The Land Across

8 THE CAPITAL

What they wanted was for me to make radio broadcasts. I told them it would not help and nobody in America would even listen, but they said it did not matter. What did was that the government would hear them and think it mattered. The government would tune in and have everything I said translated and study it, and in that way the idea of the Light of Stability would sink in.

When Raincoat told me that, I pointed out that he had a gun.

“It is a tool,” he said. “To do good work, one must have tools.”

That is the way it was with those people. On the one hand they did not like to destroy anything. On the other hand they were willing to destroy everything. The Light of Stability was really important to them, but winning was a lot more important. That was one way to put it.

I had taped two or three broadcasts for them when it hit me. None of them spoke English, but if the government had me translated like they said it would, the government had somebody who did. I was broadcasting from an old factory down by the river, and by that time I knew what had been made there. So in the middle of my next I said, “We here where so many women once sewed shirts are sewing the shroud that will wrap all those who oppose the Light of Stability. For them to perish is change, but having perished they will change no more. You in America who hear my words must think on this. Listen again.”

After that I waited, wondering how long it would be and telling myself it might be an hour or even a couple of hours. It took me a long time to go to sleep that night, only when I woke up nothing had changed.

They had given me a book in English to read. It was called the Code of Unchanging and nothing in it made a whole lot of sense, but I had learned early on that the way to do it was to pick up phrases from it and drop them into my broadcasts. So I got them to give me a notebook and a ballpoint and wrote down some things I thought I might use. It would be interesting to know who had translated that book for them, but from the way it read I thought it had to be machine translation.

Like I said, it did not make much sense, but looking for good phrases gave me something to do, and having the pen and notebook I started making notes for this book.

One thing I came on straight off was the staircase. I had gone up it to take some pictures of the upstairs rooms, and Martya had climbed it so I could take pictures of her coming down. Only it had always seemed colder than the rest of the house—colder than it was outside, too.

Also it was too long. The first-floor rooms had really high ceilings. I think I have written about that before, and it is true. But that stairway seemed like it had too many steps. I wanted to get back to the Willows and count them, but I could not.

The next night I never got to sleep. They had given me a bed that had ARMY written all over it, a steel-frame bed with flat wire springs and a thin mattress. It was not as good as my bed at Kleon’s had been, but a ton better than sleeping on deck, which I had done out on the lake. I undressed and washed up as well as I could, then put on my clothes—the jeans and cool shirt I had been so happy to take out of my suitcase—and lay down and pulled the thin cotton blanket they had given me over me. I was thinking of the big dining room at the Hotel Sacher and how nice it would be to eat there again when I heard shots.

I jumped up and ran to the door of my room. It was locked and there was wire over the windows, which would not open anyway. The door was old and I had always thought it probably was not as strong as it looked. I kicked it a couple of times, knowing that would bring Vest in if he was still out there. Nobody came, so I hit it three or four times with my shoulder and it flew open.

The first thing I saw was a cop with a gun. He fired, and right then I thought he had missed me. Later I found out he had not.

I turned and ran, only not back into the room where they had kept me locked up. I got out into a big, dark place where they must have had a couple of hundred sewing machines in the old days. It would have been a good place to hide in, only getting shot at like that had put a real scare into me and I just wanted to get away.

Which I did. The cops had the place surrounded, or thought they did, but I guess they had not seen the door I found. It opened on a stack of old steel drums like you might ship diesel in, with just room enough for me to wiggle between the drums and the wall. When I got out of there, I saw a couple of police cars with searchlights aimed at the building, and soldiers, too, holding the kind of rifles soldiers have.

You can guess what I did next. I got out of there as fast as I could, you know it! I had not gone far when I saw a poster. It was half torn off and somebody had spray painted a short word I could not read on what was left. But it was a picture of the third border guard wearing a suit. Part of the face was gone and there was some spray paint on the rest, but it was him. After that I saw at least two others, not painted and not torn. They did not seem important; still I wondered about them. You would have, too.

The city was mostly dark, but I got lucky and found the district where the bars and clubs and so forth were. They call it the Mousukos. (I found that out later.) There were a lot of places I would have liked to see, only I did not have any money.

