The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  “Not that I’ve seen. He’s persona non grata at Soline headquarters—they’ve had to purge him, or appear to have purged him. No, it’s just Wall Street to home now, Wall Street to home…He was in there a lot longer than usual today. I don’t know what that means—if anything.”

  “Do you know how much Bosch pays on his house in property taxes alone?” I said.

  “Half a million.”

  “Oh, come on! You guessed too high! You’re supposed to guess something semi-reasonable—remember, we’re just talking about property taxes.”

  “Fifteen dollars.”

  “Three hundred grand, wise ass. On property taxes alone.”

  “You got that from the Architectural Digest piece?”

  “The real estate website—there are all sorts of stats on there, more photos too. Rooms the size of ballrooms. I think there might actually be a ballroom in there. They’ve got a perfect blue lake that backs up to their land and a little stream that runs through it with a little bridge over it like something out of a fucking Jane Austen novel. Who knows how blue the lake actually is—these photos are like soft-core porn with all the lighting and the touch-ups. The colors are like the Platonic ideals of colors, the Platonic ideal of a blue lake or a red Persian throw rug in front of a fireplace the size of a Studebaker. Do you know how many bathrooms he’s got in that place?”

  “Thirty,” Sam said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Zero,” Sam said. “No bathrooms at all. Just a porta potty out front that they have to share with the construction workers.”

  “Seven! Seven bathrooms! What the hell does an empty-nest couple need with seven bathrooms?”

  “Seven’s a biblical number, as I’m sure you know. Maybe he’s a spiritual man.”

  “I think we can assume Larry Bosch is a deeply spiritual man,” I said. “Anyway, now what?”

  “Now we do it again.”

  “You mean tomorrow?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What does ‘maybe’ mean?”

  “It means maybe.”

  “Well, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking he’s trying to move his money, do something to shelter it, protect it. Three hundred grand is a lot to pay for property taxes, but in the scheme of things, in the scheme of Westchester County and all that criminal wealth, a ten-million-dollar house is middle-of-the-road. I think he’s plenty liquid and getting ready to be more liquid.”

  “You meant you and me when you said ‘we’ a second ago, right? About doing another junket?”

  “You’ll have to arm-wrestle Alex for it. We’d be taking her car. And I think she kind of likes this stuff. Makes her feel adventurous, she says. She says it ironically, but you can kind of tell.”

  “Then there’s her famous bladder control…”

  Sam smiled vaguely ahead at the windshield, cryptically, a shadow of sadness passing over his face. “She says it makes her feel a little like Bonnie to my Clyde.”

  “Is that right?” I said.

  We called these outings “junkets,” by the way, since “stakeouts” sounded too Hollywood, and too blunt a reminder of what it was we were actually planning, contemplating, kicking around. How serious were we about an abduction? I wouldn’t have been the one to ask. I’m sure some bad ideas do hatch in haste, and out in the open, with a group’s enthusiasm or insanity running ahead of itself and in loose hurling concert. Our bad idea was different—secretive, tentative, jolting into a new stage of evolution without the Group being notified of it, with only a few insiders putting their heads together in the shadows. This was the problem with Sam now, too. When he looked through a windshield and smiled a vague little half-turned cryptic smile, or when he disappeared for days on end and no one could tell you why or where to, you realized you’d lost the bead on this friend of yours. This strange, ever-thinning friend, this angular insect of a man with his mandible jaw—who was he? Was he a paranoid now, a sudden introvert? Had I somehow lost his trust? Was he testing me? He ran hot and cold sometimes in the space of a single sentence, and the cold could stop your heart, as if you’d swum out with him into the warm shallows of his old enthusiasm, his old joie de vivre, only to feel the bottom drop out at the continental shelf’s edge: Suddenly you’re in bottomless, dark, updrafting, freezing water.

  By contrast, Alex at this same time became more solicitous of me, teasing, probing, more intimate than she’d been at any time since our relationship—more intimate than she’d been at times during our relationship. We still prepared our potluck ramshackle dinners en famille, and if it was Alex’s turn to spring for the protein or the booze, or if it was mine, we walked together to the greened sooted copper stretch of Roosevelt Avenue where a bodega, a Korean market, and a liquor store all huddled within a block of one another in the latticed shade of the elevated 7 train. A simple shopping trip could take us hours, slowed by the sense that something was being rediscovered, something unearthed in our long walk-and-talks, like the knowledge from a past life that Socrates apparently drew out of his pupils as they walked beside a river. By the time we got home, Alex and I often met with the recriminating stares of hungry House members, some of them asking outright what had taken us so long.

