After they had left and as soon as the first stars had come out, a tolling bell began to echo from the hillsides above, and I let myself drift from the present backward in time. The sea became quiet. My cane rested between my legs. The lights of the lobster boats came on, and I took my solitary tequila straight up. After dusk I drove up the coast to clear my head, following the line of cliffs bristling with agaves. It was what I did every night, racing as far as the new American golf town of Real del Mar. Amid the coarse and treeless hillsides the HQs of the Frisa Group and of Radar Communications stood in howling winds. It was, I supposed, where Zinn had been working behind the scenes.
When I returned to the house Maria was already asleep and the dog was roaming the beach alone, as I let him do. With an unwatered bourbon I lay sleepless in my bedroom, whose single window faced the sea and funneled its noise directly to my bed. I got three hours usually, but that night it was barely two. The electric lights on the beach went off at midnight, but the sand was bathed in a dim glow from the hotel terrace. Lobster fishermen stood with their baskets in front of a wind-guttered fire and I watched them for a long time, shaking with insomnia. There was, I thought, something calling to me from out in the dark.
It came from out in the tempest, even from the lights of the fishing boats a mile out at sea. You can be called to a last effort, a final heroic statement, because I doubt you call yourself to leave comforts and certainties for an open road. But the call is inside your own head. It’s a sad summons from the depths of your own wasted past. You could call it the imperative to go out with full-tilt trumpets and gunshots instead of the quietly desperate sound of a hospital ventilator. Victory instead of defeat. You know that it will be the last time you ride out of the gates fully armed and that makes you more curious than you have ever been.
TWO
One dry morning a few days later I drove up to San Diego and checked into a little hotel I knew in Hillcrest that long ago used to be charming. Now, like all things, it had faded and was preserved merely by failure. I got a kick out of being near Balboa Park and the rattle of gang violence late at night. The barbarians were not only at the gates, but well and truly inside them, confident and getting bolder by the day. In the evening I made my way down to Casa de Pico on Juan Street in Old Town, where I could devour a few suizas to the sound of a mariachi band with their ponderous double basses and silver-embroidered sombreros. It was a sad scene but I liked it. Everything familiar has its merits, just like everything sad.
I got a little booze high that night and had to be escorted back to my car by the gentlemen of the establishment, who were also wearing spangled sombreros. I assured them that I could drive back to my hotel, which was not far. But in the end I had to sober up leaning on the hood and it was a while before I could drive at all. At the hotel I fell into bed and lay there fully clothed, full of demonic premonitions. It sometimes happened when I went back to the booze, and I went back to it as soon as I was alone in America and not with my housekeeper and regulars in Mexico. It was as if the lights went out and in the darkness I crawled about, secretly delighted and ravished. Drinkers never learn the antidote. Our way of surviving is just to succumb once in a while.
The following afternoon I went to the Méridien. Since the Zinns went there frequently I figured the staff there would remember them and be able to tell me something about them. Maybe they argued in public, maybe Zinn went there sometimes by himself and met associates. Everything happens in restaurants. The hotel stood on the Coronado side of the bay surrounded by landscaped gardens and pools upon which silent swans and teal sat as if tranquilized. Its terraces looked out over the downtown towers; below it, on the Coronado shore, other restaurants would light up at night, great glass cages flickering with candles and set on the beach. It was a maze of waterfalls, bubbling streams, and blue lagoons. The new world. The Marius restaurant, though, had no windows. It was intimate and slightly suffocating, a place for more secretive rendezvous, decorated with beige limestone floors and honey-glazed walls. The manager was surprisingly helpful. I showed him my photograph of the Zinns and asked if he could find a reservation the couple might have made. It turned out they had been in some months earlier, and he showed me the reservation himself. I asked if he remembered them.
“Monsieur Zinn?” he said. “He was a frequent guest. He came every week almost. They always ordered a Pomerol.”
“A Pomerol?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was he a heavy tipper?”
