Oscar was quite familiar with the internal routines of the local police headquarters, since he’d visited three of his would-be assailants in custody there. He presented himself to the desk officer. He was informed that young Norman had been charged with battery and disturbing the peace.
Norman was wearing orange coveralls and a wrist cuff. Norman looked surprisingly spiffy in his spotless prison gear — he was rather better dressed than most Collaboratory personnel. The cuff was a locked-on shatterproof bracelet studded with tiny mikes and surveil-lance lenses.
“You should have brought a lawyer,” Norman said from behind the cardboard briefing table. “They never turn off this cuff unless there’s attorney-client privilege.”
“I know that,” Oscar said. He opened his laptop and set it on the table.
“I never knew how awful this was,” Norman mourned, rubbing at his monster cuff. “I mean, I used to see guys on parole wearing these things, and I’d always wonder, you know, what’s with this evil scumbag… But now that I’ve got one myself… They’re really demeaning. ”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Oscar said blandly. He began typing. “I knew this kid at school once who got into trouble, and I used to hear him spoofing his cuff… You know, he’d sit there in math class muttering ‘crime drugs robbery murder assault…’ Because the cops run voice recognition scans. That’s how these cuffs surveil you. We thought he was totally nuts. But now I get why he did that.”
Oscar turned his laptop screen to face Norman, showing a dimly legible set of 36-point capitals. WE’LL KEEP UP THE SMALL TALK AND I’LL LEVEL WITH YOU ON THIS.
“You don’t have to worry about the local law enforcement peo-ple. We can talk freely here,” Oscar said aloud. “That device is meant for your own protection as well as the safety of others.” JUST KEEP YOUR ARM DOWN IN YOUR LAP SO THE CAMERAS CAN’T READ THIS SCREEN. He erased the screen with a key-stroke.
“Am I in big trouble, Oscar?”
“Yes you are.” NO YOU’RE NOT. “Just tell me what hap-pened.” TELL ME WHAT YOU TOLD THE POLICE.
“Well, she was giving one heck of a speech,” Norman said. “I mean, you could barely hear her at first, she was so nervous, but once the crowd started yelling, she really got pretty worked up. Everybody got really excited … Look, Oscar, when the cops arrested me, I lost my head. I told them a lot. Pretty much everything. I’m sorry.”
“Really,” Oscar said.
“Yeah, like, I told them why you sent me there. Because we knew from the profiles who was likely to make trouble, and that it would probably be this guy Skopelitis. So that’s who I was casing. I was sitting right behind him in the fifth row… So every time he got all ready to stand up and really give it to her, I ran a preemption. I asked him to explain a term for me, I got him to take off his hat, I asked him where the rest room was…”
“All perfectly legal behavior,” Oscar said.
“Finally he screamed at me to shut up.”
“Did you stop conversing with Dr. Skopelitis when you were asked to stop?”
“Well, I started eating my bag of potato chips. Nice and crunchy.” Norman smiled wanly. “He sort of lost his head then, he was trying to find cues in his laptop. And I was shoulder-surfing him, and you know, he had a whole list of prepared statements there. He went in there loaded. But she was really tearing through her material by then, and they were applauding, and cheering, even… lots of major laugh lines. They couldn’t believe how funny she was. He finally jumped up and yelled something totally stupid about how dare she this, and how dare she that, and the place just went ape. They just shouted him down. So he walked out of the meeting in a major huff. And I followed him.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Mostly just to distract him some more. I was really enjoying myself.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I’m a college student, and he’s just like this professor I had once, a guy I really couldn’t stand. I just wanted him to know that I had his number. But once he was outside the briefing room, he took off running. So then I knew he was up to something bad. So I fol-lowed him, and I saw him trip a fire alarm.”
Oscar removed his hat and set it on the table. “You say you actually witnessed this?”
“Heck yeah! So I had it out with him. I ran up to him and I said, ‘Look, Skopelitis, you can’t pull a dirty stunt like that! It’s not profes-sional.’ ”
“And?”
“And he denied it to my face. I said, ‘Look, I saw you do it.’ He panics and takes off I run after him. People are pouring into the halls because of the fire alarm. It gets really exciting. I’m trying to appre-hend him. We get into a fight. I’m a lot stronger than him, so I punch his lights out. I’m running down the hall after him, jumping down the steps, he’s got a bloody nose, people are yelling at us to stop. I pretty much lost my temper.”
Oscar sighed. “Norman, you’re fired.”
Norman nodded sadly. “I am?”
“That’s not acceptable behavior, Norman. The people in my krewe are political operatives. You’re not a vigilante. You can’t beat people up.”
“What was I supposed to do, then?”
“You should have informed the police that you saw Dr. Skope-litis committing a crime.” HE’S FINISHED! GOOD WORK! TOO BAD I HAVE TO FIRE YOU NOW.
“You’re really going to fire me, Oscar?”
“Yes, Norman, you are fired. I’ll go to the clinic, I’ll apologize to Dr. Skopelitis personally. I hope I can persuade him to dismiss the charges against you. Then I’m sending you home to Cambridge.”
Oscar went to visit Skopelitis in the Collaboratory clinic. He brought flowers: a lushly symbolic bouquet of yellow carnations and lettuce. Skopelitis had a private room, and with Oscar’s sudden arrival, he had hastily returned to his bed. He had a black eye and his nose was heavily bandaged.
“I hope you’re not taking this too badly, Dr. Skopelitis. Let me ring the nurse for a vase.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Skopelitis said nasally.
“Oh, but I insist,” Oscar said. He went through the agonizing ritual, shuttling the nurse in, accepting her compliments on the flow-ers, small-talking about water and sunshine, carefully judging the pa-tient’s growing discomfort. This shaded into open horror as Skopelitis glimpsed Kevin in his wheelchair, stationed outside in the hall.
“Is there anything we can do to assist in your convalescence? A little light reading matter, maybe?”
“Stop it,” Skopelitis said. “Stop being so polite, I can’t stand it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Look, I know exactly why you’re here. Let’s cut to the chase. You want me to get the kid off. Right? He assaulted me. Well, I’ll do that on one condition: he has to stop telling those lies about me.”
“What lies are those?”
“Look, don’t play your games with me. I know the score. You had your dirty tricks team in there. You set up that whole thing from the very beginning, you wrote that speech for her, those slanders against the Senator, you planned it all. You waltzed into my lab with your big campaign machine, muckraking all the tired old stories, try-ing to wreck people’s careers, trying to destroy people’s lives… You make me sick! So I’m giving you one chance, straight across: you shut him up, and I’ll drop the charges. That’s my best offer. So take it or leave it.”
“Oh dear,” Oscar said. “I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed. We don’t want the charges dropped. We intend to contest them in court.”
“What?”
“You’re going to twist in the wind for weeks. We’re going to have a show-trial here. We’re going to squeeze the truth out of you under oath, drop, by drop, by drop. You have no bargaining position with me. You’re sunk. You can’t pull a stunt like that on an impulse! You left DNA traces on the switch. You left your fingerprints on it. There’s an embedded vidcam inside the thing! Didn’t Huey warn you that the lab’s alarms are bugged?”