The Grasshopper (11 page)

“Not only me, Mr. Kaella, not only
me. Today I am just a representative of the Consumers. I symbolize
the respect and love of all the people.”

“Thank you... truly… thank you very
much,” Mr. Kaella’s eyes were full of tears.

“Excellent moment of
sentimentality,” thought Babe and looked at the camera.

“And now dear viewers, let us take
a look at the messages from our dearest friends, the generous
sponsors of the interview with the two greatest men of the
present.”

Chapter 36

In the dense darkness Pascal sat on
the bed and lowered his feet to the floor. “My telephone’s gone!”
he thought as he searched his jacket pockets. “Of course it’s gone.
Why am I surprised? Who in their right mind would leave their
captive with a telephone? Something soft beneath my feet.” Pascal
slid his shoes along the floor. “Carpet.. I’ll get up.” He rose
suddenly, staggered and sat back down on the bed. “This drug of
Raul’s is still… Slowly… It was too quickly…”

He stood up slowly, managing to
maintain his balance. He took a step. One step… another… He hit his
knee on a hard object. It seemed to him that even that faint sound
echoed through the complete silence. He stood there for a while,
listening.

“Did someone hear that? Again
nothing, silence… No one heard me. Or they did but are not
reacting.”

He bent over to touch the object
that he had hit. He passed the palms of his hand over the flat
surface. He spread his hands as much as he could, but he still
didn’t touch the edge. “It’s long. Like a low cupboard… a dresser.
Let’s see how wide it is,” he moved his palms forward, leaning his
knees on the object. He immediately touched the end. “A wall”, he
passed his hands across the wall in front of him. “Wait, wait… bed,
dresser, wall. I’ll go to the end of the dresser… there’ll probably
be some door or window with the blinds drawn… something… a light
switch. No, no… if this is… and it looks like a hotel room… the
light is… the nightstand!”

He stepped back, felt the bed under
his knees and sat down on it again. He propped himself up with his
hands and moved his body along the edge of the bed. With the
outside of his thigh he felt a low hard object. “There it is!” he
touched the object with his hands. “It must be a nightstand,” he
thought excitedly. “And on it a lamp,” he concluded as he passed
the palm of his hand over its entire surface. But he didn’t feel
anything. “Then it’s a wall-mounted lamp. Above the nightstand.”
Still sitting, he ran his fingers over the wall and found a switch.
He pressed it. The room was lit up by a lamp on the wall, placed
slightly above the switch.

Pascal closed his eyes because even
this weak light bothered him at first. Then slowly, squinting
through his eyelashes, he looked around himself. He was in a
typical bedroom. The bed was large, a double bed covered in an
elegant silk dark-red cover with a black rose embroidered in the
middle. There were two nightstands, on each side of the bed, and
along the walls – two dressers made of the same dark wood. The bed
practically took up the entire length of the room. Between the end
of it and the opposite wall there was just enough room to open the
door.

“A door! And how about window?”
Pascal wondered. It was only then that he noticed that the room
didn’t have any windows. “What is this? Some luxurious solitary
confinement cell?”

He went to the door and put his ear
against it. Complete silence again. He turned the doorknob and the
door opened.

Chapter 37

Mr. Kaella’s aging prostate held up
very well during the interview. But now, during the commercial
break, he had to give in to it. Prince knew this very well and
waved to the bodyguards to take his father to the
toilet.

When Mr. Kaella had left the
submarine salon, Babe and Prince got up and approached each
other.

“Babe, I’m simply speechless. You
take my breath away,” Prince openly showed his
exhilaration.

“Wow!” thought Babe, very pleased.
“We’ve already lost the ‘Miss’. And with my knees
clenched.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kaella,” she
answered Prince. “I hope that it is now clear to you why I was in
such a hurry today.”

“Yes, yes… and forgive me for
keeping you. Had I known…” Prince paused, listening to the
cheerful, inspired voice in the first commercial.

“Look, dear Consumers, where is it
that your Miss Babe has a piercing?””

Prince suddenly turned to the
nearest monitor and watched in shock as the camera zoomed Babe’s
eye, filmed just now, during the interview.

“You were surely wondering, dear
Consumers, during the interview with Mr. Kaella and his son
Prince,” chirped the voice in the commercial, “where it is that
Miss Babe attached the two chains with the little Earths. Take a
good look…”

Babe smiled when Prince’s focus
jumped from the monitor to her eyes.

“You see, dear Consumers, but don’t
believe. Believe it, believe it… Miss Babe has a piercing in her
whites of her eyes. Yes in her the whites of her eyes, her sclera!
Let’s hear what Miss Babe has to say about this new
fashion.”

Prerecorded footage of Babe
appeared on the monitor, as well as on television screens across
the planet.

“I was a bit afraid, dear
Consumers, I have to admit it. But I have absolute trust in the
achievements of our science and technology. And above all – I
couldn’t resist this piercing. I simply couldn’t. Just as I am
certain that all the girls watching this cannot resist either. But
don’t worry, girls. You won’t have to wait for next season. Sclera
piercings are coming to fashion accessory sector shops already…”
here the background music went into crescendo, and then suddenly
subsided. “The day after tomorrow!” Babe shouted in the commercial.
“And that is why, girls, line up in front of your shop tomorrow
evening.” Babe blew a kiss to the camera with her full lips and
said “Love, Babe.”

“It seemed to me… but I didn’t
believe…” Prince stuttered after the commercial. “Are you at all
aware of what you mean to this State? How much you mean to me,
Babe…” he whispered hoarsely.

“So, a new piercing means going to
first-name basis”, thought Babe, shyly lowering her head. “The
obstacles are falling faster than I expected.”

