Revolution Number 9

by Peter Abrahams

  One of his assistants arrived with a bottle of champagne. They drank it. She couldn’t stop talking about the verdict, which was fine with him. “God,” she said, “what a rush.”

  And later: “You must be exhausted, Hugo. Do you want a massage?”

  In truth, he wasn’t tired at all. He had the constitution of a barge worker on the Rhine. That was a factor his opponents often failed to consider. They were so busy trying to counter his knowledge and his imagination that they forgot about his endurance. He thought of the champions of the bare-knuckle days, with no round limitations, no decisions, and the victor distinguished by the fact that he was the one still on his feet.

  Still, a massage sounded nice. “That sounds nice,” said Hugo Klein.

  Much later she left, and he was alone on the boat. He went to the bookshelves and began leafing through his law school yearbooks. He soon found the face he had seen in court, and the name that went with it.

  Klein picked up the phone and called an old classmate, an active alumnus who raised money and went to reunions. Klein asked how the latest fund-raising was going, promised his usual contribution, and said: “By the way, I bumped into a fellow I think we were at school with the other day.”

  “Who was that?”

  Klein told him.

  “You were in Washington?”

  “Here. Why would I be in Washington?”

  “That’s where Goody works.” His fellow alumnus chuckled. “Kind of the opposite side of the street from you.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Klein.

  “Sorry,” said the alumnus. “That came out wrong. He has some kind of classified job, that’s all I meant. No offense.”

  “No offense,” said Klein.

  Later he looked at the picture in the yearbook. His memory really was prodigious, he thought, to have remembered a face after all those years. Goody. He reached for the champagne bottle, but found it empty.

  3

  Nuncio looked across his secondhand desk at the client, sitting in the secondhand chair where clients sat. Only Nuncio’s chair had been bought new, but so long ago that it now fitted in unobtrusively with the rest of the decor.

  “Brucie, Brucie, Brucie,” Nuncio said, shaking his head.

  “Yeah?” replied Brucie Wine. Brucie wasn’t the kind of client adept at reading subtexts. Or any texts at all. Brucie had been Nuncio’s client for many years. He seemed to have put on a little weight since their last conference, and he hadn’t shaved in a week or so. Not a promising-looking client, but a longtime one. A relationship had been formed.

  “First,” said Nuncio, “this consultation will cost you one hundred dollars, no matter where we go from here. In cash.”

  Brucie dug his roll out of the pocket of his jeans, peeled off a C-note, and handed it over. Nuncio took it between his beringed fingers and gave it a crisp snap. The sound proved nothing.

  “This the genuine article?” he asked.

  “Huh?” said Brucie.

  “I’m asking if this is Uncle Sam’s product, or something homemade.”

  “Mr. Nuncio! What do you take me for?”

  That was a good one. Brucie Wine had grown up south of Market somewhere, Nuncio didn’t know precisely and didn’t care. His father had been an honest, hardworking printer who ran a little engraving business on the side. Brucie had learned the trade at his old man’s knee. When the old man had a stroke, leaving everything to his only son, Brucie had redirected the business along lines his father hadn’t considered: into counterfeiting and forgery, to be exact. Mostly counterfeiting in the beginning, but forgery was big now, what with all the illegal aliens around, needing documents—visas, social security cards, driver’s licenses, passports. Brucie was good. He could fake perfect passports, which were the hardest, although recently he had expanded beyond even that and could now sometimes get real ones. That’s how they’d beaten his last rap—Brucie had fingered his connection at the passport office. In return, Nuncio had persuaded the D.A. to drop the charges. The bill was fifteen grand. Brucie paid cash.

  That was Nuncio’s M.O. when it came to mounting legal defenses for Brucie Wine. On the previous counterfeiting charge, Nuncio had suggested to the D.A. that Brucie had printed the phony money under an arrangement with some midlevel mob figure. The D.A., up for reelection, had decided he’d get better press for taking down a mobster, even a minor one, than a working-class nobody like Brucie Wine.

  Twenty grand. Cash.

