The Straw Men

by Marshall, Michael

  Zandt sat, staring at the reproduced pictures of the dead girls. His mind seemed to revolve faster and faster, mixing the facts in front of him in with the ones he had internalized two years before. The places, the names, the faces. He tried to see it all as one, removing only his own family and daughter, who he was now convinced had only been chosen as a lesson to him. Zandt had tried removing Karen from the equation before, but had never been able to. An awareness of her disappearance had coloured everything he had thought and done from the moment he and Jennifer found the note outside their door. But now he substituted her with the girls in the new files, trying to sense whether they were connected by anything other than speculation. Trying to reach out from the place where he was headed, where he had lived most of his life, the strange city of dream-makers, of poverty and test screenings and murder and money—to other places, other nights, other hunting grounds. To other cities, other machines, forests of buildings and rivers of concrete where other men and women missed the stars at night and tended small plants on window sills and kept tiny dogs to take for walks along corridors in the endless procession of boxes and intersections and lights; where they rented space in other people's property so they had somewhere to sleep so they could get up and perform profit-related tasks they neither understood nor cared about, simply so they would be given the tokens of exchange they needed in order to rent the space in which they slept and snarled and watched television until finally some of them slipped out of their windows and ran howling down the dark streets, throwing off a numbness handed down from a society that was itself trapped in fracture and betrayal and despair; the lonely insane in a culture turning into a Christmas bauble, gaudy beauty wrapped around an emptiness which was coalescing faster and faster into parking lots and malls and waiting areas and virtual chatrooms—non-places where nobody knew anything about anybody any more. Abruptly the whirling stopped.

  Chapter 27

  It was growing dark by the time we got back to the hotel room. There were two messages for Bobby. While he called people back I turned the TV on with the sound muted, watched the local news channel out of a grim interest in seeing how long it took the story to break. The chances were that there would have been hikers in earshot, who would eventually find the bodies. Though there was nothing to tie us to the event, I wanted us out of Hunter's Rock fast.

  I walked quickly round the room, packing up my few bits and pieces.

  'Christ,' Bobby said, his voice harsh and strange. I turned to see him still on the phone. 'Turn the television on.'

  'It is on.'

  'Not local shit. CNN or something.'

  I flipped through the channels until I found it.

  The footage was hand-held and shaky. A big grey building in some urban environment. A school. It had obviously been filmed earlier in the day, because it was still light.

  'We got it,' Bobby said into the phone. 'I'll call you back.'

  I flipped the mute off, and we listened as the voice-over put the death toll at thirty-two, with many still missing and half the building still unsearched. It was unclear whether the two pupils shot by police had been solely responsible for the atrocity, or whether a third individual had been involved. Rifles and a large home-made incendiary device had been involved.

  The camera roved around the devastation, catching glimpses of knots of children and teachers, faces shocked white in the lamp glare. The ambient sound was down in the mix, but you could still hear the sirens and sobbing. A woman staggered past, supported on both sides by paramedics, her face entirely covered in blood.

  'Where is this?'

  'Evanston, Maine.' Bobby closed his eyes.

  The TV cut to live footage. The scene was calmer now, all but a few bystanders held back from the school by incident tape. A man in a tan coat held a microphone, flicker-lit by blue flashing lights. Two additional bodies had been found. Jane Mathews and Frances Lack, both eleven years of age.

  Back to earlier footage. Fire trucks, ambulances. Wounded people, both children and adults, lying on the ground, being attended to. Others on the ground with no one holding their hand. People to whom no one could make a difference any more.

  'Holy fuck,' I said, pointing at the screen. The camera panned along the street opposite the school, at people standing watching the gate to hell that had been opened. Amongst them was a tall blond man with a large shoulder bag, caught from behind. Unusually, he was not craning to get a better view, like everyone around him, but was standing calm and still. The cameraman didn't notice him, and passed on along the line, a slow pan of appalled shock.

  'I've seen that guy before,' I said.

  A blond man, at The Halls, with a blue shoulder bag.

  •••

  Bobby spent a chunk of the flight on the phone. I overheard him talking to three different people, arranging for tapes to be couriered to Dyersburg airport. Then he sat quiet and stared into his complimentary coffee for a while.

  I looked at him. 'They're sure it's just these kids?'

  'Their homes are being turned upside down as we speak, but nothing's come up so far. Isn't some global hatred thing this time. This was the handiwork of two well-adjusted young Americans, so far as anyone can tell. The mood in general is not buoyant.'

  I could believe this. The atmosphere among the other travellers was subdued, and even the pilot's 'Well, here we are on board' speech had been extremely muted.

  'I didn't hear you telling anyone about what happened to us today.'

  He laughed harshly. 'Right. 'Hey, we just killed a couple guys in the woods, and when we got back to the hotel this friend of mine saw another guy on TV he thinks he recognizes'? This is not high concept, Ward, and you are not exactly remembered fondly. The Agency's cleaned itself up a little, my friend. They'd throw me out even more happily than they did you.

  'They didn't throw me out. I walked.'

  'One step ahead of a polygraph subpoena.'

  'Whatever,' I snapped. 'Bobby, that was the guy.'

