It is as he suspected. “They’re going in. They’re absolutely going in,” Leonard mutters to himself, as if Francine or Lucy were at his side, although the phrase
going in
is too low-key. Clearly something less civil is intended. What’s certain is that it’s rare and it’s unsettling to see such firepower on active duty in a British street.
Assault’s
a truer word.
Offensive
is the perfect word, in both its senses. Here’s a chance to watch it live. Francine will be sleeping now. She doesn’t even have to know if, instead of picking up her car at once, he spends half an hour at the barrier again, just to be a witness. In the flesh.
The plainclothes officer controlling access to the inner streets of Alderbeech with an Uzi resting on his forearm is curtly adamant. He shakes his head at Leonard’s ID fob. “That’s not legit. Police personnel and residents only. You don’t score,” he says, indicating the way back with his chin and clearly not prepared to waste a word or moment more on this civilian. Leonard does not argue or complain, despite the young man’s lack of courtesy. He isn’t dressed for it. He doesn’t look the part. Anyway, the decision is out of his hands now.
No pasarán
. No witnessing. He’ll just have to collect the car and drive back to the Woodsman for Francine. But again, at the entrance to the waste ground and just twenty paces from their Buzz, another man, this time in uniform, spreads a hand a centimeter from Leonard’s chest and orders him to stop. That open area is off-limits, he explains, “for the foreseeable.” Leonard shows his ID fob once more, points to where they have left their car, promises that he will be only three minutes at the most, and then off home. The policeman whispers into his shoulder radio and nods his head.
“Go ahead, mate. Three minutes max.”
“What’s hitting off?”
“I’ve no idea.”
Their tiny car (“It’s built for elves,” a neighbor once remarked) is dwarfed and hidden by the caravan of blank-sided vehicles and panel trucks that are now occupying almost every meter of open ground. Driving away through what narrow gaps remain will be tricky. Impossible, perhaps. It’s just as well they didn’t bring the wider, longer gigmobile. There’d be no escape, except on foot. Leonard collects his thicker coat from the rear seat, and finding his yellow beach cap in its pocket, pulls that on as well. He’s feeling warm and jaunty, suddenly. He whistles as he hunts between the vehicles for an easy route onto the street.
A man is in the shadows, urinating on a lorry wheel, by the sound of it. When he emerges finally, buttoning his uniform, he shines his billy torch at Leonard and the Buzz and nods a greeting. “Nippy,” he says.
“It’s glacial,” Leonard agrees, presuming that the policeman means the weather and not their elfin car. He routinely feels for his ID and holds it up, but this officer does not bother to check. He’s not suspicious in the least. If Leonard has reached this far and has a car parked among the police and NSF vehicles, clearly his presence is legitimate, despite his shabby appearance.
“What’s hitting off?” Leonard asks again.
This officer is less reticent and less officious than his colleagues. He is, though, tired and cold and bored. “I couldn’t say what’s going on exactly, but it’s about time,” he says. “I’ve been on nights since Thursday. So have you, by the looks of it. What are you? Press?” Leonard nods, not meaning to deceive or at least not lying for any purpose. He’s written pieces now and then for
Jazz UK
and
Impro Quarterly
. “I’m not supposed to speak to press.” The policeman points toward the exit on the far side of the open ground and the two dark blue marquees that were being raised yesterday afternoon. “You’re down that end, then. On the right. That’s press.”
Leonard does not step into the marquee, although he can see the journalists inside, in their showy winter hats and overcoats. A few are helping themselves to coffee; some are doing their best to catch a little sleep; others are readying their microphones and cameras. They are uncharacteristically muted. All look tense, chilled to the bone, and not in the least thrilled to be selected for this night patrol and required to prepare dawn choruses for their Web sites and their breakfast shows. He waits for a minute at the marquee’s entrance flap, delayed by the coffee smells, and pretends to puff on a cigarette—it’s chilly enough for breath to look like smoke—until he’s certain that the officer he’s spoken to is looking elsewhere. Then it takes only seconds to walk the extra meters along the far side of the marquee and into the lee of a shoulder-high, grit-dashed garden wall, where he is out of sight. Again he stops to mime a cigarette and take his bearings, though no one’s watching him. He’s baffled, actually. Just a few minutes ago he was standing by the car, ready to drive away. Now he’s hiding in the shadows, and closer to the hostage house than he’s allowed to be, closer than is wise. But he hasn’t broken any laws, so far. A fib, perhaps. Otherwise, he’s just slipped through their nets, unintentionally. Too easily, in fact. Three officers have questioned him and let him go. Security is lax. It’s not his fault. He’s come to collect his car. That’s what he’ll say if anybody else challenges him. He is a man without a plan—except to be nosy for a minute or two.
