“Are you a hunter, Nun?”
On the point of answering negatively, he remembered what Teresa Van Buren had said not long ago: “You’re a hunter of women, aren’t you?” Perhaps, he thought, if circumstances had been different, he would have hunted this beautiful woman, Karen. Selfishly he, too, felt sad about that year-too-late vaccine.
He shook his head. “I’m no hunter.”
Later, Karen told him that for twelve years she had been cared for in hospitals, much of that time in an old-fashioned iron lung. Then, more modern, portable equipment was developed, making it possible for patients like herself to live away from institutions. At first she had gone back to live with her parents, but that hadn’t worked. “It was too much of a strain on all of us.” Then she moved to this apartment where she had been for nearly eleven years.
“There are government allowances which pay the costs. Sometimes it’s tight financially, but mostly I manage.” Her father had a small plumbing business and her mother was a salesclerk in a department store, she explained. At the moment they were trying to accumulate money to buy Karen a small van which would increase her mobility. The van, which Josie or someone from Karen’s family would drive, would be adapted to contain the wheelchair.
Although Karen could do almost nothing for herself, and had to be washed, fed, and put to bed by someone else, she told Nim she had learned to paint, holding a brush in her mouth. “And I can use a typewriter,” she told Nim. “It’s electric and I work it with a stick in my teeth. Sometimes I write poetry. Would you like me to send you some?”
“Yes, please. I’d like that.” He got up to go and was amazed to discover he had been with Karen more than an hour.
She asked him, “Will you come again?”
“If you’d like me to.”
“Of course I would—Nimrod.” Once more the warm, bewitching smile. “I’d like to have you as a friend.”
Josie showed him out.
The image of Karen, her breathtaking beauty, warm smile and gentle voice, stayed with Nim through the remainder of the drive downtown. He had, he thought, never met anyone quite like her. He was still thinking of her as he left his car in the parking garage of Golden State Power & Light’s headquarters building, three floors down from street level.
An express elevator, accessible only with a key, operated from the parking garage to the senior executive offices on the twenty-second floor. Nim used his key—a status symbol at GSP & L—and rode up alone. On the way, he remembered his decision to make a personal appeal to the Sequoia Club chairman.
His secretary, Victoria Davis, a young, competent black woman, looked up as he entered his two-room office. “Hi, Vicki,” he said. “Is there much in the mail?”
“Nothing that’s urgent. There are some messages, though—including several saying you were good on TV last night. I thought so, too.”
“Thanks.” He grinned. “Welcome to my fan club.”
“Oh, there’s a ‘private and confidential’ on your desk; it just came. And I have some things for you to sign.” She followed him into his inner office. At the same moment a dull, heavy thud occurred some distance away. A water carafe and drinking glasses rattled; so did the window which overlooked an interior courtyard.
Nim halted, listening. “What’s that?”
“I’ve no idea. There was the same kind of noise a few minutes ago. Just before you got here.”
Nim shrugged. It could be anything from an earthquake tremor to the effect of some heavy construction going on nearby. At his desk he riffled through messages and glanced at the envelope which Vicki had referred to, marked “private and confidential.” It was a buff manila envelope with a dab of sealing wax on the back. Absently he began to open it.
“Vicki, before we do anything else, see if you can get Mrs. Carmichael on the phone.”
“At the Sequoia Club?”
“Right.”
She put the papers she was carrying in a tray marked “signature” and turned to go. As she did, the outer office door flew open and Harry London raced in. His hair was disordered, his face red from exertion.
London saw Nim.
“No!” he screamed. “No!”
As Nim stood still in bewilderment, London flew across the room and hurled himself across the desk. He seized the manila envelope and put it down.
“Out of here! Fast! All of us!”
London grabbed Nim’s arm and pulled, at the same time pushing Victoria Davis roughly ahead. They went through the outer office to the corridor outside, London pausing only long enough to slam both doors behind them.
Nim began an angry protest. “What the hell …”
He didn’t finish. From the inner office came the boom of an explosion. The corridor walls shook. A framed picture nearby fell to the floor, its glass shattering.
A second later another thud, like the earlier one Nim had heard but this time louder and clearly an explosion, came from somewhere beneath their feet. It was unmistakably within the building. Down the corridor, figures were running out of other doors.
“Oh Christ!” Harry London said. His voice was despairing.
Nim exclaimed urgently, “Dammit! What is it?”
Now they could hear excited shouting, telephones ringing stridently, the sound of approaching sirens in the street below.
“Letter bombs,” London said. “They’re not big, but enough to kill anybody close. That last one was the fourth. Fraser Fenton’s dead, others injured. Everyone in the building’s being warned, and if you feel like praying, ask that there aren’t any more.”
11
With a short stub of pencil, Georgos Winslow Archambault (Yale, class of 72) wrote in his journal:
Yesterday, a successful foray against the fascist-capitalist forces of oppression!
An enemy leader—Fenton, president of Golden State Piss & Lickspittle—is dead. Good riddance!
In the honored name of Friends of Freedom, the headquarters bastion of the ruthless exploiters of the people’s energy resources was successfully attacked. Out of ten F-of-F weapons directed at target, five scored direct hits. Not bad!
