The Ancient Rain

by Domenic Stansberry

  Sixty-one years old. Divorced. Gut hanging out over his gray slacks.

  Sorrentino had a meeting with the prosecutor’s office later that afternoon in the city, but that was not the only reason for his preparations. He had another errand first. He drove north on the El Camino for a while, then headed west over the hills toward Daly City.

  There was an envelope in his pocket, with a check inside.

  Years ago, it had been truck farms out this way. It was all box stores now. There were people who longed for the old days, but he couldn’t go with that. A person could only eat so much broccoli, so many tomatoes. He liked the box stores. They were cheap, and you didn’t have to struggle all day for parking. You didn’t have to deal with the no-goods on the city streets, or worry about running into someone you knew from the neighborhood, because there was no neighborhood.

  But there was too much damn traffic. Too many damn cars.

  He snaked his Torino up over the hill and down into Daly City.

  His ex-wife still lived here, in the middle of the fog belt—in the little house that he had bought on his policeman’s pay back in the late seventies. The idea had been that they would keep the place for a few years and then step up to someplace bigger. It hadn’t worked out. Then a few years back there had been a rash of break-ins, so his wife put up iron bars on the door and the windows.

  Now, whenever he drove by the house, he was taken aback by those iron bars.

  Sorrentino parked a little ways up the street. His intention had been to go up and knock on the door, but he had had that intention before. Instead, he pulled out the check in his pocket, examining it.

  * * *

  Elise Younger had given the check to him a few days back—when they’d met, once again, at that diner out in the Sunset. Elise was out there two, three times a week, tending to the flowers on the sidewalk, the notes people left, the small commemorations from passersby. Cleaning up, too, the trash and scrubbing the graffiti from the sidewalk.

  “No,” Sorrentino had said. “I can’t take your money.”

  “You must. You’ve done too much work for nothing. I don’t feel right.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “That’s not all of it,” she said, embarrassed.

  “A donation?”

  “To the justice fund. The person who gave it, he wants to remain anonymous.”

  “You need it yourself. There’s Sacramento coming up.”

  “That’s taken care of,” she said sheepishly. “I bought myself some clothes. Presents for the kids.”

  “Does Blackwell know about this?”

  “It’s none of his business.”

  She was right about that, maybe—and if people wanted to help her, well, it wasn’t like there had not been expenses … but it made him uneasy.

  “I’ll go to Sacramento with you,” he said. “To the Remembrance Day march. Just like last year.”

  She glanced away. Put her hand over his the way she liked to do.

  “Take it.”

  Five thousand bucks.

  It wasn’t so much money, really, not for all the hours he’d put in, and though she wanted to give it to him, and he had his needs, there was something sad in her eyes. All through the conversation, it was like they were skating around something.

  “That man who works for them—the investigator,” she said. “I saw him out by the memorial.”

  “Nosey son of a bitch.” He shook his head. “Nothing’s sacred.”

  He took the check. He had his reservations, but he took it anyway. Then the next day, Blackwell called. The prosecution wanted to see him—and they wanted him to bring his files. He had half a mind to say no, but if it helped Elise, then OK. They needed him on the case, he thought. They had work for him.

  * * *

  Now Sorrentino held the check between his fingers. His ex-wife was home, he was all but certain. Her car was in the driveway. It was always in the driveway. What his ex did with her days, he didn’t know anymore. She didn’t work. She didn’t do anything. With the divorce settlement he had given her half his pension, so he was always broke, and the house had gone downhill. The roof was leaking. She’d embarrassed him by calling up Leo Malvino’s kid and asking him to do the work on account, till her husband caught up with his alimony.

  His intention had been to walk up and ring the bell and give it to her. A way of exonerating himself somehow. He had gotten a hint of the kind of stories she told about him, and he wanted to clear his obligation. And maybe more than that, for her to see his name on this check and know that he was not a fool. He’d done a job and he had gotten paid.

