A motel in Manhattan Beach, nowhere near the sand, drab room and swaybacked queen-size bed, but clean and bug-free, at least until the lights were off. Rain in the night like ten thousand voices of a restless populace, the gusting wind a fierce orator urging them to violence as it periodically rattled a nearby metal awning and banged a loose shutter on an abandoned building across the street. More deli takeout, heavy on the protein. Coke with vodka.
As she ate, Jane reviewed her notes on the death of Sakura Hannafin and on the life, in general, of Randall Larkin, Lawrence Hannafin’s friend. Everyone connected to the billionaire David Michael lived in a mirror maze of deceit, each of them casting multiple reflections, no two alike, social and political elites whose secret lives—their true lives—were conducted in the gutter. If her loathing were a poison, they would all be dead.
With her second Coke-and-vodka, she switched on the TV to see what cable news had to offer besides stories about her—and for the first time learned of the incident in Minnesota, where the death toll now stood at forty-six.
A beloved teacher plotting a mass murder, one of those not in the name of Allah, had the hallmarks of a suicide attack programmed by a nanomachine implant. Cora Gundersun had been Minnesota Teacher of the Year. Maybe the conspirators’ computer model pegged her as one who at least in some small way would push society in a direction of which they disapproved. And among those she’d incinerated were a governor and a congressman with reputations as reformers.
Those chosen for elimination were on what the conspirators called “the Hamlet list,” a fact Jane had learned from one of the two men she’d killed in self-defense the previous week. With the self-righteous air of a politician justifying graft as a form of social justice, he had explained that if someone had killed Hamlet in the first act of Shakespeare’s play, more people would have been alive at the end. They seemed really to believe that this ignorant literary interpretation justified the murder of 8,400 people a year.
They were intellectuals, excited by ideas more important to them than people. Self-identified intellectuals were among the most dangerous people on the planet. The problem was, all intellectuals first self-identified as such before others accepted their status and sought them for words of wisdom. They didn’t need to pass a test to confirm their brilliance, didn’t appear before a credentialed board by which they needed to be certified. It was easier to be celebrated as an intellectual than to get a hairdresser’s license.
Jane turned off the TV, sickened. Something in the newscasters’ demeanor suggested that their solemn expressions and measured voices and emotional pauses were calculated, that each of them, down where the perpetual inner child and the reptile consciousness overlapped, was excited to be on air when tragedy spiked the ratings, when they could imagine that they were part of history.
Wigless, in T-shirt and panties, she sat in bed to finish her drink, listening to the rain and the quarreling wind and the traffic in the street. She closed her eyes and saw her son sleeping in the safe house of the friends no one could connect to her, saw the two German shepherds that lived there as well, imagined one of the dogs sleeping in the bed with the boy, as in ancient Europe a she-wolf had slept with the abandoned baby Romulus and kept him safe that he might live to found the city of Rome.