Location 2:

Columbia University, on the steps. Thursday. 4 o’clock.

After the crossroads and the shooting I took a day to do laundry and wake up slowly. I went to Columbia in the afternoon and I saw a thin crowd lining the big steps of the Lowe library, the large domed building that isn’t a library any more. I walked down past them and onto the steps. I walked across and was heading out of the gates which lead to the subway when I heard the wup-wup of sirens coming closer. I stopped under a tree and saw two police motorcycles pull into the Columbia, along its tiled pathway. After the cycles came two long dark blue Mercedes, one with a flag on the bonnet, then two or three huge black jeeps with lights under the grilles at the front flashing blue and red. As the second one came past I looked in and saw padded black arms and soldier faces bunched up under black helmets. More vehicles, more lights under grilles, a low slung foreign limousine with another flag, more jeeps. It was a motorcade of fifteen dark vehicles, nosing in under the trees at Columbia, pulling up by the big steps of the Lowe library. I walked up and stood on the edge of the steps as the leading mercedeses arrived. Suddenly there was a crowd of secret service men in black suits looking every inch like trained actors, talking into their wrists and touching their ears, looking around, up and down, gathering in a group, a swarm of thirty or fifty and they jogged lightly up the long steps, three further ahead and maybe eight behind, talking into their hands, up the long steps, past the plump security guards and into the building. Gone.

Then I looked back at the motorcade. Some of the drivers were taking pictures of each other. Five of the huge black men had gathered in a group, their long firearms with actionfilm gunsights hanging down and there was a man in a brown suit, standing square in the middle of Columbia’s huge quad. The man in the brown suit was talking into his wrist but he was looking up and making gestures with his other hand. I followed his look and saw along the tops of the faculty buildings that there were men dressed in dark blue with more long guns and huge binoculars scanning the sky and the bright clothes and smiling faces of the hundreds of university students that milled and wheeled in between the darkened windows and shining wheels of the long parked up motorcade. It all looked uncannily like a Hollywood assassination scene. Behind the brown suited man young boys picturesquely dressed in outdated baseball outfits played gently on a tidy lawn with red white and blue banners hanging over the fences. A man walked past holding a bunch of fifty light blue balloons under the bright and puffy clouded sky. A blind woman came by. Ten students with their tops off jogged athletically through the crowd. All the disaster scene extras. And so I stayed for an hour, talking to a friend who is on her way to becoming a Romanian news anchor, waiting for him to come out. Him? Putin. The KGB man Vladimir had been in that pack of secret men who had jogged up the steps and into the building. Putin, movie like, once said there’s no such thing as an ex-KGB man. I’m going to believe him.