The Invisible (6 page)

Nobody answers him. I pull my arms around myself, a cold shiver rocking through me.

Now the photos show the kind of people I know. We’ve passed the riots. On to the parties. The balls. The orphans singing for the mayor and his ilk. Tuxedos, champagne, orthodontically perfect smiles. Then shots of South Side children polishing shoes, their foreheads black with grease marks.

I look out the window for a second, and my throat seizes—in every apartment in all the towers on the block, there are TVs broadcasting the same assault of pictures. People crowd around some of them, their profiles in shadow. Other TVs broadcast to empty rooms.

But
how
?

I shake my head hard and turn back to the screen, wanting to understand.

The images combine with similar phrases like the ones I saw this morning on the girl’s phone:

SOME PEOPLE ARE SO COMFORTABLE IT HURTS.

THE GAME IS RIGGED.

THE SCALES ARE OUT OF BALANCE.

SOME OF US ARE GOING INSANE AT THE SIGHT OF IT.

And on and on. The music thumping. The images flying.

And then, again, the masked man behind the desk. The desk draped with the flag of Bedlam. Four white stars in a square formation. One for each bridge. The red and blue halves of the flag split diagonally. His mask, the crude child’s drawing of a face, the features uncannily askew, everything just a little wrong in the placement. The chin area of the mask curling up slightly, jutting into a rounded triangle that reveals a small swatch of his chin, giving the effect of a face being peeled from a skull.

“To those of you sitting in the dark right now, and you know who you are . . .”

I feel gooseflesh rise on my arms when there’s muffled laughter from behind the mask.

“You have an assignment. It’s a simple one. And it won’t hurt you a bit. Go to your banks, withdraw half your money, and give it to someone who has less than you. Let’s come together to even the scales, shall we? You have forty-eight hours. If you complete the assignment, you might get to keep all the things that make your life so easy. And if you decide not to do your homework, there will be . . .” A long pause here. I meet my mother’s eyes and see vivid horror etched in them. “. . . consequences. Bedlam will start to live up to its name.”

The man in the mask folds his hands together on his desk, sets them down on the Bedlam flag. Then the illustrated eye flashes for a second on the screen, followed by static.

And just as they all turned on out of nowhere, the TVs shut off all by themselves.

Then all around the neighborhood, the lights come back on. Our own lights flare on a second later, and we stare at each other around the table, blinking.

“Forget it,” my father says. “A prank. Let’s eat.”

The whole thing is over just as quickly as it began. Except that none of us are able to forget what we’ve just seen.

“We will not be cowed by terrorists,” the mayor huffs into his microphone at a press conference less than an hour later. We haven’t left the kitchen, having turned the TV on to watch while we ate dinner so we could see the reaction to this bizarre transmission. Two laptops lay yawning open on the table, open to the Internet for more news. “We will find the person or persons responsible for these ridiculous, baseless threats, and they will be held accountable.”

My father bursts out laughing and gets up. He pauses behind my mother and puts his hands on her shoulders. “Some trick. Gotta give them that,” he snorts.

“I’m glad you find this so funny, Harris,” my mother breathes, shaking his hands off her shoulders and standing up. “I don’t see why you’re laughing when there’s a maniac making threats. I may have to cancel the masquerade ball, if this keeps up.” My mother’s been chairing a committee for a charity ball this weekend. I look at her sharply. Can this really be her biggest concern right now?

“Everything will be fine, Leenie. Internet consensus is that they hacked into the TV satellites,” my dad says. He seems almost to be relishing the theater of it all. “Manny’s calling them terrorists for the ratings. They’re just a bunch of punk kids.”

Something in me can’t hold back when he says that. I think of the party at Gavin’s house, for new Syndicate recruits. Kids younger than I am being handed guns. All the blood money Gavin used to outfit his house in the latest technology. The kids I met there, some of them fourteen or even younger, who worshipped the Syndicate, as if the crime organization was their ticket to righting the wrongs the world had committed against them.

“You’d know all about punk kids, right, Dad?”

