The Bomb Maker's Son (20 page)

We find the room, and help each other forget the horror of the day, remind each other that we should never have been apart.

The Los Angeles Police Department received this message five hours after the murder of Belinda Hayes:

Subject: Communiqué #2

To: Chief Pig of the LAPD

From: JB

Judgment Day has dawned. The turncoat Belinda Hayes sold out the revolution. Her body lies moldering in the trash heap of betrayal.

We demand the immediate dismissal of charges against Ian Holzner, the release from political prison of Charles Sedgwick, the dismantling of the Gestapo NSA, the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. Military troops from Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf region, and the imprisonment of the capitalist billionaires that control this country.

We and the oppressed people of the world will continue to exploit the vulnerabilities of Imperialist America until our demands are met. We are numerous. Free Ian!

~JB

The homicide detectives assigned to the investigation insist that Holzner is JB, that he somehow masterminded the killing from my apartment—never mind that he’s under house arrest or that he has no cell phone or access to my laptop, which I’ve password-protected and carry everywhere. Never mind that I don’t have a landline. Never mind that the killers tried to murder me, his own son.

As for Mariko Heim, I think she showed up at The Barrista so she could determine whether I’ll reveal the Assembly’s dark secrets. She’s not interested in exposing them, as she claimed, but in hiding them. She probably concluded that I pose an ongoing risk. I know things and won’t hesitate to reveal them if ever the time is right. As for my identification of her, the cops say she has an alibi—what that is, they won’t reveal. The Sanctified Assembly must be covering for her. They also maintain that if Lovely and I were the targets, we would’ve been dead long before Hayes arrived home. Maybe so. Or maybe Heim and her people weren’t in position in time to do that.

Now, two days after the shooting, my mother and I sit in my living room, arguing with each other. As soon as we raise our voices, Ian and Lovely escape to the balcony. He leans against the wall, his usual gymnast’s posture replaced by slumped shoulders, a bowed spine, and stiff legs. He hasn’t been working out for the past couple of weeks—no multiple sets of push-ups, pull-ups, and squats. Men his age lose muscle tone quickly—another milestone to look forward to if I live as long as he has, which after the shooting at Hayes’s house is highly debatable. Lovely, wearing black slacks and a vanilla wool turtleneck, follows him outside and assumes an identical posture. They both stare silently out at the ocean, the morning sun shimmering off the surface like burnished chrome. Emily Lansing has been remanded to the care of the deputy US Marshal downstairs.

Why are my mother and I arguing? I want the revered Quiana to put pressure on the Assembly elders to stop protecting Heim, but she won’t do it.

“You just have to snap your fingers,” I say.

“For the tenth time, it doesn’t work that way anymore. It’s not nineteen ninety, Parker. There’s a new generation of devotees who—”

“But you’re the Assembly’s patron saint.”

“Stop the sarcasm. It’s disrespectful; I’m still your mother. And after all these years it’s gotten tiresome. You’re forty years old.”

“It’s not sarcasm, it’s the truth. Bradley Kelly became a god, and you’ve been canonized, on your way to sainthood. Which gives you the power to force Heim to come clean. I don’t get why you’re afraid of her.”

“I don’t even know how Heim was able to . . .” She actually throws her hand to her lips as if to clamp her mouth shut.

“How she was able to what, Mother?”

“I can’t. It’s forbidden to discuss Assembly business with a nonbeliever.”

“So you’ll just let them get away with trying to murder me, is that it, St. Quiana?”

“Parker, please stop!” She covers her face with clawed fingers. She’s suddenly so overwrought I fear she’ll rake her eyes with her fingernails. Holzner rushes inside and puts an arm around her. She buries her head in his chest and begins to cry.

“Let’s assume you’re right about this sainthood business,” he says to me. “That’s why the Catholic Church only confers sainthood on the dead. It’s too fucking hard for the living.” All the while, my mother’s shoulders are heaving, her face still glued to him. For the first time in years, I’m in the presence of the mother who raised me, vulnerable and sad.

