The Ancient Rain

by Domenic Stansberry

  Dante left her at the corner of Vallejo Street.

  Prospero’s was just a few blocks away, but as he watched her turn the corner, disappearing into the crowd, he felt a vague misgiving—as if she might disappear forever.

  Probably it meant nothing.

  Such feelings were common enough these days.

  * * *

  The house on Fresno Street was not what you might call tidy. His tenants had taken most of their belongings, but not all. The most conspicuous item was a large restaurant booth they had somehow gotten through the front door and into the living room. Maybe the original idea had been to put the booth in the kitchen, but they had not made it that far.

  The restaurant booth was the kind of thing you picked up at salvage somewhere, and did not look like it could be easily disassembled. Likely it weighed a thousand pounds.

  To make up for it, they’d left him a bottle of wine.

  Dante wandered downstairs to look among his father’s old things. Dante had moved them down there after the old man died. The stuff remained there, untouched—though he would have to do something with it someday, one way or another. In one of the cabinets, he found his mother’s old keepsake box. Inside there was a picture of his mother and father on their honeymoon, and a picture of himself as well—one of those two-by-two miniatures that had been popular, himself as a baby, no more than a few months old.

  His mother’s wedding ring was in the box, and his father’s ring as well. Dante had put them there after the old man died.

  Dante found a corkscrew. He opened the bottle of wine and sat down in the booth in the front room.

  He wondered how long it would be before Marilyn would return.

  Dante …

  On the day they’d committed his mother, it had been raining … People were conspiring against her, she insisted … She had gotten her information from the dead … from the fish on its plate … from noodles covered with sauce … Her husband and the film star Ida Lupino were having an affair … Mussolini was sleeping with Jackie Kennedy … The Chinese had taken over the family warehouse …

  Dante …

  The house creaked, and in that familiar noise, the creaking, he imagined his mother’s voice. Outside, a motorcycle went by, and he heard the singsong of a Chinese woman scolding her children on the street. A siren died away in the distance.

  He remembered his mother, head to the sidewalk, to the walls.

  Listen …

  Maybe it was true, the inanimate world conspired with the living—but the tracings were hard to read.

  A shopping bag on the bank floor.

  Bullet casings. A woman’s blouse, bloodstained, held in a plastic evidence bag for twenty-seven years.

  Had Owens been inside that bank?

  Dante didn’t know. From what he could tell so far, the government’s case was weak. Meanwhile he had started tracking Sorrentino, and the man left a path a mile wide.

  Nakamura … Kaufman … Elise Younger …

  Where did it lead?

  Finally, Marilyn returned. She carried a folder she had not had with her before, full of listings, maybe, from Prospero’s office. Now, standing in the living room, she regarded the big booth with its maroon vinyl.

  “What’s this?”

  “A place to sit.”

  “Most charming.”

  They went around the house, from room to room. There was something cautious in her manner. When they had talked about the house—about the possibility of moving in—it had not been about the house as it was but as it might be: if this wall were gone, a door here, the kitchen opening onto the back porch. Now her manner grew remote, a little sad. And he saw at the same time her professional side, a real-estate agent examining a property.

  “What did Prospero want?”

  “I have a client,” she said. “He’s considering selling his place. And he wanted to look at the multiple listings—to get an idea of the market.”

  “The man on the phone?”

  “Hum?”

  “The man who left the message the other day—that was the one?”

  She looked distracted.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “The market is hot, you know—all of a sudden.”

  She had tried to explain it to him earlier. On the surface, it might not make sense, given the papers were full of doom—stories about how easy it would be to poison the water at Hetch Hetchy, to gas the crowd at Candlestick, to make a dirty bomb, to kill us all—but for some reason, in the midst of all this doom, houses were selling. People were frightened, nesting in.

  “Did you bring the photos?”

  She nodded then and laid them out on the table: pictures of an apartment somewhere in Spain. A place with a balcony and a view of a city street. Then more pictures behind those.

  Marilyn sipped at the wine. “I read in the papers,” she said, “Owens has been granted bail.”

  “He still has to raise the money. We’ve been invited to the defense party—when he gets out … remember?”

  Marilyn faltered. “The kids…?”

  “They’re okay.”

  “Sure.”

  He glanced again at the pictures.

  “You and I,” she said.

  “That’s not the Costa Brava.”

  “Someone snapped that place up.”

  “Madrid?”

  “Yes. I spent some time there, just after college.”

  “I hear it’s different now.”

  “There’s still the backcountry, all those little towns. The women in black…”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Franco…”

  “The peasants, they are all gone.”

  “No, they just dress differently,” she said. “More like here.”

  They sifted through other possibilities. A cottage in the hills near Dublin. A house with a tin roof in Baja. A thatched veranda. Ceiling fans. Lava rolling to the jungle coast.

  More pictures.

  Saigon and Copenhagen and Casablanca.

  Landscapes in which to imagine yourself.

  Marilyn, with her green eyes and her skirt up around her knees, lying by the glass coffee table, next to the red sofa from Milan, her hands inside his pants, that first time making love, years ago, on the floor of his cousin’s house.

