Revolution #9

by Peter Abrahams

  Someone knocked on the door. The words “Blake Wrightman” seemed to fill the silence that followed. There was a second knock.

  “What is it?” Klein said, listening, intent. His dark, categorizing eyes didn’t leave Charlie’s face.

  “Ready when you are, Mr. Klein,” answered a woman’s voice.

  “I … won’t be needing you after all.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” Footsteps moved down the hall and into inaudibility. Klein took his eyes off Charlie and reached for his suit jacket, hanging over the chair. He put it on, began buttoning the middle button. His fingers seemed unsteady. He fumbled for a moment, gave up. Then, still without looking, he lunged forward awkwardly and threw a punch at Charlie’s head.

  It was a poor attempt, long and looping, and never landed. Charlie caught Klein’s wrist in midair and held it. Their faces were close together.

  “I deplore violence,” Klein said, his tone accusatory, as though Charlie were to blame for the attack. His body was shaking.

  Charlie let him go. “So do I,” he said.

  Klein made a sputtering sound. “Is that a joke?” His voice rose out of its baritone register. “Your penchant for violence ruined my daughter’s life.” He rubbed his wrist.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Klein lowered his voice. “I’m talking about how you destroyed her future. How you exiled her from her friends, her family, me. She could be dead, for all I know. Do you know how that makes me feel? I’m her father. Are you a father, Mr. Whatever-you-call-yourself?”

  “No,” Charlie said, but thought at once of Emily and the baby growing inside her. Zachary, was that what she had said? If it was a boy. He felt a moral weight shift, pulling him down, and fought to get back up to the level of the argument. “I don’t know how it feels, but why am I responsible?”

  “Are you baiting me?” Klein’s voice rose again, on a fountain of outrage. “You altered the setting on that … that device, to activate it after the agreed time. You perverted the symbolic statement she wanted to make into a killing.”

  “Where the hell did you hear that?”

  Klein opened his mouth, closed it tight, as though he had said too much already. He was not a public man in the mechanical style of the former attorney general; he had emotions and sometimes they showed. Perhaps that was what gave him his presence.

  “You’d better go,” Klein said.

  “I asked you where you got that story.”

  “And I said you’d better go. I have nothing more to say.” Charlie didn’t move. Klein tried to button his suit jacket but still could not. He held onto the back of the barber’s chair, looked at Charlie. “You are failing to grasp the situation.”

  “What situation?”

  “Yours. At this moment. If, as I assume, you are still a fugitive, it is my duty as a citizen to call the police. Under some interpretations, your very presence in this room would render me liable to criminal charges.”

  “I’m not going to make a citizen’s arrest,” Charlie said.

  Klein smiled; he had perfect teeth, big and white, matching Charlie’s memory of Rebecca’s. “But I may do just that,” Klein said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Word would get out. It might scare away clients.”

  The smile vanished; Klein’s face hardened, and for a moment Charlie was reminded of Rebecca again, specifically her Torquemada look. “You take me for a cynic. It’s commonplace to hate me but rather unusual to question my sincerity.”

  “I withdraw the remark,” Charlie said. He had nothing to base it on, except one feeble punch from a deplorer of violence. “But I’d like to know who told you that I rigged the timer, if you haven’t seen Rebecca since before the bombing.”

  Klein said nothing, but he was squeezing the back of the barber’s chair, as though his body was fighting to contain enormous pressures. Charlie realized that he had indeed outwitted the other man, almost without trying. “I take it you have seen her, then,” Charlie said. “Did she feed you that story about the timer? Or was it Malik?”

  “You’d better go,” Klein said again, but his words had lost their force.

  “The truth is you have seen her.”

  “No.”

  “And you know where she is.”

  “No.”

  “But who else could have told you that? And you got money to her in Toronto. After the fact. So you’d already made your decision about aiding and abetting, or whatever the legal term would be. Why stop there?”

  Klein said nothing.

