Firestarter Read online

  The story America got over its collective coffee cup, via Today, Good Morning, America, and The CBS Morning News, was this: There had been a terrorist firebomb attack at a top-secret scientific think tank in Longmont, Virginia. The terrorist group was not positively known yet, although three of them had already stepped forward to claim the credit--a group of Japanese Reds, the Khafadi splinter of Black September, and a domestic group who went by the rich and wonderful name of the Militant Midwest Weatherpeople.

  Though no one was sure exactly who was behind the attack, the reports seemed quite clear on how it had been carried out. An agent named John Rainbird, an Indian and a Vietnam vet, had been a double agent who had planted the firebombs on behalf of the terrorist organization. He had either killed himself by accident or had committed suicide at the site of one of the firebombings, a stable. One source claimed that Rainbird had actually been overcome by heat and smoke while trying to drive the horses out of the burning stable; this occasioned the usual newscom irony about cold-blooded terrorists who cared more for animals than they did for people. Twenty lives had been lost in the tragedy; forty-five people had been injured, ten of them seriously. The survivors had all been "sequestered" by the government.

  That was the story. The name of the Shop hardly surfaced at all. It was quite satisfactory.

  Except for one dangling loose end.

  2

  "I don't care where she is," the new head of the Shop said four weeks after the conflagration and Charlie's escape. Things had been in total confusion for the first ten days, when the girl might easily have been swept back into the Shop's net; they were still not back to normal. The new head sat behind a make-do desk; her own would not be delivered for another three days. "And I don't care what she can do, either. She's an eight-year-old kid, not Superwoman. She can't stay out of sight long. I want her found and then I want her killed."

  She was speaking to a middle-aged man who looked like a smalltown librarian. Needless to say, he was not.

  He tapped a series of neat computer printouts on the head's desk. Cap's files had not survived the burning, but most of his information had been stored in the computer memory banks. "What's the status of this?"

  "The Lot Six proposals have been tabled indefinitely," the head told him. "It's all political, of course. Eleven old men, one young man, and three blue-haired old ladies who probably own stock in some Swiss goat-gland clinic . . . all of them with sweat under their balls about what would happen if the girl showed up. They--"

  "I doubt very much if the senators from Idaho, Maine, and Minnesota have any sweat under their balls," the man who was not a librarian murmured.

  The head shrugged it off. "They're interested in Lot Six. Of course they are. I would describe the light as amber." She began to play with her hair, which was long--a shaggy, handsome dark auburn. "Tabled indefinitely' means until we bring them the girl with a tag on her toe."

  "We must be Salome," the man across the desk murmured. "But the platter is yet empty."

  "What the fuck are you talking about?"

  "Never mind," he said. "We seem to be back to square one."

  "Not exactly," the head replied grimly. "She doesn't have her father to watch out for her anymore. She's on her own. And I want her found. Quickly."

  "And if she spills her guts before we can find her?"

  The head leaned back in Cap's chair and laced her hands behind her neck. The man who was not a librarian eyed appreciatively the way her sweater pulled taut across the rounds of her breasts. Cap had never been like this.

  "If she were going to spill her guts, I think she would have by now." She leaned forward again, and tapped the desk calendar. "November fifth," she said, "and nothing. Meantime, I think we've taken all the reasonable precautions. The Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune . . . we're watching all the majors, but so far, nothing."

  "Suppose she decides to go to one of the minors? The Podunk Times instead of the New York Times? We can't watch every news organ in the country."

  "That is regrettably true," the head agreed. "But there has been nothing. Which means she has said nothing."

  "Would anyone really believe such a wild tale from an eight-year-old girl anyway?"

  "If she lit a fire at the end of the story, I think that they might be disposed to," the head answered. "But shall I tell you what the computer says?" She smiled and tapped the sheets. "The computer says there's an eighty-percent probability that we can bring the committee her dead body without lifting a finger ... except to ID her."

  "Suicide?"

  The head nodded. The prospect seemed to please her a great deal.