  'You said you barely saw him up there. You admitted you didn't see his face.'

  'I know. But it was him.'

  'I believe you,' he said, and suddenly he looked serious. 'Weird thing, I thought I knew him, too.'

  'What? Where from?'

  'Don't know. Christ, by the time I saw what you were pointing at he was gone. But there was something familiar about him.'

  It was dark by the time we landed. The car I'd left in the airport lot was gone, presumably retrieved by its rental firm. Bobby went to the other desk and got us a new vehicle. All they had was a very large Ford. I fetched it from their lot and swung around to wait by the main exit.

  Bobby eventually came out of the terminal with a small box under his arm.

  'Cool,' he said tersely, as he climbed in the front. 'Room for the kids and a whole week's shopping. Let's go find us a Publix.'

  'Least we can sleep in it if we have to.'

  'I'm not even going to think about that.'

  'You're getting soft, soldier.'

  'Yes I am, and that means I don't have to eat broccoli any more, to paraphrase an esteemed former president.'

  'Esteemed by whom?'

  'His mother.'

  Bobby still had the keys to the room he'd taken at the Sacagawea. After checking that it didn't seem to be occupied by anybody else, he went off to negotiate with the management.

  I hunted down a couple of cans of iced tea and then let myself back into the room. It brought to mind long-ago vacations even more strongly than the pool at the motel outside Hunter's Rock. Fifty or more years of people briefly inhabiting the same space, camping out in the middle of a journey. The chair I sat in could once have held someone watching Gilligan's Island broadcast for the first time, to whom the tune was not a hot-wired piece of race memory. One day someone else might sit there, in their silicon-enhanced space-clothes sipping a no-sugar, no-caffeine, no-flavour moon drink, and think the same thing of Friends: 'Hey—look at all the skinny people. And what was the de
al with the hair?'

  Bobby returned with a massive VCR under his arm.

  'Old fool hadn't even noticed I'd left,' he said. 'Though he was sharp enough over a deposit for this piece of archaeology. I think you may actually have to wind it up.'

  Once the machine was connected to the room's near-collectible television, Bobby perched on the end of the bed and ripped open the package he'd picked up at the airport. Inside were a couple of VHS tapes. He quickly checked the labels, and stuck one of them inside the machine.

  'This is unedited,' he explained, as he pressed the PLAY button. 'Viewer discretion is advised.'

  The cameraman had arrived at the scene of the school bombing very soon after the initial explosion. In most of America's big cities there's a market for freelance news crews, two-person units who roam the city like ownerless dogs. They scan official radio bands and often get to the jumpers and pileups and bullet-scarred bars ahead of the cops, in search of freak-show footage to help the networks and cable channels fulfil their ever-expanding screen-minute quota. Something about the quality of the camerawork suggested this kind of provenance, though I could have been wrong. Confronted with these scenes it's possible my own hands wouldn't have been too steady either. When you see atrocities on television it's easy to forget that—in spite of the impression of verity—the news has already been sanitized for our protection. We watch people standing round mass graves in Bosnia and the rough-and-ready quality of the footage helps us forget that we're not being shown what's inside, or what those dusty fragments mean to the people who are actually there, rather than watching safely through a thick piece of glass in a living room on the other side of the world. Even the wall-to-wall coverage of the World Trade Center horror steered clear of showing us what the emergency services saw. We're so used to being edited, so infected with the sleight of hand of the media, that we're more aware of what's been added than of what has been taken away. It doesn't matter how many 'making of advertumentaries we watch, the latex monster will still scare us in context: and when watching the news we do not question why the pan ended at a particular moment, what was splattered across the frame we did not see. It's soft-core news, set up without the money shot. We're allowed to hear the screams, but at an acceptable and contextualized volume—all the while listening to a voice whose sombre outrage is in itself a kind of reassurance. 'This is wrong,' the voice implicitly tell us. 'This is bad. But it is rare, and it will be made better. This will pass, and in the end it will all be okay.'

  This video had no voice-over. No cuts had been made. It said nothing. It merely showed.

  The single explosion had ripped the front off of a squat, two-storey municipal building. In doing so it had sent tons of concrete, glass and metal flying out from a central point at very high speeds. These materials had interacted with others of their kind, and also with much softer substances. A great deal of this material had been blown clear to rain down outside. When the cameraman arrived—along with a sound technician whose appalled exclamations were audible at regular intervals—he had simply stumbled through the parking lot in front of the school, taking a curved path through the devastation. Occasionally he had whip-panned across to the outbuilding to his right, or to the other side of the lot as the police and ambulances began to arrive. But for the most part the camera merely recorded what was in front of its lens.

  A girl who was apparently unaware of the fact she had lost an arm, and was running, screaming out someone's name. Parts of bodies, and heads. A young boy whose face was so covered in blood that he looked newborn, wandering through the smoke making a mewling sound. A long stretch of chunks of flesh, like a giant pile of bloody vomit, with a few identifiable features and body parts spread amongst it. Most of an older man, lying on the ground and twitching, all of his facial features burnt away and nothing left except a pink mass where a hole gaped in mute purposelessness. Half of an attractive young woman, her eyes open, nothing below the rib cage except a stump of spine and the hood of the car she had landed on.

