First Citizen (22 page)

At first, I thought Tracy was throwing a party. I pushed on the door with my face working up a big smile for our old friends and the new ones Tracy was sure to have found. But the foyer was empty, neat as always except for the scatter of handbag, keys, and scarf Tracy usually dumped on the table there. Just the music coming through that space.

I climbed the six steps to the living room. It was empty, too, except for a weasel-faced man who was wearing one of my checkered silk robes, tied loosely, with his hairy chest sticking out one end and his hairy legs sticking out the other. He was sitting on the couch, grooving on the music, and drinking my scotch. Haig & Haig Twenty. From the bottle.

“Who are—?” I started to shout over the music.

Then from the upper balcony leading to the bedroom I heard: “Gran! Help!”

Weasel Face did a double take and started to get up. I nailed him. Ten years of soft living and making money hadn’t rotted my body. I ran through the
katas
every other day, working out in a clear space at the resident’s gym. My edge had lost nothing.

I nailed him. From a standing start at the top of the stairs I was across the living room in three giant steps and a quarter turn that brought my heel—six layers of Italian leather and one of hardened callus—straight onto the point of his chin. He did a backflip over the couch and balled up in the corner by the window. It probably broke his neck, although I didn’t hear the telltale
crick.

There had to be more of them. Right? They had to be upstairs. Right? So I took the risers three at a time, shrugging out of my suit jacket and clawing at my tie.

Number Two, a scrufbum with half a week’s growth of beard, naked as a hairy ape, stood in the bedroom doorway. I put three stiff ringers six inches deep in his solar plexus. But I didn’t finish him off. Somebody had to be around for the S.F.P.D. to book.

On the bed, were Tracy and Number Three, who was looking over his shoulder with slack- jawed surprise. He seemed about as clean as his partners. Tracy and he were both naked. That is, from what I could see: They were
under
the satin sheets. On the top of the sheets was a smattering of fresh blood. Coming from Tracy’s nose. I was ready to leap on the bed and stomp him. But that might have hurt Tracy more: He was kind of on top of her. Instead, I grabbed his foot and pulled—except in the tangle of satin I got her ankle and she yelped. On my second try, the foot was his. Sensei Kan always said, “Strike clean, never grapple. That’s judo, and I don’t teach it.” But there I was, pulling 190 pounds of wife-molester down-bed, against the tuck of the sheets, going slower and slower all the time. What else could I do? It was a big bed, and I wanted to get at him to pound him.

Tracy was screaming, the
modo
was still thumping, and the guy was saying things like “Hey! Wait a minute! I can explain!” Just what you’d expect, and I had no reason to listen. But finally I had to listen. The disc player ran out of music, Tracy ran out of screams, and the friction—even with satin sheets—finally caught up with my tugging. I let go and he sat up in a pile of shiny white cloth.

Tracy used a corner of it to wipe her still-dribbling nose. She was giving bruised looks alternately to the guy and to me.

“That’s better,” he said. “My leg was comin’ off.”

“Better?” I felt my face go stiff again. “I come home, find three guys raping my wife, and you’re worried about your leg? You should see your friends.”

“Hey! What rape?” he protested. “She invited us in. I’m the engineer for this building. They’re the gardeners. We got contracts to be here.”

“Contracts? To rape my—?”

“Oh, brother! What you don’t know! You think that little bit of blood makes it rape? She popped herself on the schnoz two seconds after we heard the door slammin’ open. This is purely a setup. And if you’ve hurt those gardeners, you’ll have assault and battery charges comin’ out of your ears. Not to mention a union grievance.”

Tracy was strangely quiet. I looked at her. She was making no move to cover herself, even though my hauling had pulled the sheet down to her knees. Instead, she was working her face up to the right state of outrage.

“It was too rape!” she screamed after a second. “You guys forced your way in here. Knocked me around. You put on the disc player to cover the yells. Then you stripped me and carried me, biting and scratching, up here!”

“Oh come on, bitch!” he said tiredly. “Where are the bites? Where are the scratches?” He showed me his arms, mugged his face left and right. “And, about the music, she said she liked to fuck to that
reggae
beat. Mister, we’ve both been had!”

