Authors: Jim Crace
Genesis (10 page)
Five volunteers would never be enough for the swarming ambush that Freda had in mind at first, her show of force, her mighty kick against the pricks. She'd seen the glorious newsreels from 1968, the year of barricades, with the columns of police rebuffed by mobs of students, armed only with their banners and some cobblestones. Never by as few as five. Again the city had let her down, she felt. Only thirteen years previously, Peking, Paris, Prague, Chicago, Santiago, Rome had all been pulled apart by people less than thirty years of age. It must have seemed to Freda that Youth could be truly powerful in every corner of the world, excepting ours. She kept a press photo from 1968 in her wallet: a Czech, wild-haired and young and biblically beautiful, his jacket pushed back on his shoulders, his shirt pulled open, was baring his chest, his rack of ribs, a centimeter from the barrel of a Russian gun in a gesture that, for Freda, was sensual and thrilling. It always made her think of
The Fox's Lament,
“Stop me, shoot me, if you dare / For I'm too far and fast to care.”
The Fox's Lament,
“Stop me, shoot me, if you dare / For I'm too far and fast to care.”
She wondered sometimes if he was still alive, this seminaked man. Was he still a radical? He looked, she thought, a bit like Lix. She'd noticed it when he'd been standing up so pompously and so theatrically at the RoCoCo meeting. That birthmark, certainly, made his face seem challenging. She'd wondered what his ribs were like and how his hair would look if ruffled up a bit by her.
Would it look more like the Czech's? What could she do to make him look more Czech?
Would it look more like the Czech's? What could she do to make him look more Czech?
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IT WAS at that moment, peering across the room at Lix, his eagerness to please, she decided she'd accept him as a lover for a while and even that she would allow herself a period of being in love. She had not flushed like he had flushed for her. Her pulse had not increased for him. Her feelings were not bodily She was calmly concentrated on the chance that Lix had offered her of pushing back the jacket, pulling open the shirt, and making politics with kisses on a comrade's rack of ribs. Freda always needed someone in her bed when the optimistic ghost of 1968 invaded her. Her body and her spirit demanded company But not just yet. She'd let his role intensify as all the action of the coming weeks intensified, as they prepared to pull the cobbles loose and press their chests against the police and MeisterCorps. She'd save their best encounter for the aftermath of Marin Scholla's kidnapping. She would defeat him on his bed. That was her long-term urgency.
Time to begin. Freda followed blushing Lix out of the meeting room and made him talk to her as they walked across the campus to their almost neighboring Academies of Human Science and Theater Studies for their evening lectures. She was, she said, again in her soft, fiercely reasonable voice, “irretrievably disillusioned” with RoCoCo. Marin Scholla was being virtually delivered into their hands. And they could only muster five. “Some
throng.” They'd need twenty-five at the very least to rush the chairman off his feet, she said. They could not expect the head of a leviathan like MeisterCorps to stride into their university unaccompanied, like some delivery boy There would be the usual dignitaries and luminaries surrounding him, men and women in their best clothes who would be easy to intimidate. There'd be private guards as well. Americans were paranoid whenever they left home. They moved around in skittish flocks, “like trigger finches,” never trusting anyone. “Americans are terrified of streets,” she said. And there'd be armed police, perhaps, despite the recent ruling that the campuses were off limits to any unauthorized civic forces. There'd be the television and the press, of course, and beefy businessmen from MeisterCorps who maybe, emboldened by their lunch and their genetic hatred of the young and studious, would be quick and eager to deploy their shoes and fists.
throng.” They'd need twenty-five at the very least to rush the chairman off his feet, she said. They could not expect the head of a leviathan like MeisterCorps to stride into their university unaccompanied, like some delivery boy There would be the usual dignitaries and luminaries surrounding him, men and women in their best clothes who would be easy to intimidate. There'd be private guards as well. Americans were paranoid whenever they left home. They moved around in skittish flocks, “like trigger finches,” never trusting anyone. “Americans are terrified of streets,” she said. And there'd be armed police, perhaps, despite the recent ruling that the campuses were off limits to any unauthorized civic forces. There'd be the television and the press, of course, and beefy businessmen from MeisterCorps who maybe, emboldened by their lunch and their genetic hatred of the young and studious, would be quick and eager to deploy their shoes and fists.
Besides, even if RoCoCo had volunteered en masse and were a hundred strong, Scholla would avoid a crowd. He'd steer clear of anybody seeming faintly aggressive. Anyone approaching him would have to look absolutely safe. He had his share of enemies who would be glad to land a punch on his old Yankee chin, or splash an egg across his suit. (Making “garbage that didn't last and enemies that did,” she joked, was MeisterCorps's contribution to the world.) She'd heard that men like Scholla never walked closer than five meters to a building in case some demonstrator on the seventh floor was standing by an open window on a chair, ready to spit or urinate. “Or dump,” suggested Lix. They laughed together for their first time.
