Time Bomb

30

Still unable to reach Milo. Unable to get a bored desk officer at the West Side station to tell me where he was.

Where were the cops when you needed them?

I remembered Judy Baumgartner’s account of her cryptic conversation with lke. Relax your standards. If I was interpreting my dictionary correctly, that made sense. I phoned her again at the Holocaust Center. Her secretary informed me she was out of the office and was cagey about saying more. Remembering what Judy had said about death threats, I didn’t push, but finally managed to convince the secretary that I was legitimate. Then she told me Judy had flown back to Chicago, wasn’t expected back for three days. Did I want to leave a message? Thinking about what kind of message I could leave, I declined and thanked her.

As I hung up, I thought of someone else who’d be able to firm up my theory. I looked up the number of the Beth Shalom Synagogue and dialed it. No one answered. The directory yielded three Sanders, D., only one with no address listed and a Venice exchange. I called it. A woman with an accent similar to the rabbi’s answered. Children’s voices filled the background, along with what sounded like recorded music.

“Rabbi Sanders, please.”

“Who may I say is calling?”

“Alex Delaware. I met him at the synagogue the other day. Along with Detective Sturgis.”

“One moment.”

Sanders came on saying, “Yes, Detective Delaware. Any progress on Sophie?”

“Still an ongoing investigation,” I said. Amazing how easy that came…

“Yes, of course. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got a theological question for you, Rabbi. What are Orthodox Judaism’s criteria for determining if someone’s Jewish?”

“Basically, there are two,” he said. “One must either be born to a Jewish mother or undergo a proper conversion. Conversion is predicated upon a course of study.”

“Having a Jewish father wouldn’t be enough?”

“No. Only the Reform Jews have accepted patrilineal descent.”

“Thank you, Babbi.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. You’ve been very helpful.”

“Have I? Does your question have anything to do with Sophie?”

I hedged, repeated the open investigation line, thanked him for his time, and hung up. Tried Milo again beth at the station and at home. At the former, the desk officer’s boredom had progressed to torpor. Answering machine at the latter. I told it what I’d learned. Then I tried the network again.

“Mr. Crevolin’s in a meeting.”

“When will he be free?”

“I can’t say, sir.”

“I called yesterday. Dr. Alex Delaware? Regarding Ike Novato?”

“I’m sure he got your message, sir.”

“Then how about we try to get his attention with a new message.”

“I don’t really-”

“Tell him Bear Lodge claimed nine victims, not ten.”

“Barry Lodge?”

“Bear, as in the animal. Lodge as in Henry Cab- as in hunting lodge. Bear Lodge- it’s a place. It claimed nine victims. Not ten.”

“One second,” she said. “I’m still writing.”

“You can also tell him that apathy claimed the tenth. Just a few months ago. Apathy and indifference.”

“Apathy and indifference,” she said. “Is this some kind of concept for a script? ’Cause if it is, I know for a fact the season’s completely programmed and it’s really not worth pitching anything until they clear the board for the next sweeps.”

“Not a concept,” I said. “A true story. And it would never play on prime time.”

She called me back an hour later to say “He’ll see you at four,” unable to keep the surprise out of her voice.

At five to four, I walked across a network parking lot crammed with German and Swedish cars. I was wearing a tan gabardine suit and carrying my briefcase. A roving security guard in his seventies took down my name and directed me to a flight of metal stairs that led up to the second floor of the bulky deco building. On the way, I passed a canopied waiting area filled with hundreds of people lined up for tickets to the latest late-night talk show. A few of them rotated their heads to inspect me, decided I was nobody to be concerned with, and turned their attention elsewhere.

At the top of the stairs were double plate-glass doors. The reception area was big as a barn: thirty feet high, walls bare except for a giant reproduction of the network logo on the south side and, just below it, a door marked PRIVATE. The floor was travertine tile, over which a surprisingly shabby maroon area rug had been laid. In the precise center of the rug was a rectangular glass coffee table. Hard black leather sling chairs ran along both sides. On the far side of the room a young black security guard sat behind a white counter. To his left a white Actionvision monitor played some sort of game show. The sound was off.

