The American Zone by L. Neil Smith
She was puzzled. “Why, that’s morphine, Mr. Suprynowicz. It’s for my mom.”
He shook his head. “Now you just take that right back to the shelf where you got it, Mary-Lou, and look a little harder next time. Our store brand is a lot cheaper, and it happens to be on sale this week.”
“Thank you, Mr. Suprynowicz!” When she returned, the storekeeper counted out her change, bagged her purchases, and she skipped out of the store, happy as a little freckled lark.
If I cringed, I guess it was because I’m still a blueback. It was also a leftover from the ugly place where I’d been born. I tried not to show it. My darling Clarissa didn’t show it, either—because she hadn’t even noticed the transaction, and if she had, she’d likely have thought nothing of it. She’d been born a Confederate and had probably gone to the store herself, for Mommy’s narcotics and Daddy’s ammo, once upon a time.
I was tired. I was seeing entirely too much of Mr. and Mrs. Civil Liberties Association, and they, in turn, were getting suspicious of me. I had to take them aside and explain exactly what kind of case I was helping with. I figured it was Will’s case causing all the bloodshed, not my own.
They took the bodies away, one to the meatlocker, the other to an infirmary. We woke Bennett Williams up and confirmed my expectation that he wasn’t either of the guys who’d attacked me. All they’d had with them, weaponwise, were the knuckles and a switchblade. Clearly amateur talent, from out of town.
Way out of town.
I tried to relax and sip my chocolated coffee. I still hurt all over from last night’s adventures, but if there’s anyplace in the American Zone that rivals the Hanging Judge as a place to catch up on gossip in a congenial atmosphere—and get a lesson on living in a free country—it’s Suprynowicz’s General Store next door to the Golden Apple Tea Room at the end of the 2300 block at the corner of Wilson and Shea.
Clarissa and I were here, on our own at last, to visit two more of the people on my list of possible importers of Gable and Lombard (not to mention Cummings and Davis) pictures. It was good to have her along; this was how I’d always wanted it to be, her Nora to my Nick.
Will was at home with his wives for the morning, dealing with some crisis, or so he’d claimed, involving paint colors for the nursery. It must not have been much of a crisis. He’d been humming cheerily to himself when he rang off. It was one of those stupid situations where I knew he was lying, he knew I knew he was lying, and I knew he knew that I knew, but the forms had to be followed nonetheless. Meanwhile, Lucy had grabbed an ultraspeed flight all the way down to Lubbock (twenty minutes’ air time—they actually consume half their delta-V keeping the plane from going into orbit), believing she was in pursuit of another of Will’s native radical suspects.
Somebody sitting near the front window leaned back, put his feet up on the table, and fingered a guitar.
“Well I used to be an American,
Where they told us we were free,
But the only ones with rights were crooks,
And the newsheads on TV—”
The little bell over the door jingled. Samuel T. Harkin IV had kept the appointment with us first. At forty-nine, according to my research, Harkin was a grim, perpetually impoverished in-the-cellar-with-a-candle-guttering-in-the-winebottle type anarchist. Word was, he’d spent the last thirty years of his life Stateside laboriously writing, editing, printing, collating, and distributing thousands upon thousands of smudgy political pamphlets that nobody ever read. Until recently, when he’d emigrated to the Confederacy one leap ahead of the Immigration, Naturalization, and Condemnation Service’s killer hounds, he’d been an illegal squatter—in the house that his parents had once owned—in southern California’s “Earthquake Safety Clearance Area,” one of those corrupt west coast government land grabs that stank across eleven thousand worlds. At least he’d fared better than Donald Scott, the California guy local governments had murdered for his ocean-front Malibu property.
It was said that Harkin had an odd knack for gathering about him artists and writers, mostly younger than he was, with genuine talent greatly exceeding his own.
Greeting a few of the regulars with a negligent wave—I noticed Daggett the knifemonger was here, having his first Diet Coke of the day—Harkin also nodded at Suprynowicz and looked around until he found us. He came to the card table Clarissa and I occupied, and seated himself without asking.
