Revolution Number 9 (23 page)

“Follow him,” he said, and Svenson was gone.

Goodnow descended the stone steps that wound inside the campanile, stopping twice to rest. He checked his watch, hoping it had been four hours since his last pill, so he could have another, or even three and a half, which would be close enough. But it wasn’t even three. He took one anyway. The pain in his gut didn’t go away, but after a minute or two it changed shape. He felt a sense of well-being. That was just the morphine. It was gone by the time he reached the Ecostudies Center.

Goodnow shone his flashlight on the hatch, opened it and bent over to crawl through. The cancer didn’t want to be shoved around like that and let him know right away. He heard a gasp, his own, and found himself leaning against the building, biting the sleeve of his jacket. He took a few breaths, shallow, unobtrusive, inoffensive. The cancer gave tacit approval. Goodnow again approached the open hatch. This time he didn’t bend but went to his knees like a supplicant, then leaned forward onto his hands and went through the hatchway. He bumped his head, not hard, but the slight pain that resulted stood on the shoulders of a giant, and he almost screamed aloud. He wished that there was a bomb, and that it would explode now.

But there was no explosion, and after a minute or two Goodnow lowered himself to his belly. That reshaped the pain again, but didn’t make it worse. He shone his light, saw gardening supplies, and farther away a few cement blocks. He crawled toward them, digging at the earth with his toes wriggling his body. He reached the blocks. There were three of them, lying together: just blocks. He pushed one of them with his hands, hard as he could. It didn’t budge.

The effort caused a funny feeling in his stomach, not pain, almost a release. He rested, his cheek against the cool earth. Something bit the tip of his nose. He started to cry.

After a while Goodnow twisted around, shone his light
around the crawl space. He saw nothing but cement blocks and gardening supplies. No new bomb, no explanation, no meaning. What was Charlie doing? Tripping down Memory Lane, as Svenson had said at first? Flipping out, as he seemed to believe now? Goodnow didn’t know. He only knew that Charlie had failed to take the logical first step.

Goodnow backed out of the hatch. He got his hands on the top of the door, pulled himself up. The front of his shirt was wet. He touched it. Wet and sticky. Goodnow unfastened the buttons, shone the light on himself. A yellow, viscous liquid was leaking through the almost-healed holes where the stitches had been. Goodnow buttoned his shirt, closed the hatch, moved on.

· · ·

Charlie caught the last flight to Toronto. It was almost midnight when he stood at the front door of 192 Howland; the house was dark. Charlie knocked. No one came. He pressed the buzzer, heard it buzz, knocked again. Then he walked around to the back.

The mountain bike was locked to the porch; its handlebars gleamed under the pink night sky of the city. Charlie climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. No answer. Charlie wanted answers. He knocked again, hard: pounding more than knocking. The door swung open.

Charlie walked inside. He stepped on something soft, flesh-like. Running his hand along the wall, he found a switch, turned on the overhead light. He was standing on a shelled lobster tail.

The rest of the creature lay with a cut lemon on the table. The table was set for one: one plate, one shell cracker, one lobster fork, one glass, one bottle of white wine, open but full. Someone had cleaned up the mess that Malik had made and that Charlie had made worse. Everything was tidy, as though the maid had just left, tidy except for the lobster tail on the floor. Charlie touched the wine bottle. It was warm.

He walked into the next room, switched on the light. It might have been the dining room, but there was nothing in it except wall-to-wall carpet and a fax machine. Charlie kept
going, through other empty rooms—all carpeted, all with telephones, answering machines, or faxes in various combinations, but otherwise empty. He went up to the second floor and saw more of the same. He climbed the stairs to the third floor.

There was a narrow hall at the top of the stairs. At one end was a study with a desk, a chair, file cabinets. At the other was a bedroom with a double bed, neatly made, a television, a closet full of clothes. In the middle was a bathroom with a shower, a Jacuzzi, and a hanging fern, the only living thing he’d seen in the house. Charlie opened the mirrored cabinet, saw razors, shaving cream, toothpaste, foot powder, tweezers. He returned to the kitchen, shutting off the lights as he went down.

