“Yeah, I know who owns it and I know how much he loves money. Just read it, Buddy. That’s all I ask.”
Fix checked his watch. Eight more minutes to go.
“What’s the story?”
“Sheriff sends up some bad guys and they’re released from prison. Send him a message they’re coming back. Warn him to clear out. He won’t go.”
“Done and redone. Man against the mob. What’s new about that?”
“What’s new is that he’d rid the town of this bunch. If the town stands with him the gang has no chance.”
“And?”
“Town turns its back on him. Leave, say the elders. We want no more trouble.”
“And?”
“Now he has the gang and the town against him.”
Fix smiled. “You’ve been working with Brecht too long, Joe. So the town is the Germans, who instead of standing up to Hitler embrace him. No more trouble.”
“It’s all in the writing, Buddy, the telling, you know that, classic tale with a new twist. Put Gary Cooper in it.”
“I saw Galileo, you know,” he said, referring to Brecht’s play. “Dreck. Why did he make him snivel like that?”
Morton had worked on the revision of Galileo before going to jail for refusing to talk to Congress about people like Brecht. Brecht had written his first draft while on the run from the Nazis, making the Italian astronomer a hero who stands up to the Inquisition, a metaphor for the Nazis. In Santa Monica he realized he’d written a lie. No one stood up to the Nazis.
“To show the monster he was up against.”
Fix sighed and stood up, hands on hips. “Can’t do your story, Joe. Gary Cooper is the last guy who’d do a script with your name on it. Not to mention Howard Hughes, who’s the boss now. Howard’s talking about Cooper for The Fountainhead. Ayn Rand.”
“So forget Cooper. Hughes will love my script. Just get him to read it.”
“Nobody will do a film with your name on it.”
Joe didn’t move. “How do you know?”
“How do I know? Because it’s my business to know, goddam it, because I’m paid to know what the American people will like and to help them like it. Because people think you’re a goddam Commie, Joe; because Congress cited you along with the others like your pal Brecht, who left the country for East Germany just in time. Because you just got out of jail.”
“With my name on it, eh?”
Fix started to say something and stopped. “Hey, you write something I like, give me another name to put on it and we can do business. Hey, I’ve got a still better idea: we’ll put your wife’s name on it. Why not? She’s a helluva writer.”
“What? Me ghost for Lizzie?”
“Ghost, schmost. Get her to write it.”
“What—my sheriff story?”
“No, not your goddam sheriff story. Morality doesn’t sell anymore. What sells today is strength—Superman, good against evil, John Wayne against the Indians and Gary Cooper against the bureaucrats. They want Galileo standing up to the bad guys, not going all blubbery. Look, Joe, I’m trying to help. Get Lizzie to write up the whole Pitts-Murphy-Chili business. Helluva a story. Make a classic noir.”
“I’m not here to shill for my wife. I’ve got my own story. Why don’t you take a look? What do you have to lose?”
“Time, dammit, time, which is what I’m losing now. I can’t touch you, Joe. Read the Waldorf agreement. My hands are tied. Your time is up.”
Joe hadn’t risen. “The Waldorf agreement! I saw your name on that screed. The others I can understand: Goldwyn, Mayer, Harry Cohn—Galileos all. I didn’t expect to see Buddy Fix on that reactionary list of infamy.”
“Infamy? We told it like it is, Joe. We’re businessmen, not moralists.”
“That’s what the Krupps told Hitler.”
The intercom on the desk sounded. Fix ignored it and turned to watch a great truckload of maple trees chug by toward the Brooklyn street at the rear of the lot.
“Here’s how it is, Joe, just as real as those maple trees out there: Anything with your name on it is poison, end of story. Your pal Brecht is the toast of East Berlin—the man who came back when everyone else was getting the hell out.”
“Brecht was anti-fascist, anti-war, anti-Hitler long before we lifted a finger. So he’s a leftist now. So were a lot of people who fought against Hitler.”
“C’mon. You were with the Bolshies before the war. Admit it.”
