A Few Good Men (27 page)

His features looked much the same as always; his expression was composed; his eyes looked perfectly normal. I don’t mean to say that he looked like he’d been crying. He didn’t even look as though he’d been worrying. But something—something behind his eyes, something behind the perfectly composed facade of his features—had collapsed. It was like a building that is wholly burned on the inside without the walls showing any damage from the outside.

In that look I realized two things: He was sure Nat was dead. And he would not let it stand in the way of the great cause that had already cost the Remy family two of their young men.

I wasn’t so sure in either case. Oh, Nat might very well be dead. Who was I to say otherwise? I had no proof, nothing concrete I could oppose to the idea. On the other hand, I didn’t think I could allow Nat to be dead. I didn’t think I could take it. Not now, not yet, not like this.

“Sam,” I said, my voice curter than I meant it to sound. “You wished to speak to me?”

His answer came quickly and in perfectly urbane tones. “Yes. You see, we’re supposed to meet with Simon St. Cyr and Jan Rainer today, and before we do, we need to get some paperwork in order. I’m sorry to call you so early, but I haven’t been to bed yet. I stayed up all night discussing things with the council of twelve, on how to steer this. It is obvious that they’re going to launch a frontal assault as soon as they’re sure that there is no way to get rid of you by stealth. Right now, the only reason they haven’t attacked the island openly is that they have hopes the Scrubbers can do their job and take you out, and then they can deal with us as they would deal with any house that has lost its Good Man. Jan is going through the same. Believe it or not, this is both the best and the worst right now. Strategically, we shouldn’t want the whole might of the Good Men to come to bear on two—or even three seacities—but on the other hand, this also doesn’t allow us to defend ourselves, to get our own military force in place, or to request supplies and volunteers from the various secret organizations that have been fighting—” He stopped and stared at me, in shock.

Until he did so, I didn’t realize I’d sworn, loud and profanely. Yeah, the sound of it still hung in midair. Yes, my mouth felt like it had just pronounced the words, the hard dental consonant pronounced hard enough to bruise my tongue against my lips. But I had no intention of doing it, and didn’t realize I’d done it till Sam stared up at me.

“I beg your pardon?” he said, not so much in censure, but in total confusion, like a man who takes a step in the dark and finds nothing under his foot.

I took a deep breath, found my mind—or at least that part of it that had sworn loudly, rather than, say, punching a hole in the nearest wall at listening to strategy of revolution while Nat Remy was missing—while Nat Remy might, even now, be fighting for his life or worse. And I repeated the swearing, with careful and exact instructions of what we should do to the revolution, the Council, the Good Men, the army and the broom they rode in on.

For a moment Sam stared at me, speechless. I heard Ben, as clear as day, in his best, sarcastic tone say, mildly,
What? All of them, Luce? Even you don’t have that much stamina.
And it occurred to me I’d never used that word in front of Sam, much less in that loud, decided and vulgar a manner. “I’m sorry, Sam, but—”

“Son,” he said. His voice was at once commanding and hollow. The house might be burned to a husk, but its walls were stone, two foot thick and twice as hard to dismantle. “Son, do you think I don’t know how you feel? Do you think I don’t feel it too? Nathaniel was my son.” He looked, of a sudden very tired. “My firstborn. Beyond that, he’s been my closest helper. He’s been my right hand for years. Do you think I’m not grieving?” He looked suddenly stern and angry, Zeus pater, or another of the old, unabashedly male divinities, in a raging fury. “Do you think I don’t care? I will remind you that in many ways it is the second time I’ve lost my oldest son. I raised Benjamin from the time he was two. What do you want me to do? Scream and howl? Do you think I wouldn’t do it if I thought it would bring them back? Or even bring one of them back? But that’s not how life works. That’s not how grown-ups act. We know that screaming and howling has no effect on the material world, and that dead is dead and nothing is bringing it back.”

And now I was angry. In my mind, clear as day, was the certainty that this was how he’d taken Ben’s arrest too—with grief, sure, with crushing grief, likely, but also with quiet and sure resignation, the kind that absorbed the body blow and lived to fight another day. If the Sons of Liberty, the organization he was working for, the organization he served to his last breath, had done anything, anything at all, there was a chance Ben would be alive today. That Ben would be alive right now.

