They wandered away toward the room with the bar.
Glancing around, Reen saw that Marian was back with her elegant gray-haired husband. The lids over his large brown eyes were at half-staff. “... that lard-assed Hopkins’s hands on you,” he growled. Suddenly he reached out to grab Marian’s arm. She pulled away, hissing something Reen couldn’t hear. She had a fixed half-smile on her face and her blue eyes were hot with embarrassment.
Howard’s voice, thick with self-deprecation, rose over the crowd: “No, I don’t think I’ve had enough. I never get enough. Poor Howard doesn’t get anything anymore.” He turned to a man beside him and brayed a laugh that turned heads. “She’s in love with a dickless gray alien.”
People froze. Marian’s tense smile disappeared, and for a moment she stood as Reen himself stood, alone and defenseless in the turmoil of the party.
Abruptly the embarrassed gathering shifted. One man in the crowd turned to another. “So,” he said, “what’s new over at Justice?”
Reen ducked and weaved his way through to the open bar. As he passed the piano, the pianist finished the piece, stood, and shot his sleeves. Their eyes met.
“Hi.” Rachmaninoff suddenly wasn’t as self-assured. The man seemed to have shrunk inside his formal attire. “I’m Jeremy Holt.” He offered his hand.
Reen regarded the hand dubiously. “Holt? I thought you were Russian.”
The refused hand jerked back to the safety of the suit and dallied around a pocket for a moment before deciding on a few simple twitches at the man’s side. “Oh, no,” the pianist said with an edgy squeak of a laugh. “I’m the President’s new medium.”
Reen took a step back to study the horn-rimmed glasses, the chamois-soft skin.
“I sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. He drops in on me every once in a while to see how I’m doing.”
“President Womack?” Reen asked.
“President Lincoln. I sort of met your Brother, but I was someone else at the time. I wanted to tell him that I’m available for funerals and weddings and bar mitzvahs.”
Reen looked at the business card Holt thrust into his hand and wondered how he could steer the conversation to the karma sellers without making the man suspicious.
Holt laughed again, his chortle going over the heads of the guests like a wayward fly ball. “You want a composer? A rock star? A dead president? I can be anybody you want. It’s because I have a go-between like Lizard. Lizard’s great. When he asks spirits to come through, they don’t refuse.”
“The karma sellers ...” Reen began.
But abruptly the hostess was there, taking Holt’s arm and propelling him away. Her voice trailed behind her like strong flowery perfume. “Marvelous, darling. For the rest of the evening, how about Van Cliburn?”
Abandoned, Reen meandered past the open bar and found a door that led into the refreshing chill of the backyard. Following a curved path through ornamental shrubbery, he came to a gazebo. There he sat and nursed his tomato juice. Earth’s moon, pale and wan, topped the roofs of the nearby houses.
So far the party had been useless, except for Hopkins’s odd smile and the news of the press conference. That information, Reen thought glumly, might have waited until the morning. A few hours from now he would have to return to the Cousin Place, and the Sleep Master was sure to sense the anxiety in him.
“Tali,” a voice whispered from the bushes.
Reen stood and looked around but saw nothing.
“Listen and don’t talk,” the voice said.
The bushes stirred in the night wind. The noise from the party was as faint as memory. Dead moonlight iced the flagstones, frosted the redwood railing and the evergreens.
The whisper was cold. “We fucked up getting your Brother today, but we’ll try again.”
There was a rustle of branches. A shadow separated itself from a tree trunk and, hidden by the night, left the garden.
The voice wasn’t Marian’s or Bill Hopkins’s. It didn’t belong to anyone Reen knew. He longed to run after the speaker, to ask how Tali could have betrayed him. He didn’t dare. Not now. Not when everything, in its own way, had been settled.
From the house came the bell-like tones of a Beethoven sonata. A broken fragment of cloud scurried over the moon. Reen put his hand over the nameplate and felt the sharp edges of the letters. Tali. Dead Cousin Brother. Tali, who had wanted Community rule so badly, he had been willing to do the human thing and kill to get it.
