Mao II - Don Delillo [53]
“How does he know I’m here, or why I’m here, or who I am?”
“After the first series of threatening calls,” Charlie said.
“I thought I was the unannounced presence. But you told George I was here. And now this colonel with a brush mustache.”
“I had to report the names of all the people invited to the conference. Because of the phone calls. The police needed a list. And I told George actually the day before because I thought it would help. Anything that helps.”
“Why does the colonel want me to go home?”
“He says he has information that you may be in danger. He hinted that you would be worth a great deal more to the group in Beirut than the hostage they’re now holding. The feeling is he’s too obscure.”
Bill laughed.
“The whole thing is so hard to believe I almost don’t believe it.”
“But of course we do believe it. We have to. It doesn’t break any laws of logic or nature. It’s unbelievable only in the shallowest sense. Only shallow people insist on disbelief. You and I know better. We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there’s no longer a moral or spatial distinction between thinking and acting.”
“Poor bastard, you’re beginning to sound like me.”
They walked in silence. Then Charlie said something about the loveliness of the day. They chose their topics carefully, showing a deft indirectness. They needed some space in which to let the subject cool.
Then Bill said, “How do they plan to get me into a hostage situation?”
“Oh I don’t know. Lure you eastward somehow. The colonel was vague here.”
“We don’t blame him, do we?”
“Not a bit. He said the explosive was Semtex H. A controlled amount. They could have brought down the building if they’d wanted to.”
“The colonel must have enjoyed dropping that name.”
“The material comes from Czechoslovakia.”
“Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“See how stupid we are.”
“Where are you staying, Bill? We really have to know.”
“I’m sure the colonel knows. Just go ahead and arrange the conference. I came here to read some poems and that’s what I’m going to do.”
“Nobody wants to be intimidated. But the fact is,” Charlie said.
“I’m going back to my hotel. I’ll call you at noon tomorrow. Get a new location and let’s do what we came here to do.”
“I think we ought to have dinner, the two of us. We’ll talk about something else completely.”
“I wonder what that might be.”
“I want this book, you bastard.”
People stood gathered in a rambling white space set on several levels under ducts and sprinklers and track lights, chatting over silver cocktails. The walls were hung with works of living Russians, mainly large color-brave canvases, supernation paintings, ambitious and statement-making.
Brita moved through the crowd, edging sideways, drink held high, and she felt the interplay of glances, the way eyes consume their food, taking in faces, asses, tapestry jackets, raw-silk shirts, the way bodies slant involuntarily toward a well-known figure in the room, the way people carry on one dialogue and listen to another, the way every energy is directed somewhere else, some brightness nearby, the whole shape and state and history of this little hour of truth. There seemed to be some imaginary point of major interest, a shifting middle cluster of conversation, although every person in the room retained an awareness of the street beyond the plate-glass windows. They were here, in a way, for the people in the street. They knew exactly how they appeared to those who were walking or driving by, to standees on crammed buses. They appeared to float outside the world. They were only art browsers but they appeared privileged and inviolate, transcendent souls lighted against the falling night. They shared a stillness, a way of looking sharply etched. This gave the incidental scene a claim to permanence, as if they believed they might still be here a thousand nights from now, weightless and unperspiring, stirring the small awe of passersby.
It took her a while to reach