Amerika (6 page)

Peter cornered Dr. Alan Drummond on the courthouse square, before the city council meeting. The chief of staff at Milford County Hospital was fiftyish, a husky black man with graying hair and a kind of delicate and battered humanity about him. Although an exile, he was a necessary commodity—a doctor—to the Milford community.

“Got a moment, doctor?”

“Always, Peter, for you.”

“Ward told me about the man who died at your hospital last night. It sounded like those new Triage guidelines killed him.”

“Drinking lighter fluid killed him. But the guidelines didn’t help any. The rule was clear. I wasn’t supposed to do a thing for him. A matter of priorities.”

“What about your Hippocratic Oath?”

“You’ want me to disobey the guidelines? That’s essentially the same as disobeying the National Advisory Committee.”

“If a life is hanging in the balance, I want you to ignore them if you have to.”

“Will you put that in writing, Peter?”

“No.”

A wry smile crossed Alan Drummond’s face. “That’s smart of you. Back in Philadelphia, I put something in writing once. Cost me a two-hundred-thousand-a-year practice. I wasn’t political—just doing the decent thing. Some other people didn’t quite see it that way, and now I’m in Nebraska. Nothing against your home state, Peter, but if we’re talking about circles of hell, I’ve fallen far enough, thank you very much. Far enough so that I’m keenly aware of how much farther they might have pulled me down—if the idea of minority doctors didn’t fit in quite so neatly with their propaganda. So now I think about politics and guidelines, jump when the advisory committees say jump, and worry about informers on my staff. And yet, dammit, I hate for people to die in my county if there’s a chance of saving them.”

“My advice is pick your shots, Peter. You can’t save everybody.”

The two men went into the council chambers. The city council met weekly in a large conference room that featured portraits of Lincoln and Lenin on the far wall. Their session did nothing to lighten Peter’s spirits. Someone reported that the local VFW chapter was refusing to march in the Lincoln Day parade if the SSU troops participated. There was a lot of talk about biack-market skimming of already scarce consumer goods and about whether the county could meet its production quota. Some people wanted to blame everything on the Exiles, wanted to turn the SSU loose on them. Before long, Alan Drummond was embroiled in an impassioned defense of those who had fallen much farther than himself.

“You don’t understand the first thing about it,” he raged. “They didn’t ask to be sent here. Some of them have been here for years—three years now. They aren’t farmers but they’re trying to make a living on those pathetic little plots of land they gave them. But when they come into town, they’re treated like outcasts, like dirt. Dammit, they’re Americans!”

“Don’t get riled up, Alan,” said one of the council members, a red-faced hardware merchant. “I just wish ail the exiles were people who wanted to work and make a place for themselves.”

“That sounds too damn much like what bigots used to say about blacks,” Alan Drummond said bitterly. “You don’t understand what these people are up
against.”

“The White House sent them here,” another council member declared. “Let the White House feed them.” “Wait a minute,” Peter said at last. “That’s easy to say. But it’s us who have to deal with them. I don’t know if you heard, but the exiles rioted in Missouri last week. I don’t want that here.”

“Let ’em riot. The Special Service Units can handle ’em.”

“Not in my county,” Peter said firmly.

And so it went. Peter thought that whoever said “divide and conquer” damn sure knew what he was talking about.

As the meeting broke up, the men headed for the doorway amid a humming chorus of gripes, groans, and unresolved complaints. Peter Bradford, having heard enough 'of his neighbors’ sorrows for one morning, hoped to slip away without being buttonholed. But as he was halfway down the corridor, Ward Milford motioned him over. The deputy sheriff looked dramatically pale and tenser than he had seemed at breakfast that same morning.

“What is it, Ward?” asked Peter, with ill-concealed impatience.

“New Exile list just came in.”

“Can’t it wait? I really need to get out of here.” “No, Peter. It can’t wait. Read it.” He thrust the computer printout into Peter’s hands and scrutinized his expression as the county administrator scanned the list of unfamiliar names. For a moment he had the distracted look of a busy man whose time is being wasted. Then he winced.