“All the usual things” thundered
the narrator’s threatening voice from the monitor during the
regular narrative between commercials, while he reminded Consumers
of what all they have to hand over to the Inspectorate by the end
of the month. “So everything, all clothes and shoes, all fashion
accessories, cosmetics, children’s toys, pots and pans, computers,
telephones, tablets, television sets…”

“Don’t Mr. Kaella, please. Don’t
give me false hope,” Babe whispered to Prince in a sad
voice.

“False hope?! What false hope? You
mean everything to me, Babe, everything…”

Touched, Babe tried to hold back
the tears and turned her right cheek towards him.

“I need you, Babe…” Prince suddenly
went silent, wanting to take advantage of this opportunity to have
a good look at the discrete tattoo behind her ear.

It seemed to him that it was just
hieroglyphs, but carefully studying them one at a time he realized
they were letters. “Just a little strange,” he thought. “Distorted,
of different sizes, thickness… overlapping… but they are letters…
There that’s an
r
, and that’s an
h
or perhaps an
n
, and the first one… it’s…”

“Prince! You’ve tattooed my name!”
he shouted.

“Quiet, quiet…” Babe calmed
him.

“You’re driving me crazy…” he
whispered feverishly.

“Don’t be angry, Mr. Kaella, but I
had to…” she looked at him humbly, her eyes begging for
forgiveness.

“Be angry? I’m crazy about you!
Crazy!”

“I had to show it somewhere. This
deepest, most hidden intimate thing.”

“Deepest?”

“Yes.”

“Most hidden?”

“Yes.”

“Intimate thing?’

“Yes.”

“My name?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t go on without you, Babe.
You have to be mine…”

“If you truly think that, Mr.
Kaella…”

“’
Mr. Kaella! Mr.
Kaella!’ Is that your deepest intimate thing? Is that what you hid
behind your ear?”

“Prince…”

“So,” thought Babe, “a tattoo
behind the ear equals ‘Prince’ instead of ‘Mr. Kaella”. Well, we’ll
see, Prince, what the following advertisement will bring. Just as
soon as this guy finishes listing to the Consumers…” Babe looked at
the monitor. And Prince continued excitedly:

“Your intimacy… deepest… you say,
Babe. And do you know what is my deepest intimate
thing?”

“I don’t, I don’t dare…”

“Princess, my Princess! That’s what
I’ll tattoo! Princess!”

“I was wrong,” thought Babe,
pressing her chest with her hand so that her heart would not burst.
“A tattoo behind the ear equals ‘Prince’ instead of ‘Mr. Kaella’
plus ‘Princess’ instead of ‘Babe’.”

Chapter 38

Jagdish came up to Raul and Margot
and asked:

“Do you know what I don’t get,
Raul?”

“What?”

“Where did this information about
such a high percentage of votes suddenly come from? I mean, we did
our studies, locally, in our cities, but…”

“Jagdish, we couldn’t get the real
picture based on that. We couldn’t even guess that so many people
from consumer cities, from places we had never set foot in, with
censured media, the Internet… that people there knew about us,
about Pascal… Not only that they knew, but that they would vote for
him. I find something else odd. That’s what the three of us mainly
discussed yesterday. This informant of Seneca’s has been sending
him the results of their polls every two, three week, since the
beginning of the presidential campaign.”

“Why didn’t you tell us earlier,
Raul?”

“We couldn’t. Seneca didn’t want
anyone to know about this informant of his.”

“I understand. And how did the
percentages change? They increased in time, right?” Jagdish
asked.

“They didn’t. That’s what’s odd.
The entire time they were around twenty seven, no more than thirty
percent for Pascal.”

“And for Xing?”

“Close to forty.”

“So how did it
suddenly…?”

“We don’t know. We can only assume
that their pollsters this time falsely introduced themselves as
being ours or neutral… I don’t know. So the people weren’t afraid
to say that they would vote for Pascal. Kaella also received all
those periodical results of the polls. And this is now a great
shock to him, as it is to us. That is why we concluded, just as you
did, that they would try to carry out an assassination.”

“Raul… alright, we understand now.
I mean, the situation changed so suddenly with this information
about the certain victory in the elections… But, where does this
trust of yours in Seneca come from? As Liam said, how do you know
that he didn’t immediately hand him over to Kaella?” Margot
asked.

“He could have arrested us all and
handed us over to Kaella whenever he wanted. At any moment, during
all these months. And he didn’t do that. So, you tell me, Margot,
what is the most important thing to Seneca?”

“Megapolis,” Margot
said.

“Exactly, Megapolis. And had he
arrested us, banished us, handed us over to the villains… what
would Megapolis have done to him? What would the students have done
- all those educated people, experts, scientists, athletes, artists
of all profiles, which Megapolis is full of. They would have
despised him. Spat on him. He could rule by force, but Seneca is
not like that. He loves Megapolis precisely because of those
people. Because of the youths, because of the University. That’s
all he boasts about. He hands out scholarship, rewards the best
students, that’s why I… I mean… that’s why we trusted him… that’s
why we trust him to keep Pascal safe.”

“I understand, I agree,” said
Margot, already much calmer.

“People…” Raul said loudly,
addressing the entire staff. “Calm down, think it over, talk among
yourselves… You’ll see that I’m right. And that is only until the
elections. We simply moved out of the way. And we got Pascal out of
the way. We’re calmly waiting for Kaella’s move. And that’s when
we’ll decide how to proceed.”

“Raul’s right,” Margot supported
him. “He and Pascal have done the right thing. We can be at ease.
There, I’m already completely calm.”

Chapter 39

Babe and Prince twitched when the
old Mr. Kaella returned from the toilet, and they moved away from
each other. Luckily the makeup artist immediately rushed in an
started powdering the sweaty Mr. Kaella, her body concealing the
two of them.