Fraternity of the Stone

by David Morrell

  "With the hours I've been putting in, I told the ambassador my son's more important than any damned crisis."

  "And he didn't get angry?"

  "All he did was laugh and say, Tell your son Happy Birthday for me.' "

  3

  A long black limousine stopped in front of the house at two the next afternoon. Drew watched, excited, from his bedroom window. The car had a small American flag on a metal post near the driver's side-view mirror. Its license plates were the same kind as on his father's car - from the embassy. A uniformed American got out, took a large red-white-and-blue package from the seat beside him, straightened the bow, and proceeded up the curved front walk, past an ornate Japanese garden, toward the entrance.

  He knocked on the door and, while he waited, adjusted his chauffeur's cap, then turned, attracted to the song of an unseen bird in a nearby blossoming cherry tree. An elderly Japanese woman, one of the few local servants who hadn't quit working here, came out and bowed gracefully in her brilliant orange kimono.

  The driver bowed slightly in return and then, from American habit, tipped his cap. "Please tell Mr. Mac-Lane that the ambassador sends his compliments." The driver grinned. "Or I guess you should tell his son. And give him this birthday present. The ambassador hopes it makes up for the canceled party."

  The driver handed the package to the servant, bowed again, and returned to the limousine.

  4

  Despite his growing impatience, Drew obeyed instructions and waited in his room while his mother and father made sure that everything was properly arranged.

  "It's just the three of us," his mother had said. "But we'll have enough fun for twenty."

  Eagerly he paged through the American comic books - Superman and Davy Crockett were his favorites - that his father had arranged to be specially delivered. "In the diplomatic pouch," his father had said, though Drew knew he was joking. "Nothing's too good for my son."

  He lay on his bed, staring anxiously at the ceiling.

  "Okay, Drew," he heard his mother call from the garden at the rear of the house. "You can come out now."

  He leaped from his bed and scurried out of his room. The quickest way to the garden in back was through his father's study. As he passed his father's desk, he saw through the open sliding door to where his mother and father sat at a circular table piled high with presents, all sizes and colors. Sunlight glinted off the tall, frosted glass that his mother held.

  "Why, even the ambassador sent you a present," she said, excited when she saw him coming, and raised the glass to her mouth.

  "He didn't need to. Thinks of everything. Wonder what's in it," Drew's father said and shook the box.

  Drew entered the garden.

  The stunning blast deafened him, throwing him back through the open study door, slamming him hard against his father's desk. He must have blacked out for a moment. He didn't remember falling from the desk to the floor. The next thing he knew, he was staggering to his feet. The roar behind his ears made him sick. His vision was blurred. As he stumbled toward the indistinct wreckage of the study door, he realized - confused - that his clothes were wet, and peering down, frantic to clear his eyes, he saw that he was drenched with blood. The blood alone should have made him scream. But it didn't. Nor did he scream as he panicked, afraid of how badly he might be hurt, nor as he realized - no! - that the blood wasn't his.

  He lurched through the shattered doorway, seeing his mother and father in fragments across the lawn, the grass wet from their blood. The birthday cake, the plates and cups and gaily wrapped presents that had covered the table no longer existed. The table itself had disintegrated. Acrid smoke from the blast swirled thickly around him, making him choke. A nearby bush was in flames.

  But still he didn't scream.

  Not until he focused on his mother's almost-severed head. The force of the blast had rammed the glass from which she'd been drinking into her mouth. Its circular base propped her lips apart. Inside her mouth, the rest of the glass had shattered. Blossoming shards protruded, dripping blood, from both her mangled cheeks.

  Then he did scream.

  5

  The steam began to clear. Arlene's shadow was motionless behind the curtain. The bathroom was silent. Drew hadn't been aware that she'd turned off the water.

  The silence was broken by the rasp of metal hooks on the curtain as she opened it part way, her features taut with sympathy. "I didn't know."

  "You couldn't have. It's something I don't like to talk about. Even now, it's too painful." Except, Drew thought, once, in a moment of weakness, he had told Jake. He wiped what might have been steam from around his eyes.

  "I'm deeply, terribly sorry."

  "Yeah." His voice was flat.

  "The present from the embassy -"

  "With red-white-and-blue wrapping paper."

  "- was booby-trapped?"

  Drew nodded.

  "But it didn't come from the embassy, and the limousine wasn't an official car, and the government license plates were fake," she said.

  "Of course. And the driver - nobody knew anything about him. The embassy's security staff made me look at photographs. Nothing."

  "Classic."

  "Yeah." Drew closed his eyes. "Wasn't it, though?"

  6

  His mind blank, his body numbed from grief, he faced the ambassador in the large, oppressive office. From his ten-year-old perspective, the ceiling disturbed him; it was so high that it made him insecure, as if he'd suddenly become shorter. The hulking furniture was covered with leather and looked uncomfortable. The walls had somber wood paneling, brooding books on massive shelves, disturbing photographs of important-looking men. The carpet was so thick that he didn't know if he was allowed to stand on it with his shoes.

