Concert of Ghosts (25 page)

“Protecting me? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Tennant took a step back from his father. In the mire of perplexities, what was one more? When you split open the fruit of a conundrum, you were bound to find a proliferation of mysterious seeds.

“Did it never strike you as strange that you didn't go to Vietnam, Harry? You didn't have the excuse of physical disability. You didn't have the pretext of being an accredited student. You were hanging around San Francisco doing your drugs—yet you had a deferment. You never appeared before a draft board. What did you imagine, son? They'd lost your name and address? You'd slipped through the cracks in the system?”

In the haze of the Haight-Ashbury, in the fumes that clouded all the blown young minds, the noise of sabers in Vietnam had seemed a distant clash of metal, a senseless flexing of muscle in obscure jungles, young men dying for old men's causes. People who gravitated to the Haight in the days before the antiwar crusades gathered maximum force were stupefied by drugs, unlikely candidates for the abattoir in Southeast Asia. An illusion persisted in Harry's mind that he was immune to the draft because he inhabited the Haight, and no board would seek cannon fodder in such a place, amidst the dropouts, the freaks, people whose oars had long been out of the water. He'd been wrong, of course; but the fact the draft bypassed him hadn't surprised him at all. If you abandoned society, so did you abdicate your responsibility to society's wars. You smoked dope. You dropped acid. You were a lover, a poet, not a warrior.

“I had influence, Harry. And I'm not going to deny I used it. I wasn't going to see my boy die in some pointless war. Am I making myself clear? I protected you then.”

Harry said nothing. The notion of Rayland's intervention had never occurred to him. He wondered why Rayland was telling him now. Was it to convince him that the father was worthy of the son's love? That a truce could be forged?

“While you were amusing yourself in la-la land, I was pulling strings in the real world. I didn't want you sent home from some jungle in a bloody bag. I couldn't have survived that.” The old man appeared to sway. He had frail eyelids, the veins of which were suggestive of ink lines scratched on thin paper. “Later, when you moved to upstate New York, I knew the illicit trade you drifted into. I learned about your relationship with Bobby Delacroix. I found myself having to intervene on one occasion to prevent your arrest because agents of the DEA knew you were providing narcotics to Delacroix. This took a great deal of energy and persuasion on my part, Harry. Some of these agents can be bought. Others you have to coerce. Promises are made. Bargains struck. Do you understand me, Harry? I was your guardian angel.”

Guardian angel? Alison's phrase for the sniper in the motel parking lot.

“Frank Rozak told you to sit tight, didn't he?”

“Frank Rozak is one your bloodhounds?” Tennant asked.
Of course
.

“Why the devil did you bolt before he even had a chance to get to the prosecutor? Why couldn't you have given it another few hours, time for strings to be pulled? Why didn't you listen to the man instead of jumping into this … let's call it a misadventure.” Rayland looked forlorn. “Now I'm no longer sure I have the power to protect you. It may have been taken away.”

“Taken by whom? I don't understand. I don't know what the hell you're talking about.”

Rayland made a dismissive gesture with his white hand. “There are things I cannot explain, Harry. I can tell you only this,” and he leaned forward, an old man who'd once known considerable power and who looked exhausted now, bone-colored, stripped of his authority. “If you participate in this quest of yours, I can't guarantee your safety. There are influential people involved. Do you understand?”

“What people, Rayland? What are they involved in? I hate this cryptic shit.”

Rayland was quiet for a time. He stared at Alison, who, frozen out of this precarious reunion, looked anxious, longing to participate and yet not knowing whether she dare. “Let me spell it out for you. Stay away from the past. Stay away from that little girl.”

“Why?”

“Because I have the feeling you may well come home to me in a bag. All these years after I tried to prevent it, my nightmare will finally happen.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Take my advice. Leave the past alone. Discard your young traveling companion. That's all I can tell you.”

“It's not enough,” Harry said. “Why do I have to leave everything alone? What difference does it make to you what I do?”

