Concert of Ghosts (6 page)

“If he wasn't a real lawyer, how did he get access to you? And how come there's no record of his visit?”

“I guess he slipped past the front desk. Maybe the night cop was snoozing. I don't know. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. He'd seen the search warrant. He said.”

“It was probably some kind of dirty trick. He could have been one of Flitt's people sent in to probe a little. Do some exploratory work. See how you were reacting. See if you were in the mood to cop a guilty plea. I wouldn't put that kind of thing past Flitt. The blow below the belt.”

“Yeah, but he was adamant I wasn't going to jail.”

“I think they call that lulling you into a false sense of security, Harry. Like softening you up. Getting you to lower your guard. Give you something with one hand, whip it away with the other. Suddenly, you don't know where you stand. You're confused. It's an old trick, but it's still a nasty one.”

“Could be.” Tennant stepped inside the Cadillac and gave the girl directions. She drove, in the kind of silence that suggests controlled outrage, two miles down the highway to a country store that smelled of New York cheddar, cider, cinnamon. From the call box outside the shop Tennant dialed McKay's number. The attorney answered on the first ring.

“I just had a visit from Flitt,” Tennant said. “He wants names. If I don't talk, I'm going to jail. So he says.”

McKay was quiet in a way that was troublesome. Tennant could hear in the silence an echo of a cell door closing. He could see himself trapped between four miserable walls.

“What do you say to that, Harcourt?”

“I'll defend you, Harry. I told you.”

“Flitt says you can defend until you're blue in the face. If I don't speak, I'm going down. How much of what he says is bullshit?”

“Harry, the quid quo pro would guarantee you your freedom. You'd get a sizable fine, probation maybe two years. You don't give him names, he'll throw everything he's got at you. Since he and Stakowski are like Mutt and Jeff, I'd be a fool to predict the outcome. We're talking about cultivation of a controlled substance, a toughie. The only promise I can give you is I'll defend you to the best of my ability.”

“How good are you, Harcourt? What's your track record against Flitt? What's the bottom line?”

“Look. No two cases are alike. Yours is different from any other—”

“Just give me the scoreline.”

McKay laughed quietly. “It doesn't work that way.”

“Have you ever won against him?”

“Sure.”

“And you've lost too.”

“Like they say, the ball bounces back and forth.”

“So give me a tally.”

McKay said, “Off the cuff, I don't know. Maybe we're even over the years.”

“Then again maybe he's slightly ahead.”

“It's not a contest. I don't keep track.”

“I've got a fifty-fifty chance at best? Would you say that?”

“Yeah. Well. In there at least.”

“I don't like the odds.”

“Nobody in this town will give you better, Harry.”

“I don't like the idea of jail.”

“Jail, jail. Look on the bright side.”

“Is there one?”

Tennant put the telephone down. His quarter came spitting back out at him, rolling over his foot. A lucky omen, he thought. He needed some luck. If he couldn't get any, he'd make his own.

He walked back to the Cadillac. Alison Seagrove was drumming her fingertips on the steering wheel. Tennant thought: This is getting to her. My whole situation
means
something to her. He had always regarded his world as one of comforting self-sufficiency. Now something had altered, but there was no way of knowing the extent of the change.

“Well?” she asked.

“Put it this way. I'm not encouraged.”

4

He took a beer from the refrigerator. His hands and fingernails were filthy from digging in damp earth and his shoulder muscles locked solid. He sat at the table, massaging his right shoulder. He drained the beer, set it down, and looked at Alison Seagrove's face. She had an irregular loveliness, all the more delightful because it wasn't bland in an age of the homogenized bimbo. If you weren't suckered in by the enchanting darkness of the eyes, you noticed the small mouth and the crooked tooth and the slight asymmetry of the nose; but the high cheekbones quickly drew you upward from these minor imperfections and into the eyes, where you were pleasantly lost. He wondered how many people had gone astray there.

