But if Julian is the radical activist in the family, then what is Alex? The armchair strategist? Lizzie isn’t sure, because Alex plays his cards very close to his chest, even with her.
Lizzie’s understanding of the situation this week in particular was that Julian had asked Alex to come down and help him organize some big street protest that was in the offing. She wasn’t surprised that Alex agreed, because she knew that Alex would do anything for Julian. But she also knew from experience not to ask too many questions, and was content instead to imagine the two of them-it’s preposterous now, she realizes-hand-cranking out leaflets on a small printing press, or unpacking bulk consignments of Anonymous masks.
But then Alex asked her to come as well. She was into it at first, a mix of flattered and intrigued, but that was when her exposure to Julian hadn’t extended beyond a single face-to-face meeting over a pizza, a few Skype calls she happened to be in the room for, and Alex’s many stories about him.
Five days of the real thing has pretty much taken the shine off those.
But Lizzie’s focus in all of this is not-and never has been-on Julian. In a way, he’s the mad, fucked-up older brother in the background, like a secondary character out of some sitcom that got canceled after its first season. No, the focus for Lizzie, obviously, has always been on Alex-innocent, whispery, logical, weirdly sexy, on-the-fucking-spectrum Alex.
And Alex doesn’t get canceled, not lightly.
Which is when it hits her. Like a second whack of the baseball bat.
That thing that’s been nagging at her.
Within a minute, Lizzie is on her feet, digging into the pocket of her jeans for the crumpled-up ten and two ones. Walking along Forty-second, she looks back over her shoulder. Sixth goes up, right? And Fifth down.
She’s not a native here, not anymore.
She approaches the front of the New York Public Library, the steps, the stone lions. She’ll get a cab downtown, as far as the meter will take her, and walk the rest.
She has no choice now. She has to go back. It would be an act of disloyalty not to, and as the cab whittles down through the midtown cross streets, below Fourteenth, down to Washington Square Park, and over to Broadway, she realizes she doesn’t feel sick anymore. She’s not anxious, or scared, either.
She doesn’t know what she is.
But one thing she does know-as she gets out of the cab, surrendering her twelve bucks, with fifteen or so blocks outstanding, and as she replays that clip in her head-one thing she alone knows, and knows for sure.
It wasn’t Julian, it was never him.
The shooter? Okay, outside the Rygate, the potential shooter-but the shooter on Columbus Avenue? The shooter in Central Park? She’s prepared to lay even money now, not that she has to, because it’s just come to her, in a flash, from the clip, the woolly hat, the gray hoodie, which was which.
Who was who.
The shooter wasn’t Julian.
The shooter was Alex.
Ellen comes out of the library with a name.
Julian Robert Coady.
It was actually pretty easy. Five minutes of sweet-talking her way into a temporary reader’s pass, forty minutes of flicking through a pile of Atherton Chronicle back issues, and then another twenty, twenty-five minutes online, cross-referencing names that appeared in the paper with names from the college radio station’s website-specifically from the page for its headline talk show, What Up?
The paper is a weekly and doesn’t have an online edition, but it didn’t take Ellen long to familiarize herself with the layout and to identify likely page locations where strong political views might be expressed. She also started from a year ago, more or less around the time of that blog post with the comment thread that threw up the “ath900” handle. She got through over fifty issues-a quick riffle, literally, for each one-before coming across anything of interest. This turned out to be a semi-regular column called “The Eyeball” that railed pretty consistently against the bankers and their gigantic criminal conspiracy. Nothing unusual in that, of course, it’s practically a new art form-indignation porn, you find it everywhere-but the tone here was quite peculiar.
The byline on the articles was Caligula.
In one of them, reference was made to an academic called Farley Kaplan, who had apparently given an interview the previous week on a small local cable news show, the Stone Report, in which he stated that “leading bankers should face a firing squad.”
When Ellen went online and did a trawl of names on the WKNT website-guest lists, program hosts, production assistants-she quickly came across the name Farley Kaplan again. He appeared on an edition of What Up? a couple of months after the Eyeball piece and did a ten-minute interview in which he expanded on his firing squad comment.
What Up? is a half-hour show that goes out on Saturday afternoons and covers political and environmental stories mainly culled from alternative media sources. Ellen pulled the Kaplan interview from the archive and listened to it. It was standard stuff, with the firing squad remark definitely coming off as facetious rather than sinister, but toward the end of the ten-minute slot he did repeat it, adding that there should be enough bullets to go around “for a representative from each of the three Wall Street crime syndicates, investment banking, hedge funds, and private equity.”
Ellen was still trying to process this when the presenter signed off by thanking Kaplan for coming on the show, and also “our sound engineer, the Chronicle’s legendary Caligula, for enticing him to come on.”
It didn’t take Ellen more than a couple of keystrokes to establish that the What Up? sound engineer around that time was one Julian Robert Coady.
Was Coady the guy? Was he ath900? Was he one of the shooters?
Maybe, maybe not, but as she emerges from the library, Ellen has a keen sense that she’s on to something, certainly that she has something to work with-names (Coady, Kaplan) and possible places to check out (the WKNT office, the residence halls here at Atherton, wherever the Stone Report operates from).
She decides her next stop should probably be the Administration Building, but as she’s crossing the main quad in front of the library, she spots Geek Girl and her posse occupying a bench on the east side, under a maple tree, all of them looking in her direction.
“Hey there,” Geek Girl says, and waves.
Ellen stops, shakes her head, and walks over.
“What, you guys have nothing better to do,” she says, “no classes to go to?”
The Smart One holds her hand out, indicating the now-sundrenched quad. “What could be better than this?”
“Besides,” Geek Girl says, “we’re intrigued.”
Ellen looks at her, holding her gaze, saying nothing.
“You know.”
“Do I?”
“A reporter on campus, a real reporter. There must be something… afoot.”
“Afoot?”
“Yeah, you like that?” She pauses. “Newspaper girl.”
This chick is something else. Ellen has been hit on by women before, but not-as far as she can remember-by a twenty-year-old, and not outside the dim and noisy confines of a bar.