· · ·
It was almost nine-thirty when the taxi left Route 128, went past a field that until recently might have been farmland but was now nothing, and pulled into Stuart Levine Industries. Charlie paid the driver, got out, and only when the taxi was driving away realized that he had come to a place of business long after business hours, and on a Saturday night. He turned to the building. It was long, low, sleek; resembling desktop machinery on a giant scale. The entrance was a huge smoked-glass portal, with the letters SLI imprinted inside the glass in changing shades of blue.
Charlie noticed all that at a glance. He also noticed that lights shone in some of the office windows despite the hour and the day, that the employees’ parking lot was one-quarter full, and that two security guards were sitting at a desk in the lobby. He imagined a conversation:
Charlie: I’d like to see Mr. Levine.
Guard: Name, please?
Charlie: Mr. Wrightman.
Guard: (Picks up phone, speaks too softly to be overheard, listens, glances furtively at Charlie.) If you’ll wait a moment, sir.
Charlie: Thanks. (He waits a moment. The police pull up outside.)
• • •
Charlie turned away from the fancy glass entrance and moved into the employees’ parking lot.
Sodium arc lamps lit the parking lot, casting an other worldly, perhaps futuristic, orange glow on cars from most of the car-making nations—the U. S. A., with one or two exceptions, excepted. The cars increased in sticker price the closer they were to the reserved spaces alongside the building. “Comptroller” drove a Volvo 740; “VP—Finance,” a Lexus; “VP—Marketing,” a BMW 940i; “VP—R&D,” a Porsche. The space closest to the entrance was reserved for “President and Chief Operating Officer.” “President and Chief Operating Officer” drove a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible, green as money. Charlie considered several possibilities. Then he got down on the pavement and slid underneath the Rolls.
Lying there on his back, with plenty of room, Charlie thought of his yellow Volkswagen Beetle with the twice rebuilt engine. It was an amusing thought and made him smile. Cars mean nothing, he told himself, and besides, I’ve got Straight Arrow, transportation that means something. Then he wondered if he could be said at that moment to have Straight Arrow, and that led him to thoughts of Emily, and he didn’t feel like smiling anymore.
After a while he heard hard shoes walking across the parking lot. A car started and drove off. Then came soft shoes, and another car, farther away, departed. More hard shoes, more soft shoes, more cars departing, many more, including one close by, probably a VP. After that came quiet, with nothing to listen to but the hum of traffic on 128. Then two sets of feet approached, one shod in Nike Airs, the other in black leather wingtips. Charlie heard Nike say, “Guess I’ll fire her on Friday.”
Wingtips said: “Make it Monday. The bitch is getting on my nerves.”
Nike said: “What about her health plan?”
Wingtips said: “Whatever you can get away with.”
Car doors slammed, and Nike and Wingtips drove off. Twisting around, Charlie saw that the Rolls was the only car left in the lot.
He heard more voices, coming from the entrance. A man said, “Good night, Dr. Levine.”
And a man answered, “ ’Night, boys. Keep on truckin’.”
Laughter, swallowed by the soft impact of the closing door. Keep on truckin’. The argot hadn’t changed in twenty years. But the voice had, deeper, louder, full of confidence and authority. Charlie almost hadn’t recognized it.
He watched the final pair of shoes come closer, gleaming leather tassel loafers. They came right to the driver’s side of the car, stopped. Nice tassel loafers, and gray pant cuffs that looked like silk. Charlie smelled cigar smoke. Then he heard the jingle of keys. Would all the locks pop open when the front door was unlocked? If so, he could roll out from under the car and jump into the front passenger seat. But the locks might not all pop open in a Rolls, and even if they did, the driver might have time to do something reckless, such as leaning on the horn until the guards came running. Better, Charlie thought, to act before the key slid in the lock. He reached out from under the car and grabbed a silken ankle.
“Bombo,” he said in as close to a normal tone as he could manage, “be calm.”
