Amerika (33 page)

She looked at him tentatively. “What do you need, Andrei?”

“You, perhaps.” He leaned toward her and touched her face gently with his hand.

She sat rigid. “Don’t touch me, please. It isn’t fair.” “Come with me to Washington. Today. Maybe we’ll stay there. My work here is almost finished. We can start a new life.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Why not?”

After a silence, she said, “Something has happened to me.”

“A new romance? The actor?”

She smiled. “No, not the actor. Not romance.” “Then what?”

She threw her head back, gazing at the ceiling. “After you left, after the raid on the club, I needed you. I tried to call, I begged, but nobody would help. I didn’t know what to do. I left here. Ran away. Not sure what I was running from or to. But I was lucky. I discovered something—something bigger than myself.” She broke off. He laughed grimly. “Don’t tell me you joined the resistance.”

“I don’t expect you to take anything I do seriously. But I found something and it doesn’t matter whether you respect it or not. This is for me.”

“All right, Kimberly, I will take you seriously, really. What is your discovery?”

She looked him in the eyes, an odd smile on her face. “I realized I’m an American.”

He frowned, not understanding, thinking he had missed something. “Yes?” he ventured.

“I never understood what it meant before. I always thought it was me against the world. I never thought that all those other people . . . that we were all Americans, all part of the same thing. I never thought I could be disloyal to anything because I’d never been loyal to anything. Some people called me a traitor, because of you, and I thought they were silly. I understand it now. And I don’t think I can be with you anymore.”

“Do you love me?”

“Don’t ask that. It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters. I have given it a great deal of thought. In the end, we live for ourselves.”

“I’m not as smart as you, Andrei. I just know I’ve changed; I can’t go live with you in Washington.”

He stood up. Andrei understood the art of strategic retreat. “I want you to think it over,” he said. “Stay here; I’ll be in Washington the next day or two.”

She nodded slowly.

“Good. In the guest room, if you prefer. I put no pressures on you. Except the inconvenient fact that I love you. Perhaps I’d forgotten. Perhaps I needed reminding.”

She smiled at him. “You are very kind, Andrei, sometimes.”

“I will have the charges against your colleagues dropped.”

She stood. For a moment she felt herself surrendering to the old passion. Then she pulled back. “Goodbye, Andrei.”

Her kiss had given him hope, yet he knew not to push. “Goodbye, my little actress.”

* * *

From his limousine on the way to the military airstrip, Andrei put a call through to Peter Bradford at the Palmer House hotel in Chicago. “How goes the Heartland speech?” he asked.

“The rhetoric still throws me,” said the new governor-general with a modest laugh, “but I’m getting there.”

“The rhetoric is the easy part,” said Andrei. “Glory. Prosperity. A brighter tomorrow. After the secession, Heartland will truly be independent, standing on its—”

“Whoa, my friend,” Peter interrupted, “you seem to forget that the word
secession
has rather negative connotations in this country.”

“Used
to have,” corrected Andrei. “But then, so did words like
socialism
and
collective.
You seem to underestimate the plasticity of your beloved English language. But listen, I have another matter to discuss with you. Are you alone?”

“My wife is with me.”

“I urge'you, for your own sake, to keep this to yourself. Marion has ordered that your friend Milford be transferred to a hospital in Omaha for psychiatric evaluation. There is, I believe, a special program there.”

“What sort of program?” Peter asked, and Amanda started at the queasy fear in his voice.

“Let’s not turn squeamish at this point in the game,” said Andrei, an unaccustomed steeliness coming into his voice. “Behavior modification. Brainwashing, in your crude parlance.”

“Andrei, please ...” Peter’s tone was suddenly imploring. To Amanda it sounded almost like a whimper.

“Don’t confuse small issues with great ones, Peter. I’m on my way to Washington.”

“What was that about?” Amanda insisted when Peter had hung up the phone.

“Please don’t ask, my dear.”

But she did ask, and Peter Bradford needed her comfort too badly not to tell her.

“What if he tries to bite me?”

“Good God, it’s stupid to be afraid of a dumb animal.”

“For you, maybe . . . actually, I’m the best example of why it was such a bad idea to send people like me to the country.”

“Dammit to hell, Let’s take a break. The damn tractor’s no good anyway. I just hate to give up on it.”

They leaned against the side of the bam, breathing hard. “Gerta was like that,” Dieter said. “Never threw anything away. She said the things you accumulated in your life could tell you how you were going. Or what it was you were doing. I forget.”

Will nodded. “Mary called it leaving a trail. She used to say your kids never appreciated you until it got to be too late to do anything about it. If you left them an attic full of junk to root around in, then maybe they’d appreciate you.”

“We never had children. I often wish we had.” “Yeah, well, they’re not all they’re cracked up to be.”

“You’ve been blessed. Your Devin, such a courageous man.”

Will drew a red bandanna from his pocket and blew his nose noisily. “Well, it seemed to me he was always fighting somebody—me, the government. To me it just seemed that nobody else’s life, what they did, what they were, stood for much unless it fit into his way of thinking. I guess the first time I thought I understood that boy was a few weeks back, at that parade thing, when they wanted him to apologize, or whatever it was. I looked at him and damned if I didn’t see the face of my own father. The look he got when he walked out on a field of wheat that’d been beat to the ground by hail. He’d just look at it, not say anything, but you knew from the look on his face that he wouldn’t let it beat him. I saw that in Devin; it was like looking at my dad up there.”

Will looked away, into the distance, embarrassed by his emotions. He noticed a man and a boy walking up the drive to the house.

