Goodbye California - Alistair [126]
Everyone, with one exception, nodded. The exception, inevitably, was Mitchell. ‘And what if you’re wrong?’
‘Must you be so damnably pig-headed and cantankerous?’ Barrow was irritated to the point of exasperation.
Ryder didn’t react, just lifted his shoulders and said: ‘So I’m wrong.’
‘You must be mad! You would take the burden of the deaths of countless fellow Californians on your hands?’
‘You’re beginning to bore me, Mitchell. In fact, not to put it too politely, you do bore me and have done so for some time. I do think you should call your own sanity in question. Do you think I would breathe a word of our conclusions – with you being excepted from our conclusions – outside this room? Do you think I would try to persuade anybody to remain in their homes on Saturday night? When Morro knew that people had ignored the threat and had heard, as he inevitably would, the reason why – namely, that his scheme was known – the chances are very high that in his rage and frustration he’d just go ahead and press the button anyway.’
The singularly ill-named Café Cleopatra was a wateringhole of unmatched dinginess, but on that hectic, frenetic and stifling evening it possessed the singular charm of being the only such establishment open in the blocks around Sassoon’s office. There were dozens of others but their doors were rigorously barred by proprietors who, when the opportunity was open to them, were lugging their dearest possessions to higher levels or who, when such opportunity was denied them, had already joined the panic-stricken rush to the hills.
Fear was abroad that evening but the rush was purely in the mind and heart: it was not physical, for the cars and people who jammed the street were almost entirely static. It was an evening for selfishness, ill-temper, envy, argument, and antisocial behaviour ranging from the curmudgeonly to the downright bellicose: phlegmatic the citizens of the Queen of the Coast were not.
It was an evening for those who ranged the nether scale from the ill-intentioned to the criminally inclined as they displayed in various measure that sweet concern, Christian charity and brotherly love for their fellow man in the hour of crisis, by indulging in red-faced altercation, splendidly uninhibited swearing, bouts of fisticuffs, purse-snatching, wallet-removal, mugging and kicking in the plate-glass windows of the more prosperous-looking emporiums. They were free to indulge their peccadilloes unhindered: the police were powerless as they, too, were immobilized. It was a night for pyromaniacs as many small fires had broken out throughout the city – although, in fairness, many of those were caused by unseemly speed of the departure of householders who left on cookers, ovens and heating appliances: again, the fire brigades were powerless, their only consolation being the faint hope that significant numbers of the smaller conflagrations would be abruptly extinguished at ten o’clock the following morning. It was not a night for the sick and the infirm: elderly ladies, widows and orphans were crushed against walls or, more commonly, deposited in unbecoming positions in the gutter as their fitter brethren pressed on eagerly for the high land: unfortunates in wheelchairs knew what it was to share the emotions of the charioteer who observes his inner wheel coming adrift as he rounds the first bend of the Circus Maximus: especially distressing was the case of thoughtless pedestrians knocked down by cars, driven by owners concerned only by the welfare of their family, and which mounted the pavement in order to overtake the less enterprising who elected to remain on the highway: where they fell there they remained, for doctors and ambulances were as helpless as any. It was hardly an edifying spectacle
Ryder surveyed the scene with a jaundiced and justifiably misanthropic eye although, in truth, he had been in a particularly ill humour even before arriving