It was Tracy’s word against his. And against the fact that, for a scene where three guys had set on her, the apartment was strangely neat. The men’s denims were folded or hung over chairs. Her clothes seemed to have been put away.

Tracy’s words and the blood on her nose were giving me a convenient reason to side with her. I could press charges against these guys and not a judge in the city would fail to arraign them. Except for the fact that it would be a huge scandal, smeared all over the media: the Case of the Penthouse Pests. I could read those headlines on the front screen of my mind. And except that Tracy might pull the same stunt the next time I went away on business. I understood all this just standing there.

“Get out,” I told him quietly.

“Granny!” Tracy half-screamed, half-pleaded.

“Take your friends,” I said, still talking to him. “If I hear one word about lawsuit or grievance, you’re going to see some disappearing acts you wouldn’t believe.”

“Hey, I got rights,” he whined.

“Not in my house. Get out.”

So he went, taking the other two, Bruised Belly and the Undead One from the living room. On the way, he gathered their clothes; they also got away with my robe and my scotch. I never heard a peep from them afterward, and maintenance on the grounds didn’t seem to suffer—for the little bit of time we continued to live there.

“Well, you certainly embarrassed me, Gran.” Tracy slowly pulled the blood-spattered satin up around her breasts.

“Three at a party, Tracy? With the
gardeners?”

“I guess you don’t believe me. It was rape. They forced me.”

“Damned considerate, putting your clothes away like that.”

“They wanted to make it
look
like something else.”

“Clever fellas.”

“They
were!”

“Pardon me if I don’t believe you. It’s really nothing personal. Just—this puts me in a very bad situation. A man in my position, who does the deals I must, has to give his word sixteen times a day. People rely on what, I guess, you could call my honor. So, I really can’t be vulnerable to blackmail. Or even to the snickerings of people who think they know what’s going on behind my back. Not even discreetly.”

“You cold-blooded bastard!”

“No, Tracy. It’s simply that my wife—”

“You prancing freak!”

“—has to be above suspicion.”

“Do you think I don’t know about your
boys?”

Poor Tracy thought she had a stopper there. Fact was, she didn’t know anything and was only guessing wildly. And if I were doing anything, I’d be one hell of a lot more discreet than she had been. Christ, leaving the door hanging open! And her guesses were truly irrelevant, because the issue in question was not what I might have done, but what I found her doing. However, like a wise old woods wolf, I knew that the best policy with a discovered trap is to spring it, harmlessly, from the outside.

“Doing
what
with boys, dear wife?” I countered.

“You’ll swing with anything, Gran, provided it hasn’t been dead three days. And I’ll bet you’ve tried that, too.”

“Homosexuality, pedophilia, necrophilia—that’s quite a catalog of fantasies. Do you want to add bestiality or just leave it to be presumed? You have quite a few unfounded allegations, but not one of them backed by evidence or even hearsay.”

“Don’t wrap me up in lawyer’s words, Gran.”

“I’ll wrap you in a bill of divorce, you hussy. I caught you
in flagrante delicto.”

“What does that mean?”

“Getting reamed and liking it.”

She smiled at that, the slow, lazy smile of a satisfied woman. “Go ahead and sue. Do it now, and you can make the
Examiner’s
evening edition. We can be on the
Ten O’Clock News.
‘Prominent Dog-Faced Boy and Socialite Wife Wrangle Over Billion-Dollar Estate.’ I
like
it!”

Actually, the money was now more than two billion, with the latest S.W.E.E.P. transactions, but I wasn’t going to tell Tracy that. Let her attorney dig through layer on layer of holding companies, joint ventures, stock options, and poison pills. Like Schliemann digging at Troy, he was never going to find the real treasure. But this matter wasn’t going to get that far.

“Ride’s over, Trace. I want you out of here in twenty-four hours. You can take what you like. Hint, hint: There’s probably three hundred thou in Bophuthatswana’s new gold rands hidden behind the bookcases. Keep whatever you can find. I’m turning my back now. If you disappear without a scene, I will make out a cashier’s check for fifteen million for you. If you try to make a fuss, you will disappear without a sign.”

“That’s a threat! My lawyer will hear about it. It’s mental cruelty!”

“Your lawyer will take half of that fifteen mill if you’re not careful. See? I’m looking the other way. Take what you can and get out. Now!” I really did turn my back on her.