“We need,” Lix said, already seeking ways of reining in his
Mad Idea, but reining in, as well, the female of his dreams, “a strategy that's more in keeping with the Melt.”
Mad Idea, but reining in, as well, the female of his dreams, “a strategy that's more in keeping with the Melt.”
She snorted in reply and stretched her neck and shook her hair. A frisky thoroughbred. “The Melt's a cheap diversion. They'll let you change your clothes, but just you try changing anything that matters.”
“Well, then, something smaller-scale at least. You can't beat men like Scholla with force, anyway. There's five of us. And three of them can't run. No, you have to beat a man like that with weapons that he hasn't got.”
Lix was not speaking from experience. Nor was he speaking in a voice he recognized from his wide repertoire. He was someone new and unrehearsed, the overcheerful, overcareful supplicant who wanted desperately to keep this woman at his side. His voice had softened, matching hers. He tried and didn't quite manage to sound as uncompromisingly logical. He could feel his body change, just from being close to her, within her odor range. Close enough already to have brushed her hand with his and for their shoulders to have collided several times. He might risk a friendly parting kiss, he thought, like comrades do, but that was far more daunting than the kidnapping even. He found that he was almost dancing as he walked. He must have seemed childishly exuberant to her, to anyone who spotted him, but he'd never experienced such escalating changes in his mood and did not know how to restrain himself. His stride had lengthened and his arms were swinging loosely He let his knuckles brush her skirt, her fabric and his skin producing startling ecstasies. She didn't seem to mind.
“Like what? What hasn't Scholla got?” she asked. “The man's got everything.”
“He hasn't got a sense of humor. And he isn't young,” Lix said. “We have. We are.”
Again, he'd earned some smiles from Fredaâthough he was too besotted and disarmed to glimpse in these approving and addictive smiles something he would only be able to articulate once their affair had ended and was in jagged pieces, that he could never be exactly the irresistible, magnetic target of her desires. She was the target of her own desire. She was entirely dazzled by herself. Who wouldn't be if they were her? The most successful people are most dazzled by themselves. In seeking love, accepting it, she was polishing a mirror, all the better to see herself. The best that Lix could hope for was the opportunity to provide Freda's armâand her reputation for flying in the face of conventionâwith a compliant accessory. There were, he would have thought, less satisfying roles in life.
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WHAT FREDA AND her four admirers planned over the next few weeks (once Lix had been installed on Freda's arm, her new man-friend, her latest cobelligerent) was eventually, as Lix had hoped and engineered, far removed from honest kidnapping and shows of force. Little more than just a prank. This was not 1968. It was instead the playful year of Laxity. They were not Baader-Meinhof or the Red Brigades. Still, they could pretend they were. That was the whole point, wasn't it? To truly play the part, to cast themselves as dangerous, but then, if it backfired, to declare themselves
little more than kids, excited students overstepping the mark. Only Youth and Humor attempting politics.
little more than kids, excited students overstepping the mark. Only Youth and Humor attempting politics.
They met in different bars each night, swathed by secrecy and smoke, huddled around their glasses and their cups like five improbable bullion robbers, to finalize their tactics, fired up by cigarettes and alcohol. They were as furtive as possible and theatrically well behaved in public. They never spoke about their “mission” on the phone. They had code words: “the posse” and “the prey.” They took no notes. They kept no minutes of their meetings. They had to memorize their allocated roles, their spoken lines, their stage directions. They were the antiheroes in a film and like the antiheroes in a film they felt adorable. Excitement made them better-looking than they'd ever been before, and better students, actually
The language student's task, in this unlikely plot, was to “look absolutely safe” in her disguise (which meant, in her case, no boots and jeans, no hand-rolled cigarettes, no sappho-sappho shirt, but the camouflage of glasses, makeup, and a stage wig) and then to stop the chairman as he passed the rank of recessed external elevators in the narrowest part of the campus concourse on his way to his foundation stone and his brief duty with a trowel. All dignitaries walked that route; it was the only one not begging for repairs, the only one with winter flower beds and murals, andâperfectly, for RoCoCo's purposesâthe only one where visitors would have to walk in single file.
Now for the simple sting. The vanity hook. She'd ask Marin Scholla to sign a copy of his “inspirational” autobiography,
Trade
Winds
, with its front jacket photograph of the chairman on the
deck of his ostentatious sloop, also called
Trade Winds
. Her line was this: “Fantastic book, Mr. Scholla! Truly fascinating. Can you sign it for me?”