“So I admit it. The Crash made a lot of people ask questions. Then came the Depression. What about you, Buddy, weren’t you asking questions?”
He was leaning on the desk. “Never. I’ve always been a true-blue Ayn Rand capitalist.”
“And your father . . .?”
Fix froze, pudgy fingers pressing white-tipped into the desk, tie dangling, beady eyes squinting. Joe watched his expression change from anger to surprise to curiosity.
“What the hell do you know about my father?”
“I ran into him on a picket line once.”
Fix grimaced, then burst out laughing. “Yeah, right, well, we all make mistakes, don’t we? At least he didn’t go to jail. Now get out of here.”
“What about my script?”
“So leave your fucking script,” he shouted. “And get yourself a nom de plume or whatever the fuck they call it!”
Chapter 32
“Los Angeles has, young lady, the most perfect transportation system in the world.”
The man leaned forward in the redwood chair and jabbed his finger toward the blazing fireplace to make the point. “I bet you didn’t know that. Most people don’t. They get up and hop a trolley that covers eleven hundred miles of track for a quarter—that’s more than half the distance to Chicago—and they take it for granted. Dumb clucks don’t even know what they’ve got.” He sighed and sank back into the canvas cushions. From the kitchen the coffee gurgled. “Well, they’ll know when it’s gone.”
Fred Barrett had not been that easy to find. An angular, bearded, ageless man on the wrong side of fifty, maybe sixty, he’d quit his job on the Los Angeles Utilities Board and gone to ground. It took her two weeks to locate him at Lake Arrowhead, where he’d built a cabin. “Sick of the whole thing,” he told colleagues before he disappeared. People knew he lived in Venice, but he was gone when Lizzie found the house. “Up in the mountains” was all he’d ever said about his cabin. After knocking on a few Venice doors Lizzie found a neighbor who knew it was Lake Arrowhead. Some mountain sleuthing led her to his cabin on a snowy winter day.
“I had to get out of that place before it ruined my health,” he said, staring back into the fire. “I couldn’t stand to see what they were doing. People are going to go to jail. They damn well better. Trouble is it’ll be too late.” She’d taken out pad and pencil, but after listening for a few minutes put them back in her purse and flipped on the tape recorder. Fred Barrett liked to talk. At his office, they’d told her he knew every mile of every line in the city and could tell a story about all of them. She’d come to listen.
The Times had taken its time getting into it because few people grasped what was happening. Reports came in of tracks being pulled up here and there around the city, but other tracks were being laid. It didn’t seem different from what had been going on for years as Los Angeles grew and spread and redistributed itself. The Pacific Electric Company of Henry Huntington was a business, and it was natural that unprofitable lines would be replaced by profitable ones. All this was overseen by the utilities commission because trolleys were public transportation, monopolies to be regulated in the public interest. Some of the construction had been spectacular, like the grading through the Cahuenga Pass that took trains over the Hollywood Hills to Studio City and Sherman Oaks.
“They do it in the dark of night,” said Barrett. “People wake up and where there’d been a train that to
ok them to work they find a hole in the road.”
Cal’s tip put her onto the story, but it took time because she’d been wrapped up in the second Pitts trial and because beyond the sale of Pacific Electric to National City Lines it wasn’t clear what the story was. It wasn’t until more tracks started to disappear that she knew she had something. And when she went looking for National City Lines, she couldn’t find it. How could that be? Pacific Electric was the largest employer in the city, running lines into every corner of the county, carrying over a hundred million passengers annually. The Sawtelle trolley downtown to the Times was an easy ten-minute walk from their Barrington house.
How could the new owner of such a leviathan be invisible? And if they were pulling up old tracks why weren’t new ones being laid?
