“We didn’t call them right away. When we did it was too late. We’re barricaded in here.”
The team sat about at their desks pretending to work, pretending not to notice the noise from the corridor.
Paul, however, was not in the least disturbed. He was standing by the window in his office looking out. Clarissa, her hat and her hair together awry: a confusion of straw and veil and bolts of reddish hair apparently not all her own, was making-up in a pocket mirror.
“Ravenous, wild beasts!” she hailed me. “I’ve seen their likes before.”
“Gene, good fellow! Got through the mob all right? Here, have a bit of brandy. No? Perhaps some Scotch?”
I said it was too early for me to drink. Shakily, I sat down. Paul laughed at the sight of us. “You both look like the end of the world has come.”
“I’d always pictured the end as being quite orderly....” I began stuffily but Doctor Stokharin’s loud entrance interrupted me. His spectacles were dangling from one ear and his tie had been pulled around from front to back quite neatly. “No authority!” he bellowed, ignoring all of us. “The absence of a traditional patriarch, the center of the tribe, has made them insecure. Only together do they feel warmth in great swarming hives!” His voice rose sharply and broke on the word “hives” into a squeak. He took the proffered brandy and sat down, his clothes still disarranged.
“My hair,” said Clarissa grimly, “may never come out right again today.” She put the mirror back into her purse which she closed with a loud snap. “I don’t see, Paul, why you didn’t have the foresight to call the police in advance and demand protection.”
“I had no idea it would be like this. Believe me, Clarissa, it’s not deliberate.” But from his excited chuckling, I could see that he was delighted with the confusion. The triumph of the publicist’s dark art. I wondered if he might not have had a hand in it: it was a little reminiscent of the crowds of screaming women which in earlier decades, goaded by publicists, had howled and, as Stokharin would say, swarmed about singers and other theatrical idols.
Paul anticipated my suspicions. “Didn’t have a thing to do with it, I swear. Doctor, your tie is hanging down your back.”