“Nietfeldt, what happened?”
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
“I believe it all. I’m doting, overcredulous, and naive.”
“You wouldn’t believe this.”
“Go ahead and test my faith. I’m sitting here on a Sunday.”
“The guy said he wouldn’t meet with the kids if we tailed him. So we didn’t break surveillance, but we hid it a little. I mean, no one in the restaurant. Which is a shame. I hear the fish is very fresh, locally caught. Anyway, they moved around a lot. A bar, the restaurant, then just walked around. The thing is, L.A. gives him this cover; he’s supposed to say he’s up on business. He’s a high school teacher out in the desert, it’s summer vacation. I mean, what kind of business? Good deals on number two pencils? How’s he supposed to not blow it when you give him a cover like that?”
Polhaus let his mouth fall open and allowed the phonemes to escape, two breathy sounds carried on the still air: “L.A.”
“It was L.A.’s idea. I’m sorry. I had a bad feeling.”
“It’s L.A., the whole bright idea for this brilliant family reunion.”
“Should I even mention that we were about a half an hour from Herself? That if the conversation between Rorvik and the kids had gone as planned—to the extent that the conversation was necessary, was a semi-intelligent idea and not something an ape swinging through the jungle would have rejected out of hand—we would have found her and had her right now?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t mention it. So what else happened?”
“Rorvik said that he asked them what they were doing these days, and they said working. Susan’s at Plate of Brasse.”
“Until Friday she was.”
“Roger’s still painting houses.”
“You think this is true, or you think it’s more bullshit they’re feeding the old man?”
“Roger shows up with paint on his clothes, anyway.”
“Why does L.A. do this? Why?”
“My suggestion is check out small jobs in the area. Small nonunion painting jobs. I would think the Peninsula. All those complexes in Belmont and such. Probably a lot of work getting bid out. Labor Day’s coming up. Big moving day.”
“So check them out.” He dismisses Nietfeldt.
Eventually you realize that L.A. exists just to be at fault. Not the Bureau office, the whole fucking city. It has an infinite capacity to absorb blame. Whatever goes wrong in the country, there’s always L.A. Used to be New York, but L.A. took over. The cognoscenti understand this. Jew haters still blame New York. Right-wingers blame Berkeley. The unobservant blame Polhaus’s beautiful golden San Francisco. But you want to trace everything that’s wrong in the world, from tits in the movies to niggers in the streets, you look to L.A.
Small nonunion jobs. Maybe they’d get lucky, but things aren’t looking up. The single useful lead that they have in the whole thing of the case, 625 Post, is blown. They could send them electric trains and a salami, they could send a carton of Milky Ways and an ounce of grass—they’d never go near the place again.
Rose hung up the receiver, then stared at the kitchen phone. A beige wall unit, set in the center of a dark corkboard in the shape of a flower, to whose petals were pinned a shopping list, a business card, a prescription, a mechanic’s estimate, something in a slit window envelope. And oh yeah the postcard from her sister, who’d visited Porterville. She wasn’t sure if her sister had been joking around or not. These things said Life Goes On. And how.
She was a woman with a grown child. Two, for all intents and purposes. She was waiting for her husband to return from an out-of-town trip. She would have liked to say that the house felt empty. She would have liked to say that now she could get to all the things she’d been meaning to do. She would have liked to say that she had converted Susan’s bedroom into a sewing room. She would have liked to say that there were Kodachrome snaps arriving in the mail each month, accompanying lengthy, chatty letters of the kind she had always been in the habit of writing. She would have liked to say that she and Howard were going to take a couple of months and visit sunny Italy, a second honeymoon. She would have liked to, but basically it was just quiet around there.
She knew Howard was on his way home because he’d checked out of the Hilton. She knew that because the kids had just called her to say that they’d missed him there but to let him know that they weren’t involved in any kind of trouble. Oh, and hi. Not in any trouble, but don’t be too upset if she doesn’t hear from them for a while. But things should straighten themselves out soon. Then, fire up the barbecue! They’d be home for a nice long visit.