Lovely comes inside, and my mother immediately straightens her spine and places her hands in her lap like a royal at a state function, an act all the more ludicrous because her cheeks are shiny with tears.

“Here’s how I see it,” Lovely announces. “Parker, you really don’t know what you saw. Maybe you saw Heim, maybe you didn’t. The car was a hundred yards away, speeding from the scene, and your gut was ripped with fear and your brain muddled with adrenaline shock. That’s certainly how I was feeling. Not to mention the sight of Belinda Hayes with her brains lying on the driveway and you had to pry her keys out of her hand. No way you could get a positive ID on the driver. And like the cops say, we were sitting ducks long before Hayes arrived.” She turns to Harriet and points a finger at her. “You got Parker into this, you got me into this, and now you won’t help us get to the bottom of it. The Assembly’s celestial attributes—
fortitude, rectitude, beatitude
, right? You’re not showing any of those. How come?”

“You’re impertinent,” Harriet says, but her haughtiness is belied by the slight catch in her throat.

Lovely places her left hand on a hip and bends her opposite leg like an impatient mother.

Harriet glances at me and then folds in on herself. “I can’t do it.”

“Can’t do what?” Lovely says.

“I can’t control Heim. She became a devotee and somehow rose with the speed of a comet. I don’t know how she managed it in what, three or four years? Except for the fact she’s ruthless.” She looks at me sadly. “I’m not the woman I used to be, Parker. The Assembly values youth—Brad and I wanted it that way, because we were young, truly believed that if you drank of the Celestial Waters you’d never age. Bradley died, so he never aged. But me . . .” She places her hand on Ian’s shoulder. “Ian returned to my life, reminded me of youth, but it’s all just a memory. Parker, you’re forty years old. How can I have a child who’s forty years old?”

Parents always seem old to a child, so their aging process is meaningless until the child himself begins truly to age. That’s happening to me, which is why I can finally recognize how time has taken its toll on Harriet Stern.

“How did he find you?” I ask. “You’re not the easiest person to locate.”

“Not that difficult if you know where to look.” This isn’t an explanation, it’s a rebuke. I start to follow up, but she crosses her arms tightly, like a complicated high-security lock tumbling closed. Pursuing this question will get nowhere. But I wonder—did they somehow keep in touch over so many years despite the risks to both of them?

“Heim is out to get you, Mother,” I say. “You know that, don’t you?”

Her hands are still in her lap, no longer folded but knotted tightly. “I’ve known that for some time. I have no idea whom to trust anymore. What is she after? My position?”

“She came to The Barrista and asked me about Ascending Sodality.”

She gasps and covers her mouth with her hand. “How would she know about that?”

“There are a lot of children of the original founders who are now adults,” I say. “Someone was bound to talk. You either repress sexual abuse or you think about it every day of your life. I’m surprised no one has gone to the cops. Maybe she wants to use it to expose you, or maybe she’s after me because she thinks I’m finally going to tell what I know.”

“Do you even know what we’re talking about?” Lovely asks Holzner.

“I don’t pry into others’ secrets,” he says. “I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a hypocrite.”

“Were you part of that?” Lovely asks my mother.

“Never! I was the one who stopped it.”

When Lovely looks at me for confirmation, I nod, because it’s literally true. Not that my mother stands on high moral ground. She claims she didn’t know, but I don’t think that’s possible.

“I have to tell you this, Parker,” my mother says. “I don’t know if Mariko Heim was one of the people shooting at you. But she’s quite capable of it. A big reason she’s risen in the hierarchy is that she’s promised to rid the Assembly of its enemies. You, my son, remain high on that list.”

