Islands in the Net (38 page)

Laura grabbed Singh's khaki sleeve. “Look, I don't need all this—”

“It is the people,” Singh mumbled. His eyes looked glazed and ecstatic.

“Let her speak,” yelled a guy in a striped jubbah. “Let her speak!”

The shout spread. Two kids rolled a topped trash can into the street and set it down like a pedestal. They raised her onto it. There was frenzied applause. “Quiet, quiet …”

Suddenly they were all looking at her.

Laura felt a terror so absolute that she felt like fainting. Say something, idiot—quick, before they kill you. “Thank you for trying to protect me,” she squeaked. They cheered, not catching her words, just pleased that she could talk, like a real person.

Her voice came back. “No violence!” she shouted. “Singapore is a modern city.” Men around her muttered translations in an undertone. The crowd continued to grow and thicken around her. “Modern people don't kill each other,” she shouted. The sari was slipping off her shoulder. She tugged it back into place. They applauded, jostling each other, whites showing around their eyes.

It was the damned sari, she thought dazedly. They loved it. A tall foreign blonde on a pedestal, wrapped in gold and green, some kind of demented Kali juggernaut thing …

“I'm just a stupid foreigner!” she screeched. A few moments before they decided to believe her—then they laughed, and clapped. “But I know better than to hurt anyone! So I want to go to jail!”

Blank looks. She had lost them. Inspiration saved her. “Like Gandhi!” she shouted. “The Mahatma. Gandhiji.”

A sudden awesome silence.

“So just a few of you, very calmly, please, take me to a jail. Thank you very much.” She jumped down.

Singh steadied her. “That was good!”

“You know the way,” she said urgently. “You lead us, okay?”

“Okay!” Singh swung his lathi stick over his head. “Everyone, we are marching, la! To the jail!”

He offered Laura his arm. They moved quickly through the crowd, which melted away before them and re-formed behind.

“To the jail!” shouted Striped Jubbah, leaping up and down, striped arms flapping. “To Changi!”

Others took up the yell. “Changi, Changi.” The destination seemed to channel their energies. The giddy sense of explosiveness leached out of the situation, like a blowtorch settling to a steady burn. Children ran ahead of them, to turn and marvel at the advancing crowd. They gawked, and capered, and punched each other. People watched from street-side buildings. Windows opened, and doors.

After three blocks, the crowd was still growing. They marched north, onto South Bridge Road. Ahead of them loomed the cyclopean buildings downtown. A lean Chinese with slicked-back hair and a schoolteacherish look appeared at Laura's elbow. “Mrs. Webster?”

“Yes?”

“I am pleased to march with you on Changi! Amnesty International was morally right!”

Laura blinked. “Huh?”

“The political prisoners …” The crowd surged suddenly and he was swept away. The crowd had an escort now—two police choppers, hissing above the street. Laura quailed, her eyes burning with remembrance, but the crowd waved and cheered, as if the choppers were some kind of party favor.

It dawned on her, then. She grabbed Singh's elbow. “Hey! I just want to go to a police station. Not march on the goddamned Bastille!”

“What, madam?” Singh shouted, grinning dazedly. “What steel?”

Oh, God. If only she could make a break for it. She looked about wildly, and people waved at her and smiled. What an idiot she'd been to put on this sari. It was like being wrapped in green neon.

Now they were marching through the thick of Singapore's Chinatown. Temple Street, Pagoda Street. The psychedelic, statue-covered stupa of a Hindu temple rose to her left. “Sri Mariamman,” it read. Polychrome goddesses leered at each other as if they'd planned all this, just for grins. There were sirens wailing ahead, at a major intersection. The sound of bullhorns. They were going to walk right into it. A thousand angry cops. A massacre.

And then it came into sight. Not cops at all, but another crowd of civilians. Pouring headlong into the intersection, men, women, children. Above them a banner, somebody's bed sheet stretched between bamboo poles. Hasty daubed lettering:
LONG LIVE CHANNEL THREE
…

Laura's crowd emitted an amazing, heartfelt sigh, as if every person in it had spotted a long-lost lover. Suddenly everyone was running, arms outstretched. The two crowds hit, and merged, and mingled. The hair rose on Laura's neck. There was something loose in this crowd, something purely magical—a mystic social electricity. She could feel it in her bones, some kind of glad triumphant opposite to the ugly crowd-madness she'd seen at the stadium. People fell, but they were helping each other up and embracing each other.…

She lost Singh. Suddenly she was alone in the crowd, tripping along in the middle of a long fractal swirl of it. She glanced down the street. A block away, another subcrowd, and a cluster of red-and-white police cars.

