The Ancient Rain Read online

  “I know.”

  “You haven’t gotten any sleep,” she said.

  She reached out and touched his nose. It was in some ways a monstrosity, that nose of his—a handsome monstrosity, from his mother’s side of the family. It was the kind of nose you saw in the old pictures, the old Italians, but not so much anymore. It drew attention, sometimes; people stared, pointed, kids laughed. Old women reached out to touch him. Younger women looked him up and down—and sometimes looked again. There was something she liked about the way they would look at him. It excited her—and made her want to keep him for herself.

  “I have to go tell Prospero. I shouldn’t just walk out.”

  But it wasn’t only Prospero she was thinking about, it was the other man, too, David Lake, a potential client, after all. And as she headed toward the banquet room, she was already taking the business card out of her purse, imagining how she would touch him on the arm when she said good-bye, how his eyes would follow her as she left.

  Inside the banquet room, the soprano rose toward the microphone. Marilyn said her good-byes quickly. The sound of the woman’s voice, high and tremulous, stayed with her, as Dante held open the door at the front of the restaurant, and as they headed together across the square.

  SIX

  The Owens’s house was across the bay, on Shale Street, at the base of the Oakland Hills. Farther up those hills, the houses were larger, more modern, but the Owens’s place stood in the old part of the neighborhood, a two-story bungalow with a wall of bamboo alongside. It had a craftsman porch and a big window and a hedge of wild roses out front.

  The business at the school office, picking up the kids, had been somewhat strained. The kids had been subdued on the drive over, sitting up unnaturally straight, knees together. As they walked inside the house, Dante noticed Owens’s daughter, Kate: how her lips had started to tremble.

  “We’ll order pizza,” said Marilyn.

  “Mom’s on the plane?”

  “Yes,” said Dante. “Otherwise, she would call.”

  The last time Dante had talked to their mother, she had been on the jetway, headed for the plane. She couldn’t get a direct flight out of Chicago, but was being routed instead through Atlanta with a stopover in Denver. The connections were tight, though. She might not have time to call between flights. If everything went well, she would be back in Oakland around dawn.

  After the six o’clock news, the house phone started to ring. Most of the calls came from friends expressing concern, but others were strangers, crackpots with an agenda, and one of these let loose with the opinion that Owens had at last gotten what he deserved. After this, Dante adjusted the machine so the calls went straight to message.

  Kate left the television and bolted upstairs to her room.

  Dante glanced at Marilyn. “Maybe you should talk to her. Get her mind on something else.”

  “That won’t be easy to do,” said Zeke. He was playing with the game device and watching a rerun at the same time. “She’s obsessive.”

  * * *

  A little while later, Dante stepped outside to take a look around. The house had a wraparound porch, so the main entrance actually faced the side, abutting a smaller street, an alley of sorts. A bamboo hedge surrounded the yard, a privacy hedge—but that worked both ways, allowing an intruder to make his way around the property unobserved from the street. The gables were low as well, the lattice work was sturdy and easy to climb, and the boy’s bedroom was on the first floor, overlooking the backyard. Outside, beyond the hedge, a car drove past the house. Dante listened as it made the turnaround at the top, then returned the way it came. Likely it didn’t mean anything. There was a traffic divide down below, and it was easy to go the wrong way: to end up on Shale Street, when what you wanted to do was drive on up into the hills.

  Back inside, the television had been left on, but the room itself was abandoned. Dante found the kid Zeke in his room at the back of the house with the door open—a skinny, loose-limbed boy with his father’s looks. At the moment, he played a video game that involved crawling through underground caves and killing men in gray uniforms.

  “It takes my mind off things.”

  “How’s your sister?”

  “Still upstairs.” He shrugged. “My sister likes the Internet. That’s the way she relaxes, but I prefer this. The Internet, you run into news, child molesters—that kind of thing. I’m not into that stuff.”

