Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Read online

  A thrill close to fear ran through her. This was a good man. She hadn’t been a wonderful person, and now she could redeem herself through a good man. She said, “Have you spoken with them?”

  “An intern!” Charles cried. “The Audubon Society had me messaged by an intern who used a translation module for English! They didn’t even send a video feed! Maybe when I message them that we’re hooking up with the Grid, they’ll let me talk to somebody in membership!” Diana had never seen Charles this agitated. “I can message with everyone on the Grid. I talked to their head agriculturalist for an hour yesterday. They care, Diana.”

  Diana said, “We could clear out the center accounts. We could pool the money and control it ourselves.”

  “You can handle that? You can do the money?”

  “That’s what I do, Charles. I do money.”

  “I can talk to the Grid president!” he said. “I can get him on my perc in two minutes!”

  She worried he was getting too excited. “Are you sure hooking up with them is what you want?” she said. “If the U.S. gets mad, they could bomb us. Where would your trees be then?”

  “Bombing a nature center? That would start World War III!”

  “Oh, Charles.” Tears filled her eyes. “It wouldn’t.” The pain in his face at these words was unbearable. “Or maybe it would,” she said quickly.

  “Can I set you up an appointment to talk with the Grid president? Will you do that? Please? I can’t go further without you.”

  “YOU’RE STILL THINKING about that truck?” Sharis said. “You don’t know about that truck.”

  He didn’t, really. Yet he did. Abba didn’t believe it for one second. Sharis shot him a skeptical look and stirred her eggs a little more fiercely. “Obscene to have another party eight days after that one,” Chad said. “What is she trying to prove?”

  “Normal life, Chad. Super Bowl parties are normal life.”

  He had noticed something. Sharis was happier for several days after she’d blown up at him. Releasing her anger seemed to lighten her, bring her a jauntier walk. His own good deed to make her angry. “I think they’re immoral,” Chad said. “I think George and Gentia are immoral, corrupt people.” Then he sat back, waiting for the storm.

  Sharis set two plates of eggs in front of him and Abba. “You may be right,” she said.

  GRADY, THE PILOT, climbed out of his helicopter and looked around him. This was the deepest he’d gotten into the Grid, and it was even flatter here than down by the border. The snow had been swept by the wind into ridges like sand; from the air the white ground seemed almost to be moving. Odd they brought in a purported liaison person by attack helicopter, but Grady supposed that someone had decided to make everything, even the liaison’s mode of transport, a threat. Grady was happy that he and his copilot now got to do occasional transport duty. He was weary of border surveillance.

  The copilot was reaching back into the helicopter to give a hand to the special envoy. The special envoy was wearing a dark blue skirt and surprising heels. “Those for my benefit?” Grady had asked as she climbed on board.

  He never missed with anybody, never. As she flew her legs were crossed in Grady’s direction. Her legs were her best feature; other than her witchy eyes, she didn’t have much of a face. This was their fourth trip together. They always came to this same place—“The Green House,” the special envoy called it, laughing. They were at the center of the Grid, near what used to be Lafayette, Indiana.

  There was one of the usual Grid villages about a mile away, but in front of their helicopter, looking more slapdash than the town, was a cluster of aluminum-sided, one-story buildings, the biggest of which was the governor’s office. Governor, he was the president now, the president of the Free and Independent Republic of the Heartland Grid, and this glorified prefab was the capital. What a joke. They didn’t even have money. All they had was produce and a crop of crazed farmers. Even the name was ridiculous: FIRHG, pronounced like it was spelled; supposedly the Gridians wanted to change it, but there was disagreement at the top. Can’t make cash till they have a name to print on it, Grady supposed. He and his copilot, side by side with the special envoy behind them, marched through the three inches of snow to the president’s door. There should be a greeting line for her, Grady thought resentfully. There should be a path. Instead there was only the disturbed snow, and a small group of women huddled near the outside door to the offices. One of the group—a young woman with blonde Rapunzel curls—turned in Grady’s direction and waved. He winked.

  The special envoy was a classy lady. Late thirties and already a big shot, so you knew she had a lot on the ball. She walked with confidence over the snowy ground. A hank of hair whipped over her face; she reached up and tucked it behind her ear.

