The Sex Sphere Read online

  "What upset me most was the graveyard. They tore poor Mother out of the earth and put her someplace else. I had many dreams about it.

  "Now that my father's store was gone, he had gone to work at the Bayer factory. He lived in a horrible room with the money from his store in a box. A horrible room in a horrible factory town. You would not believe the air.

  "I finished two more years of study at Heidelberg. There were many radical students there, and we did a number of street-actions. Some of us became urban guerillas. I myself bombed a general's car at the American base. A Mercedes.

  "Suddenly the police were very interested, and chasing down my friends. I had to leave Heidelberg. The bulls had put my picture on their terrorism posters, just for one Mercedes.

  "I took the train up to Essen one morning, and while my father was still at work I broke into his room and stole all his money. I left in a big hurry and ended up in Paris.

  "There were some other German radicals there, and we all lived very well for a few months. After that my money was used up. Holger, one of my friends, knew an Arab who wanted to pay us for some jobs. Bombing someone's embassy, things like that. We told him to meet us with the money, out in the Père Lachaise graveyard.

  "I don't like Arabs at all. When men have killed all the green, the whole world will be like the Middle East. Holger and I robbed this guy and beat him up. Holger went too far, and suddenly the Arab was kaput. He had friends, and we had to get out of Europe fast.

  "We got some false passports and took a plane to New York the next day. America . . . the land of unlimited possibilities.

  "The only job I could find was as a waiter in a Bavarian restaurant. What a joke. They are the biggest fascists in Germany, the Bavarians. It's as if you came to Germany and worked in a Texan restaurant. I had to wear leather pants and let old people touch my ass. Soon I missed Europe very much.

  "The whole time, I was taking courses at the Free University, mostly things about radical politics. This is where I met Beatrice. She convinced me to come to Italy with her."

  The Story of Beatrice Luz

  "My mother is Italian and my father is Spanish. I guess they're still alive. Shoveling shit in Buffalo.

  "We had a really humongous family. I was the first girl and did a lot of the child-care. Mom worked in a piss factory, inspecting pipes. Dad was on the swing shift at Hooker Chemical.

  "When I was about eighteen these really horrible things started happening in our neighborhood. Everyone was getting leukemia and blood-cancer and tumors. The little twins . . . the little twin boys in our family . . . both of them got leukemia the same year.

  "Mom was real Catholic. She hung rosaries on the twins' beds, but they died all the same. And then it came out that we were living on top of a toxic chemicals dump. I mean it was no surprise . . . there was always horrible scum oozing out of the ground, and when our neighbor tried to grow cucumbers they were curly and rotted on the vine.

  "The Feds said we had to evacuate, into downtown Buffalo. I was out of high school and spent the summer working in Mom's sewer-pipe factory. They buried the first twin in July and the other in August. Little white coffins. I couldn't take the scene, and hitched to the City.

  "My big brother Hayzooz was living there in the Lower East Side alphabet. Avenue B. He was speeding a lot, working in a garage capping tires. I did a lot of weed till one time I got dusted. Somebody sold me a pack of KJ and said it was Colombo. I was so fucked-up, walking down the street on wood feet, talking crash. Hart of the wud and trubba not. I got busted, and in jail it came to me how for someone to put a cattle-trank on God's green weed was just like killing the twins. I was . . . radicalized by the experience.

  "Hayzooz used to fly with some of the FALNs, those Puerto Rican nationalists? I got in tight with them and threw my first bomb. The office of Hooker Chemical. Before long the pigs were closing in. Hooker and heat.

  "I had to cool off. I moved across town to Little Italy, got a job running a sewing machine and studied radical politics at the Free University. One course had an anthology of terrorist writings. The best thing was a piece called Stadtguerilla by the Red Army Faction. The old Baader-Meinhof gang. I got the idea that revolution is riper for the plucking in Europe. I decided to go to Italy, since that's what I can speak.

  "Peter and I started really relating. He moved in with me. We both wanted to get the fuck out of Amerikkka, but we didn't have the bread.

  "This room I was living in was like upstairs from a grocery. Gino's Superette. Gino was a real pig. He had a brother in the police, and they were always busting shoplifters. We decided to burn his ass.

