Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (44 page)

He scrambled groggily to his feet, careered into me, righted himself and wobbled uncertainly as the last of the spray settled over him. The disinfectant evaporated quickly, leaving my skin feeling tight and goose-pimply.

Potty-Mouth swung his head around with saurian sloth. He focused on me and grabbed my shoulder. “The fuck are you doing to me, fag?” His grip tightened, grinding my collarbone.

“Chill out,” I said, placatingly. “We're in the same boat. We're drafted”

“Where are my clothes?”

“In that bag. We had to strip while they sprayed us. Look, could you let go of my shoulder?”

He did. “You may be drafted, bro, but not me. I'm leaving.” He popped the seal on the bag and struggled into his civvies.

“Look, there's no percentage in this. Just keep calm, and let this thing sort itself out. You're gonna get yourself killed.”

Potty-Mouth ignored me and took off toward the door we'd used to get onto the roof. He kicked it three times before it splintered and gave. I looked up at the frères in the cherry-pickers. They were watching him calmly.

A small, wiry frère was waiting behind the door Potty-Mouth kicked in. He stepped out, grinning. Potty-Mouth threw a punch at the frère's solar-plexus. The frère whoofed a little, but didn't lose his grin.

Potty-Mouth grappled with him, lifting the smaller man off his feet. The frère took the beating for what seemed like a long time, merely twisting to avoid the groin and face-shots that Potty-Mouth aimed. The trustafarians on the roof were all silent, watching, shivering.

Finally, the frère had had enough. He broke free of Potty-Mouth's grip on his arms with ease, and as he dropped to the ground, smashed Potty-Mouth in both ears simultaneously. Potty-Mouth reeled, and the little frère aimed a series of hard, wicked-fast blows at his ribs. I heard cracking.

Potty-Mouth started to fall, but the frère caught him, picked him up over his head, then piledrivered him into the gravel. He lay unmoving there, head at an angle that suggested he wouldn't be getting up any time soon.

The frères in the cherry-pickers scrambled down. One of them slung Potty-Mouth over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carried him down the stairs. The little frère who'd killed him stepped back into the doorway, pulling the broken door shut behind him.

“Get dressed,” broadcasted a power-armor.

They herded us back downstairs without a word. The crowd moved with utter docility, and I could see the logic of the proceedings. Terrified, blood-sugar bottomed out, thirsty, we were completely without fight.

On the third floor, the cubicles and desks had all been piled in a corner, making one big space. A few long tables were set up with industrial-size pots of something that steamed and smelled bland and uninspired. My mouth filled with saliva.

“Form an orderly queue,” said the sergeant from the night before, who was waiting behind one of the pots with an apron over his uniform, a ladle in his hand.

He looked each trustafarian over carefully as they passed through the line, clutching large bowls that were efficiently filled with limp vegetables, lumpy potatoes, and a brown, greasy gravy. Each of us was issued a stale baguette and a cup of orange drink and sent away.

We seated ourselves on the floor and ate greedily off our laps. Here in the mess, the frères relaxed and allowed the men and women to mingle.

Friends found each other and shared long hugs, then ate in silence. I ate alone, back to a wall, and watched the others.

Once everyone had passed through the line, the sergeant began walking through the clusters, stooping to talk and joke. He touched people's shoulders, handed out cigarettes, and was generally endearing and charming.

He made his way over to me.

“M'ser Rosen.”

“Sergeant.”

He sat down beside me. “How is the food?”

“Oh, very good,” I said, without irony. “Would you like some baguette?”

“No, thank you.”

I tore off a hunk of bread and sopped up some gravy.

“It is a shame about your friend, on the roof.”

I grunted. Potty-Mouth had been no friend of mine—and in a situation like this one, I knew, you have to be discriminate in apportioning your loyalty.

“Ah.” He stared thoughtfully at the trustafarians. “You understand, though, why it had to be?”

“I suppose.”

“Ah?”

“Well, once he was taken care of, the rest saw that there was no point in struggling.”

“Yes, I suppose that was part of it. The other part is that there in no place in a war for disobedience.”

War. Huh.

The sergeant read my face. “Oh yes, M'ser Rosen. War. We're still fighting street-to-street in the northern suburbs, and some say that the Americans are pushing for a UN ‘Peacekeeping' mission. They're calling it Operation Havana. I'm afraid that your government takes a dim view of our nationalizing their stores and offices.”

“Not my government, Sergeant … “

“Abalain. François Abalain. I apologize, I had forgotten that you are a Canadian. Where did you say you live?”

“I have a flat on Rue Texas.”

“Yes, yes. Far from the fighting. You and the other
etrangers
behave as though our struggle here were nothing but an uninteresting television program. It couldn't last. You had pitched your tents on the side of a smoking volcano, and the lava has reached you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that our army needs support staff: cooks, mechanics' assistants, supply clerks, janitors, office staff. Every loyal Parisian is already giving everything he can afford to the Cause. It is time that you, who have enjoyed Paris's splendor in comfort and without cost, pay for your stay.”

“Sergeant, no offense, but I have rent receipts in my filing cabinet. I pay for groceries. I am paying for my stay.”

The Sergeant lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Some bills can't be settled with money. When you fight for the freedom of the group, the group must pay for it.”

“Freedom?”

“Ah.” He looked out at the trustafarians, who were leaning against each other, eyes downcast, utterly dejected. “In the cause of freedom, it may be necessary to abridge the personal liberties of a few individuals. But this isn't slave labor; each of you will be paid in good Communard Francs, at the going rate. It won't hurt these spoiled children to do some honest work.”

