The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [44]
A stillness fell. “All customers are asked to leave the premises at once. The store must be evacuated. Kindly proceed …” People began gathering their parcels and moving briskly from the room. Phoebe looked around in confusion. “Attention all customers …” Was the store closing for the day? But obviously not. Baffled, she followed the crowd into a central area filled with mirrored cosmetics counters, where hundreds of shoppers were already gathered. She heard the terse, complicit whispers of people in danger and experienced a thrill of fear. Something was the matter. Light poured in from the street, but the bottleneck of departing customers forced her to a standstill some distance from the doors. She began to grow nervous. Yet at the same time, she felt strangely exempt from any real danger. “All customers are advised to move toward the nearest exit doors. The building …”
“What’s going on?” Phoebe asked a man beside her, who carried a round loaf of bread under his arm.
“Bomb threat, I’d imagine,” he said. “Happens fairly often.”
“Wow, a bomb?” Phoebe said. Everyone seemed so docile. “I guess ‘threat’ doesn’t mean there’s really a bomb, though.”
“Rarely,” the man said. “Mind you, they do go off now and then.” From his half-smile Phoebe sensed he was baiting her, and tried to assume an air of indifference. The doors looked very far away.
“You’re American,” the man observed. He pronounced it “Amer-ee-can.”
“Yes,” Phoebe said. “I got here this morning.”
“You haven’t got many terrorists in America, then.”
“Terrorists?” Phoebe said, startled. “No. Well, I mean, Patty Hearst was a terrorist …”
He frowned. “Who’s that?”
“She was this rich heiress, but then she was kidnapped by terrorists and she became a terrorist, too. It was incredible,” Phoebe said, aware as she spoke that it didn’t sound particularly incredible. The man said nothing. “Are there a lot of terrorists in London?” she asked.
“We’ve got our share. Mind you, the French have it worse; they’ve got bombs exploding every time you turn round over there.”
A smell of anxiety and humanity filled the vast room. Phoebe wanted to escape. The man had a kindly, defeated air. She pictured his children leaping on him like monkeys before he’d had a chance to put down his loaf of bread.
“So … what’re they trying to do? The terrorists in London,” she asked.
“Depends which ones,” said the man. “The IRA hate the Brits, full stop. The Pal-ee-stinians want hostages freed, or they’re taking revenge over some bloody thing. Then you’ve got kids all over Europe that haven’t got a clue, just sod capitalism and that. Cooking up bombs and carrying guns around—that’s the bit they really enjoy.”
“I’m sure they have better reasons than that,” Phoebe said, feeling oddly defensive on the terrorists’ behalf.
“Avoid boredom?” he said with a short laugh. “Best reason in the world.”
Finally they neared the doors. Phoebe felt a sudden, odd reluctance to leave the danger behind. She pictured the terrorists observing this commotion from some hidden place, and longed to slow down for them, flaunt her fearlessness.
At last they pushed through a door to the street. Phoebe looked around for the man she’d been speaking with, thinking he might have paused to share with her the triumph of escape. But he’d disappeared. The crowd, still flooding from the doors behind her, forced Phoebe to move on. Policemen crowded the sidewalk, black helmets strapped beneath their chins like bonnets. Phoebe slowed, resisting the crowd’s momentum. Customers still leaving Harrods were caught in the press of bystanders pushing toward it. The policemen’s short-tempered warnings did little to quell the crowd’s desire to move nearer the trouble. And Phoebe felt it, too—here was the world of events, a place