The Affinities (29 page)

The house where Jenny's mother lived had not been well maintained. From the curling shingles to the faded siding, it announced neglect. Jenny's dad had left enough money for upkeep, Jenny said, but her mom was too far in the bottle to hire a contractor or even a handyman. I parked and went up the three wooden stairs of her front porch and knocked at the door, wondering if she would recognize me.

A couple of minutes passed before she answered. As the door opened, the house exhaled a sour effluvium of tobacco smoke and body odor. Mrs. Symanski stood in that invisible wind, oblivious to it, wearing a stained gray nightdress, a nasty caricature of Jenny's mom as I had once known her. She gazed at me and said, “Have you come to fix the electricity?”

“No. Mrs. Symanski? It's me, Adam. Adam Fisk.”

She squinted. “Aaron?”

“No,
Adam
. Aaron's brother.”

“Fuck me, I believe it is. Well, well. What brings you here?”

“Actually, I'm looking for Geddy. Has he been here today?”

“What—Geddy?”

“Yes. My stepbrother. Geddy.”

“What would Geddy Fisk be doing here?”

“Well, that's the thing. When he went out this morning he said he was going to call on you. But that was quite a while ago, and he hasn't come back. I was wondering if he made it here at all.”

“Why would he come here?”

“He's in town and wanted to say hello.”

“Well, he didn't. Say hello, I mean. Is he lost? How do you get lost in a one-horse town like Schuyler?”

“So you haven't seen him at all?”

“Not since Jenny was a girl.” She gave me a longer look, as if trying to locate me in the crumbling firmament of her memory. “Adam Fisk. Looking for Geddy? Can't you just, uh, phone him?”

“Unfortunately no. The phones aren't working.”

“Or the lights.
Or
my fucking stove.
Or
the refrigerator. Food spoiling. Nothing works right anymore.”

I guessed on olfactory evidence that her food had been spoiling long before the blackout. Or else she didn't bother taking out the trash. “Mrs. Symanski, I wish I could stay—”

“You should have married her.”

“Excuse me?”

“If you'd married Jenny she wouldn't have to live with your brother. I guess it won't shock you to learn Aaron's an asshole. But I knew that about him. I always knew that about him, always, always. The way he looks at people. You were different. You didn't have that, um, assholiness in your eyes. Yeah, but you
didn't
marry her, did you? You gave her to Aaron like she was some bicycle you got too big for.”

“You haven't seen Geddy, then?”

“No, I haven't seen Geddy Fisk, for better or worse.”

“Then I need to keep looking. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Symanski.”

“Don't you want to come in?”

It was an invitation to enter the kingdom of futility and despair she had made of her life. The world the Affinities were meant to redeem. “I can't right now.”

“Should have married her,” she said, closing the door in my face.

*   *   *

I thought obsessively about Geddy as I drove to Schuyler's small police station. And the memory that came to mind was of the night he had burst into my bedroom, tearfully demanding to know whether the world was
old
or
young.

So typically Geddy, that attack of philosophical anxiety. So impossibly difficult to anticipate or answer. Moments like this were what had made Geddy an outsider, friendless at school, mocked behind his back and often enough to his face. I loved Geddy dearly, loved him maybe more than I loved my biological brother Aaron, but his strangeness was a constant admonition:
There but for the grace of God go I.
I had been a solitary kid with a sketchbook and a penchant for keeping my own company, and Geddy was just a few steps farther down the same road—and that much closer to the annihilating loneliness at the end of it.

The police station was on Schuyler's main street. Downtown traffic was almost nonexistent today, and most businesses were closed for the obvious reason, but I noticed the Sunnyside Diner and a couple of coffee-and-muffin places running on generator power, doors open and decent crowds inside. It was Sunday, and the parking lots at both the Catholic and Methodist churches were full. I pulled into the first vacant space in front of the Town of Schuyler Police Department. Inside, I told the uniformed officer at the front desk that I was looking for someone who hadn't come home and I wanted to make sure he hadn't been in an accident.

