Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER SEVEN

Saturday, July 12, 2042

“Like it?”

Lessing smiled and handed the manuscript back to Liese. “The writing’s fair, but Doomsday’s still a way off. I’m not much interested in politics, and your totalitarian state… frankly… doesn’t convince me.”

“Ought to.” The girl laid the sheaf of paper down, raised herself upon an elbow, and rubbed suntan lotion along one pale-golden thigh.

“Sorry.” He reached over and took the plastic bottle from her fingers. “You’re missing a spot. Let me.”

“It’s not politics, Alan,” Mrs. Delacroix said from her lawn chair in the shade. She gestured to take in the enclosed garden, the sun-dappled tiles, the potted plants, the pool, the statuary. “It’s survival. The survival of Western civilization, of the way of life you’re enjoying now.”

At the moment all he wanted was to enjoy it — and Liese — further. He said, “Thanks for inviting me to stay.”

She was not to be put off. “Yes, of course. But you… people like you… really ought to think about things seriously. After all, the strong survive, and the weak perish. That is evolution, the immutable law of Nature. And who is still the strongest, even after decades of laziness and ignoring our responsibility to history? We, Alan, the Western ethnos. We are the ones who invent, develop, organize, create, and provide capital and jobs. We have done more than any other group. Now we are weakened by a babel of other voices. But we cannot afford to let them divert us: who would take over? Can you imagine that dreadful ‘Emperor’ of Guinea feeding even his own people, much less the people of Ghana, Nigeria, or anywhere else? If we… our industries and our expertise… were taken away, there would be chaos! Then destruction and an end to all that we… all that all humans… hold dear.”

“Um ” He cast about for another topic. If only she would go

take a nap or something! Liese had been friendly last night; he sensed that she was ready to be somewhat more.

He found himself thinking of Jameela again. Dammit! Not even a harmless fantasy in peace! He couldn’t pursue Liese without coming to terms with Jameela. He had let himself be induced to stop over in Pretoria. He had been nice to Liese — some might call it “courting” — but he had gone no farther than a remark or two, a little body contact, and a few drops of suntan lotion courteously applied. So far he had only transgressed mentally — which was hardly a crime!

So far.

Did he push it, or did he let it lie?

For the moment he would let it lie. He needed time.

The perfume of the suntan lotion, mingled with the faint, flowery scent of Liese’s tangled, blonde tresses, and the sun-warmed, salt fragrance of her skin aroused him. He hunted for a safe subject. “Who is this Vincent Dom anyway? I never heard of him.”

Mrs. Delacroix gave Liese a look, very arch and very French. “You are looking at her. Not I… Liese, there. She is, perhaps, the ‘Dom,’ while others are the ‘Vincent.’”

“What?” Then he wondered why he was surprised. There had been talk at the Guatemala City meeting of a committee of writers. All he could think of to say was: “Congratulations.” ,

“She writes the theoretical parts,” Mrs. Delacroix continued. “Others do the history and the… how do you say?… action program.”

“You mean the platform?”

“Not exactly. Your word ‘platform’ is too concrete, a list of very specific proposals. That leads to squabbles and factions within the movement. Instead, we emulate the First Führer: his Weltanschauung was no list of means and goals; it was a view of the future, of a strong Germany, of a society that could lead the West and the world. He had little use for platforms, such as the one the Party issued in 1920, nor did he fill his book, Mein Kampf, with specifics for people to argue over. His Weltanschauung was his eventual objective, but he was pragmatic and expected the details to change according to circumstances. He was a visionary, a prophet… and a guide, an arbiter, a conciliator between individuals and factions. And he was above them all.”

“No Führer now,” Liese shook out her tresses. “Have to attract through ideas, not charisma. Behavioral psychologists checking every word of our book. No mention of past, of Nazism. Just positive things. Warmth, love, progress, stability.”

Lessing was amused. “You could hire an actor… a ‘Vincent Dorn’ to give speeches “

Liese sniffed scornfully and buried her head in her arms to let him massage lotion into the nape of her neck. Mrs. Delacroix took him seriously, however: “We thought of that. We may do it yet, if we cannot find a charismatic leader. Speeches, television, public appearances… all are so important, n’est-ce pas? We have also thought of keeping Monsieur ‘Dom’ anonymous… comment?… incognito. But that could not continue after we become a public political force.”

