Foreshortening
Noon on Christmas Eve day, and the place was as full as I’d ever seen it. The music was back on, the colored lights were blinking in obsessive-compulsive fashion, and a group of what looked like high school kids in white choir robes was being herded up onto a temporary platform that had been laid down over the dirty water in the reflecting pool. Fortunately, the fountain had been turned off. The kids shuffled aimlessly, apparently waiting for someone to kill the PA system so they could sing. Most of them seemed nervous, and I wanted to go tell them that they looked great and everyone would love them, but I knew they’d disregard it as the nattering of some weird old guy, and also, it wasn’t true. After the first thirty seconds, no one would listen to them.
But I was, happily, wrong. The overhead recording of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” came to an abrupt end—not quite abrupt enough for me—and a middle-aged woman in a matching robe, augmented by a bright red-and-green scarf that hung to her waist, lifted both hands and waited, eyebrows raised, surveying the kids until they were all facing her attentively. Then she marked the downbeat and the kids’ faces changed somehow and they all began to resemble one another, mouths open, eyes on the woman with the scarf, and with a fluid movement of her hands, she brought them together to the breath that supported the first note, and as it rang out, the kids looked like people somehow sharing a dream. By the end of the first long, slow lines—
The first Noel
the Angel did say . . .
—the sounds of chatter and movement began to die away, and all over the mall people turned to look. And in the absence of noise, the great hollowness of the mall took the sound of the kids’ voices and purified it, deepened it, gave it the resonance of a cathedral, and the kids heard it, too, and some of them closed their eyes.
Was to certain poor shepherds
in fields as they lay,
In fields where they
lay, keeping their sheep . . .
The line of children waiting to see Shlomo had fallen silent, many of them turning, having forgotten they were holding a parent’s hand, to see the choir. One of them, I was surprised to see, was the kid with the Frida Kahlo unibrow, so this was his second pass at Shlomo. Beyond the children I saw Shlomo lift a four-year-old onto his lap and turn her toward the singers, whispering some Christmas promise in her ear, and she burst into a delighted smile and a couple of the kids in the choir smiled back at her.
I was smiling, too.
“You didn’t say there were two Santas,” someone said beside me. I turned to see Anime, and beside her, looking like she’d spent the night in a wind tunnel, her girlfriend and partner in larceny, Lilli. Anime was, as usual, as slick as an otter, her straight, black hair pulled back and meticulously smoothed into place except where it had been blunt-cut directly across the middle of her left ear, a mirror-image of Lilli’s haircut, and her face had been scrubbed until it shone. Lilli looked as though every rumple that had fled Anime had taken refuge on her and that she resented every one of them.
On a cold winter’s night
that was so deep.
“This is the only carol I like,” Lilli said grudgingly.
“It’s an old one,” I said, almost whispering. “More than two hundred years. It’s from Luke.”
“Luke who?” Lilli said.
“She’s being intentionally obtuse,” Anime said. “She was up all night.”
“God, this place is a dump,” Lilli said.
I said, “Ssshhhhhhhh,” and we listened to the rest of the carol.
For a moment, as the final chord died away, the place was almost as silent as it had been the previous night when I’d had it to myself, but then people began to move, conversations were resumed, interrupted complaints were aired, and by the time the choir accepted the downbeat for “Jingle Bells,” the moment had passed.
“You guys want to meet Santa?”
“A lifelong dream,” Lilli said, trying to smooth her wheat-colored hair and looking enviously at Anime.
“Well, then, wait for me a minute.” I pulled my phone from my pocket and brought up the picture of the dog tags, and waited until the four-year-old slid off Shlomo’s lap. Then I held up the phone and wiggled it back and forth so he could see I had something to show him, and moved up the line of kids, saying to Shlomo’s elf, “This will just take a second of Santa’s time.”
Shlomo looked at me and then down at the phone, and then he closed his eyes and used his left hand to massage the bridge of his nose. “Gold-plated?”
“Yeah.”
“My kids run true to type. Which one?”
“Philip.”
“You went into his house?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Did you take anything?”
“Just pictures.”
“The good thief,” he said, shaking his head. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Enlarge the document under the card.”
He did, and then he shook his head. “One point eight.” Then he looked past me. “And who’s this?”
