Afterward, though … that seemed like sentimental bullshit. I belonged to no tribe. Every human being possessed their own sexuality—and when they died, it died with them. If no one was ever born gay again, it made no difference to me.
And if I dropped the case because I was gay, I’d be abandoning everything I’d ever believed about my own equality, my own identity … not to mention giving LEI the chance to announce: Yes, of course we hired an investigator without regard to sexual preference—but apparently, that was a mistake.
Staring up into the darkness, I said, “Every time I hear the word community, I reach for my revolver.”
There was no response; Martin was fast asleep. I wanted to wake him, I wanted to argue it all through, there and then—but I’d signed an agreement, I couldn’t tell him a thing.
So I watched him sleep, and tried to convince myself that when the truth came out, he’d understand.
* * *
I phoned Janet Lansing, brought her up to date on Mendelsohn—and said coldly, “Why were you so coy? ‘Fanatics’? ‘Powerful vested interests’? Are there some words you have trouble pronouncing?”
She’d clearly prepared herself for this moment. “I didn’t want to plant my own ideas in your head. Later on, that might have been seen as prejudicial.”
“Seen as prejudicial by whom?” It was a rhetorical question: the media, of course. By keeping silent on the issue, she’d minimized the risk of being seen to have launched a witch-hunt. Telling me to go look for homosexual terrorists might have put LEI in a very unsympathetic light … whereas my finding Mendelsohn—for other reasons entirely, despite my ignorance—would come across as proof that the investigation had been conducted without any preconceptions.
I said, “You had your suspicions, and you should have disclosed them. At the very least, you should have told me what the barrier was for.”
“The barrier,” she said, “is for protection against viruses and toxins. But anything we do to the body has side effects. It’s not my role to judge whether or not those side effects are acceptable; the regulatory authorities will insist that we publicize all of the consequences of using the product—and then the decision will be up to consumers.”
Very neat: the government would twist their arm, “forcing them” to disclose their major selling point!
“And what does your market research tell you?”
“That’s strictly confidential.”
I very nearly asked her: When exactly did you find out that I was gay? After you’d hired me—or before? On the morning of the bombing, while I’d been assembling a dossier on Janet Lansing … had she been assembling dossiers on all of the people who might have bid for the investigation? And had she found the ultimate PR advantage, the ultimate seal of impartiality, just too tempting to resist?
I didn’t ask. I still wanted to believe that it made no difference: she’d hired me, and I’d solve the crime like any other, and nothing else would matter.
* * *
I went to the bunker where the cobalt had been stored, at the edge of Federation Centennial’s grounds. The trapdoor was solid, but the lock was a joke, and there was no alarm system at all; any smart twelve-year-old could have broken in. Crates full of all kinds of (low-level, short-lived) radioactive waste were stacked up to the ceiling, blocking most of the light from the single bulb; it was no wonder that the theft hadn’t been detected sooner. There were even cobwebs—but no mutant spiders, so far as I could see.
After five minutes poking around, listening to my borrowed dosimetry badge adding up the exposure, I was glad to get out … whether or not the average chest X-ray would have done ten times more damage. Hadn’t Mendelsohn realized that: how irrational people were about radiation, how much harm it would do her cause once the cobalt was discovered? Or had her own—fully informed—knowledge of the minimal risks distorted her perception?
The surveillance teams sent me reports daily. It was an expensive service, but LEI was paying. Mendelsohn met her friends openly—telling them all about the night I’d questioned her, warning them in outraged tones that they were almost certainly being watched. They discussed the fetal barrier, the options for—legitimate—opposition, the problems the bombing had caused them. I couldn’t tell if the whole thing was being staged for my benefit, or if Mendelsohn was deliberately contacting only those friends who genuinely believed that she hadn’t been involved.
I spent most of my time checking the histories of the people she met. I could find no evidence of past violence or sabotage by any of them—let alone experience with high explosives. But then, I hadn’t seriously expected to be led straight to the bomber.
