“What was on the agenda?” he asked.
“Agenda?”
“Yeah. You guys talked politics, right? Call the meeting to order, read the minutes from last session, lay out the night’s topics?”
On another night she might have laughed. “They were never as organized as that. They were joined by conviction and friendship. They caused a little trouble and flirted with real action, but they were never really organized.”
“Armchair revolutionaries.”
“I don’t think any of them actually owned an armchair.”
He cocked his head at that, then continued to his Mercedes. Opened the passenger door and took out an SLR camera. He smiled at her and swept a hand toward the still-open front door. “Shall we?”
4
The Roxy, around a corner from the Castro’s main drag, was self-consciously unselfconscious, a literal hole in a ply-board wall that, once evening had settled in, was only visible to those who knew that they were looking for a small door with ROXY scrawled on it in Magic Marker. But there was nothing magical about the Roxy.
When Rachel entered, she was faced with the strings of multicolored Christmas lights that decorated the cramped place year-round. Revolutionary posters adorned the chipped walls—Ché, Rodchenko, and HUMANITY WON’T BE HAPPY UNTIL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST. The bar was a short, sticky affair, and the table where young Nathan pulled at his flimsy goatee and talked into his phone wasn’t much cleaner. He ignored her as she settled down, saying angrily, and cryptically, into the phone, “Bitches is as bitches does!” Then he ended the call and said nothing. Rachel waited.
Beth, the bartender who had recently shaved the left side of her head during a long LSD weekend, brought over a glass of house red—she knew by now that Rachel never touched beer. “Thanks,” Rachel said, and Nathan finally came out of his funk.
“Jay’s fucking around.”
“Sorry to hear that,” said Rachel.
Beth, who hadn’t left yet, laughed. “You didn’t know? There’s no warm place Jay’s dick hasn’t been.”
“Fuck off.”
Beth shrugged and wandered off. She was an interesting figure who had earned her own short paragraph in Rachel’s report. Bartenders, she’d come to believe, served as nexus points for the movement: discreet and knowledgeable, they sometimes acted as gatekeepers. If someone like Beth was impressed by you, she could make an introduction to the real movers and shakers in the underground. Not the kids she’d ended up with.
Nathan scooped up his beer, and when he said, “I’m getting wasted tonight,” Rachel decided against asking how that was any different than every other night.
By the time Gary and Layla arrived, Nathan was on his third beer. Between gulps, he’d tortured her with an endless parade of his hopes and dreams, and how he’d poured so many of them into Jay, the grizzled daddy bear who’d opened up a whole new world that Nathan, back in St. Louis, never could have imagined. Rachel consoled because, as she’d learned over the last month, this was her way in with these young revolutionaries—she was their maternal sounding board, her quiet acceptance succeeding precisely where their own mothers had failed them.
Layla pulled up a chair as Gary collected drinks from the bar, and Nathan finally blessed the table with silence. He well knew that Layla, like Beth, would offer no sympathy. It was a detail Rachel had already noted in her report—the females of the West Coast radical scene were a hard bunch.
“Peter’s got a great place for tonight,” Layla announced.
“Why do we have to go anywhere?” Nathan asked. “I’m comfortable.”
“Then stay,” she told him. “I want to visit wine country.”
“Wine country?” Rachel asked, interested. Their other nighttime squats had all been within fifteen minutes of the city.
“Sonoma. Supposed to be ridiculous. An estate.”
Even Nathan looked interested, but as they were preparing to leave his phone rang. Flustered, he answered it, and by the time he hung up he was in tears. “It’s Jay. Go on, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Suit yourself,” said Layla.
“Good luck,” Rachel mouthed to him.
Layla drove, using handwritten directions to send them north, and when they crossed the Golden Gate and pushed into Marin, Gary, in the back seat, brought up the raging debate over healthcare that had been ushered in with Barack Obama’s inauguration last year. “Fucking compromise will screw us in the end. Single-payer is the only way to take care of a country.”
