Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25)

by Fletcher, John

  Virginia Grant rejoined us then. We finished the Negro’s grave and walked back to the village. The teacher took us to Ben Canster’s appliance shop, where she had earlier broken open the display room door. In a back room I found an elaborate, all-frequency-receiving apparatus. It was easy to put it in operation. The receiver was powered by a Delco electric unit, driven by a gas motor, which made the receiver independent of the regular electric supply.

  Jim Riley and I explored the back of the appliance shop. In a separate, frame building we found a radio transmitter. Ben Canster spared nothing for his hobby. It was a magnificent transmitter in excellent order, and powered like the receiver by the independent Delco unit. While I was testing it, we heard uncertain footsteps on the gravel outside. A tall, thin, old man, his white hair uncombed and a gray stubble on his chin, staggered to the door. He was wearing khaki trousers, a frayed, cotton shirt, and very battered boots; he stank of sweat and liquor.

  “That you, Ben?” he asked, peering into the semi-darkness.

  “It must be Hank Jenkins,” Jim Riley whispered to me.

  I held out my hand. “My name’s Yorovich.”

  “Russian! You guys got here damn fast. Might know you’d smell out all this liquor.”

  The boy said, “No, we’re refugees from Los Angeles—”

  “All the worse. City people! Always drink up everything in sight. No moderation. Well, I got the Double Seven staked out; you ain’t gettin’ in there.”

  He stumbled away, weaving down the street and humming an off-key melody.

  It was after one o’clock that afternoon when Jim Riley came running over from the hotel to tell us Bonhill and Thatcher were back. “And we’re going to have dinner right away.”

  “Did they find the survivors?”

  “Sure. Two ladies and a colored boy.” Jim’s eyes sparkled. “His name is Ted Fisher and he’s just my age and he wasn’t hurt at all!”

  The two women Bonhill and Thatcher had rescued were both in their thirties.

  The taller of the two, a slim blonde, whose name was Janice Gage, was very attractive—except for the shadow of horror in her gray eyes. The other refugee, small, brown-haired, pert-faced, was Lola Donne, a buxom, sensuous woman who seemed on the verge of overflowing the tight dress she wore.

  While we ate, they told us what had happened on the desert. The two women were strangers. Each of them, in separate cars, had been among the first evacuees to leave Los Angeles.

  Near Lucerne Valley they were caught in the frantic exodus of automobiles coming down the east highway out of Big Bear. Janice Gage’s car was pushed off the shoulder of the road. She struck Lola Donne’s coupe and both machines were wrecked.

  Then the bombs had fallen. With eyes glazed Janice relived the horror. Only she, Lola, the boy Ted and his father survived. The Negro was hurt worse than any of them.

  With the force of his personality alone the Negro kept them going throughout the night. The road above them was impassable for a mile or more. They had to climb through mesquite and manzanita. They might have returned to the highway above the slide, but by that time the Negro must have lost his sight. He led them by instinct, knowing they had to move constantly upward and feeling out their path by the inclination of the land. At dawn the women were too exhausted to go any farther. The Negro said he’d get help. In the pale light they saw his face and hands for the first time—the skin was in ribbons of burned flesh. And he still did not let them know he was blind. By sheer animal strength he managed to reach the highway, where we found him.

  We lingered over the meal, under no compulsion of time. We had no appointments to keep. Hank Jenkins wandered in and joined us, bringing a half-empty fifth of liquor. Virginia Grant made a place for him at the table and piled his plate with food. Mrs. Bonhill made a pleasant ceremony of giving Jerry and me new clothes, which she had taken from a sporting goods shop.

  Jerry and I went into a storage room behind the registration desk and put on the clothes. I winced when I felt the wool against my back. Bonhill laughed and said I had a touch of sunburn. As I went back to the lobby, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror on the door, and the man I saw was a stranger.

  An American. The clothes symbolically completed my transformation, from Soviet paratrooper to American in eight hours. I belonged. And I understood, then, that America was not a nation, but a state of mind.

  Cheryl Fineberg came and slid on the lounge between us. Bonhill tipped his cigar at a jaunty angle, grinning at her.