Under the silk the calf muscle, thin and gristly, stiffened. A cylinder of cigar ash dropped to the pavement and fell apart. The voice—Stu’s voice, but presidential and chief executive officer-like—spoke: “Who are you?”
A good question. Charlie said, “Your father smoked cigars too, didn’t he?”
“I know you from somewhere.”
“True.”
“You called me Bombo.” A long pause. “Not Blake?”
Charlie was silent.
The speaker sighed. His calf muscle went soft. “Aw, shit,” he said. His voice began to lose its presidential tone.
“Unlock the car,” Charlie said. “You can take me for a ride.”
The calf muscle hardened. “No need to waste time, Blake. How much do you want?”
For a moment Charlie didn’t get it. “Money, you mean?”
“What else?”
“Unlock the car, Stu.”
The keys jingled. Charlie heard the locks pop. “Get in,” he said.
“With your hand on my ankle?”
Charlie let go. The tassel loafers climbed quickly up, out of sight. Before the door closed Charlie rolled out, sprang up on the other side of the car, the side away from the building’s entrance, opened the passenger door and jumped in. Levine, still reaching for the lock button, said, “Shit.” And there they were, together in soft leather and polished walnut luxury, bathed in an orange glow.
Stuart Levine, president and COO: still bony, although flesh sagged under his chin. The boniness now gave him a look that was almost ruthless. The stringy hair was gone. All of it. The baldness made him look smart. Gone too were the granny glasses. Now he wore something in tortoiseshell that might have been designed by Ralph Lauren. They went nicely with the gray silk suit, the white-on-white shirt, the subdued tie. Rich, ruthless, smart, well dressed, Charlie thought. He himself wasn’t the only one with a new identity.
Levine was watching him. “Christ, Blake, you look good. Young. A hell of a lot younger than me.”
“I stayed away from cigars.”
Levine glanced at the fat cigar in his hand. For a moment Charlie thought he was going to toss it outside. Levine stuck it in his mouth instead. His lips closed comfortably around it. When he spoke again, he had recovered some of his presidential tone.
“Reunion,” he said. “Class of ’seventy-two.”
“Ex—’seventy-two,” Charlie said.
“Yeah,” said Levine. He blew out a thin stream of smoke, studied it. Charlie waited for him to say “I always thought this might happen” or “How did you find me?” but Levine’s mind was on another tack. “It wasn’t the right place for me,” he said. “For someone like you, maybe, but not for me.”
How about for Junior? Charlie thought. He was wondering whether to say it aloud when Levine turned to him and said, “I’ve got to ask.”
“What?”
“If it was the one I made. The … device.”
“What else?” said Charlie. “Let’s go.”
Levine sighed and put the key in the ignition. Before turning it, he looked at Charlie again. “I sometimes think maybe I dreamed up the whole thing. A lot of drugs went down in those days, of course. And then there was my … episode.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” Charlie said.
“I guess not.” Levine turned the key. The car made quiet and powerful sounds. The radio was tuned to classic rock. Levine switched it off. “Still play the sax?” he said, wheeling out of the parking lot like a Rolls-owner from way back.
“A little.”
“You were good. Damned good.”
“Not that good.”
They drove along the road toward 128, pas
t a dark car parked on the shoulder, with someone sitting in the front seat, past the barren field. “Where to?” Levine said.
“Somewhere we can talk.”
“My place? It’s not far.”
Charlie thought for a moment. Levine watched him from the corner of his eye. “Okay,” Charlie said.
Levine, driving up the ramp to 128, spoke around his cigar. “When are you going to name the figure, Blake?”
“Figure?”
“How much you want.”
“This isn’t about money.”
“Everything’s about money, old friend.”
