“Sometimes,” I began and Alexi jumped and spun around, “I don’t know myself.”
“Calavera?!” Alexi exclaimed as I stepped forward into the little circle of light cast by the lamp on the desk. I was wearing the clothes I had worn during the trip to Rubacava. Alexi looked back and forth between Salvador and myself, each of us wearing identical outfits (except mine being a little more stained despite the best laundering Rubacava had to offer). “What the hell is going on here?”
“You’ve been drafted, soldier,” Salvador said. “You and your two friends.”
“Not me,” Gunnar insisted. “Since you’re here, Manny must be everything he said he was. I’m a volunteer.”
Alexi looked at Gunnar as if he had suddenly grown a suit of skin. “What is this all about?” he asked warily.
“It’s about justice!” Salvador snapped. “What else?” He stood and moved around the desk to stand against the door. “I believe we can consider this your headquarters, Manuel,” he said.
I edged past Gunnar and sat down behind the table. “Are you ready to be reasonable now?” I demanded of Alexi.
“Define ‘reasonable’,” he demanded himself in a snide tone.
“Are you with the cause or not?”
“What cause?” he asked. He turned toward Salvador. “I know who you are. I know what you stand for. He,” Alexi thrust a skeletal finger in my direction, “he is a class enemy. He—”
This time Gunnar did the interrupting. “Oh, get with it, man!” he snapped. “I’ve talked to the cat. I know where he’s coming from.”
Alexi waved his hand at Gunnar, as if brushing away a fly. “I want it from Limones,” he said. “I want him to tell me where Calavera is coming from.”
Salvador shook his head. “No, my friend. Manuel, he will tell you himself. He is in charge here in Rubacava. I am only his guest… and,” his tone became a shade harder and colder, “you will do very well not to presume to know what I stand for in the here and now.”
“All right,” Alexi said. He turned toward me. “So tell me, are you LSA cats for the revolution or not?”
“Which revolution?” I asked. “The one demanded by Marx’s historical dialectic?”
“Of course!” Alexi exclaimed impatiently.
“OK, but his dialectic is materialist, right?” I spread my hands. “Yet here we are. Dead.” I thumped my fist lightly on the table top. “Despite appearances, there’s no matter here. Where does the Land of the Dead fit into that dialectic?”
Alexi didn’t say anything.
“It doesn’t,” Gunnar said. “What we need is a spiritualist dialectic but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about, are you, man?
It took me a second, but I realized that Gunnar was trying to advance the argument, not trip me up, even though he damn near succeeded in doing just that.
“No,” I agreed, “I’m not. You want to organize the dock workers against the union?” I aimed a forefinger at Alexi. “Great. I’m with you all the way. Do you want to know why? Because the union is crooked and the workers are getting a raw deal and I want justice for them, same as for anyone else. But this is the Land of the Dead, comrade. Marx was dealing with the Land of the Living. His dialectic’s out. It doesn’t apply here, except maybe as an abstraction. Without Gunnar’s spiritualist dialectic,” whatever that was, “we’re just left with justice, and that applies even here. Are you following me?”
“I’m not sure. What do you mean by that? Justice for whom and how? Marx gives us the tools for answering those questions. If those tools don’t work in the Land of the Dead—and I’m not convinced of that—then just what are we working with here?”
“If you want an all-embracing ideology, I can’t give you one,” I admitted. I didn’t honestly think I wanted one. Having all the answers, or at least thinking you had, was just asking for trouble. “But I can spell out the situation we’ve got here.” I paused. Not even Gunnar was going to like what I was about to tell them. “Do you know what Sal and I were doing before the LSA was formed?”
Alexi shrugged. “Marking time like everyone else.”
“Hardly,” I said. “We were reapers.”
“Salvador Limones!?” Gunnar exclaimed at the same time Alexi angrily asked “You expect me to believe that Salvador Limones was a tool of the Man?”
I laughed. “You really have no clue how this world works, do you? Oh, well. Let’s try this. Can you agree that some people lived their lives better than others?”
“By whose rules?” Alexi demanded.
“By the powers that be,” I snapped, getting a little angry at his stubbornness. “By whomever or whatever pulls the strings. A power that we can’t see, hear, or touch.” And a power that doesn’t seem to give a damn about what’s happening within the DOD, I thought bitterly. “So tell me something. The Land of the Dead is pretty dangerous, right? Well, suppose you could make the journey across it easier for some. Who then gets safe passage? The fat cat who can pay for it, or the person who deserves it?”
“Leaving aside the question of whose rules—and I’d like to hear some day about why you’re so uptight about that question—it’d be fairer to make everyone equal,” Alexi answered.
“He’s talking about justice, brother, not fairness,” Gunnar said. “Make a choice.”
Alexi glared at Gunnar but was quiet for a few moments. “Then it goes to the one who deserves it,” he finally said. Then, unwilling to give any more ground than necessary, he demanded, “But how do you determine who that is, man?”
“Well, people have been dying for a long time,” I pointed out. “The DOD’s got a lot of experience and they train agents pretty well. Just about everyone I ever met did their best to see that people got what they deserved. And if what they deserved wasn’t all that good, we didn’t bend the rules just because the client was loaded. Unfortunately, there’s an outfit with other ideas.”
“What outfit is this?” Gunnar asked. “That’s something you haven’t explained to me yet, either.” He glanced over at Alexi. “Now that we’re both up to speed, what are we rebelling against?”
I resisted the urge to say ‘What have you got’ and instead said “Sal?” We had agreed beforehand that this part of making the ‘sale’ was his.
“The Department of Death is no longer serving the people as it has in the past,” Salvador said. “No longer are good deeds rewarded and the innocent gently conveyed to the next world. The greedy and corrupt are stealing the destinies of the sainted dead and are thereby making a mockery of justice. The corruption is spreading, reaching out to poison all of the Land of the Dead. If it is not dealt with quickly and decisively, then nothing—not even something as simple as a band of dock workers organizing against a corrupt union—will escape undefiled.”
“Right,” I said and then brought Salvador’s soaring rhetoric down to earth. “They’ve been stealing Double-N tickets and selling them to the undeserving rich. That leaves the people who earned those tickets out on their own, walking across the Land of the Dead, without hope.” Like Meche. “And that’s only the part we’ve discovered so far. You see,” I said, trying to bring the point home, “our struggle here isn’t a materialist one; it’s spiritual, like Gunner said.” Or, if he didn’t mean exactly that, he didn’t interrupt to argue with me. “But it boils down to pretty much the same thing: do we take people as they are, and treat them according to their deeds and their needs, or do we bow to the fat cats and screw over everyone else? So I’ll ask you again, mano, are you with the cause or not?”