Bill's napkin was bunched on the table in front of him. The two men watched him place the glass fragment in a furrow in the cloth. It glinted like sand, the pebbly greenish swamp sand that belongs to childhood, to the bruises and welts, the fingers nicked by foul tips. He felt very tired. He listened to Charlie talk with the other man. He felt the deadweight of travel, the apathy and vagueness of being in a place that didn't matter to him, being invisible to himself, sleeping in a room he wouldn't recognize if he had a picture of it in front of him.
George was saying, "The first incident was unimportant because it was only a series of phone calls. The second incident was unimportant because nobody was killed. For you and Bill, pure trauma. Otherwise strictly routine. A few years ago a neo-Nazi group in Germany devised the slogan 'The worse the better.' This is also the slogan of Western media. You are nonpersons for the moment, victims without an audience. Get killed and maybe they will notice you."
In the morning Bill had breakfast in a pub near his hotel. He found he was able to order a pint of ale with his ham and eggs even though it was just past seven because night workers from the meat market were on their meal shift now. Extremely progressive licensing policy. White-coated doctors from Saint Bartholomew's sat at the next table. He looked at the cut on his hand. Seemed to be doing nicely but it's good to know the medics are near if you need advice or assistance. Old hospitals with saints' names are the ones you want to go to if you have cuts and abrasions. They haven't forgotten how to treat the classic Crusader wounds.
He took out a notepad and entered the breakfast bill and last night's taxi fare. The sound of the blast was still an echo in his skin.
Later in the day he met Charlie by prearrangement in front of the Chesterfield. They walked through Mayfair in a lazy dazzle of warm light. Charlie wore a blazer, gray flannels and bone-and-blue saddle oxfords.
"I talked to a Colonel Martinson or Martindale. Got it written down. One of those hard sharp technocrats whose religion is being smart. He knows all the phrases, he's got the jargon down pat. If you've got the language of being smart, you'll never catch a cold or get a parking ticket or die."
"Was he in uniform?" Bill said.
"Too smart for that. He said there wouldn't be a news conference today. Not enough time to secure a site. He said our friend George is an interesting sort of academic. His name appears in an address book found in an apartment raided by police somewhere in France -a bomb factory. And he has been photographed in the company of known terrorist leaders."
"Every killer has a spokesman."
"You're almost as smart as the colonel. He talked about you in fact. He said you ought to get on a plane and go back home. He will make arrangements."
"How does he know I'm here, or why I'm here, or who I am?"
"After the first series of threatening calls," Charlie said.
"I thought I was the unannounced presence. But you told George I was here. And now this colonel with a brush mustache."
"I had to report the names of all the people invited to the conference. Because of the phone calls. The police needed a list.
And I told George actually the day before because I thought it would help. Anything that helps."
"Why does the colonel want me to go home?"
"He says he has information that you may be in danger. He hinted that you would be worth a great deal more to the group in Beirut than the hostage they're now holding. The feeling is he's too obscure."
Bill laughed.
"The whole thing is so hard to believe I almost don't believe it."
"But of course we do believe it. We have to. It doesn't break any laws of logic or nature. It's unbelievable only in the shallowest sense. Only shallow people insist on disbelief. You and I know better. We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there's no longer a moral or spatial distinction between thinking and acting."
"Poor bastard, you're beginning to sound like me."
They walked in silence. Then Charlie said something about the loveliness of the day. They chose their topics carefully, showing a deft indirectness. They needed some space in which to let the subject cool.
Then Bill said, "How do they plan to get me into a hostage situation?"
"Oh I don't know. Lure you eastward somehow. The colonel was vague here."
"We don't blame him, do we?"
"Not a bit. He said the explosive was Semtex H. A controlled amount. They could have brought down the building if they'd wanted to."
"The colonel must have enjoyed dropping that name."
"The material comes from Czechoslovakia."
"Did you know that?"
"No, I didn't."
"See how stupid we are."
"Where are you staying, Bill? We really have to know."
"I'm sure the colonel knows. Just go ahead and arrange the conference. I came here to read some poems and that's what I'm going to do."
"Nobody wants to be intimidated. But the fact is," Charlie said.
"I'm going back to my hotel. I'll call you at noon tomorrow. Get a new location and let's do what we came here to do."
"I think we ought to have dinner, the two of us. We'll talk about something else completely."
"I wonder what that might be."
"I want this book, you bastard."
People stood gathered in a rambling white space set on several levels under ducts and sprinklers and track lights, chatting over silver cocktails. The walls were hung with works of living Russians, mainly large color-brave canvases, supernation paintings, ambitious and statement-making.
Brita moved through the crowd, edging sideways, drink held high, and she felt the interplay of glances, the way eyes consume their food, taking in faces, asses, tapestry jackets, raw-silk shirts, the way bodies slant involuntarily toward a well-known figure in the room, the way people carry on one dialogue and listen to another, the way every energy is directed somewhere else, some brightness nearby, the whole shape and state and history of this little hour of truth. There seemed to be some imaginary point of major interest, a shifting middle cluster of conversation, although every person in the room retained an awareness of the street beyond the plate-glass windows. They were here, in a way, for the people in the street. They knew exactly how they appeared to those who were walking or driving by, to standees on crammed buses. They appeared to float outside the world. They were only art browsers but they appeared privileged and inviolate, transcendent souls lighted against the falling night. They shared a stillness, a way of looking sharply etched. This gave the incidental scene a claim to permanence, as if they believed they might still be here a thousand nights from now, weightless and unperspiring, stirring the small awe of passersby.
It took her a while to reach the picture that had attracted her. A silk screen on canvas measuring roughly five feet by six feet. It was called Gorby I and showed the Soviet President's head and boxed-off shoulders set against a background of Byzantine gold, patchy strokes, expressive and age-textured. His skin was the ruddy flush of TV makeup and he had an overlay of blond hair, red lipstick and turquoise eye shadow. His suit and tie were deep black. Brita wondered if this piece might be even more Warholish than it was supposed to be, beyond parody, homage, comment and appropriation. There were six thousand Warhol experts living within a few square miles of this gallery and all the things had been said and all the arguments made but she thought that possibly in this one picture she could detect a maximum statement about the dissolvability of the artist and the exaltation of the public figure, about how it is possible to fuse images, Mikhail Gorbachev's and Marilyn Monroe's, and to steal auras, Gold Marilyn's and Dead-White Andy's, and maybe six other things as well. Anyway it wasn't funny. She'd taken the trouble to cross the room and look closely at this funny painted layered photo-icon and it wasn't funny at all. Maybe because of the undertaker's suit that Gorby wore. And the sense that these were play-death cosmetics, the caked face-powder and lemon-yellow hair color. And the very echo of Marilyn and all the death glamour that ran through Andy's work. Brita had photographed him years ago and now one of her pictures hung in a show a few blocks down Madison Avenue. Andy's image on canvas, Masonite, velvet, paper-and-acetate, Andy in metallic paint, silk-screen ink, pencil, polymer, gold leaf, Andy in wood, metal, vinyl, cotton-and-polyester, painted bronze, Andy on postcards and paper bags, in photomosaics, multiple exposures, dye transfers, Polaroid prints. Andy's shooting scar, Andy's factory, Andy tourist-posing in Beijing before the giant portrait of Mao in the main square. He'd said to her, "The secret of being me is that I'm only half here." He was all here now, reprocessed through painted chains of being, peering out over the crowd from a pair of burnished Russian eyes.