But as the moments pass, Leonard feels himself edging forward rather than retreating. It’s not that he is being shoved by someone other than himself: “Go on, Leonard, one more step.” That’s familiar; he’s always being urged ahead, by Francine in particular. On this occasion, he’s not being shoved so much as drawn. Drawn toward a rendezvous. Another dozen steps or so and he’ll be there, wherever
there
might prove to be. He sucks in air and fills his lungs, for confidence.
The public barrier where Leonard has already stood on two occasions to view the hostage house is still in place, he sees, but, unsurprisingly, there is no one waiting there, no hardcore and determined group of insomniacs to join and mingle with. In fact, apart from a pausing, puzzled cat, making humpback bridges with its spine as it patrols, the visible neighborhood is lifeless. The streetlights burn with only Leonard to witness them. Security monitors in a hundred stationary cars flash red, unfailingly and independently, deterring nobody. The nation sleeps. This could be anywhere, anywhere where nothing’s going on—except there is a shiver in the air, the kind of geared-up atmosphere that perhaps it takes a musician’s ear, or a cat’s, to pick up on, a charged hush, the sort of breath-sucked quiet that often means the sky is jittery and heralding a thunderclap, or shooting stars, or rain.
Leonard fills his lungs again and blows out his deceptive smoke, smelling not of nicotine but of last night’s garlic. This darkness, with its pulsing ornaments of light, would make a moody concert poster or an ambient video track, he thinks, pushing his hands into his coat, posing cool and blue. He’s humming “Nighthawks” to himself, working his fingers inside his pockets, tapping the keys of his cell phone until it cheeps at him. He takes it out to switch it off. He doesn’t want a call from Francine right now. The ringtone will only draw attention to his hiding place. He checks the street once more, but there is still nothing new or odd to catch his eye, so far as he can tell. It is what he would expect to find if the siege had ended days ago, with normality returned and the guns, the cameras, and the uniforms working somewhere else. But clearly he can’t have come too late. If the assault, the offensive, were already over, finalized in the last hour or so, when he and Francine were in bed, there certainly would be bustle and noise, and the news crews would not be sitting under canvas, twiddling their switches and their thumbs, but gabbing into microphones and posturing at lenses. It does seem likely, though, the more he thinks about it and the more he shivers in the morning chill, that he has come far too early to witness the end of the siege, and for any final chance of seeing Maxie Lermon in the flesh and failing publicly. The police will surely wait for dawn to break before they risk a raid with firearms. They will bide their time until daylight is on their side. Leonard checks his watch, daring to extend his wrist out of the shadow of the wall and tell the time. It’s earlier than he thought, just short of 3 a.m. The pub’s lobby clock must be running ninety minutes fast. That means an even longer, colder wait for light and action, if he’s to persevere. No, Francine’s waiting, keen to get away. He might as well be sensible. He might as well admit defeat, set free his wife, drive home with her, stay warm, and wait for it to happen on the news. At least he will get closer on the news.
A dozen steps and Leonard will reach the press marquee, its hectic hush, its delaying coffee smells. Another forty meters will take him across the waste ground and its host of silent vehicles to the Buzz. A kilometer reaches Francine in her grimy room. Ninety or so minutes on the road delivers them to their front door. It will chirrup when they open it. But before he’s even reached the corner of the wall, a restless, impish ruby light, just briefly glimpsed, detains him for a moment. Is it a cigarette? He thinks of Lucy suddenly, her skinny roll-ups, and imagines that she, like him, is hiding in the dark and waiting for her father. He stays until he catches sight of it again. This time the glow is wrong for cigarettes. Too uniform. Now it looks more like one of the car security monitors, no bigger and no brighter, except it is not pulsing. This smoldering glow is constant and moves like an unusually determined firefly, directly and unswervingly, leaving a fleeting wake of red across the weighty shadows of the street as, first, it darts along the gutter of the curb, then cuts across the pavement. It stops to fidget for an instant in the angle of a garden wall, outside the hostage house. Leonard moves along his garden wall to keep the light in sight. It’s briefly lost and then shows up again, on the wooden acorn decoration of the gatepost. The firefly hovers, its beam stretching to an oval on the swell of the carving, before crossing to the house itself and, contemptuous of gravity, rising geometrically, at speed, avoiding only windowpanes. It comes to rest on the ledge below the front bedroom.