  But he had been at this point before, sitting in the car out in front of her house, with some offering or another. He’d been out to Colma, where his son was buried, but in the end, whether he sat in the car or went up to look at the grave, what difference did it make?

  He couldn’t bring himself to get out. No doubt, she still blamed him—because he had encouraged the kid to enlist. No doubt there were still pictures of their son on the mantle, in the tiny hallway, on the bureau in their bedroom. If he knocked on the door, he would have to look into her eyes, he would have to see all those pictures. There was no telling where things would go.

  He couldn’t do it.

  He drove around the corner to the local post office and dropped the check in the mail. His wife would see the postmark, he told himself. That was good enough. She would know he had mailed it from nearby.

  * * *

  The prosecution had scheduled the meeting for just after two. Sorrentino was not sure exactly what they wanted from him, but he had brought his files, as requested. He parked the Torino in a cyclone lot up Polk Street, even though it meant walking past a boatload of junkies and an asshole transvestite. Hey fat boy, what you got in those pants? Still, it was better than paying the higher fees at the Union Street garage.

  Outside the Federal Building, there were protestors. This wasn’t anything new. There were always protestors outside the Federal Building. This particular group, Code Pink, he remembered from the press conference, the day they’d brought in Owens, though their numbers had grown. Older women mostly, dressed in black tights and pink T-shirts, continuing their vigil, protesting U.S. troops massing in the Middle East. “All for oil!” they chanted, “All for greed!” There were maybe seventy-five of them chanting in the north end of Federal Plaza and a smaller group on the sidewalk, just outside the square. At the fringes, a number of the woman stood passing around cartons of milk—and a number of these looked quite pale, as if seized by a sudden illness. As he walked into the plaza, the chants echoed more loudly against the building. Meanwhile, the cops watched placidly.

  Sorrentino couldn’t believe this city.

  Everywhere else in the country these days, people had flags out their windows, bunting everywhere. Anywhere else, loudmouths like these would be stuffed in the tank.

  But here …

  The women looked harmless enough, but Sorrentino knew better. Lesbians. Professors from Berkeley. Women on the edge of menopause, too uptight to get laid. He had a sister-in-law like this. College teacher, so used to laying off her opinion on her students, she’d gotten the idea that the world was her soapbox. If you disagreed with her, if you so much as twitched, then there was something the matter with you.

  Eventually, even her husband had gotten sick of listening and left for another woman. One of her students, as it turned out. A girl with big eyes and no opinions.

  Sorrentino reached the security barricade at the front of the building, and there joined a line that snaked back into the plaza, to the image of the federal seal embedded there in concrete. The line moved slowly. Up ahead, there was some kind of problem with the scanning machines.

  Across the plaza, the protestors fell quiet. The group did not seem as cohesive as it had just a few minutes before, lingering now in smaller groups, loosely knit—like a flock of birds, flamingoes in their pink shirts and spandex leggings. They star
ted to move then, as if by some common signal. The police moved, too, in an arc outward from the center of the plaza. Since 9/11, protestors were restricted to the far end of the square, and the police moved now in such a way as to keep the women toward the periphery. The chanting started up again. One of the women broke from the others, dashing forward toward the police, then all of a sudden falling to her knees. Another woman did the same. Similar scenes, more or less identical, played out around the plaza—a woman bolting toward the statue of justice, another holding her stomach as she ran, heading for the security quay, straight toward Sorrentino, her face contorted, as if she meant to leap into his arms. A cop ran to intercept her. At the last minute, she pulled up short. The policeman stopped, too, regarding her warily. The chanting went on in the distance. And as the cop stepped forward, his club drawn, the woman grabbed her stomach, doubled over, then vomited violently onto the federal seal.

  Pink puke, bubbling and frothing. Pink blood.

  Around the square, the same scene played itself out, women rushing forward, falling to their knees. America makes me puke! The blood of America is in my belly!

