by Sandra Lowen

Created on: August 27, 2010

THE UNDERCROFT: Short Story

Theirs was not the catholic cause.

Guido did not want the job. He would do far better, he thought, as the driver, or the procurer. He would even rather be the one who would inform the World Press tomorrow of what five people—far less than it had taken to launch the Communist Party—had wrought.

Leon had gotten the C4; a soldier himself, he had stolen it from the convoy headed for the Armory without their knowledge. One did not need so much; half a pound, he had insisted, all too easy to strap under a coat, would go far in making their point.

Their point!

Fernando kept its parameters blurred, Guido thought purposefully, to protect them, should their scheme become known. He said they need grasp only their individual responsibilities, and that only its forgers need understand clearly the noble Cause.  Guido wished he understood it better. When he melted into the woodwork, when he went back to his ordinary life and the Cause emerged as the stalwart force to guide the people through their terror time, he would need to be erudite. And should he melt into the woodwork literally, should the C4 go off unexpectedly soon, should it vaporize him, he would need to understand why his future had ended so suddenly and without apparent reward.

The City had chosen the date. They had laughed about it being Guy Fawkes Day. “You are Guido Fox,” Portia said. Guido had never been called ‘Guy’. He had never had a nickname. Such monikers were for the children of the wealthy, not for street urchins. The shopkeepers from whom he stole with impunity, and later their spoiled daughters and their bastardized brood, had names for him, too, but they were not endearing ones.

He thought at times that he should be off; take a flight to France, or South America; it didn’t matter. His mother was long gone; off some years ago with a man they called The Gypsy, though he was by all appearances an Angle. She had done this after pledging with much weeping and lamenting over her dead husband’s coffin that she would be faithful unto death. He had not realized until she winged out the door with The Gypsy that she meant only the death of her memory of his father.

Guido remembered him as a hard-working man, coming home each evening with his hands blistered and his eyes tired. One night he had failed to get out of his chair and haul his bones up the stairs to his bed. Guido had tried in vain to shake him back to responsiveness,

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