We came around a long curve outside Fairfax, blue-green meadows on either side of us, a suggestion of violet mountains on the horizon behind us. Gentle, tall horses, bay and chestnut and roan, grazed near the highway. Traffic was sparse; it was a Wednesday, early afternoon of a warm September. FLAGGER AHEAD, said the orange signboard.
      "Wouldn't you know," I said to Marta. "They're always tearing up something."
      She didn't answer -- just reached across to squeeze the hand I had already lifted to the shift lever, ready to stop. She knew what I was really thinking.
      "It's okay," I said.
      "Your hand is sweaty."
      "I know. Just a reflex."
      She gave the hand one last bit of pressure, then let go. I felt the coolness where her touch had been.
      "Don't lose your temper," Marta said. "Don't make things worse."
      The road made one last slalom, left then right, and we could see the flagger for the first time.
      "It's a woman," Marta said.
      I brought the car to a stop twenty or twenty-five feet short of where she stood with the red octagon towering above her. She motioned me forward -- a delicate woman, with short blonde hair and even features in a small, round face. A brush of sunburn over the bridge of her nose. Red bandana, faded work shirt, jeans too large for her. She was alone; no work party, no road machinery. A pretty young woman in a pretty setting.
      I coasted alongside, rolled down the window. "Nice day for it," I said.
      The young woman bent forward to look across me at Marta.
      "Hi," Marta said.
      "Hi." The woman gave her attention back to me. "Where you headed?"
      "D.C.," I said.
      "Government?"
      "No, no. Just a couple of days off. Thought we'd do the zoo, a museum or two, maybe a concert."
      "Staying at a hotel?"
      "No," I said. "Friends."
      "In Georgetown," Marta said.
      A half-smile touched the woman's face. She stepped away from the car and gestured for us to go on.
      "There's another flag stop about a mile this side of Falls Church," she said. "Name's David. Tell him I passed you through."
      "Thank you," I said. I pushed the shift lever into first gear. "What do they call you?"
      "Patsy," she said. "My name's Patsy."
      She gave us a little salute and a twirl of the signpost. Marta and I both waved as we left her behind us. Marta half-turned in the seat and watched Patsy out the back window.
      "What's she doing?" I said.
      "She's got a hand CB. She's talking to somebody."
      "Damn it all," I said. I jerked the gearshift into second. "Damn it, damn it, damn it."
      You never knew what to expect. The authorities -- you always assumed there were "authorities" -- printed up weekly lists of safe enclaves, but the flaggers were like ghosts, like the guerrilla fighters in Nam or Salvador or South Africa: what was safe on Sunday was a red zone by Tuesday. You made your plans and you took your chances. If you were smart, usually you made out all right. If you were foolish, you hoped you'd be lucky. #