All I had was circumstantial evidence. All I could do was gather detail after detail, and hope that the mountain of facts I was assembling would eventually reach a critical mass—or that Mendelsohn would slip up, cracking under the pressure.
* * *
Weeks passed, and Mendelsohn continued to brazen it out. She even had pamphlets printed, ready to distribute at the Mardi Gras—condemning the bombing as loudly as they condemned LEI for its secrecy.
The nights grew hotter. My temper frayed. I don’t know what Martin thought was happening to me, but I had no idea how we were going to survive the impending revelations. I couldn’t begin to face up to the magnitude of the backlash there’d be once ATOMIC TERRORISTS met GAY BABY-POISONERS in the daily murdochs—and it would make no difference whether it was Mendelsohn’s arrest which broke the news to the public, or her media conference blowing the whistle on LEI and proclaiming her own innocence; either way, the investigation would become a circus. I tried not to think about any of it; it was too late to do anything differently, to drop the case, to tell Martin the truth. So I worked on my tunnel vision.
Elaine scoured the radioactive waste bunker for evidence, but weeks of analysis came up blank. I quizzed the Biofile guards, who (supposedly) would have been watching the whole thing on their monitors when the cobalt was planted, but nobody could recall a client with an unusually large and oddly shaped item, wandering casually into the wrong aisle.
I finally obtained the warrants I needed to scrutinize Mendelsohn’s entire electronic history since birth. She’d been arrested exactly once, twenty years before, for kicking an—unprivatized—policeman in the shin, during a protest he’d probably, privately, applauded. The charges had been dropped. She’d had a court order in force for the last eighteen months, restraining a former lover from coming within a kilometer of her home. (The woman was a musician with a band called Tetanus Switchblade; she had two convictions for assault.) There was no evidence of undeclared income, or unusual expenditure. No phone calls to or from known or suspected dealers in arms or explosives, or their known or suspected associates. But everything could have been done with pay phones and cash, if she’d organized it carefully.
Mendelsohn wasn’t going to put a foot wrong while I was watching. However careful she’d been, though, she could not have carried out the bombing alone. What I needed was someone venal, nervous, or conscience-stricken enough to turn informant. I put out word on the usual channels: I’d be willing to pay, I’d be willing to bargain.
Six weeks after the bombing, I received an anonymous message by datamail:
Be at the Mardi Gras. No wires, no weapons. I’ll find you.
29:17:5:31:23:11
I played with the numbers for more than an hour, trying to make sense of them, before I finally showed them to Elaine.
She said, “Be careful, James.”
“Why?”
“These are the ratios of the six trace elements we found in the residue from the explosion.”
* * *
Martin spent the day of the Mardi Gras with friends who’d also be in the parade. I sat in my air-conditioned office and tuned in to a TV channel which showed the final preparations, interspersed with talking heads describing the history of the event. In forty years, the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras had been transformed from a series of ugly
confrontations with police and local authorities, into a money-spinning spectacle advertised in tourist brochures around the world. It was blessed by every level of government, led by politicians and business identities—and the police, like most professions, now had their own float.
Martin was no transvestite (or muscle-bound leather-fetishist, or any other walking cliché); dressing up in a flamboyant costume, one night a year, was as false, as artificial, for him as it would have been for most heterosexual men. But I think I understood why he did it. He felt guilty that he could “pass for straight” in the clothes he usually wore, with the speech and manner and bearing which came naturally to him. He’d never concealed his sexuality from anyone—but it wasn’t instantly apparent to total strangers. For him, taking part in the Mardi Gras was a gesture of solidarity with those gay men who were visible, obvious, all year round—and who’d borne the brunt of intolerance because of it.
As dusk fell, spectators began to gather along the route. Helicopters from every news service appeared overhead, turning their cameras on each other to prove to their viewers that this was An Event. Mounted crowd-control personnel—in something very much like the old blue uniform that had vanished when I was a child—parked their horses by the fast-food stands, and stood around fortifying themselves for the long night ahead.
