Revolution #9

by Peter Abrahams

  The phone in the kitchen started to ring. Goodnow climbed the stairs. The phone was still ringing when he arrived. He answered it.

  It was Svenson. “Mr. G?” he said. He was whispering.

  “Whispering is stupid,” Goodnow said. “You might as well shout at the top of your lungs.”

  “Sorry, Mr. G,” said Svenson in a normal voice. “You were right.”

  “Right?”

  “About him.” Svenson’s tone was surprised, respectful. “He just got on a plane to San Francisco. Flying coach.”

  Goodnow’s heart started beating faster, much too fast. Hope was a powerful drug. “Has it taken off?”

  “Ten more minutes,” Svenson said. “They’re backed up.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the departure lounge. What do you want me to do?”

  Have him arrested. That was the proper response. But Goodnow said: “Go first class and don’t let him see you.” Because you might get killed. Goodnow kept the thought to himself.

  “Of course not, Mr. G. I’ve already got a ticket.”

  “Good, Buzz.” Perhaps he would recommend Svenson for promotion after all. “Very good.”

  There was a pause. “Mr. G?”

  “Yes?”

  “I wish I’d known this before—that it was going to work, and all.”

  “Before what, Buzz?”

  Another pause. “Last call,” Svenson said. “Got to go.”

  Goodnow hung up. He was hot, trembling, alive: Hugo Klein lived in San Francisco. The missile was on target at last.

  Goodnow took a taxi back to the airport. San Francisco, San Francisco, the next flight to San Francisco: the saint’s name spun through his mind. But before Goodnow could get to the ticket counter he heard himself paged. He reported to U.S. Customs, wondering how Svenson had messed up. But it wasn’t Svenson. Bunting was waiting for him.

  Bunting took him aside. Bunting, with his Harold Lloyd glasses, his pink skin, his perfect health. Bunting—Choate, Amherst, Harvard Law. He didn’t expect bluntness from Bunting.

  He got it anyway. “You’re fired,” Bunting said.

  Goodnow nodded.

  “Where is Svenson?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is he doing?” Bunting almost raised his voice.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then we’ll have to hunt him down, won’t we?” said Bunting.

  Goodnow exercised his right to remain silent.

  Bunting glared at him. It was hard to frighten a man with glares through Harold Lloyd glasses, hard to frighten a man with a Gerber baby growing inside his stomach. Goodnow was beyond fright. It was a nice feeling.

  A man from the office appeared, a big man, almost Svenson’s size. “Escort Mr. Goodnow home,” Bunting said. “He’s not well.”

  24

  Air Canada’s flight 603, Toronto to San Francisco—filled to capacity, lavatories reeking—pounded through the night, fighting headwinds. Charlie, in coach seat 33A, feeling hungry, even hungrier than he’d been at the Catamount Bar and Grille, chose the chicken teriyaki, but found he still could not eat. He fell into an incomplete sleep, his mind flickering with dreams that didn’t quite emerge from the shadows. Svenson, in seat 1B, first class, drank a bottle of champagne, ate filet mignon in sauce béarnaise, and watched a movie about terrorists and oil wells that might have been a comedy; it made him laugh, in any case. Yvonne, also in first class, seat 6D, pulled a blanket over herself and slept the whole way.

  · · ·

  Malcolm met her. He took her bag, but didn’t give her a kiss. “Hi, Mom,” he said. “How was the trip?”

  “Tiring,” Yvonne answered. “What are you doing here?”

  “Conference,” Malcolm said. “I told Annie I’d pick you up.”

  They crossed the parking lot to Malcolm’s car, a beat-up Ford compact of a type no longer made. Inside, a clutter: textbooks on marketing, accounting, management, tapes by bands she hadn’t heard of, his rugby cleats, his trumpet, two or three empty beer cans. Yvonne got in, forcing herself to keep silent about the beer cans; but she couldn’t help imagining possible chains of cause and effect that might follow his arrest. Malcolm squeezed in behind the wheel; he seemed broader, more muscular than ever.

  “How’s Wharton?” she asked.

