Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  Marta was saying, “I mean, we’re living together and we’d talked about marriage, but the baby’s changed the timing.”

  Before the next siren blotted out my voice I said, “I’d better get over there, Marta.”

  To which she replied, “Is she over there?” She said it too quickly, her wheels had been turning.

  “My apartment’s over there, my job, everything I own.”

  But Marta had seen her in my eyes and that was the focus of all the energy that had brought her to La Morinda on a Monday evening to give me the kiss-off. As I rose from the booth she said, her voice rising to be heard over the passing ambulance, “I just wanted to let you know I’m having someone else’s baby, not yours. That’s all.”

  I pressed a five into the waitress’s hand as I passed her. She said, “Geez, I hope everything’s all right. God bless.”

  And I took off running towards the commotion, pleading in my mind, Don’t let it be her, don’t let it be her.

  four

  Immediately after the blast that gutted Homer Smith’s office, Jake couldn’t put together the sequence of events surrounding it. By the time he recorded his memoir of Bobwhite Court, he had a perspective that was, I suggest, cosmic.

  Here’s part of his recorded message:

  The bomb that blew up Homer Smith’s office and the gunshot wound in my chest were antipodes. The shooting liberated me from the things that make life a slow death, and yet I was conscious of Death, lying there bleeding. He wasn’t the Final Alternative nor the Dreaded End, he was the wise counselor. He was just out of my enfeebled reach and he had the answers to life’s important questions. Like, why any of us are wounded by love. I had a million questions to ask him, like why Meany had succumbed in the end to clutching at what he never really owned. Death answered my questions with silence.

  As a consequence of Homer’s booby-trap, my office came crashing down around me but I came away with only a cut hand and transient hearing loss. I should have been thrilled at this evidence of my invulnerability, yet I was so filled with dread and thoughts of foreshortened alternatives that it took a couple of days and Robert’s cajoling to bring me back to equilibrium.

  Besides my own experience and what Robert told me, there was the story in the Diablo Valley Courier, by a reporter who finagled her way into the lives of everyone on Bobwhite Court. And I also had my spies out that night, Mrs. Birnbaum and Mrs. Clarke, who hadn’t had so much excitement since V-J Day.

  I formed a picture myself, before the Courier article, but it rang true like the ringing in my ears from the blast, more irritating than satisfying. I saw things the way I had as a child, wracked by influenza’s high fever or dazed by a knee to the head in sandlot football.

  *****

  A policeman had parked his cruiser across the incoming lane to Bobwhite Court. He fixed me in his flashlight beam as I came sprinting up from Cup O’ Java. I stopped.

  “I live there, I work there,” I said.

  The policeman shook his head.

  “I think I know what exploded, I’m the janitor there and I was in Homer Smith’s office a few minutes ago.”

  “Talk to Sergeant Rutledge.” He pointed to a gentleman in civvies, with slicked back hair, an expanding gut and a doubling chin.

  I went and stood next to a knot of assorted public safety workers. Sergeant Rutledge was in charge. He was talking to an arson investigator from Diablo Fire District Number 3. As I waited my turn two FBI agents joined the group.

  I looked across the lawn and saw Mary Clare with Jake’s elderly lady friends, and I ran over and threw my arms around her and she was crying and shaking and a policeman came up and motioned me back.

  Mary Clare wouldn’t let go of me. She kept saying, “Oh, Bobby, oh,” over and over.

  Mrs. Birnbaum and Mrs. Clarke echoed the ‘ohs’ and hugged each other.

  I said, “Maybe you should go inside now. I have to talk to the police.”

  She shook her head. “Give me the key to your place.”

  “Meany comes home tonight. He’s sure to come over here.”

  “Probably.”

  “You don’t care?” I asked.

  She said, “I don’t look cross-eyed at the Great Accountant in the Sky when he pays me a dividend. You go do what you have to do; just come to me soon.”

  *****

  Jake had made his way from the EMTs’ van, where he had his hand bandaged and was being questioned, but he kept pointing to his ear and shaking his head. When I came up he said, “Ask Robert.”

