First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  She sat with one foot in front of the other, leaning slightly forward, her jaw and neckline perfect, like the white bust of Nefertiti. Her eyes were like the queen’s, too—large, dark, and luminous, with a light that came from ages of experience and understanding. When she looked at me, I could see her seeing me see her. It was a dizzy feeling.

  Everything about Mandy was long and smooth, supple, brown, and silky: her legs, her arms and hands, her neck, her hair. Without perfume or other devices, she sent her sense of self out on the air to strike at a man’s most vulnerable parts. To know her was to want her immediately, to need to twist her graceful limbs around yourself and rut until your brains fell apart.

  She was wearing a white dress, sheer linen worked with fine stitches of white thread at the neckline and sleeves. It flowed loose across her breasts, arms, and thighs, accentuating where it lay upon her, tantalizing where it fell away. On her slender feet were sand-colored leather pumps, flat heeled and practical for dancing.

  How old was Mandy? My eyes and senses said nineteen or twenty. My memory says now, by her own admission, thirty-three. But around Mandy, time was a liar. … She told lies, too.

  Devi brought us forward, toward the chair, and bowed himself aside. “General Corbin, memsahib.”

  “Welcome to our estate, sir,” she said in a voice that was liquid gold, taught to sing contralto. “My name is Amanda Holton. I am the—ah—proprietor here.”

  Holton! Mandy Holton? It could not be a coincidence. But it also could not be the same woman. My Mandy Holton, who had taught Palestinian politics and household explosives at the Commune in Berkley, had been older than I. That would make her well over fifty now. Besides, my Mandy had been a good-looking girl, but she had not the visceral-sexual power of the woman before me. And yet, there were flashes, hints in the bone structure, glints in the skin. This was not a coincidence.

  The quiet in the room stretched out. I suddenly realized she had stopped talking while I had gone on thinking. Everyone was watching me for a reply. “You are not … possible,” I stammered.

  She smiled. “How not?”

  “I knew you … a different you … years ago. A woman who had your name and some of your face. I loved her. Years ago.”

  “I know,” she said, still smiling. “That was my mother, who named me after herself.”

  “Where is she?” I asked, too abruptly.

  “She died, near here, two years ago. It was an ambush, a setup along the road, by competitors in the business. I hate to believe she finally got careless, but …” Mandy shrugged.

  “And your father?”

  “Mother was married to a man named Aguilar. He died. Also.”

  “And now you are the—proprietor?”

  “Among those who will accept me.”

  “What is your business?”

  The smile faltered on her lips. She rose from the chair; it took my breath to see the fabric of her dress slide over her body. “Enough, General. You did not come all this way to ask questions about me.”

  “No, I suppose not.” It took a minute to remember why I had come.

  “You came looking for someone,” she prompted, not a question.

  “Yes, we suspect that …”

  “I know. We also believe General Pollock came south into California. That is why we cut the road and why we watch there constantly. But my people do not know the man on sight. Perhaps you can help us identify him?”

  She turned her head slightly, looking off to the right, raised her right hand, snapped her fingers once. From an inconspicuous side door, Devi’s broad buttocks—he must have slipped out silently while we were talking—bumped into the room. He was pulling something very heavy, or maybe just fragile, a rolling cart of some kind, that made a clinking sound as the front wheels went over the threshold.

  It was a laboratory cart, loaded on both shelves with open glass beakers. Each had a capacity of about three or four gallons. They were filled with an amber fluid, which glistened darkly when the sunlight in the room touched it. Some of it spilled out as the rear wheels went through the door. The room was suddenly filled with the piercing odor of a good scotch whiskey.

  “Oh my God.” That was from our Turtle driver. His comment served for us all. One of the men behind me gagged. I heard him turn and stumble away toward the far end of the room. There were nineteen beakers and, inside each one, veiled by the liquor and some darker tinge, was a human head, severed raggedly at the neck. Some were men and a few were women, whose longer hair clouded their faces. Some had eyes open and some closed. Some had their mouths peacefully shut and some screamed. From the neck wounds, a few of the heads still dribbled a wisp of blood to stain the fluid more or less.