“Because you have no future if you persist, Harry. I can't help you beyond this point, if you decide to ignore my advice. God knows, I had a hard enough time convincing my associates to give you one last chance.… They wanted you dead. They said, ‘Why don't we just kill him and his young companion and get it over with once and for all?' So they sent down an order, and I managed to have it countermanded at the very last minute, but only at great cost to myself, Harry.”

“The guy with the rifle,” Tennant said. “You sent him.”

Rayland made no response. Stress showed on his features, nervousness in the eyes. Whoever Rayland's associates were, they had clearly pressured the old man to his limits, and beyond. Tennant glanced at the limousine.

“Harry. I don't want you to die.”

“I'm not in the mood for dying, Rayland.”

“Harry, please.” Rayland reached out, closing a hand around his son's wrist. “You've never seen me beg before, have you? I'm begging now. Don't get yourself killed over something that has no relevance. Leave it alone. Walk away.”

“How can I walk away, Rayland? For God's sake, there are parts of myself I don't know, there are pieces of my life that don't fit. I want these things to cohere, Rayland. Call it wholeness. Does that make sense?”

“Survival's more important than wholeness, Harry. Better to live incomplete than die in some unpleasant manner.”

“I don't want to live incomplete,” Tennant said. “I want to know what the fuck is going on. Wouldn't you? Somehow I've mislaid twelve goddamn years of my life, and more—Jesus, would you walk away, Rayland?”

Rayland took out a handkerchief and rubbed it against the tip of his nose. “I warn you, Harry. Don't persist. And keep this in mind. Your little friend is in the same claustrophobic pit as yourself, Harry. Would you want to see her damaged?”

“She makes her own choices, Rayland. I don't have any control over the girl.”

Rayland looked at the limousine. A tractor-trailer, stacked with logs, rumbled past. The shadow in the back of the limousine shifted very slightly. Rayland took a step toward his son and held out his arms for an embrace. “Don't die on me. Please don't die.”

Harry felt his father's arms go around him—a moment of old love expressed in the heart of a haunted city. He felt his father's frailty and smelled age upon him, and the sensation of love gave way to a terrible pity, as if only now did he really regret all the years of alienation. I could have ignored the differences between us, he thought. I could have set them aside. What the hell did it matter if you didn't agree with your father over certain moral issues—you could still maintain love, couldn't you? You could agree to differ. You could bypass rage. But you hadn't, Harry.

“I love you, Harry. I can't bear the idea of you dying.” The voice was a whisper. This was a secret confession, hidden, words meant only for Harry and not for any potential eavesdropper in the limousine. “You mean everything to me. You always have. My heart breaks for you, son.”

Harry didn't release his father. They held fast to each other, love and hurt, regret and reconciliation, a knot of emotions. Tennant cursed his own sullenness, the distance he'd kept from the old man. The trouble with love lay in the simple human failure to acknowledge it at times. You treated it with carelessness, disregarded it, silenced it, forgetting its rarity, its power to make life bearable. When you were neglectful of it, you harmed something essential deep inside yourself.

“If you can't give up this search, I can at least try to pretend that you have. I can report that you agreed.”

“Report to whom, for Christ's sake?”

“I don't think for a moment the watchdogs will be pulled from duty on my word alone. I can't make any promises. I've played out my string, Harry. That's what it comes down to. All the cards I had are gone. All my markers have been called in.”

“Who are they, Rayland? Your associates—who the hell are they? What are you all involved in? Maybe if I understood that, I might—”

“I can't say any more.” Rayland stepped back. “I'm glad you've seen sense, Harry.” He raised his voice for the benefit of the man in the limousine. Then he held out his hand, which Harry shook. There was a sense of finality in the touch, as if this were the ultimate goodbye. “Go. Live your life. Forget all this nonsense,” and the old man turned, walking toward the limousine. The figure in the backseat emerged from shadow for a moment. Tennant had a sense of familiarity; nothing beyond a flicker. He tried to get a fix on it even as Rayland stepped inside the big car. The back door was immediately closed. The limo swung around and slid into the tide of traffic that rolled along the Panhandle.