Layla pointed out that such a move would drive half the country nuts.
“Until they realize they benefit from it,” said Gary.
“And how long’s that gonna take?” asked Layla, joining a swarm of brake lights as the traffic thickened. “Personally, I don’t give a shit how they feel.”
The conversation went on, but Rachel didn’t bother joining in. She looked out the window at the passing towns, half obscured by redwoods, and tried to measure their progress up the peninsula toward the open fields of California’s vineyards as dusk settled in. She thought about what she’d learned about Peter. Serbian mafia? She didn’t see it, or maybe she was just taken in by her own prejudices. She thought back a few days to when Layla first had brought him to the Roxy. She’d noted his muted yet untraceable accent, the little signs of Old World manners, and the way he could dismiss a disputed point with a wave of his hand and a quiet, “Nah.” They’d been discussing something that she could no longer remember, because when he broke in and soliloquized memories of what came before were obliterated, and all she could hold onto were his words:
“We’re looking at the end of five thousand years of progress. It had to happen eventually, because humans aren’t made for long-term thinking. Hey, our short-term thinking has served us pretty well. It got us iPhones and a trip to the Moon. But what we’re faced with is the boundary of human ability. The old philosophers knew it, knew we’d burn ourselves up. And these reminders of our limitations are coming at us from all directions. How the internet has turned against us. How capitalism’s orbited back to the feudal ideal, but the peasants will no longer take it. The planet itself is coming to get us, drowning island nations and beating the shit out of our infrastructure. I mean, a civilization that still pisses on people of different colors—people who look different or speak differently? How are we any better than the polar bears, or the pigeons?”
And that was when she knew that Peter Kožul—or, whoever he really was—was someone to be watched, someone who might end up with his own appendix in her steadily growing report. She decided to give Layla’s merry band a little more time.
It took an hour to reach the address, which led to the end of a country road and an open iron gate. The driveway stretched long and straight through vineyards just starting to flower, and as they drove Gary perked up, oohing at what he could still make out in the gathering darkness. The drive culminated in a circle, where Peter’s Jeep was parked in front of a mock-gothic monstrosity two stories high. Tall windows, stone details, and unnecessary points adorning the roof. And at the open front door, a bottle of Shiner in his hand, stood Peter.
“Well, how the fuck do you like this,” Layla said as she parked.
Climbing out, Gary said, “I like.”
Peter—tall and dark and wearing the blazer and polished shoes of the real estate agent he claimed to be—welcomed them to mi casa, waving them inside. When Rachel approached, though, he put his large hands on her shoulders and, without hesitation, kissed her fully on the lips. “Suzie. You’ve got to see the bedroom upstairs.”
She smiled and kissed him back.
He looked over her shoulder. “Nathan?”
“Romantic troubles.”
He rolled his eyes and led them all inside.
Through speakers deftly hidden throughout the house, she heard a male voice intone a strangely somber poem and immediately recognized the D.C. punk band Nation of Ulysses. A whine o
f feedback, then the steady groove of “N-Sub Ulysses”:
They’re all talking about the round and round
But who’s got the real anti-parent culture sound?
The music clashed wildly with the Victorian décor, the corridors lined with oversized classical paintings, and the long stairs that headed up to bedrooms.
Peter told them, “Drinks and food are in the kitchen, and don’t worry about making a mess. The owner died a month ago, and it’s already been sold to some Chinese investment firm that’ll collect the keys next week. I need to run and make a call. Do exactly as you like.”
He didn’t have to tell them twice.
5
“Here,” Rachel said as she and Toby returned to the kitchen. She pointed at the bottles on the marble counters—beer, vodka, gin, whiskey, and a single drained bottle of rosé. “He had set out all the alcohol before we arrived. And there—” She pointed at a tiled island that was smeared with guacamole, tortilla-chip crumbs, and crusty smears of soft cheese and cigarette ash. “The hors d’oeuvres.”