  "That's nice," the man who was not a librarian said, standing up. "For my own part, I'll remember that the computer also said that Andrew McGee was almost certainly tipped over."

  The head's smile faltered a bit.

  "Have a nice day, Chief," the man who was not a librarian said, and strolled out.

  3

  On the same November day, a man in a flannel shirt, flannel pants, and high green boots stood chopping wood under a mellow white sky. On this mild day, the prospect of another winter still seemed distant; the temperature was an agreeable fifty degrees. The man's coat, which his wife had scolded him into wearing, hung over a fencepost. Behind him, stacked against the side of the old barn, was a spectacular drift of orange pumpkins--some of them starting to go punky now, sad to say.

  The man put another log on the chopping block, slung the ax up, and brought it down. There was a satisfying thud, and two stove lengths fell to either side of the block. He was bending down to pick them up and toss them over with the others when a voice said from behind him: "You got a new block, but the mark's still there, isn't it? It's still there."

  Startled, he turned around. What he saw caused him to step back involuntarily, knocking the ax to the ground, where it lay across the deep, indelible burn mark in the earth. At first he thought it was a ghost he was looking at, some gruesome specter of a child risen from the Dartmouth Crossing graveyard three miles up the road. She stood, pallid and dirty and thin in the driveway, her eyes hollow and glistening in their sockets, her jumper ragged and torn. A scrape mark skidded up her right arm almost to the elbow. It looked infected. There were loafers on her feet, or what had once been loafers; now it was hard to tell.

  And then, suddenly, he recognized her. It was the little girl from a year ago: she had called herself Roberta, and she had a flamethrower in her head.

  "Bobbi?" he said. "My sainted hat, is that Bobbi?"

  "Yes, it's still right there," she repeated as if she had not heard him, and he suddenly realized what that glisten in her eyes was: she was weeping.

  "Bobbi," he said, "honey, what's the matter? Where's your dad?"

  "Still there," she said a third time, and then collapsed forward in a faint. Irv Manders was barely able to catch her. Cradling her, kneeling in the dirt of his dooryard, Irv Manders began to scream for his wife.

  4

  Dr. Hofferitz arrived at dusk and was in the back bedroom with the girl for about twenty minutes. Irv and Norma Manders sat in the kitchen, doing more looking at their supper than eating. Every now and then, Norma would look at her husband, not accusingly but merely questioningly, and there was the drag of fear, not in her eyes but around them--the eyes of a woman fighting a tension headache or perhaps low-back pain.

  The man named Tarkington had arrived the day after the great burning; he had come to the hospital where Irv was being kept, and he had presented them with his card, which said only WHITNEY TARKINGTON GOVERNMENT ADJUSTMENTS.

  "You just want to get out of here," Norma had said. Her lips were tight and white, and her eyes had had that same look of pain they had now. She had pointed at her husband's arm, wrapped in bulky bandages; drains had been inserted, and they had been paining him considerably. Irv had told her he had gone through most of World War II with nothing much to show for it except a case of roaring hemorrhoids; it took being at home a
t his place in Hastings Glen to get shot up. "You just want to get out," Norma repeated.

  But Irv, who had perhaps had more time to think, only said, "Say what you have to, Tarkington."

  Tarkington had produced a check for thirty-five thousand dollars--not a government check but one drawn on the account of a large insurance company. Not one, however, that the Manderses did business with.

  "We don't want your hush money," Norma had said harshly, and reached for the call button over Irv's bed.

  "I think you had better listen to me before you take any action you might regret later," Whitney Tarkington had replied quietly and politely.

  Norma looked at Irv, and Irv had nodded. Her hand fell away from the call button. Reluctantly.

  Tarkington had a briefcase with him. Now he put it on his knees, opened it, and removed a file with the names MANDERS and BREEDLOVE written on the tab. Norma's eyes had widened, and her stomach began to twist and untwist. Breedlove was her maiden name. No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it; there is something terrible about the idea that tabs have been kept, perhaps secrets known.

