The Distance Beacons Read online

  Gwen nodded. "And a lot of Feds—like Bolton—think the whole thing isn't worth it. The referendum will make them look weak, as if they're begging people to believe in them. Bolton's from the old school. Before anything else, you have to consolidate your power and impose order. Then you can fool around with democracy."

  I recalled the speech Bolton had given me about the importance of the referendum. It hadn't sounded quite right. I had thought his audience was the problem, but apparently the problem was with Bolton himself. I finished off my chicken.

  "Still, that's no reason for someone to threaten the president," Stretch argued. "Governor Bolton and the rest of them have been doing all they can to make the referendum a success. You should have heard the speech he gave today to the government employees. Maybe he's not totally behind the idea, but so what? I mean, everyone has disagreements with his superiors from time to time."

  "It does seem like overkill," I agreed.

  "You'll get to the bottom of it, though, won't you, Walter?"

  "You bet, Stretch."

  We were silent for a while as we finished our meal. Then Gwen changed the subject slightly. "Um, Walter, about The Second American Revolution?"

  I looked at her. She sounded ill-at-ease. She almost never sounds ill-at-ease. "Yes, Gwen?"

  "This is sort of a scoop. Would you object if I wrote a story about it?"

  I smiled. Sometimes I forgot that Gwen had ambitions too. She has wanted to be a writer for far longer than I have wanted to be a private eye; perhaps, I've sometimes thought, it's easier for her to put things down on paper than to say them. At any rate, she was much more successful at achieving her dream than I have been at achieving mine. But there seemed to be a conflict here. I didn't mind telling my little pseudo-family about my case, but I doubted that Bolton and Cowens would approve if Gwen told the world about it. On the other hand, I couldn't remember anyone prohibiting me from mentioning TSAR, and I liked Gwen a lot more than I liked the Feds. "How about a compromise?" I suggested. "You can write about TSAR's threat, but don't bring up my name or what I found out in the government records."

  "Perfect," she said. She leaned over the table and kissed me. "I'll also ask around at the Globe and see if anyone has heard of TSAR."

  "Okay." I tried to sound enthusiastic, but I'm sure I failed. Gwen gave me a puzzled look, then seemed to decide not to worry about it. She had a story to write.

  * * *

  We cleaned up the dishes, and then Gwen bicycled back to the Globe to write up her scoop. Stretch changed his clothes and went off to one of his endless sewer meetings. I was left alone to ponder my case.

  I climbed the stairs to the third floor, to the musty room where I felt happiest—where I kept my books.

  I read too much. It's an addiction. Words are a narcotic; stories dull the pain of existence. Words also teach you things, of course: how to cure disease and build elevators and rule the world. All very interesting, all very helpful. Mainly, however, I'm interested in the narcotic angle.

  I stared at the titles that thronged my shelves, and I recalled getting my first case—the pride and satisfaction it had given me, and the need I had felt to give it a title of its own. I was part of the tradition now, following in the line of Chandler and Hammett and the rest. My first case had deserved a title as good as any of theirs.

  I didn't feel that way about this case, however. It wasn't just that I didn't like working for the Feds, I realized as I sat in my broken leather recliner. It wasn't just the threat from General Cowens, and my lack of interest in the referendum. There was something more basic going on.

  I had given my first case a lot of thought (not having had much else to do lately). My attitude toward it was about as changeable as my attitude toward the government. Sometimes I thought I did a pretty good job, all things considered, and at other times I was amazed at my incompetence. But there was one thing that bothered me about the case: it was bogus. Oh, there was a real client with a real problem, but I wasn't getting anywhere in solving it, until Gwen and my friend Bobby Gallagher conspired to manufacture some evidence; their evidence led me to England and, eventually, to a solution.

  I figured out what they had done finally but, as usual, I didn't know how to respond. Still don't. On the one hand, it was a wonderful thing they did. It got me to England, the promised land, where things still work, where Bobby and Gwen fully expected me to remain, because when you get out of hell it only makes sense to stay out. On the other hand...

