The Seventh Candidate (30 page)

Flashing through his mind: their incursions
in singular places like cemeteries, porcelain shops, fashion shows
and, as now, the underground. How they braked, sometimes
unsuccessfully, on the brink of precipices. Roared a hundred
kilometers the wrong way down motorways in half an hour. Enjoyed
practical impunity thanks to the solidarity of the vast motorcycle
clan. How a policeman had shot one of the Doom Riders who was
terrorizing a convent. How minutes later three hundred machines had
roared round and round the nearest police station which had gone up
in flames along with part of a suburb.

As the front wheels touched down and the
machine bounded forward directly toward the director total recall
went on.

Ten Commandments for Survival. No. 6: if
they bore down on you as they might well do anywhere, any time:
Don’t Budge! Stock Still! Smile! No murderous intention. Would
avoid the immobile target at the last hundredth of a second.
Preferred the challenge of a panicking obstacle diving to the left
or the right like a goalkeeper just before a penalty kick. The
rider succeeded in evading the mobile obstacle most of the time.
But sometimes not. So stock still with a disarming smile was the
safest tactic.

The director bolted anyhow, without choice to
the right since to the left lay the rails. He sprawled out on the
ground. Thunder blasted his eardrums; grit whipped his face;
exhaust gas burned his scalp. Then it was past and when he opened
his eyes the three machines were almost at the other end of the
long platform.

Incredibly, Theodore was still on his
ladder, back turned to all this, his No. 5 brush abolishing the
obscenity in Helena’s lap. The cowboy stood in the middle of the
platform, arguing furiously. He had the knife out and was staring
down the platform at the three motorcycles.

Instead of roaring up the opposite stairs at
an impossible angle and vanishing in a cloud of blue exhaust gas
the riders braked at the foot of the flight. They responded to the
challenge of the drawn knife.

Their torsos arced back violently. Their
machines bucked and swiveled about on their rear wheels, nearly
vertical like prehistoric monsters sniffing out prey. Then the
front wheels jolted down, the riders revved up and bore down on the
cowboy, bore down on Theodore, bore down again on the director.

The cowboy joyously stood his ground and
made flailing stabs in the direction of the oncoming machine, the
first of the three. The rider swerved about him.

It was the director’s turn.

He should have joined the others cowering on
the bench where two girls shrieked with terrified pleasure.
Instead, he moved closer to Theodore. To protect or to be
protected?

Hot thunder. The displaced air or the noise
almost knocked him down. Now the third machine. Again Lorz broke
the Sixth Commandment for Survival by diving, this time to the
right. He was certain, too late, that he’d chosen the wrong
direction.

“Theo!” he cried as the third motorcycle
blasted past between them.

From where he lay on the platform the
director saw Theo’s hand with the brush jerk, saw a long dribble of
Basic Black heading for Helena’s sky-offered face, saw a jar of red
paint smashed on the pavement. Hadn’t the machine jostled the
ladder? Or perhaps the rider had shot out his gauntleted hand in
the small of Theo’s back, more defiant in its unresponsiveness than
the drawn knife.

The boy turned about on his trembling
ladder. He stared at the end of the platform where the three
machines were regrouping. There was the familiar intense expression
on his face as before an arduous chess problem. The first of the
motorcycles had wheeled about again and roared past. Now the
second. The third was bearing down on them again. Again Lorz cried
out to Theo for help.

Theo’s fist shot out, blurred with speed, a
marvel of coordination. It struck flesh or metal.

The rider lost control of his machine. It
zigzagged diagonally across the platform, smashed into a vending
machine which burst into a shower of candy-bars, cogs, coins and
mirror-splinters. The rider’s face was covered with blood. The
motorcycle wobbled toward the edge of the platform. A train was
pulling in. A fraction of a second earlier and the machine would
have leaped off the platform into destruction. As it was it wobbled
into the moving wall of the slowing train.

Miraculously, the rider remained in the
saddle as the machine recoiled and swerved across the platform,
nearly maiming the flailing cowboy, then banged against a
bench.