I gave him my name. He opened a ledger, ran his finger down a page, turned to the next page, did more finger-walking, stopped, made a call on a white phone, listened, and said, “Uh-huh. Okay, yeah.” To me: “Be a couple of minutes. Whyncha have a seat.”

I tried to get comfortable in the sling chair. The glass table was empty- no magazines, not even an ashtray.

I said, “Nothing to read. That supposed to be a philosophical statement?”

The guard looked over as if noticing that for the first time, chuckled, and returned his attention to the monitor. A hefty woman in a print dress was bouncing up and down, embracing a male host who was trying hard to maintain a blow-dried smile. As the woman continued to hug him, the smile finally faded. The host tried to get loose. She held tight. Colored lights flashed in the background.

The guard saw me looking. “They turn off the sound. Don’t ask me why- I just started. That’s some kind of new show-Fair Fight, I think it is. Still trying to figure out exactly what it’s all about. What I think it is, is that you got to insult your friends, give away their secrets, in order to answer questions and win the big money.”

The host finally pried himself free of the hefty woman. She started bouncing again. The name tag on her bosom fluttered. Despite her bulk, she was firm as a canned ham. The host smiled again and pointed and said something. In the background a beauty-contest runner-up in a black mini-dress spun something that resembled a bingo bin. The camera closed in on numbers incandescing along a giant roulette wheel rimmed with flashing light bulbs.

The guard studied the screen, squinting. “Tough to know what they’re saying,” he said. “I figure a couple of more weeks on the job and I’ll be able to read lips.”

I settled back and closed my eyes. At four-ten the PRIVATE door opened and a young woman with strawberry-blond hair stepped out. She wore a sequined red T-shirt over black jeans and had a reluctant, tired smile.

“Dr. Delaware? Terry can see you now.” She gave the door a shove and walked through, leaving me to catch it. Treating walking as if it were an athletic event, she took me past a half-empty secretarial area to a short, bright hallway marked by six or seven doors. The third door was open. She said, “Here,” waited until I went in, and left.

No one was in the office. It was a medium-sized room with an eastern view of more parking lot, tar-paper rooftops, intestinal twists of hammered metal ductwork, and the smog-softened contours of central L.A. The walls were gray grass cloth; the carpeting, tight-nap industrial tinted the dull aqua of a poorly serviced swimming pool. Floating in the center was a clear-plastic desk with matching chair. Perpendicular to the desk was an anorexic couch upholstered in slate-blue tweed. Facing the desk were two blue chairs with chrome legs. Warm and comfy as an operating room.

Three of the gray walls were unadorned. The one behind the desk was filled with color animation celluloids. Cinderella. Pinocchio. Fantasia. Given what Judy had told me, I hadn’t expected political posters, but Disney took me by surprise. My gaze lingered on Snow White about to accept a poisoned apple from a gleeful crone.

A man came in, cupping his hand to his mouth and coughing. Forty or close to it, short, with a pallid, soft-featured face under a salt-and-pepper new-wave crew cut stiff with butch wax. One of the faces that had been in the group photo, younger, thinner, long hair. Second row, right, I thought. Shadowed by Norman Green’s towering height.

He stared at me. There were sooty bags under his eyes. A gold stud sparkled in his left ear. He wore a baggy black bomber jacket over a gray silk T-shirt, gray sharkskin trousers with pegged cuffs, black high-top Reeboks.

He sat down. The height of the apple in the Snow White cel was such that it appeared to sit atop his head.

William Tell in Melrose Avenue duds.

He said, “Terry Crevolin.” Incongruous bass voice.

“Alex Delaware.”

“So I’ve been told. Sit.”

As I did, he got up and locked the door. Two silk T-shirts exactly like the one he was wearing hung on dry-cleaner’s hangers from a hook on the back.

He returned to the desk, sifted through papers for a few moments, then said, “Yeah, you look like a doctor. What kind of doctor are you?”

“Psychologist.”

“Psychologist. But you know about what plays in prime time.”

I said, “I know Bear Lodge sure wouldn’t. Too long ago and times have changed. No one cares much about a hunch of radical freaks blowing themselves up.”

