Philipe stood by himself, next to the doorway to the kitchen, and I moved next to him. “What are we going to do next?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Who knows? You got any ideas?”
I shook my head slowly, surprised not only by his answer but his attitude. The rest of us were pumped up, high from our first outing and ready for more, but Philipe seemed… I don’t know. Bored? Disappointed? Disillusioned? All of those and none of them. I looked at him, and the thought crossed my mind that he was manic depressive. That didn’t fit, though. Manic depressives were either up or down; there was no middle ground. Philipe was more even-keeled than that.
Maybe, I thought, he was feeling remorse.
Maybe he was feeling what I was supposed to feel.
I still wanted to hit someplace else, to strike another blow against the empire, but I decided that maybe this wasn’t the time to bring it up. On the table to my left was the Show section of the
“Let me see that,” Philipe said. He took the paper from me. He had been reading over my shoulder and had obviously found something that caught his interest. He looked over the front page, and a grin spread across his face. His eyes, dull a few moments before, were animated and excited. “Yes,” he said.
He strode into the middle of the room, held up the newspaper. “Tomorrow,” he announced, “we’re going to a jazz concert!”
We’d planned to arrive early, but by the time we battled the work traffic on the freeway and made it to Fashion Island, it was five-fifty. The concert was scheduled to start at six.
Bleachers and folding chairs had been set up for the audience, but both were filled and people were starting to stand around the periphery of the concert area. We stood in front of a men’s clothing store, watching the people pass by. It was an upscale crowd of beautiful people, the type of people I’d always hated. The women were all model-thin with short skintight dresses and designer sunglasses, the men blond and athletic and young and successful. Most of them were talking business.
Apparently Philipe felt the same way I did. “Obnoxious jerks,” he said, surveying the crowd.
An announcer introduced the band, and an eclectic group of longhaired men and short-haired women took the stage. The music started, a Latin-fusion hybrid. I looked toward Philipe. He obviously had something planned for tonight, but none of the rest of us knew what it was. I felt a rush of adrenaline as I saw him straighten, walk forward.
He moved beside a smug-looking woman wearing designer-label tennis clothes, a trendy chatterbox who had not stopped talking to the identically dressed woman next to her since the concert began. He turned to face her. “Would you please be quiet?” he said. “We’re trying to hear the concert.”
He slapped her hard across the face.
She was too stunned to react. By the time she realized what had happened, Philipe had again stepped back to where the rest of us were standing. The woman looked at us, through us, past us, searching for the person who had hit her. There was fear on her face, and her right cheek was bright red where it had been slapped.
She and her friend quickly moved away, toward a security guard standing near the bleachers.
Philipe grinned at me. I heard Bill and Junior giggling behind me.
“What should we do?” James asked.
“Follow my lead,” Philipe said. He moved forward, into the crowd, in the direction of the folding chairs. He stopped next to a young Turk in a power tie who was discussing stock options with a friend.
Philipe reached out, grabbed a handful of the man’s hair, and yanked. Hard.
The man screamed in pain and whirled around, fists clenched.
Steve punched him in the gut.
The man fell to his knees, gasping for air and clutching his stomach. His friend looked at us with frightened eyes and began backing away.
Bill and John advanced on him.
I felt strange. Following the rush of our city hall escapade, I’d wanted to do something else along those lines, I’d wanted to see some type of action, but this sort of random violence made me feel extremely uncomfortable. It shouldn’t have — I’d already killed a man, I’d already vandalized a public building, I didn’t like these yuppies here to begin with — but I still felt as though we were in the wrong. If there had been more provocation, if there was some way I could justify our actions, I might feel better about it, but as it was, I felt sorry for the woman Philipe had slapped, for the man he had attacked. I’d been the victim too often myself not to sympathize with other victims.
The first man was starting to get up, and Philipe pushed him back down onto the cement. He turned to me. “Go with Bill and John. Get his friend.”
I stood there.
“Get him!”
Bill and John had tackled the other man. Someone else had come to his rescue. This was turning into an honest-to-God brawl.
“Get in there!” Philipe ordered.
I didn’t want to “get in there”. I didn’t want to —
An Armani-suited jerk bumped into me. He was heading toward the fight, ready to get into it. He obviously hadn’t seen me and had run into me accidentally, but he didn’t even bother to apologize. “Get the fuck out of my way,” he said instead, pushing a fisted hand toward my face.
That did it.
The crowd suddenly had a face to me. The man in the Armani suit instantly came to symbolize everything that was wrong with these people, everything that I hated about them. They were no longer innocent victims of Philipe’s random attacks. They were deserving recipients of justice.
These were the people who had kept us down, kept us Ignored, and after all this time, we were finally striking back.
I punched Armani hard in the back.
He stumbled, grunted, whirled around, but Don was already on him, hitting him in the stomach. Armani doubled up, but took it, and was about to retaliate when Buster, behind him, kicked the back of his left knee.
He went down.
“Retreat!” Philipe announced suddenly. “Move back!”
I didn’t know why he said that, what he had planned or decided, but like the others, I instantly, instinctively obeyed. All ten of us gathered around Philipe. He grinned hugely. “Look,” he said.
My gaze followed the nod of his head. The fight was still going on, although between whom I did not know. Two security guards had rushed over and were trying to break it up.
No one had noticed our absence.
I got the point.
Philipe caught my eye, grinned, nodded when he saw that I understood. “We’ll spread out, start up conflicts throughout the crowd. Bill and John, you go to the other side of Nieman Marcus. James, Steve, Pete, start something near Silverwood’s. Buster and Junior, you do something by the far bleachers. Tommy and Don? You two attack near the sign-up table for the drawing. Bob and I will take this area.”
The plan worked perfectly. We would pick one man and then set upon him, pummeling him. Others would join in, expanding the fight, and we would bow out.
Soon there were several pockets of turmoil in the crowd, a free-for-all melee with us unseen at the center of the storm.
The band had stopped playing by this time, and an announcement was made from the stage that unless order was restored immediately the concert would be canceled.
The fighting continued, with an ever-increasing number of security guards emerging from some reserve area in an attempt to bring the crowd under control.
