Then, for some minutes, nothing, until the speaker grilles rattled and said, “All inmates, proceed to your duty stations.”
Muzzi’s work in the bakery was one way, Harvey’s library the other. They didn’t say good-bye to each other. They didn’t speak at all.
Harvey was not surprised when, toward the end of his morning shift, the speaker in the library defied the
Quiet!
signs and blared, “Six Four Seven Harvey! Report to Visitors’ Center!”
The well-connected Muzzi had used his connections well. He had procured them a reception party to be waiting once they were outside the prison. He had procured a couple of assistants to manufacture the plastic explosive and help with the digging—and, of course, to get him his personal shiv as well. He had also procured for Harvey a “son” to serve as a courier, and not a bad son at that. The kid even reminded Harvey a little bit of himself at that age—not counting color, anyway. Not counting their family backgrounds, either, which were Short Hills versus Bed-Stuy, and certainly not counting parentage—in Harvey’s case a pair of college teachers, in Marcus’s a retired hooker and her pimp. It was hard to see any resemblance at all, to be truthful, except that the young Johnny Harvey and the young Marcus de Harcourt shared the lively, bursting curiosity about the world and everything that made it go. So when Marcus came in he was right in character to be bubbling, “I seen the model of Bed-Stuy, Dad! Boy! There’s some neat stuff there—they got windmills that’re gonna pump hot and cold water, they got a place to turn sewage into gas, they got solar panels and an ice pond—”
“Which did you like best?” Harvey asked, and promptly the answer came back:
“The windmills!”
And that was the heart of the visit, the rest was just window-dressing.
Because Harvey had an artist’s urge for perfection he took pleasure in spinning out the talk to its full half hour. He asked Marcus all about his school, and about his Mom, and about his Cousin Will and his Aunt Flo and half a dozen other made-up relatives. The boy was quick at making up answers, because he too obviously enjoyed playing the game. When it was time to go Harvey reached around the desk and hugged him, and of course the guard reacted. “Oh, hell, Harvey,” she sighed—not unpleasantly, because she didn’t believe in shaming a man before his kid. “You know better than that. Now we got to frisk you both.”
“That’s all right,” said Harvey generously. It was. He wasn’t carrying anything that he wasn’t supposed to, of course, and neither was the boy. Anymore.
An excuse to clean up around the model on his afternoon shift, a pretext to return to the library after dinner—Harvey’s glib tongue was good enough for both, though not without some sweat. He was carrying, now; if he had happened to hit a routine stop-and-search with the contraband in his possession … But he didn’t. Before bedcheck that night Harvey’s part was done. The chip was in place in the library computer.
The chip Marcus had smuggled in wasn’t exactly a chip. It was a planar-doped barrier, a layer cake with gallium arsenide for the cake and fillings of silicon and beryllium.
Once Harvey had retrieved it from the niche under the model windmills and slipped it into place in the library terminal, it took only a few simple commands—“Just checking,” he grinned at the night duty officer in the library—and the chip had redefined for the master computer a whole series of its instructions.
So, back in his cell, Harvey stretched out and grinned happily at the ceiling. Even Muzzi was smiling, or as close to smiling as he ever got. They were ready. Esposito had already stolen the vaseline and the other chemicals to make plastic. La Croy had the hammers, the shovels and the spike to make a hole in the wall for the plastic charge.
And the chip was in place.
It functioned perfectly, as Harvey had designed it to do, which meant that at that moment it did nothing at all. As each inmate passed a checkpoint, his ankle ID registered his presence and was checked against the master file of what inmates were permitted to be in what locations at which times. In the seven and a half hours after Harvey did his job, about a dozen inmates came up wrong on the computer. Their sector doors locked hard until a human guard ambled by to check it out. Three of the inmates were stoned. One was simply an incorrigible troublemaker who had no business being in a nice place like Nathanael Greene. The others all had good excuses. None of them was Inmate 838-10647 HARVEY John T. Neither he nor any of his three confederates had tripped any alert, and they never would again. The computer registered their various presences readily enough. When it consulted the file of any one of them it was redirected to a special instruction table which informed it that Inmates Harvey, Muzzi, Esposito and La Croy were permitted to be any place they chose to be at any time. When it sought any one of them in his cell and registered an absence, the same redirection told it that this particular indication of absence was to be treated as registering present. The computer did not question any of that. Neither did the guards. The function of the guards was not really to guard anything, only to enforce the commands of the computer—and now and then, to be sure, to see that none of the inmates dumbly or deliberately jammed the optical scanners by kicking their IDs in backward, thus locking everybody in everywhere. The guards didn’t ask questions, since they were as sure as any bank or brokerage firm that the computer would not fail.
And were about to learn the same lesson from Johnny Harvey.
