NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, September 13, 2000. The inhabitants of a building on the upper left-hand corner of 92nd Street and Park Avenue were experiencing a disturbance of the first order. Music had begun blaring out of an apartment on the fifth floor at all hours of the night and day. Loud, crazy music played on Mittenwald zithers, or worse, Wagner: Brunhilde, the Valkyries, Siegfried, Gotterdammerung. The music was coming from the opened windows of the largest apartment in the building. The apartment had been empty for many months. It had belonged once to Emily Post, then to Alice Walton, then to a diplomat from Jamaica, and finally, mistakenly it was turning out, to a couple from London no one had ever seen. The couple’s résumé had seemed perfect. He was a London stockbroker, she was a photographer. They had no children, no dogs, and the real estate agent told the condominium association the couple only planned to use the apartment a few months each year. There were recommendations from people members of the association knew, if not well, at least well enough to speak to at cocktail parties. Because the résumé had seemed so stellar, the association voted to allow the sale without a personal interview. The buyers were in London, the association was told, and didn’t plan on coming to New York for many months.
There were three empty apartments in the building and several more for sale. Four occupants were in arrears in their condo fees. It was not a year in which 92nd and Park could afford to turn down a cash sale that included a year’s condo fees paid in advance.
The sale went through, a yellow van came and stripped the apartment of the Jamaican’s possessions, painters arrived and painted the rooms, a flooring company came in and pulled out the carpets and installed oak floors, mirrored walls were dismantled and replaced with wallpaper. Then, nothing for six months. Before the first year was up, a check arrived to cover the condo fees for the second year. “Apartment 17, the cash cow,” became a joke at association meetings. “Let’s get some more London brokers here. What a deal.”
Then, suddenly, in late July of 2000, several tall, unpleasant-looking Middle Eastern men began to leave and enter the apartment at all hours of the day and night and the music began to blare out of the open windows. The Ring of the Nibelung, and, even louder and worse, music played on zithers.
This activity would go on for several days, then nothing, then begin again.
A retired orthopedic surgeon named Carlton Rivers was the new president of the condominium association. He thought it was just his luck that this situation should develop the month he took office. He had run for the unpaid job because he had it in for the building supervisor and was planning on firing him soon. Instead, this blaring music, coupled with the sleazy-looking Middle Eastern men. Carlton wasn’t Jewish but his college girlfriend had been, and he felt a deep empathy and connection with Israel, to which she had disappeared the day after their college graduation. Her name was Judith and she had given Carlton the greatest sexual experiences of his life. He had let her go, thinking he could reproduce those experiences elsewhere in the world. It had not proved to be true. It had been his initiation into sex and it had proved unbeatable. For years after she was gone he would drift off in the middle of an operation and remember her teeth or mouth or hair and sigh deeply for the paradise he had lost.
When he began to make money, his main charity was a research hospital in Haifa. He thought of going there to find her but he never did. He was busy in medical school, then as an intern, then establishing a practice. Finally he married a dark-haired nurse who gave great blow jobs and went on with his life. There were no children of this union and Carlton was secretly glad of that. He was not a man who could tolerate much disorder.
His wife died the year after he retired. When he recovered he threw himself into campaigning to become president of the condominium association. He had barely had time to enjoy his success and begin his campaign to rejuvenate the place when the goddamn Arabs started coming into the building and blaring out Wagner at all hours of the day and night.
He called the condominium lawyers and they wrote letters to the owners in London. There were no answers to the letters. Phone calls were made to the phone numbers in the records of the condominium association and those at the real estate firm which had handled the two-million-dollar sale. A call was placed to the brokerage firm the owner was supposedly associated with. All these telephone calls were answered by machines. Mr. and Mrs. Alterman were out of the country and could not be reached was the information supplied by the machines.
Carlton was going ballistic when, as suddenly as it began, the music stopped and did not start up again. No one entered or left the apartment. There was no mail. The apartment phones rang but were not even answered by machines.
Three weeks of silence went by. Then, on September 13, there was a meeting of the association and the first order of business was what was going on in 17 and what should they do about it, if anything.
“Apartment seventeen,” Carlton began. “We allowed the sale to a couple we had never met. That’s done. They never set foot in the building. Nothing wrong there. Wealthy people buy things they never use. Then, suddenly, there are Middle Easterners coming and going at all hours and music waking up eighteen, nineteen, twenty, fifteen, and the people on the fifth floor of 988. Our lawyers write the owners and get no reply. We call all the numbers left by the owners with us, the Realtor who sold the place and the brokerage firm where he supposedly worked at the time of the purchase, but they say he is no longer with them. So what are we to make of this? And what should we do?”
“Nothing,” Mrs. Bloodworth answered. She was the vice president of the association and still had her nose out of joint because Carlton had been chosen over her for first in command. She was a stout matron with iron gray hair who wore old-fashioned suits made by a tailor on the Upper West Side. She had taught chemistry at Harvard and never let anyone forget it. “We called this meeting to talk about raising the condo fee three hundred dollars a month to make up for the shortfall of unpaid dues on empty apartments. That, coupled with the seven-hundred-dollar raise in insurance premiums, has put many owners in distress. The last thing we want to do at this point is create a problem with seventeen. Seventeen is paid in advance for the next fourteen months. The problem has ceased. We should forget it and get on with the business of finding someone to work on the eaves and roof.”
“You’re prejudiced against Middle Easterners, Carlton,” a man named Herman put in. “You wouldn’t vote for that nice Saudi woman two years ago. She was an internist.”
“With a degree from a medical school in Guadalajara, Herman. Don’t talk about things you don’t understand. It was on the basis of her so-called education that I voted against her.”
“And now that apartment’s empty too. You can afford to pay these ever-higher fees but some of us can’t….”
“Please, ladies and gentlemen.” Mrs. Bloodworth stood up. “Please. Order in the room. Order.”
“They were advance men for a decorating firm,” Herman said. “One of them told the supervisor that. I don’t understand this constant prejudice we encounter in this group at every step.”
“Bleeding hearts,” Carlton snapped. “I’d have an easier time believing they were making a nuclear device. The music was to cover up conversation. That’s what people do when they don’t want to take a chance on being taped. High decibels render even very sophisticated listening devices mute. I saw that on 20/20 last year.”
“Oh, please,” Mrs. Bloodworth said. “Let’s move on, may we?”
The meeting broke up after a vote on raising the condo fees to cover the cost of the roofing problems, and everyone went back to their apartments muttering about ineptness and the cost of life in the city.
That night Carlton decided to take matters into his own hands. He had a key to the back door of 17 that one of the former tenants had left in his care. He could have used the keys the maintenance crew kept in the basement, but those had to be checked out. After dinner he drank a couple of brandies, found a flashlight, and went up the back stairs to 17. The key worked. No one had bothered to change that lock. He let himself in and, using only his flashlight, began to search.
After an hour of poking around in empty drawers and closets he found the first piece of handwriting he had come across in the whole apartment. It was in the drawer of a bedside table near a phone. It was a list of names.
Frederick Sydney Harwood, Berkeley, California
Joseph Leister, Madison, Wisconsin
Holly Knight, Eureka Springs, Arkansas
Carlton copied down the names and carefully replaced the paper in the drawer. He wrote down the serial numbers of the expensive Bose CD player and the television set. Then he left and went back down to his apartment and called a private detective he knew named Lynn Fadiman and asked to have someone come and get fingerprints from the doorknobs and glass surfaces. “Possible,” his friend answered. “But very expensive.”
“I’m rich,” Carlton said. “Do it tomorrow night. In the meantime, if I give you the names of three people can you get dossiers on them and tell me what they have in common?”
“You could probably do it on the Internet. Have you tried?”
“I don’t have a computer. I’m a Luddite.”
“Okay. Tell them to me.”
Fifteen minutes later Lynn Fadiman called Carlton back. “I’ve got data on all three. Easy. You do have a fax machine, don’t you?”
“No. But there’s one at the all-night drugstore down the street. Here’s the number. 212-555-2345. You got it?”
“They’re booksellers.”
“What?”
