On a Clear Day (10 page)

We ate and waited for Roderick to let us in on why we were at the Black Lion. My mind shifted back to the Andover Group’s giving up the Nigerian oil rights. Whatever Andover had in mind was too sophisticated for the Sturmers. You got smart people like the ones they had in C-8, and you couldn’t mix them with anybody like the Sturmers. They were going for two different things. C-8 was shooting for profits that the Sturmers couldn’t even have
imagined. The Sturmers would be happy with their next beer.

We ate, and waited, and then the punch line came. With Sturmers, the punch line was always violence.

Roderick reached over and started feeling up the waitress. She looked Irish. Tall, thin, kind of pale, and just fragile enough for somebody to want to take care of her. She pushed Roderick away as she cleared the end of the table. Grinning, he reached from behind and put a huge hand between her legs. A younger white guy who was busing tables stepped in and knocked Roderick’s hand away.

“What the hell ya doing?” he yelled.

Roderick, mouth open as if he was surprised, looked the kid up and down and then laughed.

“Olga! He’s yours.”

A Sturmer chick stood, walked over to the guy, and punched him in the groin. The guy went over quickly, and she chopped him on the back of the neck. The Sturmers burst into laughter. Stage shit. It was all stage shit. I glanced over toward Tristan. Calm eyes. Such calm eyes.

A few of the other customers stood. You could see the fear in their eyes. They didn’t know what was going down. This was the kind of world we were living in, and people like Roderick were gaming it to the max.

He stood up and raised his arms. All the Sturmers shut down. More theater shit. The reference to Nazis was clear, and they were milking it.

“We’re disturbing the people,” Roderick said. “There’s another room. Maybe we can go to it.”

“You grabbing any more women?” Mei-Mei asked.

“I wouldn’t touch you, sweetheart.” Roderick grinning. In charge. Big man. Drego’s throat bulging with anger.

A bootlicking sucker, his fat gut hanging over his belt, showed us to another room. Tristan went in first. I followed him. He looked around, sat at the long dark-wood table. The tables were heavy, mahogany. Real wood. Roderick was chowing down on some kind of meat, holding the bone in his hands. The waiters brought the rest of the food from the outside tables.

If they’re putting up with this, it means that they’ve been well paid. In the computer projections, I need to add a money trail
.

Roderick stood and wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“Whatever is said, whatever anybody feels, there’s something we all know,” he said. “What we know is that some of us are better than others. We can play games about democracy or equality, but in our hearts we know. What I want to do is two things. Not very complex, not very risky, not very hard. One is to let everyone feel in their heart what I say aloud, which is the truth. That there are people on top and people on the bottom, and there always will be!

“Once we say this—and we all believe it; there are no fools here—then we can get to the next step. And that step is to make life better for everyone,” Roderick went on. “What that better life is like we can question, but who doesn’t want a better life, eh?”

The bone, the fat dripping off the glazed skin, partially
covered Roderick’s face as he bit into it. I wondered what role Roderick could play in the C-8’s latest plans. Maybe he was not as confident as he seemed if he still needed all the theatrics.

“How do you see us getting a better life, Roderick?” Michael asked.

“Hah, I’m glad you said ‘us.’ ” Roderick wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “The trouble, as I see it, is that the crawly creatures are the biggest problem. They are the neediest, so it’s natural that they invent wars against us to get what they want. But they hold the key to the way everybody has to live. You can’t travel anywhere for fear that they’ll attack. Yeah, I know what they want is food, and sometimes medicines. But they are still the source of the conflict, the root cause.”

“And if we just found a way to give them more?” I asked.

“They would still want to be equals in an unequal world, wouldn’t they? And please, don’t bore me with some nonsense about us all groping our way to some level playing field. That ain’t happening, baby.”

“And you’re proposing?” Michael.

“To control them,” Roderick said. “To make the world a better place by removing the worst elements. If you have a diseased body, a cancer growing in you, you try to remove that cancer. You don’t kill the body.”

