After the First Death (9 page)

Pleasure flooded Miro. Artkin had never taken him into his confidence before. He wanted to express his appreciation to Artkin for the honor. But he could not allow himself to do so. Not in the midst of an operation. And a fighting man does not say things like “Thank you.”

The cries of the children began again, a chain reaction. One child cried and others followed, as if fear were contagious, like a disease.

“Help the girl to keep order here,” Artkin said. “Win her over. I am planning to give the children more of the
drugs. They cannot be managed this way, even with the girl.” The clamor of the children continued.

“It is hot in here for them with the windows closed and the door also closed,” Miro said.

“They will have to suffer the heat. At least until nightfall.” Artkin glanced toward the girl. “Do you think she is capable, Miro?”

“Yes,” he said. “For an American girl, she is capable.” Miro immediately pondered his statement. Actually, he did not know whether she was capable or not. But she was good with the children, and Miro alone would not know what to do with them.

“Good. But keep her in your sight. Try to determine what she is thinking every moment. She was not part of the original plan—and for that reason she is a danger no matter how helpless or innocent she seems.”

“I will watch her every minute.”

“Good,” Artkin said, touching Miro’s shoulder. “I rely upon you. Especially for what happens now.”

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.