Revolution Number 9 (16 page)

He turned to her. She didn’t say a word. Perhaps his mouth was still not fully closed, had not quite resumed its screamless form. Rebecca grabbed him and drove her tongue into it. She reached down into his pants, roughly, and then his pants were around his ankles and Rebecca was on her knees and sucking
his penis, roughly. Furiously. She used her hand, her lips, her tongue, her saliva, her teeth, raking him and raking him back and forth across the borderline of pain and pleasure, at the same time reaching down into her own jeans. The buzzing and crushing inside Blake grew to unbearable levels. He gazed down at the frenzy around his loins, helpless, and came and came. Sirens wailed.

They went out into the hall. Malik was waiting by the door. People were running—barefoot people, half-dressed people, frightened people. They ran with them. Down the stairs, through the lobby, out the door, into a river of running people. They flowed with it, through the line of oaks, into the central quad, past the chapel. Dawn had fully broken now, flooding the physical world with the first, clearest light of day. And Blake, standing in a crowd of superexcited, almost hysterical human beings, saw:

Two firetrucks parked on the grass in front of the ROTC building, engines running, firemen jumping out.

And: A pile of rubble where the front of the building had been. The wooden steps, the door, the wall, the remodeled porch—all gone.

And: The inside of the first floor all the way through the lobby to the staircase, as though it were an architect’s cutaway model. Something lay on the charred floor at the foot of the stairs.

And: An ambulance, its door popping open and paramedics jumping out.

And: Little fires burning here and there on the ground floor of the building, hoses uncoiling, an ax smashing through a splintered window frame, smoke rising above all.

And: That something at the foot of the stairs.

“One stick of dynamite?” Blake said. “One stick of dynamite did all that?”

But no one heard him. Noise, cacophonous, incomprehensible human noise, rose from the crowd, the way the smoke was rising from the rubble. A din, a babble, an uproar, but not loud enough to drown the buzzing in Blake’s head.

Something was pressing against his back. Someone. Blake half turned. A man pushed by, his face intense, beyond intense, with powerful emotion. A woman in a nightdress and curlers
came after him, clutching his shirttail to keep up. The man shoved his way through the crowd, broke free into the space in front of the rubble, the woman in the nightdress and curlers stumbling after him, her face distorted by fear, by terror. A fireman moved to block the man’s path. The man pushed him aside and kept going, through the smoke, into what was left of the building. The fireman recovered in time to get his hands on the woman. She beat on his chest, tried to struggle free. Her nightdress tore, exposing one of her breasts: fat, loose, long nippled, maternal.

Then the man emerged from the smoke. His legs appeared first, bare legs: all he wore was his shirt, long enough to cover him to mid thigh. The noise of the crowd died at once, as though this were all being controlled by switches backstage. The man had tears streaming down his face and—

Something in his arms.

Someone. A person. A child. A boy.

A boy in a baseball uniform. A navy shirt, white pants with navy pinstripes, navy stirrup socks, white cleats. The boy’s hands were crossed on his chest. In his hands was a baseball glove, a first baseman’s trapper, Blake saw, a southpaw’s trapper. He could even identify the make and model: Rawlings, Willie “Stretch” McCovey.

The boy’s face was tilted toward the crowd. It looked absolutely unmarred, the face of a healthy eleven- or twelve-year-old who happened to be sleeping in the middle of a wild scene. But he wasn’t moving at all.

The woman in the nightdress and curlers let out a sound then that Blake had no word to describe. It made the fireman loosen his grip. The woman tore loose, ran into the smoking rubble, looked down into the face of the still boy, fell on her knees, leaning against the bare legs of the tall man. She reached up for the cleated feet, took them in her hands and held them to her breast, started rocking and didn’t let go, not for as long as Blake was watching.

· · ·

It was almost nine-thirty when the taxi left Route 128, went past a field that until recently might have been farmland but
was now nothing, and pulled into Stuart Levine Industries. Charlie paid the driver, got out, and only when the taxi was driving away realized that he had come to a place of business long after business hours, and on a Saturday night. He turned to the building. It was long, low, sleek; resembling desktop machinery on a giant scale. The entrance was a huge smoked-glass portal, with the letters SLI imprinted inside the glass in changing shades of blue.

