Текст книги "All That Follows"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

Соавторы: Jim Crace,Jim Crace,Jim Crace
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

On Noondayon BBC National, Leonard’s preferred station, Maxie Lermon is on the left of the picture, his head pushed back against the investigation screen, his features coarsened by the flash of police and agency cameras. He needs a shave and looks exceptionally tired, more hollowed out and cornered than he seemed in the flesh before dawn. Even his hair is lifeless. But – other than some grazing to his face, which Leonard knows was caused by the tarmac in the hostage street – there is no sign of bruising or evidence of beatings. He is expressionless, bored even, as if he’s only posing for a passport photograph and has briefly put his features on hold. The face staring from the still-muted screen a meter from Leonard’s own face is too remote and stationary to truly care about. Nevertheless, Leonard freezes the image and copies it. He enters his Personal Briefcase, selects Menu, Archive, Album, Austin, and adds this latest image of Maxie and his two comrades to the file of photographs. Again he goes a little closer to the screen and peers at them – the sooner he retrieves his glasses, the better – looking for the romance in their faces, looking for the valiance. But the police photographers have done their duty, providing unheroic public images that present the hostage-takers as sullen, dull, defeated. People without feeling.

Leonard sees it now. He cannot help but cry out in astonishment. The screen’s a mirror, suddenly. He’s looking at himself. A younger self – an old press photo taken on the evening of the Mercury. Then, almost before he has a chance to focus properly, a second image glides across, a close-up portrait not yet nine hours old. He reaches for the console and finds the volume button but is too late to catch the commentary. So he jumps to EuroFox and then to Sky and Five and each time is greeted by the same dramatic still of himself, now with shared agency captions but no name as yet: “Prizewinning jazz musician arrested at hostage site” or “Saxman detained, questioned. Terrorist links.” It shows him in compacted profile, his left cheek pressed to the pavement, his shoulder pushed against the curb by a combat boot, the barrel of an automatic weapon pointing at his face, his beach cap trodden into the dirt but still the only touch of brightness – of summer, come to that – in the photograph. He is expressionless, but the image is flattering. As Francine says, he has no sag. His jaw and chin look less than fifty years of age, despite the almost two-day stubble and the blood.

Leonard’s hand is trembling now. He drops the belt at last, flexing his aching fingers. It is astounding to discover that while he has not been watching the news, he has become the news, he has been living it. It’s too early to know if this is a pleasing or a costly development. A pounding heart can signify both things. He takes a copy of the still, pastes it in the open Austin file, next to the Gruber’s photograph. Then, on an impulse, he zooms in on himself in Texas, October 2006, and drags the expanded image across the screen until it sits next to the shot from Alderbeech. Now he can compare. What has become of him?

On the left is Leon Lessing, the nation’s most nervous militant, on the evening before AmBush, and only a half hour or so before the restroom beating. He has a decent head of hair but nothing lush. He’s not an especially handsome young man, not least because his eyes are small and fearful: fearful of the meat spread out in front of him, fearful of the company, fearful of the day ahead and the undertakings he has given. Leonard has not noticed this before, but the fat man who beat him in the restroom hallway is hazily discernible in the upper background, pictured from the shoulders down, a mist of cloth and flesh. Leonard closes in and sharpens. Now he can just make out some of the darker lettering on the Texan’s shirt: “Bar and Grill.” It could be the title of a tune.

Leonard restores the Gruber’s image to its full dimensions, sending T-shirt Man into the bleary background again, and pans across to the right and the second portrait of himself, the one snatched from this morning’s newscasts and Web sites. Here he’s fifty years and one day old but, despite the pressure of the combat boot and gun, not betraying any fear, not revealing any of the dread that was his foremost feeling at the time. He seems fierce, and triumphant. His eyes are wide open; his mouth is slightly parted. He doesn’t quite resemble himself. The photograph, his photograph, is deceiving, Leonard knows, but it is thrilling too. It looks as arty and theatrical as a cinema still. He is mythologized by it. Already he can imagine the image on a music download file. Sax Warrior, perhaps, with Lennie “the Lion” Lessing and the Warrior Quartet. He’ll compose some stirring tunes for it. Jazz for Militants. Riffs for Radicals. Improvising for a Better World. He’s tapping out a clothy rhythm on his chest.

