by Jim Crace
Lix was not speaking from experience. Nor was he speaking in a voice he recognized from his wide repertoire. He was someone new and unrehearsed, the overcheerful, overcareful supplicant who wanted desperately to keep this woman at his side. His voice had softened, matching hers. He tried and didn’t quite manage to sound as uncompromisingly logical. He could feel his body change, just from being close to her, within her odor range. Close enough already to have brushed her hand with his and for their shoulders to have collided several times. He might risk a friendly parting kiss, he thought, like comrades do, but that was far more daunting than the kidnapping even. He found that he was almost dancing as he walked. He must have seemed childishly exuberant to her, to anyone who spotted him, but he’d never experienced such escalating changes in his mood and did not know how to restrain himself. His stride had lengthened and his arms were swinging loosely He let his knuckles brush her skirt, her fabric and his skin producing startling ecstasies. She didn’t seem to mind.
“Like what? What hasn’t Scholla got?” she asked. “The man’s got everything.”
“He hasn’t got a sense of humor. And he isn’t young,” Lix said. “We have. We are.”
Again, he’d earned some smiles from Freda—though he was too besotted and disarmed to glimpse in these approving and addictive smiles something he would only be able to articulate once their affair had ended and was in jagged pieces, that he could never be exactly the irresistible, magnetic target of her desires. She was the target of her own desire. She was entirely dazzled by herself. Who wouldn’t be if they were her? The most successful people are most dazzled by themselves. In seeking love, accepting it, she was polishing a mirror, all the better to see herself. The best that Lix could hope for was the opportunity to provide Freda’s arm—and her reputation for flying in the face of convention—with a compliant accessory. There were, he would have thought, less satisfying roles in life.
WHAT FREDA AND her four admirers planned over the next few weeks (once Lix had been installed on Freda’s arm, her new man-friend, her latest cobelligerent) was eventually, as Lix had hoped and engineered, far removed from honest kidnapping and shows of force. Little more than just a prank. This was not 1968. It was instead the playful year of Laxity. They were not Baader-Meinhof or the Red Brigades. Still, they could pretend they were. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? To truly play the part, to cast themselves as dangerous, but then, if it backfired, to declare themselves little more than kids, excited students overstepping the mark. Only Youth and Humor attempting politics.
They met in different bars each night, swathed by secrecy and smoke, huddled around their glasses and their cups like five improbable bullion robbers, to finalize their tactics, fired up by cigarettes and alcohol. They were as furtive as possible and theatrically well behaved in public. They never spoke about their “mission” on the phone. They had code words: “the posse” and “the prey.” They took no notes. They kept no minutes of their meetings. They had to memorize their allocated roles, their spoken lines, their stage directions. They were the antiheroes in a film and like the antiheroes in a film they felt adorable. Excitement made them better-looking than they’d ever been before, and better students, actually
The language student’s task, in this unlikely plot, was to “look absolutely safe” in her disguise (which meant, in her case, no boots and jeans, no hand-rolled cigarettes, no sappho-sappho shirt, but the camouflage of glasses, makeup, and a stage wig) and then to stop the chairman as he passed the rank of recessed external elevators in the narrowest part of the campus concourse on his way to his foundation stone and his brief duty with a trowel. All dignitaries walked that route; it was the only one not begging for repairs, the only one with winter flower beds and murals, and—perfectly, for RoCoCo’s purposes—the only one where visitors would have to walk in single file.
Now for the simple sting. The vanity hook. She’d ask Marin Scholla to sign a copy of his “inspirational” autobiography, Trade Winds, with its front jacket photograph of the chairman on the deck of his ostentatious sloop, also called Trade Winds. Her line was this: “Fantastic book, Mr. Scholla! Truly fascinating. Can you sign it for me?”