She moved around the kitchen, shaking her head at the wreckage of the place. She created unfamiliar echoes in a house whose rooms hadn't reverberated with any human noises except his own for years—unless you counted the cops. But he didn't want to think about the gendarmerie for a moment. The whole process of law burdened him, lay on him like an iron weight. It was an odd thing how the law could imprison you even before you'd been tried for any crime—but that was what he felt: trapped, restricted, denied liberty. What was he supposed to do? Sit here and wait until Flitt slammed the cell door in his face?

“I can't do it. I can't give them names,” he said. “Even if I could, I wouldn't. It's something you just don't do.” He wondered if he was being honest. To spare himself jail time, would he have named names had he been in the position to do so? He didn't like to think so. There was an unspecified code between outlaws like himself and Delacroix, and even if you'd never seen the rules written down, you understood them anyway. You said nothing, kept your mouth shut.

Alison picked up a broken cup and set it down on the sink counter. “It's a slimy proposal. But then Flitt's a slimy guy. And your lawyer doesn't sound much better. It happens in these small towns, Harry. One attorney lives in another's pocket. They lunch together. They play golf. They play bridge. Old pals. The law's just another game for them. The client gets shafted.”

Shafted, Tennant thought. He gazed around the kitchen, remembering how tidy the room had been, towels folded neatly, canisters labeled Tea and Coffee and Sugar placed just so on shelves. A fastidious bachelor's kitchen: He'd often been struck by the possibility of becoming an old man cemented in his ways, doctrinaire and mechanical, performing every function to an undemanding schedule. But that prospect, which had been strangely comforting to him, was no longer an option.

His eye picked out the dog bowl in the corner. It contained the crusted remains of canned meat. A fly, disgustingly alive, hovered over the relics.

“Consider your situation, Harry. Maybe McKay will come through for you and you'll get probation. More likely he won't. It's a gamble no matter how you slice it. Look, I really wish I could help you in some way. I'm just not sure how. Can you think of anyone else you could turn to for advice?”

He shook his head. Her question disturbed him. He was reminded of Rozak's request for character witnesses.
Anyone else?
“Not really.”

“What about old friends? You must have them somewhere. What about school? College?”

He shut his eyes. He said nothing. Friends, he thought. Acquaintances. He was drawing one blank card after another. He remembered a few faces from high school, but they belonged in another time, strangers to him now. And he'd never gone to college. There was Delacroix, but he wasn't a friend. “I can't think of anybody.”

“That's about the saddest thing I've ever heard.” She sat down and took the newspaper photograph from the pocket of her jeans. She dropped it on the table in front of him. “Then who are these people? What role did
they
play in your life, Harry? Were they perfect strangers? Did you just happen to come together?”

The mysterious picture: Tennant glanced at it. He felt defensive all at once: Who was this little girl with her difficult questions? “What's your interest in this thing anyhow?”

“A story.”

“You write.”

“Yeah, I write,” and she mentioned the name of a magazine only vaguely familiar to him.
A journalist, sweet Christ. Who else would penetrate his isolation like this?

She opened the refrigerator and took out a can of beer. “You mind if I help myself?”

“Feel free.”

She sipped the beer, then ran the back of one small hand across her lips. “When you looked at it before, I got the distinct impression you didn't remember it,” she said. “Does San Francisco in 1968 jog your memory?”

He didn't speak. He looked out the window. Somebody turns up with an old photograph of you, and you don't recall it ever having been taken. You don't remember the people in the group, the day the picture was shot, the circumstances—everything gone. His head had begun to ache; his throat was parched. He found a fresh beer and popped it open and drank hastily.

“Harry,” the girl said.

He looked directly at her. The lapse in his memory humiliated him.

“You really don't remember, do you?”

The girl touched the back of his hand in a sympathetic way, and he recalled how sweet she'd been when they'd dragged the dog out of the house, the way she'd helped. Death created tiny bonds. “How could you have forgotten?”

“I didn't
say
I'd forgotten.” He picked up the flimsy piece of creased paper. “I'll look at it again.”