One of his eyes twitched. He looked at my briefcase.

We had ourselves a little staring contest. He was pretty good at it- plenty of practice, no doubt, with desperate writers pitching concepts. But I’d sat through tens of thousands of hours of therapy. On the doctor’s side of the couch. Waited out every evasion known to mankind…

Finally he said, “I was given the impression you had something for me- a concept. If you do, let’s hear it. If not…” Shrug.

“Sure,” I said. “Here’s a concept: adolescent search for identit-”

“It’s been done.”

“Not like this. My protagonist is a bright young kid, orphaned at a very young age. Good-looking, idealistic. Half-black, half-Jewish. His parents are political radicals who die under suspicious circumstances. Seventeen years later he tries to find out how and why. And ends up getting murdered for his efforts- set up in a phony drug bust. Lots of good stuff in between but probably too downbeat, huh?”

Something that could have been pain scuttled across his face. He said, “You’ve lost me.”

“Ike Novato. Novato as in Spanish for novice. Novice as in green. The little boy who once belonged to Norman and Melba Green.”

Crevolin inspected his nails.

I said, “He tried to see you this past summer, couldn’t get through.”

“Lots of people try to see me.”

“Not about Bear Lodge.”

He peered at a cuticle.

“Do lots of them get murdered, Mr. Crevolin?”

Some color came into his face. “Boy, this sounds pretty dramatic.”

“He was murdered. Check it out for yourself. Last September. Drug deal gone wrong down in Watts. Funny thing is, though, people who know him say he never used drugs, had no reason to go to Watts.”

“People,” he said. “There’s no way to know someone- to really know what goes on in someone’s head. Especially a kid, right? The whole kick about being young is keeping secrets, right? Creating your own private world and keeping everyone else out of it. If you’re really a shrink you should know that.”

“Ike Novato’s secrets were dangerous,” I said. “They may have killed him. And his grandmother too. An old woman who lived in Venice named Sophie Gruenberg.”

His mouth opened, then closed.

I said, “She disappeared a few days after he was killed. The police think someone disappeared her. They’ve got no leads, can’t seem to connect any of it, think maybe there’s a dope connection. But I’ll just bet they’d love to talk to you.”

He said, “Oh, shit.”

I said, “Gruenberg to Green. Green to Novato. The family had a thing for name changes, but they kept the hue consistent. When did Norman Green change his?”

“He didn’t. His old man did. For business. The father was bourgeois; the mother didn’t approve of the name change. After the old man died, she changed it back.”

“But Norm didn’t?”

“No. He liked the old man. Politically, he saw eye to eye with his mother. But she was hard to get along with. Abrasive. Emotionally, she and Norm weren’t close.”

His nostrils flared and closed. He rolled his lips over his teeth, chewed on a pinkie. “Listen, I’m sorry to hear all this. What’s it got to do with me?”

Bad bluffer. Pinocchio would have laughed and lent him his nose.

I said, “I think you know. One family destroyed- three generations exterminated, because the wrong people got asked the wrong questions. Asking you might have been safer, but Ike couldn’t get through.”

He waved a hand frantically. “Don’t lay that on me.”

“You’re laying it on yourself. You’ve never forgotten Bear Lodge. That’s why you agreed to see me.”

He slumped, ran his fingers through his spiky hair, checked the time on a wristwatch thin enough to fit through a coin slot.

I said, “Getting his message last summer brought back those memories full force. You probably considered seeing him. Your idealism may be long-buried under a heap of game shows but-”

He sat up. “I don’t do game shows.”

“- you’re still a person of principles. Or so it’s been suggested.”

“Yeah? By who?”

“Judy Baumgartner at the Holocaust Center. She says you helped them get that documentary produced. She’s the one who told me about your book.”

His expression turned sour. He pulled something out of his jacket pocket. An orange lollipop that he unwrapped with stealth and haste, as if it were a forbidden pleasure. He jammed it in his mouth, sat back, hands folded across his belly, pacified.

“Principles, huh?”