  “Your father’s okay,” Dante said all of a sudden. “You don’t have to worry.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Some people I know—on the force.”

  It was a lie. No doubt Owens was alone in an eight-by-twelve, nothing to do but sit on the bunk with his head in his hands. No doubt he’d been pushed and badgered all day and now lay there in his darkened cell, wondering if he’d ever get out. The kid, meanwhile, seemed to understand he was being humored, but did not challenge him.

  “I know what happened back then,” Zeke said. “I know a woman was killed, but that happened a long time ago. And my father, he wasn’t even there.” The boy went on with his game, nimble-fingered, deft with the controls, but at the same time the ends of his fingers were raw, Dante noticed, the nails ragged, bitten to the quick. The kid had already polished off the enemies in the cave and was on his way to the next level. “It could be the woman deserved it, too,” he said. “That’s always a possibility.”

  Zeke glanced up at Dante through his glasses, hopeful, eyes wide, magnified by the lenses, innocent, and Dante found himself tempted to say, yes, maybe it was so, the woman had deserved to die.

  Instead, he ruffled the kid’s head.

  “I’m going to go check on the girls.”

  * * *

  Upstairs, Dante found Marilyn in the master bedroom, lying on the bed. Kate’s door was closed.

  “She wants to be left alone,” Marilyn said. “But she’s asked me if I would sleep up here. In her parent’s room.”

  The Owens’s bedroom looked comfortable, he had to admit. The bed had a colorful quilt and more pillows than anyone could need. Dante still had not had a chance to sleep since his surveillance the night before, and he felt weariness overcoming him. He went to the window overlooking the street. It was a pretty street, the kind of street people want to live on. Another car pulled up into the twilight, negotiated the turnaround, then went down the way it had come.

  Dante felt a sense of foreboding. La Segazza, his grandmother had called such feelings, half mocking. The wisdom. It was her name for a particular kind of intuition, but he, himself, at the moment, didn’t feel particularly wise.

  There were photos on the walls, on the dresser. Owens and Jill on their wedding day. Kate on a pony. At a school play. A family vacation somewhere. Owens and Zeke at the ballpark, caps twisted sideways on their heads.

  “Did you lock up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then lie down.”

  “I should probably take the couch downstairs,” he said. “It makes me uneasy, the boy down there by himself.”

  “In a minute,” she said. “Just rest.”

  “Their mother must have caught the plane. Otherwise she would have called.”

  “Unless they arrested her, too.”

  “There’s no reason for them to do that.”

  “Just lie down.”

  She ran her fingers down his cheek; she petted his nose. Dante closed his eyes. She took his hand, and the two of them just lay there, very quiet, saying nothing. Despite the circumstances, there was something comforting in it, just lying on the bed, here beside Marilyn. The window was open, and he could hear the evening sounds—but also a vague whispering, as of someone talking just out of range. But when he listened more closely, the sound went away.

  “In the pictures, they all seem so wholesome.”

  “The boy, he likes his device.”

  “Why are they going after Owens now, after all this time?”

  “The woman’s daughter. That’s part o
f it. And the feds—they’ve got a campaign on.”

  “Do you think he’s guilty?”

  Dante didn’t know the answer, not for sure. Owens’s history, and his relationship to the old leftist underground—it was complicated business, as this stuff tended to be, full of names and interconnections that shifted continually, and it was hard to ascertain truth from rumor. There were a few things, though, of which he was fairly certain. He knew Owens and his first wife had worked as legal-aid volunteers out at the prison and were later convicted of aiding in the escape of Leland Sanford, an Oakland stick-up artist who’d gotten a political education in prison. Sanford had hooked up with the Symbionese Liberation Army after he was out, the SLA—the radical group that kidnapped the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, demanding ransom money from her father to feed the poor.

  Old stuff now, newsreel footage, dragged up out of the archives on account of the terror scare. Not too many people remembered the details, but it had been everyday news then, a media circus that made the feds look bad.