A shrill whistle came from the end of the
platform. Three policemen were trotting toward the disorder. They
had their hands on their holsters. The two other machines returned
and flanked the wounded one. The trio wobbled away from the
policemen. They halted at the foot of the opposite flight as though
recovering new force. Then they roared up and away.

Theo saw none of this real chaos. He’d
returned to the important chaos, the spoiled poster, a terrifying
problem of restoration. The paint had attacked Helena’s radiant
face.

Still prostrate in the filth of the pavement
the director looked up at Theo. He saved my life, he thought
joyously. What gift of his own could match that gift?

***

7

The director’s joy at Theo’s supposed gift
gave way to perplexity that sleepless night. Then to humiliation.
Finally to distress.

He’d cried out for Theo’s help but had his
cry been heard beneath the thunder of the machines? Even if heard,
was it his appeal that had motivated Theo’s punishing blow or the
marring of the poster?

Objectively, in any case, Theo had
protected him. This created a precious new bond between them, of
course. Yet the total reversal of their presumed relationship was
disturbing. He, the would-be protector, turned out to be the
protected. He’d proved farcically unequal to his self-imposed task
that afternoon. He recalled his dives into humiliation confronted
with the machine. He hadn’t even been able to summon up the minimal
heroism of standing stock still and smiling. It called in question
his daily presence in
Crossroads
. If he couldn’t protect the boy what was the point of
following him about?

He was still coping with this problem when
another thought occurred to him which aggravated the consequences
of his cowardice. Only the unexpected arrival of the police had
prevented the two able-bodied Doom Riders from massacring the boy
for what he’d done to their companion. They were sure to return to
avenge the affront. Perhaps by the hundreds as with the police
station that had gone up in flames.

Theo was a marked man now. He couldn’t
possibly remain in the underground another day.

Again the director circled around the
question of his own presence in
Crossroads
. He realized that, far from protecting Theo, he’d
been the cause of the boy’s present predicament, assuming (as the
director longed to) that Theo had consciously responded to his cry
for help.

His fault then. Of course in a deeper
sense one could say that it was his assistant’s fault. Whose idea
had it been, in the first place, to banish the boy to
Crossroads
and its dangers? But why had he
let himself be pressured into accepting her idea? He was the
director, after all. He’d been letting her encroach on his
prerogatives. This would have to stop.

In any case, tomorrow when he showed up at
12:30 Theo would have to remain in the office. At this thought the
director remembered the boy on his ladder brightening the ceiling
of that safe space and briefly experienced joy again. In a way, the
dangerous incident in the underground had been a blessing in
disguise. Theo would be present in the office again, five days a
week as before, with now the golden bonus of two extra hours daily.
It didn’t matter how much disorganization he caused. Let him apply
a second coat of paint, a third, if he liked. Let the ventilator
roar at Force Ten. Let Lorz’s eyes redden and gush.

Seconds later his lyric exaltation
collapsed. He recalled the failure of his attempt to convince Theo
to remain in the office on Fridays. How could he ever get the boy
to give up the underground totally?

Bitter salvation lay perhaps in confessing
the truth to the Commission, explaining the dangers the boy was
exposed to in
Crossroads
with
his predictable refusal to accept the safety of the office. A
short-lived safety in any case, the director now realized. The
boy’s daily disruptive presence in the office would spell
bankruptcy for
Ideal
, his sole
haven from commitment.

At best some institution or other seemed the
only perspective for him. That or violent death. You gave me the
gift of life. I give you too the gift of life, with the mad. The
director rebelled against the monstrous alternative.

He slowly realized that his connection with
the boy could be maintained (and his visits justified) only on one
condition. He, Edmond Lorz, past forty and in failing health, must
now fully assume the manly role of protector, in fact, not just in
theory. He remembered the mad cowboy and his knife and how the
machine had prudently swerved beyond the arc of the flailing
steel.

It was 3:24am by the luminous green dial of
his bedside alarm clock when Edmond Lorz finally resolved to go
armed into the underground.

With this decision he fell asleep
immediately.

