The Ancient Rain Read online

  “It’s just for a little while.”

  “This place is musty—I can’t get the musty smell out. And this furniture…”

  “Jensen’s looking for another place … maybe you can—”

  “Me?”

  She put her hands on her hips, indignant. Since his arrest, she had spent time on one crisis after another. To defend him, she and Moe had had to give up the case in Chicago and had thinned their docket here as well. It cost the firm money, putting them in the hole. Sprague had engineered their bail and helped with other things as well, but with Jill at home, and he, himself, unable to work, their household was running on empty. Also, there were things Sprague wanted—and it wasn’t clear, exactly, how much further his generosity might extend.

  “It’s how the government works on you,” Owens said. “Pitting one against the other—so even those people who are on your side, your friends, you can’t be sure. I remember—”

  “I don’t want to hear about what you remember,” she snapped. “I don’t want to hear about any of that.”

  He couldn’t blame her. Earlier today, they had taken care not to be recognized at the corner market: Jill in dark glasses, her hair pulled back; himself wearing a wool beanie and a 49ers shirt. She’d accused him of enjoying it. Like the old days, yes. You and your gang.

  Now Jill stomped upstairs.

  Owens sat alone in the restaurant booth, studying the alley. In a little while, he saw a darker shadow emerge from the other shadows in the alley, a black silhouette cast on the walkway, under the streetlight, in the pool of light, growing larger; then the shadow became corporeal. Dante knifed out of the darkness and into the light.

  * * *

  Owens did not wait for Dante to knock but instead joined him out in the alley. He could see the surveillance car still there at the top of the alleyway. The cop was watching, no doubt. Owens knew this. No doubt the man inside the car had taken note of Dante’s presence, of the comings and goings, but the man did not follow them. Dante walked with his head down and his hands in his pockets, and Owens walked beside him. Fresno Street was really nothing more than a cobbled path up the hill with row houses on either side. In the daytime they were all faded pastel, but at the moment, with the fog and the cadmium lamps, the clapboard looked fog slick and damp, all but colorless. As they clomped downhill, their pace quickened, and Owens had to admit, at least part of him wished he could just keep going.

  “They’re watching the house?” Dante asked.

  “For our protection.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know which idea scares me more—the nutcases, or the cops perched outside my door.”

  “Jensen insisted?”

  “Yes. But I want them gone. It’s an intrusion.”

  Dante didn’t say anything, and Owens found himself wondering if it were wise to push the matter. But no, he wanted the surveillance gone. In the first place, it was not 24/7. It was sporadic. If someone wanted to get them, they would get them.

  And for all he knew, the cops and the loonies were in league.

  They walked on Grant Street now, headed toward Columbus. Owens knew this neighborhood from his time underground, when he and Rachel, his first wife, had skitted from house to house—and he also knew it from his many years working as an investigator in the city. He caught a glimpse of himself in the window walking by, he and Dante under the electric light, himself with his wool cap pulled tight over his head, looking like he belonged here, slicing through the neighborhood. His wife was right—he enjoyed it, the street, walking the edge.

  They worked their way across Columbus to one of the old-line restaurants on the slope of Russian Hill. The food was old-style—the noodles wet and heavy, the meatballs full of eggs and crumbs.

  “It’s good that there are still some places around like this.”

  “Elise Younger, as I’m sure you know, she claims she identified you, those years ago, coming out of the bank. You’ve seen the police sketches—the renderings they did back then.”

  Owens nodded.

  “The likeness is good.”

  “I know,” said Owens.

  He smiled awkwardly, but the truth was, this turn in the conversation, it was not altogether unexpected. Meanwhile, a waitress sauntered over with their wine. Owens welcomed the interlude—watching her pour the glass, nodding his approval—but at the same time felt something darken inside himself. He tried not to let it show.

  “Jan Sprague and Annette Ricci,” Dante said, “what were their roles in all this?”