“This is—” I turned to check. “This is Anime Wong. She wants to say hi to Santa.”
“Hi,” Anime said, blushing furiously.
Shlomo gave her all his attention. “Have you been good?”
“Oh,” she said. She fidgeted. “Um, not very.”
“She’s been fine,” I said. “Better than fine.”
“I can see that in her eyes,” Shlomo said. “What are you going to give for Christmas?”
Anime’s eyes widened. “Give? Oh, right, thank you for asking. Umm—” Anime glanced behind her to make sure that Lilli wasn’t within earshot. “I’m going to give my girlfriend a, um, a poem I wrote.” She looked at him and then up at me. “Is that corny?”
“It is not,” Shlomo said. “I know a lot about presents, and I promise you it’ll be one of the best she’s ever gotten.”
Anime was grinning like her face would split, and when she felt my gaze she turned and punched me on the arm. “He’s my friend,” she said to Shlomo, a bit fiercely. “Junior is. Thanks, Santa.”
“And merry Christmas,” Shlomo said.
“Same to you, as silly as that sounds,” Anime said, and to the child who was already on her way to Shlomo’s lap, she said, “Merry Christmas, kid.”
“Are we done yet?” Lilli said. “Did you ask for your sled?”
“Just had to tell him where to hang your lump of coal,” Anime said. “Let’s get going.”
“The place is being looted,” I said to the girls as we climbed the stairs to the second level.
“What kind of stuff?” Anime, who was in the lead, asked the question. Lilli, behind her, yawned.
“Everything, you name it. But only from the smaller stores.”
“Tumblr,” Lilli said as though it were the most obvious thing in the world and she couldn’t believe that neither of us had said it yet. “There’s whole communities of lifters, mostly teenage girls, or twists who like to think of themselves as teenage girls. Handles like prettylifter, toocutetopay, sweetydeeppockets, kleptokutie. There’s a couple of hangouts where they swap ideas. The big one is called Winona Ryder University, you know, ’cause she got snagged trying to—”
“We get it,” Anime said.
I blew out a bunch of air.
“I’d think you’d be interested in this,” Anime said. “Considering what you do for a—”
“I have mixed emotions about it, okay? And it’s going to take me longer than ninety seconds, which is how long I’ve known about it, to sort them out.” Anime and Lilli, still in their early teens, were computer-age thieves. Working under the supervision of a heavily tattooed human equation who called himself Monty Cristo, they looted the infrequently audited funds that states set up for the money they seize from abandoned safe deposit boxes. The girls’ long-term objectives were doctoral degrees in computer science for both of them from Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, or MIT, and a completely debt-free graduation, throughout which they’d be holding hands.
“They’ve got moral codes and everything,” Anime said. “No lifting on the really big sales days, like Black Friday, because that’s the only time poor people can afford stuff, so you’re stealing from the poor, which is uncool, no low-end food for the same reason, no lifting from mom-and-pop stores because—”
“Well, that leaves Edgerton out,” I said. “As I said, the mom-and-pop stores are the ones getting looted.”
The choir launched into “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and Lilli covered her ears and said, “Take me away, somebody. This is the most guy carol of them all.”
I said, “What’s so guy—”
“Here’s a little kid,” Lilli said as Anime rolled her eyes, “just been born, right? Probably still wet, and he’s freezing to death, shivering in the cold, like it says, and what are these lunkheads going to give him? Silver and gold. Come on, any woman in the world would say, ‘Hey, take your silver and gold to the damn store and buy the kid some blankets.’”
“She wasted that on me yesterday,” Anime said, “and she’s been dying to trot it out for someone smart enough to appreciate it.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s certainly changed my life. Listen, to tell you the truth, I don’t really care who’s specifically doing the lifting. I already know, pretty much, what’s going on. What I want to know is how it’s being done. On the macro scale, the big picture.”
“The big picture,” Lilli said in a deep radio-announcer voice. She’d gone to the railing to look down. “Clear away, little people, make room for the mental giant.”
“You didn’t like her insight,” Anime said, following her girlfriend. “She gets grumpy when—”
Lilli did a brusque little hula move to the left and hip-checked Anime hard enough to send her a step sideways, then licked the tip of her index finger and made an imaginary vertical mark in the air. “Twenty-nine to three,” she said. “You gotta keep your eyes open.”