  Gradually the quality of the background sound began to change, as the most urgent screams died out and the sobbing and shouting climbed in volume to take its place. Slowly a semblance of order began to affect the people in the camera's gaze. Aimless movement was replaced by more directed activity, as society's white blood cells moved in and tried to impose a structure. Some of these men and women moved with purpose: pointing, shouting, bandaging. Others might as well have been victims themselves.

  And then we saw him.

  By this point the news crew had seen enough of the hardcore, and had gravitated out toward where the parking lot fed into an accessway onto the street. The soundman had been sick twice, the cameraman once. The crowd opposite the entrance to the lot had not yet had time to gather, but incident tape was already going up, fencing the event out of our reality, consigning it to exceptional circumstances.

  The man was already there, however, standing more or less where I had spotted him earlier. Tall, with short blond hair, standing with his feet planted solidly on the ground. Looking out over the devastation, gazing up at the plume of smoke generated by a fire that at this point was nowhere near under control. Bobby hit PAUSE.

  The man was not smiling. I don't want to give that impression. The picture jumped all over the place, and it was impossible to make out the detail of his face. He was merely watching.

  Neither of us said anything. Bobby reached for his iced tea, tried to take a swig from it, realized he hadn't popped the can. He did so; swallowed half of it.

  'Okay,' he said quietly. 'The rest is a long shot.' He ejected the tape, unconsciously handling it as if it might be contaminated. He stuck the other tape in the machine and pressed PLAY.

  'Got this from one of the technicians in media analysis,' he said. 'It's for internal consumption, a reminder to people in Washington. A marketing tool. Footage of certain things that have happened in the last ten-fifteen years, continually updated.'

  The first sequence showed material I recognized quickly, having been exposed to it in short doses for much of the last week. It was the aftermath of the shooting in England. The lighting was harsh, early-morning glare. The camera was rock steady, presumably the work of some well-trained BBC guy. Clumps of people holding each other. Medics clustered around a door from which bodies were carried, some covered in sheets, others merely in blood. A couple of other well-behaved news crews. A ring of policemen around the intersection of two busy roads. There was little shouting or crying. The main sound was of traffic going past: people late for meetings, coming back from the gym, on their way to deliver litres of Diet Coke.

  We didn't have to wait for long, but the shot was blurred and inconclusive. A pan across the chain fence, from the inside, showing people gathering outside. Amongst them a tall man, with fair hair. Bobby froze the tape, ran it back and forth. The face was too small, and the pan was too fast.

  'It's him,' I said, nonetheless.

  Over the next two hours we watched the rest, a tapestry of death stitched with points of light. I lost count after a while, but at least thirty episodes of mass murder were paraded in front of us, until the differences between them—the places, the sounds, the changes in clothing over more than a decade—seemed transparent in the face of the similarities. In most we saw nothing we could point to, but in a few we saw something close enough that we were prepared to add it to the list Bobby began on a piece of hotel stationery:

  A food court in Panama City, Florida, 1996. A main street in northern France, 1989. A shopping mall in Dsseldorf, 1994. A school in New Mexico, just last year. An alleyway in a project in New Orleans, back in 1987, where an alleged drug deal gone bad had escalated into a situation that left sixteen people dead and thirty one wounded.

  'It's him,' I said, again and again. 'It's him.'

  Eventually the tape stopped, without ceremony. Presumably very few people made it all the way through to the end.

  'We need more tape,' Bobby said.

  'No we don't
,' I said. 'No, we really don't.'

  'Yes. Of the ones where he wasn't caught on camera.'

  'He probably wasn't there. He won't be the only one. There will be others like him.' I went through to the bathroom and drank about three pints of lukewarm water out of a very small glass.

  'Plane crashes,' Bobby said, when I came back. 'Bombings in Northern Ireland, South Africa. Civil wars in the last ten years. Flu epidemics. Someone has to start them. Maybe we've been looking in the wrong places. Maybe it's not fundamentalists for one side or another. Maybe it's people who hate everybody.'

  I shook my head, but without a great deal of conviction.

  Bobby took the tape out of the machine and turned it over in his hands. 'But why just stand there? And what are the chances of him being caught in a camera shot, so many times?'

  'It's not chance. It's a signature, supposed to be read by those who know. To say 'The Straw Men did this'.'

  'But we've caught him now'

  'Have we? A blond man, shots too short and long to see properly, and a bunch of unconnected events spread over ten years and half the Western world? You want to call Langley, see if anyone's interested? Or shall we try CNN? We're nobody's idea of Woodward and Bernstein and this just sounds like conspiracy crap until we've got more than glimpses. You could spend all day on a computer and not get half an ID out of any of the images we've seen.'

  'What about the Web page? The Manifesto?'

  'It's not there any more, Bobby. We could have typed it ourselves.'

  'So, what? You're just going to forget about it?'

  'No,' I said. I sat on the end of the bed and picked up the hotel phone. 'There's maybe one person who would help. Two, in fact. The pair who hot-dogged it up to Hunter's Rock.'