  Amanda Holton walked toward this deathly exhibit. Then she turned toward me with a pale, sinister stare. “Can you tell me if General Pollock is here? I hope he is, because this has used up my last five cases of contraband Suntory. Please don’t tell me I’ve wasted good booze.”

  Pollock was there, all right. Second from the left on the top shelf. That high forehead was wrinkled for the last time in a look of disdain. The sleepy lids were half-closed over those smoky hazel eyes. The mouth was half-open, as if about to offer an objection. Athlete, aesthete, scholar, a natural attraction … politician, general, enemy … and finally, corpse—with the rest of his body left somewhere to rot. Good-bye, Gordon Pollock.

  “Why did you kill them?” I asked.

  “They were trespassing,” Mandy said simply. “And we knew what you wanted done with them, with him. General Pollock is among them, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” I pointed.

  “Good,” she said. Then, “Punjab!” and she made a flicking motion with her hand. Devi rolled the cart back through the door. The scent of scotch-and-something-else lingered.

  Mandy turned back to me, the pale expression gone. Her chin came up to about my collarbone, I noticed. “Well, General. Will you stay and share our hospitality? At least for a little while?”

  “What is your business?” I asked my question, at last.

  “We are pele growers.”

  This was a virulent mutation of marijuana, first discovered in Hawaii. It had a euphoric rush and produced mild hallucinations, a sense of power, and at the same time, relaxation. The best of all possible drugs. It was fiercely addictive.

  “You grow it in this valley?”

  “No, sir, along the whole North Coast. It likes the natural shade of the redwoods.”

  “We can stay for a little while.”

  “Good. We need you.”

  My men were shown to rooms on the next level down and invited to rest. I and two of my lieutenants, Pet Gervaise and Barney Wong, were also told to dress for dinner. “Dress” meant casual civilian clothes, not evening wear. This was still California, after all.

  The meal was held in another hall, this one with a more intimate view of the back of the hill and its live oaks, colored yellow-green by the westering sun. We were seven for dinner: Mandy, two of her “officers,” the three in my party, and Mandy’s brother. Ram Devi, whom even I was beginning to think of as “Punjab,” stood in attendance at the main door and supervised the serving. The dinner was lamb and spring vegetables in a Middle Eastern preparation of strong herbs.

  The brother, Eduardo Aguilar, was an insolent youth of seventeen. He was trying too hard in a party of adults, working his opinions on us as a stand-up comedian works his material. He must have been taking something; perhaps it was just contact with the pele plants, because he had worked a shift on patrol with the harvesters that afternoon. Anyway, two glasses of their excellent local cabernet went right through him. Or seemed to.

  “You made a real ass-sh of yourself in Wichita,” he said to me. He was referring to a battle of more than two years before. “If you hadn’t been late at the river, you’da caught Pollock and saved us the trouble.”

  “Ed, please,” Mandy urged him to quiet from the head of the table.

  “General Pollock
made a career of staying two steps ahead of me,” I said lightly, to evade the insult.

  “Yeah, he really led you a cherry mace—um—merry chase. He had to come to California to find real soljers. Not your buncha pretty boys and—” His eyes swiveled left to Barney Wong. “—slants.”

  Barney stiffened. He wasn’t used to ethnic slurs—nobody in my army was. Suddenly I had to interpose myself to force the issue, before Barney took a table knife to the boy.

  “Are you calling me out, sir?” I said.

  Aguilar focused back on me, his eyes taking on a calculating look. Beneath the calculation was his certain belief that anyone over fifty, and showing as much gray as I had gathered, must hobble with a stick and pee with great pain. If his answer was at all affirmative, I would choose bare hands for weapons and give him at least a metacarpal fracture to remember his manners by.

  “No, I—ah—”

  “Eduardo is not used to wine,” Mandy said smoothly. “Nor to polite company, it seems.” That with a glare at her brother. “I want to apologize for us both.”

