“No, sweetheart,” he said, his voice thick, cracking.
“For Mommy then.”
It was all too much. He couldn’t stand it any longer. “Jesus, why don’t you listen to me? I told you no.”
3
The ambulance was braking to a stop in the driveway. Throwing open the front door, he called out to the driver, who was rushing across the brightly sunlit front lawn toward him. “You didn’t use the siren.”
“Didn’t need it. Traffic wasn’t bad at all.” The driver was hurrying across the front porch past him into the dark hall.
“But you took so long.”
“Ten minutes. Coming across town, that’s fast.”
The driver was young—long hair, mustache, sideburns. The doctor hurrying inside behind him looked even younger, short blond hair parted perfectly. My God, he thought, surprised. I need somebody older. Why didn’t the hospital send somebody older?
But they were already going through the living room to the kitchen while he tried to explain, and then they halted at the sight of her. The skin of her face was drawn even more severely, jaw and cheekbones standing out. Her eyes were frightening, glaring wide at them past the child held rigidly to her breast. When the doctor made a move toward her, she instantly came alert, and in the end it took all three of them to get the baby away from her. He felt sick fighting her. The doctor went through the motions of listening for a heartbeat with his stethoscope, of checking for eye movement with a penlight, but the baby was dead all right. “Take it where she can’t see it,” the doctor said. But when the driver went to carry the baby out to the ambulance, Claire screamed and clawed to grab him back.
“Hold your wife,” the doctor told him, swabbing her arm with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol.
His nostrils flared from the bitter smell of the alcohol. He hated struggling with her, gripping her arms so tightly he could feel her bones beneath her flesh. “Claire,” was all he could say. “Please, Claire.” He thought about slapping her to jolt her quiet, but he knew he couldn’t do it.
Then the doctor was jabbing her upper arm with a hypodermic, and she swung so powerfully to get away that it seemed the needle would snap off in her or rip her arm, but already the doctor had the needle cleanly out, and they were forcing her across the living room and up the stairs to the bedroom where she clung to the doorknob, repeating, “My baby. I want my baby,” while they pried her fingers free and dragged her to the bed, holding her down. She thrashed, moaning, “I want my baby,” slowly lost strength, rolled onto her side and started weeping, hands over her face, knees drawn up, and little by little they released her.
“No, don’t fight it,” the doctor told her. “Relax. Make yourself calm. Try not to think.” He went over and closed the bedroom drapes, pale light filtering through, everything mostly in shadow.
The bed had not yet been made. Claire lay on rumpled sheets, weeping steadily, rhythmically, disrupting the pattern to shudder and breathe, beginning to weep again. She wore mostly washed-out jeans around the house, but today she had put on an orange pleated skirt, and now it was hitched up, showing one buttock covered by her blue silk underwear. The elastic of the underwear was loose, itself hitched up above a fold of white-skinned hip. Between her legs a few black kinks of pubic hair stuck out from under the elastic. He glanced at the doctor, and feeling modest for her, he tugged down the skirt. She thrashed to get away from the touch of his hand.
“I said, don’t fight it. Give in, let it put you to sleep,” the doctor ordered, bending close to her. His face was flushed from exertion, dark against his blond hair. He studied her, watching her weep and shudder and breathe. Slowly he straightened.
“It’s working now. In a minute she’ll be under.” The doctor ran a hand through his hair, and his part was destroyed. “How about you?”
“I don’t know.” He wanted to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. “All right, I guess. Yes. I’m all right.”
“Sure you are.” The doctor reached into his satchel and came out with a clear plastic vial of pills. “Take these two with a full glass of water. These other two are for when you go to bed.” The pills were long and yellow. “Break one in half and give it to your little girl. Remember. A full glass of water. Especially the little girl.”
Reminded of Sarah, he suddenly wondered where she had gone this time. She had twice been in the way downstairs, and then she had disappeared.
“Wait,” he said. “These things aren’t going to put me to sleep, are they?”
The doctor looked sideways at him. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I just don’t want to be put to sleep.”
“They’re only to relax you. That’s the truth, no need to look like that. They might make you dizzy, so don’t try to drive, and don’t drink any alcohol with them. You’ll wind up on the floor.”
Claire was weeping slowly now, softly, almost asleep.
“I’ll stay with her until I’m certain she’ll be quiet,” the doctor told him. “Better go and take the pills.”
He looked down at her, lingered uncertainly, then did what he was told.
4
The bathroom was directly across the hall. Thinking of the poison in the milk, he stared uneasily at the glass of water in his hand. The water was clouded gray as it always was after several days of heavy rain. Still he could not stop thinking of poison. The pills maybe. But he knew that was crazy. Even if Kess had planned a follow-up, he would have picked another kind of man to deliver those pills, somebody older, who looked more like an experienced doctor; and Kess’s man would have said a name, would have mentioned something about the hospital to establish his credentials. But this man had not said anything; he had just gone right to work.