It was when they assured her of the imminent visit home that it occurred to her that her entire life as a mother had been a failure. Because this was a lie as transparent as the lies they were telling about their lack of intimate involvement with armed revolutionary groups, state prisoners, and fugitives from justice. The whole known past had been abruptly dethroned by a hidden counterpart that was monstrous in its secret and unknowable details; that so thoroughly excluded her that it might as well have happened to people she didn’t know. Worse, it worked in only one direction. Her life remained as open to them, as accessible, as it always had been, while they denied her basic knowledge about such things as where they happened to be laying their heads, the hair on which she’d cut herself right here in this kitchen, with newspapers spread over the linoleum. But a mother couldn’t afford to be willfully enigmatic. She’d had her secrets—secret garments, secret devices in the medicine chest and hanging from the showerhead, secret silences—but they were not deceitful secrets. Not even Jocasta deliberately deceived her children. And there weren’t many of them, her secrets. They were things that had happened before they were born. They were things she concealed on and inside her person. They were things she carried alone, in her head, without speaking of them or acting them out, without even dreaming of speaking of them or acting them out. Everything else, her whole life, belonged to her children, or at any rate was there for them to take. But the things her children were supposed to have been up to! Whatever she thought she’d been teaching them all these years, all she’d really taught them was that it wasn’t advisable to tell their own mother the truth. Who did they tell the truth to? They told each other the truth. They told their friends, unfamiliar to her. Probably they thought they were telling the truth whenever a bomb exploded or a gun went off. And she’d given them everything. It wasn’t fair.
She realized that her number one tactic, the jeremiad, didn’t work, hadn’t ever worked. She’d employed it all these years in the belief that by putting across her point of view she could impose the reality it urged. But all those letters had carried no weight. Now that she thought of it she recognized that all she’d ever obtained was some token deference. Then the kids went ahead and did whatever they pleased. As carefully as she wrote, as lucidly as she framed her arguments, as diplomatically as she lodged her objections, as skillfully as she obscured her appeals to the children’s fears and guilt feelings, as astutely as she expressed her familiarity with them as individuals, it was all only words, capable of changing nothing, remote from any existence other than its own as words on a page, reflecting nothing but her own sense of the way things stood, or ought to stand.
Normal sounds. A sprinkler, darkening the desert earth and bringing forth flowers and grass in the unwavering sunlight. Motorcars, back and forth, and one in particular that pulled into the driveway and stopped. The monster she loved was home again.
The door. “I’m home,” said Howard. He put down his overnight bag.
“Well,” she said.
He paused by the door to go through the mail stacked on the table near the entryway. She knew he had to do this when he walked through the door, and she waited, reaching for the embroidered clasp purse in which she nested the pack of cigarettes she was working on. Soon he would walk into the kitchen and have a glass of tap water, using the ridiculous plastic cup (picturing Donald, Huey, Dewey, an
d Louie) that he kept beside the sink for this purpose.
“The kids look good,” he said. “They seem all right.”
“They just called,” she told him.
“They did?” he said.
“They wanted to say goodbye.”
“What?” He had crossed the threshold of the kitchen and stood before the sink, letting the water run to clear the pipes of lead traces, germs, and insalubrious residue. “What do you mean, goodbye?”
“They called to say we wouldn’t see them anymore. They’re in trouble, Howard.”
“Now wait just a minute. That’s not what they told me. They told me this was all a mixup. Maybe you misunderstood.” He took the cup and filled it, then stood drinking it down. Rose watched his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed.
“No,” she said. “You misunderstood them.”
“The FBI only wants to talk to them, I told them I thought it would be a good idea, and end of subject. We finished dinner and had a walk and talked about this and that.”