  Dante was quick, Owens thought. Maybe too quick. Perhaps Jill was right, and he should speak to Jensen.

  “It’s true that I gave material support to the SLA—to Sanford after he escaped,” he said. “That was why Rachel and I went to jail. Jan and Annette, they were around, but their roles…” he shrugged. “Annette was into guerrilla theater, Jan spoke at rallies against the war. We were fervent, But none of them, none of us…” Owens hesitated. “That drawing—Elise was ten years old. The police put ideas in her head. That whole time they were whispering in her ear.”

  Dante said nothing, not following up. Owens recognized the technique, having used it himself. You raised a question and let it sit there. Often as not, the interviewee would circle back, sometimes unexpectedly, and reveal something from the other side of that veil, from within the darkness.

  “How’s Marilyn?” he asked.

  “They moved her out of the burn unit. But the fever, it’s higher than they would like.”

  “The delirium?”

  “It comes and goes.”

  Something about the way Dante regarded him, he felt a shift in the man, though maybe it was only the light, the way his eyes retreated, peering at him from the shadows of that enormous nose. Owens thought about the old North Beach, the one he’d never quite experienced, the saxophones blaring, the old beat poets howling, Lennie Bruce sniggering in front of the Hungry i. But there was another North Beach—the one with the old ones and their pasta and their Knights of Columbus meetings and their flags pinned to their lapels.

  Dante, he realized, did not really belong to either one. It was hard to know which way he might fall.

  “You know I appreciate you taking the case,” Owens said. “I appreciate everything you have done. And if you want to back out, I would understand.” He smiled. “I wouldn’t be happy about it—but I would understand.”

  “No,” said Dante. “I want to see this through.”

  Owens felt sheepish. He had opened the gate, giving Dante an avenue out, but the man wasn’t going to take it. He hadn’t suspected he would.

  “I’ve been looking into the discovery material,” Dante said. “The initial evidence and witness list that the prosecution submitted with the indictment. It includes an affidavit from the original indictment, back in ’75, outlining your activities with the SLA.”

  Owens had seen the old affidavit—put together by Blackwell himself—chronicling his antiwar activities. His participation in the rally that had shut down the MacArthur Tunnel. His presence in the room when Sanford and a handful of others had cast their lot with the SLA. His alleged involvement in the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst.

  According to the affidavit, contrary to the original reports, Leland Sanford had not been killed during the gun battle with the SLA in Los Angeles. He had survived, and together with Owens and the remaining members of the SLA they’d gone underground. To raise money for their activities, they’d engaged in a spree of robberies, including the one at Crocker National, where Eleanor Younger had been killed.

  But the government had never been able to prove this, partly because they’d never found Leland Sanford.

  “How about Cynthia Nakamura?” Owens asked now. “Is her name on the discovery material?”

  “No. But Sorrentino’s been looking for her. Nakamura—she provided you with an alibi, correct?”

  Owens thought of all the times he had been on the other side of the table, listening
to the stories of defendants on their way to trial. A junkie who’d shot a grocer in the Tenderloin. A Vietnam vet who’d been running a welfare scam for fifteen years. A farmworker who’d poured lighter fluid on his schizophrenic wife. They didn’t remember their crimes, or changed the memories in their heads. Because to recognize them was to dissemble, to collapse into nothingness.

  “Yes—we were in Aptos the day of the robbery. At Cynthia’s parents’—down the coast. I was there. So were Jan and Annette.”

  “How about Leland Sanford?”

  “No.”

  There were still stories, all these years later. Sightings in Tangier. Bali. In Castro’s Cuba.

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  “No.”

  “He wasn’t with you in Aptos?”

  “No.”

  “I heard differently.”

  Owens shook his head. There was confusion about this, he knew, because the police had raided Cynthia’s place in the city after their departure. Who they found was Cynthia’s boyfriend, the poet Bob Kaufman. They had taken Kaufman into custody, not being able to tell one black man from another, and there had been stories ever since … a rumored correspondence.

