“Presuming the Homeland isn’t in the middle of a war,” said Duke glumly.
“If that’s the case then I’ll find someplace safe for Georgia and the baby, and then I’m going back,” said Bob. “Everyone I have is in Missoula, and if I can’t help them from here then I’m going home and reporting to my reserve unit, or whoever’s still fighting.”
“Understood,” said Cardinale. “We know you’re not full time Office, you’re just here on this one project, and if that’s the way it plays out, we’ll help. Duke, suppose you run him over to the District now? Best use the Key Bridge this time of day, and let’s make damned sure that FLEC card of his works. Once you’re there, show him around and start getting him oriented. Park someplace and take him for a ride on the buses and trains. Most of what you’ll be doing over there you can do on foot, and if you end up having to do the Resurrection Shuffle in the Green Zone, boxed in like you are you don’t need to be hampered by a car.” Bob thrilled at hearing the old NVA term for going on the run. “We disable the GPS in all of ours, but still, in an enclosed space like that a lone man can move and hide better on foot than a vehicle on the street, if they’re looking for you.”
Suddenly the phone on Cardinale’s desk rang. He picked it up and opened it. “Yeah?” He listened for a bit. “Okay, got it” he said, closing the phone. “Crap!”
“What is it, boss?” asked Duke.
“Our girl just called in,” said Cardinale. “Her usual order, three cartons of Belmont filters. She likes Canadian cigarettes for some reason. I wanted to give you a couple of days to get your bearings before initiating contact, Rich, but sounds like destiny is playing your song. You up for it now?”
“Let’s go,” said Bob.
An hour later Richie the buttlegger from Mayor Daley’s old neighborhood rang the doorbell of a refined semi-detached brownstone in the suburb of Georgetown, ironically located in the northwest quadrant of the District of Columbia. The intercom buzzed. “Who is it?” came a young woman’s voice.
Bob leaned down to the speaker. “My name’s Richie. I just came over from Arlington, and I got the botanical material you wanted.” He was acutely conscious of the small white camera on a pole across the street, panning slowly back and forth, a small red light flashing. The damned things were everywhere, all right, and he was doing an illegal drug deal right in front of one.
“What’s the password?” the woman inside giggled.
Bob rolled his eyes, but he had been briefed. “Joe sent me.”
Several locks on the door rattled, and Georgia opened it. Bob remembered a pretty little child; what he now saw before him was a sorceress, a temptress of light, a vision in jeans and a pale blue cotton work shirt. Her skin was white as porcelain, her long yellow hair so light as almost to be white, her eyes the clear blue of the evening sky yet ringed like Millie’s, with a darker blue that made them piercing. She had the face of a Botticelli angel, a body slim and soft and from what he could tell beneath the cloth and denim, perfect in form. He understood why the boss had named this operation Belladonna. He could have been looking at Dante’s Beatrice, if Beatrice had been in the custom of receiving callers with a smoldering marijuana joint dangling from her lips.
“You’re new,” she drawled, with another giggle. Her eyes were glittering and her pupils dilated.
“Yeah, just blew in from the Windy City. Here’s your stuff,” Bob said, handing her a paper sack from the gym bag he carried.
“Three grand, right?” she said, handing him a wad of bills. He stuffed the money in his back pocket, so the camera could see it.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Bob asked her.
“Mmmm, now that you mention it…” She looked at his face, trying to focus. “You brought the steaks and real Texas chili for Congressman Ortega’s barbecue last weekend?”
“No,” he said. “You did a favor for my sister once, long ago. You and Kevin hid her from some unsavory characters in your father’s garage. Hi, Peanut.”
She stared at him, startled, and then all of a sudden she screamed “Bobby!” and threw her arms around him, crushing him and burning his neck with the joint, which she had forgotten to take out of her mouth.
God, she’s beautiful! was Robert’s first thought, and God, she’s stoned! was his second.
X
THE LOST BABY
(12 years and six months after Longview)
Ha, banishment! be merciful, say “death;”
For exile hath more terror in his look,
Much more than death.
—Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 3
Fortunately for Robert Campbell, Georgia was alone in the townhouse when he showed up at her door, or in her excited state she would probably have dragged him in and introduced him to all her friends, including the black and Jewish ones, and gotten herself arrested for Unauthorized Contact with someone from the dreaded Northwest Republic. Bob was never able to reconstruct accurately the first half hour he spent with her inside the brownstone, except that any worries he had about getting her to open up were laid to rest. He found himself inside the thick-carpeted living room and seated on a plush sofa, while Georgia Myers, or Halberstam, sat beside him, clinging to him like a limpet and babbling in a soft surreal drone, a stream of consciousness speech or recitation that seemed to have been bottled up inside her waiting for this moment of release, when she finally had a safe audience. It was as if she had been waiting for him to come to her for the past twelve years, so she could finally tell someone. In that first 30 minutes, he got her whole pathetic life story.
Some men would have found it amusing and many more annoying, no matter how beautiful a girl was who grabbed onto them and wouldn’t let go, and who wouldn’t stop chattering. Bob found it horrifying and searing, because he understood that it was a story she had been desperate to tell for over half her lifetime. From the moment her mother had bundled her into the SUV in Missoula that day, telling her they were going to the mall to try and find some ice cream, Georgia Myers had no one, no one at all, that she could talk to truthfully and openly. Every moment of her life since then had been a lie forced on her by every other human being around her, the essence of the American experience. It had possibly driven her mad.
It was all there. The child’s first realization that the SUV driven by her mother was headed out of town and not for the mall. Her turning around and noticing the packed bags and suitcases in the back. Her tears and pleas to her mother to turn around and go back home, and the dawning realization that she would never see her father or her brother again as her mother babbled on and on, every left-wing liberal cliché from the past century droning from Amber’s lips like a constant low-key air raid siren.
There was the terror of approaching the new border, where Amber had described to her in detail the horrors that would be perpetrated against them both if the evil Nazi border guards caught them—this had been where Georgia had learned what rape was. In point of fact there were no Nazi border guards, evil or otherwise. The only thing they saw while leaving the Northwest Republic were a few Civil Guards directing traffic or helping broken-down motorists. Their vehicle wasn’t searched by threatening armed men until they entered the American sector at a military police checkpoint at an on-ramp on the eastern side of Interstate Fifteen, and then they were back in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Later on, at a hundred cocktail parties and formal dinners, Amber would amplify their escape into a daring midnight break for freedom, dodging Nazi tanks and SS goons with Dobermans. The liberal audience avidly hung onto her every word, and by then Georgia was always too apathetic or too bombed to contradict her. After a while, Georgia’s memory got so fuzzy that she sometimes couldn’t recall what really happened, so maybe there had been SS men and Dobermans after all.
Above all, Georgia remembered two things from that long, claustrophobic road trip: the constant search for a “decent” motel at night—Red Lion and Day’s Inn were for middle-class plebes; the daughter of
Washington liberal aristocracy had to bed down in a Sheraton or at least a Holiday Inn—and the endless, blatting monologue all the way to D.C., wherein her mother constantly justified, rationalized, recapped and ranted on and on about what she was doing, and how it was absolutely the right thing, no question at all, almost as if she were trying to convince herself.
“I have dreams all the time,” Georgia told Bob as she poured it all out, clinging to him. “I dream about Dad and Kevin. I dream about you and Jenny. I dream about Missoula, the blue mountains on the skyline all around us. I dream about waking up in the morning in our old house on Daly Avenue and finding the windows covered with snow and Dad having to shovel a tunnel from the front door to the street. I dream about you and me and Kevin and Jenny running around playing all over the halls in the university, running out on all the lawns, and up on Mount Sentinel. Some of the dreams are bad, real bad, but the worst nightmare of all is that I am stuck in that car forever, driving east with my mother going on and on and on about how she’s really doing the right thing for my sake and how Dad and Kevin are sick with racism because they’re men and for the sake of our true womanhood—yeah, she used that phrase—we have to get away from them and never let them poison our lives. Bobby, when I die, if God decides I have to go to hell for being the worthless little twist I am, then He will put me back in that car with my mother forever, just rolling down the highway in the dark as she goes on and on with all that crap, denying and destroying everything I’ve ever known and loved, and she just will not shut up.”
