She got to the financial section and saw, immediately, what Michael had been talking about. The headline reached across most of the page, something she’d noticed that newspapers tended not to do on any page except the very front one.
price heaven files for chapter eleven
reorganization calls for closing of 300 stores
Suddenly, her throat felt very scratchy. Her stomach felt raw. There was a bench in a little shelter where the bus stopped. She went to that and sat down, the paper still open in front of her face. She wasn’t reading the story. She knew what it would say. Michael always pointed out that this was the Il-luminati’s most treasured tactic. They wanted the people to be prosperous, but not sure of their prosperity. If people began to feel that there was nothing to worry about, they’d always be able to find work and enough to eat and enough to have the things they wanted, they would stop being docile. That was what happened in the sixties, when everything began to go completely out of control. Now they were more careful. They made sure there were always downturns and layoffs. They threw some of their least important companies into bankruptcy. They cut jobs right before Christmas and placed the news very prominently in the newspapers and on the television news—but never on the front page, and never as the lead story. The trick was to let people know at the same time you had them distracted by trivialities. That way they’d become uneasy and afraid, but not be able to figure out who was the cause of either, or what to do about it. The wind around her legs was very cold. She hadn’t noticed it before. A bus had stopped, and people were getting out. She didn’t notice them, either, and when the driver finally pulled the door shut in disgust, she didn’t realize he had been waiting for her.
If she hadn’t been taught to understand the plan, if she hadn’t learned all about why things like this happened and what they were used for, she would have broken down right on this bench and cried for an hour.
2
Anne Ross Wyler had been depressed and jumpy all morning, long before she heard the news about her sister-in-law. Morning was not the best time in this neighborhood. Even in the half-light of a grey and overcast day, it was too easy to see the buildings around Adelphos House as what they really were: abandoned, or worse; haunted the way houses can only be haunted if their ghosts are still made of flesh and blood. Besides, Anne thought, getting herself coffee in the Adelphos House kitchen while she pretended not to look at Ryall Wyn-dham’s column left lying faceup on the kitchen table, there was nobody around. The whores and the junkies were all night people. So were the pimps and dealers. Even the pawnshop didn’t bother to open until noon. Annie had gone in there once to see what it was like. She’d ended up disappointed. She’d expected sin and sexuality, some kind of apocalyptic vision. She’d always secretly suspected that the people who lived on the streets lived more exciting lives than the one she had been brought up to live. They had adventures, and passions, and pasts. The truth was a thin layer of grime on the glass of display cases and mundane articles—class rings, ancient typewriters, gloves with the fingertips worn almost to nothing—waiting for buyers who would never materialize. Except, Annie had realized, that they would have to materialize. Somebody had to buy these things, or the pawnbroker would make no money.
She poured coffee into the first mug she could find in the first cabinet she opened. She never noticed what she ate and drank from, any more than she noticed what she wore. She put the mug on the table and sat down in front of Ryall Wyndham’s column. It was illustrated by three small pictures, all murky, of women in evening dress. Mrs. Carter Lindford at The Philadelphia Opera Gala, one of them said. She remembered Mrs. Carter Lindford as a girl named Abigail Hull Drake, who used to spell out her whole name like that on English essays when they were both at Madeira. People went on doing the same things over and over again, without thinking about why they were doing them. They went to school where they were expected to go. They went to college where they were expected to go. They went into law or banking or university teaching because that was the kind of thing the people they knew did. They thought they believed in God, but except for the one or two of them who converted to Catholicism or got born again and caught up in Bible study, most of them really didn’t.
The first story in Ryall Wyndham’s column was a progress report on the investigation into Tony Ross’s murder. It said less than similar stories that had appeared in print and on television in the last few days, but it said it with an air of insinuating archness that was meant to indicate that its author knew much more than he was telling. All of Ryall Wyndham’s writing sounded like that. It was what he sold to the people who read him, the illusion that they were on the inside of a world they were sure was barred to them forever, secret, out of sight.