It is even more thrilling when, a moment later, Leonard finally discovers the video clip. It has only just been cleared and returned to screen after an hour’s embargo. As a paste-over explains, the faces of the NSF operatives have been obscured “to comply with security and operational guidelines.” Leonard’s face has not been touched. Here, in these moving and more expressive images, the resemblance is more accurate. He’s recognizable enough to have been named at last. Someone – a jazz nerd, probably, or a neighbor – must have spotted him. He gets down on his knees, hardly comprehending what he’s seeing, and studies the screen just within his focus range. He can almost feel the fizzy heat of broadcast on his forehead and cheeks. Certainly his whole body flushes hot with a kind of tumbling displacement, the deepest déjà vu. It is as if his dreams were filmed. He watches it again.

The news video must have been shot, he realizes, from under the entry porch of the press marquee, where he faked such convincing cigarette smoke this morning. The lens is shielded from the weather but the heavy rain is visible nevertheless, smudging the outline of the houses. The wind is flapping canvas, just in the shot. The segment scans across the street and settles on the hostage house for a few seconds before a commotion can be heard off-camera. Several voices shout at once: “Stay where you are,” “Get down, arms out,” and “On your knees.” The framing lurches for a moment – crews and journalists running forward have pushed the cameraman aside – but he steadies quickly and clamps his focus on Leonard again – no mistaking him – moving deliberately but calmly toward the waste ground. Red lights are dancing on his coat. His yellow cap is jaunty on his head. He does not look nervous in the least, just walking catlike from the hips. He manages five steps before three men in combats with pixilated faces burst into the shot, like killers from a wildlife film, like hunting dogs. Their duty sticks are drawn. They pounce on him and knock him to the ground with what seems like redundant violence, exactly as the NSF command knew it would. The camera follows Leonard to the ground. Their feet and arms are going in and out. The spoken commentary mentions something about “suspensions,” then Leonard is identified again as “the jazz composer and cult musician”—he’s pleased with that – and not displeased and not entirely surprised when it is suggested he is “a known associate of the Final Warning faction.” He summons up the Clip Save menu on the screen and sends the video to his Austin file. “Bravissimo,” he says.

Leonard is exceptionally tired all of a sudden. It has been a surprising and dramatic Sunday. The drama of it is catching up with him. He stretches, rubs his shoulder, rubs his face – he still hasn’t shaved or washed, or changed his clothes – rubs his shoulder again. It hurts even more than usual, but it is less troubling. He welcomes it. Overnight, his rotor cuff disorder has ceased being an older man’s condition, a sign of the body losing tone and strength and seizing up in premature rigor mortis. Now it has a stirring narrative. It is a young man’s injury, a war wound in a way, his scar of opposition to the Reconciliation Summit, a twin of Mr. Perkiss’s shattered, noble arm. He can carry it with pride. It’s something that the NSF has done to him: “You must have seen the video.” He lifts his right arm as high as he can. Yes, the pain is worse. His movement is more restricted than it has ever been. He turns his ouch of pain into an unexaggerated yawn.

Leonard is still on his knees gazing at the telescreen when Francine calls, leaning over the banister in her clean nightclothes, to let him know that finally she has recovered – and is hungry. Hasn’t he promised her a brunch in bed when she wakes up, she asks, or has she dreamed it? He thinks for a moment, incorrectly, that he can hear her coming downstairs, that she will catch him out again, praying at the screen, the surfing serf, that she will see the press photographs and the video before he has a chance to prepare her and explain. “I’m bringing it. Go back to bed,” he shouts. She’s happy to.

Brunch will be a mushroom omelette and grilled tomatoes with finger toast. He’ll halve a grapefruit and loosen the segments with a curved knife. He’ll make a pot of tea. He’ll take great pains to lay her tray attractively, to decorate the plate, to make it clear that he’s taking care of her. He’ll carry the bag of gifts and cards upstairs with him and sit on the end of the bed to open them. She’s bound to sing “Happy Birthday,” as she always does, in that pretty voice with which she entertains and educates her kids. It’s been the strangest week, he thinks, adding the smell of eggs to the kitchen’s residue of strangers’ nicotine. A farce. Too much of a farce, maybe, to justify how smug he feels, how pleased he is with his new public image. Who knows what Francine will make of it? She hasn’t got an inkling yet. He will try not to exaggerate in his account. Nothing he has done has really made a difference, after all. She could think that, given what has happened since, he might as well have simply picked up the phone Wednesday night and done his duty as a citizen, a compliant and dreary citizen who’s never dreamed of Catalonia.

