“That’s right.” Peter switched chairs, and Ginger positioned a microphone on the white countertop in front of him, saying, “Don’t sit too close when you talk. Just the way you are now.”
“All right.”
“We should close that door. We’ll get outside noise.”
“Leave it.” Peter was irritable, impatient. “We’re not interested in high fidelity. They’ll understand the message.”
Ginger shrugged. “Let’s make sure we’re using blank tape.” He turned away, seating himself at the controls. He hit switches, and a faint hissing sound came from concealed loudspeakers.
Larry said, “Peter, are you sure you don’t want to discuss it first, get it down on paper?”
“I know exactly what I want to say.”
“All right,” Ginger said. “It’s clean. Give me a sentence for level.”
Peter looked at the microphone. “This is Rock,” he said, “Commander of the People’s Revolutionary Army.” ‘Rock,’ the original meaning in Greek for the name ‘Peter,’ was the code name he’d used ever since first going underground.
Ginger touched switches and dials, and from the speakers Peter’s voice sounded, repeating the sentence. Listening, with that sense of foreignness that people invariably feel when hearing their own recorded voices, Peter decided he approved; the voice sounded determined, cold, capable of backing up its words with action.
“All right,” Ginger said. “Start from the beginning.”
The beginning was to repeat that self-identification, and go on from there: “We are holding, as a prisoner of war, a collaborator named Koo Davis, and have demanded in exchange for his return the release of ten political prisoners in American jails. The official response has been a farcical television broadcast, in which seven of these ten have been obviously, blatantly forced to claim they do not want to be released.
“The American public will not be deceived, and the People’s Revolutionary Army is not deceived. Does the U.S. government think it can fool the world? Can seven out of ten people not want to leave prison? The staging of this mockery was as clever and professional as we might expect from an organization with all the resources of the United States government behind it, but the result can’t hold up. Simple reflection will show that it can’t be true.
“Therefore, our demand remains the same. The ten people on the list will be removed from their prisons and flown to Algeria, where they will be free to make any statements they choose. If any of them wish to return to prison, of course they may, but let’s hear them say it once they are free of the threatening power of the United States government.
“The speed with which the government’s comedy was assembled shows that our original deadline was not too tight. This is Thursday night. By noon tomorrow, California time, the government will announce its decision. If the answer is no, Koo Davis dies. If the answer is yes, the government will then have twenty-four hours, until noon on Saturday, to release the ten prisoners and place them on public view in Algeria. If the government fails, Koo Davis dies. There are two deadlines; noon tomorrow for the government response, noon Saturday for the release of the prisoners. Fail to meet either deadline and Koo Davis dies. There will be no more negotiation. A second television farce like the first will result in Koo Davis’ immediate death. As a demonstration that our patience is exhausted, and that the comedy is finished, we are enclosing one of Koo Davis’ ears.”
“Good God, Peter!” Larry cried.
Clapping his hand over the microphone, Peter said to Ginger, “Did that stupid exclamation get on the tape?”
“If it is, I can erase it.” Ginger was noncommittal. “You really mean to do this, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Even though you know none of those people on television were forced.”
“The laughing has to stop,” Peter said.
“So you do intend to kill Davis.”
“To strengthen our credibility in the future.”
“Credibility.” Ginger shrugged slightly, then said, “And the ear?”
“Peter won’t do that,” Larry abruptly said, angry and scornful. It wasn’t like Larry to show scorn and he was awkward at it, the result looking more like petulance. Turning to Peter, he said, “You’d have Mark do it, go cut the man’s ear off, but Mark isn’t here, he’s run away. Can you do it yourself?”
“I intend to.” Getting to his feet, Peter said, “You two come along, to hold him down.”
26
Koo opens his eyes from confused dreams of family and flight, to find Joyce looming over him, staring down at his face with great intensity. Orienting himself, seeing the mirrored ceiling with himself and Joyce reflected in it like a bad genre painting, Koo clears his husky throat and says, “The soup lady.”
She blinks, as though she’d been lost in thought, then turns to look over her shoulder at the door. “We don’t have much time,” she says.
“We don’t?”
“I’m getting you out of here.”
Koo sits up, astounded. “Careful now,” he says. “I’m the one tells the jokes.”
“It isn’t a joke. I’m a...a double agent.”
A crazy. Koo pastes a happy smile on his face. “That’s terrific,” he says, in the style of the ultimate naïf. “A double agent. Afterwards, you’ll be able to collect unemployment insurance twice a week.”
“They signaled me during that television show.”
“Is that right? Fancy that.”
“I can see you don’t believe me, but it’s true. Didn’t you notice the one thing he said that wasn’t about anything? St. Clair; he said, ‘Two-thirteen Van Dyke.’ Remember that?”
As a matter of fact, Koo does; it had been an unexpected anomaly in the middle of the program. But the program itself had been such a catalogue of horrors that Koo—and probably everybody else watching it—had promptly forgotten that quick enigma. “What is it, your code name?”
“A phone number.” There’s something about the very intensity of her manner that forces him to believe her. “The two-thirteen is the area code.”
“Los Angeles,” Koo says, in some surprise. “This very metropolis, in fact.”
“I worked for them for a few years, and that’s always the way they got in touch with me. An area code, and a phone number done as a name. Van Dyke sometimes, and sometimes Lydgate. If I hear one of those names, and the area code, I know how to make contact.”
“You dial the seven letters. Van Dyke.”
“That’s right.” Looking uncertain for just a second, maybe even oddly saddened, she says, “It’s been years since they signaled me. A long long time.”
“Probably, they were busy.”
“I called them,” Joyce says, and double agent or not there’s something wild-eyed about her, something unhinged. “And they said I should get you out of here now.”
“I agree with them.”
“But we must be very quiet.”
“I agree with you.”
Holding a finger to her lips, she moves away across the room, opening the mirrored door, leaning out, then gesturing Koo to follow her, which he does.
This is his first view of the rest of the house, and it’s disappointingly ordinary after that bedroom. There’s also the sound of surf, faintly, from a distance; is that why he dreamed about drowning in the ocean?
The house is dim and quiet, but doesn’t have the echoing quality of a place without people. Koo is very aware of the unseen presences under this roof, unseen and hostile, as he creeps down the carpeted stairs behind Joyce. He’s scared, but at the same time this is exhilarating; finally he’s doing something.