I put my hand in my pocket, to take out the flag, to put it on the desk, to say that I didn’t want any part of this organization that took its own members being destroyed and did nothing. But, though it sounds crazy, I felt a hand close around my wrist, and I heard Ben’s voice,
Steady, Luce. You don’t want to do that. And you know you don’t. What else do you expect of them? They’ve been clandestine for two hundred years. Proscribed on penalty of death. What do you expect? Fighting spirit? They wouldn’t have survived this long. They’re the mouse that nibbles in the dark, not the cat who hunts in daylight.

I took a deep breath. “I want you to not give up,” I said. “I want the twelve to not give up. I want you to think where Nat can be. I want us to find him. He told me that the Sons of Liberty take care of their own. He wanted me to join so I’d be protected. And now we’re going to leave him alone to die? We’re going to leave him for dead, when he might still be alive? You and the twelve can go to hell. I’m going to find him.”

He looked up at me, startled, then asked a personal question.

“Not that I see where that’s any of your business,” I said harshly, and saw him flinch, which was good because if anyone else had asked that question in those circumstances, I’d have punched his lights out. To think that the only reason one could have for wanting to fight for Nat’s life was physical intimacy was insulting and demeaning to both him and myself, and possibly to the whole human race. I expected better of Sam, and the only reasons I didn’t get truly angry was that I knew the shock he’d just suffered, and that he had to be half out of his mind. I was half out of mine, too. But at least mine wanted to fight for what was worth it. “But no. I’m not even sure we’re friends. But I’m sure he’s a loyal and honorable man, and I’m sure he’d fight for me or for you. He doesn’t deserve to be left alone to die in some ignominious way.”

“Lucius, son,” Sam said, very softly. “If I weren’t sure he was dead—”

“How can you be sure? What sense does it make? Why would they kill him when they know how useful he is as bait?”

Sam stood up. His office had no windows, unlike mine. It was hardly larger than a quarter of my bathroom, about the same size as the cell in which I’d spent fourteen years. The desk was set halfway through it, halfway between the back wall and the door, facing the door. Now he started pacing between the wall and the door. “Why would they leave him alive, Lucius? Ask yourself that.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “They left me alive, and more, they left Ben alive. I fully understand that I had to be kept alive, a way of storing the body in more or less working condition, but why keep Ben alive? Why not cut him down that first day? Was it just so they could force me to kill him, and have an excuse to put me away?”

“You don’t know what strings I pulled, and how fast, to keep Ben alive,” he said, looking up at me. He looked suddenly very tired. “You have no idea. They wanted to do just that. They wanted to kill him. Your . . . your father did. I convinced him that if he left Ben with you, you . . . your tendencies wouldn’t be so obvious. No, I didn’t know why at the time, but he clearly didn’t want it to be known what . . . how you were. Now I understand, of course. He didn’t want rumors of it to attach to him, if he ever had to ascend to power under your name. Not that it should matter to an absolute ruler, but clearly it mattered to him. And I convinced him there would be less scandal, and less trouble if he left Ben alive and with you, in jail. Only there wasn’t less trouble.”

“You have no idea what it was like,” I said. “Or what would have happened to him, if I hadn’t fought.”

“Did I blame you? Did I ever say you were guilty in any way? I figured it out. And now that I know what your father really was, and what he wanted with you, I can see that his plan simply changed. It was still obvious, to everyone who knew you in jail, I’m sure, and to everyone who supervised it that you and Ben were involved. And it was obvious that there was talk and it would be remembered, so he thought the best thing was to get you put in solitary and give people time to forget. Plus, I suspect, Ben was caught passing out information. I know they tried to get information out of him before . . . I know part of the torture was for real information. I saw the files, though your father was cunning enough not to run those by me. But we didn’t abandon him. We didn’t abandon you.” He sagged, suddenly, as though a weight had dropped on his shoulders. “You know we didn’t. Even if all my cunning planning, my desperate pleading and maneuvering served was to make Ben’s life last through one more hellish year, and to keep you distressingly aware and sane through your captivity.”

Tell him it was all right,
Ben said.
Tell him, damn you. Don’t you dare pile guilt on him, on top of everything else.

“It was all right, Sam,” I said. Ben was irresistible in that mood, even if Ben was only a figment of my imagination. I knew as well as I knew anything else, that Ben would have said exactly that if he’d been here and present. “It was all right,” I said. “You have nothing to blame yourself for. Don’t you know I’d give years of my life and heart’s blood, too, for another day with Ben? You gave us another year. Yes, it might have been hell, but not as much as even the best time without him has been. And as for my sanity, if it consoles you, I’m not even half sure that I’m still sane. But that’s not the point. The point is that you have no proof that Nat is dead. You have no proof that nothing can be done. If I were the Good Men—and arguably I’m more like them than you are—I’d not give up such a strategic asset.”