Also I was bleeding just above my belt. It was not all that bad until my side started to stiffen up. The bullet had almost missed me clean, just not quite. After I found out I had been hit, looking around the Mousukos was not as much fun as it had been, and it had not been a whole lot of fun then. Pretty soon I was just looking for any workable place where I could hole up. There were streets that were no better than alleys, but they stunk and there were rats in them. If I had been in New York or even New Orleans—in LA or Chicago or someplace like that—I might have been able to find a car somebody had forgotten to lock. Then I would have crawled into the back and gone to sleep there, and anybody who found me would just think I had gone over my limit and chase me out. Only this was not New York or New Orleans either, or even Chicago or LA. Those people in the bars and clubs had walked to get there, or maybe ridden in one of the wagons with long benches that would take you downtown for a little change.

I kept looking, but after a while the crowd thinned out and it started to get light. So I went up to a guy who looked pretty decent and asked the way to the park. His German was not as good as mine, but it was better than a lot of people’s and he told me.

There would be bushes in the park is what I thought, and I could hide in them and get some sleep. After I had rested up, I might be able to find something to eat. And after that I would start looking for the American embassy.

It seemed to me like a good plan, only I never even got started on it. A cop spotted the bloodstain on my shirt. When he found out I did not speak his language, he put cuffs on me, steel ones like Raincoat’s, and marched me off to a police station. By then I was so tired I could not walk fast for more than three or four steps. Pretty soon I would start lagging and he would hit me with his club. Cops here in the U.S. call that a baton, only it is really a club and not anything anybody would conduct an orchestra with.

In a way it was good that we had to walk, because it gave me time to think. I decided the way to handle things was to pretend I did not understand German. Or French, either, although my French is really pretty good.

So when we got to the station, I would talk nothing but English. They tried German on me, and a couple of languages I could not identify, maybe Polish and Russian, or Romanian and Hungarian. They were all Greek to me, and Greek might be a pretty good guess, too. How about Greek and Turkish?

Then a guy came in and looked at my wound. He could have been a doctor, but my guess is he was an ambulance attendant or something. He gave me shots and probed it a little, then he sewed up both holes.

When he had finished they shoved me in a cell. There were two other guys there already and no bunks, but one guy was asleep anyway, just lying on the floor. Which is what I did. The other guy was sitting in a corner and looking deep blue. He did not try to talk to me, and I did not try to talk to him, not even English.

I went to sleep, and pretty fast.

When I woke up it was afternoon, I think. My wound hurt again because the shots had worn off, and I had to pee. A slop jar took care of the peeing, but nothing stopped my wound from hurting. It just kept on and after a while I sort of got used to it.

Then they marched me out and put me in a car and drove me to a big gray building that might have been a couple of miles outside the city. Pretty soon I was sitting in a real honest-to-God waiting room with beat-up chairs, and old magazines I could not read, and a cop to make sure I did not run. He put cuffs on me, too, but with my hands in front instead of in back. That was really nice of him, and I tried to show him I appreciated it.

After about an hour I was taken to a little meeting room, and there was a red-headed guy in there who smiled at me and said, “How about a cigarette? Want one?” He was maybe two years older than I was, and he said it in English.

I said no thanks and asked if he was American.

“Nope. I did my growing up in Saint Louis, though. Went to high school there and all that crap.” He offered his hand. “Demetrios Bobokis—Butch Bobokis. How about some coffee?”

I shook and said I would love some, and something to eat if he could arrange for it. So he went to the door and talked to somebody out there, then came back and sat down. “It will be a while. Where you from?”

I said I had lived all over, which was the truth.

“Here?”

“No, that’s why I came here. I’d never been here before and I wanted to see it. Listen, I’m not a spy or anything like that.”

“You’re a revolutionary.” He grinned at me. “You were broadcasting for them, that crazy religion.”

“They made me, and that’s the absolute truth. I was under arrest in Puraustays. I was supposed to live with a guy there, and they were going to shoot him if I didn’t. Only I could go out in the daytime and take pictures for the travel book I’m going to write about your country. I found this very big, run-down old house, the Willows. I wanted to take a lot of pictures there. There were painted ceilings and lots of other neat stuff, and it’s supposed to be haunted.”

