“It’s no good for you. This is what’s good for you.”
“Sure it is.”
“Work work work for the dawn is coming.”
Bricca turned toward Ernest and lifted his cup to his lips, blowing on the coffee as he gave Ernest the once-over. Ernest bared his teeth in a smile.
“What in Captain Fry’s absence can I do for you?”
“You’re Lieutenant Bricca.”
“Twenty-four hours a day.”
“Just about, huh?” Ernest looked around him, as if the late hour resided in the corners of the room.
“You want to see me about what?”
“You have someplace we can talk?”
“People talk in my office sometimes.”
They sat on opposite sides of Bricca’s desk.
“I have to admit that I’m sitting here with you because I’m a wee bit intrigued that a man claiming to be a friend of St. Earl’s wanders in here at fucking whatever it is in the a.m. looking like a boozer at the tail end of a long unhappy binge. You’re a personal friend, are you?” The lieutenant’s face and voice were full of unveiled hope.
Ernest sort of sized up the way things stood between Fry and Bricca.
“What’s the problem, Bricca? His office prettier than yours?”
Actually, Bricca’s office was pleasant, looking more like a college professor’s than a cop’s with its embrasured windows set in the thick stone walls and the row of bookcases and the framed diploma identifying Bricca as the possessor of a bachelor’s in criminal justice from Shippensburg University. The room was softly lit by a green-shaded banker’s lamp on the desk.
“In about thirty seconds I’m going to make a determination that you’re publicly intoxicated. Class A misdemeanor.”
“Determine away. I’ll sleep it off and talk to Earl in the morning.”
“Sleep? That’s what you think. I guess you didn’t hear the fucking Polack nightingale in there.” He paused. “So,” he said finally, “is there something you wanted to tell me?”
Ernest hadn’t been anticipating this kind of hard time, and he was just nonplussed enough to dig in his heels a little. But he’d begun to feel profoundly tired sitting here, and the prospect of a night in the drunk tank held no appeal for him.
“I have information.”
“What kind of information?”
“Information concerning the whereabouts of a certain missing person. Very high profile.”
“Who would this person be?”
“The Galton girl.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Let me just say that my training and experience have led me to be skeptical of such claims.”
Ernest’s eye flitted to the diploma. The elenchus of Shippensburg. “You know,” said Ernest. “I’ve got some pretty high-level government contacts from covert operations I’ve been involved with, and I could have taken this information directly to them.” He raised a finger and wagged it at the policeman.
Bricca rolled his eyes. “Oh, dear sweet bleeding Jesus. Not one of these people. Why is it everybody with the high-level contacts somehow ends up sitting in my office three sheets to the wind in the dead of night wearing a dirty shirt? Please, the suspense is killing me, this is something you found out about from a fortune cookie? Spacemen transmitting radio waves into your morning glass of Tang? God talking to your internal organs? I should just leave you for St. Earl to deal with.”
Ernest tried staring him down.
Oddly, Bricca slackened, with a high, soughing exhalation, as if all the tension had left his body.
“Where’s she supposed to be?”
“South Canaan.”
“Well, I suppose that’s not too farfetched. You could hide the fucking Statue of Liberty in South Canaan if you wanted to, though so far nobody has. Where exactly in South Canaan?”
“A farm. I don’t know the address. But I could find it.”
“And how did you happen to see the young lady?”
“I never did.”
“Ah. You never saw her at a place you don’t exactly know where it is.”
“My brother put her up there. He told me.”
“And who is your brother?”
“A god damned Communist.”
“That’s a tough way to make a buck. I was just reading about the Red Chinese in Time. Their standard of living isn’t due to approach ours until the year 2000. But I meant who, not what.”
“Guy Mock.”
“Well, Brother Mock, what’s his connection to all this?”
“I said already, he’s a radical. Lives out there in Berkeley, all that. He knows these type of people. Gets all buddy-buddy with them.” Suddenly he sounded ridiculous to himself. He should have just gone for the 4 a.m. eggs. “Look, it’s not just her. It’s the other two too. The Shepards.”