  When I asked my own questions of Alex, she usually turned them aside, Sam-like, turning us back to less pressing subjects, gentler subjects. She recalled the time we’d spent together on top of a green mountain in Vermont, at an academic conference overrun with academics—somehow we hadn’t prepared ourselves for that. A floating enclave of Morningside Heights, it set down on top of a rural campus and sent Alex and me scurrying off into the woods. Did I remember that? Into the woods to live at least a little deliberately, to suck out the marrow of a misconceived week! By the third day of the conference Alex and I had thrown away our name tags and all the scheduling material. We skipped a panel she was supposed to be on (how did I not see that she was crashing out of academe?), spending the day instead on the dappled dirt paths Robert Frost used to walk during his summers on this same mountain. Copper plaques stood at elbow-resting height in the sunlit clearings along the trails. Some of the chiseled verses you could just make out (“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”), but many others were too effaced, worn out by weather and time, burnished a dull gold in the sun. The bare plaques were like open invitations to add our own verses. You got to contribute at least one, if you believed Whitman. One late afternoon with the sun through the trees turning grainy and thick, honeyed, the golden hour, Alex and I spread a blanket over the low ferns just off the trail and made love.

  It surprised me a little to hear Alex recalling all this now, but it probably shouldn’t have. My instinct in her presence was always to excise, to gloss over the year of romantic love that had interrupted and rather complicated our friendship, but this was never Alex’s way. Today on the shopping run it had been my turn to cover the meat and the booze—I sprang for lean ground turkey and two cases of Blue Moon, pricey beer—and now I felt Alex’s hand graze mine as we meandered back to the House. We were wearing matching Mets caps, as it happened, large sunglasses, with late shadows like masks over our faces. I could make out Alex’s mouth going lopsided again, happy air through her nose.

  “And how about my almost-date with Lyme disease?” she said. “You remember that, don’t you?”

  On the last morning of the conference she’d come to me in our little cabin/dorm room, her hair wet from the shower, in her towel, raising her left arm to reveal a small unplump tick that had rooted at the edge of the armpit’s concavity. Alex’s eyes and lips were flat and, I thought, faintly accusing—I remembered that the first trips into the woods had been my idea, that I’d dismissed Alex’s concerns over ticks as citified, paranoid.

  “It wasn’t an accusing look!” Alex said. “That was all in your head!”

  “I am a bit of a worrier sometimes, aren’t I
?”

  “A bit? You were apoplectic! So now I’ve got to worry that this little fucker in my armpit might be transmitting an incurable disease and I’ve also got to stop my boyfriend from throwing himself in front of a speeding pickup as some sort of honor suicide. ‘Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus! I’m so sorry, I’m so stupid—fuck! Fuck!’ ”

  “I don’t remember being quite like that.”

  “Exactly like that,” Alex said. “Heaping ashes on your head, rending your garments—it was biblical.”

  “You really are starting to sound like Sam,” I said.

  “I say Puritanical, he says biblical. We happen to be in agreement about you, comrade. You’ve got a guilt complex, you’re an emoter, a loose cannon. What’s the opposite of a stoic? That’s you.”

  “Are you being serious right now? Does Sam really say that about me? The both of you?”

  Alex must have seen the change in my face, or anyway she looked at me with a changed expression, the puckering eyebrows pulling down beneath her sunglasses.

  “Eli, learn to take a joke.”

  “Does Sam say that about me, yes or no?”

  “You can ask him yourself,” she said. “He’s back tonight. Get right up in his face—I’m sure he’ll like it as much as I do.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but Jesus, Alex…”

  I continued with the bit in my mouth for the rest of the way home, softening my words a little but mostly just slowing them down, drawing out the silences around them like so much difficult taffy. I was persistent, though—I wanted answers. Where had Sam been for the last week, anyway? What had he been doing? And why was it that Alex seemed to know about it and no one else did?

  “Alex?”

