Fields Where They Lay, page 27
Was to certain poor shepherds
in fields as they lay,
In fields where they
lay, keeping their sheep . . .
The line of children waiting to see Shlomo had fallen silent, many of them turning, having forgotten they were holding a parent’s hand, to see the choir. One of them, I was surprised to see, was the kid with the Frida Kahlo unibrow, so this was his second pass at Shlomo. Beyond the children I saw Shlomo lift a four-year-old onto his lap and turn her toward the singers, whispering some Christmas promise in her ear, and she burst into a delighted smile and a couple of the kids in the choir smiled back at her.
I was smiling, too.
“You didn’t say there were two Santas,” someone said beside me. I turned to see Anime, and beside her, looking like she’d spent the night in a wind tunnel, her girlfriend and partner in larceny, Lilli. Anime was, as usual, as slick as an otter, her straight, black hair pulled back and meticulously smoothed into place except where it had been blunt-cut directly across the middle of her left ear, a mirror-image of Lilli’s haircut, and her face had been scrubbed until it shone. Lilli looked as though every rumple that had fled Anime had taken refuge on her and that she resented every one of them.
On a cold winter’s night
that was so deep.
“This is the only carol I like,” Lilli said grudgingly.
“It’s an old one,” I said, almost whispering. “More than two hundred years. It’s from Luke.”
“Luke who?” Lilli said.
“She’s being intentionally obtuse,” Anime said. “She was up all night.”
“God, this place is a dump,” Lilli said.
I said, “Ssshhhhhhhh,” and we listened to the rest of the carol.
For a moment, as the final chord died away, the place was almost as silent as it had been the previous night when I’d had it to myself, but then people began to move, conversations were resumed, interrupted complaints were aired, and by the time the choir accepted the downbeat for “Jingle Bells,” the moment had passed.
“You guys want to meet Santa?”
“A lifelong dream,” Lilli said, trying to smooth her wheat-colored hair and looking enviously at Anime.
“Well, then, wait for me a minute.” I pulled my phone from my pocket and brought up the picture of the dog tags, and waited until the four-year-old slid off Shlomo’s lap. Then I held up the phone and wiggled it back and forth so he could see I had something to show him, and moved up the line of kids, saying to Shlomo’s elf, “This will just take a second of Santa’s time.”
Shlomo looked at me and then down at the phone, and then he closed his eyes and used his left hand to massage the bridge of his nose. “Gold-plated?”
“Yeah.”
“My kids run true to type. Which one?”
“Philip.”
“You went into his house?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Did you take anything?”
“Just pictures.”
“The good thief,” he said, shaking his head. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Enlarge the document under the card.”
He did, and then he shook his head. “One point eight.” Then he looked past me. “And who’s this?”
“This is—” I turned to check. “This is Anime Wong. She wants to say hi to Santa.”
“Hi,” Anime said, blushing furiously.
Shlomo gave her all his attention. “Have you been good?”
“Oh,” she said. She fidgeted. “Um, not very.”
“She’s been fine,” I said. “Better than fine.”
“I can see that in her eyes,” Shlomo said. “What are you going to give for Christmas?”
Anime’s eyes widened. “Give? Oh, right, thank you for asking. Umm—” Anime glanced behind her to make sure that Lilli wasn’t within earshot. “I’m going to give my girlfriend a, um, a poem I wrote.” She looked at him and then up at me. “Is that corny?”
“It is not,” Shlomo said. “I know a lot about presents, and I promise you it’ll be one of the best she’s ever gotten.”
Anime was grinning like her face would split, and when she felt my gaze she turned and punched me on the arm. “He’s my friend,” she said to Shlomo, a bit fiercely. “Junior is. Thanks, Santa.”
“And merry Christmas,” Shlomo said.
“Same to you, as silly as that sounds,” Anime said, and to the child who was already on her way to Shlomo’s lap, she said, “Merry Christmas, kid.”
“Are we done yet?” Lilli said. “Did you ask for your sled?”