  “I saw Willie Clapper go out right after dinner,” she said, in a low voice. “He hasn’t come back yet. I don’t want to get everybody stirred up over nothing, but I think we should know what he’s up to.”

  “We’ll find him,” Bonhill said.

  Outside the hotel, he went east on the village street and I turned west. I saw Clapper a minute later, a hundred yards ahead of me. He slithered out of a sporting goods shop, jamming something into his coat pocket, and went into the drugstore where the Negro died.

  As I ran toward the store, I saw him enter a telephone booth and drop a coin into the slot. After a moment, he began to jiggle the receiver hook. He didn’t make his connection—fortunately, for it was a reasonable guess that he was trying to contact the invasion headquarters in Los Angeles. He met me at the door of the store. He shrugged noncommittally when I asked why he was telephoning.

  Far away, on the road west of the village, we heard the hum of a motor. It stopped occasionally, and then moved toward us again.

  “More refugees?” I asked.

  Clapper threw back his handsome head and laughed uproariously. “Bonhill’s car was the last one over the road last night before the fire closed the highway. Your pretty dream is finished, Lieutenant—and so soon, too. Academically, it would have been amusing to see just how much trash they could make you swallow.” He put his hand on my shoulder and with the other pointed toward the sound of the approaching vehicle. “That will be our mutual friends from Los Angeles. If I couldn’t get back to them, they had to come looking for me—obviously.”

  In blind rage I smashed my fist into his face—again and again, until he fell against the door and collapsed inside the shop.

  We weren’t licked. We couldn’t be. And we had found a secret weapon, the stuff of the spirit that no arms could reach. I turned and ran back toward the hotel, signaling Jerry Bonhill with my hand. We had five minutes, perhaps less, before the Soviet car would be in the village. But we were Americans. That was all the time we needed.

  V. The City—Saturday morning Dr. Stewart Roswell

  CHEN PHIANG took us two blocks from the Dragen house to a garage apartment at the rear of a Chinese restaurant. The American planes were still raiding the harbor and above us the sky filled with cotton puffs from the exploding anti-aircraft shells.

  We stumbled up the wooden stairway and Chen Phiang knocked on the door of the apartment—three times before it was opened. The soldier and a Chinese spoke rapidly in Cantonese and the door was flung wide to us. Chen Phiang put George Knight on a couch. Three women bent beside him, rubbing his hands and working pillows behind his head.

  The man and Chen Phiang deluged each other with a flood of shrill Chinese. Their meeting was highly emotional. They threw their arms around each other—the small, dark-haired Chinese-American and the enormous man in the Communist uniform. Abruptly it was over. The soldier departed.

  The Chinese shook my hand. His face still quivered with emotion; his fingers were trembling, warm with sweat. I told him who we were and how we had escaped from the Soviet headquarters. He glanced at George Knight—still unconscious—and said in a tone of deep humility,

  “The Quaker teacher does an honor to my home.”

  “You know him?”

  “Only his books. We are Buddhists, but all men of honor speak to the same end.”

  The three women brought a bottle of rubbing alcohol and washed Knight’s face. The Quaker opened his eyes. Their kindness he accepted and un
derstood at once, without words.

  The Chinese told us his name was Lin Yeng. The three women were sisters, his wife Barbara and the beautiful teenager’s Charlotte and Betty Sutong.

  Lin Yeng could tell us very little about Chen Phiang, except that the soldier was a cousin, held for years in a Chinese concentration camp—or so they had always believed…

  The next morning George Knight walked without my help into the front room of the apartment for breakfast—slowly, that’s true, and dragging his right foot painfully, but under his own power. Considering how thoroughgoing Zergoff’s education of the Quaker had been, Knight had made a remarkable recovery.

  The Yengs had spread a round, teakwood table with bamboo mats and blue-glazed china. I saw the traditional, handleless teacups and the round rice bowls. But instead of tea, they gave us Coca-Cola to drink.

  We heard footsteps on the stairs and Chen Phiang flung open the door. His uniform was soiled and disheveled. His flat, Oriental face was drawn tight with fatigue. He stood by our table, twisting his cap in his hand. Lin Yeng offered him food, but he turned it down.