“The three names. They sell books. All three of them are big shots in the Independent Booksellers Association.”
“My God!”
“Maybe your music man was a budding author.”
“I don’t think so. Can you get the prints tomorrow night?”
“I told you I would. You’re sure I won’t be caught?”
“I’ll go down and talk to the night watchman while you’re in there. He loves to talk. I’ll pretend I’m having a fight with one of the tenants. I am having a fight with one. I’ll stay with him. He’s the only person who might go in.”
At nine the next morning Lynn called Carlton on his cell phone. “Go to a pay phone and call me now. I don’t like this. Call me now.”
Carlton put on a coat and shoes and went out of the building and over to the drugstore where he had collected the facsimiles the night before. He called Lynn Fadiman. The phone rang once.
“Holly Knight died last night in an accident on a remote highway. She was alone in a car and the car went off the road and into a lake. She was a fifty-seven-year-old woman who never went anywhere at night and at eleven at night she drove a Pontiac off a bridge into Beaver Lake near Rogers, Arkansas. It’s a hit list, Carlton, and it’s time to take this to the police.”
A FIVE POINT TWO AT TENA.M. in the locker room. Nora Jane Harwood was in the ladies’ locker room of the Berkeley Athletic Club trying to get Little Freddy to put on his new swimming trunks when the earthquake moved beneath San Francisco. It began in the sea and roiled its way inland, moving and shaking and being mean. Moved by forces beyond our control, Freddy Harwood was always saying for a joke and it sure fit earthquakes. If the metaphor fits, wear it, was a private joke between his twin daughters.
“He’s going metaphor,” Tammili would say.
“He’s close. He’s almost there,” Lydia would answer.
“It itches me,” Little Freddy was complaining as Nora Jane tried to get him to put his fat legs into the denim bathing suit Lydia had ordered him from Lands’ End. Little Freddy wanted to wear his old red trunks with the torn inner lining and the small, thick elephant sewn on the side. He was immune to arguments that the red trunks were too small. He want-ed to take the elephant into the water, where it wanted to be. He was fascinated by two things in the waning months of his third year on the planet Earth. Elephants and The Wizard of Oz. Elephants of the World was his favorite book. Horton Hears a Who! and Horton Hatches the Egg were his second favorite books, and his favorite garment was his red bathing suit with the elephant on the side and he wanted to take it into the water and let it swim. Besides, it kept him from getting drowned.
Little Freddy hated his swimming class and the big, bossy girl who was always making him put his head under the water or wait his turn to practice on the kickboard. The longer he put off stepping into the new denim trunks the longer it was going to be before Nora Jane took him out to the pool.
“If you just wear it this one time we’ll go out to the mall and get you another one like the red one,” she was saying. “The red one is too tight for you. It pinches your little tally-wacker.”
“Tally-wacker,” Little Freddy replied, moving away from her and climbing up on a bench where a woman the age of his grandmother was putting on her running shoes. “Me don’t have any tally-wacker.” He paused, while his mother recovered and the older woman began to giggle. “If you gimme that PowerBar, I’ll put them on.”
The older woman was really laughing now. Her name was Sylvia Kullman and she was in charge of fund-raising for Marin County Planned Parenthood. Nora Jane had seen her on television and admired her brilliance in debate and her fabulous designer clothes. All the famous designers liked to dress Sylvia for her debates. She was always at the athletic club. She worked out four days a week and it showed. She was past seventy years old and still as trim and supple as a girl.
Little Freddy eyed Nora Jane while she considered his offer. “Okay,” she said at last. “You can have part of the PowerBar but not all of it. You can have one third of it now and the rest when you finish your class.” She pulled the PowerBar out of her bag and showed him how much she would break off if he agreed to the deal. He climbed down from the bench and went to her and began to step into the denim trunks. Sylvia finished tying her shoes, still laughing and smiling at Nora Jane.
“Enjoy them while you can,” she said. “They grow up so fast. Then they’re gone and you have to pretend you don’t miss them.”
Then Berkeley moved. Not just the concrete slab that held the athletic club but the whole town moved, slanting to the east, and then it moved again and then it stopped. Nora Jane grabbed Little Freddy and pulled him to the floor. Sylvia dove beneath a sink. The other women in the dressing room began to moan. A group of three women beside the private lockers were moaning as a group.
“That’s a big one,” Little Freddy said. “I want my PowerBar. You said I could have it. It’s bad to break your promise.”
Nora Jane sat up and handed him the bar. “Are you all right?” she asked Sylvia.
“I’m okay. Should we stay here or go out in the main area? I mean, aftershocks.”
“There’re no windows in here. Not much to fall.”
“But the lockers,” a woman called out. “Could they fall?”
“They didn’t,” Nora Jane answered.
“It was built to specs,” Sylvia said. She stood up and began to take charge. “We’re okay. That wasn’t a big one. We’re all right here. Let’s just stay here a few minutes and not panic. Does anyone have a phone?”
Nora Jane got one out of her bag. “Let me call my husband, then I’ll give it to you. I have two girls at school. Surely they’re okay.” She pushed a button and Freddy Harwood answered at the bookstore. “I’m okay here,” she said.”I’m at the club. Call about the girls. I need to let other people use the phone. Call me back when you can.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m in the locker room. We’re going to stay here for a while. I won’t leave.”
She handed the phone to Sylvia, who called her husband, then handed the phone to the other ladies and they made calls but none of their calls went through. The lines were getting jammed.
Little Freddy was sitting on the floor eating the PowerBar. Nora Jane got another one out of her bag and offered it to Sylvia.
“Half,” Sylvia said. “He’s making me hungry. What’s his name?”
“Frederick Sydney Harwood. I’m Nora Jane. We own Clara Books. On Telegraph Avenue.”
“I go there all the time. Sylvia Kullman. I’m glad to know you. I see you working out although why you bother with your body, I don’t know.”
“To be healthy,” Nora Jane replied. “I like to do it. It feels good. I think about all the carpenters and cowboys and people who do real work and how fine and strong their bodies always are, compared to people who sit at desks all day and screw up their minds with thinking and selling things.”
“I’m afraid it’s vanity with me,” Sylvia replied. “My mother was injured in a face-lift situation so I won’t do any surgery. I have to do it with exercise and so I do. Sometimes I like it but I think it’s mostly vanity.”
One of the three moaning women had gone around the corner to the sofas where the young women nursed their babies and had opened the door to the main room of the club. A woman was screaming in a distant room. Screaming her head off. Screaming like there was no tomorrow.
Then the second shock shook the building and the woman began to scream even louder.
“A hysteric,” Sylvia said. “It doesn’t sound like pain.”
“We should go home now,” Little Freddy said. “I want to go to my own house.”
“Let’s get on your shoes,” Nora Jane answered. “There could be broken glass anywhere. You have to wear your shoes.”
“Let’s make our way to the lobby,” Sylvia suggested. ‘At least let’s move to the nursing sofas and get near the door to the lobby. There’s nothing in that area to fall, is there?”
“The glass table with the flower arrangement.”
“Let’s move it.” Sylvia led the way around the corner to the nursing alcove, which was near the door to the main lobby. The others followed. There was a glass-topped table on a thick pedestal near the door. Nora Jane and Sylvia moved the flower arrangement, then picked up the glass top and set it on the floor. “Upper-body strength,” Sylvia said. “I told my husband it would come in handy. He thinks I’m nuts to work out all the time. He’s jealous.” They shoved the beveled glass tabletop underneath the coatracks, and Nora Jane dumped a basket of wet towels on top of it. They moved past the nursing sofas and pushed open the door to the lobby. It adjoined the racquetball courts and the basketball court and the aerobics and yoga rooms. Men and women were herded into small groups in the lobby. The glass walls of the racquetball courts were intact, and two of the trainers were passing out bottles of Gatorade and trays of health food snacks, Luna Bars, PowerBars, peanut butter bars, and homemade raisin cakes. People were talking on cell phones and looking subdued. Two young women were nursing babies on a large flowered sofa. Little Freddy made a beeline for that activity. “Titties,” he whispered to Nora Jane. “Titty babies. Them not big like me.” He burrowed his head in her legs and she sat down and took him into her arms. Weaning had been very hard on Little Freddy. Just the thought of titties drove him wild with deprivation. There was nothing on earth he liked as much as sinking his mouth onto his mother’s sweet, milk-filled teats. His lost paradise, his Shangrila.
