The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 10

There was a chance Baynes was back at the stadium, but I didn’t think it likely. If I was right he’d be at home and in touch with them by phone. It was his house I was headed for.

I stopped running at the far end of New Mall, across the street from the Mendoza Monument, and sat on the grass for a while to get my breath. It was a warm night; the ground was faintly damp and had that good Earth-grass smell. This grass was not going to say it loved me or feed me, but right now silence was all I wanted. The monument was lit and I lay on my elbow in the quiet for a while panting heavily and contemplated the heroic bronze of Guadelupe Mendoza, the first woman Chief Justice and one of my favorite people in history. When I was a kid I saved bubble-gum cards with her picture; I had always liked her motherly ways and her liberal decisions.

Baynes’s house was three blocks from Lupe, a fairly modest mansion—considering its owner’s wealth and power—at the eastern edge of the Congressional Compound. I was wary of guards, but there was no need to be; none were around. The place was lit up with the kind of candlepower only a senator could command; even the pair of metal deer on the front lawn had a spotlight.

I considered climbing through a bedroom window but rejected the idea. I hadn’t been reborn on Belson to get shot as a burglar. So I walked up the brickwork path and climbed the stairs to the broad porch. I knocked loudly on the door and then checked my watch. It was two-thirty. I knocked again.

The door opened and a young man was standing there blinking at me. I recognized him from a visit I’d paid Baynes a few years before. I gave him my steely, no-nonsense look. “Good evening,” I said. “I’m Ben Belson and I’m here to see the Senator.” I paused a second and then pushed past him into the enormous living room. On the floor at one end of the room a couple of small black boys wearing pajamas were playing with a modern rarity, an electric train. At the other end, half lying on a Chesterfield sofa, was a thin, elderly black man. He was smiling warmly at me. “Son of a bitch!” he said with a grin. He rose sleepily to his feet, jammed his hands into his bathrobe pockets, and looked at me as friendly as you please. “If it isn’t Benjamin Belson!” he said.

“Hello, L’Ouverture,” I said, not smiling. I have to admit that he’s a charming bastard. And nobody is going to outpoise him.

“They called me a few hours ago, Ben, when they found your ship on the radar.” He gestured toward the children and yawned. “Woke up my grandchildren too.”

There was a blue viddiphone on the table by the sofa. Just then it began to hum. “L’Ouverture,” I said. “Turn the video off and don’t tell them I’m here. It’ll be in your interest.”

He nodded, flicked off the camera switch and answered the phone. After a moment he said, explosively, “Ran away? How is it that thirty MPs can’t catch a running billionaire?” He smiled at me, and listened for a bit. Finally he said, “Well, he won’t get far. I’m going to bed. And for heaven’s sake don’t shoot him.” He hung up the phone.

“Thanks,” I said.

He smiled. “Nothing to thank me for, Ben. I’m curious to know why you came here.”

“Sure,” I said. “How about some coffee first?”

“Get us some coffee, Morton,” he said, “and something light to eat. Melba toast.”

Morton left for the kitchen and I looked around me for a moment. It was a homey place, sort of shabby-genteel, with beige corduroy-covered sofas and unmatching overstuffed armchairs. There were a couple of acrylic landscapes on the walls. Baynes was as rich as Croesus, but he lived like a college president. People said he had more opulent digs tucked away in the sun, that he didn’t want to put on a show in Washington. Maybe that was it. But I’ve known other rich people who won’t spend serious money on themselves, and I distrust them.

I seated myself in one of the overstuffed chairs and leaned back. I hadn’t realized until then how tired I was. Baynes remained standing, stretching now as if trying to wake up. He’d probably spent the evening berating his captive Energy Committee, gone to bed late and then was wakened by being told I was on my way to Washington. Would he have had cops sent to his home? I didn’t think so; he had no way of knowing I was coming.

“L’Ouverture,” I said, “what in heaven’s name made you do me that way? Taking away my citizenship. Why do a thing like that?”

“Nobody’s trying to hurt you, Ben,” he said. “And you’re a rich man. You have friends.”