“I cannot think of anyone who tipped more heavily, as you say.”
“Did they ever have an argument in public?”
He said he had never seen one. They were very private, they always sat by the wall, and they were always alone. They liked the restaurant, one of the waiters told him, precisely because it had no windows.
“That’s a curious reason to like a restaurant.”
“People come here for the privacy.”
“Did he ever meet anyone else here?”
“He came midweek sometimes and had lunch with gentlemen. Never ladies. Sometimes they left together.”
“What kind of gentlemen?”
He shrugged.
“Gentlemen.”
“No Able Grables?”
“Excuse me?”
I’d forgotten he was too young to understand the reference, and I had to laugh off the gaffe.
“I’m sorry, I mean girls. The loose kind. That’s what we called them back in the day.”
I walked around the absurd hotel afterward, thinking how it might suit a man like Donald Zinn and how much he must have liked it. I was trying to understand his world, but in reality I already knew it. There were hundreds of Donald Zinns trapped inside hundreds of similar lives. They were no different from the swans and teals imprisoned within the landscaped gardens. Except that Donald was a black swan.
After lunch in the hotel I drove down to his abandoned house.
Coronado Cays lay in a place called Silver Strand to the south of Coronado itself in the direction of Imperial Beach. It was a series of quaint villages with West Indian architecture built around an artificial lagoon. The townhouses had their own mooring docks and each one had a yacht parked outside. Zinn’s included. There was a guard at the gate decked out in a white jacket and pith helmet, Bermuda-style, and the units had blue limestone shake roofs on chalk-white walls and arched Antiguan windows. There was a clubhouse with a gold-and-white-striped hip roof and a weather vane, and the Zinn residence was on a piece of the lagoon called Green Turtle.
Before their offices closed for the day, I stopped in at the Cays Homeowners Association and coolly asked how much a Green Turtle beauty might cost me. About three quarters of a million. It was useful to know. There was a lot of Japanese money pouring in, they admitted, and the Cays were the chicest address on the water now. Given how ugly it was, there was no reason to doubt it. I parked in front of the Zinn place and went up to his door. The insurance men had given me a key. A hand-fired tile set into the wall showed both his name and the number of the unit. I let myself in and found myself in a long front room hung with silk curtains with eighteenth-century indigo patterns. It was obvious that the people from the bank had been there and that they had done an inventory. There were little tags on some of the handsome antique pieces.
It was the house of a man both used to money and anxious not to lose it. I went upstairs and looked through the three bedrooms. On the mantelpieces were framed photographs of the couple, one at a polo field and another at a restaurant in Paris. Such are the interchangeable decors of the materially fortunate. The wardrobes were still packed with his splendid clothes. The velvet smoking jackets, the Huntsman suits, the shirts from Rome (or Horton Plaza). I sat in one of the velvet chairs, which seemed to match the jackets, and wandered through a bathroom with white shutters. It was as if they had walked out the day before and would be back for tea.
; But it was all, of course, built on debt. That was the key fact about the Zinns: they borrowed and they never paid back. Paying back is for crumbs and heels. It’s the art of mirrors.
* * *
—
My last stop was the offices of Zinn’s company, Desert Blooms, in Del Mar. It lay on a street called Camino Real, filled with tree-shaded compounds and elegant developments, and all around it were the lush San Diego canyons bursting with flame vines. Del Mar was a favorite Mafia hangout because of the racetrack and the seafront hotels, and in the fifties at least, it had been a place where the caporegimes liked to play. I remembered it well, and not particularly fondly. I played a few blackjack tables there myself back in the day. But now it had moved up in the world, or down, depending on how you looked at it. I found the building where Desert Blooms was located and went up to the first floor. There, sure enough, were the glass doors with the company’s logo, but behind them all was mothballed. The office had closed down, and rather recently as far as I could tell. It didn’t mean that they were out of business, but they were no longer on Camino Real. A stack of sealed boxes stood on the former reception desk.
