Revolution #9

by Peter Abrahams

  Too late. “My God,” she said. “I think he’s jealous.” She laughed—not the Malik laugh, but something closer to the one he remembered. She reached across the table and laid her hand on his; now her touch was cool. “Don’t be,” she said. “He must have told you about our little … dalliance. It was meaningless, especially in context.”

  “What context?” said Charlie, withdrawing his hand.

  “The context of back then.”

  “I’m tired of back then. And it had some meaning for him. He thought you were leaving to abort his … child, fetus, whatever the right word is.”

  She laughed again. “Politics was always hard for you, wasn’t it?”

  Charlie ignored her. “But he was wrong, on two counts. The abortion never happened, and he wasn’t the father.”

  Klein turned to his daughter. She stopped laughing.

  “I was,” Charlie told him.

  Klein raised his eyebrows, inviting Rebecca to deny it. She said nothing.

  “I saw Malcolm yesterday,” Charlie went on. “Just before he left. It would have been nice to know.”

  “Know what?” asked Rebecca.

  “That he existed.”

  “What would you have done about it?”

  “Something.”

  She glared at him, into his eyes, and saw an expression there that made her stop.

  Klein said: “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?” Rebecca’s voice rose impatiently.

  “What he says. About being the father.”

  “You just have to look at us to know,” Charlie said.

  Klein said: “I’ve only seen him at a distance. And then not often. It wasn’t worth the—”

  And Charlie saw how one long-ago act had twisted a family forever. Perhaps more than one family: he thought of his own, waiting in the house on Cosset Pond, generating. He had an urge to pick up the phone, to call Emily, to tell her everything. But first he needed some answers about that long-ago act.

  Klein was watching Rebecca. She was sipping coffee; her eyes had an inward look. “It’s true, then,” he said.

  She put down her cup; coffee slopped over the side. “What difference does it make, whether it’s Malik or him?”

  “It doesn’t make any difference to Malik,” Charlie said. “He’s dead. Someone shot him and put him in his freezer, very tidily.”

  Klein pushed himself away from the table abruptly, violently, as though physically repelled by the idea. He walked to the blind, peered through. “Who and why?” he said. His voice slipped its baritone moorings, drifted higher.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie replied. But it must have been Svenson. He had seen how Svenson dealt with others in position to disrupt Mr. G’s plan—Brucie Wine and the little Chinese man. So it must have been Svenson; yet something bothered him about that theory, something he couldn’t define.

  “But you have suspicions, don’t you?” Klein said.

  “No.”

  Rebecca took another sip of coffee. “Does it really matter? All it does is confirm the wisdom of my plan.”

  “What plan?” said Charlie. Does it really matter? When had he heard her say that, or something like it, before?

  “I told you the plan,” she said. “Cuba.”

  She had told him; but it was only when Hugo Klein took a map from his suit jacket pocket and spread it on the table that Charlie knew for sure that she was speaking of the geophysical Cuba, and not some metaphor.

  “Where are you, exactly?” Klein said, handing Charlie a pencil.

  Charlie leaned across the table. It was a map of the eastern U.S. and Canada, extending south to the Caribbean. Cosset Pond wasn’t marked. Charlie made an X where it should have been.

  Klein laid a finger on the X. The nail was bitten to the quick. “It could be better,” Klein said. “But …” The finger flew up into Canada, landed in Montreal, voyaged down the St. Lawrence to the ocean, paused in Halifax, continued south, pausing again about a hundred miles off Cosset Pond, and then skimmed all the way to Havana. “There is a freighter,” Klein said. “You don’t need to know the name. It left Montreal three days ago, will be in Halifax tomorrow to take on a cargo of used farm machine parts, donated by the Cuba-Canada Friends Committee. It’s on a run to Caracas, with stops in Havana, Kingston, and Santo Domingo. The freighter is also delivering a small, fast boat consigned to one of the hotels in Varadero. When the freighter is here”—he pointed to a spot off Cosset Pond, much closer than one hundred miles—“this second boat will be offloaded. And then …” His finger slid over the blue sea to Cosset Pond, and back, intersecting the freighter’s course to the south. He looked up at Charlie. His voice had dropped into its normal register; it was the voice of the experienced campaigner, used to getting his people into battle and safely back out. “Your job is to fly with her to this place of yours and wait until the boat comes for her.”

