Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Read online

  “We’re not industry,” Charles said, his mouth twisting. “We’re not farmland. We’re not”—his mouth twisted even more—“money.”

  “Right,” Diana agreed. “Why should we matter?”

  He loved her open face, the way she wasn’t bitter. He beckoned her to him, wrapped his arms around her slender shoulders. “Are you happy?”

  She nodded. “I’m beyond happy. I’m …”—it took her a second to find the right word—“thrilled.”

  “Me too.” And both of them thought that what they were doing was worth it, no matter what came next. This moment was worth it.

  THREE DAYS LATER the Esslandian troops—about thirty people, wearing camouflage gear and weighted with guns—were on the center grounds by 6 a.m. Charles gave them the coordinates of the center borders, and they fanned out to protect the area. At seven Charles messaged his letter. By 8:30 the media people were arriving—trucks from the networks, local newspeople, even NewsEuropa—and the Esslandians who controlled the road sent them to the place Charles had selected as the media center: an abandoned barn about a mile by foot up the wooded hillside from the center. The Nature Center, in its better days, had incorporated a farm with goats and sheep—Charles walked across the former pasture to reach his sugar bush—but no one had used the barn for years. Now the only signs of habitation were mice droppings in the corners and an abandoned plastic jump rope tossed over a beam in the loft. Charles opened the big front doors of the barn and stood near the barn’s back wall. The cameramen glanced warily at the wooden floor. “Come on in,” Charles said, pleased when the cameraman obeyed him. “It’s perfectly solid.”

  “I’m going to read this,” Charles said once everyone was positioned. He held up a handwritten copy of the letter he’d messaged to the presidents of the U.S. and of Esslandia, the governor of Ohio, and the Audubon Society National headquarters.

  “Read it and then we’ll ask questions,” someone shouted.

  “No questions.”

  “You refuse to answer questions?”

  Charles’s eyes darted to Diana, standing in the corner behind the cameramen. She gave a small nod.

  “A few,” Charles said. He thought again. “Maybe twenty.”

  “Twenty questions!” someone exclaimed, and a titter ran through the small crowd. The laughter deflated both the media’s nervousness and Charles’s authority; when he started reading his voice quivered.

  “A NATURE CENTER?” Lila said sharply. She’d been lying in bed telling herself to get up and move. “How the heck can a nature center secede?”

  “You tell me, lovely Lila,” Kennedy said over the perc. “Get on your media feed.”

  The Aullwood Audubon Nature Center had announced its independence from the U.S. and its alliance with Esslandia. A scruffy-looking male—the label below him read “Charles Hadding, Director of renegade nature center”—was shown reading a prepared statement, which put a lot of emphasis on woodpeckers and the secret emissions of trees and did not strike Lila as totally coherent. The phrase “commitment to the natural world” came up twice, which the U.S., in contrast to the Grid (oops, Esslandia—she’d never get used to that name), was said to lack. Esslandian soldiers (amazing!) were ringing the renegade center; American troops had moved in place to face them. So far, the newsreader intoned, there was a “tense standoff.” A statement from President Baxter was expected within the hour.

  “Are they crazy?” Lila said, reaching Kennedy on her perc. “They think we’ll just let them go?”

  IT HAD GONE well, Charles thought. Except for that crack about twenty questions. Let them have their fun. It must get tedious, driving around filming this or that event. A watcher, not a player. Charles had made himself a player. The network trucks had startled him, but the more he considered it the more pleased he was that they had come. The U.S. was taking him seriously! He mattered! Everyone must be talking about lepogen now.

  He was almost humming as he made his way along the fence beside the old pasture. A gate ahead, and then the downhill trail through the woods back to the center. Diana had left the barn before the (twenty-seven) questions; she should be home already. In all the morning’s excitement they hadn’t eaten, so Charles was certain she’d be fixing breakfast now. Charles was surprised he wasn’t hungrier. He felt empty, yes, but in an exhilarated way: stripped, light, like one of those beautiful otter skeletons he liked to take out of its drawer and gaze at.