So it was him too. It would have to be to complete the chain. The FBI lied to him, he lied to the children, and then together he and the children lied to her. They made telephone calls for the express purpose of lying. They drove out to the desert. They boarded jets and flew hundreds of miles, just to tell lies to each other and to her. And as the one who didn’t get a chance to lie she’d only now gotten the chance to figure it all out. And when she had—oh, how ugly that he should come home and reward her perception by pretending not to know what she was talking about.
All these years only to realize that her family had been a conspiracy against her.
“I don’t know what I did to deserve any of this,” she said.
“What are you crying for? It’ll all be over soon.”
“That’s what they told me too.”
“That’s because it’s true. It’ll all be straightened out. It’ll be over.”
“No, it already is. We won’t see them anymore.”
It was never too late to start lying. It was easier when you meant it. That was the thing about the untruth, the part she’d never before understood: The lie was easiest when you knew that you yourself fought against disbelieving it. It hurt her to see Howard’s face fall, his shoulders go slack. But they never would come back. It was not what they’d said, but she knew it to be true. All she was doing was, what do they call it, fabricating a quotation. If she were only to pass on the children’s lie it would simply echo his own, and keep her forever excluded.
GENEVA AVENUE IS ABANDONED in frantic haste once the Rorviks deliver the troubling news that Susan’s old man dropped in to take them out to a steak dinner and then told them that the FBI was picking up the check.
It is bluntly and definitively made clear that the rationale for any new living arrangements will be to quarantine the Teko and Yolanda Show in a theater of its very own. Yolanda finds a place for herself and Teko in Bernal Heights, on Precita. Susan and Jeff move into a place in Daly City right away, but Roger, Tania, and Joan are obliged to stay with Teko and Yolanda while they search for quarters. Teko takes heart at this, makes a last great flailing effort to bring them all into line. Joan especially gets a lot of shit, is brought up-to-date on the status of the continually evolving verdict against her handed down by the People’s Court of Teko: She is a tricky, renitent, untrustworthy, untruthful, divisive, frigid parasite. So much for the last vestiges of fellowship remaining from the watershed Summer of’74. Teko speaks expansively about future actions (all kill plots) and describes the ongoing search for black leadership (the latest candidate, a convicted murderer named Doc Holiday, has just been released from San Quentin).
They have to make their move soon, get out of town. None of them wants to be involved with another killing. There’s still cash, that Carmichael blood money, and when Roger and Jeff wrap up their current project, a contract to paint most of a big complex on the Peninsula, that should put them over the top.
After a week at the field marshals’ home, they find a place in the outer Mission, on Morse Street. A two-bedroom flat, though they’d move in if it were half the size.
LANGMO AND NIETFELDT EAT sandwiches and drink coffee in the front seat of their blue sedan. It’s twelve-thirty, and they’re parked at a housing complex in San Bruno hard by 280. Langmo opens a copy of Time. The cover has a picture of Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and reads, “The Girl Who Almost Killed Ford.” Nietfeldt glances at it and smiles.
“Who’d’ve thought the Manson Family was for Rockefeller?” They’d showed the manager a sheaf of photographs: pictures of the Rorviks, Jeff Wolfritz, all the unfamous faces that wouldn’t cause a stir. Without hesitation, he’d picked out Wolfritz’s picture.
“He in trouble?”
“Well, you know,” said Langmo. “His contractor’s license expired.”
“Oh, really? Tell you, if I’d known, I wouldn’t’ve hired them.”
“Oh, we know you wouldn’t have done anything like that,” said Nietfeldt.
The apartments are clustered in groups of twelve in low buildings with dark wooden exteriors. The manager pointed out one particular cluster at the northwestern edge of the complex looking directly upon the freeway, where the apartments, currently vacant, are being painted and recarpeted. Y‘should see what they do to these places. Sneak cats in and get nail polish on the carpeting. Flush objects down the john. And y’find the weirdest things left behind. They parked in view of the old dark Ford that the manager said belonged to the painters. There they wait. It’s Monday, and the lot is mostly empty. The sun moves. Nietfeldt finishes his Chronicle and tosses it in the backseat. Langmo flips the pages of Time. A boy walks by the car and peers in at the two men.