  “We’ll take it all soon enough,” he answered darkly. “Eat while you can.” He said he had been on emergency duty all night—a search detail. General Zergoff had two hundred men combing the harbor area for Knight and me. The force was later increased to five hundred. Chen Phiang volunteered for the duty, to misdirect the search if it came too close to his cousin’s apartment. His determination to save us had become the driving force of his being.

  “The Russians will order a house to house search shortly,” Chen Phiang declared. “Not this morning, perhaps. We still can’t spare the manpower. But before that happens, I must get you away from the city.”

  “How?” Lin Yeng asked. “The roads are barricaded.”

  “There is a mountain place near here. I have heard talk of it. Some of our men were sent to look for a certain Dr. Clapper. If he is hidden so well, you might be, too.”

  I glanced at Knight. “Clapper does have a cabin somewhere between Running Springs and Big Bear.”

  “When the time comes,” the Chinese soldier asked, “can you show me the proper road?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will find transportation for us. Our submarines fought a naval battle last night. No one knows the outcome, but we expect an American task force to try a landing sometime today. They will be repulsed, naturally, but in the beginning there will be much confusion. That will be our opportunity to escape.”

  When the soldier turned to leave, Lin Yeng stopped him at the door. He said he had a gift of courtesy and he handed Chen Phiang a six-bottle carton of Coke. “In America, cousin, this is our national drink. A friend of America will use nothing else.” He repeated very slowly, “Nothing else.

  “Drink no water,” Lin Yeng went on. “Go unwashed and unclean.”

  When Chen Phiang was gone, Barbara Yeng said anxiously, “I do hope he understood.”

  “I made it as plain as I dared,” her husband replied.

  “Not to me,” I told them.

  “When the milk collectors came during the night,” Lin Yeng explained, “they told us. They were taking the warning to every American family. The Soviet bombers cut the irrigation canals that cross the desert, and the water still flowing to the city was affected by radiation. Before the week is out we’ll have a water famine, but long before that every person who drinks the city water will undoubtedly suffer radiation poisoning. That means even more misery and a gruesome, painful death for those who consume the water.”

  VI. The Valley—Friday night Jerry Bonhill

  THE plan was Yorovich’s. He said the Russian car would head straight for the hotel as soon as the driver spotted Clapper’s Cadillac. He wanted us to be concealed on both sides of the street, with rifles taken from a sporting goods store. We were to fire in front of the car and behind it, trying to make enough noise to suggest a large guerilla force.

  In the meantime, from the second floor of the hotel, he would demand the surrender of the Soviets—in Russian, the parade-ground arrogance of a Russian officer. The psychological confusion should do the trick. Yorovich wanted Thatcher to have the submachine gun and to be posted with him in the second floor.

  “If anything goes wrong,” he said, “Thatcher, shoot to kill.”

  “I have one objection,” Cheryl put in. “You should have the submachine gun, Boris. Pat would be more use to us down here.”

  The Russian blushed. His dark face was suddenly boyish and it was very easy for me to remember, then, that he was no older than I was. “I didn’t think you’d want me—that is, if I had that weapon in my hands I could—”

  “Give him the keys to the car,” I told Pat.

  Yorovich looked at me with inexpressible gratitude. He tried to say something, but all he was able to do was swallow—hard. Thatcher handed over the keys. The Russian ran into the street and unlocked the trunk compartment of the Cadillac. Three seconds later he was on his way up the stairs, the gun cradled in his arm.

  “Let’s snap to it,” I said to the others. “Who’s going outside with us?” They volunteered unanimously, even Jim Riley and the colored boy, Ted Fisher. I sent them into the kitchen of the coffee shop. I asked Hank Jenkins to stick with them—more to keep him off the streets than because I thought the kids needed watching. The rest of us filed through the sporting goods store, snatching up rifles and boxes of cartridges. An emergency seems to generate its own brand of efficiency. In less than two minutes we were concealed on both sides of the street.