  "Will that be all, sir?" an embassy guard - Drew's eyes had widened at the gun in the holster on his belt -asked the elderly white-haired man behind the desk at the far end of the enormous room.

  Drew recognized the man, having met him several times before when his parents had brought Drew to the embassy for Christmas and Fourth of July parties. The man wore a gray pin-striped suit and vest. His closely trimmed mustache was as white as his hair. His lean face looked wrinkled, tired.

  "Yes, thank you," the man told the guard. "Instruct my secretary to hold all my calls and appointments for the next fifteen minutes."

  "Very good, sir." The guard stepped backward, leaving the office and shutting the door behind him.

  "Hello. It's Andrew, isn't it?" The ambassador studied him, seeming to choose his words. "Why don't you come over here and sit down?"

  Confused, Drew obeyed. The leather chair made a creaking sound as he settled onto it, his feet dangling off the floor.

  "I'm glad you're out of the hospital. Did they treat you well?"

  Bewildered, Drew only sighed. In the hospital, there'd been soldiers with guns that had scared him. There'd been no other children in the ward, and groggy from the injection he'd been given to make him sleepy, he hadn't understood why the nurses were called lieutenants.

  "Your doctor tells me that apart from several cuts and bruises - and those flashburns on your eyebrows -there's nothing wrong with you. A miracle, really. He says not to worry, by the way. The hair on your eyebrows will grow back."

  Drew frowned at him, mystified. His eyebrows? What difference did his eyebrows make? His parents -the shards of glass sticking out of his mother's bloody mangled cheeks - they were what mattered.

  Grief cramped his stomach, rising cold to his aching heart.

  The ambassador leaned forward with concern. "Are you all right, son?"

  Drew wanted to sob but controlled the impulse, swallowing thickly, nodding.

  The ambassador waited, trying to smile. "And your room here at the embassy? I'm sure that you miss your home, but under the circumstances, we couldn't very well let you stay there, even with guards. You understand. I trust that you're comfortable now, at least."

  The bedroom Drew had been giv
en reminded him of a hotel room - if he'd had the vocabulary, he'd have called it impersonal - where he and his parents once

  had stayed during a vacation trip to Hawaii. Again, he forced himself to nod.

  "I know my staff's been treating you well," the ambassador said. "In fact, I've given orders to the kitchen crew that you can have all the ice cream you want. For the next few days, at any rate. Strawberry is your favorite, I believe."

  The thought of strawberry ice cream, its color and consistency, reminded Drew of his mother's bloody cheeks.

  "Is there anything else we can get you? Something you miss from home perhaps?"

  My mother and father, Drew wanted to scream. He suffered in silence.

  "Nothing at all?"

  Aware of the tension, Drew struggled for something, anything, to say and murmured the first words that entered his mind.

  The ambassador straightened. "I'm sorry, son. I didn't hear you."

  Don't call me 'son,' Drew inwardly raged. I'm not your son. I'm not anybody's son. Not anymore.

  But all he said, not caring, was "My comic books."

  The ambassador looked relieved. "Of course. Whatever you like. I'll send a man out this afternoon to get them. Have you any preference, any you're especially fond of?"

  "Superman." It made no difference. Drew wanted desperately to get out of the office. "Davy Crockett."

  "I'll get a boxload for you." The ambassador pursed his lips. "Now then." He stood, came around to the front of his desk, and leaned his hips against it, bending forward to put his gaze at Drew's eye level. "I have a few things we have to discuss. This isn't easy, but it has to be done. Your parents' funeral..."

  Drew winced. Though only ten, he'd been taught by yesterday's horror to have a sudden understanding of death. Certainly, after having seen his parents' fragmented bodies, he knew that they couldn't possibly be put back together.

  "... will be tomorrow morning. My assistants and myself have had several discussions on the matter. We know how painful this is for you, but we've agreed that you ought to attend it. To lay your nightmares to rest, so to speak. And to make you a symbol..."

  Drew didn't understand the word.

  "... of what hate can do. Of what shouldn't be allowed to happen again. I know that this is all terribly confusing for you, but sometimes we have to make good things come out of bad. We want you to sit in the front pew at the funeral. A lot of photographers will take your picture. A lot of people - the world, in fact -will be watching. I'm sorry that you have to grow up so fast. For what it's worth, I feel confident that your mother and father would have wanted you to go."

  At last Drew did cry. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't stop himself.

  The ambassador held him tightly, patting his back. "That's the stuff. Get it out of you. Let it go. Believe me, it's all right to cry."

  Drew didn't need encouragement. He continued to sob, convulsing so hard that he thought his heart must surely break. Finally his spasms subsided. Wiping his eyes, feeling the sting of the tears on his cheeks, he frowned in pain at the ambassador. "Why?" His throat was so swollen that the word was a croak.

  "I'm sorry, Andrew. I'm not sure I understand. Why what?"

  "Who killed them? Why?"

