“He’s a cop, Maggie,” Max said.
“So what? John Kennedy was a bootlegger’s son. You have a point to make?”
“At least Kennedy was a democrat.”
“Don’t worry about me, Max.” I tugged on his coat sleeve. “Come give me a hand.”
He followed me into Emily’s study and stood in the middle of the room looking at the stacks of files and the drawers hanging open, clucking his tongue. “What were you looking for?”
“Not me,” I said. “It was Em’s burglar.”
“Goddamn sonofabitch,” he stormed.
“Don’t get started with that crap,” I said. “Are you going to help me or are you going to have a tantrum?”
He stooped to pick up a stack of files. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just feed me some truth, Max. What did Emily tell you to get you to come down to L.A.?”
“Not much. She called the day before, demanded that I fly down. Said she had some legal problems I would enjoy. That’s about it.”
Max was on the floor, gathering together bundles of papers and handing them up to me. I took a stack from him and laid it in the top drawer.
I talked to Lester Rowland at the jail two nights ago,” I said. “He helped bring in Aleda.”
“Rowland is, and was, a horse’s twat.”
“Is and was.” I reached for more papers. “He’s a scary character. He has a special beef, I think, with rich kids who knocked the system and who got away with murder. He’s like something feral, stalking them after all this time, waiting for his moment of payback.”
“It’s been a long time, kiddo. How much payback can he expect? Even if he could somehow prove who set the bomb, other than the Potts family, who really gives a fuck anymore? There’s nothing that he can do.”
“Not legally, maybe. But he could spread more than a little grief with a well-placed accusation.”
“Rowland or anyone else could.” Max was on his hands and knees, gathering in the last of the papers, sorting to the side personal documents and putting them into logical groups: taxes, insurance, rent receipts, and so on. And dumping the esoterica randomly into folders and handing them up to me. We were nearly finished. It hadn’t been much of a job, though it seemed to have fatigued him.
He stood and picked rug lint from his dark trousers. “Wonder if your burglar found what he was looking for.”
“Wish I knew. As far as I can tell, a picture of Marc is all that’s missing.”
“No shit?” Max’s brows met in the center when he frowned really deeply. At that moment, his brows seemed to overlap. He handed me an empty manila folder.
“I’ve been rooting around for something to put in there, but there’s nothing left. Take a look,” he said. The label on the tab read, “Marc Duchamps. Birth Certificate and School Records. 1970-1987.”
Chapter Eighteen
“I clean now,” Mrs. Lim said, struggling behind a cart stocked with enough cleaning equipment to put any hotel maid to shame. “You don’t look so good. You go rest.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I think I will.”
I had a lot to think about. Somewhere in the back of my mind, it was all beginning to gel-old mayhem, fresh mayhem. The possible connections between what had happened to Emily and events from twenty-something years before were both legion and intriguing. I could think of a variety of reasons why someone might want to keep those connections buried. Many of us live, work, on a keen edge that can be easily shattered, each of us perhaps with a different vulnerability.
I was thinking about what Celeste had said. If rumor got out that I was a drunk, perverse, belonged to the KKK, had AIDS, I would have major trouble getting project funding-a big chunk of arts donations comes from rich folks who are politically and socially sensitive themselves. If the charge is set in the right place it doesn’t take much to blast most of us out of the water.
Some people are better survivors than others. My father had avoided being blacklisted during the fifties only by waiting out the craziness by taking a research position with a European university. Many of his colleagues hadn’t been as prescient and had disappeared from academia.
I thought I was getting closer to the answer, but there were still many missing pieces.
I called my mother, but got the answering machine. The message, typical of Mother’s efficiency, said, “Emily tolerated the move to Palo Alto very well. Her condition remains stable. The rest of the family is fine. We hold our friends so dear and thank you for caring.” That was that.
Another call netted me the information that Rod Peebles was hosting a holiday open house for his major supporters in his district offices later in the morning. I was told he was due to show in an hour or so, the variable there depending, I suspected, on how late his night before had been. For at least an hour, then, I was a bit at loose ends. So, while Mrs. Lim attacked what was left of the fingerprint technician’s spotty mess, I turned on the television and tried to get through a few more of the videotapes.
It was tough going, watching Emily and her group perform at demonstrations around the county: at a massed rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, marches on college campuses, speeches given in auditoriums, in city parks, in front of various federal buildings and induction centers.
I heard their cant over and over, heard their blueprint for a perfect world. It sounded so young, so impossibly utopian. It was a beautiful dream, the world they were fighting to create. Peace and love, equality for all, government of the people and by the people. It was also a seductive dream, and I suspect that’s what made the message seem so dangerous. Someone in high places was afraid of them: the official response to their challenge was generally armed troops or squads of itchy-looking police.
Emily and her comrades preached passive resistance, but they were not creampuffs. As often as not, the demonstrations ended in violent routs. Sometimes before they even got underway they were cut off by a furious storm of nightsticks and rifle butts. I watched, with the ache of fear and dread, my knees pulled up to my chest and my hands clenched, as men in riot gear poured into the crowds of unarmed protesters.
Sometimes the men with batons swung their sticks like machetes to cut through the mass of demonstrators. Other times, they seemed to pick a target, always a long-haired kid. They would swarm over the kid, hold on to his arms so he couldn’t cover his head, and beat him, their sticks swinging again and again like spokes on a broken windmill. I don’t understand how anyone survived. When it was over, the men in uniform, smiling, spent, would drag the longhair away. Sometimes there would be a closeup of a bloody face, a semi-conscious kid suspended between two men in uniform, blood pouring into his beard.
On several tapes, I saw Jaime go down into that windmill. Once, Lucas was pulled off a park bandstand and submerged into the netherworld of batons and combat boots. He came up flashing a peace sign with bloodied fingers.
When Garth put together the tapes for me, he had intercut the scenes of violence at peace demonstrations with bits of Vietnam war footage, other young men being brutalized in a very different way. It was a matter of news chronology, I knew, and not an artistic or political device. But juxtaposed in this way, the two parts of those war years – the homefront and the war zone looked strangely similar. Where was the war? It was a lot to absorb.
My parents, when I lived at home, used to restrict my television watching. And at school, we were allowed access only on the weekends. I grumbled about it as a matter of form. After seeing Emily take some good licks, I began to see their wisdom. As a teenager, I doubt I would have been able to handle the scope of both her struggle and her fame.
Though her message was fairly consistent, Emily’s backdrop changed as she traveled back and forth across the country and to Hanoi, Paris, London, Frankfurt. I wondered who covered her travel expenses: Emily was a full-time student, and my parents couldn’t have helped her – they struggled along on a professor’s salary. She must have had enormous debts, financial and otherwise.