It was easy to disarm such men with unwarranted flattery. If a young woman praises a businessman for his creativity, applauds a writer for his cooking or his sporting skills, congratulates a politician for his sense of humor or a banker for his figure, then she has immediate command of his attention. It seldom fails. The chairman would be charmed and startled. (None of the reviews had praised his book, after all. They’d judged it dull and self serving—and overpriced.) The chairman’s open hand would flick up by his cheek. He’d wave his fingers until an acolyte produced a fancy pen. And the language student would request a timestalling dedication to a person with a name not easy to spell. “For Alicja Lesniak,” Freda had suggested. Her private joke. A recent foe.
The two heavy anarchists from Human Biology (also disguised and “absolutely safe”—they’d even promised to sacrifice their beards and put on the jackets they’d reserved for Graduation Day) would then join the sycophantic line of book lovers, holding further copies of Trade Winds (which as a matter of principle, they said, they’d steal, not buy, from the academic store). When their turn came for signatures, while they fumbled with pages and their pens, their cameras even, toadying to the chairman with their thanks for his insights and his philanthropy, the linguist would step back to call the service elevator—not already in use, knock wood—and hold open the door.
A simple plan: The posse makes its understated contact with the prey.
Now came the part that nearly always works with startling simplicity in films but where they’d most likely fail, where Lix at least was hoping they would fail. The flattered chairman, concentrating on the frontispiece of his own book, would be a meter from the open elevator. Two steps, two shoulders, two liters of good luck, and he’d be bundled into the metal box by his weighty, grateful readers. Every author’s fantasy. His retinue of beefy businessmen and handlers might well have time to see they had been tricked and thrust their polished boots between the closing doors. The elevator might not oblige and come when summoned. The chairman might be nimbler than he looked. If he was, if they could not persuade him through the elevator doors, then all RoCoCo had to do was shrug the whole thing off. Exuberance. Misplaced excitement at the man’s philanthropy, the prospect of his palace of the arts. An author should expect the rough-and-tumble of his fans, et cetera. They’d only meant to take the great man for a drink. A student stunt, that’s all.
If the doors were quicker than the boots, then Marin Scholla would be safely theirs. There were no basement stairs on that side of the building. So no one could give chase. One floor down, five seconds later, and they’d be in the utility corridor, amongst the heating pipes and generator leads, the cobwebs and the underpowered bulbs, the cleaning trolleys and the laundry rolls, the smell of leakages and paint. Film noir.
The kidnappers had timed and measured their escape. A foretaste of the fun they’d have. Rehearsals are more fun than true performances. Forty paces to the right, past storage and the boiler room, the ground staff’s kitchen, would lead them to an exit door. They’d pin a careful statement to the door, signed by their noms de guerre, Lix’s adolescent sobriquet of “Smudge” and once again the name “Alicja,” which outlined their grievances against MeisterCorps but guaranteed safekeeping for the missing millionaire and promised his release once he’d been “entertained.” “You’ll have him back in time for dinner,” they’d write in the hope that this would be enough to dissuade his handlers from calling in the police.
Beyond the doorway, in the parking bay, the latest lovers in their hired van would be waiting for delivery.
LIX AND FREDA WANTED Scholla to themselves, of course, a private accessory to their new affair and its total consummation later on that day. It would not be wise, they argued, she insisted, for their three and by now (despite the wigs and graduation suits)
possibly identified accomplices to join them in the van for their escape once the chairman was in their hands, no matter how “absolutely safe” they looked. If the police were summoned and they were quick enough and had the gumption to search vehicles for the city’s newly missing guest, then they’d be looking first for two large students and an unassuming shorthaired girl (and one, with any luck, they believed was called Alicja).
Freda and Lix, however, were unknown faces so far, and could more safely complete the last leg of the kidnapping on their own, an innocent young couple, not short, not overweight, with nothing odd about their van except (as you’d expect) the blaring music on their radio-cassette. They’d chosen Weather Report for their escape. A stylish touch, for what kidnapper ever draws attention to himself with raucous, horny jazz? This was during the year of the Melt, remember. In a recent immoderation meant to make the streets more jubilant, many drivers keen to prove their solidarity played their music loud through open windows. Something for pedestrians. Freedom was Amplification in those expressive days. Noise could hide a multitude of sins.