“You get any pictures of ghosts?”

“No.” After I said that I pulled up short to think. “You know, I really don’t know. Sometimes ghosts will show up in a picture even if you didn’t see them when you took it. I read a thing about that once, and I never had a chance to look at mine. Three guys knocked on the door, I opened it up to see what they wanted, and they grabbed me.”

He nodded to that.

“They put me in a boat and took me across the lake—”

“Up the lake.”

“Okay, up the lake to here. After that they held me in an old factory where they used to make shirts or dresses or something.”

He nodded again. “Go on.”

“They gave me a copy of their holy book that had been translated on somebody’s computer. And they—”

“Wait a minute. Is English the only language you know?”

“Huh-uh. I know German and French pretty well. A little Japanese, too, only not very much.”

“The report I got on you said that you only spoke English.”

“Yeah.” My mind was working so fast it damned near flew apart. “That’s what I pretended, okay? Put yourself in my shoes. I’m from America and I’m in big trouble. Do I want to talk to somebody who knows German or somebody who knows English?”

He nodded, slowly this time. “I’ve got it. Was this with the Legion of the Light, too?”

“No. They knew I spoke German, because that’s how I talked to them when I answered the door.”

He got out a little notebook and made a note in it. “Okay, I want you to think about this and think hard. Did you ever hear any of them speak English? Just one word, maybe?”

I shook my head. “Absolutely not. Believe me, I’d have jumped all over him if anybody had.”

“What they gave you was a computer translation? Did they say so?”

“No, it just read like one. What’s so big about this?”

“It’s my job to ask the questions. Your job is to answer them.”

“All right, I’ll take a stab at it. It seems like hardly anybody has computers here.”

I waited for him, but he did not say a word.

“It’s not like that in America. Suppose you were in America and somebody told you to go find a guy who owned a computer, it would take you about five minutes. Only not here. I’ve met quite a few of you, none of you seemed like you had a computer.” As soon as I had said that, I got the feeling it was not quite true. I could have named one guy who might have had one, and I wanted to kick myself for not having braced him on it.

“Go on.”

“So you can go looking for somebody who’s got one and software to translate your language into English.”

“Or German into English. We know they’ve got a German translation already, and we know who did that one.”

“Want to tell me?”

“Hell, no. Or anyway, not yet. You were forced to broadcast for the Legion?”

“Right.”

“Would you call them friends of yours?”

“No way!” I shook my head.

“Would you consider working for us? Coming over to our side?”

I did not say anything for a minute or two.

“Well? A straight answer.”

“Okay. The straight answer is that I’d have to think about it. For one thing I came over to your side already. I wrote all the things I said in my broadcasts. Did you know that? I wrote my own scripts.”

“I assumed it.”

“They gave me the book, like I said, and they lectured me a lot about the Light of Stability. After that I wrote myself a script. I’d found out we were in an old factory, and there was a room there with a million kinds of buttons in wooden boxes, so they’d been making clothes. Probably a lot of different kinds. I put that in a broadcast and you guys came like I knew you would.”

“We rescued you.”

I raised my shoulders and let them drop. “I’ve been in jail, and I’ve seen enough of this building to tell it’s a prison. If you want more, one of the cops I tipped off shot me. Want to see the place?”

He waved that one away. “I’ll get our doctor to take a look at it. What else can I do for you?”

“You can let me talk to somebody at the American embassy.”

“If I can.” He sounded tired. “I can let them know you’re here, and I will. They probably won’t come.”

“Why not?”

“Ask them. I don’t know. If you’ll work with us, you won’t be in prison. That’s a promise.”

“What if I quit?”

“Get real! What do you think?”

There was more, but I do not want to write it and you would not want to read it. We talked about America and the European Union, and he did not know as much as I wanted him to, and I did not know as much as he wanted me to. So after a while a guard—not the cop I had before—came and took me to a cell.