Charlie eyed the dinner on the table, the full bottle of wine, the lobster tail on the floor. Dinner was served, but where was the diner? Perhaps he’d forgotten something, had gone out to the store, would be back any moment. Milk, for example. Malik drank milk, straight from the carton, like a man with an ulcer. And in his absence the cat had jumped up on the table and dragged off the lobster tail. Charlie opened the refrigerator. There were three cartons of milk inside and nothing else. And he saw no sign of a cat—no litter, no dish.

There were two closed doors in the kitchen. Charlie opened one. A closet: brooms, mops, vacuum cleaner. He tried the other door. It opened on a descending staircase. Charlie turned on the light and went down.

He was in a one-room basement: gas furnace, cement floor, brick walls, a wooden tennis racquet, washer, dryer, and a freezer big enough for storing sides of beef. He opened the dryer. Empty. He tried the washer, found clothing, slightly damp and twisted, as though it had been there overnight, still waiting for transfer to the dryer. But what did that mean? Who didn’t forget about the clothes in the washing machine sometimes?

Charlie picked up the tennis racquet, tapped the strings against his palm. They were brittle; one broke immediately. Then, because he could think of nothing else, he raised the lid of the freezer.

There was an unclothed male body inside, lying on his back in a pool of red ice. It was Malik. He had two little round holes in his chest. One of his arms was twisted behind him; he was
holding something. Charlie reached down for it, but Malik’s hand was stuck in the red ice. Charlie tugged at the stiff, cold wrist. The hand came free, with the sound that frozen chicken breasts make when they’re torn from the package. Malik was clutching a corkscrew with the cork still attached, a poor choice to counter a gun. Charlie closed the freezer.

The room returned to normal. A normal basement with the normal appliances.
Think. Shouldn’t there be blood, on the floor, the sides of the freezer, perhaps the stairs?
There was none.
Had Malik climbed into the freezer before being shot? And if not?

Charlie opened the washer again, took out the clothes. He found a pair of men’s underwear, a pair of socks, a summer suit, a shirt, a tie with sunbursts. The Birkenstocks were at the bottom. Charlie examined the clothing, saw two little round holes in the suit jacket, two in the shirt, one in the tie. He put everything back in the washer, closed the lid, went upstairs, shut off the lights, left by the back door.

Tidy. No loose ends, except for the lobster tail and the question that he had come to ask and that remained unanswered: what caused the explosion at the ROTC? The answer might make him free—not technically free, the way he would be if he kept his half of the deal with Mr. G, but free in his own mind. The list of people who might know the answer had shrunk to one. Now he wanted Rebecca to be alive, and looking for her had nothing to do with the deal. That put him and Mr. G on the same side. It was an unpleasant thought.

· · ·

“Where are you?” Svenson said, sounding peevish and tired.

“Coming,” Goodnow said into the portable phone. The taxi driver glanced in the rearview mirror.

“The lights are all off again,” Svenson said. “I don’t know what the fuck he’s—Hold it. He just came out.”

Pause. Goodnow heard Svenson breathing. He looked out the window, saw a colossal tower that might have been designed on another planet for an unknown purpose. The driver glanced at him again, followed the direction of his gaze.

“Something else, eh?” he said, his voice full of civic pride.

Goodnow ignored him.

Svenson breathed a few more times. He breathed with his mouth open, Goodnow recalled; a disgusting habit. It suddenly occurred to him that Svenson might have fallen asleep.

“Well?” he said.

“Well what?” said Svenson, awake and unhappy.

Silence. The taxi turned north, away from the tower and into the city. Goodnow checked his watch. Not even two hours since the last pill.

Svenson spoke. “Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“He’s … leaving.”

“Then go,” Goodnow told him.

“You’re my mentor,” Svenson said.
Click
.

Ten minutes later Goodnow was standing outside the dark house at 192 Howland. He knew that it was owned by a limited partnership called Annex Investments. He knew that the president of Annex Investments was Mervin H. Koharski, that the house had one resident, Koharski, a Canadian citizen and registered voter, with no arrests and no criminal record, unwanted by any of the police forces included in the Interpol net. What he didn’t know was why Charlie had visited the house, twice. He swallowed another pill.

Two minutes later Goodnow was in the house. Five minutes after that he was down in the basement—if there was a basement he always checked it first—studying the tableau in the freezer. The fact of death, the dead body, didn’t move him at all. He’d seen lots of dead bodies; he’d soon be dead himself. “It’s not going to work,” he said aloud, to himself, to the corpse.

