Harbor Nocturne

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  “Thank you, dawg,” Hector said, producing another business card. “I gotta run back to the dressing room now and tell her what’s going on. Gimme your digits.”

  “What’s her name?” Dinko asked, using Hector’s pen to write his cell number on one of Hector’s business cards, under where it said, “Hector Cozzo, Facilitator and Entrepreneur.”

  “Lita Medina,” Hector said, standing up. “You won’t have no problem with her.”

  “No worries,” Dinko said. “I’m locked on.”

  Dinko felt his excitement grow as he sat alone at the table and watched the dark corridor leading to the dressing room. A few minutes passed before Hector emerged, rushing toward the front door with a thumbs-up for Dinko. Then Dinko saw the silly fucker blow him a kiss before he breezed out with a very serious expression on his goofy face.

  After another ten minutes, she came from the darkness at the back of the bar and approached Dinko’s table. She struck him as incredibly demure and, well, respectable. She looked even younger with her stage makeup replaced by only a little eye shadow and lip gloss. He stood, and she held out her hand. It was a delicate hand, but her fingers were long and her nails had recently been done with French tips. When he shook her hand, it felt cool and dry; his own felt hot and moist. Her lustrous dark hair, a shade lighter than Hector’s, was swept back to one side of her face and fell to her breasts. He remembered how those breasts had looked when she was onstage. Now she was wearing a long-sleeved red shirt, blue jeans, and inexpensive flat shoes—dressed more for a trip to the mercado, he thought, than to a meeting in a Hollywood nightclub.

  She nodded politely and included her matronymic name when she introduced herself, saying in heavily accented English, “I am Lita Medina Flores. I am very happy to meet with you, señor.”

  “I’m Dinko Babich,” he said. “Just call me Dinko.”

  “Deenko” was how she said it, smiling slightly, revealing a tiny chip at the corner of a front tooth that made her look even younger. Then, apologizing for showing amusement at his name, she said, “Is name I never hear before this. Is good name. Very nice.”

  “It’s Croatian,” he said. “You know, the country that used to be in Yugoslavia?”

  “I know,” she said. “We learn about the Europa countries at my school in Guanajuato.”

  “Would you like to go now?” he asked.

  “Please,” she said. “I am very happy to go from this place.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said, and he held his hand out, palm up, beckoning her to precede him to the door.

  The summer sun, now barely resisting the ocean dive off the coast, was still bright enough that she put on drugstore sunglasses and stood beside the Jeep while he unlocked the passenger door for her. He waited until she was seated and then closed the door, running around to the driver’s side. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so courtly with a woman, and this one wasn’t even a woman yet. She was a kid. And a freaking Mexican!

  She held a small hand-woven purse on her lap and looked straight ahead while Dinko headed for the Harbor Freeway. He figured she would not speak at all except to answer questions.

  As they were driving west on Pacific Highway, Dinko spotted a new red Mercedes SL parked just off the intersection with Bayview Avenue, facing north. The smog-laden twilight made it impossible to see more than the back of the driver’s head, but what really piqued Dinko’s interest was the big Asian in a dark suit, white shirt, and necktie standing on the curb, bending down and leaning in the passenger window to talk to the driver. There weren’t many Asians in business suits around those streets, and there sure as hell weren’t many new SLs. Then Dinko saw that the driver was smoking a cigarette, and he almost turned the car around and went back to be sure that it was Hector.

  Dinko figured he was getting two Franklins to be with a chick he’d pay two Franklins to be with, so maybe he should mind his own business. It probably wasn’t Hector, anyway. Maybe, but maybe not. Hector Cozzo never would’ve had the balls to be directly doing business with silverback street gangs, Dinko thought, not back in the day, and not now. He wished he could’ve seen if the driver was a mullethead.

  He was almost to the freeway and still considering a U-turn to satisfy his curiosity when he remembered Cozzo’s other nickname from back in school: Hector the prevaricator. They always said you could pour a quart of Sodium Pentothol in his soup and still not get Hector to tell the truth. Some things never changed.

