“Schwanger has asked us, Franny,” Ernst said, patiently, “not to make you children motherless and fatherless, too. We don’t want to hurt your father, Franny. And we won’t hurt him,” Ernst said, “as long as someone else does a good job of driving the car.”
There was a puzzled silence in the lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire. If we children were exempt, if Father was to be spared, and Susie the bear wasn’t to be trusted, did Ernst mean he would use one of the whores for a driver? They couldn’t be trusted—for sure. They were only concerned with themselves. While Ernst the pornographer had been preaching his dialectic to us, the whores had been slipping past us in the lobby—the whores were checking out of the Hotel New Hampshire. A wordless team—friends in any crisis, thick as the thieves they were—they were helping Old Billig move her china bears. They were bearing their salves, their toothbrushes, their pills, perfumes, and prophylactics away.
“They were the rats abandoning the sinking ship,” as Frank would say, later. They were not touched with Fehlgeburt’s romanticism; they were never anything larger than whores. They left us without saying good-bye.
“So who’s the driver, you super shit?” Susie the bear asked Ernst. “Who the hell’s left?”
Ernst smiled; it was a smile full of disgust, and he was smiling at Freud. Although Freud could not see this, Freud suddenly figured it out. “It’s me!” he cried, as if he’d won a prize; he was so excited, the baseball bat tapped double time. “I’m the driver!” Freud cried.
“Yes, you are,” said Ernst, awfully pleased.
“Brilliant!” Freud cried. “The perfect job for a blind man!” he shouted, the baseball bat like a baton, conducting, leading the orchestra—Freud’s Vienna State Opera Band!
“And you love Win Berry, don’t you, Freud?” Schwanger asked the old man, gently.
“Of course I do!” Freud cried. “Like my own son!” Freud yelled, wrapping his arms around my father, the baseball bat snug between his knees.
“So if you drive the car properly,” Ernst said to Freud, “no harm will come to Win Berry.”
“If you fuck it up,” Arbeiter said, “we’ll kill them all.”
“One at a time,” Schraubenschlüssel added.
“How can a blind man drive the car, you morons?” screamed Susie the bear.
“Explain how it works, Schraubenschlüssel,” Ernst said, calmly. And now it was Wrench’s big moment, the moment he’d been living for—to describe every loving detail of his heart’s desire. Arbeiter looked a little jealous. Schwanger and Ernst listened with the most benign expressions, like teachers proud of their prize pupil. My father, of course, didn’t understand the language well enough to get all of it.
“I call it a sympathy bomb,” Wrench began.
“Oh, that’s brilliant!” Freud cried out; then he giggled. “A sympathy bomb! Jesus God!”
“Shut up,” Arbeiter said.
“There are actually two bombs,” Schraubenschlüssel said. “The first bomb is the car. The whole car,” he said, smiling slyly. “The car simply has to be detonated within a certain range of the Opera—quite close to the Opera, actually. If the car explodes within this range, the bomb in the Opera will explode, too—you might say ‘in sympathy’ with the first explosion. Which is why I call it a sympathy bomb,” Wrench added, moronically. Even Father could have followed this part. “First the car blows, and if it blows close enough to the Opera, then the big bomb—the one in the Opera—then it blows. The bomb in the car is what I call a contact bomb. The contact is the front license plate. When the front license plate is depressed, the whole car blows sky-high. Several people in its vicinity will be blown sky-high, too,” Schraubenschlüssel added.
“That’s unavoidable,” Arbeiter said.
“The bomb in the Opera,” said Schraubenschlüssel, lovingly, “is much more complicated than a contact bomb. The bomb in the Opera is a chemical bomb, but a very delicate kind of electrical impulse is required to start it. The fuse to the bomb in the Opera—in a quite remarkably sensitive way—responds to a very particular explosion within its range. It’s almost as if the bomb in the Opera has ears,” Wrench said, laughing at himself. It was the first time we had heard Wrench laugh; it was a disgusting laugh. Lilly started to gag, as if she was going to be sick.
“You won’t be hurt, dear,” Schwanger soothed her.