“A final solution?” Michael touched his fingertips together.

“Hey, would your women screw one of those guys from Peru?” a Sturmer chick asked. “One of those little greasy
dudes? I don’t think so. So what’s going to happen is they’re going to stay pissed and look for ways of getting what they want. You can’t blame them, but you can sure as hell stop them.”

“There’s no reason to make a decision—any decision—tonight or even over the next few months,” Roderick added. “It’s just something to think about. We stop the wild kids, the ones roaming through the streets with Uzis and butchering people, and we raise the stock of the world and have more resources to pass around. You guys know who you are. You’re top of the pile. You got more education, more class, and a pissload more brains than the average Gater, than half the people in C-8, than every jerk—what do they call them?
Favelos
? Tell me you don’t know that. Tell me that Asian chick doesn’t have an IQ as high as two of them put together.”

“Bottom line, Roderick.” Michael put his hands palm down on the table. “How do you plan to ‘stop’ these kids, these
favelos
?”

Roderick laughed. He looked at the Sturmers with him, and they chuckled to themselves knowingly.

“We’ll find a way,” he said. “Trust me.”

“Why we meeting in London?” Drego. “Why not New York, or Boston?”

Roderick turned to Drego slowly.

“Y’all over here making friends, Othello.” Roderick let the words slide out his mouth. “We just want to know if we gonna be among those friends. Now you can’t blame a good old Southern boy for thinking on that, can you?”

Back to the eating and drinking. A Sturmer girl throwing kisses at Tristan. One of the Sturmer men sticking out his tongue at Mei-Mei.

Winding up. Michael asked for our bill, but the Sturmers, predictably, paid for it all. We shook hands all around on the sidewalk. The narrow street was dark, but not so dark we couldn’t see Roderick relieving himself against the side of the building.

A
t the hotel. Michael was saying that we should start packing up to go home. He was collecting his mail, and I saw the clerk hand him a small leather pouch.

“Maybe just hang in London for a day or two and then split.”

It sounded good to me, and I immediately started thinking of buying gifts for Mrs. Rosario and the old man. Mei-Mei was whispering something stupid to Drego. I couldn’t hear it, but I knew it was stupid. Javier was already in the elevator when Michael called to him. There was an urgency in his voice, and we all stopped.

Drego caught the elevator door and Javier powered out. We all waited as Javier took the pouch and the paper that Michael handed him.

“This legit?” Michael asked Javier.

“Could be.” Javier turned over the paper. “Let’s call the Brits.”

“What’s up?” Tristan.

“This is a diplomatic pouch, and there’s a message in it that’s supposed to be from a Sayeed Ibn Zayad,” Michael said.

“Who’s that?” Tristan.

Michael shrugging. Everybody else too pooped to care.

Anja asked if she could come to my rooms.

“Sure.”

“What did you think of tonight?” she asked when we got there, taking off her shoes. “It wasn’t as stupid as it looked.”

“What did you see that I didn’t see?” I asked. “Because it looked stupid as hell to me.”

“We come to London and the Brits are like looking at us to do something, and then the Sturmers invite us out to their little circus,” Anja said. “They’re feeling us out and the Brits are feeling us out—”

“You don’t trust them?”

“They don’t trust us,” Anja said. “But why is everybody paying so much attention to us? We’re a smart group, and we’re all edgy—”

“I’m not edgy!”

Anja giggled. “D-girl, you are the edgiest person in the group. You’re the one who’s calling people out. Mei-Mei just follows Drego. Drego’s got his ghetto cape on with the street-cred labels sewn on the outside. You’re edgy, girl.”

“Okay, now what?”

“You have any idea what we have that anybody wants?”

“Maybe they want to take you as a hostage,” I started to kid.

Anja’s face said she wasn’t kidding. “What do you think?”

“Michael’s got something going on?”

She shrugged.