  The ambassador sighed. "I wish I knew. These days, America isn't very popular, I'm afraid." He named several countries, most of which Drew had never heard of - Cuba, Cameroon, Algeria, the Congo. "It's not just here in Japan that we've had riots against us. Everything's changing. The world's a different place."

  "But isn't there someone you can punish?"

  "I'm sorry. We just don't know enough. But I promise we're doing everything we can to find out."

  Drew blinked through his tears.

  "I hate to do this all at once. There's something else we have to discuss. A while ago I said that I've told the kitchen staff to give you all the ice cream you want for the next few days. The reason for the time limit is that after the funeral, after you've had a chance to rest, you'll be flown back to the States. Someone has to take care of you. I've spoken to your uncle and made arrangements for you to stay with him. You'll have a chance to speak with him on the overseas telephone" - the ambassador glanced at his watch - "in twenty minutes."

  Confused, Drew tried to remember what his uncle looked like, but all he saw in his mind was his father's face, or rather, an indistinct image of his father's face. It alarmed him that he couldn't recall what his father looked like. Except for the fragments of the body strewn across the blood-soaked lawn.

  7

  "But who killed your parents?" Arlene sat beside him on the bed, clutching a blanket around her.

  "I never knew. At the embassy, I heard a lot of talk. The American who'd dressed as a chauffeur and delivered the bomb was described as a free-lance, a mercenary. That was the first time I'd ever heard the word. The assumption was that he'd been hired by Japanese fanatics, but one man on the embassy's security staff - he'd lived in Japan since the end of the war-insisted that a bomb wasn't the Japanese style. He kept talking about samurai and bushido and a lot of other things I didn't understand. The code of the warrior. He said a Japanese worthy of that name was honor-bound to kill his enemy in the open, face to face. Not with a bomb, not even with a gun, but with a sword. Three months later, in fact, a Japanese protestor did just that, shoving his way through a crowd to impale a Japanese politician who favored the new treaty with America. And the security guard also said that a true Japanese wouldn't have tried to kill his enemy's wife and child -only the husband, the father."

  "But if the guard didn't blame the Japanese, who did he blame?"

  "The Russians. Much of this didn't make sense to me at the time, of course, but I later got the idea of what he meant. The point of the new defense treaty was for America to help protect Japan from an attack by the Soviets. With our bases in Japan, we had our thumb on Southeast Asia and could try to stop communism from spreading. The guard's theory was that, if the Soviets could make it seem that the Japanese had blown up an American diplomat and his family... "

  "The deaths would be so shocking they'd widen the gap between America and Japan. The treaty would be threatened," said Arlene.

  "That was the guard's idea. But if so, the tactic didn't work. My parents' murders made everybody realize how out of control the situation had become. The Japanese, embarrassed that they were being blamed for the assassinations, began to stop demonstrating. The crisis passed."

  Arlene took his hand. "But not your nightmares."

  He looked at her with anguish. "I wanted someone to blame."

  8

  He'd often gone to mass with his parents, but he'd never realized until their funeral how many images of death surrounded him in church. Christ on the Cross, the nails through His hands and feet, His back slashed by whips, His head crowned with thorns, His side split open by a spear. In a prayer book, he found a colorful depiction of the tomb from which Christ had risen.

  Christ's disciples stood before the rolled-away stone, raising their faces in celebration.

  But nothing could bring his parents back, he knew. He'd seen the bloody fragments of their bodies.

  The thunderous organ music was scary, the Latin of the mass as meaningless as the English that the priest used to describe "this terrible tragedy." In the front pew, Drew felt everybody staring at him. Photographers kept taking his picture. He wanted to scream.

  The ambassador had explained that the bodies would be flown to a place called Andrews Air Force Base, where his uncle and "even the Secretary of State" would be waiting. Whoever the Secretary of State was. It didn't matter. There'd be another service at his father's family plot in Boston, but to Drew, that didn't matter either, though apparently this first service was more important, a symbol - the ambassador had used that word again - of the need for friendship between America and Japan.

  Drew noticed many hard-faced men, their suitcoats open, clutching what might have been guns attached to their belts.

&nb
sp; And when the service ended, the ambassador took the American flags - one had covered each coffin -folded them, and brought them over for Drew to touch.

  He pressed his face against them, soaking them with his tears.

  9

  "And that's why I couldn't be this free-lance assassin you told me about. This mercenary terrorist." Drew said the words with disgust. "Janus. Because a man like Janus killed my parents. And he wasn't alone. The ambassador told me there were many other mercenaries like the one who'd disguised himself as a chauffeur." Drew bristled. "Without the honor of a Japanese. Cowards. Sneak thieves, who didn't have the dignity to face their enemies directly. Mothers, fathers, children - it made no difference to them who they hurt, what grief and pain they caused. Each night as I cried myself to sleep, I repeated a vow I made to myself." He clenched his teeth. "If I might never have the satisfaction of seeing the man who'd murdered my parents receive the punishment he deserved, I'd punish those who were like him. I'd make it my business to get even with all of them."