“And they’re all up there right now?”
“No, they left about three months ago. But I’m telling you you can find them. You can track them down. Somebody’s seen them. You can question my brother. He’s got to know where they are. He’s trying to write a god damned book about them.”
Bricca thrust out his right arm dramatically, addressing his appeal to the diploma on the wall. “Do I take this sfatcheem seriously? Or do I just go out the back door and keep going until I wander into a hobo jungle somewhere and allow myself to be murdered for my Thorn McAn’s?”
“I’m the one, smart-ass. I could walk now.”
“No, you couldn’t. You could’ve. But like a good three-in-the-morning lush you had to speak right up. So now you have to sit. See, usually I get to go home soon to my empty little apartment and unwind sitting on my empty little couch waiting for the empty little test pattern to go away. But you just had to come in here and bend someone’s ear with this fucking story of yours. I only wish it had been your good pal Captain America. But he’ll be here soon enough, bright and early and shaven clean and happy-happy to be awake in the daylight like a normal citizen. Until he sees you. And then of course”—Bricca consulted a list of telephone numbers trapped beneath the rectangle of glass on his desk—“he’ll have the FBI up his ass too. Because if you really want to talk about this, you’re going to talk about it with the FBI.”
“Yeah, I want to talk.”
“Here’s the number right here. Scranton Resident Agency of the FBI. If you’re fucking around, now’s the time to quit. Say, count of three?”
“He tried to involve my parents.”
“One, two, two and a half, two and three-quarters. OK, three. Here we go.”
“I already look like a fucking idiot.”
“Yeah, well, you won’t get any argument from me there.” Bricca picked up the phone and dialed, squinting at the number under the glass on his desk.
ROGER DRIVES TO THE Bay Area, listening to a special radio broadcast, The Kidnapping of Alice Galton: A Year Passes.
“Where is Alice?” the announcer intones. “The FBI doesn’t know but believes you may be the person who will telephone them someday and say the young woman with the mole on the right side of her face below her mouth is Alice—your neighbor or a salesperson at a neighborhood store.”
Even at this hour there is a slight slowing, the sense of a queue forming, as he approaches the Carquinez Bridge. Bridges make him consider all the things we take on faith. That this old relic won’t simply fall into the strait below, for instance. An earthquake measuring exactly what point what on the Richter scale would shake this thing to pieces? He glances over at the bridge’s twin, tries to remember which of the two is newer, is touted as being stronger, safer, more soundly constructed.
“Parents in well-to-do suburbs are asking themselves: ‘Are my children too sheltered? Have I given them too much and made their lives too easy?’”
His tires whine on the roadway grid high above the dark and churning water. The car drifts slightly to the right, and he corrects generously, overcorrects, recorrects. A series of c
orrections, brain handling these NASA-like calculations with dazzling speed, and all in the service of an old Chevy with crappy alignment, shimmying the vehicle back into the center of its lane. High above dark water.
The car dips suddenly, and he has crossed over onto solid ground, safe for another day. Cheers! Just ahead, another car’s blinker pulses once, twice, before it slips into his lane, and he drops back, calm and unruffled, happy to be over the span. A new program begins on the radio.
“The caveman was all right in his day. He squatted beside the fire, snatched his lump of meat, pulled it apart with his hands and teeth. If he saw anything he wanted, he grabbed it. If someone was in his way, he knocked him down.”
Right on. Kind of the way he feels. The evening ended with the four of them—he and Tania, Teko and Yolanda—sprawled on the front room floor around a pot of rice Yolanda had (grudgingly) made. The pot was scorched on its sides and bottom and missing one of its two Bakelite handles, and it looked forlorn and out of place on the shivered floorboards, a photo from a Life expose of urban poverty. They ate in sullen silence. Well, look at the time. Got to head back down to Oakland.