Then came the years after they settled in under Georgia’s grandmother’s roof over on K Street. There was the money, the Euro-nannies and Third World servants, the expensive and exclusive private schools, and the constant procession of liberal drinky-dos and events and discussion groups that Lily Escott, the original rich liberal Democrat battle-axe from hell, ran out of her home. Lily prided herself on maintaining a D.C. anachronism in the internet age, an old-fashioned liberal salon, which she admitted she tried to pattern after the salon of Madame Roland during the French Revolution. The historical fact that Madame Roland was eventually guillotined by her ultra-left former comrades always seemed to escape Lily’s notice.
There were the early years of psychotherapy with expensive Jewish psychiatrists to get Georgia over the trauma of having survived the Nazi occupation of Montana. “That’s what I am, Bobby,” she told him in a monotone, sitting on the sofa and still gripping him. “I’m an official survivor of the Cataclysm, as it’s called. Kind of like Holocaust survivors were fifty years ago. As Cataclysm Survivors Mom and I both get a government check every month, not that we need it. I use mine to buy dope and booze and ciggies. You’d be amazed how many people from the Northwest survived the Cataclysm, once President Wallace started passing those checks out.”
“Rather like the miraculous multiplication of Jewish Holocaust survivors from the 1970s and 1980s onward, I imagine,” Bobby replied with a chuckle. “Back home we call you a Lost Baby. There were all too many of those in real life, kids like you, white children of the Runaways who were taken away from their Homeland and forced to grow up in what was left of Amurrica, brainwashed into liberalism and into hating their own race.”
“Why didn’t the Republic stop her?” asked Georgia dully. “Why did nobody on the NAR side even stop the damned car and ask where the hell we were going?”
Bob sighed. “Georgia, that debate has been raging within the Republic ever since it happened, and it’s caused more criticism by the Opposition in Parliament and from the people themselves than anything we’ve ever done. The government of the time made that decision. Most of the ministers from back then have since said publicly that it was the worst call they ever made, and the Lost Babies have become part of our national memory and legend. Untold tens and hundreds of thousands of white children, lost forever to the soul-poison that is America. Every month the NAR media runs big stories about Lost Babies who Come Home again, sometimes after having to run the McCurtain where they really do have to face machine guns and Dobermans and minefields, just not on our side of the border.
“But we have to be fair and realistic. You were only ten in those days, Peanut. I was fourteen, and so I remember a little more. Things were really shaky back then, and I don’t mean just ice cream shortages in the stores. After Longview we went through four bad months, a time they call the Consolidation, or some call it the Cleanup.”
“I remember some,” said Georgia. “Mom was really scared. If she has any legitimate excuse for what she did to me, I suppose that would be it. She was really afraid.”
“The government of the Republic was new, its hold on power was shaky, our army was only half-trained and we barely had a navy or an air force at all,” said Bob. “We didn’t know whether or not the Congress and Chelsea Clinton here in D.C. were going to simply tear up the Longview Treaty and invade the Republic full force to try and re-conquer us. That’s one reason why the stuff that went on during the Cleanup had to be kept so quiet. One thing the Republic couldn’t afford was to have a lot of atrocity stories seeping out, including stories about how we were kidnapping huge numbers of children from their parents and putting them in makeshift orphanages or something of the kind so they could supposedly be brainwashed, like Amber was afraid we’d do to you. And we couldn’t afford a lot of sullen and resentful people living in the Northwest who were just waiting for the Americans to come back, who were ready and willing to stab us in the back. We got rid of the worst ones we could catch during the Cleanup, but we simply couldn’t identify and kill all the people who were potential threats, and so it was decided to let them get the hell out if they wanted to. They were encouraged to do so. We knew it would cause us trouble later, but we opted for the short-term fix that we could actually implement. Georgia, Clancy and Kevin told me about that time the Guardsman came to deliver your house documents and Amber ran off at the mouth to him at the door. If you’d stayed, chances are that eventually there would have been another knock on the door and BOSS really would have come for your mother. As horrible as she’s been to you, would you have wanted you and Clancy and Kevin to have to go through that?”