Morning. Coffee in Michael’s room. Everybody’s there, along with Victor, who seemed to be able to speak with authority for the Brits, and a girl who said her name twice and I still couldn’t understand it. Victor was talking.

“Sayeed Ibn Zayad is from North Africa. He mostly operates like a warlord in his country, terrorizing people much the way that your Sturmers do, but on a wider scale,” he said. “We suspect he has some connection with C-8, but we’re not sure what he’s up to exactly. British intelligence knows that he’s in the country, and that he has sent some people to the conference. They don’t want us anywhere near him.”

“You’re dealing with British intelligence?” Tristan.

“It’s more a case of them dealing with us,” Victor said. “It would be an embarrassment to the government to have any formal connection with what amounts to a terrorist group.”

“You could have told us about British intelligence,” Michael said. “And I don’t know anything about this guy. Where did you say he was from?”

“Morocco. But he has some influence in the Iberian Peninsula as well,” Victor said.

“I still don’t know that much about him,” Michael said.

“It’s the American disease,” Victor said. “To you people, history begins in Boston and ends in San Francisco.”

“That’s nonsense.” Michael waved Victor off.

“Michael, you won the bloody Second World War too, and you don’t know anything about that either!” Victor said.

“Yeah, and the Revolutionary War too,” Michael said.

I looked at Anja, and her eyes were huge. We were all feeling a little stupid.

“So what’s up with this guy now?” Michael asked.

“He’s making bolder and bolder moves,” Victor said. “When he was in the mountains outside Marrakech, he devoted most of his time just to screwing up the tourist trade and supporting some incredibly stupid pirates around Gibraltar. He was more of a nuisance than anything else.

“But now he’s out of the mountains, heavily armed, and flaunting his power. The question is whether or not he has any new power, any backing that’s not obvious, or whether he’s just falling in love with himself as every other tyrant has done in the past.”

“So how are you going to find out? Do you have spies?”

“We sent in an eighteen-year-old from Surrey, a very clever boy with golden-brown skin and startling green eyes,” Victor said. “Somehow they found him out and sent us his eyes in a small ivory case.”

“So now what, you gave up on him?” Tristan.

“I don’t give up that easily.” Victor shook his head. “From Sayeed’s letter, I see he’s found you and wants to
meet you. The word is that he didn’t bring his people into Dulwich because of the weapons ban. That’s probably eighty-five-percent bluff. Actually, I think he wants us to be impressed by his weapons. But if he’s here, he’s here for a reason. I think maybe your little group can find out. He’s not going to try to intimidate you.”

“We’re Americans … so that means …?”

“Let’s face it, Michael, you are the most violent people on the planet. You can’t seriously deny that.”

“The Sturmers tried to intimidate us,” Anja said.

“You held your own against them,” Victor said flatly.

“You got spies everywhere?” Drego.

“In this country,” Victor said, “we have eyes.”

“So what do you want us to do with this …?”

“Sayeed Ibn Zayad. You’ll have a dossier by tonight. What I want you to do, if you find the scheme appealing, is to answer his letter. By now, everybody knows you met with the Sturmers. Meet with Sayeed, too. In the end he might not show up, but it’s worth a try. Whatever we can find out has to be useful.”

“If that was your intention all along, why didn’t you say it the first time we met?”

“It wasn’t my intention at all,” Victor said. “But beneath the bluster and speeches at the conference, I sensed that some people are at least taking us seriously.”

“Why don’t you just clear it with British intelligence and go yourself?” Drego asked. “If you’re as stiff-upper-lippish as all that, why don’t you just contact this Sayeed and invite him to tea?”

“Because I don’t have the nerve to face down our national intelligence system, and I don’t have the mystique of being American. And we’re not led by a rock star such as Michael. Sayeed won’t trust you, but he’s going to want to see Michael up close. He’s going to want to see the Americans up close. He might try to bluff his way through a meeting with you, but he is far more apt to reveal himself than he would in a meeting with us.”