  “No complaints.” He stopped at the tollbooth and paid. There seemed to be a lot of money in his wallet. He caught her glance. “Did I tell you about my summer job?”

  When would that have been? she thought. You never call. But she said, “No,” and left it at that.

  “Sony,” he said, and it sounded like a magic word. “They’ve got me in finance.”

  “In Philadelphia?”

  “No. New York. I’ve been there all summer. Four of us sharing a one-bedroom off Washington Square. They work us like slaves and then we’re up all night. I’m exhausted.”

  He didn’t look exhausted. He looked tanned, fit, happy, energetic. Sony, Wharton, finance: anathema. But he made it all sound … fun. Did she envy him? Yvonne recoiled from the thought.

  “Your place?” asked Malcolm, turning north on the freeway.

  “Yes,” she said. He no longer called it home. Was that part of growing up? Yvonne didn’t know. Her own history offered no guidance.

  They crossed the Bay Bridge, climbed up into the Berkeley Hills, turned onto a middle-class street, verging on upper-middle, green and quiet. Here middle-class verging on upper-middle meant that while some of the lawns might need cutting, everyone recycled. Bundled newspapers waited on the sidewalk in front of Yvonne’s house, but the little patch of grass growing around the palm tree was short. She glanced at Malcolm as he parked in the drive, knew at once that he had cut it. Whenever he came home, he repaired, maintained, cleaned: a reproach.

  They went inside. Malcolm opened the fridge. “Hungry?”

  “Not very,” she said, noticing how full the fridge was. He must have stocked it.

  Malcolm made himself a sandwich. He toasted rye bread, and while it was in the toaster, opened some canned lobster, chopped onions and tomatoes, mixed them with the meat and a spoonful of canola oil mayonnaise, laid a place at the table, and wiped the counter. The toaster popped; he spread the lobster salad on the toast, poured a glass of milk, sat down to eat.

  “Sure you’re not hungry?” he said.

  “Sure,” replied Yvonne, but she was lying. She was hungry; she just didn’t feel like a lobster salad sandwich. And the efficient way he had made it somehow reminded her of the new world order, hateful and fascist.

  “Sony?” she said. Perhaps it was a magic word; it had popped out of her mouth unbidden.

  “It’s a start, Mom,” Malcolm said with a smile. He still had that big, boyish smile, an American smile on a broad, American face. The first time she saw that smile she should have realized it was hopeless.

  Malcolm finished his sandwich, washed the dishes he had used, went down to his old room in the basement. Soon the sound of his trumpet came vibrating up through the floor. He began with something that sounded like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” but quickly developed a syncopated alter ego, far more sophisticated, filling with potential force, like water boiling under a heavy lid. He was having fun; again the word made her pause. She realized Malcolm had always been good at amusing himself; living with just his mother, he had had to be.

  Yvonne went down the hall, through the bedroom, into the bathroom. She took off her clothes, threw them in the wastebasket, had a shower. She washed her hair with aloe shampoo, conditioned it with seaweed conditioner. She soaped her body, scrubbed it with a loofah, dug under her fingernails, soaped again, rinsed under the hottest water she could stand. She turned off the hot, letting icy water drum her body. She stepped out of the shower, covered in goose bumps, feeling clean.

  Yvonne wiped the steam off the mirror, saw herself. She didn’t look like Lady Macbeth. She looked like a half-Jewish middle-aged woman whose hair was still rich and dar
k, whose face was still beautiful, whose body was still strong and sexual. The mirror steamed up again, and the image blurred. Yvonne wrapped a towel around herself, carried the wastebasket to the trash bin outside the kitchen door, and dumped the contents in one of the cans.

  She went to bed. The music had stopped; the house was quiet. A boat sounded its horn somewhere in the bay, faint and distant. Perhaps fog was piling up over San Francisco. She could picture it: a peaceful image, a sleep-inducing image. The quiet, the romance of the boat, the sleep-inducing image: there was nothing to keep her from sleeping, but she couldn’t sleep.

  Hours later, Yvonne lay in the dark, still awake. She heard a knock at the front door. Annie. Yvonne let her in.