  “How much do you think I could get for this place?”

  “Do you think you could let it go?” she asked.

  Empty now, stripped of artifacts, it was just a house, but the emptiness had its own grip as well.

  “I think so.”

  “If you did sell, what would hold you here?”

  “In North Beach?”

  “You could go anywhere.”

  “We could, yes.”

  She was smiling, her eyes had a brightness to them, but there was a dark sheen over the luminosity. He saw her sense of vulnerability but also a toughness, a determination not to be taken in. She liked things, he knew that. She liked clothes, hotel rooms. Men with money.

  He thought about his mother’s box with the rings inside.

  He was tempted to get the box—to show her the rings—but there was a next step following that, an implication.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s get some decent wine.”

  She smiled then and kissed him, but she carried a reserve about her that he could not quite read. Or did not want to read.

  Everyone had their secrets.

  They left the house and walked down the street, hand in hand. They said nothing. They stopped at the end of the block, at the Iron Horse, where they drank in a reckless way despite the hour, straggling out at dusk, then stumbling up the hill, into bed, into each other’s drunken arms.

  ELEVEN

  A week after the judge had set bail, the money had not yet been raised—and Owens was still in jail. He sat in a meeting with his attorney and his wife and the legal representatives of a liberal financier by the name of Walter Sprague.

  “It’s a lot of money,” said Owens. />
  The guards had retrieved Owens from his cell about a half hour earlier and had brought him down the long hall to this gray room. In the three weeks since he’d been arrested, he’d been out of the cell a number of times—for the arraignment, for the bail hearings, for the indictment—but a kind of disconnect had happened. He felt himself in a kind of nether land, a gray zone in which he could not accept the reality of his immediate situation. The world outside felt increasingly remote. He had done time before—almost two years, for his alleged role in Sanford’s escape from prison—and had not found it easy.

  No, he was not someone who did easy time.

  Owens knew the labyrinthine turnings of the justice system, especially in a case like this, with its political overtones, the rulings and counterrulings, a world populated by documents filled with names, pictures, connections imagined and real, arranged and rearranged.

  All of those names … those photos and affidavits … the details of the trial, then the appeal … The longer you were on the inside, here, the more your other life vanished, the more you became one of those names on paper.

  This meeting today had been hastily arranged, and the guards had not let him change clothes. He wore an orange suit and his leg was cuffed to an immovable bar below the table. His wife and the others had been searched before they came—and he would be searched again before they took him back.

  “Yes, the bail is high. It’s a lot of money,” said Jensen.

  Jensen had been his attorney back then as well. A burly man, hair in a ponytail, wide hazel eyes that seemed to take in everything you said. The first time they’d met had been in a basement in the Haight, and Owens had spoken freely, maybe more than he should have. But he had been underground then, he and Rachel, his first wife—both of them wanted for their association with Sanford, with the SLA, various antigovernment activities, pipe bombings—every unsolved crime in the book including, as it happened, the robbery in which Eleanor Younger had been killed. As a result, Jensen knew things that no one else knew.

  Names … affidavits … More names …

  Meanwhile, Jill focused on the attorney who had come here on behalf of the financier. “As far as the bail,” she said, “we don’t have that kind of equity in our house—and even if we throw in our retirement money—”

  “It bankrupts us,” said Owens.

  “And there’s no money left over for the defense.”

  “None.”

  Everyone at the table knew this already, including Sprague’s lawyer and his assistant. Their boss had liberal leanings, it was true—he’d funded something called the Sprague Foundation—but his interest in this case, Owens knew, was on account of one of those names from Owens’s past.

  Jan Sprague.

  She’d had a different name then, before she married Walter Sprague, but that didn’t matter now. Like Owens, Jan had been affiliated with the old radical underground. A tall, good-looking woman with a desire to speak out—to prove herself. She had been captured on a surveillance film at a suspected SLA safe house. She and a friend of hers, a San Francisco radical by the name of Annette Ricci.

  They were always together. Annette and Jan. Jan and Annette.

  Annette with the wild hair and the barking laugh. Jan with her honey-colored hair, always in denim. Earnest eyes. Earnest as could be.

  Names from the past.

  The government had tried to hook all their names together at one time, linking them to the robbery, pieces in a puzzle the feds could not quite put together, examining one suspect, then another, subpoenas and evidence trails confounded by misinformation, political maneuvering, a fog in the press, part of which issued from Jensen it was true, Owens’s own friends and cohorts.

  Owens did not see them anymore, but Annette and Jan were still around. Annette Ricci ran a theater group in the city. Jan had gotten a job at the Sprague Foundation, as communication director. Eventually, she had married Walter Sprague.

  But Owens had known her before that. She hadn’t been a name, but a woman who’d kept him company, with whom he’d been intimate on the floor of the Berkeley safe house, her long legs wrapped around him. Before Jill. Before Walter Sprague.

  “This is the situation,” said Jensen. “The state came to Bill with a deal.”

