Revolution #9

by Peter Abrahams

  A breeze off Cosset Pond blew in through the kitchen window, subsided. Emily smelled the sea: Charlie’s smell. She remembered Saturday morning—the morning of her wedding day—when she’d woken to find him already up, running water in the bathroom. What had she said? “Thinking of hightailing it? With me standing at the altar?”

  Charlie had laughed. A strange laugh. Or was it strange simply in retrospect, in the context of what had happened later that day? Charlie’s Uncle Sam had arrived with the man in the green whale pants, then there’d been a lot of information to absorb in too little time, after that Charlie had gone away in a limousine. Ferdie Ochs, first-class SOB, his will, choice hunks of real estate: that was the text. The subtext was the rude tone in which Charlie had addressed his uncle, the smirk on the face of the man with the green whale pants, Uncle Sam coughing blood.

  Coughing blood, in fact, on the green whale pants. Emily went into the laundry cubicle off the kitchen. There were the green whale pants, folded now on the dryer. Buzz. Their owner’s name came back to her. What was his relationship to Uncle Sam? Had anyone said? She couldn’t remember. So that’s what she had: fragments from a text, shadows from a subtext, a pair of silly country club trousers. None of it told her where Charlie was, what he was doing, when he was coming back.

  Emily ran her finger around the outline of one of the green whales, its tail raised as though to smack the sea. She thought of searching the pockets. Then she realized that she already had, when moving clothes from the washer to the dryer. And hadn’t she found something? What? An empty envelope, on Yale Alumni Society stationery, with Buzz’s address on the front, smeared from washing but still legible. She had tossed it in the trash.

  Emily hurried back into the kitchen, opened the cupboard under the sink, pulled out the plastic trash barrel. Empty. She went cold, thinking for a moment that someone had been through her trash, that she was caught in some horrible conspiracy. Then she remembered that tomorrow—today—was garbage day, and that she had hauled the containers out to the side of the road before going to bed.

  Emily took a flashlight and went outside. As she walked to the road, she heard a hull creak against a wooden dock; and somewhere in the pond a fish jumped. A yellow crescent moon was rising over the trees. It illuminated fuzzy shapes—the house across the street, a few parked cars, the two trash containers at the end of the driveway. Emily picked one up. A shadowy creature leaped out, brushed furrily against her skin, ran into the bushes. Emily dropped the container, adrenaline shooting through her limbs. Only a raccoon, but it took a while for her heart to stop pounding.

  The container lay on its side in the driveway, contents spilling out. Emily knelt. The pavement, retaining the heat of the day, felt warm against her knees. She switched on the flashlight. The raccoon had chewed through the top of a Hefty bag and dined on corncob cores and a banana skin. Emily dumped the rest of the bag, sorted through its contents. Wasn’t there a man who spent his life pilfering and cataloguing celebrity trash? What would he make of these remains—tomato paste cans, dead flowers, chicken bones, a pickle jar with a pickled onion floating in it, a coffee filter full of wet coffee grounds, floor sweepings, plastic wrappers, an empty box of Tide, wads of wet paper towel, Chinese food cartons, crumpled papers, a champagne cork, the flowered bottle of Perrier-Jouët? She sniffed at the top of the bottle, smelled a sour smell: Uncle Sam’s gift, delivered by Buzz in his gorilla suit. She remembered Charlie on the raft, taking it. She pictured him going still as he read the card. He had told her that it was from an old pal. Why, when it was his uncle? Was there something odd about it, or was it just that he didn’t like Uncle Sam? And had he really gone still, or was she imagining things, turning raccoons into monsters?

  That’s what you’re trying to find out, she told herself, and uncrumpled every bit of paper. The Yale Alumni Society envelope was not one of them. She took the next bag out of the container, dumped it, searched. Nothing. Then she turned to the second container, tried the top bag, then the bottom, and last, one. She was on both knees now, her hands soiled, picking through the mess in her driveway in the middle of the night. She poked about in a nest of cantaloupe skins and felt a ball of paper, pulled it free, smoothed it out. The envelope. Emily held it under the light; wrinkled, soggy, stained, but she could still read it:

  Mr. B. W. Svenson

  227A Charles St.