The omelette is ready and on the plate when Leonard lifts the bag of gifts and looks inside. What he sees is startling. Another Sunday shock. He has to steady himself on the kitchen worktop and look again. No, he has not imagined it: one of the envelopes inside is marked with a single word, written in a familiar hand with one of Francine’s blue wax crayons. The word is Unk. He pushes back the flap – it isn’t sealed – and pulls out the card. She’s taken an old family photograph from the album in the living room – a picture of the three of them and Frazzle the terrier, labeled “Norfolk, Summer 2017”—and mounted it on an oblong of thin board. Everyone in it is smiling. Even Frazzle has a phlegmy grin. Leonard turns the card over. She has written on the back in capitals and in the style of texts: “HAPPY 50 BDAY – UNKX. ALL OK – VERY SOZ 2 MISS YOU ALL. GOT YR MESSAGE FROM MY FRIENDSHIP BOX. CAME HOME. MUST GO TODAY.” No signature but underneath, and written more conventionally, there is a further message: “I Saw You on the News This Morning. Absolutely Star,” and then a name – Swallow – a row of kisses, and a cell phone number.

Leonard goes upstairs as quietly as he can – that’s not difficult; he’s weightless now – and leaves the brunch tray and the canvas bag on the landing table. He wants to find one extra piece of evidence in Celandine’s old room before he breaks the news to her mother. Nothing that has happened in Alderbeech can outbid this. He must be certain, though, that the birthday card is not some mighty hoax. He is almost too nervous to enter. He stands at the door and peers inside. Yes, her room does now seem to have her touch to it, her lack of touch, perhaps, her untidiness and negligence.

He picks up the towel from the attic floor. It’s damp. It has been used today. It must be damp from her. He feels the bed, not really expecting any warmth to have endured, though on a day like this nothing is impossible. But when he bends to sniff the sheets, he picks up on her smell at once. He’s heard it said that our recollections of smell are the last ones to degrade. They outlast visual memories. They outlive sound. What he has not expected is the sudden weight of tears that smelling Celandine rushes to his eyes. It is still the odor of a sweet and fiery teenager, augmented by the smell of shower gel and pajamas, of being young and coming home a bit shamefaced, the scent of Francine once removed, an overwhelming flood of fragrances. He’s crying now for everything, not just for Celandine, not only for her mother either, but also for the strange and bumpy ride he’s had all week, and for the shortfalls in his life, and for the children of his own he never had, his mother and his sister and his sister’s child; he’s crying for Lucy Emmerson and even Maxim Lermontov, and for the music, cool and blue, and for the roads less traveled, and for the waste.

The sobs are brief, too heavy to last long. Leonard is laughing soon, once he’s cleared his eyes and settled his breathing. Not burglars, then. Not the return of the raiding party after all. He sees it now, sees the front door opening. Celandine comes home with her house keys and turns off the alarm, glad the code has not been changed. She is both disappointed and relieved that there is no one home to argue with, no one there demanding to be hugged and kissed, no dreadful scene. She’s worried, though. She’s never seen such a mess and mayhem before, not in this house. It must be burglars, she thinks, or some dreadful fight. She pauses for a moment and she listens. But, as her mother would want her to, she battles to stay calm. Everything will be explained. So she settles into a familiar routine. Can it really be eighteen months since she was here, smoking cigarettes downstairs with the extractor on in the kitchen, the only place that it’s allowed? She makes herself some coffee and she fixes a meal, disappointed by the unexciting choices in the freezer. And – this is typical – she sits up into the night and watches television. Mum and Unk will return any minute, she thinks, come back a little tipsy from their birthday treat, to find the mess and then to discover their mislaid Celandine, as large as life, at home. “Don’t blame me for the mess,” she practices to say. “It’s not my fault – for once.” But finally she goes upstairs to sleep in her own bed. When she wakes this Sunday morning, she comes downstairs and – as she has done countless times since she was a kid and too frightened of the sloping attic shadows of her own room to stay another second there – waits under the low, carved lintel of her mother’s bedroom door, listening for signs of life, waiting for the invitation to climb in. Eventually she looks into the room to find that the bed is empty still. Again she sits downstairs, her stomach in a knot. She is no longer calm. She’s learned from Unk that unease is not always inappropriate. She fears the worst while waiting for the local bulletin on the News Channel and, God forbid, reports of car crashes or restaurant fires or shootings. The clatter of the circulars and papers falling on the hall mat lifts her spirits for a moment. They’re home at last – except they’re not. Her anxiety is deepening. She wishes she’d never come. But seeing Unk in the Alderbeech video provides, once she’s adjusted to the shock, some comfort and a kind of explanation. Unk’s on the news and he’s alive, at least. She’s free to go. Or else she’s too shaken by her fears to stay. And so she collects her little backpack and is relieved to leave the house again. She’s made the first move in the peace process in this small Reconciliation Summit of her own. She’s left a contact number in the birthday card. Now it’s up to themto act on it. She picks up the newspapers from the mat, puts them in the wicker bowl, and, not bothering to set the house alarm, steps outside into the street and her own self-regulating life.