She walked him outside, stood on the porch with him in the cold evening air. Trucks rattled by on the overpass. He hugged her, drawing her slight body close, surprised by how exhausted he suddenly felt. But he resisted the dubious appeal of his customary bivouac on the front room floor. It’d been a difficult day; there was bickering, a splintered atmosphere from the moment Teko and Yolanda walked in. Tania seemed to shrug it off easily enough; she was used to it, and soon there would be a second safe house, paid for with the money obtained from the “bakery,” their coded term for the bank.
Roger isn’t quite sure yet how he feels about the whole thing of the bakery. The necessity of the second safe house is tautologically self-justifying, apparently: an additional safe house is required because one isn’t sufficient. This doesn’t strike Roger as a particularly revolutionary reason, really. Though so far the revolution hasn’t threatened to interrupt his idyll here; it’s been kept at a distance, postponed by cash infusions and stolen credit cards regularly provided by Susan, still toiling away at the Plate of Brasse. But a second safe house is beyond the means of a waitress pulling shitty shifts and her housepainter boyfriend.
Maybe they’re not telling him everything. But he doesn’t want to be, has never wanted to be, a wet blanket. Always a good egg. Always game. He allows himself to entertain only slight misgivings about what he’s committing himself to. Frankly, he’s more concerned about whether Susan will be displeased with the smallishness of her assignment, which is to involve sitting in the coffee shop adjacent to the bank and timing the sheriff’s department’s response. He’s hoping she won’t be. It’s right up her alley, really, an incognito moment, a camouflaging of purpose. Lingering over toast and coffee and feigning curiosity when the pigs tear into the lot, one eye on the sweepsecond hand of her watch.
“Who wants a caveman around today? Along with houses, tables, knives, and forks, we have developed standards of friendship and courtesy that make life a lot more enjoyable.”
Susan sits at her kitchen table, wearing an old terry cloth bathrobe of her father’s, all dangling threads, a comfortable ruin stolen from the back of his clothes closet on her last trip home. She looks at her cousin, sitting opposite her.
“Teko called me a semiretard,” Roger complains. He holds a cup of tea in both hands, his fingers interlaced. To Susan he looks amused rather than insulted.
“Nothing semi about it,” she says. “Reminds me. I made your excuses for you to Mom, as usual. But I think she still expects a call now and again.”
“I’m in no mood.”
“And I come off shift just raring to hear the latest dispatch from the lonely desert outpost of Palmdale.”
He laughs through his nose, an exhalation coupled with a short hum, as if he were clearing his sinuses.
“I’m serious, Roger, somebody needs to help me out with this woman.”
“She should take a class. Adult ed.”
“Perish the thought.”
“A creative writing workshop.”
“That I should suggest to Mom, with her clippings and her used paperback books of famous psychology cases and the history of England that she brings home in a shopping bag.”
“Art appreciation.”
“I’m going to suggest to her that she is an uneducated person.”
He shrugs, smiling: You win.
“Well, so what’s the latest dispatch?”
“They had a streaker last week outside the Civic Center.”
“There’s a Civic Center?” Roger raises his eyebrows in mock surprise.
Susan glances at the electric clock hanging over the stove. Greasy yellowish dust on its face. Two in the a.m. Tomorrow—today—she has lunch and the first dinner service at the Plate of Brasse.
The businessmen work you, but it’s the tourists who run you off your feet and then stiff you. Party of six on Tuesday ran up a check of more than a hundred bucks and then left her a deuce. After she did everything but compliment their ugly sweatshirts.
“And so what did you tell her for me?”
“I said a girl,” says Susan, “what else?”
Her cousin smiles secretly. “Next time, actually, you could tell her a brain tumor.”
“Oh, you are nuts.”
“I’m sort of serious.”
“I’m sure you can imagine for yourself, the blizzard. The blizzard of clippings. If you were even to hint.”
“Just a feeling I have. I’m making a mental picture of something growing on my brain. It looks like a walnut.”
“Your brain? The size is right.”
“Please.”
