The Instructions (146 page)

HOSTAGE CRISIS OUTSIDE CHICAGO. Off screen, the studio anchor was saying, “…quasi-proto-terrorist youth group—”

I punched both MUTE buttons, and said to the soldiers: Watch TV all you want, but stay on your feet, keep an eye on the door, and always keep a soldier next to it, listening. I’m gonna go take Brodsky to the Cage and check on the soldiers at the other entrances. I’ll be back soon. In the meantime, if you hear anything funny coming from the other side of that door, tell Eliyahu immediately, and he’ll call me. I’ll come back fast and I’ll handle it.

“I wanna watch cable,” the Flunky said.

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“Flunky,” said Vincie, “calm down and watch. You’re just about to clothesline a couple of Indians.”

“I seen that already,” the Flunky said.

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Brodsky couldn’t walk. The foot on which Boystar’s mother had dropped the mikestand caused him too much pain to even take his shoe off. I decided to requisition some soldiers to carry him.

Though my talk of the scholars had gone a long way toward quelling the fears of most Israelites, it hadn’t done nearly as much for the Side and Big Ending. Even as the television showed him shooting Indians, Vincie turned his head at every small noise—

I’d thought I’d even seen his hand jump once—and Ronrico and Leevon and Jelly and Mangey all kept not one but two hands on their guns. I figured this had to do with the numbers: the 44

and 20 (now 50 and 20, or 44 and 26, depending who the Five and the Ashley counted for). Scholars coming or no, the Side/

Big Ending was still well outnumbered, and I was about to take off with Benji. I didn’t believe they had anything to fear, but that didn’t matter: fear engendered more fear, and I wanted less fear. So the soldiers I picked to carry Brodsky to the Cage were Israelites, five of them, non-ex-Shovers: Israelites so as not to reduce the Side’s numbers further, non-ex-Shovers because the ex-Shovers were the ones who’d been rough with Brodsky earlier. When the five I picked lifted him, he started to argue and 1385

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I told him I’d gag him and he ceased to argue.

Halfway up B-hall, they had to put him down.

I called Eliyahu, had him send five more Israelites, again non-ex-Shovers. The two crews of five carried Brodsky in shifts, fifteen to twenty-five feet at a time. I told Benji and June to keep them all moving, and I fell back behind them, just out of earshot—I needed some privacy.

It had been nineteen minutes since I’d said to have Roth on the line in thirty. If they couldn’t or didn’t have Roth on the line in thirty, I’d have to have Wolf brutalize Boystar, and/or the cops might feel compelled to rush the school in reaction to or in fear of my doing so. If they did have Roth on the line in thirty and the scholars weren’t there yet, I’d need to come up with another demand, or make some concession, probably both. I didn’t want any of that. I just wanted stasis til the scholars arrived. But what if it took them more than eleven minutes? The hail had stopped hailing, but it had hailed for a while and the el was moving slow.

I needed to give the cops more time without seeming too reasonable. I called 911, hoping they hadn’t found Roth yet.

This is Gurion ben-Judah, connect me to Roth.

“Hold on, sir,” said a female dispatcher.

A click, then a man’s voice.

“How do we know that you’re Gurion ben-Judah?”

Because I’m calling for Roth.

“That doesn’t prove anything. Anyone—” he said. “Please hold on, sir,” he said.

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And as I held I understood. It didn’t prove anything because they must have already played Ori’s tape on TV and any prankster would know the demand that I’d made. Whether I’d seen it but was too stupid to figure that out, or I hadn’t yet thought to turn on the television, or I
was
a prankster, the guy on the other end of the line wasn’t sure.

Another click. “Sir?” said the man.

Get me Roth.

“How do we know that you are who you say?”

Forty-some minutes ago, we phoned in a bunch of fake emergencies to distract you guys, I said. The first one was about an incident at the Frontier Motel. Would I know that if I wasn’t Gurion? I said.

The guy hesitated. They must have said something about that on television, too.

“We need to further authenticate.”

How about this: For the Frontier Motel one, I used the same phone as I’m using now, but not for the fire in the Nakamooks’

basement, and not for the gunmen at the mall. You can check your logs against your caller ID.

“Hold on, sir,” he said.

A click.