Her heart leapt. She broke from the crowd and ran toward them.

The cops were surrounded. They were embedded in the crowd, like ham in aspic. People—everyone, anyone—had simply clotted around the police, immobilizing them. The prowl cars' doors were open and the cops were trying to reason with them, without success.

Laura edged up through the crowd. Everyone was shouting, and their hands were full—not with weapons, but with all kinds of strange stuff: bags of bread rolls, transistor radios, even a handful of marigolds snatched from some windowpot. They were thrusting them at the police, begging them to take them. A middle-aged Chinese matron was shouting passionately at a police captain. “You are our brothers! We are all Singaporeans. Singaporeans do not kill each other!”

The police captain couldn't meet the woman's eyes. He sat on the edge of the driver's seat, tight-lipped, in an ecstasy of humiliation. There were three other cops in his car, decked out in full riot gear: helmets, vests, tangle-rifles. They could have flattened the crowd in a few instants, but they looked stunned, nonplussed.

A man in a silk business suit thrust his arm through the open backseat window. “Take my watch, officer! As a souvenir! Please—this is a great day.…” The cop shook his head, with a gentle, stunned look.

Next to him, his fellow cop munched a rice cake.

Laura tapped the captain's shoulder. He looked up and recognized her. His eyes rolled a little in their sockets, as if she was all that was needed to make his experience complete. “What do you want?”

Laura told him, discreetly. “Arrest you here?” the captain replied. “In front of these people?”

“I can get you away,” Laura told him. She clambered onto the hood of the prowl car, stood up, and raised both arms. “Everyone listen! You know me—I'm Laura Webster. Please let us through! We have very important business! Yes, that's right, move back away from the hood, ladies and gentlemen.… Thank you very much, you're such good people, I'm so grateful.…”

She sat on the hood, propping her feet on the front bumper. The car crept forward and the crowd peeled away to either side, respectfully. Many of them obviously failed to recognize her. But they reacted instinctively to the totem symbol of a foreign woman in a green sari on the hood of a police car. Laura stretched out her arms and made vague swimming motions. It worked. The crowd moved faster.

They reached the edge of the crowd. Laura wedged herself in the front seat, between the captain and a lieutenant. “Thank God,” she said.

“Mrs. Webster,” the police captain said. His badge said his name was Hsiu. “You are under arrest for obstruction of justice and incitement to riot.”

“Okay,” Laura breathed. “Do you know what happened to the rest of my Rizome people?”

“They are also arrested. The helicopters got them.”

Laura nodded eagerly, then stopped. “Uhmm … they're not in Changi, are they?”

“There's nothing wrong with Changi!” the cop said, nettled. “Don't listen to globalist lies.”

They were tooling slowly up Pickering Street, crammed with beauty salons and cosmetic-surgery joints. The sidewalks were crowded with grinning, larking curfew breakers, but they hadn't yet thought to block the street. “You foreigners,” the captain said slowly. “You cheated us. Singapore could have built a new world. But you poisoned our leader, and you robbed us. This is it. Enough. All finish.”

“Grenada poisoned Kim.”

Captain Hsiu shook his head. “I don't believe in Grenada.”

“But it's your own people who are doing this,” Laura told him. “At least you weren't invaded.”

The cop gave her a salt-in-the-wounds look. “We are invaded. Didn't you know?”

She was stunned. “What? Vienna came in?”

“No,” said a cop in the back with pessimistic relish. “It's the Red Cross.”

For a moment she couldn't place the reference. “The Red Cross,” she said. “The health agency?”

“If an army came, we would chop them up,” said Captain Hsiu. “But no one shoots the Red Cross. They are already in Ubin and Tekong and Sembawang. Hundreds of them.”

“With bandages and medic kits,” said the cop eating rice cakes. “‘Civil disaster relief.'” He began laughing.

