GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (44 page)

Seymour pictures the Prefect’s phallus,
immensely long, like the deployed sting of some unimaginable
insect, not spewing venom, but like a vampire, draining her of the
raw material of memory, so of being, and irreversibly.

Prostrated, Helen and Seymour and Max
collapse on their cots.

Louis sits on the edge of his cot, head
bowed, arms dangling between his thighs.

Time goes by in silence.

But then collapsing floors below and above
boom and timbers snap, boom like artillery, snap like rifles and
suddenly Louis is back then and there in valor as, shirtless
against the heat, they break out of the jungle into the meadow and
dig in against the bullets and shells from the booming snapping
entrenched heights until finally the Gatlings speak up and hold
down the Spanish fire and the bugle sounds and they rise to their
feet like a single man, shouting and charge. A soldier to his left
crumples, the bugle goes on sounding, they go on charging, dress on
the colors, boys.

He towers above them. Git up, we ain’t got time,
he orders, shaking them, pulling them up to their feet, telling
them that they’re going to rescue Margaret, maybe it’s too late but
maybe not, so they got to try instead of just laying here on their
backs. And then the tunnel. Maybe the tunnel don’t lead nowhere or
to worse than nowhere but maybe to where they want to go, maybe
just one chance in a thousand but they got to try. They can’t just
lay here on their backs.

Chapter 45

The Expedition

To guide their suspended successors to
possible freedom, Louis would have liked to mark the number of the
tunnel door on the wall, but he knows administrative tar would
censor it. Instead, he scrawls, in giant letters:
DO NOT GIVE UP HOPE
GOD IS WITH YOU
.

Then he kneels and prays for Margaret, prays
for success in their liberating and punitive venture.

On the way to the Administrative Hub, they
stop off at Louis’ armory. He chooses and allocates weapons and
tools. He thrusts a knife in his belt, slings a loaded crossbow
over one shoulder and over the other a quiver extemporized out of
an old boot and crammed with needle-sharp steel bolts. In his right
hand he grips a long spear, like Seymour and Max.

Even more tightly than the spear, Max grips
the key Louis has finally let him have, because he (Louis) will be
doing most of the fighting so if something happens to me you’ll be
able to leave. Basically Max and Seymour are pack animals, bearing
on their backs sledgehammer, pick, crowbar, shovel, rope-ladders,
flashlights with spare bulbs and batteries plus elephant-balls.

Helen has nothing. She’d insisted on having
her arms and back free to carry Margaret. When the men had
protested at the impossible burden, she’d replied, terribly, but in
her usual self-controlled voice, “She can’t weigh more than forty
pounds now,” and they said nothing.

Four-strong, the column works its way
through the rubble of the devastated corridors. Louis’ stabbing
flashlight beam lights up the long black stretches. The booming is
incessant.

Perhaps half a day later, Louis raises his
hand, stops and gags the lens of the flashlight with his
handkerchief. In the muffled light they move toward the growing
tumult ahead. Helen twists her ankle and trails behind.

Finally the men halt and kneel for
concealment behind the rubble that obstructs the mouth of the
corridor. They recall their long-ago first view, upon
materializing, of the Hub: under a dome of darkness the gigantic
poorly lighted circular passageway with a drab alternation of
hundreds of doors and open corridors running about a black pit a
mile in diameter. Obscurity has progressed. The dim stuttering wall
lamps are blurs in the dusty howling gale that shrouds most of the
passageway. But the little they see allows them to realize the
enormity of the challenge.

A dozen yards away, three massive Exiters
stand guard before the peristyle of the Prefect’s dwelling, the
first goal. The transparent shields and the wicked flexible clubs
are raised for immediate action and the goggle-eyes scan in a
crossfire of vigilance.

Further on, other Exiters are trying to beat
back a mob of maddened functionaries waving their arms and crying:
“Exit her! Exit her!” The Exiters’ black clubs and, worse, the
functionaries’ perilously bare hands lie between the Four and their
second goal: on the other side of the black chasm the distant
invisible corridor, Corridor 46, that leads to the tunnel.