The true score of hits may be even greater since the establishment-muzzled press has, as usual, minimized this important people’s victory.
Georgos repositioned the pencil stub. Even though it was uncomfortable, he invariably wrote with a stub, having once read that Mohandas K. Gandhi did so, holding that to discard a partially used pencil would be to denigrate the humble labor which created it.
Gandhi was one of Georgos Archambault’s heroes, as were Lenin, Marx, Engels, Mao Tse-tung, Renato Curcio, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Cesar Chavez and assorted others. (The anomaly that Mohandas Gandhi was an apostle of non-violence seemed not to bother him.)
Georgos went on writing.
Furthermore, the capitalist-bootlicking press today sanctimoniously deplored the death and injury of what it labeled “innocent victims.” How naively ridiculous!
In any war, so-called “innocents” are inevitably killed and maimed, and the larger the war, the larger the number of “innocent” casualties. When belligerents are the misnamed “great powers”—as in World Wars I and II and the despicable Viet Nam aggression by Amerika—such “innocents” are slaughtered in their thousands, like cattle, and who objects? No one! Certainly not the dollar-worshiping press-Führers and their know-nothing, toadying writers.
A just, social war, like that now being waged by Friends of Freedom, is no different—except that casualties are fewer.
Even at Yale, in written papers, Georgos had had the reputation among his professors of belaboring a point, spreading adjectives like buckshot. But then English had not been his major—it was physics—and later he parlayed that degree into a doctorate in chemistry. Later still, the chemistry knowledge proved useful when he studied explosives—among other things—in Cuba. And all along the way his interests narrowed, as did his personal views on life and politics.
The journal entry continue
d:
Even the enemy press—which obediently exaggerates such matters rather than minimizes them—admits there were only two deaths and three major injuries. One of the dead was the senior management criminal, Fenton, the other a pig security guard—no loss! The rest were minor lackeys—typists, clerks, &c.—who should be grateful for their martyrdom in a noble cause.
So much for the propaganda nonsense about “innocent victims”!
Georgos paused, his thin, ascetic face mirroring an intensity of thought. As always, he took considerable pains over his journal, believing that one day it would be an important historical document, ranking alongside such works as Das Kapital and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
He began a new train of thought.
The demands of Friends of Freedom will be announced in a war communiqué today. They are:
—Free supply of electricity and gas for one year to the unemployed, those on welfare, and old people. At the end of a year the matter will be reviewed again by Friends of Freedom.
—An immediate 25 percent reduction in charges for electric power and gas supplied to small homes and apartments.
—All nuclear plants to be closed and dismantled immediately. A permanent ban on any future nuclear development.
Failure to accept and obey these demands will result in a stepped-up program of attacks.
That would do for starters. And the threat of intensified action was a real one. Georgos glanced around the crowded, cluttered basement workroom in which he was writing. The supplies of gunpowder, fuses, blasting caps, pipe casings, glycerine, acids and other chemicals were ample. And he, as well as the three other freedom fighters who accepted his leadership, knew how to use them. He smiled, remembering the ingenious device which had gone into yesterday’s letter bombs. A small plastic cylinder contained high explosive tetryl with a tiny detonator. Poised over the detonator was a spring-loaded firing pin and opening the envelope released the firing pin, which hit the detonator. Simple but deadly. The charge of tetryl was enough to blow the letter opener’s head off, or a body wide open.
Obviously our demands are awaited because already the press and its docile ally television have begun echoing the Golden State Piss & Lickspittle line that no policies will be changed “as a result of terrorism.”
Garbage! Empty-headed stupidity! Of course terrorism will cause changes. It always has, and always will. History abounds with examples.
Georgos considered some of the examples drilled into him during the Cuban revolutionary training. That was a couple of years after getting his doctorate, and in between the two he had been increasingly consumed by hatred for what he saw as the decadent, tyrannical country of his birth. He contemptuously spelled it Amerika.
His general disenchantment had not been helped by news that his father, a wealthy New York playboy, had gone through his eighth divorce and remarriage, and that Georgos’ mother, an internationally adored Greek movie actress, was again between husbands, having shed her sixth. Georgos loathed both his parents and what they represented, even though he had not seen either since he was nine years old nor, in the intervening twenty years, had he heard from them directly. His costs of living and schooling, including the fees at Yale, were paid impersonally through an Athens law firm.
So terrorism wouldn’t change anything, eh?
Terrorism is an instrument of social war. It permits a few enlightened individuals (such as Friends of Freedom) to weaken the iron grip and will of reactionary forces which hold, and abuse, power.
Terrorism began the successful Russian Revolution.
The Irish and Israeli republics owe their existence to terrorism. IRA terrorism in the first World War led to an independent Eire. Irgun terrorism in Palestine forced the British to give up their Mandate so the Jews could establish Israel.
Algeria won independence from France through terrorism.
The PLO, now represented at international conferences and the UN, used terrorism to gain worldwide attention.
Even more world attention has been achieved by terrorism of the Italian Red Brigade.
