she said at last.
“Au contraire. It’s why I’m here. Because you have to come to Detroit.”
“You people are fucking amazing.”
“Somebody has to be.”
The dog snuffed gently at Jane’s boots. John loved dogs. Wistful, then annoyed, Jane pulled her feet away and snapped, “That wasn’t a compliment.”
He put the envelope down beside the book she wasn’t reading. “Inside Wikileaks.” Someone had defaced the cover, scrawling ‘Malaka!’ [‘Asshole!’] and ‘Prodotis!’ [‘Traitor!’] in gold ink across the faithless author’s name and jacket photo.
“Obi Jane Kenobi, you are our only hope,” he said.
“I’ve done my part. Accent on ‘done.’ You made it quite clear that my particular skill set is not what’s needed at this juncture. Unless of course you’ve changed your collective mind and decided to kill them all.” She raised both eyebrows in inquiry.
It was his turn to be silent.
“That’s what I thought. Look - you should be dancing in the streets. With a couple million of your new best friends. Tunisia, Egypt, now Greece,” she nodded toward central Athens and right on cue came the muddled sounds of bullhorns, sirens, and minor explosions mixed with the hullabaloo of a vast and angry crowd. “You got your revolution. What’s left is not my department.”
A tight-knit group of Greek teenagers jogged by, shouting a warning toward the rooftops. A blur of arms and legs. The dog ran after them, barking in delight. The Kid spoke with an urgent intensity. “And if I told you that revolution is included in the blueprint?”
“Their blueprint? No shit. IMF riots are always baked in. They practiced this for decades in Africa and South America before they started in on the rest of us. This thing is barely out of the egg. Years of repression and arduous struggle await. It’s a process. If you don’t believe me, go re-read what’s-his-name. Gene Sharp. Damn.” Her coffee was ice cold. “Go do some yoga or something.”
An uneven blob of middle-aged men and women lumbered past. Also shouting. Teachers, bus drivers, postmen, matching yellow t-shirts pulled over their windbreakers and sweaters. The dog frolicked among them. A few mopeds wove in and out. Swerved to miss the dog, who stopped to inspect a wad of gyro wrapping. A whiff of tear gas sharpened the air.
“Revolution is covered on page 13. Not even half way through an interesting little document with an interesting little title: ‘Beyond Global Structural Adjustment: The Brave New World Order and Expediential Fascism.’”
“They wrote it down? Just like that?” He had her attention, but she recovered quickly. “How very Third Reich of them…”
She had to raise her voice as the street flooded with Greeks on the run. Tractors driven by farmers in bib overalls chugged up the middle of the road. Women in high heels decorated the edges. A brass band in full regalia jostled miners with their hardhat lights switched on.
The Peroxide Kid tossed a familiar object on the table - a black USB drive imprinted with a skull-and-crossbones. John again. “Swash-buckle our way up around the Hamptons?” Souvenir of their original pirate adventure. Purloined Pentagon data. The explosion that should have killed them. And for what? An unhappily-ever-afterlife in the global underground. Everything, everything down the toilet. Yo-ho-ho.
“It was one of the last files we cracked. Super strong encrypted. But confirmed by purloined NSA phone taps and Bilderberg transcripts. It’s not just about taking down the global economy on purpose and shredding social safety nets. We’re talking shit that goes way, way beyond this,” he waved an arm scornfully at what was rapidly devolving into a public melee. As he spoke, a protester stumbled against their table, scrambled up, tripped again just a few feet away, and was immediately set upon by a tide of baton-wielding police in riot gear. Other men and women stopped to intervene, yelling, holding out their hands, dodging repeated blows. The dog bounded joyously into the fray, barking and dashing at the aggressors.
Jane half rose from her seat. “Uh - that cop just kicked your dog.”
“Zat iz not my dog,” the Kid said, in his best German accent.
“Und ist dass dein benzinbombe?” Jane pointed at the coke bottle.
“No, I liberated that from someone who was too young to know better.”
“At last! Something we can agree on,” Jane said, pushing the ticket and flash drive firmly away with one hand and fingering a zippo lighter, unseen, with the other. She shook her head at the coke bottle. “That is an accident waiting to happen. For optimal results you want to cap the bottle and rubber-band a gas-soaked tampon around the neck.”
