Firebirds Soaring (22 page)

 

11. Telling about it later, she left out a lot of things, but she didn’t leave out enough. There weren’t many ways to make the Colonel look good. He didn’t much like little kids, but as they all got older, he took more of an interest.

Dolly didn’t like being the Colonel’s favourite. It involved a number of activities she had hoped to avoid, having had enough of being sold long before the pack had been—captured.

Why would she think that word?
Captured?
The others liked receiving special attention. They were such dogs.

 

4. So there was Dolly, seven years later herself, looking pretty good in high heels and an evening dress, a pup no more. Looking pretty foxy, Mr. Wayne said, but she said, “No, I am a coyote now. Or maybe a wolf, I’m not sure yet.” They stood on the grass in front of the schoolhouse. Mr. Wayne had his music player outside and was fiddling with the volume.

Yes, Mr. Wayne was still there, and most of the pack hated him for it, a broken man who couldn’t get away, but Dolly knew why he was there: love of their sorry asses. Mr. Wayne walked around the camp—the campus, he called it, and the pack howled with derision at his pretension—with his hand over his heart, as if it hurt. The Colonel would ask him, “You all right, old boy?” and Mr. Wayne would reply, “Never better, sir,” the
lie
in
reply
obvious to Dolly, but the Colonel would walk on, nodding, satisfied. (This was how Dolly knew she would be able to get away when the time came.)

“You look sensational,” Mr. Wayne said, and Dolly twirled.

“I am to go to the Embassy Ball,” she said, “and they will have the Circus of the Sun there for everyone to see. All the other pups have to wear black and stay outside, but I get to go in.”

“Who are you supposed to kill?” Mr. Wayne said.

Dolly ran her hands down the sides of the sleek red gown. “I am to dance with the ambassador, and meet the other heads of state, and there is one with whom I must share a glass of wine. That’s all.”

“What have you been eating lately?”

“Food. And the Colonel’s herb drink.”

“So you will drink the wine together, and later he will die and you cannot.”

“She. Die?”

“You are fifteen now, going on thirty-five in that dress, and you don’t get it yet? What do you think bombs are for, to blow up innocent trees?”

“Shhh,” said Dolly. “He’ll hear you.”

“Not this time,” said Mr. Wayne, and swept her into a dance to the loud symphony he was playing to fill up the night. It wasn’t easy to dance to, but Dolly wasn’t stupid.

“I thought it was just another test,” she said. “How well they climbed to a roof. How well I danced. How obedient we were. What good dogs.”

“Shhh,” said Mr. Wayne into her ear. “You are not a good dog. You have to figure out how to be a very bad dog indeed, and not get caught. That’s your assignment from me tonight.”

Dolly’s head hurt. “What if the Colonel gives me an order? ”

“You have to decide. Do what he says, and get a pat on the head, or do what I say, and get a pat on the head—or do what you think is right.”

Dolly was angry. “What is ‘right,’ besides this hand you are holding out straight and pointing at the moon? Who has been letting you get away with talking about ‘what is right’?”

“That’s the wrong question,” said Mr. Wayne. “The right question is, who has been letting me get away with talking about ‘what you think’?” And he twirled her away from him as if they were jiving and not trying to waltz to unsuitable classics, and she spun away on the grass where they were dancing.

“I hope you have a good time,” he said, and she laughed with a tone neither of them mistook. “Come see me when you get home and let me know how the circus was,” he added.

 

5. So. The next thing to tell, then, is the ball. Dolly had learned a lot by then and seen a lot of movies, but she was still surprised that such an event could be part of the modern world. The Colonel had no surprise. He had prepared them all as if such a social throwback was normal. Dolly was keeping a mental list of these weaknesses.

