The Ancient Rain

by Domenic Stansberry

  And then Owens saw his kid.

  Around the bend, standing at the vista. Zeke stood in the midst of strangers, other families, a bit too close, not reading the social cues. Fascinated by the seals. Thrumming his fingers. Listening to that gadget in his ears.

  Owens stood in the middle of the path, looking at the boy. In a little while, Jill and the others came up behind him. Jill brushed past without speaking.

  Jensen put a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “These kind of things happen. People lose control.”

  Owens watched Jensen head toward his son, his family. He felt his suspicions again. Unwarranted, maybe. But natural enough. He knew Jensen was right about one thing: Eight years was the same as thirty. He had to push his memories back there into the dark. He would lose everything if he went to jail.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The day before the trial started, Sorrentino went down to the North Beach Library. His tape had arrived. Despite the enthusiasm of the boho couple at the bar, the tape came with no special restrictions. It was a rare item, maybe, but the source library in Minnesota did not seem aware of the fact, and the North Beach librarian handed it to him without any particular fanfare.

  Kaufman reading: May 13, 1975.

  Sorrentino took the cassette with him. He had not been to the Beach since the Metzger story had broken, but today he went down to the Serafina Café. Stella emerged from the kitchen looking pretty much as she had the time before.

  “What do you want?”

  “Spaghetti.”

  Despite her age, Stella did not have much gray, and her breasts did not sag. She wore an underwire, maybe, and she dyed her hair, who knew? But it was a black mop nonetheless, thick as ever, and he remembered how surprised he had been at the way it felt when he’d finally gotten his hands into it: not soft, not luxurious, but coarse and wiry.

  “Water?”

  “No, wine.”

  She made no remark but instead brought him the wine, as if she had no idea about his problems with the grape, and even if she did, it was a few dollars more in the register. He pulled the pack of Parliaments from his pocket. No one cared if you smoked in Serafina’s, and he had given up the pretense. He smoked as he pleased.

  He put the tape on the counter.

  The television was turned to one of those afternoon shows, but the volume was down low, and no one seemed to be paying much attention. The place was all but empty. It was just Johnny Pesci over there in the corner, his head tilted toward the wall, sleeping, a dead cigarette between his fingers. Just Johnny on one side of the room and Julia Besozi upright by the window, a smear of sauce on her lace collar, mincing at a plate of pasta, twirling it over and over with her fork, then putting it down without eating, sipping at her glass of port. None of the others, just these two, the oldest of the old—Pesci with his walker and Besozi with her cane. Just these two—and those shadows in the corner.

  “Play this tape for me.”

  “There’s a show on already,” said Stella.

  Sorrentino glanced at Pesci, his head against the wall, dozing on his afternoon wine. Then at Besozi, gaze forward, blind as a dog underwater.

  “At the break then,” he said. “During the commercial.”

  “This is why you came? You could not watch this at home?”

  Stella turned the tape over in her hand, and the way she did, Sorrentino could not help but feel as if it were himself being examined. He glanced away, down the glass countertop, into that sea of faces in the photos embedded under the glass. Meanwhile he could hear the Chinaman in the back cleaning the dishes.

  “So they gave you the bump,” Stella said. “You helped that girl, and they’re done with you.”

  “You could put it that way.”

  This was the kind of thing to expect from Stella: for her to remind him of his humiliation. Maybe that was why he had come down here. To get it over with, one way or the other. Here, in Serafina’s, in front of Stella, with all those pictures as witnesses. The dead ones in the shadows no doubt were enjoying this, too.

  “The other one, they will give him the bump, too. From the other side.”

  “Which other one?”

  “Dante,” she said. “Mancuso’s son.”

  “He’s nothing.”

  “It’s just business. You shouldn’t be so sensitive.”

  Maybe she was right, but he had no love for Mancuso. And not much for the rest of them, either. Blackwell had raked him harder then he needed to, taking a special pleasure in it, Sorrentino thought, Blackwell and Iverson both, looking for links to Metzger, to the firebombing, threatening to charge him with conspiracy, with obstruction of justice, knowing of course there were no links there—that Metzger himself could not be tied to the money, or to the bombing, most likely because Metzger had had nothing to do with it. It was a set-job, somebody playing bingo with the press, same as the Hearst kidnapping thirty years ago, Leland Sanford’s resurrection from the dead, all that absurd theater in the street—but the feds couldn’t figure it out, and now they were looking like jackasses all over again. The prosecution needed someone to humiliate, for business reasons, sure—but it was beyond business with Blackwell and his cronies. They’d taken a special pleasure in it.

  Still, he’d gotten a dig back. “For that bombing, did you check out the Sandinista?” he’d asked them. “Did you check out his buddies? They’re the ones experienced at this kind of thing.” But he’d seen at a glance—the way Chin hung her head—they’d played jurisdictional games too long. They’d let it slip, the trail was cold. Blackwell and his arrogance.

  Now Stella put the tape in.