  He thought of taking a detour along the ridge to the spring but that would make him late, and he didn’t want Diana to worry. He headed downhill. He took the steeper path, to the right, which in spring could become a narrow creek but which now, in the February chill, held water only in the occasional frozen puddle. He saw deer tracks in a patch of leftover snow; heard the cries of a pair of cardinals; stopped to watch a pair of gamboling squirrels who were nesting in a beech tree dead from lightning. He was almost to the junction with the main trail when he noticed the ground ahead of him moving. His first crazy thought was deer.

  The men stood. There were six of them, in camouflage gear, faces and lips painted in blotches of winter color: green-gray, dead-leaf brown, twig black. The whites of their eyes were all that revealed them as human. Charles’s first thought was to compliment these soldiers on their getups. The Esslandian solders’ camouflage, he realized, had been painfully rudimentary. Then he saw the rifles aimed at him.

  “Charles Hadding?” The man who spoke stood in front of the others, slouching as only a person in authority would dare.

  “Yes.” Charles had stopped at his place on the trail. To his right was Aullwood Creek; across it and half a mile down the bank were the nature center building and Diana. How could American troops have gotten here already? It was only a half hour since he’d finished his press conference. And where were the Esslandians? Shouldn’t he have heard some shooting as these guys broke in?

  “I’m Lieutenant Kiefaber. I wish to inform you that we have taken charge of this nature center and it continues to be, as it has always been, under the jurisdiction of the United States of America.”

  “No way.”

  “Under the laws and regulations of the jurisdiction of the United States of America,” the lieutenant amended with irritation, as if merely having to say this was insulting. His speaking dissolved his disguise, revealing his small teeth and the pink of his inner lips.

  “No,” Charles said. The explosive power of that word was almost thrilling; he could see why children said it. “I’m part of the Grid now.” A hesitant correction: “Esslandia. There are Esslandian troops all around here. Encircling us.”

  “They surrendered. You’re all alone now, Mr. Hadding.”

  Charles felt the first fear he’d felt all morning, thinking of Diana back at the center, pouring water into the pancake mix, opening a can of jelly with their antique can opener.

  “So?” Charles said, but he had to clear his throat to get out the word. The Esslandians had surrendered without shooting? They had looked pretty tough early this morning.

  “So you’ll come with us, we take you in. End this stupid little game you’re playing.”

  “No,” Charles said, less convincingly this time. In his letter, had he mentioned Diana? He didn’t think so. The Gridians knew about her, but the U.S. didn’t.

  “No?” The lieutenant licked his lip, and some of the brown paint came off. “What should we do, Mr. King of Nature?” One of the other soldiers guffawed.

  “You should get out of here! This isn’t your country anymore. And leave me alone.” He started to walk quickly down the path, but the lieutenant stepped in front to stop him with the point of his rifle.

  “You’re resisting detainment.”

  “Why don’t you get out of my way so I can go home.” It struck Charles belatedly that it was a mistake to say this, that they might follow him to Diana. He took a few steps backward. “Better yet,” he said, “I’ll go back to the barn.”

  The lieutenant’s eyes narrowed. �
�Think you’ll run to the media, hunh?” he said. “Think you’ll get those one-worlders to lick up everything you say?” The lieutenant stood up straighter. “We’re a special unit. We know how to deal with traitors.”

  He’s talking too much, Charles thought with a chill.

  “Shooting a traitor’s pretty standard issue. I don’t think anyone’s going to go apeshit about us shooting a traitor.” The lieutenant reached into a pocket of his camouflage suit and removed a piece of paper and pen. The paper’s colors matched his outfit. “You have a last statement?”

  “I’m not a traitor.” Charles imagined himself collapsing a millisecond before the shots, the bullets blazing harmlessly over him.

  “No? You handed over part of our country to the enemy, I’d call that a traitor. What do you think, Sergeant Lipschitz, that sound like a traitor to you?”

  One of the men shifted, nodded. “Eh?” the lieutenant said.

  “I’d say that’s a traitor.”

  “Private Boyle?”

