“Wasn’t sure it was you,” I said. “Back on the beach, sending in a single man.”
She blinked, frowning. “Subordinates. Sometimes you have to let them make their own mistakes.” She laughed. “Still throwing rocks. Poor bastard. I told them you were dangerous. But I was in DC still and couldn’t get away to be there. They didn’t want to wait.”
“Wasn’t a bad approach, just…easy to spot,” I said. “So, you’re not in charge?” The plane lifted at a steeper angle than commercial pilots would take. It banked, and I got a glimpse of the highway, a lonely car’s headlights in the distance. Where were they going? I wondered. Who were they? Just normal people, going somewhere, doing something. Like always.
“Nobody is in charge in DC,” she said. “It just sort of shambles along. I have to play their games, for now. For all this.” She gestured with her fingers at the plane, encompassing everything, the drone, chopper, strike force. The tools of her power. “Took some doing.” She tucked her blanket around her and shivered. Her eyes were lidded, half-closed, but still watching me.
“He in charge? This Smoke?” I wanted to learn more, but she waved me off, flicking her fingers at me.
“Nobody is,” she said. “Or maybe he is. You figure it out and let me know. You’re good at that.” She closed her eyes. “Let me sleep. We’ve got a few hours.”
I sat back. When Gold doesn’t want to talk, she won’t talk. When she does, you can’t shut her up. I forced myself, through long practice, to relax, to wait. Being tense just makes you more tense. I reclined my seat and looked out the window. Sometimes you can see signs like that, signs you need.
“I missed you,” she said, her eyes open again. “Missed you a lot.”
There it was. “I missed you too, you crazy bitch.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Gold and I had parted in Berlin after the War. We’d entered that city with the Red Army. Well, just behind it. Never a good idea to travel with armies, as they are unhealthy things to be around. We had been partisans, or with the partisans after the Luftwaffe bombers found our airfield. Posing as women just following an army, as women always have. We had to walk through most of Poland and Germany, dodging Russian patrols, but once we got to Berlin, things quieted down.
Mostly we just tried to find out what was going on. It wasn’t like today, where we have so much data. We didn’t even have a radio for months, so we learned by talking to people in the street and the cafes. There wasn’t much food in Berlin, as I recall, but there was plenty of drinking, so we spent as much time as we could in the cafes, talking and listening. My dreams were of a red, roiling sea. I had headaches, and Gold was irritable.
We both spoke excellent German, bitte. I had lived in Germany many times and loved that country. That Germans had all gone mad and followed their leaders into their madness always seemed to me to be in line with their character. Hitler was order. Order from chaos. Hitler was pride, pride from shame. People, being simple…the big lie was an easy con for most of them. The others, the resisters? There never seems to be very many of those, in such situations. Crack a few skulls, and the rest fall into line. It was no real surprise for me to watch what was happening as it unfolded. That came later, for myself and for Gold. Everyone, I suppose.
We lived poor, as everyone lived in postwar Berlin. We whored to get better food and information, but this was a dangerous way to live and difficult around soldiers. Soldiers don’t like whores who ask them questions.
Once we got a little radio, salvaged from a bombed basement and repaired by Gold, things were better. I tried to adopt a kitten and named him Heinrich, but he ran off in search of better food, I think. Or maybe Gold let him out. My dreams settled down, the sea a sullen orange, fronds of brown tendrils spreading, spreading. I tried not to sleep. Gold simmered.
We learned the full extent of Germany’s madness. Only Germans could industrialize murder. It seemed to me inevitable. Industrialization as a process was really only a few decades old. Progress was speeding up. Someone had to do it, to kill as many of their enemies, their scapegoats, with a systematic method. Gas was cheap, effective, and repeatable. Work people to death.
It was familiar, the Holocaust. Only the scope had changed. We barely spoke about it, although Gold collected the newspapers and read them, sometimes repeatedly. We had known of the camps, Poland and the Ukraine, but never the extent. We had avoided them, as they were well-patrolled and dangerous.