  They were getting a routine. Once inside, the special envoy turned right toward the president’s office, and Grady and copilot went left with the Rapunzel blonde to her office, small and wood-paneled and windowless, like a old-time car salesman’s office. The blonde then went somewhere to fetch both of them coffee, then the copilot, his needs met (“your tiny needs, your needs the size of a tree frog,” Grady said), headed back outside to wait.

  “So,” Rapunzel said once Kenny had left. She leaned against her desk, chin cradled in her hand. The fall of her hair made her shape a triangle; Grady liked that. Her breasts were small and pointed, triangles also.

  “So,” Grady said back.

  “I think we have a name!”

  “Heartlandia?”

  “No.”

  “The United State of Corn?”

  “No.”

  “Oatspeasbeansa?”

  “You’re terrible.”

  “No, I’m excellent. Don’t you want to try me and see?” By this point he was perched on her lap with his legs spread, facing her. Triangle again.

  “I’m not a traitor, you know. Don’t think you’re going to learn any secrets.”

  “Oh, you don’t have any secrets?” He was burrowing. “How ’bout that? Is that my secret?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Cockteaser,” he said, slipping his finger into her mouth, letting her taste herself. Women liked that. He loved her mouth, the little peaks at the top of her upper lip. Also, she had especially appealing pubic hair, springy and reddish-gold.

  “That it, then?” The copilot asked when Grady climbed back in the Hellion. Three times, that was Grady’s rule.

  “It’s not like I’m going to run into her.”

  The copilot filled his cheeks with air and blew out. He wasn’t particularly expressive with words, but he said a lot with breathing. He’d taped a picture of his wife and two children to the inside of the Hellion door. Grady was tired of him.

  There was a movement at the capital’s plastic door (capital’s! plastic!—didn’t that say it all?), and Grady turned over the ignition. “Good session?” Grady shouted as the special envoy climbed in. Until this thing got airborne, it made a heck of a noise.

  “Fine. They have a name. Esslandia.” She spelled it.

  “Asslandia!?” Grady said. The copilot cast him a look, and the special envoy chuckled. Rapunzel was at the capital’s plastic door now, but Grady didn’t see her. He loved to entertain the special envoy; she stretched her legs and crossed her slender ankles.

  CHAD WALKED DOWN Custard Lane from his house to Gentia’s, which meant going downhill and over the streambed then up the slope on the other side. The hillside houses were surrounded by groomed woods carpeted in groundcover, with honeysuckle and seedling trees pulled out. In the snow the effect was elegant and lofty, like some stage set of a woods: trunks rising from a bare white floor. Empty houses, their roofs glistening, were set away from the lane, any yard debris or missing awnings obscured by the snow’s concealing blanket. Two squirrels skittered across the snow and up a tree into a hole. Decadent Super Bowl party, Chad thought. Instead of heading to George and Gentia’s over the bridge and up the hill, he walked to the bridge and turned ar
ound. Up and down the hill he walked, three times, four times.

  He had never really understood the transplants that couldn’t get over being moved, or why the Gridians insisted they were one with their land, but now he understood on a visceral level the tragedy of the Gridding.

  By the time Chad reached George and Gentia’s, the sliced ham and Swiss cheese were gone. There was still salami, turkey, and roast beef. I forgive you, Nenonene had said, pressing that coin like a target into Simpkins’s forehead. Chad thought: if Nenonene could, with such cold calculation, destroy a single person, why wouldn’t he destroy a town? Maybe our town.

  It must be ego that drove Nenonene, mostly. One World, he liked to say. One World ruled by me.

  “You’re late,” Abba said. “I saved you some food. The boys and Sharis are in the den.” Abba had taken to wearing an old tam that had been Chad’s father’s, which Chad thought made her look like a Jewish leprechaun.

  Ernie from across Far Hills Avenue said, “You get lost walking up here?”

  All this life around him, all this apparent normalcy, but now it felt to Chad like an old-fashioned movie projection of life, something that—should the light burn out, should the film snap—would simply disappear.

  “It’s so nice and warm in here,” Abba added.

