The Illegal (31 page)

K
EITA HAD HEARD FROM HIS FATHER THAT IT WAS
no easy feat to attract a crowd to a demonstration. You had to overcome political apathy, offer demonstrators an incentive and make it easy for people to congregate. And you needed decent weather. It seemed to Keita that Lula and her followers had figured out what it took to bring people out. But this crowd was not assembled to hear speeches. They had come for something else entirely, something of Lula’s own making. She had dangled a promise—proof of government officials breaking the very laws they were promising to enforce.

“Some of these movers and shakers might have left something,” she had been quoted as saying in an article by Viola Hill. “We want to make sure these items are returned to their rightful owners.”

Attending Lula’s political demonstration at the gates of Ruddings Park, adjacent to the offices of Prime Minister Graeme Wellington and his cabinet, violated common sense. Keita had no business being near demonstrators or the police who had come out to watch. But Lula expected to see him.

Keita’s father had taught him how to count heads in a crowd. You climbed to a high spot—a rooftop or a tree—and picked out a manageable segment of the crowd. You counted every person in that segment. And then you multiplied the number by the approximate number of such segments in the crowd. From a third-floor café overlooking the Freedom Gates—the main gates to Ruddings Park,
adjacent to the government building—Keita had just estimated four thousand people. But the crowd was swelling by the minute.

Against his better judgment, Keita left his vantage point and wandered down to the street. He saw hot dog vendors. Ice cream sellers. Teenagers walking about catching the sun. And there, on a homemade platform, Lula stood with a megaphone and three young women. All black. All wearing high heels, hot pants and halter tops.

“What do we want?” she shouted, and then she handed the megaphone to the woman next to her.

“Water!” the woman hollered.

“What don’t we get, that everybody else in the country enjoys?”

“Sewers!”

“Instead of handcuffs?”

“Teachers!”

“Show us your tits,” a man called.

“That’s why we came,” another man shouted.

“We have many supporters,” Lula said from the platform. “And we entertain many visitors. The women of AfricTown receive visitors of every size, shape and colour. Some of our visitors walk the halls of power in this country. Some get so lost in the heat of the moment that they forget their things. Socks. Underwear. Watches with engraved initials. Even ID. If the raids don’t stop, and if we don’t receive clean water, we will show you what some of these big men left behind. Things like pieces of paper. Like ID.”

A roar went up. Another man shouted up at the stage, “Shaddup and show us your tits!”

Keita saw a group of black men tackle the heckler and a larger group of white men descend on the black men. A white man drew a knife. A black man revealed a gun. The two groups backed away from each other. Meanwhile, the audience thickened with people arriving from every direction.

“What do we want?” Lula shouted.

“Justice!” the young women next to her responded.

The people stirred, impatient for action.

Keita wandered to the outer edges of the crowd. Police officers on horses were stationed in pairs every fifteen metres or so. One officer on a horse moved toward him. He froze.

“Keita. It’s Candace!” She signalled to her partner that everything was okay and then trotted over to Keita.

Candace leaned over her horse’s neck. She had a holstered revolver, a baton and a helmet with a glass mask that was pushed up to reveal her face. She looked young and attractive, even with all that equipment.

“Not a safe place for you,” she said.

“You think it will turn violent?” he asked.

“If Lula trots out any government members’ ID, officers will move in.”

“For what?”

“They’ve been told to just do it and justify their actions later. Possession of stolen property. Demonstrating without a permit. Why don’t you go while you can?”

A roar went up from the crowd. Keita could see another fight breaking out. Candace’s police radio crackled.

“Gotta go,” she said.

“Show us your tits!” a man shouted.

“Pigs out there,” Candace said. She gave Keita a wave and turned her horse to go.

“Mr. Prime Minister,” Lula shouted through her megaphone. “Mr. Wellington. We know you can hear us out here. And you know that we have come to demand change. We know you are at your fourth-floor window, looking out at us. Come speak to us. We have some items in our lost and found. We shall release them to the public, if you do not speak to us.”