“Why’d you turn him down?” I said. “Too painful opening old wounds? Or was it just inertia? All those meetings you take every day, you simply didn’t have the energy to handle another one?”

He yanked out the lollipop, started to say something, gagged on it, and stood up, turning his back to me. He faced the rear wall, taking in his cartoon buddies.

I said, “Fairy godmothers and glass slippers. Would that life were so simple.”

“You with the government?” he said.

“No.”

“Show me some ID.”

I took my driver’s license, psychology license, and medical school affiliation out of my wallet and handed them to him. “Got major credit cards, too, if you want to see them.”

He turned around, examined them, gave them back. “Doesn’t really mean anything, does it? You could be who the papers say you are and still be government.”

“I could but I’m not.”

He shrugged. “And what if you are? Like you said, times have changed- no one cares anymore. What’s my crime? Shifting gears into a survival mode? What’s the penalty gonna be? Working at another network?”

I smiled. “How about working with game shows?”

He leaned forward. “Come on, level with me. What’s this really about?”

“It’s about what I told you. I want to ask you some of the questions Ike Novato never got to ask.”

“Why? What’s your connection to him? Were you his shrink?”

“No. I never met him. But I’ve been looking into the death of one of his friends. A young girl named Holly Burden.”

I waited for a sign of recognition, got none.

I said, “Her family asked me to do a psychological autopsy. To try to understand why she died. That led me to Ike. He was one of the few friends she’d had. A confidant. I traced him back to the Holocaust Center, some books he checked out on racism. He’d written your name and number in a margin. Judy was certain he hadn’t met you there, thought he might have tried to reach you because of your previous life.”

I opened the briefcase and pulled out his book. “I bought this today, read the Bear Lodge story and saw the Berkeley picture. Figured out who Ike really was.”

He sat down, put the lollipop back in his mouth and withdrew it quickly, as if it had lost its flavor. “Some literary masterpiece, huh? I was coming down from acid and mushrooms and Methedrine chasers when I wrote that. Flashing back and seeing God. One superstoked weekend, no revisions. I didn’t even come up for air. Pulitzer Prize stuff, it ain’t.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” I said. “It had a certain raw energy. Passion. The kind you probably don’t experience much anymore.”

“Look,” he said, stiffening, “if you think you’re going to come in here and lay all this guilt on me- for surviving- forget it. I’ve worked that through. With my own psychologist.”

“I’m happy for you, Terry. Too bad Ike won’t be working anything through.”

We locked eyes again. Again, he broke first.

“A cave,” he said. “That’s where I ended up- that’s where I wrote the damned thing. In a cave, okay? You understand? That’s how I was living after Bear Lodge. Like some Neanderthal because I had no rich daddy like so many of the others in the movement. No trust fund, nothing to fall back on when the dream ended. I couldn’t get a serious job because I’d dropped out to fight the good fight after one semester. I had a D average, no skills to do anything other than march around and chant. And the market for chanters wasn’t too hot after the dream died, unless you felt like doing some Hare Krishna free-lancing. I even tried that, but their bullshit got to me, their scams and their stinking incense. All I knew was picking fruit, digging ditches, stoop work- that’s the kind of stuff I grew up doing. On a scrub lot that never went anywhere because my daddy couldn’t compete with the big growers and died with more debts than good sense. I headed up the coast, picking my hands bloody, bunking with the illegals. I was in Yuba City when they started digging up all the braceros Corona had hacked up. The guy who’d bunked next to me had disappeared. Victim number twenty-three. That scared me outa there, up to Oregon. My cave. Picking plums by day, playing Neanderthal by night. Scared me into a clear head, too- no acid, no pills, not even hash or grass. No Betty Ford clinic, just me and the long nights and the creepy-crawlies. To help get through it, I started writing. The ultimate therapy, right? Abby had done it; Jerry had done it; why not me? The end result was that piece of stupidity you’re holding in your hot little hands. The first draft was dull pencil on sheets of ledger paper I ripped off from the shift boss. At night, using a flashlight. Later, when I had a couple of bucks, I bought a notebook and some Bics. I wrote other stuff too. Poetry that sucked. Short stories that sucked. A TV script that sucked. Comedy. Lots of comedy. In order to laugh myself out of suicide. Same plot line, over and over: revolutionaries who work for IBM but can’t quite hack the straight life. Ha ha funny, right? I convinced myself it was profound, convinced myself no one was out to kill me anymore and hitched down to L.A. Showered, shaved at the Union Station, bought a suit at the Salvation Army, walked all the way to this center of spiritual purity and tried to get my script read. Couldn’t get a foot in the door, but downstairs there was a sign saying they were hiring pages. I faked a wholesome attitude, got the job. First money I earned was used to publish the piece of crap. First printing of three hundred copies, never went into a second. I peddled it to head shops on consignment, never saw a dime. Learned hippie entrepreneurs were the worst. Learned I wasn’t going to be Mr. Bestseller- time to shift to another tack. So I worked. Every scut job the network offered me. Worked my way up to this. I won’t bore you with the details.”

