“Why are we leaving? Your message at the law school said you were in trouble and you needed me here.”
“That wasn’t my message. Mine said stay away. I got one saying you were in trouble. Say, didn’t you check your answering machine?”
“Two hours ago, no messages. Why?”
Recalling something John Standell had told him, Parker said, “There are just a few codes that control all the major brands. Anyone who has those codes could erase your messages over the phone.”
She planted her heels. “Goddamnit, what’s going on!”
“All right. My enemy wants us both here. We could stand here speculating why, but then we might find out.” He nudged her into motion. “Here we go, just a coupla populists walking briskly, not running, eyes straight ahead.” A rumble emanated from the auditorium; for a moment he thought the event might be starting, but it was just the mysterious tectonics of the crowd. “So, anyway, you know who’s getting the shaft? It’s the little guy. That’s right, the little guy.” Talking this drivel was kind of fun. “And you know who’s giving the little guy the shaft?”
She glittered at him through a long pause; this wasn’t the subject she wanted to discuss. “The big guy?”
“Exactly!” He gave her a squeeze. “Almost there,” he said through the side of his mouth. They rounded the last turn and started down the incline to the rear exit. “Remember Fred Harris? Populist democrat? Ran in the primaries a few years ago?”
“Yes! It’s my dad’s favorite political joke! ‘The little people would’ve voted for me but their tiny arms couldn’t reach the levers.’ What is it?” He’d stopped so abruptly she teetered on her heels and grasped his shoulder for support.
They were halfway down the incline; through the gate’s turnstiles he could see Adele Slansky pacing a tight circle on the sidewalk, her face submerged in her collar up to her cataract glasses. He tried to make sense of her being there. Maybe she’d failed to get past the metal detector, or maybe she’d chickened out. Maybe she was still armed, completely out of her mind, and trying to decide what to do next. If she was waiting for him, wanting to be sure he didn’t sneak out early, that would be the place to stand.
He led Fran a few yards back up the ramp and gave her the abbreviated version. He didn’t have time to make it sound plausible. “You believe everything else,” he concluded. “You might as well believe this.”
She shrugged. “Might as well. Couldn’t she be waiting for a cab?”
“She hasn’t looked at the street once.”
He led her back down to the place where he’d first stopped. “I don’t think she can see us.” Behind Mrs. Slansky he saw a double-parked van from Channel 7 News; stragglers heading for the entrance at the opposite end of the arena; traffic getting back to normal. The cops were on the other side of the building.
She indicated the Andy Frain usher blowing cigarette smoke out the turnstiles. “He could get a cop.”
“I hate to think what that might set off. Her hands are in her pockets.”
“Maybe she’s cold?”
“I don’t think she’ll do anything if she’s not provoked—whatever that means. I’m afraid she’ll recognize me. She’s seen the raincoat and she gave me the beard. Would you be able to spot me like this?”
“The hair. Nobody has hair like that.”
The voice of the P.A. announcer ping-ponged through the lobby. “Jeffrey Parker, please come to the information desk. Will Jeffrey Parker please come to the information desk.”
“He couldn’t get hold of you,” Parker said, “but he’s hoping I’ll think he did. Look—you can get out this way. Go. Stay with Marcy tonight.
I’ll call you when I get home.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Don’t be an idiot. There’s nothing you can do.”
“For all you know we’re being followed. He could stab me when I get to the parking lot. Don’t pretend you know the safe thing to do. You don’t really know what’s going on here, do you? We might as well stick together.”
“If we were being followed, why would he have to call us to the information desk? Your argument is too dumb to take seriously, so I’ll assume you’re being loyal. Ya numbskull.” He squeezed her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. “Okay, here are our options. One. We go back upstairs, enjoy the show, leave with the crowd.” He was tempted to see if they were being followed but thought it wise to keep looking straight ahead, without, of course, looking directly at Mrs. Slansky.