  “Where is she?”

  “I have no idea,” Klein said. He didn’t deny giving her money or ask Charlie how he knew about it. “And nothing you say or do will change that.”

  The door opened and Fred Friendly stuck his head in. “Nice job, Hugo,” he said. “See you next week.” He nodded at Charlie and closed the door.

  Charlie and Klein watched each other in silence. “Why now?” Klein asked, lowering his voice.

  “I don’t understand,” Charlie said, but he knew what was coming. This was the question on which everything turned, the question Mr. G had prepared him for.

  “It’s been twenty-two years,” said Klein. “Why are you looking for her now?”

  Charlie had Mr. G’s answer ready, a middle-aged answer based on lost love and a long obsession; an answer he had never liked. He had a much better one now, of his own devising: “I may be able to prove our innocence.”

  “How?”

  “That’s what I want to discuss with her.”

  Klein shook his head. “You seem like an intelligent man. Please try to absorb what I’m saying. I don’t know where she is. I haven’t seen or heard from her since months before the bombing. February of 1970, to be precise—I visited her for one day. Since then no contact of any kind. I won’t say it again.” He paused. “But proving innocence is a legal matter. I may be able to advise you, if I had the facts.”

  “Help me by telling the truth.”

  “I am.”

  “What about the phone conversation you had with Rebecca the night of the bombing?” He had walked into the end of it, with the just-assembled bomb in the khaki knapsack. Until then, Rebecca and Malik hadn’t known there would be a bomb at all. “Isn’t that considered hearing from her?”

  “There was no phone conversation,” Klein said.

  “She called someone ‘Daddy,’ ” Charlie said, trying and failing to recall the rest of it. “Who was it, if not you?”

  Klein shook his head again, a regal movement. “Your memory is playing you false. It’s been a long time, too long to remember clearly, long enough for the mind to invent consoling memories of its own.”

  “I remember,” Charlie said. It was true. Something in him had refused to forget, refused to lose that night in mental haze. He remembered the rum from St. Kitts, the baseball mitt, the face of the boy’s father: sharp-edged memories he had lived with for a long time, that had made him what he was, and now might free him. Was that hoping too much?

  Charlie and Klein stared at each other; and all their reflections on the mirrored walls of the dressing room stared too. Klein said: “You spoke of proving innocence. Whose did you mean?”

  “I said ‘our.’ ”

  “Does that include Andrew Malik?”

  It was working, Charlie thought. He said: “No.”

  Klein’s eyes looked a little brighter, as though reflecting some mental realignment. “Proof requires evidence. Have you got evidence?”

  Charlie nodded. He had evidence all right, evidence that he had altered the bomb so it would not explode, and evidence that it had not exploded: he had the bomb itself.

  “Then why didn’t you come forward earlier?”

  “Because I didn’t have it earlier.”

  “What prompted you to go looking at this late date?”

  A shrewd question. “It wasn’t a matter of lookin
g,” Charlie said. “It was a matter of thinking things out.” He felt Klein’s disbelief, and more to deflect it than for any other reason, said, “Where were you that night?”

  Klein answered with a question of his own. “Do you know a man named Francis Goodnow?”

  “No.”

  “He may be using another name.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Why do you?” said Klein. He described the man Charlie knew as Mr. G.

  “I don’t know him,” Charlie said, but how convincingly? The suggestion of congruence between himself and someone like Mr. G, raised first in his own mind and now by Klein, had thrown him. “I asked where you were that night.”

  “What night?”

  “What other night is there?”

  “I don’t see how it matters,” Klein said. “But I must have been in Chicago.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s where I heard what had happened, the next day. I was there for one of the Panther trials.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Through the media, of course. Like everyone else.”

  There was a phone on the wall. It rang. Klein answered it, listened. “I’ll be right there,” he said. “I’ll want to see everything on the Tettrazzi case.” Pause. “Of course including the appeal.” He hung up, turned to Charlie, brisk and forceful, as though contact with work had boosted his strength. “If you have evidence, as you say, why do you need Rebecca?”

