Warren Murphy: Market Force

The three-man camera crew was no longer looking his way.

That was odd. He had gotten used to the cameras always being aimed at him. But now they were aimed at the ground. Chappel had come to think of the camera operators as cyborgs, their cameras permanently affixed to their faces. But the faces had emerged. What's more, they looked worried. They were staring down the street.

Chappel followed their line of sight.

"Oh, great," he said, rolling his eyes. "Not again."

There was a group of people heading his way. That was part of the problem with using a public locale for Winner. When the Harlem location was first brought up, there were fears for the safety of the contestants. It turned out those concerns were unnecessary. The biggest worry in this modern era of celebrity worship were those locals who wanted to get in on the act.

People had been trying to crash the Winner set for the past month. At first Chappel assumed the group coming down the street was just the latest in the seemingly endless parade of media whores. But as they closed in, he realized these ones seemed a tad more focused than the rest had been.

They didn't talk. They just marched up the road. They were carrying things in their hands. Some had boards or iron bars, others had chains.

Chappel gulped. "Um," he said out of the corner of his mouth, "you think they want our autographs?" When he turned to David Felder, he was dismayed to find that his partner was no longer digging in the snow.

Felder was hightailing across the vacant lot. As he ran, he flung his knapsack. Syringes scattered across the snow.

Two cameramen were on Felder's heels. They were struggling under the weight of their cameras. The third flung his camera at the approaching mob.

"Run, you moron!" he screamed.

It was the first time R. Chappel had ever heard one of the cameramen speak.

Fear set in. Chappel turned and ran after the man. As he raced across the lot, he heard the steady beat of a hundred footfalls behind him. He looked over his shoulder.

Big mistake. The instant he looked back, he tripped on a malt liquor bottle and landed in a heap on a broken-down chain-link fence. When he rolled back over, the shadows were already falling over him.

The mob was on him.

They didn't seem interested in David Felder or the three fleeing cameramen. The mob let the others make good their escape, surrounding the lone, terrified game-show contestant.

Chappel cowered from the sea of blank faces. A rusted piece of twisted metal dug into the small of his back.

"What do you want?" he asked, his voice small with fear.

The crowd didn't answer. It stood quietly over him. There was no talking, no shouting. Just utter silence. After a long moment, the multitude parted.

An obese man in a green jogging suit waddled from the mob. His eyes were as blank as the rest. In his dark hands he clutched a palm-size portable television set with a two-inch screen. The fat man looked from the tiny little screen to the frightened man on the ground.

"Dat's the one," he proclaimed loudly. He flashed the tiny TV to the crowd.

A few others had battery sets, as well. They passed them around, dull eyes feeding hungrily on the small image. When they were through, they refocused attention on R. Chappel. This time Chappel saw the blood lust in their eyes. It was the last thing he would ever see.

Without a peep, without a whisper, without a single angry word, the silent mob fell on R. Chappel. They hit him with boards and rods. They beat him until his bones broke and his skin was bruised and bloodied.

At first the pain was unbearable. Then it wasn't so bad. Then it was nothing, as the great numbness of death washed over him. When the final blow that technically ended his life came at last, he was already gone. With a nail driven deep into his brain, "R." Remo Chappel was voted from this life to the next.

THE FORMER PRESIDENT of the United States watched the dilapidated buildings and burned-out cars through the window of his armor-plated limousine.

Even though the people here loved him, the expresident hated Harlem. He was attracted to places that thrummed with life, like the real New York City and Los Angeles. The whole world knew Harlem was dead from the neck down.

For this former president, the best gauge of a locale's vitality was whether or not it could sustain a steady stream of thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinners. Judging by the residents he glimpsed through the tinted windows of his car, the people of Harlem would be lucky to scrape up ten bucks for a Whopper with cheese and a battle of Crazy Horse.

Everything was so dreary and depressing. One thing was certain. He wouldn't be caught dead here if not for yet another one of the million little public-relations nightmares that seemed to always hang in the air around him like the warm stink around a public outhouse.

When he had surrendered the presidency, he had originally tried to rent space on Manhattan's upper west side. But those yammering pests in flyover country had gotten a major-league bug up their collective ass over the monthly 1.2 million dollars of taxpayer money it would cost to rent his pricey Manhattan digs. If it were up to him, he would have flipped them all the bird and settled like a dethroned king in his new apartment. But his wife was in the Senate by that point, and her political fate was tied to his approval numbers. When he began to drop in the polls like a plummeting anvil, the former first lady had insisted that he find a more suitable spot for his retirement offices. That's when the Reverend Hal Shittman stepped in.

Shittman was a rabble-rousing Harlem minister whose appetite for inflammatory rhetoric was matched only by his gastronomic intake. The minister had suggested publicly that the former president should take some office space in Harlem. A reward for the unflagging support of the black community.

The former president's wife loved the idea. So did the press and the people in Harlem. Everyone thought it was a great idea. Everyone, that was, except the former president.

Life was not as it had been when he was leader of the entire free world. In his time out of political office, he had learned, as all ex-presidents learned, that his opinion on a subject no longer held the weight it once did. In the end the advisers won out and the former president lost. With much fanfare he had accepted the minister's offer.

Quietly, the former president had enjoyed a secret victory. Although he had showed up for the ribbon-cutting ceremony of his new offices, that was the last time he had seen the place. In the ensuing months he had stayed away, opting for foreign trips and domestic fund-raising events.

He would have been happy to never again darken the door of his official offices. Unfortunately, he hadn't factored in the raging ego of the man who had saved his fanny all those months ago.

Hal Shittman had started talking to the press. The minister had noticed the president's conspicuous absence from his own offices. The complaints were loud and frequent. So loud were they that the expresident's wife had gotten wind of the brewing crisis all the way down in Washington.

At the time, the former first lady's approval ratings as the junior senator from New York were in a tumble. The black vote was a vital part of her core constituency. In an angry phone call that had lasted all of one minute, she had dispatched the former president to Harlem with a four-word command: "Fix it or else."

And so it was that the ex-president of the United States found himself slouched morosely in the back seat of his car as it drove along Martin Luther King Boulevard on the way to the offices he swore he'd never set foot in again.

There were only three Secret Service men in the car with him. Two were in the front, one in the back. Not like the old days.