Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “Yes.” She swallows. “That’s right.”

  I write in my Day Book.

  “And so the conversation you’re having here, that’s you asking the boys if they happen to know where your surplus dream meds might have gotten to?”

  She lowers her head.

  “Mom, you don’t have to answer all these questions.” That’s Eddie, the smaller of the brothers, giving his voice some spine.

  “Well, she does, actually. She does.” He glares at me, his face tight with anger, and I gaze back at him impassively.

  It’s dead quiet in here now. No waitresses are taking orders. No one is chitchatting in their own booth. Somebody has killed the jazz radio in the kitchen. Everybody is staring at us, at the big man in his blacks, towering over the three-top by the front window. And, you know, this is my nineteenth year doing this job and there’s something I’ve learned, which is that you can talk however calmly and reassuringly you want to, but people are gonna hear your words colored by their own feelings, by their own anxiety or fear or impatience.

  “Tell me the rest,” I say to Ms. Tarjin.

  “Mom—”

  “No, Eddie,” I say. “You keep quiet, son. I’m gonna talk to your mom a minute. Don’t obfuscate.” I shift on my feet, turn out, so I’m talking as much to Ms. Tarjin as to the boys. “A lie hidden in a shell of truth is a lie just the same, and I will know it.”

  “I was afraid that my son Eddie was stealing my pills.”

  “Mom!”

  “But—but—” She looks at the boys, and Eddie is looking at me, coldly furious, and Todd is inspecting the backs of his hands. “But Todd says it wasn’t Eddie. Todd says it was him.”

  “It was, Mom. It was me.” Todd looks up, presses a hand to his chest. “It was, okay?”

  She gives him a look I can only half see because the air is bending, the air is bent, and she says, “I thought it was Eddie because Eddie had been at the house but Todd told me that I had it wrong. So we’re getting it straightened out. That’s all. It’s not a matter for, for”—she meets my eye, very briefly—“for your department.”

  “Oh,” I say, “I see,” and I look at the family looking back and I am feeling it now, and I know right where it is, and Todd knows that I know and he jumps, grabs the back of the booth in a pivot, and runs for it.

  I huff once, like a bull, and go after him.

  He slams open the door and I catch it before it closes, hollering “Stand back, friends” as I charge out onto Pico Boulevard just behind him, slamming into a small flock of businessmen that Todd has just managed to dance around, scattering them in their lightweight summer suits like blue-breasted birds.

  “Sorry, fellas,” I say over my shoulder, grabbing on to my hat with one hand and steaming after Todd, four or five feet behind him, head down, body like a truck, my black boots slamming onto the sidewalk.

  I like this part. It’s not the part of the job that people talk about, but it’s the part I like: pure law enforcement, my feet in the boots and the boots on the ground, me breathing heavy and charging after a liar.

  He’s got no chance because I will catch him, and even if I can’t—and I will catch him, because giving chase is part of the job and I am competent and confident in all aspects of my employment—but even if by some miracle he gives me the slip, the captures are on: captures on every corner, captures in every doorway, forging history, putting us on the Record. Reality in progress.

  I’ll catch him or we’ll requisition the stretches, scour the Record, trace him to where he’s gone. Plus, the thing is, I know these streets, I know this block of Pico and every block of Mid-City all the way till it hits downtown, and I know what’s coming up. There’s an alley mouth three more doors down, between the strip club and the hardware store, and it’s going to sing out to this desperate kid like his own true love, like a sure-thing escape hatch, which I know damn well it is not.

  Todd, dancing around a lady and her dog, bounces off a parking meter, loses his balance for half a second, and I grab the scruff of his T-shirt, shout “Come on, man!,” but he wriggles free of my ham of a hand and—sure as shooting—flings his narrow body up the little alley next to the topless bar, and I race after him, breathing hard, slowing down a little, slipping on the uneven ground, the pavement slick with garbage juice and discarded sheets of Authority.

  “Train’s coming, Todd,” I say between heavy breaths, just loud enough for him to hear me.

