Revolution Number 9

by Peter Abrahams

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.” He rolled on top of her, looked into the dark eyes. “There,” he said, “have a field day.”

  “That’s my plan,” she told him, reaching out to switch off the light. “Bodies like yours aren’t found in my circles.”

  “What circles are those?” Blake asked. But by that time Rebecca was busy with something else.

  · · ·

  Charlie rewound the microfilm and brought it to the desk. “Is there a list of alumni?” he said.

  The librarian looked up from the book she was reading. “The Alumni Directory, do you mean?” She was young, probably a student with a summer job in the library, except that Charlie didn’t remember students reading books like How to Make a Bear Market Work for You. He nodded. “This year’s won’t be ready till September,” she said.

  “Last year’s will do.”

  Charlie sat at a desk looking through last year’s Alumni Directory. The listings, alphabetical, included each alumnus’s class, home address, and profession. There were thousands of them, but none for Rebecca Klein or Andrew Malik, as Charlie had expected; otherwise, Mr. G would have no need of him. He had expected an entry between Ricardo Levin, ’74, eco-planner from Colorado Springs, and Amy Lewis, ’88, analyst at Morgan Stanley, but there was nothing there, either; nothing where Stuart Levine should have been.

  Charlie looked up. The librarian was watching him. Why? Had she somehow recognized his face? He had the unlikely thought that he might be the subject of a history paper she’d written on campus unrest, or at least a footnote.

  “Need some help?” she asked.

  He tapped the directory. “What if someone isn’t in here?”

  “Then they’re on the lost list. Or dead. You’d have to call the Alumni Office to find out which.” She picked up a phone and started dialing. “What’s the name?”

  “Stuart Levine.”

  The librarian lowered the phone. “Undergraduates aren’t in the book either, of course.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They’re not alumni, by definition. Like Stu Levine. He’s in my class.”

  Charlie had heard of adults returning to college after long absences, but he couldn’t see the Stu Levine he had known in that role. “How old is he?”

  “I don’t know. Nineteen or twenty. My age.”

  “Then he’s not the one,” Charlie said, closing the directory.

  The librarian was watching him again. “Stu is a Junior, though, I think.” Charlie rose and moved toward the door. “I don’t mean a junior, like in freshman, sophomore, although he is one,” the librarian continued. She waited for Charlie to respond, but she had lost him. “I mean Junior like in Stuart Levine, Jr.,” she said. “Maybe he’s the son of the one you want.” Charlie stopped and turned to her. “And the thing is you can talk to him if you want. He’s got some assignments to finish.”

  “In the lab?” Charlie said.

  “How did you know that?”

  The science building was new, and in the context of its red brick and white clapboard neighbors, aggressively so. It might have been designed by architects hoping to land fat contracts when the time came for the colonization of Mars. The lobby had black floors, black walls, a hanging silver globe, and a black leather sign-in book at the unattended modular desk. The last entry, written in an uneven, spiky hand, read “Levine, Rm. 310.” Charlie looked for stairs, found none, and rode the elevator to the third floor.

  The door to room 310 was closed. Charlie was about to knock when he heard a crashing sound inside, followed by a cry, almost a wail, of “Shit, shit, shit.” He opened the door.

  There were half a dozen big chemistry desks inside, equipped with sinks, burners, retorts, test tube racks. A skinny young man stood at one of them, staring down at a pool of yellow ooze spreading across the floor. It began to smoke.

  “Stuart Levine?” Charlie said.

  The young man, a boy really, pale and bony, looked up, squinting at Charlie through the fingerprint-smeared lenses of his glasses. “Geez,” he said, “I’m booked in here till three, and it’s only …” He checked his watch. “Oh, God. I’m hopelessly …” For a moment, Charlie, shocked by the resemblance, couldn’t say a word. This was Stu Levine, his Stu Levine—Bombo—and twenty-two years hadn’t passed and none of it had happened. Except for the Martian building he was standing in, that is, and the pain deep under his sternum where Svenson’s rifle butt had struck, he might have almost believed it.

  Charlie said, “It’s OK. I don’t need the lab.”