The Kid frowned. “By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle in which the oppressors nearly always have superiority.” But, accepting defeat, he scooped up the envelope and flash drive, and replaced them in his bag.
“If you say so,” Jane said, without conviction, reaching for the coke bottle and the book as she and the Kid stood up to dodge a runaway souvlaki cart. The speeding cart sideswiped their table and knocked it, clanging, into the street, where two black clad protesters picked it up and carried it like a battering ram toward the line of peace officers that had fallen back behind plexiglass shields at one end of the street. “Of course,” she postulated, as the cops were joined by more cops, “under certain circumstances a little oppressor-on-oppressor action might be seen as a sort of grey zone. Speaking as a former oppressor, mind you.”
“Asimov said ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’” The Kid’s gaze was fixed a few yards away on the sandy-colored dog, who was happily gorging on meat and tzatziki sauce behind the overturned souvlaki cart. Like the dog, the Kid seemed unaware that the riot police and a host of plain-clothes thugs had engulfed the street again.
“Was he watching a bunch of nazi wannabes beat some poor bastard like a drum when he said that? Some poor bastard they knocked out of his wheelchair, mind you. And some poor Nigerian coffee guy just trying to help?” she wondered, unable to keep the rising edge out of her voice. A flying wedge of anarchist youth entered from an alley at high speed, pitching themselves bodily at the armed invaders and yelling like Comanches. The dog abandoned his feast and galloped back to stand among the mismatched combatants, barking and snarling like a canine possessed. Or a really talented stunt dog.
“Non-violence is a practical strategy as well as an ethical decision. It negates the moral authority of those who attack the unarmed and defenseless.” Jane could not tell whether the Kid’s air of objectivity was genuine or if he was deliberately baiting her.
Having distracted the police from their more vulnerable prey, the anarchists were now themselves absorbing the worst of the beatings. One asshole cop clearly had it in for the riot dog. He seemed to be getting his jollies lunging at the animal with a truncheon and trying to crack its skull, which the dog clearly mistook for fun and games. Beside himself, the cop went for his holster.
“Uh huh,” Jane said. She had already lit the Molotov’s rag and was taking careful aim at the cop with the gun. “I hear you. Don’t ever change, Boopsie. And don’t try this at home.”
4 Lately
The private room had a private bar wide enough to dance on. And the girls were dancing, two of them, in cowboy boots, big black Stetsons, and not much in between. Strutting, gyrating, shimmying, leaning in to share their cleavage, shaking their booty. It was totally hot. And, well into his third beer, John was totally not interested.
The chief, in all his tribal paint and feathered glory, was ensconced in front of a big screen TV watching “Little Big Man” while a nubile young thing fed him Spanish peanuts from an over-sized bar bowl. He seemed happy enough. In another part of the sunken living room, Vinnie was finishing up a lap dance.
“That poor kid,” Vinnie said, sliding onto the bar stool next to John. “She’s got a PhD in physics but colleges aren’t hiring and she doesn’t wan
t to work for Wall Street so this is what she does to pay off her student loans. How ‘bout you, sweetheart?” he waved a twenty dollar bill at the bartender, who was flaunting some major pole-dancing skills. “You look like you know a thing or two about quantum mechanics.”
“I was a NASA flight engineer until about a month ago,” the bartender acknowledged, flipping right side up again.
“Oh yeah? Rocket science? Duce egg if you can prove it in the next 30 seconds,” Vinnie said, ogling the dancers, who were boot-scooting in review just inches from his upturned face.
The bartender whipped out a pen and doodled on his cocktail napkin. Which was not exactly what he had in mind.
“What’s that?” He leaned in to take a closer look.
“Static friction equation.” She backed off to twirl two tequila bottles and pour Vinnie and John each a fresh shot.
“Now I was thinking more along the lines of a kinetic friction equation. Me plus you?” His eyebrows did push-ups, double-time.
John cringed, but she just smiled at Vinnie and twitched the twenty from between his fingers. “Break time, gents. See you in a few,” she promised. Sashaying and giggling, the girls filed into the next room. The chief stopped eating peanuts and listened intently as Dustin Hoffman encouraged General Custer to go play with the Indians one last time.