  “What?” he says, but he can see it now—the yellow flash of the warning light at the end of the alley, where it lets out onto the light-rail tracks. He turns, cursing, staring at me, shaking as the gate arm lowers behind him. He raises his left hand and it’s got a gun in it—oh, this fucking kid. A gun? What has he got a gun for? His brother is the drug thief.

  Everybody’s got their secrets, I suppose. He points the gun at me but I keep coming. I have a gun of my own, of course. We all carry heat. But I leave it in my pocket. Closing the distance between us. The alley is short, noxious with the stink of trash and the midsummer city. Just bricks on one side, just the blacked-out windows of the strip club on the other.

  “I’ll kill you, man,” says Todd, loud over the rattle and rush of the train. “I swear I will.”

  “You’re not going to kill me.” He’s lying. I know and he knows that I know. “No more, Todd, okay? No more.”

  By the time I close the distance he’s lowered the gun. He drops it and I kick it away, take him calmly by the shoulder and clap him into the cuffs and turn him around, push him against the bricks of the hardware store. The last rattling car of the commuter train goes past, revealing a scrum of strangers on the far side of the tracks, watching me gently place this poor young liar in cuffs. Catching my breath, I tug out my radio and get a line in to the regular police, and by the time the sirens start to sing their way closer, a crowd has gathered and Ms. Tarjin and the other boy are out here too, pushing through the front of the jostling semicircle of lookers-on.

  “Oh Lord,” she says, wringing her hands. “Oh Lord. Todd, honey.”

  Todd is silent. His eyes are locked on the wall. His head is hanging down.

  “So?” she says to me, tearful, defiant. “Well? What happens now?”

  “Well, there’s a whole process,” I say. “But, uh—but it’s going to be bad.”

  “Oh no,” she says, her face crumbling. But what am I going to do—lie?

  “I will tell the regular police what I know, and your sons will be charged with their respective crimes.”

  “Crimes,” she says quietly.

  Eddie, the other son, the one who stole his mother’s drugs, now puts a hand on her shoulder, but Ms. Tarjin shakes it off. Todd keeps staring stoically at the alley wall. Ms. Tarjin has got one hand on her brow, massaging her temple—a mother’s pose of grief. One more grief that the world has given her, a new pain to be etched into the sad lines on her face.

  “The thing is,” I say, and then: “Oh good—hey fellas.” I help the regular police make their way through the crowd, two young officers I don’t know. They move Todd away from the wall, and I keep explaining to Ms. Tarjin: “Way it works is, you could decline to press charges on the stolen pills, if you wanted to. The kid’s not looking at more than six months.”

  I glance at Eddie, who has the decency not to look relieved. It’s his brother, after all—the one now in handcuffs, the one now being led to a black-and-white parked slantwise, halfway up on the Pico curb—who, in trying to cover up for him, trying to protect their mother from knowing about his perfidy, has committed the more serious crime.

  “What about him?” asks Ms. Tarjin quietly.

  “That’s going to be a matter for the adjudication division, ma’am. I can’t tell you for sure.”

  “A ballpark, though. Can you—” Her voice catches on tears. I cough forcefully into my fist, wipe at my watery eyes, though the dissonance that jammed me up has largely cleared by now. Now the air is clean. “You can give me a ballpark,�
� she says.

  “Well. It was a forceful and purposeful distortion of the truth.” I grit my teeth. I hate this part. “Six years? Nine?”

  She starts crying about that, the poor lady, and I take a step away from her. Just then it turns nine o’clock, I hear the tower at Pico and Robertson start to toll it, and people on the street all start saying it to each other—“It’s nine o’clock now”; “It’s just turned nine”; “Hey, how are you? It’s nine a.m.”—and by the time the bell has struck nine times, the regular police have led the boy away, and Ms. Tarjin is tearfully writing down the address of the Mid-City precinct where they’re taking him, and I don’t like it but I do like it, because we have to defend the world, because the world is all we have. We have to keep things good and true because the good and true world is all we have.

  2.

  By the time I make it from the scene of the morning’s drama all the way downtown to the offices of the Speculative Service and finish with the paperwork, I’m a half hour late getting to my own desk on the thirtieth floor.

  “Hey, Mr. Alvaro,” I say in passing, palming my beard and scowling. “Ten is half of twenty.”