“I’m Harkin,” he informed us. We knew, we’d seen his picture. He was tall, but with a lot of belly under his black T-shirt and black jeans. (One report claimed that he wore black underwear, as well.) Under a black beret straight out of a comic book, he also wore a big round face on which it looked like someone had pasted a fake moustache and goatee.
“I’m Bear,” I replied, as deadpan as I could. “She’s Bear, too—but it’s a free country.” Clarissa stifled a giggle. I’d always wanted to say that.
No discernable sense of humor. Harkin pulled out a huge, well-used briar pipe from somewhere on his person, stuffed it full of some kind of vegetable matter—it may even have been tobacco—lit it, tamped it, and put his lighter away. “You wanted to ask me some questions?”
I lit a cigarette. For this particular setting, I’d reverted to American duds: my old gray working suit, white shirt, plain black zero-power necktie, comfortable brown oxfords, white socks, and the same felt hat I wear every day. Despite the fight I’d been in my still-mending left arm was supported now by a blue transparent plastic contraption that I could take off for bathing and dressing. It was still annoying, but an improvement.
At my suggestion, Clarissa had looked for American clothes, too, at the local equivalent of Goodwill: a very nice camel-colored suit without the least hint of sex-appeal, an off-white silk blouse, dark nylons, and what I call “Nazi nurse” shoes. The idea was to look serious and professional, not sexy or pretty. It didn’t exactly work—she still looked sexy and pretty anyway—but it helped some. “We wanted to talk to you,” she said, attempting to imitate Will imitating Jack Webb—which meant she sounded just like Dana Scully. “About what you import from the United States.” I noticed for the first time in that instant that although there isn’t any difference (not that I can hear, anyway) in the accents of Confederates and United Statesians, still, there’s something. My lovely spouse was trying to sound American, but she sounded like somebody on the BBC trying to sound like somebody from Texas.
Harkin spotted her in a heartbeat, and stood up, not quite going for whatever it was he carried in his waistband. “Damn Confederates anyway! What, are you planning to set me up for the train wreck or the Old Endicott explosion?”
You can never tell what’s on people’s minds. I stood up, too, put my good hand on the wrist that was reaching for his gun, and through gritted teeth, said, “Calm down, you idiot! I’m a blueback, just like you—Clarissa here is a Confederate native, my wife, and this happens to be her first case.” Not exactly true, but it would do. I turned to her. “I’m sorry, kiddo, I guess I gave you bad advice. You should have remained your own sweet self.” Back to Harkin. “We’re trying to find out who’s importing certain movies from various versions of the States, is all, not even dirty movies. I’d be glad to explain the whole thing, if you’ll just sit down and relax.”
He blinked. “Say, you’re Win Bear,” he informed me. I’d known that, of course, but didn’t let on. “The first sucker through the blue hole. That’s a pretty good shiner you’ve got there. Your secretary didn’t tell me who you were when she called.”
“Secretary?” I scratched my head. “Oh, secretary! I did ask her to call you, didn’t I? I was confused because this is her day off, and she’s gone shopping or something in Lubbock. Yes, well, I’m Win Bear, guilty as charged, and this is Clarissa MacDougall Olson-Bear.”
Harkin sat down and nodded, giving Clarissa the once-over despite her getup. I offered him something to drink and he asked for beer. I went to the counter—this wasn’t a restaurant, I’d been told, and i
“You know that in my world,” he was telling her, “Bettie Page never got to be a movie star at all. She was a devoutly religious person who refused to sleep her way onto the bottom rung of the ladder, let alone to the top.”
Clarissa answered, reminding me of conversations we’d had, “Yes, I know. Win says that her place—if we all have a place in the world—was taken by inferior talent blown way out of proportion by studio publicity departments. Just think, a world without comedy-mysteries like The Striped Silk Chair, Daddy’s Yacht, or The Two Leopards. How very sad.”
