Concert of Ghosts (22 page)

He went to the window, drew back the curtain a fraction, looked out. Nothing moved in the rain. He thought: San Francisco would be another world now. Old coffee shops and bars would have closed down. The street scene wouldn't be the same.

A car came into the forecourt, a small blue Toyota. Was it the same car that had tracked them before? Tennant couldn't tell. Apprehensive, he saw it swing in an arc, passing out of sight among the chalets.

When it came back in view, it rolled toward the Buick, then stopped. Nobody got out. The car looked both ominous and ordinary, mysterious and banal. Tennant, stepping quickly back from the window and allowing the curtain to fall into place, had an impression of two people in the front of the Toyota, but it was impossible to be sure. He went to his bag, took out the gun.

“Company,” he said, whispering, as if by lowering his voice he might convince the occupants of the Toyota that the chalet was empty. Yeah, that would really fool them. “It might be the Toyota from before. It's hard to tell.”

“How many inside it?”

“Two. Maybe more. I couldn't see.”

Alison looked at the gun. “What do you propose, Harry? Go rushing outside with your gun blazing? You think that would accomplish anything? Let them make the first move. If they're going to do anything, sooner or later they have to get out of the car. They have to expose themselves.”

Tennant lingered to one side of the window. He wasn't good at waiting. All his years of solitude, which might have taught him patience, amounted to nothing. He peered through an opening in the curtain at the vehicle. Why didn't something happen? Why didn't somebody get out of the goddamn car, for Christ's sake?

“Why are they just fucking
sitting
there,” Tennant said. “If they're going to act, why don't they do it now?”

“Maybe it's how they operate, Harry. Keep you on edge. Stick in the needle, then twist it.”

How could she sound so
calm?
he wondered. The car outside the window represented the possibility of violence, destruction, death.

Tennant had the urge to tear down the curtain and smash the glass and fire the Taurus straight into the windshield. He didn't move. Waiting was a form of paralysis. When you waited like this, you ceased to exist. Your life was defined by a lack of motion. You were the sharp instrument of anticipation, nothing else. Everything else diminished.

He looked quickly out at the car again. Alison had moved near enough to the window to witness the Toyota herself. Nobody emerged. Nobody moved. Tennant was possessed by the sudden notion that the vehicle was empty, driven to this place by a will of its own. A blue Toyota, mundane, shrouded in rain, empty.

And still nobody got out.

Now a second car had entered the forecourt, a nondescript brown vehicle that idled some way beyond the Toyota. Was this other car associated with the Toyota?

Tennant, consumed by the tension of inactivity, tightened his grip on the gun; his skin was moist on the metal. Come on, he thought. Do something. Make your move. Attack if you're going to attack.

The passenger door of the Toyota opened slowly. A man looked out but didn't emerge from the car. He was unknown to Tennant. He had squat ugly features; his face might have been accidentally compressed at birth by the forceps of some novice physician. He frowned at the window of the chalet as if he were uncertain of something. Tennant, tense, drew back into shadow. Through the thinnest of slits in the curtain he watched the man step out from the car. In his right hand he held a small dark object, an oval whose immediate significance was lost to Harry Tennant. But when the man arched his arm Tennant understood at once that the thing was a grenade, that it was going to be tossed as casually as a kid's ball through the window of the room, that when it struck glass it would explode instantly in flame and smoke, sucking all life out of the chalet.

Tennant pointed the Taurus directly at the figure. The man's arm was already halfway raised, the look on his face one of deadly determination, the kind of expression you might see in the features of a hunter taking deliberate aim. Tennant thought:
It's either you or us
, and he broke the window with his gun, his finger about to squeeze the trigger.