The officer told me 911 was down or intermittent, so there could have been any number of situations not reported, and in any case his people were “working their asses off” responding to the calls or notifications they
had
received, so he couldn't really help me—except to say that most of the problems they had encountered so far seemed relatively minor and he hadn't heard about anything involving serious injuries. But I could check with the county hospital if I liked.

Onenia County Regional Hospital was on the other side of town, usually a ten-minute drive but I made it in eight, ignoring the speed limit and thinking about Het. It was likely that the Het enforcers who had run Trevor's vehicles into a ditch were also responsible for Geddy's disappearance. For that reason, Trev had not wanted me riding around town by myself—but his first duty now was to protect Jenny, and he had relented. The question was, if the Het guys had taken Geddy, what did they want with him?

Het was a secretive Affinity, but we had learned a few things about it since the time Amanda took a stray bullet from a Het rifle some years ago. Being a Het meant, among other things, knowing who was entitled to give orders and who was obliged to follow them—and being okay with that. Hets were happy to take orders from other Hets as long as the pecking order felt rational and clearly defined. Individual members deferred to their tranche leaders, tranches were organized by region, the regions elected representatives to national sodalities, the sodalities sent delegates to an annual pan-Het convention. They were cagey about publicly naming leaders, but there was rumored to be a ruling council of ten overseen by their head man, Garrison. Other Affinities tended to be less rigidly organized, Tau being an obvious example, and the laborious process of consensus-building meant we couldn't carry off the kind of turn-on-a-dime political maneuvers for which Het had become famous.

Back when InterAlia was still fighting for control of the Affinities, the corporation had seen Het as a useful ally. InterAlia had offered them a deal: help us manipulate our opponents and we'll make you a silent partner, a sort of King Affinity. And when Meir Klein defected from InterAlia, it was most likely Het assassins they had sent to deal with the problem.

Not that Het was an Affinity composed of cold-blooded murderers—far from it. Most Hets never learned about the occasionally lethal skirmishes their sodalities undertook, and no such case had ever been prosecuted in the courts. But individual Hets were fiercely loyal to their Affinity; only rarely would an individual Het question orders from above or pry into the sodality's motives; and they were not above threatening or harming an innocent person to achieve their ends. They had made that abundantly clear. But still, if they had taken Geddy—why
Geddy
?

The waiting room in the emergency department of the regional hospital was mostly empty and the woman at the admissions desk seemed almost pleased to see me. I gave her Geddy's name and description and asked whether he had been admitted this morning. She didn't even have to check the records: Nope. She had been on duty all day, and the only admission had been a seventy-eight-year-old man who suffered a myocardial infarction while visiting his daughter in the maternity ward.

I thanked her and left.

I had a couple more places to visit. Trevor had given me the names and addresses of some Taus from the local tranche. But as it turned out, I only needed to see the first of them.

*   *   *

Her name was Shannon Handy.

Shannon was fifty-seven years old, a Tau for more than a decade, and she lived alone in a bungalow east of downtown and south of the highway. I knocked at the door, identified myself as a visiting Tau with sodality connections, and told her I needed to speak to her about an urgent matter. She invited me in.

Her home was clean and smelled faintly of maple smoke from a modern wood-burning stove in the kitchen. “Pollutes the atmosphere—it's a carbon sin, I guess—but it comes in handy when the power goes off. Warms the house and I can make a pot of tea to pass the time. Would you care for a cup?”

We sat at her kitchen table while she waited for the water to boil. Because she was a Tau, we didn't need to dance around the proprieties. She knew without asking that I was worried and I knew without asking that she was willing to help. She listened attentively as I explained the situation, twice asked me to clarify some detail or other, and when I finished she poured tea for both of us and doled out sugar and milk and sipped from her cup for a few silent moments.

“Big happenings for Schuyler,” she said eventually. “Huh! Aaron Fisk, local hero, junior congressman, friend to the beleaguered middle class—and raging asshole, apparently. So we need to find your brother Geddy, and we need to do it as soon as possible, assuming these Het folks haven't already spirited him out of town.”

