The Comedy is Finished

“Oh.” Now it’s Koo’s turn to smile; it did work after all, and he’s pleased with himself, even though it ultimately doesn’t seem to have helped. “Yes,” he says. “I guess that was me.”

“I knew it,” Mark says, not threateningly but as though he too is pleased with Koo’s accomplishment. “The others didn’t think so, but I knew it was you. How’d you do it?”

“That room I was in. I saw it in the movies once, when a director named Gilbert Freeman owned the house.”

“Gilbert Freeman. You said that name, on one of the tapes.”

“I called him my favorite host in all the world.”

“Right.” Mark frowns, thinking about that. “How does that tell anybody anything?”

“I hardly knew Gilbert Freeman. He’s never been my host.”

Laughing, very pleased with Koo, Mark says, “Sly old man. I’m glad I met you.”

“Well,” Koo says. “Uhhh. I’m not sure the feeling’s mutual.”

“No, I suppose not,” Mark agrees, the laughter giving way again to the small almost absentminded smile. “Well, time will tell, won’t it?”

“If it does,” Koo says, “I’ll never tell time again.”

“Ugh. You can do better than that.”

“Not right now I can’t,” Koo says.

33

Peter walked with Ginger out to the car, a white reconditioned 1958 Ford Thunderbird; an early Thunderbird, from back when Ford had it in mind to build a sports car. Beside it, Peter’s Impala looked like a gross unpleasant animal; an alligator next to a swan. The two cars sat side by side in the carport, a doorless concrete-floored insert on the highway side of the house, directly beneath the room in which Koo Davis was being held. Beyond the cars, as Peter and Ginger emerged from the house, traffic flashed by on the Coast Highway in bright sunshine. Across the road, the scrub-covered hills rose steeply toward the north.

Peter said, “You’ll be back in an hour?”

“Depending on traffic.” Ginger was impatient to be gone.

“Don’t make us wait too long,” Peter said. “Remember, we also have to get out of the country today.”

“I’ll be as quick as I can. How many times do I have to say it?”

“That’s fine, Ginger.”

“Goodbye.” Reaching in his pocket for his keys, Ginger went around to the driver’s side of the Thunderbird.

Peter watched in silence while Ginger unlocked the door, but then said, “Ginger, one last thing.”

“What now, Peter?”

“A threat,” Peter told him. “You know what’s going to happen to Davis. If you don’t come back, I assure you the police will find Davis in a way that connects him to you.”

“You’re a very stupid person, Peter,” Ginger said. “You have alienated me for no good reason at all. I’ll bring you your two thousand dollars, I’ll get myself out of this little swamp of yours, and that will be the end of it.”

Was Ginger right? Had Peter unnecessarily alienated him? But there had been nowhere else to go with Davis, once the first place became known. Chewing on his cheeks, keeping himself with difficulty from adding yet more verbal threats (which he knew full well could only make things worse), Peter watched Ginger insert himself behind the wheel of the Thunderbird, start the engine, and without another look in Peter’s direction back briskly out to the sunlight. Peter followed, walking slowly forward, wishing there were some way to reconstitute their former relationship, but knowing it had become hopelessly spoiled. If only they hadn’t had to move from the house in Woodland Hills. God damn the FBI! And God damn Mark or whoever was responsible for tipping them off.

The Thunderbird swung backwards in a tight quarter-turn, then slid forward like a fish, joining the flow of traffic. Peter, shielding his eyes, stepped out into the sunlight far enough to watch the Thunderbird out of sight around the next coastal curve to the east; then he shook his head and walked back into the house, hardly noticing the pain in his cheeks.

What a disaster this operation had been! It had seemed so clear and simple in the planning, such an unmistakable public statement, and it was ending in confusion, death, humiliation.

Peter had made mistakes, he fully acknowledged that, but on careful reflection he didn’t believe that he had made a fool of himself. Time had made a fool of him, time and accident and the frailty of human beings; none of which could be fully guarded against.

It had been so much easier a decade ago, when the Movement was a true and active force, when a leader was someone who sensed where the crowd intended to go anyway and got out front to yell, Follow me! But where was the Movement today? Where was the crowd, the consensus; where were the willing masses for a leader to lead? There seemed to be no direction at all, no communal grievance or belief, no goal, hardly even any adversary. What was a leader to do in such muddled times? In a way, Peter could understand the defection of those seven in jail; it’s hard to be a revolutionary when revolution isn’t popular.

Peter was now regretting that he hadn’t spent more time and thought on the theory of the New American Revolution; but when things had been going well it hadn’t seemed to matter. Each person had his capabilities, his strengths, and the Movement could use everyone in his appropriate place. Larry, for instance, was wonderful at theory, Larry truly understood what the Revolution was all about, but Larry was no leader. Larry couldn’t lead a dysentery victim to the men’s room.

That was another of the problems. In the rich days, it had been almost inevitable that the leaders would feel a kind of paternal contempt toward the theorists, and old habits do die hard. Peter needed Larry now, to give him the dialectical underpinnings for their goals and their methods, but Peter could not bring himself to go to Larry humbly, as a student to a teacher, he simply could not reverse the leader-follower roles in that ignominious way. More and more, lacking both the tidal pressure of a mass movement and the magnetic pull of a clearly defined theoretical goal, Peter was reduced to improvisation and to patchwork solutions of immediate problems. The murder of Koo Davis, on which he was determined, had no revolutionary significance (as the death of an influential senator, say, or an undercover CIA agent, could be significant in that it would to some extent affect and alter history), but the death of Davis had become for Peter an absolute tactical necessity, the only means he could think of to overcome the stigma of his failure.

There were three radios playing in the house, all tuned to the same news station, but to no effect. The noon deadline was almost here, and the authorities had not so much as acknowledged receipt of the latest message. That had been a frequent governmental tactic over the last several years—“toughing it out,” “stonewalling”—and if Peter had been interested in further negotiation he might very well have given in; presented new messages, offered new deadlines, broadened contact with officialdom. As it was, their tactic meshed perfectly with Peter’s own, and assured that next time they would be less cavalier.

Liz was in the living room, once again seated with legs curled beneath her in the Eames chair. Beyond her, through the glass doors to the deck, Peter could see Larry sunk in thought. Could he rely on Larry now, for anything? No; the simplest request would surely provoke weak and cowardly remonstrances, complaints, accusations. It would not be possible to convince Larry that Peter’s past errors of judgment—or other problems in the past—were not at the moment the point. The point at the moment was to make the best of a bad job, recoup as much as possible, and get out of here.

Which meant the death of Davis, a tactical action of which Larry would undoubtedly disapprove. Not wanting to place them all in a position where Larry would have disobeyed a direct order, Peter was forced to adjust his thinking to a plan with a cadre of one: Liz. He entered the living room, turned down the radio, sat near her, and said, “When Ginger gets back, we’ll leave.”

“All right,” she said, not looking in his direction.

She obviously didn’t care what happened next, but Peter had to explain his plans to someone, and she was all he had. “We’ll fly to Vancouver,” he said. “You still have that safe passport?”

“Of course.”