But he didn't fire. He didn't have to. The man with the grenade had doubled over and, clutching his chest, slumped to his knees. The grenade rolled under the body of the Toyota, and the squat-faced man lay still now, facedown in the dirt. Beyond, outside the brown vehicle, stood another figure, somebody holding a high-powered rifle. A moment of dark confusion, of inversions, as if tricks were being played out in distorting mirrors. The rifleman had fired a single deadly shot from the brown vehicle, and now he was stepping back inside his car even as the grenade, unpinned, roared beneath the Toyota, and a flash of red-yellow flame engulfed the blue car. Black smoke and broken glass and blinding flame; Tennant, dazzled, already smelling the wretched smoke floating toward him, moved back from the shattered window.

He went outside, Alison followed. The blazing Toyota, the dead guy on the ground, the driver burning in the front seat, the stench of melting rubber and flesh in the rain, the absence of the brown car—a landscape of sickening violence and confusion, a place from which to flee.

14

They drove in taut silence to Des Moines through increasingly sullen weather. Rain flooded the narrow highways. There was no sign of any vehicle lingering behind with conspicuous persistence. At a place where roadworks slowed traffic, Alison stopped at a red light behind which a disconsolate workman stood in a wet yellow mackinaw, as if his life were one of unbroken glumness. A line of cars formed at the back of the Buick. You couldn't tell if there were watchers in any one of them. When the light changed, she drove on carefully; the road was slick, treacherous, and her concentration poor.

She pulled over at a rest area and switched off the engine and laid her face in a weary manner against the steering wheel. Tennant lit a cigarette. He thought of the Toyota burning in the rain, the grenade that had never been thrown, the stranger with the rifle: the elements of a murderous equation.

“A guardian angel,” she said. “Is it something like that? Somebody's looking out for us?”

“I don't know,” Tennant replied. A guardian angel with a high-powered rifle instead of wings, a scope, a marksman's assurance.

“What else can it be? Two guys arrive in a car with the intention of blowing us all to hell, when out of nowhere comes a savior with a rifle? What would you call it, Harry?”

“Somebody wants us dead. Somebody else wants to keep us alive,” he said. How uncomplicated it sounded when you said it that way. “The people who don't want us around don't approve of our little jaunt around the country—”

“So who's the killer angel, Harry? What's his motive?”

The search for motive, for purpose at the heart of obscurity. Tennant, shaking his head, drawing hard on the cigarette, looked at the parked cars in the rest area. He remembered the way he'd held the Taurus, how he'd been ready to shoot the man with the grenade, how he'd smashed the glass with the barrel of the gun, how the murderous intent he'd felt had formed in his head like a hard mass of blood. Harry Tennant, pacifist. He attacks innocent men in toilets, smashes their Ray.Bans. He longs to kill. But you were threatened, Harry. Your life was in peril. Somebody had your number. What are you supposed to say? Peace, bro? Peace and love? Lay down your arms? He wondered at the changes in himself, at the process of alteration, new sensations, fresh feelings. It was as if something fundamental in his chemistry had been transformed, and he wasn't sure what or how far the process could go.

He reached out and touched Alison's face. She said, “What happens if the angel isn't around next time, Harry?”

He had no answer for the question. But he had an unusual sense of confidence. He wanted to say,
I
can protect you, Alison. I know that much now
. He stroked her cheek lightly; she shut her eyes. He thought of the small chalet room and how it had changed first from a place of love to a place of recrimination—and from there to violence. Transitions. Everywhere. A world in constant flux. He wondered if there might ever be stability again, such as the years he'd spent in the woods and the frame house. Could he ever go back to that kind of life even if he could find his way?

No. No, he couldn't.

At Des Moines International Airport, Alison drove into the long-term parking lot, gathered her belongings, and, followed by Tennant, bought tickets for San Francisco. Tennant put his gun in Alison's overnight bag because it had to be checked through in the luggage. Without it he felt vulnerable.

They had an hour to kill. Part of that time they drank coffee, saying little to each other, simply being anxiously vigilant—but how could you know who you were meant to be watching for? The cafeteria was crowded with people in wet raincoats; a smell of dampness pervaded the air. Tennant eavesdropped on the sporadic little conversations peculiar to airport terminals, where men and women fumbled with their belongings or kept examining their boarding cards as if to reassure themselves they were really booked on flights, that their destinations were the correct ones. Babies cried, farewells were made, lovers parted.

