“I want to believe that.”
“I didn’t ask you what you wanted,” the old man said, his words carrying a sharp enunciation that made it clear he would accept no such avoidance. “I asked what you believe.”
“Then yes. I do believe that people are basically good.”
“Easy enough to say, though history sadly proves otherwise. In the face of the worldwide collapse that’s soon to be upon us, we’ll be lost if we place our faith in wishes and hopes for the best.” He picked up a folded newspaper near his hand and passed it across the desk. “This is the essence of human nature, left to its own devices.”
Noah took the newspaper, expecting to see a run-of-the-mill story of a faraway genocide or massacre, widespread child abuse by some august religious institution, or maybe a retrospective of Nazi atrocities or the horrors of the killing fields. But it’s too easy to indict a powerful regime and its leaders while giving a pass to the followers themselves—they, the people who took the orders without question or stood by, silent, and watched the nightmare come to pass. The example his father had chosen was smaller, and cut deeper, and was a much harder thing to simply chalk up to some vague blanket notion of man’s inhumanity to man.
The headline of the story was TURKISH GIRL, 16, BURIED ALIVE FOR TALKING TO BOYS.
The text below went on to explain that a young girl had been the victim of an honor killing, not an uncommon thing in many cultures, allegedly at the hands of her own father and grandfather. They’d buried her alive under a chicken pen in the backyard behind the house. And this was no crime of passion; it takes a long, thoughtful time to do such a thing. In fact, a family council meeting had determined what her punishment should be for the crime of hanging out with her friends.
Noah put the paper down. “This doesn’t mean that all of humanity is evil,” he said. “There are always extremists.”
“I was a social anthropologist, you’ll recall, before I became a pitchman, so with all due respect let me assure you that it’s much closer to everyone than you might be willing to believe. People are made of the same stuff around the world. If that girl had been born in South Africa she’d have been as likely to be raped by the time she was sixteen as to learn how to read. Slavery in one form or another is more widespread today than ever before in history. The fact that one in a million of us may have evolved beyond those lower instincts is of no great comfort to me.
“It’s getting worse, Noah, not better. There have always been only four kinds of people in the world: the visionaries who choose the course, and we are the fewest; the greedy and corruptible—they’re useful, because they’ll do anything for a short-term gain; the revolutionaries, a handful of violent, backward thinkers whose only mission is to stand in the way of progress—we’ll deal with them in short order; and then there are the masses, the lemmings who can scarcely muster the intelligence to blindly follow along.
“There are far more of them than there are of us, and more are coming every day. When I was born there were two billion people in the world; now that number has more than tripled, all in a single lifetime. And it isn’t the Mozarts, or the Einsteins, or the Pascals, or Salks, or Shakespeares, or the George Washingtons who are swelling the population beyond the breaking point. It’s the useless eaters on the savage side of the bell curve who are outbreeding the planet’s ability to support them.
“A billion people around the world are slowly starving to death right now. Twenty thousand children will die of hunger today. That’s the decaying state of the human condition. And when the real hard times come—and they’re coming soon—you can multiply all the horrors by a thousand. In the vacuum created by fear and ignorance and hunger and want, it’s evil, not good, that rushes in to fill the void.”
It sounded like there was no answer, but he knew his father too well for that to be the case. You didn’t have to like it, but the old man always had a solution.
“What we’ve finally come to understand, Noah, is that the people can’t be trusted to control themselves. Even the brightest of them are still barbarians at heart. We’ve only just bailed out my friends on Wall Street from under the devastation of the last financial bubble they created, and I guarantee they’re already hard at work pumping up the next one, even as they know full well that it will be fatal. It’s like a death wish of the species: it’s in our genes, this appetite for destruction. And if we’re to survive, those urges must be brought under control.
“The riddle today is the same one faced by the Founding Fathers when they began their experiment. Societies need government. Governments elevate men into power, and men who seek power are prone to corruption. It spreads like a disease, then, corruption on corruption, and sooner or later the end result is always a slide into tyranny. That’s the way it’s always been. And so this government of the United States was brilliantly designed to keep that weakness of human nature in check, but it required the people to participate daily, to be vigilant, and they have not. It demanded that they behave as though their government was their servant, but they have not. In their silence the people of the United States have spoken. While they slept the servant has become their master.
“The American experiment has failed, and now it’s time for the next one to begin. One world, one government—not of the people this time, but of the right people: the competent, the wise, and the strong.”
The dope-induced haze was still hanging there before Noah’s eyes, and his stomach had begun to churn. Between the remains of the opiates swirling through his brain and the drugs he’d been given to counter those effects, he could feel himself starting to lose the metabolic tug-of-war. All these words his father was saying, all the things he’d seen in that presentation, what he’d learned from Molly in the hours they were together, and what he’d learned of her since—something was trying to come together in his mind but he wasn’t fit to think it all the way through.