The water had a gritty earthen taste that obscured any taste the pills might have had. They wedged down his throat in two choking lumps, He left the tap running, cupped cold water in his hands and splashed his face repeatedly.
You knew what kind of man Kess was. You knew even before you met him. What the hell was going on in your head?
The year before, in December, three of Kess’s lieutenants had been charged with attempted assassination. That was in Hartford, Connecticut—their target a third-term U.S. senator who wanted to establish trade relations with Cuba. They had attached a fire bomb under the stage in a hall where he was to give a much publicized speech, and it had failed to kill him only because midway through his talk he had left the stage to speak directly with his audience. Fragments from the stage had badly lacerated eight persons in the front row. The lieutenants themselves turned out to be from three Connecticut branches of the Kess organization, respected in their communities: a policeman, a fireman, a high-school botany teacher.
One day later, six mortar rounds had hit an upper New York farmhouse and barn where a Black youth camp was being set up for the holidays. Fifteen minutes of sniping had killed two girls and a boy; two other boys were burned by fires from the mortar explosions, and most of the others were almost torn apart by shrapnel. At nightfall, police raided an isolated hunting lodge owned and used as a training ground by another of Kess’s lieutenants; they arrested five men and seized eight machine guns, three grenade launchers, two mortar launchers, one antitank missile launcher, a variety of handguns, shotguns, and hunting rifles, and ten thousand assorted rounds of ammunition.
Both times Kess had denied any knowledge of what his subordinates were up to. He seemed genuinely shocked and annoyed by it all. But a week later on Christmas Day, police had raided his home in Providence, Rhode Island, and seized twelve fully automatic submachine guns plus two cases of grenades, charging him with violations of the National Firearms Act. They had also charged him with organizing a conspiracy to attack and loot an Illinois National Guard armory.
Now in September, the water dripping off his face into the sink, trickling down the drain, he thought of how he had watched the news of Kess’s arrest, how he had been curious to see what the man looked like, but there had been no pictures. H
e thought of how he had worked so hard, taken so much time to set up the meeting with Kess—and then he suddenly thought of Ethan again and fought to concentrate on the cool feel of the water drying on his skin. He toweled his face as roughly as he could. Anything to keep from thinking. Get busy, he told himself. Do something.
Like what?
Like find Sarah. Find out how she is.
He found her the first place he looked—down at the end of the hall in her room. She was sitting propped up against the headboard of her bed, pretending to be occupied. The book in her hands was upside down.
“I’ve got a job for you,” he said.
She turned a page and peered at it. “Is Mommy going to die too?” she asked from behind the book.
He had to close his eyes again. “No,” he said. “She’s just very upset and we have to do everything we can to help her. That’s the job I have for you.”
The pressure eased, and he opened his eyes. She lowered the book, squinting at him. “Did Mommy hurt when the doctor gave her the needle?”
“A bit.” He felt his throat seizing totally shut, and he hurried to say it all. “Sweetheart, when the doctor comes out of the bedroom, I think Mommy would like it very much if you went in and covered her with a blanket and snuggled next to her. She’ll be asleep and she won’t know you’re next to her, but when she wakes up, it’s very important that one of us be there to say hello. Can you do that for her?”
“You screamed at me and pushed me.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m very sorry.”
5
They were standing in the sunlit open doorway at the bottom of the stairs, watching him. The one was tall and big-hipped, the other was thin, and they both had their badges out. All the time he continued down the stairs, clutching the rail, they never stopped watching him.
He sat at the table in the kitchen while the tall big-hipped one asked the questions and the thin one glanced around at the spilled milk all over and the broken glass by the stove.
“My name’s Webster,” the big-hipped one said. “He’s Ford. Do you know what kind of poison it was?”
“No.” Their names shouldn’t have seemed important to him. The pills were doing it, he guessed. He knew he had heard their names somewhere before, but the pills were clouding his mind so much that he couldn’t place them.
“Well, do you know how the baby got his hands on it?”
“Yes. It was in the milk that came this morning.”
“The milk?” Webster asked incredulously. He and Ford looked sharply at each other.
“That’s right. My cat died from it too. I put her over on the cellar steps.” The pills were certainly fixing him. His voice sounded to him as if it came from somewhere outside his head.
Ford went to see the cat, stepping over the milk and broken glass by the stove. He seemed to take a very long time to cross the last few feet toward the cellar door. Tired of waiting for him to get there, he himself turned slowly in his chair, and from where he sat at the kitchen table he could see out the big front window in the living room to where the driver had backed the ambulance out of the driveway and parked it at the curb between the two fir trees. He could see the driver sitting behind the steering wheel out there, looking in the rearview mirror, combing his hair.
“I asked you a question,” Webster was saying. “I asked you if you had any idea how the poison got in the milk.”
“Kess,” he answered, still looking toward the ambulance. The curtains on the side were drawn; there was a small object outlined behind them, but he couldn’t be sure it was Ethan. He thought of the rough starchy white sheets that Ethan must be lying on but couldn’t feel.
“How’s that?”
“A man named Kess did it.”