  “What kind of deal?” asked Sprague’s attorney.

  “The government’s seeking indictments on a broad range of unsettled cases. Not just the Younger case.”

  The lawyer shifted uneasily. There was something unsaid here, and Owens understood what it was. Part of the government’s goal was to hook cases together—get one suspect to tumble and the others would fall as well.

  To link the names.

  “What kind of deal?” the attorney repeated.

  “We haven’t gotten the specifics. The government’s playing cat and mouse. But this case isn’t just about Bill. The government is trying to set a precedent here, with that new antiterror legislation. Any kind of dissent—past or present—it makes you suspect.”

  Owens understood what Jensen was doing now. Establishing a larger cause—demonstrating the political dimension behind the charges. Felony robbery … conspiracy to commit a felony … secónd-degree murder in the process of felony robbery … seditious endangerment …

  Sprague’s attorney peered at Owens, as if trying to decipher what the truth might be. Owens went black inside.

  “My kids…,” he said.

  Jill covered his hand with hers.

  “The government is compiling a list, that’s what this is all about,” said Jensen. “One name leads to the next. These indictments—they won’t stop with Bill. Our feeling: We have an obligation to fight back, to resist. So long as we can find the money to proceed.”

  The attorneys went on, discussing the intricacies of the case, possible strategies, more names, and Owens felt himself disappearing into that netherworld.

  Pretty soon, though, the meeting was over, and the others filed out. He saw Jensen take his wife by the arm. The guard unshackled Owens, then pinned him to the wall, running a hand up his ass, looking for a smuggled cigarette, a penknife, anything. The guard unlocked the door and pushed Owens toward the lower block. As he stumbled forward, all the names were in his head at once.

  The guard pushed him again.

  He descended.

  TWELVE

  It was a nice day out, beautiful really, and Marilyn found herself with David Lake, driving across the Marin Headlands through the dry hills that fronted the Golden Gate. The cottage was farther on, in Tomales. Though it was out of her territory—up the coast, in a market she did not know—Marilyn had nonetheless agreed to go take a look.

  He wanted to sell the place, he said. He never got out here anymore, and he had too much to look after.

  Usually, in situations such as this, it was customary for the real estate agent to do the driving. Beatrice Prospero had offered Marilyn the loan of her father’s Mercedes, a second car that the old man did not drive anymore, but it turned out the car was in the shop, and so they were riding in Lake’s car: a Mercedes as well, as it happened, an upscale model, newer than the one Marilyn would have driven, with more appointments.

  And also a top that rolled back.

  The redwoods were thick at the summit, where the fog piled up against the hills, but the western slopes descending to the ocean were mostly scrub: old grazing land now covered with Scotch broom and thistle and the occasional oak. The clouds rolled overhead, building up along the ridges.

  At one point along the way, Lake asked if she would like to have the top down.

  “No,” she said.

  Lake had a boyish, transparent face, and a look of disappointment fluttered across his features. Marilyn felt some small regret. She wouldn’t have minded, really, having the top down, but it did not seem quite appropriate.

  The house itself stood in a sheltered cove overlooking Tomales Bay, down in the banana belt—a smallish cottage on the bluff just below the settlement, in a cluster of older
homes. The house possessed not only the advantage of being sheltered by trees all around, but also a footpath to the dock and the small beach below. Wisteria grew over the fence, busting apart the pickets, and the pampas grass grew wild in the yard.

  “It used to be a fisherman’s cottage,” said Lake. “And when my wife saw it, she fell in love with it. Now, well…”

  He continued her tour of the property. He showed her his wife’s shed, where she had done her ceramics. Some of her work sat on the redwood shelves—fanciful vases, oversized plates glazed in bright colors. Mugs too large for anyone to use.

  Impractical, functionless work that nonetheless communicated a certain domestic joy.

  “This was her special place. She used to be out here a lot. But to be honest, I haven’t spent a whole lot of time here lately … These days, it’s just me and the dogs, at home in the city.”

  Afterward they walked down to the town, so that she could get a feel for the neighborhood, and he insisted on buying her lunch.

  He told her then he was willing to sign the contract, giving her exclusive rights to sell.

  It was apparent to her he was interested in more than just the house. This should have made her uncomfortable, but it didn’t. Lake was harmless, likeable enough, and he seemed to take a small thrill out of holding the door for her, and she enjoyed having it held. In the car, on the way back, he talked more intimately. This happened sometimes with clients. A house was an intimate thing.

  He loved the house, he said, but it was a burden. Emotionally. The place brought back memories, and he couldn’t imagine himself living there alone. And what if he did remarry? The house had been too much their place. Her place. He couldn’t imagine another woman being comfortable with all that.

  “I guess not,” she said.

  When they got back to the city, they stopped by the office for the paperwork so he could get a copy of the listing agreement. He wanted to sign right then and there, but she told him to take it home first, to look it over. Outside, he seemed reluctant to let her go.

  “Do you need a ride?”

  “I’m just up the hill.”

  “I’m happy to take you.”