“Devin.”

“Yes. My brother Devin’s coming home.”

Peter paused and his gaze seemed to look back twenty, thirty years. “Your brother; my friend. You’d think we’d be a little glad. Know what I mean?”

“You get used to things the way they are,” said Ward. Not too many bumps. “Everything in its place.” “And some people’s place is to be gone.”

“We’ll get used to him not gone just like we got used to him gone.”

“Maybe not so easily,” said Peter. “I love your brother, and he’s trouble.”

“I iove my brother, too. And I hate myself for half wishing that he wasn’t coming back.”

Peter Bradford walked out into the daylight alone. His mind reeled and the sudden glare stung his eyes. He wrestled with his conflicting emotions about Devin
M
i
l
ford’s imminent return. He’d worked so hard to establish order, to keep the peace, to maintain some semblance of normalcy among his neighbors. Yet he knew all that he’d achieved was fragile. He knew the unrest and the anger that remained, just waiting to be set off. He trembled to acknowledge that maybe he himself yearned secretly for the explosion. It was the kind of daydream he could not allow himself.

Suddenly, Peter was seized by an urgent longing to talk to and be comforted by his wife. Walking quickly across the town square, seeing nothing along the way, he hurried to the state-owned grocery store where he knew Amanda would be shopping. Amanda, as the wife of the county administrator, didn’t need to stand in line with the others as they waited for their scanty rations of flour, vegetables, and sometimes meat. She
chose to. The thought of special treatment was repellent to her.

“Peter,” she said cheerfully as he moved toward her, “what brings you—”

“I need to talk to you,” he said. “Come across to the park with me.”

Startled by his urgency, Amanda Bradford hesitated. She glanced over her shoulder and thought of asking the woman in back of her to hold her place in line. But no, even that might be perceived as special privilege, might create resentment. She silently abandoned the queue and followed her husband.

Peter Bradford sat down on the edge of a battered bench, oblivious to the cold. His wife sat beside him. She reached for both his hands and tried to read his agitated face. “It’s Devin . .

Amanda’s first thought was that Devin Milford was dead. Her breath caught.

“He’s,coming home.”

“Thank God.” Amanda caught the fleeting wounded look on her husband’s face, but it was already too late to explain. “When did he get out of the hospital?” “He wasn’t in the hospital, Amanda. He was in a prison camp.”

“All this time?”

Peter nodded.

“Those bastards.”

Peter moved toward her, then thought better of it, staying where he was, a little hurt, perhaps half angry. “Yeah. Well, I thought you’d like to know.”

“Oh, Peter,” she said. “Don’t. I hate what happened to Devin, and I’m glad he’s going to be all right— whatever that means—but we’ve been married twenty years, for God’s sake.”

She took his arm, and he looked down at her sadly. “That’s the way it is when you’re second choice to a hero.”

“He wasn’t a hero when I married you—-I’m not sure he’s a hero now.” She smiled. “I think you’re a hero. You’ve held your family together and this county too. I don’t love Devin Milford. I don’t even know who he is anymore. I love you.” Her eyes glistened. “For such a smart man, you can really be dumb sometimes.”

She kissed him and he smiled almost bashfully. “And to think I risked my place in line for this,” she kidded, feeling anew about Peter the way she always wanted to feel about him.

Chapter
4

For two hours
they were shown “indoctrination”
fi
lms
:
crude, committee-approved rhetoric about the administrative areas and the
PPP
and all the other glories of the Transition. Finally there was a lecture, warning the almost-ex-prisoners to be Good Citizens, to be Positive and Patriotic, lest they once again be declared “antisocial” and in need of “reeducation.” Devin nearly shuddered at the prospect.

