"Here?" Charles demanded. "_Here?_"
"No possible mistake," she said, stunned. "When you're a Falcaro you
travel. I've seen 'em in Duluth, I've seen 'em in Quebec, I've seen 'em
in Buffalo."
The bull-horn voice roared again, dead in the shroud of fog; "Come into
the wind and cut your engines or we'll put a shell into you."
Charles turned the wheel and wound in the moderator rod; the boat
pitched like a splinter on the waves. There was a muffled double
explosion and two grapnels crunched into the plastic hull, bow and
stern. As the boat steadied, sharing the inertia of the ore ship, a dark
figure leaped from the blue-white eye of the searchlight to their deck.
And another. And another.
"Hello, Jim," Lee Falcaro said almost inaudibly. "Haven't met since Las
Vegas, have we?"
The first boarder studied her cooly. He was built for football or any
other form of mayhem. He ignored Charles completely. "Lee Falcaro as
advised. Do you still think twenty reds means a black is bound to come
up? You always were a fool, Lee. And now you're in real trouble."
"What's going on, mister?" Charles snapped. "We're Syndics and I presume
you're Mobsters. Don't you recognize the treaty?"
The boarder turned to Charles inquiringly. "Some confusion," he said.
"Max Wyman? Charles Orsino? Or just some wild man from outback?"
"Orsino," Charles said formally. "Second cousin of Edward Falcaro, under
the guardianship of Francis W. Taylor."
The boarder bowed slightly. "James Regan IV," he said. "No need to list
my connections. It would take too long and I feel no need to justify
myself to a small-time dago chisler. Watch him gentlemen!"
Charles found his arms pinned by Regan's two companions. There was a gun
muzzle in his ribs.
Regan shouted to the ship and a ladder was let down. Lee Falcaro and
Charles climbed it with guns at their backs. He said to her: "Who is
that lunatic?" It did not even occur to him that the young man was who
he claimed to be--the son of the Mob Territory opposite number of Edward
Falcaro.
"He's Regan," she said. "And I don't know who's the lunatic, him or me.
Charles, I'm sorry, terribly sorry, I got you into this."
He managed to smile. "I volunteered," he said.
"Enough talk," Regan said, following them onto the deck. Dull-eyed
sailors watched them incuriously, and there were a couple of anvil-jawed
men with a stance and swagger Charles had come to know. Guardsmen--he
would have staked his life on it. Guardsmen of the North American
Government Navy--aboard a Mob Territory ship and acting as if they were
passengers or high-rated crewmen.
Regan smirked: "I'm on the horns of a dilemma. There are no
accomodations that are quite right for you. There are storage
compartments which are worse than you deserve and there are passenger
quarters which are too good for you. I'm afraid it will have to be one
of the compartments. Your consolation will be that it's only a short run
to Chicago."
Chicago--headquarters for Mob Territory. The ore ship had been on a
return trip to Chicago when alerted somehow by the Navy to intercept the
fugitives. _Why?_
"Down there," one of the men gestured briskly with a gun. They climbed
down a ladder into a dark, oily cavern fitfully lit by a flash in
Regan's hand.
"Make yourselves comfortable," Regan told them. "If you get a headache,
don't worry. We were carrying some avgas on the outward run." The flash
winked out and a door clanged on them.
"I can't believe it," Charles said. "That's a top Mob man? Couldn't you
be mistaken?" He groped in the dark and found her. The place did reek of
gasoline.
She clung to him and said: "Hold me, Charles.... Yes that's Jimmy Regan.
"That's what will become top man in the Mob. Jimmy's a charmer at a Las
Vegas Hotel. Jimmy's a gourmet when he orders at the Pump Room and he's
trying to overawe you. Jimmy plays polo too, but he's crippled three of
his own team-mates because he's not very good at it. I kept telling
myself whenever I ran into him that he was just an accident, the Mob
could survive him. But his father acts--funny. There's something with
them, there's some--
"They roll out the carpet when you show up but the people around them
are afraid of them. There's a story I never believed--but I believe it
now. What would happen if my uncle pulled out a pistol and began
screaming and shot a waiter: Jimmy's father did it, they tell me. And
nothing happened except that the waiter was dragged away and everybody
said it was a good thing Mr. Regan saw him reach for his gun and shot
him first. Only the waiter didn't have any gun.
