1.17 An Unlawful Evasion
1.17.1 Alenby and Ada Escape PROFATPOL
On back roads between Pouzay and Chezelet
Late morning Thursday 3 April 1987
Alenby did not go straight after crossing the bridge.
He had no rational excuse for going back on the promise he'd made only a minute earlier. Possibly his confidence in his ability to evade any roadblock, his pique at Ada for failing to share that confidence, and an overdose of Paxitin had combined in a toxic brew that clouded his judgment. Whatever the reason, instead of going straight he turned right on to D18, the narrow strip of gravel that led to a near-certain confrontation with the minions of PROFATPOL.
The betrayal hit Ada like a punch in the stomach. In a sickening insight she saw the worst case playing out in the media: …with this latest indiscretion in company with a dimensionally disadvantaged playboy user whose name has not been released pending charges, Dr Lynch has written fin to what once seemed a promising career in the well conceived extension of Prohibition known as NixTwinkies, and more recently in service of the War on Substances. This is Willa t’Hellenbach in Washington. She screamed a jumble of epithets
"Do shut up," said Alenby, flipping on the stinkpot sound simulator.
The snarl of the engine brought her to her senses. Or perhaps it was the way Alenby caressed the steering wheel, with attention to every nuance of the car’s reaction to slight adjustments of direction and speed, so obviously in absolute control. It's as if he’s making love to it, she thought. She felt a searing blast of jealousy, but also a throb of guilt. How foolish she had been to commend him for his caution! She’d provoked him to demonstrate his dare-devil side, and now they were looking at disaster. She tightened her seat belt an extra notch.
They spotted the block a little less than a kilometer past the first turnoff: A black ambulance-body Citroën athwart the road, three black-uniformed figures lounging in front.
The situation called for a tight U-turn, a maneuver beyond the ordinary driver, but Alenby made it look like dulse soup: dab of acceleration, jerk of the emergency brake lever, controlled 180 skid…. In the rear-view mirror Ada glimpsed the PROFATPOL agents leaping for cover from the stones rocketing from under the Mercedes’ churning rear tweels. She saw the Citroën looming alarmingly larger, battered, windshield crumbling. At the last instant the tweels caught, and the roadblock receded in a cloud of blue smoke.
Ada heard herself laughing. I must be hysterical, snap out of it! she told herself. But it was so funny!
She snapped out of it. "Do be careful, Alenby," she cried. "They hunt in pairs—there’s the other one!"
The other black Citroën lurched on to the gravel ahead with its flashers flashing and siren braying. The driver’s eyes bulged as he strove to avoid the head-on crash. A heart-beat later the ambulance-body lay nose down in a ditch now far behind, one wheel cocked up at an odd angle, spinning idly.
"That was…magnificent," Ada breathed.
"Oh, one must give the PROFATPOL driver credit, too," said Alenby. "Chicken is like chess; its beauty is revealed through the clash of peers." He executed a 270 turn--nonchalantly, as a master chef might flip a buckwheat crêpe--to put the Mercedes on track to loop back to D18 beyond the roadblock site, and thence to L'Ile Bouchard and Chezelet.
"Yes," said Ada, "but what I find magnificent is not your driving, impressive as it is, nor your sangfroid in chicane—"
"Excuse me, that’s chicken. Not chicane, nor its more common synonym chicanery, denoting deception by artful subterfuge or sophistry, but chicken.
"Chicken," he went on, seemingly entering some kind of trance state while maintaining total control of the vehicle, "chicken is a bird that reaches its most exalted form in the patte bleue of Bresse, the notable characteristic of which paragon of poultry is that when oven-roasted in the manner of Restaurant Mail, in Bourg-en-Bresse, its skin fries in a thin layer of subcutaneous fat so that in the end its steamy flesh is encased in a friable nut-brown carapace-- This, connoisseurs of fowl find ineffably pleasing."
This encomium left Ada in a state of turmoil. If she had analyzed things calmly, she would have realized that her confusion was rooted in the conflict between her desire to grasp and gulp at every hedonistic pleasure life had to offer, and her patriotic duty to support the Green Fedoras’ current mission in the War. Now all of a sudden she wanted to eat a patte bleue, the very activity that Operation Patte Bleue was intended to suppress!
Alenby’s plummy baritone barged in, "Oh oh, there’s another PROFATPOL car tailing us. I’m afraid we’ll have to hustle…."