The Mirror Maze Read online

  “The really big-time crooks don’t break laws,” one of the faculty members chipped in. “They make them.” Some of the others laughed.

  Martha came out onto the deck with an ice bucket containing bottles. Other figures, attracted by the scent of food, were drifting out of the doorway behind her. Brett was among them, still with Stephanie in tow. They came over to join Mel. “What’s going on out here?” Brett asked.

  “Paul’s talking about interference in the free market,” Mel told him.

  “I did warn you,” Stephanie said.

  “… because the basis of government is coercion, and coercion isn’t a very good way of finding out what people want,” Brodstein was saying.

  “What people want might not always be what’s best for them, though,” one of the students pointed out.

  Brodstein showed his teeth in a smile, as if he had been waiting for that. “And who are you to decide what’s best for them? And who is anyone else, for that matter?”

  Brett had wrinkled up his face and was shifting his head in the way he always did in response to challenge. Typically, he pitched straight in. “What about the Depression, back in 1929? That wasn’t a terminal case of laissez-faire going belly-up?”

  “I thought boom and bust cycles were endemic to capitalism.” The speaker was the girl in the black dress whom Mel had seen inside earlier.

  “That’s another myth,” Martha said. Evidently this was a husband-wife double act. “In fact a free money market provides the perfect economic stabilizer: the interest rate.” While Martha was talking, Paul excused himself for a moment and disappeared into the house. Martha continued, “It’s a price—the price of capital—and prices are signals that tell you things… if you don’t distort them. They tell you what investments are sound. The Federal Reserve system, which was set up in 1913, provided cheap credit by inflating the money supply, which reversed the signals and created huge malinvestments. Eventually bad investments have to liquidate, which is what a depression is.”

  With growing resentment at the steady encroachment of more rules and regulations into everybody’s life, there had been a lot of this kind of talk going around in recent times. Mel had been too preoccupied with his own studies to pay a lot of attention to it, but tonight he found it a welcome change from the things he spent most of his time thinking about.

  “What you’re saying is, you’d like to see complete economic freedom, then,” a young man in a blue turtleneck said, sitting munching on one of the sun lounges.

  “Exactly.” Heads turned as Paul Brodstein came back out from the house, carrying a rolled poster-size sheet. “Once you control a person’s right to make a living, what other freedom does he have left? That’s where the American concept has gone wrong, and what we’re aiming to put right.”

  “We?” Mel queried.

  “The Constitutional movement,” Paul said. Mel looked at Brett. Brett shrugged and looked at Stephanie. “I take it you haven’t heard of us yet,” Paul said. They shook their heads. “I thought that was why Eva invited you.”

  “It was more me that invited them,” Stephanie said.

  “Well, the more, the better,” Paul said. “We need all the new faces we can get.” He went on to explain, “Briefly, it’s a political movement that’s catching on across the country, especially among younger people who’ve come to despair of both the established parties. So we’re forming a new one.”

  “A new party?” Mel echoed.

  “Wait a minute, I think I’ve heard about it,” a man near Brett said. “Isn’t it do with that guy, what’s his name?… Newell, or something?”

  Paul nodded. “Henry Newell. Basically, we’ve come to the conclusion that the first amendment, separating church and state, is all very fine, but it doesn’t go far enough. It only does half the job. We want to finish it: by completely separating the power of state from economic affairs.”

  Mel frowned as he tried to visualize exactly what that meant. “You mean all kinds of economic affairs?” he said. “Personal? Corporate? International? Everything?…”

  “Everything,” Paul replied simply.

  Eva’s voice came from the direction of the doorway. “The analogy to the separation of church and state is a good one.” Mel looked around to see that she had come out from the house, too. Dave Fenner was standing behind her, holding a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She continued, “The average citizen in the Middle Ages would have been unable to conceive of a society in which his religious life was none of the state’s business. The approved faith was enforced, and any deviation from it was savagely punished. But today anyone is free to worship whatever god he chooses, or none at all. The state protects that freedom. The citizen has become a beneficiary of state power instead of its victim.” She spoke clearly and firmly, but with a calmness that sought to persuade, not to pontificate. Mel guessed that she was one of the long-time attendees at these get-togethers of the Brodsteins. “What we’re saying is that the power of the state should no more be available to secure economic privileges for one group at the expense of another, than to impose a favored religion.”

  “You mean that its role should be to protect your freedom to make a living any way you choose,” somebody said.

  “Exactly,” Eva said. “And to keep what you make, and to spend it as you see fit.”

  Martha elaborated. “Government shouldn’t have any say in how you trade our own services or property—to whom, under what conditions, or at what price. Its only function should be to enforce contracts that were entered into freely. So all the laws that result in some kind of enforced privilege should go: all forms of protectionism—export subsidies, import tariffs, preferential regulations; and all the laws that coercively subsidize one group at the expense of another—wage laws, union laws, hiring quotas, compulsory social programs…” She waved a hand to and fro in front of her face. “Poof! Gone. The Constitution guaranteed the right of opportunity to compete on equal terms, without discrimination. It never guaranteed equality of result, or the right to be given what has been taken away from somebody else.”