  The plaza smelled of curdled cream.

  We are vomiting up the blood of America!

  The policeman leaned over the woman now, struggling to get her cuffed. She gazed up at Sorrentino. Her eyes were bright with hatred. Her lips were pink.

  The security guard emerged from behind the barricade and started herding the line. He glanced at Sorrentino’s trousers and shook his head.

  “A vomiting agent,” he said. “They put into milk, along with pink dye. One of them got into the lobby this morning.”

  The milk was on his pants legs, all over his shoes. Meanwhile, the woman struggled with the cop. “Since when is it against the law to get sick?” she said.

  Then she vomited again.

  Sorrentino danced backward on his toes.

  * * *

  Inside, Sorrentino dampened a paper towel, cleaned his shoes, blotted his pants legs. After the incident, it had taken him another twenty minutes to get through security. He was going to be late as it was, but there were tiny flecks on his jacket still, and on his shirt. Dabbing these only seemed to make matters worse. As he rode up in the elevator, he noticed the damp spots still visible under the fluorescent light. Worse, he feared, was the lingering smell.

  The smell seemed worse inside Blackwell’s office when he leaned over to shake hands. Mike Iverson, the assistant prosecutor, sat at the table, too, and also the Chinese woman from Homeland Security.

  Blackwell had a stack of trial folders at his elbow, and paperwork lay scattered about the table.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “There was an incident outside. The Code Pink…” He started to explain, then decided, no. It made him look like a buffoon. “I got tied up in security.”

  Blackwell and the others did not respect him, he knew that. Never mind that he had practically dumped the case in their laps. Never mind that he was the one who had chased down the remaining witnesses after thirty years and told the prosecution about the new forensics that would link the Younger murder to the ammunition at the SLA safe house. More than that, he was the one who’d found Cynthia Nakamura.

  He only hoped she didn’t die before the trial.

  “I brought all my case notes, like you asked.”

  “We appreciate your cooperation.”

  “Well, any way I can help.”

  Sorrentino had never worked with Blackwell on the force, but he remembered department people grousing because he was always getting into their business, trying to federalize local investigations. A glance at Chin told him she understood the situation. Blackwell didn’t work in the field so much as he once had, maybe, but behind a desk—and from that desk he pulled a lot of strings. But there was a string hooked to him as well, and that string went down the long corridor all the way back to those assholes in Justice. The only reason this was going to trial was because there was a certain spectacle the feds wanted everyone to see. Don’t fuck with us, do everything we say. In some ways, these people were just as bad as those women out in the streets.

  “I’m sure you know—in fact, we had this conversation once before: The government has its own folks on this now.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’ve still been out fishing, haven’t you?”

  “Just some loose ends.”

  “What kind of loose ends?”

  “Leland Stanford, if you remember. I’ve been looking into the notion that he communicated with Kaufman, all that confusion about whether Sanford died in that raid. I mean, the first time around, the case never recovered from that.”

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  Blackwell had been involved in all of that, ridiculed in the press back then, and again more recently.

  “You understand what you’ve been doing?” asked Blackwell. “Walking around North Beach, with a picture of Cynthia Nakamura? There’s a reason we are holding her in protection, you know.”

  Sorrentino hung his head a moment. How they knew about his efforts, he had no idea, but it was true he had not been particularly discreet. He tried to explain. “Those women, Annette Ricci, Jan Sprague, they were at the farm in Aptos.” He hesitated, unsure where he was going. “If Owens doesn’t have an alibi, then neither do they.”

  There was an exchange of glances then, between Iverson and the others, and Sorrentino got the impression he’d touched upon something. What? Identifying Sanford, locating him, had been integral to their case thirty years ago, and more recently as well, but now they seemed more concerned with keeping Cynthia Nakamura under wraps.

  He didn’t quite get Blackwell, the man’s angle, his point of view—but he was starting to understand, whatever that view, it did not include Guy Sorrentino. His own interviews with Nakamura had been preliminary. She had not told him everything, he knew that. Blackwell came in later, and he wondered what he had gotten her to say.