  Stuart Levine, Jr., nodded, but might not have absorbed the information. He was distracted by the yellow pool at his feet. It was hissing.

  “What is that stuff?” Charlie asked, coming closer.

  “This and that,” said Stuart Levine, Jr., and Charlie wondered whether there was a gene that programmed helplessness.

  “Hadn’t we better get it cleaned up?”

  “I guess so,” said Stuart Levine, Jr. But he didn’t move. Perhaps he wouldn’t until the liquid dissolved the floor and he fell through.

  Charlie opened a closet, found mop, pail, detergent. He filled the pail with water and approached the spill. Remembering rules for dealing with this sort of thing, he said: “Is it acid?”

  “Partly,” said Stuart Levine, Jr.

  Charlie withheld the water, returned to the closet. In the end he scooped the liquid up with steel dustpans and dumped it into a container marked “Toxic Waste.” All that remained was a blackened circle on the floor. Stuart Levine, Jr., rubbed at it with the sole of his sneaker but it wouldn’t go away.

  The top of the desk was a clutter of test tubes filled with different-colored liquids and solids. Two centrifuges spun at the center, and a colorless liquid in a large retort heated over a bunsen burner. “What’s this all about?” Charlie asked.

  “Oh, ions and stuff,” said Stuart Levine, Jr., waving his arm over the desk in a dismissive way. His hand brushed a beaker, which overturned, dumping its contents in the sink. “Christ,” he said, quickly placing the plastic cover over the sink. He glanced at Charlie to see if he had noticed this latest accident. Charlie pretended he hadn’t. Stuart Levine, Jr., now taking him in for the first time, said, “Uh, thanks for helping with the …” He waved his hand in another loose gesture, this time without consequences.

  “You’re welcome,” Charlie said.

  “Thanks.” Stuart Levine, Jr., out of conversation, at the mercy of events, shifted from foot to foot.

  Charlie said: “How’s your father?”

  Stuart Levine, Jr., squinted up at him through the smudged glasses. “You know my father?”

  Charlie thought: How easy to be a wolf at a place like this, among innocents like Junior. He said: “I knew him at one time.”

  “Yeah? When, like?”

  “A while back.”

  “Before SLI?”

  “SLI?”

  “Stuart Levine Industries,” said Junior, looking surprised.

  “Right. Before.”

  “At MIT?”

  Charlie couldn’t imagine his Stu, Bombo, at MIT. “After,” he said. He waited for Junior to ask him when after or who he was or what he was doing here. Instead, the boy stared down at the whirling centrifuges, sighed, and said: “He’s going public.”

  “Stu?”

  The son nodded. “Nasdaq,” he said. “It’s all set. We’re going to be rich. Richer.” He didn’t look happy about it.

  “You don’t look happy about it.”

  “I don’t?” the boy said, as though it were a revelation. He gazed up at Charlie. His expression changed. Here come the questions, Charlie thought, and got ready to trot out the imperfect cover story he’d prepared.

  He never had to use it. The next moment there was a tremendous boom, and the plastic sink covers from every desk shot into the air, one or two striking the ceiling, followed by gaudily toned geysers of detritus from the plumbing system.

  Ju
nior looked around wildly. He began to shake. It wasn’t a figure of speech. “Did I do that?” he said. He was his father’s—Bombo’s—son; especially if it’s true that history is farce the second time around.

  · · ·

  Charlie stood outside Cullen House. It was a rambling structure of brick and stone, sporting columns, a frieze, and other architectural flourishes he didn’t know the names of. An industrial-size vacuum cleaner sat on the threshold. The door was open. Charlie went in.

  The smell hit him right away, not strong but complex and unique: buffered floor wax and must, ammonia and rot, frying grease and stale beer: the smell of Cullen House when the sun warmed its old wooden bones. The smell hadn’t changed at all. Charlie walked past a sign that read “Backhand Clinic—3:30” and started up the broad stairs.

