“That would be a treatise,” said Leonard, watching Emilio bring his other rook into play through traffic. “Not a novel.”
“No one reads novels anymore anyway, Leonard.”
“I know,” said Leonard, taking out Emilio’s first protective rook with his own bishop. “Check.”
Emilio frowned. It was too late to castle and he’d been profligate with the movement of his pawns and power pieces, leaving the royal hearth relatively unprotected. He abandoned his attack for a moment and swung his bishop back into a protective position.
“Check,” Leonard said again after he’d taken the bishop with his own bishop.
Emilio grunted and finally used his torpid knight to take Leonard’s bishop—Leonard had been prepared for the swap since Emilio depended more on his bishops—and now all pretense of formal defensive and offensive positions on the board melted away in a chaos of oddly placed pieces. Their games, so formal at the outset, almost always degraded into amateur play this way.
“It’s an age of treatises at least,” said Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa.
“It’s an age of Zeitstil,” Leonard said sharply.
Emilio knew the context of the phrase—the style of the times”—and they’d discussed it more than once. The German intellectual Ernst Jünger had used that phrase in his Kaukasische Aufzeichnungnen secret notebooks during Hitler’s reign. Leonard despised the memory of Jünger—at least the World War II Jünger rather than the more outspoken Cold War Jünger—because the German had, as Leonard had, decided it was enough to secretly despise and ridicule Hitler rather than openly oppose tyranny. Zeitstil—the style of the times”—was Jünger’s way of describing the use of euphemism and double-talk by those in power to wreck the very language that those in power had usurped. Jünger had seen it in 1930s and ’40s Germany; Leonard had watched it during his lifetime in America. Neither had acted.
“LTI,” whispered Emilio. It stood for Lingua tertii imperii—Jünger’s code phrase, borrowed from Victor Klemperer, for “Language of the Third Empire” and a bitter scholarly pun. “It has always been with us.”
Leonard shook his head. His knights were advancing against Emilio’s scattered defenses now.
“Not always. Not like this.”
“So your new War and Peace would have neither real war nor real peace in it, my friend. Only the confusion of our era and its language.”
“Yes,” said Leonard. Emilio had attempted defense by rook and now Leonard’s bishop swept across the board to take that rook.
“Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant,” said Emilio.
“Yes,” Leonard said again. The first time he’d heard that quote from Tacitus—They make a desert and call it peace”—he’d been a freshman in college and the four words had struck him in the forehead like a fist. They still did.
“Check,” said Leonard. “Checkmate.”
“Ah, yes, very nice, very nice,” muttered Emilio. He stubbed out his cigarette and lit a new one, leaning back and crossing his arms. “Something is bothering you, my friend. Your grandson?”
Leonard took three slow breaths and began rearranging the pieces for a new game before answering.
“Yes. Val’s missed school all this week—I get the autocalls from the high school—and he comes in during the wee hours, sleeps late, and won’t talk to me. He’s not the boy he used to be.”
“Perhaps he is becoming the man he is going to be,” Emilio said softly.
“I hope not,” said Leonard. “This is a dark phase for him. He’s angry, resentful at everything—especially me—and, I think, using a lot of flashback.”
“You’ve found the vials?”
“No. I just have a strong feeling he’s doing the drug with his friends.”
The two old men had discussed flashback many times. How could they not? Emilio insisted that he had never tried it; he preferred memory to a false, chemical reliving of things. Besides, he said, when a man is in his eighties, he cannot give up time from real living for so many minutes of “reliving.” Leonard had admitted that he’d used flashback a few times, years before, but didn’t like how it made him feel. Nor, he admitted, were there any people or times so important to him that he would pay so much money to relive his time with them. “One of the benefits—or drawbacks, perhaps—of being married four times,” he’d said to Emilio.
Now Leonard expected to hear something philosophical from his older Mexican friend, perhaps consoling, but instead Emilio said, “A local spanic girl, Maria Hernandez, was raped yesterday while on her way to school. She had a—doubtful—reputation, but her father and brothers and the local reconquista militia have vowed to kill the boys who did it.”
“The boys?” asked Leonard. His voice was so hollow that it seemed to echo in his own ears.
“A gang of eight or nine anglo boys,” said Emilio. “Almost certainly one of these flashgangs we hear about every day now. They did it so they could redo it over and over.”
Leonard licked his lips. “If you’re thinking Val… no, not possible. Not Val. As angry and troubled as he is… no, not Val. Not rape. Never.”
Emilio peered at his fellow academic and chess partner with sad eyes. “The girl—Maria—knew one of the boys who raped her. An anglo student from her school who likes to call himself Billy the Kid. A certain William Coyne.”
Professor Emeritus George Leonard Fox thought that he might be physically ill. He’d met very few of Val’s friends over the five years since Nick had sent his grandson to live with him, but the always smiling, respectful, courteous, and, somehow, Leonard knew from forty years of teaching, Eddie Haskell–devious Billy Coyne had been one who’d been to the house often.
“I think I have to get Val out of this city,” said Leonard. Emilio had moved his white pawn forward, starting the second game, but Leonard wasn’t focusing on it.
“Sí, it might be a good idea, my friend. Do you have the money for the airfare?”
Leonard laughed bitterly. “With fares now going for more than a million new bucks per ticket for a Los Angeles–to-Denver flight? Hardly.”
“His father, perhaps? He was able to pay the boy’s fare here five years ago.”
Leonard shook his head. “Nick used almost all of my daughter’s life-insurance money to buy that ticket.”
“But he was a policeman…”
“Was,” said Leonard. “He’s nothing more than a flashback addict now. I used to have Val phone him monthly, but now Val doesn’t want to speak to his father and Nick doesn’t return my calls when I leave a message. I think he’s forgotten that he has a son.”
“Are there other relatives?”
Lost in thought, Leonard shook his head again. “You know about my family, Emilio. Four marriages over all those years but only three daughters. Dara dead in that Denver car accident. Kathryn married that French Muslim and moved to Paris more than twenty years ago—she’s lost in dhimmitude there. Under the veil, as they say. I haven’t heard from her at all in fifteen years. Eloise calls me from New Orleans three times a year—always to borrow money. She and her husband are both flash addicts. Neither has a job. The three ex-wives I loved are dead; the one I learned to hate—and who always hated me—is alive and rich and wouldn’t take a phone call from me, much less my grandson from another wife.”
“So,” said Emilio, “the father.”
“Yes. The father. Val says that he hates his father—when he says anything at all about him—but it would still be for the best, I think. And it would only be for eleven months until Val goes into the army. This city is getting too dangerous for the boy.”