  Someone handed Jake a windbreaker and led him over to sit in the front seat of a police cruiser while Sergeant Rutledge turned his attention to me.

  “Where were you when the bomb went off?” he asked.

  “Bomb? I didn’t see any bomb.”

  “And you were . . . ?”

  I told him.

  “How about before your coffee break?”

  I told him what I had seen in Homer’s office. I mentioned the envelope and the arson inspector came over and listened and then asked me, “Did it have some heft to it?”

  I told him I thought it must be chock full of papers, yes, it had heft.

  “Letter bomb.”

  Searchlights from the fire trucks illuminated the scene. Smoke hung in the air. Eerie sounds emanated from a loudspeaker on one pumper, and all of the vehicles kept their engines running.

  “A letter bomb?” I repeated.

  The policemen looked intently at the arson inspector. He was tall and sandy-haired and looked as if he’d just stepped into freshly pressed clothes. The others looked like a bunch of men standing around a pile of parts, their minds collectively making the leap from junk to apparatus as things suddenly fit together.

  The arson inspector said, in an uninflected tone, “You undo the closure, lift the flap and poof! there goes perspiration.”

  My mouth fell open.

  *****

  When Jake could hear again he told me what happened while I was with Marta. Homer Smith drove up in his Cadillac, brakes screeching, wheels locked, leaving his car as usual at the back door. A car that looked like the all-purpose American mid-size rental, was right behind him. Homer and another man came into the building. Through his door Jake could hear them talking. Homer talked very loudly, the other man’s voice making calming sounds. In a while two other men got out of the rental and came into the building.

  There was an interval where Homer’s door was closed, though Jake could hear several voices anyway, making it almost impossible for him to do his own work. Someone went in and came out of the building, really shouting this time. Jake looked out his window and saw Homer waving a pistol and reached for the phone. Before he picked up the receiver, Homer jumped in his Cadillac, make a lurching U-turn, and sped off with as much noise as he came. His rear bumper clashed against the driveway as he bounded over the speed bump. Then Jake heard someone reenter the building.

  *****

  A uniformed policeman spoke into Sergeant Rutledge’s ear. Rutledge asked me to go over my description of the crates again. I told them about the markings on the end of the big crates being obscured. Responding to a question, I said I didn’t remember any other markings than those that had been painted out.

  All but the uniformed officer went into the building. Like a fog lifting, it finally was clear that, had Homer and cohort not appeared, and I’d come back to the office, I would have opened the letter bomb and I would be dead.

  Jake saw me about to faint and he came running over and grabbed me, the way the referee did when he stopped Jethro Greene from beating me senseless.

  “What is it?” Jake asked.

  “Jake?”

  “Speak up.”

  I put my mouth close to Jake’s ear, his arms still around me, holding me upright, and said, “I was going to open that envelope, the letter bomb, when I got back from my break. I thought it was about what was in the crates.”

  Jake kept holding me. The policeman looked away. br />
  I said, “Then it would have been my blood splattered all over the front of you, me that got carted off to the morgue.” I started to salivate involuntarily and knew I was about to throw up.

  “Officer?” Jake said.

  The policeman took me over to the cruiser with the open door, where Jake had been sitting, and sat me down.

  I tried very hard not to hyperventilate and not to puke.

  Just then a familiar white Cadillac convertible drove into the middle of the cul-de-sac. I touched the policeman’s arm and said, “There’s Mr. Meany, the owner.” And then officialdom turned their collective attention that way.

  five

  This is the rest of Jake’s experience in the blast, as recorded after he was shot:

  This started sometime after eight o’clock. The noise from across the hall had subsided shortly before I started to reread the manuscript of a paper I was to deliver at the upcoming American Public Health Associations’ annual convention, convening in San Francisco. With no forewarning, I hit the floor, chair and I in the same relative position, only I was staring at the ceiling. I didn’t know if something internal or external caused the change in position, it seemed as if my muscles had jumped in response to the roar that assaulted me. I soon discovered my bladder emptied in the change of attitude, or maybe just after.