Levine lived in a suburb west of Boston, the kind of suburb newspapers call affluent. His house, which stood well back from the road, with no other houses in sight, was very different in spirit from his place of business. It was all stone, wood, and leaded glass, evoking thoughts of a long-vanished England and Fielding’s cream-and-beef—fed squires. Levine, so clearly American, contemporary, unsquirelike, and probably on a low-cholesterol diet, pulled off the circular drive and parked in front of the four-car garage. He noticed Charlie looking at the house and said, “Home, home on the range.”
They went in through a side door, made their way down marble halls, across Persian rugs, past displays of displayable art, and into a big room that had a red-tiled floor but was otherwise all white. Charlie knew it was the kitchen from the many built-in appliances; but of the other attributes of kitchens—that they had good smells, made you think of cooking and eating, invited relaxed conversation around the table—it had none. A woman in a short black cocktail dress was standing at the counter, pouring vodka into a crystal glass.
“What are you doing here?” Levine said to her.
The woman turned. “I’m your wife,” she said. “I live here, at least for now.” The woman had a British accent, not the rock star kind, but not like the queen’s, either. She had a body in its forties, a face in its fifties, and a voice somewhat older.
Levine reddened. “I meant what are you doing here now. I thought you’d gone to the symphony.”
“The theater, in fact. We left during the interval.” Her eyes slid over to Charlie.
“This,” said Levine, “is Deirdre. My wife, as she so rightly points out. Deirdre, meet—”
“Charlie,” Charlie said, just as Levine was about to come to grips with the problem of what to call him; had they developed some sort of teamwork as roommates, ready to reassert itself even now?
“Charlie,” said Deirdre, raising her glass. “One of my very favorite men’s names.”
“I like it too,” Charlie said.
“Well then,” said Levine, “if you’ll excuse us, sweetheart, Charlie and I have some work to get through.”
“Naturally,” said Deirdre, and took a big swallow of her drink. She gave Charlie a little wave good-bye.
Levine had a library at the back of the house. It had a claw-footed desk, oak panels, club chairs, a stone hearth, even books. “You want a drink?” Levine said, going to a wall cabinet. “I sure as hell do.”
“Okay,” Charlie said.
Levine handed him a heavy snifter. “Armagnac,” he said. “Sixty years old.”
“What’s the occasion?”
Levine ignored him. “It’s like cognac, only from another town. One of Deirdre’s little men sends it.”
“Little men?”
“That’s what she calls them. She has little men all over the world, on the lookout for this and that. It’s the way they are, the Brit aristocracy.”
“Is she a founding member?” Charlie asked, telling himself too late to knock it off.
Levine, in midsip, glared at him over the rim of his snifter. “You’re an asshole, you know that? You all are. Fucking assholes. You know absolute bugger-all about real life.”
Charlie could see that despite the anger, despite the new air of authority, Levine was afraid. “Who is we all?” he said.
“You. Malik. Rebecca.”
Did Levine imagine that the three of them were still together? He tasted the Armagnac. Perhaps it was good, better than good, but he found it sickening and put it down.
Levine took another drink. “Just tell me one thing,” he said. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Blow up that fucking building, what else?”
“Cambodia,” Charlie said.
“Cambodia? What kind of answer is that?”
A lousy one. Charlie had known that right from the beginning.
A computer on the claw-footed desk made a beeping sound. Levine got up, glanced at the screen, tapped a few keys. Charlie realized Levine could probably use it to summon help. He moved quickly to the desk, looking at the screen over Levine’s shoulder. He saw nothing but columns of numbers, meaningless to him. Levine turned, gazed up at him.
“What’s it going to take?” he asked.
“To do what?”
“To make you go away and stay away.” Levine twisted one of his fingers until the knuckle cracked. “All it would take is one anonymous call, right? ‘Stu Levine made the bomb that killed the little boy in nineteen seventy. But no one connected him to it because he was in the booby hatch at the time.’ That kind of call. Maybe you even have some proof, although I doubt it. You certainly won’t be taking the stand yourself. But you’ve already figured out that none of that will be necessary. With this SDI thing I couldn’t afford even that one phone call. The DOD is paranoid and stupid. I’m paranoid and smart—that’s why I’m so good at dealing with them. So how much will it take?”
