Revolution Number 9 (2 page)

The jury filed in, their faces without expression. “What’s your guess?” Svenson murmured.

“I don’t guess,” Goodnow replied. “Besides, it’s obvious.”

“But they drilled that sucker.”

Goodnow didn’t argue. He was deciding not to recommend Svenson for further promotion when all at once he felt hot and his head began to pound. He rubbed his temples. Hair came away in clumps.

The judge put on his glasses. “Have you reached a verdict?”

The forewoman rose in the jury box. She was small boned and intense, with short, well-cut gray hair, and had once been an art professor at Stanford. Goodnow couldn’t understand how the prosecution had allowed her to serve. In a quiet but clear voice, with the slightest underthrob of self-righteous defiance, she spoke the words Goodnow expected.

“Not guilty, Your Honor.”

The spectators cheered, except for the friends and relatives of the dead trooper. The Santa Clara Five raised their fists. The judge pounded his gavel. Hugh Klein folded his hands as though in prayer, closed his eyes, sighed deeply; then rose and accepted congratulations like some maestro who had just transported everyone to perfect realms of beauty. Goodnow wanted to kill him.

The court cleared. The Santa Clara Five were taken away first, back to their various prisons. They were all serving life sentences for armed robbery and other crimes, but murder would not be one of them. They had shot the trooper, yes, but the art teacher had bought the argument that it was self-defense. Klein donned a black FDR-style cape and swept out.

Goodnow and Svenson sat alone. Goodnow had a vision of Klein carrying on for years after he himself was gone, of Klein rising over and over to accept congratulations, of his hair growing longer and more silvery, of his great head growing more distinguished. Klein’s obituary would be long and fascinating; his own, brief and cryptic.

“I don’t suppose it matters much,” Svenson said.

Goodnow turned to him.

Svenson faltered a little under his gaze. “With them already in jail and whatnot.”

At one time, even a few months ago, Goodnow would have
said something cutting. But now he was silent. His energy had to be rigorously husbanded. He couldn’t waste his cutting tools on Svenson. His time was limited—although the doctors were coy about its precise quantification.

“Months or years, Doctor?”

“Oh, I hate to say.”

Svenson looked at his watch. “So,” he said, probably thinking of his girlfriend, “catch the two-thirty flight?”

Slowly, very slowly, Goodnow rose. But not slowly enough.
You hate to say, Doctor? I hate even to think about it
.

They caught the two-thirty flight. It left at a quarter to four, flew toward the coming night, met it east of the Mississippi, and landed in full darkness.

“Need help with your bags, Mr. Goodnow?” Svenson asked.

“I can manage.”

“See you tomorrow, then.” Svenson hurried away.

Goodnow got into a taxi, gave the driver his address, and then, halfway there, had him turn around and go to the office instead. Soon he was sitting at his desk, terminal switched on, scrolling back through the life of Hugo Klein. The Klein file was his, had been his almost from his first day at the agency. He had asked for it. Not out of animus: it was just that he remembered Klein from his big-man-on-campus days. Surely not from animus. This had nothing to do with personalities. Klein was a danger to the national security, brilliant and mischievous, and protecting the national security was Goodnow’s job. In the case of Klein, he had failed.

Goodnow stopped scrolling when he reached the time of the invasion of Cambodia. Goodnow had no interest in the invasion of Cambodia; it was a tiny echo of all that bombing that he cared about, an echo that had sounded in the life of Hugo Klein. A tiny echo to begin with, and now much fainter with the passage of time, but Goodnow had always believed that it carried the sound of complicity and guilt: the sole indication of Klein’s vulnerability in a file spanning almost forty years. No one was completely invulnerable. How could you be? If you had a child, like Klein, you were vulnerable. If you had cells in your body, you were vulnerable.

Goodnow leaned close to the screen, studied the green paragraphs,
sifted, collated, reinterpreted. Time passed. The metastasizing clock inside him ticked away, then rang its pain alarm. Goodnow swallowed a pill, and soon another. He lay his head on the desk, just for a moment, bowed down before the terminal.

Bunting, first to arrive in the morning, found Goodnow asleep at his desk. Bunting, younger than Goodnow, though not as young as Svenson, was Goodnow’s boss. He leaned over Goodnow, looked at the screen. Then he stepped back and cleared his throat.