  “What happened next?”

  “There was this swirl going on … The police … the feds … I realized…” Owens hesitated. “We feared the police would shoot us on sight, and so we made arrangements to meet with Jensen down in the Haight. Rachel and I, we were tired of running. So we took his advice. And we gave ourselves up.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Earlier that same day, Dante had gone to the sidewalk memorial on Judah. What he thought he might learn, it was hard to say. The bank had been torn down, there was construction in progress, but he walked the perimeter of the site, trying to understand the eyewitness reports from decades before.

  Dante had studied the newspaper accounts and the depositions. He’d seen the picture of Elise’s mother: thick glasses; hair in short, tight curls; a face wide-boned and without glamour—German Czech by way of Oklahoma; a part-time department-store clerk recently moved to the city from the Central Valley.

  Here, on the north end of the lot, Eleanor Younger had parked, leaving her young daughter in the car. She’d walked past a woman seated on a bench—a woman in a sundress and a straw hat—then four people had emerged from the alley at the back of the lot.

  The alley was gone now, and the people who had emerged from it had been variously described. Two women and two men. Three men. A woman with curly hair. The woman with the curly hair was not a woman at all, but a man, African American, light-skinned. Or maybe Latino. Wild hair jammed up under a baseball cap. Regardless, the four had burst in through the side entrance, masks pulled tight, yelling the SLA slogan.

  Death to the fascist insect …

  Dante stepped past the shrine to the hole in the wooden fence. He peered at the excavation where the workers in their blue helmets and yellow jackets were laying concrete and rebar for the building that would go up where the bank had once been.

  A thin man with a shotgun had stood at the center of the melee. The eyewitness accounts were contradictory. Not a man, but a woman with a husky voice. A woman giving orders in military fatigues, wearing a mask that muffled her speech. Not fatigues, camping clothes. Two of the gang moved swiftly toward the tellers while the one in the center shouted orders, and another paced back and forth, shouting, too, so it was hard to know whose voice was whose, which commands to follow. One minute, business as usual, the customers queued up between the velvet ropes—then, chaos, the line dancing backward, snaking away, people falling to the floor at the intruders’ commands. Noses down to the linoleum.

  Eleanor Younger had moved too slowly. Or too suddenly. When her purse slipped off her shoulder, the shooter misread the motion, maybe—panicked. Or maybe the shot was accidental. The suspected weapon had been recovered later, at an SLA hideaway. Forensics showed the shotgun’s mechanism had been filed too fine, amateur work—a hair trigger so close it would go off too easily, at a sudden movement, a jerk, the waving of the gun.

  Accident or no, the gun had fired. Eleanor Younger teetered a moment in her checked blouse and black slacks.

  Hush up, hush up.

  A man on the floor next to Eleanor as she lay whimpering implored her, Shh! Shh!, not realizing she’d been shot, he testified later. Fearing her cries would attract the gangsters’ attention.

  Hush up!

  Dante turned away from the fence now, from the men down there in the blue helmets.

  He all but tripped over the memorial. He got to his knees, straightening a vase that had fallen over.

  As he did so, he felt the kind of prickling on the back of his neck that you feel when there is someone watching. La Seggazza. When he stood up, he saw a woman at the corner. Happenstance, perhaps, but no, she was often here, tending to the shrine; he knew this, because he’d tracked her himself. Now she stood at the corner, a half block down, flowers in her hand, watching.

  Elise Younger.

  The manner in which she’d hesitated gave him the impression, unlikely as it seemed, that she had recognized him, too. Perhaps he had the feeling because he had been digging into her past himself. He’d seen the pictures of her as a girl, and knew about her divorce, her breakdown, and a lot of other small things that he would eventually pass along to Hansen. He knew also that she had filed for a gun permit some time ago, but never actually purchased the weapon. Now she stared back at him—as if she had something to say. As if she had indeed recognized him as well, seen him hovering at the corners of her life.

