Gibbon's Decline and Fall (16 page)

He dropped her hand and sat back, face serious. “You're saying high heels and extreme fashions are a sign of an affluent … ah, decadent society?”

“No. I don't know what I'm saying, but that's not it.”

“But you'd rather not be fashionable?” He was being patient, really wanting to know.

She shrugged uncomfortably. A wife didn't keep a husband by making him be patient, for God's sake. “I didn't mean to make a federal case of it. What I
really
meant was … Well, it would be nice to live in a world where women didn't expect to be uncomfortable just because they're female.”

He looked at her, stared at her as though seeing her for the first time. She tried to read his face. What was he thinking? That it was her job to be fashionable? That he had her for that reason?

He wasn't looking at the sparkle!

What was he looking at?

T
HE PHONE RANG IN
C
AROLYN'S
bedroom, early in the morning. She picked it up to hear an operator asking if she would take a collect call from Mrs. Shy-oh.

Mrs. Chaillot. It was what Helen Jagger called herself, an ironic code.

“I'll take it, operator.” She heard a buzzing sound, someone swallowing painfully. “Is that you, Helen?”

“Yes.” Laughter, a little hysterical, on the edge of control. “Who else but the madwoman.”

“What's happened?”

“Not much. Just a frantic desire to hear a human voice. I've been thinking about Greta's little boys, and I got so sad.…”

“Helen. Your sister's out of it. Be thankful she's at peace.”

“It's the children! She had to be out of her mind to leave them like that. What if I'm driven out of my mind, Carolyn? What if I think I can't stand it anymore … ?”

“I told you I'd pick you up anytime, day or night. I told you I'd bring you here to take you anywhere you wanted to go. You don't have to stay there.”

“It's the children.”

“I can put you in touch with a network, Helen. They hide
mothers and children. We can arrange to have the kids picked up, you picked up, both at the same time.”

“Oh, I've dreamed about that, Carolyn, but it wouldn't do any good. They're in special schools! Scott's attending the American Institute. Jake says it's for kids who need to be kept quite safe from any improper influences. He means me, of course. I don't know where the place is, or where Emily is. Even if I could find them, Jake would find us. He'd kill them. He's told me so.”

Carolyn heaved a deep breath, silently beating her head against a symbolic wall. She'd been through all this before.

“He still won't let you answer the phone? He still checks the phone bill? He still doesn't let you have any money?”

“He won't let me use the phone, no. I'm calling from a public phone half a mile down the road. He calls home now and then, just to be sure I don't answer. The only money I find is what he leaves in his pockets, and even then I have to be careful because it might be bait. I found the money I used to call you under the cushion of his desk chair. I think he moved us out here just so every call would be long-distance! He figures I'm too proud to call you collect, as though I had any pride left.…”

“At least let me bring you some money. And a phone card. The bills will come here, he won't even know.”

Long silence, then a sob. “All right. There's a stone lantern down at the entrance road, it has an arched opening on each side. Put some money in there, in the corner, where it doesn't show. Quarters, Carolyn, please. So I can at least get the operator. Bring me a bottle, too.”

“Helen! You're not drinking?”

“Maybe one or two drinks a week. When things get … impossible.”

“I'll do it tomorrow. Has he hurt you?”

Helen's voice took on a note of quavering pride. “He doesn't hit me. I know the rules. That's how I triumph, knowing the rules well enough not to get hit.”

“He'll end up killing you.”

The ghost of a chuckle. “I'm not afraid of dying, Carolyn. Like they say about seasickness: It's only the hope of dying that's keeping me alive.”

The phone went dead. The line buzzed vacantly in Carolyn's ear, like a call to forever, waiting to go through. Sighing, she hung up the receiver, hauled herself off the bed, and
stalked down the hall to the big bedroom. Hal was sitting against piled pillows, peering at a book.

“Hi,” she breathed, crawling in beside him.

“Hi, yourself. To what do I owe the honor?”

“I'm miserable.”

“Something on the phone? I heard a distant alarum, a clangor, a tocsin.…”

“Helen Jagger.”

“Poor soul,” he said solemnly, meaning it, gathering her up into his strong old arms and kissing her ear. “What has that bastard Jagger done now?”

“Nothing more than usual. You know, when I first met Helen and Greta, they were as independent and strong as any women I'd ever known. Jagger went after Helen like a terrier after a rat, but why she married him, I'll never know. And now Greta's dead and Helen's just limp, all the starch battered out of her. He doesn't even need to hit her, he just threatens to hurt the kids and she caves in. He's got them in some cult school, someplace like that compound in Waco. The American Institute?”

“An Alliance school? It probably would be like the Branch Davidians in terms of access, but it's bound to be one hell of a lot bigger.”

“She doesn't even have family to turn to, and I can't help thinking part of it's my fault, Greta's death and all.”

He hugged her again, saying chidingly, “It was a divorce case, Carolyn, plain and simple. We lawyers don't ordinarily walk into a courtroom expecting to confront Mr. Hyde.”

“I should have been paying more attention.”

“You couldn't have known in advance that Jagger was like that.” Hal removed his glasses, laid them on the bedside table, and rubbed the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “There aren't many lawyers who will create evidence out of whole cloth in order to win. Even I didn't imagine he'd do that, and I had more reason to suspect him than you did.” He extricated his arm from around her, restored his glasses, and swung his legs out of the bed. “Pity I'm not still with the Bureau. Maybe I could get him bumped off.”

Carolyn plumped her pillow and settled herself. “Is that the proper word usage? Isn't it something about terminated with extreme prejudice?”

