A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [65]
Lulu emerged from her room in her school uniform, hair brushed. Dolly hadn’t even noticed it was light out. Lulu looked askance at her mother, still in yesterday’s clothes, and said, “It’s time to go.”
“You’re going to school?”
“Of course I’m going to school. What else would I do?”
They took the subway. The silence between them had become inviolable; Dolly feared it would never end. Watching Lulu’s wan, pinched face, she felt a cold wave of conviction: if Kitty Jackson died, her daughter would be lost to her.
At their corner, Lulu turned without saying good-bye.
Shopkeepers were lifting metal gates on Lexington Avenue. Dolly bought a cup of coffee and drank it. She wanted to be near Lulu. She decided to wait on that corner until her daughter’s school day had ended: five and a half more hours. Meanwhile, she would make calls on her cell phone. But Dolly was distracted by thoughts of Kitty in the green dress, oil burns winking on her arms, then her own obscene pride, thinking she’d tamed the general and made the world a better place.
The phone was idle in her hand. These were not the sorts of calls she knew how to make.
When the gate behind her shuddered up, Dolly saw that it was a photo print shop. The hidden camera was still inside her purse. It was something to do; she went in, handed it over, and asked for prints and a CD of everything they could download.
She was still standing outside the shop an hour later when the guy came out with her pictures. By then she’d made a few calls about Kitty, but no one seemed to take her seriously. Who could blame them? Dolly thought.
“These shots…did you use Photoshop, or what?” the guy asked. “They look, like, totally real.”
“They are real,” she said. “I took them myself.”
The guy laughed. “Come on,” he said, and Dolly felt a shudder deep in her brain. As Lulu had said this morning: What else would I do?
She rushed back home and called her old contacts at the Enquirer and the Star, a few of whom were still there. Let the news trickle up. This had worked for Dolly before.
Minutes later, she was e-mailing images. Within a couple of hours, pictures of General B. nuzzling Kitty Jackson were being posted and traded on the Web. By nightfall, reporters from the major papers around the world had started calling. They called the general, too, whose human relations captain emphatically denied the rumors.
That night, while Lulu did homework in her room, Dolly ate cold sesame noodles and set out to reach Arc. It took fourteen tries.
“We can no longer speak, Miss Peale,” he said.
“Arc.”
“We cannot speak. The general is angry.”
“Listen to me.”
“The general is angry, Miss Peale.”
“Is she alive, Arc? That’s all I need to know.”
“She is alive.”
“Thank you.” Tears filled Dolly’s eyes. “Is she—are they—treating her okay?”
“She is unharmed, Miss Peale,” Arc said. “We will not speak again.”
They were silent, listening to the hum of the overseas connection. “It is a pity,” Arc said, and hung up.
But Dolly and Arc did speak again. Months later—a year, almost—when the general came to New York to speak at the UN about his country’s transition to democracy. Dolly and Lulu had moved away from the city by then, but one evening they drove into Manhattan to meet Arc at a restaurant. He wore a black suit and a wine-colored tie that matched the excellent cabernet he poured for himself and Dolly. He seemed to savor telling the story, as if he’d memorized its details especially for her: how three or four days after she and Lulu had left the general’s redoubt, the photographers began showing up, first one or two whom the soldiers ferreted out of the jungle and imprisoned, then more, too many to capture or even count—they were superb hiders, crouching like monkeys in the trees, burying themselves in shallow pits, camouflaging inside bunches of leaves. Assassins had never managed to locate the general with any precision, but the photographers made it look easy: scores of them surging across the borders without