  Then she turned away, as if offended by his presence.

  * * *

  Now, back in North Beach, Dante turned the key and walked inside the apartment. The light flashed on Marilyn’s machine, but Dante ignored it. He called the hospital to check on Marilyn’s condition. She was sleeping quietly, the nurse said, and advised him to do the same.

  “How’s the fever?”

  “Under control.”

  He stripped down to his underwear and lay on the bed. Then he went back to listen to Marilyn’s messages. Well-wishers, friends. One of these messages was from a client of hers, David Lake.

  Dante deleted the message and went back to the bed.

  He did not sleep.

  EIGHTEEN

  Marilyn was floating, dreaming. Time was a nonsensical thing. They had taken her out of the burn unit earlier that day and removed the bandages from her eyes. Or maybe it was the day before. Either way, they’d had to remove the bandages carefully because in cases like this the lids themselves might peel off when the cotton was removed—and also the explosion had left bits of glass in her face. Periodically they changed the dressing and irrigated her eyes and examined them, but the doctor said nothing definitive either way, and during those brief interludes the room was a disconcerting blur of light and shadow. The cornea had been singed, and she felt as if she were peering up through some kind of scabrous jelly, so it was almost a relief when they replaced the bandages. Or would have been if not for the itching—and for the darkness.

  They gave her more drugs.

  One of the surgeries had been for preliminary grafting. Or maybe that was happening tomorrow. “Don’t worry,” the doctor had told her, “these burns are all show biz. You’ll be healed up in no time.” Meanwhile, the side of her face felt as if it were on fire. The tar had splattered in a scattershot fashion over her chest and thighs and had soaked through the silk fibers of her blouse and burned through the raglan sleeves and left hot swamps of damaged nerves that transferred pain helter-skelter in ways that made it feel as if her flesh were in perpetual contact with molten iron.

  She lay in the bed and listened to the television.

  The drugs helped. They didn’t make the pain go away, but instead moved it into the distance—as if it were a barking dog made bearable by shutting the window and cranking up the music and closing your eyes.

  Just sing along. Just float.

&nbs
p; Dante.

  During surgery, the eye doctor had taken out the shard of glass that the paramedics had inadvertently jammed in deeper when they immobilized her eyes at the scene.

  One side of her face was covered with bandages, and her skin oozed. She wondered how bad her scars would be.

  All show biz.

  On the television, a cartoon hound had just been hit over the head with a frying pan by a horse named Quick Draw. She couldn’t see the cartoon, but she could hear it and in the darkness her mind made a picture. The hound was purple and the horse wore a holster.

  She laughed.

  Her mother stood next to the bed, dressed in a blouse with a fluted sleeve like it was 1966. Her mother had been dead for ten years, but it didn’t matter. She’d dressed like that until the day she died.

  Marilyn felt dispassionate and somewhat amused. It was the drugs, maybe. Dante came into the room. He had been here a lot, in and out. She was asleep, but she heard his footsteps or maybe she dreamed them—she had been delirious for a while but the fever and chills went away. Then they returned. She was lying on the Owens’s lawn, under the blanket, chilled and burning at the same time. She was in the ambulance.

  “We’ll go to Spain,” Dante said.

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll go along the coast.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Just you and me.”

  “It’s not safe to travel these days.”

  “We’ll go along the Moorish coast, and then over to Sardinia by boat.”

  Along the coast there were white breakers, the sound of which was soothing at first, drowning out the sound of the dog outside the window, of the television laughter, and then the sounds of the waves became a white static that grew louder and more menacing. It pricked at her and danced on her body. Dante was trying to explain something.

  “Owens…”

  “Your father’s house?”

  “It’s empty.”

  It made sense, she guessed, but something about the situation made her want to cry. She was in this hospital, and Dante had let them move into his father’s house. Those strangers were living there as a family.