Charlie noticed all that at a glance. He also noticed that lights shone in some of the office windows despite the hour and the day, that the employees’ parking lot was one-quarter full, and that two security guards were sitting at a desk in the lobby. He imagined a conversation:

•  •  •

Charlie turned away from the fancy glass entrance and moved into the employees’ parking lot.

Sodium arc lamps lit the parking lot, casting an other worldly, perhaps futuristic, orange glow on cars from most of the car-making nations—the U. S. A., with one or two exceptions, excepted. The cars increased in sticker price the closer they were to the reserved spaces alongside the building. “Comptroller” drove a Volvo 740; “VP—Finance,” a Lexus; “VP—Marketing,” a BMW 940i; “VP—R&D,” a Porsche. The space closest to the entrance was reserved for “President and Chief Operating Officer.” “President and Chief Operating Officer” drove a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible, green as money. Charlie considered several possibilities. Then he got down on the pavement and slid underneath the Rolls.

Lying there on his back, with plenty of room, Charlie
thought of his yellow Volkswagen Beetle with the twice rebuilt engine. It was an amusing thought and made him smile. Cars mean nothing, he told himself, and besides, I’ve got
Straight Arrow
, transportation that means something. Then he wondered if he could be said at that moment to have
Straight Arrow
, and that led him to thoughts of Emily, and he didn’t feel like smiling anymore.

After a while he heard hard shoes walking across the parking lot. A car started and drove off. Then came soft shoes, and another car, farther away, departed. More hard shoes, more soft shoes, more cars departing, many more, including one close by, probably a VP. After that came quiet, with nothing to listen to but the hum of traffic on 128. Then two sets of feet approached, one shod in Nike Airs, the other in black leather wingtips. Charlie heard Nike say, “Guess I’ll fire her on Friday.”

Wingtips said: “Make it Monday. The bitch is getting on my nerves.”

Nike said: “What about her health plan?”

Wingtips said: “Whatever you can get away with.”

Car doors slammed, and Nike and Wingtips drove off. Twisting around, Charlie saw that the Rolls was the only car left in the lot.

He heard more voices, coming from the entrance. A man said, “Good night, Dr. Levine.”

And a man answered, “ ’Night, boys. Keep on truckin’.”

Laughter, swallowed by the soft impact of the closing door.
Keep on truckin’
. The argot hadn’t changed in twenty years. But the voice had, deeper, louder, full of confidence and authority. Charlie almost hadn’t recognized it.

He watched the final pair of shoes come closer, gleaming leather tassel loafers. They came right to the driver’s side of the car, stopped. Nice tassel loafers, and gray pant cuffs that looked like silk. Charlie smelled cigar smoke. Then he heard the jingle of keys. Would all the locks pop open when the front door was unlocked? If so, he could roll out from under the car and jump into the front passenger seat. But the locks might not all pop open in a Rolls, and even if they did, the driver might have time to do something reckless, such as leaning on the horn until the guards came running. Better, Charlie thought, to
act before the key slid in the lock. He reached out from under the car and grabbed a silken ankle.

“Bombo,” he said in as close to a normal tone as he could manage, “be calm.”

Under the silk the calf muscle, thin and gristly, stiffened. A cylinder of cigar ash dropped to the pavement and fell apart. The voice—Stu’s voice, but presidential and chief executive officer-like—spoke: “Who are you?”

A good question. Charlie said, “Your father smoked cigars too, didn’t he?”

“I know you from somewhere.”

“True.”

“You called me Bombo.” A long pause. “Not Blake?”

Charlie was silent.

The speaker sighed. His calf muscle went soft. “Aw, shit,” he said. His voice began to lose its presidential tone.

“Unlock the car,” Charlie said. “You can take me for a ride.”

The calf muscle hardened. “No need to waste time, Blake. How much do you want?”

For a moment Charlie didn’t get it. “Money, you mean?”

“What else?”

“Unlock the car, Stu.”