  Tarkington had talked for perhaps forty-five minutes in a low, reasonable tone. He occasionally illustrated what he had to say with Xerox copies from the Manders/Breedlove file. Norma would scan these sheets with tight lips and then pass them on to Irv in his hospital bed.

  We are in a national-security situation, Tarkington had said on that horrible evening. You must realize that We don't enjoy doing this, but the simple fact is, you must be made to see reason. These are things you know very little about.

  I know you tried to kill an unarmed man and his little girl, Irv had replied.

  Tarkington had smiled coldly--a smile reserved for people who foolishly pretend to a knowledge of how the government works to protect its charges--and replied, You don't know what you saw or what it means. My job is not to convince you of that fact but only to try and convince you not to talk about it. Now, look here: this needn't be so painful. The check is tax-free. It will pay for repairs to your house and your hospital bills with a nice little sum left over. And a good deal of unpleasantness will be avoided.

  Unpleasantness, Norma thought now, listening to Dr. Hofferitz move around in the back bedroom and looking at her almost untouched supper. After Tarkington had gone, Irv had looked at her, and his mouth had been smiling, but his eyes had been sick and wounded. He told her: My daddy always said that when you was in a shit-throwing contest, it didn't matter how much you threw but how much stuck to you.

  Both of them had come from large families. Irv had three brothers and three sisters; Norma had four sisters and one brother. There were uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins galore. There were parents and grandparents, in-laws ... and, as in every family, a few outlaws.

  One of Irv's nephews, a boy named Fred Drew whom he had met only three or four times, had a little pot garden growing in his backyard in Kansas, according to Tarkington's papers. One of Norma's uncles, a contractor, was up to his eyebrows in debt and shaky business ventures on the Gulf Coast of Texas; this fellow, whose name was Milo Breedlove, had a family of seven to support, and one whisper from the government would send Milo's whole desperate house of cards tumbling and put them all on the state, common bankrupts. A cousin of Irv's (twice removed; he thought he had met her once but couldn't recall what she had looked like) had apparently embezzled a small sum of money from the bank where she worked about six years ago. The bank had found out and had let her go, electing not to prosecute so as to avoid adverse publicity. She had made restitution over a period of two years and was now making a moderate success of her own beauty parlor in North Fork, Minnesota. But the statute of limitations had not run out and she could be federally prosecuted under some law or other having to do with banking practices. The FBI had a file on Norma's youngest brother, Don. Don had been involved with the SDS in the middle sixties and might have been briefly involved with a plot to firebomb a Dow Chemical Company office in Philadelphia. The evidence was not strong enough to stand up in court (and Don had told Norma himself that when he got wind of what was going on, he had dropped the group, horrified), but a copy of the file forwarded to the division of the corporation he worked for would undoubtedly lose him his job.

  It had gone on and on, Tarkington's droning voice in the closed, tight little room. He had saved the best for last. Irv's family's last name had been Mandroski when his great-grandparents came to America from Poland in 1888. They were Jews, and Irv himself was part Jewish, although there had been no pretension to Judaism in the family since the time of his grandfather, who had married a Gentile; the two of them had lived in happy agnosticism ever after. The blood had been further thinned when Irv's father had gone and done him likewise (as Irv himself had done, marrying Norma Breedlove, a sometime Methodist). But there were still Mandroskis in Poland, and Poland was behind the Iron Curtain, and if the CIA wanted to, they could set in motion a short chain of events that would end up making life very, very difficult for these relatives whom Irv had never seen. Jews were not loved behind the Iron Curtain.

  Tarkington's voice ceased. He replaced his file, snapped his briefcase shut, put it between his feet again, and looked at them brightly, like a good student who has just given a winning recitation.

  Irv lay against his pillow, feeling very weary. He felt Tarkington's eyes on him, and that he didn't particularly mind, but Norma's eyes were on him as well, anxious and questioning.

  You haff relatives in the old country, yesss? Irv thought. It was such a cliche that it was funny, but he didn't feel like laughing at all, somehow. How many removes before they're not your relatives anymore? Fourth-cousin remove? Sixth? Eighth? Christ on a sidecar. And if we stand up to this sanctimonious bastard and they ship those people off to Siberia, what do I do? Send them a postcard saying they're working in the salt mines because I picked up a little button and her daddy hitching on the road in Hastings Glen? Christ on a sidecar.