Goodnow, reading in his dreams—how often he seemed to do that now; this time it had been
Treasure Island
—awoke with a start. He took in Bunting’s pink, freshly shaven face, smelled manly cologne, felt nauseated. Bunting’s eyes, behind his Harold Lloyd–style glasses, were watching him closely. Goodnow’s lips were cracked and dry. He licked them and said: “Just checking one of my files.”

Bunting nodded toward the screen. “An old one,” he said.

What was the implication of that little comment? That Bunting already considered him a figure from the past? The alternative was that Bunting no longer cared about Klein. An impossibility. Goodnow touched a key. The screen went black.

“I meant what I told you last week,” Bunting said.

“Which was?”

“That you’re welcome to all the time off you want. With full pay. You’ve earned it.” He held up a pink hand. “Not that we don’t need you. Of course we do.”

“I don’t want time off.”

Bunting bit his lip. “Please think about it. At a time like this …” He stopped himself.

“At a time like this, what?”

“You should take care of yourself. That’s all.”

“I am,” Goodnow said. Bunting went away.

Now Goodnow wanted to go home, loosen his belt, lie down on his side. But he remained seated at his desk, eyes fixed sightlessly on the blank screen. He knew he would be unable to get up slowly enough to keep the pain from stirring. He took a breath, not too deep, and tried imaging: hairy, beaky, rampant. He reached for the pills.

· · ·

Hugo Klein relaxed in his study, a wood-trimmed, book-lined room in the stern of his cruiser, the
Liberté
. Klein lived on the
Liberté
—with the smell of the sea, the rhythm of the waves, and a view of the Golden Gate for his constant pleasure—had lived there since his last divorce. It was a lot cheaper than a waterfront house and a lot more fun.

One of his assistants arrived with a bottle of champagne. They drank it. She couldn’t stop talking about the verdict, which was fine with him. “God,” she said, “what a rush.”

And later: “You must be exhausted, Hugo. Do you want a massage?”

In truth, he wasn’t tired at all. He had the constitution of a barge worker on the Rhine. That was a factor his opponents often failed to consider. They were so busy trying to counter his knowledge and his imagination that they forgot about his endurance. He thought of the champions of the bare-knuckle days, with no round limitations, no decisions, and the victor distinguished by the fact that he was the one still on his feet.

Still, a massage sounded nice. “That sounds nice,” said Hugo Klein.

Much later she left, and he was alone on the boat. He went to the bookshelves and began leafing through his law school yearbooks. He soon found the face he had seen in court, and the name that went with it.

Klein picked up the phone and called an old classmate, an active alumnus who raised money and went to reunions. Klein asked how the latest fund-raising was going, promised his usual contribution, and said: “By the way, I bumped into a fellow I think we were at school with the other day.”

“Who was that?”

Klein told him.

“You were in Washington?”

“Here. Why would I be in Washington?”

“That’s where Goody works.” His fellow alumnus chuckled. “Kind of the opposite side of the street from you.”

“I don’t understand,” said Klein.

“Sorry,” said the alumnus. “That came out wrong. He has some kind of classified job, that’s all I meant. No offense.”

“No offense,” said Klein.

Later he looked at the picture in the yearbook. His memory really was prodigious, he thought, to have remembered a face after all those years. Goody. He reached for the champagne bottle, but found it empty.

N
uncio looked across his secondhand desk at the client, sitting in the secondhand chair where clients sat. Only Nuncio’s chair had been bought new, but so long ago that it now fitted in unobtrusively with the rest of the decor.

“Brucie, Brucie, Brucie,” Nuncio said, shaking his head.

“Yeah?” replied Brucie Wine. Brucie wasn’t the kind of client adept at reading subtexts. Or any texts at all. Brucie had been Nuncio’s client for many years. He seemed to have put on a little weight since their last conference, and he hadn’t shaved in a week or so. Not a promising-looking client, but a longtime one. A relationship had been formed.

“First,” said Nuncio, “this consultation will cost you one hundred dollars, no matter where we go from here. In cash.”

Brucie dug his roll out of the pocket of his jeans, peeled off a C-note, and handed it over. Nuncio took it between his beringed fingers and gave it a crisp snap. The sound proved nothing.