“SDI thing?” said Charlie.
Levine waved a hand in dismissal. “Don’t play dumb. It was in all the papers. That’s what gave you the idea to put the bite on me, isn’t it?”
Charlie, understanding nothing, said nothing.
Levine nodded, satisfied. “That contract’s worth a hundred million dollars in the first three years alone. After that, anybody’s guess.”
“What’s it for, exactly?”
“The contract? Software. That’s what I do. And Star Wars is all about software. If there are glitches in the software, we’ve got nothing but a lot of junk floating around up there, maybe exploding at unexpected moments.”
They thought their thoughts about that. Charlie said: “What were those SATs?”
There was no hesitation. “Seven sixty, math; seven twenty, verbal,” Levine said. “Now what do you want?”
“I’m looking for Rebecca.”
Levine blinked. “You mean you’re not with her?”
“Why would I be with her?”
“I just thought … you two.” Levine emptied his glass. His eyes had a faraway look. “Rebecca. If it hadn’t been for her nothing would have happened.”
That was true, Charlie thought, but how did Levine know? Did it mean he had seen her sometime after the bombing? “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Back then. At school.”
“What did you mean nothing would have happened?”
“I never would have built the … thing. If she hadn’t persuaded me.”
“She persuaded you?” Charlie saw what was coming and didn’t like it at all, didn’t like the way Blake Wrightman’s history was being rewritten.
“Hell, yes,” Levine said. “I still get hard thinking about it. She was the first woman I ever balled, as we used to say. A nice crunchy granola word for it, made it so natural and pure—unlike the sex I have now, the semiannual time I have it.”
Charlie wanted to hit him. That was a surprise: it was so long ago, and he was in love with another woman. He backed away, sat down in the club chair, picked up the snifter, drained it. Levine, unaware of Charlie’s reaction, got up too. He went to the cabinet, came back with the Armagnac, refilled their glasses.
“If that’s all you want, information on Rebecca, you could have it,” Levine said. “But I haven’t seen Rebecca since my fa—… since I left the school.” Charlie looked into Levine’s eyes and saw it was true. “T
oo bad you’re not looking for Malik.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Malik is a different story.”
16
Blake didn’t know what to do. Had he not wound electrical tape around the red wire to stop the flow of electricity? Or had he dreamed that or imagined it or been stoned at the time or simply screwed up? He stood frozen in front of the ROTC building, rum rising sour up his throat. He sensed Rebecca nearby, saw her beside him, eyes dark and wild, as though emerging from a bad sleep; lips moving slightly, as though trying to find speech. She didn’t know what to do either.
Malik knew what to do.
Blake felt him tugging at his shirt, saying, “Come on, come on.” He was saying it right into Blake’s ear. Blake heard, but that didn’t help him move.
He said again: “One stick of dynamite did all that?”
No one heard but Malik. Malik slapped him hard across the face. No one saw but Rebecca. “Come on,” Malik repeated, fiercely and through gritted teeth.
Now he could move.
They slipped out of the crowd, Malik first, then Rebecca, half stumbling like the woman in curlers, then Blake, face burning. They left the central quad, moved into the line of oaks, paused.
“Money,” Malik said. He was breathing heavily; they all were, as though they had just done something strenuous.
“Money,” Malik said again.
Rebecca nodded. The word made no sense to Blake.
Malik seemed to understand that. “We’re going to need money,” he explained. He opened his wallet, a fancy leather one, a businessman’s wallet. Blake stared at it, surprised that Malik would have a wallet like that, but still not understanding. “I’ve got forty-three dollars,” Malik said. “Rebecca?”
She shrugged. “Two or three hundred, maybe. But it’s in the room.” It struck Blake, not for the first time, that Rebecca, who didn’t care about money, always had lots.
Revolution Number 9 Page 13