A Song Called Youth (121 page)

Barrabas tried to work up some inner spark of outrage about it. But the flint found nothing to strike on.

The music swelled to thud and skirl on the high ceiling; Barrabas had expected recordings of “authentic aboriginal” music, or some such, but instead the music was an amalgamation of house music and dance electronica. Perhaps it was the contemporary equivalent of aboriginal music.

“I was hoping Smoke was still here,” Jo Ann was saying. “I need to talk to him, if you think it’d be okay. I’ve got a problem. Some people—”

“Might be better to tell as few people as possible,” Barrabas broke in. Smiling apologetically. “To protect them as well.”

Jo Ann hesitated. “I guess so. To protect them.”

“Oh, I
do
love the dramatic sound of all this,” Dahlia said, yawning. “Not going to tell even poor Dahlia?”

“Um—eventually,” Jo Ann said.

“They don’t know if they can trust us,” Jerome remarked, whispering it sotto voce to Bettina.

“Hell, I don’ know if dey can either,” Bettina said. “I don’ know who dey are. I don’ care about dis shit neither. Dying for some motherfucking dinner.”

Jerome started to get up. “I’ll get Smoke, maybe we can all cruise for something.”

Bettina grabbed him, held him back. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere. Did I say you get up?” Looking at Jerome with narrowed eyes.

Not serious, Barrabas realized. Some kind of game.

“
Fuck
you,” Jerome said, trying not to laugh, wriggling free of her. “I go where I please, bitch.”

“Who you calling bitch—? Come here, I beat yo’ skinny pink ass!”

But he was gone, laughing at her as he went through the door.

“Little white punk!” she called after him. “I make you sorry!” But shaking with silent laughter, big belly and the obese undersides of her arms quivering.

Weird, Barrabas thought.

“If you want Smoke’s help,” Dahlia said, thoughtfully clicking her long, gold-painted nails against the carved wood of the armrest, “then it’s maybe some . . . political problem?”

“Yeah,” Jo Ann said.

“You need Smoke’s people too?”

“Yeah.”

“Right, no reason not to talk in front of Jerome and Bettina. It’ll come out, I reckon—they’re part of it.”

“Uh—” Jo Ann looking at Barrabas. Thinking, he supposed, of warning Dahlia not to say too much in front of him. She wasn’t sure of his loyalty.

And he wasn’t sure himself. But he said. “It’s okay, Jo Ann. I’m committed.”

She pursed her lips—but shrugged resignedly.

Barrabas noticed Bettina watching them; following the implicit message as well as the explicit one, in the exchange between Jo Ann and Barrabas.

He had an uncomfortable feeling Bettina knew exactly what was going on. Looking at her, just a quick glance into Bettina’s eyes, he glimpsed the analytical whir of her mind; was shaken up by the hard glitter of intelligence he saw there.

Jerome returned with a stooped, lanky, hawk-nosed man in a rumpled, ill-fitting real-cloth suit of gray pinstripe. He was in his stocking feet. “This woman wanted to talk to you,” Jerome said.

“Jack Smoke,” the tall man said, crossing to them, shaking Jo Ann’s hand.

The restaurant was crowded and close and smelled strongly of beer and beef. Yellowed prints of nineteenth-century opera posters on the wall almost vanished into the dim, dark-wood ambience. The low rafters were smoke-blackened from a time when smoking was allowed in restaurants. Barrabas, Jo Ann, Dahlia, Jack Smoke, and Jerome banged elbows in a hard wooden booth. Bettina sat grouchily on a chair at the end of the table. Jo Ann told her story, keeping her voice down for much of it so they had to strain to hear her. Finishing just as the food arrived.

“Only ting dey know how to cook in dis fuckin’ country is roast beef,” Bettina said, digging into hers with no further preliminaries.

Barrabas would have liked to have resented the remark, only it was uncomfortably correct.

“There’s curries,” Dahlia said. “And cous-cous.”

Not British, Barrabas thought. Except by default.

“I’ve been taking cooking courses,” Dahlia said. (Barrabas thinking: I was right about her, she’s a course taker.) “North African cuisines. And it’s had an effect on my paintings.” (Barrabas nodding to himself.) She went on, “The spicier the food I cook, the more color I tend to use—it’s a reflection of those energies, you know.” And she went on, filling up the time talking about “her art” and “her music,” as Smoke ruminated on Jo Ann’s dilemma.

