Harbor Nocturne

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Jetsam said, “Did your snitch say if those two mutant deviates had all their own body parts intact?”

  “Yes, they did. And by now I’ve read enough about that kind of paraphilia to know that most of these people are obsessed with the idea of amputation but don’t necessarily try it out on themselves. They probably like to hear horror stories about some of the more gutsy people who allegedly went the distance. But Hector Cozzo is not one of them. He was only trying to please the Russian.”

  “Why don’t you, like, operate the goddamn massage parlor with an undercover copper and get a violation for prostitution and be done with it?” Jetsam said. “Why fuck with this sick Russian at all?”

  “We’ve tried UC operators without success,” the vice sergeant said. “These people are super careful and highly suspicious, and besides, we’re looking beyond a masseuse turning tricks. I know you’ve heard a lot lately about the LAPD cracking down on so-called erotic massage parlors, but we’re aiming higher. We want the money guys behind this one. So after we got the intel from Vegas and I learned about the collector’s rich Russian client with paraphilia, well . . .”

  “Dude,” Flotsam said to his glum partner. “Don’t push the off button. Let’s air this out. I wish they’d send me in as bait to chum up the water. I could handle whatever some Bangkok Bessie might wanna spring on me besides a back rub.” Then he leered at a buxom waitress and said, “And I could totally bring game to this here breast-aurant.”

  “Keep your mind in this game, bro!” Jetsam said. “They’re trying to shanghai me here!”

  “Funny you should say that,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “The name of our primary target is Shanghai Massage.”

  “See?” Jetsam said. “There’s all, like, bad juju going on here. I’m not down with this program.”

  “Don’t go aggro, dude,” Flotsam said to his partner. “He ain’t asking for a kidney.”

  “And we’re not looking for a misdemeanor prostitution arrest on an individual masseuse,” Sergeant Hawthorne said quickly, pleased to have Flotsam as an ally. “This is an intelligence-gathering mission, nothing more. We’re hoping that any masseuse who meets you will gossip about you to the collector, about an amputee client who tipped well and talked about having had his foot surgically removed in Tijuana by Dr. Maurice. We hope the collector might get curious enough about you to wonder if you could be a brother-in-fantasy to the big Russian. You being a somebody who had actually gone the distance with an amputation of a healthy foot. And if so, his very important Russian client might be burning with curiosity to meet you and hear all about how your Tijuana amputation went down. And if that works and you get inside, who knows what information and evidence you might be able to gather from these people?”

  “That’s a lotta ifs you got going here,” Jetsam said.

  “What’s Cozzo look like?” Flotsam asked.

  Sergeant Hawthorne produced a six-year-old mug shot, put it on the table, and said, “White male, thirty-two, five-six, a hundred forty soaking wet, black hair cut in a mullet, brown eyes, teeth like a ferret, and flamboyant in the clothes he wears.”

  The surfer cops barely glanced at the photo, and Jetsam said dismissively, “Everybody in fucking Hollywood’s flamboyant, so what’s that mean? Half the male population uses Johnny Depp guy-liner, for chrissake. And who the hell but the lamest of low-life skateboarders that wear their baseball caps sideways would have a mullet haircut in the twenty-first century?”

  “How do you know this ain’t just get-out-of-jail-free bullshit from your Vegas snitch?” Flotsam said, piling on.

  “We’ve been able to corroborate some of it,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. Then he added, “I’ll bet I could get your watch commander to let me borrow you both for the occasional nights we’d be needing you.”

  “What the hell would I do?” Flotsam said.

  “Maybe you could kind of act like security for your partner, sort of like his muscle. If he gets a foot in the door.”

  “It’s my stump that’s gonna get me in the door,” Jetsam reminded him.

  Sergeant Hawthorne managed a polite guffaw at the amputation humor and said, “Maybe a good cover story would be that you’re a seller of illegal video poker machines, the kind that’s springing up in residential casinos all over L.A. They’re brought from Arizona and can rake in between one and two thousand per machine per week, no problem. With your highlighted blond hair and permanent suntans, you resemble each other enough for you to claim you’re brothers, and I think Hector Cozzo would buy that. If he accepts the amputee, he’ll accept the brother with no worries that this might be a police sting.”