  “You are the ones who sent me after Kaufman,” he said. “It was your—”

  Blackwell snapped now, cutting him off. “Are you trying to tell me that you are going to accomplish what the FBI hasn’t been able to accomplish for thirty years? That you are going to pull Leland Sanford out of a hat?”

  “All I’m saying—”

  “You’re out of your league,” snapped Blackwell.

  “I know you are well intended,” said Iverson.

  “Fuck his good intentions. You interfere with this case, Mr. Sorrentino, it’s obstruction of justice.”

  “I’m working for Elise,” he said.

  “This isn’t up to Elise. She interferes, we will file against her, too.”

  Blackwell leafed through the file in front of him, pulled out an envelope, then pushed it across the table. Sorrentino opened it. Inside, he found pictures of himself—on the landing outside his apartment, on the streets of North Beach. In some of the pictures, items had been circled. A gray Honda Accord. A man’s face. The same man later, on a street corner. Sorrentino in the foreground, oblivious.

  “The man’s name is Dante Mancuso.”

  “I know who he is.”

  “Another ex-cop. Not one of our favorite people.”

  “He’s been following you for a couple of weeks,” said Chin.

  “This one was a lousy cop.” Blackwell pointed at Mancuso’s picture. “And he was shitty undercover, not knowing when to back off. That nose of his, that face—how could you not notice somebody like that following you, a face like that?”

  Sorrentino felt his own face burning. He thought of the check Elise had given him, and the little kiss on the cheek, and the vague look of sadness in her eyes. He had felt disloyal, not telling her about this meeting, but now he suspected she had known.

  Meanwhile, he noticed a fleck of pink on his jacket. He brushed it from himself as the others watched. The damp spot on his polo had left a vague stain, and his pants legs were still damp.

  The air around him smelled of
sour milk.

  “Listen, Guy,” said Iverson. “You’ve been invaluable, but we’re moving past the investigation now, into the trial. And one of the things we are concerned with, like it or not, a case like this, is controlling the pretrial publicity. The firebombing—that works against us. It gives them sympathy. Meanwhile, Elise has this thing coming up in Sacramento … It’s going to be very high profile.”

  Sorrentino knew what was coming. They were prepping Elise for the final push. They were going to take his files and freeze him out. She had known.

  Five thousand bucks.

  “We think it would be better, for the case, for Elise, if you kept your distance.”

  “Elise agrees?”

  “Yes,” Blackwell said. “Elise agrees.”

  PART FOUR

  The Parade

  TWENTY-ONE

  Maybe it was the next afternoon, as Dante pulled out of the hospital lot, that the car first appeared behind him. Or maybe it was a little farther along, on Cathedral Hill, as he negotiated the long swoop down Gough Street, past churchyards and playgrounds and the sidewalk nobodies who slumped along in the shadows. Either way, he did not notice the car at first, preoccupied as he was with other things.

  Marilyn would be released the next day. At the moment she was in session with a medical cosmetician—a woman who specialized in makeup for burn victims. “Girls only,” Beatrice had whispered to him in the hospital corridor, arms loaded with packages, clothing from Dazios. “Why don’t you come back later, when she’s all dolled up.”

  Dante had promised to return.

  In the meantime, he headed across town toward Annette Ricci’s. He had tried to get access to Jan Sprague earlier, but the reception at the Sprague mansion on the Heights had been pretty chilly—and Jensen had called afterward, telling him to back off. It didn’t make sense to Dante. Partly, he supposed, the sensitivity had to do with some of the stuff running in the paper lately, wide-swinging attacks from the law-and-order people, hyperbole suggesting the bombing was some kind of ruse, that the police had not looked hard enough at the people on the scene. Still, if the defense wanted him to find Nakamura, well, Sprague had known her back then. And so had Ricci.