The crowd roared at his appearance. Feet were stamped. Hands were waved. Fists were pumped.
Friedrich and Maes performed a Laurel and Hardy-like pantomime of who would have the honor of letting Laura precede them.
She had to go. She had to do this.
Now.
The air grew suffocatingly close as she walked onto the stage. Despite the howl of cheers and applause, Laura was conscious of the hard tap of her cane across the wooden boards. She felt her shoulders roll in. Her head bowed. The urge to make herself smaller was overpowering.
She looked up.
More lights. A fugue of cigarette smoke hung in the rafters.
She turned toward the audience—not to see the crowd, but to find Jane. She was in the front row, as promised. Andrew was to her left, Nick to her right, but it was Jane who held Laura’s attention. They exchanged private smiles before Laura turned back to the stage.
She had to start this so that she could end it.
Microphones pointed rifle-like at four chairs that were separated by small side tables. Laura had not been part of any discussion regarding seating, so she stopped at the first chair. Beads of sweat broke out onto her upper lip. The harsh lights might as well have been lasers. She realized too late that this was the part she should have practiced. The chair was typical Scandinavian design: beautiful to look at, but low to the ground with not much support in the back. Worse yet, it appeared to swivel.
“Doctor?” Maes grabbed the back of the adjacent chair, holding it still for her. So, Laura was meant to go in the middle. She lowered herself into the low chair, the muscles in her shoulders and legs spasming with pain.
“Yes?” Maes offered to lay her cane on the floor.
“Yes.” Laura clutched her purse in her lap. “Thank you.”
Maes took the chair on her left. Friedrich walked to the far end, leaving the chair beside Laura empty.
She looked past the pointed end of the microphones into the crowd. The clapping was tapering off. People were starting to take their seats.
Martin Queller was not quite ready to let them settle. He stood with his hand high in the air as he saluted the audience. Poor optics, given Maplecroft’s line about Göring. As was the slight bow he gave before finally taking the chair center stage.
Now the audience began to settle. The last of the stray claps died down. The house lights lowered. The stage lights came up.
Laura blinked, momentarily blinded. She waited for the inevitable, which was for Martin Queller to adjust the microphone to his satisfaction and begin speaking.
He said, “On behalf of my fellow panelists, I’d like to thank you for your attendance. It is my fervent hope that our discourse remain lively and civil and, most importantly, that it lives up to your expectations.” He looked to his left, then right, as he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a stack of index cards. “Let’s begin with what Comrade General Secretary Gorbachev has dubbed the ‘Era of Stagnation.’”
There was laughter from the crowd.
“Dr. Maes, let’s let you take this one.” Martin Queller was, it must be said, a man who could command a room. He was clearly putting on a show, teasing around the edges of the topic they had all come to see debated. In his youth, he’d likely been considered attractive in that way that money makes a boring man suddenly interesting. Age had agreed with him. Laura knew he was sixty-three, but his dark hair was only slightly peppered with gray. The aquiline nose was less pronounced than in his photographs, which had likely been chosen for their ability to garner respect rather than physical admiration. People often mistook personality for character.
“What of Chernenko, Herr Richter?” Martin’s voice boomed without the aid of a microphone. “Is it likely we’ll see the full implementation of Andropov’s arguably modest reforms?”
“Well,” Friedrich began. “As perhaps the Russians would tell us, ‘When money speaks, the truth keeps silent.’”
There was another smattering of laughter.
Laura shifted in the chair as she tried to relieve the pain radiating down her leg. Her sciatic nerve sang like the strings of a harp. Instead of listening to Friedrich’s densely academic answer, she stared off to the side of the audience. There was a bank of lights hanging from a metal pole. A man stood on a raised platform working a shoulder-mounted Beta Movie video camera. His hand manually twisted around the lens. The lighting had likely thrown off the auto-focus.
Laura looked down at her own hand. The thumb and two of her fingers were still calloused from years of adjusting the focus ring on her Hasselblad.
The month before Lila had died, she’d told Laura that she wanted to take photography lessons, just not from her mother. Laura had been hurt. She was, after all, a professional photographer. But then a friend had reminded Laura that teenage girls were finished learning from their mothers until they had children of their own, and Laura had decided to bide her time.
And then time had run out.
All because of Martin Queller.
“—the juxtaposition of social policy and economics,” Martin was saying. “So, Dr. Maplecroft, while you might disagree with what you call the ‘atavistic tone’ of the Queller Correction, I merely sought to put a name to a statistically occurring phenomenon.”