  “First of all, we don’t use tanning parlors,” Flotsam said, his eyes narrowing.

  “And we don’t highlight neither,” Jetsam said, equally resentful. He touched his lightly gelled hair and said, “These streaks’re what the sun does to hard-core kahunas that surf year-round.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest anything untoward,” the sergeant apologized.

  Flotsam grunted and turned to Jetsam, saying, “Untoward?” Then, to their host: “If we work for you, Sarge, we might need a translator.”

  Sergeant Hawthorne, who was thinking exactly the same thing about them, said, “You can ask any of the night-watch vice officers about me. I’m a forgiving supervisor, and I’m easy to get along with. Maybe I don’t look or sound the part, but I’m a pretty good street copper as well.”

  Doubting that, Flotsam told his partner, “Dude, it could be nectar-neat to catch an occasional break from these bluesuits and, like, go all Mission Impossible for a night or two.”

  “Easy for you to say, bro,” Jetsam said. “You ain’t the one that’d have to get your mind into a ghoulish game of show-and-tell where some psycho pervert wants to hump your stump.”

  Sergeant Hawthorne said, “It’s not like that. Cozzo is basically a grifter with a rich foreign client who has a very strange Achilles’ heel, that’s all.”

  “If he ever decides to go the distance himself, the geek won’t even have a heel,” Jetsam reminded them with a perceptible sneer.

  “We could try it once and see how it goes,” the vice sergeant said. Then: “Whoops!” as another dollop of ketchup obliterated the a in ucla.

  Jetsam shook his head. “Sarge, your sweatshirt now just says UC, as in ‘undercover,’ with two blobs of red beside it. So you just managed to out yourself. Any denizens of the dark out there can read that you’re UC, and you did it with your own ketchup.”

  Sergeant Hawthorne managed an embarrassed smile and began wiping ketchup off the sweatshirt and off his face, until scraps of shredded napkin clung to his chin.

  Jetsam looked at the vice sergeant and said, “What’s the thread count on these things anyways? You got pieces of it hanging off your face.”

  Flotsam said, “Sarge, if we let you dial us in, you gotta learn how to eat a fucking hamburger. You’re making us, like, way nervous here.”

  TWO

  “The first thing you gotta learn is, forget classroom Spanish. It’s not San Pay-dro. Around here everyone pronounces it San Pee-dro, or just Pee-dro most of the time.”

  Dinko Babich was conducting a late-morning tour for Tina Tomich, his mother’s first cousin, and her husband, Goran, who had arrived two days earlier for a brief visit to the Babich family home. Tina and Goran were in San Pedro to take one of the cruises to Hawaii being offered at Great Recession prices in the third summer of the Obama presidency. Dinko was conducting this private excursion at the request of his mother, Brigita, as a way to kill the last few hours until their ship was ready to board. All they had done since their arrival was sleep, eat, and gossip incessantly with Dinko’s mother, who’d said her good-byes to their Cleveland relations that morning while Dinko loaded his forest-green Jeep Grand Cherokee with their luggage.

  Dinko was still bloated from the food orgy of the last thirty-six hours. Of course, there was the inevitable mostaccioli and sauerkraut, staples of San Pedro Croatians,
but his mother had worked for days prior to the visitors’ arrival and had prepared spicy pork meatballs and boiled Swiss chard with olive oil, garlic, and potatoes. And not just any olive oil, mind you, but Dalmatian olive oil. Dinko’s grandfather had always said that even a dish of sardines and mackerel tasted like Mary the Mother of God had prepared it, if you had Dalmatian olive oil and local, brick-oven French bread for the dipping.

  Dinko’s mother, whose parents had emigrated from a village near Dubrovnik, had apologized to Tina and Goran because she had no way to purchase Adriatic fish, which everyone in her family believed to be the best in the world. But she presented a main course of the Croatian version of shish kebab and, if that wasn’t enough, another main course of beef in tomato sauce. And somehow fearing that her Cleveland cousins would leave her home unsatisfied, she served with their breakfast a plate of burek, pastry made of cheese, apples, and more meat, just in case their cholesterol had not spiked yet. And she packed them some thin fried pastry, to take with them in case they got hungry after boarding, but mostly to prove that the old-world way of cooking was alive in San Pedro.

