John Birmingham - Without warning

‘He’s a poet and don’t know it,’ cried out one of the hecklers standing behind Culver.

On screen, the camera panned around as the auditorium erupted with fierce catcalling and jeers, but Jed estimated that at least half of the howls of protest were directed against anyone who’d objected to Guertson’s proposal to reserve a third of the new congressional seats for the armed forces. As an emergency measure.

The reaction behind him, in the hotel room, was uniformly negative. Deafeningly so. Nobody here was backing the idea. The Louisianan lawyer frowned and tried to get some more volume out of the television, but it seemed to have been programmed by the hotel to preclude inconsiderate or hard-of-hearing guests from annoying their neighbours. He could just make out a rising cacophony as Guertson attempted to shout down a sizeable chorus who were chanting over and over again, ‘Sieg heil! Sieg heil!’ The image cut to a shot of the convention chairman, newly elected Anchorage mayor Mark Begich, banging his gavel and calling for order, entirely without effect.

Culver shook his head and pushed himself up to his feet. His knees hurt and he felt a little giddy, probably from all the smoke in the room. All three suites were choked with cigarette smoke, despite all of the non-smoking signs, and the whole space reeked of wet clothes, body odour, recirculated air and stale farts. The carpets had disappeared under an inch-thick mat of crushed potato chips and pizza rind, and every flat surface was full of empty bottles and paper cups. Clear plastic bottles of spring water stood next to crushed cans of Canadian beer. He wondered sometimes how many people were here simply because he had a proven supply of snack foods and free beverages.

Well, not free. There was nothing so gauche as a cover charge for entrance into Jed Culver’s lair, but everyone in these rooms would pay a price for being here. Sometime, somewhere.

‘Hey, Culver. Been looking for you.’

He turned, looking for the owner of the harsh Brooklyn accent. Or Brooklyn by way of Warsaw, to Jed’s well-travelled hearing.

‘Mr Cesky,’ he called back, over the din. ‘I’ve been looking for you too. Wanted to thank you for your help yesterday.’

Cesky, a short, thick-shouldered man, with the hardened hands and beaten-down features of somebody who’d worked in construction all of his life, waved him off with one hairy, bandaged paw. ‘Nah. Fuggedaboutit,’ he said. ‘What’s money for if you can’t fuckin’ spend it to gets what you want?’

Culver smiled but said nothing. For all of Cesky’s two-fisted, roughneck routine, he’d found him to be quite a shrewd operator. A hard nut, his old man would have called him. Not likely to crack under the hammer. The businessman was covered in suture marks and bandages from whatever misadventures he’d endured getting himself and his family out of Central America. Cesky had said nothing to Jed, but the lawyer had done his background work before taking the man’s favours, and he knew that after a couple of failed attempts, Henry Cesky had pulled off a remarkable escape from Acapulco, right in the middle of the city melting down. He had to have some kind of smarts, and he was obviously tough enough to have come through intact, if not unharmed.

Like all men, however, he was cursed with his own particular weaknesses. That crack about the money, for instance. That wasn’t just for Jed’s benefit, reminding him of how much credit he’d poured into the lawyer’s ‘discretionary account’ – his black-bag fund, for want of a gentler euphemism. No, it also let everyone within hearing distance know that Henry Cesky was no fucking chump. Henry Cesky had somehow managed to salvage a good deal of his personal fortune and what was left of his business, and Henry-fucking-Cesky was still a fucking player. Especially by the much-reduced standards of the American body politic, as they were now being played out in the surviving seat of power, the Pacific Northwest.

The Brooklyn construction king slipped one of his heavy arms around Culver’s shoulder. With Cesky’s shirt sleeves rolled up, Jed could feel the thick mat of gorilla fur on the man’s forearms tickling the back of his neck. He ignored it. Getting inside your personal space was a favoured ploy of Cesky’s, and as the lawyer had about four inches and a good number of pounds on him, he let it slide.

‘What I wanted to talk to you about was them fucking army engineers,’ said Cesky ‘They’re doing a lot of work for the city at the moment and I can’t help thinking that it could be done a lot fucking quicker and cheaper by the private sector, you know. By people who don’t need to cross every fucking “i” and dot every fucking “t”, if you know what I mean.’

Jed didn’t correct him. He knew what the construction magnate meant. T hear you, Henry,’ he bellowed back. ‘I’m a hundred per cent behind you on that. But for now, at least, the army’s a law unto themselves here. You’ve seen that. They’re still running this place, really’

And he had to wonder at that, given what he’d been hearing about relations between the city and Fort Lewis over the last month.

Cesky took his arm away. He’d had to reach up some, and it couldn’t have been comfortable for him. ‘Well, they need to get back in their fucking box,’ he said. ‘Or someone needs to put them there. I heard about what they did with the council guys. Coming the fucking heavy like that. No fucking wonder they got the contracts locked up for this joint, eh?’

Culver would have shaken his head in amazement. Another Henry Cesky weakness was a complete inability to see the world in terms other than his own. He honestly regarded the army as little more than a rival firm, undercutting him on his bids for city work. In their position, it’s what Cesky himself would have done; so, obviously, that’s what they’d been doing when they ‘sequestered’ the local councillors during the worst of the immediate crisis following the Disappearance. They were simply looking to do Cesky out of a buck. Un-fucking-believable.

Jed held up both palms. ‘No argument from me, Henry. I can see why they moved the way they did at first. It was probably the only way to keep things together here. But we’re past that now, aren’t we?’

Cesky nodded sagely. Or in a manner that he obviously thought of as sagely, if he even knew what the word meant. ‘Fucking lotta work to be done here, Culver,’ he went on as they threaded their way through the heaving crush and heat of the crowd. ‘Not just spade work neither. There’s a lot of rebuilding up here, too,’ he added, tapping the side of his head with two thick fingers.

Culver nodded, a little surprised at his insight. That’s why this week is important,’ he replied. ‘It’s why we need guys like you on side, Henry. Things are at tipping point, if you ask me. Could go either way. We could fuck this up, end up with Fort Lewis running everything and doing guys like you out of a job, or we could make a whole new start. And all this bullshit about giving the army seats in any government – that would be fucking things up, don’t you think? That’s third-world stuff.’

Cesky nodded vigorously. He grabbed a bottle of Molson Old Style Pilsener off a tray as it wobbled past at eye level. Whether he bought Jed’s argument as a point of high principle, or whether he saw his main chance being cruelled by his major competitors getting their camouflaged butts into Congress, was a moot point. From Jed Culver’s point of view, Henry Cesky was an ally because, like everyone else in this room, he was firmly in the ‘No’ camp when it came to the question of rewriting the Constitution.

‘I dunno what these assholes are so frightened of,’ declared Cesky. ‘I don’t see anywhere dealing with the fucking Wave as good as us, and we got hammered flat by the fucker. Look at them French assholes, killing each other in the street. Fucking China, falling apart like a cheap fucking toy. And England, it’s a fucking prison camp. None of that happened here, and never will, unless we let it.’