The Ancient Rain (24 page)

“Where's Zeke?”

“I thought he was with his mother.”

“What?”

“I went back upstairs for my coat.”

Jill stood with them now. “Zeke's not with you?”

The young woman tried to explain it again, how she went back for her coat, assuming Zeke had gone with his parents down the steps to the beach. Owens felt himself panic. His life had been riddled with such moments lately, when the kids slipped from his sight.

“Call the police.”

“What?”

“I said call the goddamn police.”

“Don't panic.”

“What do you mean, don't panic?”

A glance fell between the assistant and Jensen, and there was something in the glance Owens did not like. As if he were someone to control. He'd heard the insinuations in the media—government proxies, talk-show hosts, right-wing columnists who said the kidnapping threats, the firebombing, all of that was coming not from the prosecution but from the defense camp: stage-managed crimes designed to get sympathy for the defendant.
They did it thirty years ago, and they're doing it now … Annette Ricci and her guerilla politics. Jan Sprague and her husband's money … the same lousy crew … Meanwhile our boys are packing up for overseas
 …

“You know how Zeke is,” said Jill. “He's probably back up there somewhere. He probably just wandered into one of the other rooms.”

“I don't see how you could let this happen.”

“Me?”

Jill had her hands on her hips now, arms akimbo, and the gesture made her look older—the way her belly pushed out. She wore her sloppies now, but at home the night before, in her pleated pants and gold sweater, she'd made the same gesture, and suddenly he'd wanted nothing to do with her anymore. He'd felt this kind of disgust more than once, not just for her but for himself as well, their whole middle-class life. He hadn't wanted all this, but now he couldn't let it go. The fear shot through him.

“Bill, you can't blame this on me.”

He wasn't listening, but was instead already headed toward the car. Jensen was almost as quick and got into the passenger seat beside him. Owens veered onto the Great Highway, jackknifing over the curb, up the hill toward the Cliff House. The restaurant was less than a mile from the lower lot, but he could not restrain himself.

“Easy,” said Jensen. “It's not going to help if we run over someone.”

The admonition only made him more reckless. At the top of the hill, he pulled wildly across two lanes of traffic, ignoring the crosswalk. A startled family jumped back from the curb.

“What's the matter with you?” yelled Jensen.

Owens strained forward. A car blocked the way, and he leaned on the horn. Then he shouted at Jensen, “What's the matter with me? Don't you think I see what you're doing? You and the rest?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Owens felt himself shaking all over, losing control. Him, the conspirator, veteran of the underground. The same man now, wild, out of control, puffing middle-aged fool, inarticulate as could be, suspicious of everyone.

He thought of the woman cut in half on the bank floor.

“Everything's a publicity stunt with you, everything's a way of getting attention for the case.”

Jensen's lips turned up. They were both thinking the same thing, maybe: back again to that moment in the dark, heads down, in that basement on Haight Street, whispering.
The shotgun, short barrel. Sawed off so it fit sideways into a straw bag. The trigger, hair trigger, filed too sharp … I told Jan to be careful, but she took it, anyway … Annette stuffing it in the bag … I told her …

“I wouldn't get so pious, Bill,” said Jensen. “Not if I were you.”

He left the car now and stormed into the Cliff House—calling more attention to himself than he should. He searched the bathroom, the gift shop, the dining room where they'd eaten lunch. Then he burst back through the doors onto the sidewalk.

He could hear the seals. A tourist bus had parked in the easement, and over the crest families headed toward the Sutro Baths. Children straining toward the cliffs. Past the signs warning of crumbling rock. Unroped paths that snaked out toward the vista.

Down the other way, Jill and his daughter came toward him along the seawall, working their way up from the lower lot.

He ran down the path, dodging the families.

