The Enthusiast Read Online Free PDF Page A

Tuesday and give it a try. That afternoon I caught up with Gerald at the dorm’s front doors and said, “Hey.”
    He gestured up at the building’s façade, twelve stories of gray slab with slotlike windows and flattened concrete drip marks. In a Slavic accent he said, “One day they come and said my farm is collectivize. Three years I wait the permission to come Moscow. Now I live in all-modern worker building.” He opened the door. “Pliz.” Relieved, I followed him upstairs and told him about my appointment with Troup, and we figured out the three buses I would take to get there.
    I got up at five on Tuesday and put on my suit. On the first bus, I read a newspaper someone had left behind. A mail bomb had been sent to a laboratory that developed satellite tracking systems, killing a research assistant and costing an engineer half her hearing and most of her left arm. A communiqué sent to The Washington Post took responsibility for the bomb, which it said was a blow against “the tracking, banding, and tagging of the most endangered species of all, the free-ranging human individual.” The communiqué’s signer, “Freebird,” had claimed credit for three other attacks, all in the past year. The parts of the bombs that were recovered were handmade and untraceable. The name Freebird was believed to be taken from the old Lynyrd Skynyrd song that jokers were always requestingat rock concerts, regardless of who was playing. The problem for the jokers was that while the bomber was at large, yelling “Freebird!” at a concert would cause people nearby to wheel around and ask, “Song or the guy?” If you said the guy, it could lead to a fistfight, but of course so could the song.
    The last bus went up Sepulveda Boulevard, a tertiary line through a primary city: movie theaters converted to Apostolic churches, marble banks turned Army Navys, and bowling alleys that were still bowling alleys. I thought the neighborhood would stay like that all the way to Troup’s office, which would have the Silex and ceiling tile Gerald had predicted, and that Troup would be the flinty avenger I’d been picturing since our first phone call. He’d wear Haband and drive an Aries K, but the fiduciary cowboys who screwed deputy program managers and their fry-chef children would be sorry they’d ever heard of him.
    I saw myself, the lanky one, sitting next to him in court and handing him smoking-gun depositions. The cowboys would be almost openly snickering at him when the trial started, but by the time he got to his summation those smirks would be coming in staticky, and when he wound up with “Because these are lives we’re talking about, ladies and gentlemen,” they’d be gone. He’d bite his lip, look up at the slow-grinding ceiling fan, then turn back to the jury. “I’m done.”
    But the bus continued to Century City, where the buildings were shiny and tall. Troup’s firm had half of a fifteenth story, and the waiting room was as big as our first floor at home. Swallowed by a bottomless suede sofa under gleaming Chagall posters, I tried to read The Financial Times and Golf Digest while my graduation Weejuns bounced nervously on the three-inch carpet.
    After twenty minutes Troup came out. Instead of the white-haired scrapper I’d expected, he was forty and smooth, in ablue dress shirt with white cuffs and collar and an expensive haircut that draped over one ear, Edwardian hip. He spoke in the same deliberate way he had on the phone, though, so that “Would you like some water?” sounded as if he’d roughed out the offer by himself for a few days and then finalized it with his partners that morning.
    We went into his office, which had two brass nautical clocks and a view of the fancy shopping center next door. He leaned against his desk, the antique-dining-table type, folded his arms, and looked somewhere over my