“You’re a big boy now,” Nora Jane told him. “You have chocolate milk in a paper carton with a straw.”
“Yes,” he said mournfully. “That’s what I do.”
A young trainer, one of the fifteen or sixteen men at the club who was in love with Nora Jane, that is, deeply smitten, not just in constant appreciation of her startling, luminous beauty, stopped beside the sofa to ask if she was all right.
“Who was that screaming?” Nora Jane asked. “Was someone hurt?”
“A woman fell on one of the treadmills. She skinned her knee. Jay Holland, the eye doctor, was up there and took care of her. He’s got her in Beau’s office. There were three doctors on the machines, a radiologist, an eye surgeon, and an internist. I guess this is the place to be if an earthquake hits. The little guy seems happy. He didn’t cry?”
“He was eating a PowerBar. He loves to eat.”
“Did you see that demonstration at the Democratic convention? With those nuts protesting breast-feeding? They said it caused unhealthy oral fixations. I thought it was a joke, but then the cops arrested some of them.”
“I didn’t see it. I guess we have enough crazies in California now. I guess we’ve reached our limit.”
“There is no limit. They keep coming. Anyway, I thought of you when I saw that on television. I thought you’d get a kick out of it.”
The owner of the club had come out into the center of the lobby and was holding up his hands. “There could be other aftershocks. The police have asked us to stay here for another hour or so. Traffic is going to be horrific everywhere anyway. You can take mats into the aerobics or yoga rooms and do stretches, none of you stretch enough, admit it, or you can use the basketball court but we don’t want anyone upstairs near the machines. Snacks and drinks are on the house. Jeff will get a television going in the snack bar if you want to see it on television. We think there are forty-six people in the dub and fourteen three- to four-year-olds. If your children are okay, take them into the playrooms and let them play together. No one was in the pool. There was only one injury and it’s being treated. Let the trainers know if you need help. It’s ten forty-five. Let’s shoot for staying in the building another hour.”
People began to wander off into various activities. Sylvia invited Nora Jane to stretch with her in the yoga room and Little Freddy agreed to go into the nursery to play with the other children.
The third shock hit just as Little Freddy was settling down with a Lego game. His friend Arthur was sitting beside him. When they felt the floor and table move they started laughing so hard they couldn’t stop. “It’s a big one,” Little Freddy yelled. “Get on the floor.”
“Titty babies,” he whispered to Arthur to make him even more hysterical with laughter. “Them are titty babies.”
Nora Jane and Sylvia had just unrolled their mats when they felt the third shock and they felt it roll and took it. Then they got up and went to the nursery to see if Little Freddy was all right. He and Arthur were still sitting at the table laughing their heads off.
“We could learn from that,” Sylvia said.
“I do,” Nora Jane replied. “It’s a new world. I never had a boy.”
“You sing opera, don’t you?” Sylvia asked. It was an hour later. People were beginning to fan out into the parking lot to find their cars. “I know Anna Hilman, the director at San Francisco Place. She told me about your voice. She heard you sing last year at the benefit. She said it was divine. I wish I’d been there. The reason I’m bringing it up is that we are having a fund-raiser in December and I wondered if we might persuade you to sing for us. It’s national. I mean, you’d have to go to New York. It’s going to be in the Metropolitan Opera House. We want to take San Francisco talent with us so it won’t be all East Coast. Would you even consider doing it? We’d pay your expenses, with your husband, of course. I have a house on Park Avenue, actually. You could stay with us if you don’t have a hotel you like.”
Nora Jane wasn’t answering, so Sylvia went on. “I don’t mean to ask you on a day like this but I thought you might want to do it. It will be on C-Span. I don’t even know if you are interested in Planned Parenthood.”
“Of course I am. I just never sing in public. It just isn’t something I enjoy doing. I’ve done it five or six times in the last few years, but proving I can do it doesn’t make me like it. My grandmother was a diva. She taught me, years ago in New Orleans. Somehow it has always been part of my love for her, not something I want the world to hear.”
“Anna said you sing like an angel. She said you had a really astounding range.”
“I do. It’s a gift. I’ve almost never studied or used it. I took from Delaney Hawk for two years. Sometimes I go over and sing with her for a month or two, but that’s about it. I like being a housewife and a mother.”
“That’s lovely, Nora Jane. Commendable in this day and age. Well, think about my offer. I might even be able to get an honorarium. If you get interested, call me.” Sylvia handed her a card and smiled and left and Nora Jane took Little Freddy by the hand and walked out to her Volvo and put him in the back in his car seat and got into the driver’s seat and started driving. She had been in a fine mood, glad the earthquake was a small one, glad to spend time with a star like Sylvia, feeling good, and now she was feeling bad. The world was always reaching out and wanting things from her that she didn’t want to give.
There had been no home for Nora Jane when she was young. Her father was dead and her mother drank. Only when she was at her grandmother Lydia’s house was life beautiful and quiet. All Nora Jane wanted in the world was to keep the world quiet and good for her children. She didn’t want fame, she didn’t want applause, she didn’t want half the money Freddy gave her and put in her name and put in bonds and stocks and accounts for her. All she wanted was for the days to pass in peace and the people she loved to be safe.
Is there no way they’ll let me alone? she thought. All I ever wanted was to keep this one thing to myself, this music Lydia gave to me, the Bach and Scarlatti and, oh, the Puccini. She began to sing an aria from Tosca and Little Freddy raised his voice and sang with her,screaming at the top of his lungs to match her high notes and beating his legs on the car seat with power and joy.
Five days went by and Nora Jane avoided the weight room at the club because she didn’t want to run into Sylvia. Once or twice she brought up the subject of the offer to her husband, Freddy, or her daughters, but they were busy with their own thoughts and didn’t seem to want to discuss her quandary at any length.
“It’s up to you,” Freddy kept saying. “If you want to do it, I’ll go with you and support you in any way I can. If you don’t want to, just tell her so.”
Then a letter came in the mail from the national office of Planned Parenthood inviting her formally to participate in the program and offering her five thousand dollars and her expenses and a dress designed especially for her by Geoffrey Beene. He would send someone to take measurements and consult with her about her taste in color and fabric.
“I’m going to do it,” Nora Jane declared and put the letter in front of Freddy at the breakfast table. “I am doing it for Planned Parenthood and for the dress. I’ll give back all the money I don’t spend. I might have to spend some on lessons with Delaney for a few months. I want to work something up. A tenor from the Met will be there and they think Christopher Parkening. I have to do this, Freddy. I can’t turn this down. This fell in my lap. Grandmother would want me to do this. She would want me to sing at Lincoln Center.”
“Are you sure? Absolutely sure?”
“Yes, I think I am.” She stood in the light from the windows, with her beautiful face screwed up into a terrible imitation of courage and Freddy loved her so much he could not breathe.
“Then say yes. When is the performance?”
“On December the eleventh.”
“We’ll take the kids and spend a week and do Christmas things.”
IN 1996 THE GROUP LED BY ABU SAAD had killed a writer named Adrien Searle as part of the cleansing that surrounded the Salman Rushdie shame. Now more killing must be done. Blood revenge, blood for blood, life for life. If blood doesn’t flow, men never learn.
The new cleansing was supposed to take place on the three days covering the anniversary of the day the three men who killed Adrien Searle were locked away in a prison that was worse than death.
September ?3, Holly Knight. September ?4, Freddy Harwood. September ?5, Joseph Leister. The paladins would move from Arkansas to California, then to Wisconsin.
It would be a full moon, the brightest moon of the year, a lunar shadow, three victims, three assassins, a car wreck, a throat slit, a fire, and they were done and the message was delivered that Fire From Heaven takes vengeance on the ones who helped the one who broke the sacred vows that knit the souls of the faithful together for all time. Amen.
