Revolution Number 9

by Peter Abrahams

  “You betcha.”

  The front door closed. A few moments later a car started. The sound of the motor faded and faded and died away. And that was Daddy.

  The closet door opened and light came in. The first thing Emily saw was a lean, capable hand, contracted into a fist. Nothing moved in the little closet world except one of Pleasance’s eyelids: it began to twitch.

  “You’ll be first,” he told her. “You and little Ronnie, of course. So ol’ Charlie can see. It’s only fair, right?”

  Emily, mouth taped, head full of pain, glared at him. He looked down at her, then away, taking a bottle from his back pocket. He gulped from it, once, twice, until it was empty. Sweat popped out on his forehead.

  “Only fair,” he repeated. “And then a big surprise for ol’ Charlie.” He tossed the bottle across the room, not hard, but it shattered on the floor anyway.

  The act, the noise, the destruction seemed to liberate him in some way. He tore off his shirt as though it were the yoke of civilization. His torso was bony and scarred. He faced Emily again. This time he had no trouble looking her in the eye. He gave her a long uncivilized gaze and shut the closet door.

  34

  The Committee of the American Resistance—the gang, to Yvonne—was waiting for her in the Estuary Park. She passed the Jack London condos—where soon, if Felipe’s dreams came true, they would be in bed in some well-decorated room of the kind he only saw in the movies, with the possibility of videotaping in the offing—and turned into the park. She stopped the Tercel beside a dented van at the end of the brick-top turnaround, and got out. She didn’t lock the car. There was nothing in it but a red rose, wilting in the back.

  It wasn’t much of a park: small and grassless, with a few stunted palms not much bigger than houseplants growing by the waterfront. It wasn’t much of a night, either: cool and damp, with marine mist blowing in from the west. The mist thickened to fog as she watched, dimming the lights of Alameda in the distance. Across the estuary, on the south side, three silhouetted forms separated themselves from the darkness: the long wooden pier that stretched into the inner harbor, the warehouse that rose behind it, the oceangoing freighter that was docked to its end. She smelled rotting seaweed, rotting fish, garbage, waste.

  The side door of the van opened and Eli climbed out. She could smell him, too, smell his nervous sweat, and in the glow of the van’s interior light that spilled out, she could see the stains spreading under the arms of his denim work shirt. He smiled at her and said, “A nice night for it.” His smile was too tight, his voice too high; and he himself was too young.

  “We’ll see,” Yvonne said, wondering whether the Santa Clara Five fiasco had also begun with a joke. Eli flinched, probably thinking of his girlfriend in Leavenworth and everything that could go wrong. Yvonne stepped up into the van. The rest of them were inside—Angel behind the wheel, Annie beside him, Gus in back—all dressed like blue-collar workers as seen through their own eyes: Annie in clothes too big, making her look more frail than ever; Angel wearing a black beret, which combined with his wispy mustache and copper skin might have made him think he resembled Che Guevara; Gus in a T-shirt that read “I’m in the NRA and I vote.” Yvonne, dressed for Felipe in a black Spandex halter and a short leatherette skirt and carrying a disco purse with sequins, felt strangely alive.

  “Any questions?” she said.

  “Aren’t you cold?” asked Annie. She must have suspected that Yvonne was enjoying her costume, and didn’t approve.

  “I’m hot,” said Yvonne, “Very, very hot.”

  Gus laughed, a brief laugh but real. Then he reached into a gym bag and handed her a police special. She stuck it in the disco purse with the sequins.

  “¡Buena suerte!” Angel said.

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” Yvonne said. Gus laughed again. His belly jiggled in visual counterpoint. She liked Gus. He was competent. In another life—in this life, if he had chosen differently—he might have been the kind of big shot she hated. Like her, he was a winner who had opted out, instead of—say it—a loser like the others. Yvonne climbed down from the van and slid the door closed. The light inside went out.

  Yvonne started walking, out of the park, onto street, over the estuary bridge. The fog was cold and getting colder, but the funny thing was she really did feel hot. At first she could hear the traffic on the freeway, but then a train approached on the Embarcadero tracks and overwhelmed all sound with its hooting. For a moment she was caught in the glare of its light. She walked unhurriedly on in her little skirt and top, like a whore on patrol. The train hooted again and passed by, leaving her in darkness.