“Shut up, you,” said the captain listlessly. Rice Cakes throttled it down to a snicker.

“I never heard of the Red Cross pulling a stunt like that,” Laura said.

“It's the globalist corporations,” said Captain Hsiu, darkly. “They wanted to buy Vienna and have us all shot. But it too expensive, and take them too long. So they buy the Red Cross instead—an army with no guns—and kill us with kindness. They just walk in smiling, and never walk out of Singapore again. Dirty cowards.”

The police radio squawked wildly. A mob was invading the premises of Channel Four television, at Marina Centre. Captain Hsiu growled something foul in Chinese and turned it off. “I knew they attack the tellies soon or later,” he said. “What to do …”

“We getting brand-new orders tomorrow,” said the lieutenant, speaking for the first time. “Probably big rise in pay, too. For us, plenty busy months ahead.”

“Traitor,” said Captain Hsiu without passion.

The lieutenant shrugged. “Got to live, la.”

“Then we've won,” Laura blurted. She was realizing it, in all its scope, for the first time. Ballooning inside her. All that craziness and all that sacrifice—it had worked, somehow. Not quite the way anyone had expected—but that was politics, wasn't it? It was over. The Net had won.

“That's right,” said the captain. He turned right, onto Clemenceau Avenue.

“Then I guess there's not much point in arresting me, is there? The protest is meaningless now. And I'll never stand trial for those charges.” She laughed happily.

“Maybe we book you just for the fun of it,” said the lieutenant. He watched a car full of teenagers zip past, one leaning through the open window, waving a huge Singapore flag.

“Oh, no!” said the captain. “Then we must watch her make more globalist moralizing speeches.”

“No way!” Laura said hastily. “I'm getting the hell out of here as soon as I can, back to my husband and baby.”

Captain Hsiu paused. “You want to leave the island?”

“More than anything! Believe me.”

“Could arrest her anyway,” suggested the lieutenant. “Probably take two, three week for the paperwork to find her.”

“Especially if we don't file it,” said the snickering cop. He started laughing through his nose.

“If you think that scares me, go right ahead,” Laura said, bluffing. “Anyway, I couldn't get out now if I tried. There's no way. Martial law closed the airports.”

They drove across the Clemenceau Bridge. Tanks guarded it, but they looked abandoned, and the police car cruised past without pause.

“Not to worry,” said the captain. “To be rid of Laura Webster? No sacrifice too great!”

And he took her to the Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank.

It was an eerie reprise. They were all on the top of the bank building—the personnel of Yung Soo Chim. Up there amid the white bristling forests of microwave antennas and fat rain-stained satellite dishes.

Laura wore her sari flap hooded snugly over her head and a pair of cop's mirrorshades that she'd begged from Captain Hsiu. Once past the private security and into the bank building, redolent with the stink of panic and the new-mown-hay aroma of shredded files, the rest had been easy. No one was checking ID—she had none to check, no luggage, either.

No one bothered her—she was passing for somebody's Eurasian mistress, or maybe some exotic tech in high Hindu drag. If the pirates learned she was here among them, they might do almost anything. But Laura knew with thrilling certainty that they'd never touch her. Not here, not now, not after all she'd come through.

She wasn't afraid. She felt bulletproof, invincible, full of electricity. She knew now that she was stronger than they were. Her people were stronger than their people. She could walk in daylight, but they couldn't. They'd thought they had teeth, in all their corner-cutting crime conspiracies, but their bones were made of glass.

The criminal machine just didn't have it—the
gemeineschaft
. They were rip-off artists, flotsam, and there was nothing to hold them together, no basic trust. They'd been hiding under the protective crust of the Singapore Government, and now that it was gone the Bank was wrecked. It would take them years to stick it all back together, even if they were willing to try, and the momentum, the world tide, was against them. This place and its dreams were over—the future was somewhere else.

What a brag session this was going to make. How she'd crept out of Singapore in the very midst of the pirate bankers. A steady procession of twin-rotored Singaporean military choppers was arriving on the plush landing pad on the Bank's roof. Two, three dozen refugees at a time would cram in helter-skelter and vanish into the leaden monsoon sky.