A large contingent of black women in the crowd began chanting: “
Welling-TON, Welling-TON, we want you, Welling-TON
.”

There was no response and no movement from the doors of the Freedom Building.

Lula addressed the crowd again. “We shall give them a few minutes. Prime Minister Wellington’s knees must be pretty busted up from rugby. And the building has a lot of stairs. In the meantime, props to sister Viola Hill for writing about this story for her newspaper. Sister Hill, do you have something to say to the crowd?”

I
N THE THICK OF THE CROWD, NEAR THE STAGE,
V
IOLA
H
ILL
was taking notes. She looked up and waved—no, she did not wish to come up on stage. For one thing, ten steps led up to the platform. More importantly, Viola was not a community activist. She was here to report the story, not to become it.

“Come up here, Sister Hill,” Lula said.

“No,” Viola called back up, “staying down here, thanks.”

“Just one minute, folks, while we fetch Viola Hill,” Lula said.

Fuck them. There was no way Viola was getting up on that stage. She would lose all credibility with Bolton. They might not let her keep covering the story. But then four black men reached down to place their hands under her chair.

“Ma’am,” the lead male said.

“Just leave me right here, please,” Viola said.

“Sorry, ma’am, Mrs. DiStefano’s order.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck what your orders are. It’s my ass you are putting your hands under, so let go.”

“Sorry, ma’am.” The men bent over, hoisted her and carried her up the steps. They put her down beside Lula.

“Viola Hill, you have done us such an honour by writing about this tragic situation. Could you tell us what you know?” Lula handed her the mike.

Viola was met with loud cheers from a vocal section of black women in the crowd. “You go, girl! Stick it to the man!”

Viola wanted to tell the crowd that anything she knew could be found in the pages of the
Telegram
. She cleared her throat.

Then a bottle of Coca-Cola sailed through the air, crashed and
shattered into a million pieces less than a metre away. Suds bubbled up next to her. Someone shouted, “Dyke faggot gimp freak!”

Another cried, “Get that lesbian nigger gimp off the stage, and show us some tits!”

More bottles sailed through the air. One struck Viola on the shoulder. Stuck in a wheelchair on a rickety homemade stage! Goddamn that Lula DiStefano. Viola didn’t care how important she was. If she could have stood on her own two feet, she would have punched that woman’s lights out. The men who had carried Viola jumped down off the stage.

“Take me too,” she called to them, but they ignored her and gave chase to the first bottle-thrower.

Viola saw them ripple through the crowd, like wind through weeds, as the offender fled and the men followed. Eventually, Viola lost sight of the perpetrator. Instead, she saw Keita Ali. He was waving to her and pointing.
Look out
, he seemed to be telling her. Others were making similar gestures. “
Look out!
” a thousand people were calling now. Suddenly, a volley of bottles, cans and rocks bore down on her. Viola dove out of her wheelchair and crawled head-first down the steps.

V
IOLA’S WHEELCHAIR REMAINED ON THE PLATFORM.
J
OHN
kept his video camera rolling. The images wouldn’t be worth much, because he was getting shoved and pushed in the crowd, but he was certainly catching some good sound effects. He’d captured Lula challenging Prime Minister Wellington to come out and speak to the crowd. He’d got some angry male voice screaming obscenities at Viola after she was introduced to the crowd. He got voices warning, “
Look out, look out!
” He caught an angry man yelling through his own megaphone.

And now there was the sound of a young man beside him, saying, “No, John, don’t film me, please, just come this way. This is no place for a boy to be.”

John spoke into the camera. “That was Keita Ali, the runner, trying to steer yours truly away from the riot. We are going to try to escape now. We are trying to get to the perimeter of the crowd.”

Whistles blew. Police yelled through their own megaphones: “
Disperse. This is the police. If you do not leave, you will face arrest
.” The last sound that John captured, before he was knocked to the ground, was Lula.

“Mr. Prime Minister, we are waiting for you. But our followers cannot wait any longer. They all long to know what is in our lost and found from the Bombay Booty in AfricTown. The first item is a piece of official government identification belonging to—”

John struggled back up. Police officers had rushed the stage. And behind him, hundreds more uniformed men had blocked the park exits.

