Vicious Circle

Okay, it was definitely time to make an entrance. I stepped onto the escalator, which wasn’t moving, and put my whistle to my lips. Walking slowly up the steps, and almost stumbling because of their uneven height, I played a shrieking, nasal blast like the scream of a lovesick bagpipe. The mall had pretty good acoustics, at least when it was relatively empty like this. Up above me the crazies paused in their recreations to look around and find out who was killing the cat.

They separated and stood up, allowing me to get a better look at them. They looked scarily ordinary: one in late middle age, bespectacled and balding, dressed in shirtsleeves and suit trousers; the other two much younger—one of them maybe no more than a student—and in casuals. You couldn’t imagine them carrying out a murder together. You couldn’t even imagine them standing in the same bus queue.

But this wasn’t the time to speculate about how they’d met and discovered a common interest in death by hanging. No, this was show time. Theater was going to be all important here. I wanted them to keep watching me rather than getting back to the business at hand. I started to scuff my feet on each step, Riverdance style, to get a rhythm going in counterpoint to the skirling notes I was pushing out of the whistle. Left foot and then right, raising my knees high and swaying my upper body from side to side like some kind of deranged snake charmer trying to go it alone after his cobra had left him.

All of which combined to produce the desired effect. The three men abandoned their hog-tied victim and crowded to the railings to watch me walking up toward them. Then a whole lot of other faces appeared behind theirs, men and women both, clustering at the railings to peer past them with varying expressions of alarm, eagerness, and incomprehension. I hadn’t seen these people before because they’d been standing away at the back of the upper gallery, presumably in a tight, attentive cluster.

My skin crawled. Somehow the intended execution was made infinitely worse by the fact that it would have had an audience. If I’d had any doubts before as to whether I was in Kansas or the merry, merry land of Oz, I ditched them now: whatever was going on here, it wasn’t natural.

I stepped off the first escalator, turned, and crossed the short expanse of tiling that separated it from the second. That meant presenting my back to the crazies, which I didn’t welcome at all, but on the credit side it meant the escalator was going to bring me out on the opposite side of the upper gallery from where they were. Something big and heavy crashed to the floor right in front of me, showering me with shards of glass and plastic. It had been a sound system of some kind, speakers not included, and one of the fragments close to my foot bore the OLU of a BANG & OLUFSEN logo: not a missile you see used all that often. I stepped over it, and kept on going.

There were howls and jeers now from the gallery above me, followed by a rain of smaller objects that I didn’t bother to acknowledge. One of them thumped me in the back, but it wasn’t sharp, or heavy enough to break bone. Maybe I hiccupped on a note, but it’s not like I was playing Beethoven’s Ninth to start with. It was just noise, loud and discordant and impossible to ignore.

As I climbed step by step up toward the top level, the crazies ran around the gallery to meet me. That was good insofar as it took them away from the man they’d been about to kill, but bad because I still couldn’t see any sign of Juliet and I honestly didn’t think they were running to get my autograph. I got to the top of the escalator just as they rounded the last corner and came running toward me in a solid wall. I tried to swallow, but found that my mouth was dry. This was the moment of truth, and I normally prefer elegant prevarications. I cast one last forlorn glance around the gallery in the hope that my curvaceous, demonic cavalry might appear in the nick of time: no such luck. With a muttered curse, I slipped my whistle back into my inside pocket, out of harm’s way, clinched my fists, and braced for impact.

The first of the rioters to reach me was a woman, dressed for the office in a pastel-colored two-piece and sensible heels. The only thing that spoiled the ensemble effect was the claw hammer she was waving over her head. I jumped awkwardly back out of its way as it came down. Then, since she followed through with her entire body, bending from the hip to get more of her weight behind the blow, I was able to hit her on the back of the head with a roundhouse punch. She went down heavily, the hammer skidding away across the tiles. I didn’t feel particularly good about it, but this was no time for chivalry.