It was not as bad as I expected, which was something Butch had promised over Danish and coffee, a nice cell. There were two bunks in it, but no other prisoner. Right away I figured there would be somebody shoved in with me pretty soon, and he would be a plant.

Do you want more? There was a little window with wire over it, low enough for me to look through. That was bad in winter until they put a cover over it, but when I got there the nights were pretty warm and it was not bad at all. There was a toilet and a washbowl, too. There was no hot water, but I used my hands and my shirttail for a washrag and cleaned up as well as I could, telling myself that if I ever saw Butch Bobokis again I would ask him for soap.

The bunk was better than the one in the old factory, and the blanket was wool. I was more than ready for both of them.

I slept all night and half the morning. Probably they had called the prisoners for breakfast, but I slept right through it. When I sat up, there was a big guy in my cell sitting on the other bunk and looking at me. So I told him, “Good morning,” in German.

He said, “I don’t suppose you understand English?” It was in English, and you could tell he had about given up hope by the sound of his voice.

I said, “Sure I do. Where you from?”

“Cincinnati. We call it the Queen City.” He sighed. “And I wish to God I was back there.”

We talked some more, and I found out that his name was Russ Rathaus and he was sixty-three. He looked quite a bit younger than that to me, maybe fifty or fifty-five tops.

“I had a neat little novelty business,” he said. “We made voodoo dolls and sold them all over the country. I don’t mean we dealt with customers direct. We wholesaled them to novelty shops, the kind of stores where they sell souvenirs and plates with the presidents on them. All that junk. My partner invented the process, and I bankrolled him, running the business out of my garage at first. You looked at me funny when I said voodoo dolls. I guess anybody would.”

I said I thought you had to make those yourself.

“Hey, it doesn’t work, so who cares? The thing was the faces, see? Suppose you’ve got it in for the mayor. You ask around for a doll with the mayor’s face, only nobody’s got one because they’d have to have a contract with him and pay a royalty, and all that crap. Then you hear about our Imprinting Dolls. That was what we called them, Imprinting Dolls. You look at the dolls and the clerk explains how everything works. So you buy the complete kit. That will run you thirty-two ninety-nine to about forty-four ninety-five, depending on where you buy it. For your money you get one doll—male or female, your choice—an imprinting lens, about a hundred of our special pins, and our special book of spells and instructions. That’s everything you need except a picture of the mayor and a strong light source. The doll works sort of like film used to. You remember film cameras?”

I told him I did, and I even owned a few.

“Then you’ll understand a lot better than most people. Well, the book shows you how you set up your Imprinting Doll and the imprinting lens, and the guy’s picture and the light. You set ’em up and leave them like that for six or seven hours. How long depends on how good the picture is and how strong your light is—how many lumens. When the time’s up you’ve got a voodoo doll with the mayor’s face, see? If he’s got fat cheeks, the cheeks swell. And the eyes are his eyes, just like in the picture you used. It was neat and people loved it.”

I said he must have sold a bunch of them.

“You bet we did. We were selling to shops all over the country, and getting orders from overseas. Suppose you had it in for somebody else, too. Let’s say there was this lousy actor and you hated him and everything he’d ever been in, see? So you decided to get another doll. Well, this time you didn’t have to buy a whole kit. You already had the lens and the book, and a bunch of pins. All you needed was another doll and you were set. The same place that sold you your kit would sell you a new doll for nineteen ninety-nine, if you were lucky. Twenty-nine ninety-five in most outlets. Actors will sell anybody a nice big glossy for ten or fifteen bucks—get one and you’re set. Only if you’re smart, you’ll cut a picture out of a magazine.”

“I’ve got it,” I told him. “You must have made quite a bit of money.”

“We did.” For a minute he smiled. “We made quite a pile, and the big doll manufacturers were all after us to sell out. Finally we did. I handled the negotiations, and got us quite a bit more than the company was worth. Pete actually ended up with more than I did, because he’d held on to fifty-five percent of the patent. But I got quite a bit, and we get royalties, too. Two bucks on every doll they make doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up.”

“They must make thousands of them,” I said.

“Hundreds of thousands, and a hundred thousand dolls is two hundred thousand bucks. So I get my cut of that, and I got half the money from our company. Only I don’t have it here.”

