The Ancient Rain (10 page)

“It used to be a fisherman's cottage,” said Lake. “And when my wife saw it, she fell in love with it. Now, well…”

He continued her tour of the property. He showed her his wife's shed, where she had done her ceramics. Some of her work sat on the redwood shelves—fanciful vases, oversized plates glazed in bright colors. Mugs too large for anyone to use.

Impractical, functionless work that nonetheless communicated a certain domestic joy.

“This was her special place. She used to be out here a lot. But to be honest, I haven't spent a whole lot of time here lately … These days, it's just me and the dogs, at home in the city.”

Afterward they walked down to the town, so that she could get a feel for the neighborhood, and he insisted on buying her lunch.

He told her then he was willing to sign the contract, giving her exclusive rights to sell.

It was apparent to her he was interested in more than just the house. This should have made her uncomfortable, but it didn't. Lake was harmless, likeable enough, and he seemed to take a small thrill out of holding the door for her, and she enjoyed having it held. In the car, on the way back, he talked more intimately. This happened sometimes with clients. A house was an intimate thing.

He loved the house, he said, but it was a burden. Emotionally. The place brought back memories, and he couldn't imagine himself living there alone. And what if he did remarry? The house had been too much their place. Her place. He couldn't imagine another woman being comfortable with all that.

“I guess not,” she said.

When they got back to the city, they stopped by the office for the paperwork so he could get a copy of the listing agreement. He wanted to sign right then and there, but she told him to take it home first, to look it over. Outside, he seemed reluctant to let her go.

“Do you need a ride?”

“I'm just up the hill.”

“I'm happy to take you.”

“No. I have a couple of places I have to stop at along on the way.”

“Friday, at the War Memorial, they are doing
Tosca
. The final performance.”

She understood what was coming next.

“Do you ever go to the opera?”

“Let me get some comps on your house. Then we'll talk again.”

He gazed at her with his blue eyes. She had ignored the question and was afraid he might repeat it, and she did not want to embarrass him.

“Okay,” he said. “I'll look this over. And be in touch.”

He smiled then.

She walked up the hill alone.

Dante was not home.

She made herself dinner and afterward rummaged herself some cigarettes from a pack Beatrice Prospero had left behind. There were three left in the pack. She smoked two of them and stood in her nightgown looking out at the street.

There was nothing out there. She was tempted to turn on the television, but she didn't want to hear that chatter.

The unease of the world is the unease of the self.

But how true was that, really?

Probably Dante was out on assignment.

She envied Prospero and his ability to be at harmony with himself. To care about nothing but his cigar and his wine and the moment.

She thought of the way David Lake had looked at her.

He was right to sell the house.

She took another drink and lay down on the bed. When she woke up again it was just before dawn. Dante's jacket lay across the chair.

She found him downstairs, at the window, smoking the last cigarette.

They weren't going to Spain, she knew.

He was already too deep in the case.

THIRTEEN

Two days after Owens made bail, the defense held a gathering at his house on Shale Street in Oakland. Though he and Jill had expected otherwise, the oddball phone calls had let up after his release, so there'd been no ugly messages. Just good will, just friends. Now cars lined the street down past the corner and people filled his home—more friends and sympathizers and legal types—and a long table of food, buffet-style, had been spread out in the backyard.

It was a coming-home party of sorts, but more than that it was the launch of his defense.

It was the way Jensen often did things, Owens knew. When there was a case, it was not just a case, it was a cause, and Jensen made it into a family kind of thing, with everyone gathered around. The approach was a carryover from the old days—from the Panther trials, the Berkeley Eight, the Free Speech Movement—and though Owens had been around this before, it nonetheless felt odd to find himself at the center of the spectacle, here in his own house, under the gaze of his wife and kids.

Jensen put his wide hand on Owens's back. By the man's side stood a new paralegal, a young blonde who followed his every move. Twenty-five pounds and two divorces later, Jensen had the same weaknesses.

“The Spragues are here,” said Jensen. “Go mingle.”

