Miro did not ask: What happens now? He did not want to risk further questions.
Artkin looked toward the dead child on the back seat. “It is time to begin, Miro. Our audience is gathered out there. They are waiting. The last time I looked, a television van had arrived at the building. To have an ending, we must have a beginning. And it begins now.”
As if in answer to Artkin’s words, the sounds began again, the howl of the sirens and a new siren, the kind that screams ah-oo, ah-oo, a two-toned cacaphony that cut through the other sounds like the voice of a machine gone mad.
Gross. But more than gross. It was beyond her most terrible imaginings, so astonishing and—what? She groped for the word and shrunk from calling it into use even as she summoned it: evil. She could think of nothing else to describe the scene before her eyes. And the most terrible thing of all is that she had to keep looking, frozen; she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sight of Artkin, Artkin and the child, Artkin in the mask and the child held aloft, above his head, as if the child were a sacrificial lamb being offered to a mercenary god. The child was a kind of sacrifice, Kate realized with horror. And no mercy anywhere, not anywhere in the world.
It had begun a few minutes before, when Artkin had walked with deliberate steps to the back of the bus and had picked up the dead child. She’d been trying to placate the children and finally calmed them down by allowing them to open their lunchboxes and begin to eat whatever their mothers had fixed them for lunch. She’d wanted to save the food for later, when the children got restless. But she also realized that the present moment counted: now, not the next minute, the next hour, the next day. She’d seen Artkin look at the children in annoyance as he talked to the boy Miro at the window. She had to keep them quiet, docile so that Artkin wouldn’t feed them any more dope. She had to keep the children from getting on Artkin’s nerves. Cripes, she thought ruefully as she held a weeping child on her lap, she had to keep them from getting on her own nerves. She had little experience with kids. She was an only child, had seldom done any baby-sitting. Yet she knew the children were a kind of blessing for her. Worrying about them, she was able to put her own terror aside, at least for a little while. They diverted her panic and channeled her energy into caring for them, keeping her busy, keeping her from thinking about herself.
That was when she looked up to see Artkin pick up the dead boy and sling him over his shoulder like a slab of meat. The linen cloth slipped partially from the child’s body and trailed along the floor.
Artkin stepped out of the bus without glancing in her direction.
She hurried to the front of the bus and looked through the windshield. Miro had left a two- or three-inch strip uncovered across the windshield so that Kate had a clear view of the area outside and the space between the van and the bus. Artkin walked between the two vehicles and stood near the parapet. He held the child aloft, above his head, his hands supporting Kevin McMann’s neck and the back of his knees. Artkin’s own back was arched. His masked face was raised to the sky. He offered the child to that same sky. The child’s arms hung limply in the air, dangling lifelessly.
A silence fell on the scene, more abrupt than the earlier silence. The ah-oo, ah-oo of the siren was cut off in mid-scream, as if strangled by an unseen hand. The children on the bus sat like small robots whose motors had run down. Or, as if they sensed somehow, as children often do, that this was a moment to be quiet, to wait, to remain silent.
Artkin began to turn around, slowly, deliberately, his arms stretched high, the child still held aloft, turning, turning, quicker now, stepping up the movement, as if he were dancing to some compelling music nobody else could hear. The silence continued, both within the bus and outside. Why don’t they shoot him? Kate thought. There are cops out there and soldiers, with guns and rifles. Shoot him!
“They will not shoot him,” Miro said, his voice loud in Kate’s ear even though he was whispering. He had crowded close to her to view the scene through the limited space. She turned to him, horrified. She’d spoken aloud without knowing she did so. Christ, she thought, I’m coming apart at the seams.
“I’d shoot him,” she said, needing to hear the sound of her voice to restore her footing in the world. “I’d blast him off the face of the earth.”
“They cannot take that chance, miss. The demand we sent—it said that for every one of us who is harmed, a child will die.”
While Artkin continued to whirl.
Quicker now, swifter.
Turning and turning, a dance of depraved delight. The child’s dangling arms swinging wildly as Artkin whirled. The spinning was building momentum now, and Kate feared that Artkin would lose his hold on the child, who would go spinning off into the air, over the side of the bridge, falling to the river below. But the child was dead, of course. The child could no longer be harmed, thank God. He was beyond reach of Artkin’s madness.
“He’s a madman,” Kate said.
“No, miss. Not a madman. He knows exactly what he is doing. He is showing them that we do not go by the rules of others, the laws of others, and that life is not precious to us. Not a child’s, not our own.”
Kate did not wish to witness the scene any longer. She tore her eyes away from Artkin’s dance and looked toward the children. They looked back at her quietly, trustingly. So defenseless, so innocent, so vulnerable. And children first of all: one girl sucked her thumb, a boy scratched his buttocks, another boy’s face was sticky with jam from his sandwich.
She moved toward the children, feeling anew her responsibility toward them.
“What happened out there, miss,” Miro said, “could have been worse.”
“How?” she asked, keeping her voice cold, such a small gesture of defiance.