  The warehouse stood behind a chain-link fence on the other side of the estuary. It was windowless, with rusty, corrugated walls and a tin roof: the kind of creation commerce makes necessary. There was an office at one end. A single bulb hung over the door, illuminating a sign that read: “Nippon American Import Export. Authorized Persons Only.” Fog swirled through the pool of yellow light.

  Yvonne moved into the shadow near the locked gate in the chain-link fence and waited. She was hot, but not the sweating kind of hot. She wasn’t nervous, either: she was looking forward to it, as though it were … what? A long trip. She smiled to herself.

  Headlights appeared, coming from the north, swept their beams in an arc along the fence, steadied on the gate. An armored car drew up and stopped. “Armored Trucking Services, Inc.,” it read on the side. The driver’s door opened and Felipe, in his uniform, got out. He had a gun on his belt and keys in his hand. He went to the gate and unlocked it. Then he returned to the truck and drove it through. The truck halted just inside. Felipe got out again and walked to the gate, keys in hand. Yvonne stepped out of the shadows and walked through the opening.

  Felipe stopped. For one moment he didn’t recognize her. For one moment she was a person, a person in the wrong place and therefore a threat. The next moment she was a woman, and not a threat, and he was looking at her womanly parts. Only after that did he look at her face.

  “Carol?”

  “Felipe. I’m so glad you’re here.” It was fun to say something like that, fun to sound like someone who needed a big strong man.

  “What’s wrong?” Felipe said. He glanced back at the truck. “We were sposta meet at the condo, no?”

  “Yes. But my damned car broke down.” Yvonne gestured into the night. “And it’s dark out there.”

  Felipe blinked. “The problem is … is better if you wait outside.” He turned to the truck again, then back to her. “We got all these fuckin’ rules, you know?”

  Yvonne walked up to him and put her arms around him. “But it’s dark out there, Felipe.” She kissed him on the mouth. At first he didn’t respond. Then he did. Yvonne rubbed against him, felt his gun against her bare stomach. She spoke low in his ear: “Did you bring your video camera?”

  He shivered, shivered and started to get hard. She felt that too, and moved her hand down his front, down under his cheap work-issue belt and his cheap uniform pants. He moaned. “Not now, Carol.”

  She heard a soft footstep behind her, outside the gate, and moaned herself, to cover the sound. Felipe tried to push away. “Not now. Be a good girl.”

  Yvonne held onto him, held him by his cock. “I am a good girl,” she said. “I just want a little appetizer.” She was watching the truck. Open the fucking door, idiot.

  “Appetizer?”

  “Like this,” she said, going down on her knees and unzipping his pants—slowly, because she wanted the door of the truck to open. But it didn’t open, and there she was on the oil-stained pavement outside the warehouse on the waterfront with unseen eyes watching her and her lips around this poor fool’s poor nervous thing, and the odd part was that it aroused her.

  “No, Carol,” Felipe was saying. “Please. Just wait. Be a good girl.”

  She started to laugh, almost spat him out. Then the rear door of the armored truck finally opened and a man with a shotgun looked out. />
  “Hey, Felipe,” he called, “what’s taking—Christ almighty.”

  “Fuck,” said Felipe with anger, putting his hands on her shoulders and pushing her roughly away. Yvonne let herself be pushed, let herself roll back, out of the way. After that things speeded up.

  First came a cracking sound from the darkness beyond the gate, and the man with the shotgun fell back inside the truck. That would be Gus’s work; he was a dead shot. Then Yvonne caught a brief tableau of Felipe frozen there, unzipped, moving his lips soundlessly. The next thing she knew he was standing over her, gun in hand. She tried to slow everything down in her mind, but it was beyond her control. Eli came charging out of the darkness waving one of Gus’s Uzis in Felipe’s direction. Then came the first surprise: Felipe snapped up his gun and shot Eli in the head. He surprised her again by reaching for her hand and pulling her up.

  “Quick, Carol. Run.”

