Mao II - Don Delillo [52]
Bill picked a fragment of glass out of his hand. The others watched. He understood why the pain felt familiar. It was a summer wound, a play wound, one of the bums and knee-scrapes and splinters of half a century ago, one of the bee stings, the daily bloody cuts. You slid into a base and got a raspberry. You had a fight and got a shiner.
He said, “We have an innocent man locked in a cellar.”
“Of course he’s innocent. That’s why they took him. It’s such a simple idea. Terrorize the innocent. The more heartless they are, the better we see their rage. And isn’t it the novelist, Bill, above all people, above all writers, who understands this rage, who knows in his soul what the terrorist thinks and feels? Through history it’s the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist? And I don’t abjure that word even if it has a hundred meanings. It’s the only honest word to use.”
Bill’s napkin was bunched on the table in front of him. The two men watched him place the glass fragment in a furrow in the cloth. It glinted like sand, the pebbly greenish swamp sand that belongs to childhood, to the bruises and welts, the fingers nicked by foul tips. He felt very tired. He listened to Charlie talk with the other man. He felt the deadweight of travel, the apathy and vagueness of being in a place that didn’t matter to him, being invisible to himself, sleeping in a room he wouldn’t recognize if he had a picture of it in front of him.
George was saying, “The first incident was unimportant because it was only a series of phone calls. The second incident was unimportant because nobody was killed. For you and Bill, pure trauma. Otherwise strictly routine. A few years ago a neo-Nazi group in Germany devised the slogan ‘The worse the better.’ This is also the slogan of Western media. You are nonpersons for the moment, victims without an audience. Get killed and maybe they will notice you.”
In the morning Bill had breakfast in a pub near his hotel. He found he was able to order a pint of ale with his ham and eggs even though it was just past seven because night workers from the meat market were on their meal shift now. Extremely progressive licensing policy. White-coated doctors from Saint Bartholomew’s sat at the next table. He looked at the cut on his hand. Seemed to be doing nicely but it’s good to know the medics are near if you need advice or assistance. Old hospitals with saints’ names are the ones you want to go to if you have cuts and abrasions. They haven’t forgotten how to treat the classic Crusader wounds.
He took out a notepad and entered the breakfast bill and last night’s taxi fare. The sound of the blast was still an echo in his skin.
Later in the day he met Charlie by prearrangement in front of the Chesterfield. They walked through Mayfair in a lazy dazzle of warm light. Charlie wore a blazer, gray flannels and bone-and-blue saddle oxfords.
“I talked to a Colonel Martinson or Martindale. Got it written down. One of those hard sharp technocrats whose religion is being smart. He knows all the phrases, he’s got the jargon down pat. If you’ve got the language of being smart, you’ll never catch a cold or get a parking ticket or die.”
“Was he in uniform?” Bill said.
“Too smart for that. He said there wouldn’t be a news conference today. Not enough time to secure a site. He said our friend George is an interesting sort of academic. His name appears in an address book found in an apartment raided by police somewhere in France—a bomb factory. And he has been photographed in the company of known terrorist leaders.”
“Every killer has a spokesman.”
“You’re almost as smart as the colonel. He talked about you in fact. He said you ought to get on a plane and go back home. He will make