world your friends wish to create? It betrays humanity whenever it does live up to its expressed ideals. Was the choice so hard?
That's deep, Barry Cooper had said, sincerely. That's deep: the reflexive rejoinder of the shallow. But if Cooper were shallow, his very shallowness had saved him from the worst temptations of the revolutionary left. And his information proved to be the undoing of dozens of violent cells. Their safe houses were shut down, their leaders imprisoned, their sources of funding identified and rooted out. The pothead in the funky blue houseboat had helped to do that. In that respect, the posturing, hard-hearted spokesmen of the revolutionary vanguards had it right: sometimes a small man can make a big difference.
In return, the State Department quietly desisted in its attempts to seek extradition.
Now Janson sipped hot coffee from a mug that still bore smudges of acrylic paint.
"I know you're here just to hang," Cooper said. "I know you don't, like, want something from me." It was banter that survived from their first interviews, a quarter century ago.
"Hey," Janson said. "OK if I crash here for a while?"
"Mi casa es su casa, amigo," Cooper replied. He raised the small marijuana cigarette to his lips; Janson was never sure whether it still really affected Cooper or whether the maintenance dose just returned him to what passed as normal. The smoke made his voice pebbly. "I could use the company, tell you the truth. Doris left me, I ever tell you that?"
"You never told me Doris joined you," Janson said. "Barry, I have no idea who you're talking about."
"Oh," Cooper said, and his forehead knit in a moment or two of furious concentration. He was visibly searching for consequence: And therefore ... and therefore ... and therefore. The engine of reason was turning over but not catching. Finally, he raised an index finger. "Then ... never mind." He had obviously worked out that someone he hadn't seen in eight years might have little interest in the recent end of a six-week relationship. Cooper was so pleased to have come up with an appropriate response that were inappropriate to the situation he now confronted. He needed to think differently.
Demarest's words of counsel - echoing from another age - came to him j now: Can't see a way out? Take the time to see things differently. See the two white swans instead of the one black one. See the slice of pie instead of the pie with the slice missing. Flip the Necker cube outward instead of inward. Master the gestalt. It will make you free.
He closed his eyes for a few seconds. He had to think as they had. Exposure and publicity, they saw, could be the most effective shields of clandestinity - which was a logic that Janson himself would have to embrace. A stealthy entrance was what they were anticipating, what they would be well protected from. He would not arrive stealthily, then. He would arrive as conspicuously as possible, and at the front door. This operation called not for discretion but for brazenness.
Janson surveyed the balled-up papers on the floor near the pastels. "Got a newspaper?"
Cooper padded over to the corner and triumphantly returned with a copy of the latest De Volksrant. The front page was smeared with paints and pastels.
"Anything English-language?"
"Dutch papers are in Dutch, man," he answered in a cannabis croak. "They're fucked-up that way."
"I see," Janson replied. He scanned the headlines, and his knowledge of English and German cognates allowed him to get the gist of most. He turned the page, and a small article caught his eye.
"Here," Janson said, tapping it with a forefinger. "Could you translate this one for me?"
"No sweat, man." Cooper looked up for a moment, gathering his powers of concentration. "Not the jukebox selection I'd have gone for. Now wait a minute - didn't you tell me your mother's Czech?"
"Was. She's dead."
"Put my foot in it, didn't I? That's awful. Was it, like, a sudden thing?"
"She died when I was fifteen, Barry. I've had some time to adjust."
Cooper paused for a moment, digesting the fact. "That's cool," he said. "My mom passed last year. Couldn't even go to the goddamn funeral. Tore me up. They'd clap irons on me in customs, so, like, what would be the point? Tore me up, though."
"I'm sorry," Janson said.
Cooper began to read the article, laboriously translating the Dutch into English for Janson's benefit. It was not, on the face of it, a remarkable story. The Czech foreign