Finally, when they were drinking bitters and eating pudding, Smoke said, “Jerome. Bettina.”

They looked at him expectantly.

He went on slowly, staring into his half-eaten pudding. Talking low, though the place was crammed with noise, “Can you check the Plateau, see if anyone we can trust has access to an extractor in London?”

Jerome-X and Bettina nodded, like a person with two heads.

And as one, their eyes glazed.

Barrabas felt a chill, looking at them. Like they were in a trance. Some kind of chip augmentation, maybe.

“Mickin,” Bettina said.

“Cover,” Jerome said.

“Hub?” said Jo Ann.

Smoke explained. “They’re talking in a sort of aug-chip shorthand. She said that there was a microwave oven in use creating some interference; Jerome said he’d give her some transmission cover so she could get through.”

“Oh.”

“You wouldn’t mind our using an extractor, Jo Ann?” Smoke asked. Politely but without any real concern for her dislikes.

“An extractor?” Jo Ann asked nervously. “Can you get the stuff out with . . . well, I guess you can.”

Smoke nodded. “And we can record it. Find out what it is. Way you describe it, it sounds as if it would be of interest to us.”

To us.
It was then that Barrabas was sure. About who he’d fallen in with.

He was with the New Resistance.

He was hiding out with his own enemies.

They thanked Dahlia and sent her home. The rest of them cabbed directly from the restaurant to the London Institute of Neurobiology, where a sympathizer had access to an extractor. Getting into the cab, Barrabas was uncomfortably aware that the big black woman was standing very close to him; was, in fact, watching him. As was Jerome. They began keeping an eye on him directly Jo Ann told them about his involvement with the SA. He began to wonder if he would be separated from Jo Ann at some point, taken somewhere for interrogation. Afterward, his body dumped in the Thames . . . 

They weren’t going to just let him go, that was certain. He toyed with the idea of disappearing on his own. He was afraid to return to the SA, but he might hide out with relatives upcountry—or somewhere, anyway, on his own.

He couldn’t bring himself to break away completely from Jo Ann, though. When he looked at her, a strange gestalt organized her face into someplace exquisitely restful.

Suppose he suppressed those feelings. Suppose he asked them to let him out of the cab, right here . . . 

They’d never let him go. They didn’t dare trust him. He could hardly blame them for that, really. There’d be an argument at least, quite possibly a fight.

No. He’d have to take his chances with them, at least for now.

By the time he’d decided, it was fair dark out and they’d arrived at the hospital.

They drove around the back. A nearly midget-size Paki doctor in a blue tunic was waiting for them, his arms clasped anxiously over his chest. He nodded briskly to Smoke, frowned at the others, but said nothing. The doctor led them into the clinical brightness and medicinal tang of the corridor, their footsteps echoing off the white tile walls. He took them hastily into a lab, through the lab to a little room filled with equipment Barrabas didn’t recognize. In the midst of all the cryptic gear was a padded examination table. “Lie down, please,” the doctor said.

Barrabas realized, with a chill, that the doctor wasn’t talking to Jo Ann. He was talking to him. To Patrick Barrabas.

“I’ll go first,” Jo Ann said, seeing the look on his face.

“First?” Barrabas said.

“Lord, motherfucker can talk! I thought he was deef!” Bettina said.

“Keep your voices down, please,” the little doctor said, almost squeaking it, looking through a window in the door. “We’re not supposed to be in here, you know.”

Smoke nodded and said softly to Barrabas, “We have to debrief you, find out how much we can trust you, how you stand on things, what you might know that can help us.”

“For all I know, you might erase part of me,” Barrabas said. “To protect yourselves. Or brainwash me.”

Smoke shook his head. “Not going to erase anything from your head. Or plant anything. Just going to read it. We won’t force you. But . . . ”

But. Barrabas nodded. It wasn’t a threat exactly. That wasn’t the tone the man was using. More a mixture of regret and warning—that they might have to kill him.

Barrabas took a deep breath and said, “You are forcing me, in a way. But sod it.” He turned to Jo Ann. “I’m going to do this for you.” Maybe it was melodramatic; he didn’t care.

He felt trapped. But, strangely, at the same time he felt set free.

He lay down on the table, and she held his hand.

Dover, Kent.

Dawn was breaking steel blue and aluminum gray across the Dover Straits. It was a windy morning, and the sea lashed against the pilings of the dock, making the big hover ferry rock at its moorings. Barrabas and Jo Ann and Smoke and Jerome stood on the dock at the back of the crowd, waiting for the all-clear to go aboard the hover ferry. Bettina was conspicuously absent.

