The plan is working better than planned.
The elevator is empty.
He finds 19, pushes the button, leans against the wall.
Just before the doors close, a dwarf hops into the car.
Young, tan, streaky surfer hair, oddly handsome for a guy
with a mashed-in pumpkin head.
A blindingly bright white T-shirt
shows off his gym-buffed chest.
Great, thinks Nolan.
My luck.
Our man is being tested.
The old Nolan would have been pissed, forced to ride up
19 floors with a mutant.
The newly reconstructed Nolan wills
himself to imagine what the short dude went through
on his first day of kindergarten.
Or asking a girl to the prom.
Nolan had a hard enough time, and he's on the tall side.
The trouble with changing your attitude
is the old one doesn't disappear.
It hides in the creases of your brain,
sending out faint signals.
He can hear what Raymond would have
said about the elevator dwarf.
The hungriest chromosome is the broken one.
The weak and damaged will multiply and conquer
the Earth like a virus.
Nolan remembers one of those boozy, late-night "discussions"
with Raymond and his friends.
One guy said people used to think
dwarfs had magical powers, which, they all agreed, just
went to show how stupid people are.
Nolan never bought it.
He never believed that freaks were
having lots of sex and millions of freaky children.
The elevator seems to have stopped.
Is this Nolan's floor?
"19," says the mind-reading dwarf.
He got on after Nolan.
He couldn't have seen him hit the button.
What if Work-Out Dwarf is a magical being?
And what's with the knowing smile?
Maybe he works in the building and sees a thousand guys
like Noah, every week some Nazi punk
turns and heads for Brotherhood Watch.
That worm-colored geek with the shiny head?
Send the guy up to 19.
Nolan has to remind himself he's dressed in such a way
that there's nothing to distinguish him
from your normal, fashionably bald dude in jeans
and a long-sleeved shirt.
The elevator releases Nolan into a carpeted hall
paneled in gleaming wood.
Behind the reception desk sits a beautiful Asian chick
in stylish black ninja pajamas.
How classy, how predictable for a famous human rights outfit
to hire PC Dragon Lady to guard the front door.
Nolan recalls a Hong Kong film where the Secretary rockets up
from her desk and does triple flips,
hurling nunchucks around the office.
He wishes he'd brought six other guys.
He wishes his tattoos showed.
In the end, what he can't hide is
enough to give Suzie Wong the willies.
The duffel bag is a problem, as he knew it would be.
Of course, it would have been smoother if he
could have left it somewhere.
As Nunchuck Girl eyes the bag, Nolan
watches a little fight-or-flight thing
take place in her face, until her receptionist training wins
out over her basic human instinct
not to be anywhere near him.
Nolan has the feeling that she's got one finger on the panic
button just in case.
"May I help you?"
"I'd like to see Mr. Baslow.
Dr. Maslow.
Whatever."
"Do you have an appointment?"
He doesn't know what the gentleman's called.
Does it sound like he has an appointment?
"No," says Nolan.
"I need to talk to him."
So do millionaires, politicians.
Nolan can expect about 5 more seconds of Miss Yin Yang's
attention.
He says, "I've got some information
I think he might want to have.
I guess you know what ARM is, right?
The American Rights Movement?"
A definite yes from Ice Princess.
Now she's really eyeing the duffel bag,
obviously wondering if this is her time,
if her bullet-riddled body will be
all over tomorrow's front page.
And is that a tiny twitch pulling her hand
beneath the desk?
Call security!
Red alert!
Hitler's in the building looking for Meyer Maslow!
Nolan can't decide if he wants to pop her in the nose
or fall on his knees and promise he won't hurt her.
He follows her glance toward the duffel bag.
"I'm in a kind of transitional state," he says.
"And if you're thinking what I think you're thinking--"
he turns his palms outward and tries to smile.
"I'm harmless.
I promise.
Unarmed.
There's nothing in the bag but some books
and clothes and dirty laundry."
The receptionist's lip curls.
She doesn't want to think about Nolan's dirty laundry.
"I was in the ARM for five years."
Lie number one, and Nolan's only been here 2 minutes.
So what.
It's a detail.
They can hash out the fine points later.
"Congratulations."
She gives him the freeze-out look
she learned in Bitch Receptionist 101.
She hesitates, thinks, thinks some more.
Then she picks up the phone and keeps pushing the same button.
Security isn't answering.
So she's pretty much on her own.
Is that fear on her face?
Just a trace, and it's gone, either because she's
a professional, a professional receptionist,
or because she doesn't want to give Nolan the satisfaction.
Or because he's charmed her.
That's always a possibility.