Reen sat down, upsetting his drink. Tomato juice spread like thick human blood over the gazebo’s planked floor. He would leave the party now and go to the Cousin Place where Thural and Tali were not and never would be again.
He rose unsteadily. As he exited the gazebo, he heard a man weeping. The sounds were labored, as though the man were trying to bring to the surface a grief that had long ago congealed.
A dark form sat on a bench, its face in its hands. Reen passed without being seen. The man on the bench was Howard.
THE CHAUFFEUR drove Reen north, away from the White House, taking winding residential streets to Rock Creek Park. Back and forth they threaded past thickets of trees and bicycle trails until Reen thought to check his watch, saw it was nearly midnight, and began to wonder whether he was being kidnapped again.
Fifteen minutes later the chauffeur pulled the Buick over to a wooded copse and stopped by a parked BMW. Marian, a phantom in the moonlight, got out of her car and climbed into the backseat with Reen. Wordlessly the chauffeur left the car and stood by the fender.
Marian’s dress made a slithering sound against the leather seat as she moved toward him. She smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. “Have fun at the party?” she asked.
“No. And you?”
“It was all right.”
Reen gazed out the window into the moon-dappled shadows under the trees. Far across the park, streetlights gleamed in shades of topaz and aquamarine. “You were talking to William Hopkins, I noticed, and you seemed friendly.”
“Jealous?”
Marian was a pale blur next to him: the glimmer of her dress, the glint of her blond hair. Was she smiling? “No. But it causes me to wonder.”
“Billy and I keep friendly pretenses up. It’s expected at parties.”
Friendly pretenses. Was it only that? Reen asked himself again if it was sex she wanted. For him, Marian’s company was enough. Still, the idea of her and Hopkins together was painful in an apprehensive way, like the beginnings of an inflammation beneath the skin.
“Did you find out anything?” she asked.
Reen was looking at the trees again. Under the streetlight a few stubborn leaves gleamed on dead branches like silver coins. “No.”
He had learned nothing that would help Marian. His Conscience, the betrayer, was dead. During the drive through the park Reen had made peace with his Brother. Tali had plotted against Reen not for power but for sad, misguided duty to the Community. Reen could forgive him that.
“Too bad.” Leaning over she unpinned Tali’s nameplate from his chest and replaced it with his own. She was a warm shape in the dark, as nebulous and emotionally charged a presence as the Old Ones.
“I love you,” he said.
Her form wavered. “What brought that on?”
Howard’s words, he realized. The idea of sharing Marian with Hopkins.
“If you want someone else,” he said, “I’ll accept that. After all, I didn’t stand in your way when you decided to marry. What I cannot understand is why you stay with Howard after the way he ...” Reen stopped himself.
A suck of indrawn breath. “I don’t want anyone else.”
So Hopkins wasn’t the usurper. Her tyrant was Howard. After all these years, still Howard.
“Why bring Howard into this?” she asked, suddenly irate. “Haven’t you done enough?”
So what she felt for
Howard was guilt, not love. Reen wondered which emotion was the stronger and which one she would heed.
“Oh, shit.” She swiped at her eyes. “Poor, dumb Howard.”
“What do you want of me, Marian?”
“Let’s buy a house in the country, all right?” She laughed. “Maybe some horses and some dogs. Let’s retire there. At night you can tie fishing lures. I can knit. At eleven o’clock we’ll climb into bed and watch the news on TV. Forty-seven years, Reen. Don’t you think you owe me that?”
He squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” She pulled away, opened the car door, and was gone.
“I’ll take you back to the White House now, sir,” the chauffeur said, getting into the front seat.
Reen didn’t answer. He watched Marian’s BMW disappear around a curve.
The Buick executed a three-point turn and headed south, taking Reen around the darkened zoo and down a nearly deserted Connecticut Avenue toward the White House.