  Option three: the no-loss way out, Charlie thought. He said: “Who’s going to be driving it?”

  “Me,” Klein replied. “Who else?”

  Charlie looked at the map. It might work. He resisted a temptation to run his finger over the route Klein had traced, all the way to the baby-blue Caribbean, all the way to Cuba.

  “Any questions?” Klein asked.

  There was only one, a question he’d already asked: why now? He wasn’t satisfied with their answer but he didn’t ask again. “When do we start?” he said.

  “Tonight.”

  They all glanced at the closed blinds. Light, gray and faint, leaked in around the edges.

  · · ·

  They went over everything again. Rebecca walked Klein to the door. They embraced. Charlie heard them whispering. Klein opened the door an inch or two, peered out. He did it stiffly; from his posture alone, Charlie could see he hated sneaking around, hated what it did to his dignity. He had the wrong body for furtive behavior, the wrong face, the wrong haircut. He stepped out, glanced around, went quickly away.

  Five minutes later, Rebecca was packed. All she had was one suitcase, small enough to fit under the bar at an airport security belt, and a brown paper bag half-full. “That’s it?” Charlie said.

  “What else do I need?” she asked. The question had no overtones; she was puzzled. Charlie realized that this was almost easy for her.

  Before they left, he went upstairs to the bathroom. The white towel was still there, but no longer on the doorknob. It lay soaked in the tub, bearing no trace of pink. Charlie picked it up and sniffed at it. He smelled nothing but soap.

  They went outside. The sky was pale yellow with the promise of heat to come. A man came out of a house across the street tugging at his tie, hurried into his car, sped away. He was too worried to see them. Rebecca tossed her suitcase and the brown bag into the backseat of the Tercel and took the wheel. Charlie sat in the passenger seat. Rebecca started the car and drove off down the leafy street. She didn’t look back.

  “Who owns the house?” Charlie said.

  “I do.”

  “What’s going to happen to it?”

  “Who cares?”

  But she did care. After a few blocks she stopped at a mailbox, took a letter from her pocket. “The deed,” she said, getting out of the car. He had time to read “Wharton” on the envelope, and not much else. Rebecca got out and dropped the letter in the box. In those few moments Charlie twisted around and looked in the paper bag. Inside were the sequinned purse, the black skirt, a black Spandex halter. The skirt and halter were damp and twisted, as though they’d been washed and wrung.

  Rebecca drove down out of the hills. San Francisco rose on the other side of the bay, the marine layer spreading through its canyons like tongues of a glacier. “What a pit,” Rebecca said.

  She turned onto the freeway and headed north, away from the bridge. “Which airport?” Charlie asked.

  “No airport.”

  “We’re driving across the country.”

  “Got it in one.”

  “Why?”<
br />
  “Safer. And we’ve got three days. What else would we do?”

  Three days: he thought of Emily. He’d already been gone for six.

  Rebecca drove all morning, first north, then east, into the heat. The air conditioner labored, discouraging conversation. There were no tapes in the car. Charlie turned on the radio, found an all-news station.

  “It gives me a headache,” Rebecca said.

  He switched it off.

  They picked up sandwiches and coffee at a fast-food stop in Nevada, gassed the car, switched places, kept going. On the way out of the parking lot, Rebecca rolled down her window and tossed the brown paper bag containing the purse, the halter, the skirt, into a trash basket.

  “What’s that?” Charlie said.

  “Garbage.”

  Charlie drove. The miles went by. The sky was yellow, the earth was brown, the road was black. Charlie remembered how he had come the other way twenty-two years before, by bus and by thumb, looking for Rebecca. He sensed that he was in orbit, a long orbit with a twenty-two-year period; now he was closing the circle, like a comet completing a revolution around the sun. He glanced at Rebecca, saw that she had been watching him.