At the next table a man was speaking loudly into a cellular phone. He had that air of frantic self-importance of people who carry such things, people who live addicted to urgent business deals.
We gotta take a chance on this, John, if you wanna be a major player. It's one of those things where you snooze you lose
. Tennant finished his coffee, set down his Styrofoam cup, tore it into little pieces—remembering how Obe's room was filled with strips of newspaper. A sign, Obe had said. What kind of sign? You delve into madness, you look for signs, clues to something as basic as your identity. For Obe identity was lost in forms of babbling.

Tennant was sweating. He took off his raincoat, folded it over his arm, wiped his brow. A tall woman slid past him; her hair was upraised in a bouffant style that had gone out with Donovan records. He experienced dizziness, a longing for air. The warmth of the cafeteria, the smell of wet clothes—he was stifled.

“Let's go to the gate,” Alison said. “It's about time.”

They passed through the detector, found seats in the crowded departure area. Crowds were safe. A clamor of inaudible messages came over the loudspeaker system. Flights for Omaha, Dubuque, New York La Guardia. The cacophony irritated him.

He thought about Maggie Silver, elusive Maggie, the ashes of old love. Had she ever thought about
him
down the years? Were there times when she'd taken out his memory and looked at it and wondered what had ever become of him? Maybe she lingered over the consideration of him, maybe she even had her own copy of Obe's photograph, something she looked at every so often to remember those days.
I wonder where Harry is now
. If she was alive. He had the realization that together they must have planned things in the way of lovers, talked about a future, discussed destiny. Whatever had become of that love anyway? Had it burned out in the Haight like everything else? The sound of her screaming filled his head all at once.
Somebody is pulling at her, pulling her hair, her clothes, and she doesn't want to go—

Frustrated, a man deprived of an essential sense, Tennant silenced the noise. He stood up, walked around, tried to loosen his locked muscles. What had happened to Maggie Silver? Why was somebody dragging her away? And if you remember it, Harry, then it means you saw it, and if you saw it, why didn't you do something to help? Because you couldn't, because you weren't able to act, somebody or something restrained you—

If she was alive
.

The flight to San Francisco was announced. He followed Alison aboard the plane, hating the notion of being trapped in a cylinder that would momentarily be sent implausibly rising into precarious space—up, up through rainclouds to the skies beyond. They sat together, Alison at the window, Tennant in the aisle seat. They were located next to the wing, which appeared too insubstantial to support the idea of flight. Tennant fiddled with the airline magazine, scanning articles about the pleasures of Biarritz and how to make home cider, then stuffed the magazine back in place. He had the notion that this trip was inevitable. He was simply doing, in his own way, what all exiles yearn to do—to return to a point, no matter how nebulous, of origin. And he had the confused feelings of the exile too, misgivings, intense curiosity, excitement.

And dread.

He stared down the aisle, watching other passengers board, cram their luggage into overhead compartments, take their seats, fiddle with belts. He gazed from the window, seeing puddles form on the tarmac under the wing. When the plane took off, rain scudded against the wing, and then the clouds were gone, evaporating rapidly; sunshine glistened on the damp wing. But blue skies and bright light and the smooth roar of the big plane didn't ease Tennant's anxiety. He adjusted his seat and closed his eyes, when an unexpected turbulence, which made the craft shiver, caused him to sit upright.

Flippantly he said, “I always preferred dope as a means of getting off the ground.”

She didn't smile. She looked out of the window, her expression pensive, distant. He wondered if she was still thinking of their lovemaking in the chalet. More likely she was remembering the explosion of the Toyota. He was barred from knowing. She was drifting off into an inviolate space of her own, a privacy on which he couldn't intrude. It was as if some sudden mystifying force field surrounded her.

When cocktails were served—he had a double brandy—he made a few mild jokes about his fear of flying, but he struck no real response in her. He reached for her hand and took it; he might have been holding a lump of clay.

“I take it your systems are shut down in a general way,” he said.