Lights Out in the Reptile House (15 page)

“Magic,” Kehr said. He shrugged.

“He didn't tell me anything,” Karel said. “He didn't tell me why he did it.”

“He did it for the reason people like him do it,” Kehr said. Karel could hear the impatience and contempt in his voice. “To get a job, to keep a job, to get a better job.”

“He didn't have to,” Karel said.

“No, he didn't,” Kehr said. “No one has to display intelligence or ambition. He certainly hadn't before that.”

Karel stood up. “I don't want to talk anymore,” he said. Stasik and Schay came out of the spare room and looked in on them both. Kehr nodded at them and they left the house.

Karel was fingering the edge of the table. “He just left,” he said. “He made all sorts of promises, that he wouldn't do what my mother did, that he'd get a good job. Then he just left.”

Kehr was looking at him silently, as if he'd expected something like this. “Broken promises helped make this country what it is,” he said.

They remained where they were. Karel occasionally sniffled.

“Sometimes I think it's my fault,” he said. Why was he telling Kehr this?

Kehr looked unimpressed with his generosity.

“Why'd you hire him?” Karel said. “If you think he's so dumb?”

“He doesn't work for me,” Kehr said. “And I certainly didn't ‘hire' him. He works for the Party. He's in a different bureau. Your father I assume impressed people with his mediocrity the way others do with their talent. You know him as well as I do.” He sat forward. “It's important we see these things with clarity. Your father when we found him was working for a brick manufacturer and had just dropped a load of bricks four stories. He was available.

“Since then he's been working for the Fifth Bureau,” he said. He shrugged. “I'm told he's had surprising success. The details of which I won't burden you with.”

He went on about himself. The information did nothing to lift Karel's spirits or clarify his sense of what was going on. Kehr described himself as an idealist, which he defined as a man who lives for an idea, and not a businessman. This set him apart from many of his rivals in the Party, including his chief rival in the Security Service, a man he didn't name but characterized as a hedonist and a shopkeeper. When Karel contributed that he thought the war was against the nomads, Kehr agreed that that was in fact the problem. Karel was very astute, he said: what had been conceived of as a healthy competition that would foster competitive spirit and loyalty to one's outfit had in fact gotten out of hand. But power in these matters had not been strictly delegated yet, or set, Kehr said, and it remained to be seen over the next few months and years just who would control what in terms of the security of the nation. But that was neither here nor there. He asked Karel why it was, he thought, that he was not involved in any way with the Party.

Karel was taken aback. “I don't know anything about it,” he said.

Kehr opened his mouth and poked around his molars with his tongue.

“You know, on the radio they talk about the program and everything, but I don't follow it,” Karel said. Why was Kehr bothering with him? What did he want?

“Mmm-hmm,” Kehr said. He seemed to be in no hurry. Karel rubbed his hand over his face as if he wanted the skin to come off. Here he couldn't get ten minutes of talk out of his father and this complete stranger who looked busy and important enough to Karel seemed to have all the time in the world.

Kehr suggested that Karel in the future ignore the Party program, since it was conceived largely as a public relations gesture to those outside the Party. This was a movement, not a Party; it wasn't bound to any program. Karel nodded blankly. Kehr sighed and indicated that the interview was over and that they'd talk again soon.

It was hot and sticky that night and flies crisscrossed the kitchen under the light. He stood over the stove and made a dinner of broiled chicken and fried broad beans. He'd gotten the instructions and ingredients from them. Schay stood around beside him the whole time. He spoke once, to warn him that Kehr didn't like that much oil.

Karel didn't eat with them. When they were finished he said he was going out, and Kehr let him go. He headed to Leda's to tell her what was going on and keep her from walking in on everything. He ran into her on her way over.

She announced she'd had no luck pursuing the missing inmates. He was a little insulted she'd tried without him. While they walked she said she didn't understand people anymore, that whenever she heard the celebrating on the radio she felt like going out into a deserted field and lying down by herself.