“Yeah. I know how that is.”

“Damn these bastards anyway!”

I waited.

“Rosalee and I had decided we’d tour Europe, see? We started in Germany because my folks were German way back. We bought a nice Mercedes there. I figured we’d drive it around Europe for a couple of years, sell it, and go home. We went to Austria next, then east and south.”

“They don’t get a lot of tourists here,” I said.

“We didn’t think we were tourists.” Russ looked a little mad and a lot sad. “Tourists go around and look at certain things, old churches and all that junk, and never see the country. We called ourselves travelers, and that’s what we felt like.” He took a big breath and let it out.

“So you came here.”

“No. Not really. Rosalee’d had an aunt, her aunt Lilly. Aunt Lilly’d married some guy from Europe, but he got hurt on the job and had to quit work. He was disabled, see, and couldn’t work. But he got disability benefits. He’d get those for the rest of his life.”

“Sure,” I said.

“He’d get them anywhere he lived. The government would mail him a check or just stick the money in his account if that was what he wanted. So he told Aunt Lilly that this was a nice place and they could live here cheap. With the money he’d be getting they’d be rich here, okay?”

“Right.”

“So off they went, only the family never heard a thing after that. Lilly didn’t write letters or anything, or if she did, they didn’t get through. So Rosalee wanted to find out what had happened to her. We’d come here and look in phone books and like that, and ask around a little. I thought sure somebody at our embassy would know about her.”

I said, “You could have written to them from the States.”

“We did. Or Rosalee did, anyhow. Only she never heard back. We figured the mail here was lousy and maybe somebody at the embassy had written, except we never got it.”

“Diplomatic mail goes special,” I told him.

“No shit? Well maybe nobody ever got Rosalee’s letter.” Russ’s voice, which had been pretty loud, went soft. “Rosalee’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, anyway. Know what I mean?”

“Sure. I’ve dated a couple of those.”

“That’s your private life.” Russ had been sitting on his bunk. He stood up when he said it and went over to the window. “I don’t want to stick my nose into that. That’s not my way.”

I said I had nothing to hide, which was the truth.

He turned around to look at me. “Damned nice of you, but everybody’s got something to hide.”

“Not me. I’ll level with you, and here’s a question. Will you level with me?”

“About everything? Hell, no. But you probably won’t ask about that stuff. It was a long time ago, see? So you can ask me anything you want to. If I have to lie, I’ll lie. But I won’t get my back up.”

“Swell, I will. Do you speak any languages besides English?”

“A little German I picked up in Germany and Austria.”

“Anything else?”

He shook his head.

After that I asked him two or three questions in German, but he did not understand any of them, or said he did not. It was a long time before I found out how good his German really was.

I switched back to English. “Who’d you talk to before they put you in here with me?”

“All the names?”

“If you can, sure.”

“Mostly they don’t give you their last names, and I’m not sure I remember them right. They probably didn’t give me their real names anyway.”

“Okay,” I said, “but try.”

“The first one was a young guy who kept playing with his gun. At first I thought he was just a jerk, later I could see he was trying to make me nervous. Hell, I was nervous as a cat already. They’d separated us. Did I tell you that? About Rosalee?”

He had not and I said so.

“Well, they arrested her, too. They didn’t say what for. They just marched her away. That was the last time I saw her, and I keep thinking I may never see her anymore. Will I? What do you think?”

“You want a guess?”

He nodded. “An honest guess. Sure I do.”

“Okay. I think they’ve released her already and she’s gone back to Austria or Germany, and she’s trying to find out what happened to you. She doesn’t know whether they’ve still got you, or what. If you get out of here, you’ll see her again, but if you don’t you won’t.”

“I hope it’s really that good,” Russ said.

“I was just guessing,” I told him, “but that’s what I think. They’re probably not as tough on women as they are on men. Do they think you’re a spy or something?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Same here,” I said.

And he said, “Well, are you?”

