Concert of Ghosts (29 page)

She was watching him. He met her eyes briefly, then looked elsewhere. There ought to be birds in here, he thought. Not just these great silent growths and the sound of running water—but birds, life, song.

The girl stared down into her upturned hands. “I didn't tell you about Maggie because I figured you wouldn't help me. You wouldn't want to become involved in my personal, whatever you call it—okay, my private fucking obsession. You'd probably tell me to leave you alone. The search for my mother had unhinged me: Consequently I was reading too many wild things into a photograph. You wouldn't have listened to me, would you? I was just some young bimbo up from the city pathetically chasing a ghost. You wouldn't have time for me.”

“So you edited it,” Tennant said.

“I edited it.”

Find the lady, Tennant thought. What you see is what you get. “How convenient I was facing a drug rap.”

“I had nothing to do with that. That was pure coincidence.”

“Yeah, but you used the situation, Alison.”

“Okay. I used it. I'm sorry.”

“And how convenient I had no goddamn memory. Harry Tennant, a criminal, a blank page. Let's fill in the gaps, Harry. Let's hunt the big white whale of the past, Harry. Let's harpoon that sorry sonofabitch.”

Alison looked at him sadly. “I wanted to find my mother, goddamit. That makes sense, doesn't it? I was desperate, Harry. I didn't set out to uncover all the other shit. I wasn't expecting dead kids and lost memories. And I didn't mean to drag you into anything like this. How could I have known where it was going to lead? How?”

Tennant stuffed his hands in his pockets. She wanted to find her mother, he thought. And so did I. So God help me did I.

He stared up at the vaulted glass roof. Ribbons of condensation slid down the panes and dripped into deep foliage. He thought of the chalet again, the way he'd held the girl even as he called her by her mother's name. He shook his head. Connections he didn't want to make. Thickets of the past, entanglements that threatened to choke him. He stared at the roof. Rain fell on glass.

“I don't need to think this through,” he said. “You and me. Maggie and me.”

“I understand. But you must understand this: I didn't know, and you didn't know.”

“So that makes us innocent?”

“It doesn't make us guilty.”

Tennant said, “I don't care about innocent or guilty. I just don't like the idea of sitting here trying to do calculations in my head. Your birthday. The last time I saw Maggie. I don't need the arithmetic of all that. I don't want to think about it. What good would it do you or me?”

A kid. A daughter
. Was she all he had left of Maggie Silver? The question shocked and depressed him. And yet there was some mild undercurrent in him he didn't want to explore right then: some muted sense of—what?—having reclaimed a lost part of himself. But then he was back in the chalet again, and the vague feeling that had lifted him turned bleak. I don't need to know, he thought. I don't need the burden of proof. I don't want evidence. Maggie Silver might have been unfaithful. Another lover. But he didn't want to believe that any more than he wanted to entertain the idea Alison might be the hapless offspring of a fated liaison between himself and a woman totally lost to him. So which way do you go, Tennant?

“There's a name for this,” he said.

“Forget the name—”

“It runs around and around inside my head, Alison.”

“And you feel what? Disgusted?”

“I don't know if that's the word. I don't know what the word is. This isn't one of your everyday situations, is it?” He saw her stand beside the bed, saw the tight bare breasts, the triangle of underwear, heard the way she'd said,
Take them off
. He remembered sliding them from her hips and the sensation of her flesh under his fingertips. Alison, Maggie, one and the same. You once loved the mother, and you still do.

And now the daughter. The daughter.

She asked, “Suppose we'd never found out? Suppose we'd gone on without discovering Maggie? We'd go deeper and deeper, Harry. You and me. We'd have gone on. We'd have been together. I feel that. I
know
that. If we hadn't found Maggie, we'd never have known, would we? And if we'd never known, and if we survived all this …” She gestured around the conservatory as if the foliage itself were the enemy. “We'd have tried somehow to stay together.”

Yes, he thought. We might have tried. We might have amounted to something. Alison and Harry, a couple, going on blindly into the sunset. Sheer happiness.