When Fred Barrett unwound his gangly frame from the redwood chair to head into the kitchen, she had a chance to look around. He’d built the house himself, he said, over countless weekends, countless years. It was his therapy. The house was built in the shape of a tower, or maybe pagoda, at the end of a dirt road winding up from the lake, which was frozen solid as she drove by. It seemed all one room, though the kitchen had its own round corner behind a partition, and a spiral wooden stairway led to a loft bedroom under the exposed beams of the roof. Like the man, the house was sparse and neat. The fireplace kept it warm though it couldn’t be much above twenty-five degrees outside. Through skylights on either side of the loft she saw falling snow. She’d had to wait at the Times while they put chains on the company car, “just in case.” It was snowing by the time she hit San Bernardino, and Highway 18 up to Crestline was impassible without chains. The Times stringer at Lake Arrowhead found Barrett’s address at the post office and told her how to find the house. It was mid-afternoon by the time she arrived. Despite his surprise, Barrett welcomed her warmly.
“It’s accumulating, darling,” he shouted from the kitchen. “You better drink your coffee down and get out of here or you’ll be snowed in.”
“I didn’t come all this way just to go back. I don’t suppose you have a phone.”
“No phones up here. That’s why we come. Tell you something else. People come up here because they’re afraid of the ‘Big One’—you know, the earthquake that’s supposed to level the city one day.” She heard a guffaw. “What they don’t know is that the San Andreas Fault runs right under Lake Arrowhead. When the Big One comes we’ll be at ground zero.”
He had a good fire going, and when he returned with a coffee tray and biscuits she was not sure she wanted to leave. He put a new log on the fire.
“Any place to stay in Arrowhead?”
“You don’t want to stay up here. Never know when you’ll get back down.”
She took a sip of the strongest coffee she’d ever tasted.
“Better pour some milk in that,” he said, settling into his chair. “Tell me, how did you get onto this?”
“I have a friend who worked at Pacific Electric.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“Just that the P.E. was being sold and nobody knew the buyer.”
“Best kept secret since the Manhattan Project.”
“But how can that be? The city council was involved. The public utilities commission was involved. The state railroad commission had to know something.”
“I’ll tell you how it happened,” he said, putting his feet up on a wooden stool. “If you’re not going back then you’ve got some time and might as well get comfortable. We can drive into town in a bit and check out the Village Inn. They’ll have something for you. Now, turn that machine of yours on and we’ll get going.”
He drank his coffee half down. “I assume you know that National City Lines is a front. If you didn’t know that you wouldn’t be here. Guy named Roy E. Fitzgerald runs it, or maybe that’s E. Roy, never was sure about that. Signs his name both ways. He’s as much of a ghost as his company. Got started in a town called Galesburg, near Chicago, with money from General Motors to buy the town’s railway system and junk it. GM promised Galesburg buses to replace it—you know, those yellow things they make. Worked so well that GM kept on giving and E. Roy kept on pulling up tracks in little towns all around Illinois. Nobody complained—too much money being sloshed around. Pretty soon GM had partners named Standard Oil, Mack, Firestone, Greyhound, and they started eyeing bigger fish. Took their act to Tulsa, Montgomery, St. Louis. Tracks come out, buses go in. By the time the public knows what’s going on it’s too late. But none of these towns is anything compared to Los Angeles. They were fishing for minnows and then went for the whale. Best transit system in the world, I tell you.”
“And that’s what you told the city council?”
“That’s what the public utilities board told the council. And we told the council what these guys were doing back east. I went back myself to see and wrote it all up for the council.”
“So it’s all part of the record.”
“It’s all in there.” He paused. “But try and find it.”
He crunched on a biscuit. “Where you from?”
“Born right here in Los Angeles,” she said.
He smiled. “One of the few. I got my start in New York, little town called Syosset. I worked on the Long Island Railroad. Went right through Syosset. After the war—the First World War, that is—I came out here. Docs said I needed a dryer climate. Went to work for the P.E. and watched our train system grow up and surpass the Long Island. We laid half again as much track as the Long Island. Now can you imagine New York without the Long Island Railroad? You cannot. New York would not function without the Long Island Railroad. Where would the people live? Now don’t you imagine that General Motors and Standard Oil and the rest of them would love to pull up seven hundred miles of Long Island track and replace it with cars and buses? You bet they would. And any New York city councilman or Long Island town supervisor who let that happen would be up at Sing Sing the next day.”