The camps, as I say, were shocking but not surprising. Things got out of hand. First, a political trick to scapegoat communists, gypsies, and Jews. Round them up and send them elsewhere. But nobody would take so many, and the Nazis had been so brutal for so long that they just took that next, fateful step. Horrors, yes, but Gold and I had perspective others lacked. I had seen sacked cities before, many times. Only the scale of the camps was novel to us.
When the War ended in Japan, though, it stunned us. My dreams went scarlet, almost into black. Something had happened. Something terrible. We could feel it. Bombs that could destroy cities. We had heard rumors of such before the War, but it seemed like something out of pulp magazines. Popular fiction. Radiation sickness, blast wave pressure. We became experts, as best we could.
The Americans were running our sector, having carved up Berlin amongst the victors. The Russians were strutting around puffed up with pride. They had won the War they claimed, to whoever would listen. And it was true, I knew, having seen the War from the East. It had been a horrific struggle in the mud and the cold. The cities had been worst, but the country, where we tried to stay, was bad in its own way. Enough said on this. It is depressing.
The Russians were shipping whatever they could steal to the East. Including people. My dreams drove me to learn what sorts of things they were taking. Factories. Whole factories were being dismantled, packed up, and shipped onto trains headed to the east. Technical equipment, technical people. Engineers, the Soviets wanted engineers. Anyone with a technical degree in their sectors was at risk, I learned. People learned to hide it, play dumb, but the Soviet intelligence apparatus was good even then, and ferreted them out.
The Americans, too, were strip mining Germany for technical talent. Rocketry experts were first, those men who designed the blitz weapons. Lured, not sent, but I think they knew if it wasn’t the Americans it would soon be the Russians, and America at least had places like Florida and California to offer. Not Siberia or Kazakhstan or some basement in Moscow. But they desired other technical disciplines, we soon learned from a dalliance Gold had with an American officer: cryptographers, code breakers, mathematicians, physicists. Anything that had to do with math or physics was in high demand.
The Soviets also wanted the same and were not gentle with their persuasions when they found someone in their sectors with these skills. Snatching, kidnapping…threats, outlandish bribes and promises rarely kept. The NKVD used them all. But this I learned later, and at the time we just knew both sides wanted technical people.
Gold grew more and more interested in the Americans. We had traveled there, after their Civil War, and I had not loved it then. In Texas, I saw how the new white settlers treated the natives and the Mexicans, whose land they stole. These people had been proud once, and now they were treated like the black slaves had been. Gold had sneered at me, pointing out that these people’s ancestors wore human ears as necklaces and had plucked the hearts out of their children to please her. She despised them and the whites, although I think she hated the Mexicans more, having suffered their worship in the long ago past.
She wanted to go with them, with her officer paramour who thought her a German woman of Italian descent, and wanted to rescue her. Restless, she grew less interested in what I was learning of the Soviets. The NKVD was active in Berlin, arriving with the Red Army and never leaving. Even today, their successors are still there.
Russia only changes its clothes. It is always brooding and secretive, paranoid and pragmatic. A dangerous mix, made worse by the fac
ade of Soviet idealism, masking their comfort with authority. I learned, living there in the fifties and sixties, how ingrained the Russian tendency to want to avoid trouble, keep your head down, do not attract police attention, do not trust the bureaucrats, the checkists, the State. The gangsters. Not my circus, not my monkeys, they joked, but with a quick glance around first. Always look over your shoulder. Don’t smile.
Oh yes, they had gangsters even then. Forever the gangs in Russia. The joke in the NKVD was: Russian organized crime? Who do you think organized them? Half of the Politburo started in the gangs before the Revolution, or their fathers had. Stalin himself, the king of the gangsters. I became their friends in Berlin because they knew much of what was happening and had long feuds with German criminals. When they caught Nazis, they were ruthless. The NKVD used them for such, and for snatching the smart boys, the ones who had gone to school in Vienna or Konigsberg, students of Von Neumann. They had a list, the NKVD, of high value targets. Many theoretical physicists on it. New fields, such as information theory. Cryptanalysis. Code breaking and code creation. Radar specialists. The Wehrmacht and the German industrial machine had a use for such men, and so now did the Soviets. These men knew things, and the State needed to know what they knew, so they would take their brains East and put them to use. Drained. Nothing personal, comrade.