“Sounds like the American dream.”

“Hey, it’s a free country. Really is. I learned that the hard way. Testing the system- starting at rock bottom and taking it to the limits. Which is more than most people ever do. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty that’s rotten in the system, hut what’s better? The Ayatollah? The Chinese? So I’m here for the long haul, trying to get through each day, paying my mortgage. I know what I do every day isn’t feeding starving orphans, it isn’t heart surgery, but I try to get some quality through when I can, okay? It’s no better or worse than anyone else’s gig, right? Which is what I want now. To be like anyone else. Blend in, concentrate on Terry, learn to be self-centered. Drive a car with leather seats, sit in the Jacuzzi at night, listen to compact discs, and get philosophical. Just get through each day.”

He pointed a finger at me. “I paid more dues longer than anyone else I know, so forget your guilt.”

I said, “Your guilt isn’t my concern, Other people paid dues too. The ultimate dues. Norm and Melba Green, the rest of the gang at Bear Lodge. I’m sure any of them would be happy to trade places with you.”

He closed his eyes, rubbed his eyelids, “Oh, boy, everything comes back like a wheel, doesn’t it.”

I said, “You were part of the group, weren’t you? What made you decide not to show up the day of the big blast?”

“Decide.” Eye twitch. “Who decided? It was an accident-twist of fate. If I read it in a script, I’d call it hokey.”

“How’d you escape?”

“I was babysitting. Taking the kid to the doctor.”

“Which kid?”

“Malcolm Isaac. He was sick.”

“Why didn’t his parents take him?”

“Because they were sick too. All of them were. Puking their guts out. Some kind of intestinal thing- diarrhea, fever. Something they ate- bad meat. I’d just come up the day before. There were two groups, you see. Two cadres. I was part of the second, brought communications from the second to the first. We were all supposed to get together in a week or so. I was a vegetarian back then. Didn’t eat the meat. That saved me. Me and the other kid.”

“Rodriguez and Santana’s son? Fidel?”

“Fidelito,” he said. “He was just a baby, too young for meat, on formula because Teresa couldn’t nurse. So he was healthy too. Crawling around the warehouse, fat and happy. But Malcolm Isaac had it bad. Really high fever, diarrhea, crying in pain. Melba was worried about dehydration, wanted him to see a doctor, but she and Norm were too sick to take him themselves, So they asked me, and I did, Public health clinic in Twin Falls. Me and him and a bunch of loggers and Indians in the waiting room. They had a country-western station on and he was wailing over it, in pain. That didn’t impress the nurses. They turned up the volume, made us wait. Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. Funny the things you remember, huh? I was holding him, wiping his forehead with alcohol pads, when I heard it- beep beep news bulletin breaking into the country music.”

His own brow had broken out in sweat. He wiped it with the back of his sleeve. “Big explosion at a warehouse in Bear Lodge. No one else in the waiting room was even listening- they could care less. But to me it was like everything was caving in, like a big hole in the earth- everything just being vacuumed into it. Then the FBI guy comes on and starts talking about some bomb factory, lying through his government-issue teeth, and I knew someone had shafted them. Knew I had to run.”

“There was no bomb factory?”