He finished his coffee and glanced up at the skylights, now dark with snow. “I tell you, darling, the day will come in Los Angeles—don’t know when it will be, maybe twenty-five, fifty years out, who knows?—when the city is so inundated with cars and smog and bumper-to-bumper traffic and general misery and frustration that it will look back at what it had in the thirties and forties and wonder how in hell people could have been so stupid. Mark my words, there will be a highway from downtown to the beach that will follow the exact path of the Venice Short Line, only instead of a half-hour ride while you read your newspaper you’ll be shut in your car barely moving and breathing the exhausts of the cars all around you. It will take four times as long and you’ll arrive four times as frazzled—and then try to find a place to park.
He stood up. “And you know what they’ll do? One day, after wringing their hands and pulling their hair for years, they will start to rebuild what they destroyed. They will pull up the roads and scrap the buses and lay down track—maybe subways, maybe elevated, who knows what they’ll have by then—and those tracks will go exactly where Pacific Electric had laid them. I’m telling you, they will follow the exact same routes. How much will the new system cost? It will cost a thousand times what it cost to build the system we have today. Hah! And they say that the human species is getting smarter.”
He stopped talking and walked to the front door for a peek outside. A gust whooshed in that made her shiver. “Getting pretty heavy. The 18 will be closed by now. Tell you what. I’ll drive to the Village Inn. You follow me in. They’ll have a room. Better for you than stuck out here. We’ll get some dinner and talk. Time this story gets the attention it deserves.”
She’d brought only a purse, but the village shops would get her through the night—or maybe a few nights. Her main problem was shoes, so after checking in at the hotel and leaving Fred Barrett at the bar she went searching for boots and heavy socks. In another shop she found pajamas and a woolen cap and then it was b
ack into the snow to the local drugstore for toiletries. At least she’d had the foresight to bring her good woolen coat. Back at the inn, she had her things sent up, went into the ladies’ room to freshen and then off to find Barrett. As a rule, she didn’t drink in the daytime, but it didn’t seem like daytime anymore and she was cold enough that she would have broken her rule anyway. Barrett was seated at a table in the bar reading the Times, and they ordered hot rum grogs.
“First time at Arrowhead?”
There was a fire going. She’d kept her boots on and with new socks could finally feel her toes again. “First time,” she said, keeping her hands wrapped around the warm mug. “Beautiful place, though I’m not used to the snow. We live in Brentwood.”
“Brentwood? Santa-Monica-Sawtelle Line—runs from downtown right out to the Veterans Hospital. Say, your name’s Mull. You by any chance related to the late Willie Mull?”
“Willie Mull was my uncle.”
“Well, darling, you have my deepest sympathies. That was one sad story. I’ve never been to the temple, but been by it enough times, right smack on the Glendale-Burbank Line, one of the finest lines of all, private right of way, no cars to slow us down.”
“But you were a commissioner, not a trainman . . .”
“I was a trainman before I was a commissioner. I’ve been on every line in the city, dear, know ’em all, ask me anything.”
She turned her tape recorder back on. She still had no feeling for this story, for how to approach it, for where its center was. Usually she knew from the beginning what she had and what she didn’t and whom she needed to see to fit everything together. This story was too amorphous. She needed to pull back to view it better, go up on a hill like the generals do to look down and see the big picture. The heart of the story—that some mysterious Roy E. or E. Roy comes to town and takes over its transportation network without anybody noticing—was simply too preposterous. Takes it over and takes it apart. Cities have utilities boards and city councils and mayors and newspapers to prevent things like that. How could this have slipped under the radar? That was the guts of this story—that the whole thing was done in secret. Why didn’t Fred Barrett blow the whistle instead of disappearing up into the mountains? Or did he?
Blood and Oranges Page 24