  She smiled. “I’m enjoying this,” she said. “I’ve been so bored. Haven’t you?”

  “No.”

  The land wrinkled up in the distance, casting shadows at them, longer and longer. Night fell. They stopped, bought more sandwiches, more coffee, switched places again. Charlie saw she was limping.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Twisted my knee.”

  “Do you want me to drive?”

  “No. I’m fine. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

  Charlie lay down on the backseat. He watched her silhouette, backlit from time to time by oncoming headlights. He imagined he could see abstract things about her in the way she held her head: her strength, her will, her determination. She could drive nonstop across the country if she had to. Getting to Cuba was not a fantasy to her. It was as good as done.

  · · ·

  When Charlie awoke, it was day and he was alone. He sat up. The car was parked beside a diner in flat country. Rebecca’s suitcase was on the floor. He opened it. There was little inside, no wallet, no money, no credit cards, no ID; just clothes, toiletries, two pairs of shoes, and the gun: what to pack for a long vacation in Cuba. He closed the suitcase, got out of the car.

  Rebecca came out of the diner with a cardboard tray. She saw him and smiled. “How’s tuna?” They might have been any contented couple on vacation. Perhaps that’s what the policeman thought, glancing at them as he got out of his cruiser. Rebecca walked up to Charlie, gave him a kiss on the mouth that he couldn’t back away from, not with the cop watching. “Morning,” she said. “I think we’re in Nebraska.” The cop went into the diner.

  Rebecca laughed. Charlie found himself laughing too: partners in crime. Partners in crime who had been on the run for a long time, so long they might have lost their bearings, might no longer know the difference between careful and careless. He stopped laughing. His lips still tingled from her kiss.

  “What is it?” she said, no longer laughing either. The expression in her eyes intensified quickly from inquisitive to inquisitorial, in that old familiar way.

  “Nothing.”

  They sat on a bench, ate the sandwiches, drank the coffee. Rebecca wolfed her food, barely stopping to chew, then rubbed her hands together as though anticipating a productive day. She didn’t look like someone who had missed a night’s sleep, didn’t look tired at all.

  “Ready to roll?” She got up.

  Charlie followed her to the car. She didn’t look tired, but the limp was worse.

  He drove. She sat beside him. They were the sole voyagers in a little tin probe that sped through a bicolored space, blue above, green below. Adam and Eve, he thought, after the fall. Twenty-two years after. Again, he was aware of her gaze on his profile.

  “You’re not what I would have thought,” she said.

  “No?”

  “You’re much … tougher. Much more competent. You remind me a bit of someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Guy named Gus. No one you’d know.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Nobody important.” She yawned and stretched. A crow swooped across their path, landed in a cornfield. “My God,” she said, “I’m going to be free. Really free.” There was a pause. “Aren’t you tempted?”

  “By Cuba?”

  “You make it sound like the ninth circle of hell.”

  “It’s not the place of my dreams, that’s all.”

  “What’s the place of your dreams?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “This pond place? How romantic.” There was another pause. Then: “Are you married?”

  He nodded.

  She laughed. It began as the barking laugh but grew wilder, almost out of control. “God, how stupid I’ve been,” she said. “That should have been my first question. Of course you’d be married. You’re … invested. Invested in all this shit.” She gestured at the blue-green space outside. “I suppose you’ve got children too.”

  “Just Malcolm,” he said, in case she had forgotten her own investment.

  Rebecca whirled and struck at his face, much too quickly for him to do anything about it. The car swerved into the next lane. He swung it back, steadied it, and only then felt a sharp pain, from just under his right eye down to the chin. He checked the mirror, saw three red tracks on his cheek where she had raked him.

  His right hand came off the wheel, rounding into a fist. But that was silly. He couldn’t bring himself to hit a woman, and no amount of living in late twentieth-century America could change that. He didn’t say a word. He just drove.

