Beyond the doorway, in the parking bay, the latest lovers in their hired van would be waiting for delivery.
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).
Freda and Lix, however, were unknown faces so far, and could more safely complete the last leg of the kidnapping on their own, an innocent young couple, not short, not overweight, with nothing odd about their van except (as you’d expect) the blaring music on their radio-cassette. They’d chosen Weather Report for their escape. A stylish touch, for what kidnapper ever draws attention to himself with raucous, horny jazz? This was during the year of the Melt, remember. In a recent immoderation meant to make the streets more jubilant, many drivers keen to prove their solidarity played their music loud through open windows. Something for pedestrians. Freedom was Amplification in those expressive days. Noise could hide a multitude of sins.
They’d blindfold Marin Scholla as soon as they had slammed the van’s rear doors and sent their three comrades off on foot, in three directions. They’d tape his mouth if it was necessary. Be practical, they told themselves. A man like that was bound to make a noise if given half a chance. He’d call for help, perhaps, but not be heard. The panels of the van were triple-clad, metal, wood, and fabric lining. Weather Report would drown him out. If he struggled while Lix was driving off, then Freda would cope. She was a tall and healthy woman after all, and Marin Scholla was a man in his late seventies and as weak as a blown egg, by all accounts. He wore a hearing aid. He used a walking stick. He’d had a minor stroke. His bones would be like breadsticks. Freda could probably knock him over with her earrings.
Within a moment of accepting their delivery, the lovers would be circling the park with its yearlong revelers on Navigation Island, driving sensibly once they had crossed the river (by the perfectly named Deliverance Bridge) into the old city, their music slowly muted, just one more unremarkable vehicle in the mid-afternoon rush-hour lines. Then they could proceed on the quieter bankside roads until they reached the little Arts Laboratory on the wharf.
Lix had arranged an exclusive matinee performance for his elderly charge. An outing to the theater was never wasted time, especially for a man who, two years previously, had bought the Boston Playhouse, demolished it, and built an arcade. The four surviving and determined members of the Street Beat Renegades, the agitprop group that had so consumed him during his first terms at the academy, would be waiting with their stilts, their light and smoke machines, and their accordions, and with a tripod camera, ready to begin the old man’s entertainment: Meister Scholla’s Dirty Dollars, their hurriedly improvised morality play in the medieval style, based on the fable of the Fat Man and the Cat, with Sin and Virtue unambiguously portrayed for their dullwitted audience of one, and dollars denoted by a bowl of cream (and cream represented on the stage by half a liter of white distemper). They’d give him Music, Tumbling, and Dance. Stiltwalking and Puppetry by “members of the cast.” The script? By Felix Dern himself. Forty minutes (mostly mimed, as Scholla only spoke American). No interval.
Theirs would be an alliance, then, of stage and campus, the intellect and the imagination, politics and pleasure, hope and desire. “Silence for the comrades, please!” RoCoCo Renegades.
How could the chairman not be charmed? Marin Scholla would not truly be their “captive,” after all, and not their “prey,” but just their involuntary guest and only for the afternoon. Was that unreasonable? They’d turn him loose as soon as it was dark, outside the zoo where city vagrants gathered for their soup each night — another clever touch, they thought. They’d make him eat some soup. They’d take a photograph for the press and for their own scrapbooks: the animals, the dispossessed, the humbled businessman, the steaming bowls. Then he could get a taxi back to his ostentatious hotel in time for dinner. No damage done — except perhaps the blunting of his appetite for soup, and bruises on his backside from forty minutes on a wooden chair. Otherwise no harm could come of it.
The RoCoCo Renegades hung on, then, to this colossal self delusion and the courage it provided them: Marin Scholla would be charmed by them, their nerve, their play, their youth, their sincerity, and he would shrug the matter off as he might shrug off the peccadilloes of his own three sons, none of them (according to the gossip press) exactly beyond reproach. Better he’d had children who engaged in politics, who had their say, than those three party animals with their unfastened ways.
The nine conspirators could imagine him, back home in Boston in a week or two, recounting his experiences on a television talk show: “These young people taught me something valuable that I might never have realized otherwise. And I am grateful to them for it.” Studio applause.
So Marin Scholla had been transformed in their imaginations before they’d even laid an eye or hand on him. The more they pictured him, delivered into their brief care, the more they redefined him as a sort of willing guest, an eager volunteer in their debate about the future of their city and the world. At best, they were the sons and daughters he’d never have. They were his natural heirs. At worst, RoCoCo and the Renegades would have provided him an interesting and an improving interlude that he would want to think about, digest, and not dismiss completely. No worse than that. No need for police or any prosecutions, then. He was endowing an arts complex, after all. And what was this but art? A happening. An offspring of the Melt. They’d make him understand before release, before they delivered him into the backseat of his taxi, that theirs had only been a bit of heartfelt fun. Where would we be without the creeds and dogmas of the young?
“FOUR MORE DAYS until our first anniversary,” Freda reminded Lix, reaching forward from the back of their hired van to rub the side of his best cheek. “A month! I haven’t stayed with anyone this long before. What shall we do to celebrate? What would you like to do?” She beat out the remaining days, with playful toughness and her knuckles, on the bony lump behind his ear. “One. Two. Three. And then you’re in my record book.”
“That can only hurt.”
“I like to hurt you.” She pressed her face against Lix’s and blew into his ear. He’d suffered her lips, her knuckles, and her fingertips that day, bruising indicators — or so he’d found in those four weeks — that Freda was feeling anxious rather than amorous, despite the promise of her words.
For once she liked the way he’d dressed. He’d dressed for the occasion. The linen scarf tied at the throat had been her choice, her first and only gift for him. It made him look a touch more dangerous and jaunty than usual, more like the Czech she’d so often fantasized about, more like the kidnapper he’d prove to be within the hour. An ear of cloth stuck out beneath his chin like the blue touch paper of a firework, hoping to be lit. If things went well with Scholla, she’d light this lover up herself later, release the chairman at the zoo, and then release her lover’s linen scarf, release him from his trousers and his shirt, release herself from all the prospects and the tensions of the day, with kiss and punch and stroke.