  It was an old cassette, a redub onto video of film recorded three decades back. The colors were washed and faded. It had been shot inside the Caffé Trieste. The owners of that place, they’d always played it both ways, even back then, hosting the old-timers with their accordions, their swelling violins, the local diva at the mike alongside a brick mason as fat as Caruso—but this night, the place had been packed with bohemians, gathered elbow to elbow at the long tables, glassy eyed, arrogant, pretending they were in the East Village, or Paris, lounging around in a movie of the sort no one with any sense would want to watch.

  The camera work was amateur. It zoomed about in jerks and staggers, skimming the audience, holding on a face here, there. The date was not too long after the robbery—after the FBI had raided the Aptos property but before Owens had turned himself in. It could even be that Owens was in the audience. Nakamura, too. The video cut all of a sudden, catching Kaufman midsentence at the podium.

  Kaufman had a beer bottle in one hand and fumbled around like a man with the shakes. He wore a turtleneck underneath one of those hippie vests, a white turtleneck, and his skin was leather-dark. After all Sorrentino had heard, he’d expected a more electric presence, but Kaufman was shy, stuttering, his voice high and unsure, and the crowd—smoking cigarettes, swaying, nodding, hands on their goatees, on one another’s legs—had, underneath it all, that bored-to-death coffeehouse look. Kaufman held some scraps of paper in his free hand, and after a while he fumbled the beer onto the podium and began to snap his fingers, leaning into the mike, muttering in a singsong voice Sorrentino found hard to understand.

  Something about the ancient rain.

  About Russia, China.

  The entrails of America on a slab in ancient Greece.

  The rain was a mist of blood. It was fragments of bone, a sky full of ash, and it had been falling for a long time.

  It wasn’t going to stop falling anytime soon.

  Why should it?

  Kaufman snapped his fingers out of time. He took a drink, lost his place in the papers, then lost his rhythm altogether as one of the scraps fell to the floor. He shuffled through the words. Bits of tissue, colored paper, shopping bags, napkins, he let them slip through his fingers—reciting from memory now. Making it up as he went along.

  He let the paper fall and reached for the beer.r />
  The gasoline that is eating your car. The wife with the high hair who is not really there.

  His mouth sounded as if it were full of sand. He jittered about behind the podium, graceless. He slobbered and lurched. The crowd looked as if they had seen it all before. I spoke to Leland Sanford the other day, he said. He told me he was dead. He told me strangers had inhabited his body in the moment of its demise. But do not listen to them because they are dead, too.

  The revolution is dead.

  And the ancient rain is still falling.

  I hunt myself on the savannahs and kill myself in the streets.

  I am a soldier in a ditch at the end of time.

  Kaufman went on. Describing the corpse at the end of time, a corpse that lay in the sand. The rain that fell like sand driven by the wind until the bones were ground to dust. The sand red like blood. Yellow like a Chinaman. Black like rain.

  The rain does not purify anything but keeps on falling.

  The rain falls in my mouth as I die. The rain of vengeance. The rain of purification. The rain that sets nothing right.

  Now it is raining television sets, bits of glass. Severed hands.

  Ash.

  The old rain, the endless rain …

  Kaufman went on. And then on some more. It was time to give it up, but he kept on going. He laughed. He dropped his beer. Then there was a smattering of applause, and the video flickered out. Johnny Pesci, the old black shirt, had not stirred, he was still sleeping, and Julia Besozi, whose husband had been interned with the Japanese, took another sip of port. Stella had left halfway through the man’s rant, retreating to the kitchen, but returned now at the sound of the static to eject the tape.

  Nonsense, Sorrentino thought. The tape had told him nothing. Or almost nothing.

  Only that he had been suckered. By the rumors, by that hoax and nonsense Ricci and her like had put out, tapes, stories smeared all over the press, making connections where they didn’t exist, sending the feds scurrying this way and that. They’d done it back then, and they were doing the same thing now.

  No, Sanford was long dead, Sorrentino was all but sure. Or if not dead, insignificant to the matter at hand.

  Blackwell, he guessed, had already figured this out. Blackwell wanted Owens—for his own lousy reasons, maybe, nothing to do with Elise—but Sorrentino could not see how he meant to get him. He could not see Blackwell’s angle.

  If Sanford had not been with Owens the day of the robbery, then who? What four people? But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t Sorrentino’s business anymore.

  Sorrentino looked along the counter and felt his eyes welling. Stella slid him the tape but he did not look up because he did not want her to see. He leaned over and picked up the tape. Then he just stood there, head down, staring at the counter.

  He looked at the photo.

  Himself and the kid, smiling. Father and son. Arm around Dad. A string of fish hanging on a line at the dock. Mountains behind.

  He felt a cry rise from his diaphragm, involuntary. An ugly noise, strangled in an old man’s throat.

  He pushed the front door out into Chinatown. He was weeping now, and could not stop himself, not even in front of these yellow men and their families, these Chink bastards, these faggots and Jews.

  My son. You killed my fucking son.

  Down at the Embarcadero, he put his hands on the railing and let himself go. The tape had told him nothing. A dead lead. His weeping had nothing to do with the man on the tape, he told himself, nothing to do with his meandering poem. It was of no value to the case, no value at all.

