Revolution Number 9

by Peter Abrahams

  The wild hair hadn’t changed much; a little shorter, that was all. The brown eyes were still alert perhaps, but now there was much more going on in them, not all of it pleasant. And the skin on her face was drawn, with deep dark semicircles under the eyes. She was an adult now: complex, problematical. Charlie understood that, but it failed to quell his teenage sensations. Some part of himself was back in the spring of 1970, prepared to resume course as though she were the same person. That part of him both recalled that she had slept with Andrew Malik and Stu Levine, and didn’t care.

  “You haven’t changed at all,” she said, shifting her weight on the bed. He felt the vitality of her body at once.

  “That’s not true,” he said, and heard the words come out a little strangled, a little high. He cleared his throat. “I’ve changed.”

  She smiled. “You look good. That’s all I meant.” The smile had changed the most; it wasn’t her smile at all. Same mouth, same lips, same even white teeth; but new smile. He realized it was the smile of someone who had grown unused to smiling, whose face was turning down. The thought saddened him, even made him want to do something about it. He sat up straighter: he shouldn’t be doing anything about it; he should be planning his call to Mr. G. He had found her. Wasn’t it all over but the mopping up? No: he didn’t fool himself for more than a moment. It wasn’t over, not with the feelings her presence stirred up, not with Malcolm.

  “You look good too,” he said. The words were out, in teenage fashion, before he could stop them.

  “Don’t I though,” she said. She ran her eyes down to his chest, then back up. Her eyes narrowed slightly, and he remembered the Torquemada look. “But the question is: why are you here?”

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I’m aware of that. I’m asking why.”

  “Because I want to understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “What happened. Back then.” Without hesitation he abandoned Mr. G’s cover story about middle-aged obsession, although the effect she had on him made him wonder whether there might be some truth in it.

  “It’s not hard to understand,” she said. “We were opposing a murderous, evil polity.”

  “I meant the specifics.”

  “Specifics?”

  “Of the bombing.”

  She shrugged. “What does it matter now?”

  “It will always matter, Rebecca.”

  That remark brought the smile, the unhappy smile.

  “You find it funny?” Charlie tried to think of the number Mr. G had made him memorize, and could not.

  She shook her head, still smiling. “ ‘Rebecca,’ ” she explained. “I haven’t heard my name in a long time, that’s all.”

  “What do you call yourself now?”

  “Other names.”

  “And your father? What does he call you?” Charlie heard the anger in his tone, residue from the notion that there could be anything funny about the bombing.

  “I haven’t seen my father in twenty-two years.”

  “His office is a twenty-minute walk from here.”

  “That’s what makes it so clever. But I haven’t seen him. I wouldn’t put him at risk like that, his life, his work.”

  “But you communicate in some way.”

  “Do we?”

  “You do, if red roses mean anything.”

  Their faces were close. He caught the frontal force of the Torquemada look, now fully developed, fully mature. The kernel of truth that had made the reference amusing had grown rampantly, rendering it unfunny. Perhaps she was aware of his reaction. She blinked and the look was gone. There was a long silence. Then she said, in the low bedtime-story voice: “It was baseball, wasn’t it?” For a moment he wondered whether she was implying that baseball—specifically that long-ago fastball up and in—had been the destabilizing force in his life, and maybe hers. Then she added, “That you played, I mean.”

  He nodded.

  “Not football.”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought. I learned a little about the game … later.” Charlie pictured the satin jacket hanging in the bedroom down the hall: their son’s satin jacket. “A nice game, if you like games,” she said. “Still play?”

  “No.”

  It was the moment for her to tell him about Malcolm. He waited, wondering how she would begin, whether she would mention Malik and Toronto. She seemed to be thinking. After a while she noticed the gun, looked down at it almost in surprise, as though she had forgotten it was there.

  “There’ll never be a revolution,” she said. “Not in this fucking country.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Charlie said. The opinion was out before he could examine it. Was it just the smug self-defense of a man with a job and a home, a pretty wife and a baby on the way? Or was it true? He didn’t know.