Owens treaded through the crowd, smiling sheepishly. He shook hands with his brother-in-law. He pressed his cheek against the cheek of his neighbor's wife. He looked into the uncertain eyes of his children and headed for the white-haired man in the kitchen, Walter Sprague, whose generosity was making all this possible.

Among the visitors were some he had not seen for a long time, whose names dwelled with his other self, back in the cell. Jan Sprague stood alongside her husband—as well as Annette Ricci, the director of the San Francisco Street Troupe.

“So here we go again,” said Annette Ricci.

Jan met his eyes cautiously, but not so Annette. She had directed the troupe since as far back as he could remember. Now, like always, she placed herself at the center of things. An attractive woman, in her early fifties, energetic—red hair, green eyes—she regarded him with her chin tilted, imperious and vulnerable at once. Her boyfriend was maybe ten years younger, and had fought in the Sandinista Revolution.

“Yes,” said the Sandinista. “But it is not surprising. The American people are so placid. Like sheep.”

“Bah,” said Annette, rubbing her wooly hair. “Bah, and bah again.”

Owens had seen the routine onstage years ago, Annette wrapped in an American flag, bleating like a sheep.

The group laughed, but it was an uneasy laughter.

Annette had a certain flamboyance, it was true, a brightness in the eyes, but there was a darker spirit underneath. There always had been. The point of street theater was to push things to the edge, and she was always orchestrating, controlling.

“How are things with the troupe?” asked Jan.

“No one has come after us yet … we are still operating.”

Though Sprague helped fund the troupe, Jan and Annette did not see much of each other anymore, Owens guessed. There was, at any rate, a certain tension between them. He and the two women had been involved with the SLA at about the same time, and they knew things about one another that it was better perhaps not to know. Even so, Jan Sprague was still a handsome woman. Her honey brown hair had gone white, but in a glamorous way. Even when she was younger—dressed in denim, a man's work shirt rolled up at the sleeves—she'd had an air of sophistication, of breeding and money. She looked down into her cup now, and her husband put his hand on her shoulder.

“Bah,” Annette said again.

Though Walter Sprague was a powerful man, and very wealthy—and outspoken in his support of liberal causes—he had one weakness. That weakness was Jan. He was in his midseventies now, and she was twenty-five years his junior.

“I have to thank you, Walter,” said Owens. “I would like to say again how grateful I am.”

Jan's glance acknowledged nothing. The Sandinista, on the other hand, looked at Owens wryly, smirking, as if he understood it all. Rumor was that he had been a foot soldier in the street wars of Managua and had gone door to door, rooting the wealthy out of their beds. The Sandinista made Owens uncomfortable. Today he and Annette had been among the first to arrive, bringing with them a man from a restaurant in the Mission who carried in several trays of Honduran tamales wrapped in banana leaves. The other man was gone now, but Owens remembered him lingering out by the bamboo.

The Sandinista held one of the tamales.

“Have you tried these?”

“Yes. They are quite good.”

Supposedly the Sandinista had, for a while, held a high post in the party back home. Owens supposed it was possible. The man had rakish good looks and political assuredness. But since the Sandinistas had fallen out of power, he was here in the States, living with Annette Ricci.

Persona non grata back home. A romantic figure among the aging politicos of San Francisco.

Blood on his hands, maybe. But who could talk?

*   *   *

Owens spotted Dante then, lingering by the back door. He had brought Marilyn, who was talking real estate, something about Europe, as she helped Jill at the counter. They talked, too, about the Honduran tamales, the banana leaves, the unusual texture of the corn. Meanwhile, Jill was exhausted, Owens could see that. He could see the strain in her face.

“We are working on a play, for Columbus Day,” said the Sandinista.

“Shouldn't we be moving people outside?” asked Annette. “We are going to do a little preview—for the kids.”

Dante approached and Owens introduced him all around. Annette Ricci regarded the man carefully, holding her chin a little higher, putting her head in profile the way she did, waiting to be admired. The Sandinista, on the other hand, went on talking as before: “This game your president is playing in the Middle East—cowboys and Indians all over again.”

