“Thank you,” Wallasek blubbered. Catching himself, since gratitude for the explosion of pregnant civilians was less than apt, he revised, “I mean, I copy, right?”
“Sim.”
“Seem?” Wallasek repeated helplessly. Having no previous experience with accepting a terrorist bomb claim, Wallasek mustn’t have been up on the etiquette of bringing such conversations to graceful conclusion. “Anything else you wanna add to that statement, mister?”
“Ve sorry for loss of life. Ve muito sorry about zhe lady and her unborn bebê. Ven Barba veen her independence, zhees regrettable meestakes veel not occur.”
“Mistake!” Wallasek returned to the blustery hard-nose Edgar knew. “You filthy—!”
“Liberdade! Vitória!” Edgar hung up. That was the etiquette.
Edgar folded up his cloth handkerchief, wet from the spittle of rolled Rs. He’d come to prefer the classic hankie-over-the-receiver to Saddler’s awkward homemade kazoo, which distorted his voice a bit too well. It was tiresome enough reciting all that go-Barba rah-rah once a call without having to repeat each hackneyed patriotic buzz phrase three times. Edgar had no idea how Tomás Verdade could stand it.
Ducking out of the phone booth, Edgar glanced around edgily, like Clark Kent readjusting his tie. As ever, it wasn’t inconceivable that he’d make a phone call from Terra do Cão, but he could skip the explanations. Gunning off in the faithful Bear-mobile, Edgar reflected on the callowness of clarifying after murdering five people that, like dropped digits in a column of figures, certain casualties were mistakes. The admission translated roughly, “The PR backlash was somewhat more severe than we anticipated.” After all, bad press was the only reason a terrorist was ever “sorry,” since if you weren’t prepared for mistakes you didn’t set off car bombs but pasted posters on bus shelters instead. Edgar’s smarmy apology had been hypocritical and insulting, worse than no apology at all. Which must have been why it felt just right.
That afternoon Edgar jawed with Lieutenant Carlos de Carvalho, Cinziero’s chief of police and a Latino Barney Fife; ever since Edgar had allowed he was bosom buddies with The Bear (O Urso), Carlos had been garrulously cooperative. They commiserated over the Madrid operation, whose forensics Interpol had sent out to police services all over Europe. Cops everywhere loved waxing eloquent on that D-48K-Yellow-Jacket-single-fuse-detonator-from-the-Czech-Republic technical stuff, so that Edgar was able to tease out any number of “off the record” details about the device that weren’t distributed to the press.
These details contributed an invaluable sense of authenticity to the SOB statement Edgar drafted when he got home from Terra do Cão. You could pick up responsibility for most orphaned incidents without much documentation, but to beat out ETA he’d need to exhibit thoroughgoing acquaintance with their ordnance. Edgar cited the nature of the explosive and its origins, the type of detonator, the tripping method, and the timing of the fuse. After that brothers-in-struggle what-have-you on the phone to Wallasek, he typed that ETA and the SOB had simply experienced a “communication breakdown”—as if all terrorists worked under the same multinational umbrella and there’d been a bureaucratic foul-up, the way payment for a contract fulfilled by one company could sometimes be deposited in the wrong subsidiary’s account.
Edgar had already sealed the envelope and tucked it in his baseball jacket when he realized in horror that his hands were bare. Leaving fingerprints all over the stationery, he might as well have signed his name. After scurrying back up the tower, snapping on a pair of surgical gloves, and printing another copy, Edgar burned the original statement in the fireplace. He might have just thrown it out—no one was here besides you-know-who—but Edgar could just as soon skip Saddler’s lambaste for having got so sloppy.
Impatient, the next morning he mailed the envelope em correio expresso. He was careful at the post office to wear leather gloves, which made handling bills awkward and exasperated the clerk that he wouldn’t take them off. His change spilled over the floor. Edgar fled, flustered at having attracted attention to himself, though leaving the escudos behind on the parquet attracted more.
At Casa Naufragada, he logged onto the Record’s Web page, where an article casting doubt on ETA’s responsibility for Madrid was prominently posted. There was nothing left for Edgar to do but sit tight, like watching the metal ball bounce about a roulette wheel with a C-note riding on red.
