“If innocent people died”
“Hey, baby, we’re in a war,” Lynn said. “In war, people die. The sooner these fat-ass Dutchmen wake up and smell that cup of coffee, the sooner they’re gonna fit into this new Unified Europe thing.”
Mistral Helene Carlysle gave him a final angry look and got into the driver’s seat. The two agents piled hastily in after her. They squealed away from the ancient church as emergency vehicles flooded the square behind them.
Chapter Two
On Eglantier Straat the narrow ancient houses leaned gently toward one another across the canal, the tulips in the boxes at every sill like overemphatic splashes of makeup on the faces of aging tarts. Mark Meadows collapsed in the doorway of the house where he rented a flat, and just breathed. It was a questionable move, however necessary. The streets in this district were all named for flowers – its name, Jordaan, was the nearest the Dutch could come to phonetically spelling its old name, which was the French word for garden – but the Eglantine Canal that ran right past the house front smelled more like a sewer.
After a while old Mrs. Haring’s big black tom Tyl appeared and jumped on Mark. He made sure to brace his hind feet in Mark’s crotch and knead Mark’s solar plexus with his powerful forepaws, making it difficult to breathe. Mark thought he loved all animals, but Tyl was an evil bastard.
In the first flush of panic Mark’s instinct had been to return here, home, like a fox to its earth. Now that he had a chance to think about it, he wondered if it had been such a good idea.
They’ve found me. How do I know they’re not upstairs waiting? How do I know they aren’t up under the gables across the canal, watching, calling to each other on their walkie-talkies, getting ready to yank the snare?
He felt scattered, strange, irresolute. He felt as if maybe he should just lie here in the doorway until they came for him. It was better than having to choose. To act.
He squeezed his eyes shut. No. He’d been suffering these bouts of indecision, of the sensation that he was a lot of dissociated motes flying around without a common center, since Takis. Dr. Tachyon said they ought to pass, in time, but that was mostly just to make Mark feel better, not to mention himself. The truth was, Mark’s condition was something entirely new to the psychological sciences of Takis as well as of Earth.
A part of Mark had died on Takis. Literally.
He reached to his chest, felt the reassuring lumps of the vials in his shirt pocket, beneath the sweater. Only four now. He hadn’t even thought of them when the shooting started.
Would I have had the presence of mind to take one before… before Takis?
He told himself to hang on. Things had worked out fine. He hadn’t needed a friend; if he’d summoned one, there might have been a confrontation with his pursuers. More innocents might have been hurt. As it was, he desperately hoped no one had been killed by the gunfire meant for him.
And he could not stop from wondering, What have I really lost?
He made himself breathe slowly, from his diaphragm – not easy with that damned fifteen-pound cat digging him there and grinning – and pull his wits together. He wasn’t too hip to modern police procedure, but he understood that cops were basically lazy. If they knew where he was living, they’d just have waited for him there, rather than roam all over the city in hopes of stumbling across him. They could take him easily and unobtrusively here, in this still-slummy backwater of the generally gentrified district just west of where the medieval town walls once stood.
If unobtrusiveness was a priority. They had been willing to spray a crowd of innocents with gunfire in broad daylight. Not exactly discreet.
He shivered. And they were Americans. Not since Vietnam and his belated rise to consciousness of the antiwar movement had he felt such shame in the country of his birth. What have we come to?
He was a criminal, of course. A federal fugitive, and one whom the authorities believed was fantastically dangerous. They were right, too, if you considered raw power. But he believed, in the core of him, that he had done nothing wrong.
In fact they were primarily hunting him for doing something right. The rightest thing he had ever done: rescuing his daughter Sprout from the living hell of the kid jail the kinder, gentler New York authorities had committed her to.
A vague alarm, trilling in the pit of his stomach: what if they followed me here? But frightened as he was, he hadn’t gone completely stupid. The path he’d taken had been anything but direct. Like a lot of ancient European cities, Amsterdam was compact – tiny, actually, at the core – but it was also as convoluted as Hieronymus Bosch’s brain. Ideal for losing pursuers.
He pushed the cat off his chest. Tyl got a good dig into him with foreclaws through sweater and T-shirt, then rubbed purring against Mark’s shins as he stood. Hoping to overbalance him so that he’d crack his head on the stoop, no doubt.
He pushed into the house. The stairwell was filled with gloom and the smell of vinegar-intensive Dutch cooking. Mark put his head down and started up the steep steps.
Because the grachtenhuizen, canal houses, were painfully narrow – the palaces of the old syndics over on the Bend of the Herengracht no less than the tenements – there was little room for switchbacks in the stairwells. This house had been built with the stairs a straight shot up to the fifth-floor attic flat Mark rented. Mark told himself it was aerobic exercise and kept climbing, though the tendons of his shins were already so tight, it felt as if they’d snap his tibias like Popsicle sticks.
The door opened at what he still thought of as the second floor, though everyone in Europe insisted it was the first. The face of his landlord glared out like a big lumpy fist clutching a wad of wiry black hair, with two round turquoise rings for eyes.
“Ahh,” the landlord breathed in a juniper-scented gust of genever, the local gin. “Mr. Marcus.”
“Afternoon, Henk.” As unobtrusively as he could manage, Mark craned to look past him into his apartment, just in case it was packed to the rafters with American narcs and automatic weapons. There was nothing but the usual clutter of bottles, tracts, and porcelain figurines. Henk Boortjes liked to keep a supply of cutesy bric-a-brac; symbols of hypertrophied bourgeois gezelligheid, on hand so he could bust them up when the iconoclastic fit was on him.
Henk was an old kabouter. The kabouters – gnomes – were a post hippie movement of the early Dutch seventies, self-proclaimed anarchists and environmentalists. Some of them still hung on, but their niche in the food chain had been mostly co-opted by the Greens.
The landlord squeezed onto the stairs. Mark managed to sidle past before his belly, which overflowed from the bottom of a well-holed black T-shirt with a red-circled A on it, blocked the passage. There was no room for a landing in this narrow scheme of things.
“Have you heard the news?” Henk demanded.
“No, man. I’ve been out.”
“There was shooting, down in the Damplein. Someone fired a machine gun at the crowd. Half a dozen were injured, though nobody has died yet.”
“That’s, uh – that’s terrible, man.”
Henk fixed him with a red-rimmed glare. “Whenever such things happen, one can be certain there are Americans at the bottom of it.”
Mark swallowed. “It wasn’t me, man,” he joked feebly.
The landlord kept him pinned with his stare. Mark realized the man was half convinced he – Mark – was a CIA spy sent to make sure he didn’t single-handedly upset the applecart of American imperialism. He was guiltily familiar with that kind of self-glorifying paranoia. During his years as a counterculture fringie he’d indulged in a lot of it himself.
Then came the last couple of years, when Mark learned what it was like when they really were after you.