  “No offense taken.”

  “You are very gracious, General.”

  The dinner went on, but with strange tensions in the room that seemed to pull about Wong— from the way the others’ eyes and conversation avoided him. The boys’ insult had been more than a child speaking the worst he knew. I would have to discover more about this.

  After dinner, Wong, Gervaise, and I went down the hill briefly to check on the camp and reassure our men. When we returned it was after midnight.

  The room assigned to me was dark except for the frosty light of a gibbous moon coming through the draperies. I hesitated with my hand on the switch. Someone was there ahead of me. And I was making a perfect silhouette in the light from the hallway. I left the switch off and slid sideways out of the doorway, closing it with my foot.

  “Don’t be afraid, General.” Mandy’s voice. From the bed. Low and liquid.

  “My lady, one reaches an age when there is nothing to fear but much to be cautious about.”

  “Oh. Not that old, certainly.” As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see that she was under the sheets, lifting them in invitation, and she was wholly nude. I was halfway out of my clothes before I was halfway across the room.

  Mandy tasted of cinnamon and anise. She twined like a vine. She rolled like the waves of the deep Pacific. I don’t know if she used some drug on me, either put it in my food or smeared it on her own body, but I stayed erect and hard as a bar of iron, yet painlessly, for most of the night. We rode each other like wild horses.

  In the morning, as the sun first came over the hills, I felt clean and washed, empty and light, strong, and very pleasantly tired. Mandy slept beside me like a beautiful child, with a smile on her face.

  After four years and more of back-and-forth war, with all its intrigues, manipulations, and shifting alliances, I needed a woman of clear and simple lusts. I needed a place where the problems were all microscale. I needed a time that moved to the rhythms of growing things, not to the mechanisms of politics and technology. I needed to be here and now.

  After four years and more of chasing Gordon Pollock across the country, always two steps behind, I was tired. Now, with my rival dead, I could relax for a while, enjoy this valley, this woman, this season of youth and simple colors. With the clarity that morning brings, I decided to award myself a furlough. Let Alcott and Birdsong handle the war for a month or two. And, besides, I was already halfway in love with Mandy.

  Make that “completely.”

  If she had used a drug on me—and I did think the world had an aura, a brightness to its color and sounds, that morning—then it was one that imparted a feeling of power, optimism, freshness, strength. But I felt neither giddy nor silly, as sometime happens with lifters. And none of the mushmind that comes with tranks. Mandy’s drug must have been the legendary chericoke, or a close derivative. And if she had used it without my knowledge, then so be it.

  The staff knew to bring a double order of breakfast to this room. A soft tap on the door and, when I looked out, a tray with cereals and cakes, yogurt and fruits, and coffee. I poured some of the latter, and the smell of it appeared to wake Mandy. Her sleepy smile blossomed in a telltale instant as she focused on me.

  We took the food out onto the small terrace, an open space under the house’s arches, hanging over the valley. The sun warmed us and chased the haze of fog that drifted below us. After the passion of the night, however, Mandy was very contained and quiet. She dipped her yogurt with the tip of a spoon and lapped it with her tongue like a cat. With the light of day, I was careless of personal signals and decided to pursue a matter from the evening before.

  “What was that comment at dinner about ‘slants’? And Lieutenant Wong was treated coldly, I thought. Yet Asian prejudice has been a dead issue in California for decades.”

  “Don’t ask,” she said, lifting her head between laps of yogurt.

  “But I do ask.”

  “Very well …” She sighed and pushed away her dish. “We’re in the middle of a little war of our own here, General. The rest of the country calls us ‘dream merchants.’ By accidents of geography and climate, this region grows a most potent brand of pele, one that commands high prices. The weed grows in other places, of course, but our plantings are the largest and have the strongest alkaloid concentrations. This year, maybe this decade, our pele is the drug of choice in America. That gets us a bad rep with other retailers, particularly with the great pharmaceutical houses of Japan and Korea.”

