Chapter Thirty-Two

THE FUNERAL

The screen shows a funeral procession on a Manhattan avenue; a moving line of black, purple, and maroon cars on a cloudy slate-gray day. One by one the cars pull into a cemetary.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

At a gravesite the Man in the Black Hat stands impassively, his nondescript wife with Chief Lopate set a few paces behind him. The camera shifts to reveal a row of sober young literary priests on the other side come down from New England.

Lost is another of Black Hat's top lieutenants, second in the past year. This man faced off publicly against the rebels twice; against their best poet; against their most insane clown. Now he's too swiftly gone. Ostensibly a poet-- an easy cover-- in fact he'd been a chief apparatchik who'd been key in putting together and maintaining the system of literary control and indoctrination now solidly in place.

A twisted curl appears on Black Hat's lower lip-- we see only the lower half of his face, beneath the black veil. Without a word he turns bitterly from the grave and moves up a rise away from his friends and colleagues, toward a crypt at the center of the cemetary.

Inside: black walls. In front of him is a brass name plate. The camera zooms in on it. We can't read it but know it's for his grandfather or other ancestor, one in an endless line of Puritan-bred patriarchs who've passed on to Black Hat his unbreachable name, his legacy, and his obligations. He feels buried alive. Buried! In this crypt, this grave, this walled prison cell trapping him on a path of power and manipulation from which there's never an escape.

He can't breathe. Cars and people await outside but he doesn't want them. He lies on the cold stone floor like a boy in his mansion's room, saying over and over "Not me, not me, not me. . . ."