  “But it’s twice five.”

  “So it's ever been.”

  “So it ever shall be.” Mr. Alvaro is the boss man, standing at the big board like always, endlessly updating the list of cases in progress, today’s assignments: anomalous facts to be sorted through, questionable statements to be followed up on. Accidental infelicities to be sorted out from purposeful misrepresentations.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I say. “I had an incident report to file on the fourth.”

  “So I heard. Chasing a bald-faced out of a breakfast joint on Pico, right? I got the whole story from dispatch. Explains why you didn’t answer your radio.”

  “What?”

  “Not a big deal. You’re next on the rotation, and we had an incoming. Car crash outside Grand Central, wildly deviant accounts of the moments preceding.”

  “You radioed?” I look down at my unit, fiddle with the buttons. It might be a matter of someone’s honest mistake, it might be a mere misalignment of perceptions, or it might be something worse—someone trying to paint a fake picture for the regular police, escape consequences by bending what is So. Those tend to be fun. I don’t like to miss those.

  “Arlo radioed. You musta missed it. No big deal, like I said. You’re too busy chasing petty liars down Pico Boulevard. Which, no kidding, is excellent work and will be reported up to Ms. Petras. If I remember, which I hopefully will.”

  He probably won’t, but I say “Thanks” anyway. Laura Petras is the Golden State’s Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws—officially, Alvaro’s boss and my own. There’s a picture of her framed near the elevator, an older blonde woman with a careful smile and a tan blouse.

  “And let that—excuse me a moment, Laszlo.” Alvaro makes his hands into a bullhorn to address the room. “Let that be a lesson to the rest of you mopes! Mr. Ratesic over here is collaring flagrant liars during his breakfast.”

  This testament to my supposed virtues earns a smattering of sarcastic applause and a vigorous middle finger from Burlington with his big mustache. The gang’s all here this morning: Mr. Cullers, leaning back with a hot towel over his forehead, and Ms. Bright, and Mr. Markham—the small-ball Specs, pure ID checkers and paper-trail combers. But Ms. Carson is here too, with her pencil skirt and serene expression, her hair shellacked into a hard helmet under her pinhole.

  I look around the room for Arlo Vasouvian, the senior-most Speculator on the floor, and there he is—at my desk with an individual I do not recognize, a young female standing at nervous attention. She’s wearing a pinhole, which means she is Service, but she’s also all in gray, not black, which means she’s junior. She’s in training. This I don’t like at all.

  “Arlo?” I go over there. Put down my bag and the cup of coffee I got downstairs. “What’s going on?”

  “Ah, good. Mr. Ratesic. Hydrogen is the lightest element.”

  “And Osmium is the heaviest. What’s going on?”

  He smiles slowly, peers at me from behind his thick glasses. “There’s someone I would like you to meet. A new member of our service. Mr. Ratesic, this is Ms. Paige.”

  “Okay,” I say flatly, extending my hand. “Twelve times twelve is one hundred forty-four.”

  “And, inversely, the square root of one hundred forty-four is twelve,” replies Paige, sharp as a paper cut, and then, while we’re still shaking hands, she rolls right on: “It’s Aysa, sir, Aysa Paige, and it is an honor to meet you, and I look forward to our working closely together.”

  I let go of her hand.

  “Arlo? Why did she just say that?”

  “Well, you can ask Ms. Paige, but I imagine she said it because it’s an honor for her to meet you. And because she is looking forward to working closely with you.”

  Arlo’s smile is knowing and roguish; Ms. Paige’s is earnest and guileless. She is young and upright, dark-skinned, well turned out, with the brim of her pinhole turned sharply to center, her thick curly hair carefully tucked away and bobby-pinned. Her shoes are shined and every button is in place. The keen care she’s taken with her appearance goes beyond the dress code and says something exacting about her character—exacting or eager to impress. Either way, her looking like that, with me in my poorly fitting blacks and battered pinhole, makes me feel like I just climbed out of a duffel bag.

  I turn to Arlo, who looks back at me mildly. No longer a field officer, Arlo wears no pinhole, no hat of any kind. and his thin white hair drifts in several directions.