  Before feeling the urine turn cold, I smelled acrid smoke that reminded me of my military stint. The lamp was on the floor, shade off but bulb intact, puzzling, since there was nothing left on my desk, which had moved closer to the credenza by a couple of feet, so that I had to move sideways to get free of it. There was nothing left on the walls and half the books in the bookcase were scattered as if my office were decorated for a gangster movie trashing. The carpet had been flung back, the door was on the floor and a man lay on it as if on a stretcher; a fine immanence of plaster dust drifted and settled. I saw fire flickering across the hall; I got scared. I hoisted myself out the broken window, lowering myself with a hand across a sash only partially deglazed.

  I stood like a pillar of salt, looking at the blood dripping from my hand, until the American mid-size tore past, down the driveway. Then I ran straight back in the building, as my brain finally registered what I’d made of the man on the door: he had no hands at all. I dove at him, grabbing first one handless forearm then the other, trying to quench the arcing fountains of blood by squeezing, but I couldn’t do both at once, couldn’t have even if I hadn’t been shaking like a leaf and feeling unnaturally weak all over.

  I tore off my tie and wrapped it above one of his elbows, knowing from my MP training I could get good purchase there. Then I took off my belt and did the same to the other arm, though not with as good a result. I jumped up and tried to pull the door out of the office, but the lower hinge was still partially attached. My back endured that, as it did my straddling the man and horsing him into the hall and then out the back door. He was shorter than I but fiercely heavy. I laid him on the back stoop and went in, to look briefly into my office, trying to find something to put over the man. He looked more lifeless than the bloody stumps told me. I put my ear to his chest, which was when I realized I was deaf.

  Just then the lights began to flicker throughout the building, finally to go out as the first police car arrived and a policeman jumped out and, with horror in his eyes, surveyed the blood, mine and mostly the blast victim’s, soaked into my clothes.

  The arson inspector volunteered that I’d done as much as anyone could, I’d kept my head and tried to help a dying man. I was touched by his saying it, and if he’d said it a week on I might have wept for the dying man, but just then the comfort missed its mark—I was just another helpless human overcome by the fragility of life, too depressed to cry.

  Little by little I relaxed, only to begin shivering. The arson inspector, talking too loudly now, volunteered to find someone to drive me home. I told him about the paper I’d been writing and that I needed to see if it could be discovered among the debris in my office. He turned to the Battalion Chief and said something I couldn’t hear, but came back to me saying it was all right to go in the building for a couple of minutes.

  *****

  Jake saw Meany’s car too. He said to me, “Looks like you have something to take care of.”

  As I approached Meany, still shaky, he said, “Gattling, where were you when it happened?”

  “Out having a cup of coffee,” I said.

  “Thank God. Why don’t you see if your place is okay—I assume it is—and we’ll talk in the morning.” He turned and walked towards the elevator to the penthouse. He stopped and patted his pockets. He’d not only left his car in the middle of the street, he’d left his keys in it.

  If Meany had known what he was looking at, he would have seen relief break through the daze in my expression. I felt like a man who’d drunk five cups of coffee suddenly spotting a bush to pee behind.

  I trotted down the driveway.

  When I arrived at the Caddy I reached through the window and extracted the ignition key, on the same ring as the key to the elevator, kept walking, towards the officer guarding the entrance to the cul-de-sac, waiting for it to dawn on Meany that I wasn’t acting rationally, anything but, I was almost to my truck when I heard a roar like a wounded grizzly, Meany bellowing my name.

  I heaved the keys with all my might towards the freeway, into an acre of iceplant growing in the landscaped right of way. I trotted over to my own vehicle, knowing Meany would be too astonished to send anyone after me.

  The Mad Bomber Of Bobwhite Court

  one

  Jake tells this part with more humor than I:

  Robed and slippered, I took sanctuary in my favorite chair, applying Rémy Martin’s version of the world’s best analgesic to my throbbing hand and sodden heart. The phone jerked me back from yet another attempt to will the dead bomb victim alive, but only fear of its waking my wife and children made me quit the recliner and pick it up.