  Her mood changed. “This fucking country?” she said, no longer speaking in the bedtime-story voice. “Not so bad? You didn’t use to think that, my old partner in crime. You used to be a big believer in Marxist analysis.”

  “I can’t argue with the analysis. People just don’t seem to fit in it, that’s all. Not without getting hurt.”

  “To right a wrong,” she said, her voice rising a little more, “it is necessary to exceed the proper limits. And the wrong cannot be righted without the proper limits being exceeded.” She paused and added: “Mao.”

  “That has a nice ring to it,” Charlie said. “But what did exceeding the proper limits accomplish, other than killing that kid?”

  “If you feel so guilty, why didn’t you turn yourself in?”

  That was a question he hadn’t been able to answer honorably for twenty-two years, not until he had crawled under the Ecostudies Center and found the khaki knapsack and what was in it. He kept the thought to himself.

  “I haven’t got a guilt button,” she said, “so don’t even bother trying to press it. It was an accident. We were at war. Accidents happen in war.”

  “You should have been the Pentagon spokesman.”

  She winced, and for a moment he thought his words had hurt her, that perhaps she had a guilt button after all. Then he noticed she was squeezing her leg.

  “Are you all right?”

  She smiled again; that same tight smile. “Never better,” she said. Then she laughed, a harsh laugh that reminded him of Andrew Malik. “It’s true,” she said. “Never better.” She laid her hand on his. “Let’s not fight.”

  Her touch triggered thoughts of Emily right away, and Charlie would have withdrawn his own hand at that instant, but he felt Rebecca’s hand trembling, and so did not. Then it came to him that all his problems had resulted from that kind of thinking, that image of himself as a strongman who could make everything come out right, even a bombing, and he pulled away. Her heat lingered on the back of his hand, warming his skin.

  A deep, well-worn vertical furrow of anger appeared between her eyes. Charlie got off the bed, went to the window, looked out at the peaceful neighborhood. Hadn’t Mao also said—and Malik quoted—something about the guerrilla being a fish that hides in a protective ocean? Perhaps that was her only reason for coming to Berkeley; perhaps she really hadn’t seen her father. He heard her getting off the bed, walking toward him across the room; she stopped just behind him, almost touching. He didn’t turn.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I told you. I want to understand what happened. The specifics.”

  “Nixon invaded Cambodia. We bombed a military target in protest and in solidarity with our Vietnamese comrades. Those are the specifics.”

  No, Charlie thought. The specifics are that the bomb I made wasn’t meant to go off and it did not go off. He almost said it aloud.

  He felt her take another half-step toward him, closing the space between them to almost nothing. “Have you been safe?” Her voice was lower now, even lower than the bedtime-story level.

  “Safe?”

  “All these years.” />
  Safe enough to blurt the answer to twenty-six across, Charlie thought, to finally start rebuilding a life. He said: “Yes.”

  “Any close calls?” Her voice was in his ear; he seemed to feel her words as well as hear them.

  “No.”

  There was a long pause. Then she said, “That’s good. You’ve got a new name, I suppose.”

  He nodded, and left it unsaid.

  “Still in the movement?”

  “What movement?”

  “Well put. But I’ve made a career of it anyway.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you do?”

  “I’m a waitress in a dive. Up until today.” She made a strange sound, almost a giggle; its breeze tickled his ear.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “You meant have I blown up anything recently? The answer is no. But I’m still a revolutionary in my mind.”

  She took the last half-step and pressed against him. He felt something hard: the gun, tucked in her belt.

  Her lips touched his ear. “Let’s go somewhere. You and me.”

  “Where?”

  “Cuba.”

  “Cuba?”

  “We wouldn’t be the first. It’s safe in Cuba. Safe and comfortable, especially if you’ve got a little hard currency to spread around.”

  “I don’t.”

