I wanted him dead.
I read the letters, and I went directly to the wall safe, and opened it, and took out the gun, and loaded it. We kept it unloaded, because of the children. The box of cartridges was in the safe, with the gun. I loaded the gun, and then I went upstairs to dress.
I dressed for expediency. Nothing else. I wasn’t thinking of any kind of disguise, I had no thought of getting away with it, I just didn’t give a damn. I merely wanted him dead. So I dressed for ease of movement. Baggy blue jeans I used when I was gardening, a T-shirt, white socks and Reeboks, my hair up under Lyle’s baseball cap so it wouldn’t fly all over my face, wouldn’t get in my eyes when it came time to shoot him. I put on a ski parka when I left the house. We used to ski a lot before the children were born. The gun was in the right hand pocket of the parka.
I took a taxi up to the Hall. I walked right in, nobody there to stop me, you’d think after all this terrorist stuff there’d be people frisking me or something. But no. I walked right in with the gun in my pocket. I opened the door at the back of the auditorium, opened it just enough so I could look in. He was onstage with a lot of other people, Alan Pierce, Josh Coogan, some other people I didn’t know. I closed the door and came around the side of the auditorium, to where there were a lot of offices and a corridor running between them. I went down the corridor almost to the end of it, and then opened a door that led to the stage.
My heart was beating very fast.
I opened the door and found myself in this backstage area, the wings I guess you’d call them, looking out at the stage. It was very dark where I was standing. There was no one around. Everyone was onstage, calling directions and adjusting lights and what not. Alan told Lester to go off left and then walk toward the podium so they could make sure the follow spot was on him, something like that. I took the gun out of my pocket.
Alan said Okay, start your cross, and Lester stepped out of the wings on the other side of the stage and began moving toward the center of the stage, this bright light on him, it was as if they were illuminating him for me, so I could kill him, the son of a bitch.
My hand was shaking.
When he reached the podium, I shot him.
I fired six times. I don’t think all of my shots got him. But I saw him falling, and I could see blood all over his pink sweater, so I figured I had got him good. Then everyone started screaming and yelling. I turned and ran.
That was the first time I had even a notion of survival. Of getting away.
Before then, I’d only wanted him dead.
I could hear yelling behind me.
I kept running.
There was a corridor with anEXITsign at the end of it. I was heading for the door under it, when someone came out of an office at the end of the hall, a woman, and I turned and started running in the opposite direction again, back toward the stage. But there were voices ahead of me now, coming off the stage, so I opened the nearest door and went in whatever it was, I didn’t know what it was, I was just trying to hide.
The room was dark except for faint daylight coming through a narrow window at the far end. I could hear people running by outside, shouting. In the dim light, I saw urinals. I was in a men’s room. I ducked into one of the stalls just as someone cracked open the door. Anyone in here? a man’s voice yelled. I held my breath. The room was dark, the light from the window filtered. Where’s the fuckin light switch? the man asked himself. Silence. I heard him fumbling around on the wall. Then he asked Anyone in here? again, and muttered something, and closed the door, and was gone. I heard more running outside, voices passing by, fading. I waited.
I didn’t know where to go. I wanted to cry. I had killed him, and now I wanted to cry. Not because he was dead, the son of a bitch. But because they would catch me and put me in prison forever. The children, I thought. I kept still in the dark, terrified that the man would come back and put on the light this time, and search the room, and find me, and take me away.
I don’t know how long I waited there in the dark, in the stall. At last, I came out of the stall and stood still, listening in the dark, for several moments. Then I went to the window. It was open a crack, just some three or four inches. I opened it all the way. I was looking out onto what seemed to be an airshaft, the sky far above, a narrow paved passageway below. I climbed up and over the sill and dropped to my feet on the other side. The passageway ran behind the building for the entire width of it. I ran down it, enclosed by walls on either side of me, and saw another window on the far wall. This one was open just a little bit, too. I reached up, and opened it all the way. Then I hoisted myself up and climbed into what I realized was another men’s room, a smaller one this time, just two stalls, and a single urinal, and some sinks.
The lights were on.
A man was in one of the stalls.
I heard him coughing, and then I heard the toilet flushing.
I ran for the door at the other end of the room, opposite the sinks.
I opened the door, and stepped out into a long corridor. I was on the stage-left side of the auditorium. A door painted red was immediately to my left. An illuminatedEXITsign was above it. I opened the door and went out into an alley. Sunlight struck my eyes. I dropped the gun down a drainage sewer near the wall, and began running.
An old bum in army fatigues was just stepping into the alley at the far end.
I almost knocked him off his feet.
He said, Hey!
That was all he said.
Hey.
After I’d just killed a man.
THEY ASKED HERif there was anything she wished to change or add to her confession. She said No. They asked her to sign it, and handed her a pen.
She signed it.
It was all over but the shooting.
18
This is what they call The Denouement, I thought.
I am not a writer, Mr. Commissioner, but that is what writers call the chapter in the novel where everything falls into place and makes sense. It is alternatively called The Epiphany, which has religious overtones, I know, but which means some kind of dramatic change, as for example when a woman looks at herself in the mirror and sees looking back at her someone all bleary-eyed from being knocked unconscious, and all tied up to a chair in a basement she doesn’t even know where.
A black woman came in carrying a tray upon which was, or were, a donut and a cup of coffee, when a person was starving to death. There was also an Uzi on the tray, which the black woman was careful to remove before placing the tray in front of me.
“Here you go, sister,” she said.
I asked her how I was supposed to eat with my hands tied behind my back.
“You won’t have to worry about eatin too much longer,” she said, and burst out laughing, which I considered ominous.
“You goan be dead by midnight,” she added, which I also took to be a bad sign.
The clock was ticking.
Along about eleven-thirty, the door opened and Mr. Mercer Grant himself came marching down the steps. Behind him was the French receptionist from the Reve du Jour Underwear Factory.
“This is my wife Marie,” he said. “By the way, those are our real names.”
“Then why did you tell me they werenotyour real names?” I asked.
“To lure you to the factory,” he said. “It’s called entrapment. It’s done all the time.”