So at five o’clock the next morning all four of them had strolled to a cell in the east wing of Nathanael Greene, part of the block that had been evacuated while the outside digging for the Bed-Stuy shit pit was going on. “Do it, fuckheads,” Muzzi ordered, licking his lips, as Esposito held the spike and La Croy got ready to strike the first blow. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
He was fondling the paper-wrapped shiv, and Harvey had a dismal feeling. “We all really ought to stay right here, Moots,” he offered.
Muzzi said, without malice: “I got business with a guard.” And he was gone.
“Oh, shit,” sighed Harvey, and nodded to La Croy to swing the hammer.
Since no one else was in that wing, no one heard. Or no one but the geophone, which relayed the information to the central computer, where the same chip informed it that the digging noises were part of the excavation for the shit pit. The geophone heard the sound of the plastic going off in the drillhole five minutes later, too, and reported it, and got the same response; and they were through the wall. All that remained was furious digging for about a dozen yards. When they were well begun Muzzi came staggering
back, holding his face, his jaw at an unusual angle. “Fuckin cockthucker thapped me,” he groaned. “Get the fuckin hole dug!” And dig they did, frantic shoveling, now and then noisy and nervewracking sledgehammering as they hit a rock, and all the time Muzzi ranting and complaining as he held his fractured jaw: the shiv had been too short, it had broken off, the fuckin guard fought back, Muzzi had had to strangle the fucker to teach him a fuckin lesson for giving him a fuckin hard time—Harvey began to panic; the grand plan was going all to pieces because this raving maniac was part of it—
And they made it through the dirt and broke out into open space, into the excavation. Out onto a narrow plank walk over four stories of open steelwork. To a ladder and up it, five stories up, all the way to the surface, seeing buildings, seeing city streets, seeing the lightening pre-dawn sky, and it was working, it was all working after all!
They even saw the black car that was waiting where it was supposed to wait, with its clothes and guns and money—
And then it all went wrong again—Jesus, Harvey moaned, how
terribly
wrong—as a construction-site security guard, who did not have a computer to tell him what to do, observed four men clambering out of the excavation, and tried to stop them.
It was too bad for him. But the shots gave the alarm, and the noise and the commotion were too much for the person in the black car, and it rolled away and around the corner and there they were, Esposito dead, Muzzi with a bullet in his ass, out of the prison, free—but also alone in a world that hated them.
Marcus was early at Mr. Feigerman’s office, not just early because the errand he had to run couldn’t wait, but too early for Mr. Feigerman to stand for it. He couldn’t help himself. All the way from the candy store his feet kept hurrying him, although his head told him to slow down. His feet knew what they were doing. They were scared.
So was the rest of Marcus Garvey de Harcourt. It was bad to be summoned out of school because his father had been hurt. It was worse that when he got to the candy store his father was in a stretcher, a paramedic hovering by, while two cops questioned him angrily and dangerously. The store had been robbed, Marcus gathered. The robbers were not just robbers, they were escaped prisoners from Nathanael Greene; and they had held up the store, beaten up his father, stolen all the money and ridden off in a commandeered panel truck with Jersey plates. None of that really scared Marcus. It was only the normal perils of the jungle, surprising only because his father was known to be under the protection of someone big. It did not occur to Marcus that the story was a whole, huge lie until his father waved the cops away so he could whisper to his son. What he whispered was, “Around the corner. Mr. Gambiage. Do what he say.” It was serious—so serious that Dandy de Harcourt didn’t bother to threaten Marcus with the cat, because he knew the boy would understand that any punishment for failure would be a lot worse. That was when he began to be scared; and what finished the job was when Mr. Gambiage snatched him into the black car and told him what he had to do.
So he took the knapsack and the orders and went trotting off, and if the boy warrior did not wet his pants with fear it was only because he was too scared to pee. He had been told that a diversion had been organized. The diversion was beginning to take shape all around him, people in threes and fours hurrying toward the heart of the Bed-Stuy project,
some carrying banners, some huddled on the sidewalk as they lettered new ones. It made slow going, but not slow enough; he got to the Williamsburgh Bank Building more than ninety minutes before he was expected, and that was too early. The best thing to do was to pee himself a break in the twenty-ninth-floor men’s room to collect his thoughts and calm himself down, but a security guard followed him in and stood behind him at the urinal. “What’s in the backpack, kid?” the guard asked, not very aggressively.
Marcus took his time answering. It was a good thing he’d finally managed to get tall enough for the man-sized urinals, because there weren’t any kid-sized ones here. He urinated at a comfortable pace, and when he was quite finished and his fly glitched shut he turned and said, “I’m Mr. de Rintelen Feigerman’s personal assistant, and these are things for Mr. Feigerman.” The guard was a small man. He was lighter skinned than Marcus, but for a minute there he looked a lot like Dandy getting ready to reach for the cat.
