about a lot of different things in the past several days. And besides, almost everyone in the country had some sort of military service in their background, so maybe she was just assuming that the old man had been a veteran—
‘Carl?’ she asked again, voice quavering.
‘Yes,’ he said, sitting up. ‘I heard you. There are people out there.’ He yawned and scratched at his back and saw the look on her face, a look of concern and affection. Not now, he thought. Keep it in mind but focus on getting out of here.
‘What have you seen?’ he asked.
‘A couple of people, going in and out of that building. It was so damn spooky! I mean, the only other person we’ve seen on this island was that loony-looking chap on the bicycle. Now I’ve seen other people ... I don’t know. It makes me wonder what’s really going on here.’
They slung their knapsacks over their shoulders and Carl led the way down the stairs, using the flashlight. When he reached the lobby he turned it off. ‘No need to draw attention to ourselves,’ he said. ‘Let’s just go across the way and do our business.’
She slipped her hand into his, and he squeezed back. ‘That sounds fine.’
He reached under his jacket and unbuttoned the flap to his holster. He would follow the posted rules of the building, of keeping his weapon holstered, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to keep it within easy reach. Out on the street it was getting dark, and a wind was blowing in from the west. A block away he saw two men carrying something between them. He wondered how anyone could live on this dead island.
At the brick building he took a deep breath and said, ‘Well, here it goes,’ and this time, the brass doorknob turned easily in his hand.
~ * ~
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Sandy was next to him, squeezing his hand so hard it almost hurt. They were in a large room, lit by candles at each corner. The floor was dirty tile and the plaster walls were a dull yellow. Peepholes of some sort had been chopped into two of the walls and empty wooden benches and chairs were lined up on the far side of the room but in the wall to Sandy and Carl’s right was a window that looked into the next room. As they got closer, Carl saw that it was thick glass, like from a banker’s workplace. Below the window was a counter and below that was a metal drawer. To the right of the counter, a barrel-shaped contraption was installed in the wall. It was a type of dumbwaiter, something that could be used to rotate goods in and out of this room, into the adjacent one.
He took a few more steps, Sandy right next to him. Behind the glass were a man and a woman, in their late forties or early fifties. The man was balding, with thin black hair combed back over his scalp. He had a sallow complexion and wore a white shirt that looked gray, a skinny black necktie and a wrinkled leather jacket. He had wide sideburns and he smiled for a quick moment, showing bad teeth. His voice was dulled by the thick glass.
‘You’re not from here, are you?’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ Carl said. The woman was wearing a flowered dress, knitting slowly, and Carl realized by the way her head was cocked and from her unblinking expression that she was blind. Her gray hair was pulled back in a bun, and her forearms were shiny with burn scars. The room the couple was in was lit with candles, revealing rows of shelves behind them, stretching out into the darkness.
The man said, ‘Well, what are you, freelance?’
Carl looked at Sandy and then back at the man. ‘Sorry, I don’t understand. What’s freelance?’
The man said something low to the woman and she laughed. He said, ‘Freelance salvage, that’s what. You thinking you can start work here, without the Village Council having a say-so? Think the two of you can sell me stuff and get your grubstake started, and then have me blackballed? Think again, kids.’
Sandy spoke up. ‘No, you don’t understand. We’re not here to sell anything. We’re not even—’
The woman stopped knitting. ‘Albert, that woman, she’s British.’
The man smiled again. ‘Melan
ie, you’re right. She’s a Brit. What are you doing here, hon, trying to save us starving savages? Well, you’re about ten years too late!’ He laughed, a bitter sound that had no humor.
Carl spoke up. ‘Listen, we’re journalists. We’re with the Times of London. We’re looking for a way to get off this island.’
‘How did you get here in the first place?’
‘We came in, with the Army.’
‘Then why don’t you go back with them?’
Sandy interrupted. ‘There was an incident, and we can’t go back to the Army. We need to leave on our own.’
Resurrection Day Page 31