  She kept her face pointed steadfastly east, a rictus smile on her lips. At the turn onto our street a homeless man in a nest of grimy blankets held out his sign perfunctorily—Alex reached into the grocery bag I carried, pulled out a Blue Moon, and handed it off to the man without a word.

  Back at the House, Sam had already arrived home, just in time for dinner. He looked at ease setting the table, catching up on the latest with Greg and Tiffany, Asshole Adam (who wasn’t so asshole-ish anymore), ASU Jason (now two-plus years out of ASU). I realized I needed new names for these people, new versions. I’d tried especially hard to reconcile the Greg Baxter I’d known through Hahn’s norming sessions, pedantic, begrudging, bow-tied Greg Baxter, with the Greg who’d apparently come aboard the House through Tiffany’s persuasions. I’d had to adjust what I thought I knew about Tiffany, too. More than once I’d watched her and Alex interlocking hands as they climbed upstairs for the night, Sam following behind a little sheepishly, uncertainly—a cocked eyebrow to me once, on the couch, conspiratorial, a lucky libertine’s smiling acknowledgment, but he didn’t pull it off. I sensed he was surprised and unsure of his role now. Did this account in part for his distances lately, his sudden silences? His absences?

  During dinner I saw that I wasn’t the only one being kept in the dark on Sam’s recent whereabouts, and not the only one chafing under this ignorance either. Jamaal got up at one point for a second crack at the fajita bar, floating into the kitchen on the helium power of his Afro, bigger and looser than ever, like a flowing electrostatic field around his head. He’d complained of the sweat soaking his hair like a sponge throughout the hot hot summer, but here we were in October now, the home stretch, or so we hoped.

  In the kitchen Jamaal reached into a cupboard only to jerk the hand back as if stung. “Fuck! These roaches!”

  He detoured on his way back to the table to lift the record player’s arm off Sam Cooke, copacetic and soft.

  “Just a minute, Sam,” Jamaal said. He turned to us. “Black Sam, I mean, Sam with the soul.”

  “How do you know I don’t have soul?” said our Sam. “You’ve never heard me sing.”

  “How do you know I’m talking about that kind of soul?”

  “I have as much soul as you,” Sam said, looking suddenly very pleased with himself, “and full as much heart.”

  Then his face sank a little when nobody got the apparent reference.

  Jamaal sat down opposite Sam but addressed the whole group, leveling a long forefinger like the barrel of a gun. “First order of business: We need to do something about these motherfucking roaches. Next person up for grocery run, get some real traps, not these cheap-ass motels where the fuckers can rest up and watch free cable. Second order of business—” He jutted another finger out under the first, the hand like a two-pronged pitchfork pointing at Sam’s chest, a Black Mass of the peace sign. “Second order of business is where the fuck were you and why can’t we get a straight answer about it out of anybody? I mean, you must have known,” he said to Alex, “but it’s like the goddamn Manhattan Project the way you guard it.” And turning to Tiffany, “And you too—what’s with all the Stalinist secrecy around here? Do we have to join this triad of yours to get answers? Do we have to fuck our way to the top?”

  “Wow,” Alex said. “What a charming reactionary you make.”

  Tiffany said, “Nobody told me anything.”

  “I went to visit my sister is all,” Sam said. “She just had a kid, a little girl. I wanted to meet her. Do I need to run my travel itineraries past everyone in the House?”

  “Honestly I didn’t even know to ask. I didn’t realize I’d been excluded from a secret.” Tiffany again. “I must have missed that memo.”

  “It was a secret because you all made it a secret,” Jamaal said. “ ‘Where’d Sam get to?’ It’s a simple question, with a simple fucking answer.”

  “Okay, okay,” Greg said, holding up a papal hand, apparently casting himself in the role of sainted moderate. He pointed out that we were supposed to be in the middle of planning something pretty big, weren’t we? If only for that reason we should probably do a better job of keeping each other abreast of things—“updated,” he corrected himself.

  “Well, actually, on that front,” Sam said. “On that front we might need to slow down for a while.”

  “Says who?” said Jamaal, and the lines quickly redrew themselves. “Who’s deciding all this anyway, and behind what closed doors?”