“I think the blackout might work in our favor,” I said. “Typically, Het enforcers won't act without instructions from their superiors, and unless they have magic telephones, they aren't getting any.”

“They might be working from some prearranged plan, no need for instructions.”

“They might. But as I said, Geddy's not directly involved in any of this—he's not even a Tau. Kidnapping him, if that's what they've done, seems kind of, I don't know, improvisational.”

“And even if the blackout does help us, it could end at any time. So whatever we do, we should do it as soon as possible. Which means we don't really have time to appreciate a nice cup of Earl Grey.” She stood up. “Let's go.”

“Go where?”

“I manage a store in Schuyler. It's called Gizmos—you must have passed it on your way to the police station. We sell personal electronics, cell phones, coffeemakers, shit like that.”

“Sure, but—”

“See, there are twelve Tau households in Schuyler. More in the neighboring counties, especially Duchesne and Flaxborough—our tranches all party together—but twelve inside the city limits. We're well connected in the community and we're mostly long-time residents. We know the town and the people who live in it.”

“That's great, but—”

“Hush and let me finish. I did the annual inventory at Gizmos just last week, so I know we've got at
least
sixteen pairs of two-way radios in stock—what you call walkie-talkies. Little Motorolas with a range of fifteen miles or so. You get one, your friend Trevor gets one, every ambulatory Tau in Schuyler gets one. Once we're hooked up we can get coordinated, make a plan, do what we do best. How's that sound?”

Strength in numbers. I felt a little surge of optimism, the possibility that this awful day might have a non-tragic ending. Shannon gave me a sympathetic smile. “We'll take my car,” she said.

 

CHAPTER 20

Driving back from Gizmos with a trunkful of two-way radios, I shared a few more details about Jenny and Aaron and their relation to Geddy.

Shannon listened thoughtfully. “Well,” she said, “maybe these Het goons just screwed up. Maybe they wanted Jenny Fisk, but Geddy was the one they could get, so Geddy's the one they took. My opinion, for what it's worth? They'll probably try to cut a deal. Give you Geddy in exchange for, I guess, not releasing the abuse video.”

“Either way, it's an impasse until the blackout ends.”

“Because they can't even negotiate Geddy's release until they can talk to you. In the meantime, they keep Geddy somewhere we can't find him.”

Geddy had never much liked traveling. He hated sleeping in strange rooms, rooms in which strangers had slept. That had been the worst of part of touring with a band, he once told me.
All those ugly little beds in all those ugly little rooms.

“Well, hang in,” Shannon said. “This isn't a big town. Unless he's already gone, we'll find him.”

We pulled up at her house. She offered to cook me dinner; I told her I needed to get back to Rebecca and Jenny and Mama Laura. She wanted to talk to Trev, who could describe the Het vehicles and maybe some faces. “He can contact me by radio,” she said. “And in the meantime—”

She didn't finish the sentence. She was interrupted by a trilling that emanated from the left hip pocket of her faded jeans. Wide-eyed, she pulled out her phone. But the ringtone stopped before she could answer it. “False alarm,” she said. “Huh.”

But it was more than a false alarm. It was a promise and a warning. The engineers and IT geeks of the world were working the problem. Communications would be restored soon, maybe any minute now. For better or for worse.

*   *   *

It was dusk by the time I got back to my father's house. Trevor came down the front porch as I parked and met me when I stepped out of the car. I told him where I'd been and what I'd learned, and he nodded approvingly when I showed him the two-way radios.

“Gives us a fighting chance, anyway. I'll talk to this woman—Shannon?”

“Shannon Handy.”

“Living up to her name, seems like. You go on inside.”

“I need to explain all this to Mama Laura.”

“Jenny already had a talk with her. About Aaron. And the video.”

“I should have been here.”

“They don't know about the Het troops, but they both figure Geddy's been kidnapped for the purpose of keeping the video quiet. This is hard on both of them, especially Mama Laura. We need to be solving the problem, not explaining it.”