They’d blindfold Marin Scholla as soon as they had slammed the van’s rear doors and sent their three comrades off on foot, in three directions. They’d tape his mouth if it was necessary. Be practical, they told themselves. A man like that was bound to make a noise if given half a chance. He’d call for help, perhaps, but not be heard. The panels of the van were triple-clad, metal, wood, and fabric lining. Weather Report would drown him out. If he struggled while Lix was driving off, then Freda would cope. She was a tall and healthy woman after all, and Marin Scholla was a man in his late seventies and as weak as a blown egg, by all accounts. He wore a hearing aid. He used a walking stick. He’d had a minor stroke. His bones would be like breadsticks. Freda could probably knock him over with her earrings.
Within a moment of accepting their delivery, the lovers would be circling the park with its yearlong revelers on Navigation Island, driving sensibly once they had crossed the river (by the perfectly named Deliverance Bridge) into the old city, their music slowly muted, just one more unremarkable vehicle in the mid-afternoon rush-hour lines. Then they could proceed on the quieter bankside roads until they reached the little Arts Laboratory on the wharf.
Lix had arranged an exclusive matinee performance for his elderly charge. An outing to the theater was never wasted time, especially for a man who, two years previously, had bought the Boston Playhouse, demolished it, and built an arcade. The four surviving and determined members of the Street Beat Renegades, the agitprop group that had so consumed him during his first terms at the academy, would be waiting with their stilts, their light and smoke machines, and their accordions, and with a tripod camera, ready to begin the old man’s entertainment: Meister Scholla’s Dirty Dollars, their hurriedly improvised morality play in the medieval style, based on the fable of the Fat Man and the Cat, with Sin and Virtue unambiguously portrayed for their dullwitted audience of one, and dollars denoted by a bowl of cream (and cream represented on the stage by half a liter of white distemper). They’d give him Music, Tumbling, and Dance. Stiltwalking and Puppetry by “members of the cast.” The script? By Felix Dern himself. Forty minutes (mostly mimed, as Scholla only spoke American). No interval.
Theirs would be an alliance, then, of stage and campus, the intellect and the imagination, politics and pleasure, hope and desire. “Silence for the comrades, please!” RoCoCo Renegades.
How could the chairman not be charmed? Marin Scholla would not truly be their “captive,” after all, and not their “prey,” but just their involuntary guest and only for the afternoon. Was that unreasonable? They’d turn him loose as soon as it was dark, outside the zoo where city vagrants gathered for their soup each night—another clever touch, they thought. They’d make him eat some soup. They’d take a photograph for the press and for their own scrapbooks: the animals, the dispossessed, the humbled businessman, the steaming bowls. Then he could get a taxi back to his ostentatious hotel in time for dinner. No damage done—except perhaps the blunting of his appetite for soup, and bruises on his backside from forty minutes on a wooden chair. Otherwise no harm could come of it.
The RoCoCo Renegades hung on, then, to this colossal self delusion and the courage it provided them: Marin Scholla would be charmed by them, their nerve, their play, their youth, their sincerity, and he would shrug the matter off as he might shrug off the peccadilloes of his own three sons, none of them (according to the gossip press) exactly beyond reproach. Better he’d had children who engaged in politics, who had their say, than those three party animals with their unfastened ways.
The nine conspirators could imagine him, back home in Boston in a week or two, recounting his experiences on a television talk show: “These young people taught me something valuable that I might never have realized otherwise. And I am grateful to them for it.” Studio applause.
So Marin Scholla had been transformed in their imaginations before they’d even laid an eye or hand on him. The more they pictured him, delivered into their brief care, the more they redefined him as a sort of willing guest, an eager volunteer in their debate about the future of their city and the world. At best, they were the sons and daughters he’d never have. They were his natural heirs. At worst, RoCoCo and the Renegades would have provided him an interesting and an improving interlude that he would want to think about, digest, and not dismiss completely. No worse than that. No need for police or any prosecutions, then. He was endowing an arts complex, after all. And what was this but art? A happening. An offspring of the Melt. They’d make him understand before release, before they delivered him into the backseat of his taxi, that theirs had only been a bit of heartfelt fun. Where would we be without the creeds and dogmas of the young?