He gave me a disgusted look. “Right. Lard and sugar and horse manure and sawdust- we were making a produce nuke, right? If it was that easy, half the farms in America would’ve blown up before Ronnie Ray-gun screwed them over.”

“Half the farms in America don’t have igniting devices.”

“Neither did we. The FBI stooge either made that up or planted it. The supplies we’d stockpiled were for growing, not destroying. Seeds, fertilizer. Organic fertilizer. The sawdust was for compost. The lard was for cooking and making tortillas- Teresa loved to make tortillas. The plan was to stockpile enough stuff to put together a decent-sized collective farm, big enough to be viable. A new Walden. We were gonna move in on government land that was going to waste just a few miles south- land that was ripped off from the Indians in the first place. The plan was to squat on it, liberate it, homestead it, plow, sow, then invite the Indians to join us in the establishment of a new collective state. We knew it wouldn’t last- Tricky Dicky’s Nazis would move in and overrun us. All we wanted was to last long enough to create something viable- for the press. The publicity would put us in a good light- the government destroying crops. What’s more all-American than farming, right? So we’d be the good guys. Black and white and brown and red working together. The establishment would be seen as putting out all the negative energy. Too threatening, so they destroyed it.”

“Who’s they?”

“The government. Or some free-lance running dogs, working for the government. Someone had to have poisoned the meat, planted charges, waited until all of us were in that warehouse, puking, weakened, then blew it to kingdom-come. Some sort of remote-control detonator. Death knell for the dream.”

“Collective farming,” I said. “It’s not exactly what comes to mind when you think of the Weathermen, FALN, the Black Army. People like Mark Grossman and Skitch Dupree.”

“That’s ’cause you’ve been programmed to think that way. Everyone in that warehouse- everyone in New Walden- was a fugitive from violence. We were sick of violence, sick of the way things had turned. Tonio and Teresa had just quit FALN. Skitch had taken a lot of crap for renouncing violence- even got shot at by Black Revo Army dudes because he changed his tune. Norm and Melba were the architects of the plan. They’d turned their heads totally away from violence.” He shook his head. “Bomb factory. Do you think Norm and Melba and Tonio and Teresa would have brought their kids into some bomb factory?”

People had brought their babies to Jim Jones. Sacrificed countless other innocents to other Molochs. I didn’t say anything.

He said, “I sat in that clinic waiting room, and I knew everything was over. I wanted to run. But Malcolm was hot as a skillet, needed to see the doctor, so I sat and waited and hoped no one could see I was ready to burst out of my skin. Finally we got seen by a nurse, after all that time. She gave me medicine, told me he’d probably be okay once the fever broke, to give him lots of fluids, come back in a couple of days. I left, walked around the corner, carrying him, kept walking until I found a car with the keys left in the ignition. Got in, laid him across the front seat, started it up, drove all the way through Nevada, into California. Stopped to buy apple juice and diapers, driving while holding a bottle to his lips. Hundreds of miles of nightmares, roads with no one else on them, him screaming for his mama, me constantly thinking someone was gonna get on my tail, gun us down. Made it all the way to L.A. before dawn.”

“To Venice,” I said.

He nodded. “Like I said, they’d never gotten along, she and Norm, but where else could I take him? I left him on the doorstep and split.”

I opened his book, turned to the Berkeley picture, and showed it to him. “The other people- they were the second cadre?”

Another nod. “They were a hundred miles up the Snake River, negotiating for building materials. The plan was to build log cabins. They had bought the stuff from a logging contractor but got delayed trying to find some way to haul it down- Teamsters gave ’em grief, didn’t want to deal with a bunch of goddam hippies.”

“What’d they do after the explosion?”

“Disappeared. Mostly up to Canada.”

He took the book. Gazed at it. Closed his eyes.

I said, “What happened to them?”

He opened his eyes and sighed. “These two”- he jabbed a finger- “Harry and Debbie Delage. They stayed up there- they were French Canadian. I think they’re teachers in Montreal but I’m not sure, haven’t had contact with them. With any of them.”