“Uh-uh. It hasn’t even started yet and I’m sick of it.”
“I don’t think we should decide this on aesthetic grounds.”
“Two?”
“Two—we walk through the lobby and leave by another gate. That’s chancy because we’d have to walk past the information desk. Three—we walk through the auditorium to the other side of the building and leave through the main entrance.”
Fran was watching Mrs. Slansky, who’d stepped back to lean against a car.
“Auditorium,” Fran said. Like her poise, this terseness kept her from losing control—parsing her confusion into tiny certainties.
“Or we could cut over by way of the balcony.” He was having a hard time shutting up. “Cutting across the main floor is faster and riskier. When our friend sees we’re not coming to the information desk, he’ll probably…”
“Right,” she said, her profile a bulwark of cheekbones, “main floor.”
“If we keep the usher between us and Adele, I don’t think we’ll have any problem. Her eyes aren’t very good.”
The lobby grew quiet; men carrying soft drinks or popcorn rushed past them up the ramp.
“I think it’s about to start,” he whispered. “Whatever it is.”
* * *
—
The tiny man had almost disappeared behind the podium, his beard, his upturned collar, and the twin bursts of radiance that covered his eyes. “The fire marshall has asked us to clear the aisles. Will you please take your seats!” He was met with a detonation of hoots and applause. This was hardly the Roar in full cry—it was barely clearing its throat—but he shrank further into his trenchcoat.
They’d just come in through the back of the auditorium. Parker had worried that the ushers might send them back upstairs and had instructed Fran that in the event of their being asked for their stubs, she was to wear down the usher’s resolve by laboriously rummaging through her purse—an old trick for upgrading seats at rock concerts. But security was busy elsewhere, passing latecomers through the metal detectors, pleading with the people in the aisles, and forming a Maginot Line in front of the podium.
The aisles were all packed, so they started up the closest—up the center aisle toward the podium and the main entrance. In the stands above them thousands of mirrors bore down like a smashed sun.
“Tonight I have the pleasure,” said the tiny emcee; he broke off in mid-sentence and held onto the podium. The crowd in the stands had begun doing the Wave. From where Parker stood the effect was of riding a merry-go-round spinning loose of its underpinnings. Fran leaned against him; he closed his eyes against the cyclone of peristaltic brightness, whirling now in opposite directions.
The man at the podium was mouthing into a rising wind. “Without further ado!” he screamed and stepped down.
The wind and the waves died, the brightness settled, and while everyone watched the empty podium, the arena grew quiet as a bomb that stops ticking.
It occurred to Parker that there’d been no printed programs, no advance word of topics or speakers. He thought of the famous hoax in which the British comedian Spike Milligan advertised a mystery event at the Royal Albert Hall; when the long-anticipated moment arrived and the curtain rose, the audience was facing a second audience. The two audiences gave each other a standing ovation and went home. Parker doubted that this crowd would be as
sporting. If the podium were still empty in another minute, the place would be dismantled for the second time.
“Come on,” he whispered to Fran, who’d stopped to wait.
The man rising behind the microphone drew scattered applause. He didn’t appear to be what the crowd had envisioned as they stared at the empty podium. Beneath his unbuttoned trenchcoat he wore a check flannel shirt and a striped tie. He cocked his head, and Parker recognized the sharp-boned nose, the grin opening like a seam in the real beard. It was Harry Krell.
Parker frantically reassessed their predicament. He’d accepted Fletcher’s theory that the convention was the gathering of demagogues and boneheads it appeared to be, that Hank Monroe, Jr. was acting alone, and that he was planning to use the camouflage of “thousands of identically-disguised suspects” to kill Fran and Parker. Now it seemed like the optimistic view.
He reached behind him and tugged Fran past two beer bellies closing between them. The sight of Harry Krell had brought back his worst fears: that the convention was a ruse, that the crowd was about to turn on them. Did it know where they were?
