by Tad Williams
"Turn around and walk. Through there." He was shoved toward a doorway in one of the walls. At the gunman's direction Joseph pulled the door open and stepped through into blackness. He flinched, positive that any second the bullet would slam into the back of his skull. When something clicked, he jumped. A moment later he realized he was still alive, but that controlling his bladder was no longer an option. He was ridiculously glad he hadn't had much to drink in the last few hours—at least he would die with only a small show of cowardice.
A fluorescent light spasmed on overhead. He had been brought to some kind of garage or storage room, empty but for a few cans of paint and some broken chairs, the kind of place someone whose small business had failed might rent to keep his equipment in until he could sell it off. Joseph saw his own shadow stretched against the floor with his kidnapper's flung alongside it.
"Turn around," the gunman said.
Long Joseph did, slowly. The dark-skinned black man who stood before him wore what surely had once been a nice overcoat, but which was stained, as was the white shirt he wore beneath. His hair had been expensively cut at some point, but had not been tended recently. Even Joseph, one of the world's less observant people, could see that the man was nervous and upset, but the gun in the fellow's hand kept him from saying anything about it. "Do you recognize me?" the kidnapper asked.
Joseph shook his head helplessly—although now that the man mentioned it, there was something vaguely familiar. . . .
"My name is Del Ray Chiume. Does that mean anything?" The gunman shifted from one foot to the other.
Long Joseph frowned, still frightened, but now puzzled, too. "Del Ray. . . ?" It came to him a moment later. "You used to see my daughter Renie?"
"That's right!" The man laughed explosively, as though Joseph had conceded a hard-fought point. "And do you know what your daughter has done to me? Can you even guess?"
Joseph watched the gun go up and down, up and down. "I don't know nothing that you are talking about."
"She's ruined my life, that's what she's done." Del Ray paused in his back-and-forthing to wipe the sleeve of his overcoat along his damp forehead. "I've lost everything because she couldn't leave well enough alone!"
"I don't know what you are talking about." Joseph gathered his courage. "Why you kidnap me? You going to kill me because my daughter break up with you or something?"
Del Ray laughed again. "Are you crazy? Are you crazy, old man? That was years ago. I'm a married man! But my marriage is over because of your daughter. I've lost my house, everything. And it's all her fault!"
Renie, Long Joseph decided, had clearly been keeping a lot to herself. And she had the nerve to criticize his behavior. He was beginning to feel that there was a good chance he was going to live after all, and he was torn between an urge to collapse and a desire to shout out his joy and fury. This was no hard man. Long Joseph knew this type. This Del Ray fellow was some kind of businessman, the kind who turned down your loan application with a sneer, but when push came to shove and he wasn't on top anymore, had no balls. "So are you going to shoot me, then? Because if you are not, then put your damn gun away, but don't keep waving it around like you some kind of Mafia hitman."
"Hitman!" Del Ray's laugh was theatrically bitter. "You don't know shit, old man. I've met the bloody hitmen. They came and had a talk with me—that was before they burned my house down.
One of them had fists as big as your head—biggest, ugliest Boer you ever saw. Face like a bag of rocks. You know what they said? Told me if I didn't do what they wanted, they were going to rape my wife and then kill her, right in front of me." Del Ray suddenly burst into tears.
Long Joseph was taken aback—how did you deal with a weeping man with a gun? In fact, how did you deal with a weeping man of any kind? "Why would they do a thing like that?" he asked, almost gently. "Why they so angry at you?"
Del Ray looked up suddenly, his eyes bright, madly intent. "Because of your daughter, that's why! Because Renie dragged me into something I didn't want to know about, and my wife's left me, and . . . and. . . ." The tears returned. He sank to the floor and sat, legs stretched in front of him, like a toddler who had fallen down. The gun lay on the floor between his knees.