  When Jamaal finally shouted that it was Phoenix all over again, only roles reversed—another cabal had been formed—Alex handled the accusation calmly. “Not a cabal, no,” she said, “but a leadership group? Well, if the shoe fits…Weren’t Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Guevara—weren’t these people all part of led factions? We wouldn’t know about their movements otherwise—”

  “So which one are you?” Jamaal interrupted. “Which one is Sam? You’re Lenin, he’s Trotsky, is that it? You’re Bonnie, he’s Clyde?”

  Sam did another of his startled turtle-jerks backward on his neck, cutting a hateful look at me—Alex slower to respond, comprehending.

  “Why shouldn’t he tell us?” Jamaal said. “We’re either an open organization or we’re a bullshit hierarchy, in which case Eli’s down here with us, in the shadows of the Great Leaders. Solidarity of the also-rans.”

  Alex spoke very quietly now. “Here’s what I know. Sam takes off for a week and everything basically stops. When he and I hang fire, you all hang fire. No one decided this, no one announced it, but it appears that, yes, a natural hierarchy has emerged.”

  “That’s good to know,” Jamaal said, scraping back his chair on the way to the staircase, where he turned and gave a deep, faux-subservient bow.

  When he’d slammed a door upstairs, I noticed a new handmade sign hanging on the wall where Jamaal had stood. It was a black-and-white printout of an old-timey police officer—think James Cagney in his later period—complete with brimmed shining hat, the bared teeth between bulldog jowls, the dark glowering eyes. I recognized Alex’s handwriting above and below the image: WHAT SHOULD YOU DO IF A PIG APPROACHES YOU???

  •
DO NOT LET THE PIG SEARCH YOUR PERSON OR BAG OR VEHICLE—OR ANYTHING—UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!

  • DO NOT VOLUNTEER ANY INFORMATION ABOUT YOURSELF OR ANY OTHER HOUSE MEMBER!

  • MAKE THE PIG STATE CLEARLY THE REASON FOR HIS APPROACH…

  A little word balloon grew out of the “HIS” in this last directive: “Or ‘HER’? Hmmmmmm?”

  Pretty soon the conversation had relaxed again, spreading out delta-like as we all moved to the couches. I noticed Alex slipping back into her casual-intimate mode with me, with Sam and Tiffany looking neutrally on. I didn’t know how to feel about this. I felt Alex’s smiling judgment settle over me like a fallout, gentle and familiar. I’d never understood her, had I? I was a Puritan, an athlete of repression, etc. And maybe that shoe fit as well. I certainly did perk up a minute later—mentally, bodily—when Alex came up from behind me on the couch and ran her hands down the front of my chest. I covered them with my own hands, instinctively. Alex’s face soft and close, her cheek to my cheek. She whispered in my ear, side-kissed my temple. The other House members lazing nearby looked discreetly away, I noticed, all except Tiffany—Tiffany with a cautious, warming-up smile. She’d seen this before, perhaps.

  And Sam? Sam’s eye I carefully avoided, though later I could hear his distinct, heavy tread following behind us up the stairs.

  “Et voilà, as you’d say, with your stupid French envy,” Alex said to me as we crossed into the bedroom.

  A little odd to consider, in a House so skimpy on boundaries, but I’d never actually set foot in this room. It surprised me. Out of the roil of things in my body, the muted roar in my head, I chose to focus on the stylish, spare decor, the room glowing like a darkroom from the red-shaded table lamp. Above the table, a red-framed circular mirror floated the reflection of a large, goateed, beret-wearing man on the opposite wall, a marked intensity in his gaze. If I was meant to recognize this face, I didn’t. It looked a little like a Lichtenstein print presiding over the constellation of smaller frames, carefully arranged to look uncareful: a gold-winged dragon, like something off a Roman crest; a trio of men and a raffish underfed-looking woman in Bolshevik long coats and peaked hats…As for the bed, as for the sleeping situation, this too rather startled in its contrast with the haphazard threadbare sprawl of the rest of the House. What lurid imaginings I’d allowed myself about Alex and Tiffany and Sam usually involved an unwieldy sultan’s bed, as wide as it was long. But here a tidy queen with a white headboard, a simple flower pattern on the comforter, tucked into the far corner of the room, and in the other a narrow bunk bed was made up with clean, cool bedding the color of Easter eggs—pale blue, pale green. Sam took a seat in a black wooden chair beside the table, and Alex and Tiffany sat together on the bottom bunk, taking me in a little coolly now.