  The Soviet jeep entered the village. At an open window in the second floor of the hotel I saw Boris Yorovich stiffen and raise his gun to his shoulder. The jeep moved toward us. I counted four infantrymen, all of them armed with submachine guns. The two in back were standing, scanning the walks, their weapons cocked against their upper arms.

  The jeep was in front of the hotel. In the stillness I heard the driver say very distinctly, “The Cadillac matches our description of Dr. Clapper’s car.” Afternoon sunlight, slanting over the hills, fell on his face. He was very young and very tired. The faint shadow of a blond beard was on his chin.

  Then Yorovich’s command echoed over the street. I saw the sudden fear and indecision in the young Russian’s eyes. All four men looked up. Simultaneously the drug-store door banged open and Willie Clapper staggered out. They snapped their guns to their shoulder. “I’m Clapper!” he cried. “Don’t shoot.”

  From our concealed positions we began to fire. Yorovich’s voice barked again. Bullets from his submachine gun lashed across the hood of the jeep, shattering the windshield. The four men dropped their weapons and raised their hands. It was over.

  No, it was just beginning. We swarmed around the car. Thatcher scooped up their weapons. I pushed the captives into the hotel.

  We put the Russians on a lounge. Yorovich came down the steps and stood looking at them, the submachine gun draped carelessly over his arm. He grinned and said something in Russian. They stared at him, their eyes wide with fear. He spoke again and stiffly they reeled off their names and the other information he demanded.

  Andrei Trenev. Infantryman, eighteen, a small, fair-haired, blue-eyed boy conscripted from a Ukranian farm co-cooperative.

  Vasili Shostovar. Paratrooper, twenty, shallow-chested, beady-eyed, dark-haired, a mechanic from a Moscow implement depot; he had a two-year trade school education and appeared more sophisticated than the others.

  Igor Morrenski. Air-corps sergeant, seventeen, small and sturdy, with a broad, peasant face vaguely suggesting Mongol ancestry; he came from Stalingrad, where he had worked on a farm co-operative.

  Feodor Psorkarian, Paratrooper, seventeen. A tall, handsome, wild-eyed boy with an unruly shock of yellow hair and laughter on his lips. A Cossack and proud of it. Of them all, perhaps the most adaptable personality.

  Virginia Grant took over the job at that point. “I think, we’ll get you some respectable clothes,” she said. “I disapprov
e of uniforms. Jerry, take them up to the men’s shop and let them pick out something to wear.” So I’d get her point, she repeated it firmly, “Let them do the choosing.”

  Shostovar protested like a good dialectician: we had no right to take their uniforms.

  “If you want war on your terms, we take what we like,” the teacher answered, lifting her rifle in a gesture that was unmistakable. “On ours, you have a choice. Make up your mind, Russian—that’s the American way—but don’t overlook all the consequences.”

  Yorovich and I took the four men to a sporting goods store, herding them carefully away from the racks of weapons. The Cossack took us at our word. We said he could take what he wanted and he did just that. He squeezed his long, muscular legs into corduroy riding breeches, and he found a flame-colored, silk shirt. Around his waist he tied a broad, yellow scarf. He was delighted with what he saw when he examined himself in the full-length mirror. One by one the others stripped off their uniforms. Naked, they pawed through the display of clothing, whispering over the workmanship and awed by the abundance.

  We fed the men at a table in the hotel lobby. None of us was able to eat so soon, except for Jim Riley and Ted Fisher. The two kids tore themselves away from their games long enough to plow through plates of beans and a quart of milk.

  Willie Clapper had not come into the hotel when we were feeding the men. I didn’t want to make an issue of it in front of them. Afterward Pat Thatcher and I tried to find him, without any luck. There were scores of places where he could have hidden in that deserted village. Pat and I were both certain he hadn’t gone far.

  “This could be dynamite,” Pat told me.

  I agreed with him. “I suppose Willie’s planning to steal the Caddy or the jeep somehow and make tracks for L. A.”

  “Let him go, Jerry. In this set-up he’s nothing but bait. They’ll keep sending more men after him as long as he’s here.”

  “It would be a hell of a lot worse if he got away. They’d send bombing planes, then, to wipe us out.”