I decided that if the chance ever came, I'd kill Sergeant François Abalain.

I swallowed my anger. “My cousin, a young girl named Sissy, she was taken last night. She was just passing through, and asked me to take her out to the club. My aunt must be crazy with worry.”

The Sergeant pulled his clipboard out of his coat pocket and snapped it open. He scritched on it. “What is her last name?”

“Black. S-I-S-S-Y B-L-A-C-K.”

He scritched more and scowled at the display. He scritched again. “M'ser Rosen, I'm very sorry, but there is no record of any Sissy Black here. Could she have given us a false name?”

I thought about it. I hadn't seen Sissy for ten years before she e-mailed me that she was coming to Paree. She'd always struck me as a very straight, sheltered kid, though I'd been forced to revise my opinion of her upwards after she gutted out that long bus-ride. Still, I couldn't imagine her having the cunning to make up a name on the spot. “I don't think so. What does that mean?”

“Probably a clerical error. You see, we're all so overworked; that is why you are here, really. I'll speak with Sergeant Dumont. She handled women's intake. I'm sure everything is fine.”

Our “training” began the next morning. Like high-school gym class with heavily armed teachers—running, squats, jumping jacks. Even a rope climb. Getting us in shape was the furthest thing from their minds—this was all about dulling what little sense of initiative we might have left. I tried to stay focussed on Sissy, on where she might have gone or what might have happened to her. For a few days my speculations got darker and darker until in my mind's eye I saw her being used as some sort of sex toy by the senior members of the Commune. I had no reason to believe this; the Communards were like the Victorians or the Maoists in their determination not to let sex get in the way of politics. But I was running out of even remotely acceptable possibilities. And then one afternoon I realized I hadn't thought about her at all since waking. The fatigue had fried my brain and all I could think about was my next rest-break.

Once we'd been thoroughly pacified, they started taking us out on work-gangs of ten or fifteen, clearing rubble and repainting storefronts. On a particularly lucky day, I got to spend ten hours deep in rebuilt Communard Territory, laying down epoxy cobblestones.

We worked in a remote cul-de-sac, a power-armored frère blocking the only exit route, so motionless that I wondered if he was asleep. I worked alone, as was my habit—I had no urge to become war buddies with any of the precious tots I'd been conscripted with.

I'd never been this deep into the rebuilt zone before. It was horrible, a mixture of Nouveau and Deco perpetrated by someone who'd no understanding of either. The Communards had turned the narrow storefronts into 1930s movie sets, painted over their laserprinted signage in fanciful, curliqued Toulouse-Lautrec script. Cleverly concealed speakers piped out distant hot jazz with convincing Victrola hiss, clinking stemware and Gallic laughter.

We arrived just after dawn, and within a very short time, my knees were killing me. A few Parisians had trickled down the block: a baker who cranked out his awning and set baskets of baguette in the window; a few femmes des menages with sexy skirts, elaborate up-dos and catseye glasses clacked down the street; a gang of insouciant lads flicked their cigarette ends at us poor groveling conscriptees and swaggered on.

I managed to keep it together until the organ-grinder arrived. It was the monkey that did it. Or maybe it was the Edith Piaf cylinder he had in his hurdy-gurdy. On balance, it was the way the monkey danced to Piaf—I started chuckling, then laughing, then roaring, so hysterical that I actually flopped over on my back and writhed on the cobblestones I'd laid down.

The Parisians tried to ignore me, but I was making quite a spectacle of myself. Eventually, they all slunk away, looking embarrassed and resentful. I stared at the gray sky and held my belly and snorted as they departed, and then a patch of cobblestones beside me exploded, showering me with resinous shrapnel, bruising my ribs and my arm. The power-armor at the street's entrance lowered his PowerFist pistol and broadcasted a simple order: “Work.”

It seemed less funny after that. Edith may have regretted nothing, but I started setting new records for self-pity.

I'm pretty sure I lost track of the time while we were trapped in that old office block. Maybe I was concussed—the frères weren't shy about slapping us around. I doubt it, though. More likely I just stopped thinking as a way to get through the days.

Until the evening they started dividing us into groups.

The frères said nothing as they culled people from the bloc in the mess-hall. The smaller trustafarians had been clustered into two groups; no heavy labor for them, was my guess.

Unlike the scene when we were brought in, there was almost no noise. There was no sign of Sissy, but with our heads shaved I'm not sure I'd have recognized her.

I had just identified one group as being visually different when a pointing finger directed me into it, giving me opportunity to study its members close-up.

We were a sullen-faced bunch, and I had this sudden, chilling feeling that wasn't helped in the slightest by the frère who grinned at us as he nudged us out the door of the mess-hall. He's like a herdsman, I thought, and looking again at the faces of the trustafarians around me, I guessed that we were the group of troublemakers. We were being culled.

The next morning I began to serve the Paris Commune in earnest. Our group had been taken out of the barracks and driven in the back of an old panel van to one of the outer arrondissements. The gunfire sounded a lot louder in the street than I was used to, though, and I felt a caffeine-jag of fear when we were led into a dark, abandoned shop and taken to a bivouac in the cellar. We were given new clothes: Bangladeshi belts, the webbing of a weird fibre-plastic combo; and new t-shirts, the cotton still weirdly stiff, to wear under our good Communard uniform blouses.