  He looked over the pier into the water. He looked at the water for a long time. Then he dropped the tape into the bay.

  PART SIX

  The Trial

  THIRTY-THREE

  The trial would bring certain things to light. Or that was the idea. What had happened that day in the bank, it would be revealed in the courtroom, with the jurors watching from their box, the press reporting, the cameras peering. In reality, though, there was a door at the back of the courtroom, leading to a corridor, and that corridor in turn led to another room. Inside that room, the judge sat in her chambers. And the truth was, not everything emerged from chambers. Not everything made its way down the long corridor back into the light.

  In chambers, at the moment, the defense sat to one side of the judge, and the prosecution to the other.

  “I am going to address this question to the prosecution,” said the judge, and she glanced toward Blackwell, the federal prosecutor.

  * * *

  Blackwell was not well liked. He knew this. Mocked in the press, distrusted by his underlings. Despised by the defense, of course—but also by Elise Younger, who shrugged away from him as if he were some kind of reptile. Disdained, too, by the honchos at Justice, who worried he would botch the government’s case.

  He’d read the recent spate of articles, seen the media portrayals contemplating his motivations, picking at his biography—or the bones of it anyway, the barest facts. He’d read the descriptions of his ranch house in San Mateo, of his fundamentalist daughter and wild son. Of his long career as a nose-to-the-grindstone investigative attorney, a cool shell with a hot exterior, perennial second in charge. The government’s hit man, angry in the shadows.

  Well …

  Maybe he was a son of a bitch, but the world was full of sons of bitches. Like a lot of people, he had a wife and family. And like a lot of people, if anything happened to them—if someone with a cockamamie idea blew apart his life—then he would want someone like himself to do just what he was doing now.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” he said.

  “In regard to Cynthia Nakamura—this issue of the discovery material?”

  “Ms. Nakamura has been available to the defense for some time.”

  “That’s not true,” interjected Jensen. “The prosecutor has been playing a shell game.”

  “Your Honor, Ms. Nakamura was listed initially under her husband’s name. As soon as we realized the potential for confusion, we corrected the problem. The defense has been provided with her deposition.”

  “Her illness precludes our speaking with her,” said Jensen. “And the deposition has obviously been heavily coached. Your Honor, we must insist this witness be disallowed.”

  This back and forth had been going on for some time, since early in the trial, and Judge Jackson looked weary of them both, but seemed particularly impatient with Jensen, Blackwell thought. The defense attorney had lost his touch. He was loud, inelegant. His skin had grown splotchy, and he touched his beard too often. There was something decidedly syphilitic in his manner.

  “Your Honor,” Jensen continued, “if it weren’t for the current political environment, we wouldn’t be here. This case is the same one that was too weak to go to trial three decades ago. So far, the government hasn’t brought anything new. And now they want to bring forth a woman who has obviously been coerced on her deathbed.”

  “You’ve made your point,” said the judge.

  Regardless, Blackwell knew that his case so far hadn’t done much to tie Owens to the crime. He’d introduced the new forensics, true, connecting bullet casings at the bank to weapons found in an SLA hideaway. But Jensen would counter that by challenging how the evidence had been stored these many years. Other than that, Blackwell had spent much of his time with witnesses who could establish what had happened in the bank. An aging woman who’d been working as a teller that day. The security guard who’d seen the shooting. The insurance salesman who’d dropped to the floor at the robbers’ commands, and who had lain beside Eleanor Younger as she died.

  The only thing that had taken the defense by surprise, perhaps, was when he’d called Annette Ricci and Jan Sprague. Both of them well spoken. Ricci with her theatrical smile. Sprague with her cashmere looks, her pearl necklace, her well-cut jacket. His questioning of the two women had been brief and without incident. He’d asked them where they had been the day of the robbery. In Aptos, they
told him. And Owens, they said, had been there, too.

  The press commentators had derided the seeming purposelessness of his approach, how he’d been outclassed by the women, but this didn’t bother him. He had his own strategy, his own plan.

  As for Judge Jackson, Blackwell had been in front of her before. Antonia Jackson was African American—a severe, dark-eyed woman of liberal reputation, but she was no knee-jerk liberal. She had a brother who’d been killed in a robbery and a son who worked as a prosecuting attorney. And she, too, like everyone, had her own considerations.

  “How ill is this woman?” she asked.

  “She’s terminal. But she has recently taken a turn for the better. If I can point out, our handling of this is well within the boundaries of the new legislation, which grants the state considerable discretion in matters of protecting witnesses.”

  Jensen went off on a howl then. Complaining about the abuse of the system. About the trumped-up nature of the case. About the state expanding its powers to coerce witnesses and bring in pretty much whomever they pleased, violating the rules of discovery. Most of it was noise. The rules had changed recently, but underneath it all, there were other reasons for the fuss. He could see the worry in Jensen’s eyes.

  Antonia Jackson shifted in her seat, uncomfortable in her robes, her eyes running from one of them to the other. She was in a hard place herself. The administration was going after certain judgeships. And the public was in a lousy mood. Once you got past the noisy ones and the fools, the protestors in the street, people weren’t game for letting killers go.