  “That’s why we’re called the Constitutional movement,” Paul said. “Taking away by force what a person has earned is theft—however else you try to disguise it with words. This country was not founded upon principles like that. And we won’t get out of the mess we’re getting into until we get back on the tracks we began on. The law shouldn’t legalize for government what would be considered criminal if done by anyone else.”

  “Hear, hear!” somebody threw in from the back. Approving murmuring broke out in support.

  Paul had a talent for inspiring, Mel realized as he listened. He could see what had made Paul the focal point of this local nucleus for action that was forming. Paul chose his moment well. Stepping forward to the center of the deck, he held up the rolled poster that he had brought from the house. “And, I have something to show you all,” he announced. An expectant hush fell. “In keeping without avowed intent of forming a full-fledged party apparatus to challenge the incumbents, we now have an official party animal.” He unfurled the poster and turned first one way, then the other to let everyone see it. “The Constitutional Tortoise,” Paul announced. “Starting from the back and just plodding along at its own steady pace… but you all know where that gets you in the end. ” He grinned broadly, and was rewarded by applause and approving shouts from all around the deck.

  Through it all, Brett was staring at Paul disbelievingly. “You people are serious?” he said. “I mean, do you really think you can change anything?… You’re gonna upset one hell of a lot of people.”

  Brodstein looked back at him unblinkingly. “Oh yes, Brett. We’re quite serious. In fact, we intend fielding a presidential candidate for the year 2000 election, six years from now—very probably, Henry Newell himself. The election that will choose the country’s first administration of a new millennium. Very significant, symbolically.”

  Brett met Brodstein’s gaze and shook
his head slowly. “Not a prayer,” he declared bluntly. “Six years from now? No way. Not even in another thousand.”

  CHAPTER 9

  It had been bad enough to be told that Stephanie had killed herself, and then to have worked out that it must have been Eva. But then to learn that someone who had been so close to all of them, and a sister to Stephanie, had not only been killed deliberately, but in the brutal manner that the deputy coroner at Denver had described… The thought filled Mel with such horror and helpless outrage that he was unable to bring himself to speak for the rest of their journey away from the airport. And then Brett, on top of it?… It was only as his own numbness and the sick feeling in his stomach began wearing off to allow coherent thought to form again that he was able to realize fully what Stephanie had been going through for days.

  They took a cab underneath the harbor through the Sumner Tunnel and across downtown to a steak-and-pancake restaurant on Beacon Hill, which was one of Mel’s regular eating places. He could manage no more than a black coffee, while Stephanie nibbled at a sandwich and then pushed it aside. Her exhaustion after the flight and all that had happened was catching up with her, and despite all, her conversation was sparse. As far as Mel was concerned, that was just as well.

  Snow was falling again when they left. After a thirty-minute wait they despaired of getting another cab, and deciding to risk the elements, walked and slithered the seven blocks to where Mel lived in the Back Bay area, south of the Charles River Basin. The apartment was on the second floor of a solid, once imposing but now aging, Victorian town house, smelling of cats, dusty drapes, and the accumulated odors of four generations of living.

  When they were halfway up the stairs, the power went off. They completed the climb in darkness, and Mel let them in the front door of the apartment by touch until he located the flashlight which he kept strategically on the hall table for such eventualities. By its light he lit a kerosene lantern in the living room, and then led Stephanie through to the single bedroom and left the lantern for her to unpack her things. He went back into the living room with the flashlight and started a wood fire in the stove fitted inside the original fireplace—nobody with any experience of Massachusetts winters relied on the power companies alone for warmth these days. When the logs had taken, he augmented the blaze with a shovel of coal from a stock that he kept in a bin beneath the sink in the cooking area, and put a pot of water for coffee on top. Stephanie, now wearing a bathrobe of his which she had found in the bedroom closet, came back out with the kerosene lantern and sat down in the leather armchair by the stove, and Mel got a blanket for her to wrap around herself while the room was warming up. Then he went into the bedroom to change into some dry jeans and a sweater. By the time he came out again, the water was hot. He made two mugs of instant coffee and settled down on the couch facing the stove. The warmth and the drink revived Stephanie’s spirits, and at last she was able to begin relating her story.

  “I never did tell you the real reasons why I left California and moved out to Denver, did I?” she said. Her voice was strained and shaky, but determined to see it through.

  Mel shook his head. “Not really.”