  “What do they have to do with it?”

  “Simple competition. People flashing out on pele aren’t buying methaluude, diodreamin, cocolaide, or most of the other chemical dependencies. Our Asian friends are working through an American front company, Hajimeru Kara, Inc., to change that.”

  “What can they do?”

  “Look out there.” She pointed off toward the east, between the fog and the sun. Her finger did not hold steady but wove a short line against the horizon.

  “See them?” she asked.

  I looked hard, and finally detected a pair of gnats, diving among the hilltops, two ridges away.

  “Crop dusters?”

  “Very good, sir!”

  “Not yours.”

  “No. They come every morning when they can see through the fog to fly. They get a few patches where they think we aren’t looking. They don’t try to destroy the plants, just poison them. It’s more fun if we put all the effort into cultivation and harvesting, then kill off a few customers. They think we don’t know about it.”

  “Can you stop them?”

  Mandy shrugged. “No air force. Just a few private jets and they aren’t armed.”

  “I have a wing of Stompers here. …”

  “How many in ‘a wing’?”

  “A dozen planes.”

  “Would you fly them against civilians? That would hardly be honorable, would it?”

  “I’ve done worse.” She stared at me with a hooded look. I moved my eyes away—and noticed that those planes were growing larger and they were no longer zipping around. Coming right at us.

  “Do they often do that?” I pointed.

  “No …” She hesitated.

  The two dusters came in straight and level. If they opened up with cannons or machine guns, they could pick Mandy and me off this ledge. Their silhouettes grew against the sun, larger, wingtip to wingtip, separating, their engines a drone, a blast, a thunder. And then the planes pulled up in a hard climb. Were they trying to frighten us?

  Something tiny broke off from the belly of each. Without thinking, I dove across the table, tackled her in the chair, and crashed the both of us back behind the foot of the archway. Mandy banged her head, scraped an elbow, and cried out as I fell on top of her.

  The bombs went off with a shallow concussion that had the undertones of a timpani section, with flutes and fifes singing over it. Sonic grenades. They were meant to cause neural
damage, but you had to be line-of-sight to receive the full effect. Behind a parapet, with the blast below us, we were only shocked and deafened in the midrange. That effect would wear off. I helped her to her feet.

  “Next time,” I said, my own voice sounding muffled in my head, “we’ll come out and play.”

  “What?” Mandy shouted beside me.

  Next time came the next morning. We went down to the valley before dawn, readied four of the Stompers, and waited under the fog. A fifth plane already in the air, high over the valley, pulling radar watch.

  “Guns Leader from High One. Two bogeys on scan. Bearing east southeast at ten miles. Crank ’em and spank ’em.”

  Because the excursion involved little danger—unless there were more than two of the dusters, or one decided to ram us—I took Mandy along on the foray. We circled around the hills, contouring them with our ground radar, and came out of the mist behind the bogeys. We checked on visual to make sure we weren’t dogging a pair of innocent Cessnas on private business. But as soon as we broke, the dusters went into wide evasive turns, one left, one right. We split, tracked them, and blew them away with rockets. The whole operation lasted five minutes.

  Mandy’s eyes fairly gleamed.

  That evening, as we were getting ready for bed, an emergency signal came up from the valley. An intruder had been found near the Stomper pads, a man dressed as a ninja and carrying a string of clock-detonated bombs.

  “Send him up to the house,” I told Gervaise.

  “Sorry, General,” she said, “he didn’t survive getting caught.”

  “See if you can get a live one next time.”

  Next time turned out to be that same night. Mandy and I were in bed, lying quietly after our lovemaking. We were in her corner suite, above the east gate, with one set of windows looking into the hill, the other across the valley’s end.

  I was almost dozing and Mandy’s breathing had slowed to sleep when a tiny tink came from the window. My eyes popped open. Turning my head, I caught a shadow against the drapes, on the outside. I slithered off the bed and rolled into the darkness beside the window’s moon-lightened square.