The Sutro Baths had been built over a hundred years ago—a public bathing house overlooking the water, brine pumped in from the ocean. The baths were famous in the city's mythology, a place lost to fire, demolished in the sixties, but the truth was they had been unsanitary, and there had been a lot of illicit behavior. Politicians sucking cock, making deals. Now the building was gone, and all that remained was the foundation down there in the rocks, a few stubborn walls, concrete, rusted pipes, the old pumping station out there at the edge of the tide, moss and rocks, a cracked basin filled with water. It was in some ways the bleakest corner of the city, the place where the edge of the peninsula jutted into the ocean, and the wind seemed always hard, the sky always black and gray.

And then Owens saw his kid.

Around the bend, standing at the vista. Zeke stood in the midst of strangers, other families, a bit too close, not reading the social cues. Fascinated by the seals. Thrumming his fingers. Listening to that gadget in his ears.

Owens stood in the middle of the path, looking at the boy. In a little while, Jill and the others came up behind him. Jill brushed past without speaking.

Jensen put a hand on his shoulder.

“It's all right,” he said. “These kind of things happen. People lose control.”

Owens watched Jensen head toward his son, his family. He felt his suspicions again. Unwarranted, maybe. But natural enough. He knew Jensen was right about one thing: Eight years was the same as thirty. He had to push his memories back there into the dark. He would lose everything if he went to jail.

THIRTY-TWO

The day before the trial started, Sorrentino went down to the North Beach Library. His tape had arrived. Despite the enthusiasm of the boho couple at the bar, the tape came with no special restrictions. It was a rare item, maybe, but the source library in Minnesota did not seem aware of the fact, and the North Beach librarian handed it to him without any particular fanfare.

Kaufman reading: May 13, 1975.

Sorrentino took the cassette with him. He had not been to the Beach since the Metzger story had broken, but today he went down to the Serafina Café. Stella emerged from the kitchen looking pretty much as she had the time before.

“What do you want?”

“Spaghetti.”

Despite her age, Stella did not have much gray, and her breasts did not sag. She wore an underwire, maybe, and she dyed her hair, who knew? But it was a black mop nonetheless, thick as ever, and he remembered how surprised he had been at the way it felt when he'd finally gotten his hands into it: not soft, not luxurious, but coarse and wiry.

“Water?”

“No, wine.”

She made no remark but instead brought him the wine, as if she had no idea about his problems with the grape, and even if she did, it was a few dollars more in the register. He pulled the pack of Parliaments from his pocket. No one cared if you smoked in Serafina's, and he had given up the pretense. He smoked as he pleased.

He put the tape on the counter.

The television was turned to one of those afternoon shows, but the volume was down low, and no one seemed to be paying much attention. The place was all but empty. It was just Johnny Pesci over there in the corner, his head tilted toward the wall, sleeping, a dead cigarette between his fingers. Just Johnny on one side of the room and Julia Besozi upright by the window, a smear of sauce on her lace collar, mincing at a plate of pasta, twirling it over and over with her fork, then putting it down without eating, sipping at her glass of port. None of the others, just these two, the oldest of the old—Pesci with his walker and Besozi with her cane. Just these two—and those shadows in the corner.

“Play this tape for me.”

“There's a show on already,” said Stella.

Sorrentino glanced at Pesci, his head against the wall, dozing on his afternoon wine. Then at Besozi, gaze forward, blind as a dog underwater.

“At the break then,” he said. “During the commercial.”

“This is why you came? You could not watch this at home?”

Stella turned the tape over in her hand, and the way she did, Sorrentino could not help but feel as if it were himself being examined. He glanced away, down the glass countertop, into that sea of faces in the photos embedded under the glass. Meanwhile he could hear the Chinaman in the back cleaning the dishes.

“So they gave you the bump,” Stella said. “You helped that girl, and they're done with you.”

“You could put it that way.”

This was the kind of thing to expect from Stella: for her to remind him of his humiliation. Maybe that was why he had come down here. To get it over with, one way or the other. Here, in Serafina's, in front of Stella, with all those pictures as witnesses. The dead ones in the shadows no doubt were enjoying this, too.

“The other one, they will give him the bump, too. From the other side.”

“Which other one?”

“Dante,” she said. “Mancuso's son.”

“He's nothing.”

“It's just business. You shouldn't be so sensitive.”

