Nashville: The Mood (Part 2)

by Donald H. Carpenter

  “I’ll tell you, Mayor, I’m getting some strange stories about this thing.”

  The chief of police sat back in his chair and swiveled around slowly. He liked the mayor personally, but the mayor was a master politician, and it was always difficult to know what he was thinking, and what he really believed in, if anything. He watched as the mayor appeared to think about what he had been saying, and let a long period of silence go by while they just sat there. The mayor’s two aides, one on each end of the desk, watched the mayor intently, each nervously glancing every once in a while at the chief.

  “’The Day After Society’?” the mayor asked evenly. The mayor never got concerned about anything, the chief thought to himself. If he did, it was an act. “You say that’s the name of this group?”

  “That’s what I’m hearing. I’ve heard it from more than one place. But I don’t know if any of them know what they’re talking about.”

  “Who’s saying all this? The usual fearmongers? The religious set?”

  The chief shifted uncomfortably. He was a long time churchgoer with deep roots in his church community. He was a deacon there, and never missed a Sunday service. He had been going so long that to quit now would cause major issues, both within his family and within the surrounding community. He knew what the mayor was getting at, but he felt uncomfortable thinking about it in those terms.

  “This sounds like something somebody writing a satire would come up with,” the mayor said. “A group that targets underage kids for the day when they turn eighteen in order to introduce them to a sexual lifestyle?”

  “The day after,” one of the mayor’s aides chimed in from the side.

  “The day after,” the mayor said softly, almost where no one in the room could hear. He leaned back and looked at the ceiling for a while. Then, unexpectedly, he glanced to one aide, then quickly to the other, then glanced across the desk at the chief.

  After a few more moments of silence, the mayor stood up slowly and walked over to the main window in his office. He looked down, far down, into the street. Everything seemed slow in downtown Nashville. There was very little pedestrian traffic or vehicular traffic, and one could almost see the stillness in the street many stories below. The mayor stood there, looking downward for a while. Then he raised his glance and looked out, past the city limits as far as he could see, into the surrounding countryside. Everything looked green and fresh from the recent rains, and if one had ignored the buildings immediately in the front part of the view, one could have imagined he was far out in the countryside, enjoying a uniquely rural picture of life.

  What is he doing? the chief thought to himself. I’ll never understand this guy as long as I live. He’s clearly in his own little world, and he’d rather not even be disturbed with these troublesome things. The chief remembered other politicians like that. They hadn’t lasted that long, for the simple reason that they couldn’t handle it, couldn’t handle the pressure of dealing with one thing after another. He ought to be on the front lines like I am, thought the chief.

  “What have you done about all this, Chief?”

  “This is the first thing I’ve done, Mayor. I heard the story, the same story, several times from several different people. Nothing solid in it, so I ignored it. But then, after hearing it enough times, I decided I’d better bring it to you. It sounded sensitive enough that maybe we need to get out in front of it.”

  The mayor, still facing out the window, nodded slowly. He hunched up his shoulders, as if he was stretching, or trying to loosen his upper body, then he turned and looked back at the room. He looked at the chief, then to each aide, then to the chief again. His face took on a semi-scowl, and he strode to his desk and sat down. He leaned forward and arched his back and stretched his arms over his head, sitting up straight.

  “These people who have told you this: is it anyone in particular? In other words: who is it?”

  “I’ve never seen two of them before,” the chief said. “One of them called up on the telephone, and then came down to the office. The other one just walked in one day. The third one is someone we’ve dealt with before. Usually, their information has been reliable. The first two, we don’t know anything about.”

  “What did they ask you to do about it?”

  “Nothing, really. They just said it was something they thought we ought to know. But they weren’t demanding any kind of action, especially since they really didn’t know anything first-hand about it.”

  The mayor looked at each person’s face again, and it was evident he was thinking hard about the subject. In truth, he didn’t like the sound of it at all. But, based upon the description, he wondered what could be done about it. It definitely had some political capital to it—he knew that right away. But the question was when to use that capital up, and how.

  “So right now no one’s beating the drums for a meeting—either with you or with me?” the mayor asked the chief.

  “No, not right now. I’ve been waiting on one of these groups to get hold of it and come marching into the office. But so far, that hasn’t happened.”

  “It all sounds extremely vague,” the mayor said. “I wonder if we ought to have the legal department give us their opinion of it, although with just the few details you’ve given me, I’m not sure we even ought to bother them. They’d probably tell us to go to Hell until we know more.”

  The chief nodded. “I hear what you’re saying. They don’t like to be bothered down there unless it’s something urgent. If you set something up with them, Mayor, let me know if you need my input. But I’ve told you everything I know.”

  The mayor still looked concerned. He grimaced, and ran his hand over his face a few times, then both hands, working his forehead and eyebrows and the upper parts of his cheeks, trying to work out stress. He looked at his two aides again. “You two guys know anything about this, hear anything about this?”

  Both of the young men, each with less than a year’s experience with the mayor, shook their heads. They were both somewhat new to the political process, and were hesitant to go out on a limb about anything. The mayor had criticized them before for not showing a little more boldness, but in this instance he let it pass, since the chief didn’t seem to know any more, either.

  The mayor was still clearly agitated. It showed in his face, and in his fidgety movements as he sat in his chair. It was like he wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere but sitting there talking about this particular subject, or maybe any subject at all. The chief speculated that it would only be a matter of seconds before the mayor stood up from his chair and walked around the room again, and sure enough, the mayor soon rose quickly, but trying to project the image of doing it slowly, and went to the window again. He must have sensed that he was doing the same thing he had done only a few minutes ago, because he soon turned from the window and began to stroll around the perimeter of the room, walking slowly, deliberately, as if he wasn’t doing anything terribly dramatic, anything that would call attention to him.

  “Yes, I used to be in the legal department. I was in it a dozen years ago, maybe a little longer than that, when they decided they would enforce the zoning regulations to stamp out prostitution in the city. It was an interesting experiment, but I couldn’t help from wondering at the time if they really thought they were going to end prostitution in a major metropolitan area, or if they really intended to just drive it underground and out of sightI could never get a clear answer from anyoneYou remember those days, Chief.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And you’ve seen or heard nothing else about this, other than what you’ve told me about these three sources?”

  “That’s it.”

  The mayor crossed his arms. He was standing in a remote corner of the room, as far away from anyone else in the room as he could be. He was alone in a shadowy area of the room, and the afternoon sun was streaming into the office, creating a lighted place on the floor that seemed to accentuate the darkness of the area in which he stood. To
the other three men in the room, although they could see the mayor standing in the corner, he became more just a voice, and not an actual physical presence.

  “Let’s keep our eye on this,” they heard the voice say. “This could turn into something. Something in more than one way. It could be a crisis we can prevent, and/or it could be an opportunity.”