The Reincarnationist Papers

by D. Eric Maikranz

  Copyright © 2021 by D. Eric Maikranz

  E-book published in 2021 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Sean M. Thomas

  Previously published by Barbary Press,

  an imprint of Parallax Publishing,

  as The Reincarnationist Papers by D. Eric Maikranz,

  copyright © 2008 by D. Eric Maikranz

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-0941-5494-7

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-0941-5493-0

  Fiction / General

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  Author's

  Explanatory Note

  This manuscript came into my possession while living in Rome at the turn of the millennium. I noticed the three plain notebooks in an antique shop on the medieval Via dei Coronari, just off Piazza Navona. At the time I was conducting research for my first book, Insider’s Rome, a travel guide to some of the city’s more obscure but interesting sites. The notebooks seemed out of place in an antique store, weathered but not quite old enough. Idly picking up the first notebook, I was surprised to find it filled with Cyrillic handwriting. Being a Russian speaker, the pages intrigued me and I purchased them for a meager twenty thousand lire, about ten dollars US, at that time.

  Despite lengthy efforts, I could not fully translate the text of the notebooks and eventually determined that they were Serbian, Bulgarian, or Ukrainian, but definitely not Russian.

  Following a hunch, I first went to the Bulgarian Embassy on Via Pietro Rubens in Rome. I struck up a conversation with a receptionist, and she confirmed the handwriting was Bulgarian. Intrigued by the first few pages, she agreed to help me translate it. Over the summer, Marina Lizhiva and I set to work. She translated aloud to my typing accompaniment. We became enthralled as the story unfolded in those summer evenings in my apartment on Caio Mario near the Vatican. When the translation was finished, I set to work to verify what I could of Evan’s claim. That research is detailed as footnotes to the text, the only editorial work required after translation.

  D. Eric Maikranz

  First Notebook

  “As the stars looked to me when I was a shepherd in Assyria, they look to me now a New Englander.”

  Henry David Thoreau, 1853

  1

  The noose looked ridiculous. Fashioned from a braided extension cord, it was likely too stiff to be an effective neck breaker anyway, and I would end up strangling in a flailing, pantomimed panic. The asymmetrical loop at the end hung off to the right like an elongated number six, and its bright-orange color lent a circus air to the entire endeavor. Would it even hold my weight, wrapped around the cheap light fixture like it was?

  It’s easy to write about it now, that I’d often thought about killing myself, that I’d thought specifically about how I might do it: drowning, overdose, asphyxiation—immolation is a personal favorite. I’ve even talked about the virtues and pitfalls of different methods with strangers on the bus.

  “Why would you do such a thing?” was always a popular response. But I think that is the wrong way to look at it. I’ve always thought the better question was “Why not do such a thing?”

  “What prevents you from doing such a thing? Do you like it here that much? Are you in love? Do people depend on you being here? Did it never occur to you? Are you afraid?”

  I am not afraid.

  If you knew you would come back. If you knew you would live again, not just believed it, but knew it, why would you not do such a thing?

  But I didn’t put my neck into that noose, not out of fear, but out of courtesy really, because this place, this type of desperate end would be too horrible to remember. That’s the trouble with having a perfect memory. The benefit is that you remember everything that has ever happened to you. The drawback is that you can never forget anything that has ever happened to you. The former imparts wisdom, but the latter robs you of hope. I decided to write down this story with the certainty that I will look on it again with different eyes in a different time and remember who I’d been.

  i left minnesota three years ago because I started to remember. I left to find myself, only to find myself here, in Los Angeles. Nobody’s exactly what they seem in LA. Everyone has an ulterior motive for leading their everyday lives. No one’s just a doctor, or a student, or a salesman. Instead, they’re a doctor and an art collector, a student with an audition next week, a salesman with a screenplay. In this place, more than any other I’ve found, there is anonymity in being more than you seem. And that, more than anything else, explains why I landed here.

  It was still in the low nineties outside when I left for the club. When it’s hot at night and there’s no wind, all of downtown LA’s visceral smells hang thick in the air, assaulting as you pass. But still, it felt good to be outside, anywhere but in that room.

  I’d been cooped up in my room for three days straight, knowing the management wouldn’t put a padlock on the outside of the door if there was still someone inside. I had lived, if you can call it that, in the Iowa Hotel1 for five months and every time I was even a day late with the weekly rent, those bastards put that same blue, spray-painted padlock on my door. If you didn’t pay the rent by the end of that week, they would remove the lock along with all your possessions. That hadn’t happened to me yet but was only four days away. Leo, the manager, was already scurrying through the drawer in search of the blue lock when I passed by the front desk on my way out.

  There was a line outside the Necropolis Club. It seemed there was always a line. Thankfully, the doorman let me in without waiting. I was supposed to meet Martin at midnight; it was ten forty-five when I arrived.