Leonard ought to phone his stepchild straightaway. He suspects he ought to phone before he speaks to Francine, just to make sure that it’s really not a dream. It still feels like a dream. Instead, he sends a text to the number Celandine has given. He is not being cowardly (tomorrow, Monday, is a working day, and he can then start finally to be a braver man) but being level-headed. It’s hard to resurrect an argument by text. Text’s far too slow for angry repartee. It’s good for brokering a truce. His message is: “THANX CELANDINE, THANX SWALLOW. AT LAST. ITS BEEN TOO LONG. MUST TALK 2 MUM 2 DAY. UNK X.”

Leonard backs into the bedroom, self-conscious and attentive with the tray. He knows the omelette must be almost cold. Francine is already sitting up, her table light on, her reading glasses perched appealingly on the tip of her nose.

“You’re looking very happy with yourself,” she says. “You need a shave, of course. But otherwise …”

His smile is loose and unconditional. He can’t contain it. “Mushroom omelette, ma’am.” He puts the tray across her lap, pulls back the curtains to reveal a brightening sky, but not enough sunlight to slant and cast across the bed. He does not stay to watch her eat or to see her find the envelope and birthday card tucked between her saucer and her cup and weighed flat with a silver spoon. He leaves the room and starts to go downstairs, not hurrying. He plumps his lips and parps a short phrase to himself, a new melodic phrase that he must jot down while he remembers it. He attempts some variations and embellishments, but silently. With every step and every note, he expects to hear his Francine crying out. Then he will go back to the room with his loose smile again. They will embrace and – almost, almost – it will be an end and – nearly, nearly – a beginning. The house is shimmering.

17

LUCY EMMERSON HAS KEPT HER PROMISES. She’s sent a music file to Leonard’s handset. Davey Davey, Do It Now, the Jo Bond song. And she has hacked her hair short, a badger cut. She looks like Maria played by Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Leonard thinks. She’s boyish and defiant. They sit exactly where they sat before, on the wooden bench behind the Woodsman, below the first-floor room where he and Francine made love on Saturday. She’s smoking still, but these are manufactured cigarettes today. They look unwieldy and self-conscious compared to her self-rolled skinnies.

“It was such a hum, you know, to watch it all kick off on the TV,” she says. “Didn’t you just love the name we chose? SOFA. How radiant was that? I really fooled them, didn’t I? I think it made the difference. To Dad, I mean.”

“What difference?” Leonard does not mean to sound combative, but for a moment he is tempted to own up. Or is it boast? Perhaps she ought to know he’s informed on her. After all, it’s only because of his timely betrayal that the police felt confident enough to storm the house, assured that there’d be no costly quid pro quo. But who would benefit from owning up? Not Lucy. She’s more than happy to believe that her genius has worked.

“A lot of difference,” she says. “No, really. Mighty-mighty major much.” Her self-confidence is unassailable.

“Like what? I mean … I wanna know, is all.” He’s talking Texan now.

“So, for a start, like …” She hesitates, holds up a hand, and spreads her fingers to count off the differences she’s made. “No one was hurt because of him. And that’s maybe – well, probably – because he was bearing me in mind.”

“Protecting your eye and tooth.”

“My dad had hostages, but he didn’t fire a shot. Not one. Except, you know, to make a point. A warning shot … when they were chasing him. He didn’t fire a single shot at anybody. The family walked out of there unscathed.” Leonard raises an eyebrow. Unscathedis not a word he always likes to hear. “Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking,” she continues. “Only unscathed physically. Really shaken up inside, of course. Did you hear, though? The man said they’d all been treated really well, you know, like it was almost fun, a break from work and school. The woman even put on weight, she reckons.”

