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“Look, Nat. I actually just want to ask you to forgive me.”

“That was nasty, the way you acted, Cassandra.”

“I know it. Inexcusable.”

“I thought me and you were—”

“We weren’t, Nat. That’s what you wanted, but we weren’t.”

“Sure, you’re right. We couldn’t have much of anything together as long as Wilton was alive. Now he’d dead, you’re more in love with him than ever.”

I knew for a fact now that wasn’t true. But I let it stand.

“And the useless cops still haven’t found who did it?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “They know.”

“So how come you’re still asking questions?”

“It’s too hard to talk about now. I have to go soon,” I said. “Maybe we’ll get together sometime. As friends, I mean.”

“Maybe.”

“How are things going with the free school?”

“Okay. Still got that picture of you one of the girls drew. It’s up in the coatroom.”

I had helped Nat when he first organized the free school/preschool. Most of the children were needy and sweet, and some of them had already been plowed under at age four or five.

“Thanks for the info,” I told him as I left.

“Watch yourself, Cassandra.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just watch it. You messing with something you have no business doing. Think I don’t know you at all?”

On the way out, I called my thanks to Torvald, who told me to wait just a minute. He brought me a thin sheaf of papers wrapped in tissue. “Little present for you,” he said.

I removed the wrapper, saw what he had given me: the new anarchist calendar for the year ahead. It was a little beauty featuring an exquisite line drawing for each month and noting the milestones in leftist history for every day of the year. Tor had been hand-lettering and reproducing calendars for years. Nat’s collection of them dated back to 1951. I thanked him for the gift as I flipped through it quickly. March 7, 1942—Lucy Parsons dies. April 6, 1931—the trial of the Scottsboro Boys begins.

2

I made out a little in the front seat with my chauffeur, then he drove me over to the Rising Tide office, where I figured one of Taylor’s co-workers could help me with some research on the August 4 Committee.

The office was a mile-high mess of manuscripts, empty soda bottles, denim jackets, LPs, manila folders, ashtrays, books. I could smell traces of tacos and grass as I walked past the empty receptionist’s desk.

Actually, just about all the cubicles were empty. On the one other occasion I’d visited Taylor on the job, the place was wild with activity. Where was everybody? I made my way back to the big space the staff used for meetings. I found them all watching television in a kind of group trance.

An assassination. Another one. These days, that was the first thing you thought when you saw a crowd of people staring intently at a TV.

But that wasn’t the explanation.

A daytime TV series about vampires, called Dark Shadows, was hugely popular with heads. In fact, a lot of Debs College students who were hooked on it would flock to the Sears Roebuck just across Wabash Avenue to catch it every afternoon. Sometimes the electronics department in the store was so jammed with freaks, the straight people couldn’t even move.

But no. The Rising Tide people weren’t grooving on that vampire soap opera, either. They were looking at the local news, and a few people were booing the face in close-up. Taylor grabbed me by the arm and pointed me toward the screen. The star of the show was our own vampire-torturer, Detective Jim Norris.

He was announcing proudly the breakup by authorities of a dangerous cadre of radicals. The black man found shot to death several days ago, who had rented a transient apartment under the fictitious name of Larry Dean, had now been identified as one Alvin Flowers.

Flowers, the ring leader of a group that aimed to foment revolution among black servicemen, had apparently been killed by another member of the group.

“Bullshit,” Taylor said. “I bet the cops killed this Flowers guy in cold blood.”

There was a chorus of right on’s from the staff.

Two core members of this group, calling itself the August 4 Committee, had been apprehended