  On the other hand, I kinda wanted for this dream of mine to be real. I didn't appreciate having to rely on my tolerant friends to come up with my cases for me and provide the solutions for them and generally act as if I were a dotty old uncle whom everyone has to humor. I was being unfair, I knew, but I couldn't help it. It annoyed me that Bolton found out about me through Gwen's article (even though I had agreed with her that it would be good publicity); it annoyed me that he then went to Stretch to get a personal recommendation; it annoyed me that Gwen wanted to help me out by asking her sources at the Globe for information about TSAR. The more people helped, the less real my profession seemed to me, and the more I wondered why I was doing what I was doing.

  I am not naive, I think. I do not actually believe that mysterious blondes will knock on the door of my office. But I do believe that, in a land where the fabric of civilized society has become somewhat tattered, a service such as mine can be quite valuable. So far, I seemed to be alone in that belief. Maybe people are too used to handling their troubles themselves to come to a stranger with them. Maybe I should run my ad somewhere besides the Globe. Or maybe I should get a job in the sewer department.

  When I fall into moods like this, the only thing I can do is to get out the drugs. I took a book down from a shelf and tried to dull my pain.

  Stretch returned after a while and yelled good-night up the stairs. Gwen didn't come back until long after my oil lamp had been lit and I had started worrying about her.

  She came up to the third floor and stood in the doorway. She looked beautiful in the flickering lamplight–her long brown hair framing her thin face, with its sad eyes and knowing smile. Maybe she isn't beautiful. We're both young, but I've known her for too long to be able to separate out what is emotion and what is objective reality in my perception of her. Reality doesn't matter in these things, I think. "You okay?" I asked.

  She nodded and smiled.

  "They like your story?"

  "Sure. Wolsey loves scoops." Wolsey was Gwen's editor; like Spenser, he apparently had no first name. She came into the room and sat on the floor in front of my chair. She leaned back between my legs; I reached down and stroked her hair. She closed her eyes and sighed with pleasure. "No one there has heard of TSAR." She paused, then added, "I had to find out for my story."

  "Of course." I felt a pang of remorse. Why should she have to apologize for trying to help me?

  "Wolsey suggested that it could be an old group who gave themselves a new name—to keep the Feds from knowing who they are."

  "That makes sense. But we still don't know what old group it might be."

  "I'm sure you'll find out."

  "Um," I replied, not at all sure I agreed with her.

  I could feel Gwen smile her knowing smile. "Do you think you'll meet the president?" she asked.

  "Doubt it."

  "I'd love to interview her. I'd love to find out what she's really like, what she really thinks about things."

  "Maybe you will. It sounds like she's eager for publicity."

  Gwen shook her head. "She'll stay away from the Globe. We're too open-minded for the Feds."

  She sighed, and I thought of her ambitions once again. Stretch wanted to improve the world, but Gwen wanted simply to understand it. Neither goal was particularly easy to achieve, however. I had set my sights a lot lower than both of them, I thought, but even I was having my problems.

  After a while we went downstairs to our bedroom, even though I knew that tonight, as usual, s
leep would not come easy for me. We paused as we passed Linc's room. "He wouldn't have approved of me working for the Feds," I whispered.

  "Still, he would've been proud of you."

  I knew, as usual, that Gwen was right. Linc's pain had been a lot more real than my psychic discomfort, and he had never found the narcotic that would dull it, the ambition that would drive him to ignore it. Finally he had been forced to end the pain in the only way he knew how. He had committed suicide while I was in England.

  Gwen and I got into bed together and held each other close. At such moments, we used to whisper to one another about dreams coming true someday. But that had stopped since I came back from England. Now we knew that dreams can come true, but that life goes on, and more dreams are required. I guess maybe we were still growing up. Someday, maybe, we would stop dreaming, and then, like Linc, we would have nothing to hold onto but the pain.