  “You’re back,” Annie said, watching her closely, perhaps sensing that she hadn’t been asleep. Annie knew her well—knew Yvonne, that is—had known her almost since there had been an Yvonne. Loved her too, maybe, and Yvonne, for political reasons, had tried to love her back. But Yvonne had been unable to alter the shape of her sexual urges for political reasons, although she had altered almost everything else in her life for them.

  “I’m back,” said Yvonne. They sat in the dark living room, side by side at opposite ends of the couch.

  “How was it?”

  “I just had to get away, that’s all.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Walked around. Looked in windows. Slept. Nothing.”

  A horn sounded again in the bay.

  “Is it foggy?” Yvonne asked.

  “I didn’t notice.” Annie: too wound up to notice. Was that unfair?

  Silence. A silence with nothing in it but the darkness and Annie’s edgy presence.

  “We had a meeting tonight,” Annie said.

  Meetings were important. The gang was all they had, the sole model of a just society. “I had to get away” was not a good excuse, but Yvonne made no apology.

  “About what to do with the money,” Annie continued.

  “We don’t have it yet.”

  “But we will.”

  Only if I pull it off, Yvonne thought, so don’t bug me about your goddamn meeting. “Yes,” she said, “we will.”

  Her confidence was contagious. Annie’s voice became brisker, more energetic; like a salesman’s. “The consensus seems to be to buy a ranch for all of us. Not that we’d have to live there, not full-time. But it would be a kind of haven.”

  “A ranch?”

  “Or something like that. The feeling was we need some security.”

  “That was the only idea—buy a ranch?”

  After a pause, Annie said: “Angel mentioned Cuba.”

  “Cuba?”

  “Going to Cuba. All of us. Using the money to get established there.”

  “Living there forever, you mean?”

  “No one said forever.”

  “Giving up, in other words.”

  “You don’t have to be so angry. The idea was dropped.”

  Leaving the ranch. “I thought we were doing this to make a statement,” Yvonne said.

  “We are. But after the statement we’ll have all this money. Don’t we have to do something with it?”

  “Give it to the poor.”

  “You know that’s not practical. It would be misinterpreted. They’d find ways to make it look condescending—find poor people who’d say they wanted no part of it, all that. Poor but proud. All the Horatio Alger bullshit.”

  “But we’d be making a statement.”

  Annie sighed. She didn’t argue anymore. Maybe she was tired of talking. Yvonne knew that she herself was. Except for the Santa Clara action, there had been so many years of nothing but talk, so many years of nothing but analysis, so many years lived in camouflage. Those years had led to this: a ranch, with one vote for emigration—call it retirement—to Cuba. It was so fucking … American; as though the camouflage had become the skin itself.

  Annie said: “Malcolm picked you up?”

  “Yes.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did he mention what he was doing?”

  “If you mean working for Sony, so what?”

  Suddenly Annie was laughing. She had a pretty laugh, light and musical. Yvonne wanted to shut it off, anyway she could. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” Annie said. “You name him after a revolutionary, raise him on radical politics, and he ends up at Sony. He must take after his father.”

  Yvonne kept her tone even, unperturbed. “I don’t think so,” she said. Of Malcolm’s father, Annie knew no more and no less than Malcolm did: he had been the male half of a stoned half-remembered one-night stand, out of the picture long before Malcolm’s birth. One of those stories made more credible by the legend of the sixties. Berkeley was full of them.

  “No?” said Annie. “What was he like?”

  “Who?”

  “Malcolm’s father.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  They sat in the dark. Annie moved her hand across the couch. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said.

  Yvonne was silent.

  “Maybe we could lie down for a while. Not to do anything, just lie down.”

  “No,” Yvonne said, and tried to soften the response by adding, “I want to be alone.” What a stupid thing to say, and not even original, but breathed by a celluloid character in some old movie. Yvonne tried to think of some other softener, but Annie had already gone, closing the door silently.

  And it wasn’t even true: Yvonne didn’t want to be alone. In the dark she suddenly found herself thinking about Felipe; and the thought was arousing. Felipe. Arousing. God in heaven. What was she coming to?