  When they were heading north on the Harbor Freeway in moderate Los Angeles traffic, which would be deemed horrendous in most other U.S. cities, Dinko said to Lita Medina, “How long have you been here from Mexico?”

  “Three month,” she said, facing straight ahead.

  “Do you like it here?”

  “Is very nice,” she said.

  “Do you get homesick?”

  She said, “I am sorry. I do not know what . . .”

  “Do you get sad and feel lonesome when you think of your home?”

  She thought it over. “My home?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Do you have a mother and father and sisters and brothers?”

  “I have my mother and two brothers,” she said. “My brothers are very young and my mother does not possess good health. She has the diabetes and a weak heart and is very ’spensive to get her medicine. I must make money here and send to them.”

  “How old’re you, Lita?” he asked abruptly. “Tell me the truth.”

  She faced him with a look of apprehension, opened her purse, and said, “I am twenty-two. I have Social Security and driver license. I can prove for you how old I am and—”

  He held up a hand and said, “Relax, I’m not a cop. I just don’t think you’re twenty-two years old, no matter what your phony ID says. But don’t worry, I won’t tell nobody.”

  After another long silence she looked down at her purse and said, “I am age nineteen years and four months.”

  “I thought so,” he said. “You’re just a kid. A child.”

  “I am no child,” she said.

  He said, “I felt like I wasn’t a child either when I was nineteen, but now that I’m a man, I know better.”

  “I am no child,” she said more firmly, and this time she looked at him. “I quit the school and I work for my family almost four years in Guanajuato. I do the work what I must do. I am no child, Dinko.”

  He looked at her and thought he saw her eyes moisten. He decided not to press her further. He punched the CD button and played some soft rock while they rode in silence.

  Smoggy darkness had fallen by the time they were close to the Hollywood nightclub, and the boulevard traffic was worse than Dinko remembered. He hated coming up to the city at any time, but weekend nights were beyond awful. The ceaseless headlights were unbearable, and sometimes it could take thirty minutes to travel a mile and a half in the bumper-locked madness. An hour of this could make him long for San Pedro, even with the Mexicans turning it into a barrio slum. There was a saying among the generations of Croatians and Italians of San Pedro: “Go ahead and leave, but sooner or later, everyone comes back to Fish Town.”

  After he parked in the only space he could find, nearly two blocks from the nightclub, he got out and walked with her to the door of the building. It was a typical east Hollywood commercial setup, having had several identities and business uses over the years, before becoming a nightclub. The lighted sign saying “Club Samara” was surprisingly subtle, and Dinko figured that must have something to do with zoning restrictions rather than good taste. He didn’t equate Russian and Armenian hoodlums with good taste.

  When they got to the door she said, “Please, Dinko, wait for me at the car. I will not be in there for very much time.”

  He nodded and let her go in alone. He found himself thinking about Hector. He felt like calling him and asking what the hell he was doing parked by Pacific Highway with some dressed-up Asian, but there was always a slim chance that it had not been Hector’s
SL. Yet he knew in his gut that the SL must belong to Hector the selector.

  Dinko stood on the sidewalk looking at the endless lines of headlights on the boulevard. At times like this he wished he had a cigarette, but he hadn’t smoked one in four years. He smoked weed occasionally, but never cigarettes, not since his father had died from lung cancer, a terrible death that had made Dinko swear to his mother that he’d never smoke a cigarette again. Being her only child, Dinko was all she had left, and she never stopped reminding him of that.

  One of these days he was going to get out of the comfortable Babich family home on the hill west of Gaffey, where Croatians and Italians didn’t have to be surrounded by beaners, but he couldn’t seem to hold on to enough money for a start. The biweekly poker games with other longshoremen were sucking him dry, and he didn’t really enjoy gambling. After ten minutes of loitering on the sidewalk inhaling exhaust fumes, Dinko said, “Fuck it,” and he entered Club Samara.