“You know she’s equal to the job. Maybe she still calls it the Big C, but she can handle the research. Remember Grandma?”
“Oh, God.”
“Mom could only whisper the word, leukemia. But she found out everything.”
She had too. Doled out what her daughter and nephew had dubbed the “Platelet Report” every morning. Returned home from the ReSale Oasis with shopping bags full of books about the disease. Living with it. Dying from it. Cures derived from apricot pits. Meditation therapy. Recipe books for chemo patients. A book about a young man with leukemia who fell in love with his young nurse.
“And then she just went, Grandma. Went downhill real fast.”
“But Mom didn’t,” whispers Susan. “It was more words to whisper. Multiple myeloma. You want her whispering at you?”
“No,” he whispers back.
Americans talk about getting sick the way she imagines Europeans talk about sex or food: with real gusto and a connoisseur’s recognition of the quality, value, rarity, significance, and magnitude of a given malady. I am sick, I must die. Lord have mercy on us. And a cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo.
Sick or healthy, they hit the hay. Susan wants some shuteye. But she finds herself crawling out of bed early, to sit at the table in the sunlit kitchen, the schematic of a felony flickering in her brain.
She shakes a cigarette out of the pack before her, places it in her mouth, and lights it. The smoke curls in the sunlight, winds toward the ceiling in ghostly bluish plaits, though of enough substance to cast a shadow.
The thing will happen. They will storm onto private property and forcibly take money. It will be planned to the last detail and timed to the last second, an operation of military precision. And soon. Turns out she does like her part, imagines herself dressing for it. Imagines herself picking something good and American off the diner menu, something above suspicion. Crucial role. Timekeeper. Observer. How many cops? Lights and sirens or silent approach? Guns drawn or holstered? Will the media appear? The intelligence she gathers will be used to refine their technique for the next action.
Politically the value of the action is questionable, since they don’t intend to exploit the propaganda opportunity presented by the assault. What they do
intend is to melt into the earth, carrying undisclosed amounts of cash, traveler’s checks, and money orders. She means, in other words it might be interpreted, not altogether incorrectly, as just another bank holdup.
She appreciates the idea of the second safe house. And the idea of a women’s collective is near and dear to her. What bothers her, though, is her skulking impression that as a justification for armed robbery it is pure needy childishness, driven by a kind of bored nihilism. But she’s not about to examine things too closely. Oh, how she’s been waiting for this. They came to her—to her! And then like an idiot, she handed them off to Guy Mock. She should have learned her lesson about him during those early days in Oakland.
They came to her, and there was room for nothing but compassion, what with all the SLA dead, and the empathy aroused by the idea of their being survivors on the run, an overflowing of good and generous and openhanded spirits, and Berkeley felt righter and better than it had in years, with expressions of condolence and solidarity from the Movement, with memorial graffiti on the walls that made them all cry; and they fed them cookies and soup, and brought them changes of clothes, and saved the newspapers for them to read, and delivered their revolutionary communiques, and then she gave them away to Guy fucking Mock.
Stupid idiot! Once the prick saw that he’d cornered the SLA market, he cut her off. All summer she felt sick at heart, frustrated, unfulfilled, empty. They disappeared into their adventure, distant and mysterious, while she spent her days fetching extra dressing and replacing unsatisfactory flatware and sending perfectly good food back to the kitchen because it wasn’t cooked silly. She and Jeff argued over whether her support and concern for the SLA were counterrevolutionary, since (in Jeff’s opinion) it stemmed from her “personal feeling” (he made it sound obscene) for Angela, which (according to him) had the “unmistakable aroma” of “the personality cult.” Susan fumed. Jeff was still annoyed, Susan knew, by the notoriety she achieved addressing the crowd at Ho Chi Minh Park; he had work that day. Now he was giving her shit, telling her how “concerned” he was about her “preoccupation,” which he “felt morally obliged to say” he thought was “not politically based.” She told him to just stick to painting apartments.
Trance Page 41
