Miranda nodded, gazing up at her hanging garden, as if waiting patiently for the jungle to return. In some way she seemed almost at odds with her father, trying to undo his work and transform it for her own purposes.
‘Halloway…’ She touched his arm. ‘My father’s very old. I want him to finish this before it’s too late. Stillman’s losing interest. Will you work for us for a while?’
The next day Halloway joined Stillman’s one-man construction gang. He had said goodbye to Olds, who returned with the sailplane to the airport, and spent the night in one of the small hotels around the square.
Riding on the cowling of the tractor’s engine, Halloway squatted in front of the driving cab as Stillman roved the city, searching for the exact models of the cars that Buckmaster had ordered. Each one they carried back to the monument, and Halloway climbed the wall of vehicles and guided Stillman as he steered the largest of the cranes and inserted the car into its place. From the observation platform the old industrialist supervised the work from behind his blueprints. Meanwhile his daughter, dressed for the day in a 1940s business suit, with boxy shoulders and a skirt of brown pin-stripe, her hair in a frizz, moved silently among the flowers in the centre of the memorial, tending the vines and blossoms in this dark, humid arbour.
His involvement with this strange trio surprised Halloway, but he soon realized that each of them played a role in certain unfolding obsessions of his own. Of the three, Stillman with his black jacket and hoodlum style most disturbed and most stimulated him, brooding over a dark dream of the city so like Halloway’s own.
As they drove back through the streets on that first day Halloway had an unsettling glimpse of Stillman’s unpredictable violence. The massive tractor was clanking down a wide avenue, a yellow taxi-cab held in its claw, when they passed a department store. Halloway was sitting in front of the cab, and was nearly flung to the road as Stillman slammed back the left-hand drive lever and turned the tractor towards the sidewalk. Cars were parked nose to tail along the kerb, but Stillman drove straight into them, knocking them out of his way with powerful left and right swings of the taxi. Gripped by the claw, the battered vehicle showered glass and rust on to the road. Working the levers and throttle with hard and almost spasm-like thrusts of his arms and shoulders, Stillman drove the tractor towards the store. His jaws champed rapidly on a piece of gum, but his face was deliberately expressionless, part of a continuous stylization of gesture and movement that Halloway had never seen before and that excited and disturbed him at the same time.
A group of mannequins sat in the store window around a table, part of a mock dinner-party that had started twentyfive years earlier and never proceeded beyond the waxy hors d’oeuvres. The polite poses and prim over-elegant manners clearly pulled a hair-trigger in Stiliman’s mind. As the plate glass collapsed into the sidewalk he slung aside the taxi, sending it rolling across the street, and then began to sweep the mannequins out of the window, scattering them on to the sidewalk.
As he watched the destruction of these smartly attired female figures, Halloway was thinking of Miranda and her obsessive changes of costume. Was this her way of containing Stillman, or of provoking him? Stillman stared at her with a kind of humourless irony, as if forming in his mind a series of obscene jokes about her. Only his deference to the old industrialist seemed to prevent him from assaulting Miranda.
Seizing the yellow taxi again, Stillman set off down the street, the shattered mannequins lying in their tailored rags like the well-to-do victims of a terrorist attack in a fashionable shopping centre. Halloway was shaking with excitement, barely able to keep his seat on the engine cowling. For all his fear of Stiliman, he knew that he was half-hoping that he would be violent again. He imagined the city filled with people, their lives invigorated by just this kind of callous and stylized aggression. When they passed another clothing store with a group of mannequins in the window he tapped the windshield and pointed them out to Stillman.
Later, when Buckmaster and his daughter retired to their third-floor suite in a hotel facing the monument of cars, Stillman and Halloway wandered through the dusk towards a nearby park. Stillman broke into a gunshop, and from the racks behind the counter took down a sporting rifle and shotgun. Pockets filled with cartridges, they strolled into the park, and in the evening light shot quail and a small deer. The roar of gunfire, the coarse smell of the cordite and the hard recoil against his arms and shoulders, the terrified movement of thousands of birds and animals as they fled through the forest, together filled Halloway’s head with fantasies of violence.