  Gentia was talking, George sitting next to her staring at the floor. He was worried about heaven, George had told Chad. Was he good enough? Would he get there? Chad didn’t care about heaven. He wanted his life here.

  They walked home in the dark, all five of them close together, the flashlight beam like a rope pulling them home. Sharis and Abba and the boys kept talking, but Chad didn’t say a thing. He couldn’t have said if he was better or worse, but he was different. His wife was still his wife, his boys were still his boys, his aunt was—more than he’d realized—his aunt, but other than that there was not much he was sure of. It was a newly mutable world, where the very ground he walked on was provisional. He envisioned, for the first time, tanks rolling down the streets of Dayton.

  “human folly is always amusing”

  NO ONE RETURNED things to the library any more, Kennedy said. “They laugh at us; they act like we don’t matter.”

  “Well, I matter,” Lila said. She tapped her skull. “The only place anyone can find the water map is here.”

  Kennedy said, “Are you insane? What if they find you out and torture you?”

  Lila called the number on Nelson and Solganik’s card. “That service you provided for me”—she gripped the phone with her shoulder, twisted a rubber band around her wrist—“could it be undone?” Why hadn’t she thought of torture? Incessant screeching noises piped into her brain. Metal instruments tearing at her wound. She hated pain. Their hurting her would make remembering the map impossible, and then they’d hurt her more.

  “Undone?” The legend’s merry laughter hurtled through the receiver. “Honey, you don’t have to worry about a thing. Sue and I are professionals. That stuff’s dust now. It’s air.”

  “LANITA’S NOT TALKING to you,” Naomi said to Tuuro. “No way.”

  “Could you hold the receiver in the air when she’s talking, let me hear her voice?”

  “You listen to me, you erase this number from your mind. Because if you call me back, I’ll have to round up my angry friends.”

  LILA CALLED GERALD Ferrescu, the former city manager. She would never, in her past life, have called someone so eager to be called. But he knew things. They met for lunch at L’Auberge, the most expensive restaurant in town, which appeared to be—oddly or not—thriving. At a table near them sat a woman in lipstick, with painted fingernails, trim buttoned boots, and a purple cap on her head. Unimaginable, looking at that woman, to think that they were in quarantined Dayton. Lila smoothed her skirt—she had only one winter skirt, and it wasn’t glamorous—and looked across the table.

  Ferrescu smiled. “To what do I owe this pleasure?” Kennedy had told her Ferrescu had a relative who worked in Washington in Homeland Security. Ferrescu never named this relative, or any of his informers; his gossip was customarily preceded by the words “I hear,” as if the facts had slipped from the air into his ear.

  “Curiosity,” Lila said. She’d made it clear that she was paying for his meal.

  The Grid had not lost its appeal to her. It struck her that the Gridians might need her water map, that under their umbrella she could be protected. What a crazy irony that would be, working for the Grid after they’d shot her in the leg. People did what they had to. Ferrescu ordered oysters, and Lila thanked God for her savings. She could still afford her lemons, although they cost three times what they had the year before.

  Ferrescu was filling her in on Grid history. “ … and then they enlisted those Lindisfarne people, who were always”—a significant pause—“particularly clannish.”

  This was no surprise to Lila, but Ferrescu’s next statement was a revelation. “They were utopians, you know,” he said, the slippery gray of an oyster disappearing into his mouth. “Wanted to be blasted off into outer space.”

  “Outer space!” This was worth the oysters. There were still a few abandoned space stations circling the earth, but the Mars colony had been shut down during the world recession of 2032, and only schoolchildren and hotheaded scientists talked about space travel now.

  “That was why they didn’t want babies. You remember that abortion debacle. Their idea was to hold off on reproduction until they had a new world to colonize.”

  “Bizarre. I thought they had more sense than that.”

  “Sense? Never Jeff Germantz’s strong point, my dear.”

  “What was his strong point?”