"So you going to shoot me?" Long Joseph asked. "You been waiting around in front of that hospital just to shoot me?" He considered for a moment. "Or you waiting to shoot Renie?"
"No, no." Del Ray wiped his sweat-shiny face with his sleeve again. "No, I have to talk to Renie. She has to tell these people what they need to know so I can stop hiding."
Joseph shook his head, unable to keep up with the man's logic. "I can't tell nothing to Renie. She is not here. I just come to see my son, and that's what I'm going to do. Unless you going to shoot me." He had allowed a sneer to creep onto his face—now that he thought back on it, he had never liked this high-talking fellow very much, and had been openly glad when Renie got shed of him.
Del Ray's hand suddenly snapped up, the gun clutched in it once more, the alarmingly large black hole pointing right at Long Joseph's face.
"You are crazy," Del Ray said. "You don't know how lucky you are it was me got you first. My brothers and I have been watching out for you or Renie for days and days, but if I can watch that place, so can the hitmen. Do you think for a second you can just walk in and see your son without them knowing? These people won't just kill you, old man, they'll torture you first to find your daughter—and then think what they'll do to her."
Joseph frowned. "I don't understand any of this talk. It all sound crazy to me—crazier than what Renie says, even." He blinked, trying to remember how it had been when he could talk to someone and make them understand him, and he could understand them in turn. It seemed like years. "Put that gun away, man. Just tell me what happened."
Del Ray stared at him for a moment, then looked at his own outstretched arm and the gun trembling in his fist. He tucked the pistol into his coat pocket.
"That is good," Joseph said. "Much better. Now tell me what happened to you." He looked around the dimly lit garage, then back to Del Ray Chiume's wide-eyed, sweaty face. "But can we go somewhere? I truly need a drink."
It was not good to think too much about things, Jeremiah was discovering.
When there was no one to talk to but yourself and nowhere to visit but the same echoing rooms, when you saw no sun, and had listened to the radio voices babble about a world that had nothing to do with you until you wanted to scream, when you had heard little else except the breathing and amplified heartbeats of two people who for all intents and purposes had left you behind in another country, it was bad to spend too much time letting your mind wander.
There had been times during the years he had worked for the Van Bleecks, first for both of them, Doctor and Doctor, but most of the time for Susan alone in her long widowhood, that Jeremiah Dako had thought, I would give everything I have for just a little time to rest and think. Acting as secretary, housekeeper, cook, and chauffeur for a brilliant, cantankerous, absentminded old woman, he had done a job that two younger men would have found arduous, but Jeremiah had prided himself on his ability to take anything life (or Susan Van Bleeck's dubious skills of organization and personal punctuality) could throw at him and keep going, venting his frustration only in small steam-valve gusts of bad temper and irritable over-solicitousness. He had given up his own social life for it, had been out of the bars and club scene so long that on the few occasions he found himself with a night off and his mother otherwise engaged, he not only didn't recognize any of the people he met, but could not understand the music or the clothing, as though an entire generational shift had happened while he wasn't looking.
But even if he had little interest anymore in investing the hard work of maintaining a social life, had weighed the pros and cons and reconciled himself largely to celibacy and—much more frightening—perhaps a solitary old age, he had not entirely given up his dreams. In all those years of fiercely hard work, he had never regretted anything
except the lack of rest, of time to think. The worst thing about middle age, he had discovered, was that if you weren't careful, your life sped past at such a breakneck pace that an entire year could sneak by and leave no important memories.
So he had yearned through all the years with Susan for a little time to himself, real time and real leisure, not the annual week of taking his mother to play the slot machines at Sun City (while himself hoping for a brief and discreet romance, which had indeed happened a couple of times, a happy encounter at a casino bar after Mama's bedtime, the memory of which would carry him through the rest of the year.) Jeremiah had longed for time to think, to read, to regain at least a little of the young man he had been back in school, when he had felt that living in the world should be synonymous with changing the world. What of all the books he had used to read, the big thoughts, African history, sexual politics? He had been lucky in the Kloof years if he found time to check the traffic reports and download an occasional recipe.
