The day would come when they would pay. Did they, like most Americans, think the Revolution was dead? Quiescent, yes, but the same problems of power and responsibility still existed, the same separation of the governed from the governing, the same potential for the misuse of power and for horrors done in the name of the people but without their cognizance or their will. Those who now held power would be unable forever to restrain themselves from using it; the Revolution was a bomb with a fuse that only the Establishment could light, but they would light it. And on that day, Peter’s list would still exist. And the people on it would pay, they would dearly pay.
He had gone this far in his thinking when Ginger entered the room, took a chair facing him, and said, “Well, what now, genius?”
Peter barely heard the sarcasm; his mind was already too full. Nor had he yet considered Ginger’s question. What now? He had no idea. “We go on,” he said. “If we were willing to be stopped by temporary setbacks, we would never have succeeded at all.”
“Temporary setbacks!” Ginger’s true astonishment superseded his half-artificial scorn. “You call this a temporary setback?”
“We still have Koo Davis.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Peter, get out of that dream! You don’t think you’re going on!”
“What else can we do? Give up? There’s no way to give up.”
“Let Davis go,” Ginger said. Waving one hand in a frail parody of his usual ebullient style, he said, “I’ll buy you tickets out of the country. You people go to Algeria.”
“With our tails between our legs? No, Ginger.”
“While you still have tails and legs. Peter, you are a very very silly person, I understand that now, it’s undoubtedly what attracted me to you in the first place.” Bit by bit, Ginger was regaining his normal stance toward life; this disaster seemed, if anything, to have improved his spirits. “You and your little friends go play pattycake in Algeria,” he said. “La grande affaire est finie.”
“No,” Peter said.
Ginger made shooing motions. “C’est dangereux. Allez vous en.”
“No, Ginger.”
Angry and flippant at the same time, Ginger waggled a nervous accusatory finger at Peter: “Je tiens à ce que vous partiez immédiatement!”
“I’m staying,” Peter told him. “And Koo Davis is staying.”
“Vous voulez rire!” Ginger turned aside to an imaginary audience, spreading his hands and saying, “Ecoutez cet homme!”
“And you’re staying.”
Ginger was startled briefly back into English: “What? I certainly am not! Il y va de ma vie! Je pense à mon avenir!”
“And my future.” Peter was unassailable. He had stopped grinding his teeth, and the resurgent blinking had once again disappeared. He didn’t know what was going to happen next, where or how he would move from this abyss, but nevertheless he was calm, secure, confident in himself to a degree he’d never known before. He had touched bottom, and was no longer afraid. “You are tied to me, Ginger,” he said, “and if things go badly for me they’ll go just as badly for you.”
Ginger seemed truly depressed now, and not merely play-acting at gloom.
“J’ai mal à la tête,” he said, slowly getting to his feet. “Je vais me coucher.”
“Sit down, Ginger,” Peter said. “And speak English.”
Ginger’s shrug was exquisitely Gallic. “Pourquoi?”
Peter surged to his feet, his right hand whipping around so fast that Ginger never saw it coming. The sound of the slap was a quick flat cracking noise in the soundproofed room, leaving a reddening blot on Ginger’s astounded face. “Sit down,” Peter said. “No more playing. Sit down, speak English, and stop pretending you’re not a part of this.”
“My God, you struck me!”
“Will you sit down, or will I strike you again?”
Slowly, unbelievingly, Ginger backed to the sofa, lowered himself into it, and turned aside as though for thought or self-composure, touching his fingertips to his red cheek. When he next looked over at Peter, his eyes were blank, all his fey mannerisms gone, leaving not a monkey but a monkey-god, stonefaced and unforgiving. “You have just made, Peter,” he said, “perhaps your most serious mistake of all.” Except for the red mark on his cheek, his face had drained of color.
“You aren’t leaving this room,” Peter told him, “until you really do understand that you’re as deep in this thing as I am. Don’t you think I know what you had in mind?” He parodied Ginger’s former manner, more insultingly than accurately: “ ‘Oh, I have a headache, oh I’m going to bed.’ Right out the door, you mean, a quick stop for the anonymous phone tip to the police, and then off to Cold-water Canyon or some such place to work up your alibi—‘I was screwing this young thing, Officer, I never did go to that place in Malibu, it’s all some horrible coincidence.’”
“Horrible, at any rate.”
That Ginger neither denied the charge nor made fun of it was disturbing, but it confirmed Peter in his guess. “I didn’t want you in this, Ginger,” he said, “but now you’re in, and you have to ride it through with the rest of us.”
“Why am I in it? How did the police happen to poke around that house anyway? Some other misjudgment of yours?”
“I have no idea,” Peter said. Privately, he suspected that Mark might have done something, either deliberately or inadvertently, during the time he was gone from the house after the fight with Larry, but he was hesitant to say so, because the accusation might get back to Mark. Peter was not prepared to challenge Mark directly; it was better to keep that killer rage directed outward. With Ginger, on the other hand, the direct approach was best: “The point is, we had to move, and here we are, and now you’re no longer merely our backer, you’re part of the action.”
“And if I walk out? Or do you intend to stand guard over me twenty-four hours a day? Can you really keep an eye on two prisoners at once?”
“If I’m arrested,” Peter said, “the first name I speak will be yours.”
Ginger was still considering that threat, his expression calm but his lips thrust out, when the door opened and Larry entered, looking earnest and troubled and eager to be of help. “Can I join the conversation?” He left the door open.
Peter said, “Where’s Mark?”
“Joyce says she thinks he’s gone for good.” Larry sat to Peter’s right, saying, “Peter, do you have any idea what to do next?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” It had just come to him, while looking at Larry’s obtuse face. “Ginger, I want to make a tape.”
“For the police?”
“They’re my only audience.”
Ginger rose, turning toward the recording equipment, while Larry leaned closer to Peter, speaking in a low and confidential voice, saying, “I was thinking, Peter, maybe we ought to cut our losses.”
The sweet predictability of Larry cheered Peter enormously, after the intricacies of Ginger. Almost laughing, he said, “Larry, you want to turn Koo Davis loose. The answer is no.”
“I just thought—”
“I know what you thought, and what you always think.”
Ginger said, “Sit in this chair here. You want to make the tape yourself?”