I pull myself up tall, looking up into his green eyes, his charmer’s smile faltering into a glazed, expressionless grimace.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I think you know,” I say. My hands are starting to shake.

“I don’t know what you’re implying, but if you have something to say to me, I’m all ears.”

I press my mouth closed, suddenly aware that my mother and Lily are looking at me strangely. This isn’t a conversation I want to have in front of them.

“Fine. I’ll be in my office. Too much female hostility up here for me at the moment.” He crosses the kitchen and heads for the stairs down to the lower floor.

My mother shoots me a bewildered look and heads to her room, where I’m sure she’ll take a pill and fall asleep.

“You okay?” Lily says softly.

I nod. But I’m not. Not really. I can’t keep doing this, I decide as I drop the dinner dishes one by one into the sink full of suds Lily’s prepared. Sneaking around and trying to catch my father in the act has gotten me nowhere. It’s time to confront him.

When the last dish disappears into the scummy water, I head down the stairs and knock on his office door.

“What.” Not a question, and barked in an unfriendly tone, but I push the door open anyway.

He’s sitting in the dark, tapping on his keyboard, some sort of spreadsheet on his computer screen. His face glows in the only light in the room, coming from the three computer monitors set up in a row on his desk. He keeps his eyes on the screen when he talks. “Hello,
dear
. Are we continuing the game of Ambush Daddy?”

“Do you give money to the Syndicate?”

My father stops typing and swivels his chair around to face me.

“Where is this coming from?” Amusement and condescension flit across his face and then vanish, replaced with his thousand-watt real estate developer smile.

“I heard it somewhere. That you give money to the Syndicate.” I am thankful for the darkness of his office—my face is on fire.

“From whom, exactly?” he asks, laying his hands open-palmed on his knees.

“I . . . I can’t remember. It was a while ago.”

“Anthem, why don’t you have a seat?” He gestures to the leather club chair pushed up against one of the walls.

I collapse into it, my legs suddenly like toothpicks holding up a boulder.

He takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Crosses his legs, uncrosses them. “We have been in a position to keep you very innocent of some of the dirtier parts of living in this city. And I’m happy we were able to shield you from them. But you are getting older, so I’m going to tell you something now that may shock you.”

You are a crime boss. Mom is in on it. Everything I’ve always been told is a lie.

“Everyone with any kind of business operation in greater Bedlam gives money to the Syndicate. We don’t like it, and we don’t like them. But we do it. All of us.”

My mouth falls open. I’m shocked by the bluntness of his honesty.

“All of who?”

“Everyone. Anyone who needs to get things done here. Because if we don’t pay them off, they make our lives impossible. What do you think a mafia is? It’s organized crime, and it depends on coercion to keep itself operational. And we—the businessmen and women of Bedlam—have been coerced into paying them to leave us alone.”

“How long has this been going on?” I say robotically. It’s starting to sink in. He’s not “The Money,” not the ringleader of the Syndicate. If he was, he would deny any involvement. He’s bad, but not in the way I thought.

“My whole adult life. Ever since my first job after the boys’ home, when I worked construction. There have always been payoffs.”

My whole adult life.
My father never talks about his childhood. All he ever says is “I’m glad it’s over.” I know he spent his teens in a boys’ home outside the city, that he left home at twelve because there were too many mouths to feed, that he’s a self-made man. But that’s about it.

“But why don’t you call the police?” I say, my throat a desert, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. “Why pay them off when you can have them arrested?” Though of course, I know why. The police are on the Syndicate payroll. Not all of them, but definitely a few. Detective Marlowe, for one, whose name is also in Gavin’s book. And probably hundreds of others. The only cop I trust even a little bit is the officer who interrogated me with Marlowe after Gavin died. Officer Rodriguez struck me as incorruptible. I still have her business card in my wallet.

“We do, if things get really ugly. But small payoffs, they’re the cost of doing business. The Syndicate knows they can only push me so far before I snap and call in the law, and for the most part they respect my boundaries. If I called the police every time someone wanted a payoff, I wouldn’t be able to run Fleet Industries.” His lips twitch into a sad half-smile, and he shrugs, as if to say he’s sorry that the world isn’t the fair, just place I’ve always thought it was.