Karel told her about Kehr and left out the part about his father. She was shocked, and then angry for him, and then sympathetic. She put her hand on his waist. They sat on the Oertzens' stone wall. Behind them dishes clattered in dim windows. Leda seemed to be thrashing this out for herself. She asked if he thought Kehr's being there was connected to the missing inmates. He said he didn't know. She thought even if it wasn't, considering who he was he'd know something. She said she thought that Karel had to be careful but this was a great opportunity: Kehr had access to all sorts of information. This was a really rare opportunity. Karel sat on the wall feeling as utilitarian as a rake or a hoe. They talked about her mother, and Nicholas, and then before leaving she kissed him for the second time ever, on the corner of his mouth. The pressure was moist and warm. The kissed spot was cooler when she drew away. He walked her back to her yard and then continued home alone, musing on the quiet fervor and unfailing warmth that she always displayed toward the Karel she thought he could be.

He didn't see her for the next few days. He didn't see Albert either, or tell him what was going on. He worked around the house and followed orders—what Schay mockingly called “household tips”—and had no more talks with Kehr. He registered impressions: of showing them a bad section of plumbing and being surprised at his anxiety at their lack of approval; of coming downstairs early one morning and finding Stasik in sandals and a frayed robe in the back garden, oiling his forearms and face; of passing his father's room, now Kehr's, and the way Kehr left the door open as he dressed, pleased to be seen at it. Kehr did the same thing at night, catching Karel catching a glimpse of him folding the edges and sleeves of his tunic away into Karel's father's cupboard. At one point Karel came upon Schay going through the accumulated laundry, his hands buried in a pile of socks and shorts. Kehr at meals sat and chewed for minutes, and regarded Karel, smiling, as if remembering something mischievous from long ago.

Two units of the army were garrisoned in town and just outside of town as well. They brought with them a medium-sized camp following, and the square was impassable at busy hours. An avenue of poplars where Karel and Leda walked was leveled, bulldozed, and metaled over and then surrounded by fences for reasons no one could guess. Around town Karel saw vans full of goats, wagonloads of pigs packed shoulder to shoulder, trucks with covered load beds that gave off
moos
. He could see cows' eyes through the slats. Everywhere, day and night, there were sleeping soldiers, dozing against the wall, in the shade, in cafés, on piles of equipment. At night he thought he could hear them from all parts of the town and from within his house, stirring and sighing in their sleep, dreaming whatever they dreamed.

The rumors were that all of this was in preparation for a visit by the Praetor himself. Kehr refused to confirm or deny anything and only looked amused at Karel's curiosity.
The People's Voice
ran a retrospective article on the Praetor's early years which mentioned the possibility, though it stressed that because of security considerations and the many claims on his time nothing was certain. The article was headed with a picture of him dozing under a grape arbor. Inside they ran a more official portrait: shirt open, jaw set, staring off past danger and personal concern to a distant goal. He had thin hair and dark, blank eyes. The biography provided nothing new. He'd worked laying telegraph lines as a boy and developed a passion for things mechanical. In school he'd been the leader, organizing his peers in political discussion groups. With the Republic came disorder and hunger, and he'd been unemployed at a time when “death and mess had become the natural order of things.” He never drank but had been a solitary presence, great with books. Karel hadn't studied his life and even he knew the details by heart. He also knew through Albert and Leda the other versions everybody knew: that as a child he'd been renowned for hating everybody; that he gambled on everything and refused to pay when he lost; that he once knifed a schoolmate; that he discovered out of school that he didn't like hard work and so went around with a gang of friends harassing shopkeepers and dressing so eccentrically, with a white yachting cap, winged collar, green army breeches, and a blue workshirt, that he was known in his hometown as the Circus Performer. He'd had a beanlike growth trimmed from his forehead. (That, Leda told Karel, was a particularly delicate secret: he was so vain that before assuming power he'd responded to charges that he dyed his hair by holding a series of public baths so the people could confirm he was a natural blond.)