Hunched in his overcoat he studied the massive leaf of the philodendron in front of him. He considered the vast mystery of the plant. Controlled and yet finally untrammeled, it forced its way up toward the glass roof, and when it could grow no further it coiled back in on itself, twisting, twining, as if intent on devouring itself. He had the urge to move now, to pick up his bag from the bench and walk.

“I've never been happy with hypothesis. What do we really know anyway? We can't be sure of anything. Leave it that way.” But you do know, Harry. If the child hadn't been his, would Maggie Silver have been allowed to live? Rayland's granddaughter. Your own daughter. Maggie Silver had been protected too. She'd had her life taken away, sure, but she'd been spared because of the child. He felt an enormous sadness. He was being pulled this way and that, with no more control over his responses than an object adrift on a rough tide. Too many strands here, too many blood echoes he hadn't known existed. Breakdown. Collapse. Systems unraveling.

Alison covered the back of his hand with her own. “It doesn't disgust me, Harry. That's not where it leaves me. Sad, sure. More sad than you'll ever know. Because we can't be. Because we don't have a future of the kind we might have considered. But disgust, no, I don't feel anything like that.”

He enjoyed her touch a moment, even the small contrary stirring of godforsaken desire he felt, before he took his hand away.

She said, “We can still have something, Harry. We can still have some kind of love.”

Love? The word had too many meanings, every one elusive. Did she love him as a lover? A father? What did it matter now? He was suffocating in this humid place. The past had betrayed him. The future was obscure. He looked at the girl and he thought:
I
can't have you. But maybe I can have something else. Maybe I can still have Harry Tennant
.

Grabbing his bag, he stood up.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

He didn't answer. Walk away. Do what you have to do on your own. Leave this child out of it. She came after him, tugging at his sleeve. Outside the conservatory, where rain drizzled among the trees, he stopped.

“You don't walk out on me, Harry. No matter what.”

He said nothing.

“I have every right to go wherever you're going,” she said.

What had Rayland said?
Would you want to see her damaged?

“You can't leave me now, Harry.”

“Wait here. I'll come back for you.”

“Screw it. I go where you go.”

He shook his head, but he already knew the depths of her determination, he already knew he had lost the conflict before it had even begun in earnest.

“Don't do this to me,” she said. “I won't put up with it, Harry. I'm in this with you. All the way.”

He started to walk in the direction of the street. She followed. All the way, no matter where. On the sidewalk he scanned traffic for a taxicab. When one finally arrived through the rain, Tennant opened the door and the girl skipped inside before him. She was impossible to restrict. How could he even begin to try?

He told the driver Chinatown and sat back, his eyes closed.

Chinatown. Where Obe had clicked his camera. Where a crowd had gathered more than twenty years ago outside St. Mary's Church. Where the roots of treachery and murder lay. Where a child, a girl, was already forming in Maggie Silver's body.

It was no longer raining by the time the cab dropped them at the intersection of Grant and California. A watery sun hung in the sky, and dark clouds, blown by a breeze from the Bay, streamed above rooftops. Tennant stood on the corner and looked at St. Mary's. A cable car crammed with a laughing tourist party clanged past. Smiling people hung precariously to handrails.

He walked past the church a little way, past the place where Sammy Obe had taken his photographs, down into Chinatown. Alison was keeping up with him. He stopped outside a souvenir shop whose window displayed silk robes and kites and chairs made out of bamboo. A Chinese woman stood in the doorway and regarded him with mild interest.

I came this way with Maggie, he thought. To buy opium. And then a chance encounter with Sammy Obe. A group shot, quickly assembled.
Gimme a knowing look, kids. Gimme the kinda look that says you know something your parents wouldn't begin to dream about. Yeah yeah yeah that's it that's better
. He'd plotted their positions, making Carlos stand here, Bear Sajac there, Maggie in the dead center.
Quit giggling, kid. I want this picture to be kinda solemn. I want you all to look wise
. Tennant pressed his forehead against the window of the store. To look wise. He remembered Obe's hands on his body, pushing him into place.
This is a composition, kids, this isn't some kinda souvenir shot you send your granny. Gimme the look, gimme the look!