  Boston, Mass. 02114

  Emily scooped the trash back into the containers, ran into the house. She called information in Boston. B. W. Svenson was not listed.

  Emily sat in the kitchen for a few minutes. Then she went out the back door and walked down to the dock. The crescent moon replicated itself in yellow frowns across the pond. Thinking of hightailing it? The question popped up again in her mind. Had Charlie had second thoughts about marrying her? That led to the corollary question: was there another woman? Unworthy thoughts, unworthy of them both, Charlie and her. She saw Straight Arrow lying still on the water, her lines bowed slackly. Straight Arrow: solid, rugged, seaworthy.

  Like Charlie.

  But then, what? Where was he? What was he doing? Would Charlie have abandoned their honeymoon in a quest for choice hunks of real estate? Maybe honeymoon was just a pretty word, irrelevant to people like her and Charlie, but she had been looking forward to it anyway—a two- or three-day walk on Long Trail, cooking by a lake, sleeping in the zipped-together sleeping bags—and so had Charlie. Hadn’t he?

  Yes. He had. If she didn’t know that about him, she knew nothing, and that was impossible. Something was wrong. Realizing that was step one. Step two was finding out what it was.

  Emily tightened Straight Arrow’s bowline and returned to the house. She showered, dressed, packed a shoulder bag. She left a note on the kitchen table. “Charlie—be back soon. Stay put. Love, Em.” She almost crossed out “love” because she was angry.

  The sky was paling as Emily went out the front door and climbed behind the wheel of the yellow Beetle, paling like the dawn in one of Conrad’s steamy countries. It was going to be the first hot day of the year, and hotter in the city. The car jerked as Emily backed out of the garage. Zachary fluttered; perhaps it could even have been called a kick.

  “Damn right,” she told him. She turned onto the street and drove away. A rusty pickup with Georgia plates went by the other way. The red clay motif made them easy to recognize.

  · · ·

  Two twenty-seven A Charles Street was a brick town house at the foot of Beacon Hill. It had black-trimmed windows, black double doors, and a heavy brass knocker. Emily found a parking space behind a florist’s truck. The driver was carrying an armful of yellow glads up the stone steps of the town house. He’d sweated dark patches through his FTD T-shirt and was breathing heavily as he climbed the steps. Emily followed him.

  He rang the bell. “I’m gonna die out here today,” he said to Emily. The flowers were wilting in his arms. Another florist’s van appeared, double-parking beside the first. Its driver got out, opened the back doors, picked up a few bouquets, climbed the stone steps.

  The door half opened, and out rolled an invisible wave of cooled air. A woman, her hand still on the doorknob, looked out. She was about Emily’s age, but taller, thinner, and better dressed, dressed for the kind of high-paying job where a conservative appearance mattered. She was talking on a cordless phone. She took in Emily and the two florists, opened the door a little wider, motioned to a marble table in the hall, went on talking.

  “I just don’t know,” she was saying. “They haven’t told me anything at all.”

  The florists laid their gaudy burdens on the table and went away. Emily stayed where she was. The woman raised her eyebrows.

  “Is Buzz Svenson in?” Emily asked, speaking in a low voice to show she didn’t want to interrupt the conversation, but interrupting it anyway.

  The woman’s reaction was a surprise. Her lower lip trembled, like a baby in precry. “Mother?” she said. “I’ve got to go.” She clicked off the
phone, lowered it to her side. She gained control of her face. “Are you a friend of his?” she asked Emily.

  “We’ve met.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Emily Rice.”

  “I don’t believe he ever mentioned you.”

  “Possibly not. But I’d like to see him if he’s in. It’s important.”