Then he relaxed and grinned. “Aw, hell, sure. Mr. Feigerman’s seeing-eye kid, that right?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but reached under his web belt and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “If you see anybody coming in, kid, you give a real loud cough, you hear?” he ordered, just like Dandy, and disappeared into a stall. In a moment Marcus smelled weed. Cheap chickenshit, he said, but not out loud, because he knew there was no hope that a guard working for Mr. Feigerman would offer a hit to Feigerman’s young protégé, no matter how much the protégé needed to steady his nerves.
In the waiting room of Feigerman & Tisdale Engineering Associates Marcus dusted off his best society manners before he approached the receptionist. It was, “Mr. Feigerman’s expecting me, sir,” and, “I know I’m too early, sir,” and, “I’ll just sit over here out of the way, so please don’t disturb Mr. Feigerman, sir.” So of course the receptionist relayed it all to Feigerman practically at once, and Marcus was ushered into the old man’s presence nearly an hour before his time. But not into the big office with the useless huge windows. Feigerman was down where he liked to be, in his model room, and he turned toward the boy at once, his headset wheeling and clicking away. “I heard about your dad, Marcus,” he said anxiously. “I hope he’s all right.”
“Just beaten up pretty bad, Mr. Feigerman. They’re taking him to the hospital, but they say he’ll be okay.”
“Terrible, terrible. Those animals. I hope the police catch them.”
“Yes, sir,” said Marcus, not bothering to tell Mr. Feigerman that it was not likely to have been the escaped convicts that had done the beating as much as one of Mr. Gambiage’s associates, just to make the story look good.
“Terrible,” Feigerman repeated. “And there’s some kind of demonstration going on against the Bed-Stuy project, did you see it? I swear, Marcus,” he said, not waiting for an answer, “I don’t know how Gambiage gets these people out! They must know what he is. And they have to know, too, that the project is for their own good, don’t they?”
“Sure they do,” said Marcus, again refraining from the obvious: the project could do them good, but not nearly as much good, or bad, as Gambiage could do them. “We going to go take a look at it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Feigerman, but not with enthusiasm; it was a bad day for the old man, Marcus could see, and if it hadn’t been for the nagging terror in his own mind he would have felt sympathy. Feigerman reached out to fondle a sixteenth-scale model of one of the wind rotors and brightened. “You haven’t been down here lately, Marcus. Would you like me to show you around?”
If Marcus had been able to afford the truth he would surely have said yes, because almost the best part of working for Mr. Feigerman was seeing the working models of the windmills, the thermal aquifer storage with oil substituting for the water, the really truly working photovoltaics that registered a current when you turned a light on them—all of them, actually. And there was something new, an Erector-set construction of glass tubing with something like Freon turning itself into vapor at the bottom and bubbling up through a column of water and pulling the water along, then the water passing through another tube and a turbine on the way down to generate more power.
Feigerman’s sonar eyes could not tell him what someone was thinking, but he could see where Marcus was looking. “That’s what we call the wopperator,” he said proudly. “It can use warm underground water to circulate that fluid all winter long, boiling another fluid at the bottom and condensing it again at the top—what’s the matter?” he added anxiously, seeing that Marcus was shaking his head.
“It’s Dandy,” Marcus explained. “Before they took him away he told me I had to deliver some cigarettes for him—they’re good customers, over by the power plant—”
Feigerman was disappointed, then annoyed. “Oh, hell, boy, what are you telling me? Cigarettes don’t come in tin cans.”
Fuck the old bastard! Sometimes you forgot that he saw things in a different way, and that metal would give off a conspicuous echo even inside a canvas backpack. “Sure, Mr. Feigerman,” Marcus improvised, “but there’s two containers of coffee there, too. And Dandy said he’d get the cat out if it got there cold.”
“Oh, hell.” Since Feigerman wasn’t much good at reading other people’s expressions, perhaps in compensation his own face showed few. But it was clear this time that he was disappointed. He said in resignation, “I don’t want to get you in trouble with your dad, Marcus, especially after those thugs beat him up. Sam!” he called to the modelmaker chief, standing silent across the room. “Call down for my car, will you?” But all the way down in the elevator he was silent and obviously depressed. No more than Marcus, who was not only depressed but scared; not only scared but despairing, because he was beginning to understand that sooner or later somebody was going to connect his visits to the prison with the fact that the escaped prisoners had just happened to stop at his father’s candy store … and so, very likely, this was the last time he would spend with Mr. Feigerman.
Julius was waiting for them with the car, illegally parked right in front of the main entrance because it had begun to rain. Mr. Feigerman’s machine was doing its whee-clickety-beep thing and he turned his head restlessly about, but the sonar did not work through the windows of the limousine. “There’s a lot of people out there,” said Marcus, trying to help without upsetting the old man.
“I can hear that, damn it! What are they doing?”
