“I hope so. I mean, I will. I’ll be well. You, too.”
57
On the front page of the Daily News, above the fold, Miss Delvane and Mr. Smaller looked as though they had come from different worlds, heck, from different solar systems. She might have been born on the Planet of Superhot Women, while he traveled to Earth from the Planet of Unfortunate Men.
Reading, I quickly discovered what Mr. Yoshioka meant when he said the newspaper might show me what their weird little gang had been up to at City College.
Late in the demonstration, seven bombs had gone off, one after the other, at locations all across the campus. Nobody had been killed or critically injured, though six sustained minor wounds. Authorities believed that the explosives had been placed specifically to avoid killing anyone, that the purpose had been to create total chaos and distract the police and particularly the campus security forces.
Evidently, there had been plenty of chaos. As the explosions occurred at buildings to all sides of the crowd, the thousands of demonstrators hadn’t known which way to run and had run every which way, crashing into one another. The bombs had been packaged with what the newspaper called “smoke accelerants,” which seemed to mean that in a very short time, churning clouds of smoke spread across campus, greatly reducing visibility and causing everyone’s eyes to water, their vision to blur.
Campus security men, who were not armed, left their posts and patrol routes, rushing into the melee under the impression that many seriously wounded awaited their help. The guard assigned to the Albert and Patricia Barton Gallery, adjacent to the College of Arts, locked the main entrance behind him, but the two men who looted the current exhibition blew open the door with the seventh bomb.
The security cameras caught two individuals—most likely men—dressed in black, wearing masks and gloves. They came in through the blown door and swirling masses of smoke, each carrying a cloth sack. The current show in the gallery featured seventeenth-through early nineteenth-century Chinese jade: vases, incense burners, screens, bowls, human and animal figures, scepters, snuff bottles, jewelry.… They moved through the big room as though they knew the location of everything they wanted, ignoring the heavier items, snatching up the jewelry—necklaces, bangles, pendants, earrings—and the oldest and most exquisitely carved little snuff bottles. They were gone in five minutes.
A preliminary estimate of the loss was in excess of $400,000, an immense sum in those days. Experts suggested that the thieves surely had not stolen such items on speculation, because many were unique and all but impossible to fence. They must have had a client, a wealthy collector who wanted the pieces not for public display but for his private collection.
The assumption also had to be made that the crooks were closely tied with one or another anti-war organization. The protesters had descended on City College in a carefully coordinated surprise, but the bandits would have had to know about the event far enough ahead to scout the jade exhibition and to decide where to plant the bombs. They didn’t need to be planners of the demonstration, only privy to the secret schedule.
My initial impulse was to slip the newspaper into the middle of the trash in the kitchen waste can, bag the trash, and put it in the garbage can outside. If my mother saw the photograph of Miss Delvane looking like a supermodel, it could only hurt her. If she recognized Mr. Smaller in spite of his bandana, I couldn’t begin to imagine all the questions and speculations that might occur to her. Pretending to share her surprise and puzzlement, I would quickly come to a moment when she saw through my pretense, and all that I’d concealed from her might come tumbling out. The reasons for my secrecy had all seemed good and honorable at the time; but I didn’t have confidence that they would seem good and honorable—or entirely defensible—now.
If I ditched the Daily News, Grandpa Teddy would want to know what had happened to it, and I didn’t want to tell him it never came, didn’t want to start lying to him, as well. My grandfather had never seen Miss Delvane and perhaps he’d seen Mr. Smaller only once or twice, briefly and at a distance; he would recognize neither. My mother didn’t read the entire newspaper and often skipped stories involving violence, which depressed her.
I decided to trust my luck, let it to fate. I folded the paper, trying to make it appear untouched, and slipped it back into the thin plastic bag in which it had come when tossed into the front yard. I put it on the table beside my grandfather’s armchair.
Grandpa Teddy wasn’t playing in the hotel’s Deco dining room that night. It would be a long evening of suspense, waiting for my mother to chance upon the photograph. I decided to go to bed early and read a book, sort of hide out. Maybe if she discovered the photo when I wasn’t present, she would never mention it to me.
Anyway, the events of the day had worn me out. I would most likely fall asleep early, which was another way to hide.
58
Later, after dinner, Mom and Grandpa Teddy and I were clearing the dinette table when Amalia Pomerantz stopped by, sans Malcolm, with a proposal that I assumed my mother would reject after at most a half minute of consideration. Being seventeen and responsible, Amalia had for almost two years been taking the bus to other places in the city, safe places, to catch the matinee of a play, to explore a museum, to listen to a lecture, and that kind of thing. Her parents had no problem with her taking Malcolm along, and now that the geek saxophonist and I were becoming friends, she hoped that perhaps I would be allowed to join them on these expeditions.
