by James Sallis
"Sure hope you got yourself good reason to be back here," a voice said behind me.
He was tall and straight and hard and looked the way birches look when bark peels off, skin gray and raw white in patches.
"Yessir. I knocked and called through the door 'fore I came in. I was wondering if there might be work 'round here a man could do. I can clean-do repairs and the like, plain carpentry and plumbing. Cook some too."
"Wardell, that you? Who you talking to back there?"
"Got a nigger looking for work."
"Ways fromhome ain't he?"
I showed myself in the pass-through. "Yessir. You're right, there. No work back in the ward though, and not likely to be. I figure work won't come to me, I'd best get where I might come across some."
"Now don't that beat all."
"Walk on through that door there," Wardell told me. "Let's get on out front."
"You think there might be something for me here?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I think there just might be. We'll talk about it"
I went through the door muttering my gratitude.
Wardell stayed behind me. I stood by the bar, momentarily invisible, as they spoke among themselves.
"Shit, Wardell, you got any clothes of your own? Everytime I see you you got that same damn uniform on."
"I been at work all night, Bobby, like always. You fucking know that."
"Not that it don't look good on you," the third one said, speaking for the first time. He leaned forward into the light. Eyebrows perfect parentheses far above close-set eyes, giving him a vacant, unsetding appearance. His skin was dark, leathery, hands pink and smooth. As though someone else's hands had been grafted on.
"Looking for work, huh."
"Yessir, I am."
"And what would you be willing to do?"
"Do about anything I was able to, I guess. Whatever needs doing."
He nodded. "Get you a beer? Awful hot out there."
"Nosir. You don't have work for me, I'd best be moving along. You do, I'd best get to it."
"Well…" He glanced at Wardell there behind me. "Much as I hate to say it, we don't have anything for you, son. Wish we did. 'Cause I admire what you're doing, I want you to know that. Ain't one in a hundred has your spirit, be man enough to do it. You sure you won't have a beer? Take it with you if you like."
I shook my head. "But thank you."
"Where you say you're from?"
"Down by North Broad."
"You done wandered a long way off the playground."
Not far enough, I remembered telling Don.
I thanked them all again and, when I turned, Wardell backed out of my way. I went through the kitchen and out, hearing laughter behind me, laughter that came not from any joy or amusement, laughter that came only because it was expected, part of the code.
I returned to the car, put myself back together as best I could, and cut through the trees to the Kingfisher Mobile Home Park and Amano's trailer a mile or so distant. The door was unlocked, just as Lee Gardner said.
Despite the trailer's lived-in look, the man who left here had anticipated being away for some time. Two rooms. In the back one the bed was made, not altogether a common occurrence judging from the state of the bedclothes. Books sat in squared-off stacks, arranged according to size, beneath the bed and against the opposite wall. My eyes picked out The Conjure Man Dies and Blind Man with a Pistol as I looked over them. An ashtray atop one of the stacks had been wiped clean. In the frontroom, three or four mismatched plates, a half dozen cups looking to be permanendy stained by tea, and a small blue pan, used (from evidence of deposits) to boil water, filledthe drain-board. The trash can under the sink held a freshplastic liner. A small TV in an imitation-wood casing was on with the sound turned low.
I've done it hundreds of times but it's always strange walking into someone's life that way. Here's this person you don't know-and you know however hard you work at it, however deep you scrabble in, you never will know them, not really-yet you're about to enter into this odd intimacy.
Amano's IBM Selectric sat on the counter just as, from his writing, I'd expected, a towel draped over it to keep out dust. Hisfilingsystem consisted of old typing-paper boxes stacked crisscross. Lower ones had collapsed under the weight, so that the masses of paper inside, not the boxes, bore the whole thing up. A scratch pad of discarded pages folded in half sat alongside, fountain pen centered on it. I picked up the pen. It was British-made, satisfyingly hefty and thick in the hand, not an inexpensive item. The pad's top page was blank.
I got a beerfromthe tiny refrigerator and started making my way down through the stacks, letters to and from readers, rough drafts and false starts for what eventually was to become American Solitude, a handful of short stories torn (didn't he keep carbons?) frommagazines with names like Elephant Hump Review and Shocking!, notes on scraps of paper that meant nothing at all to me {? 2nd p. grail mcguffin?).
A couple of boxloads down the stack, there was a thick file of articles and editorials photocopied or torn from magazines, all of it crude and blatantly racist, and atop that, drafts for similar pieces written in Amano's own hand.
Research, surely. He'd done his homework, reading the sort of thing these people put out on a regular basis, then had a try at writing the stuff himself, to get the feel of it, to clamber up inside their heads and sit there awhile looking out.
There could be more to it, of course. Maybe this had been his ticketin, maybe he'd written these hate pieces to gain admission to the group. To prove his candidacy, his right-thinking, or to make himself useful to them.
Or maybe-and the thought wouldn't turn away; I remembered all too clearly the authority of the voice in Amano's fragmentarymanuscript-maybe the connections were deeper.
Maybe the connections were authentic.