We came over a shallow hill, the car bumping across the broken cement of the Interstate, and let ourselves be funneled by black and yellow temporary barriers into the breakdown lane. From a half-mile off we could see David, almost as tall as his sign, facing us with his legs planted well apart. Defiant.
      "Don't fuss," Marta said.
      "I won't. But it gripes the hell out of me, how arrogant they're getting. You can almost see the Monument from here."
      "They could be a real repair crew."
      "Oh, sure," I said. "And I'm Santa Claus."
      David stepped back to the end of the barrier and motioned me to stop beside him. Other men were hanging out nearby -- a rough lot, with beards and filthy dungarees, a few with stained fatigues, baseball caps. Some of them might have been deserters; even convicts. You heard a lot of stories. Still no sign of construction equipment.
      "No shovels," I said. "Not even a pile of gravel for show."
      "Hush," Marta said.
      David had lowered himself to a squatting position, his left hand high on the pole. He might have been thirty-five -- perfectly capable of holding a job. And brawny. Shoulders like an ox.
      "Where you coming from?" he said.
      Very bad teeth.
      "Warrenton."
      He tipped his head to study Marta. "That your wife?"
      "Yes."
      "What do you call her?"
      "Marta."
      He pondered. "Classy name," he said finally.
      Marta smiled and looked away.
      "Patsy sent us through," I said. "She said we should tell you that."
      "Patsy's my niece," David said. "Nice-looking girl."
      "Yes, indeed."
      "Lovely," Marta said.
      "Damn right."
      He took off his cap. It was sweat-stained and dusty, black with a faded orange bill -- Orioles? -- and wiped his brow with his forearm. Receding hairline. Freckled scalp.
      "Nice automobile," he said. "What's the make?"
      "Mercedes," I said.
      He nodded. "Fancy foreign job."
      "I don't own it, actually," I said.
      He gave me a curious look. "You steal it?"
      "Lease," I said. "I'm just leasing it."
      David stood up, let the sign fall to the road in back of him, and walked slowly around the car. He rested his foot on the front bumper and put his full weight on it; the front end dipped and came back up slowly. He finished his circuit and knelt at my window.
      "Good shocks," he said. "This a diesel?"
      "Yes."
      "Six-cylinder?"
      "Five."
      The number seemed to startle him. "You sure?" he said. "Five?"
      "That's what it's got," I said.
      David nodded, surveying the car, thoughtful. I wondered what he would do. What they would do. Now he was up again, looking in at the back seat.
      "What's that leather case?"
      "Camera."
      "Let's have a look-see."
      My impulse was to object, to refuse, but Marta had already reached back for the camera case and was handing it across me.
      "Much obliged, Mrs Mercedes," David said. He snapped open the case and flopped the cover back. "Japanese," he said. "Very swanky." He put the view-finder up to his eye and took a couple of steps backward. "Say 'surplus,'" he said, and clicked the shutter.
      Marta leaned close to me. "We're at mile-marker seven," she whispered. "We can tell the police exactly where to look for them."
      I shook my head. Don't kid yourself, is what I wanted to say. David had made another step back from the car and taken a second picture.
      "I wonder if you folks would mind getting out of the car," he said. The camera was poised at the level of his chest. "I think some of the boys here would appreciate being snapped in the company of such classy people."
      "I don't know," I said. "We don't want to be late for dinner with our friends."
      "We'd count it a considerable favor," David said. "Get out."
      I slipped the ignition key into my jacket pocket as I left the car. Marta got out on the other side and walked around the back to stand beside me. A couple of the other "workmen" had come up to the car, and now they stood on either side of us while David aimed the camera.
      "These two friends of mine are Morley and Chris," he said. The shutter clicked and clicked again. One of the features of the camera is automatic advance, driven by a solar battery. "Gentlemen, this is Mr and Mrs Mercedes, on their way to our nation's capital to see a show and feed their faces."
      I thought the men looked embarrassed; they nodded to us, but kept their hands in their blue-denim pockets.
      "Morley," David said, "why don't you move that automobile? It sort of overwhelms these little candids."
      Morley sat in the driver's seat.
      "What do you fork out nowadays to lease a brand-spanking-new five-cylinder-diesel Mercedes see-dan?" David said. "I ask purely for information."
      "Six-twenty a month," I told him. "That's plus insurance."
      David grinned. "You be careful of this machine, Morley. It be somewhat beyond your means."
      "He's hid the ignition key," Morley said.
      David snapped the leather case closed over the camera and hung it by its carrying strap over the car's outside mirror. "Give the man the key," he told me.
      Marta had taken my arm; I felt the anxious pressure of her hands, and I knew how frightened she was -- not for herself, but for me. I got the key out of my pocket and handed it into the car.
      "Our house keys are on that ring," I said. But what I was thinking was: What's the point? You work hard all your life, you save and invest, you begin to own the things you've always wanted, and then what? Along comes somebody -- a David, a Morley, a nameless welfare type -- and takes it away.
      "We don't want the house keys," David said. "You'll get them back." He gestured at Morley, who started up the Mercedes and pulled it off the highway into the nearby meadow.
      "Why don't you two make yourselves comfortable over there," David said. He indicated a patch of grass on the opposite side of the road. "We won't keep you long."
      "What are you going to do to us?" Marta asked.
      David smiled. "Nothing more to you than you always did to us," he said. "Don't you worry yourself."