They were stopped at the gate, and an army officer leaned into the car. “Yes, sir? Who shall I– White House Chief Reen! Sir!” he said in surprise, seeing Reen’s nametag. “Everybody’s been worried about you. Go ahead.” He gestured to the marine guard in the gatehouse. With a buzz the gates slid back, and the Buick purred around the drive to the West Wing.
A commuter ship was parked at the side of the building, Reen noticed as he stepped from the car. Head down, he walked toward the Cousin who was standing at the door. The Cousin unexpectedly trotted down the lawn to meet him.
“Reen-ja!”
Reen’s steps faltered. It was Thural standing there, elation in his ebony eyes.
Reen’s throat spasmed. No words emerged. He walked to Thural’s side and snagged a claw in his sleeve, pulling him as close as Communal law allowed. “Cousin.”
Thural hooked the side of Reen’s uniform, and Reen could feel the cold, welcome press of his claw. For a moment the two simply stood, holding on to each other as the early morning traffic rumbled down Pennsylvania Avenue and the moon set behind the buildings.
To Thural’s back another Cousin emerged from the ship. Stunned, Reen watched his Brother Conscience approach.
“Reen-ja,” Thural said, “The commuter ship crashed with Sidam in it. It might have been Tali and me, but at the last minute Tali had business and sent the ship on.”
What sort of business was that? Reen wondered as he watched his Brother stride across the lawn to them. Was it accidental business or planned business that saved him?
“Where were you?” Thural went on. “We were so worried when the bomb went off at Dulles and you did not return.”
Ah, but was everyone worried? Reen felt the pull of his Cousin’s claw as Thural gently prodded for an answer; but Reen only had eyes for his Brother.
When Tali stopped on the grass beside them, Reen’s sharp gaze never left his Brother’s face.
“Someone tried to kill me,” he said.
FOR THE RIDE to the Cousin Place, Tali chose to sit with Thural instead of with Reen. Reen lingered a while in the ship’s lounge, then wandered to the circular hall and peered out the windows as the craft rose from the lawn. When they had gained some height, Foggy Bottom and the Potomac came into view. The searing halogen floodlamps that had been set up for rescue work were so bright that even at that distance they made Reen wince.
There was not much to rescue. One entire side of the Watergate was rubble, and what was left looked like a ruin awaiting demolition.
As the ship sailed east, the lights of the rescuers grew smaller and smaller until Reen couldn’t pick them out from the blazing clutter near the river. He looked down at the Capitol, an illuminated pastry set on the dark starry tablecloth of the Washington streets. Over Maryland, the lights were sparser, with busy little angular embroideries at Woods Corner and Camp Springs.
When they landed, Tali hurried off the ship as though fleeing his Brother, fleeing the truth. Reen pursued him. By the time they reached the Communal chamber, the Brother Conscience was already heading for the niches.
Reen halted in the center of the room, glaring at Tali’s retreating back.
The Sleep Master rose from his bench. “Out! Get out of here immediately!”
Tali paused at the door and turned-the Brother who plotted treachery with humans but chose to be, among them, the Cousin without a name.
Without a name. Reen suddenly understood the smile he had seen on Hopkins’s lips.
“When I left for Dulles, you remained behind to talk with Hopkins, didn’t you, Tali? You plotted with the FBI to murder me.”
With a gasp Thural reached out and hooked Reen’s sleeve. Reen flung his arm up, away from his Cousin’s restraining claw.
The Sleep Master roared: “Get out!”
Reen faced the old Cousin. “Sidam died today! A Cousin is gone! Won’t you feel that vacant place among the niches? Let us speak the truth, then, in the sleep place where the law forbids lies to hide. That ship was sabotaged.” He could see fear in Tali’s black eyes. “Why did you put a bomb on that ship, Cousin Brother?”
Something knocked Reen off his feet. He looked up from the floor of the chamber. The Sleep Master had butted him with his claws.
No Cousin strikes another, Reen thought. But, then, no Cousin murders another, either.
The Sleep Master leaned over him, claws held as though he wished to hit Reen again. “Leave! You walk through filth and then track it into the chamber!”
