Revolution Number 9 (36 page)

All at once, Rebecca stiffened; listening. Charlie listened and heard it too, a sound too soft to be called knocking. She moved quickly; in an instant the gun was back in her hand, the light was off, and she was out of the room.

Charlie followed her dark shape, down the hall, down the stairs, to the entrance hall. She glanced through the half-moon window in the door. The soft sound came again, fingerpads tapping on wood. She opened the door.

A figure stepped quickly in: a man. She closed the door. Charlie watched the two dark shapes, the man’s taller than Rebecca’s, motionless in the hall. “Oh, God,” the man said. “It’s been so, so long.” Then the two shapes came together. They were still for a few moments; after that they began to shake as one. Charlie heard crying, male and female. It went on for a long time.

“Rebecca,” the man said.

And she answered: “Daddy.”

I
f Hugo Klein had not risked seeing his daughter in twenty-two years, why was he doing it now?

“Why now?” Charlie said.

They sat—Charlie, Rebecca, Hugo Klein—at the dining room table, with the blinds down and a single light burning on the buffet. Hugo had made coffee; steam rose from mismatched cups.

“Why now?”

“Because of you,” Rebecca answered. The gun was no longer in her belt; Charlie didn’t know when or how she had gotten rid of it.

“Me?” he said.

“Your little quest has stirred things up,” Klein said. “Perhaps that was not unintentional.” The crying was over, and had left no trace on the surface of Klein’s calm, dark eyes. But loose skin sagged below his cheekbones, under his chin, and his silvery wings of hair sagged too, yellow at the roots. Charlie had felt that same calm regard when he had first walked into Klein’s dressing room, but now he remembered the minute stiffening in Klein’s posture that had accompanied it. At the time he had thought his own aggressiveness was the cause; now he wondered whether Klein had suspected who he was, had known he was coming.

“Did Malik call you?” Charlie asked him.

“Andrew Malik?” Klein said, as though remembering a name never familiar, now almost forgotten. “Why would he do that?”

“To tell you about me.”

“He most certainly did not,” Klein said. But he didn’t ask
how Malik would be in a position to do that: didn’t that mean he already knew that Charlie had seen Malik?

Charlie turned to Rebecca. “Maybe he called you.”

“How? Without knowing my name or where I am?”

It was a good question. Charlie caught himself gazing at Rebecca, searching for the answer in her face, and looked away.

Too late. “My God,” she said. “I think he’s jealous.” She laughed—not the Malik laugh, but something closer to the one he remembered. She reached across the table and laid her hand on his; now her touch was cool. “Don’t be,” she said. “He must have told you about our little … dalliance. It was meaningless, especially in context.”

“What context?” said Charlie, withdrawing his hand.

“The context of back then.”

“I’m tired of back then. And it had some meaning for him. He thought you were leaving to abort his … child, fetus, whatever the right word is.”

She laughed again. “Politics was always hard for you, wasn’t it?”

Charlie ignored her. “But he was wrong, on two counts. The abortion never happened, and he wasn’t the father.”

Klein turned to his daughter. She stopped laughing.

“I was,” Charlie told him.

Klein raised his eyebrows, inviting Rebecca to deny it. She said nothing.

“I saw Malcolm yesterday,” Charlie went on. “Just before he left. It would have been nice to know.”

“Know what?” asked Rebecca.

“That he existed.”

“What would you have done about it?”

“Something.”

She glared at him, into his eyes, and saw an expression there that made her stop.

Klein said: “Is it true?”

“Is what true?” Rebecca’s voice rose impatiently.

“What he says. About being the father.”

“You just have to look at us to know,” Charlie said.

Klein said: “I’ve only seen him at a distance. And then not often. It wasn’t worth the—”

And Charlie saw how one long-ago act had twisted a family forever. Perhaps more than one family: he thought of his own, waiting in the house on Cosset Pond, generating. He had an urge to pick up the phone, to call Emily, to tell her everything. But first he needed some answers about that long-ago act.

Klein was watching Rebecca. She was sipping coffee; her eyes had an inward look. “It’s true, then,” he said.

She put down her cup; coffee slopped over the side. “What difference does it make, whether it’s Malik or him?”

