Concert of Ghosts Page 6

  Tennant looked at the young woman. “I’d say the final break with Rayland came about a year after the Harker trial. We met in San Francisco. I was stoned out of my gourd at the time, which didn’t help the situation much. We were speaking like people from different planets. He mentioned he’d given up the day-to-day practice of law and turned his talents to something I found just as laudable as defending ghouls: high-powered lobbying on behalf of the goons who make arms. A whisper in the right congressional ear. A discreet cocktail with a senator in some quiet bar. You know how it works. Rayland’s a persuasive man. And by the time he defended Harker, he’d made a bunch of new pals in the military, and no doubt they saw Rayland’s potential. Want to bulldoze some useless new trillion-dollar high-speed tank through congressional appropriation committees? Rayland’s your man. He’s on intimate terms with all the best ears in town.” Tennant was quiet a moment. “We had a real bad scene in the bar of the Mark Hopkins. There he was in his dark three-piece while I had on this leather vest and faded jeans and my hair down to here—and I dumped a drink on him and tossed peanuts into his face and he slapped me. It might sound amusing now, but at the time it was god-awful. Rayland isn’t big on unseemly behavior in public places.”

  “He was the warmonger and you were the hippie pacifist?”

  “The way I see it, dope beats the hell out of war any old day of the week,” Tennant said.

  There was a silence. Tennant wondered if, having told the story of his relationship with Rayland, he’d actually unburdened himself of anything. Probably not, otherwise he wouldn’t feel the way he did, weighed down, depressed.

  “So you met a friendly lawyer in my father’s firm and he was kind enough to provide you with my address?” he asked.

  “It took some small persuasion and a great deal of patience on my part. But he told me eventually.” She smiled then, perhaps a little slyly, a gesture that caused Tennant to wonder about the nature of this intimacy. It must have been enough to turn the lawyer’s head around, because Rayland’s private files were sacrosanct, rumored to contain damning information about prominent men.

  “Funny,” he said. “I had no idea Rayland knew where I was living. That was naive of me, I guess. He always did have a network of informants and private detectives. I can see how he’d get some satisfaction knowing my address. He has this dark side that enjoys information gathered in secrecy and stored in locked cabinets. It gives him a jab of power.”

  Tennant, dismissing the memory of his father, discarding the sense of betrayal Rayland inspired in him, stretched a hand across the table and let it fall upon the newspaper clipping. In the dimming light he could no longer make out the details of the picture, and he felt indifferent to the faces now, as if the falling darkness had stripped the images of any ability to surprise him. Even so, there was a charge in the air, a sense of impending ambush, like a stillness trapped between canyon walls. He had the instinct that something else was about to happen.

  Alison Seagrove picked up the picture and looked at it. “So you don’t remember anything about this picture because you were too fucked-up on drugs and the whole San Francisco scene. Is that your story, Harry? A casualty of the times. One of the walking wounded. Maybe you blame your father for driving you off into an alternative life-style?” Was there sarcasm in her voice?

  “Blame him? I might have gone to the Haight anyway with or without his contribution. How would I know? I can’t go back and point to the exact spot in the crossroads and say why I took one particular direction instead of another. You can’t always reconstruct things, for Christ’s sake.” He heard irritation in his voice; why did she have this knack for sliding under his skin?

  “You’re not exactly a whiz when it comes to reconstruction, are you, Harry? Maggie Silver, for example. You can’t reconstruct a memory of her at all, can you?”

  He shook his head. He wondered what constituted a recollection in any case. Did you require precise images? Or would a solitary inexplicable emotion suffice?

  “Listen. I can’t help you with your story. It’s museum stuff anyhow. It’s old record albums. Janis Joplin. Country Joe and the Fish. Jimi Hendrix. Peace symbols. In thousands of attics you’ll find trunks crammed with hippie clothes. Beads. Headbands. They all smell of mothballs. Tell your editor you gave it your best shot. Write about something else.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I told you why. Old hat.” He didn’t like her persistence, but he was enjoying, in unexpected ways, the presence of another human being in the house.