Georgos Winslow Archambault stopped. Writing tired him. Also, he realized, he was drifting out of the revolutionary jargon which (he had also learned in Cuba) was important, both as a psychological weapon and an emotional outlet. But it was sometimes hard to sustain.
He stood up, stretched and yawned. He had a good, lithe body and kept himself fit with a rigid daily exercise schedule. Glancing in a small, cracked wall mirror he fingered his bushy but trim moustache. He had grown it immediately after the attack on the La Mission generating plant when he had posed as a Salvation Army officer. According to news reports the following day, a plant security guard had described him as clean-shaven, so the moustache might at least confuse identification, if it ever came to that. The Salvation Army uniform had, of course, been destroyed long since.
The memory of the La Mission success pleased Georgos, and he chuckled.
One thing he had not done, either before or after La Mission, was grow a beard. That would be like a signature. People expected revolutionaries to be bearded and unkempt; Georgos was careful to be precisely the reverse. Whenever he left the modest east-side house he had rented he could be mistaken for a stockbroker or banker. Not that that was difficult for him since he was fastidious by nature and dressed well. The money which the Athens lawyer still paid regularly into a Chicago bank account helped with that, though the amount was less than it used to be, and Georgos needed considerably more cash to finance the future plans of Friends of Freedom. Fortunately he was already getting some outside help; now the amount from that source would have to be increased.
Only one factor contradicted the cultivated bourgeois image—Georgos’ hands. In the early days of his interest in chemicals, and then explosives, he had been careless and worked without protective gloves. As a result his hands were scarred and discolored. He was more careful now but the damage was done. He had considered seeking skin grafts, but the risks seemed high. The best he could do, when away from the house, was keep his hands out of sight as much as possible.
The agreeable odor of lunch—stuffed bell peppers-drifted down to him from above. His woman, Yvette, was an accomplished cook who knew what Georgos liked and tried to please him. She was also in awe of his learning, having had a minimum of schooling herself.
He shared Yvette with the three other young freedom fighters who lived in the house—Wayde, a scholar like Georgos and a disciple of Marx and Engels; Ute, an American Indian who nursed a burning hatred of the institutions which eclipsed his people’s nationhood; and Felix, a product of Detroit’s inner city ghetto, whose philosophy was to burn, kill or otherwise destroy everything alien to his own bitter experience since birth.
But, for all the sharing with the others, Georgos had a proprietorial feeling, bordering on affection, for Yvette. At the same time, he despised himself for his own failure in an aspect of the Revolutionary Catechism (attributed to the nineteenth-century Russians, Bakunin and Nechayev), which read in part:
The revolutionary is a lost man; he has no interests of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings … Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, one thought, one passion—the revolution … He has broken every tie with the civil order, with the educated world and all laws, conventions and … With the ethics of this world.
All the tender feelings of family life, of friendship, love, gratitude and even honor must be stilled in him … Day and night he must have one single thought, one single purpose: merciless destruction …
The character of the true revolutionary has no place for any romanticism, sentimentality, enthusiasm or seduction … Always and everywhere he must become not what his own inclination would have him become, but what the general interest of the revolution demands.
Georgos closed his journal, reminding himself that the war communiqué, with its just demands, must arrive at one of the city’s radio stations later today.
As usua
l, it would be left in a safe location, then the radio station advised by phone. The radio idiots would fall all over themselves to pick it up.
The communiqué, Georgos thought with satisfaction, would make a lively item on the evening news.
12
“First of all,” Laura Bo Carmichael said when they had ordered drinks—a martini for her, a bloody mary for Nim Goldman—“I’d like to say how sorry I am about your president, Mr. Fenton. I didn’t know him, but what happened was shameful and tragic. I hope the people responsible are found and punished.”
The Sequoia Club chairman was a slender, svelte woman in her late sixties with a normally brisk manner and alert, penetrating eyes. She dressed severely, wore flat-heeled shoes, and had her hair cropped short, as if to exorcise her femininity. Perhaps, Nim thought, it was because, as an early atomic scientist, Laura Bo Carmichael had competed in a field which, at the time, was dominated by men.
They were in the elegant Squire Room of the Fairhill Hotel, where they had met for lunch at Nim’s suggestion. It was a week and a half later than he had intended, but the turmoil which followed the latest bombing at GSP & L had kept him occupied. Elaborate security measures, which Nim had shared in planning, were now in force at the giant utility’s headquarters. More work had also come his way as a result of the critical need for a rate increase, now being considered by the Public Utilities Commission.
Acknowledging the remark about Fraser Fenton, he admitted, “It was a shock, particularly after the earlier deaths at La Mission. I guess we’re all running scared right now.”
And it was true, he thought. The company’s senior executives, from the chairman down, were insisting on low profiles. They did not want to be in the news and thereby expose themselves to terrorist attention. J. Eric Humphrey had given orders that his name was no longer to be used in company announcements or news releases, nor would he be available to the press, except possibly for off-the-record sessions. His home address had been withdrawn from all company records and was now a guarded secret—as much as anything of that kind could be. Most senior executives already had unlisted home phone numbers. The chairman and senior officers would have bodyguards during any activity where they might be considered targets—including weekend golf games.