“It doesn’t make any difference to Malik,” Charlie said. “He’s dead. Someone shot him and put him in his freezer, very tidily.”

Klein pushed himself away from the table abruptly, violently, as though physically repelled by the idea. He walked to the blind, peered through. “Who and why?” he said. His voice slipped its baritone moorings, drifted higher.

“I don’t know,” Charlie replied. But it must have been Svenson. He had seen how Svenson dealt with others in position to disrupt Mr. G’s plan—Brucie Wine and the little Chinese man. So it must have been Svenson; yet something bothered him about that theory, something he couldn’t define.

“But you have suspicions, don’t you?” Klein said.

“No.”

Rebecca took another sip of coffee. “Does it really matter? All it does is confirm the wisdom of my plan.”

“What plan?” said Charlie.
Does it really matter?
When had he heard her say that, or something like it, before?

“I told you the plan,” she said. “Cuba.”

She had told him; but it was only when Hugo Klein took a map from his suit jacket pocket and spread it on the table that Charlie knew for sure that she was speaking of the geophysical Cuba, and not some metaphor.

“Where are you, exactly?” Klein said, handing Charlie a pencil.

Charlie leaned across the table. It was a map of the eastern U.S. and Canada, extending south to the Caribbean. Cosset Pond wasn’t marked. Charlie made an X where it should have been.

Klein laid a finger on the X. The nail was bitten to the quick.
“It could be better,” Klein said. “But …” The finger flew up into Canada, landed in Montreal, voyaged down the St. Lawrence to the ocean, paused in Halifax, continued south, pausing again about a hundred miles off Cosset Pond, and then skimmed all the way to Havana. “There is a freighter,” Klein said. “You don’t need to know the name. It left Montreal three days ago, will be in Halifax tomorrow to take on a cargo of used farm machine parts, donated by the Cuba-Canada Friends Committee. It’s on a run to Caracas, with stops in Havana, Kingston, and Santo Domingo. The freighter is also delivering a small, fast boat consigned to one of the hotels in Varadero. When the freighter is here”—he pointed to a spot off Cosset Pond, much closer than one hundred miles—“this second boat will be offloaded. And then …” His finger slid over the blue sea to Cosset Pond, and back, intersecting the freighter’s course to the south. He looked up at Charlie. His voice had dropped into its normal register; it was the voice of the experienced campaigner, used to getting his people into battle and safely back out. “Your job is to fly with her to this place of yours and wait until the boat comes for her.”

Option three: the no-loss way out
, Charlie thought. He said: “Who’s going to be driving it?”

“Me,” Klein replied. “Who else?”

Charlie looked at the map. It might work. He resisted a temptation to run his finger over the route Klein had traced, all the way to the baby-blue Caribbean, all the way to Cuba.

“Any questions?” Klein asked.

There was only one, a question he’d already asked: why now? He wasn’t satisfied with their answer but he didn’t ask again. “When do we start?” he said.

“Tonight.”

They all glanced at the closed blinds. Light, gray and faint, leaked in around the edges.

· · ·

They went over everything again. Rebecca walked Klein to the door. They embraced. Charlie heard them whispering. Klein opened the door an inch or two, peered out. He did it stiffly; from his posture alone, Charlie could see he hated
sneaking around, hated what it did to his dignity. He had the wrong body for furtive behavior, the wrong face, the wrong haircut. He stepped out, glanced around, went quickly away.

Five minutes later, Rebecca was packed. All she had was one suitcase, small enough to fit under the bar at an airport security belt, and a brown paper bag half-full. “That’s it?” Charlie said.

“What else do I need?” she asked. The question had no overtones; she was puzzled. Charlie realized that this was almost easy for her.

Before they left, he went upstairs to the bathroom. The white towel was still there, but no longer on the doorknob. It lay soaked in the tub, bearing no trace of pink. Charlie picked it up and sniffed at it. He smelled nothing but soap.

They went outside. The sky was pale yellow with the promise of heat to come. A man came out of a house across the street tugging at his tie, hurried into his car, sped away. He was too worried to see them. Rebecca tossed her suitcase and the brown bag into the backseat of the Tercel and took the wheel. Charlie sat in the passenger seat. Rebecca started the car and drove off down the leafy street. She didn’t look back.

“Who owns the house?” Charlie said.