It was over. Charlie was out of control. Why was he surprised? The man had killed before. Now he was improvising another violent scheme. Perhaps that was his customary reaction to pressure. It was time to pull the plug, play it by the book, cut his losses, surrender to all the bureaucratic clichés. Goodnow pictured Hugo Klein’s smiling face and felt empty inside, empty except for the cancer, growing like a Gerber baby. He slammed the freezer shut.

The Gerber baby didn’t like that, wasn’t pleased when he
acted like his old self. It knocked Goodnow to the floor, bent him into the fetal position, made him rock back and forth. “Please, oh, please,” Goodnow said. He fumbled for his pills, got one in his mouth.

After a while, he could stand. He was leaking again through the scar.
Leak
, he told himself,
I don’t care
. It was over.

The phone in the kitchen started to ring. Goodnow climbed the stairs. The phone was still ringing when he arrived. He answered it.

It was Svenson. “Mr. G?” he said. He was whispering.

“Whispering is stupid,” Goodnow said. “You might as well shout at the top of your lungs.”

“Sorry, Mr. G,” said Svenson in a normal voice. “You were right.”

“Right?”

“About him.” Svenson’s tone was surprised, respectful. “He just got on a plane to San Francisco. Flying coach.”

Goodnow’s heart started beating faster, much too fast. Hope was a powerful drug. “Has it taken off?”

“Ten more minutes,” Svenson said. “They’re backed up.”

“Where are you?”

“In the departure lounge. What do you want me to do?”

Have him arrested
. That was the proper response. But Goodnow said: “Go first class and don’t let him see you.”
Because you might get killed
. Goodnow kept the thought to himself.

“Of course not, Mr. G. I’ve already got a ticket.”

“Good, Buzz.” Perhaps he would recommend Svenson for promotion after all. “Very good.”

There was a pause. “Mr. G?”

“Yes?”

“I wish I’d known this before—that it was going to work, and all.”

“Before what, Buzz?”

Another pause. “Last call,” Svenson said. “Got to go.”

Goodnow hung up. He was hot, trembling, alive: Hugo Klein lived in San Francisco. The missile was on target at last.

Goodnow took a taxi back to the airport. San Francisco, San Francisco, the next flight to San Francisco: the saint’s name spun through his mind. But before Goodnow could get to the
ticket counter he heard himself paged. He reported to U.S. Customs, wondering how Svenson had messed up. But it wasn’t Svenson. Bunting was waiting for him.

Bunting took him aside. Bunting, with his Harold Lloyd glasses, his pink skin, his perfect health. Bunting—Choate, Amherst, Harvard Law. He didn’t expect bluntness from Bunting.

He got it anyway. “You’re fired,” Bunting said.

Goodnow nodded.

“Where is Svenson?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is he doing?” Bunting almost raised his voice.

“I don’t know.”

“Then we’ll have to hunt him down, won’t we?” said Bunting.

Goodnow exercised his right to remain silent.

Bunting glared at him. It was hard to frighten a man with glares through Harold Lloyd glasses, hard to frighten a man with a Gerber baby growing inside his stomach. Goodnow was beyond fright. It was a nice feeling.

A man from the office appeared, a big man, almost Svenson’s size. “Escort Mr. Goodnow home,” Bunting said. “He’s not well.”

A
ir Canada’s flight 603, Toronto to San Francisco—filled to capacity, lavatories reeking—pounded through the night, fighting headwinds. Charlie, in coach seat 33A, feeling hungry, even hungrier than he’d been at the Catamount Bar and Grille, chose the chicken teriyaki, but found he still could not eat. He fell into an incomplete sleep, his mind flickering with dreams that didn’t quite emerge from the shadows. Svenson, in
seat 1B, first class, drank a bottle of champagne, ate filet mignon in sauce béarnaise, and watched a movie about terrorists and oil wells that might have been a comedy; it made him laugh, in any case. Yvonne, also in first class, seat 6D, pulled a blanket over herself and slept the whole way.

· · ·

Malcolm met her. He took her bag, but didn’t give her a kiss. “Hi, Mom,” he said. “How was the trip?”

“Tiring,” Yvonne answered. “What are you doing here?”

“Conference,” Malcolm said. “I told Annie I’d pick you up.”