I just stared at him. Such a cool son of a bitch. L’Ouverture is very good-looking. He is cheap about his household furnishings and I can’t remember his ever picking up a check in a restaurant, but he dresses gorgeously. He looked like an expensive whiskey advertisement in that bathrobe with the monogram over the pocket. The kids in the corner kept buzzing their little green train around its track; through silvery draperies I could see the ghosts of L’Ouverture’s lawn deer in frozen grazing; two miles away the Isabel was sitting, packed with uranium, waiting for the ground to cool. And here I was in this dumpy living room talking to this elegant man like an angry son just back from college. Somewhere in that sky out there, down south in Pisces Austrinus, shone Fomalhaut, no bigger than a bright pinhead. And Belson? Obsidian Belson, my heart’s quiet home? Too small to see from here. Too small and far away. I looked back to L’Ouverture.

Baynes was born in the twentieth century and is a fine grandfatherly figure of a man. Tall, purplish-black and shiny. In his seventies. He must be six feet six—nearly as tall as his celebrated father, one of the finest basketball players who ever lived.

I’m tall enough to be unused to looking up at the person I’m talking to. Napoleon claimed that being short was an advantage; it made others feel awkward to bend down to him. But I didn’t feel that way with Baynes. A part of me was like a kid with him and I didn’t like it. “Being a pirate has style,” I said. “It goes with my beard. But I resent the rest of it. And think of the money the government will lose on taxes alone if I don’t get my uranium to work.”

Baynes seated himself on the sofa and leaned forward, elbows on knees and chin on those big fists of his. It made our heads at the same level. “The Committee discussed that, Benjamin. The loss in revenue will be considerable.”

There was a clatter behind me as the toy train derailed. “Motherfucker!” squeaked one of the kids. Neither of them seemed to be more than five years old.

Baynes spoke sharply. “You ought to say ‘Goodness!’ when a thing like that happens.”

“You don’t,” said the kid, matter-of-factly, and set the engine back on its track.

Baynes shrugged and spoke to me. “You went off to wherever it was you went in violation of the law. An act of Congress forbids space travel as wasteful of energy. You attempted to import a dangerous extraterrestrial substance…”

“Come on, L’Ouverture,” I said. “Why in hell did you throw the book at me? Are you afraid I’ll ruin you in the wood business?” I pulled a cigar from my shirt pocket and started getting it ready to light. “Are you still mad at me for bankrupting Exxon?” I’d bought what was left of some energy corporations a few years back, put them into receivership, and made a fortune on the tax losses. Baynes had put his money on the other side and lost.

He laughed pleasantly. “Not at all. Revenge is a waste of time. The Committee just can’t let you have a monopoly. There’s a delicate balance of energy use in the United States, Benjamin. We won’t have any one person disrupting it…”

“Goddamn it!” I said. “That ‘delicate balance’ means the military gets the oil, the Mafia gets most of the coal, and people like you and me get rich off the leftover coal and wood. It means that what little uranium there is is being saved for bombs. People are freezing out there and it may get worse. What if the temperature drops again next winter?” I puffed my cigar furiously for a moment, staring into Baynes’s grandfatherly look, into his pose of bemused patience. “You charlatans in Congress have campaigned on the word ‘crisis’ for so long you think it’s only meaningful in TV spots.”

“Your concern for the ordinary citizen is touching.”

“Oh, come off it!” I said. “That uranium out there is a gift from the heavens. Everybody can profit from it. It’ll run the elevators in New York and heat houses in Omaha, enrich the U. S. Treasury and give me a lot of money. What in hell’s wrong with that, L’Ouverture?”

“You make it sound idyllic,” Baynes said. “A TV spot in its own right. You’re ignoring some things, Benjamin, in your polemic. There is currently a forty percent surplus of wood in the country. Talk of an ice age is premature. There is enough coal in Wyoming alone to run all the elevators in the world, continuously, until the good Lord sees fit to blink this planet back into chaos. The U.S. has tidal engines, windmills and solar plants. And uranium has a bad reputation. Very bad. Consider what the conservationists did to your country home in Georgia.”

“Nonsense!” I said. “The conservationists are being paid by the Mafia; everybody knows that. Uranium’s unsafe, but so is coal. Look at the Chinese. They run their whole industrial plant on U235. The U.S. was trying to find safe uranium in space, just like me, back when I was a kid. You can’t have elevators and fast cars on solar power, L’Ouverture.”

