The Ancient Rain Read online

“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.

  “I’m chilly,” said Kate. “Can I get my sweater?”

  Marilyn leaned toward the girl. “I’ll get it for you. I need mine, too.”

  The back door was locked, as Owens suspected. It was just like Annette, the way she tried to control everything—and so he got up and walked with Marilyn, key in hand, to let her in himself.

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “I don’t want to miss the play.”

  “They’ll wait.”

  He stood in the kitchen, in the hall, and watched Marilyn go into the living room. Marilyn bent over, picking his daughter’s sweater up off the couch, then looking for her own on the rack by the window. She had her back to him, and he stood in the doorway admiring her. She was not of their group, no, with her silver blouse and her jewelry and her dark hair that smelled of the salon—and maybe Owens found her more attractive for that reason, for her wide hips and her tight skirt. But at the same time there was something else, darker maybe—and he suspected Marilyn was conscious of his looking, that there was something studied in the way she lifted her head, gazing out the window, curious, as if something out there had drawn her attention. Then the window imploded.

  There was flying glass and a sudden burst of light. Then smoke, thick smoke, and in that smoke, as he struggled forward, Owens caught a glimpse of Marilyn, just ahead, a shadow illuminated by fire, a figure in flames—but then he could see nothing.

  The smoke overcame him. He fell to his knees.

  PART THREE

  Code Pink

  FOURTEEN

  The cocktail had been well made. It was Finnish-style, the police said later—made in a vodka bottle, with a Bengal light strapped on each side. The Bengals were slow-burning flares, of compacted powder, that emitted a small blue flame. Whoever had thrown the cocktail had likely stood inside the hedge, invisible from the street, and hurled it through the window. The cocktail ignited when it hit the glass and the contents splattered out—a mixture of gasoline and grease and tar.

  When the glass broke, the liquid splattered. The flames followed the mixture. The curtains were sheer and ignited easily, and smoke issued from the couch. It was noxious smoke. Where the mixture landed on flesh, the effect was like napalm—a tarry mixture that generated its own heat and burned through the clothing and onto the flesh and kept burning.

  Some of the mixture had hung for a split instant in midair, droplets of gas suspended in vapor.

  Then there was a burst of flame and light.

  Marilyn felt a searing in her lungs, as if she were on fire from the inside—a burning across her face, her chest, her thighs.

  The flames leapt from her dress.

  * * *

  At the moment of the explosion, Dante had been at the table in the backyard, watching the Sandinista and Annette Ricci move in pantomime, puppetlike across the lawn.

  Then he was on his feet.

  At first he could not enter the living room, the smoke was so thick. Back in the kitchen, he ran a dish towel under running water, then held the wet cloth over his face. He entered the living room on his knees, close to the ground, where the smoke would be less dense.

  He saw Owens—down low, on his elbows, struggling along the carpet.

  Dante pulled Owens into the kitchen. He left the man gasping on the tile and went back after Marilyn.

  The towel slipped and soon he was gagging, his eyes streaming from the smoke. He saw her in the center of the room,
where she had collapsed on the carpet, apparently trying to roll out the flames. He put his body over hers, smothering the fire. The air was better down low, and he grabbed her under the arms, pulling her along the carpet, but it was too slow, and so he cradled her over his back, stood up in the heat and roiling smoke, and stumbled forward.

  In the kitchen, Jensen was helping Owens. Dante staggered into the Sandinista at the top of the stairwell, and there was a minute when all three of them might have fallen if Dante hadn’t shifted himself into the wall, bearing their weight. Then Dante brushed him back. He collapsed with Marilyn on the back lawn.

  Her clothes still smoldered.

  Dante knew something about burns and that the first step was to strip off the burning clothes and cool the body. He called out for ice, for water. He did not notice Annette Ricci already on her knees beside him in her outfit from the play, a peasant dress embroidered with peacocks. Later Dante would wonder about the backyard door and why it had been locked—but at the time he did not reflect on that, noting instead in the back corner of his mind the glance she exchanged with the Nicaraguan—as if something had gone terribly astray—and noting, too, the hardness, the steely calm in them both, as the Nicaraguan headed out to reconnoiter on the street, and Annette dipped her hands into the Styrofoam cooler she’d brought from the table. She dumped the ice, wrapping the soda cans and beer bottles as compresses for Marilyn’s wounds.

  Marilyn’s cheeks were blistered, her eyelids singed, the hair frizzled back to the scalp on one side. Dante placed a damp rag over the side of her face, hoping to cool the burn, while Annette Ricci put compresses about the thighs and abdomen.

  “No,” he said, waving her off, worried that Marilyn’s temperature would drop too fast.

  Her breathing faltered, her chest did not move.

  He placed his fingers in her mouth and cleared the air passage and put his lips over hers.

  She came to consciousness, moving spasmodically beneath him, muttering, then she was gone again.

  “Get me the hose,” said Dante. “Get me some water.”

  Dante wanted water to lower her temperature. Marilyn had burns over a good part of her body. The wounds should be iced, but drop the body temperature too far, and she would go into shock. Her face was red, and it was already starting to puff up, and there was a string of postules across her face where the tar grease had spattered. There were holes in her skirt from where the tar had burned through, and an ugly cinch around her waist where the elastic had melted into the flesh.