Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

“I’m Jack Winters.”

“Good to meet you, Jack. For whatever it’s worth to you, it wasn’t personal.” Colin held out his hand. After a moment, Winters took it. He squeezed with brief, controlled strength, then let go. Colin decided he might have been lucky the LAPD man didn’t feel like brawling.

“Take care,” Winters said, and walked away. Before long, he was lost in the throng of dark blue uniforms.

His duty and the department’s done, Colin drove back to the station. He had to go slowly, because bicyclists made up almost all of the traffic. They gave him curious looks as he went past them-not, he judged, because he was in uniform in an unmarked car, but because he had a working automobile. He saw only a couple of others on the twenty-minute trip. There were many more people on skateboards on the sidewalk than drivers.

Nobody was buying new cars, either. Not only was nobody buying them; hardly anyone was making them. GM had declared bankruptcy again. Ford had tossed in the sponge. Toyota and Hyundai were shuttering American plants. The massive layoffs in the auto business after the eruption only planted another lily on the economy’s chest.

When Colin got back, he walked into Mike Pitcavage’s office. “How was it?” the chief asked.

“About as gruesome as you’d expect,” Colin answered. Both men grimaced, almost identically. Colin went on, “The widow’s. . stunned. That’s the only word that fits. Never gonna be the same for her and those kids.”

“They nailed the son of a bitch who shot McClintock, anyhow,” Pitcavage said. “That’s over. She won’t have to wait for them to try him and convict him and then wait another twenty years till they stick a needle in his arm.” He made a disgusted noise, down deep in his throat.

“Yeah.” Colin nodded. He felt the same way. Any cop would-justice deferred was justice denied. An awful lot of justice was being denied in California these days. He didn’t want to dwell on that, so he told the chief about his encounter with Jack Winters.

“Heh,” Pitcavage said. “He should’ve swung on you. That would’ve given everybody something to talk about besides the sermon.”

“It wasn’t worth talking about,” Colin replied. “And the gossip would’ve been about my busted snoot.”

Pitcavage waved that aside. Sure-why wouldn’t he? It wouldn’t have been his ox getting gored or his nose getting punched. And his department would have scored the publicity. LAPD would have got egg on its face. If Colin had got blood on his. .

When you were a chief, maybe you didn’t worry about such minor details.

You had to look at the whole picture, right? That was what it took to run a department, even a small one like San Atanasio’s, right? Mike Pitcavage sure seemed convinced it was. Colin? Colin had one more reason to count his blessings for not winning the chair Mike was sitting in now.

* * *

Whenever Bronislav drove into the L.A. area, he stayed down in San Pedro. That was partly because he hoped to pick up more hauling work at the port, partly because a good-sized Serbian community had settled there. He could hear his own language, and speak it. He could eat familiar food. He could drink familiar booze. It wasn’t the old country, but it was as reasonable a facsimile as he was likely to find on the shores of the Pacific.

He could introduce Vanessa to all those things, too, and show her off to his friends. She rode the bus down there every chance she got. When she landed a job, she told herself, she would drive. In the meantime, she had better things than gasoline to spend her money on.

She’d fallen in love with a guy she knew in high school-in love enough for him to pop her cherry, anyhow. She’d been living with him when she met Bryce. And then, in short order, she’d fallen in love with Bryce and was living with him. She really had thought that would last. For a while, she had. For a while, it had, too. She remembered telling him If I can’t make it with you, I can’t make it with anybody .

But she couldn’t make it with him. How on earth could you get excited about, or even interested in, poetry written a million years ago in a dead language? When he did make brief forays into the real world, all he wanted to do was screw. He didn’t want to go out to dinner, he didn’t want to go shopping at the mall, he didn’t care about movies, he didn’t dance.

He did go to the occasional baseball game. He approached baseball the same way he approached his ancient poetry: as an archaeological problem. Vanessa’s interest in sports was almost as great as her interest in spiders.

So-Hagop. She hadn’t fallen in love with him, no matter how much she’d tried to tell herself she had. He was a lifeline when she got sick of boring Bryce. If only she hadn’t followed him to Denver. .

Well, now she was starting to think even that might have been worthwhile. If she hadn’t gone to Denver, she wouldn’t have been coming back to L.A. from the east and stopped in at that Denny’s outside Las Cruces. She never would have met Bronislav Nedic.

And that, obviously, would have been the biggest tragedy since Shakespeare hung up his quill pen. Bronislav made her happy in ways she hadn’t even imagined before they met. She wasn’t used to being happy. She still complained, but her heart wasn’t always in it.

In self-defense, she’d learned bits and pieces about Hellenistic poetry. She’d learned bits and pieces about the rug business, too-mostly about how everybody who had anything to do with it was the biggest robber not currently residing in San Quentin.

And she learned from Bronislav, too. They were walking along a street not far from the harbor when she saw a restaurant with way too many consonants in the name. Nobody from the former Yugoslavia seemed to have heard of Vanna White. “Is that place any good?” she asked, pointing.

His expressive eyebrows came down and pushed together in the center. “I don’t know,” he said. Plainly, he didn’t care for the question.

Vanessa couldn’t see why he didn’t like it. “Shall we find out, then?” she said.

“No.” Bronislav picked up his pace to hurry past the restaurant.

Vanessa had to almost trot to catch up with him; his legs were longer than hers. “Why not?” she demanded when they were level again.

He stopped short-so short that she took an extra step and a half past him and had to turn back, feeling foolish. He was angry. No, he was furious. She needed a couple of seconds to realize how furious he was. Unlike hers, his rage burned cold. “The people who run that place, they are not Serbs. They are Croats,” he said.

By the way the last three words came out, they might as well have been They are baby-butchering, carrion-eating filth . Vanessa didn’t get it. “So?” she said. She knew just enough about the old, deceased Yugoslavia to recall that almost everybody in it had spoken a language called Serbo-Croatian. If both groups had used it-and they must have, or they wouldn’t have given it their names-how different could they be?

She proceeded to ask Bronislav that very question. He stared at her for close to half a minute with those disconcertingly sharp eyes. At last, he said, “You are an American.” He spoke softly and with great care, as if reminding himself. Vanessa got the feeling that that was just what he was doing.

It pissed her off, because the way he said it meant You don’t know jack shit . “You are, too,” she reminded him-he’d already told her, more than once, that he was a U.S. citizen, and that he was proud of it. “What’s so awful about Croats?”

He patted his left arm with his right hand. “They gave me this.” Then he stretched out his right arm so his cross-and-four-C’s tattoo came all the way out from under his sleeve. “If I go in there and they see this”-he tapped the tat with his left forefinger- “maybe we just fight. Or maybe they kill me, or I kill them.”