What they were doing was shouting and chanting, and there were a lot more of them than Marcus had expected. Old man Feigerman was not satisfied. Blind he might be, but his otoliths were in fine shape; he could feel the pattern of acceleration and deceleration, and knew that the driver, Julius, was having a hard time getting through crowds. “Is it that maniac Gambiage’s demonstration?” he demanded.
Marcus said apologetically, “I guess that’s it, Mr. Feigerman. There’s a lot of them carrying signs.”
“Read me the signs, damn it!”
Obediently Marcus rattled off the nearest few. There was a
Give Bed-Stuy Freedom of Choice!
and a
Salvemos nuestras casas! and jobs, Not Theories!
and two or three that made specific reference to Mr. Feigerman himself, which Marcus did not read aloud. Or have to. As they inched along, block by block, the yelling got louder and more personal. “Listen, Feigerman,” bawled one man, leaning over the hood of the car, “Bed-Stuy’s our home—love it or leave it!” And old man Feigerman, looking even older than usual, sank back on the seat, gnawing his thumb.
The rain did not seem to slow anybody down—not anybody, of all the dozens of different kinds of anybodies thronging the streets. There were dozens, even hundreds, of the neighborhood characters—five or six tottering winos, fat old Bloody Bess the moocher, even two young brothers from the Franciscan rescue mission, swinging their rain-soaked signs and shouting—Marcus could make out neither the slogans nor the signs, because they seemed to be in Latin. There were solid clumps of blue-collars, some of them construction workers, some from the truckers and the airline drivers; there were people who looked like bank clerks and people who looked like store salespersons—put them all together and it was a tremendous testimonial to Mr. Gambiage’s ability to whip up a spontaneous riot on a moment’s notice. And they were not all pacific. Ahead there was a whine of sirens and a plop of tear-gas shells from where the construction equipment stood idle.
“They’re getting rough,” bawled Julius over his shoulder, and he looked worried. “Looks like they’re smashing the backhoes!”
Mr. Feigerman nodded without answering, but his face looked terribly drawn. Marcus, looking at him, began to worry that the old man was not up to this sort of ordeal—if, indeed, Marcus was himself. He craned his neck to peer at the clock on the Williamsburgh Bank Building and gritted his teeth. They were running very late, and it was not the kind of errand where an excuse would get you off. It didn’t get faster. A block along a police trike whined up beside them, scattering a gaggle of high-school girls shouting, “Soak the rich, help the poor, make Bed-Stuy an open door!” The cop ran down his window and yelled across at Julius, then recognized him as a fellow policeman and peered into the back to see Mr. Feigerman.
“You sure you want to go in here?” he demanded. There was a tone of outrage in his voice—a beat cop who had spent the first hour of his shift expecting to find desperate escaped convicts, received the welcome word that they were probably across the Hudson River and then been confronted with a quick, dirty and huge burgeoning riot.
Julius referred the question to higher authority. “What do you say, Mr. Feigerman?” he called over his shoulder. “Any minute now some of these thugs are going to start thinking about turning cars over.”
Feigerman shook his head. “I want to see what they’re doing,” he said, his voice shrill and unhappy. “But maybe not you, Marcus. Maybe you ought to get out and go back.”
The boy stiffened. “Aw, no, please, Mr. Feigerman!” he begged. “I got to deliver this, uh, coffee—and anyway,” he improvised, “I’d be scared to be alone in that bunch! I’m a lot better off with you and Julius!” It was a doubtful thesis at best, but the cop in the trike was too busy to argue and Mr. Feigerman too full of woe. Only Julius was shaking his head as he wormed the big car through the ever narrower spaces between the yelling, chanting groups. But as they crossed the Long Island Rail Road tracks the crowds thinned. “Down there,” Marcus ordered, leaning forward. “Over between the power plant and the shit pit, the stuff’s for the guards at the excavation—”
Julius paused to crane his neck around and stare at Marcus, but when Feigerman didn’t protest he obediently turned the car down a rutted, chewed-up street. Feigerman gasped, as the car jolted over potholes, “Damn that Gambiage! I thought he was still planning to buy me off—why does he do this now?”
Marcus did not answer, but he could have guessed that it had something to do with the stuff in his backpack. “Right by the guard shack,” he directed, and Julius turned into an entrance with a wire-mesh gate. A man in uniform came strolling out. “Got the stuff for us, kid?” he asked, chewing on a straw, his hand resting on the butt of a gun.
“Yes, sir!” cried Marcus, shucking the pack and rolling down the window, delighted to get his errand run so peacefully.
But it didn’t stay peaceful long. Julius was staring at the man in guard’s uniform, and, with increasing concern, at the quiet excavation and the absence of anyone else. Before Marcus could get the pack off Julius shouted, “Son of a bitch, it’s Jack La Croy—get down, Mr. Feigerman!” And he was reaching for his gun.