“FOUR MORE DAYS until our first anniversary,” Freda reminded Lix, reaching forward from the back of their hired van to rub the side of his best cheek. “A month! I haven’t stayed with anyone this long before. What shall we do to celebrate? What would you like to do?” She beat out the remaining days, with playful toughness and her knuckles, on the bony lump behind his ear. “One. Two. Three. And then you’re in my record book.”
“That can only hurt.”
“I like to hurt you.” She pressed her face against Lix’s and blew into his ear. He’d suffered her lips, her knuckles, and her fingertips that day, bruising indicators—or so he’d found in those four weeks—that Freda was feeling anxious rather than amorous, despite the promise of her words.
For once she liked the way he’d dressed. He’d dressed for the occasion. The linen scarf tied at the throat had been her choice, her first and only gift for him. It made him look a touch more dangerous and jaunty than usual, more like the Czech she’d so often fantasized about, more like the kidnapper he’d prove to be within the hour. An ear of cloth stuck out beneath his chin like the blue touch paper of a firework, hoping to be lit. If things went well with Scholla, she’d light this lover up herself later, release the chairman at the zoo, and then release her lover’s linen scarf, release him from his trousers and his shirt, release herself from all the prospects and the tensions of the day, with kiss and punch and stroke.
Freda was captivated by Lix. Her feelings were not insincere, though she’d deny it for the most part of her life. She was not captivated by his looks. Nor by his questionable energy. But by his fear and reticence, which she mistook for the saintly attribute of patriots and revolutionaries like Nyerere, Cezar, and Mandela, a kind of granite sweetness which showed no malice and no alarm, which never raised its voice without good cause. He had what she would never have, she thought, the Gift of Sympathy.
He loved her, of course, like everybody else, though love like his defied analysis. To contemplate it was to stare into a maze and volunteer to lose yourself. It was uncharted, inexplicable. He loved her with a perseverance and an abandon that would startle anyone who knows him now. He’d take the maddest risks for her, he could persuade himself, eat glass and fire, walk on coals, obey
, obey. She was his driving force. This kidnapping would mark the proof and climax of their love.
She tugged his kerchief ears and said again, “Come on then, say. What would you like to do, Comrade Felix Dern? To celebrate our thirty-one days?”
He’d like, he thought, to spend the day in bed with her; he’d like, indeed, to put their madcap plan on hold and, instead, clamber right then, at once, into the metal-ribbed and windowless asylum of the van’s carcass to seek out something fresh and new with her, one of those many deeds he’d heard about and seen in films and read about in American novels and even simulated on the stage but not yet tried.
What shall we do to celebrate? he asked himself. Let’s soixante-neuf. Let’s see what sex is like for colonizing tongues and lips. Let’s snuffle in between each other’s legs.
Or bondage possibly. Some blindfolds and a gag, the ones they’d set aside for Marin Scholla should he prove to be a problem, would be irresistible on Freda. Not that Lix had much appetite for deviations of that kind, and never would, but his four weeks with her had been appallingly frustrating. Sometimes it seemed she loved him with her fingernails and teeth, but little else. And so his imagination had been running wild. They’d not had any intercourse so far in which he had felt free to give expression to himself. Not proper intercourse. If proper is the proper word. Penetration was “for men,” she’d said, and though they’d consummated their relationship in the legal sense, penetration had become either his last and unencouraged port of call, allowed when she’d lost interest anyway, or just a station to the cross of Freda’s pleasure, the cross he had to bear. What bodily encounters they had regularly indulged in—mutual masturbation mostly, and oral sex, unreciprocated—served her “right to orgasm,” she said. She’d not be used by any man. For militants like her, “the front line is the bed.” Lix understood how right she was. He understood and sympathized until those moments when his brains went south and he required and hoped—just once—to be in charge of her.