  “Traitor.”

  “Private Hurtell?”

  This one looked, beneath his paint, younger than the others. His eyes had a bruised innocence. Charles heard him mumble a barely audible yes.

  Charles stepped back.

  “What you scramblin’ for, boy?” This was a quote, delivered in a crackling accent, a line from a recent movie about an escaped slave who becomes a cowboy; even Charles recognized it.

  My God, Charles thought, I’m going to be killed by a crazy army guy who quotes bad movies. He thought fleetingly of heaven, which as a child had worried him terribly. Were there predators and prey in heaven? How could it be heaven for the prey? On the other hand, without prey, how could it be heaven for a predator?

  “Look.” The lieutenant pointed to a spot twenty feet away, just up the hill. “You stand by that tree.”

  It was a maple tree, a lonely sugar maple in a stand of oaks, its catkin carried here on the back of a deer or a raccoon, a misplaced and brave and unlikely tree. It seemed beyond cruel to Charles that in shooting him, they would shoot this particular tree. It was in its prebud phase, thousands of gallons of sap coursing its trunk. You could make syrup for five hundred pancakes from this tree. A bullet hole would bleed it for no reason. Enough bullets would kill it.

  Frantically, Charles scanned the group of faces. The young-looking soldier—Private Hurtell—was staring straight ahead, mouth open. Charles aimed his voice at him: “You’re going to let them shoot me in cold blood?”

  Private Hurtell blinked, but said nothing.

  Manna, that was what they ate in heaven. A nonmeat product.

  One of the privates—not Hurtell—broke into giggles. “I farted,” he said.

  “I’m not liking this.” The lieutenant’s voice changed. “Get by that tree!” He jabbed the point of his rifle into Charles’s belly. The pain was terrific; Charles thought for a second he’d been shot, but when he looked there was no blood. He took a step away.

  “Just go over there. Get away from us.” A new element had entered the lieutenant’s voice. “You’re too close.”

  “What,” Charles said, emboldened by the lieutenant’s discomfort, “you’re afraid you’ll get my guts on you?”

  There was something else pointed at him beside the rifles, a sense, almost an odor, and Charles realized it emanated from the lieutenant’s men. They were panicking, he realized. Panic in nature served no useful purpose. It was one step from death, the panicker’s or something else’s. Charles’s eyes ran over the faces of the lieutenant’s men. Their eyes were wide, unfocused, as if they were sitting in front of a visu-game controlled by someone else. Only Private Hurtell seemed to really see Charles, and Private Hurtell’s eyes snapped away.

  Were these soldiers? Charles thought suddenly. They seemed to be lacking a soldier’s resolute hardness, despite their elaborate makeup. And this sort of job—hiding in the woods, intimidation, maybe murder—should be a special ops assignment, not a job for a lieutenant and a gaggle of scared privates.

  “I don’t think you want to do this,” Charles said, aiming his words at Private Hurtell. “You won’t forget it. You can’t get rid of memory. No matter what drugs you take.”

  “Traitor!” the lieutenant bawled. “Lowlife traitor!

  “I’m not a lowlife,” Charles said. Lowlife: fungus, bacteria, saprophytes. He would end up feeding lowlife, like all highlife in death. “I’m not a traitor to the trees. I’m not a traitor to the birds.” He was walking backwards up the hill, repeating these lines like a mantra, aiming his steps away from the big maple. He himself farted. Oh beautiful body, luminous and aching. Oh kingdom of the visible and invisible world.

  “Stand right there!” the lieutenant shouted. “Stand!”

  But he kept walking backwards. No bullets hit the maple.

  “LILA, WILL YOU?” Michelle the youngie from Agro repeated, her lips moving after the words. The image feed was slow again today; Lila had heard there’d been damage to cables in southwest Ohio—sabotage, people were saying. Grid sympathizers trying to cut off American communications.

  “Today?” Lila said. “With this nature center stuff going on?”

  “Why do you think he needs to find a place for her?”