  Dr. Hofferitz, who was nearly eighty, came slowly out of the back bedroom, brushing his white hair back with one gnarled hand. Irv and Norma, both glad to be jerked out of their memories of the past, looked around at him.

  "She's awake," Dr. Hofferitz said, and shrugged. "She's not in very good shape, your little ragamuffin, but she is in no danger, either. She has an infected cut on her arm and another on her back, which she says she got crawling under a barbed-wire fence to get away from 'a pig that was mad at her.'"

  Hofferitz sat down at the kitchen table with a sigh, produced a pack of Camels, and lit one. He had smoked all his life, and, he had sometimes told colleagues, as far as he was concerned, the surgeon general could go fuck himself.

  "Do you want something to eat, Karl?" Norma asked.

  Hofferitz looked at their plates. "No--but if I was to, it looks like you wouldn't have to dish up anything new," he said dryly.

  "Will she have to stay in bed for long?" Irv asked.

  "Ought to have her down to Albany," Hofferitz said. There was a dish of olives on the table and he took a handful. "Observation. She's got a fever of a hundred and one. It's from the infection. I'll leave you some penicillin and some antibiotic ointment. Mostly what she needs to do is eat and drink and rest. Malnutrition. Dehydration." He popped an olive into his mouth. "You were right to give her that chicken broth, Norma. Anything else, she would have sicked it up, almost as sure as shooting. Nothing but clear liquids for her tomorrow. Beef broth, chicken broth, lots of water. And plenty of gin, of course; that's the best of those clear liquids." He cackled at this old joke, which both Irv and Norma had heard a score of times before, and popped another olive into his mouth. "I ought to notify the police about this, you know."

  "No," Irv and Norma said together, and then they looked at each other, so obviously surprised that Dr. Hofferitz cackled again.

  "She's in trouble, ain't she?"

  Irv looked uncomfortable. He opened his mouth, then dosed it again.

  "Got something to do with
that trouble you had last year, maybe?"

  This time Norma opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Irv said, "I thought it was only gunshot wounds you had to report, Karl."

  "By law, by law," Hofferitz said impatiently, and stubbed out his cigarette. "But you know there's a spirit of the law as well as a letter, Irv. Here's a little girl and you say her name is Roberta McCauley and I don't believe that anymore than I believe a hog will shit dollar bills. She says she scraped her back open crawling under barbed wire, and I got to think that's a funny thing to have happen to you on the way to your relatives, even with gas as tight as it is. She says she don't remember much of the last week or so, and that I do believe. Who is she, Irv?"

  Norma looked at her husband, frightened. Irv rocked back in his chair and looked at Dr. Hofferitz.

  "Yeah," he said finally, "she's part of that trouble from last year. That's why I called you, Karl. You've seen trouble, both here and back in the old country. You know what trouble is. And you know that sometimes the laws are only as good as the people in charge of them. I'm just saying that if you let out that little girl is here, it's going to mean trouble for a lot of people who haven't earned it. Norma and me, a lot of our kin ... and her in there. And that's all I think I can tell you. We've known each other twenty-five years. You'll have to decide what you're going to do."

  "And if I keep my mouth shut," Hofferitz said, lighting another cigarette, "what are you going to do?"

  Irv looked at Norma, and she looked back at him. After a moment she gave her head a bewildered little shake and dropped her eyes to her plate.

  "I dunno," Irv said quietly.

  "You just gonna keep her like a parrot in a cage?" Hofferitz asked. "This is a small town, Irv. I can keep my mouth shut, but I'm in the minority. Your wife and you belong to the church. To the Grange. People come and people go. Dairy inspectors gonna drop by to check your cows. Tax assessor's gonna drop by some fine day--that bald bastard--to reassess your buildings. What are you gonna do? Build her a room down cellar? Nice life for a kid, all right."