  · · ·

  Rebecca Klein lived at the east end of the hall on the top floor of Cullen House. Strictly speaking, no men were allowed in the women’s rooms after eight on weekdays or eleven on weekends, and it was the job of the senior adviser, who lived in a big and strategically placed room at the top of the first floor, to enforce the rules. But by the time Blake met Rebecca there were couples living openly in Cullen House, and the door to the SA’s room was always closed, nothing ever emerging but the smell of marijuana.

  Blake and Rebecca were one of those couples. Blake ate in the dining room, used the bathroom in the hall, slept in the fairy-tale bed, lay talking for hours in that bed, made love in it. That room, unnumbered, at the east end of the hall on the top floor of Cullen House, with its posters and its bed, was his world during the spring of his freshman year and most of his second, and last, year. There he entered an intimacy he had never known, changing from a boy who kept things to himself to a man who told his secrets, at least to Rebecca. He told her about his mother, about Ollie, and finally about his father in the jungle west of some place with a blacked-out name.

  And Rebecca, lying beside him in the bed, with a joint in her hand and Joni Mitchell playing quietly on the stereo, said: “You must be outraged.”

  “Outraged?”

  “About your father.”

  “Because of Ollie, you mean?”

  “No,” said Rebecca. “Because he got killed.”

  “Outraged at who?” Blake asked.

  “At the government, of course,” she replied, sending some outrage his way. “At Nixon, at Kissinger, at the whole fucking establishment that runs this country. Who do you think killed him?”

  From the walls around the fairy-tale bed, Marx, Engels, Che, Rosa, La Pasionaria, Mao, Malcolm, Ho, General Giap, and Rebecca’s father all looked on. Everything began to make sense. The political world, a world he had never thought much about, was turning inside out. And as it did, it revealed its ugliness, and he awoke to the idea that there was an enemy to blame for his father’s death and all the other deaths, an enemy right here at home, up on top—and to be toppled.

  Rebecca was watching him closely. “I want you to meet Andy Malik,” she said.

  “Who’s he?”

  “A friend of mine.”

  “What kind of friend?”

  “A very smart one.” Rebecca rolled on top of him, rubbing her body against his. Blake lost himself there in her soft bed.

  · · ·

  Charlie knocked on the unnumbered door at the east end of the hall on the top floor of Cullen House. No one answered. He turned the knob and went inside.

  The room was vacant. It had a simple, steel-framed bed with a bare mattress on top, a simple wooden dresser, a simple wooden desk. The walls were bare. It was devoid of resonance, atmosphere, magic: nothing, just an empty student bedroom in the summer vacation. But more than all those absences, what impressed Charlie was its size. The room was tiny, insignificant, claustrophobic. He closed the door and went away.

  The library was still open, the young librarian still at her desk. This time she gave Charlie a big smile. “Success?” she asked.

  It took him a moment to realize what she was talking about, a moment for her smile to begin to fade. “Yes, thanks,” he said. You’ve got to be quicker, he told himself, quicker and smarter.

  A minute later, Charlie had a business directory in his hands. A few seconds after that he was looking at what he wanted:

  Stuart Levine Industries

  100 Levine Industrial Parkway

  Lexington, Mass. 02173

  The librarian still had her eyes on him as he walked toward the door. He looked at her, wondering again if she had recognized his face, trying to read her mind. He got ready to run.

  She smiled. “I’m off at five,” she said. “If you want to go for coffee or something.”

  13

  “What I’m saying,” said Andrew Malik, “is that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Not,” he added after a pause, “my own. Lord Acton.”

  The members of the Tom Paine Club, all of whom fit comfortably in Malik’s one-bedroom apartment, laughed. Malik, sitting in the only chair, stroked his black Zapata mustache and allowed his eyes to twinkle. He scanned the faces of the members of the Tom Paine Club, gathered on the floor around him, and the twinkling stopped, the way ripples in water flatten when the breeze dies down. “On the other hand,” he went on, “life without power is a form of death.”

  Malik paused again. During that pause, Stu Levine, who came to the meetings with Blake and Rebecca in hope that involvement in the club might lead to getting laid, spoke up: “Is that one Lord Acton’s too?”

