Revolution Number 9 (20 page)

“Huh? What government? I’m a printer.” He saw Blake looking at him closely and misinterpreted. “The poetry’s just on the side.” He held out his hand, as though to arm-wrestle, for a hippie handshake. “Brucie,” he announced. “But everybody calls me The Kid.”

“I’m Ronnie,” said Blake. The words were out before he had a chance to think. “I know some other chords.”

“Yeah?”

They shook hands, Ronnie and The Kid.

· · ·

He crashed at The Kid’s pad. He stopped going to Sproul Plaza and got a job unloading trucks at Safeway. He saved money, enough to pay what The Kid charged for papers in the name of Charles Ochs, a real person, recently deceased. “So it’ll all check out, man. You know?” The Kid never asked why he needed them; Blake assumed he thought it had something to do with dodging the draft.

Except that on the very first night at The Kid’s pad, while his guest, having gorged on pita burgers and milkshakes, slept deeply, The Kid took a moment or two to go through the pockets of his jeans. He found the clipping from the
Boston Herald Traveler
, read it, and put it back. He never said anything about it. Why should he? The only thing, when it came to negotiating for the new ID, he upped the price a little. That was just good business. You know?

H
ow common was the name “Koharski?”

There were three listed in the Toronto phone book: Koharski, Abel; Koharski, J. and D.; Koharski, M. Koharski, M., lived at “192 Howland Ave.” Charlie rented a car at the airport and asked the clerk for directions.

“Is maybe map in car,” said the clerk.

There was a map, but of Detroit. Charlie found Howland Avenue some time later, not far from downtown. The street was lined with large brick houses that looked as though they had been up and down the social ladder several times before
arriving at their present state of gentrification. Charlie found a space in front of 192 and got out. One ninety-two Howland: three stories, sandblasted brick, glassed-in porch, third-floor cedar deck, chocolate brown trim. Charlie, on the sidewalk, moved onto the tiny front lawn to let two women pass. One wore business dress and carried a laptop, the other wore shorts and bounced a basketball. The basketball woman said, “Taxes are killing me.”

“You’re breaking my heart,” said the other.

Charlie checked his watch: 5:36. The sun glowed red on the bricks, the air was soft and only slightly hazy with pollution: a fine urban afternoon. A fat man on a bicycle rode slowly up the street. He wore a summer suit, Birkenstocks, smoke-gray glasses, and had a briefcase clamped to a carrier over the back fender. He turned with a wobble into the narrow driveway at 192, climbed heavily off the bike, and started wheeling it around the side of the house. Then he noticed Charlie on the front lawn and stopped.

“Looking to buy?” he said. “All yours for five fifty.”

Charlie said: “How about twenty-four-oh-one?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Twenty-four-oh-one.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Final Jeopardy!”

The fat face shaped itself in a tentative smile. “You saw me on TV?”

“I saw a tape,” said Charlie.

“Yeah?”

“At Stu Levine’s house. You remember Bombo, don’t you?”

The fat man went still, the smile lingering foolishly on his face. He stood in his driveway, hands on the grips of his bike, smoke-gray lenses fixed on Charlie. There was a long silence, during which the basketball woman walked by the other way, this time alone and without the ball. When she was out of hearing, the fat man said:

“So.”

“So,” said Charlie.

The fat man nodded, as though reaching some understanding. “I suppose I should have expected this.”

Charlie was silent.

“Who else knows?”

“Alex Trebek,” said Charlie.

There was a buzzing sound. It came from inside the briefcase on back of the bike. The fat man leaned the bike against the side of the house, opened the briefcase, took out a portable phone, extended the antenna, and said: “Koharski.” He listened. He said: “A ten-year lease or nothing.” He retracted the antenna, saw Charlie watching him. “Property—the pivot of civilization,” he said. “Not,” he added, “one of mine.”

“I thought property was theft, Andy.”

“Merv. That’s just the flip side of the coin. Everyone gets so emotional about property. That’s what drives the market.” He gestured to the house beside him. “They look at this and try to see whether it expresses their inmost souls. I look at it and see a widget. Office towers, apartments, condos, villas on the Riviera, the Trump Plaza—they’re all just widgets to me. That’s why I’m so good at this.”