The decision proved difficult to implement.
To be sure, self-defense shops had become as common as sex shops in
the capital. In their windows one found, alongside classics like
black-jacks and brass-knuckles, a plethora of blinding and
asphyxiating gas devices, walkingsticks producing 20,000-volt
discharges, ear-piercing sirens, etc. But none of these objects,
visibly non-lethal, seemed sufficiently dissuasive to the director.
A pistol was out of the question even if his father’s service-arm
(a Rocal 42) lay somewhere in his mother’s closet, wrapped up in
oiled cloth, memorial to her grief. During the bad moments she
would caress, kiss and weep over it. Lorz had no permit and wanted
none. From early childhood he’d had deep fear of firearms, even of
the cap pistols his father persisted in buying him.

Now, decades later, he considered purchasing
such a toy. But thugs were by definition knowledgeable about guns.
Their expert glance would pierce the pretence at once.

Then he thought of the long knife thrust in
the psychotic cowboy’s belt. A publicly displayed knife with a
20-centimeter blade was dissuasive of course. But didn’t it testify
to madness as much as spurred boots in the underground did? No, if
a knife, it had to be concealed but instantly available for action.
Purely dissuasive action, of course.

Lorz went into the kitchen and came up with
the only thing with a blade long enough to conceivably inspire
fear, a bread-knife. But with its yellow plastic handle it was
absurdly utilitarian in the foreseen context. Still ill at ease in
his role, he couldn’t help imagining the snickering thug countering
such a brandished “weapon” with a pumpernickel loaf. Then he
thought of his father’s ceremonial dagger received from the hands
of the King himself long ago.

But why that dagger? Anything long and sharp
would have done. And if, for obscure reasons, it had to be the
ceremonial dagger, why his father’s? Not so long ago you found them
in rummage shops by the thousands even if of late they’d gone up
steeply in price what with the modish nostalgia for the monarchy
and its trappings that was the sure sign of the irrevocable death
of the old order. But if Lorz stubbornly persisted in his search
for that particular dagger it was perhaps in the half-conscious
hope that the dagger retained, over thirty years later, something
of the potency of his father’s fatal courage in that older combat
against disorder.

He found the ceremonial dagger in the closet
in his mother’s bedroom. It lay among medals in a cardboard box
secured by a faded blue ribbon. Hastening out of the unbreathable
room, Lorz perceived himself as a ghostly daggered army in the
mirrors she’d collected in her last years to raise the dead.

His first discouraging discovery was that
the blade had to be naked. His best time at unsheathing was a fatal
three seconds. The next problem was to find a hiding place. His
briefcase, which nearly always accompanied him, was the obvious
spot, but having to fumble with the clasp and grope in the depths
was bureaucratically slow for successful intervention. The belt
was, after all, the logical place for a dagger. It could be hidden
by his jacket if thrust into the belt in the region of his left
kidney.

But the unsheathed blade rendered body
caches dangerous. It proved necessary to force a wine cork onto the
point to avoid involuntary hara kiri each time he bent down. It
hurt anyhow and gave him an unnatural military carriage hard to
maintain all day long.

Finally the director returned to his first
idea and placed the dagger in his briefcase. He would have to
remember not to plunge his hand into it too quickly when seeking a
paper or when confronted by danger.

But days and then weeks went by without
confrontation. Lorz didn’t have to grope perilously in those depths
for the dagger. The Doom Riders didn’t return. There were no more
madmen, no more thugs, no more perverts gravitating about Theo.

The director sometimes attributed the
changed atmosphere to the simple presence of the dagger. Even in
the bureaucratic briefcase it seemed to irradiate the fearlessness
of his father, to generate a force field of immunity about Theo and
himself. It did more than bestow immunity. It instilled in him, he
felt, latent courage. Sometimes he felt disappointment at his
passive role as a mere bearer of potency in a briefcase. That
suddenly implanted courage began craving outlet. He sometimes let
himself imagine confrontation beyond dissuasion, the dagger,
obedient to his will, dropping thugs, addicts, perverts and madmen.
He had these fantasies not in the underground but in bed.