  The lower lip trembled again, and this time tears welled in the woman’s eyes, not quite spilling over. But the woman’s voice didn’t change at all. It remained cold and condescending, of a piece with the severity of her dress, the perfection of her hair and makeup. “Buzz died last night.”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  “Or possibly this morning. The facts are still being manufactured.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “D-E-A-D. What could be simpler? You’re not from the office, are you?”

  “What office?”

  “Buzz’s. The office. That’s what they call it, as though it’s the only one that counts.”

  “I’m not from the office,” Emily said. The tear level fell in the woman’s eyes, her lip grew still. “What kind of work do they do?”

  “Motorcycling work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I can’t tell you.”

  “You can’t or you won’t?”

  “Both. Now if you don’t mind.” She put her hand on the door.

  Emily didn’t move. “I’m sorry. But my husband left home with Buzz on Saturday and I’m worried about him. Now more than ever. I think you can help me.”

  “I’m not in a helping mode.”

  “I understand that. But I didn’t choose the time.”

  The woman took a good look at Emily, perhaps her first. “Did he go to San Francisco with Buzz, this husband of yours?”

  “No,” said Emily, but then wondered how she could say that with certainty. Because they had gone off in a car, she had assumed they weren’t going far: to Providence, maybe, or somewhere in Connecticut. “But they didn’t say.”

  “Who didn’t say?”

  “Charlie—my husband—Buzz, and Charlie’s Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam arrived with Buzz. He did most of the talking.”

  The woman blinked. A tear spilled out of one eye and ran down her cheek, ignored. “What’s his surname?”

  “I don’t know.” It could be Ochs, but something told her it wasn’t.

  “What did he look like?”

  “He’s sick, for one thing,” Emily began, and described Uncle Sam. She cut it short; recognition had appeared in the woman’s eyes the moment she used the word “sick.”

  “His name’s not Sam,” the woman said, “and I don’t think he has any nephews.”

  Emily, with the hot sun on her back and the cold breath of the house in her face, wanted to sit down. The woman, with her hand on the doorknob, did not invite her in.

  “His name is Francis Goodnow. He’s Buzz’s boss in Washington.”

  Emily remembered then how she had stood in the doorway of the house at Cosset Pond—the way this woman was standing now—confused at the arrival of Uncle Sam and Buzz because Charlie had never mentioned an uncle. Charlie had appeared behind her and said: “It’s all right, Em.” And then: “Hello, Sam.” That meant Charlie had recognized him. But the man’s name was Francis Goodnow, not Sam, and he was not Charlie’s uncle. Didn’t that mean that the entire visit was a charade, staged for her benefit, with Charlie’s knowing participation? What else could it mean?

  Emily was trying to find some alternative when the woman suddenly said, “Why don’t you come in?”

  “Thank you.”

  · · ·

  They sat in a high-ceilinged room lined with empty built-in bookcases. The books were packed in boxes on the floor, the rug rolled against the wall, the lamps in one corner, hung with mover’s tags, the furniture lined up in the middle of the room. Emily and the woman faced each other on floral love seats, the width of a subway car apart.

  “This is going to be the library,” the woman said. “Or should I put that in the past tense?” She glanced around as though this were her first viewing of the room, and she didn’t particularly like it. “Buzz and I were getting married in the fall.” She laughed, abruptly and unpleasantly. “Two overbred snots with one attitude,” she said. “That was Buzz’s line.” Tears began to flow freely, over the planes of her perfect face. It was almost like one of those religious miracles that backward European villages live on, the kind where statues bleed.

  “Are you pregnant?” Emily asked, the question came too quickly for self-censoring.

  The woman laughed again, although the tears kept coming. “It could have been worse, couldn’t it? No, I’m not pregnant. That wasn’t in our plans. We’d agreed to be our own children. That didn’t keep Buzz alive though, did it?”

  Emily could think of nothing to say.

  “My apologies,” the woman said. “Self-pity is nauseating.”

  That made it easier for Emily to ask her next question. “How did he die?”

  “Some kind of motorcycle accident,” the woman said. “Supposedly.”

  “In San Francisco.”

  “Correct.”

  “Was anyone else hurt?”

