“His friend?” the reporter asked.
“The little Negro boy. Jonah. The other boy, he said, ‘Jonah’s still alive, I can’t leave him.’ ”
Drackman might have killed Tilton at that moment, right there in the Quonset. But when he had looked at my father, he’d seen genuine shock. He’d decided against a hasty execution.
Standing beside Drackman, Fiona had said ominously, “Juju.”
The occult interested Lucas Drackman. “Juju? Voodoo? What’re you talking about?”
“Jonah. Jonah Kirk. I should have smashed his monkey face that first day. He’s a weird little freak. He believes in juju. He has a metal box full of wangas.” When she saw that Drackman didn’t know the word, she described my collection of interesting junk as I would not have thought to define it: “Wangas. Charms. And fetishes—objects that are supposed to possess supernatural power.”
Now, Wednesday morning, sixteen days later, Drackman, Smaller, and my father were sitting around the kitchen table in the farmhouse, talking about the coming revolution, when the TV news reported that the Colt-Thompson truck and the missing—and murdered—guard had been found, though of course the 1.6 million in cash was long gone.
For days, Tilton had argued against ever going back to the city. Drackman had remained adamant: “We have a score to settle. Unless you don’t have the guts. No one’s immune if they’re in the way of the Cause, brother.” Smaller vacillated on the issue, but he had so long been steeped in paranoia that he tended to side with Drackman most of the time. Finally Tilton accepted the inevitability of the venture.
Although they had planned to go back on Friday, Drackman felt that the discovery of the armored truck required an adjustment in their timetable. He was a great believer in bold action and in the predictive power of Tarot cards. He was also a great believer in Hitler and Stalin, but they were dead and could give him no advice. Following the counsel of the Tarot, he had already sent the new-look Fiona Cassidy back to spy on us. Now he opened the deck again and shuffled the seventy-eight cards and laid five of them on the kitchen table in the form of a cross. After revealing them one at a time, he brooded a while before saying, “What it’s telling me is not to pull back, not to delay, to move ahead even faster.”
As Drackman would later tell the police, the best thing about having a big pile of cash and not giving a damn about the law is that you can get anything you want, and you can get it fast. As a man of means, he hadn’t needed what he and his crew stole from Colt-Thompson. But if you were going to be a player in the Cause, if you were on the revolutionary road, you should bring down the corrupt system with the system’s money, not with your own. After Fiona called him on Saturday to report that our house remained under surveillance, Drackman had made contact with like-minded individuals of long acquaintance, in a city other than ours. For a price, they agreed to supply a Ford van of the same year, model, and color as the stakeout vans on our street, credible license plates, and a registration card in the name of one of his false identities. The supplier intended to deliver it Thursday afternoon.
Drackman’s intention had been to meet with Fiona on Friday, compare notes, and go into the Bledsoe place that night. But trusting his intuition and the Tarot cards, he said, “We drive back tomorrow instead, and we go into that house tomorrow night.”
When the weather map on the TV news at that moment predicted heavy rains throughout the region beginning Thursday afternoon, Drackman knew that he must be right to move more quickly. A rainy night would provide perfect cover for the job.
94
When my mother came downstairs shortly after eleven o’clock Thursday morning, I was parked in my wheelchair at the kitchen table, reading one of my grandpa’s books, a memoir of Tin Pan Alley, which was a nickname for a neighborhood in New York City, a stretch of 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where music publishers and songwriters had flourished from 1886 until rock ’n’ roll changed that world in the late 1950s. I figured that a first step in becoming a songwriter should be to read about successful ones, the guys who made Tin Pan Alley famous: W. C. Handy, Harry Warren, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jimmy Van Heusen, Lerner and Loewe.…
Mrs. Lorenzo worked at the cutting board, near the sink, slicing potatoes thin for home fries to accompany the omelets that would be Mom’s breakfast and my lunch.