  The once-quiet Necropolis had been my bar of choice for the past year, but with one write-up in the LA Weekly,2 the amateurs started pouring in from as far away as Simi Valley and Chino. But for all its newfound popularity, the bar itself hadn’t changed. The Egyptian-themed club sat in an old movie theater, and all they did to modernize it was to remove the seats, level the floor, put bars along the front and back walls, and build a stage in front of the silver movie screen, which showed vintage films behind the bands. The bar tops along each wall were lit by blue-white neon underneath thick, frosted glass, making it look as if they served nothing but iridescent blue liquors to the patrons. The walls had been stripped clean, painted black, and covered in twenty-foot-tall, white bas-relief portraits of strange-looking Egyptian gods.

  “Hello, Evan,” a familiar voice said from behind the bar.

  “Henry,” I said, smiling at him as I took the last empty seat at the back bar.

  “What can I get for you?”

  “Give me a beer.”

  “That’ll be two bucks,” he said, nodding to someone holding up an empty glass at the other end of the bar.

  I had less than a dollar on me. “Run me a tab, will you, Henry? I’m going be here for a while,” I said, lighting a cigarette. Henry smiled and went down toward the man with the glass.

  By midnight the place was buzzing. The second band of the night took the stage while an angry Godzilla silently destroyed 1958 Tokyo on the screen behind
them. The dance floor seethed with motion that appeared in stop frames from the overhead strobe lights. I could see the door from my seat at the back bar. The doorman was still letting people in at twelve thirty.

  I had given Martin directions to the Necropolis and told him to be there early because of the increasing crowds; told him to mention my name and to tip the man at the door. I told him to look for a six-foot-tall, twenty-one-year-old white man with blue eyes and short, straight blond hair wearing a black shirt. Looking around now, there were three dozen of us matching that description. Martin had started to describe himself over the pay phone, but I told him I would know who he was; I would, and he wasn’t there.

  Henry came back with another beer in hand. “Here you go,” he said, placing the glass on a fresh napkin. “Hey, check out the mark.” He pointed over my shoulder into the crowd toward a middle-aged balding man in a camel hair sport coat and cream-colored khakis. He was apologizing as he made his way through the crowd.

  “Oh,” I chuckled, “he’s with me.”

  “Yeah right,” said Henry, turning away.

  I walked straight up to Martin.

  “Evan?” he asked, gasping, a dazed look on his face.

  “Yes, Martin, you’re late.”

  “I know. I had trouble at the door.”

  I looked him up and down, from his balding head to his penny loafers. “I can’t imagine why.”

  “This place is different all right, just like you said. Pretty cool. Why did you have me meet you here?” he asked.

  “Because if you were a cop, a wire would be useless in a place like this,” I shouted as I reached inside his sport coat to run my hand over the sweater vest, feeling for a recording device. “Right?” He squirmed at my touch.

  He regained his composure and ran a comforting hand over his lapels as I took my seat again. “Is this an old movie theater?” he asked.

  “Yes. How did you hear about me again?” I took a long draw off my beer.

  “Preston. He said you could help me.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you help me?” he asked, raising his eyebrows in an attempt to solicit a response.

  “Yes, I can. Did you bring the money?”

  He reached inside his sport coat and produced a white unsealed envelope which he placed on the luminescent bar next to my beer. “I’m glad to get rid of it. I get nervous carrying around that kind of cash on this end of town.”

  I didn’t acknowledge his remark as I looked at the envelope. It lay on the frosted glass, half an inch thick. I picked it up carefully, as if it might break. Fanning through it, I found twenty-five one-hundred-dollar bills, a handwritten address, and a key. “I get the other half when it’s done.”

  “Yes, I know. Preston told me,” he said.

  Henry came over again and shot me a curious look, then sized up Martin. “Another?”

  I nodded.

  “And what’ll you have, Dad?” Henry asked sarcastically.

  Martin looked at me. “What, is he making fun of me?”

  I shook my head and stifled a grin.

  “I would like a white wine, please.”

  Henry grunted and grabbed a fresh glass.

  “So how do you want it done?” I asked Martin.

  He hunched over instinctively and leaned close to me. “Well, it’s got to look like an accident or it’s just no good.”

  “Besides that,” I said, dismissing his comment, “is there anything else I need to know?”

  “The key is to the alley entrance, it’s a heavy steel door. You can’t miss it.”

  “Are there any windows?”

  “Yes, on the second floor, but there are none on the first floor, they were bricked up years ago.”

  I smiled and grabbed the fresh beer. “It’ll be done in a week. Meet me here again, at midnight, the Saturday after it’s done,” I said, folding the thick envelope of cash into my front pants pocket.

  “Are we finished, then?”

  I looked at him sideways. “No,” I said sternly. “We are finished after we meet again.”

  “Okay then, until we meet again.” He held up his wine glass to make a toast.

  I clinked my glass against his and drank deeply, letting the cold beer calm the excitement I felt at being flush with cash again. He gathered himself, shook my hand, and nodded a curt goodbye. He took a first step away, but I grabbed his shoulder before he could go and whispered in his ear. “Make certain you’re insured,” I said, unsuccessfully trying to suppress a laugh.