  And there had been two or three other busts over the years, with similar play-outs. Brucie did excellent work. His twenties, fifties, hundreds, his passports, his social security cards—works of art. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was he did stupid things and got caught.

  “Brucie, Brucie, Brucie,” Nuncio said, again shaking his head.

  “Yeah?”

  Brucie was tapping his foot on the threadbare carpet. He couldn’t understand what was taking so long. He just didn’t get it. How to spell it out for him? There was no one left to finger.

  “Brucie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s no one left to finger.”

  “Huh?”

  Nuncio lit a cigar. It was a cheap cigar, the kind that came in a box of five for a buck and a quarter, but he took his time with it, as though it were the finest Monte Cristo, and he, Winston Churchill. He didn’t offer one to Brucie. Brucie shook a bent cigarette out of a pack of Camels and lit up. Soon there was a lot of smoke in Nuncio’s office, but they were no further ahead.

  “Mind telling me something, Brucie?”

  “Depends,” said Brucie, demonstrating one of his rare and always inappropriately timed outbreaks of low cunning.

  “Why,” asked Nuncio, “were you doing eighty-five on the Golden Gate Bridge on a night when you had two hundred grand in counterfeit paper in your glove compartment?”

  “ ’Cause of Laverne,” said Brucie. “I was late. For picking her up for our date, see? That pisses her off like you wouldn’t believe. You know what I’m saying?”

  Nuncio didn’t know. He didn’t want to know anything about Laverne.

  “Besides,” added Brucie with some pride, “I got the fuzzbuster.”

  “The fuzzbuster.”

  “For picking up cop radar.”

  “If they got their radar turned on,” Nuncio said.

  “Huh? Oh. Right, sure.”

  “So I guess it was when you zipped by that squad car on the inside that they musta got suspicious.”

  “Suspicious?” asked Brucie.

  “That you might be exceeding the speed limit.”

  “Oh. Yeah. They hit the siren right away, Mr. Nuncio. But what right did they have to search the car? Tell me that.” Brucie was sticking out his soft recessive chin in an aggressive manner. Whatever happened, he had to be kept off the stand.

  “It was the open bottle of Bud on your dash, Brucie. That gives them the right.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Probable cause,” Nuncio said. Brucie looked blank. “Brucie, I want you to think very carefully about something I’m going to ask you. Take your time with the answer.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Could anybody have had access to your car?”

  “Access?”

  “Could somebody have gotten into your car without your knowledge?”

  “Are you shitting me, Mr. Nuncio? That’s a brand-new Trans-Am. Loaded. Don’t even have a thousand miles on the odometer, and it’s been hooked up the whole time. That baby’s locked in the garage under the house every night. And I lock up the car too, and set the burglar alarm. I’m talking about the car alarm and the garage alarm. Plus there’s Flipper.”

  “Flipper?”

  “My pit bull, chained up outside. You should see him, Mr. Nuncio.”

  Nuncio didn’t want to see Flipper. Except for the fact that he was often in trouble and always paid up, Brucie was a poor client. You couldn’t counsel a client to lie exactly, to make up a false story. That w
ould be unethical. Worse, it could lead to criminal charges, probably disbarment. On the other hand, there was no law against gently guiding a client toward an interpretation of the facts of the case that might raise reasonable doubt as to guilt. That was what the practice of criminal law was all about. Raising reasonable doubts. Raising reasonable doubts meant coming up with one measly crackpot theory and planting it in the mind of one measly crackpot juror. Finding the right juror during the impaneling was Nuncio’s job. No problem. He’d done it hundreds of times. Where he needed Brucie’s cooperation was in coming up with the crackpot theory. But Brucie was tapping his foot again, and knocking ash on the carpet.

  “Brucie?”

  Brucie looked like he was about to—Yes, he yawned. “Yeah?”

  “Think again.”

  “What about?”

  “About the possibility, however remote, of someone getting into the glove compartment of your car before you drove to Laverne’s.” Maybe he hadn’t been clear enough. Maybe he should have said “getting into the glove compartment and planting that counterfeit money.” Dangerously close to the ethical line, though. Besides, wasn’t it perfectly obvious what he was fishing for? What kind of a human being could now fail to say: “My God, Mr. Nuncio! Someone must have planted that stuff in my glove compartment!” Then they could rise on wings of creativity, spinning tales of enemies, setups, dark deeds.