  And then Felipe was running toward the office, and she was running with him, his hand tight and protective around hers. There was another cracking sound and Felipe stumbled and fell. Yvonne fell with him.

  Yvonne looked back, saw Annie bent over Eli, and Gus and Angel running toward her and Felipe. They were almost abreast of the armored car when the shotgun boomed inside it, standing Angel up straight, splattering his blood like moths in the night sky, felling him. Gus dropped to one knee, spread an arc of automatic fire through the open door of the truck. The shotgun made no reply.

  Felipe struggled to his feet, reaching for her hand again like some stalwart out of the Chanson de Roland. “Is a robbery, Carol. Run.” But Gus was coming and Yvonne stayed down.

  Felipe fired. His eyes were so wide Yvonne could see white all around the irises. Gus fired back. Felipe fell again, on top of Yvonne. His warm wetness spread over her body. His eyes were open, but not quite so wide now, and looking right into hers. “Oh, Carol,” he said. “I so sorry.” She held him. The expression in his eyes turned to nothing.

  Gus loomed over her. Blood was running down his arm. “You all right?” he said.

  Yvonne nodded. “You?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go go go.” He shifted the gun to his bleeding arm and extended his free hand to her. He didn’t see the dog at all.

  It sprang out of the darkness, right over Yvonne, catching Gus in the chest, knocking him down. Yvonne scrambled to the side, saw that the office door was open, saw a watchman coming with a rifle. The dog snarled. Gus cried out, a terrible sound coming from someone like him. Yvonne looked around wildly for the disco purse, found it lying a few yards away, crawled to it. Gus’s gun went off. The dog went still and slid off him.

  Gus got unsteadily to his feet. Now his face was bloody too, and his lip was torn in a twisted grin.

  “Behind you,” Yvonne said. She got hold of the purse just as Gus spun around and saw the watchman. The watchman was close now, close enough to see what had happened to the dog.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. He put the rifle to his shoulder and shot Gus in the neck.

  Gus sank down, the torn twisted grin on his face and a fine red spray coming from his throat. But he still had time to get his finger on the trigger, still had time to squeeze it. He died that way, shooting. One of the bullets found the watchman. He was unlucky, and died too.

  Yvonne rose. It was quiet. She heard nothing but the sea sucking at the pilings, and then another train coming from the south. The fog rolled in.

  Yvonne walked away, away from Gus, the watchman, the dog, away from Felipe, away from truck with the guard’s feet hanging out the back and Angel on the ground, his beret upside down beside him, walked back to Annie. She was still crouching near Eli, rocking back and forth. The sweat stains were still visible on his T-shirt but most of his face was gone.

  Annie raised her head, looked up at Yvonne. Tears were rolling down her face, as though she’d sprung a leak that could never be fixed. She rose, took a step forward, as though to embrace. Yvonne took an equivalent step back.

  “Oh, God, Yvonne, it’s so awful.”

  “Political power,” Yvonne said, “grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

  Annie flinched. “I don’t understand.”

  Yvonne laughed. “It’s just an expression, like ‘Have a nice day.’ ”

  Annie shook her head, noticed Eli, and began to sob. “Hold me, Yvonne.”

  The train came closer. Yvonne heard it, felt it in her feet. “There’s no time,” she said, taking the disco purse off her shoulder.

  Annie raised her hands and dropped them in a helpless gesture. “Oh, God,” she said. “What are we going to do?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Yvonne said. She considered several possibilities, all complex, none liberating. Then she took the police special out of the disco purse and shot Annie in the heart. The train hooted, drowning the sound of the gun completely. Annie fell onto the pavement, with no comprehension in her eyes.

  Power, which grows from the barrel of a gun, corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Where had she first heard that one? From Andrew? Or Gus? Or her father? Or some other idea man along the way. Men and their ideas.

  Yvonne stuck the gun back in the purse and walked to the truck. She shoved the guard out of the way and found four canvas sacks. She opened one and saw U.S. currency inside, neatly bound in fat wads. She removed the sacks and laid them on the ground.

