The Ancient Rain
Authors: Domenic Stansberry
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Contents
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Death to the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people â¦
âSLA slogan
PART ONE
The Arrest
ONE
The call was one he shouldn't have taken. It was the kind of call, if you'd missed it, you'd never have known, and things would go on as before. If it caught you, though, you would find yourself doing some small thing you hadn't intended, then another, and before long your life had been altered.
It was that kind of call, though Dante didn't know it yet.
He'd been out all night in the Excelsior District on a stakeout, cramped in the back of a Ford Econoline.
So he'd just crawled into bed beside Marilyn. She stirred but did not awaken. She lay in her nightgown, her dark hair spilling over the pillow and her arms strewn recklessly. Dante closed his eyes. As the sky lightened, he skirted the edge of sleep, his consciousness flitting in the shadows. He was pursuing something, or being pursued, it was hard to tell, and he lay on the sheets, his legs twitching. He had a sensation that he was out on the old mudflats, at low tide, with the shore behind him.
Overhead, the sky was dark with birds. He had the impulse to follow them somehow, but he could not lift his feet. His thighs were heavy.
Then his cell went off.
It occurred to him later that if he had turned down the ringer before climbing into bed, like he usually did, then things would have gone on the same as before. There would have been a message on his voice mail when he woke up, maybe, but the urgency of the moment would have passed. Someone else would have been drawn in.
Instead, he took the call.
He smothered the ringer so it wouldn't wake Marilyn, then stepped out of the room. He caught a glimpse of himself. Or something like himself, his angular form emerging from the shadows, from the half light, in the dressing-table mirror at the end of the hall.
“What is it?” Dante asked.
On the other end was a fellow investigator by the name of Bill Owens. Dante had worked with him a couple of months back.
“I need your help,” said Owens.
There was something unusual in the other man's voice. A high note that could be mistaken for hilarity, the way the voice quavered in the digital signal. At the same time Dante heard traffic in the background, the sound of someone crying close byâthough he wondered later if the sobbing was in his imagination, a detail his memory added when it reconstructed the incident.
As it turned out, Owens was on the Berkeley ramp to the Bay Bridge. Owens had been heading into San Francisco, driving his kids to the private school they attended in the city, same as he did most every weekday morning. Only this morning the cops had blocked off the ramp, then converged from behind.
Dante glanced back into the bedroom, at Marilyn, languorous on the bed. She was a good-looking woman, but she made little pig noises while she slept. Truth was, she snored like an animal.
“I'm being charged with murder,” said Owens.
“I don't understand.”
“Eleanor Younger.”
It took Dante a moment. The Younger murder. It had been a notorious case, some thirty years ago. Owens had never really escaped its shadow. Eleanor Younger had been shot to death, an innocent bystander, during a bank robbery out on Judah. The police contended that Owens had been there on the sceneâthat it was a part of a spree of robberies connected to the old Symbionese Liberation Army. The case against him had fizzledâbut it was one of those cases that circled back into the public consciousness from time to time. Either way, the cops wanted Owens now, his wife was out of town, and he needed someone to drive the kids to school.
“Where are they taking you?”
The reception was breaking up, and Dante receded into the hall. He walked toward the mirror but did not glance up. Dante knew what he would see in the reflection: a forty-year-old man, olive skinned, in white boxers and a sleeveless muscle shirt, standing in his lover's apartment. A man who had a face like some prehistoric bird. With a nose that drooped and eyes that were watery and dark.
“Jill's in Chicago. I was hoping you might get word to her,” said Owens. “And the kids, I don't want them sitting around the station. If you could get in touch with Jensen's office, maybe. He's in Chicago, too, with Jill, but⦔
Jill was Owens's second wife, an attorney who worked in a practice with Moe Jensen, with whom Owens himself had a longtime association. Dante was about to ask Owens again where the cops were taking him. It was surprising that they would let him make the call in the middle of an arrest. Usually that happened at the station.
Then the connection was gone.
Dante glanced at Marilyn again. Her lips were delicately parted. She was still asleep, still snoring. He touched her and she quieted, and then she rolled toward him. She did not awaken.
