Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Page 3

  Tuuro dressed and ran back to the church, his left little toe sore, a blister rubbed open, the air still hot and sticky even as the dawn made a pink stain in the sky. He would unearth the coffin, go into the church, call the police to tell them what he’d found. The police would say oh yes, thank you for calling, we have the mother right here. They would bring the mother over in their car, her eyes like draining holes in her broad face, but when Tuuro prized the coffin open (he hadn’t used that many nails), she would understand. As terrible as her son’s fate had been, Tuuro had, in his small way, eased the pain of it. He pictured the boy’s mother kissing her son’s face, running her hand over the boy’s thin shoulders, touching the scarf with which Tuuro had dressed him, turning her eyes to meet Tuuro’s, acknowledging in that gaze their mutual love for the boy.

  By now it was light out. If he was lucky, if he kept running, this could all be over before the pastor showed up to his office.

  Two blocks from the church a big dog ran down the center of the street, a twist of red and black and green trailing from his mouth. Tuuro broke into a cry, understanding. He had forgotten about the dogs.

  There were scores of dogs, newly feral, that had been abandoned to the streets when people left Dayton. During the Short Times abandoned dogs had been a problem, too, but now the situation was worse, because most members of the Containment Squad were volunteers from the southern—the wealthier—suburbs, and a disproportionate number of those people had found a way out of town. Tuuro had heard that the Containment people now simply shot dogs in the street. As Tuuro ran now he cursed himself for not making the coffin stronger, for not burying it deeper, and he begged God again and again to let the boy’s body be intact. He was so worried about the dogs he never imagined police cars and a van outside the church. He didn’t notice the horde of people, some in uniform, in the garden.

  Who is this? Why are they here? Tuuro thought when an arm stopped him. Then, even worse, he spotted the pastor. “Tuuro!” the pastor cried, lifting his hands in the air. “Do you know anything about this?

  THE LAWYER’S NAME was Brandon English. He was the color of a peeled potato, stocky, probably fifty, wearing a rumpled shirt and pants it looked like he’d slept in. For Tuuro, who kept himself neat, the attorney’s disdain for his own appearance was puzzling. It might be alcohol, it might be a runaway wife, it might be so much power that looks didn’t matter.

  “Mr. Tuuro,” the lawyer said. “Don’t tell me if they roughed you up.” He removed his perc from his pocket, set it on the table between them, then slumped over its tiny holographic screen. He did have power, Tuuro thought: those holo-screens were expensive. After some minutes he looked at Tuuro with an unvarnished weariness and said, “First off, you need to know something: this boy of yours is Nenonene’s grandson.”

  Nay-no-nay-nay. The name was somehow familiar. Tuuro ran through his list of neighbors. No. Tuuro said, “Does the boy have a mother?”

  “Of course he has a mother!” Mr. English closed his eyes; when he opened them he looked, if possible, even wearier. “Even in our crazy modern world, a child has a mother. But it’s Nenonene’s son that is the father. I don’t know who the mother is. Some woman. The wife of Nenonene’s son.”

  Tuuro stared. The boy did have a mother.

  “Nenonene!” English repeated. “The general. The African. The one who runs the Alliance from that hotel basement up in Cleveland.”

  Tuuro tried to shift his mind from the mother to a famous grandfather, but it was an ungainly process, like an old machine slipping laboriously into gear. Of course Tuuro knew Nenonene! Everyone knew Nenonene. But as a name, a concept, not as a real person.

  “My God,” Tuuro said after a moment. “Nenonene is the enemy. What was this boy doing in Dayton?”

  English shook his head impatiently. “His parents live here. Nenonene’s son is an American citizen. He has a PhD from somewhere south. International finance or global economics, something like that. He teaches at Wright State. He didn’t keep his father’s name. The son’s name is Norris. Ken Norris.”

  Tuuro nodded blankly, trying to take it in. Still, the boy had a mother. “And this little boy, what was his name?”

  “Cubby Norris.” A very American name. Not a name you’d expect for Nenonene’s grandson. Maybe the mother had picked it.