“I guess not,” said Georgia dully. “I still love her. I have to. She’s my mom. She was doing what she thought was right, but it was just so, so wrong.” Finally, tears began to trickle down Georgia’s cheeks.
“Go on, honey, tell me the rest of it,” he urged her.
“Not much to tell, what there is of it is pretty bad, and I’m probably boring you to death,” she snuffled.
“No, Peanut, I want to hear it all.”
Georgia’s teenaged years had been luxurious, but a blasted heath emotionally. More expensive prep schools, then a bought-and-paid-for admission to Columbia because she couldn’t cut it academically for Lily and Amber’s alma mater at Brown University, or at any of the remaining five Sisters—Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Smith, or Wellesley. There were carefully selected expensive friends whose brains were stuffed with cotton, and the endless therapy her mother and grandmother made sure she got, not to heal her wounded mind or savaged soul, but increasingly to blame her academic failure and social lapses on PCSD, Post Cataclysm Stress Disorder. Lily Escott was glad to have them around as part of her entourage; Northwest “survivors” were a chic accessory to wealthy liberals post-Longview. There was the endless round of cocktail parties and fundraisers and weekend retreats to the Hamptons and the country clubs where Amber and Georgia were trotted out and introduced as prize specimens in Lily’s personal collection of trendy-left memorabilia. “This is my daughter and my granddaughter. Cataclysm Survivors, you know,” she would say. “They had to flee from the Northwest with Stormtroopers chasing them on motorcycles and shooting at them with machine guns.”
The drugs and the booze started at age 14, the same year Amber married high-powered Jewish lobbyist and attorney Marvin Halberstam. First came the purloining of liquor from Lily’s sideboard and the Hamptons wine cellar for Georgi
a and her friends, then illegal grass, then legal grass when the ban was revoked, then the pills. Georgia never had to buy pills from a street dealer, because between them both, Lily and Amber had every prescription painkiller, tranquilizer, narcotic and male or female sexual stimulant known to pharmaceutical science.
The boys started at 15, the traffic tickets and wrecked automobiles at 16, and the first runaway escapade combining all three plus an illegal tobacco possession charge occurred at age 17. Six months later Georgia was rounded up in a police raid on an unlicensed “youth club” in Anacostia, and her date for the evening was found to have over twenty Habanos and Montecristos on him and twelve cartons of Marlboros in the car, which he had been planning to sell at the rave. The car was Georgia’s, and she was looking at an accessory charge on a distribution rap, but Marvin Halberstam got her out of the police station and home by midnight, and her name never appeared in any arrest report or media story. The boyfriend got three years in a penal factory and was beaten to death by the Zulu prison gang when he bungled a promised cigarette deal.
Georgia’s daughter Allura had been the result of a cliché night of drunken freshman carelessness at Columbia. Georgia didn’t even refer to the father. “Mom keeps the baby because she says I’m not a fit mother,” she said casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “She’s probably right. I’m stoned most of the time and I keep waking up beside guys whose names I can’t remember. Maybe I’ll get my act together someday and I can have her with me. But what the hell, I’m young now, might as well enjoy myself, right?”
Bob thought of his own kids, and he barely refrained from tearing into her with an angry lecture on parental responsibility, because that wasn’t what he was there for. The Northwest Republic needed this young woman, needed her to do grotesque and sickening things in order to stop a war and save God alone knew how many white lives, and moralizing judgments were not on the menu. “But you kept Allura,” he told her gently. “You didn’t have to. People as rich as your family don’t have to obey the law. You could have gotten rid of the child.”
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