Nomos, Mr. Walsh’s attorney.”
He drew a deep breath. “I think you’re Lara Morgan.”
She hung up. He dialed the number again, and the telephone rang and rang in the imaginary offices of Walsh Promotions; but no one answered.
North came out, fresh and pink now from the shower, still buttoning a blue-striped shirt. “You want to go to the john or anything?”
He shook his head.
“Then let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“Let’s just say it’s to a little meeting with some friends of mine, to discuss our strategy.”
He stood up, smoothing his suit and straightening his tie, got his topcoat and made certain nothing had fallen out of the pockets. “Strategy for what?”
“For taking over the government of this crazy place, what the hell do you think? We need men, and some sort of guarantee that the army won’t move against us.” North picked up the two guns in their black leather holsters and buckled them on, one for each shoulder.
The Conspiracy
“Turn in the middle of the block,” North told him.
He turned and drove down a narrow, twisting alley like the one down which he had run from the mounted policeman. Different in one respect, however, for it was now night, and the alley was utterly dark except for the headlights of their car. Cats with shining green eyes slunk to one side, and once he had to leave the car to move a fallen garbage can out of their path.
The alley divided, then redivided again and yet again; and though he saw wider streets at the ends of some of its branches, North always directed him away from them. Soon he decided that North himself did not know where they were going, that North had probably jotted directions on a slip of paper that could now, in the darkness, no longer be consulted; that some whim of insane pride prevented North from using the overhead light or striking a match.
At last they halted behind several other cars and edged past them on foot to reach a narrow flight of concrete steps that led to a metal door. North pounded the door with his fists until it was opened by an old woman.
“You need a light out here,” North said.
“The bulb’s out,” the old woman replied. She seemed to be expecting them, and ushered them into a cramped room with grimy concrete walls.
A tall woman in a dirty white coat switched on several very bright lights there, lights so powerful that he closed his eyes for a moment. The tall woman inspected their faces and daubed them with powder. “I like that smile,” the tall woman murmured, and touched his lips with scarlet salve, then held up a mirror so he could inspect them. He rubbed one lip against the other, trying to get off as much as he could.
“I thought—” he began.
“You don’t understand how they do things here,” North told him. “It wouldn’t do for us to look as if we’d just walked in off the street.”
“It certainly wouldn’t,” the tall woman agreed, and bustled about, touching their faces here and there with a pencil.
He heard voices from outside the room, and once there was a noise like the rumbling of distant thunder; girls and men passed to and fro, shadowy forms in a shadowy corridor. When the tall woman had nearly finished, he glimpsed the shambling silhouette of a bear.
“Here we go,” North told him. “Just follow me.”
The shadowy corridor led to a brilliantly lit room in which four men sat around a painted wooden table. One wore a rumpled uniform; two were dressed in suits, as if for work in an office; the remaining man, whose room it appeared to be, was in yellow pajamas and a maroon bathrobe. Half a minute or more had passed before he realized that the room was a great deal larger than it appeared, that only this end of it (which was perhaps much less than half) was lit, and that there were watchers in the darkness beyond the light.
The man in uniform spoke to North, briefly explaining what had been said before he and North had arrived. It seemed clear he wanted North to lead them, equally clear that he would resent any leader.
North said, “We can not only fight injustice; we can win. But only if every one of you and everyone involved in the whole movement is willing to do exactly as he’s told, and suffer the consequences if he doesn’t. A thing like this attracts a lot of dilettantes; but dilettantes are of no use to it. We must have disciplined men, and they must discipline themselves. Is there anyone here who wouldn’t be willing to eliminate the man next to him if I told him that man had failed us?”
He started to protest, but the man in uniform was already replying: “There isn’t one man here who wouldn’t be willing to eliminate
“A man like that would not have failed us,” North told him. “A man like that is strong, and it is through strength—and only through strength—that we can win. You may think the government is strong and we’re weak; but you’re wrong. The government is huge and rich, but it isn’t strong. Its massive limbs are bound by ten thousand cords, too fine for your eyes to see. They’re tied by religion and morality, and by the need to look moral and religious even when real religion and actual morality point in the other direction. They’re tied too by filthy businesses and rackets and hack politicians who’ve each bought their own little pieces of turf. When the government begins—too late!—to move against us, you’ll see just how clumsy and ineffective it really is. And the stronger we get, the weaker it will be. Strength is God! What is God, but the thing that grants our prayers? It is Strength that grants all prayers, that makes it possible for a nation or a man to do what he wants.”
