Mack Reynolds: After Utopia

Tracy Cogswell yawned again, gave up and left the letter in his typewriter unfinished. He could do it in the morning. It wasn’t important anyway. Some instructions to a group of Montevideo.

He sometimes wondered at the advisability of the movement’s making an effort in countries like Uruguay. What was the percentage? The decisions were going to be made in the most advanced countries: the United States, Common Europe, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China. The small nations could do no more than string along. The movement couldn’t succeed in a country that wasn’t highly industrialized and self-sufficient.

He was living in a small apartment, in a small apartment house, on Rue Dr. Fumey, Tangier, Morocco. In a city famed for the anonymity of its population, Tracy Cogswell was possibly the most anonymous of them all. At times he wondered if even Interpol was familiar with his efforts. They probably were. You didn’t fight in Spain as a boy and twenty years later in Hungary—not to mention his other activities over the years—without getting into the dossiers of the political police of the world, on both sides of the Curtain.

For a moment, he considered taking an amphetamine and knocking out some more work, but decided against it. That wasn’t the way. Over a period of time you got more done without resorting to lifters, and Tracy Cogswell was trained in the long view.

He considered the pamphlet sitting on the coffee table next to his reading chair. It was an early work of the older Liebknecht, and Cogswell wasn’t finding the going particularly easy, largely because he didn’t know very much about what the situation in Imperial Germany had been before the turn of the century. However, in its way it was a classic, and Cogswell, though not a scholar by inclination, worked at acquiring a good foundation.

He decided that he was too groggy to concentrate on political economy, put his beret on his head, and left the room. Come to think of it, he hadn’t been out all day and that didn’t pay off. He’d wind up in a mental rut and there were too many people depending on his staying out of ruts. It was not by error that Tracy Cogswell was working full-time in the movement as a sort of international clearinghouse.

The apartment was a fifth floor walkup. During the three years that Cogswell had lived here, he’d had no visitors other than the plumber and, once, an electrician. And each time they’d appeared he’d gone to considerable trouble to alter the apartment’s usual appearance, to make it look a bit less than what it really was. On the occasion where it was necessary to make explanations, Tracy put himself over as an unsuccessful writer, always at work on his serious novel. But the layout of his apartment was different from what even the most extensive researcher among writers might utilize. Too many files, too many stacks of mimeograph paper, too many pamphlets, leaflets, brochures; and his library was heavy with political economy, practically bare of anything else save a certain amount of history and reference.

Ordinarily, the recreation Cogswell allowed himself was rather limited to attending the local cinema. In the movies one can relax mentally and physically—and anonymously. Tonight, however, he had no desire for the Hollywood never-never land.

He walked down Rue Dr. Fumey to Rue De La Croix and turned right up to Mousa ben Nusair and the Bar Novara. This was the French section of town, and, except for an occasional haik clad, veiled fatima on her way home from a maid’s job, you could have thought yourself in Southern France.

Paul Lund’s bar had few claims to uniqueness so far as its appearance was concerned. It looked like any other bar.

The Vandyked owner-bartender was a typical resident of extradition-free Tangier. Exsmuggler, excon man, ex-half a dozen other types of criminal, the knowledge that Interpol was waiting for him anywhere out of Tangier kept him hemmed in; and kept him honest, for that matter. Paul Lund was smart enough not to foul his sole remaining nest.

Paul said, “Hi, Tracy. Haven’t seen you for donkey’s years.”

Cogswell said, “I’ve been working. Having trouble with my eighth chapter.” He flicked his eyes over the two other occupants of the bar and recognized them both: an American sergeant of the marines, stationed at the local consulate, and a French teacher at the French lycée, a parlor-pink type who got his kicks out of supporting the Commie party line in public but who, in the finals, would probably turn out to be a rabid DeGaulle man.

Paul was saying, “Eight chapters? Haven’t you got any further than that with that poxy book of yours? Wot’ll you have?”

“I’m rewriting,” Cogswell said. “Let me have a pastis.”

“Absinthe?”

“Hell no, that stuff fuzzes up my head for days.”

Paul Lund poured an inch of Pernod into a tumbler and added three parts of cold water to it. Cogswell climbed up on one of the tiny bar’s six stools and took a sip. He wondered how Desage was doing in Marseille. The police had nabbed him the week before, but they had nothing on him. France was one of the countries where the movement was legal; the authorities didn’t like it, but it wasn’t illegal. The same was true of the States and England. In the smaller countries they were underground. The smaller ones and the Soviet countries. It meant a bullet in the back of your head if you were caught behind the Curtain.

Paul winked at him and indicated the other two customers with a gesture of his head. “Jim and Pierre are solving all the troubles of the world.”

Cogswell grunted. He listened uninterestedly to the argument. It occurred to him that Jim looked surprisingly like a taller Mickey Rooney and Pierre Meunier like David Niven.

The argument wasn’t unique. The American marine evidently got his opinions as well as his facts from Time . Pierre Meunier was reciting the Commie party line like a tape. In fact, as Cogswell listened he decided that Meunier wasn’t even doing a particularly good job of that. He evidently wasn’t aware of the fact that the party line had shifted in one or two particulars just that morning. Among other things, the American president was no longer a mad fascist dog; he was now a confused liberal. Meunier seemed to be of the opinion that he was still a mad fascist dog.

Jim finally turned to Tracy Cogswell plaintively. “Look, Mr. Cogswell, what do you think? Should the free world put up with the Russkies using the UN for a propaganda drum?”

“Free world!” Pierre Meunier snorted. “Yankee dollar imperialists on one extreme and feudalistic countries like Saudi Arabia on the other. The free world! Among others, Portugal, with its African slave colonies. Morocco, with its absolute monarchy. South Africa, that land of freedom! And Spain, that one! And the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, and Nicaragua, and Formosa, and South Korea and South Vietnam. All those freedom-loving countries.”

Tracy Cogswell made a point of avoiding political discussions in Tangier. It wasn’t his job to make individual converts. His position as an international coordinator remained possible so long as he remained anonymous. He also made a point of not arguing his political beliefs while he was drinking.

But in this case, something had happened. Jim had called him Mr. Cogswell. Unconsciously, Cogswell ran his right hand up over the scar that ran along the ridge of his jaw, disappearing into the sideburn. A mortar bomb fragment had creased him there at the debacle at Gerona during the Spanish civil war. The sideburn was now going gray. Jim must have been a child when the Abraham Lincoln Battalion had been all but wiped out at Gerona toward the end of the Spanish fracas.