  After that things slowed back down. Yvonne was sweating now, although she no longer felt hot. She dragged all the bodies to the truck, including the dog’s, and got them inside. It was effortless; she didn’t feel their weight at all. She tossed all the weapons inside too, except her own. Then she climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the key.

  A voice crackled out of the dashboard. “Felipe? Where are you? Come in, Felipe.”

  Yvonne drove the truck carefully around the warehouse and onto the pier. She followed it about halfway to the end and turned the wheel to the right. The truck rolled toward the side of the pier. Yvonne opened the door, jumped out, landed on the rough planks, stayed on her feet. It was easy.

  Inside the moving truck the radio crackled: “Felipe? Is something wrong?” Without Yvonne’s foot on the gas, the truck slowed, but it had enough momentum to reach the edge, to teeter over it, to plunge into the estuary. The sound it made was thrilling.

  The night was making up for a lot: twenty-two years of what she’d always thought of as preparation, but what had it amounted to? A lot of talk, and raising Malcolm—or more accurately, watching him grow. Except for stealing one of the cars used in the Santa Clara affair, she hadn’t done anything, other than grow middle-aged in the safety of her middle-class persona. A revolution meant action, irrevocable action, death. The night was making up for a lot.

  Yvonne walked to the office and closed the door. Then she returned to the four canvas bags. She’d expected more but it didn’t matter: she could only handle three. She left the fourth where it was, a gift to the proletariat. That was instead of spraying “Free the Santa Clara Five—Power to the People” on the side of the warehouse, which had been the original plan. The spraying was Eli’s responsibility. The spraycan was probably still in his pocket, leaving her nothing to write with but the blood, lying in pools here and there.

  Yvonne carried the three canvas bags through the gate in the chain-link fence. She closed it behind her and fastened the lock. She looked back. From there, everything looked tidy, except for the single canvas bag. It brought to mind the image of a lobster tail on a spotless kitchen floor.

  The dented van was parked outside the fence. Yvonne walked past it, back to Estuary Park. The Tercel was waiting in the brick-top turnaround, almost lost in the fog. She dropped the canvas bags in the trunk, got inside, started the car. She kept anticipating sirens, but there were none. Perhaps no one had heard the gunfire, perhaps they had heard and no longer bothered to react.

  Yvonne drove out of the park and turned left, heading for Berkeley, observing the speed limit. After a while she grew awa
re of the sticky dampness all over her thigh. She touched her bare skin, just below the hem of the leatherette skirt, felt pain, and realized only then that she’d been shot. She glanced in the rearview mirror. There was blood all over her face too, but that was Felipe’s.

  35

  Charlie, dreaming, heard a woman’s voice. “No, Daddy,” she said. “Money won’t be a problem. Getting there is the problem.” When he awoke he remembered nothing.

  He had put his head down, just for a second. Now it was night; but city night, radiating enough light for him to see that he was lying on the princess bed: a disorienting observation, especially in those moments preceding full consciousness, when the mind is still pulling itself together. And in those moments when Charlie’s mind was still pulling itself together, when it was a chaos of images—Malik in the freezer, Svenson like a white knight on his motorcycle, Brucie’s ponytail, Emily’s stomach, a red rose—in those moments, Rebecca walked into the room.

  She sat down beside him. The hair on his arms rose. That had never happened to him in his life; he had always thought it was the kind of fictive thing found only in stories featuring a haunted house.

  “My partner in crime,” she said. Her voice was low, as though she were about to tell a bedtime story.

  In the half-light the princess bed could have been the bed in Cullen House, and Rebecca, in jeans and a sweatshirt, could have been the Rebecca of Cullen House, or even before that, Rebecca, girl-photographer in the infirmary, where he had awakened to find her sitting beside him, just like this, with her wild black hair, alert brown eyes, flawless skin. He felt a tightness in his throat, a fluttering in his stomach: sensations he hadn’t known since his teenage years, since her. Youthful sensations: swelling with the promise of limitless possibility.

  Charlie sat up, reached for the bedside light, switched it on. His head began to clear; and he saw the gun in her hand. She wasn’t pointing it at him, exactly. She was just holding it, loosely and resting on her leg, in a natural sort of way.