The Face

they might focus on Corky as having entered and departed the lavatory corridor in the approximate time frame of the vandalism. But they would not be able to obtain a useful image of his face.
        He had intentionally worn nondescript clothes, the better to fade into the rabble. On videotapes recorded elsewhere in the mall, he wouldn’t be easily identifiable as the same man who had visited the restroom just prior to the flood.
        A gorgeous excess of spangled and frosted holiday decorations further compromised the usefulness of the cameras, infringing upon the established angles of view.
        The winter-wonderland theme avoided both direct and symbolic references to Christmas: no angels, no mangers, no images of Santa Claus, no busy elves, no reindeer, no traditional ornaments-and no festive lengths of colored lights, only tiny white twinkle bulbs. Festoons of plastic and shiny aluminum-foil icicles, measured in miles, glimmered everywhere. Thousands of large, sequined Styrofoam snowflakes hung on strings from the ceiling. In the central rotunda, ten life-size ice skaters, all mechanical figures moving on tracks, glided around a fake frozen pond in an elaborate re-creation of a winter landscape complete with snowmen, snow forts, robot children threatening one another with plastic snowballs, and animated figures of polar bears in comical poses.
        Corky Laputa was enchanted by the pure, blissful vacuousness of it all.
        On the first escalator to the ground floor, on the second to the garage, he brooded over a few details of his scheme to kill Rolf Reynerd. Both as he had shopped and as he had enjoyed his destructive escapades in the mall, Corky had carefully laid a bold and simple plan for murder.
        He was a natural-born multitasker.
        To those who had never studied political strategy and who also [123] lacked a solid grounding in philosophy, Corky’s capers in the men’s room might have seemed at best to be childish larks. A society could seldom be brought down solely by acts of violence, however, and every thoughtful anarchist must be dedicated to his mission every minute of the day, wreaking havoc by actions both small and large.
        Illiterate punks defacing public property with spray-painted graffiti, suicide bombers, semicoherent pop stars selling rage and nihilism set to an infectious beat, attorneys specializing in tort law and filing massive class-action suits with the express intention of destroying major corporations and age-old institutions, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, corrupted corporate executives cooking the books and stealing from pension funds, faithless priests molesting children, politicians riding to reelection by the agitation of class envy: All these and numerous others, working at different levels, some as destructive as runaway freight trains hurtling off the tracks, others quietly chewing like termites at the fabric of civility and reason, were necessary to cause the current order to collapse into ruin.
        If somehow Corky could have carried the black plague without risking his own life, he would have enthusiastically passed that disease to everyone he met by way of sneezes, coughs, touches, and kisses. If sometimes all he could do was flush a cherry bomb down a public toilet, he would advance chaos by that tiny increment while he awaited opportunities to do greater damage.
        In the garage, when he reached his BMW, he shrugged out of his sports coat. Before settling behind the steering wheel, he donned the yellow slicker once more. He put the droopy yellow rain hat on the front passenger’s seat, within easy reach.
        Besides providing superb protection in even a hard-driving rain, the slicker was the ideal gear in which to commit homicide. Blood could be easily washed off the shiny vinyl surface, leaving no stain.
        [124] According to the Bible, to every season there is a purpose, a time to kill and a time to heal.
        Not much of a healer, Corky believed there was a time to kill and a time not to kill. The time to kill had arrived.
        Corky’s death list contained more than one name, and Reynerd was not at the top. Anarchy could be a demanding faith.

CHAPTER 18
        
        FRIC IN THE SUFFACATORIUM, ANXIOUS AND wheezing, and no doubt bluer than a blue moon, dragged himself out of the middle of the room and sat with his back against a steel wall.
        The medicinal inhaler in his