  He smirked, unamused, and walked away quickly as though he didn’t want to acknowledge his involvement. They’re always like that the first time.

  “Who was that?” asked Henry.

  “Not sure really, let’s find out,” I said, holding up his eel-skin wallet. I fished out the driver’s license. “Martin Shelby, it says.”

  “Nice pull,” he beamed. “Are you working again?”

  “Yes, a new job.”

  “Why did you lift the wallet? Wasn’t there enough money in the envelope? Hell, I saw it. It was that thick.” Henry held his index finger and thumb an inch apart.

  I reached up, placed my hand on his, and adjusted his measurement by half. “That thick. And no, it’s not the money. See, this guy only has eight bucks in here, but the rest of this stuff might come in handy.”

  I pulled the eight dollars out of the billfold before I put it in my pocket and retrieved my lighter and cigarettes. “Henry, Mr. Shelby would like to buy me another beer.”

  “Whatever Mr. Shelby wants,” he said, replacing my glass.

  “I might need your help in a couple of days. The usual stuff at the usual rate. You up for it?”

  “For you, man, always. Besides, I could use the money. Just call me when you’re ready. Another drink?”

  I reached into my pocket, grabbed the envelope, pulled out the handwritten address, and unfolded it. “No, this is my last one. I’m going to take a walk.”

  garbage and broken window glass covered the sidewalks in Martin’s warehouse neighborhood. Only one in four buildings looked occupied. I counted down the numbers on the transoms and door frames of the passing buildings: 2678, 2674, 2670. Martin’s building was brick and had been painted, the last time in gray. It stood two stories high, with four tall, narrow, unbroken windows running along the street side of the second floor. The two large picture windows in the front of the second floor had long been boarded over with plywood that had turned the same color gray as the paint from the assailing smog-soiled rain. A lonely floodlight at the back of an occupied warehouse halfway down the alley cast long shadows at the rear of the building. The door Martin had mentioned was large, four feet wide, eight feet high, and made of metal with riveted steel straps running horizontally across it. It looked more at home in a prison than it did on a warehouse.

  I looked around and picked up a discarded newspaper. Folding it so that it fit the inside contours of my left hand, I pulled out the key with my right. I placed my hand on the large iron door handle, being careful to keep the newspaper in place around it so that I left no fingerprints, and gently placed the key into the dead bolt housing. It turned with ease and made no sound as it unlocked.

  The poor lighting from the alley penetrated only a few steps inside. A dim glow from the second floor windows illuminated an old wooden stairway leading up along the back wall. I took out my vintage Russian cigarette lighter, slapped it three times against my hand, and lit it. The small flame threw sparse light around the back room and up the stairwell to the rafters of the second floor. To the left was an open door to a dingy bathroom. Directly in front of me, the ground floor opened up into a dark expanse.

  I stepped into the main room on the first floor, careful not to overstep the small circle of illumination the lighter provided. The ceiling was a cross-hatched pattern of floor joists, c
ross beams, and electrical conduits, and no sprinkler system. The ground floor was a concrete pad painted battleship gray like the outside brick. Eight roughly hewn square wooden posts supported the weight of the second floor. There was no sign of light or life anywhere as I retraced my footsteps to the staircase in the back.

  Decades of footfalls had worn the rough-cut stairs smooth in the centers. I climbed into brighter light with each step. The tall windows I had seen from the sidewalk opened to the streetlights on one side, projecting long rectangles of light onto the hardwood floor. I walked along the wall next to the side street, checking each window in vain with a newspaper-covered hand to see if it would open. The gray paint on the outside bricks ran wildly over the wooden window frames, locking them tight. The ceiling looked exactly like the one below, with no sprinkler system in place. I turned away from the wall and surveyed the second floor. “It’s going to have to start up here,” I said to the awakening voices in my head. “Let’s figure out how to burn this place.”

  The Iowa Hotel stands at the corner of East Seventh and Ceres.

  The LA Weekly is an alternative local paper with club listings.

  2

  Holding the steps together in my head, I practiced and executed this latest arson job over and over as I walked back toward downtown. The sun lurked just below the horizon as I reached the Iowa Hotel. I pushed open the front door and walked into the empty lobby, realizing I had never seen it in the early morning. Usually, it was crowded with broken men sitting on broken furniture. The black-and-white television mounted in the upper corner of the room was off for the first time in memory, and the threadbare couches by the counter looked even more so without occupants. The lobby looked strangely peaceful, like a leftover scene in a run-down theater long after the actors had walked off. I quietly walked over to the vacant front desk and enjoyed the silence for a few moments before repeatedly pounding the bell on the counter, sending shocking waves of unrelenting noise through the dirty brown curtain into the manager’s room beyond. I continued striking it three times a second like a fire alarm until that familiar bald head peered around the curtain.