"I saw Jimmy last three years ago. I haven't been in Mob Territory
since. I didn't like it there. Now I know why. Give Mob Territory enough
time and it'll be like New Portsmouth. Something went wrong with them.
We have the Treaty of Las Vegas and a hundred years of peace and there
aren't many people going back and forth between Syndic and Mob except
for a few high-ups like me who have to circulate. Manners. So you pay
duty calls and shut your eyes to what they're really like.
"_This_ is what they're like. This dark, damp stinking compartment. And
my uncle--and all the Falcaros--and you--and I--we aren't like them. Are
we? _Are we?_" Her fingers bit into his arms. She was shaking.
"Easy," he soothed her. "Easy, easy. We're all right. We'll be all
right. I think I've got it figured out. This must be some private
gun-running Jimmy's gone in for. Loaded an ore boat with avgas and ammo
and ran it up the Seaway. If anybody in Syndic Territory gave a damn
they thought it was a load of ore for New Orleans via the Atlantic and
the Gulf. But Jimmy ran his load to Ireland or Iceland, H.Q. A little
private flier of his. He wouldn't dare harm us. There's the Treaty and
you're a Falcaro."
"Treaty," she said. "I tell you they're all in it. Now that I've seen
the Government in action I understand what I saw in Mob Territory.
They've gone rotten, that's all. They've gone rotten. The way he treated
you, because he thought you didn't have his rank! Sometimes my uncle's
high-handed, sometimes he tells a person off, sometimes he lets him know
he's top man in the Syndic and doesn't propose to let anybody teach him
how to suck eggs. But the spirit's different. In the Syndic it's parent
to child. In the Mob it's master to slave. Not based on age, not based
on achievement, but based on the accident of birth. You tell me 'You're
a Falcaro' and that packs weight. Why? Not because I was born a Falcaro
but because they let me stay a Falcaro. If I hadn't been brainy and
quick, they'd have adopted me out before I was ten. They don't do that
in Mob Territory. Whatever chance sends a Regan is a Regan then and
forever. Even if it's a paranoid constitutional inferior like Jimmy's
father. Even if it's a giggling pervert like Jimmy.
"God, Charles, I'm scared.
"At last I know these people and I'm scared. You'd have to see Chicago
to know why. The lakefront palaces, finer than anything in New York.
Regan Memorial Plaza, finer than Scratch Sheet Square--great gilded
marble figures, a hundred running yards of heroic frieze. But the hovels
you see only by chance! Gray brick towers dating from the Third Fire!
The children with faces like weasels, the men with faces like hogs, the
women with figures like beer barrels and all of them glaring at you when
you drive past as if they could cut your throat with joy. I never
understood the look in their eyes until now, and you'll never begin to
understand what I'm talking about until you see their eyes...."
Charles revolted against the idea. It was too gross to go down. It
didn't square with his acquired picture of life in North America and
therefore Lee Falcaro must be somehow mistaken or hysterical. "There,"
he murmured, stroking her hair. "We'll be all right. We'll be all
right." He tried to soothe her.
She twisted out of his arms and raged: "I _won't_ be humored. They're
mad, I tell you. Dick Reiner was right. We've got to wipe out the
Government. But Frank Taylor was right too. We've got to blast the Mob
before they blast us. They've died and decayed into something too
horrible to bear. If we let them stay on the continent, with us their
stink will infect us and poison us to death. We've got to do something.
We've got to do something."
"What?"
It stopped her cold. After a minute she uttered a shaky laugh. "The fat,
sloppy, happy Syndic," she said, "sitting around while the wolves
overseas and the maniacs across the Mississippi are waiting to jump.
Yes--do what?"