“You’re saying there’s no hope for this country,” Noah said.
“I’m saying, Noah, that my clients came to me with a problem,” the old man said, “and I gave them a solution. We start tomorrow morning. I’ve stood by and watched the glacial pace of this decline for too many years. Now the remnants of the past will be swept away in a single stroke, and I’ll see my vision realized before I die. Order from chaos, control, and pacification of the flawed human spirit. Call that hope if you like, but it’s coming regardless. The experiment that begins tomorrow will not fail.”
PART THREE
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
—EDWARD BERNAYS, AUTHOR OF Propaganda
CHAPTER 32
Noah had excused himself suddenly and then stumbled his way into the elegant stall in the corner of his father’s private restroom. You know you’re sick when you’re still vomiting ten minutes after the last thing was expelled from your stomach. He was still hugging the porcelain bowl, drained and wretched, feeling like he’d just capped off a marathon with four hundred sit-ups.
Once he was fairly sure the nausea had passed, he pushed himself to his feet, walked to the sink, and turned on the water as hot as he could stand. He let the basin fill and then bent and washed his face, let the heat try to revive him until he felt whatever flicker of energy he still possessed begin to gather. He stood then, dried himself with a hanging towel, re-buttoned and tucked in his shirt, and then used his sleeve to clear the steam from the ornate mirror over the lavatory.
His skin was as pale as a Newark Bay oyster, but while he was certainly beat he wasn’t quite out of commission yet.
The doctor had said these aftereffects could linger for up to a day, but would ease as the hours went by. He took another of the pills from his pocket and told himself that the worst of it was behind him now. He needed it to be, becaus
e in addition to coming to grips with what he’d just heard from his father, there was also a score he needed to settle before a certain young woman’s trail became too cold to follow.
As Noah hurried down the stairwell toward the mailroom he lost his shaky footing and nearly tumbled down the last half flight. The people he passed in the hallway stood back and gave him a wide berth; whether they sensed his illness or his anger, they obviously didn’t want to catch whatever he was carrying. He was breathing hard as he made the last corner, feeling chilled and damp under his clothes.
It’s not that he expected her to be at work that day, innocently sorting the mail as though nothing were wrong. But he was going to find her one way or the other, and this was the closest stop on the tour.
“Frank!” Noah called.
The department manager popped his head out from behind the sorting shelves. “Yes, sir.”
“Have you heard from Molly today?”
“No, sir. She was on the schedule but she ain’t been in. I called her agency about an hour ago and they haven’t got back to me yet.”
“Okay, thanks. Does she have, I don’t know, some emergency contact numbers down here, from her application?”
Frank looked a little surprised to be asked such a thing. “Maybe that’d be up in Human Resources, Mr. Gardner. All I could give you is the number of the place we hired her from.”
“You’re talking about that temp girl, Molly?” Another of the mail-room staff had apparently overheard the conversation, and he came nearer. “Somebody called here for her over the weekend. I picked up the voice mail when I opened up this morning.”
“Do you have that message?” Noah asked. “It’s important.”
“I deleted it, and I didn’t write anything down, since it was a personal thing. The fellow who called must have just tried all the numbers he had for her. He said her mama was in the hospital.”
Noah stood there and let that bit of news sink into his empty stomach. As it gripped him there he remembered what Warren Landers had said, up in his father’s office. It had passed in one ear and straight out his other, because, as usual, he was immersed in his own significance, as though the only bad things that existed were the ones that had happened to him.
We’ll make them sorry. That’s how Mr. Landers had put it.
“Which hospital?”
“Uptown, Lenox Hill,” the man said, and then he leaned in and offered a quiet addendum. “None of my business, Mr. Gardner. But it didn’t sound so good.”
CHAPTER 33
In the cab on the way uptown Noah had made two phone calls, one to the hospital’s automated system to find the patient’s floor and room, and the other to an old and trusted acquaintance who was now on her way to meet up with him at Lenox Hill.
Over a long-ago summer Ellen Davenport, of the East Hampton Davenports, had become his first real friend who was a girl. It was a new thing for him, because though they’d hit it off immediately, they both also seemed to realize that dating each other was the last thing they should ever do. They’d actually tried it once just to be sure, and the discomfort of that terrible evening was matched only by its comic potential when the story was retold by the two of them in later years.
Now Ellen was a second-year neurology resident at Mount Sinai Hospital across town. His call had caught her at the end of a twenty-six-hour shift, but, true to form, she’d told him that she’d be right over without even asking why.
As he walked down the hallway of the ward he saw three things: the crowd of people overflowing from the double doorway of the floor’s small chapel, a smaller knot of visitors waiting outside a single room down near the end, and Dr. Ellen Davenport, still in her wrinkled scrubs, waving to him from an alcove near the elevators.