  She made the giggling sound again. “Don’t worry about the money.”

  Cuba. Mao. They added up to very little, compared to the sum of Emily and Cosset Pond. And did all their dreaming, all their planning, all their risking—his, Rebecca’s, the Tom Paine Club’s, the whole movement’s—did it all end in only that? Retirement in Cuba? Just a fun-house mirror image of a Republican retirement in Florida, ninety miles away?

  But all at once, Charlie thought of a use for Cuba, a third option, a Cuban option. Option one was delivering Rebecca to Mr. G, but that involved a kind of betrayal he had never been sure he could perform, even before learning about Malcolm, even before feeling the effect she still had on him. Option two was finding proof of her death, but as Svenson had foreseen, his luck hadn’t run that way. But suppose he told Mr. G that he had traced Rebecca to Cuba. Wouldn’t that be enough? A third option, allowing him to keep everything, to lose nothing.

  So he said: “I don’t think you can fly from here.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of flying. I was thinking of using your boat.”

  “My boat?”

  “You’re a lobsterman, aren’t you? Don’t lobstermen have boats?”

  Had he told Hugo Klein what he did for a living? He couldn’t remember. But if he hadn’t told Klein, how did she know? Had he told anyone else, anyone who could have told her? He said: “It’s not exactly the kind of boat for going to Cuba.”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?” she said, making him wonder whether Cuba weren’t just some metaphor. She moved her hips against him, just barely.

  “Why the gun?” he asked.

  “I panic when I find my back door broken in and an intruder in my bed.” She put her arms around his neck. “We could live a good life in Cuba.”

  “Doing what?”

  “We wouldn’t have to do anything.”

  Still standing behind him, she took his chin in one hand, turned it, pulled his face toward hers, kissed him hard on the mouth. Charlie kissed her back. He couldn’t stop himself. He had never felt a kiss like this. It had the power to rejuvenate him; more, to reincarnate him: he was moving fast toward rebirth, rebirth as Blake Wrightman, continued.

  She reached down his front, under his pants. He was moving, faster and faster. Then he felt the gun digging into his hip. He stopped moving; stopped moving and had a sudden vision. It was a vision of the future, the very near future, fifteen or twenty minutes away. They would be lying on the princess bed, hot maybe, panting maybe, sticky maybe, but not touching. He would still be Charlie, and she would be whoever she was now, this woman with a gun. Blake was gone, lost in the bombing.

  Charlie stopped kissing her. He pulled her arms apart and pushed away.

  They faced each other, a body length apart. The anger furrow appeared between her eyes. Charlie could think of nothing to say. Beyond her he noticed a black skirt on the floor, lying near a small black sequinned purse, and beyond that the open door to the bathroom, with a white towel, smeared with pink, hanging on the knob.

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?” he said.

  “You haven’t gotten any smarter, have you? We’ve both been in some kind of trouble for twenty-two years.” She rubbed her forehead, smoothing the anger furrow away. “Aren’t you tired of living like this? I’m sick to fucking death of it.”

  I’ve come to terms with it, Charlie thought. But it wasn’t true. Perhaps it had been almost true, until the night before his wedding, when the gorilla arrived bearing champagne. But it wasn’t true now, and it could never be again. “Yes,” he said, “I’m sick of it. That’s why I want to understand what really happened.”

  “You’re starting to bore me,” she said. She stood there with the gun in her belt: Liberty at the Barricades. Malik’s image. Malik had also told him not to be jealous of their affair. Hugo Klein was the only man in her life. She and her father were a team, Charlie saw: not exactly good cop/bad cop, but more like a politician and a soldier—Mazzini and Garibaldi, say. Or possibly Ronald Reagan and Oliver North. Was this something that Mr. G knew as well? That thought brought others, crowding into his mind, and with them came Mr. G’s 800 number, ending in 1212. It loomed there, like a signpost at a crossroads.

