Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

“I don’t doubt it. You’ll just have to assess the risks. You know who your enemies are; you’ll have to figure out why I would be working for them.”

She nodded. “May I call you back?”

“No,” I said. “Sorry. I’m keeping my whereabouts a secret. I’ll call back at noon tomorrow. Shall I go ahead and set up that Swiss account?”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Just call. I’m addressing a D.A.C. meeting at noon, so make it at eleven.”

“What’s D.A.C.?” I said.

“The Daughters of the American Confederacy,” Mattie Hinkle said.

I sat there and fidgeted for a minute. Then I decided to go ahead with it despite Mattie. I punched my Bank Dispatch code into the phone and had Shanghai send a twenty-million credit to Geneva under the rubric FRIENDS OF THE POOR FOR MATTIE HINKLE and a notification to Miyagawa and Sumo.

If I didn’t hear anything for a week I’d send the rest of it.

I slept well that night and dreamed beatifically of money. Not of graphs on production charts or shorts in corn futures or even of bank accounts, but of crisp green beautifully engraved bills and brightly minted coins. For a while during the night I was a baby wrapped in new thousand-dollar bills, as though in swaddling clothes. I gurgled with the joy of contact with all that sweet money while older folk moved slowly by me, their steps taken as if in a sea of molasses, themselves dressed soberly in gray and brown suits, disdaining my infantile garment of cash. I smiled at them all.

Some part of me must have been expecting it all along. When I saw the four Marines the next morning standing in the lobby at the foot of the stairs, it had some of the quality of dèjá vu . Big sons of bitches. I stared at them and froze. When one of them took me by the right arm I came out of it and tried to pull away from him. It didn’t work. I suppose I’d been imagining myself as one of the strongest men in America; this was a rude brush with reality. This youth with the perfect shave was bigger than I in every way. His fingers on my forearm felt like rocks. The other three looked about the same.

When they took me past the desk to the door the clerk looked away, busying himself with some records. Outside the hotel was a gasoline-powered military jeep. I sat in back with a Marine on each side of me and we drove off down Broad Street while people on the sidewalk stared.

I got back a bit of my composure in the jeep. “Men,” I said, “where are you taking me?”

“Air base” was all I could get, from the only one who seemed to know how to talk. He had sergeant stripes. “You’re not supposed to do this,” I said, “I’m a Chinese national.” I might as well have been speaking to the wind.

They took me about twenty miles to Kissinger Air Force Base, put me on an F-611 jet fighter, and flew me to Washington at four times the speed of sound. Those military sons of bitches; they burn jet fuel as if it were seawater.

It’s quite an experience to fly like that, let me tell you. The Isabel could zip through her warp at two hundred times the speed of light, and light goes fast enough to circle the earth seven times in a second; but even so, that little white jet felt a hundred times faster. Zoom , Pennsylvania! Zoom, zoom , New Jersey! Zoom , Maryland! Zip , Washington! Good afternoon, Senator.

I wore one of those white spacesuits for altitude and was handcuffed to my seat, feeling like a nailed-down snowman skimming the stratosphere in this military frisbee. When we slowed for a landing the G forces pressed my body like the hand of death. I sat strapped in a tiny cockpit, feeling like hell, feeling like a childish fool, and unable to say a thing to anybody. I couldn’t even hear my own voice over the roar of those fuel-wasting jets. Damn the military. They could have sent me back on a Pullman and saved everybody a lot of grief. But I grudgingly had to admit what they were doing made Baynes look good, the son of a bitch. There was class to this operation.

Four MPs at the Washington Air Base got me out of the white suit and into another jeep. They drove me straight to the Reagan Detention Center, where Baynes was waiting, dressed elegantly in gray tweeds. I checked my watch; less than two hours since they’d picked me up. If only they could handle mail like that. “Hello, L’Ouverture,” I said, rubbing my wrists where a cop had just taken off the cuffs. We were in a steel-walled room without windows, sitting on wooden benches facing one another through plastic; our voices came through speakers. There was no humanity to this; I’d have felt closer talking to him by viddiphone.

“Ben!” L’Ouverture said, shaking his head in mock dismay. “What a nuisance! What a waste of taxpayers’ money!”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking,” I said. “How did you find me?”

Baynes shook his head again. “Ben,” he said, “it was simplicity itself. You left clues everywhere. People recognized you in Philadelphia and called the FBI. The Chinese Embassy filed a report.” He looked at me in a kind of bemusement. “Ben,” he said, “I don’t see how a man so careless could be so rich.”

I felt myself blushing. Caught in my fool’s paradise again, playing games. Tom Sawyer Wins An Election.

“Quit rubbing it in,” I said. “What is it you want from me?”

“I want to know where that uranium came from, Ben.”

“I figured as much,” I said, “and I’m not going to tell you.”

L’Ouverture leaned toward me, with his elbows on his knees. He was wearing a pale-blue oxford-cloth shirt and I could see silver cufflinks. He folded his long black fingers together. “That’s no way to talk, Ben,” he said. He smiled amiably. “If you don’t tell me, you’ll spend the rest of your days in this building.”

“The Chinese Government…”

“The Chinese Government doesn’t know where you are, Benjamin, and I don’t think they care. Mourning Dove Soong is a busy woman. She has more to do than keep up with your whereabouts.” He smiled again.

“What are the charges against me?”

He threw back his head and laughed, stretching out his long arms from his body. Then he shot his cuffs and set his bony elbows on his knees again. “Oh my my!” he said. “Resisting arrest, twice. Assaulting a police officer, four times. Illicitly importing dangerous drugs. Using same. Telephone fraud. Crossing state lines as an unregistered alien.” He laughed again. “There are friends of mine on the bench who would give you ten years at hard labor just for burning up Aynsley Field.”

I just looked at him. What was there to say? I knew he was at least partly wrong about Mourning Dove, if only because Lao-tzu needed me for future supplies of endolin; but I wasn’t going to tell Baynes that. I wasn’t going to tell Baynes anything this time.

“Well, L’Ouverture,” I said, “you seem to have all the cards.”

He nodded and smiled grimly. “You dealt them to me, Ben.”

“L’Ouverture,” I said, “I don’t need this. I’ll give you sixty percent of my uranium…”

He looked at me very coolly. “I don’t want it.”

“You don’t want it? My God, it’s worth a king’s ransom.”

He shook his head. “I’m a king already, Benjamin.”

I looked at him. He was certainly dressed like a king. “It’ll triple your wealth, L’Ouverture. It’ll put America back on top of the heap.”

He looked at me calmly. “Who are you to talk that way?” he said. “You’re Chinese.”

“Come off it,” I said. “That’s an expedient, not a political choice. We can be partners. Belson and Baynes.”