  Eventually, most of the SLA had died in a shootout with the police down in Los Angeles. There’d been trouble identifying the bodies afterward, some kind of anomaly in the dental records. So the police could not be sure, absolutely, that Sanford was dead—and he’d become a kind of legendary figure on account of it.

  You still saw posters of him, sometimes, down in the Haight—collector’s items, for those who cared about such things: the radical in his paisley shirt and his beret with a carbine strapped across his chest.

  After the shootout in Los Angeles, there had been a series of robberies attributed to the surviving members of the SLA. It was during the last of these that Eleanor Younger had been killed. But Owens’s exact relationship to all of this, and exactly how closely he’d been tied to the revolutionary underground …

  “It was a long time ago,” said Dante. “I don’t know what kind of case they can make now.”

  They lay there for a little while, saying nothing. Marilyn leaned over him then and kissed him on the mouth. Her face was flushed and pretty. He reached up to unbutton her blouse.

  “Not now.”

  He put his hand between her legs.

  “Not now,” she whispered again, teasing him, tongue in his ear.

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  She pulled away.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To check on the kids.”

  She was right, of course. Now was not the time, not here on the Owens’s bed. Even if he had not been so sleepy.

  He closed his eyes.

  * * *

  When he awoke, it was with a start. The room was dark, and Marilyn lay sleeping next to him.

  It was past midnight.

  It happened sometimes that Dante woke up in this manner, startled out of sleep for no apparent reason, and found himself suddenly sitting bolt upright on the mattress. His jumpiness went back to his time with the company down in New Orleans—those gray years after he’d left the force. He had been involved, seen things, done things—operating in a murky continuum, government approved—that ended badly. That affiliation had ended, or so he liked to tell himself, when he’d returned to San Francisco for his father’s funeral. He had developed certain instincts—but as often as not his tuning was too fine. Waking at a shift in the floorboards, a surge in the power.

  The light in the hall was off. The girl’s door remained as it was, still closed, and so Dante listened from outside, not wanting to wake her, instead waiting until he heard her stir, turning in her sleep. Downstairs, he found the boy’s door wide open.

  The kid lay on top of the bed, asleep in his clothes.

  Dante checked the locks again, examining the yard from the windows. Then he lay on the couch in the television room. The volume had been turned low, and he wondered if this might have been the sound he had heard earlier, coming through the grates upstairs. The station was set to CNN and the news played nonstop. The enemy was on the run in Afghanistan, or so they said, and American troops were gathering in Kuwait. The experts had things to say, almost audible: conspiracy within conspiracies … 9/11 … Al Qaeda … terrorists in Miami …

  Dante turned off the television. He dimmed the lights. Given how little he’d slept these last few days, it should have been easy to fall asleep, but when he closed his eyes, he still heard those voices, it seemed, whispering in the dark.

  * * *

  His cell rang at just past four in the morning. Jill Owens had arrived at the Oakland Airport. She was just at that moment climbing into a taxi, she said, and would be home within half an hour.

  “Are the kids awake?”

  “No,” Dante said.

  No sooner had he spoken, though, then he heard Zeke rummaging in the back. Likely he had been awakened by the phone.

  “Let them be. I’ll be quiet when I come in.”

  Dante could see the boy had no intention of going back to bed. He came out holding his video game and sat on the couch, leaning his head against Dante’s shoulder. He stayed that way until his mother came in the door, smelling of the airplane, red-eyed, tired, full of indignation, fury, and shame. Dante watched the woman struggle to keep all those feelings off her face as she greeted her son. She was a tawny-haired woman in her early forties who had met Owens in her last year at law school. Now she gathered the boy into her skirt, cooing—but she could not keep her anger from hissing out.

  “Those sons of bitches,” she said. “Those goddamn sons of bitches. This is all Blackwell.”