“It’s a school day, son,” says Langmo. “Why aren’t you there?” The boy moves on.
“Isn’t it Columbus Day, or something?” asks Nietfeldt.
“Who?”
The G-men are laughing when a young woman, her clothes covered with white paint, comes out of one of the front apartments. Leaning against the Ford, she lights a cigarette. Her hair is drawn back in a ponytail and her clear, close-set eyes seem to be looking directly at the blue sedan.
“There’s Lazy S.,” says Nietfeldt. His eyes are wide with excitement and his voice is unusually high. He reaches out and grasps his partner’s forearm and gives it a light squeeze. “There’s Susan.”
“Holy shit,” says Langmo. “Finally a break. You think she’s alone in there?”
“Doubt it. Manager says they’re painting two apartments a day. There’s got to be at least a couple of them.”
The young woman tosses her cigarette to the ground and returns to the apartment, closing the door behind her.
“Better call it in.”
“Fucking A.” Nietfeldt picks up the radio.
At 5:30 Susan and a young man leave the apartment. Langmo flips through the bundle of photos the agents carry.
“Who you think? Jeff?”
“He’d be the logical one.”
The man climbs into the driver’s seat and starts up the Ford. Revolutionaries or not, men like to do the driving. Nietfeldt allows the Ford to leave the lot before he follows. He noses out into traffic and watches as it heads toward the on-ramp for 280 North, then follows the car onto the freeway, tailing it at a distance.
“They’re staying in the right lane,” observes Langmo.
“Probably getting onto three-eighty.”
The interchange comes up but the Ford keeps heading north on 280. Nietfeldt steers the sedan into the lane that will channel them onto 380, a spur that cuts across the Peninsula, linking 280 with the airport and the Bayshore Freeway to the east. Polhaus has positioned several cars along likely routes to be able to pick up the Ford at any point on its journey.
“Well, we’re out of it,” Nietfeldt says.
They approach the raw brown hills just below the city, on one of which letters spell out the announcement:
SOUTH
&n
bsp; SAN FRANCISCO
THE INDUSTRIAL CITY
Nietfeldt remembers when the letters were whitewashed onto the hill, surrounded by colorful wildflowers. The idea was to give the sign the look of a sampler that had been embroidered by some old industrial granny, patient in her industrial rocker. He remembers it aloud, as usual. Langmo looks out the passenger side window and surreptitiously rolls his eyes. Now the letters are of poured concrete, concludes Nietfeldt. As usual. Five feet high.
They round a curve and suddenly the manufacturing and warehouse topography on their right drops away and the bay is brilliant there. Up ahead is Candlestick, not so brilliant. Hereabouts the radio burbles, and Langmo grabs it. Turns out they’re back in it. Code Three call. Exit 101 at Army and wait at Army and South Van Ness.
They ease to the curb at a bus stop before a low-rise housing project. An old armchair with one broken leg sits propped up on the sidewalk, and a man in faded fatigues sleeps in it, a near-empty bottle of Cisco (“Takes You by Surprise”) cradled in his arms. Langmo radios in their position.
Soon they see the Ford rolling down the hill toward them, stopping for the light at Mission, signaling a right turn. Nietfeldt pulls into traffic, turns left onto Mission, and eases up to the curb outside Cesar’s Palace, a nightclub. Langmo begins to drum softly, a Latin-type beat, on the dashboard.
“Ever been here?” he asks. Nietfeldt just looks at him.
The Ford draws abreast of them and comes to a stop. Nietfeldt feels the hair prickle up on the back of his neck. The last thing he wants is to be shot sitting in his car outside a Mexican dance hall. He hazards a quick look out his window. Susan Rorvik is talking and sipping from a straw stuck in a big paper cup. The cup says “COLD Drink,” and icicles have formed on the letters of the word COLD. Brrrr. Abruptly the car turns left onto a narrow side street. Precita.
Trance Page 55
