End Time

by G. A. Matiasz

  He had reduced most of his other regional field offices to skeleton crews despite the objections of his local directors, and he had gotten approval on Operation Anvil from the highest authorities to draw agents from other regions. The influx of new faces and the obvious FBI presence all around the Bay Area was already having unintended side effects. He had flushed out several fugitives, anti-war activists who had gone underground to avoid the draft, arrest or grand jury subpoena. The operation collected excellent incidental information on the Left as well, useful once he recovered the riemanium and prepared to lead the Bureau’s inevitable crackdown. His office also had numerous anonymous tips about the Mexican Revolution Solidarity Brigade, nearly all of which were turning up as dead ends.

  In turn, all of this had saddled him with mountains of paperwork, which had chained him to a desk for the past week. He chafed under the red tape, triplicate documentation, and endless politicking that went with his new position of authority. He was becoming a glorified “desk jockey,” something that his basic field agent instincts fought against. Designating himself to head the Tuesday night sting had been necessary to maintain his sanity, not to mention his sense of dignity and accomplishment.

  As he dismissed his men so that they might finish prepping for the evening, he thought to call his second wife, the one he could still talk to, and their daughter, inspired by the danger to him on this operation. But he squelched the thought immediately. He had faced life-threatening situations many times before, not just as an agent but as a Marine. Suddenly, for the first time in this case, he felt tired, almost weary. Got to get a good night’s sleep soon Edward told himself and shook it off. Can not afford it now though, he thought. Have to keep pushing. Drive up the pressure, the temperature, into the nuclear range. Create a blast furnace that burns away everything to expose his enemies.

  ***

  David and Greg did scope out the streets of San Francisco around the march route, having driven down after Greg’s last, long class for the Temptations Cafe meeting.

  “Smoke may be too out-of-control,” David admitted, “But he does know his hooliganism.”

  The Temptations Cafe was glass and chrome. The patio fronting the sidewalk was polished tile and exuberant plants in flower boxes. The whole thing was a yuppie wet dream. Indeed, someone had managed to scrawl the slogan: “Die Yuppie Scum,” in fluorescent pink paint on a part of the brick wall next to the cafe. Reminder of some past demonstration, it had been only partially removed by scrubbing. They were early. They found a table inside, next to a window with a view of the patio.

  “Jesus,” Greg breathed, looking the menu over, “You could feed a small African village for what they charge for an entree.”

  “Don’t worry, I have some money,” David scowled at the prices, “We’ve got to order something so as not to look conspicuous.”

  The waiter took their order with an air of disdain; a large chefs salad with blue cheese dressing for Greg, and a half order fettuccine alfredo and a dark German beer for David. It was not that the two were not dressed for the Cafe. It was California after all. The waiter’s manner reflected the place’s pretensions.

  “Drink some of my beer,” David said, then glanced up at the racket of a departing table. “Now there’s a group that’ll be first up against the wall, come the revolution.”

  A party of four stood to leave, from the Fed rendezvous table. All were young, male and dressed to the GQ European standard of perfection. Three were white and one was Asian. They behaved like junior execs, brokers or law firm partners; with their groomed conformity, bragging, one-upmanship, sense of superiority, need for control, and overt heterosexuality. With some slight changes in skin color and language, this could be a group in Tokyo, Berlin, Singapore, or any of the world’s cosmopolitan cities. For even as regional capitalist blocks were consolidating, the top and bottom of the capitalist world were becoming entirely fluid, merging together.

  The dressed-for-success young men represented an emerging, truly transnational corporate elite. And the two dark skinned busboys who hustled to clean their table, undoubtedly the dishwashers and probably the cooks as well, were also of the new capitalist world order. One was perhaps central American, another Mexican, still another Filipino or Caribbean, again perhaps half were illegal or recently legal immigrants, and all were representative of an international class of migrant laborers, counterpoint to the suited young sharks. They were the product of a shattered Third World collapsing into Fourth World destitution, war, civil war, famine, disease and desolation, just as the suits were a product of international capitalist affluence and gluttony. It was the visual metaphor of a railing. A number of large posts, the regionally consolidated blocks of capitalist developed and developing nations, rose from a common floor, the international class of “guest workers” and their thoroughly exploited countries. The posts were topped off in turn by a thin banister, the transnational, corporate ruling class and its managerial minions.

  As their waiter brought the food, a young couple tried to sit at the exact same table vacated by the corporate sharks. The waiter strode out to deliver the word that the table was reserved, and the couple politely relocated to a table across the patio entry, only to be informed that that too was taken. Clearly, cafe management was in on the FBI deal. Third time they found a seat, and the two from Alabaster watched, lightly nibbling on their meals to make them last. The cafe filled up, during the time before the appointed meeting.

  Virtually every Bay Area heavy rad started showing up, taking a table on the periphery, and ordering only coffee or a light snack, to the annoyance of the cafe’s management. The Hooligentsia. Greg had seen most of them at demo’s, some even as speakers. Clearly, the word had spread.

  Fifteen to the hour a couple of thick, fake tourists occupied the table across from the table in question, without protest. They ordered coffee. Five to the hour, a middle aged white and a younger Hispanic suit plopped down in the target zone, also without protest. They ordered only coffee.