I didn’t see how the bomber could seriously expect to find me once I was mingling with a hundred thousand other people—so after leaving the Nexus building, I drove my car around the block slowly, three times, just in case.
* * *
By the time I’d made my way to a vantage point, I’d missed the start of the parade; the first thing I saw was a long line of people wearing giant plastic heads bearing the features of famous and infamous queers. (Apparently the word was back in fashion again, officially declared nonperjorative once more, after several years out of favor.) It was all so Disney I could have gagged—and yes, there was even Bernadette, the world’s first lesbian cartoon mouse. I only recognized three of the humans portrayed—Patrick White, looking haggard and suitably bemused, Joe Orton, leering sardonically, and J. Edgar Hoover, with a Mephistophelian sneer. Everyone wore their names on sashes, though, for what that was worth. A young man beside me asked his girlfriend, “Who the hell was Walt Whitman?”
She shook her head. “No idea. Alan Turing?”
“Search me.”
They photographed both of them, anyway.
I wanted to yell at the marchers: So what? Some queers were famous. Some famous people were queer. What a surprise! Do you think that means you own them?
I kept silent, of course—while everyone around me cheered and clapped. I wondered how close the bomber was, how long he or she would leave me sweating. Panopticon—the surveillance contractors—were still following Mendelsohn and all of her known associates, most of whom were somewhere along the route of the parade, handing out their pamphlets. None of them appeared to have followed me, though. The bomber was almost certainly someone outside the network of friends we’d uncovered.
An anti-viral, anti-drug, anti-pollution barrier, alone—or a means of guaranteeing a heterosexual child. Which do you think would earn the most money? Surrounded by cheering spectators—half of them mixed-sex couples with children in tow—it was almost possible to laugh off Mendelsohn’s fears. Who, here, would admit that they’d buy a version of the cocoon which would help wipe out the source of their entertainment? But applauding the freak show didn’t mean wanting your own flesh and blood to join it.
An hour after the parade had started, I decided to move out of the densest part of the crowd. If the bomber couldn’t reach me through the crush of people, there wasn’t much point being here. A hundred or so leather-clad women on—noise-enhanced—electric motorbikes went riding past in a crucifix formation, behind a banner which read DYKES ON BIKES FOR JESUS. I recalled the small group of fundamentalists I’d passed earlier, their backs to the parade route lest they turn into pillars of salt, holding up candles and praying for rain.
I made my way to one of the food stalls, and bought a cold hot dog and a warm orange juice, trying to ignore the smell of horse turds. The place seemed to attract law enforcement types; J. Edgar Hoover himself came wandering by while I was eating, looking like a malevolent Humpty Dumpty.
As he passed me, he said, “Twenty-nine. Seventeen. Five.”
I finished my hot dog and followed him.
He stopped in a deserted side street, behind a supermarket parking lot. As I caught up with him, he took out a magnetic scanner.
I said, “No wires, no weapons.” He waved the device over me. I was telling the truth. “Can you talk through that thing?”
“Yes.” The giant head bobbed strangely; I couldn’t see any eye holes, but he clearly wasn’t blind.
“Okay. Where did the explosives come from? We know they started off in Singapore, but who was your supplier here?”
Hoover laughed, deep and muffled. “I’m not going to tell you that. I’d be dead in a week.”
“So what do you want to tell me?”
“That I only did the grunt work. Mendelsohn organized everything.”
“No shit. But what have you got that will prove it? Phone calls? Financial transactions?”
He just laughed again. I was beginning to wonder how many people in the parade would know who’d played J. Edgar Hoover; even if he clammed up now, it was possible that I’d be able to track him down later.
That was when I turned and saw six more, identical, Hoovers coming around the corner. They were all carrying baseball bats.
I started to move. Hoover One drew a pistol and aimed it at my face. He said, “Kneel down slowly, with your hands behind your head.”
I did it. He kept the gun on me, and I kept my eyes on the trigger, but I heard the others arrive, and close into a half-circle behind me.
