When I did, I was amazed at the little chute and narrow ladder that swung down. What did I know about attics? I lived in an apartment building my whole life. If we had one of these in our apartment, it would have led into the Spiegelmans’s apartment above us. For a heavy woman, Gloria managed to get up into the attic pretty easily.
“Watch your head,” she warned as I came up behind her.
You had to love this woman. Even the attic was neat, if a little dusty.
“Now where is it?” she asked herself, as she scanned the nooks and crannies. “There it is. See that suitcase, Bobby?” Gloria said, pointing to a pretty large, old-fashioned, leather-handled case under a stack of cardboard boxes. “That’s Sam’s. The first week she moved in, she asked me to keep it for her. I totally forgot about it until just now.”
I fought the urge to fling the boxes off the suitcase and forced myself to carefully move the boxes above it. The suitcase was pretty beat-up, tattered, and frayed. I moved it aside, and put the boxes back in place. Gloria and I stared at it, both of us a little queasy, I think.
“Take it,” she said. “Take it. I don’t wanna know what’s in it. I don’t think I could deal with it. I know it’s strange, but with Rocco in so much danger and everything, I don’t wanna be reminded of the dead.”
“I understand.”
When I went to pat Gloria’s shoulder, she hugged me with intense conviction. She was really hugging her son, but that was okay with me. We didn’t say goodbye. She handed me the case as I made my way down the attic ladder. When I was sure she was down safely, I took the last vestiges of Samantha Hope and let myself out.
I resisted the urge to open up the suitcase only partially due to self-control. The other part was that the suitcase might be locked, and I didn’t want to stand out on the street trying to pry it open. I put it in Aaron’s trunk and drove home. I got lucky for once and found a parking spot right out front of our building. I put the gift-wrapped bottle of Château Latour on the front seat for Aaron to find in the morning when he got into the car. That was a pretty expensive bottle of red grape juice, but I had kind of abused the privilege with his car. It was still a great shock to me that my brother had become so fascinated by wine. I suppose it appealed to his obsessive side. Although he wasn’t adventurous by nature, he did love studying and finding the subtleties in things. He confessed to me once that his dream was to get out of sales and to buy a wine shop. That was cool. The part that wasn’t cool was the part where I was supposed to be his partner. Yeah, sure.
I was beat; all the mileage I’d covered over the last two days was catching up to me in a single rush. I felt like once I got upstairs, I would fall into bed and sleep for a week. The thing is, I never made it upstairs. I didn’t make it five more feet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I locked the Tempest’s door and took a weary step or two when I saw a car speeding right for me. I squeezed my eyes shut in anticipation of an impact that never happened. Instead, the car swerved past me, skidding, shrieking, screeching to a tire-smoking halt two hundred feet ahead. I was so preoccupied by not being dead that I failed to notice the man coming up behind me. Something hard and round jabbed me in the ribs.
“Don’t turn around, you honky mothafucka. Just get in the car.”
The car’s rear door was flung open and a strong hand hurried me along to it. I wanted to point out that getting pushed was just insult to injury, that I was already sufficiently motivated by the gun in my ribs. Before I got a chance to speak, I was shoved into the back seat of the waiting car, which took off even before the door shut. When I righted myself, I saw that I had plenty of company in the car with me. Besides Strong Hand on my right, there was another man next to me on my left. I assumed he was a man. He was built like one, but I couldn’t be sure because he was wearing an LBJ Halloween mask that covered his entire head and neck. The driver had on a Hubert Humphrey mask. Strong Hand was wearing a George Wallace mask — for purposes of irony, I suppose. The person next to Hubert Humphrey in the front passenger seat had on a Robert Kennedy mask. I was pretty sure the front seat passenger was female, her slight build giving her away. All of them were dressed in army surplus jackets and black turtlenecks below their rubber masks.
I should have been afraid, but I just wasn’t. In spite of the gun in my side, I couldn’t take this bunch seriously. The tough guys I knew meant business. They didn’t worry about irony and political statements. Even when I tried to muster up some fear, the best I could manage was bemusement. I felt more confused than anything else and it wasn’t profound confusion at that. Mostly, I think my lack of fear had to do with the fact that I recognized the girl in the front seat, her Kennedy mask notwithstanding.
“What does a guy have to do to get a mask around here?” I asked. “I’m feeling left out.”
Hubert Humphrey laughed, but George Wallace was not amused. He shoved the barrel into my ribs and said, “Mothafucka, I warned you to shut up.”
“What, I’m not a honky mothafucka anymore? And to be accurate, you warned me not to turn around. You didn’t warn me to shut up.”
Wallace pressed the barrel so hard into my ribs I thought it might go through my coat. “I’m warnin’ you now. Shut up.”
I turned to him and said, “Listen, man, I don’t think sticking the barrel of your gun through my ribs is what Stokely Carmichael meant by Black Power.”
Hubert Humphrey laughed again. Wallace was even less amused than before, but he didn’t take it out on me.
“Y’all keep on laughin’, just keep on laughin’ and we’ll see how you laughin’ with my foot in your damn mouth when I’m kickin’ your teeth down your throat.”
Robert Kennedy whipped around, angrily shaking her head at Wallace. I guess abducting someone off the street at gunpoint was considered fair play, but insulting your comrade was verboten. I caught a good glimpse of the girl’s eyes through her mask before she turned back around. After that, I was sure I knew who she was.
“So, Susan, what did you get on your final paper in Romantic Poetry?” I asked as if we were old friends who just happened into each other on the subway. “It’s Susan Kasten, right? I never forget a face.”
Nobody was laughing now.
LBJ blurted out, “Holy fucking shit!”
“Shut up!” yelled Hubert Humphrey.
“Man, ain’t nobody told you dumb crackers vaudeville is dead?”
Kennedy slapped her hand on the dashboard. That got everybody’s attention and it shut them all up. I was a little less intimidated by her.
“By the way, Susan, how’s Grandpa Hyman doing now that you blew his fix-it shop all to hell?”
With that, she finally spoke, but not to me. “Pull over.”
“But the Com — ” Humphrey stopped himself mid-word. “But didn’t they say to bring him straight to — ”
“Now! Pull over right now,” she screamed at the driver. When he didn’t respond quickly enough to suit her, she yanked the steering wheel hard to the right.
We slammed into the curb, the driver’s late braking doing little to slow the car down. When we came to rest, George Wallace said, “I told y’all we shoulda jus’ iced this mothafucka and been done with it.”
Suddenly, my lack of fear wasn’t quite so lacking.
“No!” Kennedy shouted. “We have to know what he knows. We’re not the pigs. We’re not fascists. We don’t just waste people on a whim or because they piss us off.”
“I guess Stalin, Mao, and Castro didn’t get that memo, huh?”
“Reactionary stooge,” scoffed LBJ.
“I was always partial to Curly myself,” I joked.
Wallace backhanded me across the side of my head. Some people have no sense of humor. “C’mon. Now let’s just ice his white ass.”
“We’re not cowboys. We must act as we’ve been instructed.”