Spectral in the dust storm, more
functionaries stumble out of their collapsing offices and join the
mob. It surges forward. Some, impaled on the barbed and pointed
fence that delimits the circular chasm, scream thinly. Plaster
fragments rain down from the darkness overhead. “The Dome is
collapsing! Exit her! Exit her!” The Exiters tirelessly flail
functionaries to their knees but move back under the pressure.

The three Exiters guarding the peristyle now
concentrate their vigilance on the nearing rioters, turning their
vulnerable backs to the three men. Tersely Louis assigns a target
for Max and Seymour. He rises out of crouch and commands: “Now!”
Gripping his long spear like a pole-vaulter, he starts running
forward. They have to imitate him.

Max’s Exiter wheels about at the last moment
and receives the spear point with Max’s hurtling weight behind it
on the shield. He totters back a few steps, then halts. The steel
spear bends, straightens out and propels Max sprawling and stunned
to the flagstones.

Seymour, running toward the assigned leather
back, imagines his spear point visiting entrails and squeamishly
squeezes his eyes shut a second before a contact which doesn’t take
place. He misses the Exiter and barges into a badly cracked marble
nude, one of six survivors of the original ten, barely upholding
the sagging Doric roof. The nude falls apart under the impact of
his violent embrace; the roof sags even more perilously; the
massive bronze eagle wrenches half-loose; Seymour drops stunned to
the floor.

Louis expertly rams his spear through the
third Exiter at the level of the liver and all the way to his
joined fists. Both fall, dangerously entangled. The Exiter who had
survived Max’s amateurish assault strides over and raises his
flexible club over Louis’ head. Louis has a lightning image of a
long-ago wooden dummy exploding under a Force Ten blow. He jerks
away. The club smashes a flagstone to pieces an inch from his
head.

As the Exiter tries to regain balance Louis
rolls over, frees the crossbow, aims and releases the bolt with a
musical twang. The keen steel penetrates the Exiter’s throat. Thick
gray blood spouts out of his open mouth. He crumples.

Before Louis can get to his feet and grab
Seymour’s spear or reload the crossbow, the last of the three
Exiters is upon him, club lifted. The wall lamps go out at that
instant. Muttering thanks to God for decreeing darkness, Louis
picks himself up. He gropes in the direction of his goal, the
peristyle, and collides with a marble nude.

The lights stutter back on, revealing the menacing
Exiter a foot away. His club whips like a scythe. Louis dodges and
sprawls. The marble nude receives the blow, Force Ten or more, and
she explodes into fragments. With the loss of still another pair of
supporting arms the roof slumps radically and the massive eagle
wrenches loose and topples onto the Exiter just as his club rises
above Louis’ head. The sharp bronze wing with a ton behind it
pierces the helmet and the man’s skull, emerging from his jaw like
a pharaonic beard.

Surely a sign from the Lord, Louis thinks,
stepping over the man’s body and the bird’s imperial beak.

By this time Max and Seymour are back on
their feet. Wrenching the ornate door open, Louis signals to them
and they race through the rococo antechamber and burst open the
door of the huge neo-classical office with blank-eyed Roman busts
in wall-niches and a giant desk. Behind it a locked door. Louis
kicks it open on an intimate room with a wealth of drapes. A small
circular table set for two is covered with decayed delicacies and
fragments of ceiling. A bottle of champagne lies drunkenly on a
rotting camembert. Plaster dust shrouds caviar and
pâté de foie
gras
. Crepe-paper
flowers blossom from a fluted crystal vase.

A crumpled knit dress and an old-fashioned
hand-cranked gramophone with piles of vinyl records lie on the
floor next to a space cleared, it can only be, for dancing. To one
side of a door, draped on a high-backed chair, is the prefectoral
uniform and, leaning against the chair point upward, the unsheathed
ceremonial sword.

The door is locked. Louis kicks it open.

Seymour, stumbling behind, sees him cross
the threshold, gripping a knife, followed by Max and then hears
Louis’ drained voice: “Almighty God, Almighty God.” And Max,
whispering: “Jesus, Jesus.” Seymour, approaching the threshold,
steels himself against the coming sight of the bed, imagining
Margaret naked and drained, a practical skeleton, her brain a
voided vault, alongside a sated monstrously bloated naked Prefect,
apoplectic with total recall.