ETA must have been mystified, but the truthful rarely see the need for the substantiating evidence incumbent on good liars; it was unlikely that the Basque separatists’ claim included the SOB’s meticulous corroboration. Besides, since even scumbags preserve their own concept of scumbagginess, the Basques may have leapt at the chance to evade the onus of rudely terminating an eight-month pregnancy in a devoutly Catholic country. At any rate, ETA didn’t raise a stink. Five days after Edgar’s postal mission, “security sources” announced that the judges had carefully considered both applications and the SOB took the prize.
Naturally they didn’t put it that way, but for Edgar his imaginary bad boys winning credit for Madrid over more traditional (not to mention more extant) terrorists marked the fiction’s coming of age. Award of such official recognition conferred the political equivalent of cash: clout he could spend like money.
The Prado car bomb attribution was big. Affronted op-eds foamed on every editorial page. The Sobs had fallen off the edge of the civilized world, shown their cowardice and moral bankruptcy and tipped their empty hand. Words like scurrilous, calumnious, and unspeakable were a dime a dozen. Edgar was reminded of his favorite storybook as a kid, The Velveteen Rabbit, about a bedraggled stuffed bunny that was loved real. Maybe you could be despised real as well. Amid hailstorms of opprobrium, the letters of Barrington’s concocted acronym rose off newsprint with a hard, violent clarity. Loathing made the SOB stronger, the way a sow grows stout on garbage.
In successfully adding Madrid to his team’s scoreboard, Edgar was naturally jubilant, as if the Orioles had finally made the Series after all. Yet post-Prado he did begin talking to himself rather a lot—mumbling at the wheel, muttering down the halls of Casa Naufragada, or declaiming to Saddler while ranging Abrab Manor. In these private soliloquies, Edgar often articulated the vital distinction between the immoral and the amoral. Having himself supposed that if Nicola got wind of the hoax she’d be sure to find Barrington “exciting-evil” and Edgar “ignoble-evil,” he now rejected both reproachful labels. Who’d been killed who wouldn’t have been killed anyway? Sure, there’d been a few skinned knees at that Novo Marrakech deportation scuffle, but every immigration enforcement arm was obliged to conduct the odd shakedown for illegals, right? And there’d been plenty of racial and religious tension in Barba before the SOB, Barrington said! Saddler was right. Perpetuating the myth of the SOB wasn’t evil at all. It just wasn’t especially good. Nevertheless, a tiny, peevish voice whispered that the distinction between amoral and immoral wasn’t a hard line but a smudge, and that the former prefix slid easily to the latter when you weren’t looking.
For there may indeed have been, as Saddler maintained, “a world outside heaven and hell,” where the likes of Barrington felt at home. But while Edgar had played the renegade in his shoplifting youth, his choice of law in adulthood suggested a conservative bent, a thirst for order, structure, and direction. In the ethical nether region where he’d recently dwelt, whose signposts pointed toward neither vice nor virtue, Edgar felt disoriented. Constitutionally, even if the amoral didn’t slip insidiously to something more sinister, Edgar wasn’t cut out for it.
Atrocity poaching became Edgar’s salvation. Edgar convinced himself—strike that. Edgar was convinced that pilfering mainstream guerrilla operations on behalf of some no-account, backwater phantasm was the ideal punishment for blowing pregnant women to kingdom come. Imagine, so much preparation: hush-hush palavers in some smelly garret; you-nitwit! exhortations to never mention operations over the phone; edgy negotiations with unsavory arms dealers; swea
t-drenched drives with volatile cargo; aerobic tangling with alarm-clock timers in your own mother’s basement, since many poorly paid terrorists would still live at home: let’s see—does the detonator connect to the blue or the yellow wire . . . ?
All to advance Barban independence? The resultant sense of misappropriation would be akin to that of donating thousands of dollars to the Africa program of Save the Children, only to discover that you had really funded Iowans for Tax Relief. Surely, Edgar reasoned, if so much effort in the name of Palestine, Islamic fundamentalism, or the Aryan Brotherhood only jacked up the notoriety of larcenous cretins in Portugal, the motivation of orthodox terrorists to assemble still more wayward science-fair projects ratcheted down a peg. Throwing off the ill-fitting mantle of the amoral apostate to whom ordinary rules of right and wrong did not apply, Edgar recast himself as the Robin Hood of the paramilitary underworld. Instead of stealing riches from the rich, he stole shit from shitheads.