Tennant watched it go. He was conscious of Alison standing beside him. He looked up into the sun, seeing a gathering of clouds float like a flock of malignant geese over the rooftops. He thought of Rayland sitting in the gray limo, thought of the old man being transported back inside a nightmare he couldn't explain to his own son.

Tennant turned his face to the girl. Pensive, hands in the pockets of her coat, she was walking around in a slow circle, staring at the ground. “I figure I was meant to hear what he had to say. I guess it was for my benefit as much as yours, Harry. Stay away from the past. Stay away from me. He can't go on covering your ass unless you're a good little scout and do what you're told—which explains why we haven't joined Bear Sajac yet. Daddy's looking after his boy.” She kicked at blades of grass. “Okay. He loves you and he wants to do his best for you. But why is it so damn important to him that you don't go on? Why?”

Tennant reached out, squeezed the girl's shoulder fondly. He imagined looking down through the wrong end of a telescope, and what he saw were two very small people locked in a world too large for them. He faced Schrader Street. A part of him wanted to stop right where he was, avoid Schrader, avoid it all, obey the old man, take some of the obvious pressure off Rayland. But it wasn't enough. He'd come this far. He had to get to the end.

As he stepped off the sidewalk, he realized he knew the identity of the man in the back of the limousine. It had been Noel Harker.

16

On the corner of Schrader they paused. Uncertainly, Tennant looked up in the direction of Haight, a couple of blocks away. Which house had had the scaffolding around it all those years ago? He had the feeling of quicksands. At any moment the sidewalk would turn to swamp and swallow him.

Alison took his arm. They walked up Schrader. The houses, many of them large Victorian edifices carved up into apartments, were imposingly ornate in the sunlight; fanciful cupolas, eaves, bay windows that appeared to scrutinize you in the manner of great cameras. It was easy to imagine you were being observed, your movements recorded, if not by Rayland's watchdogs, then by unseen faces behind those windows. He thought about Noel Harker in the back of the limousine and wondered why his father maintained contact with the butcher, what it was that kept these two men circling in the same orbit. Of course, Rayland had lobbied for the arms makers, which in reality meant the Pentagon, and maybe he still kept up the friendships of expediency he'd developed before—but why had Harker been in the old man's company at that particular time in that particular car? There was a simple answer: Harker had to be one of Rayland's mysterious
associates
, but what did that loose term cover?

“Which house, Harry?” Alison asked. “Do you remember?” Her questions were asked in an anxious tone; she was hurried now. Why wouldn't she be? The encounter with Rayland, the warning contained in the old man's message—she wanted to move, to keep ahead of danger if she could.
I love you, Harry
, the old man had said.
I
can't bear the idea of you dying
. Dying. Tennant wondered how long he and Alison had, if there was a timetable, a schedule of death, if it would come here in one of the streets of the Haight-Ashbury in daylight. How long could the old man protect them anyway? An hour or two?
I can't make any promises. All my markers have been called in
. Time had been rendered meaningless. Hours might have been diminishing into minutes, minutes into seconds.

He stepped into an alley. With a puzzled look Alison followed him. He unzipped his bag and took out the gun and, thinking how frail it seemed, how insubstantial against Rayland's associates, stuck it in the pocket of his overcoat. Alison watched him, said nothing.

They emerged from the alley and continued along Schrader. He gazed up at windows. Any one of them might have been the window from which he'd watched traffic slide down Schrader to the Panhandle. Any one of them might have been the room from which Maggie Silver had been dragged away by persons whose faces he couldn't recall. Windows yielded so little. Blinds, drapes, slats of plastic. Here and there a decal was pressed onto a pane, a bumper sticker. Or you could see a plant, flowers, the back of a piece of furniture. But what did these things really tell you about the inhabitants, the faces beyond glass, the shadows in dim rooms? He put his hand in the pocket that held the gun.

“Which house?” Alison asked again.

“I'm not sure. I need to think. Clear my head. We'll walk around, come back this way.” So simple a pronouncement, he thought. Clear your head. People used it constantly and didn't need to think about what they were saying.