The Soviets could see it coming, I think. The Cold War was obvious to them before even the Americans. The Americans were too attractive, and the War in the East had been so bad, so ruthless, that anybody who could escape to the West across the porous border was doing so. So they acted. First, by stealing whatever they could. Whole factories, laboratories, equipment. Then people who knew what they didn’t know. Gold, now tight with the American intelligence colonel who she was fucking, said the Americans were very interested in what the Soviets wanted out of Germany, the people they were taking, their names. Who were they? They had files on these folk, and some of them knew things the Americans didn’t want the Soviets to know. It was all cloak and dagger stuff. Exciting.
We didn’t know what was happening either, and shared the excitement. Gold was manic—not sleeping, drinking too much. It was the weapons which excited her, and the strides in the technology which the Germans had and now the Americans were taking. Technology, this new word, would become this new world. It was clear. Investments made during the War would pay off big. America had switched thirty percent of its production over to making ships, tanks, jeeps, planes, bombs and bullets. Those factories were now switching back to peacetime production. Cars, boats, furniture, houses for people starting families put on hold during the War years. A boom, they called it, like a gold rush. Boomtime.
Gold wanted it. She had seizures and came out with new convictions and ideas. Strange ideas. Obsessing about codes. Codes and machines and people to make and break codes. She grew distant from me, as I was not at all sharing her enthusiasm for America. I was jealous, I will admit. She had her dashing colonel, and I had a string of grubby NKVD gangsters pawing at me. I tried to sway her, to keep her, but it was useless. She wanted what she wanted. Once, in our kitchen, I had caught her when a seizure took her and eased her to the floor. I held her until it passed, always an endless time, such long seconds, when someone is taken by it. She came out of it and, mazed and fuzzy, looked up at me as I wiped her mouth of the foamy spittle, and she laughed.
Laughing, she clutched at me, drew me close, put her lips against my ear, her legs closing around my waist. She kissed her way up my neck and, her foul breath hot against my ear, tongued her way all around it, lingering at my earlobe. I liked that, I did. It was just like her, the cold and the hot, the sweet with the sour. She pulled me to her, hands in my hair, ankles locking in the small of my back. She kissed my ear and I resisted. It was difficult, but she had no right to this, to behaving this way. Part of me, I will admit, enjoyed it. Wanted it.
But I’m not a young girl. I’m old. Far older than most. So sex, hot as it might be, doesn’t rule me. Even with her. She pressed herself against me, grinding, trying to lock eyes with me. I stared back, defiant. Fuck you, that kind of stare. She challenged me, mocking me with her eyes. This, as you know, is itself a flirtation, an invitation. Oh yeah, you think so do you? Come on then, show me. It’s as old as time itself, this game. I know it. But with her—it’s a hall of mirrors. A forest, endless, trackless, with one way in and no ways out. I become lost.
So, after that we parted. I packed the next morning while she pretended to sleep, and left. I went east on a morning train, towards the sun. Just as I had as a child with my Murta so long ago, and after. Eastern, always towards the sun.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The helicopter set us down at a base. A military base, it was clear, but where was difficult to tell. It doesn’t matter. One base is much like another, really. This place had its unique stamp, though, in it seemed to strive for military efficiency. And secrecy. No signs, official or the other samizdat military bases accrete after a few years. This place was…maybe not scrubbed so much as curated. Someone kept things neat, and they were serious about it. The tarmac had no weeds. The jeep that raced out to our jet was full of three serious looking soldiers, the ones in front with sidearms and the one in back with a wicked-looking submachine gun. All but the driver hopped out, and the passenger stood at parade rest while we finished our taxi.
