Revolution Number 9 (33 page)

And then walked on. Just another urban crank.

Charlie rose. The questions raised by the sight of the young man with the trumpet coiled and uncoiled in his mind. He had no answers. All he knew were two things: Hugo Klein had dropped a red rose into the blue Tercel, and the young man looked just like him. But could he really be sure of the second? Maybe it was his imagination, coming up with possible complications on its own. Charlie walked up to the front door and knocked.

No one answered. The house was silent.

Charlie opened the mailbox beside the door. Inside were two envelopes and a Sears catalog, all addressed to “Resident.” Charlie replaced them and knocked again. Silence.

He glanced around, saw no one, then pressed his face against the half-moon window in the door. He saw an entrance hall with a dead plant in one corner and a coatrack in the other. A black T-shirt bearing glittery writing hung on the coatrack. He could read “Paco’s.”

Charlie left the front door, walked around the side of the house. A picket fence enclosed the tiny backyard. The gate hung on one hinge. Charlie pushed through.

There was nothing in the yard: no trees, no flowers, no bicycles, no lawn furniture, no barbecue; just a distant and partial view of the bay. Charlie went to the back door.

He looked in, saw a washer and dryer. A brassiere and panties were spread on a towel. Through a doorway beyond he saw into the kitchen: a refrigerator with nothing tacked on it and a bare table.

Charlie tried the door. It was locked. He leaned his shoulder against it. The door gave slightly, as though the lock were loose or the materials worn and second-rate. He glanced around again. No one was watching. He was free to do a criminal thing. And why not? He was a criminal, and he had enemies—yes, why not call them that?—who were prepared to commit violent crimes. Still, Charlie almost turned and walked away.

But in the end he could not. He lowered his shoulder and drove it into the door. Wood splintered around the lock, making
a sound like crashing surf. He fought off the urge to glance behind him and hit the door again. It swung open and he went in.

And once in, he searched the house without compunction. He checked the sizes of the panties and brassiere, not quite dry, on the towel. Medium and 36C, but what did that mean? People change shape in twenty years, and he didn’t think Rebecca had ever worn brassieres. That didn’t stop him from opening the dryer and examining everything inside: all of it women’s clothing, all of good quality. He checked the pockets, found nothing but a dollar bill, wadded in a tight, clean ball.

Charlie moved into the kitchen. Searching the dryer had reminded him of Malik, stuck in red ice. He opened the refrigerator. The only corpse was on the bottom shelf, a plastic-wrapped fowl. The perp was Frank Perdue.

The coffee in the coffeemaker was still warm. Charlie took a mug marked with two Chinese characters from the dish rack, poured some and tasted it. Very good. He wondered whether the young man with the trumpet had made it.

In a drawer beneath the wall phone was a phone book. Charlie leafed through it. There were no handwritten numbers inside, no messages, nothing underlined. He went into the dining room and then the living room. There was furniture, but it hardly seemed used; there were books, but they didn’t look read; a desk, but no bills, letters, bank statements, address books, or anything with a name on it in the drawers. Charlie went upstairs.

On the second floor were two bedrooms and a bathroom. Charlie went into the bathroom first. There was a wet towel on the floor, and water drops still clung to the inside of the stall shower. A blob of shaving cream lay on the counter by the sink. Charlie opened the mirrored cabinet. Inside he found soaps and cosmetics in fancy packages with European names on them. Charlie closed the cabinet, and saw a tired and troubled face in the mirror.

He went into the first bedroom. It had a single bed, stripped, and nothing in the chest of drawers but a few worn sweatshirts—size, men’s X-large. Charlie opened the closet. On the single hanger was a purple satin jacket of the size a big twelve-year-old might wear. On the back was stitched in gold thread:
“East Bay Little League Division One 1982 Champions.” On the sleeve: “Malcolm.” There was nothing else of note in the room except a black-and-white poster of Wynton Marsalis.

Charlie went into the second bedroom and stopped right away. He knew. It was the bed that did it, a big bed with a painted headboard, carved posts, a canopy like soft pink clouds. For a moment he thought it was the princess bed, but it was not. Charlie remembered fat putti on the headboard of the princess bed; the painting on this headboard showed a Tuscan landscape in the evening. But close enough. He knew.