Now they’d know I wasn’t stupid and they’d know I was Gurion; they’d assume, now, that none of us were watching TV. I saw that was good, especially the last part: now, if they decided to raid us, they might not spend manpower preventing 1387

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live cameras from shooting the raid. We’d be that much more likely to see them coming.

Another click, and then a different man’s voice, a Texan-sounding one.

“Wayne Persphere, crisis negotiator,” he said. “I’m speaking to Gurion?”

You’re not Roth.

“You said thirty minutes. It’s hardly been twenty.”

My call-waiting beeped—Eliyahu.

Hold on, Wayne Persphere.

I clicked over. Eliyahu? I said.

“The Levinson went to the bathroom,” he said. “He heard someone breathing in one of the stalls, and came back into the gym and told me. Long made short, BryGuy Maholtz now lays at my feet, here in the bathroom, head and shoulders sopping wet from the multiple swirlies the Five, after binding his arms and legs, administered.”

Did he call anybody?

“He said he called the police, but they were already here, and he wasn’t able to tell them anything that they wanted to know.

He said they asked about numbers, but he didn’t know the numbers—he’d been hiding in here since before we cleared the gym.

He says so, at least.”

You believe him? I said.

“I do,” said Eliyahu. “He’s too scared to lie. He’s crying his face off, begging we don’t kill him. Should we keep him here, or—”

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No, I said. I know something we can do with him. We’re on our way to the Cage—tell the Five to bring him. Right now I have to go, though. I’m talking to the cops.

I took a deep breath, and clicked back over.

Roth? I said.

“Wayne Persphere,” said Persphere.

Wayne Persphere, I said. Wayne Persphere, I said. Wayne Persphere, I said, you are not Philip Roth. I want to talk to Roth.

Put Roth on the phone.

“You said thirty min—”

How long does it take to get a man on the phone?

“I think you can imagine. He’s not just some man. He’s a great American novelist. Some say the greatest. You yourself called him

‘the last great—’”

Don’t ever put quotes around my words again, Persphere.

“I’m not trying to upset you. Kindly hear me out. I’m just trying to tell you that it’s no easy thing. We rustled up his number from the telephone company, but it turns out he writes in a barn this time of day. A barn in Connecticut. It’s a big ole barn, that, with a bathroom and wiring, but a barn nonetheless. The barn’s behind his house and he doesn’t have a phone there, for reasons, I reckon, of concentration. After we tried him and got no answer, we rung up his publisher and got to his editor, who told us what was and then told us what wasn’t.”

And?

“And now we’re sending some good local lawfolks who live 1389

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there to talk to him. It might take us a little more than seven minutes, though.”

Six.

“Right,” he said, “six. We’d like some more time.”

How much?

“We’d like ninety minutes—he’s really out in the sticks.”

You’ve got one hour.

“Much appreciated. Can we talk about something else now?”

The prisoners?

“Yes,” he said. “Well—prisoners. Wait. Are they hostages or prisoners?”

Get Roth on the line and they’ll stay safe, Wayne.

“Can we call you back on this line to talk?”

You can call me back as soon as you’ve got Roth. No conces-sions before then. And you can tell your boss I don’t much take a shine to fake Texans and their like. In your accents I hear deeply harbored contempt.

“Contempt for whom?”

For real Texans, Wayne.

“I rightly must say—”

Rightly come real or pick another accent. And use a better name. No one’s ever been a Persphere.

“We’ll—”

I punched END.

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RICK STEVENS, NBC NEWSANCHOR: Sorry to interrupt you, Bob, but we have an important update: we’ve just received confirma-tion that Gurion Maccabee had indeed attended two of those schools we reported on earlier. I repeat, he
had
attended two of them. Now on the line with us from Chicago, we have Rabbi Lionel Unger, headmaster of the Solomon Schechter School, where the young terrorist was in attendance from 2001 til just this past May.

Rabbi Unger, a great number of your male students failed to show up to school today, and I take it this isn’t any kind of ditch-day prank.

UNGER: No sir, it isn’t. Jewish students do not engage in ditch-days, at least they didn’t used to, though frankly, we can’t yet say for sure why they failed to show up—no one knows. I, for one, suspect that they were told by Gurion of his plans to commit this act of terrorism and they all went somewhere to watch it on television.