The one who had been in the back seat jogged off to the right, then stopped and assumed parade rest about thirty feet away from the jeep. His machine gun remained slung across his back but it was there, and from the easy way he had run with it, I knew he was proficient with it. Gold came out of the little bathroom, wiping her hand on her pants leg. She had on her glasses again, all steel and mirror. I thought back to how a helm on a knight would let you see their eyes. Behind their masks—some of which had been fearsome, but even the plainest, cheapest helm is fearsome—behind the snarling wolf snouts, pig nose, or skull, some of those boys were shitting themselves.
I remember one…well I remember more than one. Ignore that, okay? I have seen many knights and warriors before they went into battle, is my point. They were afraid, unmanned. Men about to go into battle are boys. Especially the virgins. Little boys, quivering with fear. It is heartbreaking, and women have forever watched this. Lived through the fear, gut-wrenching and heart-sickening.
Boys have been afraid forever. Part of being a boy, for most boys, is being afraid. I’m talking about most boys throughout history. Not in helicopter parent country. Not like America or the West these days, but everywhere else. Every when else. Boys were abused. Destroyed. Traumatized. It was nothing like today, child-rearing in my day, so to speak. Men were vicious bastards, mostly, or could be at the drop of a hat, even the gentlest souls. And they were cruel, but they were afraid, too, afraid of what might happen, frankly, if they didn’t beat their boys into being vicious bastards like they were. Like their fathers had beaten them, and so on down the chain.
Back then it was how things were. How they’d been forever, since the dreamtime. Nobody questioned it. Boys grew up from sweet young souls into sociopathic maniacs. It was really, in some places, what they had to be to survive. To ensure their folk survived. Not the hunting peoples, mind you, but the kind that came later. Medieval, they would call it here. Late stone age mentality, really. Protect the homestead, protect the chief or the king. Preserve our people. Kill the strangers. It really is a chain, and they lived this way, down that ceaseless chain, link by link. It was different. Mechanization, citification, education, even a little…it really changed people. Really, well, at least here it did.
Anyway, it was their eyes I thought of, those boys with Gold, and the glimpse I had caught of her coming out of the tiny aircraft bathroom. Gold’s eyes had, in the instant when she came out of the bathroom, been like that. Empty. Forlorn and without hope.
We descended into the blinding sun. At the foot of the ramp I saw the machine gunner off to my left, still at parade rest; now the submachine pistol
, all angular steel and black plastic, stayed tucked discretely behind his hip, inches from his fingers. He looked relaxed but observant. I nodded to myself. Whoever is in charge here has their shit together. Gold was not in charge here, I realized then. I had seen camps she was in charge of, and they were shoddy affairs, full of laxity and grift. This was at least discipline.
Once in the jeep, we left the plane and machine gunner behind and sped towards a hangar half-built into a low rise. I realized the rise was a fake, created by tons of dirt hummocked over the shell of a reinforced aircraft hangar. Inside we stopped. I saw in the dim light, a cargo lifter like you might see inside an aircraft carrier. A huge elevator built into the floor, big enough to hoist a jetliner. As soon as we stopped, it dropped us down. I felt a wave of familiarity, as if I had seen this in a long-ago dream. Or maybe recently. When had I slept last?
We descended some floors; I don’t remember. I saw several decks, floors, whatever, receding off into the distance. It was a large facility. We stopped and our driver hopped out, stopped, and stood at attention. There was a welcoming party. Military brass, mostly, and a few discrete men in well-tailored suits who stood at opposing angles to us, never facing each other directly but covering every angle of a circle around us. Kill zones, should they need them. They were subtle about it, but their movements betrayed them, ballet-like and well practiced. Normal human movement never synchronizes and only happens with long practice.
A man stepped forward. Bald, but still young. Asiatic, or maybe Mesoamerican. Japanese? Hard to say. A pronounced brow ridge, but otherwise gracile build. He wore a suit but no tie, and was at the center of the knot of uniform and braid. Gold strode up and offered a crisp salute. He returned it formally, a well-practiced salute. I smirked. She was so full of shit.
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