Will took a step forward and squinted, watching intently as they drew near. He didn’t recognize either of them—a big, bulky man in his thirties and a slender, dark-haired boy in his early teens. Yet something about them gripped his attention.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, not unkindly, when they 'were a dozen feet away.

Will did not recognize his grandson and namesake, who had changed so much in the seven years since they had been together. But Billy recognized his grandfather; the old man had hardly changed at all. Yet Billy held back, with the uncertain dignity of adolescence. The four of them stared in awkward silence, until the boy finally said, “Grandpa . . .”

Will reacted slowly, as if this was too much to hope for or believe. “What the hell?” he said. “It’s not. .

“It’s me, Billy.”

“I know, boy,” the old man said stiffly. “X know . .

Billy stepped forward cautiously. When they were three feet apart he extended his hand. They shook hands solemnly.

Will said, “Don’cha t
hink
I recognize my handsomest, ugliest grandson from Chicago?”

“Well, I knew my old coot of a grandpa,” Billy said, and their arms went out and they embraced.

Dieter and Clayton watched from a distance as the old man and the boy hugged, laughing and crying at the same time.

“Damn if you haven’t grown up,” Will said, holding the boy at arm’s length.

“You look great, Grandpa.”

The grandfather shrugged. “Still kicking.” He looked around at the others and remembered his dignity. “Now, William, tell me who this fellow is, and what the blazes you’re doin’ here.”

“That’s Clayton. He’s a friend of my dad’s. We came here on the underground railroad.”

“The what?”

“It was neat. We’ve been in trucks, ridden the rails—you know, on trains. All these people helped us.”

Will laughed with amazement. “Okay, you two runaway slaves, let’s go up to the house. Meet my friend Dieter here. Dieter, this is my most handsomest, ugliest grandson, William, and his fugitive friend Clayton.”

Clayton shook both the men’s hands. Then he took Will aside. “Mr. Milford,” he said. “I brought Billy here at your son’s specific request. It was what they both wanted. But the authorities are looking for the boy. I’m sure they’ll come here. I want to warn you, there could be trouble.”

Will pondered the younger man’s warning, then unaccountably laughed. “Mister, us Milfords are close kin to trouble. I reckon we’ll handle it, whenever it comes.”

He threw his arm around Billy and led them into his home.

As they left Soldiers Field, Peter told his driver to drop him at his office in the Federal Building and then take Amanda back to the hotel. Peter wanted some lime to polish the inaugural speech he would give the following day, but once he was settled at his desk with pages of manuscript scattered around him, he found it impossible to concentrate. There was just too damn much on his mind. For openers, Andrei had been summoned to Washington, and that almost always meant trouble.

His problems with Marion gnawed at him, too, compounded now by the news of Devin’s arrest. And complicating everything was Amanda’s demand that she be allowed to visit Devin. She was changing so much, worrying about the Exiles and politics and other things she’d never worried about before; he wasn’t sure
he
knew h6r anymore.

And there were the kids, too. He was so busy with
his
work, and they with their passions—Jackie’s dancing, Scott’s basketball—that they barely had time to
speak.
Jackie loved her new Russian ballet teacher,
and she’d
thrown herself into her studies, but she worried constantly about Justin. Amanda had made inquiries, but it was as if he’d vanished from the face of the earth.
The
one time Peter had tried to discuss it with her,
she’d
turned away, as if he were somehow to blame for
the
boy’s disappearance.

Peter was startled by a knock at his door. He looked up to see General Fred Sittman’s ruddy, pockmarked face in the doorway.

“Burning the midnight oil, chief?”

“Just working on this damn speech,” Peter said.

“The rehearsal looked sharp,” the general said.

“Your men looked sharp,” Peter said. “But of course they always do.”

“Never bullshit a bullshitter, chief. See you in the morning.”

Peter grinned. Fred Sittman was turning out to be one hell of an interesting character. At first glance he looked like your basic short-haired, thick-necked, gung-ho marine officer. And it was true that as a young man, he’d proved his courage in Korea, and he’d gone on to be one of the most decorated officers in Vietnam. Sittman had them all: the Purple Heart, the Congressional Medal of Honor, and a list of wartime commendations as long as his arm.

But that wasn’t all; Peter had done some checking into Fred Sittman’s record. After the war, when a
New York Times
reporter interviewed him at the Pentagon, the general declared that the Vietnam War had been a colossal mistake, a blunder that pigheaded civilians had forced on military men who knew better. “It was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons,” Sittman had declared. It had been the
Times’
Quote of the Day.

There had been a flurry of protests from the Pentagon and Congress, and some talk that Sittman would be reprimanded, but his record was too outstanding for that. He continued as one of the marine corps’ top generals, and just in case anyone missed the point, he proceeded to write a book about what went wrong in Vietnam.

The irony was that all this “radical” behavior had made him one of the highest-ranking American military men in the country. The Transition had not been an easy one for the U.S. military. The Soviets were willing to deal with American lawyers, politicians, journalists, and corporate executives, but they hated and feared the American military. Peter had heard rumors that dozens of senior Pentagon generals were assassinated during the first months of the Transition, and that hundreds of others were sent into exile, or to prison for “reeducation.” And if you believed the rumors, many others were somewhere in the mountains, leading an armed resistance.

Fred Sittman was a dramatic exception. Because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, the Soviets had decided to use him as an example of a “good” general; they needed “good” generals to lead and maintain order among the national guard. They had asked Sittman to serve as a national guard commander during the Transition, and he replied, “I’m a soldier, and I serve my government, whatever it may be.”