The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Her eyes widened. Her lips parted. She raised a hand toward her neck. The man in the raincoat used the hand holding the knife to push her hand gently but firmly down. At the same time he pressed the black scarf to the woman’s throat and held it there. Then he kissed the hollow of her temple, looking through her hair as he did it. He saw Wilson, and his lips parted in a smile wide enough to show two rows of small, even teeth. He nodded to Wilson, as if to say either have a nice day or now we have a secret. There was a drop of blood on the woman’s window. It fattened and ran down the glass. Still holding the scarf to the woman’s throat, Raincoat Man slipped a finger into her slackening mouth. He was still smiling at Wilson as he did it.

‘Finally!’ the Sikh said, and the Jolly Dingle cab began to move.

‘Did you see that?’ Wilson asked. His voice sounded flat and unsurprised. ‘That man. That man on the bus. The one with the woman.’

‘What is it, sir?’ the Sikh asked. The light on the corner turned yellow and the Sikh scooted through, ignoring a flourish of horns as he switched lanes. The Peter Pan bus was left behind. Ahead, Grand Central loomed in the rain, looking like a penitentiary.

It was only with the cab moving again that Wilson thought of his cell. He took it out of his coat pocket and looked at it. If he’d been a quick thinker (always his brother’s department, according to their mother), he could have snapped Raincoat Man’s picture. It was too late for that, but not too late to call 911. Of course he couldn’t make such a call anonymously; his name and number would flash on some official screen as soon as the call went through. They would call him back to make sure he wasn’t a prankster whiling away a rainy afternoon in New York City. Then they would want information, which he would have to give – no choice – at the nearest police station. They would want his story several times. What they would not want was his pitch.

The pitch was titled ‘Give us three years and we’ll prove it.’ Wilson thought of how it was supposed to go. He would begin by telling the gathered PR flaks and executives that the spill had to be faced directly. It was there; volunteers were still washing oil-coated birds in Dawn detergent; it couldn’t be swept under the rug. But, he would say, atonement doesn’t have to be ugly and sometimes the truth can be beautiful. People want to believe in you guys, he would say. They need you, after all. They need you to get from Point A to Point B, and that makes them unwilling to see themselves as accessories in the rape of the environment. At this point he would open his portfolio and display the first card: a photo of a boy and girl standing on a pristine beach, backs to the camera, looking out at water so blue it almost hurt. ENERGY AND BEAUTY CAN GO TOGETHER, the copy read. GIVE US THREE YEARS AND WE’LL PROVE IT.

Calling 911 was so simple a child could do it. In fact, children did. When someone broke in. When Little Sister fell downstairs. Or if Daddy was tuning up on Mommy.

Next came his storyboard for a proposed TV commercial that would run in all the states on the Gulf, emphasis on local news and the cable twenty-fours like FOX and MSNBC. In time-lapse photography, a dirty, oil-smeared beach would become clean again. ‘We have a responsibility to fix our mistakes,’ the narrator would say (with the slightest southern twang). ‘It’s how we do business and how we treat our neighbors. Give us three years and we’ll prove it.’

Next, the print ads. The radio ads. And in Phase Two—

‘Sir? You said what?’

I could call, Wilson thought, but the guy will probably be off the bus and long gone before the police can get there. Probably? Almost certainly.

He turned to look behind him. The bus was way back there now. Maybe, he thought, the woman cried out. Maybe the other passengers are already piling onto the guy, the way passengers piled onto the Shoe Bomber when they figured out what he was up to.

Then he thought of the way the man in the raincoat had smiled at him. Also of how he’d put his finger in the woman’s loose mouth.

Wilson thought, Speaking of pranks, it might not have been what I thought it was. It could have been a gag. One they played all the time. A flash-mob kind of thing.

The more he considered this, the more possible it seemed. Men cut women’s throats in alleys and on TV shows, not on Peter Pan buses in the middle of the afternoon. As for himself, he had put together a fine campaign. He was the right man in the right place at the right time, and you rarely got more than one chance in this world. That had never been one of his mother’s sayings, but it was a fact.

‘Sir?’

‘Let me out at the next light,’ Wilson said. ‘I can walk from there.’

For Hesh Kestin