GLORIA DROVE the truck in through the open gate in the cyclone fence. In the distance, puffy white clouds rode the piercing blue sky. A man was looking out over the river, where a tugboat pushed heavily against a mild chop; he was wearing the same spruce-green uniform everyone in or on the truck was wearing. He didn’t even glance up as Gloria stopped the truck alongside the incinerator building.
She cut the ignition and pocketed the key.
All four of them put on the ski masks.
SOMETHING KEPT bothering Carella.
“What do you think?” Brown asked. “We stay awhile, or we go back to the office?”
“I think we’d better stay awhile,” he said.
“Maybe he was just pulling our leg all along,” Brown said. Carella looked at him.
“Well,” Brown said, and shrugged.
It was close to a shrug of defeat.
Both of them knew the Deaf Man hadn’t been pulling their leg but neither of them had even the faintest notion of what his plan might be.
THERE WERE TWO sanitation Department employees inside the incinerator building. One of them was reading a sports magazine. The other one was eating a sausage and pepper sandwich his wife had made him for lunch. When the front door opened, they thought it was the cops from the Property Clerk’s Office, here to burn their dope. It was only a quarter to one, but sometimes they got here a little early. Instead, they saw four guys in ski masks and uniforms same as they were wearing, all four of them holding guns.
The tallest one said, “Nice and easy.”
The two garbage men knew better than to move.
FROM WHERE THEY stood behind the stage waiting for the show to begin, Carella and Brown could hear the voice of the crowd. It was a single voice that vibrated with the pleasure of expectation. At one o’clock sharp…
On Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…
…according to what Bartlett had told them, the concert would open with a rap group called Spit Shine…
“Here’s the program right here,” he’d said, “you can keep it, I’ve got dozens of ’em.”
It was now five minutes to one, and the voice of the crowd…
On Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…
…hummed now with expectancy. In just five minutes, the concert would begin. Bartlett had estimated that there were 250,000 people in the crowd. 250,000 people waiting for…
Explosion?
Here?
Carella could not imagine how.
AT THREE MINUTES past one, just as Spit Shine began performing the song George Chadderton had written, rapping out his words, a van marked with the police department’s seal and the wordsPROPERTY CLERK ’S OFFICErolled down the ramp into the river front complex and parked alongside a graffiti-riddled garbage truck near the rear of the incinerator building. A radio car came down the ramp after it, and two officers got out of the car just as a sergeant and another officer got out of the van. The men exchanged greetings there at the river’s edge, commented on what a great day it was, and then the sergeant said, “Let’s see if they’re ready for us,” and they all walked into the building and found themselves looking into the barrels of what appeared to be four semiautomatic assault pistols.
The sergeant wondered why this hadn’t happened long before now, this city.
“…WHY SHE DO THIS WAY?
“On her back, on her knees, for the white man pay?
“She a slave, sister woman, she a slave this way,
“On her knees, on her back, for the white man pay…”
Sitting on the side of the stage, listening to the lyrics her husband had written so long ago, Chloe realized that the group was doing something marvelous with them, Sil and Jeeb in the background rapping a steady insistent urgent beat, the two girls rapping the words in a keening high-pitched wail that almost brought Chloe to tears.
The sound was picked up by forty or fifty microphones collecting audio information on the stage and feeding it into a cable that measured some two inches in diameter and lay on the ground like a snake. This cable, which was in fact called the snake, ran from the stage through the center of the audience in a lane flanked by sawhorses and covered with a rubber mat, going back some hundred and fifty feet to the control tower, where two sound engineers sat behind the console doing a house mix by ear.
From the console, four separate feeds ran out to the delay towers and the left and right main speakers stacked on either side of the stage. There were sixteen speakers stacked in each of the delay towers, together with a dozen thousand-watt amplifiers. The system had been equalized during the days before the concert, the delays calibrated so that the sound coming from the delay towers was synchronized with the sound coming from the towers on either side of the stage, where eighty speakers in each tower were moving a hell of a lot of air.
“…won’t she hear my song?
“What she doin this way surely got to be wrong.
“Lift her head, raise her eyes, sing the words out strong…”
THE ONLY ONE they had to shoot was the garbage man taking the air at the river’s edge. It was Gloria who shot him because she was the one standing closest to him when he turned and yelled, “Hey! What’s goin on here?”
This may have been because he’d just seen four men in ski masks moving toward the police van. Gloria was thinking about the payoff on this thing, and she wasn’t about to have any shitty little garbage man screw it up. She fired three shots in rapid succession, the sound dissipating instantly over the water. The shots took him full in the face and knocked him back against the cyclone fence. He slid to the ground like an oil rag.
“Nice,” the Deaf Man said.
Then they all climbed into the police van, and he handed Gloria the keys he’d taken from the sergeant’s belt.
THE SONG WAS CALLED“Hate.”
It started at twelve minutes past one, just as Gloria turned the van’s ignition key.
Jeeb was the lead rapper on this one.
Sil did backup.
The girls sneered and snarled in the background.
The Deaf Man had no prior knowledge of the program that would be performed at today’s concert. He was only concerned with timing and diversion, the magician’s concern. He was stealing thirty million dollars’ worth of narcotics under the very noses of the police, and the only way to get away clean was to divert them.
The timer was set for one-twenty sharp.
At that time, he hoped to be transferring the contents of the police van into the rented Chevrolet already waiting in the boat basin parking lot farther downtown.
It was pure coincidence that the song’s content would aid and abet his plan. His plan was foolproof even without the song, but the song couldn’t hurt; give him a little chicken soup, as the lady in the balcony once remarked. Had he been here, the Deaf Man would have been pleased by the song and the spirited performance of the group named Spit Shine.
Sitting in the audience, Carella recognized dangerous and inflammatory lyrics when he heard them, all right, but his mind kept clicking back over something he’d seen or read, something in one of the newspapers or magazines, something about…
Saturday, April 4th…
Something about…
April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…
Too damn many newspapers, too damn many magazines.
“…kick the ofay, kill the ofay, snuff the ofay, off the ofay, box the ofay,hate the ofay, cause the ofay hate you !
“Hate the ofay….”
His mind circled back again.
April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…