#

They had a tow truck and a stake truck with a tarp over the back of it, and they began by siphoning the fuel out of the Mercedes tank into five-gallon cans. While that was going on, Morley and a couple of other men jacked the car up and set the frame on cement blocks. David was overseeing the jobs; no question that he was the leader of the flaggers.
      I knew they were going to steal everything they could, and I also knew no one else would come along to interrupt them. Patsy would stop everyone at her roadblock and send them on a long detour around us. Marta and I couldn't do anything but watch, and listen to rock music blasting at top volume out of a boom-box perched on a fender of the tow truck.
      David came back to us, apparently satisfied that the work was properly under way. He dropped the key ring into my hand and sat down next to me with a heavy sigh. He smelled of tobacco, and of sweat that had gone rancid. People were inside the car now, stripping the leather upholstery. Outside, two of the wheels were off and loaded onto the stake truck with the cans of diesel fuel. Two women were removing pieces of chrome.
      "You know," David said, "I remember when cars had hubcaps, or if they didn't have hubcaps they had wheel covers. I used to walk the ditches back home in West Virginia, looking for those big chrome-plated dishes to sell. I had a display next to my garage taller than I was and wider than a good-sized barn. I'll tell you: It was a pretty sight." He took a cigarette out of a crushed pack and struck a wooden match against the bottom of his shoe. "All that chrome, shiny in the sunlight. You could see it from miles off."
      "This car has mags," I said. All four wheels and the spare were already off the car. "Standard."
      "Know a fellow who reclaims it," David said. "The magnesium metal. Don't ask me how."
      "What do you do with the leather?"
      "Gloves," he said. "Something you can't do with vinyl. Vinyl gets used for jackets, boots. Too stiff for gloves."
      "That makes sense," I said. And it did. It wasn't that I was beginning to approve of what these outcasts were doing to a material possession of my own, but that the logic of it, and the sheer efficiency, was something you had to admire. They had the hood off the car by now; they'd disconnected the hoses and wiring harnesses, and unfastened bolts and mounts, and now they'd wrapped a chain around the engine. The tow truck was winching the diesel out of the car.
      "What will you do with that?" I said.
      "That five-cylinder beauty?" David scratched his head and resettled the Orioles cap so that the bill was almost down to his nose. "I expect that'll be the makings of a generator somewhere." He tipped his head and looked sidelong at Marta and me. "If there's some particular thing off that machine you'd like to keep for yourself," he said, "you just speak up."
      I looked at Marta; she shook her head. "I wouldn't mind keeping the hood ornament," I said. "A little souvenir."
      David grinned. "You got it," he said.
      He got up and ambled into the meadow where the Mercedes hood lay. A young woman was unscrewing the grille from the sheet metal. We watched him remove the star emblem with a quick twist of his wrist.
      "At least we saved something," I said.
      "Don't blame yourself," Marta said. "Who knows what these hoodlums would have done to you if you'd tried to stand up to them."
      David's shadow fell across us then, and I wasn't able to tell her that I was less concerned about myself than about her. He handed me the Mercedes emblem, the little spring that held it in the shell of the radiator grille still dangling from it. "There you go," he said.
      "Thanks."
      He didn't resume his seat beside me. Instead he pointed toward the city and with his other hand motioned for us to stand up. "About a mile and a half past that rise," he said. "That's all the farther you'll have to walk to find transportation. I doubt you'll even miss your show."

#

I tell this story at the club, and at parties where politics is a topic, and everyone agrees we were fortunate. The car was covered by the insurance. The trauma of the whole adventure was something Marta and I were emotionally strong enough to take in stride, and we never even bothered with therapy. Marta had the radiator emblem made into a pendant; she wears it with her black sweater and calls it her lucky star.
      We've learned lessons, of course. We drive a Chevy now, stripped -- no radio, no tape deck, no fancy sport package. We bought one of the cheaper Polaroids for vacation snapshots. For a while, I kept a revolver -- a Smith & Wesson .32 -- in the glove compartment, but I stopped after that fellow from Baltimore was shot with his own gun at a roadblock outside Philadelphia.
      The people who robbed us -- David and Morley and Patsy and all that flagger crowd -- they got clean away, of course. The authorities found the Mercedes, what was left of it, in the field where it was dismantled. The final blow was that somebody had set fire to it, so you couldn't even imagine how beautiful it had been once upon a time with its saddle leather and its burled-walnut dash and its dazzling champagne-metallic paintwork. What a shame that nobody nowadays appreciates the real value of a car like that.

Published in Isaac Azimov's Science Fiction Magazine

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