Maybe led by things seen and heard at the trailer park, from a neighbor like Jodie early on in the manuscript, or at Studs, Amano had started poking about, learning what he could. Curious, appalled, intending at firstto turn over the stone, expose what was going on; later, to use it in fiction. But then as he got ever closer he began to find himself strangely attracted. Found himself being taken over by it.
I'd become so absorbed in Amano's papers and my own thoughts that I failed to hear anything until the door lisped open behind me. It sounded like hands being rubbed forcefully together. And when I turned, that's what was there, hands. One in my stomach, hard, the other, not to be disappointed, waiting for my face to come down and meet it.
"Right again," a voice said.
I looked at the canvas-and-leather boot planted on my chest, then further up to close-set eyes and high brows.
"Missing that hungry look. Had to be up to something, all the way out here. Old Ellis is right again."
He trod down hard and I heard a rib snap.
Then I went away for a while.
Chandler never wrote better than when Marlowe was being drugged or beaten half to death. Must have been tough out there in La Jolla. Something about British public schools, maybe, so many of them grow up with this masochistic bent.
When I was twelve or so, there was this kid who kept pushing me, wanting to fight. Every day at lunch he'd start up again. Couple of times he even had me down in a hammerlock, but I never did anything. Then one day when he stepped up, before he even had a chance to say anything, I put out my arms, walked him backwards onto some cement steps and started banging his head against them. A teacher out for a smoke ran over and made me stop.
"No you don't. Not that easy, boy." His kick brought me swimming back into focus, coiled around the pain. "First you tell me what you're doing out here. Then maybe I let you go to sleep."
He held a knife loosely down along his leg, one of those hunting knives with a massive handle that's supposed to look like a stag's horn.
We both heard it without knowing what it was, a dull slap, the way a board might sound breaking under the bed. He pointed the knife towards me and half turned, liste
ning.
No more.
"Wardell?"
Breath suddenly loud in the room.
Louder: "Wardell?"
He leaned close to hold the knife against my throat.
"You move, I cut."
Stepping to the door, he stood by it, poised, listening. Then reached and pulled it abruptly open. Where before it had lisped, now it screeched.
Joey the Mountain stood there filling the doorway, wearing a dark suit, maroon tie. Pomade in his hair glistened in sunlight. His lapels and shoulders, the creases in his slacks, were architecture. "What the fuck you want?" Ellis said. Holding up the knife. "Where's Wardell?"
Then, that quickly, it was over.
Joey glanced at the knife, and when Ellis's eyes followed his, reached up and grabbed his shoulder, squeezing. Whatever he did hit the nerve there. Ellis's arm went limp; the knife fell. Joey smiled momentarily, then hit him square in die forehead, once, with afist the size of a chicken. Ellis went straight backwards a foot or so before collapsing.
'Tough guys," Joey said, shaking his head. "Always got to talk to you first, let you know how hard they are, do this little dance. One outside was even worse. Fuck 'em."
He took a couple of steps and looked down at me.
"You okay, Griffin?"
I sat up, managed to prop one arm against undercoun-ter shelving and push myself more or less erect. Joey stepped back as I rose.
"Maybe you oughta try getting to bed nights, not take so many naps." Leg-breaking and stand-up comedy a specialty.
Stand up being easier said than done.
Joey threw Ellis over his shoulder. "Taking this one with me." Seeing he wasn't going to get through that way, he unslung Ellis and held him straight out a foot off the floor, pushing him ahead through the door, a lifesize marionette with broken strings. The security guard lay collapsed at the foot of the steps.
'That one ought to be coming around soon enough. Don't expect he'll waste much time removing his sorry butt."
"Joey, what are you doing here?"
"What the fuck you think I'm doing, Griffin. Keeping you in one piece. Allyou tough guys are a pain in the ass."
He started off through the trees with Ellis on his shoulder, walking at a full clip. Might as well have been a raincoat. The dark blue Pontiac would be his.
"You coming or what, Griffin?" he said, never looking back.
I RODE THE tail ofjoey's Pontiac back into town, to a deserted dry cleaner's just off the warehouse district, part of our intermittent inner-city ghost town. Tumbleweed blowing past skulls in the street wouldn't look out of place. New Orleans is riddled with these inexplicable lapses: you'll have whole blocks or sections abandoned, boarded up or kicked in, then right next to it everything's fine, commerce carrying on as usual, dragging life along.
Joey got out, retrieved Ellis from the trunk, and came over to my car. When he leaned down, Ellis's head swung forward and banged against the fender.
"Wait."
He started off, then came back: "Someone be with you to take your order soon." He vanished into the building.
Not a creature was stirring.
Well, in truth lots of creatures were stirring. Rats the size of beavers that in other parts of the city took to the trees hunting squirrel; cockroaches that, you cooked them up, they'd serve a family of four; street-smart starved dogs and scrawny cats looking as if every extra day tickedoff on the chart of their lives was a victory over holocaust.
Just no human creatures. That you could see, anyway. Didn't mean none were there.
And after half an hour or so, one was.
Jimmie Marconi came down the outside stairs from the building's second floor, some kind of office up there probably, in the old days kept workers and management comfortably apart. One of Marconi's men, the wiry one from Leonardo's, followed him, stepping into the recess of a doorway at the bottom of the stairs to become shadow. His eyes peered out at car, street, buildings opposite.