Charles Orsino was not good at arguments or indeed at any abstract
thinking. He knew it. He knew the virtues that had commended him to F.
W. Taylor were his energy and an off-hand talent for getting along with
people. But something rang terribly false in Lee's words.
"That kind of thinking doesn't get you anywhere, Lee," he said slowly.
"I didn't absorb much from Uncle Frank, but I did absorb this: you run
into trouble if you make up stories about the world and then act as if
they're true. The Syndic isn't somebody sitting around. The Government
isn't wolves. The Mobsters aren't maniacs. And they aren't waiting to
jump on the Syndic. The Syndic isn't anything that's jumpable. It's some
people and their morale and credit."
"Faith is a beautiful thing," Lee Falcaro said bitterly. "Where'd you
get yours?"
"From the people I knew and worked with. Numbers-runners, bookies,
sluts. Decent citizens."
"And what about the scared and unhappy ones in Riveredge? That sow of a
woman in the D.A.R. who smuggled me aboard a coast raider? The neurotics
and psychotics I found more and more of when I invalidated the Lieberman
findings? Charles, the North American Government didn't scare me
especially. But the thought that they're lined up with a continental
power does. It scares me damnably because it'll be three against one.
Against the Syndic, the Mob, the Government--and our own unbalanced
citizens."
Uncle Frank never let that word "citizens" pass without a tirade. "We
are not a government!" he always yelled. "We are not a government! We
must not think like a government! We must not think in terms of duties
and receipts and disbursements. We must think in terms of the old
loyalties that bound the Syndic together!" Uncle Frank was sedentary,
but he had roused himself once to the point of wrecking a bright young
man's newly installed bookkeeping system for the Medical Center. He had
used a cane, most enthusiastically, and then bellowed: "The next wise
guy who tries to sneak punch-cards into this joint will get them down
his throat! What the hell do we need punch-cards for? Either there's
room enough and doctors enough for the patients or there isn't. If there
is, we take care of them. If there isn't, we put 'em in an ambulance and
take them someplace else. And if I hear one goddammed word about
'efficiency'--" he glared the rest and strode out, puffing and leaning
on Charles' arm. "Efficiency," he growled in the corridor. "Every so
often a wise guy comes to me whimpering that people are getting away
with murder, collections are ten per cent below what they ought to be,
the Falcaro Fund's being milked because fifteen per cent of the dough
goes to people who aren't in need at all, eight per cent of the people
getting old-age pensions aren't really past sixty. Get efficient, these
people tell me. Save money by triple-checking collections. Save money by
tightening up the Fund rules. Save money by a nice big vital-statistics
system so we can check on pensioners. Yeah! Have people who might be
_working_ check on collections instead, and make enemies to boot
whenever we catch somebody short. Make the Fund a grudging Scrooge
instead of an open-handed sugar-daddy--and let people _worry_ about
their chances of making the Fund instead of _knowing_ it'll take care of
them if they're caught short. Set up a vital statistics system from
birth to death, with numbers and finger-prints and house registration
and maybe the gas-chamber if you forget to report a change of address.
You know what's wrong with the wise guys, Charles? Constipation. And
they want to constipate the universe." Charles remembered his uncle
restored to chuckling good humor by the time he had finished
embroidering his spur-of-the-moment theory with elaborate scatological
details.
"The Syndic will stand," he said to Lee Falcaro, thinking of his uncle
who knew what he was doing, thinking of Edward Falcaro who did the right
thing without knowing why, thinking of his good friends in the 101st
Precinct, the roaring happy crowds in Scratch Sheet Square, the
good-hearted men of Riveredge Breakdown Station 26 who had borne with
his sullenness and intolerance simply because that was the way things
were and that was the way you acted. "I don't know what the Mob's up to,
and I got a shock from the Government, and I don't deny that we have a
few miserable people who can't seem to be helped. But you've seen too
much of the Mob and Government and our abnormals. Maybe you don't know
as much as you should about our ordinary people. Anyway, all we can do
is wait."
"Yes," she said. "All we can do is wait. Until Chicago we have each
other."