“It could have been—” And the boy did not say more.
Kate shriveled inside but maintained an outward composure. She wouldn’t give in to him. She knew what the boy had almost said: it could have been you.
By the time the children had finished their lunches, the sirens began to sound again, and the mechanical flutter of the helicopter could be heard once more.
She hated herself for asking, but she couldn’t help it. “Has he stopped that crazy dance?” she asked the boy.
“It was not crazy and it was not a dance,” Miro said. “But yes, it has stopped.”
“What did he do with the child?”
“He gave him back,” Miro said.
He spared her the agonizing how.
“He lowered the child by a rope to the bottom of the bridge. We are not animals, after all.”
Yes, you are, Kate thought, yes you are.
part
5
My father and me. In confrontation. Six guns at sunset in the western town, the shadows slanting long over the false-front street, the fake street we saw the time my mother and father and I visited Universal City in Hollywood. Not Hollywood really, Burbank, California. Everything fake out there, even Hollywood, which isn’t really Hollywood but a lot of other places. Just as I am a fake, here, sitting at the typewriter, typing for the sake of typing, something to keep my fingers busy and my mind distracted.
Anyway.
We have just had our first meeting, me and my father, since the Bus. Me at one end of the sunset town, him at the other. The bad guy is supposed to be in black, but I am actually wearing jeans, a blue Castle T-shirt under a beige cardigan sweater that my mother was disgraced to see is threadbare at the elbows. My father should have been in white, like all the good guys, but he was wearing his tweed jacket and gray flannel pants and gray turtleneck. My mother jokingly calls this his professor outfit, claiming that it makes him feel as if he is still on the campus of good old New England U. in Boston. Which may be true.
Waiting for somebody to make the first draw, counting silently. But nobody did. Although some guns were fired.
You know what I’m doing at the moment, don’t you?
Some verbal sleight of hand, but I am trying to deceive myself not
anyone else.
I am playing the warmup act before the main event comes on, trying to come up with funny songs and dances and some jokes.
Like Henny Youngman.
First man: Any cops around here?
Second man: No.
First man: Stick ’em up.
I am laughing to keep from crying.
And typing to keep my hands from crawling like big white spiders all over the place.
And keeping my lips sealed, my mouth clenched tight so that the scream I keep inside does not escape and fill the room with its anguish.
The asterisks again.
Denoting the passage of time.
But only a few minutes. Three, four at the most.
Time going slowly, bent out of shape like a Dali watch.
But a good thing so that I can control myself.
There. That’s better:
My hand has stopped shaking.
My father has stepped out of the room. To use the john at the end of the corridor. He is taking some kind of blood-pressure pill and there is no water here in the room, so he excused himself a few moments ago to find a paper cup and water.
He also said that he must check in with Dean Albertson: something about a lecture he has been asked to give during the winter.
He also said he must telephone my mother, his wife, to let her know he arrived here in good time.
Excuses, of course.
He really wanted to get out of here, out of this room, away from this person who is by an accident of birth his son.
I can’t blame him.
“Please wait,” he said. “I’ll be back in a little while.”
So I am waiting.
I also should get out of here and make my pilgrimage to Brimmler’s Bridge, but I will wait for him, keep my word, honor my father.
Besides, I would not want to do anything rash so soon after seeing him because then he would blame himself and wonder: What did I say? what did I do?
So, I’ll wait.
Wait for him to get back.
And wait until later for my appointment at the bridge.
But I must keeping typing.
I lied before when I said that I never learned the touch system but must hunt and peck. I wrote that down so that I could justify looking out at the window so often to see if my father was approaching.
I am really a terrific typist. Between 60 and 70 words a minute, one of the bonuses of that exclusive concentrated school at Delta.
Let me say how I first saw my father when he finally arrived today. It was exactly 11:25 A.M. when I saw him emerge into the quad. My mother wasn’t at his side. I didn’t recognize him immediately. Oh, I recognized him, I suppose: he was six feet tall, as usual; he walked with his head slanted to one side, as usual, as if he were listening to something far away.
But there was something else I didn’t recognize. Something new about him and so strange that I could not pin it down right away.
An air of tentativeness about him.
He was walking at his usual pace, not fast and not slow, but—different.
As if he were walking for the first time in a long time.
As if he were breaking in a new pair of legs.
Or walking on stilts.
And there was also a fragility about him.
He came across the quad as if he were made of glass and was afraid that he would shatter into a million pieces if he bumped into something.
His face: a blank.
I couldn’t make out his features at that distance and I imposed my own version on his face. Which was terrifying, of course.
As I watched his progress across the quad, walking fragilely on the new snow, I thought: This is what I have done to him. This is what my action on the bridge did to him.
I sat and waited, although I wanted to run out of there.
If he had come this far to see me, how could I deny him this last look?
My mother was right: he looked terrible. Gaunt, Abraham Lincoln but without the height or the beard. I never realized how deep in the sockets his eyes were set. Or had they sunk to those depths since I saw him last?