  “Does Cubby”—Tuuro paused on the name; you could say the boy had been hidden in a cubbyhole; how savage, to make a name into a place of death—“have brothers or sisters?”

  “Not currently. The wife is pregnant. Very pregnant.” English hesitated. “I saw her as I came in. She’d just seen the body.”

  “The boy was young.”

  “Four and a half. He was tall.”

  “How is the mother?”

  “Devastated!” A look of incredulity; a quick glance around the room. “What do you think?”

  “I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to tell her I cared.”

  English’s voice turned cold. “How long had you cared?”

  “Since I found him! I never knew him alive. I told the policeman everything, don’t you have … ?” And Tuuro waved at English’s holographic screen.

  At this, English made the holo-screen disappear. He sat for a moment, considering Tuuro, the sides of his cheeks moving as if he were chewing at their insides. “Let me ask you this straight out: Are you a homosexual?”

  “Oh no,” Tuuro smiled. “Never.”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  Tuuro straightened his face. “It’s ridiculous. It’s something I never considered.”

  “You speak well. How far did you go in school?”

  “I finished my first year at Sinclair.” The local community college.

  “Why didn’t you go on?”

  Tuuro shrugged helplessly. “Money.”

  “Reasonable. Are you political?”

  “Political?” Tuuro laughed awkwardly. “I’ve never voted. I know it’s a duty, but …”

  “You didn’t know about the boy’s connection to Nenonene?”

  “How could I know? I come across this, this”—Tuuro saw again the boy’s tucked head—“tragedy, this small boy dead in my church, and I picked him up and …” “My” church, he’d said: not something he would say in front of the pastor.

  “I’m your lawyer,” English interrupted. “Don’t tell me things I shouldn’t know.” He leaned into the table. “Now,” he said, “it would be absurd to think you hurt this boy to send a message to Nenonene, am I correct?”

  Tuuro stared.

  “Or to his son. You might be sending a message to his son. But it would be absurd to think that. It was a simple crime of passion, right?”

  “A crime? I never hurt this boy. I came upon him, I saw the …”

  “You didn’t do it.”

  “He was a boy! A little child.”

  “No conspiracy. Absolutely no political motive.”

  “I went home to get him a blanket, I took a hat for him.”

  A light had appeared in English’s eye; he sat up a straighter. “This wasn’t a molest-y thing.”

  “It was like he was me!”

  “You didn’t do it,” English repeated, wonderment in his voice. “Well, the genetics will take care of that.”

  “It’s terrible to find the body of a child,” Tuuro said. “I have a child.”

  “Okay, okay, I believe you.” English sighed. His shoulders sank, the spark that had seized him suddenly extinguished. “But damn, you managed to do right by the wrong body.”

  lila wakes up (1)

  SEYMOUR, LILA’S ASSISTANT, appeared in her office. “There’s a Federal wants to talk to you.”

  “You mean State.” The State people were pests. The loss of Cleveland had thrown them into a tizzy. By June 2047, the cavernous lakefront edifice that had been built as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a tracking station receiving information from Canada and Alliance ships in the Atlantic. The BP tower was a pile of rubble called Strike One,
the Federal Building was the Centro de Gobierno (the Alliance had let the South American forces name this one), and the former Terminal Tower was a military headquarters, with General Nenonene’s quarters taking up the basement of what used to be the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. It was all confusing. Many people had left Cleveland, but many more people hadn’t. Why couldn’t they? Their houses. Their businesses. The schools for their children. Their elderly relatives who didn’t understand. All of it made sense, and yet it didn’t make sense. With the Grid already knocking out a good third of the state and Cleveland occupied, there wasn’t much State of Ohio left. The people in the state capital in Columbus reminded Lila of befuddled bees circling a destroyed hive.

  “No, darling. I mean Federal.”

  “Federal?” Lila sighed. Federal people rarely bothered her, but when they did it was never pleasant. What environmental edict were they obsessing about now? “Okay.” She turned to face her screen. “Put ’em on.”

  “I mean they’re here,” Seymour said. “A youngie-girl.”

  “In person?” Lila swiveled in her chair. She tried to remember the last time anyone had made a call on her in person. What made Federal think she had the time for in person? More ominously, what did Federal need that they sent a real person?