Again Louis’ “Almighty God, Almighty God”
and Max’s “Jesus, Jesus” and as if in answer to those pleas, there
comes from the room ahead the biblical fragrance of what Seymour
can’t know is balsam, santal, myrrh, frankincense, stacte, onycha
and galbanum.

Now choking brimstone as he advances into
the smoke-filled room, nothing visible, thank God. A sizzle like a
bad short-circuit almost covers sobs (could that be Louis?), then
his eyes are seared by a glare of blue and the room explodes in
thunder. Seymour is hurled to the floor and loses
consciousness.

Comes to, half-blind with persistent blue,
thunder persistent in his ears, dazed, being dragged out of the
ruins. The new barbecue stench makes him gag on the names he tries
to pronounce but Max keeps dragging him, panting that it’s too late
for the two back there, they gotta get out of here and fast and now
pulling him to his feet and forcing him back the way they had
come.

They totter into the rococo waiting room
just as Helen hobbles in. Seymour expects her to stop them and ask:
“What’s happened to Margaret? Where is Louis?” But she limps past,
as if the two of them didn’t exist, as if she expected nothing
better than ignominious flight on the part of the men she’d called
murderers.

Stumbling out of the Prefect’s dwelling,
Seymour and Max work their way, in worsened gloom, through the
chaos of the fallen peristyle, the roof fragments and dismembered
nudes, skirting the bodies of the Exiter with the steel bolt in his
throat, the one with the midriff pierced by the spear and the one
with his skull skewered by the bronze eagle’s wing.

They emerge into the circular passageway and
absolute silence. The booming has stopped. The gale has fallen, the
dust settled. No more dome fragments fall from the darkness
overhead. The insurrectionary tumult has ceased although in the
nearly extinct light of the bulbs they can make out the mass of the
motionless functionaries and Exiters who hopelessly block the way
to Corridor 46 and the door marked 147 and behind it the possible
tunnel to freedom.

Just as the thousands of wall bulbs start
brightening they hear movement behind them. The Exiter with the
arrow in his throat stirs in his vast puddle of thick gray blood
and rises to his feet, as does the spear-pierced one. The third
with his ton headpiece of imperial bronze resurrects too out of
blood and impossibly arises. All three stand at stiff
attention.

Terrorized, Seymour, followed by Max, starts
running toward distant Corridor 46 on the other side of the massed
functionaries and Exiters. Strangely reconciled now, they stand
stock still at attention, statues of obedience, dangerous clubs and
even more dangerous bare hands tight to their bodies. Weaving past
them, followed by Max, Seymour makes out in the growing light
Hedgehog with his bottle-glasses, and Sadie and Philippe and
Turnkey, all stiff with allegiance, paying no attention to the
suspended duo, as though they were invisible. Functionaries and
Exiters face, as at a rising sun, the Reception Room on the
threshold of which stands once ragged once Sub-Prefect
Marchini.

Prefect Marchini now, subordinate to none
but the Most High, resplendent in a spotless white integrally
buttoned lavishly braided and medalled uniform. He outshines the
brightening bulbs. The functionaries’ pale lips move in their
expressionless masks as they hail in chorus: “Glory to the Supreme
Echelon!” “All delegated power to Prefect Marchini!” Even the
functionaries impaled on the barbs and points of the wrought-iron
fence join in.

The way is free.

Puffing badly, Max and Seymour race toward
Corridor 46. Prefect Marchini’s voice echoes behind them: “A new
era in the history of the Prefecture has commenced. The work of
reconstruction shall begin immediately. Return to your
offices.”

Advocate’s voice reaches them faint and
quavering from the other side of the black chasm:

“
Monsieur
Stein … return … all is well. Return … I
implore you … Return … all is well now …”

When they finally reach Corridor 46 Seymour
halts, turns about and sees Helen held limp, surely dead, in the
arms of an Exiter.

He starts bawling for her and for Louis and
for Margaret. Max yells that the Exiters are coming for them, yanks
Seymour into the corridor and forces him to run, the way Louis did
at the beginning here for both of them in the interest of physical
and mental well-being until kind sad Helen came to their rescue and
convinced him to stop.