  The place was very dark and more upscale than he’d expected, way above the dump where he’d found Lita. The bar itself wasn’t long and welcoming, probably because they wanted people at the tables or lining the stage, which would mean more tip money for the dancers. There were some faux-leather booths along the far walls, and the stage was first-rate, with lighting that followed the blond dancer, who straddled the pole and waved to a hooting male customer seated stageside. Dinko noted that some of the tables could accommodate four and several only a deuce, and he was surprised to see half a dozen youngish couples at the tables for two.

  Then Dinko noticed a waitress bringing a tray of tapas to one of the tables—to be expected, because they had to serve food in these clubs in order to get a liquor license. He was surprised that so many lounge lizards actually brought girlfriends to watch other girls show their tits, but then this was Hollywood, where every kind of freak hung out. In a little room on each side of the main room, a girl was giving a geezer a lap dance. He knew that the seating there faced outward toward the main room per legal requirements, so that any vice cop or ABC agent could see into the room to determine if lewd conduct was occurring. It was the same in the titty bars down in Wilmington.

  He took an empty bar stool and ordered a draft beer, just pointing to the closest of the three beers on tap they offered. When the bartender brought the brew, Dinko said, “Is Samara the name of the owner here, or what?”

  The menacing bartender, with dark hair slicked back and pointing down his forehead in a widow’s peak like Count Dracula, said in heavily accented English and a voice fathoms deep, “Is a great city on the bank of the Volga. Better city than this one.”

  His lip curled as he said it, so Dinko replied, “No offense, man. My geography’s a little rusty.”

  The bartender turned and walked to the other end of the bar, where a customer was holding up two fingers for him and his buddy. No tip for you, Russkie asshole, Dinko thought.

  Other than the ethnicity of the male customers here, most of them being white, he thought they weren’t a lot different from the bar customers he saw around the L.A. harbor. Nobody was dressed upscale except for a few guys in suits, who were probably downtown stockbrokers hoping for a short-lived erection before going home to momma and the kiddies somewhere on the West Side.

  Dinko felt appropriate in his skinny-fit jeans and blue cotton half-zip pullover, the right style, he’d been told by a cute salesgirl at the Gap, for a guy as tall and slim as he was. The deal was sealed when she said the blue pullover enhanced the blue in his eyes, but she’d only given him a noncommittal smile when he’d asked if she’d like to meet him for coffee sometime. The outfit had cost him a Franklin, tax included, and he figured he looked okay anywhere in Hollywood, which itself was looking tackier than he remembered it from when his dad, on special occasions, would drive them up to catch a first-run movie.

  He saw Lita Medina walk into the main room from a corridor leading to the restrooms and a back office. A man was walking beside her, an older man in a double-breasted, pearl-gray business suit who was definitely not a downtown stockbroker. When he got into the light Dinko saw that his dyed black hair was swept up and back like an ancient rocker’s. Christ, it even looked like he combed it in an old-time ducktail.

  Dinko slid off the bar stool and scurried to the door, not wanting Lita to know that he’d come inside. As he was striding briskly along the sidewalk, he wondered why he didn’t want her to know he’d gone in there. Why should he care where this Mexican kid worked, or what she did with her life, or what she thought of him? It was none of his business. He told himself she was nothing to him, nothing at all. L.A. was full of Third World tramps like her. She’d probably be fucking those old communists the first night she showed up for work.

  Dinko was seated in the Jeep by the time she reached the car, and he got out, feigning boredom, and opened the passenger door for her.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  She nodded and said, “Mr. Markov says I shall begin my work on Tuesday.”

  “Dancing?”

  She nodded.

  “Lap dancing?”

  “I shall do anything to get the propinas . . . I mean, the tips.”

  “Have you ever lap-danced?”

  “No, but I shall learn.”

  “This sucks.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. Let’s get the hell outta Hollywood.”

  They didn’t speak until they were cruising south on the Harbor Freeway, and then Dinko said, “Isn’t there some other kind of work you can do here in L.A.? You got any skills?”