I nod. It’s an ugly reality, but not the one I expected. “And the funeral you went to? Your employee who fell off the bluff at the lake?”

“What about him?” He sounds testy.

“I happen to know he’s . . . he was . . .” I struggle to get the words out. “He was high up in the Syndicate.”

My father shoots me a suspicious look and lets a silence fill the room before he answers. “And how would you know something like that?”

“I just . . . do.” I watch my father absorb the fact that I’m stonewalling him. Like he’s reassessing me. I guess he’s surprised that I have secrets too. He looks at me strangely, as if he’s got a new respect—or maybe wariness—of me.

“I heard about that too, just after his body was found,” he says at last. “But I knew nothing about the guy when he was working for me. And then at the funeral I realized that Serge and I were surrounded by Syndicate thugs. I was shocked.”

I nod, silent. Hoping he’ll say more.

“We employed him as a caretaker for our Morass Bluffs project, which had been stalled for over a year.” He leans in closer. “But kitten, why are you so curious about him?”

“Because . . .” I stop mid-sentence, wondering what I can possibly say that will make sense.
Because he was my boyfriend, the one who conned me into thinking he was kidnapped? The one you didn’t want to give the ransom money for? “
I don’t know. I just heard it somewhere.”

He sighs. “I wish I didn’t have to give the Syndicate anything. I hate them. They’re murderers and thugs. Someday soon, I hope I won’t have to. If the mayor can just crack down harder. Get the police to do a big sweep of them. Ferret them out.” He looks up at me. “Maybe you’ll help do something about it when you’re older. Maybe you’ll join the city government.”

Or just go out at night and tie up bad guys
, I think, my chest squeezing my heart like a vise. “Maybe—anything’s possible.”

I rise from the chair. My father stands up too, and he gives me a short, tight hug. For the first time in a while, I feel like I used to. I’m Harris’ daughter again—comforted in my father’s arms. No longer naïve, but also no longer scared of him.

When we separate, he says something so quietly I have to ask him to repeat himself.

“I said this Invisible thing is just amateurs. Fame-seekers, pranksters. It’ll blow over soon.”

I nod. “I hope you’re right.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

When the blue numbers on my bedroom clock flash two A.M., I slip out of my bed and get dressed in jeans, suede sneakers, and a hooded black jacket. I’ve watched Invisible’s dispatch on the Internet dozens of times and spent the past three hours turning over every word of it in my head.

Will people really start giving their money away? Is it just a thought experiment, a prank?

I’ve tried, but I can’t possibly sleep, thinking about it all. It’s time to get a new perspective. And there’s only one person I want to see.

Running through the South Side, my feet barely touch the ground at all. The air on my face is like a wind tunnel. Parked cars and buildings are no more than smeared blurs in my vision. My heart pumps ten times faster than normal when I’m at rest—right now, moving this fast, it must be at 1,000 beats per minute. I feel it humming under my ribs, a hot motor powering me.

All over the South, a giant Syndicate party is in full swing. The revelry outside the South’s many bars is louder and more boisterous than I’ve ever seen it. Homemade fireworks pop low in the sky along the riverbank, throwing watermelon-sized sparkles into the black sky.

Groups dressed in the black, gray, and brown favored in the South spill out of bars on every corner, stumbling along in the slick streets. On Oleander and Ivy, a stumbling, bleary man harmonizes with a younger woman on an old Bedlam protest song:

We will fight, against the might

Of the rich, who wish we all would disappear.

We will fight, every night

In quarters far and near

And call upon the angels bright

To hold us tight

against the bombs, the water cannons, and the gas

Because it’s with knives

And with our lives

That we pay ’em back for all that’s come to pass

It’s because of the video, I realize as I speed down an alley and pass by a group of people a year or two older than I am, hair dyed in blues and purples and pinks. They are drunk, stumbling, two of the boys in the group with SYN tattoos on their necks, shouting something about a payday or a paycheck. The words are all garbled.