From the rustling and the banging—of bedsheets, bare feet, clothes, and finally the closet door—she cleared out in nineteen seconds. I vacated the apartment for a few days and when I came back, it had been stripped. Empty. Everything gone including the runner in the hallway and the light fixtures in the bathroom.

Let her have it. I never heard another word from Tracy Starrett Corbin, her lawyer, or her kin. The check I had left in her name at the bank was picked up inside of thirty-six hours. This time around, it was I who filed divorce papers
in absentia.
And like Anne Caheris, I did it from Mexico, too, but I didn’t go there just for a legal dodge.

I went to war.

You see, ever since I was a kid, Mexico had been a country on the edge of disaster, in terrible economic shape, dying, dying, and not dead yet. Transfusions of cash and technology from the United States had done nothing to revive the comatose economy. Oil and mineral wealth beyond the dreams of sheikh or shah had done nothing to improve the life of the people. But that year, in 2009, it finally happened. The
banditos,
the petty revolutionaries, and the peasants finally got together and kicked the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, out of power. Like a dried skeleton in a sandy crypt, the country just fell apart.

Within weeks, Yucatan was trying to be an independent communist state and laid claim to the oil fields in the Gulf of Campeche. The west coast and Baja set themselves up as a free state with tourism and drugs the mainstay of their economy. The rest of the country was balkanized in similar fashion with a dozen family parties and warring factions scrambling for the few pesos left in the cashbox. The process was fearful and wonderful and wholly predictable.

The confusion raised anxieties in the United States, of course. The border States of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, which had grown into a loose confederation known as the TENMAC, were the most concerned. For decades, they had absorbed—and, frankly, capitalized on—a trickle of hungry brown people seeping across the border, a few hundred each day at each crossing point. Now that trickle had turned into a torrent; thousands of human locusts were streaming north. Everywhere. Every hour. Many of them were armed and most of them understood democracy and a free market economy not at all. It was the Southwest’s worst nightmare come awake.

The TENMAC petitioned Congress for intervention. The States took their authority from the Mexican government’s last series of requests for U.S. aid. They took their cause from the plight of the Walt Whitman School, an American institution in Monterrey which the local People’s Revolutionary Socialist Council, or CRSP, had taken under its “protection.” Rumor had it they were holding the teachers, mostly U.S. citizens who had come down to work and play in the sun, and the strudents, mostly the children of local industrial managers, also American-based, hostage to extract concessions from their companies.

The image of helpless white women and children being held in ruthless brown hands played well in Baltimore. The House Subcommittee on International Strategy granted the TENMAC’s request to form nearly independent militia units, formally known as the Gentlemen Volunteers, to intervene in Monterrey. In a further move, also inspired by the TENMAC, Congress put forward a resolution annexing the entire country. That passed by a four-vote majority. The date was February 8, 2010.

Technically, a state of war existed. Moscow protested, and the U.S. government, in the person of Speaker McCanlis, cited the now-defunct Monroe Doctrine, bared its collective teeth, and fingered The Button. Moscow backed off.

Why did I get involved? Couple of reasons …

The first was boredom. I was tired of paper risks, with all the adrenaline flowing in somebody else’s blood. I could buy a colonel’s rank—maybe even a general’s—in the G.V.’s and campaign with my own troops. It would be the ultimate game, the real “sport of kings.” I might even get killed.

The second reason was part of the first. I was tired of being a victim of circumstances. My life to that point had been pushed right and left. By the rise and fall of the economy and the financial markets. By one wife’s demands and another’s appetites. By terrorists in Arabia and America. By the lusts and laws that my own childhood had imposed. By the stuttering thing in my head that I never talked about.

It was time I went out and made some circumstances of my own. And Mexico was the place to do it.

Chapter 12

Billy Birdsong: War Among The Ruins

God-damned white man!

I had almost gotten my life together, making something to be proud of with the sludgeworks and socking away big money, too. Sludge is almost soothing: a complex of fertile, life-supporting liquids that gurgle gently inside white piping and cook in gleaming steel vats. The farmers, the pharmaceutical makers, and the metal and water traders all depended on my products. It was a gentlemanly business, like aging wine and cheese.