“‘Hero of the Party, martyr to the cause!’” Liese quoted, and laughed. Her voice sounded shaky, on the verge of tears.
Lessing was waiting for them in the hospital garden, seated on a lawn chair and framed by a trellis of red flowers. He stood up.
“Lessing?” Wrench heard Liese’s sharply indrawn breath behind him.
The man looked older, thinner, graying, sun-blackened, lined, and calloused with hard labor. His Russian slacks and open-necked, white shirt didn’t fit him very well. He looked like an aging farm hand.
His voice was the same, though. “Wrench?” Then: “Liese…? Hello!”
Copley shook hands, made excuses, and departed. Kenow and Rose Thurley stayed. The woman’s expression was a study in possessiveness, anxiety, and something else that ran a lot deeper than “old mere buddies.” Liese might have to watch out for herself.
“Why?” Liese gulped. “Didn’t call us!”
The blue eyes — paler than Wrench remembered — smiled, then shifted obliquely away. “No.”
“Why not?”
“No reason to comeback. Didn’t want to get back into becgeeing. Too old to be a mere. And I heard you people were busy rebuilding America. You’d have had no time… no place for me. Farming feels better: plants and dirt, rain and sun.”
Liese flicked a glance at the Australian woman. “Happy?”
“Fairly.” He waited: relaxed, calm, and patient
Wrench said, “We could have taken care of you, Lessing. We… you and I, all of us… are more than just business acquaintances, godammit. You only had to get to the American settlement in New Moscow to call us.”
“Reached Ufa,” he answered irrelevantly. “Izzies there. They nearly thumbed me.”
Kenow muttered, “Ufa’s a town down the road a piece. Yoodie headquarters for this region… our rivals, tough bunch. They want Sverdlovsk’s steel mills, heavy engineering, plastics. We got a lot of stuff they’d love to git their cottonpickers on.”
Lessing said, “Copley thinks one day we’ll have to fight the Izzies, right here in Russia.” He might have been discussing the lush, crimson blossoms behind him.
“Come home,” Liese urged softly. “Now.”
He looked at her, disconcerted for the first time. “Home? Is Sonny there?”
“He talks about this ‘Sonny’ sometimes,” Rose told her quietly. “Somebody he met in Israel, we think.”
Wrench said, “He fought there in the Baalbek War. A fellow mere?”
“Not likely. Sometimes he cries when Dr. Casimir, who’s been treating him, mentions ‘Sonny.’ Maybe an Izzie he had a bad time with.”
Lessing had overheard. He said, “He’s dead I saw him. It was his green pants I pulled out of the car.”
“He’s told us that too. About a fire, a dead city.”
“Ponape?” Liese wondered.
“No.” Lessing spoke directly to her. “Jerusalem.”
Rose shook her head. “This is where it gets vague. He’d have had to fly like a bloody rocket from Ponape to Israel in time to be there when somebody dosed the Middle East with Pacov. But then he talks about a ship at sea, a storm, and the rest I told you upstairs. Sometimes he says the ‘driver-lady’ drove him to Jerusalem. Or maybe from Jerusalem to some place else. God!”
“Does he ever ask about his comrades from Ponape?” Wrench asked. “The Swedes found bodies in the cells in ARAD headquarters in Jerusalem. One of Lessing’s friends, an Arab named Abu Talib, was among them.”
“He talks a bit about some woman named Emma. Once, under hypnosis, he yelled at somebody named Mallon to run away and hide. That’s all.”
“Emma Delacroix: a nice, old lady who’d lived most of her life in Africa. The Izzies grabbed her off Ponape, and then she disappeared. She could’ve been wounded and died en route to Israel… or later in one of their prisons. Mallon was killed on Ponape. As for Abu Talib, the Izzies had worked him over pretty bad, but the real cause of death was Pacov. We identified him from dental records. His wife and maybe one son are alive, though; went off to Saudi Arabia or somewhere.”
“Like, Lessing blocked out the whole shootin’ match,” Rose said. “What you don’t think of never happened. Lucky bugger, in a way.”
A compact, middle-aged Hungarian with bushy, brindled, black eyebrows and hair to match came bustling across the grass toward them. Rose identified him to the others as Dr. Casimir.
The newcomer looked from one to the other. “General Copley says you want to take this patient back to the United States. I don’t see why. He is recovering nicely here.”
Wrench drew on the authority of his Party uniform. “He’s one of ours, doctor. We have a duty to him.”
“Hmmph. Well. We are quite capable…”
“Of course. But your government…”
“General Copley…”
“…Has agreed with our government…”
“Your Party of Humankind…”
“Please! Lessing should go back with us. We can provide him with the best therapy available. His friends….”
“He’s at peace in Sverdlovsk,” the doctor said. “I wish you’d never discovered he was here.”
Wrench had no idea who had told the Party’s agents in New Moscow of Lessing’s presence. Kenow? Copley himself? Possibly just a “stringer” trading miscellaneous information for a few clips of American ammo — or a case of B anger pom tapes for the holo-vid.
The informant was not Rose Thurley; her face was as readable as a billboard!
“We are taking him, doctor.” Wrench glanced over at Rose. “You can come and see him whenever you want. We’ll fly you over at our expense on an American government ‘Russ-ops’ plane.”
“It’s green light by me.” The woman seemed ready to be reasonable. “He oughta go where he can be treated best.”
“Right here, in Sverdlovsk!” said the patient himself. “Wrench, I’m fine. Everything I need… Rose and Johnny and once in a while Colonel Copley to shoot the bull with.” He paused “And I really should stay close to Beverly. She can’t move around much, you know.”
“Understatement of the bleedin’ year!” Rose breathed. “That’ll be the dead girl.”
“She’s recuperating, though,” Lessing continued cheerfully. “As soon as she can travel….”
Liese turned away.
Damn it, Wrench thought glumly, this had to happen! Liese had not been well, and the doctors had put her on “cheery-pops,” the latest mood-altering drug.
Lessing got up and went to her. She turned her head, murmuring something plaintive that no one else could hear. Then she stood stiffly still, drawing in upon herself.
It must be hell, Wrench thought, to be embraced by a ghost.
“I don’t have much choice, do I?” Lessing asked. He stepped back. “You’re taking me with you to the United States?”
Liese ‘s voice was muffled but still audible. “Yes. Come. I… we… want you.”
Wrench said, “We can help, man. You belong with us.”
“Then I better go pack. Wait for me upstairs.” He sounded only mildly concerned. His healing had a ways to go yet.
They went inside, to a pleasant, pastel-blue waiting room. They sat awkwardly on formal, straight-backed, wooden chairs around what looked like a card table covered with green, plastic padding, while one of Dr. Casimir’s subordinates served them tea and buttered croissants.
Wrench busied himself with the food; it gave him time to think — and Liese time to recover. “Lessing ‘s going to be all right.” He tried to sound definitive, for Liese’s sake.
Dr. Casimir watched Liese. He gestured for Rose to go to her. To Wrench he replied, “Of course. The prognosis becomes better with each day. Tea?”
“We don’t get good tea any more. Most of the tea-producing countries are too messed up to export much.”