Hoover One said, “Don’t you know what happens to traitors? Don’t you know what’s going to happen to you?”
I shook my head slowly. I didn’t know what I could say to appease him, so I spoke the truth. “How can I be a traitor? What is there to betray? Dykes on Bikes for Jesus? The William S. Burroughs Dancers?”
Someone behind me swung their bat into the small of my back. Not as hard as they might have; I lurched forward, but I kept my balance.
Hoover One said, “Don’t you know any history, Mr. Pig? Mr. Polizei? The Nazis put us in their death camps. The Reaganites tried to have us all die of AIDS. And here you are now, Mr. Pig, working for the fuckers who want to wipe us off the face of the planet. That sounds like betrayal to me.”
I knelt there, staring at the gun, unable to speak. I couldn’t dredge up the words to justify myself. The truth was too difficult, too gray, too confusing. My teeth started chattering. Nazis. AIDS. Genocide. Maybe he was right. Maybe I deserved to die.
I felt tears on my cheeks. Hoover One laughed. “Boo hoo, Mr. Pig.” Someone swung their bat onto my shoulders. I fell forward on my face, too afraid to move my hands to break the fall; I tried to get up, but a boot came down on the back of my neck.
Hoover One bent down and put the gun to my skull. He whispered, “Will you close the case? Lose the evidence on Catherine? You know, your boyfriend frequents some dangerous places; he needs all the friends he can get.”
I lifted my face high enough above the asphalt to reply. “Yes.”
“Well done, Mr. Pig.”
That was when I heard the helicopter.
I blinked the gravel out of my eyes and saw the ground, far brighter than it should have been; there was a spotlight trained on us. I waited for the sound of a bullhorn. Nothing happened. I waited for my assailants to flee. Hoover One took his foot off my neck.
And then they all laid into me with their baseball bats.
I should have curled up and protected my head, but curiosity got the better of me; I turned and stole a glimpse of the chopper. It was a news crew, of course, refusing to do anything unethical like spoil a good story just when
it was getting telegenic. That much made perfect sense.
But the goon squad made no sense at all. Why were they sticking around, now that the cameras were running? Just for the pleasure of beating me for a few seconds longer?
Nobody was that stupid, that oblivious to PR.
I coughed up two teeth and hid my face again. They wanted it all to be broadcast. They wanted the headlines, the backlash, the outrage. ATOMIC TERRORISTS! BABY-POISONERS! BRUTAL THUGS!
They wanted to demonize the enemy they were pretending to be.
The Hoovers finally dropped their bats and started running. I lay on the ground drooling blood, too weak to lift my head to see what had driven them away.
A while later, I heard hoofbeats. Someone dropped to the ground beside me and checked my pulse.
I said, “I’m not in pain. I’m happy. I’m delirious.”
Then I passed out.
* * *
On his second visit, Martin brought Catherine Mendelsohn to the hospital with him. They showed me a recording of LEI’s media conference, the day after the Mardi Gras—two hours before Mendelsohn’s was scheduled to take place.
Janet Lansing said, “In the light of recent events, we have no choice but to go public. We would have preferred to keep this technology under wraps for commercial reasons, but innocent lives are at stake. And when people turn on their own kind—”
I burst the stitches in my lips laughing.
LEI had bombed their own laboratory. They’d irradiated their own cells. And they’d hoped that I’d cover up for Mendelsohn, once the evidence led me to her, out of sympathy with her cause. Later, with a tipoff to an investigative reporter or two, the cover-up would have been revealed.
The perfect climate for their product launch.
Since I’d continued with the investigation, though, they’d had to make the best of it: sending in the Hoovers, claiming to be linked to Mendelsohn, to punish me for my diligence.
Mendelsohn said, “Everything LEI leaked about me—the cobalt, my key to the vault—was already spelt out in the pamphlets I’d printed, but that doesn’t seem to cut much ice with the murdochs. I’m the Harbor Bridge Gamma Ray Terrorist now.”
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 55