Charlie checked the walls. There were no posters of Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, La Pasionaria, Mao, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, General Giap; just restful European landscapes, bathed in soft Mediterranean light.

Malcolm X
, Charlie thought. He stood in the doorway for a long time.

After a while he searched the room. He found the predictable: clothing, shoes, bedding. The unpredictable: a black, luridly detailed vibrating device. But nothing with a name on it.

Nothing with a name
. The phrase stuck in his mind, blocking other thought. He was tired. When had he last slept? In Toronto, or before? Charlie sat down on the bed, trying to remember. He couldn’t. He sat there for a long time.
Should I be sitting on this bed? Why not? It’s just a bed, isn’t it?
And he felt like sitting.

Shadows slid slowly across the floor. The bed was soft, the Tuscan landscape a sleep-inducing sfumato-land of crumbling statues and dying light. Maybe if he put his head down, just for a second, it would come to him, whatever he was trying to remember.

Charlie put his head down.

T
here was a knock at the door. “Don’t even think about it,” Pleasance said in a low voice, up off his chair and onto his feet with the speed and silence of a forest creature.

Emily thought about it anyway, but what could she do? She was in the broom closet, bound to a chair with duct tape; there was another strip of it across her mouth. Pleasance shut the closet, and then there was nothing to see but a keyhole-shaped piece of daylight.

Emily didn’t hear Pleasance’s footsteps, but after a moment or two she heard the front door open. Then came a voice: “Is Emily in?”

A man’s voice, and not just any man’s, but the first man’s voice she had known. Still, it was so unexpected she almost didn’t recognize it at once: her father’s voice.

“Emily?” said Pleasance.

“Emily Rice,” said her father. After a slight pause that was full of meaning, although perhaps meaning undecipherable to anyone but Emily or her mother, he added: “Or she may be calling herself Ochs now.”

“Emily,” said Pleasance. “You betcha. The thing is she’s not here right now.”

“What about her husband?”

“He’s gone too.”

“When will they be back?”

“Hard to say. I’m kind of … house-sitting, see? While they’re away.”

“Where are they?”

“New York.”

“They are? Emily hates New York.”

“Me too,” said Pleasance.

There was another pause, longer this time. “You’re a friend of Emily’s?”

“My connection’s more with Charlie, if truth be known. But she’s a fine gal, just fine.”

“I’m her father.” His voice was cold.

“Jack Pleasance, captain, U.S. Army, retired. Pleased to meet you.”

Another pause. Emily had the horrid thought that the two men were shaking hands. “Did I see you at the wedding?” her father asked.

“Couldn’t make it, to my great sorrow. Heard it was quite a bash.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“No? Well, everybody has their own idea about fun, right? I saw things in Saigon you wouldn’t believe.”

“You were there?”

“ ’Sixty-five to ’sixty-seven. It was the biggest fuck-up there ever was.”

“I won’t disagree with that.”

“You were there too?”

“Twice. With the Marine Corps.”

“Well
semper fi
, you ol’ son of a gun,” said Pleasance, and there was another pause. Perhaps they were shaking hands again.

“Charlie didn’t strike me as someone with military friends,” her father said. Did his voice seem less cold? It did.

Pleasance laughed. “Those fucking radicals,” he said.

“Charlie’s a radical?”

“Oh, not now. For sure not now. Now he fits right in like you don’t even see he’s there. But me and Charlie go back some, way, way back.”

“To Pittsburgh?”

“Pittsburgh?”

“He came from Pittsburgh, didn’t he?”

“Oh, sure. Steel City. Right. But we hooked up a little after that. In college, it was.”

“Charlie went to college?”

“Hell, yes. How do you think the fucker ducked the draft?”

Come on, Daddy. Pick up on it—he’s no friend
.

Her father said: “I knew it.”

“Huh?”

“But you’re friends.”

“Why not?”

“What you said. The draft.”

“All that’s water under the bridge,” Pleasance said. “Spilled milk, if you know what I mean. Violence is as American as … what is it again? Anyhoo, you gotta love Charlie. Shit, you must know that. He married into your family, right? Draft dodger or no draft dodger.”