Thural interposed himself between them, “Reen-ja is tired, Cousin Master of Sleep. I will take him outside for a bit.” And without waiting for the Sleep Master’s reply, he pulled Reen up and marched him to the door.
Outside the Cousin Place, the damp air haloed the lights, and the breeze smelled of snow. Thural eased Reen onto the steps and sat beside him. Reen pulled his legs up and rested his arms on his knees. He stared at the tarmac, his rage gradually subsiding.
After a while Thural said quietly, “Tali is sometimes difficult to deal with, but he is still Brother. You do not really believe your Brother plotted to kill you, Cousin Firstborn.”
“I refused to believe it before, but I have reason to believe it now.”
Resting his back against the smooth wall of the building, Thural contemplated the line of scrapped American warplanes. “Tali did talk to Hopkins. How did you know that, Reen-ja?”
Reen gave Thural a human shrug since no Cousin gesture seemed appropriate.
“I sometimes wonder about Jonis, First Cousin.” There was a pensive, contrite look on Thural’s face. “There was a time before he was kidnapped that Jonis no longer spoke to me, and we were Brothers, as you know. Why should a Brother stop speaking to a Brother?”
A pale blur of movement beyond the row of planes. A quartet of guardian Loving Helpers was making rounds about the perimeter, a Cousin Taskmaster at their heels.
And Reen thought of Tali. “Because of shame.”
As though he had called him forth, the door spread open and Tali walked into the damp wind. Across the tarmac the first flakes of snow began to fall.
In his black uniform Tali was merely a floating head and bobbing hands. “I could not sleep,” he said, “without making my peace with you.”
“Sit, then,” Thural offered when Reen refused to speak.
With a sigh not much louder than the falling snow, Tali sat on the stairs. “It was Hopkins I visited, Cousin Brother.” The landing-strip lights were reflected in his huge eyes. “But we spoke only of his worry that Marian Cole steals too much of your confidence. This is all we spoke of, nothing more.”
“Is it your right,” Reen asked, “to judge my actions in the presence of humans?”
“It is my right to judge you at all times,” Tali retorted, sounding more like himself. He shifted his body on the steps. “I come to make my peace wit
h you before sleep, Brother, not to be told my duty.”
“Let us have peace, then,” Thural said, holding a hand toward each of them as though he feared they might begin tussling on the ground like humans.
Reen looked away. Snow was falling faster now, and the wind drove the flakes around the lights like a horde of moths.
“Hopkins is a good man,” Tali went on, “but a man of many words when just a few would do. The hour became late, and Sidam was tired, yet Hopkins talked. I sent Sidam on and kept Thural, who did not then need sleep, with me.”
“You did not want to tell me you were meeting with Hopkins. You were ashamed to admit it.” Cousins weren’t bothered, as humans were, by small changes in temperature. But Reen felt cold. He hunched his shoulders and pressed his hands together in his lap to protect them from the wind.
“Yes, Cousin Brother Firstborn.” Tali’s voice was subdued, earnest, and uncharacteristically contrite. “I was ashamed.”
Of course Hopkins had known the Cousin at the party was an impostor. By that time he knew Tali no longer wore a nametag. And he knew that the Cousin who had died was Sidam. But, then, who had whispered to Reen from the bushes? Perhaps someone sent by Hopkins to make Reen distrust his Brother.
“I forgive you,” Reen said shortly.
“Then we will go inside, yes, Reen-ja? Yes, Cousin Conscience?” Thural asked. “It is getting late.”
The three rose and walked into the warm, spice-scented chamber together, making their way to the niches. The Sleep Master glared at Reen but didn’t stop him.
THE NEXT MORNING Reen sat with Thural on the flight to the White House. A gray sky, soft as a goosedown comforter, was spread over the city, and from it a few flakes of snow still fell. It was the kind of day Reen liked, one in which sharp edges were softened, harsh colors subdued.
“You should not press Tali so, Cousin Firstborn,” Thural said as they passed over the Tidal Basin.
Brother Termite Page 11