“They'll never get out,” said Annette. “They will create what they fear.”

“It's an excuse, this war on terror. To bury the political opposition. If the American people had any gumption, they would fight back.”

Owens didn't necessarily think otherwise, but the Sandinista puffed his chest out disagreeably. Though the man did not look at Dante, the remarks seemed to be directed at him, testing him, perhaps. Jan and Walter Sprague had the look of tremulous relatives at a family party they intended to leave at the first opportunity. Walter Sprague leaned forward.

“You are right,” he said. “We must fight, in the ways that we can.”

They are afraid, Owens thought. All of them.

Even Annette, brassy and laughing, and her Sandinista boyfriend. He could feel the fear coming off of them.

What happened to me will happen to them
.

Dominoes in a line … one flick of the finger …

“So what kind of play are you doing for Columbus Day?”

“Just a little skit,” said Annette. “A tribute.”

She laughed then, big-throated, full of herself, and Jan Sprague laughed, too. There was a fragility in the laughter, an awkwardness. Her eyes skittered over to his but did not linger. There were things they all remembered, but did not want to think about.

Owens shook the ice in his glass, ill at ease.

*   *   *

It was a typical Berkeley gathering in some ways. Here they were under the eucalyptus, under the oak, with the light filtering through the blue haze, at the moment when the afternoon turned into evening, and the air was suddenly very still, and the kids started to yearn for their electronic devices. There was a smell like marijuana burning, the sound of a motorcycle in the alley, of cars in the distance. Just a backyard barbecue, friends around the table, complaining about the government, growing boisterous, loud, before the talk turned to schools and real estate. Owen wished this were simply that—friends reminiscing together under the cloud of current events before the inevitable ride home. He wished he could turn upstairs after it was all over and lie on his brightly colored bed with its million pillows and his hyperactive kids roaming the Internet, playing with gadgets. He wished he were just some ordinary dad cursing under his breath the foul gloom of the government, distant events, and news-hour commentaries. If only it were that simple for him, and the face he saw on the news was not his own, displayed split screen with Elise Younger, seeking revenge for her mother's death.

Now Annette Ricci stood in front of him blocking the way inside.

“Can I get by?”

“Everyone's out here now. I herded them out.”

“I was going to get a jacket…”

“We are going to do a toast,” she said.

“To my innocence?”

“To the task ahead.”

She was being rather coquettish, flirtatious. Insistent. A hardness underneath. For Annette, always, everything was a show. He had learned a long time ago that she always had plans of her own, and there was little you could do to interfere. He remembered then a moment at the SLA safe house, Annette and her boyfriend at the time, a Chicano kid, Naz Ramirez. Another name the feds would have been tracing as well, if not for the fact he'd been dead ten years. But Annette, she'd liked the Latinos even then. Doing the Ché thing. All in khaki, dark brown, a blouse with military sleeves. Jan at the window, sober-faced, working up her courage. The cache of weapons on the floor. If only he could go back …

I am innocent.

“Be quick,” said Annette.

He got the jacket. When he came back, Annette stood as before, waiting on the stairs. She pulled the door behind them, and he saw her pause at the threshold.

“Did you just lock that?”

She put a hand on his wrist.

“We are giving a little performance. For the kids. I don't want everyone running in and out.”

They walked down to the table. Dante was there, and Marilyn, and his wife, and all his friends and his kids, and they made their toast.

“To a free and happy world.”

“To the end of these dark times.”

“Free Bill Owens.”

They did one toast, and then another, his old friend Moe Jensen at the head of the table, a big man with a soft voice, gray in his beard, eyes dim. Jan leaned against Walter Sprague as if this occasion had more to do with her philanthropist husband then herself. She looked at Owens, doe-eyed, as if she were not really there, but they both knew the reason for her husband's involvement: to erase her name from Owens's past. He would not see her again after this, he realized, unless it was at the trial, and there, too, she would keep her distance. In a little while, Annette turned on the boom box, playing Andean flute music, then she and the Sandinista disappeared by the bamboo to change into wardrobe.