  For a minute or two he felt her gaze, and then he did not. After a while he glanced at her, saw she had fallen asleep, sitting up straight. Later her head fell to one side, and not long after that she came sloping his way and settled with her head in his lap. Looking down into the wild darkness of her hair, he saw gray ones, more than a few, scattered here and there.

  Charlie drove, across the Mississippi and into the night. She groaned, once or twice.

  · · ·

  He pulled into a truck stop after midnight. The sky over Chicago glowed pink and orange in the distance. He slid out from behind the wheel, lowering her head to the seat. She didn’t wake up.

  Charlie went in, sat down, ordered coffee. A tabloid paper was open on the table. While he drank, his eyes scanned an article about an armored car heist: robbery at the Oakland docks, seven dead, $860,000 missing. He looked a little more closely when he saw that some previously unknown radical group was suspected of the crime, more closely still when he saw that one of them was named Gus. There was a picture of Gus. He was fair, with a broad face and intelligent eyes. A waitress from a place called Paco’s Sports Bar and Restaurant in Hayward was being sought for questioning. Paco was quoted, expressing bewilderment.

  Charlie walked outside. He half expected the car would be gone. But it was still there, and she was still asleep. He went around to the trunk and unlocked it. There were three canvas sacks inside, one bearing a large red-brown stain. He opened one of the others, reached in, and pulled out a wad of bills wrapped in a yellow paper band that read “50 ¥ $100.” There were lots of identical bundles in the canvas sack. He replaced them and closed the trunk.

  She was still asleep. Charlie pushed her aside, squeezed in, started the car. She stretched out, her head moving toward his lap. He put his hand on her shoulder and kept her where she was. She groaned and went still.

  Charlie pulled out of the truck stop and onto the highway, heading east, distancing them from Oakland with every rotation of the wheels. He realized after a little while that he was driving the getaway car. She’d done it to him again. “God damn it,” he said aloud. She groaned.

  · · ·

  She awoke just after dawn. They were in a paved world under a brown sk
y. “Where are we?” she said.

  “Toledo.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  “I’m okay.”

  She rubbed her eyes, stretched. He was conscious of her gaze again. Then she leaned toward him and kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Last night. Or whenever it was. I’ve lost track of time.”

  “What about last night?”

  “Clawing you. It doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression. Maybe because you spend your time with lobsters.” He felt her fingers lightly tracing the marks they’d made. Soft and gentle: but the salt from her skin stung him all the same. An ambulance howled by on their left.

  “I don’t remember telling you what I did for a living.”

  Silence. “It must have been Daddy.”

  I don’t remember telling him, either, Charlie thought. He tried to remember whom he had told.

  They stopped at a gas station outside Ashtabula. Rebecca opened her door, looked around at the wasted landscape, said: “I feel so alive.” But she had trouble getting out of the car and stumbled to the ground after two steps. Charlie helped her up, carried her into the women’s room. She seemed light, much lighter than twenty-two years before; the only other possibility was that he had grown stronger.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just my knee.” But she didn’t resist.

  The women’s room had a sink, a toilet, a greasy mirror, grimy walls. As Charlie crossed the threshold with Rebecca in his arms, he glimpsed their reflection: a man and a woman, exhausted and worried, in dirty clothes, like a misanthrope’s comment on honeymoons. Charlie sat Rebecca on the sink, then closed the door and locked it.

  “Let’s see that knee,” he said.

  “It’s nothing.” But she let him undo her jeans and pull them down.

  It wasn’t her knee. The problem was higher up, on the front of her thigh. She’d wrapped it with bandages and taped a wide clear plastic strip over them. The bandages were saturated with red, and the plastic strip bulged with it. Charlie tore away the tape. Blood splashed on the floor, ran down her leg. He unwrapped the bandages, slow and careful. He thought again of her sitting beside his bed in the infirmary, long ago; then he had been wearing the bandages. Charlie examined her leg. There was a small round tear in the flesh; blood seeped out.