“So,” Anime said, rubbing her hip and looking down at the ground floor. “What’s the question?”
“I don’t want to suggest an answer,” I said. “My first day here I noticed—I thought I noticed—something odd about the crowd, about the way they move. I want you to—”
“Next level,” Lilli said, heading for the stairs. “The higher the better.”
We climbed the stairs, the girls bouncing despite their lack of sleep and me feeling like I should be using both hands to lift my legs. At the top, Lilli chose a corner for, she said, perspective. Something, she said, about foreshortening, and Anime said something about the angle of approach when there were too many individual data points, and Lilli high-fived her and then the two of them shut up and just looked down for a while.
“Jesus,” Lilli said after a few minutes. “This is like binge-watching fungi.” Then she yawned again.
I yawned, too. Then Anime yawned. We passed the yawn among us like a talking stick and I said, “I’m going to bet that among the three of us we didn’t get a total of nine hours’ sleep.”
“No takers,” Lilli said, and yawned again, but then her spine straightened and Anime and she craned down at the crowd below with a new energy.
“Could be,” Anime said, pushing her aside.
“Is,” Lilli said. She did the hip thing again but Anime stepped back and Lilli grabbed her lower back and said, “Ow.”
“But then on the other—” Anime dropped the sentence and instead pointed across the diagonal of the mall at the far corner.
“I see it,” Lilli said, sounding cranky. She was rubbing the small of her back. “I’m not an ashtray, you know.”
“See what?” I said.
“Wait,” Lilli said, as though speaking to a member of a lower species. “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”
“Smartass,” Anime said. “Nothing.”
Lilli said, “Oh, yeah?” and pointed in the direction of Dwayne Wix’s throne. “Three of them,” she said. “All in different directions.” To me, she said, “Take a look.”
I was already looking, but now I looked harder. The throng of people on the ground level were milling around, except that they weren’t all milling around. From everywhere in the crowd, individuals, or in some cases families, began to move, detaching themselves from the larger patterns and filtering purposefully through the throng. First it seemed to me that they were going to the escalators, and then they seemed to be going toward the stores in the center of the west side of the mall, and then they seemed to be moving toward the stairs, except, as they kept moving, I realized that the crowd was slowly producing three smaller groups, little rivers of people, each headed in a different direction. Many of those who were on the move were looking at their phones.
“What’s your guess?” I asked Lilli and Anime. “What percentage of the crowd is on the move?”
“About a fifth,” Anime said. She could pick a fraction like that and be right. “The others are still just wandering.”
The Choir began to sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Many of the idlers looked toward them or stopped to listen for a second, but as far as the three streams of people were concerned, the choir wasn’t even there.
“Flash mobs,” Lilli said. “Three at the same time.”
“Actually,” I said with my eyes closed, visualizing what I’d seen, “about five, ten seconds apart.”
“One source,” Anime said.
“What do you think?” I said. “Is it live or is it on some memory chip somewhere, set to dial at this time?”
“Live,” Anime said. “Too many variables for it to be programmed. Somebody’s running it in real time. Where’s the nearest geek with a view?”
“Down there,” I said, pointing at the second level. Standing at the railing, looking down at the ground floor, conspicuous because of the gleam of his prematurely grey hair, was Wink, the guy who owned iShop. He was focused on the screen of his phone, but he seemed to sense our attention because he looked up and around, but by the time his eyes passed over us, Anime and Lilli and I were facing one another, pretending to be in conversation.
“Don’t look at him,” I said. “But as soon as he looks away, I want you to video the crowd movement on your phones, okay?”
“Why don’t you—” Anime began, and said, “Never mind.” Lilli snickered.
“You’ll do it better than I could,” I said. “Twenty-five, thirty seconds at least, a single take so no one can suspect editing, and you both send them to me.”
“Okay.” Anime already had her phone out.
“And when the geek down there goes to his shop on the first level, you guys go in a moment or two later.”
“And?”
“Keep an eye on where he puts his phone when you come in,” I said. “And then, right in front of him, steal something. And when we’re finished with that, I need your help with some shopping. Okay?”
“It’s Christmas,” Anime said. “How could we say no?”