I greeted him at the door and we shook hands, firmly but awkwardly. We probably had not shaken hands a half dozen times in our lives.
“Ben,” he said, and immediately looked away, glancing around the room, commenting on its size and roominess, etc., and I admired him for the heartiness he had injected in his voice. My father, the actor.
Finally, he swiveled and looked at me. Really looked. As if he were studying me. I wondered what he hoped to see—the kid I’d been a long time ago when a child is innocent, without blemishes? Or was he seeing me as the kid who used to strike out in the Little League games, although I did hit a triple once in a crucial game and scored two runs and heard for the first (and only) time the cheers of a crowd? Or was he seeing me as I was last summer before the Bus and the Bridge? Before the betrayal.
“Well,” he said, standing back and still inspecting me. “I see you’ve gained weight, Ben, and I’ve lost some.”
“Great food here,” I said, automatically, meaninglessly. Because I hadn’t gained any weight that I know of, although I must admit I don’t go running to the scale every day like some denizens of the gym around here. And then I realized that it was going to be that kind of conversation, filled with interpretations, hidden meanings, second guessing on what was said, the search for a tone of voice and what it means, ad infinitum. And I told myself: patience, get through it, play the game, act the part of the dutiful son, follow his lead and try not to hurt him anymore.
And now it was my turn to say something because I realized a great big silence had developed in the room, so deep and awful that it was suffocating. As usual, my mouth began to work and the words started to come out, the way it happened that day I met Nettie Halversham and talked nonstop, and I went on and on about Castle and the guys and Elliot Martingale and the classes and, Jesus, I thought somebody better stop me before I lost my breath and fell in a dead faint at his feet. Finally, I wanted to shatter that awful stare of his, the expression I could not interpret. And out of me erupted the words that had hounded my days and nights since last August.
“Was Inner Delta saved, Dad?”
You couldn’t find the answer to that question in the newspapers or in the television newscasts. I couldn’t ask anyone else about it, not even my mother. The only one was my father. I had never heard of Inner Delta before the hijacking and I had never heard of it since.
“It was saved, Ben,” he said. “Oh, there was some damage, of course. The problem with an operation like Inner Delta is that it depends entirely on secrecy, and that’s what the hijackers were counting on—making it public, focusing publicity on it, and therefore rendering it useless. Plus their other demands.” His voice trailed off. I knew how difficult it was for him to speak of things he had been pledged to be silent about.
He had first explained Inner Delta to me on the afternoon of the hijacking. He came to the house after lunch and told the bodyguard to wait outside. I had just finished a tuna fish sandwich—it was tasteless because Nettie Halversham had made my entire world tasteless, odorless, and colorless—and I offered to make him one. He said that he did not have time to eat, that he had come home for a few moments to talk to me.
“Did you locate Mom?” I asked.
“Yes, in Boston. She’s staying with Sarah Thomspon in Weston. I want her to remain there today and tonight at least.” He hesitated. “There have been reports of possible bombings at the entrances to Delta and I don’t want her on the highways in this area. She’ll be safer with Sarah.” Sarah was an old school chum of my mother’s, and Weston is a suburb of Boston, a few miles west of the city.
For the first time I sensed the drama going on about me. The radio had been sketchy about the hijacking, interrupting the record sessions with bulletins that told us nothing, really. And television had continued with its endless daytime game shows. But seeing my father tense an
d pale, hearing him talk of possible explosions and providing for my mother’s safety, gave the day’s events sudden immediacy in my life. I also looked at my father for the first time in my life as not my father: General Rufus Briggs.…
Maybe he saw that look.
Because he said: “I’m going to confide in you, Ben. And tell you as much of what’s going on as I can. Within the limits to which I am confined. As you know, some unidentified men are holding a busload of children hostage. That happened about nine A.M. today. We have since received their demands. The demands were made by letter, the letter delivered by a private messenger service out of Boston.”
“What do they want, Dad?”
“They’ve made three demands,” he said, relaxing now for the first time, as if he were preparing to put his thoughts in order, not only to provide me with information but to sort out his own feelings about it all. “Number one, they’re demanding the release of fifteen so-called political prisoners serving various sentences in this country. Two, they’re asking for ten million dollars in cash. Three, they’re demanding the dismantling of what is known to some people as Inner Delta. By dismantling, they mean make a public confession of its existence, reveal the names of its agents around the world, recall them from their assignments.” He paused, sighed, rubbed his neck as if he were trying to loosen the tension there.
I didn’t dare breathe. Or move. I had a feeling he had forgotten I was there, and if I did anything to remind him of my presence he would instantly shut up and go off to Inner Delta, wherever that was.
“We have until tomorrow morning at nine to meet the demands. Or, they say, the children will die, one by one.” He looked at me again and, again, seemed to react to the expression on my face. “I’m not telling you any deep secrets, Ben. Most of this will be on the newscasts later in the day. We’re trying not to turn this into a media circus but we can’t keep it all under wraps.”
“Can you meet the hijackers’ demands, Dad?” I asked.