  “Ah, but it gets better, Harry. Take the photographer. Sammy Obe was represented by an agency called Cygnet. I got the names of all the people in the picture from the agency files. There were old addresses for three of the participants, but none for you or Maggie. I didn’t expect them to check out after all this time, and I was right. I thought I’d ask Obe if he knew the whereabouts of any of the subjects. I figured, say, a fifty-fifty chance. After all, that photograph made him famous. Maybe he was still in touch. It was worth a try. But I didn’t get further than a phone call to his wife, who says he sits in a room in an institution somewhere in Iowa. On good days, according to her, he can just about weave a few strands of a basket. On bad days, he tears up newspapers and babbles. He’s been in the same joint since 1968. Nobody’s quite sure what happened. One day he was seemingly okay, the next …” She snapped her thumb against her middle finger, suggesting the sound of a mind breaking like a fragile twig.

  Tennant opened the kitchen door and turned on the outside light. Small flares of moisture hung like gases in the reaches of electricity. He liked the rich sound of rain in the woods.

  “Two dead kids, a photographer who’s lost it, and a couple of people I haven’t been able to trace.… That’s what I call all the elements of a good story, Harry.” She stood directly behind him. He could smell her perfume, mellow as a newly punctured peach.

  Flippantly he said, “Maybe the picture’s jinxed.” The rain was harder, the trees buckled. He wanted to step into the core of the thunderous noise. Suddenly the downpour slowed and the dark shed its turbulence.

  “Yeah, right,” Alison Seagrove said. “Don’t you wonder at times? Don’t you ever ask yourself about your black holes or whatever you call them? Is this your whole life, Harry? These woods. Your precious plants. Is this all? It’s not much, is it? Was it ever enough?”

  “It was okay,” he answered. “It was a life, and I lived it, and I lived it quite happily.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Nine years. A little more.”

  “Before that? Did you grow dope someplace else?”

  “Before I came here you mean?”

  “Right. Between the time you lived in the Haight and the time you came here, what did you do with yourself?”

  “I …”

  And he stopped.

  It was as if his mind were a room plunged suddenly into stillness. He walked to the end of the porch and breathed the wet air deeply. He wondered why he was struggling so to get his lungs going. The darkness in his head was bleaker than anything in the woods out there. “Well, Harry? Or have drugs rubbed out all that too?”

  He didn’t speak. He scanned his mind frantically, trying to bring back some memory that would enable him to answer the girl. He felt as if he were rubbing sticks together in the brain in the hope of creating the friction of recall. A tiny flame. Anything. You’ll be okay boyo. You’ll lead a happy life. That voice. Did madness lie in this direction—amnesia, voices, messages from your personal ether? He shut his eyes, frowned in desperate concentration. Nothing came back from the void. It was a gulley without echoes. Go back, Harry. Back before this place. Back and back. What do you come to? “I don’t …” He opened his eyes and looked at the woods and he thought: Nine years in this place is all I have. Where is the rest of me? There was slippage going on; more than slippage. He was slithering down a slope, kicking up nothing but scree.

  “You don’t know, is
that it?” she asked.

  “Wait. Gimme a minute.” He gripped the porch rail, felt rain blow against his face. “Gimme a minute,” he said again. Why was he having this difficulty in fixing that part of his history? The surge of panic he experienced threatened to consume him. Control, Harry. Slow down.

  “Okay. I was in San Francisco,” he said.

  “Until when?”

  “It must have been … 1968, ’69, I guess.”

  “And you came here in what?”

  “April 1981. The twenty-second.” Such precision. Such surprising precision.

  “That leaves about twelve years, Harry.”

  Twelve years. Something in his chest flapped and fluttered. He was suddenly frail, a scrap of paper in the night rain, a kite freed from its line and set adrift across the trees.