“You know this man? You know for a fact that he did this?”
“Not personally. I mean, I know him, but I don’t think he did it personally. He likely ordered someone else to do it. I met him early this year for an article I was working on.” His voice sounded even farther outside his head. He was having trouble now getting enough breath to say all the words.
Outside, the ambulance driver finished combing his hair.
“Please look at me,” Webster said.
He managed to turn to him.
“What do you mean an article you were working on?”
“I’m a writer.”
“Hey, no kidding,” Ford said, interested, coming back from the cellar door. That was the first he had spoken. “What do you write? Maybe I’ve read your stuff.”
“Novels. Stories.” It was all too complicated to explain. Because of his writing, Ethan was dead, but he was losing the strength to tell them, and finally he had to fall back on the standard modest reply he always gave to strangers who asked him about his work. “I got lucky three years ago with a novel that made the best-seller lists and was turned into a movie.” He gave the name.
“I must have missed that one,” Ford said.
Webster looked around at the kitchen and the living room. The place was more than a hundred years old, its inside walls made of brick and oak. The money from the book had meant that he could afford to buy it and restore its features. It had the feel of old photographs, of solid deep-grained dark wood and heavily mortared walls and things that were built to outlast the men who fashioned them. Webster obviously was thinking, yeah, you got lucky all right. “What about this article?” he asked.
“When I’m having trouble with a book, I sometimes let it rest and try an article. God help me, last December some things happened with Kess that made me want to write about him.”
“Who is this guy anyway?” Ford asked.
It was all too much to explain. He had the sensation that his brain was slowly revolving inside his skull, and when he concentrated to stop it, the kitchen shifted on an angle. He stood off-balance, steadied himself, and made his way off the cold hardwood floor onto the deep soft rug toward the wall of bookshelves in the living room.
“What’s the matter?” Webster asked. “What are you doing?”
“Getting you this,” he answered, wondering if he would be able to get back and sit down again, opening a copy of the magazine with his article in it. “I don’t know how to put it better than this.”
6
Chemelec is the base of Kess’s organization, his command post. It stands in the middle of a large open field on the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island: a huge sprawling one-story structure made of cinder blocks that give it the appearance of an enormous bunker, windowless, surrounded by a tall electric barbed-wire fence with several armed guards patrolling the perimeter.
The company manufactures chemicals and electronics equipment, but its profit is due mostly to sizable subsidies from various large American corporations. After all, Kess has insisted from the start on the abolition of trade unions. His followers themselves contribute dues to the company. They need to keep it working: they need quick access to those chemicals and electronic instruments required for the kind of sophisticated explosives they plan to use in time of emergency, required as well for chemical warfare and the electronic jamming of enemy radio communications.
The company was founded by Kess in 1965, an amalgamation of two other companies that went bankrupt on him in 1964 because of what he insists was government pressure on his customers not to renew their contracts. That is only a sign of his differences with the government, not the cause of it. He was with those American forces that invaded Germany in 1945 and were ordered to stop when the Russians came in from their side. He was only twenty then, politically uneducated, but he could see what was going to happen between America and Russia in Germany, and he had watched so many of his friends die in combat that he insisted America had the right to take the country for her own. He insisted so much that he was ordered to keep his views to himself, and when he did not, he was given a psychiatric discharge as a paranoid aggressive.
In 1963, he and five friends were deer hunting in upper Michigan when someone els
e in the woods took a shot at them by mistake. From all reports they enjoyed the scare, found cover, deployed and double-flanked the man, fired several intended near misses at him, forced him to surrender his rifle, then intimidated him for the rest of the day until they finally chased him screaming from the woods. What delighted them most was their discovery that years out of the army they still retained their presence of mind under fire, recalled exactly how to trap a man, and did it well. They began talking about their war experiences and decided that if the country were ever attacked, a distinct possibility they believed, they would still be able to put up a good fight. Over drinks that night they warmed even more to the idea, figured how they would do it, camping in the hills, living off the land, sniping, hitting a patrol here, a supply depot there, backing deep into the woods before they could be pursued. Ideally, of course, the enemy could never be allowed past the coastline, but that required meticulous defensive preparations, and as far as they were concerned, the government was too weak to do so, riddled as they believed it was with the enemy or enemy sympathizers. Kess himself supplied the name for the organization—The Guardians of the Republic.
“Your wife is resting fine now.”
He looked, and the doctor was standing at the archway to the kitchen. The living-room rug had evidently muffled his approach. His hair was parted perfectly again.
“She’ll be waking around six,” the doctor continued. “She’ll be groggy and she won’t want to eat, but give her some soup anyway, and if she gets frantic again, here’s two more of those pills. Is your foot hurting very badly?”
“My foot?” He peered down. His bare feet seemed far below him, as if he saw them through the reversed end of a telescope, and he had to stop himself from peering too far down and falling. The nail on his right toe had been ripped half away from the flesh. Thick blood clotted darkly under it. The toe was numb. He had thought that was because of the pills.