“At what?”

“Real estate syndication. I corral some investors, do a deal, take a share for putting it together. One two three.”

“Corraling’s your thing, isn’t it, Andy?” said Charlie.

“Merv.” Malik looked around, saw no one. He studied Charlie from behind the smoke-gray lenses. “You haven’t aged at all.”

“Not true.”

“Compared to me.”

“Fat’s a good disguise,” Charlie said. “But going on ‘Jeopardy!’—that was hubris.”

Malik licked his lips. “How much do you want?”

“That’s what Stu said.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“Stu’s rich.”

“He is?” Malik glanced up at his house. “I’m not. Don’t be misled by all that real estate talk. Business is terrible.”

“Let’s discuss it.”

“If you insist.”

“I do.”

Malik walked his bike around the house. Charlie followed.
Malik carried the bike up three steps onto a porch, chaining it to the railing. The effort left him breathing hard. He took out a key, opened the back door, and walked inside. Charlie went after, closing the door behind him.

They were in a messy kitchen. Remains of several meals lay on the table and the counters; stacks of dishes waited in the sink, and the dishwasher door hung open, revealing more. Charlie sat at the table. Malik went to the fridge, took out a carton of milk and gulped from it.

“I waited for you,” Charlie said.

“Did you?” The milk left a white mustache where the Zapata had been, long ago. Malik wiped it off with the back of his hand.

“In Sproul Plaza.”

“Where’s that?” said Malik; or rather, the words came out of this Friar Tuck face that now spoke in Malik’s voice.

The words, the face, the voice, the detachment: something set Charlie off. The next moment the table was lying overturned on the floor, and he had done it.

Malik backed up against the wall, hands raised in an attitude much closer to supplication than self-defense. “Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?” said Charlie, standing in a spill of broken dishes and General Tso’s chicken.

“Hurt me,” said Malik. “Don’t hurt me. I’ll pay what I can.”

“Why would I want to hurt you?”

“You tracked me down. It must be for a reason. How about twenty grand? U.S.”

“You didn’t show, Andy.”

“Merv.”

“And neither did she.”

“She?”

“Rebecca.”

“Ah.”

“Ah? What does that mean?”

Malik was silent.

“Take off those glasses,” Charlie told him.

“They’re prescription.”

“Off.”

Malik took off the smoke-gray glasses, held them on his palm like a strange object. There were his eyes: unchanged. Instantly he looked a lot less pathetic, less laughable, less benign.

“That’s better,” Charlie said.

“Thirty,” said Malik. “U.S. I can’t really go any higher.”

They faced each other across the littered floor. The phone on the wall began to ring.

“Leave it,” Charlie said.

Malik opened his mouth and closed it, like a fish passing water through its gills. “Maybe we should go into the living room,” he said when it stopped ringing.

“Why?”

“More comfortable.”

“I’m comfortable.” Charlie was suddenly aware of his own size and strength; he felt powerful, in a way he had not for a long time.

Malik might have been aware of it too. “Just a suggestion,” he said.

“Your suggestions never did me any good.”

Malik put his hands together, cracked his knuckles. “That was all long ago. I was young.”

I was younger
, Charlie thought, but he kept it to himself. He said, “Suggestions like running away to Berkeley.”

Malik frowned. “There was talk of meeting there or something?”

“It all seems distant to you, doesn’t it? Like it happened to someone else. Yeah, there was talk of meeting there. At Sproul Plaza. A definite plan, in fact. The three of us were going to turn the world upside down.”

The fat face reddened. Perhaps it was only the sinking sun, shining through the dusty kitchen window. “I lost interest in politics,” Malik said. “It was just a phase in my development. They don’t have politics up here, anyway, not the way I understand it.”

The table was already overturned. Charlie just stood there and felt the anger growing inside him. “You lost interest on the way to Berkeley?”

Malik smiled, as though it was all coming back to him. And
for a moment he was like himself again, his younger self. “Berkeley was never on, if I recall.”

“What are you talking about? It was your idea.”

“Possibly. But Rebecca countermanded it. Or I changed my mind. Or something.”

“When?”

“When?”

“The minute I left the room? An hour later? A day later? Two days? When?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did you start out for Berkeley?”

“Oh, no. We came right here.”

“Here?”

“To Canada. Much safer.”

“You went together?”

“Thumbed to Albany, I think it was. Then took a bus.”

“Together.”

“Why not?”

“Because the plan was to go singly.”

“Was it? It’s all so long ago. But of course Rebecca and I went together. We had a thing going, after all.” Malik saw a look on Charlie’s face and added, “You knew that, didn’t you?”

Charlie didn’t answer. He was thinking of that fairy-tale bed, with Malik in it. The thought didn’t make him any angrier, but it caused a sort of mental lurch, as if he’d stepped on ground that wasn’t there.

Malik licked his lips again. “You had a little … relationship with her too, was that it? Or something of the kind. I’m trying to remember. Things were different then. Conventions, and all that. But it didn’t matter who Rebecca slept with—there was only one man in her life.”

“Who?”

“Hugo, of course.”

“Hugo?”

“Her father. He was a great man. Still is, I suppose. And he adored her too, of course. She was his own Liberty at the Barricades—doing in real life what he did on paper. He got us some money after we arrived. I don’t recall how. We were
living in Rochdale at the time. A sort of communal apartment complex. Now it’s just an ordinary building. Rent controlled.”

“And then?”

“Then?”

“You jumped right into real estate?”

“Far from it,” Malik said, without a smile. “There were years of scratching and clawing. Flipping dumps south of Bloor, doing all the renovations myself. I didn’t really get rolling till the boom started in ’eighty-two. Later, with all the Hong Kong capital coming in …” He stopped himself; maybe remembering that thirty grand was all he could afford. U.S.

They were going to turn the world upside down. Perhaps they had, by growing up to be real estate syndicators, SDI software writers, users of portable phones, connoisseurs of Armagnac, contestants on “Jeopardy!”.

“And Rebecca’s money got you started.”

“I’m a self-made man,” said Malik. “Rebecca had nothing to do with it. She was only here for a month or two. Three at the most.”

“Where did she go?”

“Back to the States. Abortions weren’t legal here then. Not that they were legal down there, either. But she knew someone.” Again Malik saw a look on Charlie’s face that made him pause. Perhaps he thought Charlie disapproved of abortion. “How could we have had a baby under those circumstances?” he said.

“What circumstances?”

“On the run like that. Living in … fear.”

“She didn’t come back?”

“From the abortion? No. I never heard from her after she left.”

Charlie watched Malik’s eyes, searching for signs of truth. He saw only the effects of the sun’s low-angled light on vitreous tissue.

“That didn’t surprise me,” Malik said. “It wasn’t like we were in love or anything.”

“Where did she go?”

“For the abortion? I don’t remember.”

“Think harder.”

“Why? None of this matters now.”

Charlie, barely aware of his movements, crossed the kitchen, crunching glass beneath his feet. He took the front of Malik’s summer suit jacket in both hands and backed the big, soft man into the wall. Now there was only the memory of Ronnie Pleasance, the memory of violence past, to stop him from hitting Malik as hard as he could. It was enough. “It matters,” Charlie said.

Malik was convinced. “San Francisco,” he said in a strangled voice, although Charlie was not strangling him. “I think it was San Francisco.”

“Is she still there?”

“How would I know?”

Charlie let go. Malik slumped against the wall, breathing hard again. He loosened his tie, blue with an orange pattern that suggested sunbursts. “Maybe she was really going to see you.”

Another one of Malik’s suggestions. Charlie ignored it. “What was the name of the doctor?”

“Doctor?”

“Who did abortions.”

“You expect me to remember that?”

“I don’t expect anything from you, Andy.”

“Merv.”

Silence.

“Let’s see your ID,” Charlie said.

Malik’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement, but he got out his wallet and handed it over as though Charlie were the law. Charlie looked inside. He found an Ontario driver’s license, a Canadian social insurance card, a health insurance card, a gold American Express card, a gold Bank of Montreal MasterCard, all in the name of Mervin H. Koharski.

“What’s the
H
for?”

“Herman.”

“Mervin Herman Koharski.”

Malik nodded.

“When did you do it?”

“What?”