“Just had to tell him where to hang your lump of coal,” Anime said. “Let’s get going.”
“The place is being looted,” I said to the girls as we climbed the stairs to the second level.
“What kind of stuff?” Anime, who was in the lead, asked the question. Lilli, behind her, yawned.
“Everything, you name it. But only from the smaller stores.”
“Tumblr,” Lilli said as though it were the most obvious thing in the world and she couldn’t believe that neither of us had said it yet. “There’s whole communities of lifters, mostly teenage girls, or twists who like to think of themselves as teenage girls. Handles like prettylifter, toocutetopay, sweetydeeppockets, kleptokutie. There’s a couple of hangouts where they swap ideas. The big one is called Winona Ryder University, you know, ’cause she got snagged trying to—”
“We get it,” Anime said.
I blew out a bunch of air.
“I’d think you’d be interested in this,” Anime said. “Considering what you do for a—”
“I have mixed emotions about it, okay? And it’s going to take me longer than ninety seconds, which is how long I’ve known about it, to sort them out.” Anime and Lilli, still in their early teens, were computer-age thieves. Working under the supervision of a heavily tattooed human equation who called himself Monty Cristo, they looted the infrequently audited funds that states set up for the money they seize from abandoned safe deposit boxes. The girls’ long-term objectives were doctoral degrees in computer science for both of them from Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, or MIT, and a completely debt-free graduation, throughout which they’d be holding hands.
“They’ve got moral codes and everything,” Anime said. “No lifting on the really big sales days, like Black Friday, because that’s the only time poor people can afford stuff, so you’re stealing from the poor, which is uncool, no low-end food for the same reason, no lifting from mom-and-pop stores because—”
“Well, that leaves Edgerton out,” I said. “As I said, the mom-and-pop stores are the ones getting looted.”
The choir launched into “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and Lilli covered her ears and said, “Take me away, somebody. This is the most guy carol of them all.”
I said, “What’s so guy—”
“Here’s a little kid,” Lilli said as Anime rolled her eyes, “just been born, right? Probably still wet, and he’s freezing to death, shivering in the cold, like it says, and what are these lunkheads going to give him? Silver and gold. Come on, any woman in the world would say, ‘Hey, take your silver and gold to the damn store and buy the kid some blankets.’”
“She wasted that on me yesterday,” Anime said, “and she’s been dying to trot it out for someone smart enough to appreciate it.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s certainly changed my life. Listen, to tell you the truth, I don’t really care who’s specifically doing the lifting. I already know, pretty much, what’s going on. What I want to know is how it’s being done. On the macro scale, the big picture.”
“The big picture,” Lilli said in a deep radio-announcer voice. She’d gone to the railing to look down. “Clear away, little people, make room for the mental giant.”
“You didn’t like her insight,” Anime said, following her girlfriend. “She gets grumpy when—”
Lilli did a brusque little hula move to the left and hip-checked Anime hard enough to send her a step sideways, then licked the tip of her index finger and made an imaginary vertical mark in the air. “Twenty-nine to three,” she said. “You gotta keep your eyes open.”
“So,” Anime said, rubbing her hip and looking down at the ground floor. “What’s the question?”
“I don’t want to suggest an answer,” I said. “My first day here I noticed—I thought I noticed—something odd about the crowd, about the way they move. I want you to—”
“Next level,” Lilli said, heading for the stairs. “The higher the better.”
We climbed the stairs, the girls bouncing despite their lack of sleep and me feeling like I should be using both hands to lift my legs. At the top, Lilli chose a corner for, she said, perspective. Something, she said, about foreshortening, and Anime said something about the angle of approach when there were too many individual data points, and Lilli high-fived her and then the two of them shut up and just looked down for a while.
“Jesus,” Lilli said after a few minutes. “This is like binge-watching fungi.” Then she yawned again.