B
LINDS COVERED ALL THE WINDOWS, IN CASE THE DEMONSTRATORS
in Ruddings Park had it in their minds to spy on them with binoculars. And since everyone knew the prime minister’s office was on the fourth floor, it was Geoffrey’s idea to set up a war room on the eighth. They would have an even better view of the demonstration below, and they were less likely to be spotted peering through the blinds.

Geoffrey had three different cellphones going. He had a line to the Clarkson police chief, so that they could discuss containment. And although it was highly unlikely that the crowd would storm the Freedom Building, there were five hundred soldiers on standby inside the Parliament Building just across the street. Geoffrey also had a line to their chief plant in the demonstration, Saunders, whose job was to beat up on white people—also plants—in the demonstration. In case things got nasty, they would need photos of blacks attacking whites to justify the police intervention. Geoffrey could stage a chess match like nobody’s business.

“Let’s send Rocco out to address the crowd,” the prime minister said. “We should appear calm and accessible.”

“There’s nothing for him to say, Bossman,” Geoffrey said. “He’s going to stand out there and make a fool of himself.”

“He’s a fool anyway,” the PM said.

“Yes, but if he goes out there and makes an ass of himself, people could really get riled up. He might have trouble getting out of there. He could get hurt. Or the officers escorting him might get hurt. Then we would have a major incident. Not worth the risk.”

“I don’t like this. We look indecisive.”

There was a knock on the door. Geoffrey opened it to Rocco Calder in his gym wear.

“Out for your constitutional?” the prime minister asked.

“I was running in the park, saw the disturbance and thought I would come right to the office.”

Geoffrey snickered.

Rocco wanted to call him a half-pint mama’s boy, but instead, he walked up to stand beside the prime minister, body-checking Geoffrey on his way. Just a little shoulder, to throw the jerk off balance. The prime minister didn’t even notice. He was busy peering out the blinds.

“Mr. Prime Minister, I think I should go down there.”

“And do what?”

“Give a statement. Tell them that we are considering their requests and will have a response in a matter of days.”

“You can’t go down there, Rocco.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not safe,” the prime minister said.

“Sir,” Geoffrey broke in. “There it is! A projectile. Straight down there, to your right. Time to unleash the first wave.”

“Get the police chief on the line,” the PM said.

“I’ve got his chief of staff right here,” Geoffrey said, pointing to the cellphone.

“Tell them it’s time to break up the demonstration. Lula claims
to have the ID of government officials. That would constitute stolen property. Arrest the bastards, search them and confiscate their goods.”

“Sir,” Rocco said, “there’s no need to crack heads over this. I’m sure we can contain this and disperse the crowd with a promise to investigate.”

“Too late,” Geoffrey chirped again, “heads are already cracking.”

B
ASTARDS.
C
ANDACE HAD PREDICTED IT.
H
ER RADIO CRACKLED.
Officers were instructed to hold their ground and to arrest anyone seen throwing rocks, speaking into a megaphone or attempting to run away. She saw children, women and men running as the police pressed in. She saw the instigators drop their rocks and cans and attempt to blend in with the crowd.

She spotted Keita running nearby with two officers in pursuit. She silently wished him luck. But her partner, Devlin James, a smartass cocky bastard who was good on his horse, gave chase and caught up to Keita. Devlin whacked him on the shoulder and jumped down to distribute his own brand of justice. By the time Candace reached them, Devlin had zip-cuffed Keita and was demanding ID. Good thing she outranked him.

“Let him go, Devlin.”

“He was fleeing.”

“He threw nothing. He caused no harm. And I know him. He’s a good sort. A marathoner. Let him go.”

“I’m taking him in.”

“Cut through those zip-cuffs and let him go, and that’s an order.”

“Cut him free yourself,” Devlin said and rode away. She could see that she had made a permanent enemy of him, pulling rank in front of a civilian. Some guys couldn’t take being outranked by a woman.

Candace got down from her horse. With her Swiss Army knife, she cut through the zip-cuffs.