«Right.»
«Stop staring!»
«Wrong—oh, sorry, Olympia.»
Around the corner on Capitol Street, concealed in a recessed doorway, were two tall men. One was resplendent in the full dress uniform of an army general, the other in the ragged clothes of a tramp. The tramp rushed out of their sanctuary, peered around the edge of the building, and then ran back to the general.
«Things are progressing, Henry,» said MacKenzie Hawkins. «They’re really getting hot!»
«Have the media arrived?» asked Sutton, the actor. «I made it perfectly clear to you, I don’t make my appearance until the cameras are there.»
«A couple of radio stations have come. You can tell by the people with microphones.»
«Not good enough, dear boy. I specifically said cameras.»
«All right, all right!» The Hawk raced out again, looked again and raced back. «A TV crew just got here!»
«What station? Is it a network?»
«How the hell do I know?»
«Find out, mon général. I have my standards.»
«Christ on a seesaw!»
«Blasphemy isn’t called for, MacKenzie. Look again.»
«You’re impossible, Henry!»
«I hope so. It’s the only way you get anywhere in this business. Hurry up, now. I feel the urge to perform; it’s the stimulus of a growing audience as you hear them flocking into a theater.»
«Don’t you ever get stage fright?»
«My good fellow, I’ve never been afraid of the stage, it is afraid of me. I tread across it like thunder.»
«Shit!» The Hawk rushed out again, but instead of racing back to the actor, held his place and saw what he hoped to see. Four taxis pulled up on the other side of First Street, only moments apart. Out of the one in front stepped three men of the cloth: a priest, a minister, and an elderly rabbi helped by the two Christians. From the second emerged the Marilyn Monroe of hookers, hips swaying—somewhat awkwardly—but who was examining? The third cab deposited the maximum rube of the Ozark’s backcountry, with the image of chickenshit dripping from his porkpie hat and over his ballooned checkered suit. The fourth taxi made up for the banality of the three fares ahead. An immense, elegantly dressed black man stepped out on the curb, his huge sculpted head and giant body nearly dwarfing the vehicle.
As programmed, Jennifer, Sam, and Cyrus walked in different directions, no acknowledgment among them, but none crossed the street to the Court. The three religious zealots stayed on the pavement, bickering among themselves, the rabbi’s head pecking forward as the two opposing Christians alternately nodded and shook their heads disapprovingly. The Hawk reached into his ragged pocket and withdrew his walkie-talkie. «Calfnose, come in. Come in, Calfnose!» (There was no need for a code name.)
«Don’t shout, T.H., this thing’s in my ear!»
«Our contingent’s arrived—»
«So have half the horny population of Washington! And I do mean just half—the other half would like to scalp our girls!»
«Tell ’em to keep it up.»
«How high? Are we up to garter belts?»
«That’s not what I mean! Just keep up the chants and make the drums louder. I need the next ten minutes.»
«You got it, T.H.!»
The Hawk ran back to the recessed doorway. «Another ten minutes, Henry, and you make your entrance!»
«That long?»
«I have a few things to do, and when I return, we’ll go out together.»
«What do you have to do?»
«Eliminate some of the enemy.»
«What?»
«Nothing to be concerned about. They’re young and inexperienced.» MacKenzie raced out in his disheveled tramp’s clothing.
And one by one the four of the Ranger commandos in their camouflage green and black fatigues were tapped on the shoulder and subsequently rendered unconscious by an old hobo. Each was dragged to a curb, his face doused with several ounces of Southern Comfort, and laid to rest until revived.
However, and adding to Sir Henry’s anxiety, the «ten minutes» became twelve, then twenty, and finally, nearly a half hour. The Hawk had spotted five buttoned-down, stern-faced federal agents and six gentlemen whose squinting frowns and large foreheads were barely above and perhaps even below the gorillas-in-the-mist. He dispatched them in like fashion. «Amateurs!» whispered the Hawk to himself. «What kind of commanders do they have?» … Whoever they were, they sure had the PR covered! Some son of a bitch in a T-shirt kept his video camera rolling, focused on the counterprotestors, obviously for the benefit of those who had given them their orders. Ha! A joke! But every time Mac tried to grab the bastard with the camera, he pivoted like a goddamn ballet dancer and disappeared in the crowds.
And crowds there were en masse, as Mac ran back to the doorway. Sir Henry Irving Sutton was not there! Where the hell was he?… The actor was ten feet away at the edge of the building, stunned, studying the melee at the steps of the Supreme Court. Fights had broken out in front of the forty-odd stamping, chanting, drumming, sign-jerking Wopotami protesters, but the violent altercations seemed to have nothing to do with the Indians.
«Oh, my God!» said Hawkins, his hand on Sutton’s shoulder. «I’m not as young as I used to be!»
«Neither am I. So what?»
«A few years ago, none of those bastards would have gotten up. Or there were a hell of a lot more of them than I saw.»
«Who?»
«Those clowns who are beating the shit out of one another in the crowd of tourists.»
And, indeed, they were. The buttoned-down collars were screaming at the camouflaged commandos, who proceeded to throw them over their shoulders, as the goons of the world, figuring that any fight meant they had to be the victors or it was back to the union shop, jumped in with brass knuckles and leaded blackjacks. A full-fledged riot was not merely in the making, it was made. Angry tourists, pummeled and tripped by the combatants, screamed; those in mortal combat, bewildered by the lack of uniforms or any identification of their enemies, kept hammering away at anything that moved near them, and the idiot with the video camera kept yelling «Glorioso!» as he pranced around.
«Go, Buttercup!» shouted Hawkins into his radio.
«Right, Daffodil, but we’ve got a problem,» came the voice of Colonel Cyrus.
«What problem?»
«We’re okay with the religious trio, but we’ve lost the hooker and the rube!»
«What happened?»
«Pocahontas got mad when some female tourist threw a bunch of firecrackers at the feet of the dancers and screamed something in Greek. Our girl went after the bitch and Sam went after her!»
«Get them back, for God’s sake!»
«Do you really want Judge Oldsmobile to go into that mess and bash heads?»
«Damn it, we don’t have much time! It’s almost quarter to three and we’ve got to get inside, change our clothes, and present ourselves to the praetors of the chambers by three o’clock!»
«We may have a few minutes of flexibility there,» interrupted Cyrus. «Even the judges have to know about the chaos out here.»
«A Wopotami chaos, Buttercup! Let’s say that’s not to our benefit, even though it’s necessary.»
«Hold it! Our chickenshit rube is bringing back Pocahontas—in a hammerlock, I might add.»