“All I have to do is drive the car, with Freud in it, right down the Ringstrasse to the Opera,” Schraubenschlüssel said. “Of course, I have to be careful not to run into anything, I have to find a safe place to pull off to the side of the street—and then I get out,” Schraubenschlüssel said. “When I’m out, Freud gets behind the wheel. Nobody will ask us to move on before we’re ready; nobody in Vienna questions a streetcar conductor.”
“We know you know how to drive, Freud,” Ernst said to the old man. “You used to be a mechanic, right?”
“Right,” said Freud; he was fascinated.
“I stand right next to Freud, speaking to him through the driver’s side window,” said Wrench. “I wait until I see Arbeiter come out of the Opera and cross the Kärntnerstrasse—to the other side.”
“To the safe side!” Arbeiter added.
“And then I just tell Freud to count to ten and floor it!” Schraubenschlüssel said. “I’ll already have aimed the car in the right direction. Freud will simply floor it—he’ll get up to as fast a speed as he can. He’ll run smack into something—almost right away, no matter which way he turns. He’s blind!” Wrench cried, enthusiastically. “He has to hit something. And when he does, there goes the Opera. The sympathy bomb will respond.”
“The sympathy bomb,” my father said, ironically. Even Father understood the sympathy part.
“It’s in a perfect place,” Arbeiter said. “It’s been there a long time, so we know no one knows where it is. It’s very big but it’s impossible to find,” he added.
“It’s under the stage,” Arbeiter said.
“It’s built into the stage,” Schraubenschlüssel said.
“It’s right where they come out to take their fucking final bows!” Arbeiter said.
“Of course, it won’t kill everyone,” Ernst said, simply. “Everyone onstage will die, and probably most of the orchestra, and most of the audience in the first few rows of seats. And to those sitting safely back from the stage it will be truly operatic,” Ernst said. “It will provide a very definite spectacle,” said Ernst.
“Schlagobers and blood,” Arbeiter teased Schwanger, but she just smiled—with her gun.
Lilly threw up. When Schwanger bent over to soothe her, I might have had an opportunity to grab the gun. But I wasn’t thinking well enough. Arbeiter took the gun from Schwanger, as if—to my shame—he was thinking more clearly than I was. Lilly kept throwing up, and Franny tried to soothe her too, but Ernst went right on talking.
“When Arbeiter and Schraubenschlüssel come back here, and report on our success, then we’ll know we won’t have to harm this wonderful American family,” Ernst said.
“The American family,” Arbeiter said, “is an institution that Americans dote on to the sentimental extreme that they dote on sports heroes and movie stars; they lavish as much attention on the family as they lavish on unhealthy food. Americans are simply crazy about the idea of the family.”
“And after we blow up the Opera,” Ernst said, “after we destroy an institution that the Viennese worship to the disgusting extreme that they worship their coffeehouses—that they worship the past—well … after we blow up the Opera, we’ll have possession of an American family. We’ll have an American family as hostage. And a tragic American family, too. The mother and the youngest child already the victims of an accident. Americans love accidents. They think disasters are neat. And here we have a father struggling to raise his four surviving children, and we’ll have them all captured.”
Father didn’t follow this very well, and Franny asked Ernst, “What are your demands? If we’re hostages, what are the demands?”
“No demands, dear,” Schwanger said.
“We demand nothing,” said Ernst, patiently—ever patiently. “We’ll already have what we want. When we blow up the Opera and we have you as our prisoners, we’ll already have what we want.”
“An audience,” Schwanger said, almost in a whisper.
“Quite a wide audience,” Ernst said. “An international audience. Not just a European audience, not just the Schlagobers and blood audience, but an American audience, too. The whole world will listen to what we have to say.”
“About what?” Freud asked. He was whispering, too.
“About everything,” Ernst said, so logically. “We’ll have an audience for everything we’ve got to say—about everything.”
“About the new world,” Frank murmured.
“Yes!” Arbeiter said.
“Most terrorists fail,” Ernst reasoned, “because they take the hostages and threaten violence. But we’re beginning with the violence. It is already established that we are capable of it. Then we take the hostages. That way everybody listens.”
Everyone looked at Ernst, which—of course—Ernst loved. He was a pornographer willing to murder and maim—not for a cause, which would be stupid enough, but for an audience.