And then the hotel manager walks in.
Brown blazer, twenty-dollar haircut and a smile from here to Salt Lake City. A huddle at the platform. Baker and Mr. Manager bowing and scraping at each other, Bud Odum looking grim, Weiss turning colors. Sophie and I go up, followed by half the congregation. Nobody trusts to hear it secondhand. I can sense the sweat breaking under that blazer when he sees us coming, toothless, gnarled, suspicious by habit. Ringing around him, the Anarchists' Convention.
"A terrible mistake," he says.
"All my fault," he says.
"I'm awfully sorry," he says, "but you'll have to move."
Seems the Rotary Club, the Rotary Club from Sioux Falls, had booked this room before us. Someone misread the calendar. They're out in the lobby, eyeballing Bakunin, impatient, full of gin and boosterism.
"We have a nice room, a smaller room," coos the manager, "we can set you up there in a jiffy. Much less drafty than this room, I'm sure the older folks would feel more comfortable."
"I think it stinks," says Rosenthal, every year the Committee Treasurer. "We paid cash, the room is ours."
Rosenthal doesn't believe in checks. "The less the Wall Street Boys handle your money," he says, "the cleaner it is." Who better to be Treasurer than a man who thinks gold is filth?
"That must be it," says Sophie to the manager. "You've got your cash from us, money in the bank, you don't have to worry. The Rotary, they can cancel a check, so you're scared. And maybe there's a little extra on the side they give you, a little folding green to clear out the riffraff?"
Sophie has him blushing, but he's going to the wire anyhow. Like Frick in the Homestead Strike, shot, stomped and stabbed by Alexander Berkman, they patch him up and he finishes his day at the office. A gold star from Carnegie. Capitalism's finest hour.
"You'll have to move," says the manager, dreams of corporate glory in his eyes, the smile hanging on to his face by its fingernails, "it's the only way."
"Never," says Weiss.
"Out of the question," says Sophie.
"Fuck off," says Pappas.
Pappas saw his father lynched. Pappas did three hard ones in Leavenworth. Pappas lost an eye, a lung and his profile to a mob in Chicago. He says it with conviction.
"Pardon?" A note of warning from Mr. Manager.
"He says to fuck off," says Fritz Groh.
"You heard him," echoes Allie Zaitz.
"If you people won't cooperate," huffs the manager, condescension rolling down like a thick mist, "I'll have to call in the police."
It zings through the room like the twinge of a single nerve.
"Police! They're sending the police!" cries Pinkstaff.
"Go limp!" cries Vic Lewis, knuckles white with excitement on his walker. "Make em drag us out!"
"Mind the shuttles, mind the shuttlesl" cries old Mrs. Axelrod in Yiddish, sitting straight up in her chair.
Allie Zaitz is on the phone to a newspaper friend, the Barnard girls are taping everything in sight, Sophie is organizing us into squads and only Baker holding Weiss bodily allows Mr. Manager to escape the room in one piece. We're the Anarchists' Convention!
Nobody bickers, nobody stalls or debates or splinters. We manage to turn the long table around by the door as a kind of barricade, stack the chairs together in a second line of defense and crate Mrs. Axelrod back out of harm's way. I stay close by Sophie, and once, lugging the table, she turns and gives me that smile. Like a shot of adrenaline, I feel fifty again. Sophie, Sophie, it was always so good, just to be at your side!
And when the manager returns with his two befuddled street cops to find us standing together, arms linked, the lame held up out of their wheelchairs, the deaf joining from memory as Bud Odum leads us in "We Shall Not Be Moved," my hand in Sophie's, sweaty-palmed at her touch like the old days, I look at him in his brown blazer and think Brickman, I think, my God if Brickman was here we'd show this bastard the Wrath of the People!
Schiffman's Ape
I HE GIBBONS CONTINUE to feed while the leopard shakes the young pig to death. The leopard is in its black phase, it holds the pig's haunch in its jaws, patient, giving it an occasional violent jerk, then resting. The muscles in its neck and shoulders are bunched tightly, it breathes in steady rhythm. Gibbons swarm the trees for the climbing vines of purple grape, small, bright yellow birds flit after insects under the forest canopy, and on a branch directly above the leopard, a male Schiffman's ape sits picking lice from its chest. Even the pig, in shock, seems to stare at some distant objective.
Squatting in the underbrush some thirty yards downwind, a bearded man watches breathlessly, taking notes.
"I've seen it."
Lisa is boiling river water on the little cooking fire when Warden reaches the clearing. His eyes are wide with excitement, the Bolex bounces and twists on its strap around his neck as he rushes to her.
"I've seen it!"
"Oh my God. Where?"
"Other side of the river, just down from the ford."
"How many?"
"Just one. That leopard we heard last night had a pig, I stopped to shoot some film, and there it was. Just sitting there, in a tree. Schiffman's ape. Hurry, let's pack it up and get back over there."
"You're sure, honey?"
"Positive. We've found it. Hurry now."
They hug quickly and begin stuffing equipment into their backpacks. Twice Warden repacks an item Lisa has put in at a bad angle. The water is dumped, fire doused and spread, and they are off ducking low branches and hanging vines, stumbling along the overgrown path to the river. Lisa is beaming, chattering questions, and Warden reminds her to keep her voice down. When the path is wide enough to permit it they hold hands.
June 3 — First sighting of ape. Full-grown male on west bank of river. No sign of others. Ape is almost as large as a chimpanzee, with the chimp's large, expressive facial area, but is extremely woolly and long-armed like the gibbon. Re-sighted ape further north of ford. L. is beside herself, like a schoolgirl. Followed ape till dark when it settled high in a lodge tree.
Schiffman was a public-relations man hired by an oil company to put out a line on their new drilling offshore from the island. He came on location to film a commercial about the environmental-impact study the company had paid for, but the terrain around the Holiday Inn where the drillers stayed wasn't wild enough for his purposes. He took his crew inland to the old temple in the forest and it was near there that the first footage of the ape was shot. It was just another monkey to them, some nice local color, but a New York editor who'd worked on the Jane Goodall specials for the net work picked up on it and screened the film for a primates man at Columbia. A new species, possibly an addition to the select club of the great apes. Schiffman exploited the hell out of it for the oil company and the inevitable scientific controversy arose. Various experts and skeptics studied the film, the Bigfoot and Loch Ness legends were resurrected, and Schiffman was linked forever with the new primate in the popular imagination.
Warden and Lisa were on the island, at the Holiday Inn, when the story broke, just off a plane from the States. They were funded and equipped for a three-month field study of the island's dominant gibbon population, the Hylobates lar. A telegram from Warden's department caught them just in time with their new objective. They had a jump on the rest of the scientific world.