“This the genuine article?” he asked.

“Huh?” said Brucie.

“I’m asking if this is Uncle Sam’s product, or something homemade.”

“Mr. Nuncio! What do you take me for?”

That was a good one. Brucie Wine had grown up south of Market somewhere, Nuncio didn’t know precisely and didn’t care. His father had been an honest, hardworking printer who ran a little engraving business on the side. Brucie had learned the trade at his old man’s knee. When the old man had a stroke, leaving everything to his only son, Brucie had redirected the business along lines his father hadn’t considered: into counterfeiting and forgery, to be exact. Mostly counterfeiting in the beginning, but forgery was big now, what with all the illegal aliens around, needing documents—visas, social security cards, driver’s licenses, passports. Brucie was good. He could fake perfect passports, which were the hardest, although recently he had expanded beyond even that and could now sometimes get real ones. That’s how they’d beaten his last rap—Brucie had fingered his connection at the passport office. In return, Nuncio had persuaded the D.A. to drop the charges. The bill was fifteen grand. Brucie paid cash.

That was Nuncio’s M.O. when it came to mounting legal defenses for Brucie Wine. On the previous counterfeiting charge, Nuncio had suggested to the D.A. that Brucie had printed the phony money under an arrangement with some midlevel mob figure. The D.A., up for reelection, had decided he’d get better press for taking down a mobster, even a minor one, than a working-class nobody like Brucie Wine.

Twenty grand. Cash.

And there had been two or three other busts over the years, with similar play-outs. Brucie did excellent work. His twenties, fifties, hundreds, his passports, his social security cards—works of art. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was he did stupid things and got caught.

“Brucie, Brucie, Brucie,” Nuncio said, again shaking his head.

“Yeah?”

Brucie was tapping his foot on the threadbare carpet. He couldn’t understand what was taking so long. He just didn’t get it. How to spell it out for him? There was no one left to finger.

“Brucie?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s no one left to finger.”

“Huh?”

Nuncio lit a cigar. It was a cheap cigar, the kind that came in a box of five for a buck and a quarter, but he took his time with it, as though it were the finest Monte Cristo, and he, Winston Churchill. He didn’t offer one to Brucie. Brucie shook a bent cigarette out of a pack of Camels and lit up. Soon there was a lot of smoke in Nuncio’s office, but they were no further ahead.

“Mind telling me something, Brucie?”

“Depends,” said Brucie, demonstrating one of his rare and always inappropriately timed outbreaks of low cunning.

“Why,” asked Nuncio, “were you doing eighty-five on the Golden Gate Bridge on a night when you had two hundred grand in counterfeit paper in your glove compartment?”

“ ’Cause of Laverne,” said Brucie. “I was late. For picking her up for our date, see? That pisses her off like you wouldn’t believe. You know what I’m saying?”

Nuncio didn’t know. He didn’t want to know anything about Laverne.

“Besides,” added Brucie with some pride, “I got the fuzzbuster.”

“The fuzzbuster.”

“For picking up cop radar.”

“If they got their radar turned on,” Nuncio said.

“Huh? Oh. Right, sure.”

“So I guess it was when you zipped by that squad car on the inside that they musta got suspicious.”

“Suspicious?” asked Brucie.

“That you might be exceeding the speed limit.”

“Oh. Yeah. They hit the siren right away, Mr. Nuncio. But what right did they have to search the car? Tell me that.” Brucie was sticking out his soft recessive chin in an aggressive manner. Whatever happened, he had to be kept off the stand.

“It was the open bottle of Bud on your dash, Brucie. That gives them the right.”

“Yeah?”

“Probable cause,” Nuncio said. Brucie looked blank. “Brucie, I want you to think very carefully about something I’m going to ask you. Take your time with the answer.”

“Shoot.”

“Could anybody have had access to your car?”

“Access?”

“Could somebody have gotten into your car without your knowledge?”

“Are you shitting me, Mr. Nuncio? That’s a brand-new Trans-Am. Loaded. Don’t even have a thousand miles on the odometer, and it’s been hooked up the whole time. That baby’s locked in the garage under the house every night. And I lock up the car too, and set the burglar alarm. I’m talking about the car alarm and the garage alarm. Plus there’s Flipper.”

“Flipper?”