The finger drifted. “Ed Maher and Julie Bendix went to Morocco, moved around, and then came back, got married, had a bunch of kids. I heard she died of breast cancer a couple of years ago. He’s probably back east- his family had money… Lyle Stokes got involved in this New Age crap- crystals and past lives. He’s making a fortune… Sandy Porter I don’t know… Gordy Latch married that fascist’s daughter and became a scumbag politician… Jack Parducci’s a lawyer in Pittsburgh, joined the GOP.”

He stared at the picture a while longer, closed the book, and gave it back. “Fuck nostalgia.”

I said, “Who determined which cadre someone went into?”

“It wasn’t anything formal, just kind of natural selection. The first cadre were the leaders- thinkers, theorists.”

I said, “The second cadre fared a hell of a lot better than the first.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Nothing you haven’t wondered about yourself for seventeen years.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “I don’t wonder about anything. Wonderings a dead-end street.”

I said, “Why’d you choose Bear Lodge?”

“Randy Latch owned the property- her father had left it to her.”

“She was Mountain Properties?”

“Behind a bunch of dummy corporations- trust fund stuff, tax shelters. Her old man set it up for her. That’s why we pretended to lease it, so it would look businesslike, no one would dig into it.”

“With those connections,” I said, “didn’t Latch aspire to first-cadre status?”

“He might have, but that wasn’t a serious possibility. He was lots of noise, no substance. Not well respected. One of the reasons they kept him around was her money. After Bear Lodge, the two of them dropped out, reappeared as Jack and Mrs. Armstrong. Still lots of noise, no substance. The American public eats that up, right? No surprise he ended up doing what he’s doing.”

“Tell me about Wannsee Two.”

He sat up straight. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Ike Novato left some notes indicating he was researching it. He wrote it right above your name. He wondered about it.”

Crevolin gave a sick look. “That’s what he wanted to talk to me about? Hell that would have been easy.”

“Easy in what way?”

“Easy to answer. I could have told him the truth: Wannsee Two is government-issue drivel. Tricky Dicky Evil Empire Cointelpro disinformation tailor-made for John Q. Gullible. The government wanted to discredit us, so they planted bogus news items in the establishment press about us getting together with the neo-Nazi fringe- the old crapola about extremists on both ends being equivalent, Hitler and Stalin. Tarring us with the same brush as the KKK in order to isolate us, make us look bad. But in the end I guess it was just easier to blow us up- notice how you don’t hear about Wannsee Two anymore. And there are plenty of right-wing racist assholes running around.”

He shook his head, rubbed his temples. “Wannsee Two. I could have handled that in two minutes. I thought he wanted to get into personal stuff- his parents, raking up old memories.”

“Could Sophie Gruenberg have been interested in Wannsee Two?”

“Doubt it. That old lady was too sophisticated to be taken in by that kind of crap.”

“You knew her well?”

His headshake was vehement. “I only met her once. With Norm. But he talked about her. Said she was a revolutionary of the old stripe- well-read, intellectual. Even though he didn’t get along with her, he respected her intellect.”

“You only met her once?”

He was silent.

I caught his eye.

He said, “Twice. When I returned to L.A.- doing my little network page gig- I checked in with her. To see how things were going.”

“With Ike?”

“With the world.” He twisted his lip between thumb and forefinger.

I said, “Did you really just leave him on the step?”

“You bet I did. It was all I could do to hide and wait until she took him in. Going there in the first place was a risk. I was totally freaked-out, wanted to get the hell out of town before the men in the gray suits came calling. I figured eventually someone would figure out I hadn’t been blown up and try to finish the job.”

He laughed. “No one bothered. All these years.”

I said, “You mentioned the Feds’ running dogs. Any suspects?”

“Sure,” he said. “There were these weird trapper types skulking around in the forest. Mountain men- long hair, beards, homemade buckskins, eating grubs and whatever. Living off the land, like Redford in Jeremiah Johnson. We kind of did a mutual ignoring thing with them, but later, when I had time to think, I started to wonder. Because using them would have been a perfect government setup. We were naïve- we trusted anyone who looked counterculture. Crew-cut types sneaking around would have gotten us immediately paranoid, but those hairy fuckers we ignored. They’d been there before we got there, didn’t seem to have any real interest in us. Also, we respected the way they were doing their own thing. Thought of them as hippies with guns and Bowie knives. Macho freaks. We were jazzed by the whole live-off-the-land bit- that’s what we were aiming for. So it would have been easy for one of them to sneak in, plant the bombs, and sneak out. They were probably G-men or agents provocateurs- probably pushing paper in Toledo today. Which is punishment enough, right?”