  "You're going to crack this case," Gwen said.

  "And you're going to interview the president," I replied.

  Gwen fell asleep in my arms then, and I was lost in a waking dream until morning.

  Chapter 4

  "So how are you going to find out about TSAR?" Stretch asked me at breakfast the next morning.

  I smiled what I hoped was a Gwen-like knowing smile. "I have my sources," I said.

  "I hope this won't be dangerous."

  "Oh, I know how to take care of myself."

  I noticed Gwen staring at me; I looked away.

  After breakfast we all left for work. Despite my misgivings about the case, it felt good to have something real to do for a change. I carried my bicycle down the front steps of our town house and, with a wave to the statue of Christopher Columbus at the far end of the square, I set off. I was going to Charlestown, on the other side of the river from Beacon Hill.

  I felt a little nervous about Charlestown. It was Jim O'Malley's territory, and Jim O'Malley doesn't like me. O'Malley is a businessman, a competitor (and occasional partner) of my friend (and occasional employer) Bobby Gallagher. As Bobby's employee, I have had my share of battles with O'Malley's men—most of which I have won. O'Malley remembers things like that.

  He is also much more powerful than Bobby, who is content to work with a few helpers out of a warehouse in South Boston. O'Malley is practically the emperor of his community, and the Feds tend to give it a wide berth. I'm sure this situation doesn't please them, but there is little they can do about it; they have the resources to defeat O'Malley, perhaps, but they don't have the resources to govern a town that hates them. So they don't bother trying.

  One result of this was that Charlestown became the ideal home for radicals and malcontents of the sort who might want to threaten the president. I had decided to take the straightforward approach, and assume that TSAR was real; Charlestown, therefore, was the place to begin. I wanted to talk to one malcontent in particular. His name was Henry Fisher, but it was hard to think of him without using Linc's title. Linc had dubbed Henry the Angriest Man in America.

  Henry Fisher is a tailor, like his father before him.

  Unlike his father, who died long before the War, Henry is successful. Times have changed, of course, and what had been a luxury in the old days is now a necessity. Old clothes need to be repaired until they fall apart; new clothes have to be made by hand, instead of appearing miraculously on the racks in shopping malls whenever you needed them. But success has not made Henry content with our brave new world; it has just given him more time to feed his anger.

  Henry is working on a book. It is going to be an important book, a vital book, a book that future generations (should there be any) will have to read and ponder and discuss. It is going to explain the causes of the War. Henry is forever searching out books and documents, interviewing old-time government officials who have managed to survive, marshaling his evidence, honing his theories, structuring his arguments. And all of this activity keeps him in a constant state of wrath against the government, against the military, against Western civilization—against all the forces that have contributed to the virtual destruction of our planet. How could they have done this to us? It is a strange way to live, if you ask me, but I suppose his anger is what keeps him alive.

  Despite his anger, Henry was not a suspect. He was going to be a source—although an unwilling one, I was sure.

  Charlestown seemed just like all the other sections of Boston as I pedaled through it—except for the absence of Feds and VOTE YES posters. The weather was warm and sunny once again, and I had to keep reminding myself that I was in enemy territory. The house where Henry lived and kept his shop sat in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Monument, a gray obelisk commemorating the start of the first American Revolution; I was pretty winded by the time I had struggled up the hill to it. I chained my bike to a wrought-iron fence, and I went inside.

  The shop, as usual, was crowded. A few customers were waiting in line to talk to a salesman, who was displaying a swatch of fabric to a hunchbacked woman who looked like a witch. Even witches need clothes. Beyond the counter, three women sat at manual sewing machines, busily stitching away. Those sewing machines were more valuable than the house, I figured. There are plenty of houses.

  The youngest and prettiest of the women looked up finally and noticed me. "Walter!"

  "Hi, Ann." She was Henry's daughter, a dark-eyed girl of about seventeen; despite the genetic influences on her, the only thing that made her angry was her name. Her full name, she had confessed to me once, was Anarchy, and every time she heard it she felt a profound urge to murder her father. "Is the AMA in?"