  “If so, I wasn’t told. But there’s no reason I would be. They operate on a need-to-know basis. It makes them dull conversationalists.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “The office. I thought I’d mentioned that.”

  “But where is it? What do they do?”

  “The head office is in Washington somewhere. Buzz worked out of Boston, I don’t know the address.”

  “You don’t know where his office is?”

  “Near Downtown Crossing, I think.”

  “But you don’t know exactly where?”

  “I had a number to call.”

  “What was it?”

  “The number?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman hesitated for a few seconds, then told her the number. Emily rose, went to a phone lying on the floor, and dialed it. A man answered on the first ring and repeated the number to her.

  Emily said: “Francis Goodnow, please.”

  “One moment.” A moment passed. The man returned to the line. “We have no one here of that name.”

  “I think he works out of the Washington office,” Emily said. “Could you give me their number?”

  “We have no one anywhere of that name,” the man repeated. Click.

  Emily looked up, saw the woman was watching her, eyes dry again. The woman hadn’t mentioned her name; perhaps she too was a believer in need-to-know doctrine.

  “What is it they do at this office?” Emily asked.

  “Serve and protect us.”

  “From what?”

  “The enemy within.”

  Emily’s voice rose; she couldn’t help it. “What are you talking about?”

  The overbred face flinched. “Terrorism. Buzz is … Buzz was an agent in a counterterrorism unit.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s part of the NSA, but I’m not sure. This husband of yours, what does he do?”

  “Traps lobsters.”

  The woman nodded. “They all have cover jobs. Buzz told everyone he was a financial analyst for the Agriculture Department. He even had business cards to prove it. I like trapping lobsters better. At least it suggests the truth.”

  Emily wondered: Did it? Had Charlie dealt with her on a need-to-know basis? How could that coexist with Ben Webster, their bedroom life, the baby? On the other hand, she realized with a sliding in her stomach, it coexisted nicely with the strange look that sometimes rose in his eyes.

  The phone rang. The woman answered it. “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” she said. “I suppose we’ll have to call the caterers.” She was discussing the menu when Emily left the room.

  Emily stepped outside, into the heat of a planet that seemed to have increased its gravity. Anot
her sweating florist was toiling up the stairs. She unlocked the Beetle, drove out of town, not noticing the parking ticket under the wiper until she was back on her own street, Cosset Pond flashing like a mirror between the trees. The pickup with the Georgia plates was parked in front of the house.

  31

  Emily parked the Beetle in the driveway, got out, and closed the door. Another door closed almost at the same moment, like the discharge of a shotgun’s second barrel. Emily turned and saw a man standing beside the pickup. He wore faded jeans, a T-shirt, and cowboy boots; had gray, crew-cut hair that looked almost white because of the darkness of his tan.

  He raised a hand. “Hi,” he said, coming closer.

  The man smiled, the quick little smile of those with bad teeth. His skin had spent years fighting a bright sun; it was leathery and crinkled tight around the eyes, reducing the openings to the minimum for sight.

  “Mrs. Ochs?” he said. Emily smelled mouthwash on his breath.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi,” he repeated. “Is Charlie around?”

  Emily paused. She had no idea who he was or what was happening, but she sensed that a shifting of roles was taking place, a changing in the nomenclature of the sides of a triangle. Triangle A: Emily, the questioner; Buzz, the missing man; Buzz’s fiancée, the woman alone. Triangle B: this man, the questioner; Charlie, the missing man; Emily, the woman alone. With that in mind, she took a guess. “Do you work with Buzz?”

  “Don’t know any Buzzes, ma’am. I’m an old pal of your husband. An ol’ pal. Pleasance is the name. Jack Pleasance.” He paused. “Mean anything to you?”

  He was watching her closely. His eyes, so small in their protective walls of flesh, seemed colorless; they shone with the same mirrored light she’d seen on the pond.

  “Charlie never mentioned you.”

  Pleasance laughed. “Isn’t that just like the son of a bitch. Y’know something?”

  “What?”