  “I don’t have it all. She has the rest, although she doesn’t know it.” That was the bait.

  Klein considered it for a few moments. Then he said, “You don’t convince me.” He buttoned his suit jacket in one easy movement, picked up his briefcase, went to the door. “I don’t suggest you linger here too long,” he said. Then he was gone, leaving Charlie alone with his aggressive image in the mirror.

  · · ·

  “What’s this all about?” asked the former attorney general of the United States, changing shirts in his dressing room. The TV experience always made him sweat.

  Svenson, wearing earphones and adjusting the volume on his recorder, said, “God knows.”

  The former attorney general finished dressing and lit a cigar. “I hope you nail the son of a bitch,” he said on his way out.

  That’s what they were doing all right, nailing Hugo Klein. In Svenson’s earphone Ochs said, “You got money to her in Toronto.” There was no denial from Klein. They probably had him right there. It struck Svenson then that Goodnow was indeed the mentor for him: the man was a master. He regretted his call to Bunting. Still, Bunting hadn’t seemed concerned. He’d just told him to keep his eyes open. There was no suggestion that he was actually going to do anything.

  But where was Goodnow?

  It was night back east. Listening in one ear to the conversation in the next dressing room, Svenson phoned Goodnow at home. The answering machine picked up.

  “Taping successful,” Svenson said, and hung up.

  26

  Not long after crossing the state line into southern New Jersey, Ol’ J.P., peering through the bug-smeared windshield of his ten-year-old pickup and holding an almost empty bottle of Tennessee whiskey between his thighs, realized he wasn’t far from the beach with the Wee Willie Winkie Motel. Without really knowing why—but what was an hour or two after all these years? and anyway, he needed to piss—he took the next exit and soon drove into the little beach town where he and Mina had first made love.

  J.P. had no memories of the town itself and so couldn’t tell whether it had changed or not. All he remembered was the motel. He drove along the main drag, past a pizzeria, a liquor store, a pharmacy, a souvenir shop, a bar, a restaurant, an ice cream place, and parked in the court of the motel at the end.

  J.P. sat there. After a while he said, “Shit.” Could it have been this crummy back then? The pavement in the court was cracked with weeds sprouting through, the shingles on the walls and roof were blotched by water damage, a faded For Sale sign hung on the office door. No: it had been nice and new. Hadn’t it?

  But crummy or not, it was the same place: a one-story L with about a dozen rooms, steps from the ocean. J.P., gazing at it from behind the wheel, could recall everything: how he’d wrangled a weekend pass from Fort Dix; how he’d done a hundred pushups just before picking her up at her dorm on Friday night, so he’d look stronger; how she’d jumped into the car he’d borrowed from his sergeant and given him a kiss, just on the cheek, but confident and familiar, as though she’d made up her mind about something. And she had: they’d spent the whole weekend in the Wee Willie Winkie. How could he forget the Wee Willie Winkie, even if it looked like a dump now and they’d changed the name to Sea ’n Sand?

  J.P. finished what was left in the bottle and climbed out of the cab. Room 3, right there in the middle: he remembered even that, the goddamn room. It had a sliding door opening right onto the sand. They’d gone skinny-dipping under the light of the moon that first night, running across the beach hand in hand, throwing themselves into the waves, then floating together tight, goose bumps on their skins, with all the body parts that could stick out sticking out. J.P., thinking to take a peek through the sliding glass door of room 3, walked around the end of the motel, toward the water. That was when he got a shock: the beach was gone.

  Nothing but bare rock, and the ocean rising and falling beyond. Had he come to the wrong town after all? J.P. studied the back of the motel. No, there were the rooms with their sliding glass doors, most of them, he noticed, crisscrossed with duct tape.