  “Yes,” I say. “I wasn’t calling the woman a liar. I was wondering why she has the impression that we are working together.”

  “Well, that is my hope,” says Arlo. “If it’s all right with you. I had mentioned it to Mr. Alvaro”—he nods at Alvaro, over by the board, and Alvaro grunts—“and I did hope you would find the arrangement amenable.”

  “I do not.”

  Arlo’s wrinkled brow furrows, very slightly. “Oh, now. Laszlo, my boy. Can we discuss it?”

  “You can.”

  “Oh, now, Laszlo.” He speaks the heavy syllables of my name with paternal disappointment.

  Arlo Vasouvian is serene and equanimous, seventy-seven years old, with gigantic ears, with small eyes behind thick glasses, with hair so thin and white it is close to transparent. He is emeritus now, semiretired, but once upon a time, Arlo had Alvaro’s job—he did when I started, and he did when my father started, thirty years before that. Now he occupies a rickety desk toward the back of the room, slowly odd-jobbing his way through each day—helping new Specs get adjusted, putting the finishing touches on other people’s paperwork, sipping endlessly at a mug of hot tea. He could, if he wanted, be at home, puttering and humming to himself through an easy retirement in his little Ballona Creek cottage, but Arlo never married; the Ballona Creek cottage is essentially unfurnished. Arlo’s home is here. Every once in a while, someone teasingly asks Arlo when he plans on retiring, and he always has the same answer: “Maybe you’ll get lucky—maybe someone will shoot me!” This retort never entirely manages to hide the shadow of truth behind it, which is that the Speculative Service is his life, it is his soul’s strong purpose, and he fears that if the crutch of it is kicked away he will fall right over and never get up again.

  I feel comfortable averring as to how he feels, because I feel more or less the same. I’m fifty-four now, but soon enough I’ll be making the same excuses, finding the same reasons to keep coming in here every morning.

  I’m using my chair, so Arlo settles himself onto the edge of my desk, tilts his small body toward me, gathering his sport coat around his narrow chest.

  “I had only hoped, Laszlo, that you would find it in your heart—”

  “Nope.”

  “—to offer Ms. Paige the benefit—”

  “No thank you.”

  “—of your many years’ experience, and m
entor her as she—”

  “Listen, Arlo.” I push back from the desk, look him in his owl’s eyes. “I’m going to say no just one more time, but I’m going to say it nice and loud in case, because you are old, you are having trouble hearing me. Because you are very old.” I lean back toward the desk and my office chair squeaks beneath me. “No.”

  I start fussing with the stack of papers on the desk so I can be doing something, anything, other than look at Arlo. I’ve got a court appearance coming up, testimony I’m supposed to give in the Court of Small Infelicities, one of these knucklehead kerfuffles where an automobile dealership advertises “the lowest rates around” and a competitor hauls them in, challenging the veracity of “lowest” and the generality of “around,” and the courts insist on having someone from the Service in to weigh the litigants’ relative sincerity. So now I’m here, aggressively shuffling the papers, reviewing my prep materials, ignoring Arlo and the young woman, but I can feel them—this Paige character looking anxiously at Arlo, Arlo giving her a reassuring look: Don’t worry, I’ll handle this. Meaning handle me.

  The last thing I need is an apprentice; the last thing I need is a shadow, dogging my heels.

  “Listen. Laszlo.” I glance up in time to see Arlo give Ms. Paige a meaningful look, and watch her step discreetly away. I recognize this is an imposition.”

  “That is one thing it is, Arlo.”

  “I do not come to you lightly, Laszlo. I know how you are.”

  “Do you?”

  “I do. However. I consider the opportunity to mentor a high honor.” Arlo looks at me solemnly, his thin white hair pointing in all directions.

  “Okay,” I tell him, “so why not give it to Burlington? Come on, Arlo. Or give it to Cullers.”

  I point across the room, and, as if to neatly undermine my attempt to evade this high honor, Cullers groans, adjusts the hot compress he’s holding to his forehead. Maybe Cullers was up early too, chasing fugitive truth-benders down city blocks. Or maybe he was out late getting drunk. With Cullers, either possibility has an equal chance of proving out.