So that was Russ Rathaus, my cellmate. We got to be pretty good friends. I had never been in a prison before, but here is the way I figured it. You are going to have to spend a lot of time with the guy you are locked up with, and if you are not friends that is going to be pure hell. He was a lot older than I am and got a little patronizing sometimes. But I put up with it and I have to say I learned a good deal about business just listening to him. It was something I had never known a lot about or cared much about, either. Only after I had heard him talk a couple of times I realized that it was something I ought to know more about. Every time you buy a hamburger or a car you are dealing with somebody’s business, and business is not like government. It is more like poker.

Another thing I learned from Russ was the language. He had been locked up for over a year and had learned a lot more of it than I had. He coached me as well as he could and sometimes he got other prisoners to coach me a little, too.

I have already told you most of the important things about Russ, but there are others. One was the spells. He got to talking about the spells in his voodoo book, and being a writer myself I asked him who wrote them. That shut him up hard and right away, and he would not even say why he did not want to talk about it.

Another thing was that when they pulled me out of our cell to talk to me, they always asked about him. He said he had been questioned by five different guys at one time or another, but then they had had him a hell of a lot longer. For me it was just two. Butch was the good cop and Aegis was the bad cop. You probably know what I mean.

Butch would offer his cigarettes and give me coffee and see that I got little stuff I wanted, like soap. Aegis would knock me around and yell. I tried to fight him a couple times, but he was bigger and stronger than I am, and a better fighter, too. I suppose he could have yelled for help if he had needed it, but he never did. Both of them always asked me about Russ, and after a while I noticed that.

Reading over all the stuff about him that I have just written, I see that I have never mentioned anything about Russ’s smoking. That is mostly because he did not have any cigarettes when I first met him. He would bitch about it now and then, but I never paid a lot of attention to that. After we had been in that prison for almost a year, I asked him whether Butch did not offer him a cigarette sometimes and if he took it. And he said yeah he did, but he could not keep it. He had to smoke it right there.

That gave me an idea. The next time Butch offered me a cigarette I took it and explained that it was not for me, I was going to take it back and give it to Russ. Russ was always wanting to smoke, I said, which was pretty much the truth.

“You’ll need matches,” Butch told me. “I can give you some, but if you set fire to your mattress or any dumb shit like that, I’ll get in trouble.”

I said I would not do anything like that, and I would light Russ’s cigarette for him and not let him touch the matches.

“Oh, that’s okay. Russ will behave. How about a drink?”

I said I would love one but could I have the matches first?

He gave me a folder of matches after that. It was pretty beat up and did not advertise anything. It just had the name of the match company on it, and a price. I had bought big wooden matches back in Puraustays and they had been the same way. I have probably told you about them. There were only three matches left in the folder I got from Butch.

When a screw took me back to my cell, I gave the cigarette and the matches to Russ. His eyes sort of lit up, you probably know what I mean, and he thanked me. I asked if he was not going to smoke it, and he said no, he was going to save it awhile, a few hours at least, and get used to the idea that he had it and could smoke it anytime he wanted to.

After that I went to bed. I am not sure what time I woke up, but midnight would probably be about right. It was the smell of smoke that woke me. It was sort of like the smell of cigarette smoke, but there was other stuff, a lot rougher stuff, in there, too. I opened my eyes and turned my head, and there was Russ sitting cross-legged on the floor with a tiny little fire in front of him.

He was not looking at me, and he was not looking at his fire either. He was looking up at the window. I watched him for a while and listened to him murmuring to himself in some language that was not English, French, or German, or even Japanese. It was not the way they talked where we were, either. Something else.

Then his fire went out. He blew on it and got it to burning again for a couple of minutes, but he quit praying or whatever it was he had been doing.

The fire went out again and he blew some more, but this time he could not bring it back to life. So he cleaned it up and got into bed, and I was about ready to go back to sleep when somebody came into our cell without opening the door. Here I want to say that I knew him right off, and I should have. But it would be a lie. I did not, and he was standing in the corner with his pale face really plain and his black clothes just about invisible before I recognized him. Russ’s little fire had gone out and its ashes had been dropped into our slop jar, and the big stone fireplace at the Willows was miles and miles away, but fire from somewhere was still reflected in his eyes.