They had been lovers for a long time, off and on, but it was only recently that things had gotten like this between them, where he had the key and came and went like her place was his own. She wore a thin, white nightgown that rode up around her thighs. She made a noise like she was laughing, but then she rolled over and he realized perhaps it was not laughter at all.
She snuffled into the pillow and made another indecipherable noise.
Dante pulled on his pants. He went to the window and eased back the sheers and looked out onto the street.
All night he had been on surveillance. To kill time, he had listened to talk radio.
The government had raised the terror alert. People were worked up and they had things to say, one way or the other. About the government. About the war overseas. About the threats here at home.
It's a conspiracy, the CIA, you can't tell me ⦠all staged by the Jews ⦠the oil companies ⦠we've been infiltrated, our water supply, the ports ⦠we have to strike back â¦
Meanwhile the city looked the same as ever. It was North Beach as usual out there, the old neighborhood, just stucco-and-clapboard buildings lined up helter-skelter on the old streets, on top of the rocky cliffs, with the Pacific below and the gulls cawing and the scent of morning fog.
Dante went outside. On the car radio, the night talkers had been nudged out by the morning-news people. There were antiwar protestors headed down Market Street, the announcer said, hoping to tie up traffic, but the police were outflanking them. Meanwhile Dante thought of the stakeout from the night beforeâand the witness they'd been pursuingâand as he pulled away from the curb, glancing into the rearview, he had the impression that someone was following him. That was the way it was these days, everyone being followed by everyone else.
Or at least thinking they were being followed.
TWO
Grant Street was empty this hour, the meters untaken, so Dante slid into a space in front of Moose's, on Washington Square. It hadn't been his intention, but the square had lulled him in. The fog had not yet cleared, there was a mist in the air, and he could hear the pigeons in the cathedral tower. He got himself some coffee in a paper cup, then sat on one of the green benches that rimmed the square.
Do nothing.
Dante's father used to come here with a notebook and plan out his day. Sometimes the old man's friends would wander by, talking politicsâthe old feuds, the ancient stuffâand hang around the benches. Toward the end, the old man rarely left the park all day.
Dante wondered about Owens's kids.
Probably the cops would take Owens down to the Hall of Justice. So that would be the place to start. Dante knew how the Hall was, thoughâhow slowly the wheels turned.
Likely he would get stuck there for hours.
Dante knew, too, that police protocol for handling children of an arrestee was by no means a fixed thing. The arresting officer's obligation was to the immediate situation, to securing and transporting the criminal. As unlikely as it seemed, there was no requirement to call Child Services to the scene, and little time to do so, and at any rate it could be hours, even days, before the agency responded. So it often happened that the kids at the scene were left to fend for themselves. The last thing the arresting officer wanted to do was to drag a pair of kids down to the station. It was a distraction, and there was enough else to do.
Even if Dante did find them, what was he to do then?
He took out his cell and left a message for Irma at Cicero Investigations. His boss, Jake Cicero, had gone on vacation, and Irma wouldn't be in for another hour. He left a similar message with Moe Jensen's office, even though he knew that Jensen and Jill Owens were doing
pro hac vice
work in Chicago.
Do nothing.
It had been the elder Mancuso's mantra in his later years, his way of dealing with his wife's slide into madness and the problems down at the Mancuso warehouse.
If you do not turn your head, you do not see. If you do not listen, there is no reason to speak.
A cop pulled up. It was part of the new routine. Over the last year, ever since 9/11, the cops had been running the homeless out. For security reasons, supposedly, to protect the cathedral and the post office, they did a sweep after the bars closed, and another, usually about an hour before dawn. Even so, by morning there were a number of bedrolls spread out on the grass. An old woman lay sleeping nearby, under cardboard, oblivious to the dog sniffing her feet. A Chinese family sat bleary eyed near the swing set. At the center of the squareâunder the statue of Benjamin Franklinâa black man warmed himself in front of a can of Sterno. The man dressed as if it were 1977, in a dashiki that had seen better days. He sat with his legs crossed, chanting, words that were almost decipherable but not quite.
The cop's job was to survey the park, poke at packages, look inside paper bags. Survey the area, improbable as it might seem, for biological weapons and explosives.
Dante considered going back up the hill, back to Marilyn. To her body, splayed out over the sheets. To her hips. To her warm breath and the small moaning noises she made in her sleep.