  "What we did was to reserve tickets on a Sunday morning flight to Rome out of JFK. Pick 'em up there and pay cash. Saturday afternoon Peter stole a car and we loaded all our luggage in it. I had a hot machine gun I'd gotten off Hayzooz.

  "Just at closing time Saturday night . . . two in the morning . . . we step into Gino's. His cash register was bulging. He'd been selling beer and wine all evening. He had his pig cop off-duty policeman brother there for security. Since Gino knew us, they hardly looked up. And then Peter wasted them.

  "It was beautiful. We didn't want to stop shooting. All the cans of spinach busting open and exploding, the ricocheting strung-out racket of explosions and in my head rock-and-roll radio playing Patti Smith: never return to this piss factory!

  "We were out at the airport before the cops even knew. On the flight over we decided to call ourselves Green Death for the spinach. Peter got us hooked in with some movement people in Rome. They set us up in Mestre.

  "Mestre's right near Venice, but it might as well be Newark, New Jersey. A whole town of working people breathing pollution-death. We liquidated a refinery and executed an environment-criminal or two. Things heated up and Peter split. I stayed too long and got popped.

  "I'd pitched my passport, so they didn't really know who I was. I said I didn't either. My picture was in the paper. Some old guy came in claiming he was my father. But he was really a brother anarchist! Told me when and where to hijack the reactor fuel! But that comes later. Meanwhile the pigs decided to check me out for crazy before trial. Sent me to a white-coat. And that was Giulia."

  How Green Death Came to Rome

  Imagine yourself a disembodied eye, a movie camera if you will . . . watching when and where and what you want.

  Flat country. Factories on the right, smudging the sky. On the left is a large, yellowish-white compound surrounded by a ten-meter wall. A prison. You move along the road towards it, along a potholed two-lane road. It's a February noon with a high, smogged-out sun.

  The prison wall looms overhead, its surface scarred and scumbled. At the bottom is a small door, a rusty metal door propped open with a case of empty wine bottles.

  A man's booted feet rest on the case. He is tilted back in a wooden chair, guarding the entrance with a machine gun in his lap. He is beautifully uniformed and badly shaven. The boots are black and very shiny. Staring into them you can almost see yourself . . . or is that the chalky sun?

  A VW bus with one occupant pulls up in front of the prison. The slightly built, red-haired driver gets out: it's Peter Roth. He is dressed in white, like a hospital orderly. He walks slowly up to the prison guard, a sheaf of papers in his hand. His breath steams in the air.

  From behind the guard you can hear sounds: the squeak-clang of steel doors, the dull hubbub of the prisoners' voices, the sliding shuffle of their feet, and the peng-peng-peng of high-heel boots. A woman's boots, watch them now: peng. Imagine the percussion's tiny shockwave rippling up that long leg, luscious as a pig's, active as a spider's. Peng. Whose leg is this? Dr. Giulia Verdi's.

  Besides the boots, Giulia is wearing a tan poplin skirt and a thick red sweater. She is leading Beatrice out of the prison. Beatrice is wearing gray pants and a gray straitjacket with the arms crossed tight and padlocked in back. Criminally insane. She walks along in a slow, uncertain daze, led by Giulia's hand on her shoulder.


  Look at Giulia's nails, so nice and red against the gray prison cloth. It's Valentine's Day, though no one here cares. The head guard accepts Giulia's signature for a release form, and then the three terrorists drive off in that VW bus.

  Inside the bus everyone is talking at once. English is the common language.

  "What should we do now?" Peter asks Beatrice, helping her out of the straitjacket. He jerks his head at Giulia, driving. "Can we trust her?"

  Beatrice smiles. She is alive again. "Can we trust you, Giulia?"

  "Implicitly. I like very much the actions you have done."

  "How much time do we have?" Peter asks Giulia. "Until they realize you have defected."

  Giulia shrugs expressively. "Italian bureaucracy is very . . . " A quick hand-gesture sketches a maze. "Maybe even a week till they notice. Or maybe two hours. We should leave Mestre. I loaded my suitcases, you see." Indeed, there is a lot of luggage in the back of the truck.

  Beatrice swings her arms back and forth to get the circulation going, lights a cigarette. "Did you bring the weapons, Peter?"

