The Seventh Candidate (39 page)

“I have an idea,” she said, staring down at
the file as though it were written there. The director waited,
holding the knob of the open door.

“Couldn’t you keep him in your flat for a
while? Mine’s too small and where I live it’s awfully public,
people spying at the windows all the time. I don’t care personally
if they see me taking a man to my flat. Nobody takes me for a saint
there any more after what happened. It’s just that they might talk
about it to the wrong people. He stands out. You have all those
rooms in your place and practically no neighbors. Couldn’t you
clear one out, fix something up for him, a cot? It would be just
for a while until we decide what to do.”

Lorz didn’t answer immediately. Finally he
said that he would have to think it over. It was a difficult
decision to make. He stifled a yawn. She did too.

He closed the door and returned.

“Would you like another cup of coffee?” he
asked. “You haven’t been getting much sleep either. Don’t
move.”

He took the three saucers and cups off his
desk and rinsed them in the storeroom washbasin. He plugged the
electric kettle in. While waiting for the water to heat up he moved
the sugar and coffee onto her desk and asked her how he was going
to find the boy. It was the necessary first step. He explained that
Theo could be anywhere in the underground. It would take a lifetime
locating him, getting on and off at all the stations. Had she any
ideas about that? She often had excellent ideas, he said.

The kettle started whistling. He got it and
poured the water into their cups. They sipped in silence. Finally
she said that it might take a day or two to locate him, not a
lifetime. They wouldn’t have to get off at every station and
investigate every corridor. Just take a train at a terminal station
and do the whole line. Chances were there would be at least one of
the … new-style posters on the platform wall. The rectangles showed
up a kilometer away. He might not be in that particular station but
at least they’d be able to localize him roughly. “As soon as one of
us spots him he phones the other. There’d have to be the two of us
to convince him to leave.”

Like the hospital representatives, he
thought. Except they had stronger arguments.

She made him agree that after he had
searched that morning she’d spell him in the afternoon. If it was
necessary, she added, optimistically.

But at noon he rang up from an underground
booth and said they’d waste less time if he kept on looking. At
six-thirty he rang up again and told her to go home.

He returned home himself at 1:00am, the pain
in his bowels growing. He was unable to swallow a bite of food even
though he’d had no more than a sandwich all day long. He went to
bed and stared up at the ceiling.

The search had been even worse than he’d
imagined. He saw the underground as a chessboard with endless
squares and he and his employee pieces light years removed, never
destined to meet. The illogical chessboard image (chessmen met only
in a relation of hostility) was probably inspired by the multitude
of white squares that had lured him out of the train at station
after station, line after line that long day. They were everywhere,
Theo nowhere. And he’d soon made a disturbing discovery. In
Richfield
an angular man of indeterminate
age was distributing white rectangles on the pornographic posters.
Half an hour later in
West Gate
he saw an exalted-looking adolescent girl of great ugliness
with a bulging pimpled forehead doing the same thing. How many
others were there?

Theo’s censorship had become a model. His
intensely personal action had taken on social dimensions. But the
satisfaction the director derived from the discovery that he and
Theo weren’t spiritually isolated was counterbalanced by the
tremendous complications it created in finding the boy. To be sure,
he could ignore the great number of the obliterations that were
accompanied by slogans such as “
No to pornography
!!” Also he learned to distinguish between the
perfect squares of Theo and the imperfect imitations. Still the
multiplication of censors made the task of locating the boy
hopeless.

Where was Theo sleeping at this moment with
the underground shut down? On some park-bench? In prison?
Hypodermically tranquilized in a hospital room? Lorz finally fell
asleep.

The next day, a Saturday, the bowel burning
peaked so sharply that three times he had to break off the quest,
leave the train and sit bent double on a station bench waiting for
it to let up. It was during that third attack that the idea came to
him.

Lorz returned to
Ideal
and prepared everything with the greatest care
like a speleologist readying himself for some unimaginably deep and
perilous descent. He opened three of the operators’ lockers and
transferred four liter jars of Basic White to his knapsack. He
added a liter each of black and red paint, three sets of crayons,
two boxes of florescent chalks, the full range of brushes and a
fistful of ballpoint pens and pencils. It would be a great burden
at first but would gradually lighten, he comforted
himself.

There was still the need for protection. He
transferred his father’s ceremonial dagger from his briefcase to
the knapsack. He reflected a moment and took a wheeled step-ladder.
It was cumbersome but unavoidable for what he had to do. He made
sure he had sufficient money in his wallet and carefully checked
his vial of blue pills. Assuming Theo had taken them regularly, his
vial would be empty by this evening.

Lorz was tempted to leave a word for his
assistant, saying that he’d gone down again Saturday afternoon. But
to write this was to accept the possibility that he wouldn’t be
back by Monday morning.

It was 5:04pm. Saturday, September 3 when he
left the office. He didn’t even notice that the burning was
gone.

He’d intended to begin with
Central
Station
but soon
realized that it was impossible. Saturday was the worst of all
possible days for what he had in mind. The hub stations swarmed at
all hours. There wasn’t a single stretch of empty corridor. The
beggars were out in full force, the musicians too and of course the
pickpockets to work the hordes of suburban shoppers loaded down
with purchases. There were the groups of loud young drifters from
the industrial outskirts, solitary women-hunters, prostitutes, the
dangerous ethnic gangs with their studded jackets and savage
hairdos swaggering down the center of the corridors, lording it
over the native born, forcing them, eyes fearfully downcast,
against the filthy tiles of the curved walls. The corridors echoed
with their raucous voices. They lacerated and graffitied the
posters in public sight.