On the way to the ball, they drove toward the setting sun, and the sun separated into three, with a ring joining the two at the sides. “Sundogs,” said the driver. Dolly put her hand over her heart.
They’re not dogs
, she thought,
they’re wolves. They’re wild. They’re my friends. They are Wayne and me, held by a shackle of light to the orbit of the Colonel, but when the sun moves and the clouds change, they will escape and run through the night, and anyone who tries to stop them they will—

But after Wayne’s admonishment, she could not imagine killing anymore. For the first time, she added dimension to the man-shapes on the targets, substituted flesh for the stuffing of the crash-test dummies they used to blow up; for the first time, she thought of her teacher as Wayne.

At the ball, all was Cinderella and Disney as she had imagined and the Colonel had assumed. While the others, left on side streets to scale the fence, rappel the neoclassical building face, scale the roof, set up listening posts in the truck, and perform all those well-rehearsed tasks, the Colonel gestured her to the passenger seat of a Lamborghini (rented?) and they drove in a sweeping arc up to the portico, where he suddenly became a gentleman, the light glittering on his epaulets and decorations, seeing her out of the car and into the reception hall on his arm, a prize, a pet, a trophy.

She was tiny for her age but looked twice her years in the makeup they had put on her, and she drew the gaze of many women and men as she climbed the marble stairs to the ballroom door and descended within, announced by a plump, brown-faced servant whose amplified voice went unheard in the din.

The Colonel leaned toward her, murmured, “You have your orders,” then left her standing at the bottom of the stairs, saying loudly as he did, “Get you a drink, my dear.”

Even while it was really happening, Dolly was unable to credit that anyone believed his hokey charade, but there were none but admiring glances as she began to circle the room, hiding her uncertainty under a bland half smile as she’d been taught. She saw all her targets and spoke to them. The Colonel did not reappear for more than an hour. There were at least a thousand people in the room, but she was certain he could see her every move, she was so used to the camp where they were monitored even in the toilets.

When he did reappear, holding a glass of white wine for her, he said, “I’ll introduce you to Malefiore.” She said, “I talked to him for fifteen minutes, over by the window, don’t you remember?” He looked at her with approval, said, “Well
done
, girl,” to his bitch, and she realised with a start that she was
outside the fence.

After that it was easy. Difficult but not hard, more like. The secret was in numbers. There were a thousand people. They had a glass every half an hour. The silent, tiny brown-skinned women with the silver trays collected empties constantly and left the full glasses where they were until the women were sure they belonged to no one nearby, no one who had gone to dance. A favourite place for goblets and napkins to be abandoned was along the narrow shelf that topped the wainscoting, from which one or another would fall from time to time, in silence, to the thick carpet that covered all the room but the dance floor.

Dolly put her glass there, with a folded napkin beneath it, beside a similarly full one, while she reached up and fixed her hair. The Colonel was scanning the room for the woman whose final friend Dolly was supposed to become.

Dolly leaned on the wall with the glasses at her back, and when the Colonel called her away, the glass she took was not the one she was sure the Colonel had poisoned. When he turned back, she was picking up a napkin from the floor where it might have dropped from below the goblet. She glided away, not looking back until she heard the tiny plink of a falling glass. Even then her glance was just part of a survey of the other side of the hall.

She touched the Colonel’s shoulder blade and whispered, “Is that her?” pointing away through an archway, not showing her delight that not only had the unfolding linen pushed the glass over, but when it hit the floor, one side of the goblet had snapped silently away. Safe.

The Colonel said, “So it is!
Well
done,” and Dolly thought perhaps she was a wolverine instead, as she didn’t seem to enjoy being patted anymore.

 

6. The Colonel introduced her to a beautiful, tawny-skinned old woman with lush, long white hair. In their high heels, Dolly was still a foot taller. The woman would have looked like a doll, but when she turned her gaze to Dolly’s, it burned like the halogen core of a spotlight, marking Dolly’s vision forever. She made the Colonel look like the pitiful figure he should have been, had he not been held together and made presentable by megalomania.

She and Dolly talked for a moment, then, “Excuse me, dear,” said the woman, though Dolly wanted to give her a name—the Eminence?—“but I really must say good-bye. It’s far too warm in here.” And she turned away, toward the French windows onto the stone balcony.

