But now here I was bein’ taken down to that fence and right through it, in a real working automobile, no less! The car was dead gray with government numbers stenciled on the driver’s door. But the driver was Big Lou’s goon. And Little Lou sat on the backseat with me.
Little Lou was a real pain in the ass. Some people said he really was Big Lou’s son. But he sure didn’t look like Big Lou. Little Lou was only a couple years older than me and he was twice Big Lou’s size, big and hard with muscles all over. Good-lookin’ guy, too. Handsome, like a video star. Even if he hadn’t been a big shot he could’ve had any girl he wanted just by smilin’ at her.
He was smart. And strong. But he was ugly inside. He had a nasty streak a mile and a half wide. He knew I wanted to be called Vic. I hate the name my mother gave me: Salvatore. Little Lou always called me Sal. Or sometimes Sally. He knew there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.
I tried to keep our talk strictly on the business at hand. And one eye on my wristwatch. It was an electronic beauty that I had rebuilt myself; kept perfect time, long as I could scrounge a battery for it every year or so. I kept it in an old scratched-up case with a crummy rusted band so nobody like Little Lou would see how great it was and take it off me.
It was noon when we passed through a gate in the navy-base fence. The gate was wide open. No guard. Nobody anywhere in sight.
«So what’s this gizmo I’m supposed to put together for you?» I asked Little Lou.
He gave me a lazy smile. «You’ll see. We got a man here with all the pieces, but he don’t know how to put ’em together right.»
«What’s the thing supposed to do?»
His smile went bigger. «Set off a bomb.»
«A bomb?»
He laughed at how my voice squeaked. «That’s right. A bomb. And it’s gotta go off at just the right instant. Or else.»
«I—» I had to swallow. Hard. «I never worked with bombs.»
«You don’t have to. All you gotta do is put together the gizmo that sets the bomb off.»
Well, they took me to a big building on the base. No, I don’t remember seein’ any number or name on the building. It looked like a great big tin shed to me. Half failin’ down. Walls slanting. Holes in the roof, I could see once we got inside. Pigeon crap all over the place. Everything stunk of rust and rot. But there were rows and rows of shelves in there, stacked right up to the roof. Most of ’em were bare, but some still had electronic parts in their cartons, brand new, still wrapped in plastic, never been used before. My eyes damn near popped.
And there was a guy there sittin’ in a wheelchair next to a long bench covered with switches and batteries and circuit boards and all kinds of stuff. Older guy. Hair like a wire brush, a couple days’ beard on his face, grayer than his hair. One of his eyes was swollen purple and his lip was puffed up, too, like somebody’d been sluggin’ him. Nice guys, beatin’ on a wheelchair case.
I got the picture right away. They had wanted this guy to make their gizmo for them and he couldn’t do it. Little Lou or one of the others had smacked the poor slob around. They always figured that if you hit a guy hard enough he would do what you wanted. But this poor bastard didn’t know how to make the gizmo they wanted. He had been a sailor, from the looks of him: face like leather and tattoos on his arms. But something had crippled his legs and now he was workin’ for Big Lou and Little Lou and takin’ a beating because they wanted him to do somethin’ he just didn’t know how to do.
He told me what they wanted. Through his swollen, split lips he sounded strange, like he had been born someplace far away where they talk different from us. The gizmo was a kind of a radar, but not like they use in kitchen radar ranges. This one sent out a microwave beam that sensed the approach of a ship or a plane. What Little Lou wanted was to set off his bomb when whatever it is he wanted to blow up was a certain distance away.
Electronics is easy. I heard that they used to send guys to school for years at a time to learn how to build electronic stuff. I could never understand why. All the stuff is pretty much the same. A resistor is a resistor. A power cell is a power cell. You find out what the gizmo is supposed to do and you put together the pieces that’ll do it. Simple.
I had Little Lou’s gizmo put together by one o’clock. Two hours to go before I hadda be in city hall to take Jade away from the Controllers.
«Nice work, Sal,» Little Lou said to me. He knew it got under my skin.
«Call me Vic,» I said.
«Sure,» he said. «Sally.»
That was Little Lou. If I pushed it he would’ve smacked me in the mouth. And laughed.
«I got to get up to city hall now,» I said.
«Yeah, I know. Hot for that little [deleted], ain’tcha?»
I didn’t answer. Little Lou was the kind who’d take your girl away from you just for the hell of it. Whether she wanted to or not. And there’d be nuthin I could do about it. So I just kept my mouth zipped.
He walked me out to the car. It was hot outside; July hot. Muggy, too. «You start walkin’ now, you’ll probably just make it to city hall on time.»
«Walk?» I squawked. «Ain’t you gonna drive me?» I was sweatin’ already in that hot sun.
«Why should I?» He laughed as he put the gizmo in the car’s trunk. «I got what I want.»
He shut the trunk lid real careful, gently, like maybe the bomb was in there, too. Then he got into the car’s backseat, leaving me standin’ out in the afternoon sun feelin’ hot and sweaty and stupid. But there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.
Finally Lou laughed and popped the back door open. «Come on in, Sally. You look like you’re gonna bust into tears any minute.»
I felt pretty [deleted] grateful to him. Walkin’ the few miles uptown to city hall wouldn’t have been no easy trick. The gangs in South Philly shoot first and ask questions afterward when a stranger tries to go through their turf.
About halfway there, though, Little Lou lets me know why he’s bein’ so generous.
«Tonight,» he says, «nine o’clock sharp. You be at the old Thirtieth-street station.»
«Me? Why? What for?»
«Two reasons. First we gotta test the gizmo you made. Then we gotta hook it up to the bomb. If it works right.»
He wasn’t smilin’ anymore. I was scared of workin’ with a bomb, lemme tell you. But not as scared as I was at the thought of what Little Lou’d do to me if the gizmo didn’t work right.
So I got to city hall in plenty time okay. It’s a big ugly pile of gray stone, half failin’ apart. A windowsill had crumbled out a couple months ago, just dropped out of its wall and fell to the street. Solid hunk of stone, musta weighed a couple tons. It was still there, stickin’ through the pavement like an unexploded bomb. I wondered what would happen if the statue of Billy Penn, up at the top of the Hall’s tower, ever came loose. Be like a [deleted] atomic bomb hittin’ the street.
Usually city hall is a good place to avoid. Nobody there but the suits who run what’s left of the city and the oinks who guard ’em.
Oinks? Pigs. Helmet-heads. Bruisers. Cops. Police. There are worse names for them, too, y’know.
Well, anyway, this particular afternoon city hall is a busy place. Sanitation robots chuggin’ and scrubbin’ all over the place. A squad of guys in soldier uniforms and polished helmets goin’ through some kind of drill routine in the center courtyard. Even a crew of guys with a truck and a crane tryin’ to tug that windowsill outta the pavement. Might as well be tryin’ to lift the [deleted] Rock of Gibraltar, I thought.
They were goin’ through all this because the Chairman of the World Council was comin’ to give a speech over at Independence Hall. Fourth of July and all that crap. Everybody knew that as soon as the Chairman’s speech was over and he was on his way back to New York or wherever he stayed, Philly would go back to bein’ half empty, half dead. The sanitation robots would go back to the housing tracts out in the suburbs and Philly would be left to itself, dirty and hot and nasty as hell.