“Right,” said her father; his voice was grim.

Daddy: look at what’s in front of your face
. But she knew he wouldn’t. Pleasance had found his blind spot.

Pleasance said: “Well, then. Anything else I can he’p you with?”

“I don’t think so,” her father said. “When did you say they’d be back?”

“Be a few days or so, if I know Charlie. The lobsters have been lying low the past while, to hear him tell it.”

Emily thought she heard her father sigh. “Too bad,” he said. “I was in Boston for the day on business and we got out early. Took a chance she’d be in. Tell her I stopped by, will you?”

“You betcha,” said Pleasance.

Emily tried to lean forward, sideways, backward, in any direction, to somehow start the chair rocking and tip it over, to somehow make a noise her father would hear. But she was too tightly bound; all the parts of her body were one with the chair. All the parts except her head. She jerked it back with force, cracking it against the rear wall of the closet.

Then she listened. She heard Pleasance talking; perhaps his voice has risen a little: to mask her sound? “Be seeing you, then,” he was saying. “So long.”

Emily pounded her head against the wall. She listened.

Silence.

She pounded it again.

And heard her father say: “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” said Pleasance.

“I heard a noise. Kind of a thump. Inside.”

“I didn’t,” said Pleasance.

Emily forced herself to do it again, with all her strength.

“That,” said her father.

“Oh, that,” said Pleasance. “Just the darned screen door out back. Old Charlie’s not exactly Mr. Fix-it around the house.”

“No? He looked pretty handy to me.”

Pleasance laughed. “Hell, I thought you knew him. Are we talking about the same Charlie?”

“I know him well enough,” Doug Rice said. There was animosity in his tone. Emily couldn’t tell whether it was directed at Pleasance or Charlie. The idea that it might be Charlie made her angry. She banged her head again, angrily.

Silence. Then her father said: “Tell her I’ll be in touch.”

“You betcha.”

The front door closed. A few moments later a car started. The sound of the motor faded and faded and died away. And that was Daddy.

The closet door opened and light came in. The first thing Emily saw was a lean, capable hand, contracted into a fist. Nothing moved in the little closet world except one of Pleasance’s eyelids: it began to twitch.

“You’ll be first,” he told her. “You and little Ronnie, of course. So ol’ Charlie can see. It’s only fair, right?”

Emily, mouth taped, head full of pain, glared at him. He looked down at her, then away, taking a bottle from his back pocket. He gulped from it, once, twice, until it was empty. Sweat popped out on his forehead.

“Only fair,” he repeated. “And then a big surprise for ol’ Charlie.” He tossed the bottle across the room, not hard, but it shattered on the floor anyway.

The act, the noise, the destruction seemed to liberate him in some way. He tore off his shirt as though it were the yoke of civilization. His torso was bony and scarred. He faced Emily again. This time he had no trouble looking her in the eye. He gave her a long uncivilized gaze and shut the closet door.

T
he Committee of the American Resistance—the gang, to Yvonne—was waiting for her in the Estuary Park. She passed the Jack London condos—where soon, if Felipe’s dreams came true, they would be in bed in some well-decorated room of the kind he only saw in the movies, with the possibility of videotaping in the offing—and turned into the park. She stopped the Tercel beside a dented van at the end of the brick-top turnaround, and got out. She didn’t lock the car. There was nothing in it but a red rose, wilting in the back.

It wasn’t much of a park: small and grassless, with a few stunted palms not much bigger than houseplants growing by the waterfront. It wasn’t much of a night, either: cool and damp, with marine mist blowing in from the west. The mist thickened to fog as she watched, dimming the lights of Alameda in the distance. Across the estuary, on the south side, three silhouetted forms separated themselves from the darkness: the long wooden pier that stretched into the inner harbor, the warehouse that rose behind it, the oceangoing freighter that was docked to its end. She smelled rotting seaweed, rotting fish, garbage, waste.

The side door of the van opened and Eli climbed out. She could smell him, too, smell his nervous sweat, and in the glow of the van’s interior light that spilled out, she could see the stains spreading under the arms of his denim work shirt. He smiled at her and said, “A nice night for it.” His smile was too tight, his voice too high; and he himself was too young.