“And I’ll go to your supervisor first thing Monday morning to tell him you violated security procedure, Mike.”
Miles smiled at him evenly.
“Form Twelve, Mike. I’m in here without a Form Twelve, Mike. You could be in big—”
“Goddamn you. You little—”
“Just back off, Jewboy. Just back the fuck off, and you get your career back. Otherwise, you’re on your way to Siberia.”
He glared at him in smug triumph. Miles could really be quite evil — he had the capacity for it — and he watched the tall young man buckle under the pressure.
“Five more minutes, Miles. Goddamn you, they said you were a prick!”
He rushed off into the dark.
Miles turned back to the screen. He could not escape it.
Frenchy, you son-of-a-bitch. You old bastard.
Old Frenchy. Smart old Frenchy.
Then it arrived, from nowhere.
He commanded:
He could see a labyrinth of pillars and acres and acres of the rawest space under a low ceiling. It was an abstraction too, an infinitely open-ended maze. Tunnels and chambers and warrens spilled everywhere in gloomy subterranean abundance. Every fourth or fifth pillar had its own lighted EXIT arrow, stenciled orange, three-quarters of the way up. Did Borges invent this place? Did Kafka? Did Beckett? No, of course not. It was any underground parking garage anyplace in America any time in the ’60s or ’70s or ’80s.
No trace of human motion met his eyes as they probed the aisles and ranks, though in any of a hundred or a thousand dark places, in shadows, in vent openings, in ducts, in stairwells — in any of them — a man could hide.
Danzig’s fear blossomed anew, exotic, an ice-blue orchid inside his chest. It seemed a phenomenon of his gastrointestinal system, crippling and weakening his own interior ducts and vents. He wanted to be sick and could feel bile in his throat. His heart was running hard. He fought for air and found it foul with ancient auto exhaust. He steadied himself. He wished he did not have to be so brave.
The first theory of modern statecraft — so basic, really, it never saw print — was that you paid people to be brave for you. A class of man existed for just such exigencies. Yet here was Danzig, no longer bold by surrogate, required himself to step into the arena.
I am not brave; few enough are. Soldiers sense this intuitively, as if they can sniff it. Civilian, they sneer in contempt, meaning: coward. Meaning also, in his case: Jew. Kike. They were the elect: courage was their election. They held themselves apart, arrogant, hard. He’d seen the look in their eyes, in Chardy’s too; he’d been reading it in a certain Gentile set of eyes for half a century now.
Danzig stepped out, hearing the door hush closed on its pneumatic pump and click (lock?) behind him.
He stepped forward. His shoes echoed under the low ceiling.
“Chardy? I’m here, Mr. Chardy,” he called.
Ulu Beg could see him. He had a shot of close to one hundred yards, through a dozen sets of pillars, long for the pistol round that the Skorpion threw.
“You must be close,” they’d said.
He began to draw nearer. This was not difficult. The fat man was very frightened and kept yelling for Chardy and it was easy to stay in the shadows and yet feel the voice growing louder and louder. He began to count. He would count to one hundred.
55
A sheen of images rose to fill the screen. Numbers.
And on and on and on.
He hit the scroll button and the numbers rolled up, a rising tide of integers that climbed to the top of the screen and then disappeared.
He kept the button down until the numbers didn’t move.
MO, it said. More.
He commanded more:
Yes, more, more. I want MO. Give me MO.
He descended through a sea of green numbers.
He felt he had to hold his breath. He dreamed he was swimming in math.
Am I going insane?
The marine imagery continued to dominate his imagination as the numbers gurgled past, and he had to FE MO into three more segments of the Service Directory.
And then it began to slow on him.
The numbers rolled sluggishly. The system was going to crash on him. The warning light would flash on, high on the wall: sorry, brain temporarily out of order. And it would all be over for Lanahan; he’d never find his way down here again.
Move, you bastards, move, come on, damn you. His finger on the scroll button was white-knuckled and taut with pain as he pressed. The numbers moved more slowly. They moved so slow he thought he’d die. He’d never make it.
Touch down. Sea bottom. He was way, way down and he saw nothing.
Nothing, he’d gone too far. He’d missed a line, the last line from the bottom.
The shoe fits.
Miles stared elationlessly at it. A tremor raced through him.
FE he instructed, and sent the line and the screen blanked out.
He waited for what seemed the longest time. Had he lost it? Had he fucked up, blown it? Had the Security people been alerted? Yet all was silent. No, it wasn’t. It seemed silent because he was breathing so hard, was so exhausted. Yet now, concentrating, he heard the tapping of other operators on their terminals, the whine of their fans. Nobody stirred.
Words rose from the bottom of the screen, a slugline and then the message.
PAUL YOU BASTARD, said Frenchy Short, horribly dead these seven years.