  “Thank God it’s you answered, Mr. Pritchett!” Mrs. Clarke was breathless, her voice shrill.

  “Is it Mrs. Birnbaum?” I could see her friend clutch her bosom and keel over, all the excitement causing a heart attack.

  “It’s your friend, Mr. Gattling. They’ve been to his place and taken him away on a stretcher.”

  “Where?”

  “The hospital, of course.”

  “I guessed that: which one?”

  “Walnut Creek General.”

  “What happened?”

  Guns! Police! Not to mention a naked lady, which, if I understood her ‘oh dears’ and ‘my-mys,’ was as shocking as the lunatic man, down on all fours, looking like a howling dog. The policeman who interviewed Mrs. Clarke after the goings on would not tell her who the naked lady was (she’d looked away the moment she spied bare flesh from navel to ankle), but the lunatic was none other than Homer Smith. After several false starts I was to conclude the conversation and phone the hospital.

  The emergency room admitting clerk, answering the hospital’s main phone line after hours, told me the minimum essential facts about Robert. She was not so excited as Mrs. Clarke, and not even as informative. They might allow Mr. Gattling visitors after ten o’clock that morning I was told with finality.

  I poured another cognac, a double, relieved to have a live friend to worry about instead of a dead stranger to lament. I fell asleep in the chair, dreaming of naked ladies and wild-eyed bombers, only to wake to Amanda’s touch as she left for surgery the next morning.

  When I walked into his room at five after ten, Robert wore a winner’s look, despite ropes and pulleys that made him look like a recumbent Pinocchio. He may have been as helpless as a calf in a roping contest, he wore the look of a champion cowboy. Cheery—a natural high tempered only by morphine.

  As he related his tale, I sat like a Norman Rockwell tyke, toes wrapped around the legs of the chair, spellbound. Robert suffered none of the confusion of most persons who’ve had violence done to them, one of the l
egacies of boxing. And he’d had the opportunity to try out his tale on the police before morphine relaxed him and traction immobilized him, so he told it well.

  *****

  Jake was prejudiced. I have no idea how well I told it, it entertained him, so I guess well enough.

  I drove away from Bobwhite Court and stopped at the first gas station I saw and used the pay phone to call my own number. I was hoping Mary Clare would have the sense to answer it even though we’d not made any plan for my not just showing up. I saw my reflection in the glass of the phone booth and adjusted my expression to look nonchalant as I told her (she did pick up) about throwing Meany’s keys in the ice plant. The cooler my expression—Brando in The Wild One, I thought—the more invigorated I was. She had to plead with me not to come back to Bobwhite Court before Meany left, not to tangle with him before she and I had had a chance to talk. I scoffed at her caution, but I promised I’d do it her way.

  I hopped into the truck, really hopped, light as a feather, happy happy, wondering how to kill time and how much to kill.

  —Until I looked into the rear view mirror, to see a pair of fiery eyes looking back into mine.

  I jumped and let out an involuntary “Huh!”

  For a second the eyes belonged to no one, painted on the mirror by magic, and then I heard in my head an echo of the pop that had torn asunder my evening and looked back to find a large automatic pistol in my face, held by the mad bomber himself.

  Later I thought of all sorts of brave and defiant things to say, but, twisted around and staring past the gun into a madman’s eyes, I recoiled so violently my shoulder hit the horn button and the sound of it hurled me forward, towards the muzzle of the pistol.

  “Drive,” Homer said.

  “Where?”

  “Anyplace away from Bobwhite Court.”

  Dry-mouthed, no longer worried about killing time, I said, “The police are expecting me back there, you know.”

  “Sure,” Homer said.

  I drove up South Main, crossing into Walnut Creek, past the high school and Kaiser Hospital, into the center of town. (Streetlights, a few pedestrians, cars in no hurry.)