Trade
Winds
, with its front jacket photograph of the chairman on the
deck of his ostentatious sloop, also called
Trade Winds
. Her line was this: “Fantastic book, Mr. Scholla! Truly fascinating. Can you sign it for me?”
It was easy to disarm such men with unwarranted flattery. If a young woman praises a businessman for his creativity, applauds a writer for his cooking or his sporting skills, congratulates a politician for his sense of humor or a banker for his figure, then she has immediate command of his attention. It seldom fails. The chairman would be charmed and startled. (None of the reviews had praised his book, after all. They'd judged it dull and self servingâand overpriced.) The chairman's open hand would flick up by his cheek. He'd wave his fingers until an acolyte produced a fancy pen. And the language student would request a timestalling dedication to a person with a name not easy to spell. “For Alicja Lesniak,” Freda had suggested. Her private joke. A recent foe.
The two heavy anarchists from Human Biology (also disguised and “absolutely safe”âthey'd even promised to sacrifice their beards and put on the jackets they'd reserved for Graduation Day) would then join the sycophantic line of book lovers, holding further copies of
Trade Winds
(which as a matter of principle, they said, they'd steal, not buy, from the academic store). When their turn came for signatures, while they fumbled with pages and their pens, their cameras even, toadying to the chairman with their thanks for his insights and his philanthropy, the linguist would step back to call the service elevatorânot already in use, knock woodâand hold open the door.
Trade Winds
(which as a matter of principle, they said, they'd steal, not buy, from the academic store). When their turn came for signatures, while they fumbled with pages and their pens, their cameras even, toadying to the chairman with their thanks for his insights and his philanthropy, the linguist would step back to call the service elevatorânot already in use, knock woodâand hold open the door.
A simple plan: The posse makes its understated contact with the prey.
Now came the part that nearly always works with startling simplicity in films but where they'd most likely fail, where Lix at least was hoping they would fail. The flattered chairman, concentrating on the frontispiece of his own book, would be a meter from the open elevator. Two steps, two shoulders, two liters of good luck, and he'd be bundled into the metal box by his weighty, grateful readers. Every author's fantasy. His retinue of beefy businessmen and handlers might well have time to see they had been tricked and thrust their polished boots between the closing doors. The elevator might not oblige and come when summoned. The chairman might be nimbler than he looked. If he was, if they could not persuade him through the elevator doors, then all RoCoCo had to do was shrug the whole thing off. Exuberance. Misplaced excitement at the man's philanthropy, the prospect of his palace of the arts. An author should expect the rough-and-tumble of his fans, et cetera. They'd only meant to take the great man for a drink. A student stunt, that's all.
If the doors were quicker than the boots, then Marin Scholla would be safely theirs. There were no basement stairs on that side of the building. So no one could give chase. One floor down, five seconds later, and they'd be in the utility corridor, amongst the heating pipes and generator leads, the cobwebs and the underpowered bulbs, the cleaning trolleys and the laundry rolls, the smell of leakages and paint. Film noir.
The kidnappers had timed and measured their escape. A foretaste
of the fun they'd have. Rehearsals are more fun than true performances. Forty paces to the right, past storage and the boiler room, the ground staff's kitchen, would lead them to an exit door. They'd pin a careful statement to the door, signed by their noms de guerre, Lix's adolescent sobriquet of “Smudge” and once again the name “Alicja,” which outlined their grievances against MeisterCorps but guaranteed safekeeping for the missing millionaire and promised his release once he'd been “entertained.” “You'll have him back in time for dinner,” they'd write in the hope that this would be enough to dissuade his handlers from calling in the police.
of the fun they'd have. Rehearsals are more fun than true performances. Forty paces to the right, past storage and the boiler room, the ground staff's kitchen, would lead them to an exit door. They'd pin a careful statement to the door, signed by their noms de guerre, Lix's adolescent sobriquet of “Smudge” and once again the name “Alicja,” which outlined their grievances against MeisterCorps but guaranteed safekeeping for the missing millionaire and promised his release once he'd been “entertained.” “You'll have him back in time for dinner,” they'd write in the hope that this would be enough to dissuade his handlers from calling in the police.
Beyond the doorway, in the parking bay, the latest lovers in their hired van would be waiting for delivery.
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LIX AND FREDA WANTED Scholla to themselves, of course, a private accessory to their new affair and its total consummation later on that day. It would not be wise, they argued, she insisted, for their three and by now (despite the wigs and graduation suits) possibly identified accomplices to join them in the van for their escape once the chairman was in their hands, no matter how “absolutely safe” they looked. If the police were summoned and they were quick enough and had the gumption to search vehicles for the city's newly missing guest, then they'd be looking first for two large students and an unassuming shorthaired girl (and one, with any luck, they believed was called Alicja).
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