When my mother entered the room, I thought she was fast becoming like Grandpa Teddy, like Grandma Anita had been: a Presence. You just had to look at her, not merely because she was beautiful, but also because something about the way she carried herself, something about her quiet confidence and dazzling smile and sparkling eyes made you say to yourself, Now hold on a minute here, this isn’t just passing scenery, this is SOMEBODY.
Her first night at Diamond Dust had gone exceptionally well, which surprised her, though it surely didn’t surprise me. She liked everyone she worked with, and they seemed to like her. Some of the patrons talked through the instrumental numbers, of course, but few talked when she sang, and in general the customers came there because they loved swing music and jazz and the blues; therefore, they had respect for musicians. If some of them were gawkers drawn by the fact that her ex-husband was wanted for a sensational crime, she couldn’t tell them apart from those who came for the music, food, and booze.
By the time that lunch was on the table and the three of us had finished eating, the storm began with a flash of lightning and a long crash of thunder. To keep out the rain, Mom and Mrs. Lorenzo hurried around, closing the windows that had been opened for ventilation.
Wearing a voluminous yellow slicker that he shed on the porch, Malcolm visited in the afternoon, just after Mrs. Lorenzo finished flexing my leg joints. He was having a butter-side-down day, unable to get his mind off Amalia. I knew how he felt, as I had bad patches of my own, days of melancholy, also hours of more piercing despair, especially when I woke at night and thought of her and couldn’t get back to sleep.
He didn’t want to talk. He said he just needed to be somewhere that didn’t reek of cigarette smoke and wasn’t a garage. We sat in the living room, and I read aloud to him about Tin Pan Alley, about how Harry Warren and Al Dubin, a lyricist, came to write “Lullaby of Broadway” and also all those great songs in the movie 42nd Street. At one point, for a while, he turned his back to me, and I pretended I didn’t hear the small, sad, stifled sounds he made.
95
Tilton rode up front with Lucas Drackman, while Mr. Smaller stretched out on a pile of blankets in the back of the van. He slept through the larger part of the drive.
The scourge of Bilderbergers was a little less hairy than usual. He had changed his appearance by shaving his head, though he had also grown a mustache, which had sprouted into a thick brush in no time. Although he had never before been able to lose weight, he’d dropped ten pounds in sixteen days, which he attributed to the fact that for the first time in his life he was “doing something that mattered.” Blowing up a bank, making off with a fortune, and thereby sticking it to the establishment gave him greater self-esteem than he’d ever had before, and he wanted to look better.
Drackman had dyed his blond hair black and had started growing a beard, which he also had to color. Although it was necessary, he regretted the dye job, because he’d always been immensely pleased with his looks just the way they were.
Like Mr. Smaller, Tilton had shaved his head and had started to cultivate a mustache. He didn’t think he had changed his appearance enough to be out in public when the police, the FBI, and every Dick and Jane were looking for him. He didn’t want to return t
o the city. He didn’t want any part of what Lucas intended to do. But the man terrified him, and he was in deep now, and he knew he couldn’t split, couldn’t survive and stay free on his own.
He missed Aurora. She knew how to soothe a man’s nerves. She’d gotten him into this, just as she’d drawn Smaller into it. Playing at revolution excited the woman; it was a real-life romance novel to her, spiced with violence. She had an edge to her that he hadn’t been aware of at first, and for some reason guys wanted to cut themselves on that edge. He had thought she was a brainiac before he’d spent a lot of time with her; now he suspected that nothing complex happened in her head.
The windshield wipers thumped, thumped, thumped like a hammer rhythmically striking something soft, and from time to time the rubber blades stroked a thin sound from the glass, reminiscent of the whimper of a beaten animal.
96
Malcolm stayed for dinner with Grandpa, Mrs. Lorenzo, and me. Mom was already off to Diamond Dust. We dined on chopped salad, slow-cooked Swiss steak, baked corn custard, carrots with tarragon, and green beans with minced onions.