“Benjamin,” he said, in his gravelly, soothing way. “Benjamin, who needs cars? They had all that in the twentieth century, and all they did was kill and maim one another on the highways.”

“In the twenty-first century they stay home and watch TV,” I said, “and freeze in winter. There’s a price for everything. The Chinese have big bank accounts and their cuisine’s deteriorated; you can’t buy a Peking duck in Peking. Soyaburgers and fries. They have to come to New York to spend all that money. What kind of civilization is that?”

“The Chinese are known the world over for the quality of their family life.”

“Hogwash, L’Ouverture. They watch TV together and send their kids to business colleges. There’s more revolutionary zeal in Aberdeen than in all of China.” I thought of Isabel, of her sad capitalist love for communism. We should join the Communist Party together and start a revolution somewhere. I’d finance it and she’d write the slogans.

Just then Morton came back in the room with a tray. “Let’s have our coffee now,” Baynes said. He nodded toward a permoplastic table by the marble fireplace and Morton set the tray there. “Why don’t you put the children back to bed, Morton?”

“Shit!” one of the kids said, sotto voce.

“Go to bed,” Baynes said wearily. That seemed to work, and they followed Morton upstairs like lambs. Baynes turned his attention back to me. He was still smiling but clearly tired. It was about four in the morning. “I don’t really care about the Chinese,” he said. “They’re admirable in their way, but East is East…”

I leaned forward. It was time to make my pitch. I could feel the intensity in my voice. “L’Ouverture,” I said, “there’s more safe uranium where that came from.” I gestured toward the general direction of Aynsley Field. “A billion tons of it. We can beat those Chinese hustlers at their own game. We can be the richest nation on Earth again, L’Ouverture.” I leaned back and chewed my cigar a minute. “And this time we’re mellower. We’ll do it right. We won’t kill ourselves in our cars anymore. No more big horsepower. We won’t bully the little countries.” I paused a moment, overwhelmed myself by what I was going to say. “We can build a great civilization, L’Ouverture, a great, humane, and beautiful civilization. We can be an electronic Byzantium, a holy city. We can be the Age of Pericles and light up the world. Think of the talent in this country! Think of the architecture we can build with cheap power!”

I sat back, moved by my own words. I really believed it. America is a magnificent, fertile place, and in decline it has lost much of its grossness. What a comeback we could have, with all that power from Juno!

Baynes walked over to the table. “The coffee is ready,” he said coolly.

I stared at him, miffed at his ignoring my rhetoric. “Come on,” I said. “Where’s your patriotism, for Christ’s sake?”

He began pouring the coffee with a steady hand. “My daddy used to say to me at Fourth of July parades in Louisville, ‘Whitey talks pretty, but listen to him closely.’”

I stared at him and almost screamed, Bullshit. But I didn’t. I remembered the black guys in prison. The U.S. has had two black presidents and a dozen black justices in the Supreme Court; a third of Congress is black—mostly women. But the black prisoners at Leavenworth still had to fight to get shoes that fit, had to pay bigger bribes to get the easy jobs in the prison factory. I shrugged and seated myself at the coffee table.

“Your father made ten times the money my father made,” I said.

His face became arctic, just for a second. “What in hell was your father good for?”

There was one final ploy to try, a pretty drastic one, to give myself some operating room. I must at all costs get time and money and stay out of jail. The months on Belson, self-willed though they were, were jail enough. I needed action.

Wouldn’t you know the coffee cups were plastic? Here was a man who could afford anything and he used coffee cups like these. I took a deep breath, tried to dismiss things like that from my mind, and said, “L’Ouverture, I’ll give you half my share of that uranium outright if you’ll get me back my citizenship and my money and drop those charges.”

He took a sip of his coffee. “A bribe?”

“What else?” I said. “Draw up papers and I’ll sign them around noon, right after I get back my citizenship and the courts cancel that mumbo-jumbo.”