According to both versions he achieved his first serious political notice when he was twenty-three and the press picked up his proclamation that the streets of his country were “fields of crime” and that the Republic was to blame. It was said that he disciplined traitors to his new movement by asking them to sing the national anthem at the top of their lungs and then shooting into their open mouths. He had killed, Albert said, more people than the typhus, and in towns that had been particularly hard hit the standard curse—when someone was alone, or felt completely safe, which was less and less often—was “May his lungs collapse.”

It turned out the Praetor was not visiting, though one of his closest friends—one of the old OAS (Secret Army) fanatics from his original entourage—was. The visitor's name was Subsecretary Wissinger, and he had as far as anyone could tell no real role in the government. He was on a tour visiting all the towns of the frontier,
The People's Voice
mentioned with a noticeably deflated lack of interest. His work was to discover the truth about morale and the spiritual ethers of the people. He would be giving an oration, presiding over a spontaneous celebration, and dedicating a new sculpture of two men on a bench whispering while a third in uniform overhears. Karel had not seen it yet.

He asked Kehr if that was one of the reasons Kehr was in town, and Kehr said no. The rival Security Service was handling the visit. He would not be attending the festivities and did not recommend Karel did so, either. Karel was surprised and a little impressed at his independence. Leda would have told him they all thought the same way and acted completely predictably.

Kehr told him that this was not an element of the Party of which he was particularly proud. In the old days they were signing people up wherever they found them. Still, the lowest agents fostered an anarchy that the higher ones were then pledged to eradicate, the way a doctor might give you a disease so he could cure it.

Karel went anyway. Soldiers formed a cordon around the square, and Security Service men, dressed in a way they hoped was unobtrusive, drifted through crowds that pretended not to notice them. They were immediately noticeable as the only people acting casual. One kept a close eye on a string of four-year-olds brought out to hear the speech. The four-year-olds hung on to a rope tied between two adult leaders and shuffled along like a miniature chain gang.

There were only a few booths, near the entrance to the square, with canvas flaps that could be tied shut once Wissinger began to speak. One advertising a butcher's consortium said
UNITED MEAT FOR ALL
and featured a line of pale calves' heads holding lemons and carnations in their teeth. One booth was called
SUPPORT FOR THE MASSES
and displayed a pyramid of hernia trusses tied with little flags and colored ribbons.

He recognized a lot of classmates. Besides the local NUP most of the people in the crowd were children and teenage boys. The smallest children milled around a fenced-off area entitled
ORIGINAL VILLAGE OF THE RACE
in which two men in blond wigs and winged helmets banged on an anvil and a woman scratched at a washboard. All of this was over-looked by a painted backdrop depicting a sunset with nomad hordes on the horizon.

Nearer the stage there were tables set up with pamphlets and Party publications that were free. Karel paged through them, keeping an eye out for someone he knew (who was he expecting to see go by? he wondered. Leda? Albert?). He kept three: a comic book called
Secret Service
with a naked girl in a waterfall on the cover and two pamphlets called
Investigations into Science: The Nomad Race
and
Torture: Why Not?

Wissinger arrived in a car hooded in black cloth with its headlights painted over with blue calcimine. He saluted some children before he mounted the stage. He introduced a huge man by the car as Freddy the Crusher, his bodyguard. The crowd applauded.

He announced this would become an annual event of the Party. He added as if it followed that the Praetor was angry at the disturbances in the cities, the results of delinquents. He promised that those involved or thinking of becoming involved would feel the nation's anger when the war was settled. The crowd applauded again. Karel started threading his way out, thinking he'd go by Leda's on the way home. Somebody bumped him, and he felt protectively for the pamphlets in his back pocket. The Praetor, Wissinger said, like his nation, knew the emotion of anger, of being insulted. The teenage boys closest to the stage roared. Karel took a lemon from one of the calves' mouths on the way out of the square, and had it checked carefully by a young soldier taking no chances when he passed through the cordon.