The whole thing struck him as silly. A movement without a leader? A mob of psychologists collaborating with ad-men and ghost-writers to compose the Holy Writ? It was a TV executive’s wet dream! People were convinced by people, not by books: physical presence, words, and deeds — not abstract theories. Whatever else he may have been, Hitler had had the right idea about the realities of personal power. Hadn’t Alexander, Napoleon, Churchill, Jesus all made it without too much reliance upon tracts and manifestos? Marx and Engels had written books, of course, but then they themselves had not fought in the revolution that swept Czarist Russia into the dustbin. Men like Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin had led that, for better or for worse. Jameela’s Prophet Muhammad had had a book, of course, the Qur’an, but he could never have succeeded without charisma. He had given speeches, met people, argued issues, gathered adherents, fought opponents — and eventually won. No, Lessing knew from his own military experience that people wanted real, live human beings to lead them. That was why abstract, impersonal visions of God tended to become displaced by very human father-images, son-images, mother-images, and pantheons of saints, demigods, imams, gurus, holy mystics, or what have you. Human beings might die for an abstraction, but it would be another human being who convinced them the sacrifice was worth the candle.

He uttered a noncommittal grunt.

The swimming pool and its surrounding garden were as crystal-still as a photograph in some glossy resort brochure, an oasis of serenity cut off from the universe. Nothing entered without Mrs. Delacroix’s approval; nothing was allowed to change. It was as though there would always be sunlight; blue, chlorine-smelling water; tiles that were hot and wet and blindingly white; damp towels; gay-fringed, pink parasols; and little, rickety tables of glass and wire overflowing with bottles and magazines and all the bric-a-brac of leisure.

Liese rose to her feet and stretched. She picked up a towel, muttered something about a shower, and glided off, barefoot and mostly bare elsewhere as well, toward the house. Lessing’s eyes followed her of their own accord. Her legs were very good indeed.

“You will be kind to Liese?” Mrs. Delacroix’s voice sliced into his revery.

“What?”

“You know. I am neither naive nor yet quite senile, eh?”

It was useless to dissemble. “Neither of us — We haven’t made any moves yet.”

“You have both made it plain. I leave you two alone, and it becomes bedtime, no?”

He laughed at her turn of phrase. “Maybe. Anyway I have… other commitments… back in India. Nothing happens until I’ve decided about those. I don’t have fun, then run.”

“Bien. It should be what you both want.” She extended one waxen, paper-pale hand from the shadow into the sunlight. It looked almost disembodied. “You would know about Liese?”

He said nothing, and she took his silence for assent. “Liese is American, Alan. Like yourself. She ran away from home when she was twelve. She does not speak of it, but I think it was her father… child abuse… you know. The American family is more than half destroyed, the old values gone. She ended in one of your cities, was taken in by a Black gang, was put to work as a prostitute on the streets, then was sold to someone in New York who took her to Cairo… a pornographer, a broker in human flesh. One of our people saw her there and bought her… literally. He brought her to Frankfurt and made her… what do you call it?… a mannequin, a model of fashions. She was no common prostitute. Anyone could see that She had too much… I do not know the expression “

“Class,” Lessing murmured.

“Ah, oui, class. I was raised in the Free Republic of the Congo… now neither free nor a republic, but that is another story. My English is better than my German… my grandfather’s language… but my French is best. Do you speak French, Alan?”

He shook his head, and she gave him a mournful, little half-smile. “Too sad, you Americans. No languages. So. Liese suffered… I need not tell of it. You hear the effects in her speech: she does not find it easy to converse. She writes, though. Her writing is good and gets better.”

So that was why Liese spoke as she did. “My God,” he breathed. “How she must hate!”

“Ah? No. Not hatred. Not the way some women hate men, with less cause. Not Liese. She is hard and cautious, like a… a crab in a shell. Tough, ready to fight… but fragile, and inside very soft. She tries to be philosophical. What happened to her happens to many these days. She does not hate, but she does want to dismantle the system that hurt her. Replace it with a world in which such horrors cannot exist.”

“Who could blame her? But she’s an idealist. There’ll always be wars and killing and cruelty and exploitation and crime and prostitution No government, no ‘movement,’ no starry-eyed political philosophy will stop those.”

“There speaks the mercenary: the soldier, the pragmatist. Perhaps you are right, Alan. But we… Liese and the rest of us… have to try. Otherwise there is no point to life, eh?”

