‘At that meeting they agreed to experiment with subliminal advertising and propaganda through TV. A couple of scientists there had been researching it for years.’ He paused. ‘They can make you believe things and disbelieve things, they can make you angry or passive.’ For the first time he lifted the volume. ‘They can tune you like a TV set, and they’re doing it right now.’
One sketch showed two men sitting together near the front. They had an air of forced casualness as if the denim shirt of one and the T-shirt of the other weren’t their normal dress.
The T-shirt one made a tie-straightening movement twice and the other plucked at the hair which sat on top of his ears. The T-shirt was taking shorthand notes.
My second drawing was of a young woman with blonde hair pulled back into a frizzy pony tail. She was in the front row and stared up at Harvey as if she was trying to count the pores in his nose. I caught the glint of a gold chain around her neck above the creased and stained collar of the shirt that had DO IT printed on it in big red letters on dirty grey. End of the road, I thought, but it didn’t feel like that, not with her looking at Harvey like that and the other two keeping a record and with him saying what he was saying.
‘I have tapes from that meeting and photographs of the participants.’ He held up his hands, palms out. ‘Not here, not any one place for very long. It moves, like the rockets in the silos, or did they decide not to move them? Or did they decide not to decide? Or not to tell you whether they decided? One thing’s sure, they won’t tell you the truth.’
He had them all now-the blacks and the whites, the students and the faculty. He went on spelling out the details of the nastiness and I surveyed the audience again. Sitting next to Diane Holt were three guys who looked a little like cleaned-up Hell’s Angels. They had that same air of being there for the beer, and ready for trouble. One was prematurely bald, the other two were fair, they looked middling-tough. Next to them was a dark Hispanic character I dubbed the Dark Stranger. He wore dark blue clothes, was slim and looked very tough indeed.
‘You can do something’, Harvey was saying, ‘you can refuse to read their papers, you can turn off the tube and tell them so at ratings time. You can stop putting classifieds in the papers and you can protest against people who do advertise. There are lots of ways to do that. But there’s a bigger and better protest you can mount, a protest that can be immediately and massively effective. If you’ve been convinced by what I’ve said tonight you’ll want to be part of it; and I’m sorry for this, but you’re going to have to wait. I’ll tell you soon about it, real soon, and I’ll tell you in San Francisco where it’s going to happen. Be there! Goodnight.’
The muscle moved fast, they were up and blanketing Harvey before anyone else moved. The T-shirt put away his shorthand pad and sat still. I moved as fast as I could but Harvey and Diane Holt and the minders were getting into a Volkswagen van by the time I got out. I couldn’t walk up to him and say I was taking his sheila back to Bondi, I couldn’t do anything. My car was a mile away. One of the boys handed a bundle of paper down to someone in the crowd and then the van groaned and choked itself into life. As it churned away I saw the two men in disguise follow it in a dark Buick that made hardly any noise at all.
The bundle turned out to be a roughly printed handbill for an ‘event’ in San Francisco in three days time. The message was a little vague but the faithful were urged to be at Golden Gate Park at noon. I took one of the sheets back to a motel in Palo Alto where I drank most of a six-pack of Coors and watched ‘Guns of the Magnificent Seven’ which had none of the panache of the original.
I started early the next day, driving back to San Francisco, checking into a cheap hotel on Sutter Street and surrendering the Pinto because I knew I’d be spending money and wanted to make it stretch. I bought a. 38 Smith amp; Wesson at a place I’d been told about, where the only credentials they care about have numbers on them and fold easily. Then I bought an imitation leather holder and a star that looked so real I felt like going out and eating a couple of steaks and drinking a lot of beer.
Instead, I went to the Goldwasser Printing Shop, the name of which had been stamped in small letters on the handbill. I found it on my tourist map and walked there-more economising. The print shop was jammed in at the back of a supermarket and accessible only from the lane behind. It had a furtive air, but that might have been because it still used ink and moving machinery instead of fancy photography. As I went up the narrow wooden stairs I could hear the thin sound of a pinched cough from the printshop-that was good. I wasn’t feeling at all physical and the morning fog had brought me close to coughing myself.
He was dark, small and stooped from bending over his work. He straightened up as far as he could and peered at me over his half-glasses.
‘Yeah?’
I put the handbill down on the cluttered bench where it became about the millionth piece of paper.
‘So?’
‘I want to know who you did it for.’
‘Who wants to know?’
I let him see the gun in its holster when I got out the shield which I flapped open and shut in front of him. It made a flip-flop sound like thong sandals on cement.
‘Trouble?’
‘Not for you. No dirty words, no pictures. Who was the customer?’
‘You talk funny.’
‘I used to be a tennis player, we pick this talk up from the Aussies.’
He reached for a rag he had hanging out his back pocket, wiped his hands and took a few shuffling steps across to an old grey filing cabinet under the dusty window. The boards creaked under his hundred and ten pounds or so, and I wondered how safe it was to have the heavy old press in the room-I was doing fine at feeling like an official.
‘I got it here.’ He held up a docket and I got further into the role by pulling out my notebook and getting set to write.
‘Give me the name and address.’
‘Enquiry fee ten dollars.’
I looked at him for a minute and then got out a ten; he reached and I let him take it while I grabbed the docket. He said ‘Shit’, but the cough started and shut him up. I wrote Pedro Moreno and the address. There was no phone number. I handed the docket back.
‘Thanks.’
‘I think that shield’s a fake’, he said.
I turned back on my way to the door. ‘Do you care?’
He shook his head. ‘Get you a better one.’
The address was in the district up behind the University of San Francisco; I gave it to the taxi driver and asked him what kind of neighbourhood it was.
‘Bo-ho’, he said.
‘Huh?’
‘Kinda slummy but not a jungle. I’ll take you right there. Some places I’d just drop you close.’
We went over some hills and I got glimpses of the water before the next dip snatched it away. The street was a mixture of residential-apartments dating I guessed from the 1920’s, when they re-built after the earthquake-and shops and blank, anonymous buildings whose functions I couldn’t guess at. The number I had was one of the apartment blocks; stucco with grey peeping through the white paint and water-stained from the rusted guttering. I told the cabbie to go on a little.
‘Undercover huh?’ he said as he made change.
‘Mafia.’
He struck his forehead lightly. ‘I shoulda known. Spread to South Africa, eh?’
I didn’t tip him.
Brave men march up to the front door; men in their forties who think it might be interesting to live into their fifties go around the back first. Along the street and down the lane, and we weren’t bo-ho anymore. The back part of the apartment building had been scarred and broken by a fire. Windows were boarded up, woodwork was scorched and charred; and the wooden handrail that had run beside the metal fire escape was gone, leaving the steps naked and dangerous.
I stood behind a car in the lane and looked at the ruin and let the bad feeling creep over me. There was no VW van, but sticking out of an open window on the top floor was a hand. The hand wasn’t stuck out to feel for rain, it wasn’t doing anything.