“I do.”

“What’s going to happen to it?”

“Who cares?”

But she did care. After a few blocks she stopped at a mailbox, took a letter from her pocket. “The deed,” she said, getting out of the car. He had time to read “Wharton” on the envelope, and not much else. Rebecca got out and dropped the letter in the box. In those few moments Charlie twisted around and looked in the paper bag. Inside were the sequinned purse, the black skirt, a black Spandex halter. The skirt and halter were damp and twisted, as though they’d been washed and wrung.

Rebecca drove down out of the hills. San Francisco rose on the other side of the bay, the marine layer spreading through its canyons like tongues of a glacier. “What a pit,” Rebecca said.

She turned onto the freeway and headed north, away from the bridge. “Which airport?” Charlie asked.

“No airport.”

“We’re driving across the country.”

“Got it in one.”

“Why?”

“Safer. And we’ve got three days. What else would we do?”

Three days: he thought of Emily. He’d already been gone for six.

Rebecca drove all morning, first north, then east, into the heat. The air conditioner labored, discouraging conversation. There were no tapes in the car. Charlie turned on the radio, found an all-news station.

“It gives me a headache,” Rebecca said.

He switched it off.

They picked up sandwiches and coffee at a fast-food stop in Nevada, gassed the car, switched places, kept going. On the way out of the parking lot, Rebecca rolled down her window and tossed the brown paper bag containing the purse, the halter, the skirt, into a trash basket.

“What’s that?” Charlie said.

“Garbage.”

Charlie drove. The miles went by. The sky was yellow, the earth was brown, the road was black. Charlie remembered how he had come the other way twenty-two years before, by bus and by thumb, looking for Rebecca. He sensed that he was in orbit, a long orbit with a twenty-two-year period; now he was closing the circle, like a comet completing a revolution around the sun. He glanced at Rebecca, saw that she had been watching him.

She smiled. “I’m enjoying this,” she said. “I’ve been so bored. Haven’t you?”

“No.”

The land wrinkled up in the distance, casting shadows at them, longer and longer. Night fell. They stopped, bought more sandwiches, more coffee, switched places again. Charlie saw she was limping.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Twisted my knee.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

“No. I’m fine. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

Charlie lay down on the backseat. He watched her silhouette, backlit from time to time by oncoming headlights. He imagined he could see abstract things about her in the way she held her head: her strength, her will, her determination. She could drive nonstop across the country if she had to. Getting to Cuba was not a fantasy to her. It was as good as done.

· · ·

When Charlie awoke, it was day and he was alone. He sat up. The car was parked beside a diner in flat country. Rebecca’s suitcase was on the floor. He opened it. There was little inside, no wallet, no money, no credit cards, no ID; just clothes, toiletries, two pairs of shoes, and the gun: what to pack for a long vacation in Cuba. He closed the suitcase, got out of the car.

Rebecca came out of the diner with a cardboard tray. She saw him and smiled. “How’s tuna?” They might have been any contented couple on vacation. Perhaps that’s what the policeman thought, glancing at them as he got out of his cruiser. Rebecca walked up to Charlie, gave him a kiss on the mouth that he couldn’t back away from, not with the cop watching. “Morning,” she said. “I think we’re in Nebraska.” The cop went into the diner.

Rebecca laughed. Charlie found himself laughing too: partners in crime. Partners in crime who had been on the run for a long time, so long they might have lost their bearings, might no longer know the difference between careful and careless. He stopped laughing. His lips still tingled from her kiss.

“What is it?” she said, no longer laughing either. The expression in her eyes intensified quickly from inquisitive to inquisitorial, in that old familiar way.

“Nothing.”

They sat on a bench, ate the sandwiches, drank the coffee. Rebecca wolfed her food, barely stopping to chew, then rubbed her hands together as though anticipating a productive day. She didn’t look like someone who had missed a night’s sleep, didn’t look tired at all.

“Ready to roll?” She got up.

Charlie followed her to the car. She didn’t look tired, but the limp was worse.

He drove. She sat beside him. They were the sole voyagers in a little tin probe that sped through a bicolored space, blue above, green below. Adam and Eve, he thought, after the fall. Twenty-two years after. Again, he was aware of her gaze on his profile.