  Goran was sixty-four, one year older than Dinko’s mother, and forty years ago he had almost left Ohio for Los Angeles to apply for a job as a longshoreman, hoping to work alongside Dinko’s late father, Jan. That was until the call came from another cousin, offering an apprenticeship as an electrician. And so Goran stayed in Cleveland, married Tina, and had four children with her. They were extremely proud of their grandchildren and had bored Dinko with family history to the point of his almost wanting to smoke some grow in front of them, which he figured would induce cardiac arrest from both senior citizens, if his mother’s feast didn’t do it first.

  While he was driving them on their brief tour, Dinko said, “You can also call the town Speed-ro if you want to. Sometimes I think half the population under fifty are tweakers. It’s like Zombieland. You’re afraid they’ll bite you and you’ll turn into one.”

  “What’s that mean?” the older man asked. “Tweakers?”

  “Crankheads. They smoke their crystal, mostly. Pedro will never be what it was back in my grandpa’s day or even my dad’s day. Nowadays it’s sorta where the ocean meets the ghetto. Definitely not a southern California beach community, that’s for sure. You can get hit over the head with a beer bottle and robbed. We call it being robbed at beer point.”

  “So sad,” Tina said.

  “The town is just overrun with Mexicans,” Dinko said. “Gaffey and Pacific are our main streets, and Pacific is full of Mexican shops and dollar stores and people selling junk right out on the sidewalks. There’s a street gang culture now, and tagging everywhere by baby gangsters. You stand still too long, some little BG might come along and tag your ass within an inch of your life.”

  “It’s a shame what’s happened to America’s towns,” Goran said.

  “Of course, Pedro is not really a town,” Dinko said. “It’s part of the city of L.A., but it’s far removed from the rest of the city by that skinny strip of land between Normandie and Western that takes the L.A. city limits way down here to Pedro. We’re here because L.A. needed a port, so they took that strip of land and stuck the Harbor Freeway in the middle of it.”

  “I’ll never forget coming down here the other night on the freeway after you picked us up at the airport,” Tina said. “All those lights from the Port of Los Angeles. Thousands and thousands of those tall orange lights, and the crazy pattern of storage tanks and cargo containers stacked up as far as you can see!”

  “Those’re low-pressure sodium lights,” Dinko said. He’d brushed up on port stats when he’d learned that his mother would make him tour the relatives around Pedro. “The port handled eight million containers last year. More or less.”

  “And those huge cranes out there at night!” Tina said. “From the freeway they look like scary monsters from a Star Wars movie or something.”

  “Good call,” Dinko said. “George Lucas and his crew loved those big cranes. They look sorta like the giant white Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back.”

  “How many people work at the port, Dinko?” Goran asked.

  “The December report I just read said over nine hundred thousand jobs and thirty-nine billion in wages and taxes were generated by the Port of Los Angeles last year. Of course, we refer to the rest of the city up north of here as Los Angeles. We say, ‘I’m driving up to L.A. today’ even though, technically, we are in the city of L.A. See, we always think of Pedro as a town, not a part of the big city. It was always our town, but now it’s becoming their town—the Mexicans, I mean. Us Croatians, and the Italians too, we’re all way outnumbered by the Mexicans, and there’s also plenty of blacks nowadays. The Mexicans have taken over the flatlands. The old-time families that’re left mostly live up on the hill, west of Gaffey. You won’t find many blonds like me at San Pedro High School these days.”

  “You aren’t blond, Dinko,” Tina said. “More like light chestnut now. But you used to be blond when you were a kid. Your mother sent us pictures. A little towhead with big blue eyes. Now look how tall you are.”

  “How many Croatians you still got in the union?” Goran wanted to know.

  “For years I always heard there were forty thousand people of Croatian ancestry living somewhere close to the harbor, but I think there’s maybe only a few hundred longshoremen left here in Pedro from the old Croatian families. In fact, the area across from your cruise-ship terminal is a housing project full of greaser street gangs that shoot people and sell drugs. You can drive through it and smell pot.” He paused and then said derisively, “Welcome to the harbor, where the sewer meets the surf. Where the debris meets the sea.”

