coffee and Partment cooked big vats of beer soup every morning.
“But will they bite?” he said.
“Of course not,” Partment said, leaning back in his chair, “They’d
lose their precious profits. And Bidden will never quit. But it sounds
good and the public will think we’re doing something noble. It gives
us an excuse to pick off Biddenbrooks one by one.”
“Cool,” Bean said. “But how do we do it? We can’t just walk in.”
“Sure we can. That’s the beauty of it. Anyone can walk into a
Biddenbrooks store, order a coffee, and plant a bomb. And there are
so many franchises that they couldn’t possibly sweep all of them.”
“What if they don’t believe you? What if people get killed? Maybe
you should send a message to the TV news as well.”
Bidden stared at his computer screen for a while, thinking,
mulling and measuring. “No. If people get hurt, we win even more.
Everyone will say Biddenbrooks doesn’t care about the lives of their
patrons. That would be the end of them.”
Bean’s face fell. He had perpetrated lots of random violence in
his time, but not on this scale. Partment sensed his consternation.
“Kill a little and they throw you in jail,” the old man consoled
him, “Kill a lot and they make you king. Don’t worry, we’ll keep the
casualties to a minimum.”
“I can live with that,” he said. “When do we start?”
“Immediately. Only there’s one thing we’re going to have to do
first. And it won’t be easy. I’m going to need full cooperation on this
one, however.”
Bean put his big hands together and nodded. “Whatever it takes.”
Partment threw him a catalog from some preppy east-coast
clothing company. Bean flipped through it.
Partment said, “A shipment of that stuff is coming in today. I’m
going to need everyone to look like the guys and gals in those
photos.”
Bean glanced up, disbelieving. “Why?”
“If we go in looking like the lunatics we are, we’ll get caught for
sure. We’ve got to take out all the piercings, cover up all the tattoos,
cut the hair back to normal. Toupees for the shaved heads. And
baths. Lots of baths.”
“And we need to do all this by the weekend?” Bean protested,
“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
“Neither was it destroyed that fast. But things have gotten more
efficient since then.”
ABYSSINIA
318
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