There’s a knock at the door. When Lovely answers it, Emily walks inside and whines, “Aren’t you guys done yet? It’s freezing out there, and that marshal guy won’t even tell me who he thinks tried to kill Parker and Lovely.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

It’s less than two weeks before trial, and the government has added a new witness to its list, a man named Ilan Goldsmith. They identify him as an FBI informant with knowledge of Ian Holzner’s role in the bombing of the Playa Delta VA. Holzner doesn’t recognize the name and neither does Moses Dworsky. After a day of digging, Dworsky comes up with the pseudonym Goldsmith used in the 1960s and ’70s—Secretary Cracknamara.

“Cracknamara was a knockoff of the more famous General Hersheybar, who was himself a parody of General Hershey, at the time the odious head of the Selective Service, sending innocents to fight in a useless war,” Dworsky says. “Cracknamara would dress up like former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and engage in performance art at antiwar rallies. He was amusing, I will concede, but he also appeared to be emotionally disturbed, though harmless enough. I thought he was schizophrenic, to be quite candid. And all this time he was an FBI informant. A
rat
, in the vernacular. Quite brilliant, really. I am sure no one suspected. Evidently our client was snookered.”

Unfortunately, Dworsky hasn’t been able to find Goldsmith, and we can’t determine what Goldsmith will actually say at trial because the US Attorney has been vague. I’d complain to Judge Gibson about Marilee Reddick’s ambush tactics, but he hasn’t been favorably disposed to our side since the day Dworsky scratched his nose in court.

Emily’s presence in my home makes it hard to talk to my client. She doesn’t go to school—Holzner is indeed studying with her during the day. But she sometimes goes out at night, where, she won’t say. I know nothing about parenting, but if she were my daughter, I’d want to know where she’s going, almost eighteen or not. Tonight, though, her absence is convenient, because I can ask Holzner about Ilan Goldsmith. When I tell him that
Secretary Cracknamara
is on the government’s witness list, he turns ashen.

“Jesus,” I say. “What?”

After several false starts, he says, “It was three, four months before the Playa Delta bombing. We were deep underground by then. Belinda Hayes showed up at our apartment one night with the secretary in tow. Cracknamara was no fool, he only played one. He was resourceful, dedicated to the cause, or so I thought. And he was a source of two things we needed—dynamite and drugs.”

“An FBI informant provided you with explosives?”

“Evidently.”

“What did you tell him?”

“See, that’s the problem. This time, he was supplying us with drugs. We all took LSD. Me, Belinda, Rachel, Cracknamara—everyone except Charlie Sedgwick, who was afraid. I’d had so many beautiful trips, but this one was ugly. I remember dropping the acid, and as soon as I came on to the drug, I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. My face, my entire body resembled a Jackson Pollock painting, all spattered with dots and dribs and streaks. It was beautiful, until the streaks began to wriggle and slither and became maggots that were eating my flesh, consuming my eyes, crawling up my nose, devouring my lips.” He closes his eyes and shudders. “Even all these years later my stomach churns when I think about it. Whenever I dropped acid, I’d write myself a note beforehand just in case, reminding myself that it wasn’t real, that it would end soon enough. This was the first time I resorted to the note. But when I read it, the letters were poisonous snakes and scorpions that tried to bite my face. Everything went a fiery red, and I thought I was blind, thought I’d gone insane—I was insane. Charlie got me through it, believe it or not, by starting one of his discussions on political theory. But during it . . . well, I might’ve said that the Weathermen had copped out when they stopped targeting human beings after the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion. It was all talk, a way to fight off the disgusting insects that were gnawing at my flesh, to silence the hideous guitar-amp feedback squealing through my brain. If Charlie hadn’t started talking politics, I would’ve jumped out the window. Debating Marx and Mao and Marcuse was normal for us. He was trying to give me
normal
.”

“What did the others say?”

“Who knows? It’s been forty years.”

“But you remember the incident.”

“The bad trip. The debates were always the same. Charlie would’ve said it was wrong to harm civilians, though cops and military personnel were fair game. I might have said something about a VA being an appropriate target. Belinda would’ve agreed with me because she got off on the thought of violence. Ironic that all these years later, she died violently.”