But no one could have predicted an earthquake that would not let the 747 land in San Francisco and took the protectors of the faith to Las Vegas, Nevada, instead, into a hell of iniquity and disgust, unclean past all imagining.
They spread out to stay in three different hotels. They waited for orders but none came. Nothing could be depended upon for several days.
“Allah is good. Blessed be his name,” Abu said. “Order things from room service. Maintain yourselves in patience. We have to wait until he returns to his routine. It won’t be long.”
“Then we go to Wisconsin and do the third act.”
“No, it must be in sequence. The president, the vice president, the secretary-treasurer of their organization, this bookseller’s group. His holiness wants it that way. Do not question things, Davi. Say your prayers, eat food, rest, amuse yourself. In good time.”
Abu hung up the phone and settled himself on the bed to study his French grammar. He was no longer a young man with fire in his blood and was glad that he was not. Every year his study and learning made him a more valuable man to the God he worshiped, and in that knowledge lay all his happiness. He had learned four languages in ten years. French would be his fifth. He needed no praise for his work. He was his own praise. He thought of his father in heaven thinking of him and his begetting and he was glad.
Nora Jane dropped Little Freddy at his play school and started off for Delaney Hawk’s studio on Euclid Street. When the Presidio became the place to be, Delaney had sold her house in Marin and moved back into town. It was a typical Delaney move. A sixty-four-year-old woman selling her house and all her furniture and starting over in a Bauhaus world of bleached wood floors, stark white walls, uncurtained windows, and Pensi and Mies van der Rohe copies. The piano had a room to itself. The only other furniture was three Wassily chairs and an Axis table.
Nora Jane had not seen Delaney since the move, and it added to the strangeness of her decision to sing in New York to have to seek out and find her teacher in a neighborhood she knew nothing about.
Delaney was waiting on the front sidewalk, watching for her. It might be a new neighborhood but it was the same old Delaney, dressed in a long skirt, an orange linen blouse, and a gray cashmere sweater that had belonged to Nabokov when she had known him in London. She always wore the sweater around her shoulders. She wore it summer and winter. The sight of it reminded Nora Jane of whom she was dealing with and made her humble. Delaney Hawk had walked with gods and she did not forget.
Delaney tied the arms of the sweater into a knot and began to direct Nora Jane to a parking place in what anyone would have thought was the front yard. When Nora Jane had turned off the motor, Delaney came around to the driver’s side and opened the door and held it for her while she got out. Delaney was smiling her professional, no-nonsense smile. It was her main smile at this time in her life.
“I’m glad you want to get back to work,” she said. “I need money to get a driveway poured and tear off this porch. Come on in. See the new place.” She led the way to the fated porch and up the stairs and opened the front door and held it while Nora Jane moved into the living room. Four Mies chairs sat in a square around a marble table holding a vase of yellow tulips.
“It makes me want to sing right now.” Nora Jane was laughing. “My God, I bet the acoustics are wonderful.”
“You bet they are. The floors are synthetic wood, they’re made of oil, they contain liquid, not that everything doesn’t although we forget that. Well, let’s get started. What do you want to sing?”
“The Ave Maria by Schubert. Handel, Let the Bright Seraphim. And a modern piece. The girls want me to sing O Holy Night.”
“Oh, God. The Schubert’s tricky. If you have the slightest cold, anything can ruin it. Well, we can do it. This is some turn you’ve taken. What are they paying you?”
“Geoffrey Beene’s designing the dress. I get to keep it. Oh, it isn’t that. It’s for my grandmother Lydia. I might sing Puccini. We’ll see.”
“Which Puccini?”
“Vissi d’arte.”
“I see.” Delaney went to the piano bench and sat down on it facing the piano. She played several notes of the Puccini. “Well, why not. You can do it.”
“It was what Lydia was listening to when she died. When she sang it she wore a blue velvet dress and that is what I’m going to ask Mr. Beene to make for me. I have never sung it out loud since she died. Only in my heart, but I know it better than I know any music in the world.” Nora Jane was crying. Standing in the beautiful, pristine room crying without moving or making a sound. “This is for her. She was the most important person in my life and I have to quit being in denial about what her death did to me and celebrate what I knew.”
“Oh, God.” Delaney was crying also. She had not sung and taught grand opera all her life to back away from the heart and breath of life.
“Then let’s begin,” Delaney said. “There’s water in the pitcher on the table. Have a sip. Come over here. Maybe I’ll go to New York with you if you do this thing. My sister lives there, on the Upper West Side. Yes, if you do this, I’ll go with you. I haven’t been in several years. It’s time to go.”
“Yes,” Nora Jane answered. “Yes, yes, yes.”
She went to the table and poured the water and drank a small amount and walked over to the piano and waited while Delaney looked for the music in a Treviso bookshelf filled with scores and sheet music.
“Do scales,” Delaney ordered. “Start warming up.” She moved back to the piano and struck one note, a C, and Nora Jane picked it up and began to move her voice up and down her incredible range. Delaney shivered, then straightened her shoulders and went back to the bookshelf and began to take out music.
I didn’t forget how, Nora Jane would decide later. You don’t forget. It’s like skating or skiing, balance sports. No, it’s like looking at my children, like love, because it is love and I have not forgotten. My body can still do this thing I love so much, this clear happiness my grandmother gave to me so long ago when there was nothing else I had but this and her and it was enough and I survived and lived to find Freddy and have Lydia and Tammili and Little Freddy and become a person who is going to sing Puccini at the Metropolitan Opera and not be afraid.
That coming weekend, Nora Jane’s twin daughters, Lydia and Tammili, were planning on being gone for two nights to a Girl Scout retreat that included a tour of the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.
“Let’s take Little Freddy and go up to Willits,” Freddy suggested. “I have a huge desire to get out of town. Please say yes. You can rest and I’ll take care of him. I want to take him. He never gets to be there alone.”
“If you’re absolutely sure the power is going to be high enough to pump water.”
“The cells are full. No one’s been in months. I’ll call and have Deesha go out and clean it up and check. Then you’ll go Friday afternoon, as soon as the girls leave?”
“Okay. I’ll go. I love the house at Willits. I just like to think I can take a bath if I want to. Yes, yes, I’ll go.”
“You’re in a good mood lately. I would have hired Geoffrey Beene myself if I’d known that’s what you wanted.”
“It isn’t that. And it isn’t about singing either. It’s about my grandmother. I haven’t finished figuring it out yet. It’s about who she was and being part of that. She used to polish my shoes twice a day when I stayed with her. It’s about having had her and remembering it and being grateful.”
Little Freddy pushed open the door and came into the room. He had his hands folded across his chest as if to begin complaining about something.
Freddy picked him up and carried him to the bed and sat him on his knee. “We’re going to see a mountain lion, son of mine. We’re on our way to Willits to feed the lion.”
“That is not the way to get me to Willits.”
I’m teasing. I’ll let him look through the binoculars. I won’t take him where there’s any danger. You know that. I wouldn’t take him down to the woods unless I knew it was safe for him to go.”
“He doesn’t need to see a mountain lion. He’s only three years old. He can look at pictures of wild animals or see them at the zoo.”
* * *
Abu, Davi, and Petraea moved into a suite at the Sands on the third day of waiting. On the fourth day a message was delivered by a room service waiter. It was in a dialect only Abu read, so he interpreted it for the others.
“On Saturday we go to Berkeley and wait until he closes the store. He is having a book signing for a famous person from New Orleans. He must be there. He parks his car a block from the store beside a shoe store called Intelligent Feet. We can follow him home or we can take him on the street. We will have to use a sedating shot because of the public place. Everything cannot be perfect now. We will leave him in the alleyway between the shoe shop and a ladies’ clothing store. Then we go to the airport, give the car to a messenger who will meet us, board airplanes, and go to Wisconsin by three different routes. All luggage will be checked. Anything we need for the work will be supplied when we get there. Leave only clothes in the suitcases. Nothing else of any kind. The messenger will try to return your things later.”
“It has been a long wait,” Davi said. ’Allah be praised.”
“Amen,” Petraea added.