“That's more CIA, I think. Oh, hell, I was just an analyst. I was never into that stuff. I probably couldn't touch Jagger
anyhow. Rumor is, Jagger is connected at the top. He's said to be a protégé of Webster's.”

“Webster?” The name was familiar, but she couldn't place it.

He stood up and stretched, wincing when the muscles in his leg and back protested. “You saw him one time, love. Remember? First time we met. You in that adorable hat! When Albert was showing you through the Bureau, Webster was with the director.”

“Oh, of course! The Alliance founder and head honcho.”

“That's him. A man who's lately very cozy with the Vatican, according to Mike Winter. Also very cozy with several Arab states, serving as liaison among all of them.”

“Liaison for what?”

“The Vatican wants the help of Islam in carrying out its agenda.”

She sat up, glaring at him. “What agenda? When did this happen?”

“Has been happening. For years, sweetness.”

She threw up her hands, her voice rising: “Stop calling me sweetness and explain what you're saying!”

He leaned against the bedpost, assuming a professorial expression. “The imams and the pope made common cause some years ago and have been supporting each other at population conferences and at status-of-women conferences ever since. Back in ninety-five, for instance, the pope and the Arab states moved together to prevent women's groups from attending a women's-rights conference in China. They didn't succeed, but they came close, and they've had better luck since. The Vatican has been acting with the Arab states to defeat population-control measures at the UN for ten years or more. And it was the Vatican acting with the Islamic states that defeated the UN women's educational effort in ninety-eight, the so-called women's-empowerment crusade. The imams don't want women empowered. It was Islamic terrorists who bombed the dormitories at Vassar and Wellesley, and the same men had previously blown up girls' schools in Pakistan and Egypt. They were brought into the country by a certain religious order—guess which one?
Capisce?”

“Where did this come from?”

“I told you, Mike Winter. He tells me things.”

“You don't tell me, evidently!”

“I thought you knew. Bits and pieces have been in the papers all through the nineties.”

She knew that. She could remember the bits and pieces, but not this … this planned subversion. She shook her head, angry at herself. “I guess I didn't … connect it.”

“Well, Mike found out about the connection to the Vassar-Wellesley bombings a few days ago. He got it from the Israelis, because our own intelligence people have been told to keep their nose out. Which doesn't surprise me.”

“You're saying the FBI is on … on Webster's side.”

“Well”—he made an equivocal gesture—“
comme ci, comme ça
. One of the difficulties of being the good guys is that even open societies have to have secret police, and secret police turn toward repression as a compass points north.”

“And Jagger's one of the bad guys.”

“He's an Alliance man.” He leaned forward, stretching, rubbing at his injured leg, which itched. “Which raises the interesting question, are you considering our daughter's crazy request?”

She got up, annoyed, not at Hal's asking but at the subject itself. “Her asking me to defend the Dumpster mama? I've been diddling around, not saying yes or no. Stace finally called and jogged me. I'm going to see the accused today. Want to go with me?”

“Prisons do not greatly enliven my day.”

“You could keep me company on the drive; you could read some more of whatever you're reading.…”

“I was rereading. Sophy's first book of
Women's Stories.”

“What got you onto that?”

“My talk with Mike. In the light of that conversation, Sophy's books have acquired a certain … ah, prophetic resonance. All these antiwoman factions getting together would have been her worst nightmare. I was wondering how she saw so much of that kind of thing thirty-five years ago? Did she go looking for it?”

Carolyn walked to the window, forehead furrowed, wishing this conversation were about something else. “Of course she went looking for it; it was what she wanted to know about.”

“But, still, a woman, alone …”

“We used to say that. ‘Sophy, you shouldn't go there, not alone!' I'd have been scared to death to go some of the places she went, but she'd just smile and set off without a qualm. Of
course, she had one thing the rest of us lacked, and that was an almost supernatural facility for languages. She picked them up in days. She could take on local color, too, wherever she was, so as not to seem a stranger. If it meant wearing head-to-toe black wrappers, she'd do it.”

“She sure had a nose for tragedy.”

“It was more a nose for …”

“For what?”

“I'm trying to remember. She told me once she was looking for the basic imbalance. Something that was wrong, not natural.”

“That's what I always thought about her.”

“Sophy? That she was unbalanced?”

“No. That she wasn't … natural. You know, as a man, there's a kind of … oh, recognition signal you get from women, and I mean all women, even those who aren't interested in you in a sexual way. Maybe just a lifted eyebrow or a smile or a word said a certain way, whether they're eight or eighty. It's not a come-on. It's a sort of categorization, a mental filing. You know what I mean?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, Sophy never filed me as a male. She accepted me, just as she did you, but for all she cared, we were both the same sex.”

“How funny,” she murmured, trying to adjust her image of Sophy to include what Hal had just said.

“Definitely odd,” he emphasized, reaching for his cane. “Carolyn, dear love, if you will scramble me some eggs for breakfast, with some of that Jack cheese and some green chiles, please, I'll keep you company today.”

“If your leg's well enough.”

“The leg notwithstanding. That's part of the covenant—faithfulness, like a good dog.” He grinned at her. “Me and old Hector.”

“Both so well trained. Such good dogs.” She gave him a hug, then rubbed his back and shoulders while he made appreciative noises. “Do come, Hal. I feel all sort of adrift. I don't really want to do this, but I'm afraid I'm getting sucked in. I hate it, I really do. I hated it quite badly enough before Helen called, and now I really hate it.”