“Quite the night’s work,” Stern mused. “How I put myself out for you.” There was merriment in his eye, ironic and mean. This is your doing, Sam, it said. Not mine. The genie doesn’t get the blame.
Ely was lording it over him, in his own house, because he could, for no other reason than that. Power, it was all about power, who’s top dog, who rules the roost. Just like everyone else, just like Mother when she had been here, and even after.
A raw heat of outrage ignited in Sam’s chest, shot into his cheeks and eye sockets. For one mad moment, he almost took the pitcher and smashed it into Stern’s grinning gargoyle skull. But the fear, the years of obsequiousness and invisibility, stayed his hand, and the moment passed. He bowed his head, shame and regret choking him.
“There now,” Stern said, as the last of the defiled water fled down the drain. “All gone.”
Numbly, Sam set the pitcher beside the basin, held out paper towels. Stern patted his hands dry.
Stern’s eyes returned to the mirror. He ran a hand along his craggy, saurian chin. “Used to have the worst five o’clock shadow. Looks like I won’t have to shave for a while.”
Sam was only half-listening now, rooting about in the hall closet for the item Mother had put there so many years ago. Why keep that? he had complained to her. Who will ever use it? But she had saved it as she had saved everything, and, in this at least, she had been right.
“Here, Ely,” Sam said in a hushed tone, returning to him. “It was my father’s. He was six-five.” He unfurled the heavy material in his delicate hands.
Stern felt the faded terry cloth between his fingers, drew it from Sam. The robe was as soft and shapeless as the man who had once inhabited it. Stern shrugged into it, glowered down at Sam. “What was your mother? A circus dwarf?”
Sam felt the blood in his cheeks, averted his eyes. “We all have our shortcomings.”
Stern turned back to the mirror. “Gotta develop a thick skin,” he said.
Mother had called it the guest room, though they’d never had any guests. Sam had always thought of it as the discard room. But now he had a guest, one that he could not discard.
Stern lay in the narrow oak bed, pulling the moth-eaten covers up, trying to get comfortable-impossibile given his size and shape. Sam hovered by the bedside oil lamp. “There anything else you need, Ely?”
Stern shook his head, then belched, a low rumble. He winced painfully.
“Still the heartburn?” Sam’s tone was solicitous, if flat. He found his thinking was musty, as though wrapped in cotton wool like the keepsakes Mother had so carefully placed in boxes and stored away in the recesses of the attic. He felt curiously withdrawn, as if moving through a dream. I’m trying to escape, he thought, I’m trying to escape in my mind. And in some hopeless core of him, that seemed the only way.
“I don’t get ulcers; I give them,” Stern mumbled. His searchlight eyes were at half-mast, and, as he stretched, groaning, Sam could sense the bone-ache weariness of the-man? Well, no, that wasn’t quite the word, not precisely, not anymore. Nor was guest, either, but that was how it was.
“You’ve had a busy night, Ely,” Sam said, patting him on the shoulder and feeling that it was someone else saying and doing these things. He blew out the lamp, plunging the room into darkness, the drapes drawn tight against the coming dawn. “Tomorrow’s another day.” He withdrew, closing the door behind him.
Stern turned toward the wall, drew his legs up until he was curled in a ball. He was warm here, hidden. The pounding in his head had eased back some, and he felt the tempest of the day’s events fading in his mind.
He woke; he didn’t know how long later. Prickling danced over his skin, then erupted in a fierce blue energy. He didn’t need to open his eyes, he could see it through his closed eyelids. It surged over him, pulsed through his veins, filled his mouth and lungs. He fought to scream but was paralyzed, immobile as it whipped about and within him. And in that instant, that ferocity of being, he realized that he had known this feeling before, earlier, in the office. At the beginning. And he knew too that it had not gone and returned but had merely resurfaced, was always now with him. He was becoming, and this vast, elemental current was the medium of that becoming. He relaxed then, and the energy drew back into him, continued its patient work. He exhaled a long, slow breath and opened himself, accepting. He slept.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
It had been a damn long night.
Crossing the dew-soaked lawns to the buildings of the Old Executive Office-where every available bicycle had been stored-Shango felt the same tension that he’d known as a child in hurricane weather. He remembered clearly how it had felt to cross between the run-down brick buildings of the Washington Street projects when the first jagged gusts of rain would come in, cold and strange feeling in the summer heat. Rain and then still. Rain and then still, but in the stillness you could feel the storm to come. Seeing through every window all the TVs tuned to the weather, those colored maps and the crawling ribbon of warning across the bottom of the screen that said, IT’S ON ITS WAY AND IT’S GONNA BE BAD.
Why did he feel, at the end of this night of riot and fire and fear, that he’d only felt the first cold splatter of preliminary rain?
“At least we don’t have to worry about lugging guns,” said Czernas, very trim and sleek in black biking shorts and a microfiber shirt. His smooth, sculpted shoulders shifted under the straps of his backpack. “Or about being shot at.”
Word had come in fairly early in the night, about the guns. Shango had gone out behind the White House after he’d gone off-shift at midnight, and tested both of his personal handguns, the Browning and the P7, with the same results: nada. He remembered McKay’s reaction, when a Guard captain had told him about this.
Again, nada. He hadn’t been surprised.
“Might do for you to carry one all the same.” Shango halted in the dark area between the torchlight along the White House walls and the lighted perimeter, and fished his P7 from the holster at the small of his back. “Things changed once. They might again.”
Czernas obediently stashed the weapon in his backpack, where he couldn’t get to it in under a minute, but Shango said nothing. He guessed the aide was in his mid-thirties, a couple of years older than himself, but he found himself unconsciously thinking of him as younger. This might have had something to do with the other man’s boyish blondness, but Shango didn’t think so.
He was a rookie. He might know politics, and he might know campaigning, and he might know who was important and how to get things done, but he wasn’t hard. There was no core of iron inside.
“You have family here in town?” asked Czernas as they climbed the steps. “Someone to leave a message for?”
Shango shook his head. “You let President McKay check over any message you left, to make sure it doesn’t say too much?”
The aide looked surprised, then flustered. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, I guess-well, I left it with him.”
And if he was smart, he burned it, thought Shango, recalling what the President had said about not knowing who was behind the Source funding. In the face of a fuckup this monstrous-if that was what it was-the scramble for deniability would be lethal and thorough.
As Czernas showed the guard McKay’s authorization, Shango reflected that he was damn glad he’d kept his own life field-stripped. Even in ordinary circumstances he traveled with little more than he carried in his backpack this morning, and he lived the same way.