“It’s Goldie,” he said. And walked behind his desk, and sat down again.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Goldie had blood on him. Not his blood. Goldie isn’t injured.”

“But . . . did you analyze it? Do you know it was Nat’s? I’ve seen your son fight, Sam. I doubt anyone could lay hands on him without there being casualties. In fact, if the sand all around the place where you think he was taken wasn’t soaked in blood, I doubt he’s dead. Because for someone to get to the point of killing him, he’d have killed ten of them first.”

For the first time something like a glimmer of hope appeared in his eyes, but it was still too small, too frail, a mere candle against a sea of darkness. “But the thing is, Goldie escaped. And you know Nat. He would die to protect the idiot dog. And I think that’s the only thing that can have happened, because they shoot animals without even thinking. They—”

“Muddled thinking,” I said. “Not that I can blame you, since he is your son and I know you love him.” And at his surprised look, I added, “It’s quite obvious in the way you talk to him. But Sam, just because Nat would be willing to give his life for Goldie, doesn’t mean he managed it. Just because one would be willing to jump off a cliff in order to fly, doesn’t mean all the brooms get taken away from us.”

He put his elbows on his desk, and, for a moment, hid his face in his hands. “What would you have us do?” he asked. “If they’re using him to bait a trap, do you want to walk into that trap? Is that what you wish to do? What good will that serve? I won’t have your blood on my hands, as well as his, Lucius. I won’t have it. Personal isn’t the same thing as important, and personally important is not the same thing as vital. Nat is important and personal to me, because he’s my son. But I won’t risk other people, nor the cause of the revolution, because of him.”

I was about to tell him I was quite capable enough of getting my own blood on my own hands, and in fact had tried my best to do so, several times over the last few years. But I never got to open my mouth, because a fast rat-tat sounded on the office door.

Sam and I stared at the door, for a moment. It wasn’t, I knew, policy to knock on my father’s office. In fact, he could come and go as he pleased and not even Sam would intrude on his time. I didn’t know if Sam had a similar policy for his underlings, but I suspected so, from his look of shock at the sound. Then he called out, “Yes?”

The door opened and Abigail’s face showed in the opening, small and flushed with excitement. For a moment I thought Nat was back, but then I noticed her eyes were still frantic, as frantic as they’d been when she’d woken me in the morning.

She came into the room and slammed the door behind her.

“Abigail, for the love of God, we’re talking about—”

“I know. But I just heard the holo cast and I thought you’d want to know—no, need to know—this.”

“What?” he said.

But she had approached his desk and was fiddling the buttons on his link. Most desk links can serve as phones, intercoms and holo broadcasting receivers. She turned it on, so the holo formed in the middle of the room.

A smug man appeared in the middle of the room and said, “For the murder of Good Man Maximilian Dante Lucius Keeva. It is believed—” She hissed with frustration and pressed buttons very quickly. The smug man flickered and moved unnaturally, and I understood she was moving the cast backward to the beginning. In the beginning, the man looked very composed, staring at the camera with the sort of expression someone would have when announcing that a way to turn bird crap into chocolate had just become commercially viable. “Good news this morning,” he said. “After days of intensive forensic investigation, the murderer of Good Man Maximilian Dante Lucius Keeva has been arrested. From what we understand, the forensic evidence is conclusive. The Good Man, a young man of whom most had the highest hopes, was tortured and killed by Nathaniel Remy, a lawyer in his house. Nathaniel Remy has been arrested for the murder of Good Man Maximilian Dante Lucius Keeva and is being questioned. It is believed that he murdered Maximilian at the bequest of Maximilian’s so-called older brother, Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva, who has claimed the position after Maximilian’s death. The council of Good Men doubts this claim, and the claimant has refused to be examined, either genetically or psychologically, to determine his identity and his true motives. Investigation continues as there are indications there might have been a sexual motive behind the elaborate and heartless killing.” The man couldn’t have sounded happier or more dirty-minded if he’d said he’d found dirty pictures of Max, Nat, myself and three sheep. “Execution is tentatively set for the tenth of this month and it has been petitioned to be held in public or through holo-vision.”