  “Don’t much like the back up,” David smiled, and dug into the remainder of his fettuccine.

  “Yah,” Greg gulped some beer, “This whole thing’s beginning to stink.”

  They waited on the clock, diddling over the food. Quite unexpectedly, Jason pushed into the Cafe, streaking wild color and hair across yuppie ambiance. David’s jaw dropped.

  “Yo, David,” Jason jumped into a seat at their table, then lowered his voice dramatically, “Hope the Solidarity Brigade doesn’t show tonight. There’s a carload of FBI agents two steps up the street. Same one’s approached me in Berkeley. Looks like a set up.”

  “That’s it,” Greg announced, and David gave him a warning glance. Jason never noticed as he saw a half dozen other familiar faces.

  “Gotta go,” Jason planted a hand on David’s shoulder.

  As Jason left, another man approached the men seated at the Fed contact table. Clearly, he was a street person, perhaps homeless. His brown, greasy hair was shoulder length and scraggly. He wore stained army pants over frayed converse. Dirt streaked his simple white and brown Mexican poncho, which covered god knows what. He took a double take at the Feds’ low lidded glance, stopped on the sidewalk in puzzled contemplation, and then approached the patio’s plant overgrown railing.

  “Got a smoke,” Greg saw the bum form the words, at the same time he reached for something under the poncho. The Hispanic Fed dove for the tiles. The middle-aged Fed gestured, two fingers, pointing. Firecracker noise. The bum exploded. Blood and brains spattered over the patio, in particular all over the still seated Fed. Over the screaming couple on the patio. One bullet smacked off a table top and ricocheted. Passed right through the bum. It hit the window in front of David and Greg with not quite enough force to cut cleanly through. Instead, the window broke and cascaded straight down, in a violence of sound.

  An entire cafe full of people rushed out and bowled over the Feds trying to reach their blood splattered fellow, David and Greg among
the first out. They drove back to Alabaster spooked, barely exchanging a dozen words. The fact that the government had just murdered someone remotely suspected of connection with the riemanium overwhelmed Greg. Not a word of it on the radio. Much later, David, Beth, Larry and Greg seated at the campus pub downing beer in horror over what had happened, the two Alabaster eye witnesses retold the story over and again, still no word about it on TV news. They heard via the MDRG grapevine that the man shot down had been a wino named Wally. He had been reaching for was his flask of muscatel. The State would kill, and pretty indiscriminately, to get back that riemanium.

  ***

  Peregrine hit the Zapata Cafe, fully recovered from the day’s traumatic events. Focused and determined, he found the cooperative restaurant almost too easy to crack. No challenge at all. All the coops were easy money. Peregrine pocketed the cafe’s $325. The campus coops didn’t have to survive in the real world, the outside capitalist world, he told himself with disdain. They were student projects, volunteer hobbies taking advantage of the university’s largess and the pipe-dreams of mostly white, middle class college kids. He’d take the easy money until it was time to sell his cache and disappear. He knocked off Conspiracy of Equals a second time for $527 for good measure, after he left the cafe.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Isabella Allegro, CT purist, FAO militant, and leader of the Allegro Column of people’s militias, concerned herself most with the state of abject illiteracy in the towns and villages she protected. When she went to see how a cooperative, collective or commune was doing, they often did not understand what she meant when she asked if they were keeping accounts or following the instructions on seed, fertilizer or other products used for farming. They told her that if they needed something for the village, they got hold of a truck, frequently one lent them by the Allegro Column, and made an exchange with another village. What they knew about the use of various agricultural products they learned by word-of-mouth.

  She herself, the daughter of a landless day-labor family in the small village of Zepete, close to her column’s current headquarters at Tuxtla Gutierrez, had stayed illiterate until her early twenties. Isabella began earning income at six for her impoverished family of nine brothers and sisters. She looked for snails, edible mushrooms, herbs, wild fruits and vegetables and whatever else she could find. Because of her stocky build, she was in the fields, reaping with a sickle and other traditional means at eleven, graduating to the no less arduous work of the thrashing house soon thereafter. She left her village at eighteen and, reaching Guadalajara, she became a building laborer, one of the few women in the male dominated trade.

  Isabella joined the libertarian Union de Trabajadores de Mexicano, attended union meetings, spoke eloquently from the floor, but disappeared when there was mention of her being elected to a union post. Marti, then of the UTM, later secretary of the Liberty Party, and Isabella’s lover until he was killed in the bombing of Oaxaca, first realized the reason for her reluctance and suggested that her fellow workers, union members all, read her the paper daily, using its headlines eventually to teach her to read.

  As a consequence, although she read up on Anarchism once she had the skill, her own anarchist development had been entirely visceral, in large part the product of her being a woman worker in a man’s labor movement. Isabella’s militancy lead her into the FAO, but not into the atentados practiced by many of the groupos de afinidad. She advocated the organic creation of peoples militias out of an armed people. Elected to the secretariat of the CT in time for the failed 1999 General Strike, she did not believe that a liberated society could be had solely through economic actions. Her emphasis on class self-defense and her exemplary organization of the 2000 insurrection on the Isthmus gained her election to leadership of the regional column of peoples militias after the August Uprisings. Grateful for San Cristobal’s aid, she nevertheless maintained that the Mexican people alone would win their own liberation. She had often been accused of autarchic tendencies.