Krell took a sip of water, adjusted the mike stand, and looked out on the audience, the blasts off his sunglasses intensifying the merriment of his smile.
They squeezed ahead at the pace of fleeing dreamers. He reminded himself that the crowd, according to the news, was mostly non-members; they couldn’t all be in on it. Fran was nudging him to point out a guy with flag pins in his beard.
“I hate to kick off the proceedings on a somber note,” Krell began, “but it’s likely that within the next ten minutes someone in this hall will die.” The last of the crowd noise withdrew from the arena in one great inhalation. Parker turned his head—no room to get out the way they’d come in. His hand going numb in Fran’s knotted fingers, he pulled her forward.
“I won’t keep you in suspense about the identity of the victim, and yes it will be murder,” Krell said and took another drink of water. He set down the glass. “It’s me.”
The queasy laughs and fainthearted boos fell away as he continued. “And I won’t be coy about the identity of the murderer, excuse me, murderers. It’s you.” Above the rising murmur he said, “That’s right. Discuss the matter among yourselves.” Fran tilted her head at Parker, mouth agape. He shrugged.
“We’ve progressed,” Krell resumed, “to the stage where you can’t imagine why you’d kill me, but already you don’t like me very much.” He chuckled and nodded through the brief loud round of applause. “But that’s beside the point, you think, because you have no intention of killing me. So what do I know that you don’t? Let’s take a survey. Come on, let’s see what kind of populists you are. Fill in the blank: This would be a great country if it wasn’t for the goddamn_____.”
To Parker the cacophonous response sounded like “HUBBA-YALE!” Not even his paranoia could suggest what the man was up to.
Krell nodded. “We’ve established two points. You’re angry. And practically none of you are angry about the same thing.
“A few minutes ago, some of our lab people showed me the latest readings. If you’re a specialist in human disgruntlement—and I am!—the findings are unmistakable. In a few minutes you boys will reach reach critical mass…you will, you know, flip out. Lose it. Go nuts. Revert to savagery. Bust up the joint. My colleagues warned me that if I got up on the podium, the odds didn’t favor my coming down. Well, that’s like telling a surfer don’t go out today, the waves are too big.” He cocked his head. “Stay away from the cage, Mr. Lion Tamer: those critters look mean!
“I take if from your silence that that’s not how you see yourselves. I’ll bet reaching critical mass was the last thing on your minds when you brushed your teeth this morning. It’s probably way at the bottom of your list even now. That’s the funny thing about people in a bunch—crowds, audiences, mobs, nations. It’s been demonstrated that entire nations can have nervous breakdowns while their individual people go on working, falling in love, meeting with their brokers, having babies, or planning dinner.”
“Is this all bullshit?” Fran whispered.
“Maybe. I think he wants you to ask that question.”
“Why?”
“See? You’re looking for the point. Now he can play with you like a ball of yarn.”
“No he can’t. If he thinks so he’s crazy. Is he crazy?”
“See?”
“We’re back where we started: it’s bullshit…But there has to be more to it.”
“Ah!” But Parker took another look at Harry Krell—the snow-dazzle smile still fixed among his whiskers—and added, “I think he’s scared. Maybe he believes what he said.”
“Right at this moment,” Krell was saying, “one of you is working up the nerve to yell, ‘what makes you such an expert, you condescending prick?’ Frankly, that ‘condescending prick’ part hurt my feelings, but let me tell you how I came to be a scholar of discontent. I invented Tolerance Management—which a friend of mine succinctly described as the study of how much crap people will take—twenty-three years ago this month. I remember it was a rainy November afternoon. There was a wind in the eaves.”
He leaned his elbows on the podium and cracked his knuckles. “ ‘There was a wind in the eaves’—you like that, don’t you? It sounds like the beginning of a story, and you like stories, don’t you? You’re thinking something is about to happen. Things are about to mean something. You’ll wait a few minutes and see. Meanwhile I’m trying to postpone the inevitable blowout by precisely controlling your boredom, your curiosity, your hope, your rage, and your impatience. That’s Tolerance Management, and it’s how we preserve the social order. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s more humane than the alternative.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the Chicago cops massed in the lobby.