I put the small round tray of drinks on the table. Clarissa likes plain old Lipton’s. Harkin had asked for Scheiner Bock, not quite a microbrew, but a pretty tolerable regional beer from Texas. I’d been surprised that Suprynowicz stocked it. “But she’s a big star here,” Harkin observed. “This version of her, anyway. I think my favorite movie is The Blue Peekaboo.” A peekaboo is a tiny sliver of a two-piece swimsuit. They don’t call them bikinis here, because there was never any thermonuclear explosion in the Pacific.
At that point the little bell over the door jangled again, and, leaning heavily on his cane, in clumped Ludfried von Haybard, Nobel Laureate and economist of the Austrian School. “Samuel, my boy!” The professor waved his cane dangerously and loudly addressed Harkin in what sounded to me like a stage-German accent. I learned later that all Austrians sound like Donald Duck’s other uncle, Ludwig von Drake. “How pleasant to see you! Suprynowicz, still practicing practical economics, I see! And this must be the famous shamus Win Bear—somewhat worse for the wear, I see, like any good hardboiled detective—and his lovely companion to whom I have most rudely not been introduced!”
Harkin grinned. “I’ll be glad to introduce you rudely, if that’s what you really want, Doc. Don’t be surprised if the detective shoots me for it, though. This is another kind of doc, Healer Clarissa MacDougall Olson-Bear.”
Shifting his cane to the other hand, he took Clarissa’s, bowed low over it, and kissed it. People in other parts of the store cheered, whistled, and applauded. They were all pretty easily entertained, I thought. I found him a chair. “I am delighted, my dear, to make your acquaintance. You know that at the age of seventy-two, I think of myself as political zweiback, the twice-baked bread of the wonderful world of refugees.”
“More likely,” Harkin muttered, “refried beans.” I’d been thinking half-baked bread, myself.
“My boy, we’ll settle this later, with wet noodles at fifty paces.” Back to Clarissa: “You see (he actually said,”you zee”), I was originally a refugee to the United States—a United States—which, in my version of reality, reached a diplomatic understanding with a Japan unaligned with Germany, and never entered World War Two. I tell you, I was astounded—and deeply saddened—to hear the way the whole thing went in so many other worlds: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Beaverton.”
“Beaverton?” Harkin and I both said at once.
But Von Haybard had the eyes and ears of what he had every reason to believe—and so do I—was a lovely young girl, and went on without us. “I had fled Austria to avoid the Nazis. I wasn’t Jewish, there was no point in going to New Israel in Tasmania, so I chose the United States. Now I found that I was exiled permanently from my homeland, from all of Europe for that matter, with the passing of a prematurely aged Adolf Hitler—from Parkinson’s Disease, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy—and the establishment of the Anglo-German Eurofascist Commonwealth.”
“No, kidding!” I said. How many different versions of World War Two were there, anyway?
“What a mouthful, not?” he laughed. “And they always accuse us German-speakers of liking compound words.”
“And now you’re here,” Clarissa coached him.
“And now I’m here. And now I find myself a refugee once again, owing to a book I wrote, unwisely criticizing America’s ruling ‘One Nation Under God Party.’”
Clarissa said, “I’d like to see that, sometime.”
The old man laughed with delight. “I laboriously carried a single precious copy with me through the broach, my dear. It’s available on the’Com now, but I’d be happy to let you see the original.” Come up and look at my etchings, little girl. I barely resisted inspecting his cane for notches.
It was time to take this investigation back in hand—although my lovely Clarissa had certainly softened them up nicely and gotten a lot of background.
I charged in: “What we called you here for, Clarissa and I, was to ask you if you know anything about imported copies of movies like Gone with the Wind or It Happened One Night from the States.”
“Gone with the Wind,” mused the professor (he actually said, “Gone vit’ ze Vint”), “Gone with the Wind. An exceedingly long film from the 1930s about the Second American Revolution, was it not, with Robert Cummings and Betty Davis? And a real stinker!”
Actually, he’d said “Und a rrreal schtinker,” but I was suddenly too excited to give a damn. I leaned toward him, almost into his face. “So who’s importing it, Doctor Von Haybard? You got any idea?”