Edgar swiped a Delhi suicide bus bombing from a Kashmiri rebel who, being indisposed, could no longer object. He snatched credit for decimating an entire wing of London’s Victoria and Albert from the 32-County Sovereignty Committee, a breakaway faction of the IRA. He whisked responsibility for a slice-and-dice melee near the Sphinx out from under the Islamic Jihad; desperate to preserve tourism by belying homegrown cutthroats, the Egyptian government hastily endorsed the SOB claim. Edgar nosed in on one cyber-terrorism job, though the computer hackers who cut off electricity to Milwaukee for three days were first suspected of belonging to the Michigan Militia. Edgar even filched the burning of three black churches in Georgia from the Klan.
How was this possible? True, Edgar continued to access full Interpol dossiers, while bringing to police station tête-à-têtes such journalistic swagger that it was Lieutenant de Carvalho who imagined he was getting the inside dope. But the ease with which the SOB accrued abominations could not be put down to Edgar’s A-plus technical homework alone.
The more the SOB was blamed for, the more the world was dying to blame the SOB for everything else. The monotheistic West was monodemonic as well. The Evil Empire having bitten the dust, Edgar’s contemporaries were hungry for another all-purpose enemy, in preference to a dissatisfying dispersion of small-fry scoundrels. As MI6, Interpol, and the FBI threw infamies at Edgar’s feet like alms, the SOB filled a psychological, even religious void.
Alas, Robin Hood Ed had no Merry Men with whom to toast his successes. While his paramilitary kleptomania gave rise to countless boisterous booze-ups at the Rat, for Edgar the rollicking round tables were theater, and actors know that artifice is work. Though Barrington’s initial promise that, in assuming the helm of the SOB, Edgar would “rise above” his fellow hacks had been offered as enticement, Saddler might also have portrayed elevation as a price. Superiority was a form of distance, secrecy a quarantine. Edgar had never been so social, and he’d no one to talk to. He sympathized fleetingly with real terrorists, who, however despicable, were probably lonesome. Even Nicola had accused Edgar of becoming remote. She’d no idea what lay between them, yet once went so far as to mourn that she’d thought at first they’d become great friends and now, well—never mind.
In private, Edgar punched the air in righteous triumph when he wrested one more act of malice from the clutches of reprobates. Yet that same petulant little voice whispered the unwelcome wisdom that only minor mischief issued from the parochial or small-minded; in politics, the pursuit of pygmy-size self-interest was relatively safe. History’s wholesale horror shows were staged by crusaders. But that little voice was unadventurous, boring, lawyer-Edgar, unpopular, party-pooping fat-Edgar, and Edgar told the little voice to shove it.
Chapter 30
Supporting the Peace Process
LIFE IN BARBA was looking up.
Under the guise of bringing the primitive peninsula up to economic speed, the European Union was shoveling money at Barba as if trying to smother a brush fire. Thanks to agricultural subsidies, crop selection had diversified beyond the unmarketable pera peluda (the glut of which an enterprising Brussels bureaucrat arranged to export to Guinea-Bissau, where no one had ever tasted one). That spring, local stands in Cinziero sold red currants and pomegranates. The EU funded working women’s child-care, adult literacy, AIDS awareness, and water fluoridation. In the pipeline: a new city hospital, a dozen new schools, and a classical concert hall with state-of-the-art acoustics that locals quietly planned to convert to a venue for arm-wrestling contests when the continental longhairs went home. Despite the average Barban’s sixth-grade education, there was even promise of constructing a University of Barba, to offer accredited doctoral degrees. Meantime, a grant fund for artists was going begging. Barba didn’t have any.
Under the aegis of the EU Special Support Program for Peace and Reconciliation, the European Commission announced a string of “community relations” initiatives, all intended to “reinforce progress toward a stable society.” Casa Naufragada’s upper floors were now occupied by the Cross-Community Rural Regeneration Council, the Committee for Cultural Exchange and International Cooperation, and the Iberian Social Inclusion Coalition. All these bodies did the same thing, of course. They plied every Barban they could get their hands on with cash.