  J.P. stared out to sea. Time passed. He lowered his zipper and pissed on the rocks. His urine ran like a miniature yellow river through miniature badlands toward the ocean.

  Behind him a voice said: “Lookin’ for something, bud?”

  J.P. zipped up and turned. A man with lather on his face and a razor in his hand had opened one of the glass doors and come out. “Yeah,” J.P. told him, “the goddamn beach.”

  “Beach? Been no beach here in years. Not since the storm of ’seventy-eight.”

  J.P. glanced around: at the ocean, the rocks, the taped glass, the man. “No shit,” he said. Then he walked around to the front of the Sea ’n Sand Motel and got into his pickup. The office door of the motel opened and the man with lather on his face reappeared, watching him. J.P. backed out and drove down the main drag.

  He made two stops. The first was at the liquor store, where he bought another bottle. The second was at the pharmacy. He was hungry. The sea air, right? Makes you hungry. Hungry for solid food. J.P. chose a candy bar and a family-size bag of corn chips. On the way to the cashier he picked up a bottle of mouthwash and a roll of duct tape.

  “That be all?” said the clerk, totaling his purchases.

  “Got any straight razors?”

  “Think we do,” said the clerk. “I’ll check.” He went into a back room, returned with two razors in plasticized packages. “Not a popular item nowadays,” said the clerk, holding them out. “We’ve just got these two left.”

  “I’ll take the big one,” said Ol’ J.P.

  27

  Charlie walked up a steep hill and looked down at the bay. He had to think. Instead, he watched boats cutting across the water, leaving wakes of red foam in the rays of the late afternoon sun. They reminded him of Straight Arrow and Cosset Pond. The next thing he knew he was in a phone kiosk, calling home.

  “Hello?” It was Emily.

  Again he found himself unable to speak to her.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  Charlie got ready to hang up. But then she said: “Charlie? It isn’t you, is it?”

  And he answered: “Yes.” The word came strangled, muted, rough, and perhaps only partly true, but it came.

  “Charlie?”

  “Yes,” he repeated, this time with more control. San Francisco Bay, the boats with their sails cupped to the breeze, the foaming red wakes, the famous hill he stood on: none of it seemed real. Reality was this electronically reproduced
voice from three thousand miles away, marred by hisses and hums in the wire.

  “Charlie,” she said, “are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t sound all right. What’s going on?”

  Charlie had trouble recalling the cover story: Uncle Sam, a grandfather’s will, choice hunks of real estate, statutory time factors—was that it?

  “Charlie?”

  “Everything’s all right,” said Charlie. “It’s just taking longer than they said.”

  “What’s taking longer and who is they?”

  “Uncle Sam. The lawyers. This inheritance business.” His voice coarsened again, this time from having to force out the lies. He didn’t want to lie to her. He wanted to confess, as he should have done at the beginning. Or better, to have not begun at all; to have kept his mouth shut about twenty-six across—Malik’s goddamned power saw—and to have kept Ben Webster off the turntable. But now what was he to confess? Was he a criminal, a murderer? What had he done? What was he responsible for? He no longer knew. There were unresolved questions, no longer only of motive but of fact: yes, there were problems with his inheritance, the inheritance Blake Wrightman had left to Charlie Ochs. In that sense it was not a lie.

  “Is he with you?” said Emily.

  “Who?” said Charlie, aware that he was failing to communicate in the easy shorthand of a good marriage.

  “Your uncle,” she said.

  “No,” said Charlie, “not at the moment.”

  “How is he?”

  “Who?”

  “Your uncle, for God’s sake. He has cancer, doesn’t he?”

  “I guess he does.”

  “You guess?”

  “He doesn’t talk about it.”

  Silence. He thought he felt her mind, clear, quiet, with its reserves of power, probing from across the continent.

  “Where are you?” she said.

  An inevitable question, was it not? And had he an answer ready? No.

  “Where are you? It sounds far.”

  “It’s not far,” he said. “I’ll be home soon.”