color.
She dipped toward the bed. But before she plucked her shoe from under a quilt that had spilled to the floor, she engaged him at eye level.
'Not since an element of doubt began to enter your life.'
'Doubt? What is doubt?' He said, 'There is no doubt. Nobody doubts anymore.'
She stepped into the shoe and adjusted her skirt.
'You're beginning to think it's more interesting to doubt than to act. It takes more courage to doubt.'
She was whispering, still, and turned away from him now.
'If this makes me sexier, then where are you going?' She was going to answer the telephone that was ringing in the study.
He had one sock on when it came to him. G. triacanthos. He knew it would come to him and it did. The botanical name of the tree in the courtyard. Gleditsia triacanthos. The honey locust.
He felt better now. He knew who he was and reached for his shirt, dressing in double time.
Torval was standing outside the door. Their eyes did not meet. They went to the elevator and rode to the lobby in silence. He let Torval exit first and check the area. He had to concede that the man did this well, in a soft choreography of tacking moves, disciplined and clean. Then they walked through the courtyard and out to the street.
They stood by the car. Torval indicated the haircut that waited in either direction, only yards away.
Then his eyes went cool and still. He was hearing a voice in his ear bud. There was a pitch to the
moment, a sense of intent expectation.
'Threat condition blue,' he said finally. 'Man down.'
The driver held open the door. Eric did not look at the driver. There were times when he thought he might look at the driver. But he had not done this yet.
The man down was Arthur Rapp, managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Arthur Rapp had just been assassinated in Nike North Korea. Happened only a minute ago. Eric watched it happen again, in obsessive replays, as the car crawled toward a choke point on Lexington Avenue. He hated Arthur Rapp. He'd hated him before he met him. It was a hatred with the purest bloodlines, orderly, based on differences of theory and interpretation. Then he met the man and hated him personally and chaotically, with sizable violence of heart.
He was killed live on the Money Channel. It was past midnight in Pyongyang and he was making final comments to an interviewer for the benefit of North American audiences after a historic day and night of ceremonies, receptions, dinners, speeches and toasts.
Eric watched him sign a document on one screen and prepare to die on another.
A man in a short-sleeve shirt came into camera range and began to stab Arthur Rapp in the face and neck. Arthur Rapp clutched the man and seemed to draw him nearer as if to share a confidence. They tumbled together to the floor, tangled in the mike cord of the interviewer. She was dragged down with them, a willowy woman whose slit skirt ran up her thigh and became the pivotal point of observation.
Horns were blowing in the street.
There was a close-up on one of the screens. It was Arthur Rapp's pulpy face blowing outward in spasms of shock and pain. It resembled a mass of pressed vegetable matter. Eric wanted them to show it again. Show it again. They did this, of course, and he knew they would do it repeatedly into the night, our night, until the sensation drained out of it or everyone in the world had seen it, whichever came first, but he could see it again if he wished, any time, through scan retrieval, a technology that seemed already oppressively sluggish, or he could recover a slow-motion shot of the willowy woman and her hand mike being sucked into the terror and he could sit here for hours wanting to fuck her then and there in the bloodwhirl of knife and random limbs and slashed carotids, amid the staccato cries of the flailing assassin, cell phone clipped to his belt, and the gaseous bloated moans of the dying Arthur Rapp.
A tour bus blocked the route across the avenue. It was a double decker with smoke rolling from its underbelly and rows of woeful heads poking from the top tier, unstirring Swedes and Chinese, their fanny packs stuffed with currency.
Michael Chin was still in the jump seat, facing rearward. He'd listened to the audio account of the assassination but had not turned to look at the screens.
Eric watched him now, wondering whether the young man's restraint was a form of moral rigor or an apathy so deep it was not pierced by the muses, even, of sex and death.
'While you were away,' Chin said. 'Yes. Tell me.'
'There was a report that consumer spending is weakening in Japan.' He spoke in a newscaster's voice. 'Raising doubts about the country's economic strength.'
'See. What. I said as much.'
'The yen is expected to fade. The yen will sink a bit.'
'There we are. See. Has to happen. The situation has to change. The yen can't go any higher.'
Torval came walking back to this end of the car. Eric lowered the window. Windows still had to be lowered.
Torval said, 'A word.'
'Yes.'
'The complex recommends extra security.'
'You're not happy about this.'
'First a threat to the president.'
'You're confident you can handle whatever comes up.'
'Now this attack on the managing director.'
'Accept their recommendation.'
He raised the window. How did he feel about additional security? He felt refreshed. The death of Arthur Rapp was refreshing. The prospective dip in the yen was invigorating.
He scanned the visual display units. They were deployed at graded distances from the rear seat, flat plasma screens of assorted sizes, some in a cluster framework, a few others projected singly from side cabinets. The grouping was a work of video sculpture, handsome and airy, with protean potential, each unit designed to swing out, fold up or operate independent of the others.
He liked the volume low or the sound turned off.
They were climbing down out of the tour bus now. It seemed to be sinking into the dark smoke that foamed up around it. A derelict tried to board, dressed in bubble wrap. There were sirens in the distance, fire trucks caught in traffic, the sound hanging in the air, undopplered, and car horns blowing locally, another hardness upon the day.
He felt his elation deepen. He slid open the sunroof and thrust his head into the reeling scene. The bank towers loomed just beyond the avenue. They were covert structures for all their size, hard to see, so common and monotonic, tall, sheer, abstract, with standard setbacks, and block-long, and interchangeable, and he had to concentrate to see them.
They looked empty from here. He liked that idea. They were made to be the last tall things, made empty, designed to hasten the future. They were the end of the outside world. They weren't here, exactly. They were in the future, a time beyond geography and touchable money and the people who stack and count it.
He sat down and looked at Chin, who was biting the dead skin at the side of his thumbnail. He watched him gnaw. This was not another of Michael's tender reveries. He was gnawing, grinding his teeth on the hangnail, then the nail itself, the base of the nail, the pale arc of quarter moon, the lunula, and there was something awful and atavistic in the scene, Chin unborn, curled in a membranous sac, a scary little geek-headed humanoid, sucking his scalloped hands.
Why is a hangnail called a hangnail? It's an alteration of agnail, which is Middle English, Eric happened to know, from Old English, with roots in torment and pain.
Chin loosed one of his vegetarian farts. Mode control ate it at once. Then there was an opening and the car bucked and lurched, veering in a screech around the tour bus and across the avenue. The man at the taco cart solemnly watched. The car wobbled over the curbstone and sphinctered free and Chin's eyes came out of lunar seclusion when it raced all the way to Park along a surreal length of empty street.
'Time for you to do what.'
