A fat yellow-faced woman sat down with a groan beside me and began to ravish a plate of assorted cakes. Her jaws grinding, the only visible sign of life, for her eyes were glazed from sleep and her body, incorrectly buttoned into a cigarette-ash-dusted dress, was as still as a mountain, even the work of lungs was obscured by the torpid flesh.
I watched her above the newspaper, fascinated by the regularity with which her jaws ground the bits of cake. Her eyes looked past me into some invisible world of pastry. Then, having finished the report on Cave's telecast, I put the newspaper down and ate with deliberate finesse my own biscuit. The rustling of the newspaper as it was folded and placed on the table disturbed my companion and, beneath the fat, her will slowly sent out instructions to the extremities. She cleared her throat. Her head lowered. Her chewing stopped; a bit of cake was temporarily lodged in one cheek, held firmly in place by a gaudy plate. Her eyes squinted at the newspaper. She spoke: "Something about that preacher fellow last night?"
"Yes. Would you like to see it?" I pushed the paper toward her.
She looked at the picture, carefully spelling out the words of the headlines with heavy lips and deep irregular breaths.
"Did you see him last night?" she asked when her eye finally got to the small print where it stopped, as though halted by a dense jungle.
"Yes. As a matter of fact, I did."
"He sure gave it to them bastards, didn't he?" Her face lit up joyously; I thought of ça ira.
"You mean the clergy?"
"That's just what I mean. They had it too good, too long. People afraid to say anything. Takes somebody like him to tell us what we know and tell them where to head-in."
"Do you like what he said about dying?"
"About there being nothing? Why, hell, mister, I knew it all along."
"But it's good to hear someone else say it?"
"Don't do no harm." She belched softly. "I expect they're going to be on his tail," she added with gloomy pleasure, spearing a fragment of eclair which she had missed on her first circuit of her crowded dish.
I spent that morning in the street buying newspapers, eavesdropping. I heard several arguments about Cave: the religiously orthodox were outraged but clearly interested; the others were triumphant though all seemed to feel that they, as the automat woman had said, would soon be on his tail. Ours was no longer a country where the nonconformist could escape disaster if he unwisely showed a strange face to the multitude.
I tried to telephone Iris and then Clarissa but both telephones were reported busy; I called the office but was told by a mechanical voice that if I left my name and address and business Mr. Himmell would call me as soon as possible. The siege had begun.
I arrived at the Empire State Building half an hour before the meeting was to begin, hoping to find out in advance from Paul what was happening and what we were supposed to do about it.
A picket line marched up and down before the entrance, waving banners, denouncing Cave and all his works in the names of various religious groups. A crowd was beginning to gather and the police, at least a score, moved frantically about, not knowing how to keep the mob out of the building. When I stepped off the elevator at Cave's floor, I found myself a part of a loud and confused mass of men and women all shoving toward the door which was marked Cavite, Inc. Policemen barred their way.
Long before I'd got to the door, a woman's shoe went hurtling through the air, smashing a hole in the frosted glass. One policeman cocked his revolver menacingly. Another shouted, "Get the riot squad!" But still the crowd raved and shouted and quarreled. Some wanted to lynch Cave in the name of the Lamb, while others begged to be allowed to touch him, just once. I got to the door at last, thanks to a sudden shove which landed me with a crash into a policeman. He gasped and then, snarling, raised his club. "Business!" I shouted with what breath was left me. "Got business here. Director."
I was not believed but, after some talk with a pale secretary through the shattered glass door, I was admitted. The crowd roared when they saw this and moved in closer. The door slammed shut behind me.
"It's been like this since nine o'clock," said the secretary, looking at me with frightened eyes.
"You mean after two hours the police still can't do anything?"
"We didn't call them right away. When we did it was too late. We're barricaded in here."
The team sat about at their desks pretending to work, pretending not to notice the noise from the corridor.
Paul, however, was not in the least disturbed. He was standing by the window in his office looking out. Clarissa, her hat and her hair together awry: a confusion of straw and veil and bolts of reddish hair apparently not all her own, was making-up in a pocket mirror.
"Ravenous, wild beasts!" she hailed me. "I've seen their likes before."
"Gene, good fellow! Got through the mob all right? Here, have a bit of brandy. No? Perhaps some Scotch?"
I said it was too early for me to drink. Shakily, I sat down. Paul laughed at the sight of us. "You both look like the end of the world has come."
"I'd always pictured the end as being quite orderly…" I began stuffily but Doctor Stokharin's loud entrance interrupted me. His spectacles were dangling from one ear and his tie had been pulled around from front to back quite neatly.
"No authority!" he bellowed, ignoring all of us. "The absence of a traditional patriarch, the center of the tribe, has made them insecure. Only together do they feel warmth in great swarming hives!" His voice rose sharply and broke on the word "hives" into a squeak. He took the proffered brandy and sat down, his clothes still disarranged.
"My hair," said Clarissa grimly, "may never come out right again today." She put the mirror back into her purse which she closed with a loud snap. "I don't see, Paul, why you didn't have the foresight to call the police in advance and demand protection."
"I had no idea it would be like this. Believe me, Clarissa, it's not deliberate." But from his excited chuckling, I could see that he was delighted with the confusion. The triumph of the publicist's dark art. I wondered if he might not have had a hand in it: it was a little reminiscent of the crowds of screaming women which in earlier decades, goaded by publicists, had howled and, as Stokharin would say, swarmed about singers and other theatrical idols.
Paul anticipated my suspicions. "Didn't have a thing to do with it, I swear. Doctor, your tie is hanging down your back."
"I don't mind," said Stokharin disagreeably, but he did adjust his glasses.
"I'd a feeling we'd have a few people in to see us but no idea it would be like this." He turned to me as the quietest, the least dangerous of the three. "You wouldn't believe the response to last night's telecast if I told you."
"Why don't you tell me?" The comic aspects were becoming apparent: Stokharin's assaulted dignity and the ruin of Clarissa's ingenious hair both seemed to me suddenly funny; I cleared my throat to obscure the tickling of a smile.
Paul named some stupendous figures with an air of triumph. "And there are more coming all the time. Think of that!"
"Are they favorable?"
"Favorable? Who cares?" Paul was pacing the floor quickly, keyed to the breaking-point had he possessed the metabolism of a normal man. "We'll have a breakdown over the weekend. Hired more people already. Whole lot working all the time. By the way, we're moving."
"Not a moment too soon," said Clarissa balefully. "I suggest, in fact, we move now while there are even these few police to protect us. When they go home for lunch (they all eat enormous lunches, one can tell), that crowd is going to come in here and throw us out the window."