  Stephanie and Brett’s mutual attraction had developed quickly into a steady relationship that lasted through the rest of their time at the university. When Brett and Mel graduated, and Mel reset his vocational sights’ to go to law school at Chapel Hill in North Carolina, Brett had stayed on for a year of postgraduate work at Pensacola to be near Stephanie while she completed her own course of studies. Then the two of them had moved to her home state, California. Stephanie had fulfilled her ambition by taking a research position in nuclear physics at Stanford, while Brett, who excelled in programming intricate real-time systems, had first spent a year with one of the Silicon-Valley-based defense contractors, and then gone to the national laboratory at Livermore to work on the development of battle-management software for the strategic space defense system. That was when Mel, absorbed in a new field of his own, had lost regular contact with them. Life had followed the standard pattern: they would call each other with diminishing frequency, and he had visited once or twice to reminisce about the old days; but those times could never be relived or entirely recaptured, and the present had displaced it all with its own relentless and more pressing demands.

  Then, one day, Mel had learned to his surprise that she and Brett were having problems. Soon after that, Stephanie had moved on her own to Denver—to clear the air and give herself time to think, she had said. She hadn’t been more specific. In his own mind, Mel had regarded it as one of those temporary things that would straighten itself out, and he had left them alone to work it out in their own time. And sure enough, by spring of the current year, Brett had quit his job in California and moved out to join her. Everything had sounded fine again…

  And now this.

  Stephanie went on, “You know how Brett used to feel about far-right religious fanatics back in Pensacola?”

  “Tell me about it. I lived with him, too, remember.”

  “Well, it got worse after you went to Carolina. Did we ever tell you about that time he got arrested?”

  “Didn’t he break someone’s arm or something?”

  “A bunch of them were demonstrating in the library over some books they wanted taken off of the shelves. Brett hauled one of them out and threw him down the stairs.”

  Despite the circumstances, Mel couldn’t contain a thin smile. “Who was it? Anyone I knew?”

  “Oh sure. He’d been a pain all over the campus for months. Even the cops who came to pick Brett up thought it was funny. Do you remember a thin, weedy guy called Rudshaw?”

  “Oh, him… He was one of the ones who used to start quoting the Bible in biology classes when anyone mentioned evolution… They sent letters to the parents of anyone they thought was screwing around.”

  “That’s him. Anyhow, he was giving that little Cuban girl who worked in the library a hard time…”

  “Maria?”

  “Yes. He kept preaching at her until she was in tears, and that was when Brett went over and threw him out.”

  Mel nodded but was looking puzzled. “Okay. But what did that have to do with you and Brett splitting up, and you moving to Denver?”

  Stephanie sipped from her mug and sighed. “Oh, that was the beginning of the problem, I guess.” She looked across at Mel from the armchair. “Have you any idea how crazy some of those people are?”

  “Fanatics? They’re all crazy if you ask me.”

  “I mean the way-far-out-right religious ones.”

  “You mean about Armageddon and the Second Coming? How they think God wants us to have a nuclear war with the Russians?”

  “Yes.”

  Mel nodded. “I told you, I lived with Brett, too. He told me all about it at least a dozen times.”

  “Didn’t it ever strike you as strange that Brett should have ended up working in the defense industry, considering how he felt about things?”

  Mel shrugged. “I always assumed he did it for the intellectual kick. It happens like that sometimes.”

  “Yes, at first I thought so too,” Stephanie said. “But now I think there was more to it.” She paused, but Mel drank from his mug and stared at her without interrupting. “He got more active politically in that year after you left. I know that’s not uncommon among students… but you know how intense Brett could be once he got into something.”

  “How do you mean? He never really got into becoming a Constitutional the way I did with Eva. And I couldn’t see him marching around with placards or sitting down in the middle of the road. He wasn’t that type of guy.”

  “No, it wasn’t anything like that. But more… Do you remember that group called the Socratics?”

  “A sort of political debating society, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s what they called themselves. But there was a core of people in it who had interests that went beyond talking. They had other connections outside the university.�
��

  “Okay…”

  “Well, they didn’t just go away after we left Florida. Brett carried on his involvement with them after we moved to California—or at least, another group that was part of the same organization.”

  “Go on.”

  “Only the involvement got deeper. Brett seemed to… to change. He was turning into a different person.”

  “In what way?”

  “Moody, secretive… He’d stay out late, and then not talk about where he’d been… Going off to keep strange appointments…”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t another girl?” Mel didn’t really think so. The lawyer part of him asked the question automatically.

  Stephanie shook her head. “I’d have known. Besides, none of us was exactly uptight about things like that. He’d have said so if that was what it was.”

  Mel nodded. “Sure. So?”

  Stephanie made a throwing-away gesture. “The routine that you always think only happens to other people, but won’t happen to you because you’re so much smarter than they are. I wanted to know what was wrong. He said nothing was wrong. I said he had to think I was stupid. We ended up fighting or not talking…”

  “Which was when you moved to Denver…”

  “And started at GPD.”

  “But I thought that worked out okay in the end. Brett followed you out there after a while.”

  Stephanie sighed. “I thought it had worked out, too. But then it started all over again. He began getting phone calls… Then one day, sometime early in October, he said he had to go back to California—just for a few days. He promised that it was over—he was going there to wind things up, and one day he’d tell me what it had been all about.” Stephanie’s voice caught, and she gulped her coffee hurriedly.