Bright flashes as Toby took photos. “A dinner party,” he suggested.
“A dinner party in hell,” she countered, but when she said those words she thought instead of another dinner party from last year. Out in the D.C. suburbs, Gregg had called over friends—his friends, really—and all that day, as he prepared the meats for grilling and julienned the vegetables, they’d argued continuously. About an hour before the guests arrived, they passed each other in the kitchen, him clutching a pair of tongs, her a bowl of steaming black beans, and he slammed his hip into her kidney hard enough for her to stumble into the counter and send the beans flying. Porcelain shattered, and she clutched the edge of the counter to keep from falling to the floor. When she looked up, ready to lash out, he was disappearing out of the room.
The funny thing, looking back, was that it wasn’t a particularly violent moment, not for Gregg. He’d kept his fists to himself for a whole day. In his world, knocking his wife against the kitchen counter was the height of civility.
When the guests trickled in with their hearty grins, Gregg stationed himself behind the bar to serve up wine and martinis, and she withdrew into silence. She smiled as she took their coats and answered the few questions that were thrown her way, but in reality she had become an observer, like an anthropologist dropped into the middle of a native ritual that she had only read about in books.
There was the music, that incongruous Gregg mix—eighties hits and the American Songbook—that no one paid attention to. There was the boisterous storyteller that her husband became whenever he got the chance, spilling not-quite-believable secrets about the world of the Washington lobbyist in the age of the first black president. Then Gregg the confidante, who pulled this or that friend aside to whisper lines that always ended with a laugh and a slap on the back. And the drinking.
Quickly, though, it dawned on her that the way their guests drained their glasses had less to do with joie de vivre than anxiety. How had she not noticed this before? How had she not seen how, after one of Gregg’s particularly raunchy jokes, Ben would look over at his wife, Emily, eyebrows raised in patronizing surprise, and she would look down into her glass before both drank deeply? Yet they, and all of them, eagerly accepted his dinner invitations, because for all his plentiful flaws Gregg Wills had connections. He knew people. Most importantly, he had access to all kinds of influence. It was remarkable how many indignities people were willing to suffer.
The clarity of that night had been overwhelming, and as she moved further back in time, thinking over the too-long course of their relationship, she had seen that nothing had ever been right. She’d never really known happiness with him, at least no happiness lasting more than twenty-four hours. All this came to her with a cold, sober thud that momentarily deafened her, and she looked up to find at their long dining table ten sets of eyes focused on her.
“Oh. Excuse me?”
Gregg frowned from the far end, his face full of that you’re embarrassing me expression, while Ben said, “Just trying to remember something you said about tax cuts, I can’t recall the exact words.”
“Her mind is elsewhere, Ben,” Gregg said with a hint of disgust.
“Yeah,” she said finally, turning to Ben. “Sorry. I was just realizing that I’m going to divorce this asshole.”
But that was then, and now, for Toby, she described an entirely different kind of dinner party. There was the first-person-shooter played on an Xbox connected to a fifty-inch TV. Another TV in another room played testosterone-heavy movies end on end. Music streamed in everywhere: Nation of Ulysses dovetailed into the Pixies and Sonic Youth and Black Flag, a choice mix of high-adrenaline bands that, when accompanied by the alcohol and skunk weed and some mysterious blue pills that Rachel only palmed, kept everyone amped up and on edge. If she’d thought they’d have another chill night talking about proletarian revolution, she was wrong. Tonight, Peter told them as he entered the room carrying a cardboard box of spray-paint cans, was about rocking the fuck out. Then he took a canister of red, walked to the eggshell wall, and wrote THIS IS OURS NOW in huge letters.
Layla snatched a canister of blue, and Gary green.
Layla danced like a pogo stick, bouncing around; Gary waved his arms in a swaying, stoned prance. Even Rachel danced, because to not dance was to stand out, and Peter swept her up in his arms and spun, singing about a creature in the sky who got sucked in a hole. And though she didn’t tell Toby, as she danced with Peter she tried to remember if she had ever felt this relaxed with Gregg, relaxed enough to give herself over to her dance partner and actually follow him without hesitation.