How did they dare do that? Lorz posed the
question to himself in its literal sense, not out of indignation
now but envy. What he intended doing, for the first time in his
life, was, technically, no different from what they were doing. But
how could he do it before all those witnesses?

So the mobbed corridors and platforms
of
Central
Station
forced him into
the least frequented of the stations. He set up the ladder in the
first empty corridor and prepared the tools and chemicals. Shooting
glances right and left, he climbed up to the green landscape of
Soft-Joy Sweaters. In the blue sky above the hundreds of white
sheep he daubed the first of the hundreds of messages planned for
that night. He did it in contrasting red.

THEO! MEET ME AT MIDNIGHT
CENTRAL
STATION
PANEL
96.

He repeated it over and over in other
corridors.

He couldn’t help recalling similar
personal messages that defaced posters, like that of the madman who
for a whole year had plagued
Ideal
with his tireless declaration (how many thousands of
them?): “
Valeria I Love You
!” with a heart that resembled nude buttocks viewed from a
certain angle.

But how many of those personal but public
messages were motivated by the desire to save a human life? How
many of the passengers who, despite the director’s choice of
little-frequented corridors, surprised him on his wheeled
step-ladder could guess that the real purpose of the message he was
scrawling was disinterested protection of a vulnerable human-being
through the gift of a roof, affection and – urgently –
medicine.

Already he’d pictured the consequences of
the absence of the pills: the boy seized by a fit of epilepsy at
the edge of a platform, pitching forward and down onto the path of
an oncoming train, his body involved with the wheels.

Voices and footsteps again. He switched to
the alternate brush and the jar of Basic White and started
censoring what he’d had just scrawled. Pathetic subterfuge.

Did they believe it? Weren’t they
laughing?

This will be a night of humiliation. My gift
to you: humiliation, foreseen, accepted, endured.

Well before midnight he stood to one side
of panel 96 in
Central Station
in the uproar of voices, brawls, shuffling soles,
discordant beggar music, all periodically covered by the trains. He
tried to get down a sandwich for nourishment without breathing in
the reek of burned axle grease, vomit, hemp smoke and unwashed
bodies. He endured the solicitations of drug dealers and
prostitutes of both sexes, thinking again: my gift to
you.

At 12:45 he acknowledged defeat. He moved
away from panel 96 and collapsed onto the nearest bench. What he’d
done was useless. What chance was there that Theo would stop at
those six minor stations lost in the immensity of the net? And if
he did, and assuming he took one of the prepared corridors, what
chance that he’d notice the message in competition with other
graffiti?

It was the walls of the great hub stations
– beginning with
Central Station
– that had, absolutely, to bear the message. There was no
guarantee of success even then. To be sure that the message would
be received it would have to be repeated everywhere, on all the
posters of all the sixty-three stations.

The director ventured into the maze of this
idea. How long would it take to daub and scribble the message on
the 12,843 posters of the capital’s underground network? The
mathematics of the thing made him dizzy. Even scribbling away at
top speed twenty-four hours a day, not a moment off for sleep or
food, he wouldn’t be even halfway through before the first messaged
posters would start coming down. They stayed up on average only
three weeks. To say nothing of the gigantic problem of operating in
full view of witnesses. Thousands of witnesses. Tens of thousands.
Not just the voyagers but underground employees and policemen
empowered to arrest poster vandals.

Arrest and the judge’s insinuating question:
“For what purpose did you want to meet the individual you call Theo
at that late hour?” Who would believe his story of pills? Then
prison and his name, his father’s name, in the tabloids. I wouldn’t
survive the humiliation, he thought.

But wasn’t there a way of communicating his
message without the presence of witnesses? Did he dare do that, at
the risk of his life? He let the dangerous idea mature in his mind
while he turned to other aspects of that evening’s fiasco.

He had to recognize that the message he’d
scrawled was ineffective. It had to be radically modified.

First, the meeting-place had to be
changed. A poster-panel number was too abstract. Theo might confuse
this number with another. He thought immediately of the Great Clock
of
Central
Station
with its
octagonal faces giving the hour in eight world capitals. It was
universally known.

Next there was the absence of incentive. In
the past, therapeutic contact had always required the enticement of
a gift: those thin raw slices of beef in the spiced blood sauce,
chocolates, Chinese puzzles, a watch, etc. Why should Theo respond
to the invitation now? For the pleasure of his company? he thought
with sad irony. What could he promise him?

He thought he knew. In his mind he amended
the message. He even printed it in his address book:

THEO! THEO!! THEO!!! MEET ME UNDER THE
GREAT CLOCK
CENTRAL STATION
MIDNIGHT FOR
BASIC WHITE

A few jars of Basic White might seem a poor
lure for a man already in possession of half a ton of the stuff,
yet Lorz felt sure that it would have the same effect on Theo as a
single gold coin on the wealthiest of misers.

Assuming he read the message. Something
essential was lacking. Only a tiny fraction of the 12,843 posters
would be inscribed with the message. How could they be given
maximum impact? He had to go further. There had to be an image. An
image to be effaced.

He watched the idea germ, spread, take
possession of his mind. He tried to banish the insistent image. I
couldn’t, he said to himself, half aloud. Knowing, however, that he
could, had to, would.

A few minutes before closing time Lorz
went to the end of the empty
East Gate
platform next to the tunnel-mouth. He let his knapsack and
ladder and then himself down on the ballast. He advanced between
the tracks in the gloom of the blue-painted bulbs. He was careful
to avoid the mortal third rail.

The loudspeakers behind him blared the order
to vacate the underground. The message was repeated at
thirty-second intervals.