“I DON'T BELIEVE THIS IS happening to me,” I said. “Top of the all-time Indianapolis Most Wanted List, and they stroll into my office.”
“We haven't come here to give ourselves up,” the Frog said.
I looked across the room to the Bear and the Gorilla. At Kate King's mask of artificial hair. “No, I can see that.” I hadn't heard any speculation that the Scum Front was a gang of women. My mind was racing. They weren't here to plant a bomb in my mother's luncheonette.
I looked at the Frog's hands. On four fingers there were white stripes near the knuckle. Whoever she was, she lived a tanned enough life to have ring lines in May.
“So what the hell is this about?” I asked.
“We have a problem,” the Frog said.
I nodded. I said, “I take it Ms King has explained my position about knowledge of criminal acts.”
“We don't think of ourselves as criminals,” the Frog said.
“The definitions I have to respond to come from the police.”
“Oh, we know that there's a chance that you'll run straight to the cops. But I believe you'll see you have a higher obligation than that to so-called society's law.”
“Oh,” I said.
“We have a problem,” she said again. “We are too vulnerable to solve it ourselves. And maybe we shouldn't do anything about it at all.”
She looked to her colleagues on the bench. They sat rigidly, watching us, listening.
And I recognized that it must have been a traumatic process to decide to reveal themselves after remaining utterly anonymous for so many weeks.
It meant their problem was important.
The Frog said, “We settled on taking one person into our confidence. There is no time to spare, but if you decide not to help, that's all we'll do. Mr. Samson, you are—genuinely—the only person who can prevent a tragedy.”
“I think you'd better tell me what's going on,” I said.
“They call us terrorists,” the Frog said, “and in a way of course we are. But the only terror we seek to inspire is in those people whose lust for `possessions,' and `property,' and `material development' is destroying the real, living world that we and future generations must live in. If somebody doesn't stop them, they will destroy us all.”
“Please don't give me a sales pitch. I have some sympathy with your goals, but I have no sympathy whatever with bombs, even if they don't explode.”
“Not just bombs that don't explode,” she said. “Bombs that cannot explode. If we are terrorists, then at least we are socially responsible terrorists.”
I said nothing.
“Look at our record,” she said. “We've destroyed nothing, yet we have made a major impact on the media and therefore on public awareness. They know that there finally is a group in Indianapolis dedicated to protecting—”
I held up my hand. “My tolerance for political lectures is extremely limited.”
“Well, how would you change what's happening in this city, then?” she asked. “Education? The democratic process?”
“I suppose.”
“But the people with the power have those things tied up so tight—”
“You don't have to convince me that society is heavily biased toward the haves at the expense of the have-nots.”
“So the logical extension is clearly to formulate alternative—”
“Stop,” I said.
“But—”
“Stop. My limit has been exceeded.”
She stopped.
We all took some breaths in silence.
“I was trying to explain our thinking,” she said.
“I'm thunk out,” I said. “You claim there is danger of a `tragedy.' Get on with it or get out.”
“We left a `bomb' in the Merchants Bank Building on Friday.”
But there'd been nothing in the paper. I said nothing.
“We made a warning call in the early hours of Saturday morning. We call a cable television company—”
“Cab-Co's Channel 43. I know.”
“Do you see our messages?”
“No. But I have a friend who follows you guys closely and when we go out to lunch he tells me what you've been up to.
“Public awareness,” the Frog said, scoring her point.”
No point in mentioning that my friend is a cop.
“When we call Cab-Co,” the Frog said, “we give a code word, so that they know for sure it's us. So Saturday morning we made our call. Cab-Co contacted the police. The police went to the building and they looked where we told them to. Everything as usual.”
“And?”
“The bomb was not there, Mr. Samson.”
“What do you mean, not there?”
“I mean that between the time we left it and the time the police got there somebody took it.”
“Still, if it can't go off . . .”
But as I spoke I realized what the problem was. “Oh,” I said. “The instructions.”
The Frog nodded.
The point of a Scum Front bomb was to say, “Look! We could have blown this place up if we'd wanted to.” To imply that next time they might, if they didn't get what they demanded.
But just leaving a bag with a few sticks of dynamite didn't prove that they could have set the bomb off. An explosion needed a detonator and a timing device. And the knowledge of how to put them together. So Scum Front “bombs” included a wiring diagram.
I said, “That means someone is walking around with a bomb kit.”