Now there is a second firefly, roosting on the lintel above the front door, and a third, tracing its way across the brickwork of the house, looking for a perch. Leonard guesses what they are—they are familiar from films: laser beams from the telescopic night sights of power rifles. He has to rub his eyes and catch the movement of another beam before he’s able to infer an angle of origin and spot one of the marksmen. He is as dark and clothy as a country night, virtually invisible in his black gloves and balaclava. He has tucked himself into the shadow of a car and looks more like a heavy bin bag than a man. Indeed, Leonard dismissed him as a bin bag when he first inspected the street ten minutes ago. Now it is easier to spot the other men and their weapons. From where he stands, Leonard can see six in all, at the ready, fingers wrapped round triggers, hidden in the most absorbent shadows. Not Snipers Without Bullets. This hostage-taking, then, will end with bursts of gunfire first, and blood, then sirens possibly, and screaming vehicles, and Lucy weeping long into her life. Leonard shivers, not from cold. In truth, he partly wants the siege to end this way, with Maxie dead—the squads of armed, trained men, the splintered doors on both sides of the house, the clatter of their combat boots on floors and stairs, the six or so precise, intended shots that put an end to it and him the moment that a firefly settles on his head. That would be the way they’d end the siege in Hollywood.
There are other possibilities, of course, less neat, less speedy narratives, more muddled. Leonard can imagine Maxie Lermon hearing the shattered wood and glass, leaping from his guard duty, and reaching for his gun—he’s seen him all too glad to handle a gun before—determined not to be the first to be
pronounced
and maybe firing off a shot or two at the marksmen in the street or the shock-and-awe squads on the stairs, but in too great a panic to take aim and complete this final act, the act that justifies his rapid execution. There are other scenes in Leonard’s head, more troubling ones, more Wild West cinematic ones. There’s Maxie Lermon executing all his innocents, that unnamed family of five. There’re booby traps, there’re trigger bombs, there’s gas. There’s Maxie Lermon, with blood on his shoulder, coming out the front door of the house with a filed-down rifle at the grandma’s head, or perhaps a kitchen knife held against the youngest boy’s throat. “You fire, he dies,” he’s saying to the police. “Bring me a car. I’m out of here. A car, a car, my kingdom for a car.” And for a moment (but only in these dreams) Leonard himself is answering the call. He’s driving forward. His hands are on the steering wheel of Francine’s Buzz, her plucky runabout. It’s crashing through the barriers. Bullets wing the car. The rear screen shatters. Leonard does not stop. The front screen fills with Maxie’s face and hair.
When it happens it is quieter than in films and less heroic than in dreams. There is a soft but weighty thud first, as if a mattress has been dropped onto the ground from thirty meters up. The night is stunned. Then all at once the sleepy street springs to life. The doors of parked cars open abruptly and men in camouflage spill out onto the pavement. The hidden marksmen stand to aim their rifles more accurately at the windows and the doors. More marksmen throw back windows in the upper stories of the buildings opposite the hostage house. A pair of floodlights, concealed on the back of roofs, fill and penetrate the street, blackening the sky beyond their arcs. A now thundering helicopter, which has somehow positioned itself above Alderbeech without making a sound, trains its spy beams on the rear gardens and on the house, where a pair of men with heavy-duty weapons and clips of stun grenades can be seen sitting on the gable roof, keen to get it over with. Three armored police saloons speed in and hold off just out of rifle range, their engines racing. There is a second thud, a louder one, and then the pop of gas grenades and shouting. Inside the hostage house, the ceiling lamps, warmer than the floodlights in the street, click on in every room, almost in unison. Not a single shot is fired.