She listens, pushes another button, listens, then another.
So the person about to deal with the fact of Nolan's existence
is several rungs down the food chain
here at World Brotherhood Watch.
"Bonnie?"
she says.
"There's someone here you might want to talk to."
Bonnie?
Maslow's secretary, probably.
Did Nolan think Madame Butterfly was going
to ring the boss's direct line?
She looks at Nolan.
"Ms Kalen will be out shortly."
Nolan strolls across the foyer and checks out
the art on the wall, a mammoth canvas
gunked with gobs of that shit-brown colored kids mix
up just to piss off the art teacher.
A finger painting of train tracks.
Some genius got a fortune.
"Excuse me?"
Nolan wheels around to find himself standing way too close
to what's got to be Bonnie.
Putty-colored business suit, thin blondish hair tied back
in the same limp pigtail she probably were in college,
fortyish, a couple of kids, bossy psychiatrist husband.
Nolan worked for a hundred women like her, the summer he
spent around Woodstock humping chlorine and skimming
bugs for Skip's Pool and Spa.
Bonnie's eyes, two magnified blue jellyfish swimming
toward him from behind her glasses, looks slightly psycho.
Another female nutcase.
One of those women, like his mom,
always trying to be a good person.
Except, they're clueless as to what good is, so they're always
checking in with a dozen inner opinions on what they should
do and say.
If only chicks like Bonnie and his mom
would stop trying so hard to be good,
the world might be a better place.
Certainly their world would be.
She says, "I'm Bonnie Kalen from the development department."
Develop my ass, thinks Nolan.
But what's his problem, exactly?
She's really trying, smiling for so long it must hurt.
She's a little slower than her receptionist friend
at IDing Nolan.
Which is fine.
Back to plan A. Hide the tattoos and get his good intentions
across before she figures out who he is.
But what will the tattoos tell her about who Nolan is,
and what he's been through?
Except for the fact that one drunken,
stoned night at the Homeland Encampment.
It felt great to be so out of it that the tattoo needle felt
good.
He could talk himself blue in the face
and never make her understand the sweetness of feeling
that the buzzing and pain was happening
in a parallel universe, happening to some other guy,
some fool who bought the entire Aryan Homeland program.
Maybe he thought that getting the tats
was a way of thanking Raymond for his hospitality.
More likely, Nolan was letting the codeine and beer
think for him.
And now he's thanked Raymond, all right,
by stealing all his stuff.
"Nice to meet you.
I'm Vincent Nolan.
What do you develop?"
Loser.
Nolan knows what she means.
He got thrown off by the silence.
Bonnie's trapped in another smile.
"Actually, we do fund-raising."
How brilliant.
Psychic blackmail.
Rich people writing out checks to keep this Bonnie
from exploding like those blobs of hot dough Nolan
had to scrape off the walls when he worked in the doughnut shop.
No need to feel sorry for Bonnie.
She's got a fat scene going.
She or someone must be a whiz.
Somebody's bankrolled the woodwork,
the painting, the carpets.
The gold letters above the receptionist desk--
WORLD BROTHERHOOD WATCH.
PEACE THROUGH CHANGE.
Somebody paid the bills for that.
And it's not like they're selling a product.
"Well, great.
Whatever," says Nolan.
"I want to work with you guys."
Bonnie eyes the Asian receptionist.
What is Ninja Girl supposed to say?
She's hanging Bonnie out to dry.
Or maybe she's just bewitched by the spell
of this magical situation.
An incoming call blinks on and off, but no one moves.
Is Bonnie from outer space?
Nolan should just push up his sleeves, flash his tattoos,
and cut to the chase.
"That's wonderful," Bonnie rattles on.
"Actually, we do have a volunteer auxiliary
which has been very helpful with mailings and phone
calls and stuff.
Mostly it's older women, but we also attract some really
cool energetic kids."
Older women?
Really cool energetic kids?
"Wait a second," says Nolan.
"Do you know who I am?"
Good question.
Bonnie takes a step back.
God only knows what she's seeing.
"Listen," says Nolan.
"I'm not pretending I understand anything
about you or your organization, but I'll
bet most of the people you deal with are
pretty much like yourself."
Jesus, don't let her think he means Jews.
"We reach out to all kinds of people.
I'm sorry, Mr Nolan.
There's something I'm not--"
"Reach out?
All kinds?
Can I ask how many white supremacists you
guys have reached out to?"
He runs one hand over his bald head.
Does he have to draw her a map?
He'd rehearsed saying "white supremacist."
"Not so far," says Bonnie.
"I see."
And she does.
So this is where they would have started if he'd showed her
his tattoos up front.