It was Thursday afternoon when Freddy remembered that the Neville Brothers were going to sign their book in the shop on Saturday night. “There’s nothing I can do about it now,” he told his secretary, Francis. “Tell them I got sick. No, just say I’m sorry. They don’t know me. They aren’t going to get their feelings hurt.”
“Okay. Okay. We can handle it. I just wish you wouldn’t schedule these things if you aren’t going to be here to help. We could have two thousand people, for God’s sake. I’ll be awake for nights thinking about it. They’ll tear up the store.”
“We can straighten the store. We sell books for a living, Francis. We can’t afford to sell only ones we wish people will read. Don’t be a snob.”
“I like their music, some of it.”
“Well, there you are. I’m taking Little Freddy to Willits, Francis. He never gets to go without the girls so he never gets to be there in peace and quiet.”
“He’s three years old. Three-year-olds don’t want peace and quiet.”
“He might if he ever knew what it was like.”
In New York City Carlton Rivers was arguing with Lynn Fadiman. They were in a bar on Third Avenue drinking martinis. It was past two o’clock in the afternoon and they had been arguing for two hours. “Don’t drink any more of that,” Lynn said. “We’ve got to be sober when we talk to the police.”
“We’re going to drag the condominium into this before it’s over. I know we will. It will get out, Lynn. It will be in the papers.”
“What about me? I’ve been snooping through someone’s apartment. But I’m taking my chances. This is duty, plain and simple. That’s it. Let’s eat something and go on over there and tell them what we know.”
Carlton got up from the bar stool and left his third martini untouched on the bar. They walked off to a table a waiter had ready for them. Carlton went back to the bar and retrieved the martini just before the waiter wasted it. “I’m drinking this,” he told Lynn. “Goddammit, Lynn, I’m not a lush. You’re right, civic duty is the price we pay and I was raised to honor that. We’re going. Order something fast. Let’s get a steak. Let’s have some ballast. They could keep us there all afternoon.”
An hour and a half later they were in the office of an assistant district attorney for upper Manhattan talking to a man who was listening very carefully. He was not acting like they were crazy. He was not interested in why they took prints or anything else. As soon as he saw Freddy Harwood’s name on the list he began to fit the pieces into place. He had been part of the team that tracked down the writer Adrien Searle’s killers. They had killed her by mistake while trying to get to Salman Rushdie’s American publisher. The district attorney even recognized the date of Holly Knight’s accident in Arkansas as the date when the murderers were finally locked away in a maximum-security prison.
“I’m sending a team over to dust this apartment seventeen,” he told Carlton. “I don’t want any fuss. The quieter the better. Can you trust the doormen? The supervisor? How long have you known them? We’ll have to do background checks on them, but until we do I don’t want them to know anything. Can you get my men in without anyone knowing they’re there?”
“Sure,” Carlton said. “When do you want to leave?”
“We have to hope they’ll come back. You understand that. That’s why the secrecy.”
“What about the owners? Can you find out who they are?” While Carlton was speaking, a secretary came in and handed the assistant district attorney a note.
“They don’t exist,” he said to Carlton. “You guys were had. They aren’t there. Just the money, being paid from Swiss accounts. By next month it will be gone, like smoke, no more condo fees, I’m afraid.”
“Mr. Rivers’s sister is married to an Arab,” Lynn put in. “You’ll come across that. She married a wealthy Saudi and they raise Thoroughbred horses in Virginia, when they’re in the United States. We discussed it coming over here and decided we’d better tell you about that.”
“Is this relevant?”
“They don’t speak to each other. Mr. Rivers tried to prevent the marriage. The sister’s fifteen years younger. He was trustee of her estate. If this concerns Saudi Arabians, he thinks he might also be a target. It’s just an idea.”
“This has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia. This is about Iran. It’s part of an ongoing problem. Maybe a group called Medina or Fire From Heaven. They’re enforcers. They killed a woman writer four years ago, by mistake. Got the wrong target. They were after the man who published Salman Rushdie in the United States and killed his girlfriend instead. We caught those bastards, some of them, and threw their butts in a federal prison. I can’t believe we couldn’t get a death sentence. Chickenshit judges, covering their asses. People are afraid of these guys, Lynn, and with good cause. Here’s the other thing. One of the people on the list you found is the owner of the bookstore that the publisher and the writer they killed, this Adrien Searle, had just been visiting. He had just had dinner with them. The bookstore owner, Freddy Harwood, is an heir to the Sears Roebuck fortune. He had his store bombed when Satanic Verses was published and the death decree went down. So he’s been in this all along. He’s always been a target. This is a list of the officers of the Independent Booksellers Association. They’ve already killed one of them, Holly Knight, the president of the group. Well, they won’t kill the others. Okay, let’s get cracking. How can you get two or three men inside the apartment in the quietest way?”
“Have them come to my apartment as electricians, workers, and we’ll go up the back stairs. I have a key an ex-owner gave me. The locks haven’t been changed on the back.”
“What about the hit list?” Lynn asked. “Are you going to talk to the other two people on the list?”
“The CIA and FBI are already on it. It’s the first thing I did. You both are considered sworn to secrecy. Don’t tell this at a cocktail party tonight.”
The FBI put four men on Freddy Harwood and even considered warning him, but decided against it. If they could catch the killers trying to make the hit it would be better. Warning people did no good. They always tipped off the assassins. No one can act normally when they think they’ve been targeted.
The helicopter that passed over the house at Willits and scared away the wildlife was not looking for marijuana.
* * *
Saturday, September 23, dawned clear and cold all across the American West. In Las Vegas the men who had set out to kill Freddy were in a happier frame of mind. They had been taken by limousine to a ranch sixty miles from town and were being treated as honored guests by a Medina sympathizer and former Olympic boxer who had retired to raise cutting horses in the desert. Their host was an elegant, vicious man who had seen to it that everything they wanted was within their reach, including several young blond girls who were working their way through modeling school in Vegas. Davi and Petraea took advantage of these gifts, but Abu asked only to go riding in the desert. He woke before the sun rose and said his prayers and went to the stables where a groom was waiting with a big, gray stallion. By the time he was in the saddle, the owner rode up to join him. The groom ran ahead opening the gates, and they rode out into the beautiful morning.
“You are sad that it could not be on the perfect day, but Allah knows what he is doing, Abu. Your prey is waiting. It will not be taken from you. Blessed be the name of Allah. Allah be praised.”
“What time does our plane leave this afternoon?”
“At two. We’ll get you there. When we return we will eat and then leave. I wish I could go with you. I would like to be the one to draw the knife across his throat. This one is the Jew?”
“We hack away at the legs while the true infidel sits in splendor in London being idolized by dogs.”
“Come, let’s ride down into the arroyo. This is beautiful country, Abu. I am honored to show it to you.”
In Berkeley, Nora Jane and Freddy were putting Tammili and Lydia’s gear into the Volvo while Little Freddy sat in the car seat complaining.
“I’m hot,” he kept saying. “Where them going to?”
“We’re going to a Girl Scout Jamboree because we are junior counselors. We help the little girls learn things they have to know.” Tammili climbed in the backseat beside him and gave him a big kiss on the cheek. “You have to do without us for two days.”
“You all don’t have to take us,” Lydia said. “We aren’t going very far. Why are all three of you taking us to Golden Gate Park?”
“Because we’re going on to Willits. We’ve got our gear in the back.”
Freddy locked the front door and got into the driver’s seat and started down the driveway. “I forgot the stuff in the refrigerator,” Nora Jane said. Freddy stopped the car and waited while she ran back into the house and got the milk and lunch she had packed. He was so accustomed to waiting on women he didn’t even sigh. He looked out across the street and examined the neighbors’ yards. He was learning patience. If there was a heaven he was a shoo-in, he was always telling his best friend, Nieman. A man who lives with three women is a humble man.
So he was watching as the BMW 750 came down the street going ten miles an hour and turned into the Musselmans’ driveway and stopped. Since the Musselmans were in Europe for the fall, Freddy thought that was out of whack and picked up the phone and called the Neighborhood Watch and reported it. He picked out the first three numbers of the license plate as he drove by a few minutes later and called that in also. There were three men in the car. Just sitting in the driveway. Not good, Freddy decided. Doesn’t make sense.
