The ad read, Red Slatkin Needs to See Chaim Berman, and left a phone number with the Utah area code 801.
The phone rang three times before the answer.
“Yeah?”
“Swan?”
“Ecks?”
“How’s it goin’, brother?”
“You still alive, huh, niggah?”
“I’ll be around when there’s only rats and cockroaches left.”
Swan performed his deep laugh. This was punctuated by a rolling, wet cough.
“You sure to outlive me, man.”
“You okay?”
“If lung cancer and two bum legs is okay then I’m in the catbird’s seat.”
“Damn. Can I do anything?”
“You wanna gimme a lung?”
Ecks hesitated and Swan said, “Don’t worry, brother; I got so much metasizing goin’ on that I’d need a whole family of donors to make my shit right. What’s up wit’ you? You stayin’ outta jail?”
“Been goin’ to church lately.”
“Found religion?”
“More like religion found me.”
“That must be some serious shit—Ecks Rule up in God’s house. I bet they ain’t seen nuthin’ like that since Lucifer stormed the walls of heaven.”
“You know the Bible, Swan?”
“Lady takin’ care’a me push my wheelchair to church once a week or so. I listen to them the way we used to hear our lawyers.…” Swan stopped for a long, deeply troubling cough. “You keep thinkin’ that maybe they got some special circumstances or might would cut a deal. But you know, man, I’m glad you called. You my only friend, Ecks. Only one … I got a daughter up in the Bronx name of Susan Karl. That’s Karl with a K. She nineteen and alone in the world now. Wild child like her need to be looked after. I’d really appreciate it if you do what you could for her.”
“Sure I will,” Ecks said quickly and certainly as he had in the old days.
“Yeah.” Swan let the word drag out over many bars. “That’s good, man. You know I could die now, because everybody from Harlem to Brownsville know that Ecks Rule’s word is his bond.”
They talked for a while longer—about the old days and the few people they knew who had turned up in the news. Many were dead, the rest wounded or imprisoned—or both. Neither one asked where the other was living.
Ecks realized somewhere in the middle of the twenty-minute conversation that this was a new—and a last—phase of their friendship: that soon Swan would die and a part of Ecks would pass on with him.
Toward the end of their exchange Swan’s speech slurred and his sentences wandered one into the other, like sleepwalkers making their way down a common corridor. “I better be goin’,” Swan said at last, “before I stop makin’ sense altogether.”
There was an office building that had once been a warehouse on Aire Drive on the eastern fringe of Burbank. Ecks got there at ten o’clock. He was wearing his gangster suit: thin black wool with an ebony silk shirt sporting oblong and yellowing ivory buttons. The hat was a short-brimmed Stetson banded with coal gray silk, sporting no feather. On his right pinkie finger he wore a thick platinum band with a two-carat ruby anchored in it.
The ring was the only thing he inherited from his father, who died when Ecks was fourteen, not from the gunshot wound he deserved but from tuberculosis and other, never defined complications.
Ecks brought along his Afghani pistol, tucked in the belt at the back of his pants, and had slipped a Japanese throwing knife in the sheath on his left ankle.
Entering the large reception area he walked to the desk and asked the young woman to call Lenny O for him.
“Lenny’s working,” the brown-haired, plain-faced young woman said.
“Tell him that I got news about Manly and Loretta,” Ecks replied.
“I’m not supposed to—” she began. Her skin was uneven because of bad acne in her adolescence. Her irises were bifurcated—watery brown and off-yellow. Her lipstick was chalky pink and she was maybe seventeen pounds above sexy.
“Listen,” Ecks said, cutting her off. “If you don’t call him then call your boss and tell him that you got a man out here on a short fuse.”
“A short what?”
“Fuse.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You just say that I said those words and he’ll get the message.”
“Please have a seat.”
“You got three minutes,” Ecks said, and the young woman learned the meaning of the phrase.
It wasn’t until he went to stand next to the benches set out for those waiting to be called that the Parishioner actually looked at the people waiting for interviews at Zebra Film-Arts. The assembly was broken up into roughly two groups: One was young men and women, most of them attractive—some were even beautiful. Mixed in with the bevy of porn-film hopefuls were older, much less attractive agents, shills, and spouses. The atmosphere was heavy with colognes, perfumes, and sweat. Silver jewelry predominated.
Many of the smaller fish in that pond recognized the sudden appearance of a shark. Some moved off; others drifted closer, safety and proximity among this crew being mainly a matter of species.
Ecks looked at his watch. It read ten-oh-nine. He ground his molars together. He wondered why he had chosen that morning to go armed with gun, knife, and gangster garb. His heart rate had been up ever since he’d awakened from his two-hour night’s sleep. His forearms ached and he couldn’t remember where he said he would go to meet Benicia for dinner that night. He couldn’t even remember what Benicia looked like.
And then, in a sudden flash of realization, he knew that this was the way he was grieving for Swan. They had been friends since their teens. Naturally violent but never in direct competition, they were always on the same side, in it until the last bell—win or lose. Ecks would have given his life for Swan, nearly did once or twice. Swan had taken a bullet, meant for Ecks, in his own shoulder.
There was no saving him. There was no going to his side. And so Xavier Rule was dressed to kill.
His watch read ten twelve.
Looking up, Ecks saw two large men coming out of the swinging door behind the reception desk. One man was black and the other white, but they were almost indistinguishable in their dark cotton suits and light-colored dress shirts. The black man, whose skin color was actually raspberry brown, wore a monocolor blue tie.
Ecks walked toward the desk, hopped over the waist-high door with pantherish dexterity, and moved swiftly toward the security team.
“Hey …” the receptionist said.
The white thug stepped ahead and put out a hand. