The Ancient Rain (11 page)

“I'm chilly,” said Kate. “Can I get my sweater?”

Marilyn leaned toward the girl. “I'll get it for you. I need mine, too.”

The back door was locked, as Owens suspected. It was just like Annette, the way she tried to control everything—and so he got up and walked with Marilyn, key in hand, to let her in himself.

“Oh, thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

“I don't want to miss the play.”

“They'll wait.”

He stood in the kitchen, in the hall, and watched Marilyn go into the living room. Marilyn bent over, picking his daughter's sweater up off the couch, then looking for her own on the rack by the window. She had her back to him, and he stood in the doorway admiring her. She was not of their group, no, with her silver blouse and her jewelry and her dark hair that smelled of the salon—and maybe Owens found her more attractive for that reason, for her wide hips and her tight skirt. But at the same time there was something else, darker maybe—and he suspected Marilyn was conscious of his looking, that there was something studied in the way she lifted her head, gazing out the window, curious, as if something out there had drawn her attention. Then the window imploded.

There was flying glass and a sudden burst of light. Then smoke, thick smoke, and in that smoke, as he struggled forward, Owens caught a glimpse of Marilyn, just ahead, a shadow illuminated by fire, a figure in flames—but then he could see nothing.

The smoke overcame him. He fell to his knees.

PART THREE

Code Pink

FOURTEEN

The cocktail had been well made. It was Finnish-style, the police said later—made in a vodka bottle, with a Bengal light strapped on each side. The Bengals were slow-burning flares, of compacted powder, that emitted a small blue flame. Whoever had thrown the cocktail had likely stood inside the hedge, invisible from the street, and hurled it through the window. The cocktail ignited when it hit the glass and the contents splattered out—a mixture of gasoline and grease and tar.

When the glass broke, the liquid splattered. The flames followed the mixture. The curtains were sheer and ignited easily, and smoke issued from the couch. It was noxious smoke. Where the mixture landed on flesh, the effect was like napalm—a tarry mixture that generated its own heat and burned through the clothing and onto the flesh and kept burning.

Some of the mixture had hung for a split instant in midair, droplets of gas suspended in vapor.

Then there was a burst of flame and light.

Marilyn felt a searing in her lungs, as if she were on fire from the inside—a burning across her face, her chest, her thighs.

The flames leapt from her dress.

*   *   *

At the moment of the explosion, Dante had been at the table in the backyard, watching the Sandinista and Annette Ricci move in pantomime, puppetlike across the lawn.

Then he was on his feet.

At first he could not enter the living room, the smoke was so thick. Back in the kitchen, he ran a dish towel under running water, then held the wet cloth over his face. He entered the living room on his knees, close to the ground, where the smoke would be less dense.

He saw Owens—down low, on his elbows, struggling along the carpet.

Dante pulled Owens into the kitchen. He left the man gasping on the tile and went back after Marilyn.

The towel slipped and soon he was gagging, his eyes streaming from the smoke. He saw her in the center of the room, where she had collapsed on the carpet, apparently trying to roll out the flames. He put his body over hers, smothering the fire. The air was better down low, and he grabbed her under the arms, pulling her along the carpet, but it was too slow, and so he cradled her over his back, stood up in the heat and roiling smoke, and stumbled forward.

In the kitchen, Jensen was helping Owens. Dante staggered into the Sandinista at the top of the stairwell, and there was a minute when all three of them might have fallen if Dante hadn't shifted himself into the wall, bearing their weight. Then Dante brushed him back. He collapsed with Marilyn on the back lawn.

Her clothes still smoldered.

Dante knew something about burns and that the first step was to strip off the burning clothes and cool the body. He called out for ice, for water. He did not notice Annette Ricci already on her knees beside him in her outfit from the play, a peasant dress embroidered with peacocks. Later Dante would wonder about the backyard door and why it had been locked—but at the time he did not reflect on that, noting instead in the back corner of his mind the glance she exchanged with the Nicaraguan—as if something had gone terribly astray—and noting, too, the hardness, the steely calm in them both, as the Nicaraguan headed out to reconnoiter on the street, and Annette dipped her hands into the Styrofoam cooler she'd brought from the table. She dumped the ice, wrapping the soda cans and beer bottles as compresses for Marilyn's wounds.

Marilyn's cheeks were blistered, her eyelids singed, the hair frizzled back to the scalp on one side. Dante placed a damp rag over the side of her face, hoping to cool the burn, while Annette Ricci put compresses about the thighs and abdomen.

“No,” he said, waving her off, worried that Marilyn's temperature would drop too fast.

Her breathing faltered, her chest did not move.

He placed his fingers in her mouth and cleared the air passage and put his lips over hers.

She came to consciousness, moving spasmodically beneath him, muttering, then she was gone again.

“Get me the hose,” said Dante. “Get me some water.”

Dante wanted water to lower her temperature. Marilyn had burns over a good part of her body. The wounds should be iced, but drop the body temperature too far, and she would go into shock. Her face was red, and it was already starting to puff up, and there was a string of postules across her face where the tar grease had spattered. There were holes in her skirt from where the tar had burned through, and an ugly cinch around her waist where the elastic had melted into the flesh.

When she came to again, she twisted painfully on the ground, clawing at the dirt. She was delirious and uttered a stream of obscenities.

“Fuck me … no … I can't see…”

She started to shiver, and Annette came now with the cloth from the picnic table. There were sirens in the distance. He did his best to cool her burns with the water, and at the same time keep her out of shock, keeping her warm under the cloth.

“No,” she moaned. “My eyes…”

*   *   *

When the paramedics arrived, they started working on Marilyn even before they had her on the stretcher. They hooked her to an intravenous and put on an oxygen mask. The paramedics were young and lithe and had the ability to keep their voices calm, offhanded, in a way that was both reassuring and detached. They covered her eyes with a thin gauze and then loaded her into the ambulance.

Dante stood alone on the sidewalk. He had made a mistake bringing her here.

He felt now the ache and rawness in his own lungs, the effects of the smoke, and felt, too, the rawness on his cheeks, the blistering on his forearms and thighs where he had brushed against the flames. Standing there on the street, he looked back at the house—at the bamboo hedge, at the sidewalk, the alley of garages that led out to a busier street below.

An incendiary device. Loaded with gasoline and hurled through the window.

Who?

Likely the perpetrators were gone. But sometimes, if you moved quickly, you got lucky …

One of the paramedics took him by the arm.

“Your turn,” said the paramedic.

“No.”

Something happened then.

On account of the smoke inhalation. Or his mind just let go. Either way, the next thing he knew he was lying in the darkness, in the ambulance, Marilyn moaning beside him.

“You're beautiful,” he said.

Then it was dark again, and in that darkness the paramedic slipped an oxygen mask over his face.

*   *   *

Sometime after midnight, Leanora Chin showed up at the hospital. The last time Dante had seen her had been at the Federal Building, the day Owens was arrested. She wore dark blue, same as before, the same outfit, it seemed, with her black hair gathered in the back. She had come to Mercy, as far as Dante could tell, to see if the medical report would offer any insights as to the cause of the explosion. She talked to the emergency staff for a while and then came to find Dante. He had been treated and sat now in the waiting room. Chin, he learned, had already been out to General, where Owens was being held for observation. Marilyn, though, had been brought here, to Mercy, on account of the burn unit.

“Where were you at the time of the explosion?”

“Marilyn went inside, to retrieve a sweater. Then the cocktail came through the window.”

“Cocktail? Why do you say it's a cocktail?”

Chin's voice was flat, devoid of innuendo, but there was suspicion underneath, he knew. There was always suspicion underneath.

“There were grease splatters on her clothes,” Dante said. “Hot grease and tar. And I could smell the gasoline.”

“How about the people in the backyard?”

“What about them?”

“Who were they?”

Dante told Chin as many names as he could remember. He watched her write the names down. She did so slowly. Likely she had gotten these names already, or most of them, and was just writing them down to crosscheck. Still, the cop dwelled over the names. Asked him a little bit about each. Went back over the incident again, wanting to know if Dante had seen anyone on the street. If any of the guests had come and gone. If anyone had been there before, maybe … someone … Dante realized the implication. The people at the scene, you always had to consider them. He would do the same.

“No. They were all in the backyard.”

“There was a man earlier, who came with Annette Ricci and her boyfriend. He brought in the tamales.”

Dante shook his head. “He was gone before I came.”

“Were any of these people in the drug trade?”

“What are you trying to say here?”

Chin put her pen down.

“The Oakland investigators, they told me they had a case like this, last year—some kind of drug dispute. So the dealers put a cocktail through the window. Little girl burned to death. These kinds of things, they happen in Oakland.”

“I don't think this incident was drug inspired,” Dante said. “This isn't that kind of crowd.”

Chin held any expression from her face.

“Sometimes they get the wrong house.”

It was a dumb idea. Likely Chin knew that—she was not dumb herself—and suddenly Dante had a sinking feeling about the direction of the investigation. He knew how the people upstairs didn't like Owens and how things rolled down from the top. So he told Chin about the threats against the kids and did his best to connect the dots: to suggest that someone had come after the Owens family but had gotten Marilyn instead. “This case, there's also a political dimension.”

“That aspect of it…” Chin paused then. Something in her manner, it reminded him of how cops lined up together. “You work for them, don't you? You're working for Owens?”

“What's that have to do with it?”

Chin said nothing.

“That's my fiancée who was burned.”

“I'm sorry,” Chin said. “But—”

“But what?”

Chin looked him in the eyes. Dante understood the implication. She didn't say anything, but Dante understood.
It's too bad, but what were you doing working for these people, anyway? What were you doing bringing your fiancée to this kind of gathering? What did you expect?

*   *   *

When the phone rang, Dante was in a deep grog. Cicero, calling from somewhere in the Mediterranean, farther east. Past the Aegean now, off the coast of Cyprus, and in Dante's imagination he saw the narrow straits, the sheer cliffs, the islands where the giant seabirds hulked on the shore under the moon, as if Cicero were calling from someplace back in time.

“Dante?”

Dante suspected Cicero knew everything, as he always seemed to: that he had been in touch with the office, with his numerous sources. Dante himself had been back and forth to the hospital. He'd slept little. He'd broken away once to visit Shale Street—walking the scene, knocking on doors—but had been chased away by the Oakland police.

On the news, there were contradictory reports. One of these said a neighbor had seen a man lurking outside the house just before the bombing. A Latino in a red shirt.

Meanwhile, the stars were out in Cicero's faraway world. Out there in the cell-phone darkness. Off a black coast. The waters stretched out forever, ink black under the moon. Somewhere in that blackness was the Jake Cicero he had known—the leather-skinned man with the white hair and the white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows.

Dante missed Cicero.

“How's Marilyn?”

“In pain.”

“Can't they give her something?”

“A lot of it's nerve damage,” Dante said. “The drugs don't do a lot of good. Then there's the surgery.”

“Already?”

“This morning. There's more scheduled.”

These days, they started the grafting process early with the theory that early grafting promoted healing. Marilyn had a combination of second- and third-degree burns, and there would likely be some scarring. She suffered from smoke inhalation, but the thing that concerned the doctors most were her eyes. The fire had singed the lids, and the cornea was damaged. And some of the deeper ocular mechanisms as well.

“The Oakland police are swamped. To them, everything's a drug case. And the feds … the way the cops feel about Owens, I don't know if any investigation…”

“Dante?”

“Yes.”

“You know what I am going to say.”

He did know. It was a cardinal rule. When something like this happened to someone close to you, you didn't go after it yourself. Chances were, you'd fuck it up. “I talked to Moe Jensen,” said Cicero. “Walter Sprague, the financier, he'll cover Marilyn's medical. As for the bombing, that part of the investigation—they've offered one of his people.”