Information was going everywhere. The Neighborhood Watch alerted the police who told the FBI within minutes. The men in the BMW called Abu while they were waiting for Freddy to leave his driveway.
The Harwood family drove off in the beautiful morning light. Little Freddy had figured out that Lydia and Tammili were leaving him and he was in a bad mood about that. Lydia slipped him a handful of Teddy Grahams and that cheered him up some but not completely. They always went off and left him. He couldn’t figure out what he was doing wrong.
“Would you make me a baby coffee?” he asked in a pitiful little voice. Baby coffee was his name for chocolate milk in a baby bottle.
“Not now, sweetie pie,” Lydia said. “We’re going to Jamboree. Can I make baby coffee in the car? Think about it. Do you see a refrigerator in here?”
“Momma has some. She’s got some.”
“He needs to stop drinking so much chocolate milk,” Tammili declared. “He’s getting too fat. He’s outgrown all his clothes. We need to start giving him juices and water. He never drinks water.”
When Abu and the owner got back to the ranch, the plans had been changed. “They’re sending a plane to take you sooner,” the owner told Abu after he read a long e-mail. “You need to get ready. The Jew has left town. They are following him. Wake the others and tell them to get packed.”
Many things were happening in and around the house in Willits. The ground was still shifting due to the five point two that had rocked San Francisco the week before. Because of that, the doors and windows in the house were getting out of alignment. Not badly, just enough so it was difficult to raise and lower the screens or to lock the sliding glass doors.
In a ravine a mile from the house an FBI truck was setting up for business. In nearby Fort Bragg, California, two helicopters and their crews were on standby. A third helicopter was already taking reconnaissance photographs.
A satellite was also filming the area.
Seven men were now in charge of Freddy’s safety. Three were watching the house at Willits and the remaining four were following him in two vehicles. One vehicle was staying within sight of Freddy and his family. The other was three miles ahead.
* * *
Abu and Davi and Petraea were in a Ford Explorer driving behind the FBI men but they did not know that was what they were doing. They thought they were alternately following and being followed by a group of gay men and it enraged Davi, who was driving, to have to keep changing lanes with the Chevrolet carrying the FBI people. The FBI men had taken off their coats and loosened their ties in order to seem inconspicuous. Something about the closeness and quietness of the men drove Davi to decide they were gay. He was still in a heightened sexual state due to his days on the ranch. He had also caught a sexually transmitted disease but he wouldn’t know that for several weeks. “I can’t stand to see them,” he told Petraea. “This country is so foul. All foul things are here and nothing is done to stop them.”
“How long have you been here now?” Petraea asked.
“Fifteen years. Only twice did I go home and see my family. Allah is great. He has given me this to do in his service. I do not complain about my exile.”
“Do not look at them,” Abu said from the backseat. “It looks suspicious to stare at other motorists. The police will stop us thinking we are in road rage. And don’t break the speed limit. There are weapons with us now.”
Davi slowed down and let the FBI get ahead. “But they will get ahead and we can’t find them.”
“Sensors are on the car. I can pick them up. Besides, we know where they are going. The man has a shack up in the hills where he goes sometimes on weekends. We are sure that’s their destination. We have a man up there watching for us.”
The fourth Iranian was parked at a small filling station and grocery store at the turn-off from the highway up into the sandy dirt roads that led to Freddy’s house. He had already been waiting long enough to read three newspapers and begin on a magazine. He had told the store owner he had to wait until his engine cooled down. But this was taking too long. He read two articles in the magazine, went in and thanked the owner and bought some potato chips and went back to his car and began to drive slowly up the dirt road. When he was half a mile from theFBI truck he pulled the car behind a large outcrop and turned off the motor and went to sleep. He set an alarm on his watch for twenty minutes. He was very tired. He had not slept the night before. It was difficult work and he did not like not knowing what it was about.
Freddy speeded up to seventy and reached across and patted Nora Jane on the knee. Little Freddy was asleep in the backseat. They were on a two-lane highway that Freddy loved to drive. It had curves and wonderful cuts through the mountains and you could see the history of the land laid bare. He knew it bored Nora Jane to be lectured on geology so he spared her that and told the story to himself. When it was my best friend, Nieman, and myself, we could stop and look at rocks, he thought, but those days are gone. We are married men with lives. He sighed, remembering the year when they built the house, driving up from Berkeley on the weekends in a pickup truck, sleeping in a tent, building fires, seeing stars, studying rocks.
The FBI men had dropped way back. The helicopter had them now and the point man was in place. They could take their time.
In the Explorer Abu was going over their plans. “I want to make sure of the destination,” he said. “Although it could be no place else now that he’s on this road. He’s a creature of habit. Then we will circle around on a connecting road that leads to the house. Then we wait until dark. We go in after midnight and take him without hurting the others. All communication lines will be cut and the car disabled. We leave him in the meadow below the house and walk back to the car and drive to an airport near Fort Bragg. A plane is there already on the ground, waiting. It will take us to catch the planes to Wisconsin.”
“Allah calls for blood,” Davi muttered. “Allah is thirsty for the blood of infidels.”
“Don’t preach, Davi,” Abu answered. “We have not become Baptists yet. You should not watch those preachers on television so much or listen to them on the radio stations. I have been meaning to talk to you about that. You must keep your mind clean to do your work. Also, it is bad for your English and makes you say strange things. It is not good to call attention to yourself. They do not like us here.”
Freddy turned onto the gravel and dirt road that led to his house. The bumping woke Little Freddy and Nora Jane gave him his bottle of baby coffee to get him back to sleep.
When they arrived at the house, they began to unpack the car. The helicopter had its camera trained on them and missed the two minutes it took Davi, Petraea, and Abu to get out of their car and start on foot down into a dry riverbed and begin to walk the back way to Freddy’s house. There was still foliage on the trees near the dry river. It had been a wet summer and the river had been full for months. The trees had had a banner year. Now they waved their leaves above the assassins and hid them from every camera.
“We’ve lost the ragheads,” the FBI agent in charge yelled. “Speed it up. They’re gone. The goddamn sand niggers have fucking disappeared. Let’s go. Let’s get to the house.”
By the time Freddy and Nora Jane had unpacked the car and opened the house and turned on the solar fans and started running water to clear the pipes there were men hidden all around them. Abu, Davi, and Petraea were in a stand of Douglas fir and madrone trees below the house. They were only thirty feet from the mountain lion’s den but they did not know that. The lion had been gone all day foraging near the falls to the west of the riverbed.
The FBI men were out of their car and spread out in a fan along the front of the house. The FBI helicopter was frantically trying to find the men it had lost but was only coming up with the man asleep in his car.
The satellite picked up the lion and got some really good footage of him crossing a sump below the falls, heading for home.
Little Freddy was playing on the back stairs while Freddy watched. Nora Jane was putting groceries away and wondering how the girls were getting along at the science museum.
At five o’clock the sun was still high in the sky and people were getting sleepy. Everyone was getting sleepy except Little Freddy, who had slept so long in the car there was no hope of him taking a nap.
“We’ll spell each other,” Freddy said. “You nap first and then I’ll nap. I want to take him down to the edge of the woods and leave some food for Alabama. You don’t mind if I take him that far, do you?”
“Take the gun then, will you? Wear the holster and cover it up. I don’t want him to see it but I want you to take it.”
“I don’t know about that. What’s the big secret? If you have a gun you explain it to them.”
“All right. I’m going up and sleep in the loft.”
Freddy got the .38 revolver out of the glove compartment of the car and checked to make sure it had shells. He had never owned a gun until Adrien Searle was killed in a hotel in Berkeley after reading at Clara Books. Adrien’s death had wiped out a lot of Berkeley liberal bullshit. He had bought a gun, and both he and Nora Jane had learned to use it.
Freddy put on the shoulder holster, put the gun in the holster, and then opened the trunk and got out an old photojournalist’s vest to use to cover it. He zipped up the vest and walked to where Little Freddy was arranging rocks on the bottom steps of the stairway.