He wiped his face and shoulders roughly with the fluffy, blue towel Liese had given him. Suddenly the chlorine smell of the swimming pool was suffocating. “I have to get back to India. I don’t want to put you out….”

“Put me out? What does it mean? Oh, to disturb me. No, my secretary, Mrs. Van Tassel, has your ticket and documents. I shall add a gift to repay you for your services.” She rose to her feet, twitched her while sun-dress into place, and smiled. “So? You and Liese? Not now?”

He grinned back. “Later. Maybe.”

She laughed outright. “Liese needs a good man, Alan. Perhaps you are good enough? A challenge?”

He chuckled and followed her into the house.

Dinner was awkward. Neither an average, middle-class, American upbringing nor years in various armies had prepared Lessing for people who ale with twelve pieces of silverware. Thank God South Africa had at least abandoned dinner jackets and starched dickeys! Mrs. Delacroix’s six male guests were attired in a miscellany of sportswear, bush shirts, and business suits. The four women, including Liese, wore fashionable cheong-sam-like dresses slit up the thigh, made of a metallic-looking, silky, synthetic fabric and accompanied by matching bodices with a little over-jacket of translucent, lacy stuff. Sex had joyfully returned after long decades of stuffy, Born Again puritanism. The only one wearing a traditional dinner gown was their hostess herself, as regal and gracious as a portrait of some dowager empress.

Lessing found himself between an elderly Afrikaner and a younger man in the uniform of a captain of the South African police. The former sized Lessing up at once, made a polite remark or two, and then turned to the woman on his right to discuss horse racing in Johannesburg. The policeman was more forthcoming: bluff, balding, tanned, and familiar with the profession of arms. Mutual mercenary friends offered a starting point, and they went on to talk of native resistance groups, racial unrest in America (about which the policeman knew more than Lessing, who hadn’t lived there for years), and the present situation in his own country.

“We’re coming to it,” the captain said unhappily. “Sooner or later we shall have another Great Massacre like the one back in 2000. Then many more, both White and Black, will be killed, and again nothing will be solved.”

“What can do,” Liese asked from across the table, to stop it? Lessing was getting used to her disjointed way of speaking.

The captain rubbed at his wispy moustache. “Like last time: military force. Socially, we’ve gone as far as we can: education, health care, jobs, housing. The… pardon my language… bloody lot The Blacks want to do to us what they did to Rhodesia… Zimbabwe. First independence, then a ‘veddy propah British’ Black government, then a ‘president’ who’s little more than a dictator, then army rule, then tribalism, then persecution of the White minority, and finally expulsion of whatever Whites are left. Then a shambles, like Zimbabwe today.” Spots of color appeared in his cheeks. “Damn it, I’m as African as these people… ancestors here since the 1600s and all that. I won’t give up my home any more than an English-American who is politely asked to leave by the Red Indians! Same case; different ratio of natives to Whites, that’s all.”

Lessing had heard the arguments before. By his own lights, the captain was only describing the situation realistically. Philosophically — morally, ethically, in the best of all possible worlds — perhaps there ought not to be racial conflict. Yet the human animal, Black or White, was aggressive and acquisitive, and whichever side was on top would almost certainly abuse its position. History proved it, and there were no signs of humanity undergoing a change of heart. Like the old saw said: “They ain’t no justice.” Where did one man’s “legitimate political aspirations” become another man’s “oppression and tyranny?” One had only to look to the Jews in Palestine, the British in Ireland, or any of a dozen other instances. He was glad when the captain let the subject drop.

As he watched Liese and the others he felt an emotion to which he could put no name: a vague disquiet, a doomed fatedness, like a man from the future seated at the last dinner on the Titanic. The bright, brittle conversation passed over and around him and echoed off into nothingness, the words no more than shards of glass, clashing and ringing and tinkling like the wind-chimes on his parents’ porch back in Iowa. In this company he was as far out of his element as the broiled lobster Liese was daintily devouring. These elegant, overly mannered people were a soap opera on the holo-video; whatever they said and did had no relevance to the real world

Covert observation of the old duffer on his right showed him proper knife and fork for the roast beef and the correct wine to go with it. He made no unpardonable gaffes; at least no one leaped up to denounce him as an untutored, low-class slob. Actually, it was funny. He had little affinity for these people, but as the meal drew to a close he realized that he could cope if he really wanted to do so. Etiquette and chit-chat were like camouflage paint: you put it on when you went out on patrol. It wasn’t part of you, and you knew how silly you looked with your face all daubed green and yellow and black, but you wore it because it meant survival. It was the same here.