  Andrew Malik had a look for moments like that—head tilted back, forehead creased, half squinting—a look he now turned on Stu. “That one,” he said, “is mine.”

  “A form of death,” said Stu, nodding and reddening at the same time, the way he did in retreat. “Wow.”

  It was December of Blake’s sophomore year. Outside Malik’s apartment—only graduate students were allowed to live off campus—snow fell heavily from the night sky. Blake gazed out the window, not really listening as Malik went on about untruth, injustice, the American way. He didn’t need Malik anymore. In the past few months he had torn up his draft card and mailed the pieces to the Selective Service, marched on Washington once, occupied the campus ROTC office twice, and tried to close down the nearby air force base three times. He’d seen Rebecca dragged off by her hair and arrested, and been whacked across the shoulders with a nightstick for trying to stop it. He’d seen murderous hatred in the eyes of cops and bystanders, seen those poisonous emotions that Nixon and Kissinger and the others tried to hide from the cameras, but still seeped from the screen with every broadcast. Blake didn’t need Malik anymore. He was radicalized; a true believer.

  The meeting ended around midnight. The members of the Tom Paine Club went out into the night and walked back to their residences, silent in the snow. Blake and Rebecca were the last to leave. As they went out, Malik said, “Don’t go just yet.”

  They turned to him. He stood before his bookcase, a sagging floor-to-ceiling structure of bricks and boards. He was tall and thin, with a narrow, fleshless face and a stooped carriage; without the mustache, it would have been easy to imagine him in robe and cowl. He regarded them from across the room, nodded as though he’d come to a decision, then gestured for them to follow. He led them down the short corridor to the bathroom, where he closed the door and turned on the tap in the sink.

  “What’s going on?” Blake said.

  Rebecca was more in tune. “You think you’re being bugged?” She seemed excited by the idea.

  “Would the government that has no compunction about dropping napalm on innocents balk at planting microphones in my humble abode?” Malik asked.

  “But is there any evidence?” Blake said.

  “Evidence?”

  “Evidence that they’re doing it.”

  Malik gave him the look he’d given Stu. “Evidence, Number Nine?” he said. At times, at this sort of time, he called Blake by his baseball number. “How about strange noises on m
y phone line? Clicks, echoes, voices. Is that the kind of evidence you mean?” He waited for a reply. Blake said nothing. Even as late as a month or two ago, he might have mentioned hearing similar sounds from time to time on many telephones; now he was finding it easier to believe in conspiracies.

  Malik closed the cover on the toilet, sat down. Rebecca and Blake shared the edge of the bathtub. “I’m not satisfied with the club,” Malik said.

  Rebecca leaned toward him. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s fine for what it is—a tool for raising consciousness. But useless when it comes to action.”

  “Why?” Rebecca asked.

  “Because it’s an officially sanctioned club of the college, with a known membership and a public profile. What we need is a club within the club.”

  The temperature and humidity were rising, as though the little bathroom had a microclimate of its own. “What for?” Blake asked.

  “Action,” Malik replied. “Didn’t I say that already?” Twisting around, he raised the lid of the toilet’s water cabinet and removed an envelope that was taped to the inside. He handed it to Rebecca. She opened it, removed some papers, and held them so Blake could see too.

  There were four xeroxed pages in the envelope, covered with densely packed handwriting in German, a language Blake didn’t read. But there were diagrams too, and he understood what they were about and why Malik kept the papers where he did.

  Malik reached behind him, flushed the toilet. When he spoke, his voice was low; Blake could hardly hear him over the noise of the flushing and the water running in the sink. “I understand your friend Levine is a technical wiz,” he said.

  “You do?” Blake answered.

  Malik ignored him. He lowered his voice a little more. “Do you think the two of you could build something like that?”

  “I doubt it,” Blake answered. “And I wouldn’t even if I could.”

  Malik nodded and smoothed his mustache. He was in his last year of a master’s program in political science, perhaps five years older than Blake, although it seemed like much more than that to Blake, and probably to Malik too. “That’s up to you,” Malik said. “You’re the best judge of the maturity of your commitment.” He glanced at Rebecca.