  She petted the boy as she spoke, and he nuzzled closer, understanding the anger was directed elsewhere maybe, at the vague forces outside the house—though he glanced up sheepishly for an instant, as if not quite sure. Something in Zeke’s expression—the blue eyes, the sudden vacantness—reminded Dante of the boy’s father. “The police could have picked Bill up at home, they could have done this a hundred other ways. The people downtown, the DA’s office—they know Moe, they know me. They know Bill’s line of work. They could have told us in advance and made arrangements. But Blackwell wanted his moment. Grandstanding for the press.”

  No doubt there was some truth in what she said. The government wanted a jump on the pretrial publicity—to cast the case in the public eye. It was also true, though, that Owens had gone fugitive in the past.

  “Bill is innocent. All of this, it has nothing to do with what actually happened back then. The whole point—it’s politics. The government doesn’t want anyone arguing with them, past or present. It’s a way of disrupting our legal practice. Because we defend certain kinds of people. Because the government wants a free hand … That woman, Elise Younger, she hired an investigator.”

  “Sorrentino?”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  Dante had met Jill Owens once before—that evening here at the house—and she had seemed like a different person, her hazel eyes full of light and confidence. A bit smug about her politics, self-assured, in love with her husband, her kids, dedicated to her work, obsessive, insistent upon its importance, though admitting, too, that some of the people she helped defend, these days, you wouldn’t want to bring home.

  Now her face was puffy, her hair in a ruff. Her son gazed up toward her. “I want you to remember this,” she said to him. “It’s how they work. It’s how they run us down.”

  The daughter appeared on the stairs, Marilyn just behind. Kate faltered a moment at the bottom step, her precociousness stripped away: thin and rangy in her nightshirt, only half-awake, regarding them all with a surliness of the type teenage girls usually reserved for their mothers. Then she started to weep. “Come here, darling,” said Jill. “Your father’s a good man. We are not going to let this happen. Your father will be home in a couple of days. We are not going to let those people do this to us.” She rocked the girl back and forth and looked up at Dante. “Bill trusts you,” she said. Outside, a car negotiated the turnaround. The passing light rose and fell through the big window overlookin
g the porch. “When he posts bail, we will have a get-together for the defense. All of his supporters, here. You’ll come, won’t you? You and Marilyn?”

  “Of course,” said Dante.

  The car was gone now, the headlights passed. The bamboo rustled in the long shadows by the fence.

  * * *

  When Dante and Marilyn drove home that morning, it was just past dawn. There was extra security at the bridge—police and fire vehicles flanking the sides and emergency workers everywhere in yellow slickers. There was a line at the toll longer than made any sense.

  A bomb on the bridge … an abandoned pickup truck … unauthorized personnel on the catwalks … On the radio, a talk-show host repeated rumors picked up by callers off the citizens band. The rumors were repeated by the men inside the traffic copters, then retracted, and later repeated like words in a dream.

  A policewoman in yellow gear waved them through.

  It was a damp morning, and on the other side of the bridge, in San Francisco, there was an antiwar vigil going on. Protestors dressed in skeleton suits. Death masks. Angels holding swords. Sheets covered with blood.

  Don’t fight their war.

  Women on their knees, over dead children.

  Or these were the images in Dante’s head, later, as he tumbled toward sleep, in Marilyn’s bed. He nuzzled up close to her. Over the mudflats, the sky was gray. The flocks were diminishing, wheeling away. His grandmother had once told him the story of the fishermen who lived with the pelicans out in the Calabrian rocks … the fishermen, with the big noses, who followed the birds out to sea. Birds who lived in the rocks, birds with brown eyes, beaks in the shape of fish, shoulders hunched like peasants.

  Marilyn ran her fingers over his nose. She grabbed his dick.

  When she touched him, he forgot about the birds. He forgot about Owens, in his orange suit down at the Hall of Justice. He forgot about the little boy with his raw fingers and his weeping teenage sister, and forgot, too, the woman who’d been shot to death in the bank.

  “Let’s go somewhere far away,” said Marilyn.