I yawned, too. Then Anime yawned. We passed the yawn among us like a talking stick and I said, “I’m going to bet that among the three of us we didn’t get a total of nine hours’ sleep.”
“No takers,” Lilli said, and yawned again, but then her spine straightened and Anime and she craned down at the crowd below with a new energy.
“Could be,” Anime said, pushing her aside.
“Is,” Lilli said. She did the hip thing again but Anime stepped back and Lilli grabbed her lower back and said, “Ow.”
“But then on the other—” Anime dropped the sentence and instead pointed across the diagonal of the mall at the far corner.
“I see it,” Lilli said, sounding cranky. She was rubbing the small of her back. “I’m not an ashtray, you know.”
“See what?” I said.
“Wait,” Lilli said, as though speaking to a member of a lower species. “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”
“Smartass,” Anime said. “Nothing.”
Lilli said, “Oh, yeah?” and pointed in the direction of Dwayne Wix’s throne. “Three of them,” she said. “All in different directions.” To me, she said, “Take a look.”
I was already looking, but now I looked harder. The throng of people on the ground level were milling around, except that they weren’t all milling around. From everywhere in the crowd, individuals, or in some cases families, began to move, detaching themselves from the larger patterns and filtering purposefully through the throng. First it seemed to me that they were going to the escalators, and then they seemed to be going toward the stores in the center of the west side of the mall, and then they seemed to be moving toward the stairs, except, as they kept moving, I realized that the crowd was slowly producing three smaller groups, little rivers of people, each headed in a different direction. Many of those who were on the move were looking at their phones.
“What’s your guess?” I asked Lilli and Anime. “What percentage of the crowd is on the move?”
“About a fifth,” Anime said. She could pick a fraction like that and be right. “The others are still just wandering.”
The Choir began to sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Many of the idlers looked toward them or stopped to listen for a second, but as far as the three streams of people were concerned, the choir wasn’t even there.
“Flash mobs,” Lilli said. “Three at the same time.”
“Actually,” I said with my eyes closed, visualizing what I’d seen, “about five, ten seconds apart.”
“One source,” Anime said.
“What do you think?” I said. “Is it live or is it on some memory chip somewhere, set to dial at this time?”
“Live,” Anime said. “Too many variables for it to be programmed. Somebody’s running it in real time. Where’s the nearest geek with a view?”
“Down there,” I said, pointing at the second level. Standing at the railing, looking down at the ground floor, conspicuous because of the gleam of his prematurely grey hair, was Wink, the guy who owned iShop. He was focused on the screen of his phone, but he seemed to sense our attention because he looked up and around, but by the time his eyes passed over us, Anime and Lilli and I were facing one another, pretending to be in conversation.
“Don’t look at him,” I said. “But as soon as he looks away, I want you to video the crowd movement on your phones, okay?”
“Why don’t you—” Anime began, and said, “Never mind.” Lilli snickered.
“You’ll do it better than I could,” I said. “Twenty-five, thirty seconds at least, a single take so no one can suspect editing, and you both send them to me.”
“Okay.” Anime already had her phone out.
“And when the geek down there goes to his shop on the first level, you guys go in a moment or two later.”
“And?”
“Keep an eye on where he puts his phone when you come in,” I said. “And then, right in front of him, steal something. And when we’re finished with that, I need your help with some shopping. Okay?”
“It’s Christmas,” Anime said. “How could we say no?”
30
The Second Question
At least my shopping was done. I was surrounded by seven shopping bags full of presents I never would have picked out in a million years. But in the forty whirlwind minutes since I’d followed Anime and Lilli into Wink’s shop, they’d demonstrated almost terrifying shopping skills. The moment either of them had pointed at something, I’d known who it was for and why she’d like it. They’d even led me back to Will o’ the Wisp to buy my mother two saucers, sans cups, to replace the ones she’d broken years ago. She loves that pattern.
So here I was in Wally’s gloomy lookout post, all Christmas-presented up at last and ready to test my assumptions about what had been happening at Edgerton.