  “I do not know that word,” she said.

  “Talents? You got any talents?”

  “I dance,” she said.

  “You’re no dancer,” he said, feeling unaccountably angry. “You can’t dance worth a damn. I saw you, remember?”

  “I am sorry.” She stared straight ahead. “I shall learn better.”

  “For chrissake!” he said, his anger growing.

  “Please,” she said, now looking frightened and confused. “I do not wish you to have anger. I am sorry.”

  “You’re too young!”

  “I do not understand.”

  “You’re nineteen years old. You shouldn’t be working in a place like that, hustling drinks. First of all, it’s against the law.”

  “You promise not to tell my age,” she said, and when he looked over at her, the oncoming headlights revealed tears in her amber eyes.

  “Goddamnit, don’t get weepy on me,” he said. “I won’t tell nobody, but nineteen? You’re a child!”

  “I am no child,” she said.

  “Tell me something,” Dinko said. “Did Hector buy you out of a contract with that bar owner in Wilmington?”

  “How you mean?”

  “Did you sign a paper promising to work at that bar for a period of time?”

  “No,” she said, puzzled. “I do not sign nothing.”

  “How did Hector find you?”

  “He come and see me one day and then he bring a man on other day when I am dancing. A man I think is from China, but Hector say he is really from Korea.”

  “Which one was the boss?”

  “For sure, the big man from Korea. He say he look for girls to work in Hollywood. He tells me how much they pay me to work at Club Samara.”

  “Was the Korean dressed in a suit with a white shirt and necktie?”

  “Very much businessman,” she said. “How you know that?”

  “Shit!” Dinko said. The guy standing beside the SL. Hector wouldn’t tell the truth if you took his mother hostage.

  They were silent again except for Dinko’s exasperated sighs, and then she said suddenly, “And you, Dinko? How old?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “I am maybe older than you,” she said. “In many ways.”

  “You’ll get old real fast,” he said, “working in that place.”

  “I work at more terrible one in Guanajuato,” she said.

  His anger
and frustration mounted again, and he asked impulsively, “Were you a hooker down there?”

  She clearly did not understand the word, and she looked at him until he said, “A whore? A puta? Did you peddle your ass in that miserable country? Is that what you did? Is that what you wanna do in Hollywood? Work for freaks and thugs in a sleaze joint and sell your body and get diseases?”

  After a very long silence she said quietly, “I must make money how I can. I am for sure not virgin, Dinko.”

  Still boiling over, Dinko said, “Nobody is these days, the Virgin Mary included. Our fucking archbishop paid out more than six hundred million to cover his pervert priests. Those good padres busted a bunch of virgin cherries, I can tell you.”

  She started to speak, then gave up trying to work out the meaning of the angry and ugly words he’d just uttered. Whatever he’d said, she didn’t want to understand it.

  Dinko went on: “I don’t care what you had to do in a place where the cartels slaughter people by the thousands and cut off their heads, but now that you’re safe in this country, you shouldn’t be taking that slimy job in Hollywood!”

  Lita Medina looked straight ahead again and said, “Please do not have concern for me.”

  “Do you got a cell phone?”

  “No, but I shall buy one very soon.”

  “I’m gonna give you my cell number. Call me if . . . well, just call me if you want me to pick you up and take you somewhere else.”

  She turned her face toward him and said, “Take me? Take me to where?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “Don’t you have relatives in L.A.? You know, cousins maybe, or family friends?”

  “No,” she said. “I live now with two girls from Guanajuato that clean the houses for the rich peoples in Long Beach.”

  “Can’t you clean houses too?”

  “For sure,” she said, “but I must make more money very fast to send to my family. They have great need, ’specially my mother.”

  “Promise me you’ll keep my cell number and call me if . . . well, call me when you feel like you gotta escape.”

  “What is that word?”

  “Like when you gotta run. When you gotta get away from Hollywood. Call me, okay? I’ll try to help you.”