  “What do you remember of those years, Harry?”

  “Look,” and he was talking quickly now. “I did all that acid, I told you, I dropped hundreds of tabs of the stuff, I lost count, and the last batch was criminal, and it did something to my head, it did something bad to my fucking head.”

  “Calm, calm down,” she said. “Relax.”

  Relax, right, relax. He was afraid. He had a sudden memory, sharp as ice, of tripping on particularly vicious acid for days. Day after day of terrors. Volcanic eruptions threatened to burn his eyes out of his skull; disgusting reptilian shapes, disturbed from subterranean slumber, slithered among his bedsheets. Some scratching furry thing lived beneath his floorboards. From the window of a room he watched traffic passing along Schrader Street toward the Panhandle and it created an unbroken sinew of lava. Inside the Conservatory of Flowers—he’d no notion of how he’d reached the place—the humidity had devastated him. He might have been drowning in an ancient swamp. A giant imperial philodendron hung above him, its huge fronds flying at him like prehistoric birds. He’d been drawn into massive, gnarled twines, which suggested tortuous freeway systems leading, in directions too complicated to reckon, to the secret center of the planet itself. And what lived there, in fold after fold of shadow, was too dreadful to contemplate.

  How could he remember the specifics of that trip and yet be unable to place it in time? Nor could he bring the room on Schrader back with any clarity. Had he lived there? Maybe it had been nothing more than a place where he crashed one night; you were always sleeping on somebody’s floor in those days.

  He stepped back from the girl and thought: Twelve years and it’s like I never lived them. The thought might have been a meteorite crashing through the fundaments of his life.

  “You had to be somewhere, Harry. You didn’t just dematerialize. You didn’t go out of existence circa 1969 and reincarnate in 1981. You had to be somewhere, for God’s sake.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t remember the photograph. The people in it. You don’t remember a whole chunk of your life. Think, Harry. Were you in a hospital? Did somebody look after you? Think.”

  A hospital? He had no such recollection. “I don’t know, goddamnit, I don’t know.” Lost, he turned his face away from the porch. The only life he ever really knew lay dead in the woods.

  “Harry.” The girl took his hands and drew him back inside the house. She made him sit at the table. She poured him a glass of Jack Daniel’s. He sipped it, but it did nothing to dispel the chill inside him.

  “Why did you never ask yourself about your past, Harry? Why did you never wonder about those years?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.” It was as if he’d come into existence in this place in April 1981 and he’d started growing dope in the woods and every now and then he flashed on the old days in the Haight and that was it, that was all. Amnesia—the word was monstrous.

  Alison sighed. “Maybe you don’t want to remember. You know, something you buried, didn’t want to look at. Something that happened in San Francisco.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. If it was me I’d kill to find out. I’d want to know where I’d been and who I was with. I’d want to know why I can’t remember.”

  “I told you. Drugs and more drugs.”

  “Drugs, okay. But drugs don’t necessarily kill your curiosity, Harry.”

  Tennant turned his empty glass upside down and tapped it with his fingertips. Sure, he was more than curious; who wouldn’t be? But fear held him back. Fear of movement, of discovery. His past twelve years were blanks and he’d lived so long without even pondering them. Why blow the clouds away now? And yet: I always had this odd feeling, this sense of something without a name that lay in the landscape. But I never let it trouble me because … because I was too busy.

  “Here’s something for you to consider, Harry. You’re in a bad situation. You sit around here, you stand a good chance of going to jail. Right?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “Face it. You’re carrion for guys like Flitt and this Rozak character. They’ve got your number.”