Maybe she was right, but he had no love for Mancuso. And not much for the rest of them, either. Blackwell had raked him harder then he needed to, taking a special pleasure in it, Sorrentino thought, Blackwell and Iverson both, looking for links to Metzger, to the firebombing, threatening to charge him with conspiracy, with obstruction of justice, knowing of course there were no links there—that Metzger himself could not be tied to the money, or to the bombing, most likely because Metzger had had nothing to do with it. It was a set-job, somebody playing bingo with the press, same as the Hearst kidnapping thirty years ago, Leland Sanford's resurrection from the dead, all that absurd theater in the street—but the feds couldn't figure it out, and now they were looking like jackasses all over again. The prosecution needed someone to humiliate, for business reasons, sure—but it was beyond business with Blackwell and his cronies. They'd taken a special pleasure in it.

Still, he'd gotten a dig back. “For that bombing, did you check out the Sandinista?” he'd asked them. “Did you check out his buddies? They're the ones experienced at this kind of thing.” But he'd seen at a glance—the way Chin hung her head—they'd played jurisdictional games too long. They'd let it slip, the trail was cold. Blackwell and his arrogance.

Now Stella put the tape in.

It was an old cassette, a redub onto video of film recorded three decades back. The colors were washed and faded. It had been shot inside the Caffé Trieste. The owners of that place, they'd always played it both ways, even back then, hosting the old-timers with their accordions, their swelling violins, the local diva at the mike alongside a brick mason as fat as Caruso—but this night, the place had been packed with bohemians, gathered elbow to elbow at the long tables, glassy eyed, arrogant, pretending they were in the East Village, or Paris, lounging around in a movie of the sort no one with any sense would want to watch.

The camera work was amateur. It zoomed about in jerks and staggers, skimming the audience, holding on a face here, there. The date was not too long after the robbery—after the FBI had raided the Aptos property but before Owens had turned himself in. It could even be that Owens was in the audience. Nakamura, too. The video cut all of a sudden, catching Kaufman midsentence at the podium.

Kaufman had a beer bottle in one hand and fumbled around like a man with the shakes. He wore a turtleneck underneath one of those hippie vests, a white turtleneck, and his skin was leather-dark. After all Sorrentino had heard, he'd expected a more electric presence, but Kaufman was shy, stuttering, his voice high and unsure, and the crowd—smoking cigarettes, swaying, nodding, hands on their goatees, on one another's legs—had, underneath it all, that bored-to-death coffeehouse look. Kaufman held some scraps of paper in his free hand, and after a while he fumbled the beer onto the podium and began to snap his fingers, leaning into the mike, muttering in a singsong voice Sorrentino found hard to understand.

Something about the ancient rain.

About Russia, China.

The entrails of America on a slab in ancient Greece.

The rain was a mist of blood. It was fragments of bone, a sky full of ash, and it had been falling for a long time.

It wasn't going to stop falling anytime soon.

Why should it?

Kaufman snapped his fingers out of time. He took a drink, lost his place in the papers, then lost his rhythm altogether as one of the scraps fell to the floor. He shuffled through the words. Bits of tissue, colored paper, shopping bags, napkins, he let them slip through his fingers—reciting from memory now. Making it up as he went along.

He let the paper fall and reached for the beer.

The gasoline that is eating your car. The wife with the high hair who is not really there.

His mouth sounded as if it were full of sand. He jittered about behind the podium, graceless. He slobbered and lurched. The crowd looked as if they had seen it all before. I spoke to Leland Sanford the other day, he said. He told me he was dead. He told me strangers had inhabited his body in the moment of its demise. But do not listen to them because they are dead, too.

The revolution is dead.

And the ancient rain is still falling.

I hunt myself on the savannahs and kill myself in the streets.

I am a soldier in a ditch at the end of time.

Kaufman went on. Describing the corpse at the end of time, a corpse that lay in the sand. The rain that fell like sand driven by the wind until the bones were ground to dust. The sand red like blood. Yellow like a Chinaman. Black like rain.