To their right, drivers with permits to take cars to France were queued up, mostly in the cheap Brazilian methanol compacts.

Barrabas huddled into his coat and moved a little closer to Jo Ann. The sky was dull with clouds, and whitecaps tipped the jade peaks of the sea. “Fuckin’ cold,” Jerome-X muttered.

“That’s England for you,” Jo Ann said. “Supposed to be summer.”

“It’ll warm up,” Barrabas said. “It’s early days.” He was looking around, trying to spot SA. “Wish we’d done a plane flight, though.”

Smoke said, in just over a whisper, “The SA’ll be on the airport for sure. They might not’ve come this far looking for us.”

Barrabas said, “I don’t know. I’m surprised they’re not here. They want Jo Ann, and they mean to find her. I know ’em.”

“Maybe they’ll just have the cops arrest us,” Jerome said. Looking over his shoulder; searching the street behind them for someone.

“They’ve got a relationship with the police—but they don’t want them involved in this, I’m sure,” Barrabas said.

Jerome looked small and sorrowful, almost lost in the oversize gray trenchcoat he’d borrowed from Dahlia.

Smoke glanced at him. “You sure about this, Jerome? Going with us?”

“Yeah.” But Jerome looked over his shoulder again.

“You think she’s going to come and talk you out of it?” Smoke said.

Jerome-X shot him a hard look. “Fuck you.”

“Jerome—we’ve got Bones in Paris now. He’s our connection to the Plateau there.”

“I don’t want to be a chip chippie. I want to fight.”

“Your career is beginning to move in the States. If you were a celebrity, you could help us there.”

“I don’t fucking want a career.
I want to fight.
” Pouting, he huddled deeper into his coat.

Smoke said gently, “Jerome . . . ”

“
What?
”

“There’s more than one way to fight.”

“Look—I saw something once. When I was linked. When we got out of jail. Saw myself. Like—a kinda personality animation thingie. It was sick, man. Need attention all the time. No belief in myself. Trying to be a performer because I want to get into the media. Like, I’m not a valid person unless I’m making records and on TV and stuff. That’s bullshit, Smoke.”

“This is what you were up all night arguing with Bettina over?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s got good instincts, Jerome.”

“You trying to tell me to stick to what I know how to do? I can learn. I don’t have to spend my life trying to be a fucking spectacle. It’s childish. I got to get away from that.”

“Yes. Rickenharp felt something like that. But it didn’t change him. Everybody’s got drives to be one way or another. You have a drive to be a spectacle—so what? Maybe there’s a reason. You saw only the subjective gestalt. There might be some other reason you’re a performer—if it’s neurosis, well, maybe there’s a higher reason for the neurosis. You only see a small thread on the tapestry.”

“It’s too fucking early in the morning to be mystical, Smoke.”

“She’s back there, Jerome, about a block down.”

Jerome looked at Smoke, startled. “Bettina?”

“Yeah. Sitting in a rental car. I saw her. She doesn’t want to come after you. She doesn’t want to humiliate you that way.”

“Be the first time.”

“You should know her better than that. And yourself. You don’t have to prove anything. I know you’re ready to die for us. I just think you could be more useful to us going on with the other thing. Fight for us as an artist. Public relations, consciousness raising. Be yourself, Jerome. I know that hurts. It hurt me once.”

Jerome stared at him, looking as if he was about to erupt with a
fuck you.
Finally, he grinned. And said, “Hey, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.” He slapped Smoke on the shoulder, turned to the others. “Okay. I’m outta here. Good luck, you guys. Keep your head down.”

And then he turned back to Smoke. “What kind of rental car?”

“One of those big Arabian saloon cars that uses lots of cartel oil in its gearbox. I think it was yellow or—”

“Never mind—I’ve got her on chip now.”

He hurried away. Back to Bettina.

Back to his huge black mama, Barrabas thought.

Well, why the hell not.

Barrabas looked speculatively at Smoke. “You going to tell us what the extractor came up with? From Jo Ann, I mean? What was all that stuff they were buggerin’ with in her head?”

Smoke said with flat authority, “No. I’ve got to confirm something first. Bones is in Paris, I’ll talk to him first. He’s got a lot of stuff about genetically engineered organisms stored up. When I know what I’m talking about, I’ll talk about it.”