  Lila hadn’t heard from Michelle in weeks, and then Michelle messaged her at her office asking a favor. A second cousin of hers lived in Dayton with his twelve-year-old daughter. The cousin was a counterintelligence specialist working at the air force base, and the government wanted him to move to on-base quarters. The government had no plans for his daughter, which was where Lila came in.

  Michelle said, “I know you love children.”

  Did she love children? In an abstract sense. She’d certainly always sympathized with their powerlessness. Yet she’d never had to live with one. “I’m not the safest person now, I …” Yet Lila was afraid to say more. It was possible that everyone was being monitored. Or maybe not everyone, but her.

  “It shouldn’t be long. Two weeks? Just till there’s some resolution.”

  “I hate to be responsible for another …”

  “Her name’s Janie,” Michelle interrupted. “She won’t be any problem. She’s a bookworm.”

  DIANA HEARD THE shots. A whole spatter of shots, then silence. Slightly north of her, toward the barn, along the stream. She knew. It had been madness for them to think their actions wouldn’t matter. But she should be, as Charles had wanted her, safe. No one from America—her former country—knew that she was here.

  Diana went into the bathroom and stared at her ravaged face. She ended up huddled in the bathroom corner, her back to the cold tiles, and after a while it came to her what she must do.

  Her hands were shaking as she punched in the number on her perc. “Is the doctor there? I’m a former employee.”

  He came to the phone surprisingly quickly. “Hello? You have an emergency?”

  She explained in the briefest of terms. Her husband had just been killed, but she wanted his child.

  “You don’t want his clone?”

  “No. I want a mixture, him and me.”

  “His sperm would be easiest.” She nodded. “It isn’t difficult, but you’ll need a syringe and needle.”

  “Okay.” The taxidermy set in the library.

  “What did you say your last name was? Crupski?” She could picture the specialist frowning. “Can I get a video feed of you?”

  “No, not from here. I’m in Dayton.”

  “Oh, Dayton. When did you say you left my office, ’41?” There was the muffled sound of the specialist talking to someone else, then: “Are you the little girl with all the hair? Didn’t you write a letter?”

  “I was young. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t be sorry. I even remember what you said. ‘Unconscionable immorality.’ Rather a nice phrase. I thought you might have some obsessive traits re language.”

  “It was abstract to me then. Now it’s real.”

  “Oh, that’
s a good phrase, too. Have you been mapped?”

  “How do I get the sperm, doctor? How much time do I have? It may be hard for me to get to him, I …”

  “Oh, that’s right, your young fellow’s dead. Well, that’s not a problem. You have about eight hours. It’s nothing complicated. Do you have a freezer? You bring the sperm to Chattanooga and I’ll construct and implant the embryo myself. Okay, now: first, you …”

  baby lettuces

  JANIE, MICHELLE’S COUSIN’S daughter, didn’t read the sexy sort of books that Lila had. In her hand was a copy of The Bell Jar, a book that had been tired back in Lila’s youth. This relieved Lila. Lila was also relieved—watching Janie mount the front steps to her condo—that the girl was over five and a half feet tall, with oversized hands and feet, and a body as round and solid as a loaf of bread. Small humps of breasts. As Janie grabbed her suitcase from her father and dragged it alone up the inside stairs, Lila saw her old self in the youth’s brash movements. She’s only halfway to being a woman, Lila thought. Good. She won’t drain me.

  In her living room, Lila saw Janie’s eyes narrow as her father opened his wallet. “Thanks for doing this,” the father said to Lila, handing his daughter a roll of bills. No offer of money for Lila, no magic words to utter if soldiers stopped here, no indication of how long Janie would stay. He seemed to be avoiding Lila’s eyes. To Janie he said, “I’ll call you when I can. Don’t worry.” He tapped his daughter once on the top of the head, then left.

  Don’t worry, Lila scoffed, inwardly shaking her head. Michelle had told her Janie’s mother had died of brucellosis—one of Dayton’s infamous missed cases, ignored after the state health department announced the disease was wiped out. That silly pat on the head: as if Janie was a once-reliable car being sent to the junkyard.