  Brucie Wine said: “But how could they, Mr. Nuncio? I already told you. I lock the car. I lock the garage. I even lock the goddamn glove compartment. And then there’s the alarms.”

  “You left out Flipper.”

  “Right. Flipper.”

  The two men fouled the air with smoke. Nuncio glanced at the clock. He had a nice round belly under his purple vest, and it liked to be fed promptly at noon.

  “Brucie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This time you’re going down, son.”

  “What?”

  “To jail, Brucie.”

  “Jail?” Brucie was appalled. He was not the kind to do well in jail—or even survive.

  “They’ve got you by the balls, Brucie, and you’ve got nothing left to give them. No one to finger.” Had it been Churchill who had said something about giving me the tools and I’ll do the job? Nuncio took a drag on his twenty-five-cent cigar. “You’ve got to give me some tools, Brucie.”

  Brucie frowned. “Tools? You mean like the press and stuff?”

  God. “A body. Some crook to cough up to the D.A.”

  Brucie’s little eyes lit up. “I did driver’s licenses for some spics last month.”

  “Christ. What does the D.A. want with more spics? He’d probably tack on an extra year for aggravation if I even raised the idea. Think, Brucie. Think.” For a moment, Nuncio considered hiring a hypnotist, at Brucie’s expense. “Think way back into the past. Is there anybody you’ve worked with or done work for that the cops might be interested in?”

  Brucie scrunched up his face like a five-year-old asked to spell dog. It was a revolting sight. Brucie thought and thought. Nuncio’s stomach rumbled. Twelve o’clock. He started to get up. Then Brucie surprised him. He opened his eyes and said, “I got an idea.”

  “Yeah?” said Nuncio, sitting back down.

  4

  Blurting the answer to twenty-six across in the Sunday New York Times crossword was the first big mistake Charlie Ochs had made in twenty years. Playing Ben Webster was the second.

  There had been other mistakes along the way, but small ones—once when a dog made off with a baseball, for example, and Charlie, passing by the field, had taken it from the animal’s mouth and unthinkingly zinged it to the catcher, over three hundred feet away, on the fly. That had been stupid, but without consequences. The ballplayers were kids and had soon forgotten. Charlie didn’t forget—and never touched a baseball again, although he sometimes recalled the feeling of that particular one, worn and slightly damp, in his hand.

  The crossword puzzle mistake did have consequences. It would never have happened at all if he had stayed in bed, or if a monster hadn’t crawled into one of his traps.

  But.

  Charlie had a little shingle house on Cosset Pond, bought at a time when you didn’t need a city job to afford one. Kitchen and sitting room on the first floor, bed and bath upstairs. He had a tumbledown garage where he kept his car, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with almost three hundred thousand miles on it and an engine he had rebuilt twice. He had a patch of land, big enough to stack his pots, and a floating dock with Straight Arrow tethered at the end. He had no wife, no kids, no close friends. He had a silver saxophone he played at night.

  On the day of twenty-six across and Ben Webster, Charlie awoke at first light, as he always did. He rolled over and raised his head to look out the window. There was frost on the glass. Charlie scraped it away with his fingernails. He saw Straight Arrow straining its lines at the dock. White caps stormed over Cosset Pond, and heavy seas roiled outside, beyond the Cosset Pond cut. The flag on the roof of the Oceanographic Studies Center across the pond was flying straight out, and overhead, charcoal clouds sped by, fraying at the edges.

  Meanwhile, the bed was warm with the heat of his body. It would have been easy just to lie down, pull the quilt over his head, and listen to the weather, as though it were a New Age recording entitled Nor’ easter. But he hadn’t checked his pots in three days, and if he didn’t do it, someone else, someone who didn’t shrink from a little weather when there was a dishonest dollar to be made, would. Charlie threw back the covers with more force than necessary and got up.