The photograph depicts five young people. A girl, beautiful in a delicate, lacy way, dominates the center. Her long black hair hangs against her peasant blouse. She wears a big floppy hat and fancy hand-stitched moccasin boots. On her right, close to her, is a young man with a Mexican-style mustache and frizzy hair. The eyes are spirited, a bandit's face. On this young man's left stands a fat girl in a paisley shawl, big round granny glasses upon her eyes. Something about her suggests a healthy outdoor upbringing, clover meadows and milk pails. She looks as if she might never have heard of grass or acid, but her clothes betray that impression, and the small smile, when you study it, is more spaced-out than jolly. Beside her, big and bearded, dressed in Osh-Kosh B'Gosh dungarees and a plaid shirt, is a man with a congenial expression on his hairy face. Unflappable, good-hearted, that's the impression he gives. Tennant himself, in bell-bottom jeans, denim stitched with tiny zodiac conceits, is standing at the edge of the group, as if he were the photographer's afterthought, included only to balance the composition.

Five hippies—the word sounded odd to Tennant; an extinct species. Each face strikes something of the same attitude. The expressions are those of people who have sensed, like some spore borne on the wind, freedom. But there is also fragility if you look for it, a spidery crack in the Day-Glo-painted eggshell. Explorers in a dream, they look as if they've been given passports to a fabulous place where liberty was anything you wanted it to be.

Tennant looked away from the image. Rain had begun to fall quietly in the woods. The sky turned dark. The beer in his mouth had a stale taste. How was it possible to look at a likeness of your younger self and fail to locate it in place and circumstance? Who were these strangers standing around him? And yet—didn't he also have a thin shiver going through him, something that was neither recognition nor familiarity, but spectral, indefinable? He was beset by a sense of loss he couldn't explain to himself.

“Admit it, Harry. You're baffled. Why?”

He shook his head, determined to cling to some little raft of obstinacy. It was only a matter of time and the memory would return and everything would be just fine, everything clear. But even as he looked at the five faces, they seemed to recede. He remembered San Francisco—how could he not?—in a series of cameos that were not always sharp. He remembered the drugs, the patchouli musk rising from the flesh of girls on warm afternoons, the street scene in the Haight-Ashbury, the music day and night, the bells and cymbals that rang with the consistency of a sound track. Faces came and went in these flickers, but none he could assign to this goddamn photograph. But why should he recall this one picture anyway, when for most of the time in San Francisco he'd been high, zonked, zoned, indifferent to his existence in the careless manner of the time? You lived to get stoned. You got stoned to live. It was wow time. Bring on the carnival. Uppers. Downers. Pot. Thai sticks. Cocaine. Acid. What was a mind if not for blowing? Hey-ho, those were the days. How could you recall every detail of those burnt-out times?

He said, “Okay. I guess it escapes me. There's something … slightly familiar about it, but I can't get a handle on it. Sorry.”

“You can do better than that,” she said. “Try. Try a little harder.”

How could he try harder? He pushed the clipping across the table toward Alison. As he did so, he happened to glance at the lovely girl in the center of the photograph, and his head throbbed and he wondered if, in the neon clamor of his drug days, he'd been attracted to her, if he'd known her. The idea, the spark, slipped away. He'd remember anyone with those features, wouldn't he?

“Who took this shot?” he asked.

“You don't even remember that much? The photographer was called Sammy Obe.”

“It doesn't ring a bell.” He finished his beer.
Sammy Obe
. “What's the big deal about the whole thing anyway?”

“I'll run it past you. Maybe you'll understand why your failure of memory surprises me. The photograph was taken in June 1968. Chinatown, San Francisco, to be exact. It became one of those pictures that collect a certain amount of fame because it captured—I don't want to sound pompous—the
essence
of a place and time. The hippie culture. The
look
. Some pictures do that accidentally. Capa took a shot of a soldier dying in the Spanish Civil War, John Filo photographed a woman called Mary Vecchio kneeling over a student shot by the National Guard at Kent State—these things take on a certain spirit. They become icons.”