STEVENS: Where might they have gone?

UNGER: Maybe to the home of a student with two working parents, maybe to a pizza parlor, it’s hard to say.

STEVENS: A pizza parlor.

UNGER: That is correct, sir. They aren’t aliens, these boys, but Americans. Like so many young American boys, ours enjoy pizza, and frisbee as well, even black dance music. They play yo-yo and ping-pong and wear denim jeans on casual occasions when slacks 1391

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aren’t called for. Ice cream is something they find delicious. If you prick them, they bleed, sir. Like any American.

STEVENS: I wasn’t trying to— Just how many students, in total, are missing, Rabbi Unger?

UNGER: Two-hundred twelve, though three are legitimately ill with strept throat.

STEVENS: Two-hundred twelve from your school alone.

UNGER: Yes, from Schechter Chicago. That’s all our boys, grades five through eight, and a smattering of our lower-schoolers.

STEVENS: That’s a lot of young boys to congregate in a pizza parlor, let alone a living room.

UNGER: I see your point, and will consider its merits.

STEVENS: In the meantime, can you tell us what kind of student Gurion was?

UNGER: I can’t speak of his record. That’s private information, protected by the law. I can tell you, however, that I always suspected he was dangerous, violent, too big for his britches, and swollen-headed. He confirmed this for me last May in my office, when in the middle of a quiet conversation we were having, he physically assaulted me on the face with a stapler.

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STEVENS: A stapler.

UNGER: My own stapler. He threw it at my face.

STEVENS: May I ask what the conversation was about?

UNGER: Is that important, sir? Is that really important? I tell you that during a quiet conversation in my office, this boy holding hostages, who was, I assure you, the one who murdered the poor murdered gym teacher, threw a stapler at my face—at my
eye
, which
bled
—and you search for motives in our
conversation
to justify the violence? No wonder, sir. No wonder things like this happen, sir.

STEVENS: Thank you for speaking to us, Rabbi Unger.

UNGER: My pleasure.

STEVENS: Now let’s go back to Bob Brians at Aptakisic Junior High.

BOB BRIANS, CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Rick. As you can see behind me, the police and emergency services personnel are establishing a perimeter fifty yards east of the school, in accordance with demands made by the terrorists, demands caught on that exclusive NBC tape that we played for you just a few minutes back. I’m here with the cameraman who captured that footage, NBC’s own Ori Gold. Ori, it’s a privilege to meet you. You were 1393

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sent here by NBC to tape the filming of a music video by up-and-coming popstar Boystar currently one of an unknown number of hostages being held inside the school. For viewers just tuning in, that’s him—Boystar—tied to that chair just inside the front entrance of the school. Now, Ori, can you tell us—

STEVENS: Sorry to interrupt you Bob, Ori, but we’re being asked to play Ori’s tape again for those viewers who are just tuning in.

Here it is.

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Neither Botha nor Jerry had broken out of the bathrooms, but both of them were conscious and they shouted for help as we entered the Cage. Benji shouted back so they’d know we weren’t saviors, and all shouting stopped.

We sat Brodsky down on the desk of a carrel on the Cage’s east wall—the wall opposite the bathrooms—with his wrists tied together behind his back.

Are you comfortable? I said.

“Tch,” Brodsky said.

I want you to be as comfortable as possible, I said. That’s why we put you on this desk—you’ve got three walls to lean on. If you’d rather lean on one of the carrel walls, we’ll tilt you. Just say so. The main thing is I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Those idiots in the bathroom—as soon as we leave, they’ll try to convince you to squirm off this carrel, crawl over, free them. Don’t try it, 1394

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Mr. Brodsky. You’ll end up hurt. The way you’re tied, if you go face-first, you’ll knock yourself out when you hit the floor, maybe break your neck. Hurl yourself sideways so your shoulder takes the impact, and that shoulder will break, and maybe your clavicle. Go legs-first with that foot—you can imagine the pain. You can’t walk as it is. But say I’m wrong. Say you squirm off, land lucky, undo your bindings, drag yourself across the floor, get the bathroom doors open—you’re still locked in here, and you won’t get out til I say you get out, and that won’t even be that long from now, so—