Halfway up the aisle now, Parker and Fran were passing the official delegations, becalmed banners sagging across the rows.
The audience had been silent, but Krell cupped his ear in a stylized pose of listening. Now Parker heard it, faintly, mistaking it at first for his own anxious breathing—the Roar was singing, like a seashell at his ear. It didn’t seem to be coming from any particular place; people everywhere were looking around for its source. Fran tilted her head back and gazed up into the lights.
Krell smiled exultantly. “It’s coming.” He leaned against the podium. “I don’t think we’ll have time for that story after all. Let’s get down to basics. Why are you angry? And just what is this convention about anyway?
“Why are you angry? That’s an easy one. Society is a complicated, inefficient machine, and it produces unhappiness as inevitably as any complex machine generates waste. In other words, you have to take a certain amount of crap. Think of the crap you take just living with your family. No wonder a network of relationships among thousands and millions of strangers creates whole new magnitudes of crap. In other societies crap can take the form of famines, death squads, and gulags. So why is it that you guys are angrier than the people who live in most of those places? I think I can answer that.
“I’m afraid it might be all my fault. You see, at Tolerance Management we consult with big institutions to make sure that people take only as much crap as they can bear. To make life as happy—as bearable—as possible, we try to assure that the inefficiencies of society are distributed imperceptibly, minutely, and—within the limits of a free market—fairly. Unfortunately, all that fairness never quite reaches the underclass, but you populists don’t want to talk about them, do you? Let ’em stop whining, right?
“Anyway, to make sure that you don’t even notice these discrete doses of crap, we distract you. And to be sure that you don’t even feel distracted, we distract you from your distractedness. It’s a benign shell game, really: sadness reduced to the size of a pea and never under the shell when you look. Better than a cattle prod to the genitals I’m sure you’ll agree.
“So think of it this way: Everyone sleeps with a pea under the mattress. The trouble is, eventually you feel it. You might not know what’s bothering you, but you feel tricked. Fucked with. Conspired against. And that’s why you guys think this event is about the Little Guy and the Elites, when it’s really about the Princess and the Pea. And that’s why you’re angrier than the billions of people in the world who have something real to complain about.”
A man shouted, “My wife and I have four part-time jobs and no health insurance!”
“And that’s true, too,” Krell said magnanimously, conceding and dismissing the point. “At the moment, fortunately, most people don’t even realize how angry they are; we’re trying to corral all that rage while there’s still time. The latest thing we tell our clients is, ‘Agree with it.’ Here’s how it works. First, we agree with you: feed you back your half-baked notions through the polls, the politicians, and the TV. Then these lookalike opinions become your own, ‘opinion makers’ echo those, and you mimic them. It’s a feedback loop—each time your opinions come back to you they’ve lost a little more coherence, until finally they degenerate into noise. That’s why you’re reduced to this vacant ranting about the little guy. What we hoped was that as your anger grew more and more thin, nonspecific, and hazy, it would disperse like mist. Well, it doesn’t seem to be working. The less you mean, the madder you get.
“I first heard of the Legion a few weeks ago, when my dear friend Hank Monroe, Junior played one of those little pranks that…By the way, I believe that Hank, Junior might be in our audience tonight. He’s threatened to kill me, too. Good luck, pal, the line forms behind all these little guys. Where are you, buddy? Let’s hear it for him!” He lifted his upturned palms to milk the faint, befuddled applause. “Stand up, Hank, Junior. Let’s make him feel at home, folks!” No one stood up. Krell looked out on his audience, assessing its murderousness as applause fell away to coughs, creaks, and that sound of a distant sea.
The Blindfold Test Page 28