  All at once, Rebecca stiffened; listening. Charlie listened and heard it too, a sound too soft to be called knocking. She moved quickly; in an instant the gun was back in her hand, the light was off, and she was out of the room.

  Charlie followed her dark shape, down the hall, down the stairs, to the entrance hall. She glanced through the half-moon window in the door. The soft sound came again, fingerpads tapping on wood. She opened the door.

  A figure stepped quickly in: a man. She closed the door. Charlie watched the two dark shapes, the man’s taller than Rebecca’s, motionless in the hall. “Oh, God,” the man said. “It’s been so, so long.” Then the two shapes came together. They were still for a few moments; after that they began to shake as one. Charlie heard crying, male and female. It went on for a long time.

  “Rebecca,” the man said.

  And she answered: “Daddy.”

  36

  If Hugo Klein had not risked seeing his daughter in twenty-two years, why was he doing it now?

  “Why now?” Charlie said.

  They sat—Charlie, Rebecca, Hugo Klein—at the dining room table, with the blinds down and a single light burning on the buffet. Hugo had made coffee; steam rose from mismatched cups.

  “Why now?”

  “Because of you,” Rebecca answered. The gun was no longer in her belt; Charlie didn’t know when or how she had gotten rid of it.

  “Me?” he said.

  “Your little quest has stirred things up,” Klein said. “Perhaps that was not unintentional.” The crying was over, and had left no trace on the surface of Klein’s calm, dark eyes. But loose skin sagged below his cheekbones, under his chin, and his silvery wings of hair sagged too, yellow at the roots. Charlie had felt that same calm regard when he had first walked into Klein’s dressing room, but now he remembered the minute stiffening in Klein’s posture that had accompanied it. At the time he had thought his own aggressiveness was the cause; now he wondered whether Klein had suspected who he was, had known he was coming.

  “Did Malik call you?” Charlie asked him.

  “Andrew Malik?” Klein said, as though remembering a name never familiar, now almost forgotten. “Why would he do that?”

  “To tell you about me.”

  “He most certainly did not,” Klein said. But he didn’t ask how Malik would be in a position to do that: didn’t that mean he already knew that Charlie had seen Malik?

  Cha
rlie turned to Rebecca. “Maybe he called you.”

  “How? Without knowing my name or where I am?”

  It was a good question. Charlie caught himself gazing at Rebecca, searching for the answer in her face, and looked away.

  Too late. “My God,” she said. “I think he’s jealous.” She laughed—not the Malik laugh, but something closer to the one he remembered. She reached across the table and laid her hand on his; now her touch was cool. “Don’t be,” she said. “He must have told you about our little … dalliance. It was meaningless, especially in context.”

  “What context?” said Charlie, withdrawing his hand.

  “The context of back then.”

  “I’m tired of back then. And it had some meaning for him. He thought you were leaving to abort his … child, fetus, whatever the right word is.”

  She laughed again. “Politics was always hard for you, wasn’t it?”

  Charlie ignored her. “But he was wrong, on two counts. The abortion never happened, and he wasn’t the father.”

  Klein turned to his daughter. She stopped laughing.

  “I was,” Charlie told him.

  Klein raised his eyebrows, inviting Rebecca to deny it. She said nothing.

  “I saw Malcolm yesterday,” Charlie went on. “Just before he left. It would have been nice to know.”

  “Know what?” asked Rebecca.

  “That he existed.”

  “What would you have done about it?”

  “Something.”

  She glared at him, into his eyes, and saw an expression there that made her stop.

  Klein said: “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?” Rebecca’s voice rose impatiently.

  “What he says. About being the father.”

  “You just have to look at us to know,” Charlie said.

  Klein said: “I’ve only seen him at a distance. And then not often. It wasn’t worth the—”

  And Charlie saw how one long-ago act had twisted a family forever. Perhaps more than one family: he thought of his own, waiting in the house on Cosset Pond, generating. He had an urge to pick up the phone, to call Emily, to tell her everything. But first he needed some answers about that long-ago act.