* * *
From the stairs there was a wonderful view of the woods with the sky stretching out beyond them. There were always clouds in this vista, because of its nearness to the sea. It was a landscape that changed its colors all day long. In the center of the view was a rock outcrop where the old mountain lion Freddy called Alabama loved to come and sun himself. It was there that Freddy had first seen him. For fifteen years since that time he and Nieman had left treats on the rocks when they were there. It was a ritual.
Freddy had been an overprotected child who had not had a father to teach him to be brave. He had had to figure it out for himself or with Nieman’s help. They figured it out intellectually as they did most things in their lives. If there was a wild animal who had the potential to be dangerous, they studied it and were cautious in their dealings with it.
Still, Freddy liked to walk down to the outcrop and leave dog treats on the rocks. He liked thinking of the old lion’s pleasure when he came upon these windfalls. Also, he liked to believe that the lion could smell his hands on the treats and would know they were gifts from a friendly member of another species. Usually he carried a heavy walking stick and a can of Mace on these excursions. Now, rather than argue with Nora Jane, he had added the gun.
“Would you like to walk with me down to where the old lion lives?” Freddy asked his son. “We can take him some dog treats and leave them on his rock and then we can sit on the balcony and watch to see if he comes to get them.”
“Like dog food?” Little Freddy asked, looking up from his rock work. He had lined up ten rocks to make a rock family.
“Better than dog food. These are dog treats, very special. To animals these are like candy. See, they come in different colors, like the cereal Grandmother Annie gives you when our backs are turned.”
Little Freddy studied the box of dog treats. If there was one thing he really liked to do it was get his grandmother’s poodle’s dog food and go behind the sofa and eat it. If his grandmother or her maid caught him they went crazy. They ran around and yelled and held their hands up in the air. Dog food was good! It was hard, like eating salty rocks, and you could keep it in your mouth a long time, like the gum the baby-sitter gave him once. Like those round chewing gums they never let him get out of machines, only once that baby-sitter had gotten him some, and he had never forgotten it.
“You remember that baby-sitter that time that give me that gum?” he asked his father.
“Well, these aren’t for you to eat, son. These are for our friend, Alabama. He isn’t our friend really. He’s a wild creature and we have to be careful, but we can go and leave him treats. He doesn’t care about us one way or the other. He hunts for a living.”
“Well, okay. If you let me carry the box.”
“Okay. Let’s go.” Freddy held out his hand.
“Wait a minute. I got to put the daddy rock on the top.” Little Freddy picked up the largest rock in his collection and put it on the highest step he could reach from the ground. Then he stepped back to look at his creation.
“What are they doing?” Freddy asked.
“Them are watching The Wizard of Oz.“
“Who all is there?”
“Momma rock, daddy rock, sister rocks, these ones are friend rocks that came over to play, this one is the baby-sitter rock.” He held up a pretty granite formation split to show pink inside. His favorite baby-sitter wore pink all the time. It was her signature color. Freddy shook his head in wonder.
“Okay,” Little Freddy said. “Let’s go down there then.”
They started down the long sloping hill to the woods, thick stands of Douglas fir and cedar and madrone trees. They were the pride of the property and the reason Freddy and Nieman had chosen this piece of land on which to build their house. It was virgin woods, sprung up when the cataclysms that built Northern California had stopped long enough for plants to begin to grow. “Birds brought these seeds,” Nieman loved to say. “Or they were carried on the hides of animals or blew in with the wind. It is dazzling to imagine how it came here.”
“Uncle Nieman says birds brought the seeds that made those trees grow here,” Freddy began. “We should get some of the seedlings and plant them in town. Would you like to do that with me?”
“Is the lion going to eat this whole box of treats?” Little Freddy asked. “Every one of them?”
“Well, he’s a pretty big lion, for mountain lions. He’s old. He probably isn’t a very good hunter anymore. He’s probably hungry a lot of the time and he needs a treat. I have some treats for you at the house. When we get back we’ll have them.”
“What treats do you have for me?” He was hoping it was gum but he knew it would not be.
“Well, some oatmeal cookies for one thing, with raisins in them. And some graham crackers for another.”
Davi saw them coming. “Allah brings the man to us,” he said. “Now it is revealed.” And he thought suddenly that his whole life had been lived for this moment, when he, Davi, who had been sent from his mother at the age of seven to live in the hard camp and learn a warrior’s ways, who had been beaten and despised and risen up from his despair and become so good at his work that he was chosen to go to the United States to do Allah’s work on earth and earn his way to heaven, he, Davi, now stood moments away from that reward. Allah is good, he knew. And he rewards the faithful.
“Abu, can we take him with the child watching, or must we wait?”
Abu bowed his head. He was quiet for a long moment while he sought help in prayer. “Now,” he said finally. “Allah guides us. We will follow. You, Petraea. Take him quick. I will get the child out of the way.”
The old lion moved back toward his den smelling the sack of treats that was moving his way. Nieman and Freddy had been leaving them for fifteen years. Occasionally, he walked out of the woods and sunned himself on the rock outcrop visible from the house. That was the whole encounter for all those years. A bowl of dog treats on a vertical uplift near an old madrone. A lion walking out and sunning himself within smell of men.
But these smells were confused. The good smell of the treats and the familiar smell of Freddy’s photojournalist vest, then another smell, of fear and musk and oiled guns. The lion knew that smell and knew its danger.
The lion moved through the high grass and out onto the glade until he was about twenty feet from Davi and Petraea.
He stopped and waited.
Freddy was almost to the outcrop where he always left the treats. It was a group of three large rocks with an opening in the center. On top was a large flat rock with an indentation like a bowl in the middle.
Petraea moved a few feet. The lion moved with him.
Freddy sat Little Freddy on a flat rock and let him fill the stone bowl with the treats. Little Freddy filled the bowl half full, then took a blue treat and raised it to his mouth, watching his father as he did it.
“You know better than that,” Freddy said. “Those treats are for animals. We have human treats at home for boys.”
Little Freddy held the blue treat up into the air, then dropped it into the bowl and continued very slowly filling the bowl from the sack.
Petraea moved several feet, then stepped out in view of the rocks and raised the rifle. Little Freddy saw the lion before he saw Petraea. He saw both of them before Freddy did. He was looking right at Petraea when the lion leaped on the man and began to mangle him.
Freddy threw himself on top of Little Freddy and pushed the child down into the crevice between the rocks. He took out the revolver and stood up and raised it. He did not want to shoot a man or a lion or anything that lived, but he shot. He shot at the lion’s flank and then the field was full of men. Two men were on top of him and talking.
“FBI,” one of them said. “We are here to help you. Don’t move. Where’s the child?”
Behind them two other men were running into the woods. The old lion was heading down a path to the river, disappearing like a streak of sunlight.
“Did I hit Alabama?” Freddy asked. “God, I hope 1 didn’t hit the lion.”
“He ran off all right,” the agent said. “I don’t think you could have hurt him much.”
Little Freddy was still in the crevice. It was a nice, roomy place. He had brought the sack with the remaining treats with him and was lining some of them up on a ledge in front of him. He put two on the ledge and then he started eating some. He was eating a blue one and a reddish one. They were good. He liked them almost as much as he liked his grandmother’s dog food that she kept in the closet in her big house with the big pool.
Nora Jane heard the shots and came running out onto the balcony. She stopped and looked and then ran down the stairs and then down the pasture as fast as she could run.
“Let me go,” Freddy said. “She’ll be hurt.” But an FBI man got to her first and took her arm and began to explain what had happened. “Your husband and child are all right, Mrs. Harwood,” he said. “Everything is under control. Let me take you back to the house.”
“I want my child,” she said. “I’m going to my child.”
* * *
By the time she got to the outcrop Little Freddy had his mouth full of dog treats. “What are you eating?” she said. “Oh, my God, what do you have in your mouth?”
“Sometimes when they eat things like that you need to get their sodium and potassium checked,” the young officer began. “We had a problem with one of ours eating dirt after it rained. It turned out he was low on sodium because of some allergy medication we were giving him.”
