They all seemed to be with me.
Soon, I told them, the cops’ll get their numbers straight. They’ll figure out exactly how many people are in here. If I let everyone call and you all talk like hostages, the cops will come to suspect we have a lot fewer soldiers than we want them to think. They’ll be quicker to enter. That’s why the rest of you can’t call your moms.
“When do we get our phones back?” said the callers.
Later, I said.
“What if we promise—”
“Enough already!” Eliyahu shouted. “You believe in Gurion, or you—”
And Berman cut him off, shouting even louder, and although he spoke toward the same end as Eliyahu, Eliyahu’s eyes flashed, burning for a second. “Are you nice little Jewish boys missing your mothers, or soldiers of Israel!?” Berman yelled.
They said they were soldiers and stopped asking questions, and they even seemed to forget about the phones, but Chunkstyle and Boshka had turned on the news, and what passed for their forgetting was at least as much caused by that.
“All we get is NBC,” Anna Boshka announced. “Everything else is the snow of purest static.” No one seemed to mind. Each screen was split between footage of the battle, and a shot of the bus circle filled with flashing lights. Along the bottom, crawled STUDENT UPRISING CLAIMS AT LEAST ONE LIFE… HOSTAGE CRISIS OUTSIDE CHICAGO. Off screen, the studio anchor was saying, “…quasi-proto-terrorist youth group—”
I punched both MUTE buttons, and said to the soldiers: Watch TV all you want, but stay on your feet, keep an eye on the door, and always keep a soldier next to it, listening. I’m gonna go take Brodsky to the Cage and check on the soldiers at the other entrances. I’ll be back soon. In the meantime, if you hear anything funny coming from the other side of that door, tell Eliyahu immediately, and he’ll call me. I’ll come back fast and I’ll handle it.
“I wanna watch cable,” the Flunky said.
“Flunky,” said Vincie, “calm down and watch. You’re just about to clothesline a couple of Indians.”
“I seen that already,” the Flunky said.
Brodsky couldn’t walk. The foot on which Boystar’s mother had dropped the mikestand caused him too much pain to even take his shoe off. I decided to requisition some soldiers to carry him. Though my talk of the scholars had gone a long way toward quelling the fears of most Israelites, it hadn’t done nearly as much for the Side and Big Ending. Even as the television showed him shooting Indians, Vincie turned his head at every small noise — I’d thought I’d even seen his hand jump once — and Ronrico and Leevon and Jelly and Mangey all kept not one but two hands on their guns. I figured this had to do with the numbers: the 44 and 20 (now 50 and 20, or 44 and 26, depending who the Five and the Ashley counted for). Scholars coming or no, the Side/Big Ending was still well outnumbered, and I was about to take off with Benji. I didn’t believe they had anything to fear, but that didn’t matter: fear engendered more fear, and I wanted less fear. So the soldiers I picked to carry Brodsky to the Cage were Israelites, five of them, non-ex-Shovers: Israelites so as not to reduce the Side’s numbers further, non-ex-Shovers because the ex-Shovers were the ones who’d been rough with Brodsky earlier. When the five I picked lifted him, he started to argue and I told him I’d gag him and he ceased to argue.
Halfway up B-hall, they had to put him down.
I called Eliyahu, had him send five more Israelites, again non-ex-Shovers. The two crews of five carried Brodsky in shifts, fifteen to twenty-five feet at a time. I told Benji and June to keep them all moving, and I fell back behind them, just out of earshot — I needed some privacy.
It had been nineteen minutes since I’d said to have Roth on the line in thirty. If they couldn’t or didn’t have Roth on the line in thirty, I’d have to have Wolf brutalize Boystar, and/or the cops might feel compelled to rush the school in reaction to or in fear of my doing so. If they did have Roth on the line in thirty and the scholars weren’t there yet, I’d need to come up with another demand, or make some concession, probably both. I didn’t want any of that. I just wanted stasis til the scholars arrived. But what if it took them more than eleven minutes? The hail had stopped hailing, but it had hailed for a while and the el was moving slow. I needed to give the cops more time without seeming too reasonable. I called 911, hoping they hadn’t found Roth yet.
This is Gurion ben-Judah, connect me to Roth.
“Hold on, sir,” said a female dispatcher.
A click, then a man’s voice.
“How do we know that you’re Gurion ben-Judah?”
Because I’m calling for Roth.
“That doesn’t prove anything. Anyone—” he said. “Please hold on, sir,” he said.
And as I held I understood. It didn’t prove anything because they must have already played Ori’s tape on TV and any prankster would know the demand that I’d made. Whether I’d seen it but was too stupid to figure that out, or I hadn’t yet thought to turn on the television, or I was a prankster, the guy on the other end of the line wasn’t sure.
Another click. “Sir?” said the man.
Get me Roth.
“How do we know that you are who you say?”
Forty-some minutes ago, we phoned in a bunch of fake emergencies to distract you guys, I said. The first one was about an incident at the Frontier Motel. Would I know that if I wasn’t Gurion? I said.
The guy hesitated. They must have said something about that on television, too.
“We need to further authenticate.”
How about this: For the Frontier Motel one, I used the same phone as I’m using now, but not for the fire in the Nakamooks’ basement, and not for the gunmen at the mall. You can check your logs against your caller ID.
“Hold on, sir,” he said.
A click.
Now they’d know I wasn’t stupid and they’d know I was Gurion; they’d assume, now, that none of us were watching TV. I saw that was good, especially the last part: now, if they decided to raid us, they might not spend manpower preventing live cameras from shooting the raid. We’d be that much more likely to see them coming.
Another click, and then a different man’s voice, a Texan-sounding one.
“Wayne Persphere, crisis negotiator,” he said. “I’m speaking to Gurion?”
You’re not Roth.
“You said thirty minutes. It’s hardly been twenty.”
My call-waiting beeped — Eliyahu.
Hold on, Wayne Persphere.
I clicked over. Eliyahu? I said.
“The Levinson went to the bathroom,” he said. “He heard someone breathing in one of the stalls, and came back into the gym and told me. Long made short, BryGuy Maholtz now lays at my feet, here in the bathroom, head and shoulders sopping wet from the multiple swirlies the Five, after binding his arms and legs, administered.”
Did he call anybody?
“He said he called the police, but they were already here, and he wasn’t able to tell them anything that they wanted to know. He said they asked about numbers, but he didn’t know the numbers — he’d been hiding in here since before we cleared the gym. He says so, at least.”
You believe him? I said.
“I do,” said Eliyahu. “He’s too scared to lie. He’s crying his face off, begging we don’t kill him. Should we keep him here, or—”
No, I said. I know something we can do with him. We’re on our way to the Cage — tell the Five to bring him. Right now I have to go, though. I’m talking to the cops.
I took a deep breath, and clicked back over.