  Ann laughed and stood up. "I'll go get him." She thought Linc's title for her father, and especially its abbreviation, were hilarious. I admired her figure as she walked through some dark curtains into the back room.

  A few minutes later a little bald man with thick glasses perched on the end of his nose stuck his head through the curtains. "Walter Sands," he said. "What are you doing here?"

  He sounded angry. "I've come to ask for your daughter's hand in marriage," I said.

  "Phooey," he replied.

  "Well then, how about a friendly conversation with my old pal?"

  He looked put out. "I can spare you a few minutes, I suppose."

  "Thanks."

  The salesman opened a section of the counter and let me pass through. Beyond the curtains, Ann was standing next to her father. "Come on," Henry said to me. "And you get back to work," he growled at Ann.

  "Yes, master." Ann grinned at me as she walked past.

  Henry led me up a flight of stairs, then down a short hallway to his study.

  The study looked a bit like my third-floor library, but I had a feeling there was no overlap between the contents of his groaning bookshelves and my own. "Have you ever read a novel?" I asked him.

  "No time," he snapped. He sat down at a table piled high with papers. On the wall behind him, a couple of old Sierra Club posters showed the world as it once was. I sat in an uncomfortable ladder-back chair opposite him. "I haven't seen you in a while," he said. He sounded like a probation officer in one of the novels he had never read.

  "I was away. I came back."

  "So I heard."

  "And Charlestown isn't my favorite place."

  "That's not my fault."

  Conversation with Henry isn't easy. I changed the topic. "So, how's the book coming?"

  Henry eyed me suspiciously, as if probing for some ulterior motive. I tried to look interested. "Slowly," he admitted finally. "It's vital that I get everything right. It's vital that I make people understand." He bent over and picked up a large stack of paper from the floor. "I do have an extra copy of what I've completed so far," he said, "if you'd like to—"

  "No, no, that's okay," I said quickly. "I'd prefer to wait for your final word on the subject."

  Henry put the stack down. I tried not to look relieved. I don't think I succeeded. "You're never going to read it, are you?" he said.

  "Of course I am," I lied.r />
  He shook his head. "You just don't care. Remember, Walter, those who ignore the past—"

  "—are condemned to listen to people who are obsessed by it."

  "I may be obsessed," Henry said, "but it's an important obsession."

  "Depends on the outcome," I replied. I thought back over the years I had known Henry and watched his stacks of paper grow. "I may never start your book, Henry, but have you considered that you may never finish it? I think your anger means too much to you; you can't let it go."

  "You don't think I have reason to be angry? The governments of the world have poisoned us and all our descendants, and you expect maybe cheerfulness? I should whistle a happy tune and thank God they haven't exploded the rest of their bombs yet?"

  "I just think your anger could be more productive," I said. "If the world never sees your book, how is it going to learn from its mistakes?"

  "The world will see it all right," Henry replied, "if people would only stop interrupting me. Now, what can I do for you, Walter?"

  I smiled my ingratiating smile. "I have a favor to ask."

  I shouldn't have made him angry, of course, given the nature of the favor. But that would've been next to impossible. And I really didn't want to read his book. "Did you see the Globe this morning?"

  Henry made a face. "The president is coming."

  "And there's been a threat already."

  He nodded. "Your friend Gwen's story."

  "Right. She got her information from me. The Feds have hired me to track down this group called The Second American Revolution." I kept smiling. "I thought maybe you might be able to help."

  Henry erupted. "You want me to help you save the skin of the president of the United States, for God's sake? What do you think I've been doing for the past twenty-three years—writing a love letter to the government? Those people in Atlanta want to do it all over again—build up the nation-state so that they can have wars with other nation-states, so that people like you and me can end up rotting in a ditch from radiation poisoning or starving to death after another nuclear winter. I don't want to help you track down The Second American Revolution, Walter; I want to join it."