So here he was, after all these years and in this most unexpected way, with nothing to do but read and think, with no company but his own, with no demands on his time and attention that could not have been fulfilled by a four-year-old child. He had exactly what he had wanted for so long. And he hated it.
Now that Long Joseph had—for lack of a better term—escaped, one of the things that Jeremiah found himself thinking about far more often than he would have liked was the terrible responsibility of being the only person looking out for Renie's and !Xabbu's safety. There had been little need for worry thus far: although their heart rates had spiked several times, nothing had crested above the military's own warning system levels, so he had to assume they were experiencing the normal ins and outs of virtual existence. Not that there was anything actually normal about any of this.
It was nothing new, of course. Throughout his years as Doctor Van Bleeck's companion and protector the responsibility of her safety had weighed on him heavily. Durban had suffered several waves of carjackings and kidnappings, including a year-long reign of terror by one gang of young thugs who routinely murdered drivers just so they could steal a particular automotive op-sys bubble chip that was then drawing a high price on the black market. Twice Jeremiah had escaped in high speed chases from threats that he felt were very serious indeed, and once he'd driven away from a crossroad with three hoodlums still clinging to the hood, trying to break the expensive, shatter-resistant glass with tire irons. When the last of the young criminals had tumbled to the pavement and Jeremiah had begun to turn the car back toward home, a shaken Susan had instead asked him to drive her to the hospital. Her heart was beating so swiftly, she later told him, that she had been positive she was going into cardiac arrest.
Even thinking back on that now, he felt cold. There were so many dangers in the world—so many crazy, desperate people!
A deeper and more subtle chill spread through him, a deep un-happiness that made him feel sick to his stomach. Here he stood in this vast underground fortress worrying about how someone had once almost hurt Susan, ignoring the fact that she had been hurt, and that in the end he had failed in his duty to her as completely as anyone could fail. Men had broken into the house and had beaten Susan Van Bleeck so badly that she died. All the things Jeremiah had done for her over the years, the dramatic and the domestic, had all come down to that. He had failed to protect her, and they had killed her.
And now he had been planted with ultimate responsibility for two more people—people he could not speak to, could not even see. But if something went wrong, if their hearts stopped, or if someone cut the power to the military base one night while Jeremiah slept, their deaths would still be his fault.
It made him want to follow Renie's father, to flee into the big world outside and leave the responsibility to someone else. But of course there wasn't anyone else, which made the duty even more miserable, more impossible to escape.
Jeremiah was thinking some variant of these thoughts—his mind had been traveling in rather unhappy circles in the days since Long Joseph's midnight departure—when the phone rang for the first time.
It was such an astonishingly unexpected noise that at first he did not even know what it was. The incredibly old-fashioned handset slung in its metal cradle on the huge concrete pillar beside the control panels had long ago lost even its initial novelty and become merely another object in his visual field, something that would have attracted his attention only if it had disappeared, and then perhaps not for days. When the insistent ringing began, a purringly metallic tone quite unlike anything he'd ever heard, it sounded five or six times before he even understood where it was coming from.
Decades of secretarial reflexes summoned into operation, for a moment he seriously contemplated answering it—he even had a brief vision of himself picking up the handset and saying "Hello?" like someone from a costume drama. Then the full magnitude of the thing came to him and he sat frozen in fear until the ringing stopped. His pulse was just beginning to return to normal rates when the ringing started once more.
The phone rang every five minutes for the next half hour, then stopped again, apparently for good.
After the worst of the surprise was over, he was able to put it aside, even smile at his own reactions. Obviously Martine and Singh had reconnected the telecom lines, otherwise Long Joseph wouldn't have been able to access the net, even in receive-only mode. So if there was a working line, phone calls could get through, too, even random ones. Someone had triggered a number that just happened to belong to Wasp's Nest—perhaps some autodialing machine, perhaps a simple mistake. It would be foolish to pick it up, of course, but even if he did, probably not fatal. Not that he would touch the phone if it happened again—Jeremiah was tired and worried, but not stupid.