  Seymour brought in the Federal, a tall woman—good Lord, did they take them straight out of college these days?—with an eager, open face and an athlete’s stride. The youngie sat.

  “What a surprise!” said Lila. “You’re really a Federal? Who do you represent, exactly?”

  “I’m from Agriculture,” the youngie said, dipping her head. The Department of Agriculture had planned and now controlled the Grid. Since the Gridding, Agriculture had become a shameful part of the government. People had been known to pretend they worked in other parts of the government. It took, Lila suspected, an act of will and faith to half-stand and extend her hand across Lila’s desk. “Michelle Everly.”

  “Michelle,” Lila said. “Lila de Becqueville.” A lovely face, Lila realized, sculpted and high-cheekboned. The lashes at the corners of Michelle’s eyes tangled in a wanton way. A slight scent of lemon to her, probably perfume.

  “I’ve heard about you,” Michelle said, settling herself back in the chair. “I’ve heard you have an excellent system. Best treatment system of any city your size. Superior flood protection, aquifer maintenance, nice leach fields, reliable sewage …”

  “Thank you.” Everything she’d said was true. The Water Queen, Lila called herself. Not that she told anyone this.

  “My mother remembers you coming to her school,” Michelle said, reddening slightly. Michelle’s mother! Lila was shocked at how this dated her, and she made it into a curse: tu madre. “You used to give talks on the history of water in Ohio.”

  Michelle’s face was eager and imploring. Inside herself, Lila felt something shifting. “Your mother remembers me?” she said. It was true: early in Lila’s career, twenty, twenty-five years before, she had given talks. This was during New Dawn Dayton, the halcyon period before the Short Times when all sorts of industry—including Prestige Polymer, Armitage Steel, even Consort and its premier nuclear plant—had come to Dayton because of the city’s abundance of water. Lila thought how little she remembered of Ohio’s water history now, although somewhere she still had the data chips.

  “You talked about the Great Black Swamp. And malaria.”

  “Lima, Ohio, was named after Lima, Peru,” Lila said. “They imported quinine from Peru as a malaria medicine.” Malaria in Ohio: people used to be incredulous when she told them. The drainage tile used to dry northwest Ohio could be stretched from the earth to the moon. The diversion of water from the Great Black Swamp had created lakes that were still, over a century and a half later, among Ohio’s largest. Now the lakes were recreational areas, but in their early years after their formation they were notorious for mosquitoes and disease, places a sensible person avoided.

  Lila said, “You know they used to call Cincinnati Porkopolis. That was because of water, too.”

  Michelle gave Lila a thrilling sidelong glance.

  “They built a canal south from Middletown to the Ohio River,” Lila said. “Once the canal was built, farmers could move their pigs to Cincinnati, and from there the pigs could be shipped by boat east to Pennsylvania or west to the Mississippi. People don’t think about it, but water opens markets.” Lila was surprised at the fervor in her voice; she did remember. She glanced at Michelle. A young youngie, Lila thought with a wave of fatigue. Then she relaxed: if Federal really wanted something from her, they wouldn’t send a girl like this. “So what are you here for?” Lila said brightly. “Training? Advice? Employees?” Michelle’s lips were parted, her dark hair swept down her back. God, that long hair. Lila could brush that hair across Michelle’s mouth and kiss her lips through the curtain of it. She could lift it off her neck and nuzzle the pale spot behind her ear. Lila’s voice came out surprisingly husky. “You running a little dry up on the Grid?”

  A spot at the end of Michelle’s nose turned suddenly red. A flaw, there was always a flaw. Even in her glory days Lila had had one. The flaw had been Lila’s profile, her slightly bulging stomach. Now her belly lay across her thighs like a sleeping cat. Suddenly Lila felt angry at Michelle’s bosses. A little training mission here, get out and talk up the old folks, the powers-that-be of this or that inconsequential city. The jerks that would send a young woman to do this. “Am I a little too close for comfort here?” Lila asked, her voice quickening. “You are running dry on the Grid? I’ll tell you what: you get me a steady power supply for my treatment plant and I’ll give you all the water you Agros want.”