“All that sitting around, I suppose.”

“All those pizzas!”

“And you? What difference has it made to you?”

“To us? To me and Dad?”

He nods. That isn’t what he means.

“I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know once I’ve been and visited. If he’ll let me visit him. See what he says. I tell myself he’s where he has to be. It’s not my fault. It worked out for the best. For everyone.”

“And you specifically? You could have ended up inside. Conspiracy. Wasting police time. Wasting taxpayers’ money.”

“I could have shared a cell with Dad. Back to prison for his gal. I was born inside, you know? I’m quite a lag.”

“Be serious. Admit that it was risky, at least.”

Now it’s her turn to raise an eyebrow. She mimes a yawn. “I’m seventeen! This is the sort of thing that daughters do.”

“You might have been fined. You’d not be laughing then.”

“Well, I suppose. But yes, it’s weird. They only read me the riot act. It wasn’t even scary. Mum could’ve done worse. She hasdone worse.”

“And that was it?”

“They issued me with an official police caution. Like a school certificate. Passed with distinction, entrance-level conspiracy. I’m going to frame it and hang it on my wall.” Her smile seems to have doubled in width since she cut her hair. “I might kidnap myself again and go for degree-level conspiracy. Disappearing is a piece of cake, and fun. Ask Celandine.”

“She’s Swallow these days.”

“Smart move. Smart girl.”

“What now?”

“Want another one of those?” Lucy clicks the side of his glass with a fingernail.

Leonard shakes his head. He’s feeling light-headed already. And uncomfortable. The yard is filling up with smokers. He’s been pointed out and recognized, he thinks. “Let’s move.”

“Okay. So what do you say now? Take to the Curb with me?” she suggests. “Let’s go and shake our fists at the limousines. For Dad.”

Leonard looks up at the sky. It’s mild and still. No hint of rain or wind today. Francine will not be home till late; she has taken the afternoon off school and is meeting her daughter, on the neutral ground of a gallery bistro. Their first encounter in the flesh since April 24 last year. Francine has taken a bunch of lilies – a womanly and mature gift, not motherly. He can almost sense their tears, their cautious bickering, their boisterous relief at being back in touch. Their house is empty, left alone to its wedges of light and shadow. The burglar alarm is set. He has no convincing reasons to go home just yet. “Why ever not?” he says; it is the second time that Lucy has occasioned him to use this phrase and take the risk. “Let’s Take to the Curb. Yup, Lucy Lucy, do it now.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“You’re right. It’s no big deal,” he says. “But we can’t all be bigdeal firebrands, can we? Still, I guess we should at least stand on the pavement and boo.”

She gets up to take his wrists and pull him from the bench.

It’s best to go on foot, even though it is more than two kilometers from the pub yard to the nearest point of contact with the curbside vigil. The first part is eerily familiar. It’s been walked before, by both of them. Here’s where they first met, just down the road from his parked van, his walking shadow clipping her heels. They have to deviate a bit, dipping down a side road, to take their final look at Alderbeech. There’s nothing on the waste ground now except the tire-marked, turmoiled earth, peg holes where the marquees were erected, and an urban construction notice, announcing that in two years’ time there will be modern landscaped maisonettes here, “Affordable Family Opportunities.”

The street itself is daytime quiet: a pair of cats disputing on a wall; a plumber’s van; a bouquet of lost balloons deflating in the clutches of a sorbus tree, now stripped of leaves. There is no longer any interest in the hostage house. The family has sold their stories, and they will even sell the house and move out west when they grow tired of all the fuss. There’s not a single moving car for the moment, even though Alderbeech is a twenty-minute walk away from the vigil and traffic could move freely if it wanted to. Starting five hundred meters to the south, the police have closed and coned most of the townways. The route between the airport and the Reconciliation Summit has become a Security Exclusion Zone. The first of the sixteen heads of state should be arriving by now and being collected off the runway by their bulletproofed limousines and the motorcycle outriders. The world is watching, alerted by the arrest of the Final Warning cell to the possibility that there could be a shooting or a bomb.