He went on sipping his coffee in silence. I leaned back in the little plastic chair by the mantelpiece, feeling at last relaxed. L’Ouverture looked thoughtful and grandfatherly. I felt a part of me yielding to his spell and I didn’t mind, now that I’d played my cards. I knew Baynes: he would rather make a quiet deal like this than fool around. I looked at his contemplative, intelligent old face; this was turning out to be a pleasant welcome home. It was as good in its way as finding Isabel would have been. Maybe better, because with Baynes I wouldn’t be breaking crockery or screaming at cats. Yet I knew well enough that he could be an authentic blacksnake and a threat to life and limb. He who sups with the devil must eat with a long spoon. Oh yes. This man could have me clapped in irons. Still, I let myself love him a bit, dangerously, for his charm. Christ, do I ever want a father! And at my age! What a charming old son of a bitch, with his shiny black head and yellowing teeth and steady hands—so manicured, so well manicured. I wanted to lean across the table and hug him.

He was looking at me. “Have some coffee, Ben,” he said.

That reminded me of where I was. I took a sip of the coffee and almost spit it out. Instant coffee. Garbage! What kind of a father was he anyway? Somewhere in his soul was the demon that had dominated my real father: Low Rent. If Western Civilization dies it will drown in instant coffee, processed cheese and TV specials. Men and women in America have been born, lived, and gone to quickly dug graves without ever tasting real coffee, a real hamburger, or a real glass of lemonade. What right did this billionaire, the sharpest man in the Senate, have to drink powdered coffee out of plastic cups? Genghis Khan would have known better.

“L’Ouverture,” I said, even though I could go to jail for it, “you should make your coffee with a Chemex. And I need fifty thousand in cash. I mean right away.”

“Benjamin,” he said, a bit sternly, “I like instant coffee. I embrace the modern world and live happily in it. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries do not interest me. Instant coffee is the drink of the times and I drink it with pleasure. I don’t keep cash around.”

“That’s a pity,” I said, and tried the coffee again. I needed the caffeine.

L’Ouverture shrugged, still smiling, and spoke in his honeyed old voice, “Snobbery is a waste of energy. The past is dead, Ben. Your father was an historian; mine was a basketball player. Father adapted the crane dance of his ancestors to varnished oak floors and sent me to Harvard, where I learned to prosper even as he had. He hated sports, hated the Olympics, hated abstractions. Sometimes he slept with a basketball beside him. I too delight in the real, the contemporary.”

It was seductive, but I knew Baynes too well to believe it. You’re a power jack-off, I wanted to shout, and the past is alive! Solipsist! The son of a bitch probably counted the votes of his Energy Committee with a hard on. “Look,” I said, “I’d like to go to a bank in the morning and get some cash. When can you have my accounts released?”

He smiled benignly. “Just have an extra croissant for breakfast, Benjamin, and go to your bank at ten. I’ll have Justice Flaherty call in a reversal. Where did you bring the uranium from? Fomalhaut?”

Jesus Christ! I thought, How does he know? It wasn’t Fomalhaut, thank God; it was Aminidab. Juno. But how did he know about Fomalhaut? From that geologist in Jamaica? Anyway, I didn’t fall for it. “Come on, L’Ouverture,” I said. “That’s not the deal.”

He shrugged and set his coffee cup down with an air of finality. “If you won’t tell me where the uranium comes from, there is no deal. I’m going to get some sleep.” He turned his face toward a doorway and called out, “All right out there.”

At first I thought he was hailing Morton, but I realized that was unlikely just as two men in brown suits came in the doorway, each holding a pair of handcuffs. The chair I was sitting on was low, in a sort of semi-Japanese way, and when I tried to jump to my feet I knocked over the table. L’Ouverture got out of the way just in time and I didn’t even get the pleasure of splashing him with hot coffee. They had me by the time I’d recovered my balance and was, ignominiously, in a semi-crouch like a small boy with a stubbed toe. The cuffs were of steel; I had one wrist cuffed to a wrist of each of those bastards in what seemed to be a single motion. They pulled me upright from my crouch. Private cops, probably. Cheap ones too.

One of them began to recite, “You have the right to remain silent…”

Baynes interrupted him. “No need,” he said. “Mr. Belson has no rights. He is not a citizen.”

“You son of a bitch,” I said.

“Take him to the Reagan Detention Center and book him for illegal entry.”

My stomach sank. From rebirth to the Reagan Stir. I checked the two out. Poker-faced. But one of them, the fatter, seemed under his stern patriot look to be troubled by something. “Okay,” I said, “let’s get out of here.” And then to L’Ouverture, who was still smiling amiably, who had almost certainly never stopped smiling, “You are one deceitful son of a bitch.”

He went on smiling. “Have a good day,” he said.