The keys jingled. Charlie heard the locks pop. “Get in,” he said.

“With your hand on my ankle?”

Charlie let go. The tassel loafers climbed quickly up, out of sight. Before the door closed Charlie rolled out, sprang up on the other side of the car, the side away from the building’s entrance, opened the passenger door and jumped in. Levine, still reaching for the lock button, said, “Shit.” And there they were, together in soft leather and polished walnut luxury, bathed in an orange glow.

Stuart Levine, president and COO: still bony, although flesh sagged under his chin. The boniness now gave him a look that was almost ruthless. The stringy hair was gone. All of it. The baldness made him look smart. Gone too were the granny glasses. Now he wore something in tortoiseshell that might have been designed by Ralph Lauren. They went nicely with the gray silk suit, the white-on-white shirt, the subdued tie.
Rich, ruthless, smart, well dressed, Charlie thought. He himself wasn’t the only one with a new identity.

Levine was watching him. “Christ, Blake, you look good. Young. A hell of a lot younger than me.”

“I stayed away from cigars.”

Levine glanced at the fat cigar in his hand. For a moment Charlie thought he was going to toss it outside. Levine stuck it in his mouth instead. His lips closed comfortably around it. When he spoke again, he had recovered some of his presidential tone.

“Reunion,” he said. “Class of ’seventy-two.”

“Ex—’seventy-two,” Charlie said.

“Yeah,” said Levine. He blew out a thin stream of smoke, studied it. Charlie waited for him to say “I always thought this might happen” or “How did you find me?” but Levine’s mind was on another tack. “It wasn’t the right place for me,” he said. “For someone like you, maybe, but not for me.”

How about for Junior?
Charlie thought. He was wondering whether to say it aloud when Levine turned to him and said, “I’ve got to ask.”

“What?”

“If it was the one I made. The … device.”

“What else?” said Charlie. “Let’s go.”

Levine sighed and put the key in the ignition. Before turning it, he looked at Charlie again. “I sometimes think maybe I dreamed up the whole thing. A lot of drugs went down in those days, of course. And then there was my … episode.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” Charlie said.

“I guess not.” Levine turned the key. The car made quiet and powerful sounds. The radio was tuned to classic rock. Levine switched it off. “Still play the sax?” he said, wheeling out of the parking lot like a Rolls-owner from way back.

“A little.”

“You were good. Damned good.”

“Not that good.”

They drove along the road toward 128, past a dark car parked on the shoulder, with someone sitting in the front seat, past the barren field. “Where to?” Levine said.

“Somewhere we can talk.”

“My place? It’s not far.”

Charlie thought for a moment. Levine watched him from the corner of his eye. “Okay,” Charlie said.

Levine, driving up the ramp to 128, spoke around his cigar. “When are you going to name the figure, Blake?”

“Figure?”

“How much you want.”

“This isn’t about money.”

“Everything’s about money, old friend.”

Levine lived in a suburb west of Boston, the kind of suburb newspapers call affluent. His house, which stood well back from the road, with no other houses in sight, was very different in spirit from his place of business. It was all stone, wood, and leaded glass, evoking thoughts of a long-vanished England and Fielding’s cream-and-beef—fed squires. Levine, so clearly American, contemporary, unsquirelike, and probably on a low-cholesterol diet, pulled off the circular drive and parked in front of the four-car garage. He noticed Charlie looking at the house and said, “Home, home on the range.”

They went in through a side door, made their way down marble halls, across Persian rugs, past displays of displayable art, and into a big room that had a red-tiled floor but was otherwise all white. Charlie knew it was the kitchen from the many built-in appliances; but of the other attributes of kitchens—that they had good smells, made you think of cooking and eating, invited relaxed conversation around the table—it had none. A woman in a short black cocktail dress was standing at the counter, pouring vodka into a crystal glass.

“What are you doing here?” Levine said to her.

The woman turned. “I’m your wife,” she said. “I live here, at least for now.” The woman had a British accent, not the rock star kind, but not like the queen’s, either. She had a body in its forties, a face in its fifties, and a voice somewhat older.