Dolly followed her, leaving the Colonel beaming after them. “Can I please come with you?” Dolly dropped the languid sophistication in her eagerness, and the woman looked twice. The Intelligence?

“You poor thing,” she said. “You’re just a kid.” Dolly nodded, hurrying beside her. They passed from the hot, noisy crowd into a cool, orange-tinged night, and the tiny woman strode directly to the edge of the balcony.

“Don’t your security guards go mad?” Dolly asked her.

The Courage turned her sharp bright scrutiny on Dolly. “How would you know about that?”

Dolly swivelled and leaned back against the heavy stone balustrade, looked up at the façade above her. Though it was floodlit, the Victorian neoclassicism of the façade ensured many dark channels up which her pack members were making their way. She saw two of them edging along ledges toward target windows.

Dolly turned again, and looked out at the square. Calmly, she said to the woman, “First, you are so warm that I offer you my chilled wineglass, and you take a long and satisfying drink. The Colonel will like to see that I am taking care of you. Then, I leave you to report to him. I believe you are not meant to die until after the ball.

“So if you take a little time to look around in this lovely night, perhaps at the architecture, and if you see a large black animal, a cat finding its way across the face of this building, or maybe two of them, where they are not supposed to be, and you look a little closer at them to see how they got there, that would not be my fault, would it? And should you let it be known later that in case of poisoning incidents you always prepare yourself with a number of herbal and medicinal antidotes, that would be better.”

Dolly raised her glass to her lips and sipped. “I am fifteen,” she said wistfully, “and all the pack are younger than I am. There are other groups of children he has
adopted
. You understand
adopted
?”

The woman smiled and nodded, her kindness palpable in the night.

“If we are
seen
to fail, we are punished, but if he fails first . . .” Dolly dared say no more. She turned back to where the Colonel could see her mouth. “Perhaps you would feel better if you took a bit of wine,” she said. “Here, have mine—my father will say I have drunk too much tonight any way.”

Unhesitatingly the old woman took the glass and drank deeply. “Thank you, my dear,” she said.

“I must get back,” said Dolly.

“I hope we meet again,” said the Presence.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Dolly said, and swayed her hips back into the ballroom.

Rejoining the Colonel, she whispered excitedly, “She drank from my glass!”

“Hush, my dear,” he said, and patted her hand, saying more loudly, “We must get you home, little one. I think you’ve had more than your limit!” But before they could make their way all through the crowd, reclaim their evening cloaks, and get to the door, the militia or the police, Dolly wasn’t sure which, were there with their guns.

 

7. The children were taken somewhere different from the Colonel, and though some of them had to testify, Dolly never saw him again except on television.

 

9. Dolly was sent to school by the Presence, the Kindness, the Intelligence—whatever her name was going to be—though Dolly never saw her again either, except on the news, saying, “I saw a shadow I thought was a black cat, walking on a ledge. But then I realised it wasn’t. . . .”

Dolly had never heard the Mexican folksong
“Coplas”
at that time, but when she did she laughed and laughed. But that was later.

 

12. Dolly did see Wayne again, with scars in his neck where the small explosive packs that would have been triggered by the perimeter electronics had been removed. Now he was outside, too, was a teacher in her new school, and helped the school psychologist deal with Dolly.

13. After Dolly’s surgery, he helped her, too, to get used to the person she was to become for the rest of her life.

“Think of the pack,” he said. “They did as they were told, and went down fighting. Do you want to be like them?”

“Yes,” she shouted, “yes! I want to be tumbled into a big bed with the litter, and I want to wake up and discover I am eight and hungry again, but with my littermates!”

“You are a fool,” Wayne said, but gently. “If you want things like that, you will never get what you want. Want something interesting and you have a chance.”

He had a point, but she still hated him for saying it. Still, she had to acknowledge his right to do so. Every dog must have its day.