Dessert came and went, then coffee. They got up. The ritual now required after-dinner drinks and conversation.

“My name’s Hoeykens, Peter Hoeykens.” The police captain put out a bronzed hand for Lessing to shake. “Didn’t catch yours.”

“Alan Lessing.”

The man blinked, and the muscles in his jaw tensed. “Lessing, eh? Oh… oh. I say.”

“Something wrong?” He sensed Mrs. Delacroix ‘s gaze upon him from the far end of the table.

“Ah… ah, no. Not really “

“What’s the problem?” Lessing asked.

“Could we speak privately?” The man signalled urgently to Mrs. Delacroix.

The sitting room to which the old woman took them was rarely used, an oasis of dark, leather furniture, tribal shields and spears, subdued lighting from massive, bronze lamps as big as barrels, animal skins: African kitsch, Lessing thought.

Mrs. Delacroix turned upon Hoeykens and raised an imperious eyebrow. “What is it, Peter?”

The captain sighed. ‘Two things… three, really. First, you are that Alan Lessing who works for Indoco? In India, I think?”

“Yes. So?”

“Been a come-uppance at your plant there. Accident. Burned down part of it.”

“My God! How? Who… what…? Anybody hurt?” He thought of Jameela.

“Don’t think so, but can’t say. Came in over the telecom link earlier as I was leaving for this bash.”

“The other two things,” Mrs. Delacroix urged.

“Both the same… different sources. Three days ago Europol put out an A.D. order… that’s ‘apprehend and detain’… for one Alan Lessing. The Americans want him on suspicion of murder, theft, and… for God’s sake… treason. What the devil did you do, man?”

“The third thing?” He kept his voice calm. He saw no reason to enlighten Hoeykens.

“The Israelis came through with the same demand a day after Europol got on the line. Catch this Lessing and hold him for an interrogation team from Jerusalem.”

“You would do that for them? The Zionists?” snapped Mrs. Delacroix.

“Have to,” Hoeykens fiddled apologetically with his cuff links. “We supply Israel with arms and aid… and they us, you know. They swat flies in the north of Africa, and we swat flies down south. Not that we love the Izzies, but… well, one hand washes the other and that sort of thing.”

The old woman put her hands on her hips and glared up into Hoeykens’ reddening face. “This Alan Lessing, he is Herman Mulder’s… how do you say?… protege. He is one of us. You know.”

“Damn it, madame, nothing personal “

“Fine. Listen to me. You came tonight, you met Alan, but you never heard his name. He goes by my private jet to… to somewhere. At once.”

“Back to India,” Lessing put in firmly. “India.”

“They… the Americans, at least… have extradition treaties with India! You will be arrested.”

“I have to chance it. I have reasons—”

Hoeykens interrupted him. “The Americans… State Department, CIA, I don’t know which… knew you were here, how you got here. Not why. The Israelis just seemed to be pushing all the likely buttons. The two of ’em haven’t got together yet.”

“You were sent here specifically to find Mr. Lessing?” Mrs. Delacroix fixed the officer with a needle-sharp eye. “A spy?”

“My heavens, madame…! Of course, not! My superiors know you and I are friends but not that Mr. Lessing would be here tonight. Anyhow, we have powerful support up top, and neither the Americans nor the Zionists are exactly welcome, what with their views of our internal policies and all. No, this was just coincidence.”

Lessing had heard enough. “Anything else? Otherwise I’ll take that offer of a plane for India. Neither the United States nor Israel is popular there. It’ll be months before an extradition order gets through Delhi’s red tape.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Delacroix said. “And by then your Mr. Mulder will have thought of something.”

“I have just one small traveling case. I’ll get it and be ready in ten minutes. Now I’d like to say good-bye to Liese, please.”

“Oh… oh!” the captain flung after him as he turned to go. “I say, Mr. Lessing! One more bit of information! Seems both the Americans and the Zionists are hunting not only for you but for an accomplice of yours as well! Best tell him to go to ground, too!”

“Who?” Lessing thought of Bauer, then of Hollister, and lastly of Rose Thurley.

“Some chap named Pacov. I think that was the name. Russian, eh?”

Lessing fled up the stairs, toward the bedroom Mrs. Delacroix had provided him.