In the mailbox they found the brown paper bag, and inside the bag was the transmitter, with a piece of human dung, inside a sealed plastic bag. Also another cassette. With an uneasy tremor beneath his anger and humiliation, Mike traveled back to Burbank to listen to this new tape.
It was shorter than the first, and the voice was not that of Koo Davis, but was recognizably the same as the individual who had done the phoning. It said: “I’m taping this ahead of time, and I’m having a nice shit ahead of time, too, because I know what you people are like. You have no ethics. You have no morality. You think you’re on the side of good, and therefore it’s impossible for you to do wrong. You’ll promise not to plant a bug on us, but you will plant a bug on us. And I’ll find it. And I’ll send it back. I’m talking to you, Michael Wiskiel, I remember you from Watergate. We’ll be listening to the radio news all morning. Until we hear an apology from you, Michael Wiskiel, in your own voice, Koo Davis gets no medicine.”
That was it. In the profound silence that followed the harsh self-righteous voice, Mike sighed and said, “Lynsey Rayne is going to have my head on a platter.”
12
Trying to distract himself, Larry Crosfield sat in his bedroom and wrote in his notebook, the most recent in a series of notebooks he’d kept over the years. He wrote:
The dreadful paradox, of course, is the absolute necessity to do evil in order to bring about good. To make the world a better place, one must be worthy. To be worthy, one must strive for sainthood (in the non-clerical sense of total commitment to unattainable but appropriate ideals), and yet the lethargic and static forces of Society are so powerful that it requires, specifically requires, extra-social acts in order to promote change. One must do evil while knowing it to be evil and at the same time one must strive for sainthood. This paradox—
No. Larry couldn’t go on, he couldn’t stand it any longer. It was after nine o’clock, news broadcasts blared from radios throughout the house, cold-eyed furious Mark was standing guard over Davis and wouldn’t let anybody in the room with him, and neither Peter nor anybody else seemed capable of doing anything about it.
But something had to be done. Putting away the notebook, Larry went out to the living room, found Peter pacing back and forth there amid the radio noise, and forced himself into the other man’s awareness by standing directly in his path. Peter gave him a distracted irritable look, and Larry said, “Peter, listen to me.”
Peter turned away. “Why?”
Following, Larry said, “What if they don’t apologize?”
“They will.”
“But what if they don’t? Are you really going to let Davis die, with his medicine right here?”
“The ball’s in their court.” Peter was steadily, compulsively, stroking his cheeks, his face seeming more gaunt than usual, and he wouldn’t meet Larry’s eye. “They’ll have to come through.”
“But what if they don’t?”
“They will.”
“Give me a time limit,” Larry insisted. “Peter, what time do we give it up and let Davis have his medicine? Ten o’clock?”
“No.”
“When, then? Ten-thirty?”
“Larry,” Peter said, pressing his cheeks with the backs of his fingers, “Larry, I can’t set a time on it. They have to come through, that’s all. If we back down, how can we negotiate later?”
“If we let Davis die, what do we negotiate with later?”
Peter violently shook his head, as though being attacked by bees. Desperately he said, “We have to stand by our promise, we have to, that’s all. Mark’s right.”
“You’re afraid of Mark.”
“I agree with Mark!” Peter yelled, but he wouldn’t meet Larry’s eye. And he wouldn’t set a time limit. He would do nothing, in fact, but pace the floor, stroking his cheeks and staring at the walls and refusing to be a leader.
Through the glass wall Larry could see Joyce and Liz out beside the pool; Liz in a yellow dashiki and dark glasses lay on a chaise longue, while Joyce in jeans and an orange T-shirt sat rather tensely on a pool chair beside her. If leadership couldn’t function under present conditions, perhaps democracy could. Of if not democracy, precisely, then some sort of pressure group. Larry knew that Mark would not listen to either himself or Joyce, but if he could get Liz to join them, might not all three together have some effect? Abandoning Peter, Larry slid open one of the glass doors and went out to the pool, where a portable radio spoke of life on Earth: Jew versus Arab, Greek versus Turk, Christian versus Muslim, Catholic versus Protestant, white versus black.
Joyce smiled wanly over Liz’s unmoving body. “How are you, Larry?”
“Terribly worried about Davis,” Larry told her. “Peter’s just simply abdicated his leadership function.” Pulling another chair over by the two women, he sat down and said, “If the three of us went to Mark, our combined weight might make him see some sense.”
But Joyce shook her head, with the same wan smile. “Don’t count Liz,” she said. “She’s tripping. I’m her buddy.”
“She’s what?” Looking down at Liz, seeing now the unnatural stillness of the face behind the large-lensed dark glasses, seeing the blotchy redness of the usually tanned skin, Larry said, “My God. We’re all going crazy.” It had been two or three years since any of them had dropped acid; that had been a phase, like open sex, like hop, like the sixties themselves. Larry hadn’t even known there was acid left in anybody’s possession.
“It’s a strain,” Joyce said. “It’s a strain on all of us.”
“We’re going crazy. We can’t stand it anymore, and we’re going crazy.”
Larry believed that to be literally true. In the past they had planned attacks, bombings, incursions, and the planning had been good, the acts themselves had been well performed and effective. This time, the planning, the act of kidnapping, all had been just as good and just as efficient as ever. But now they were into a different kind of scene, a waiting scene, an ongoing set-piece involving one specific human life, and they were all breaking down.
We can’t hack it anymore, Larry thought, and looked out over the Valley, the crawling sun-bleached lifeless deadly Valley, glittering with smog like a fever victim. Thousands and thousands of people lived on that floor, in little white-pink-coral boxes, breathing the sharp glittery air, driving back and forth like ants under the dead sun. How could they be helped? How could they be saved? “Nobody can do anything,” Larry said.
Joyce said, “Don’t give up, Larry. Please. I need your strength.”
Larry looked at her in surprise. “My strength?” And seeing her earnest eyes, her soft face, her trust in him, he thought without pleasure: I suppose in truth I do love her. If only we had lived in better times. We were meant for quiet lives, both of us, calm perhaps boring lives, ordinary lives. In a way, Joyce and I have both sacrificed more than Peter or Mark or Liz, all of whom in any era would have been impelled to some sort of extravagance. We have given up our ordinariness for a cause. We have been caught by the flow of history and swept far from shore, far from shore.
But he didn’t want to think about that. And in any event, he couldn’t keep his mind for long on anything but the one problem; he said, “What’s the matter with Mark, why does he have to be this way? He’s the one making everything impossible. What’s he doing down there?”
“Listening to the radio,” Joyce said. “Like the rest of us.”