Toby took snapshots of the multicolored slogans on the wall—
PROPERTY IS THEFT
IF IT AIN’T BROKE, BREAK IT
MARXISM-VANDALISM
NO MORE THRONE, NO MORE CROWN
FUCK SHIT UP AND BURN IT DOWN
Toby said, “No one felt all this was crossing a line?”
“By then the pills had kicked in.”
“What were they?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but they had an effect. The giggles and the shouting and the antics skyrocketed. Over here,” she said, leading him back into the living room and pointing at a painting of a boy with an apple that had been ripped down from the wall and sliced up. Toby photographed it. “Layla did that,” she said. “And everyone laughed.”
“You too?”
“I played along. Peter seemed to be egging them on. He pulled down that china cabinet in the hallway. It shocked us, but then he said, ‘Let the Chinese clean it up,’ and that was his sign to us that we really could do as we pleased.”
“Is that when you called me?”
She shook her head. “They were having fun. Why would I call you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you didn’t feel safe.”
“I’m a woman, Toby. I never feel safe.”
He took that in. “You didn’t take the blue pills. The weed?”
“Couple hits. Really just wine.”
“So you were drunk.”
“A bottle over the space of four hours—I was buzzed. And I wanted more. The three of them were busy destroying the living room—Peter had cranked the music and they’d made an impromptu mosh pit—so I went downstairs to search for the wine cellar.”
Toby crouched to photograph pieces of stained glass from a shattered vase, as if he were working on a high school photo assignment. He looked up at her. “Want to go down there now?”
“No,” she said. “I really don’t.”
6
There was a dead bolt on the low, arched door that slid open easily, but when she felt around she could find no light switch, just unfinished steps leading down into musty darkness. She dragged her fingers along the lumpy stone walls for guidance, but it wasn’t until she reached the packed-earth floor that she felt metal bounce against her forehead. It frightened her at first, as if a prehistoric insect had material
ized deep inside the earth and found her—but, no. It was just a metal washer tied to a string. She grabbed it and pulled. With a click the basement was filled with dirty light.
In front of her was a broad, imposing rack of wine bottles. Floor to ceiling, it stretched in both directions nearly to each foundational wall. And hundreds—maybe a thousand—bottles. The Chinese investors, she guessed, were paying as much for this wine as they were for the house itself.
The collection, she saw from old, handwritten labels on the wood frame, was organized by country and regional appellations. Somewhere in FRANCE-LANGUEDOC she discovered a hefty bottle of Viognier covered by a skin of dust. She held it in one hand as she continued along, marveling at the effort and time that had gone into assembling all this. Had it been a single obsessive, or as a 1947 Château Cheval Blanc suggested, a project that had stretched multiple generations? Either way, these were people whose world was substantially different from her life on a civil servant’s wages. She felt only a brief jealousy, but it was strengthened by a sharp whiff of perfume, some unlikely remnant of a wealthy wife who had come down here to grab a bottle for guests and, perhaps, had decided to fight the moldy air with a few expensive squirts of Clive Christian.
Rachel stopped suddenly, sniffed again. That made no sense—an abandoned house with the fresh smell of perfume?
She turned to look behind herself. In the gloom, beyond the rickety stairs, were racks of tools, a work bench, and sealed plastic boxes full of life’s detritus. Her focus shifted, pulling back to the stairs, and she caught sight of spots scattered across the wood. Burgundy spots. They continued down to the floor, the spots sometimes smeared as if something had been dragged through them, or reshaped by the lines of a sole that had carelessly stepped on them.
She knew, of course, knew from the moment she saw the first spot on the steps. But that wasn’t what raised her heartbeat and blocked up her ears. It was where the drops of blood led. Straight along the front of the enormous wine rack, all the way to the far wall, and around the end of the rack. To the unseen other side.
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