Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [138]
Meanwhile the mob was already at the doors of the Inuit People Ice’s Palace, shouting death threats while using guardrails as rams against the door.
There is little more to be found about the event in the Arctic Illustrated News. Probably the journalist judged it was high time for him to file his report through the pneumatic post, if he wanted it to make the evening edition.
That particular issue (and this explains its value) was actually printed but never distributed: for the simple reason that by the time it would normally have been sold in the streets, its readers already lived in a different nation.
Brentford had seen it coming. Swallowing his pride until it ulcerated his stomach, and seething with a fury he did his best to cool down, his senses were so sharpened that he could see things before they happened, as if he still had the Second Sight goggles on his nose.
He had clearly seen that the man who pretended to elbow his way through the crowd had actually been imperceptibly allowed to slip through between two Gentlemen of the Night. Though Brentford had avoided any kind of eye contact with Arkansky, he had registered from the corner of his eye that the magician had started to move even before the terrorist had pulled out his gun. There was no doubt, if one measured it in tenths of a second, as Brentford seemed to be able to do, that Bailiff-Baron Brainveil had fallen before the first shot was heard, like a figure in a dream reacting to a noise not yet heard in real life. Then Brentford caught Arkansky’s look after his rival had palmed the bullet he had just caught in his hand. Real bullet catch. It was unbelievable, but still the only real thing in that grotesquely fake assassination.
The organized scapegoating that took place afterward was especially abhorrent to Brentford. This was the line they should not have crossed. If he had not already taken his decision to overturn the Council, he would have taken it now, without any further soul-searching. Things were not ripe: they were rotten.
When he had resurfaced at ground level two days before, as if nothing had happened, he had felt that his part was the hardest to play. Not that he had to resume any kind of real domestic life with Sybil, who seemed to sleepwalk with indifference between the apartment and the recording studio. But having to accept the invitation to the parade, bow to the members of the Council and sit near Arkansky (who did not appear very happy to see him either) had really taken its toll on Brentford’s morale and self-esteem. Now the time had come to settle accounts, for the city and for himself.
“Sorry,” he said to the empty-eyed Sybil, who stood motionless at his side in spite of the commotion. He jumped off the dais, not as quickly or discreetly as he would have liked to, for a Gentleman of the Night spotted him and took up the chase, as Brentford headed toward one of the arcades that linked Barents Boulevard to the Marco Polo Midway. Blending into the rear guard of the lynch mob, whose flow was now thinning out, Brentford was disgusted to see how the otherwise indifferent New Venetians had suddenly attained political consciousness as an excuse to take it out on innocents. Still, he was sure that most of them were not acting out of an inbred, vengeful hatred, but were simply going along with the flow, out of boredom and an appetite for Grand Guignol: rubberneckers looking for severed heads on a pike.
He zigzagged through them, using them as moving obstacles between himself and the police officer, but as he arrived at the middle of the arcade, rifle shots erupted somewhere in front of him and he realized that the crowd was suddenly rushing back, like a tidal wave of pure panic. He jumped aside, pressing himself against the door of a watchmaker’s shop, as the two flows met together, the oncoming mob back-pedalling to avoid being bashed into and trampled by the retreating stampede. The arcade quickly became such a crush that the buttons of his coat were ripped off