The bitterness in his voice put the lie to his last statement.

I said, “Did you discuss any of these suspicions with Sophie Gruenberg the time you dropped by?”

“Didn’t have to. Moment she closed the door she sat me down and started lecturing to me about how the explosion had been a government plot; Norm and Melba and the others were martyrs. No tears- she was very tough. Just anger. This hot rage that made it seem as if she was vibrating.” He smiled. “She was a tough old lady. I could see her running a guillotine back in Bastille days.”

“Where’d she send Ike to be raised?”

“What makes you think she sent him anywhere?”

“He’d just moved to L.A. a few months before his death, told people he’d been living back east. That makes sense. Someone as suspicious as Sophie might be nervous keeping the son of martyrs around in plain view.”

“I don’t know the details,” he said. “When I asked about him, she said she’d sent him away to relatives. Said government people had come snooping around pretty soon after the blast, asking questions of the neighbors. She called them goddam cossacks. Said if they found out she had him with her, they’d kidnap him or something, claim she was unfit and take him away. She said he needed to be in a safe place for a while. I took that to mean temporary, she was planning to bring him back, but I guess she could have kept him away the whole time.”

“Any idea where these relatives lived?”

“She didn’t say and I didn’t ask. I kind of assumed it was Philadelphia because Norm was born there- the family used to live there.”

“You only dropped in on her once?”

“That’s it. She was part of what I’d put behind me. So was Malcolm Isaac. That’s why I didn’t see him- it wasn’t just apathy. What would have been the point?”

His tension had lifted him out of his chair, and his skin had turned waxy. His eyes kept moving, up and down, side to side, back at the cartoon characters. Everywhere but at me.

I said, “I understand.”

“Do you? To understand you’ve got to know what it’s like to be a hunted animal- mainlining adrenaline, looking over your shoulder, hearing things, seeing things. Peeing your pants, afraid to move, afraid not to move. Convinced every tree is a storm trooper, not knowing what’s real and what’s not, when that bullet’s gonna come flying by, or the blade or the time bomb turning you into instant smog. By the time I dropped in on her, I’d finally managed to pull myself out of that insanity. Working at my page gig, renting a little bachelor apartment, going to the supermarket, the laundromat, the filling station. Eating Swanson TV dinners and hot dogs- no more macrobiotics, I was ready for some nitrite-cramming, like a real American. Doing regular-person stuff, so happy and grateful to be alive. I mean, I couldn’t believe they weren’t coming after me- couldn’t believe they were letting me live and work and eat hot dogs and do my thing and no one was trying to blow me up.

He tugged at his cheeks, created a sad mask. “It took me a long time to get there. To realize no one cared about any of it anymore. The war was over; Nixon had gone down; Eldridge was marketing codpiece-pants; Jerry and Abby were doing Wall Street, the talk-show circuit; Leary was asshole buddy with G. Gordon Liddy. Fascists were wearing long hair and beards, hippies going for crew-cuts. Boundaries blurring, all the old myths dead. Live and let live- bygones were bygones. It was my turn to live. I worked at living. Malcolm Isaac’s call came at a bad time. I’d just gotten engaged to be married, was planning to go away with my lady. Real vacation, bring a little romance into my life- better late than never, right? We’ve since broken up, but at the time it looked liked forever, rice and flowers. I had my tickets in my hand when he called. Out the door. Last thing I wanted to deal with was the past- what would have been the point?”

“No point,” I said.

“Gotta keep moving forward,” he said. “No point in looking back. Right?”

“Right.”

But a plain truth filled the space between us- unseen but corrosive.

No one had cared because he’d been second cadre all the way. Too unimportant to kill.