After the First Death (15 page)

The child dozed, the dream having passed, her face serene once more. Although it was hot in the bus, Kate drew comfort from the child’s closeness, the warmth and softness against her. She closed her eyes and it was nice to rest for a moment, suspend her thoughts, drift in the darkness.

She might have fallen asleep for a few moments, floating beautifully, suspended in time, cut loose from here and now. Then her eyes flew open and Miro was there, crouched on the floor beside her.

“Do you like Elvis Presley?” he asked, his face so close she could smell his breath, faintly acid.

The question was so unexpected that she laughed, laughter as unplanned as a hiccup.

“Why do you laugh?” He was serious, unsmiling.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. You surprised me.” Boy! Elvis Presley. “Yes, I like Elvis Presley.” But she didn’t, really; she neither liked nor disliked him: he was passé, old stuff, dead a few years now. “I didn’t expect you even knew about Elvis Presley,” she said.

“I have been here in America more than three years. I have a transistor but it is not allowed on operations. I like the Bee Gees, too. And disco.”

He stood up abruptly and turned away, as if he had
said too much. Kate watched him return to the back of the bus. She marveled at him. He could tell her casually about his ability to hurt a person with his hands, but it embarrassed him to say he liked Presley and the Bee Gees.

After a while, she placed the child on the seat and made her way down the aisle. She had to continue her pursuit of Miro. She couldn’t lose him.

He sat alert as usual; he never really relaxed, always watching, always on guard.

She sat in the seat next to the last, legs out in the aisle, conscious of the key in her sneaker. Keep him talking, she told herself, keep him talking.

“If you and your brother wandered through the camps with nobody to look after you, how did you end up in school?” she asked.

He said nothing. Didn’t stir. As if she had not spoken.

She felt enclosed in the silence, removed from the small sounds of the children sleeping and stirring, sounds that had become so familiar that she was barely aware of them, like the sound of her own breathing. The outside world was distant, far away.

“Artkin,” Miro said, finally. “Artkin found us in the camps and brought us to the school.”

“How old were you?”

He hesitated again. Should he be telling the girl all this? He had never spoken of these things before. And his age. He was not sure, really, of his age. In the camp, they had given him a birth date, and it had been chosen to suit his height and weight and growth. The same with Aniel. So now he passed for sixteen but it was possible that he was fifteen or seventeen. “I was eight or nine when I went to the school,” he said. “I do not remember.” But he did remember how Artkin found them. They had been living for a few weeks in the ruins of a
house that had been burned. The smell of embers filled their nostrils as they slept at night. It was the season of chill, when the winds blew dust across the land and the dust entered everywhere, even the pores. Aniel was older and a hotblood. So he let Miro make use of whatever they had to cover them, old coats and rags or sometimes paper. Artkin came along and saw them. They were afraid of him at first. He stared at them a long time from across the street one morning as they prepared for another day of foraging for food or whatever they could turn to food. Artkin crossed the street and questioned them gruffly. “Are you hungry?” he said finally after asking them about their comings and goings and receiving only vague answers. The answers were vague because they had only a dim idea of where they were and where they had wandered, and for how long. Wandering was their way of life and they did not question it—just as one does not question how one learns to run or walk or leap across puddles. When Artkin asked if they were hungry, they gave him a positive reply. He grunted and beckoned them to follow. He took them to the school in a nearby refugee camp. It looked like all the other camps from the outside, but Miro and Aniel learned that it was really a training school for freedom fighters. Artkin left them there. The camp and the school became their home for the next few years. Artkin visited them on occasion. He recruited other fighters, although Miro and Aniel were the youngest. Artkin seldom allowed an expression to show on his face, but he seemed proud of their accomplishments; interested, at least. Then at last their assignment was given: America. And their leader: Artkin.

Miro hesitated now. Again, he wondered: Have I told too much?

Kate, almost mesmerized by Miro’s recital, asked, “What was your assignment in America?”

“To bomb,” Miro said. “To plant bombs in the cities. Brooklyn, the post office. Detroit, the automobile plant. Los Angeles …”

Headlines leaped to Kate’s mind. Television newscasts as well. Those bombings. The explosion in the Brooklyn post office where innocent people died—a young mother and child blown to bits as the woman mailed a letter. And the others. Kate was hazy about statistics, how many dead, how many injured. But she remembered that people had died and were hurt. She remembered the passing outrage she’d felt in the moment before the commercial came on or just before she turned to the entertainment section of the paper to see what was playing at Cinema 1 or 2 or 3 or 4. But for an agonizing moment she had been caught up in the horror of the news, and now that horror visited her again as she sat across from Miro and realized that he had been involved in all those explosions which killed and wounded innocent people. And mixed up with the horror was guilt, as well, for having allowed the terrible events to pass over her without impact except for that small pause of momentary sympathy before she checked on the movie she might go to that night.

“All those people who died,” Kate said. “How could you?”

Miro looked at her patiently. “But this is war, Kate. I told you. We are at war, and people die in wartime.”

She wanted to say: Don’t call me Kate, don’t you dare call me Kate. But didn’t. Another small defeat.

“Didn’t you feel anything for them at all?”

“Who?”

“Those who died. The mother and child in the post office. Didn’t you realize what you were doing?”

Miro looked at her blankly. What did she want from him? What did she want him to say?

