Steinfeld was wearing a blue nylon windbreaker. It rode up a little on his big belly. The New Resistance was based in Paris now, which was relatively comfortable compared to Amsterdam.
“Looks like there’s more to eat in Paris,” Smoke rasped when Steinfeld sat carefully on an unsoiled corner of Smoke’s bed.
Steinfeld smiled and nodded. He looked at the IV stand, then at the lesions on Smoke’s forearm. “You don’t look so bad,” he said. “Except for this arm. What’s this?”
“It became infected,” Smoke said. “The IV needle. They put it in the wrong place a few times, missed the vein. What’s worse is when they forget to change the bottle. The damn thing empties and turns vampire, sucks blood out of me. The blood runs up the tube. Hurts like the devil.”
Steinfeld said, “They have too much to do.”
“I know. I don’t complain—anyway, they ignore complaints.”
“But once,” Steinfeld said, looking at him, “you tried to tell them you are not a soldier, that you should not be here. So I heard.”
“They don’t listen no matter what you say.”
“If they had, you’d probably be dead by now. Do you still have a death wish, Smoke?” Steinfeld asked.
Smoke said nothing.
“I think you do. That’s the only problem with it.”
“With what?”
Steinfeld said, “With the fact that you owe me now, Smoke.”
Smoke said, with a faint smile, “I see.”
Steinfeld nodded.
“You have plans for me,” Smoke said.
Now it was Steinfeld’s turn to say nothing.
“It itches in this cast,” Smoke said. It was good to have someone to complain to.
“Yes. And the food here is…?”
“Execrable,” Smoke said.
“Go on,” Steinfeld said.
“They rarely change the sheets,” Smoke said with alacrity, “and they rarely turn me. I get bedsores, which they sometimes allow to become infected. Then they give me a general antibiotic, and the sores ease, and then they forget to turn me and the sores come back. And so forth. The crying of the others is an assault on sanity.”
“I would say that it is better to be in such a place than dead in a shell of a building in Amsterdam—given that you won’t be here forever. But we come again to the problem of your death wish.”
“Are the others alive? Hard-Eyes and the others?”
“So far as I know. I’ve been away from Paris for a while.”
There was something more that Smoke wanted to ask, but he felt foolish. And in this place there was little dignity; what one could scrape up, one hoarded.
He didn’t have to ask it, as it happened: Steinfeld guessed what was in Smoke’s mind. “The crow lived, and came along to the boat. I have it in my flat, in Paris. Someone’s taking care of it.”
Smoke felt an absurdly profound relief.
Steinfeld stood up. He took a chocolate bar and a vitaminpak from his pocket and put them in Smoke’s usable hand.
“They’re giving me a treatment with electric currents to heal the bones,” Smoke said to keep Steinfeld there just a little longer. “A Frenchman told me it would hurt me, but I think it’s helping. The pain is much less, It’s just a few weeks since they started doing it.”
Steinfeld nodded. “It works. We’ll come to get you when they decide the casts can come off.”
He turned to go. Smoke said quickly, desperately, “Tell me something. Anything. I need something to think about. You have plans for me. Tell me about it. Something.”
“There isn’t much I can say here.”
“Then only what you can say.”
Steinfeld nodded at the IV bottle. “I’ll see to it they refill that thing.”
“Tell them to take it away. I don’t need it. Tell me something, Steinfeld.”
Steinfeld took a deep breath, tugged at his beard, blew the breath out again. He looked at Smoke. “I know who you are. I found out the day before the jumpjet hit us. For a while I too thought Smoke was a nickname.”
“Wait—” Smoke felt he was going to choke.
But Steinfeld bulled grimly on. “You don’t want me to talk about it. You’ve become expert in not thinking about it, and you don’t want me to undermine that expertise. Tough. You wanted something to think about. So think about this: you’re Jack Brendan Smoke. You’re American. You were in Amsterdam when the war broke out, to see a psychiatrist at the Leydon clinic. Before that, you won the United Nations Literary Committee prize for your Search for a Contemporary Reality. You were the spokesman for all the people who felt lost in the accelerated rate of change. You wrote a second series of essays in which you said, generally, that there were people manipulating the Grid for political ends, and you named Worldtalk. You predicted a return of fascism and you quoted something you’d heard about the Second Circle, the secret inner circle of the Second Alliance. The ones who make the SA’s long-term goals… That essay was never published. Evidently someone at your publishing company was SA. Some men came to the clinic in ski masks. You were taken in the night and they—”
“Please…” A great weight on his chest made it hard to breathe. “Steinfeld…”
“They tortured you. They gave you a drug that made you feel that you were choking…”
He stopped, seeing Smoke was gagging. He waited. After a minute the spasm passed.
Smoke lay staring at the ceiling, breathing shallowly.
“I’m going to go on, Smoke,” Steinfeld said.
Smoke just lay there.
Steinfeld said, “They wanted to know who you got the information from. About the Second Circle. You didn’t tell them. They tortured you in many ways. In many imaginative ways. And then the choking drug, again. They tried to move you to another place, where they had access to extraction. You escaped, en route, and went back to the hospital, where you broke down completely. You were sent in secret to another clinic. The men would have found the clinic anyway, eventually, would have come for you again—if not for the war. That was the day the Russian tanks crossed into Germany. And a little while later the Russians were moving in on Amsterdam, and they shelled the city. Your clinic was shelled. Almost everyone killed…”
“I was in my safe, locked room,” Smoke said, taking it up in a small voice. “But then the wall was blown in. I went to get someone to put the wall back. They were all dead. Except Dr. Van Henk. I saw him—his face was bloody. The sight of him bloody like that frightened me. I don’t know why it affected me so strongly—I ran from him, we lost sight of each other in all the burning. Was it Van Henk who—?”
“Yes. I had this from Van Henk. He’s still alive. So far as I know.”
“I was the only patient not killed. Wherever I went there were only the dead. I wandered out of there. Sometimes the choking, from the drug—it would start again. It seemed to come back, maliciously, after me. The choking and the dead everywhere… For a long time I couldn’t remember who I was. When I could remember—I wanted to forget again. Wanted to be someone else…” His voice was cracked glass.
Steinfeld said, “Sometimes your face looked familiar to me. But under all that grime… and the way a man gets wasted…” He shrugged. “So you wanted me to tell you something. There’s this: you were a great writer. A great speaker, great humanist. The torture didn’t break you—but then again it did. Even so, Smoke: you could help us. In the States the only ones who believe that the fascists are coming again are the ones trying to help them. As for the others—” He shook his head sadly. “Worldtalk pushes their buttons. But if people keep speaking up in the underGrid… You could help us! People remember you.”