"Here's what you need to know," Marconi told me after he'd got in and sat a moment. "Nothing."
Then he laughed. He and Joey could have worked up one hell of a routine together.
"You do have a way of getting in over your head, Griffin."
I allowed as how he had a point.
'We counted on that."
A kid on a bike came into view down the street and proceeded up it, weaving in slow curves fromcurb to curb. Marconi's man's eyes tracked him from the shadowed doorway.
Death was the only thing that would ever rush Jimmie Marconi. I sat quiedy, waiting till he was ready to go on.
"Funny how Eddie Bone never told you what he wanted, that time he called."
"He said we'd talk about it when we got together."
"Puts you off like that, then he doesn't show at all, sends along this woman instead."
"Looks that way."
"And you still don't have any idea what he wanted."
"None."
Marconi nodded. "Ambitious man, Eddie. Worked hard, took care of business. Good with details."
Yes.
"Ambitious. Always wanted to be a bigger man than he was. Had this whole world of his own, friends, places he went regularly, they'd treat him like some fucking big-shot You ever see the layout at his apartment, you know what I mean. Nothing wrong with any of that long as he kept it to himself."
Marconi looked around at the seats, floormats, dash.
"Nice car."
"My girlfriend's."
"I know. LaVerne. She's finetoo."
He smiled, a perfectly gentle, suave smile that put me in mind of carnivorous fish.
"Once in a while Eddie'd do contract work for us. Pickups, deliveries, moving things from here to there. Nothing complicated. Month or so before his death, things fell out so as he wound up holding more of our money than he probably ever should have. But he was dependable-right? "
Marconi watched the kid go out of sight up the street.
"Eddie was okay long as he didn't try to think. Man just couldn't think in straight lines to save himself. Get things all tangled up."
Marconi looked at me.
"I'm telling you this. It don't go any further."
I nodded.
"I don't know what the fuck he thought he was doing. Got it up his ass somehow that he was gonna… what is it they're always saying in lousy movies these days… he was gonna 'make a difference.' This fucker in his silk suits he don't ever get dry-cleaned, they smell like a goddamn gym sock, but he's gonna make a difference.
" Week or two goes by and we start to wonder. So Joey goes by. Eddie tells him the money's gone. This woman he had at the apartment must have taken it, but he's on her trail. Day later Joey goes back and wants to know how it's going. Good, Eddie says. Yeah, well we know where you been hanging out, Joey tells him. We know what's been coming out of your mouth."
Marconi looked out the window. At one time the building's entire side had been painted with the firm's logo and name. Now only the ghosts of white letters, DY CL N NG, remained.
"This was my folks' place. Started it the year they were married. He was nineteen and she was seventeen. Got the whole thing going on a hundred dollars. What you gonna do with a hundred dollars these days, Griffin? People in the neighborhood said Valentine Marconi could get the stains out of anything-maybe even your soul."
Someone came down the stairs at the side of the building. The wiry bodyguard went over and they spoke. Then the bodyguard started towards the car. Marconi rolled the window down. The bodyguard spoke softly into his ear and Marconi nodded.
"We still don't know," Marconi said. He cranked the window back up. "Maybe the woman took the money, like Eddie said. Maybe she talked him into doing it. Or maybe it was Eddie's screwed-up idea all along, his pitiful fucking idea of hitting the jackpot, and the two of them were together on it, accomplices.
"Maybe these dickheads"-he glanced at the stairs, Ellis up there somewhere, in some condition-"engineered the whole thing. Took the mone
y outfromunder Eddie or got him all busted up on their great cause. What we think is, one way or another Eddie gave it to them."
"To make a difference."
"Yeah. Boy up there didn't seem to want to talk about it. Thought he was some kind of soldier."
"He's dead."
Marconi shook his head. "Soon."
"You, one of your gophers, killed Eddie."
"It's what happens, Griffin."
"And Dana Esmay?"
"Police say suicide. Why not? Maybe she couldn't live with what she did, or with what she thought someone else was going to do once they found her. For all we know, she had the money, and the toy soldiers put her down for it-or because she knew they had it. We wanted to find her. Hell, I even asked you to help. And we needed to have a talk with the toy soldiers, ask them if maybe they knew anything about our money."
"Which is why Joey was following me."
"Sooner or later you were gonna come across those boys. You'd find them or they'd find you."
Someone stepped onto the second-floor landing. He held his fist out, thumb down.
Marconi shook his head. "Another tin soldier tipped over on the board. Dead with his toy honor intact Take care, Griffin."
"Mr. Marconi."
He stopped with one foot out of the car.
"I don't much like being lied to."
"I can appreciate that."
"Or set up. Or tailed."
He shrugged without looking back at me. "Who would?"
The wiry bodyguard came out of the doorway. He stood scanning the street as Marconi went up the stairs, then with a glance my way turned and followed.
10
It was night now. Streetlights ran long fingers in through the window and caressed the back wall. Neither of us had made any move to turn on lights in the house.