My God, Kate thought, turning away, looking at the blank taped window. She brought her knees up to her chin and sank back in the seat out of his view. She did not want to see him at this moment. He had seduced her with his pathetic tale of wandering through the camps as a child and had somehow enlisted her sympathy. But now she recognized him for what he was: a monster. And the greatest horror of all was that he did not know he was a monster. He had looked at her with innocent eyes as he told her of killing people. She’d always thought of innocence as something good, something to cherish. People mourned the death of innocence. Someone had written a theme paper on the topic in school. But innocence, she saw now, could also be evil. Monstrous.

Miro sat in anguish, empty of words now. Anguish because he could not understand this girl. And he also wondered why he tried to understand her. Her life was one way of living, his another. He felt anger as she continued to remain hidden from him, out of sight. She did not see the world as it existed. She looked at the world through her ignorant American eyes as she drifted through her schoolgirl years. His life had purpose and direction. Dedication. Who was this girl to turn away from that kind of dedication?

He came to his feet and looked down at her. She seemed shriveled into a ball, her face indistinct in the shadows. He searched for words to bring her out into the open again. “The blood that spills is the fuel that will bring us back our homeland,” he said, trying to recall slogans he had learned in the school. “Some must die so that others may live. We are all soldiers although we wear no uniforms.”

“But the children,” Kate said. “They’re not soldiers. What do they know about the world, your terrible war? One child has already died. He might have grown up to be somebody special. Someone who might have been a great man.”

“Aniel, too, might have been a great man, but he is dead and you do not mourn him,” Miro said. But even as he said the words he pondered a truth as bleak as the camps he had roamed as a child: Had he mourned not for Aniel but for himself?

part
7

Where
are you, Ben?

I’ve been waiting here for you more than a half hour, although it seems longer. But you haven’t appeared. I returned to the room after swallowing the pill and visiting awhile with Dean Albertson—he’s as long-winded as ever, impossible to get away from—and arrived here to find the room empty.

This is a nice room, Ben, as rooms at Castle go. Your bed is neatly made—you have always been fastidious. Your papers are piled in a neat stack near the typewriter; a theme paper, I suppose. The walls are bare like your room at home. Clutter always irritated you. I lived in the John Quincy Adams wing as a student. On the second floor. I went up there today before going to meet Dean Albertson and stood outside the room. The
door was closed, the corridor deserted.

But I didn’t go in.

Maybe I was afraid of seeing ghosts.

Which is ridiculous, of course. If I should encounter ghosts here, they would be friendly ghosts. I spent some of the happiest years of my life here at Castle. Too brief, however. And too swift. Along came the war and I didn’t see this place for years and years until they asked me to appear as a guest lecturer some time ago.

I was always happy here, Ben, with my friends. I hoped you would be, too. And make friends like mine. Jack Harkness was my closest friend. On the Monday morning after December 7, 1941, we joined up together, fled this place in a fever of patriotism, hitched a ride and made our way to Boston. We served overseas together. The Pacific Theater. The islands. All those places for which the streets at Fort Delta are named. I walk down Iwo Jima Avenue at Delta and remember Jack Harkness who died there and is buried there. I vowed over his grave that he would not have died in vain. Does that sound naive and embarrassingly patriotic and old-fashioned? A vow like that? We were poorly trained in those days, Ben, but trained superbly in one thing: patriotism. There are all kinds of patriotism; ours was pure and sweet and unquestioning. We were the good guys. Today, there is still patriotism, of course. But this generation is questioning. This generation looks at itself in a mirror as it performs its duties. And wonders: Who are the good guys? Is it possible we are the bad guys? They should never ask that question, Ben, or even contemplate it.

I am sorry, Ben. I apologize. For the preaching.

Or maybe this is an apology for something else.

Trying to say now what I could not say to your face earlier.

Actually, I found it difficult to look you in the face, in the eyes, this morning. Not afraid of what I would see. But afraid of what you would see.

I see
Knights and Dayze
on the table there.

My old yearbook.

All those names and faces. Where are they now?

And where are you, Ben?

And when you return, Ben, what do I tell you?

What do I say?

Should I attempt to explain everything?

And where do I begin?

At the beginning. Where else?

And the beginning was last August, when the bus was on the bridge and the children held hostage and one child already dead …

We knew within hours, of course, with whom we were dealing: terrorists well practiced in their craft. Merciless. Fanatic. A nationwide investigation, swiftly organized and placed in action, told us what we needed to know and indicated what our course should be. We had learned by the experience of other nations about terroristic tactics and, to some extent, by our own experience. We also knew the line we had to follow: Don’t give in. Bargain for the sake of stalling, buying time. But refuse to accede to the demands.

Meanwhile, there was activity the general public did not know about. One branch of our armed services had been training in counter-terrorist operations, prepared
to move into situations when and if they occurred. A unit of this branch was dispatched to Hallowell and deployed itself in the woods surrounding the bus and the van. They brought the latest equipment, particularly a sophisticated version of the stun grenade. This grenade would be the key to the operation, particularly since children were involved.

We deduced that there were probably no more than four terrorists involved in the hijacking. A man named Artkin who was well known for terrorist activities and had been under surveillance for some time, suspected of participation in bombings in Brooklyn, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Two others identified as likely participants were a man called Antibbe, who also used many other aliases, familiar to authorities in the Middle East and Europe as a mercenary, and a black named Stroll, known primarily as a technician, expert with explosives, machinery, etc. There was one other, whose identity was not known to us at that time. A person with no record. This person, as far as observations could be made, remained in the bus, obviously in charge of the children and the girl. The fact that he was an unknown entity and thus unpredictable in his actions—particularly where children were involved—gave us additional concern. Artkin, we knew, was capable of the most violent acts. His casual bombings had resulted in more than thirty deaths, six of them children.