Aristegui glowered at him in a way that seemed to mingle anguish and fury. For a moment Mondschein thought the man was going to strike him. But then, with a visible effort, the Colonel brought himself under control.
“I thank you for your continued silence, at least,” said Aristegui bitterly. “Good day, Senor Doctor Mondschein.”
Late that afternoon Mondschein heard loud voices from below, shouts and outcries in the servants’ quarters. He rang up on the housekeeper’s intercom and said, “What’s going on?”
“There has been an attack on the President, Señor Doctor. At the Palace of Government. We have just seen it on the television.”
So Aristegui had been telling the truth, it seemed, when he said that they were ready to make their move. Or else they had decided it was too risky to wait any longer, now that Mondschein had been told that an assassination attempt was impending.
“And?” Mondschein said.
“By the mercy of the Virgin he is safe, senor. Order has been restored and the criminals have been captured. One of the others was slain, one of the brothers, but the President was not harmed.”
He thanked her and switched on his television set.
They were in the midst of showing a replay of it now. The President arriving at the Palace of Government for the regular midweek meeting of the ministers; the adoring populace obediently waiting behind the barricades to hail him as he emerged from his car; the sudden scuffle in the crowd, evidently a deliberate distraction, and then the shot, the screams, the slim long-legged figure beginning to sag into the arms of his bodyguards, the policemen rushing forward.
And then a cut to the Hall of Audience, the grim-faced Maximum Leader addressing the nation from his throne in broken phrases, in a voice choked with emotion: “This despicable act.... This bestial attempt to overrule the will of the people as expressed through their chosen President.... We must root out the forces of chaos that are loose among us.... We proclaim a week of national mourning for our fallen brother....”
Followed by an explanation from a sleek, unruffled-looking official spokesman. The Guardia de la Patria, he said, had received advance word of a possible plot. One of the President’s “brothers” had courageously agreed to bear the risk of entering the Palace of Government in the usual way; the Maximum Leader himself had gone into the building through a secret entrance. The identity of the main conspirators was known; arrests had already been made; others would follow. Return to your homes, remain calm, all is well.
All is well.
The executions took place a few weeks later. They were shown on huge television screens set up before great throngs of spectators in the main plazas of the city, and relayed to home viewers everywhere. Mondschein, despite earlier resolutions to the contrary, watched along with everyone else in a kind of horrified fascination as Colonel Aristegui and five other officers of the elite guard, along with three other men and four women, all of them members of the Popular Assembly, were led to the wall one by one, faces expressionless, bodies rigid. They were not offered the opportunity to utter last words, even of carefully rehearsed contrition. Their names were spoken and they were blindfolded and shot, and the body taken away, and the next conspirator brought forth.
Mondschein felt an obscure sense of guilt, as though he had been the one who had informed on them. But of course he had said nothing to anyone. The country was full of governmental agents and spies and provocateurs; the Maximum Leader had not needed Mondschein’s help in protecting himself against Colonel Aristegui. The guilt that he felt, Mondschein realized, was that of having let Aristegui go to his death without trying to make him see that he was attempting something impossible, that there was no way, with or without Mondschein’s help, that Aristegui could ever rid the country of Alvarado. But the Colonel wouldn’t have listened to him in any case, Mondschein told himself.
The days went by. The season brightened toward spring. Mondschein’s driver took him up the mountain roads to see Lake Titicaca, and north from there to Cuzco and its grand old Inca relics, and up beyond that to the splendors of Machu Picchu. On another journey he went down to the fogswept coast, to Nazca where it never rains, where in a landscape as barren as the Moon’s he inspected the huge drawings of monkeys and birds and geometrical figures that prehistoric artists had inscribed in the bone-dry soil of the plateaus.
On a brilliant September day that felt like midsummer a car bearing the insignia of the Guardia came to his villa and a brisk young officer with thick hair that was like spun gold told him that he was requested to go at once to the Palace of Justice.
“Have I done something wrong?” Mondschein asked mildly.
“It is by order of the President,” said the blond young officer, and that was all the explanation he gave.
Mondschein had been in the Palace of Justice only once before, during the weeks just prior to the agreement that led to his being exiled, when they had briefly imprisoned him on the supposed charge of creating abominations and monsters. Like most of the other governmental buildings it was a massive, brutal-looking stone structure, two long parallel wings with a smaller one set between them at their head, so that it crouched on its plaza like a ponderous sphinx. There were courtrooms in the upper levels of the two large wings, prison cells below; the small central wing was the headquarters of the Supreme Court, whose chief justice, Mondschein had recently discovered, was another of the clones.
His Guardia escort led him into the building on the lower level, and they descended even below that, to the dreaded high-security area in the basement. Was he to be interrogated, then? For what?
The Maximum Leader, in full uniform and decorations, was waiting for him in a cold, clammy-walled interrogation cell, under a single bare incandescent bulb of a kind that Mondschein thought had been obsolete for a hundred years. He offered Mondschein a benign smile, as benign as that sharp-edged face was capable of showing.
“Our second meeting is in rather less grand surroundings than the first, eh, doctor?”
Mondschein peered closely. This seemed to be the same clone who had spoken with him in the Hall of Audience. He felt quite sure of that. Only intuition, of course. But he trusted it.
“You remember the agreement we reached that day?” the clone asked.
“Of course.”
“Today I need to invoke it. Your special expertise is now essential to the stability of the nation.”
The clone gestured to an aide-de-camp, who signalled to a figure in the shadows behind him that Mondschein had not noticed before. A door opened at the rear of the cell and a gurney bearing electronic equipment was wheeled in. Mondschein recognized the familiar intricacies of an electroencephalograph.
“This is the proper machinery for your brain-wave test, is it not?” the Alvarado clone asked.
Mondschein nodded.
“Good,” the clone said. “Bring in the prisoner.”
The door opened again and two guards dragged in the ragged, disheveled-looking figure of an Alvarado. His hands were shackled behind his back. His face was bruised and sweaty and smeared with dirt. His clothes, rough peasant clothes, were torn. His eyes were blazing with fury of astonishing intensity. Mondschein felt a tremor of the old fear at the sight of him.
The prisoner shot a fiery look at the Alvarado clone and said, “You bastard, let me out of here right now. You know who I am. You know who you are, too. What you are.”
Mondschein turned to the clone. “But you told me he was dead!” he said.
“Dead? Who? What do you mean?” the Alvarado clone said calmly. “This clone was gravely injured in an attempt on my life and has hovered close to death for many weeks, despite the finest care we could give him. Now that he has begun to recover he is exhibiting delusional behavior. He insists that he is the true Maximum Leader and I am nothing but an artificial genetic duplicate. I ask you to test the authenticity of his claim, Senor Doctor.”