  Flitt and Rozak, he thought. Were they accomplices? Was Alison correct in her assumption that Rozak was part of the general game? Tennant’s mystification turned to something else; it was as if he’d stepped into a river and the currents were eddying unpredictably around him. Flitt, Rozak, Judge Stakowski, perhaps even Harcourt McKay—he had the weirdly illuminating notion that they were all part of a scheme to imprison him, that they met in the back room of some local restaurant and discussed how to manipulate his fate. He recognized paranoia in this line of thinking, but sometimes paranoia, in the absence of any facts to the contrary, was the only reliable compass. He felt panic again. His brain became crowded with bad possibilities, images of conspiracy, Rozak whispering to Flitt, Flitt playing a round of golf with Stakowski, Harcourt McKay having a quiet cocktail with Rozak—permutations that had only one outcome: Send Harry Tennant to jail. He glimpsed, on one level, that none of this was clear thinking, but his brain wasn’t operating logically. Fear, a familiar cumbersome weight, pressed back in on him.

  “I should get the hell out of here,” he said. “I should skip.”

  “Exactly. Unless you want to sit around and wait until they come for you, Harry. The idea of being a fugitive is a damn sight more attractive than the county jail. I couldn’t hack that.”

  I couldn’t either, he thought. It was more than the dread of confinement now. It was the prospect of brutality. A guard who didn’t like him. An inmate bored to the point of sadism. How could he tolerate that?

  She sat next to him at the table. “Let’s say you run.”

  “Let’s say.”

  “Let’s say I go with you.”

  “You want your story.”

  “I’m not going to deny that. Maybe there’s a connection between your loss of memory and whatever it is that happened to the people in the picture—”

  “How could there be?”

  “I don’t know, Harry. But I’m not going to be happy until I find out. And I don’t think you’re going to be happy either.”

  For a moment he considered an alternative to flight. He’d call his father, who would surely arrange for some slick smartass in the firm to defend him in place of the bumpkin McKay; but this idea was a measure of his desperation. Contact Rayland? No way.

  “What the hell have you got to lose?”

  He gestured vaguely at the house. But he’d already lost that.

  “Think about it, Harry. What can possibly keep you in this place?”

  She’s right. There’s nothing here. Maybe there never has been. Mirrors, clouds, deceptions. Nothing. If more than twelve years of his life had vanished, why should he lose even more time behind the bars of the county slammer? He got up from his chair. Somehow he’d come to a decision, but the fear hadn’t left him. He was still cold.

  He went up to the attic, where the cops had forced open some old suitcases that had been in the house longer than Tennant. Clothes styled in the fashion of the late 1940s spilled from the cases. A sweet aroma of decay filled the attic sp
ace.

  The gun was still in its hiding place, a space behind a wood panel. He’d never liked guns. He wondered why he wanted it anyway. Protection, sure—but from what? Everything was happening too quickly. What was he doing, agreeing to fly off into the night with a girl he hardly knew? It wasn’t altogether rational—but nothing made sense to him anyway.

  In the same concealed compartment as the gun were two Maxwell House coffee cans stuffed with money. He removed the cash, which amounted to some six thousand dollars in hundreds and fifties. He was ready now, as ready as he’d ever be, even if he wasn’t sure of anything except trepidation—such as a visionary on paper wings of his own design might feel flying from a high cliff down to a fretful sea.

  6

  Tennant kept expecting the Cadillac to be pulled over. Whenever he saw a highway patrol car, he waited for sirens, but nothing happened. Alison drove with one hand resting lazily on the wheel. Sometimes she smiled at him, as if encouraging him to relax. On Interstate 90 towns floated past in the night—Oneida, Utica—communities forged in the same dreary foundry.

  Alison said her first stop was New York City, where she had a minor lead—minor was an overstatement, she admitted: Skimpy was probably correct—to the man known as Bear, whose real name it seemed was John Sajac. “It’s not much, but it’s worth checking out anyway. I’ve investigated five or six different leads about Bear in the past few months, but none amounted to anything. I’ll say this for myself. I’ve got all the instincts of a hound dog. Failure’s a kind of fuel for me. It keeps me in overdrive. And if this one turns out a bummer I’ll still go on looking. Sooner or later I’ll find Bear Sajac. Or Maggie Silver. Or both.”