Petraea had been mauled but not badly. His left cheek was cut and there was a long tear on his upper arm and he had sprained an ankle. The medevac crew decided to helicopter him to Fort Bragg before they stitched up the wounds. “I don’t want to go sewing that up until we culture some of the saliva,” the young M.D. decided. “We’ll clean it and wrap it and take him on in.”
“His blood pressure’s very low,” a male nurse insisted. “I think he’s in shock. How are we going to sedate him? I think we should get the truck and do it here.”
“Well, it’s not your call,” the M.D. said. “Goddammit to hell, I’m the doctor here.”
It took several hours for the National Guard and the FBI to find Davi. The Guard brought in German shepherds and they tracked him to a madrone tree. He was covered with insect bites by the time they got him down. He was armed with a Ruger and an old Ortigies caliber 7.65 but he did not shoot when the tree was surrounded. It seemed somehow not to be worth the trouble and besides he was tired and very hungry.
Abu had been harder to take. In the struggle he had wounded a young guardsman from Petaluma. The young man would never throw a football again or hold a woman against his chest without pain. He would try playing soccer with a group of wealthy men in Marin but it would never be the same. Still, he would have five hundred thousand dollars in corporate bonds with which to build a great house with a recreation room in which to watch other men play sports, and that was something. Fortunately, both his children were girls. It’s not as if he had a son he could have taught to be a quarterback.
They had surrounded Abu in a grove of young trees. The dogs had him. There had been no need for the young man to go in but Abu had shot a dog and the young man had gone crazy and charged. He shot Abu in the leg before Abu got off the shot that ruined his arm. After he was down one of the big dogs came over and lay down beside him and whimpered like a child. It had been the young man’s job to care for the dogs and he was fond of them and they of him.
“Is this ever going to end?” Nora Jane asked. It was several days later. They were at home in Berkeley, in their own home, in their bedroom. “If it isn’t we have to go somewhere and change our names. I can’t live like this, Freddy. I want you to take Salman’s books out of the store and put an ad in all the papers saying you won’t carry them. If you don’t do that I will take the children and go away. I will not be part of this. I am not a revolutionary or a political person.”
“The death decree was lifted. This sect is a bunch of crazies. They have to have enemies to exist. I was just in the line of fire.”
“They killed Holly Knight. We had dinner with her in Portland last summer at the Association meeting. Adrien Searle, then Holly Knight, that’s two people that we knew. And Little Freddy was there when armed men came running out from all directions. I think he’ll remember that. Plus, the girls know everything because it was in the papers. God knows what it will do to them to know their parents were almost killed in a Holy War.”
“I’ll sell the store, Nora Jane, if that’s what you want. I’ll call a broker and put Clara Books on the market. Say the word. If you want me to, I will.”
“I don’t know. Let me think about it.”
“Are we going to New York still?”
“Yes. I think we are. I have a lesson with Delaney this afternoon. She’s been calling every day. She thinks you should give in and take the books out of the store. It’s not as if they were asking you to quit selling Shakespeare.”
“It’s the principle. I’ll sell the store but I won’t refuse to stock books because of terrorist threats.”
“Then sell it. Principles are abstractions. I’m talking about live children, live lives.”
“Then I’ll sell it.”
“Then I want you to.”
They were in their bedroom. The drapes were drawn back. A cool blue sky was visible through the windows. It was eleven o’clock in the morning.
“Arabs and Palestinians have their side to things,” Nora Jane said. “They have families. They eat and sleep and need houses and security, they need part of that goddamn sand the Jews were crazy to want in the first place. Peace is never going to happen over there until the Israelis give back some of the sand. But I live here, in Northern California, in the richest country in the world and I won’t be involved in that mess. I have one political idea. To protect my children. You can help me with that or I’ll go away and do it by myself.”
“I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”
“This is it, Freddy. This is how the world works.” She opened the sliding glass doors that opened onto her walled garden, which was modeled on the Japanese garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She went out and sat upon a bench and looked at the designs in the windows of the wall and she thought about the carpenter who had made them for her and she thought about design and patterns and how space was bent into time and the heart of matter and the universe of stars and all the work there was to do to get ready to go to New York and the reality of evil and how it never leaves the world, never, never, never goes away. Greed, envy, cruelty, hunger, disease, and death.
And in the face of that, beauty, “the frail, the solitary lance.” I will sing my heart out for that audience, Nora Jane decided. I will walk out on the stage in my blue velvet dress and for a moment beauty will win and I will be its helper.
The old lion could still smell the dog treats on the stone. The two pieces Little Freddy had left in the crevice were still on the ledge where he put them. The lion had bloodied his paw trying to get them a few days before so now he just climbed up on the flattest stone and rested in the smell and the warmth from the sun. He had eaten well the night before, a snake he caught by the falls and a crippled rabbit he found in the woods. Hunger was leaving him alone on this fine September day and he fell into a light sleep. A memory of spring came to him, waking up and moving out into a field deep with grass. The smell of flowers and a den high on a bluff.
It was some days later. Nora Jane was in her house being talked to by a man in a suit who had once been the star of a college track team. It was very hard to be in Nora Jane’s presence without being distracted, but the man was trying. “You are being guarded twenty-four hours a day by the best and most highly trained men and women in the world,” the man was saying.
They were in the sunken living room with the pianos. There was a tray with tea and cookies. There was a pitcher of lemonade and tall frosted glasses and a plate of lime and lemon slices. Nora Jane was wearing a yellow play dress and her hair was pulled back into a bun like a dancer’s. A yellow flower was in the bun.
Tammili and Lydia were listening from the upstairs balcony, sitting very quietly on the floor, not hiding, just being quiet.
“You are being guarded as if you were the president of the United States,” the man continued. “This is the treatment we give federal judges when they are threatened. We don’t think there is a threat to you. We think we have most of the group. The one named Davi is talking his head off. An Afro-American preacher got to him on a television show. We’ve been letting him watch television as long as he keeps on cooperating. I don’t think he’s playing us. We think he’s spilling his guts. It’s a huge windfall. It’s what we wait for. We’ve got this shrink talking to him. Davi’s telling him about the camps where he was raised. He’s crying all the time. Everything he’s told us so far checks out. The position of the camps, the number of personnel, everything. We think we have rounded up the entire group in the United States. I don’t think you have anything to worry about, Mrs. Harwood. We think we can keep you safe.”
“If we go to New York?”
“You’ll be safe there. We’ll have personnel in the hotel. We will stay on this. We have orders to stay on it.”
“Please have lemonade. I made it an hour ago. It’s very good, I think. Please let me pour you some.”
“There’s one other thing.” The agent took the lemonade and sipped it. “The man in New York City who found the list is a retired surgeon. He knows about your concert. He asked if he could meet you when you’re there, after your concert, of course. It’s unprofessional of me to give you this message but he’s been hounding us to get in touch with you. He’s from New Orleans originally. He knew your father or something.”
“My father died in the Vietnam War.”
“We know about that. Well, I just wanted to give you his name if you ever want to call him.”
“Okay. Give it here.” She waited, here it was, the part she hated about performing. But this man had been instrumental in saving Freddy’s life. And he had known her father. It might be all right to talk to someone about that at last.
“His name is Dr. Rivers. I’ll write it down for you.” The agent took a pad and pencil from his pocket and wrote down a name and address and handed it to her.
“I’ll write to him,” Nora Jane said. “Thank you for giving this to me.”
“This lemonade is fine. I haven’t had a lemonade in many years. It’s good. It’s really good.”
“Let me pour you some more.” Nora Jane leaned over and poured the lemonade. She was so near the agent that for a moment he thought that he might faint. It was all right for someone to be that beautiful, he decided, but it takes some getting used to for a working man.
“We’re going to New York,” Tammili declared. “She’s going to do it.”
“I knew she would. She’s brave, Tammili. She only worries because of us.”
“Let’s call Grandmother Ann and get her to take us shopping. She’s the only one who’s going to let us buy something we really like to wear up there.”
“She’s the best one to shop with.”
“Let’s call her now.”
“Okay.”