But they’d find me. He squeezed the greasy hamburger wrapping into a ball in his fist. They’d figure I’d found out something when I didn’t come back to the base, and they’d find me somehow. No matter where I hid. And then they’d kill me. Just like Stimmitz and Helga.
He knew there wasn’t any choice now. He either found some kind of proof about Operation Dreamwatch, something solid enough to get the proper authorities into it, or else he didn’t—and could start waiting for his own death. They’ll find me out sooner or later, he grimly told himself.
He picked up the copy of the Agitant again and studied it. Tracking down the parents of the two kids whose folders he had taken hadn’t revealed anything new to him, beyond the continuous forgery of letters to allay any suspicion by the parents. The newspaper was now the only thread he had left to follow.
Somebody, he thought, is poking into the same things I am. But the Revolutionary Workers Party? I don’t get it. Why would they be interested?
Two possibilities came into his mind. The little group of radicals was also aware of something being wrong with Operation Dreamwatch. Or they were a front for whoever was behind the Opwatch project.
Ralph considered the last. Yeah, that makes sense, he decided. They could have been talking to the parents of the kids in the Thronsen Home just to see how well their cover-up is working.
But either way, the RWP was the only point in the foglike mystery he could move towards. He opened the Agitant and located a column headed “Activist Calendar.” There was to be a public forum tonight at the RWP headquarters in L.A., with somebody named Peter Vallejo talking on “Ximento—The Facts Behind the Myth.” Ralph memorized the headquarter’s address and closed the paper.
That’ll have to do for a start, he thought. He rolled down the Ford’s window and stuffed the trash from his meal into the mouth of a container shaped like a malevolently grinning clown.
Chapter 8
The front yards of the little frame houses were choked with weeds. Most of the windows were broken, showing like transparent teeth beneath the rough boards that had been sloppily nailed over them. As Ralph parked the Ford at the side of the narrow street, the old street lights came on, spreading weak yellow splotches in the twilight.
He got out, locked the Ford, and headed back along the cracked sidewalk to the busier street he had turned off. The small vacant houses remained silent, as though they were the discarded husks of their former occupants. Where did they all go? thought Ralph as he walked past.
Probably all been squeezed into one of the Nueva buildings.
At the corner of the block stood a large sign depicting the planned extension of the Muehlenfeldt Center that would soon take the place of the little houses. In an already vacant lot up the street, Ralph had seen some of the bulldozers and cranes waiting behind a chain-link fence. The buildings in the picture on the sign looked like quartz crystals or something—great slabs of concrete and glass rearing into a sky bluer than any ever seen in L.A. Nice stuff for Martians, maybe, thought Ralph. He turned away from the sign, waited for a break in the traffic, then dashed across the street.
The headquarters of the Revolutionary Workers Party was in a dingy, two-story brick building. Ralph was sure he had found the right address—there was a large poster in one of the upper windows: VOTE RWP IN ’84! in red letters that glowed from the lights in the room behind.
The lower part of the building, he saw as he stepped up onto the curb, was occupied by the Red Star Candy Store.
Behind a dusty plate glass window protected by a folding metal lattice, a few scattered candy boxes lay amid the corpses of small insects on their backs. There were no lights on in the store.
To the right of the store window a narrow door opened onto a flight of stairs. The inside of the door was covered with the same poster as in the window upstairs. Ralph looked inside, saw another light at the top of the stairs and heard voices muffled by another door.
There were more posters lining the walls of the stairwell as he climbed up. The colors were faded, depicting causes and heroes and dates back through the seventies and even into the late sixties. One, the earliest he could make out in the dim light from above, was for a rally against some war in— some place he had never heard of. I wonder if they managed to stop it, he thought idly as he mounted the last few steps.
The door at the top swung open under his hand. A flood of light poured out and revealed a large room filled with books. They were arranged on plywood shelves lining the walls and stacked on makeshift tables with folding sawhorses for legs. A sign on the wall read PROGRESSIVE BOOK STORE. A man with a pipe was sitting behind one of the tables with a little metal cashbox on it. He glanced up from the book he was reading as Ralph stepped in from the stairwell.
Ignoring the man’s eyes on his back, Ralph stood in front of the nearest shelves and pretended an interest in the books. There were several copies of each title, most still shiny with the look of new books that had never been opened. Some were a little faded and covered with a fine layer of dust.
He pulled a book from one of the shelves. A bushy-bearded face glared at him from the cover. He put it back and took another. This had two men on it, one with a precise goatee and the other with a shock of black hair and small glasses, gazing up at him from the depths of ancient photographs. Ralph opened the book and pretended to read, while sneaking a careful survey of the rest of what he could see of the RWP headquarters.
Through a wide doorway to the rear of the bookstore, he could see rows of metal folding chairs facing an unoccupied podium. More of the posters he had seen coming up the stairs lined the walls of the empty meeting hall.
Behind him, someone came in from the stairwell and called hello to the man with the pipe. Ralph put the book back on the shelf and glanced over at the table. The newcomer, a girl in jeans and a service-station wind-breaker, was talking animatedly to the man. They both were laughing and ignoring him.
Maybe he wasn’t watching me to begin with, thought Ralph. Maybe I’m getting nervous for no reason— at least so far. A little bolder, he swung his head around. Through a doorway on the other side of the bookstore another room was visible, its windows overlooking the street outside. The room was occupied by battered wooden desks and surrounded by shelves filled with yellowing stacks of Agitant back issues.
Several party members were clustered around one of the desks, sipping coffee from plastic cups and talking. A girl in a pullover sweater too large for her was talking on a phone in the room’s corner and writing something down on a yellow notepad.
Ralph suddenly perceived that the room he was looking into was in fact L-shaped, with its far section hidden from view. He was craning his neck to try to sight whatever was around the room’s bend when he felt something strike him just below the shoulder blade.
His breath became something solid in his throat for a moment. He whirled around, saw nothing, then looked lower and saw a face grinning up at him. It was the short man he’d seen in Mrs. Alvarez’s building. And Mrs. Teele said he’d been around there, too, thought Ralph. Looking at the man’s round face and uneven teeth, Ralph felt the knot in his throat swell and grow tighter. Does he remember seeing me? he wondered uneasily.