  She developed the poled house, raised field and drainage trench strategy to deal with gas attacks and caterpillar defoliants. She defended the Liberated Territories in the famous Arista assault, when combined elements of the US and Mexican Marines were turned back into the Gulf of Tehuantepec by the Allegro, Mancado and Tupac Columns in eight days of the revolution’s bloodiest hand-to-hand battles. Everyone recognized Isabella’s tactical and strategic brilliance. Those closer to her understood that, while she was probably the greatest general of popular liberation forces since Giap, she loathed war. In turn, Isabella took the greatest pride in her grassroots system of schooling.

  Isabella selected twenty-four militia members all competent to teach literacy and each knowledgeable in another field. She devised a standard curriculum around standard materials for her literacy campaign. Then she divided up her region into six circuits, with four militia teachers traveling from village to village on a weekly route. Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday were school days. The circuit riding teachers followed the notes of their predecessors in teaching the villagers to read, then presented a class or two in their own specialties. Classes were held in one of the villager’s houses for most of the children and the fewer, motivated adults. The whole village fed and sheltered the circuit teachers. Not only were the villagers developing basic literacy, but the Allegro Column had a constant, consistent source of information on the countryside; how the harvest was going, what problems there were, what damage the air war was doing, whether contra forces were operating, and the like.

  Isabella Allegro had no count of the times the Yanquis and their Mexicano puppets had tried to assassinate her.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Greg gathered with the rest of the affinity group, as well as hundreds of others, in the Zapata Cafe parking lot for car pools to Berkeley the morning of the General Strike. He walked in a daze among his friends, barely responding when Larry pulled up, honking his horn, in his VW. Mitch had taken unofficial charge of the large ASP contingent not interested in autonomous action, while folks turned to Smoke in the small action faction become autonomous ASP affinity. Greg had dressed for the part, all in black, as had Larry, David, Beth and the others in the affinity. Lori made an appearance to give Greg a roll of papers and a kiss, the papers xeroxes on how to build your own A-bomb.

  This should do the trick,” Lori said, then tilted her head to give him a sidelong look. “So, what does Peregrine think about the idea of doing another communique based on these plans?”

  “Haven’t talked to him,” Greg sidestepped her probe. “He pretty much gave us a “blank check’ for what we want to do.”

  She rejoined Mary and two other girls, wandering off into the crowd as he stowed the xeroxes hurriedly in his parked car. Larry’s microbus carried six comfortably, and the ride was laced with anticipation. Greg had not slept well the night before, what with visions of murder still fresh in his mind. He managed to doze some on the way down between second thoughts. Greg was not a pacifist per se, viewing non-violence more as a tactic then as a way of life. His opposition to the US war in Mexico had as much to do with the fact that his country, a mere 4% of the world’s population, consumed close to 20% of the world’s energy and 40% of its resources to keep a life style of mindless consumerism in high gear. US military intervention he saw as an attempt to keep southern Mexico within a viable North American Trade Zone so that domestic economic prosperity might be maintained. Still, he was skeptical about joining in on the Hooligan actions. Could street fighting and vandalism alone halt the war? He doubted it. Thousands, tens of thousands had gathered at Sproul Plaza at the UC, milling about, waiting for the march to start. A speaker, a long winded elderly Berkeley professor named Allen Meltzer affiliated with the new Frankfurt Circle, droned on endlessly. Undisturbed by large crowds, pigeons foraged among the demonstrators. Greg, Larry and the rest of the affinity group formed up momentarily with the rest of ASP. The school contingent went its own way as the affinity, along with the MDRG, joined up wi
th a confident black clothed column. Smoke, in toque and kaffiyeh, knew quite a few individuals in the Hooligan zone and disappeared for a time to shake hands. Occasional clouds slipped across the brilliant sky.

  “For now, well be keeping to the middle of the march,” Smoke said as he returned to the assembled ASP and MDRG groupings, “The Alameda County sheriffs are itching to bust some of the Hooligans.”

  Another speaker briefly set matters in motion, gathered the people, and started the march. By the time Greg and his companions were all the way down Telegraph, the crowd had swollen to a hundred thousand.

  “No War, No Way! No Fascist USA!”

  “1,2,3,4...We Don’t Want Your Fucking War!”

  “Stop The Genocide! Stop The Air War!”

  “5,6, 7,8...0rganize And Smash The State!”

  By the time they reached the highway they were over a quarter million strong, well deserving of the police escort that shut down two lanes. When the much rowdier Oakland crowd joined up, they approached a half million.

  “El Pueblo, Unido, Jamas Sera Vencido!”

  “1, 2,3,4...We Don’t Want Your Racist War!”

  “Malcolm X, ML King! Justice, Not War, Is The Thing!”

  “5,6,7,8...We Don’t Want Your Fascist State!”