He shook his head sadly. “I haven’t any idea at all. My wife—my dear, departed Hilda—loved movies like that, and she made me go to them with her. I haven’t seen it, probably since 1939. Samuel, how many A.L.s is that, anyway?”
Harkin said, “A hundred and sixty-three.”
“How time flies,” Von Haybard remarked, leaning on the cane between his knees. “Mr. Bear, we will both ask around for you and your lovely Clarissa, after this Gone with the Wind movie, if you will do a small thing for us.”
I squinted at him suspiciously. “And that would be?”
He glanced around from side to side, as if worried about being overheard. “First, you must promise to tell no one of this. It could be worth millions of … of …”
“Gold ounces,” Harkin supplied.
“Yes, gold ounces. You see, my friend Samuel here and I have had an idea, and we are looking for financial backers.”
Clarissa asked, “Financial backers for what?”
Von Haybard leaned toward us and whispered, “Governmentland!”
Harkin chuckled with moronic glee.
“What?” I said.
“Governmentland—what we shall call an abusement park! It is a brilliant idea, even if I say so myself, and certain to make everybody associated with it wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice!”
“How do you figure that?”
“You have probably noticed, as we have, how Confederate natives never believe it when you tell them how it was. They will want to come and see what living under a government is like, especially with the Franklinite Faction demanding that one be established here. We’ll divide it into sections! Sun Temple Slaveland, Inquisitionland, Robespierreland, Stalinland, Great Leap Forward Land, Third Reichland, and New World Orderland!”
What it sounded like to me was a typical Old Freedom Movement idea, like the Minerva Atoll Landfill Project or any number of other harebrained schemes that had never come to anything back in the States. Von Haybard appeared obsessed with it in a way I recognized, and he didn’t seem to notice what a terrible idea everybody else thought it was. I looked around: Governmentland was no secret here. People in the store seemed to be cringing with embarrassment as they heard him going on about it, probably for the millionth time. By contrast, when the Indiana Jones movies finally made their way to the Confederacy, some clever entrepreneur put together a Raiders of the Lost Ark brace of handguns, consisting of a P35 Browning High Power autopistol like mine and a large-caliber 4” N-frame revolver—followed as soon as possible by a commemorative Webley Mark VI. Now there was a commercial promotion to make the chicken-livered, lace-pantied, hypocritical Californians who produced those pictures swoon with the vapors. “Why not Plagueland, then?” I ask
21: TEA FOR TWO
Those who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others for wealth, power, or even a moment’s respite, deserve only the end of a rope.
—Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin
“What was my name in the States?” The woman looked at me down her long, straight nose. She had enough eye makeup on for a whole herd of 1960s go-go ponies.
I laughed. I’d just been thinking about that song the other day, and told her so.
“So that’s what you’re asking me?” the woman replied, utterly without visible emotion or even much facial expression. Keely Smith, that’s who she reminded me of, deadpanned band singer and main squeeze to Louis Prima.
“I guess it is,” said Clarissa. “Isn’t it, Win?”
“I guess it is,” I answered.
More Jack Webb. The woman reached a long, pale arm and what seemed like an even longer cigarette holder toward an ashtray. “Well, it was the same there and then as it is here and now. You see before you Andrea Galarynd, age thirty-five or thereabout, proprietor of the Golden Apple Tea Room.”
I started to speak again, but she beat me to it. She’d started taciturn, but one of us, Clarissa or me, had finally pushed a button, although I didn’t know who or how. Whatever it was, it had taken us half an hour.
She said, “I was a best-selling Gothic romance novelist where I came from, Lieutenant Bear. Unfortunately, that sort of thing doesn’t seem to sell very well here. They like westerns, of all things!” she complained. “Old westerns, written by people like Louis L’Amour or Ted van Roosevelt!”
I shrugged, but didn’t say anything.
“I was also a popular philosopher of some note—some would say ‘self-styled’—and a health-food activist.” She delivered it all in monotone, with a stone face. “They called me a ‘cultist’ at my trial. It’s true that I’m a natural nonconformist, I suppose. If I hadn’t become a radical individualist, I might have become a nudist, instead.”