  25

  “I’m always amused by liberals who profess to be such devotees of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” said the former attorney general of the United States. A tight shot of the former attorney general appeared on the studio monitor over Charlie’s head. All the lines on his face pointed down; he was physiognomically incapable of looking amused. “If they’re such strong supporters of these documents, how can they ignore the original intent of the Founding Fathers who wrote them?”

  Hugo Klein turned to the former attorney general, exposing his telegenic profile to the small but loyal PBS home audience. “The intent of the Founding Fathers was that there be slavery and no female suffrage, among other things. We can’t goose-step back to the eighteenth century, no matter how much certain members of the body politic would love to.”

  That brought a few cheers from the studio audience. Fred Friendly, the moderator, glared through the TV lights in rebuke; it wasn’t that kind of show. He leaned toward the former attorney general. “Well, sir, what do you say to that?”

  The former attorney general was a TV pro. He had lots to say, washing away Hugo Klein’s rebuttal in a river of verbiage. Time ran out. Fred Friendly promo’ed next week’s round-table—“Should there be codes forbidding hate speech on campus?”—and said good-bye.

  The studio audience filed out. The TV lights went off. Technicians unhooked the mikes from the panelists and hooded the cameras. The panelists exchanged a few remarks, shook hands with the moderator, began moving off the set and through an offstage door. Hugo Klein, delayed by a woman who wanted his autograph, was the last to leave. Charlie, seated in the shadows of the last row, rose and walked down the aisle, onto the empty set. He saw that it was as make-believe as a display in a furniture store window, and left by the offstage door.

  The door led into a long corridor. Charlie went past a props room, with puppets lying in a heap by the wall, a green room, with a coffee machine and Styrofoam cups, and several closed doors, on each of which was taped the name of a panelist. Charlie knocked on the door that read: “Hugo Klein, Esq.”

  “Come in.”

  Charlie went in and closed the door. Hugo Klein was sitting in a barber’s chair with his back to Charlie, wiping his face with a round white pad. His eyes went to Charlie’s image in the mirror on the wall; t
hey were calm, dark eyes, eyes that had seen everything, perhaps several times, and now had nothing to do but categorize. Charlie saw no reaction at all in those eyes, but why would there be? The two men had never met. All the same, Charlie was aware of a minute stiffening in Klein’s posture. He thought he saw the explanation for that in the aggressiveness of his own image in the mirror and tried to moderate it.

  “I won’t be a minute,” Klein said, dabbing at the great planes of his face. “How long do you figure it will take?” The white pad turned the color of a surfer’s tan.

  “To do what?” asked Charlie.

  “Get there. Aren’t you the driver?”

  “No,” said Charlie. He had considered several beginnings. Now that he had seen those eyes up close, none seemed promising. This was not a man he was likely to outwit. He reverted to basics: “I’ve come for your help.”

  Klein dropped the pad into a wastebasket, studied his own image, and smoothed the long silvery wings of his hair. “If it’s about a case, I can’t discuss it now. Call my office in the morning.”

  “It’s not a case,” Charlie said. “Not in that sense. I’m looking for Rebecca.”

  Klein got off the chair. He was taller than Charlie, though not as broad. “You people deserve an A for persistence,” he said, “like badgers.” He didn’t sound angry; his voice was weary, if anything. He held out his hand. “Let’s see your badge, badger.”

  “I don’t have a badge.”

  Klein’s eyebrows, magnificent speckled cornices, rose. “Then you will kindly leave.”

  Charlie stood his ground, not easily. He wasn’t afraid, not physically—he was younger and stronger. But the other man had a moral presence that was hard to resist, like the aura of some warrior saint. It was in his voice, his bearing, his face, even the silvery hair he must have had cut just so.

  “I was a friend of hers,” Charlie said. “At Morgan.”

  “Friend?” said Klein, cloaking the word in ambiguity. “What’s your name?”

  “It wouldn’t mean anything to you. But my real—” Charlie stopped himself. “But back then my name was Blake Wrightman.”