The pavements grow busier as Leonard and Lucy turn away from Alderbeech. They are not exactly thronged with protesters yet, but there are several groups striding purposefully in the same direction as they are. They give the normally unassuming streets the thrilling kind of rationale that Leonard remembers from his teenage years, when he was always there – part of the gathering, though not at the front – for any demonstration of the left. His walk, then and now, assumes a resolute and cocky swing. It says, Get up off your arse like me, and we will change the world. He takes his sun cap out and pulls it down over his hair. It’s not that he feels cold. He has decided that the cap can make him brave. Lucy links her arm round his. “Oh, boy, you look so bloody weird,” she says. “Leonard, Leon … No, I’m gonna call you Unk, okay?”

The first part of her “genius plan” once Leonard “chickened out,” she explains as they approach the comrades at the curb, was to cut her hair. She knew “a scalping” would make her almost unrecognizable. Any photograph they had of her or any description that the police might issue was bound to emphasize her mass of thick and bouncy hair. So before she walked out of her mother’s house, she took the scissors to herself and “hacked away,” only keeping one thick lock for use in her kidnap communiqué.

“If those boneheads had had the brains to look inside the compost bin, right under their noses in our kitchen, they would have found a wodge of it,” she says, pleased with herself and her good luck. Then all she had to do was to take the train to Exeter and call “a really solid friend” who had a flat where she could “throw her stuff – for as long as it takes.”

“I told you, didn’t I?” she says. “Come on, admit it. I promised three days, three days max. And that’s exactly what it was. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Job done.”

“I hear the message. I didn’t prove to be your really solid friend, okay? And, yes, yes, yes, you were correct about everything. You’re such an unbearable little genius,” Leonard says, looking straight ahead. “It wasn’t Francine, you know. Not only Francine, anyway. It wasn’t just a woman thing. I had my own doubts as well.”

“Well, that was obvious.”

“It was?”

“I think I frightened you.”

“I think you did.”

“It didn’t matter anyway. At least you didn’t let on and spoil it all. Except to Mum. And that was good. I hated seeing her at that press conference where she couldn’t even speak and looking, you know, so destroyed … You took a risk …”

Leonard’s smiling now, a touch awkwardly. “What else was I supposed to do? Mothers and daughters. It’s … umbilical. I know the score, more than anyone.”

“But it was absolutely radiant to see you being such a maniac when Dad was marched away. Those guys were terrified of you.”

“You think?”

“Took three of them to bring you down. I thought I must be dreaming. I couldn’t believe it was you. I played it over and over again, slo-mo, freeze frame. I recognized your little cap.”

Leonard taps his head.

“Everybody’s watching it. You’re the man right now. That bit where you were strolling off as if you couldn’t give a damn. They’re shouting out. They’ve got their red sights all over your back. It’s Dead Man Walking. And you’re, like, cucumber. Everybody wants to get your music now. All the downloads have been jammed. Did you know that?”

“I heard.”

“You can already buy a poster of that photograph. Under the jackboot. And there’s a T-shirt on the Web.”

“I heard that too. I won’t be getting one.”

“You ought to, though. A souvenir. You look like Che. You saw the film? That final photograph.”

“Except not dead.”

“No, not quite dead. What were you hoping to do?”

“What when?”

“When you were running up to Dad.”

I wasn’t hoping to do anything, he thinks. I was just hurrying, but hurrying forward for a change, heading for the lights instead of for the shadows. I only wanted to be seen. I wanted to be recognized. By Maxim Lermontov. To show my face to him.

“A bit of solidarity,” he says. “No more than that.”

“No pastarán.”

“Exactly so.”

Leonard and Lucy reach the vigil just in time and at a point, in the forty-kilometer route that the premiers and presidents will follow, where it is possible to step up to the very edge of the road. The plan is that at exactly 2 p.m. everybody will link hands and Take to the Curb on only one side of the road to form an unbroken, silent, disapproving line between the airport exit (by the Zone superstores, in fact) and the summit gates. Someone has done the adding-up: if the average span of two arms spread wide is about a meter and a half, completion of the vigil line will require about twenty-seven thousand participants. On a Sunday those numbers might be easily achieved, but on a Tuesday afternoon it is bound to be more difficult. Sympathizers have to work or be at school or be at home. Thank goodness that no rain has been forecast. The weather is being supportive of the cause. Nevertheless, the worry remains that there will be gaps in the line, especially in the long, remote, out-of-town stretches at both ends of the route, where the only guaranteed demonstrators will be those in their own vehicles or those bused in by the cleverly acronymed CARS, or Coalition Against the Reconciliation Summit.