  A few minutes later, carrying a thermos of yesterday’s reheated coffee, wearing long johns, wool pants, flannel shirt, sweater, oilskins, and rubber boots, Charlie walked down the path from his back door and onto the dock. The wind was blowing harder than he had thought, whipping sound from the bare trees, the wires, the rigging of the boats on the pond, like the conductor of a rough-and-ready orchestra. It was a cold wind, and stung his face. Charlie, boarding Straight Arrow, whistled into it; a tune of his own devising, inspired by bebop, and far from New Age.

  Straight Arrow was a beamy twenty-six foot Corea with a hundred and sixty-five–horse Palmer diesel. Charlie had bought it at a DEA auction of seized smuggling assets. He had scraped off its red paint, repainted it white, changed its name from Shake Dat Ting and added a small deckhouse for days like this. He switched on the engine, felt it rumble under his feet, and cast off.

  Charlie took Straight Arrow across the pond at half throttle. A plume of light snowflakes hooked down from the clouds, and then another. Not enough to affect visibility, he thought, steering through the cut, under the bridge, out to sea. Almost immediately, a wave broke over the bow, smacking hard against the Plexiglas screen of the pilothouse. Suddenly the air was white with driving snow and Charlie felt as cold as though he were wearing nothing at all. He was considering turning back when another wave came smashing in, looped over the screen and caught him in the face. Icy water ran down his neck, seeped through the wool sweater, the flannel shirt, the long johns. Charlie laughed, laughed at the futility of his preparation, preparation in general.

  And all at once he was fully awake, shocked into an acute state of consciousness, where he heard every change in the pitch of the wind, saw the individual patterns of the snowflakes that flew by his eyes, felt the currents of cold, some wet, some dry, that came from all directions. Fully awake for the first time in how long? And fully aware of the power of the sea to do with him as it pleased. Well, you either slipped through the cracks or you didn’t. Charlie laughed again, loud and free with no one to hear him, and swung Straight Arrow west, into the weather.

  Charlie’s floats were red with three white stripes. They were lined up with landmarks—the lighthouse, the water tower, the radio station antenna—but Charlie couldn’t see any landmarks, only the violent circle of seascape immediately around him, bounded by the pointillist walls of a white cocoon. He kept going, although he knew that he would h
ave to run right over one of his floats in order to see it.

  After a few minutes, he did. A wave tossed up a flash of red and white off the starboard side; Charlie slowed, circled, and grabbed the float on his first pass. My lucky day, he thought.

  With Straight Arrow in neutral, rising and falling on moving hills of water, Charlie uncoupled the line from the float, hooked it to the winch in the stern, and hit the switch. Nothing happened. He glanced at the motor. The casing was covered by a sheet of ice. He kicked it, not hard, and tried the switch a few more times. Nothing—and not the moment for taking motors apart. He began pulling by hand.

  Charlie had five pots on the line, spread along the bottom at a depth of about fifty feet. They were old, waterlogged, heavy. Charlie pulled. His body wasn’t the kind Milanese couturiers cut suits for; but useful for what he was doing now.

  The first pot came up covered in seaweed, and empty inside. The second was empty too. And the third and the fourth. Despite the cold, Charlie was sweating by the time the last pot broke the surface. It seemed much heavier than the others—he was barely able to haul it over the stern. For a moment he thought he must be getting old. Then he looked between the slats. In the fifth pot was the biggest bug he had ever seen. It seemed to be looking back at him. After twenty or thirty seconds of that, it jabbed an enormous claw in his direction. The claw encountered the wooden cage, twisted sideways, opened, closed. With a crunch, the slat snapped in two. The claw jabbed through the opening. “Jesus,” Charlie said, backing away.

  Carefully, he took the fifth pot off the line and lowered the others over the side. There was no point in continuing with a broken winch. Charlie checked the compass and turned for home. All the way, he heard scary sounds from the pot on the deck behind him.

  Charlie tied up at the dock behind De Mello’s Wholesale Fish. No one was there but De Mello, sitting in his cold office, with fish scales on the floor and Amalia Rodrigues on the tape player. He stuck a bottle in the drawer as Charlie walked in.

  “You went out in this shit?” De Mello said.