  "Ja, boss."

  They're driving through a working-class residential neighborhood with all the Old World charm of a pile of concrete blocks. The small apartment buildings are new, with cheap, ungainly shapes. Walls are painted any color, in patches, with Stella cigarette posters stuck up everywhere. There are no sidewalks. Half-dressed children float bits of filth in mud-puddles.

  "Today's the fourteenth, right?" Beatrice asks.

  "Si."

  "Well, some old guy came to see me in jail. He told me that tonight a truck would be hauling six nuclear-reactor fuel assemblies along the autostrada to Brescia."

  "That's great," Peter says excitedly. "That's fabulous."

  "We gotta hijack it. Hijack it and take it to Rome. The snoids will let us stash it in that Supercortemaggiore garage."

  "Bene," says Giulia. "Hijack the truck near Verona and get the autostrada south. I know the area well." They've reached the entrance for the autostrada, the Italian superhighway system. Giulia takes her ticket at the tollbooth and stomps on up to 140 kph.

  Now jump one hundred twenty kilometers west and six hours forward. It's dark, for one thing. But like a firefly, your disembodied eye lights things up enough to see. It's those three terrorists, huddled in their van. The van is parked on a gravel back-road, just north of the chain-link fence which seals off the autostrada. A faint smell of wine and salami.

  Beyond the fence there's a slope, the emergency apron, and then the westbound lanes. Fiats fly past, high-speed streaks of light, first white, then red. Whoooom. Whoooom. Other kinds of cars too, and trucks. Brroooooom. Brroooooom.

  Inside the van they're as tense and happy as kids on Christmas Eve.

  "OK, Peter," says Beatrice. "You better go now."

  Peter climbs out of the van. The door slams tinnily. He's dressed in black and carrying a machine gun and a walkie-talkie. He goes over to the fence, gives it a sort of shake, and a section the size of a garage door falls to the ground. They snipped it out earlier.

  Peter drags the fencing out of the way, steps through the hole and heads left, walking up the stream of westbound traffic, staying low and out of the lights. His job is to spot the truck with the reactor fuel.

  In the van, Giulia and Beatrice get ready. Giulia slips off her sweater and bra. The breasts are a bit smaller than you'd expected. But they feature perfect, jutting, baby-bottle nipples. Beatrice is impressed, and briefly reaches out to fondle Giulia.

  "You're beautiful."

  "Being beautiful isn't enough." She starts the car.

  They both get out now, Beatrice with a machine gun, Giulia with her breasts. And a brick. She's standing by the open driver's door with a brick.

  Beatrice presses her walkie-talkie to her head, waiting to hear from Peter. Crackle hiss crackle nothing crackle WHOOP!

  "HERE HE COMES!"

  Over to the left you can see a bunch of headlights coming. Giulia watches intently, then cuts on the van lights and drops the brick on the accelerator.

  The obedient vehicle stutters forward through the hole in the fence, picks up a little speed, wobbles across the emergency lane and then angles left onto the autostrada, into the oncoming traffic.

  A Ferrari fishtails around the van without slowing down. Next is a little station wagon and . . . doesn't make it. Smack into the cree-cree spark roar scub thub-thubby. DOA.

  Giulia springs out into the highway and poses near the crushed van, boobs wagging, "Help me!" At the shadowed highway edge lies Beatrice, prone markswoman. Here comes the truck.

  A shiny big truck-cab pulling two low trailers. Cool and professional, the driver glides in slow and stops in the emergency lane. He jumps out to help the half-naked woman kneeling by her van. His partner runs back to set flares.

  All unnoticed in the grass, Beatrice is talking on the walkie-talkie.

  "Hurry up, for God's sake. There's two of them. Shoot the one lighting flares. Hurry!"

  The driver, a serious, solidly built fifty-year-old; is leaning over Giulia now. Beatrice can't quite bring herself to pull the trigger. Then there's a long, loud burst of automatic weapon's fire a hundred meters to the left.

  "Got him," says Peter over the radio.

  The driver starts, turns and sprints towards his truck. Even with the shipping schedules secret, they've been expecting something like this. He realizes that he should have . . .