  “And you, Dinko? You would never touch any dope the hoodlums sell, would you?” Tina asked him with worry in her voice.

  She was even fatter than Goran, and her jowls bounced from her vigorous nod of relief when Dinko said, “Not me, Tina. You think I could operate a crane like my dad did if I was a freaking doper? Pardon my language.”

  Dinko was lying twice: first about operating a crane and then about his claim to sobriety. Although he had a pretty good job driving a utility tractor rig, he’d twice in the past year spilled containers from a chassis he was shagging around the container yard, and he’d tested positive for drug use following the accidents. The second offense had resulted in a thirty-day suspension for being under the influence of marijuana, which is why he had time to take his visiting relatives on a tour.

  “How much you get for driving a crane, Dinko?” Tina wanted to know.

  “Crane operators get about four hundred a day,” Dinko said, and that much was true.

  “You hear that, Goran?” Tina said. “You coulda been a longshoreman. Dinko makes all that money and he’s only, what? Thirty-two years old?”

  “Thirty-one,” Dinko said. “But don’t forget, I been a dues-paying member of the ILWU since I was a teenager. I didn’t make the big bucks till I earned my A book and worked my way up.”

  “Please, Tina,” the fat man said with a sigh. “I done pretty good as an electrician, didn’t I?”

  “We coulda lived in California and had nice winters,” she said. “We coulda lived here in San Pedro next to the harbor and . . .” She corrected herself: “I mean, San Pee-dro, and we coulda watched the big ships come and go.”

  Goran just sighed again and looked at Tina’s young relative as if to say, You see, Dinko? You see the cross I carry?

  Dinko thought if he had to live with Tina for a week, he’d need to rip a bong twice a day just to cope. While he talked, he drove them to the San Pedro landmarks, including the parks at the south end by the mouth of the harbor, heading first to Angels Gate, where the Korean Bell of Friendship was a must-see. He also drove them by the Point Fermin Lighthouse and Museum, but they said they were too tired to go inside.

  It was a clear, sunny day, so they parked and looked out to sea. Goran said, “What’s that big island, Dinko?”

&
nbsp; “Santa Catalina,” Dinko said.

  “But it’s so close!” Goran said. “The old song said it’s twenty-some miles to Catalina Island.”

  “On a clear day like this, it looks a couple of miles away,” Dinko agreed. “Like you could row there in a dinghy, but you’d have to row for twenty-two miles.”

  Without getting out of the car they took cell photos of the American Merchant Marine Veterans Memorial, a striking bronze depicting two merchant seamen climbing a Jacob’s ladder during a rescue, a tribute to the men who’d suffered the highest U.S. casualty rate in World War II.

  Dinko said, “The L.A. and Long Beach harbors make these the biggest ports of entry in the country for container ships. They say that everything you’re wearing and everything in your closet, two-thirds of it came in through one of these two harbors in cans we unloaded.”

  “Cans?” Goran said.

  “That’s what we call the containers,” Dinko explained. “We unload the cans with cranes for the independent truckers that wait in lines four blocks long. The containers’re stacked five high on the ships, and sometimes we gotta get on top and unfasten the locking device by hand. I don’t like that. A crane could knock a bunch of cans over real easy. When a can falls, it sounds like an earthquake, and it can pancake the cab of a truck. We lose maybe six or eight people a year. One time I saw a ten-ton boom come out of its stay and crash down and slice a guy in half.”

  “Maybe it’s a good thing I became an electrician after all,” Goran said. “Money ain’t everything.”

  “How much does a longshoreman like you make a year?” Tina asked.

  “A night-shift crane operator can make a hundred seventy-five grand a year,” Dinko said. “The day-shift crane operator can make up to a hundred fifty. Back in my grandpa’s day, you had to have sponsorship to join the union. The union books got passed on to a longshoreman’s kids. It had your name and ID number on it and the hours you worked. Most were Italians and Croatians then. Cops, firemen, even doctors and lawyers sometimes were allowed to work part-time on the night shift to make extra money.”