I didn’t have a script, but I had enough, I thought, to find my way through the conversation and get what I needed. I felt like I was at a slight disadvantage because I’d allowed Wally—old Honest Abe, can’t-tell-a-lie Wally—to mislead me so badly, but for the first time since I’d met him, he and I were in a room together and I knew something he didn’t.
Wally was sitting behind his console. Usually when a male feels threatened, he’ll stand up to increase his size, the way a bear will raise its paws above its head or a blowfish will swell up or some canine species will make their fur bristle. But for Wally, the console was the extension that gave him the power he had exercised so skillfully over the past few months, and he was staying put.
I was leaning with my back to Wally’s door, blocking the only exit. Wink was standing uncomfortably where I’d put him, in front of the rows of monitors so he couldn’t even lean against the wall. They couldn’t exchange a glance without me seeing it.
“Here’s where we stand,” I said, focused on Wally. “Until about forty minutes ago I had two questions.”
“Only two?” Wally asked. He wasn’t the people pleaser today.
“At that moment, yes, two. The first question was, how the crowds were coordinated. So that’s taken care of. It was old Wink here, sending text messages to mailing groups, people who were mostly down on the first level.” Wink raised his head to say something, but I turned toward him, and he took a step sideways away from me. “As he’ll tell you, I had a couple of young ladies distract him, and then I went in and picked up his phone, and here we are.” I held up Wink’s Samsung. “Three texts sent in about a minute and a half, to three groups of twenty to thirty each. Each message is just two or three words, the name of a store.” I looked up at the display of screens, three of which were packed with people. “Do you want to guess which three stores?”
Wally said, “So Wink is behind—”
Wink said, “Hey.”
I said, “Not exactly behind it. As you know perfectly well, Wally. An adjunct, maybe. A functionary. What he was doing—it was essentially a clerical job. Just part of the enterprise. There are dozens of these texts on his phone, each the name of a store in this mall,” I said, “going back for weeks.”
Wink said, “Nothing illegal about flash mobs.” He didn’t sound as scornful as he had when I’d asked him about the directions on the things I’d bought for Rina and Ronnie.
“No,” I said. “As long as they’re not stealing anything. I suppose, if they were stealing stuff, you could be nailed as an accessory or even, if the prosecutors wanted to get inventive, on criminal conspiracy charges.”
“But,” Wally said. And then he stopped and regarded me with the abstracted air of someone who sees something wrong with his chess position. Then he plunged back in. “But you saw the graphs.”
“That’s right, I saw the graphs. And let me tell you, it made me completely crazy when I did. Listen. There’s a science to how crowds move. One or two anomalies, well, that’s to be expected, but repeated anomalies, in a single location, over a period of time—” I’d been ticking off the points on my fingers, and now I held up all five and wiggled them. “Well, that means someone is fucking with the rules of movement. So the flash mobs were for a purpose, but guess what? They didn’t really have anything to do with the shoplifting.” I looked from Wink to Wally. “Did they?”
Wink licked his lips, and Wally immediately cleared his throat. Wink’s tongue disappeared.
“Well, of course they did,” I said. “They had everything to do with the shoplifting, in one regard at least. But here we are, with this big, fancy video system.”
“Not so fan—” Wally began, but I said over him, “Fancy enough to record the crowds once they assembled in the stores. You were stuck with that, with the crowds in the stores; there was nothing you could do about it. You needed the crowds because they let you coordinate the shoplifting: the store owners were scheduled for crowds on certain days because it was all divided up, wasn’t it, and they had to prepare, didn’t they? So the crowds were on the surveillance tape, and anyone who reviewed the tapes would see them. But, of course, no single camera covered the movement of the whole crowd down on the first floor. Bits and pieces of the floor are covered, but there’s no master shot, so to speak, nothing that would pick them up as they organized themselves and headed for their assigned destinations. I know, you told me that most of the coverage is where the merchandise is, and who needs a shot of the entire floor? All makes perfect sense.”