Ellen gave him a hug when he reached her, and then held him away at arm’s length and frowned. “You look like hell, Gardner.”
“Thanks.” He was preoccupied, looking over the people milling through the hall, every bit as afraid that he might see Molly as that he might never see her again. Some of these people were looking back at him, too, and by their manner it seemed they knew who he was.
“Hey.” Ellen snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “I mean it. You look like you need to lie down.”
“I need for you to do me a favor,” Noah said. There was a slight tremor in his hands as he retrieved the medicine from his pocket, shook out a pill into his palm, and swallowed it dry.
Ellen took the vial from him, rattled it, and held it close to her eyes. She looked at him again with a little more concern than before. “If you’re going to ask me to score you some methadone, I left my prescription pad in my other pants.”
“That woman in the room down the hall there,” he said. “I need for you to help me—I don’t know, line up a specialist, make sure everything’s being done. I just want her to be taken care of.”
“They’re pretty good at that sort of thing here, Noah.”
“Ellen, listen to me—”
Whatever Noah had been about to confess, he was interrupted by the approach of a stranger. It was an older woman, frail and thin as dry reeds, and from the corner of his eye he’d seen her come from the direction of that room near the end of the hall. The woman nodded her respect to Ellen, turned to him, and then spoke with a gentle gravity in her voice that said more than the words themselves would convey.
“She’s awake now. Somebody told her you were here, and she says she wants to talk to you.”
CHAPTER 34
He stood just inside the open doorway, watching the remaining visitors say their good-byes before they quietly walked past him, one by one. Flowers were arranged all around the room, in baskets and vases and water pitchers, on extra rolling tables that seemed to have been brought in just to accommodate the overflow of gifts from well-wishers.
The door was closed by the last man who’d left, but still Noah stood where he was until Beverly Emerson looked over and smiled as best she could, inviting him to her bedside with a weak motion of her bandaged hand.
“We meet again,” she said. It was barely more than a whisper, spoken as though her lungs might hold the space for only a thimbleful of air.
There were bruises on her face and arms, dark, uneven spots within yellowing patches, and a bandage on her neck with a soak of crusted brown near its center. She was withered, already a shadow of the person he’d last seen on Friday night. The only thing that remained undimmed was that unforgettable spark in her light green eyes.
He had no idea what to say, but he said it anyway.
“You’re going to be all right.”
That brought a smile again, but she shook her head slowly and touched his hand that was nearest hers.
“We shouldn’t deceive ourselves,” she said. “I’m afraid there isn’t time.” She was measuring her breath as she spoke, managing only a few words of each phrase between shallow inhalations. “I don’t expect you to understand why Molly did what I asked her to do.” The grip on his hand tightened, as though all the strength she had was centering there. “You should blame me, and not her. But I hold the privilege of a dying woman now, and I want you to put everything aside except what I’m about to say.”
“Okay”
“My daughter is in danger. I need for you to promise me you’ll see her to safety.”
There were so many conflicting things hammering at his mind, but despite all that mental noise and everything that had happened, for once in his life he could see it all arranged in its true order of significance, and so he knew for certain there was only one thing to be said.
“I will.”
Her grip relaxed somewhat, her head rested back onto the pillow, and she closed her eyes. Soon a private little smile drifted into her features, as though she might have just then put the finish on a silent prayer.
“Thank you,” Beverly whispered.
He didn’t respond, but only because he didn’t want to presume to be the one she was addressing.
; “I sent Molly away, but she isn’t safe yet,” she said. “She’s waiting now, near the airport. Look in the top drawer of the nightstand. She called and told one of the nurses where she’d be and they wrote it down for me.”
“Okay,” he said. “I think I’d better get started, then.” He moved to place her hand down on the bed at her side, but she didn’t let him go.
“Do you know what we’re fighting against, son?”
“Yeah, I think so. Some pretty evil people.”
She offered a look that seemed to suggest his naïvete was something she longed for. “Ephesians 6:12—look it up when you get a chance.”
“I will,” he said.
“There’s more to you, Noah. More than you might be ready to believe. I knew of your mother many years ago, and the good she wanted to do. That’s what Molly saw in you: she told me. Not your father, but what your mother’s given you. And I see it, too.”
“I guess I’m glad somebody does.”
“Noah …”
“Yes.”
There was that tiny glint of a smile again. “Noah, from the Bible, you know?”
He nodded, and despite everything, he smiled a bit himself. “Old Testament.”
The weak hold on his hand tightened once again.
“He wasn’t chosen because he was the best man who ever lived,” she said softly. “He was chosen because he was the best man available.”
Out in the hallway he hadn’t made it five steps before Ellen Davenport caught up to him. She took him firmly by the sleeve, pulled him behind her into a nearby storeroom, and closed the door.
“I need to go, Ellen.”
“You need to listen to me first. I learned some things while you were in there just now. Who is that woman to you?”