After the films, Devin and forty or fifty others were herded into a converted barracks that now contained a dozen green metal desks and twenty or so file cabinets left over from World War II. Each desk had a clerk behind it, checking records. In time, Devin was called before a thin and severe young woman who studied his file with a glazed expression.

“Your records were left in the truck from Fort Davis. That’s why you had to wait so long.” She spoke with a slow Texas drawl, her large brown eyes focusing on his file. “Are you somebody important?”

“No.”

“Well, you got a red tag on your file and that usually means something important.” She looked at the file again. “Huh. It says here you ran for president in 1992.” She scrutinized Devin’s face. “Is that a joke?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “You must’ve really screwed up. Were you a fascist?”

“No.”

“It says here you were in a mental hospital too.” “No. They sent me to Fort Davis.”

“Well, the file’s probably screwed up. Most of them are. But if it’s peachy with you, it’s peachy with me.” She regarded him again and smiled. “The prison record’s what counts anyway and yours looks real good. You have to go through orientation and delousing and then the magistrate’ll see you.”

“What? We were cleaned at the camp.”

The interview had ended. The young clerk closed Devin’s file. “Next.”

When Andrei’s jet Sanded at Dulles Airport, west of Washington, a military helicopter was waiting to whisk him westward to the command headquarters of General Petya Samanov, an “adviser” to the American government. In fact, Samanov was the single most powerful man in the country.

His estate, Birdsong, was built in the 1790s by one of Virginia’s first governors. The red-brick mansion sat atop a low hill, circled by oaks and lush farmland composed of gently rolling fields where generations of Virginia’s finest, fleetest horses had grazed. A bronze plaque by the front door boasted that Washington,

Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had all visited here, and Petya Samanov gloried in this connection.

Until the Transition, Birdsong had been a historic landmark, open to tourists, but it had fallen into disrepair until Petya chose it for his home and headquarters. He kept an office in the White House, but it was here that he preferred to spend his time, amid the magnolias and the sweet-gum trees.

As his helicopter alighted in the field beside the mansion, Andrei admired its clever defense network. The casual visitor saw only the house and outbuildings, the barns, ponds, jumps, white fences, and tall trees; no one would discern the regiment of KGB border troops that was on duty in the bunker beneath the largest bam, or the squadron of attack helicopters less than a mile away, screened by century-old oaks. Petya could hardly have been safer in the Kremlin itself.

The hand-carved door of the graceful mansion flew open and Petya himself burst out of the vestibule, his arms outstretched. He was a tall, robust man of sixty, deeply tanned, with shrewd brown eyes, graying hair that was thinning on top, and long bushy sideburns. His quick and easy smile illuminated his face with friendly charm. He wore gray flannel trousers and a tweed jacket, as befit his role as country squire. Andrei took the steps two at a time and embraced his friend and mentor.

“My general,” he said in Russian, truly moved.

“Andrei, my dear boy,” Samanov said, in English. “It is such a delight to see you, even under these dubious circumstances. Come in, come in.”

He led the way into a huge drawing room with fires roaring at either end, where two dozen men and a few beautiful young women were drinking and talking. The men, most of them old friends from university days, gathered around Andrei. They shook his hand, embraced him, and made jokes; soon Andrei was grinning like a schoolboy, relaxing as he never could in Chicago.

The men, primarily KGB officers, were dressed in business suits and looked quite American. Andrei took the women to be callgirls—they were Russian, for security’s sake—invited by Petya for whatever moments of relaxation might occur.

“We are all here,” Petya said. “All the area advisers, and the advisers to the South Florida Space Zone and the three International Cities.”

“I hope I have not delayed you,” Andrei said.

“We would wait for you forever, Andrei,” Petya said with a wink. “Or at least another ten minutes. Come, we must begin.”

He led the way into the dining room, where his guests left drinks and women behind and took their places around a long mahogany table whose surface was so exquisitely polished that it glinted. Elaborate silver sconces adorned one wall and on the opposite wall was an electronic overlay of the U.S. Petya Samanov stood before the map, his face somber now.