  For a second the youngie looked confused, then she drew herself up and pulled on an invisible jacket of authority. “We don’t have any influence over electricity. That’s Consort.” Lila was old enough to remember the days before Consort, the aggregation of utility companies that had grown up in the early twenties. It had seemed so logical then, Consortium, with states shipping electricity and gas and wind and solar power back and forth, but then Consortium got bigger and bigger, the nickname “Consort” used first by the more intelligent, referring—ha, ha!—to its relation to the government, then taken up and somehow euphemized by the company itself, making it a cheerful name, a name implying convenience and compatibility and even a gleeful communion. “Consort with us,” the top of each bill used to read.

  “But you’re a Fed,” Lila said.

  “Of course.” Michelle leaned forward eagerly. “Consort is a business. Who are we to interfere with business?” This was a slogan: when the Alliance leaders pointed out how America forgot the poor, Americans responded with a truism about business.

  God, Lila hated these rote answers. “Then why are you here?” She demanded. “You seem to want to interfere with my business.”

  “You’re water. You’re still regulated. Water is local.”

  “But you want to make my water not local.” Lila leaned forward. She decided to mention the rumor she kept hearing. “You want to transport it, just like those farmers who sent their pigs to St. Louis. You need it to irrigate the Grid.”

  Michelle’s face had become shiny, more blotches joining the red spot at the end of her nose. “No. Not the Grid. Definitely not the Grid.”

  “Then where do you want to send it?”

  Michelle leaned forward into Lila’s desk and pushed up her sleeves, as if Lila were finally asking a grown-up question. “People at Federal are smart. You’d be surprised: Federal is very realistic.”

  Lila was quiet, waiting.

  Michelle, silent, propped her chin on her hand and stared at the wall behind Lila’s head. What was back there? Lila thought suddenly, wanting to turn and look.

  “Extremely realistic,” Michelle said, lifting a hand to smooth her hair.

  A hand-drawn picture of a fanciful fish, flowing in a blue stream. A photomontage of a turbine and the outflow over a dam. An old poster—Lila’s favorite—from
the We Save Wawa series, featuring a priest and a transvestite. The transvestite was actually (no one but Lila knew this) her assistant Seymour in his younger days. The We Save Wawa campaign had been a huge hit. Not that individual conservation really made a difference—industrial water use, in New Dawn Dayton, had dwarfed any use of water for baths or yards—but the campaign gave ordinary people a goal, and promoted the image nationwide of Dayton as a water capital.

  “And that means … ?” Lila said now. She’d never get to bury her nose in Michelle’s hair, never. Might as well give up lusting. Lila thought with regret of Janet, whose hair had always smelled of chlorine. How long ago was that, twenty years? Janet could never resist her. Lila intimidated people terribly, in her day. Lila had hammered them with questions they could neither answer nor forget. And she’d used her influence not just for seduction but also for public service. Lila de Becqueville, the governor of Ohio had introduced her, community asset. She wondered if she was too old to use her influence now. Not that it mattered. She was having no effect on Michelle.

  And suddenly Michelle, looking much older, less ingenuous, was patting her cheek with her fingertips, little quick pats, as if she were dabbing it with powder, and indeed her little blotches were fading. “Not the Grid,” she repeated. “Definitely not the Grid.” Her eyes wandered, in an aimlessness Lila was sure was feigned, until they met Lila’s wide ones. “I know about you,” Michelle said, and Lila felt a buzzing thrill in her chest. “My mother doesn’t just remember your water talks. She remembers you later. She told me all about your leadership during the Short Times. I know about the ads, the time restrictions, everything. You know what my mom says? You made sacrifice fun.”

  Was there a personal connection? Was that why this youngie was here? “Do I know your mother?” Lila asked.

  “You should hear her talk about you. She was at the Needmore Rally.”

  “Need less,” Lila mumbled, meaning to be dismissive, surprised by the wistfulness in her tone. RALLY ON NEEDMORE: NEED LESS! “Did I know your mother”—Lila hesitated—“personally?”