  Beatrice drops him just off the corner of the cab. Giulia drags her suitcases out of the crushed van. Cars are stopping on both sides of the autostrada, doors slamming, hurry hurry hurry!

  Here's Peter. He knows how to drive trucks. Beatrice scrambles into the driver's door ahead of him. Giulia hands her suitcases in the other door and comes in after. The big engine fires up and they clanklurch onto the highway.

  The truck-cab is a nice medium blue, sort of ultramarine. There's two flatbed trailers in back, each with a pyramid-stacked load under gray tarps. You can tell it's really heavy stuff, from the stiff way the trailers ride.

  It's a long way to Rome. Past Bologna, past Firenze . . . they drive all night, stopping now and then for gas and coffee, delicious greasy sandwiches and a shot of grappa as the sun goes up. Somehow the badly organized police roadblocks are all too late, or in the wrong places.

  By breakfast time, Green Death is safe in the cool concrete of the Supercortemaggiore. One of the snoids, Orali, watches the other unloading the fuel-assemblies. Rectelli's using a forklift to get the six bulky concrete boxes off the trailers. Most of the weight is just padding and shielding, but no one's quite ready to try pulling the fuel rods out.

  "We're gonna build an atomic bomb," Beatrice tells the snoid.

  "Bene."

  "Do you know how this is done?" Giulia asks Beatrice.

  "Peter knows. Don't you, Peter?"

  "No."

  Beatrice starts to say something cutting, then stops herself. "It doesn't matter really. They'll think we can build one."

  Orali shakes his head. "We got build one bomb and set off good. Then is much more for threat of second one." He rubs brisk thumb against fingers in the money gesture. He's more criminal than terrorist.

  "Look," Beatrice says, sternly addressing Peter. "I saw a TV show where any bright twelve-year-old kid can build an A-bomb if he has the . . . the radioactive stuff. Read some books, man. I say we set off the first one in St. Peter's Square on Easter."

  Giulia looks a little upset at this. "No, no. Those are simple people, good people. You must not bomb them."

  Beatrice shrugs indifferently. "We need the crowd. I'd like to see at least one thousand dead for the news."

  The last giant concrete shoebox of nuclear fuel is loaded onto the freight elevator down. Orali takes Giulia's arm.

  "Vuolsi così colà dove si puote ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare."

  "Bene," she says, flashing her sharp teeth.

  Chapter Six: The Anarchist Archimedes

>   Sybil was still in Vice-Consul Membrane's office when the bad news came in.

  "The bait worked . . . almost perfectly," Membrane announced, setting down the phone. His eyes were focused somewhere past Sybil.

  "He's dead," Sybil said flatly. "Go on and tell me."

  "No, no. He's been kidnapped by a new group called Green Death. They're the ones with the reactor fuel. We monitored the arrangements over a phone-tap. Only . . . "

  The children had finished their comics now, and were feeling hyper from all the sweets Membrane had fed them.

  "On'y whut?" shouted Ida, sticking her head out from behind Sybil's chair.

  Membrane looked genuinely embarrassed. "We . . . were too slow. They snatched him out from under us. And now . . . " He raised two trowel-like hands.

  "Now my poor husband will be forced to assemble an atomic bomb for the Green Death," Sybil spat out. "Just you wait till I tell this story to everyone. Here you've taken a simple kidnapping for money and turned it into nuclear terrorism. They'll never . . . "

  Never let him go, she had meant to say. But thinking the words brought her tears back, hot and bitter. It was no use staying here, no use listening to this shitweasel blather on about secret agreements and delicate negotiations.

  "Just shut up," Sybil said, standing. "I'm leaving. I'm going to tell this to the Herald Tribune."

  Something hard flashed in Membrane's eyes. "I wouldn't do that if I were you."

  Sybil tugged the kids out of their chairs. "Why not?"

  "If you go to the paper, then I will give them my version. I will tell them of my . . . suspicions." Membrane scratched his face, goggled at her and continued. "Sybil. I think your husband went over to the terrorists of his own free will."

  "That is such BULL!" shouted Sybil. "Let's get OUT of here, children!" She slammed the door behind her.

  A minute later she was outside the Embassy. Buttwhumper gave her a friendly salute. She nodded weakly and walked off down the sidewalk. Where to now?