Yes. The look.

Tennant stepped back from the glass as if electrified.

“What is it, Harry?” the girl asked.

He hurried back to the street corner and faced the church from the exact position in which Obe had taken his photograph and he said, “There was this crowd outside the church. They just seemed to come out of nowhere. One minute there was nothing, the next, guys in dark suits, then after that, a small bunch of people began to assemble.”

“Why?”

Why? Why, Harry? Tell her. Tell the child. This child. He frowned. A light was burning in the church bookshop. The door to the church was open. A man stood there in shadow, motionless. He raised a hand to his face, touched the side of his scalp as if adjusting his hair, then he moved slightly, deeper into shadow.

“The crowd, Harry. You were saying something about a crowd.”

Yes, he thought. He kept his eyes fixed on the open door. The figure was very still now.

“Harry,” the girl said.

“We stood here,” he said. “Maggie and me and the others. Right here. Obe had his camera—”

“And what happened?”

“Somebody came out of the church.”

“Tell me who.”

He lapsed into dumb silence because he was back more than twenty years ago and he was looking at people emerging from St. Mary's. “The guys in the suits were security people,” he said.

“Security for what?”

Tennant had a moment in which his brain, like a bad tent, collapsed on him, and he couldn't see anything. And then this cleared and he was watching two people come out of St. Mary's and the way some of the security men formed a loose circle around this pair while the others spread out into the crowd. People were singing,
We love you, Bobby. Oh yes we do
. Maggie had raised her fists jubilantly. He remembered that, the glow on her face, the smile lit like a Christmas tree.

He said, “Bobby and Ethel Kennedy came out of the church. They started to walk up toward the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. It was the day before the California primary, Bobby was campaigning here. I guess he'd been to mass in the church. There were all kinds of people round him and his wife. Well-wishers. Security. People singing. We love you, Bobby.”

He thought: Bobby looks young and haggard, as if a premonition of his violent death, a little more than twenty-four hours away, already weighed on him. Ethel is bright, buoyant, and yet in some fashion somber at the heart of her appearance. They are doomed, both of them, but they don't know it yet. Tomorrow, in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Bobby will die from gunshot wounds.

The pantry.

But that isn't it either. That isn't what caused you to raise your hand and point. You weren't pointing at Bobby and Ethel Kennedy.

“I saw something,” he said.

“What, Harry?”

Something. Somebody else. He stopped talking. The memory wouldn't come. He remembered only this: raising his hand, pointing a finger, faces turning, Obe swinging his head around to follow the direction of Tennant's finger.

“What did you see, Harry?”

“I can't get a bearing on it—”

“Harry.”

“I can't—”

“One last step, that's all.”

The crowds, the security people, some of them with walkie-talkies, others with small listening devices attached to their ears, Bobby and Ethel emerging from the church. He saw all that, but he couldn't grasp what it was that had drawn his attention across the street. He remembered the negative in Karen Obe's house, and he thought: There is an accusatory quality in my gesture, and surprise. And cold cold recognition.

But I can't see now what I saw then.

He was aware of a dark brown car edging up to the sidewalk outside the church and idling there. The man in the doorway glanced at the car, moved one hand. It was hard to tell what the motion meant. Quick, surreptitious, a gesture that alarmed Tennant. This is the wrong place, he thought. The wrong time. The vehicle started forward toward the intersection, where it was boxed in by traffic moving on Grant. The man in the shadowy doorway was still again.

“Try, Harry,” Alison said. “Try.”

Tennant's memory was a shipwrecked thing. I lift my hand, I extend a finger, at what? They sweated it out of me, he thought. They made me forget. They went inside my head and killed me.

He leaned against the wall. His legs were weak. I was instructed not to remember this. This is forbidden territory. There is barbed wire hung all around it, and warning signs. I touch the wire and I will bleed.