“You’re welcome,” Grofield said.
Twenty-Three
Grofield sighed in animal pleasure and threw the empty Spam can away. He scrubbed his hands clean in the snow, dried them as best he could on the blanket he had wrapped around himself, and put his gloves back on. “That,” he said, “was good.”
“Murm,” she said.
It was pitch black, he couldn’t see her at all. He said, “What was that?”
“My mouth wur full,” she said, sounding as though it still was.
“Oh,” he said. “Let me know when you’re done, so we can talk.”
“Murm.”
They were sitting side by side in the darkness, both wrapped in blankets, their backs against the skimobile. While Vivian had held the flashlight he’d checked the machine out and found it still in good shape. Then he’d gathered the supplies together again, opened a few cans, and they’d sat down here to eat and rest.
It seemed there were fewer stars now, one whole segment of sky was now lightless, and the remainder didn’t give enough light to matter. Far away across the lake the lights of the lodge looked like more stars, tiny and dim. The fire had died down over there now, there was no longer any redness to relieve the black at all.
“There!” she said. “That was good.”
“You’re done?”
“My hands are sticky.”
“Clean them in the snow.”
After a little silence she said, “Now they’re wet.”
“Dry them on your blanket.”
Another little silence, and she said, “Fine.” She touched his shoulder. “Would you mind if I leaned my head on you?”
“Can you talk with your head leaning?”
“Sure. You want to talk?”
“Definitely,” he said.
Her head leaned against his shoulder. “All right. What do you want to talk about?”
“What’s going on,” he said.
“I’m sitting here with my head on your shoulder.”
He didn’t say anything.
She lifted her head, and he could tell she was trying to look at him in the darkness. She said, “Not funny?”
“Not funny,” he agreed. “Mostly because I don’t know how much time we have before that plane gets back. If they’re only going as far as that lake we started from, they can do the round trip in two hours.”
“All right,” she said. “I don’t know where the canisters are, I can’t help you with that.”
“I’m not ready to talk about the canisters yet,” he said. “I want to start a heck of a lot earlier than that. Like this meeting. Tell me about it.”
“There’s nothing to tell. They came to bid for the canisters. Naturally, it was supposed—”
“Wait a second,” Grofield said. “The canisters were for sale? They were being auctioned off?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Who was doing the selling?”
“The people who had them.”
“Come on, Vivian.”
“Well, I’m sorry, that’s who. They belonged to the United States Army to begin with, they were stolen from a storage depot somewhere in the States. Four Army men took them.”
“American Army men?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Where are these four guys?”
“At the lodge. If they aren’t dead now.”
“I didn’t see any Americans there,” Grofield said. “I was the only one.”
“That’s what’s so charming about people like you,” she said, some of the old coldness coming back into her voice. “You were the only white American there.”
“They’re Negroes? Four Negro soldiers?”
“What’s the matter?”
“That shakes me a little,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“These days black men are supposed to be the heroes,” he explained. “Never mind, let’s hear the rest.”
“There is no rest. They stole the canisters, they arranged for this place this weekend, they contacted nine governments—”
“I was told seven.”
“American intelligence isn’t infallible,” she said drily. “Believe me, nine were invited and nine showed up.”
“All Third World?”
“Naturally. And all unimportant enough so their leaders could safely travel incognito to a meeting in Canada.”
“Why the leaders? Why not send representatives with power to purchase?”
“I can’t speak for any other government,” she said, “but I know my Colonel Rahgos wouldn’t dare send anyone in his place to a meeting like this. Have that man return with a weapon like that, and with new contacts among the leaders of other nations? Colonel Rahgos became president of Undurwa after the army revolted and beheaded the last president, and most of the other leaders at this meeting came to power in similar ways, and they know just how tempting it would be for a representative here to go home and decide to take his president’s place at home, too.”
“Assuming his was the government that made the high bid,” Grofield pointed out.
“What? Oh no, there wasn’t to be only one high bidder. Price was to be discussed, each government was to decide how much it wanted, and everyone would get a part. There’s enough in those four canisters to kill everyone on earth forty times.”
“That’s lovely,” Grofield said. “What a goddamn sweet thing for everybody to be playing with.”
“No one liked it,” she said. “But no one could refuse the invitation. One never knows who will be one’s friend tomorrow. What if Colongel Rahgos had decided not to come, not to bid, not to buy? One of the other purchasers is Dhaba, and we share a three-hundred-mile border with Dhaba. A lot of that border has never been exactly defined, and no one knows for sure what might yet be found in that area. Metals, or oil, or merely fertile land for our expanding population. We don’t as yet have a border dispute with Dhaba, but everyone knows it will happen someday. Can we afford to let Dhaba have a weapon we can’t match? Particularly one as devastating as this.”
“All right,” Grofield said. “I see the way it runs.”
“We would all rather spend the money elsewhere,” she said. “Some of us on schools, others on yachts. No one wants to bring home a sealed metal jar full of death, costing more than one citizen’s average annual income for a thousand years, knowing we will only put it on a shelf and never use it. But we have to, we have no choice. As long as it’s available, we have to get our share.”
“Goody,” Grofield said. “But why the whole weekend? And why all those hotel reservations down in Quebec, if the main event is up here?”
“We were to gather in Quebec,” she said, “and then be brought up here. The people selling don’t trust anyone any more than they have to, so no one knew exactly where the meeting would take place until we were all brought up here. And the deal was to have been completed tomorrow morning. Most of us would have been back in Quebec by tomorrow night, and there was going to be a conference the next day, on Sunday. The different leaders had a lot of things to discuss, spheres of influence, temporary partnerships against other nations, our relationships with the major powers, things like that. That would have been done on Sunday. Then on Monday everyone would go home. A few people would have stayed up here until then, including you.”
“Why?”
“We couldn’t let you go until everything was finished and we were all on our way home.”
“Why were the other people going to stay here?”
“It was agreed the sellers would stay here until Monday. We didn’t want them betraying us, announcing to the American or Canadian authorities about what we were carrying with us.”
“Everybody trusts everybody,” Grofield said.
“All the trusters are dead,” she said.
“I believe you. All right, let me think for a minute.”