I took a few photos of the closed office and went back down to the street, where nothing awaited me and nothing was to be found. His widow must have wrapped up his affairs swiftly and sold everything that could be sold. She was a wonder of efficiency. Now I understood why Pacific Mutual had gotten the shivers, even though there was nothing they could put their finger on.
THREE
The next day I drove out to El Centro, two hours east on Interstate 8. I hoped to catch Dolores on the premises of her resort before dark came, but first I went out alone to the Salvation Army house on the edge of the commercial lettuce and radish fields where the border town peters out into dust and haze. There, by the Salvation Army, a fairground was in full swing in the spring heat, a Ferris wheel preparing for dusk and Mexicans in tall white Stetsons with their girls on their arms. Two miles north of the border it was still Mexico. It was ninety-seven in the shade and there was no shade. A warm day, you might say, at the end of spring, or the beginning of hell, or else in the middle of the Anza-Borrego.
I bought a sugared churro and wandered about at the edge of this hidden world, feeling young for the first time in years. It happens like that, and sometimes in a single moment. You are no longer seventy-two years old. The ocotillos bloomed red, their flowers like stiff paper cups, and the mesquites were filled with gracklings, as if they were the first signs of a new lease on life: an old man in a ragged cowboy hat blinked at them and wondered if he had a year left after all. A year, maybe even two. I looked at my watch and saw that it was past three o’clock.
An hour later, I drove past the Southern Pacific freight yard and the edge of the ghetto beyond, past miles of light industrial warehouses, faded silos, and unused lots of desert scrub. In the area called Northside, gang insignia were sprayed onto the curbsides, Nuestra Familia and La M. The dark jacarandas and billboards loomed over the roads selling the virtues of Farmers Insurance and Sharma Homes. North of the city lay the human wilderness of Brawley and Calipatria. I knew the Salton Sea all too well and I doubted whether it, too, had changed much in eleven years. How much could a place called Slab City change for the better? The dread was eternal. Back then I’d spent blissful days at Bombay Beach and Durmid under those burned-coke mountains interviewing dead people. One day I’d go back as a tourist, but not in this lifetime.
A mile from the road was the site of the Palm Dunes Resort, and it was indeed an oasis of transplanted palms. The work crews had walked off one fine day—so it seemed—leaving the cement mixers and the hoes in place, and now there were only the adobe bungalows sitting in their glades of ornamental saguaros and the pools emptied of water but still glittering with art deco mosaics. The sand had blown in with the winds and silted up the public spaces, leaving ridges against the locked doors and the windowsills. I got out of the car and walked around. A security man tried to intervene but I charmed him off with some loose Spanish. He even told me how long the site had been shut down. And what about el patron, I asked. He shrugged and said he had no idea. He was a developer who had run out of money for his Dune Palms.
“What about the señora?”
“Señora Zinn?”
“She’s still here, isn’t she?”
He looked up with greater wariness into my old eyes that he didn’t know and my gringo sneer.
“How come you speak Spanish anyway?”
“I retired there.”
“Mexico?”
I said it didn’t concern him, I just needed to know if Señora Zinn was in her office that afternoon.
“Claro que si.”
I gave him a tip and didn’t ask permission to walk up to the gate and peer inside. He watched me go, and said nothing. The place was like a graveyard in Jericho. The sun drenched the empty pool and the Imperial palms felt aloofly out of place now. So the San Diego rich had not come after all.
I went through the shaded reception area and into the office, where the air-conditioning was the first relief in hours. It looked as if the company had fired everyone but kept the air-con on as a refusal to admit defeat. I called out Dolores’s name and then called it again until something stirred. She was alone, and when she appeared through one of the glass doors, surprised and a little perturbed, I recognized her at once from the photographs the insurance company had given me. I stepped forward to announce my name, my hopeless mission: Philip Marlowe, so recently uplifted from retirement. I flinched as her eyes took me in, and something took me aback. The eyes were not closed against me, they were open and inquisitive—but not too much so. She had the level interest in something new that a leopard has. While it decides whether you can be killed or not, its eyes are remarkably gentle and serene.