The export souvenir industry drew a sizable subvention to update its technology, though to EU’s dismay one result of this financial infusion was a whole new array of Creme de Barbear knickknacks in the party’s ground-floor shop. In the spirit of flowering civic pride, Barba began to mass-produce souvenirs of itself: a hairy-pear squeaky toy for pets, a GI Joe-style SOB guerrilla doll with balaclava, dark glasses, and automatic, and a model DC-10 whose fusillade, tail, and wings pulled apart to scatter a confetti of tiny plastic passengers.
What’s more, the trinkets sold. The traditional holidaymaker, of course, wouldn’t go near badass Barba with a barge pole. But Cinziero became a Mecca for the political tourist: the bespectacled day-packer who bought radical paperbacks, asked directions to El Terra do Cão on his first walkabout, took notes on graffiti, photographed racist murals, attended Creme rallies in the hopes of violence, and greedily collected all five Tomás Verdade coffee mugs.
Inevitably, Edgar’s hijinks benefited Creamies in particular. Verdade’s controversially star-struck biography topped the New York Times bestseller list for nineteen weeks, and an unauthorized biography in the works from a competing publisher, expected to be scathing, was bound to further improve his PR profile by a yard. Though the State Department had refused him a visa for years, the administration reversed itself in the interests of “encouraging dialogue,” and Verdade had become a much sought-after guest speaker for outré luncheons in New York. At length eager to support “the peace process,” the White House invited Tomás to attend its formal Independence Day dinner, where he presented the president with one of Cinziero’s misshapen souvenir ashtrays with crossed Barban and American flags. His reputation laundered by no less than the highest executive in the land, Verdade’s standard honorarium went up to $10,000.
The release of an inflammatory American Enterprise Institute study in Washington gave the Creams another shot in the arm. The DC think tank had commissioned a detailed analysis of American immigration and its effect on the future ethnic makeup of the United States. According to the widely publicized report, by 2050 whites would no longer constitute a majority in the U.S., just as whites were already outnumbered in California, Hawaii, and New Mexico; Nevada, Texas, Maryland, and New Jersey were also on the cusp of “minority majorities,” the fastest growing group of which would consistently be Hispanic. Trudy Sisson seized upon the study’s revelation that three-quarters of her fellow residents in Miami spoke a language other than English at home, and 67 percent conceded that they were not fluent in English (“Translate,” said Trudy, “don’t know the word for airport.”).
The AEI report galvanized an American “white rights” movement, for whom O Creme’s platform was politically expedient. Members of What’s W
rong With White People (or WWWWP, to the annoyance of the World Wildlife Program) sported bumper stickers urging, HONK IF YOU LOVE HONKIES, DON’T TAKE VANILLA FOR GRANTED, and I SCREAM FOR O KREME! [sic]. Look, campaigned WWWWP lobbyists, in their own countries, even Latinos resent being overrun! Consequently, a foreign freedom-fighting movement whose rhetoric was revolutionary found itself rabidly supported by a bunch of right-wing gun nuts.
Not that Verdade was complaining. A shit-storm of contributions from reactionary Texas tycoons deluged O Creme. Headquarters got a facelift. Even Bebê Serio started to dress better.
With the incursion of journos, EU functionaries, groveling governmental delegations from Lisbon, academics on conflict-resolution junkets, kibitzing Congressmen on fact-finding missions, Amnesty International busybodies snooping for BEIP human rights violations, and celebs like Sir Elton John holding Peace Concerts whose grand finales always involved releasing hundreds of white doves—encrusting Cinziero’s bullfighting stadium with a stucco of bird shit—Cinziero sprouted two garish high-rise hotels that competed with one another over which could charge more. Though the rooms were cramped, the beds hard, and the minibars extortionate, a night’s fitful rest in the provincial capital could not be had for less than $350 and rising.
Upscale beaneries were fruitful and multiplied. At last Edgar could hit the town with a visiting crew from 60 Minutes and choose between an Italian trattoria, a Szechuan tearoom, a Swedish smorgasbord, an Indian curry house, a Mongolian barbecue, a French bistro, an Indonesian rijsttafel, or a full Japanese sushi bar that, though run by Algerians, had only made Edgar projectile-vomit once.