Briley was coming out, in the uniform and without his mask. The pants were a little too short, and too big around the waist, but the shortness just made him look like an old man, and the gunbelt disguised the excess material at the waist.
Briley’s taking the guard’s part was a last-minute change in the routine. An old man named Berridge had originally been set to do it. There’d been three meetings to set things up, and at the beginning of the third, Berridge had said, “There’s no point trying to lie to you boys. Or lie to me, either. I’ve lost my nerve. Maybe I’m too old, or I’ve had too much time inside, I don’t know. But I can feel inside my stomach I can’t do it.” Parker and the others had known better than to try to get a man to do what he felt he was incapable of doing—they’d be too dependent on one another during the job—but it was too late by then to get somebody to take Berridge’s place. This final Saturday night show before the Civic Auditorium was torn down was their only shot: a full house, all cash sales, no advance sales. Every dollar spent for a seat inside that jampacked soup bowl was still in this building, tonight only. So they’d altered the routine to go with a string of four instead of five, and the result was Briley in the guard’s uniform, grinning, self-conscious to be in the trappings of Authority.
“How’s it look?”
“It’ll pass,” Parker said.
Keegan said, “The pants are too short.”
Briley looked at him. “You want me to send them out?”
“I only said.”
“You’ll do,” Parker said.
“The hat was too big,” Briley said. “I put some toilet paper around the brim.” He took the hat off, grinned at the inside, and put it back on. “I’ll go on out.”
Parker and Keegan waited half a minute, and then followed Briley out, Keegan carrying the toolkit again. They looked down to the right, and Briley was standing at the window, looking down at the musicians. There was no music right now, and the crowd noise was steadily dropping. Briley was standing in a good imitation of Dockery’s original position; stomach jutting out, head forward and down, hands clasped behind his back.
Parker looked to his left, down through one of the windows at the platform in the middle of the auditorium. The four musicians who had been there were gone. Bulky stagehands in T-shirts and work pants, looking like citizens of a different planet from everybody else in the auditorium, were spreading a bright red carpet in the middle of the platform, moving the microphones and amplifiers around, and wheeling out a small keyboard instrument like a midget piano. In the middle of the red carpet was the white outline of a triangle, with an eye in it.
Keegan, beside Parker at the window, said, “They shouldn’t be able to get away with that.”
Parker frowned at the platform, not knowing what Keegan was talking about, but didn’t ask.
Keegan said, “That thing on the carpet there, that triangle. That’s off the dollar bill. That’s the kind of thing they do. Dress in the American flag, all that. None of them have any respect.”
Parker walked on to stand beside Briley, and Keegan followed. Briley, nodding at the platform, said, “The headliners are coming.”
According to Morris, the final group would play a minimum of twenty-five minutes. If they were feeling good, if they’d established an enjoyable rapport with the audience—Morris had said, “If the vibes are good”—they might extend that to an hour or more. But twenty-five minutes was the minimum, so that was the deadline.
Parker looked at his watch: one twenty-five. He said, “We have to be out by ten to two.”
Keegan said, “Then we better move.”
“Let’s wait for more noise.”
It was almost quiet out there now, the crowd expectant and waiting. The stagehands finished their adjustments and waddled off, going back to the cigar butts they’d left on table edges. The audience noise tapered off even more, till individual coughs could be heard, and suddenly the auditorium lights went out, and they were looking down into darkness.
Keegan was the only one who moved, making an abrupt jump to the left, past the edge of the window, the toolkit bumping his knee and the wall. Parker and Briley continued to stand there, side by side, looking down; Briley in the guard uniform, Parker in his dark jacket and the hood over his face. The corridor lights above and behind them remained on.
Keegan said, “For Christ’s sake, they can see you!”
“A silhouette,” Parker said. “With the light behind me. Better they see a silhouette standing still than jumping away and trying to hide.”
“I got out of the way before they could see me.”
The darkness wasn’t total down there. A sparse pattern of dull red exit lights glowed. Tiny red and green dots of light from the platform showed that the amplifiers were working; those dots seemed to wink all at once, meaning that people were moving around on the platform.
The sound, when it came, had been anticipated for so long that it seemed unexpected, a surprise and a shock. An electronic crash, a chord of aggressive, whining, insistent notes blended into one detonation, an announcement of entry like the crash of an iron door back against an iron wall. An instant later one bright white beam flooded the platform from the ceiling, and there were now five musicians out there, one at the keyboard instrument, two with electric guitars, one at a complex array of drums, and one standing in the middle of the carpet’s triangle, holding a hand microphone; this last one was dressed completely in red, and when the light came on he opened his mouth wide, held the microphone against his lower teeth, and shrieked loud enough to make distortions in the loudspeakers. The audience shrieked back, the four instrumentalists began a heavy background beat that was most like the sound of a highballing freight train—a sound out of context, since it was unlikely anyone in this audience had ever ridden a train of any kind—and the one in red began to sing/shout into the microphone: ” Tbe-mes-sen-ger- ofDeatb-will-bring-you-down …”
Parker said, “It’s time.”
He and Keegan turned away from the window. Parker counted doors and went to the one he wanted. He turned the knob and walked in, and the man at the desk dropped his pen and cried, “Good God!”