She was petite, her features small and carefully drawn, and about thirty or so, if I were to hazard a guess. Mexican or half at least, and much more attractive than the picture had suggested. She wore a black skirt and jacket, with a thick white cotton shirt underneath, and the shoulder pads were dramatic, a little too much so. The style of that terrible age. Her face, though, was perfectly made up, like a flawless arrangement of ikebana. She seemed dressed for a date in the middle of nowhere, and I wondered if she dressed like that every day, or whether she was expecting someone. The bars of an old song suddenly went through my mind, “Begin the Beguine.” The music of the ’40s, to which my hips are still attuned. I wondered for a moment what it would be like to sweep her off her feet and dance. I would never know.
I took off the straw hat I was wearing and asked her if she was Mrs. Zinn. She sized me up and ascertained in a heartbeat that I had come alone and that the hat doffing was a condolence as well as a greeting. At that moment, those same eyes changed their mood and burned violet with a quiet fury that even her elegant makeup couldn’t mask. It occurred to me that she had been waiting for me all along, and that everything was an act until now. I explained I had come at the behest of the insurance company that had paid out the dividend.
“Are you here for a reason?”
“It’s their reason, not mine. Your husband had a policy with them.”
“You don’t need to tell me that. I know all about them.”
“They’re sweet people when you see their emotional side.”
“Shall we go into my office?”
“We can stay here, there’s no one around. Looks like you’re closing shop. Is that the case?”
“It might be.”
She offered me one of the dusty office chairs and I sat, feeling a little tired in the legs and parched.
Noticing which, she said, “Drink?”
“I’ll take water.”
“I have some old rum if you’d like it.”
In the end we didn’t touch it.
There was a large window behind her, an
d inside its frame the palm trees stood still in a shrill light nevertheless dimmed and rendered golden by slowly falling sand. So this was the dream of the Zinns until her husband had washed up on the beach at Caleta de Campos. The hysteria of it was still written on her face. I said I was sorry about all that, and she took it in stride. The very fact that I was there cast a long shadow of doubt upon her grief and therefore made my presence insulting.
“You look a little old to be running around doing work like this,” she said once she had seated herself behind the only desk in the room. “Aren’t you an old-timer?”
“Actually I’m retired,” I began. “But an old friend asked me to do this. You know how sore the insurance companies get when they have to pay out money to widows. Don’t take it personally. I just have to ask the usual questions.”
Her gaze went straight to the heart of my fog-bound decrepitude. I felt myself wilt for a moment and then remembered—as an afterthought doused in sadness—that I was too old now to ignore her eyes’ brilliant light and spring back at her.
“Go ahead,” she drawled. “I have an hour before dinner in El Centro.”
An hour: she made it sound like a small eternity. It would be a vacuum that she would have to fill with pleasantries, whereas for me it was an opening into a short wonderland that would be the best hour of the year. She was at her ease now, more languid, as if these moods came upon her suddenly and out of nowhere, and there was more humor at the corners of the mouth. She settled down, like a snake finding its spot in the sun.
So it went.
My questions were hardly original. I asked her about her husband and their marriage. They had been together seven years; they owned a real estate business that had run, as far as I could see (and contrary to her denials), into trouble. They had no children; her parents lived in Mazatlán, They went to San Diego once a week to eat at the places that aspiring rich people liked to frequent, places like Mille Fleurs in Rancho Santa Fe or the very Marius I had just visited. The latter was their favorite venue for a Friday night romantic dinner. Donald had been seventy-one at his death, twice her age. But only a little younger than me, I thought with a moment’s envy. He had gotten to lie next to this beauty night after night like Gandhi among his Nereids, indifferent to the dangers of his good fortune.
Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 2