It seemed much less academic when the phone rang again four hours later, then rang back every five minutes for another half hour, then stopped again. Even so, he did not panic. It meant nothing, and never would unless he himself answered it, and there was no reason to do that.
The phone continued to ring, sometimes after intervals as short as two hours, sometimes after a hiatus as long as eight hours, or once ten—always the same phone, always with the same, persistent pattern of five minute retries. If it was just gear, Jeremiah decided, just mechanical, then anything so aggressively upsetting must be Satan's own autodialer. But what if it wasn't?
Try as he might, he couldn't imagine anything good that the phone might represent—someone at Power or Communications trying to find out why an abandoned base was sucking from the grid at a greater rate than it had in years, perhaps? Or something even more sinister, the same mysterious people who had mauled Susan and burned down Renie's house and God knew what else? He could not think of anyone they knew who might even guess they were in this place, so there was no reason at all to answer, which should have made the whole thing easier. Still, the constant repetition was maddening. He tried to turn off the phone's ringer, but the ancient device had no external control. An attempt to remove the entire phone from the pillar was equally useless: he wrestled with the frozen bolts for the better part of an afternoon and managed nothing more than to scrape his knuckles bloody, until in a fit of frustrated fury he beat at the phone with the inadequate wrench, dimpling the several layers of bland gray-green paint but not even denting the heavy iron cover.
It went on. The phone rang every day, usually several times a day, and each time it did, he flinched. Sometimes he woke up from his sleep to the sound of the phone, even though he was now sleeping on the far side of the underground base, completely insulated from its noise. But by the end of the first week he heard it anyway, even in his dreams. It rang and rang and rang.
"Man, you gone a long time. You just get one bottle of wine?" Joseph rolled down the sack and squinted at the label. At least Del Ray had gotten him Mountain Rose as he had asked, which might taste like cat-piss but had a reliable kick.
"It's all yours. I don't drink wine," Del Ray said. "At least I don't drin
k the kind of wine they sell around here. I got myself a beer." He brandished a bottle of Steenlager.
"You should get that Red Elephant." Joseph upended the squeeze bottle and took a generous swig. "That's a good beer." He settled on the garage floor with his back against the wall, unmindful of oil stains on his trousers. An hour ago he had been certain he was going to get a bullet in him, not wine, so he was in a very, very good mood. He had even forgiven Renie's old boyfriend for kidnapping him, although he had not entirely given up the idea of punching him a good one in the face, just on principle, to let him know that it wasn't smart to mess with Long Joseph Sulaweyo. But not as long as this Chiume fellow still had that gun tucked in his pocket. "So what is all this foolishness you getting up to?" Joseph asked, smacking his lips. "Why you running around all tooled up like some kind of Pinetown rude boy?'
Del Ray, who had only taken the first sip of his beer, scowled. "Because there are people trying to kill me. Where's Renie?"
"Oh, no." For once Joseph had right on his side, he felt quite sure. It was a novel feeling and he intended to enjoy it. "You don't come kidnapping and mistreating me and then expect me to answer all your questions."
"I've still got the gun, you know."
Long Joseph waved his hand airily. He had this young fellow's number. "Then shoot me. But if you not going to shoot me, then you better tell me what cause you to go snatching people off the street when they are minding their lawful business."
Del Ray rolled his eyes but did not pursue it. "It's your daughter's fault, and if you don't know about it, you ought to. She came to me, after all. I hadn't talked to her in years. I was married . . . I was married. . . ." He fell silent for a long moment, his face morose. "My life was going very well. Then Renie called up with some crazy story about a virtual nightclub, and now it's all gone to hell."