  Ferrescu waved his tiny fork. “Intellectually pliable. You figure out something you want, he’ll give you the rationale. They didn’t have any power, you know. Just those ten thousand acres of Australian scrub one of their members had inherited. That’s why they wanted the stars. But they couldn’t raise the money for a space mission. So when Babbitt Chromium, who was a friend of Germantz’s from Yale, told him that our dear President Brandee Cooper was looking into creating a large dedicated agriculture area, well …”

  “I heard Germantz was interested in agricultural linguistics,” Lila said, hoping to jog Ferrescu back to something interesting.

  Ferrescu burst into unpleasant laughter. “The linguistics of exploration, back then. As I said, remarkably pliable.”

  “Was Allyssa-something part of that first crew? I’ve met her.”

  “Ah, Allyssa Banks. Certainly. There were rumors once Germantz had gotten her pregnant. I believed it at the time, but now I doubt it. A child never showed up, and someone like Germantz would never abort his own offspring. You know what they call him on the Grid, don’t you? Father Jeff. There’re a number of baby Jeffs up there, also.”

  “Not his …”

  “Who knows? Or maybe just named in his honor. Like baby Vladimirs in the post-Lenin Soviet Union.” Ferrescu’s voice dropped confidingly. “It was Father Jeff insisted on destroying the towns.”

  “Really?” Lila had learned this from local government: any outrageous action, good or bad, started as somebody’s fantasy. People who thought that one person could do nothing had no idea.

  “It was his way of making sure the government got their hands smelly. You know, Father Jeff didn’t destroy the towns. Listen, my friend: if you can convince someone to do your dirty work, they will be a hundred times more sullied by it than you will. The best they can ever look is stupid.”

  Jeff Germantz was brilliant, Lila realized. She had never fully grasped this. She shivered in sudden relief that he was dead. And people adored him. One must always be wary. “It’s funny we never heard more about Germantz,” she said. “All we ever heard about was Brandee Cooper and her cabinet.”

  “I knew nothing good would come out of a Brandee. A Sherry—okay; but a Brandee? Listen to me, politicians want their idea people in the shadows. If the ideas are good, the politicians look b
rilliant; if not”—Ferrescu’s voice was back to its usual pitch now, gleefully dramatic—“the culprit can be dragged into the light of day.”

  Lila had never before noticed Ferrescu’s hands. They were plump, with tapered fingers, and Lila pictured them bedecked with ornate rings, lifting a tankard of mead, as Ferrescu on a bench in a vast banquet hall regaled the crowd with a story of the king and the noblewoman and the king’s best steed. “Don’t you get depressed by this?” Lila blurted.

  “Human folly is always amusing.” Ferrescu raised his wineglass to his lips. Empty oyster shells littered his plate. Ferrescu, Lila saw, did not believe in his own downfall. He was as arrogant as she’d been: they both believed their knowledge would protect them.

  “WELL?” CHARLES SAID, sitting up straighter.

  “He was very pleasant,” Diana said. She was still dazed by the strangeness of it: she, Diana Crupski, alone in a visual feed conversation with the president of FIRHG, newly named Esslandia. “Reasonable.” She considered a moment. “I liked him.” It had taken two weeks to reach him; he had not been as eager to talk with Diana as Charles had thought. But once they were looking at each other over the media he was quite gracious. His name was Kyle Beerbower. From just outside the former Hicksville, Ohio, he told her, smiling at its name. He had seen the value of the Grid from the beginning. He believed in work and hope. Red cheeks, little eyes: he reminded Diana of the man who used to come to her parents’ house each autumn to check the furnace.

  “I don’t see where joining up with Grid would upset anyone,” Diana said to Charles. “They swear they’ll protect us. I mean us like the trees. And us like”—she pointed—“the two of us.”

  “Did you get into the mechanics?”

  She was pleased Charles had trusted her with this, although when she first brought it up President Beerbower had seemed surprised. “We tell them when we want to do it. They’ll send people over the barrier to surround the place, and then we inform the Audubon Society and the city of Dayton, and we should notify the federal government, too. We can do all that by perc. And that’s it. We have our own generator. President Beerbower said they can guarantee us fresh food. Our media feed may get cut off, but we can hook up to the Grid’s. He doesn’t think there will be any, you know, violence.” She smiled. “It’s a big deal for them, having someone want to join them. For the U.S., we’re nothing. We’re a nature center.”