“What exactly do you do, honey?” she finally asked outright, in an Alabama drawl.
“I’m a sanitary engineer,” he said in a sudden inspiration.
“You mean you’re not in movies?” she asked in dismay, the demure pout vanishing and the accent becoming pure Bronx.
“Hell no, I’m in excrement, Miss. You know the Chinese have been spreading sewage on their fields for thousands of years? Well a bunch of us thought, why can’t we do the same here? So we’ve got a pilot plant going, trying to turn the sludge into little pellets for fertilizer. It’s working fine except the stuff smells, but we’re working on that too. Say, that guy near the marquee — oh, he’s just gone in — wasn’t that Hal Brooker?”
“Hal Brooker the movie producer?” she asked, turning.
“Yeah I think so. They tell me he’s casting for some costume piece about the Civil War. Anyway, the beauty is, we extract the methane from the crap and use it as a fuel to operate the process. So the plant costs nothing to run, isn’t that exciting?”
“Real exciting,” she said. “Listen, it’s been nice talking to you.”
“But there’s more. Methane is a greenhouse gas,” Wallis called after the retreating figure. “By burning it up we’re helping the environment.” But Miss Low Cleavage had vanished along the flight path to the marquee.
God, I hate these people, Wallis thought again. He drifted casually across the lawn, drink in hand, judging the ebb and flow of the crowd. Past the pool. Don’t catch anybody’s eye. Expensive bridgework sparkled at him out of a tanned face; Wallis pretended not to see it. People were dancing. The Tijuana Brass were sending soft, metallic notes over the rich, the beautiful and the Mexican waiters in short red jackets and tight black trousers.
Report the conspiracy and condemn my son to death. A boy of sixteen, somewhere in the Alleghenies.
Down the steps to the patio, where a large pig was covered in banana leaves, with its body cavity stuffed and its alimentary canal replaced by a long metal spit. The pig rotated unhappily about its horizontal axis while flames roasted its flesh and its fellow mammals nibbled at canapés and drank tequila from salt-encrusted glasses. The smell of burning charcoal and flesh hovered over the party. Wallis passed by.
Report it to whom? How deep does the treason go?
About fifty yards out from the lodge, the crowds began to thin. Little clusters of people chattered and laughed under the floodlit magnolia trees and the monkey puzzles. The trees were draped with tinsel and linked by long chains of multi-coloured lanterns; but the Christmas lights were more for effect than illumination, and here the shadows were dark. An overheated Santa Claus, his face flushed, was into a serious discussion with a Barbary pirate. Wallis nodded to them but he passed by unnoticed. Then he was at the edge of the lawn, marked out by bougainvillaea. He glanced behind, and casually strolled through them, into the shadows and the fir trees.
He went steadily on, the carpet of pine crackling under his feet. A couple of hundred yards in he stopped. There were shafts of light through the branches, but no human silhouettes: he was alone. Latin American rhythm was still in the air, but the night sounds of the forest were beginning to compete.
But what if the President is the traitor, and the conspirators are the loyal Americans? Are the patriots really the guys who win, by definition?
He came across a track, just visible in the darkness. Whether made by humans or large animals he could not say, but he followed it. It climbed steeply up. About half a mile from the lodge, panting with exertion, he cut away from the path and wandered randomly, still climbing. He came to a clearing about twenty yards wide, and sat down. The ground was bone dry and covered with moss. Pinewood scented the air. There was a gust of laughter and a woman’s scream from far below. Someone had fallen or jumped into the pool.
I don’t need to think about stuff like that. The President is my commanding officer. I obey his orders. Period.
A half moon had risen over the mountains to the right, and it was reflecting off the snowy peaks, and the roofs of the Mercs and Porsches parked behind the lodge. The Pacific was a huge black hole over to the left.
The classic Nuremberg Defence. I vass only obeying orders.
Wallis had a brief, fantastic urge to get out of it, find a freeway, hitch a lift to anywhere. But not at night, in flowing Arab robes. Not even in California.
There was a metallic glint from far along the approach road to the lodge. Wallis could just make out a shadowy figure, standing. The man might have been speaking into a walkie-talkie.
I’m not cut out for this frigging moral dilemma stuff.
The soldier lay back, his eyes by now dark-adapted. The
broad swathe of the Milky Way was overhead, dazzling, amazing. The filmy ribbon was divided by a great black rift; it swirled across the sky, a highway for gods and ghosts and creatures of the mind.
Was Jefferson right? Country before obedience? But who sets the acceptable limits on obedience? The guys giving the orders?
Something came into his vision, approaching from the Pacific. It was a moving star. It grew brighter and Wallis sat up. A faint chopping sound came over “Stranger on the Shore” and the shrilling cicadas. A helicopter. Two miles out from the lodge, its lights were extinguished. It was just visible in the moonlight. It flew low over the trees, descending. The soldier lost it behind a hill but it reappeared, sinking towards the lodge. It touched down about three hundred yards back from the car park. A solitary figure came out, bent double, and moved briskly towards the back of the lodge. The chopper revved up, rose and soared away, following the line of the approach road and disappearing from Wallis’s sight.
Wallis wondered about that. He was startled to find himself wondering about the beliefs, quietly held and strongly cherished, which had guided his life.
Maybe everything I’ve ever believed is junk. Maybe patriotism and loyalty and morality are just brain implants, devices put in my head from the age of five for purposes of control. Maybe it’s all just a game and there’s no right and wrong beyond my own sense of right and wrong. So follow my private conscience and screw the rules?
He lit up a small Jamaica cheroot, his match throwing a brief circle of light around him. He was still thinking in confused circles, a cigar later, when the hairs on the back of his head began to prickle. There was the faintest crackle of breaking pine needles, somewhere behind him. Casually, he stood up and turned. A young man, standing in the shadows. Twenty yards away. Smart, dark suit, close-cropped hair. Motionless as a statue.
“Sorry to startle you, sir. General Hooper’s compliments. He requests that you rejoin the party.”
“Evening, fella. Now how the hell did you find me way up here?” With a gut-wrenching start, Wallis realized that he must have been under surveillance from the moment he had left the party.
“If you’ll follow me down, sir.”
The party was three drinks noisier. The Tijuana Brass were into some frenetic number, but a young couple were dancing, waist-high in the water, to some private music of their own. Wallis followed the young man across the lawn, past the pool and over the patio. The young man nodded farewell and made off in unparty-like, military strides. A fat man in dark glasses and a blue sombrero had a slice of pork wedged between two thick slices of bread in one hand, and a large cigar in the other. He saw Wallis and detached himself from a group. Silver sequins covered the man’s sombrero and extended down over his black suit, as if he had been showered with sticky confetti. Wallis recognized him first by the whiff of Macanudo cigar smoke.