Genesis by Jim Crace Page B

seriously.
    The Arts Academy where Lix was in his final year of Theater and Stagecraft Studies had been endowed the semester before with nearly $7 million by MeisterCorps, the electronics and engineering giant from Milan, Berlin, Boston, and Hong Kong, to pay for a new cafe, a theater, a concert hall, a gallery, and a cinema on the campus, all in one custom-built star-shaped complex. A pentacle of creativity.
    These were tainted millions, actually—or so the more progressive of the students judged. They’d not be seduced by the prospect of new facilities and subsidized alcohol, especially as their own studies would be over by the time the pentacle was built. These dirty dollars, they claimed in the student newsletter, had been made from low wages in the Far East, “the blanket marketing of
shoddy and environmentally damaging products in dishonest packaging,” arms-for-timber deals in Africa, and from stock market trickery (which many of their parents had fallen victim to).
    Now, on Thursday the seventeenth of the coming month, just as the students would be going home for their winter vacations, MeisterCorps’s American chairman, Marin Scholla, would be visiting the city to open the company’s new central offices in the tower block that we have known since then as Marin’s Finger and to pass on (or so the rumormongers claimed) his yellow envelopes of thanks in thousand-dollar bills to our finest councillors and planning commissars. He was a worthy target, certainly.
    Lix stood before the nineteen students in RoCoCo, then, with something safely moderate in mind at first. It’s always best to stand, if you are tall enough, to concentrate an audience. He held a photocopy of a news report he thought would interest them. He read it out in his trained voice, reducing to a whisper almost when he reached the part about the chairman’s final appointment of the day.
    Lix knew, of course, that he was being watched by everybody in the meeting room (stagecraft again)—and that included Famous Freda Dressed in Black, the campus beauty with the sculptor’s head who could have been a model had she chosen, who could have slept with anybody there, then dined on them, and still had volunteers, who could have been in films or (on our newsstands finally) stapled into Playboy magazine. At 5 p.m. or thereabouts, Lix read, Scholla planned to “drop in” at the campuses to lay the first stone of what is still the MeisterCorps Creative Center for the Arts, or MeCCA. (Though MeisterCorps
itself, of course, is no longer with us. It finally buckled to its creditors in the Labor Day Free Fall, “the Wall Street Dive of Two Thousand and Five.”)
    â€œWe’ll have to organize a vigil,” someone said. Exactly Lix’s thought.
    Then Freda spoke, not bothering to stand, not bothering to raise her voice. A typical riposte, uncompromising and seductively extreme: “Pickets are a waste of time. You know they are. The police just box you in.”
    â€œA moving picket, then!”
    â€œA picket or a vigil, what’s the difference? Somebody, please, suggest a petition. Or a delegation! Or a letter-writing campaign. Just as ineffectual.” Freda had discovered that she could say exactly what she felt. Her beauty licensed her. Nobody dared to take offense, especially if she spoke as softly as a kindergarten teacher or a nurse. “A line of little placards or a bit of paper with some signatures isn’t going to trouble MonsterCorps, is it? Correct-me-if-I’m-wrong.” A little singsong phrase. She raised her eyebrows, waited for a moment, looked around the room. “No, we need to give Marin Scholla a surprise. And shake him up a bit. Something memorable. If what we do doesn’t put us on the evening news, then what’s the point?”
    Her unruffled escalation shut the meeting up, or almost did—for out of somewhere, wide of script, entirely unrehearsed, ad