Grandpa knew
Amalia well and thought highly of her, trusted her to bring me back “unscratched and hardly tattered,” and he said as much to my mother, who looked dubious. I believe that what Amalia did then was without calculation, that she was merely being her sociable self when, as she talked entertainingly about a free folk concert in Riverside Commons that she’d seen two weeks earlier, she stoppered the kitchen sink, drew hot water, squirted liquid soap into it, and started to wash our dinner dishes. Pretty soon, as Amalia rinsed and racked the plates, my mother dried them, and they were talking and laughing as if they had known each other longer than I’d been alive.
By the time I headed to my bedroom and book, the issue had been settled. The following day, I would be going with Amalia and Malcolm to some fancy art museum to look at a bunch of paintings, which just the previous day would have made me want to barf; however, if Amalia thought it would be fun, all doubts I might have had were swept away.
In my pajamas, in bed, I couldn’t concentrate to read. I had a little transistor radio with an earphone, and I tried to dial in music that might elevate my mood. Couldn’t find it. I took the La Florentine box out of my nightstand and looked at the Xerox of the page from the book about Manzanar, the pictures of Mr. Yoshioka’s mother and sister. That made me think about the war and the riots and everybody killing everybody. The only thing that settled my mind was the haiku on the little sympathy card that had been attached to the floral arrangement at Grandma’s funeral. I read it over and over again: Dawn breaks / And blossoms open / Gates of paradise.
The events of the day weighed me down. I slept. Toward morning, I dreamed. In the dream, my father was strangling Fiona, and for some reason I wanted to stop him, although she frightened me more than he did. Then my perspective changed, and I saw that she wasn’t Fiona, that she was instead my mother, that the necktie bit cruelly into her throat. Her eyes were clouded. She was half dead. I tried to scream for help, but I literally had no tongue, and I tried to hit him, to claw at his face, but I had no hands. My arms ended at the wrists, in bracelets of coagulated and crusted blood.
I woke up, thrust up, threw back the sheet, sat on the edge of the bed in the lightless room, gasping. No residue of sleep clouded my mind. I was clearheaded, alarmed, alert. What I feared was not the nightmare, but that I might hear the voice of Miss Pearl and see her silhouette, a moving darkness in the dark, which would mean that the horror seen in sleep must be prophetic.
How greatly relieved I was when she wasn’t there, but just then I glimpsed a paleness at the screened window, where the lower sash was raised to cool the room. I thought it must be the face of someone who had been watching me sleep, as Fiona Cassidy had once watched me and even photographed me slumbering unaware. If the long-awaited but unknown crisis drew nearer by the day, as Mr. Yoshioka and I both believed that it did, cowardice—even mere hesitation—might be the death of me, and so I rose and rushed to the window to confront who might be spying on me. I found no one, just a mosquito jittering against the metal mesh, such a frail visitor that it made no sound that I could hear above the pounding of my heart. If some watcher had been there, face ghostly in the waning night, she or he had fled, though perhaps it had been only a figment of my imagination.
59
Thursday morning, after feeding and walking Toshiro Mifune, Mrs. Setsuko Nozawa drove well below the speed limit on her way through Charleston, Illinois, to Eastern Illinois University. The dog was in the mood to ride with his head out the window. To drive above twenty-five miles per hour would put his eyes at risk if the wind carried in it sharp flecks of something.
Although she traveled by a roundabout route, staying mostly to quiet residential streets on which the speed limits were low, a few impatient drivers blew their horns at her. She drove with her head high, unfazed by their discontent, and she would not deign to reply in kind when crude words or gestures were flung her way. Each time a horn blew, she said, “Namu Amida!” which meant “Buddha have mercy.” Those might have been words of forgiveness, directed toward the rude motorists, if she had not pronounced them with such an edge. The dog agreed with her, sensitive creature that he was, and matched every “Namu Amida” with a growl.
In the Alumni Affairs Office of the university, an attractive redhead with a constellation of freckles and an imposing bosom was most charming and helpful. Mrs. Nozawa repeated her invented story about a student who years earlier had done a great kindness for her and her husband, and the flame-haired woman explained that they were not at liberty to give out alumni addresses. Mrs. Nozawa said that she understood and appreciated their discretion, but that she only wanted to know if the Alumni Affairs Office would forward a letter from her to the kind young man if he had in fact graduated from the university. That was, of course, a courtesy that the university would be pleased to extend to her. Mrs. Nozawa was most gratified by the cordial tone of the exchange.
She doubted that Lucas Drackman had attended the university under the name Douglas T. Atherton. More likely, he had forged the Social Security card and Student Activities card with which he had qualified to rent the mailbox from Betty Norbert. Therefore, she gave the redhead the Drackman name and a likely year of graduation—1963. In minutes it was confirmed that Lucas Drackman was indeed a graduate, and Mrs. Nozawa promised that, in a few days, she would return with her letter in a stamped and sealed envelope, which she had no intention of doing.
Mr. Tamazaki of the Daily News had hoped only that she would find that Drackman had been living in the area at the time Mrs. Renata Kolshak had disappeared from a ship in the Caribbean, thus establishing that he could have rented, under a false name, the mailbox to which a ticket to the same cruise had been sent to one Douglas T. Atherton. Mission accomplished.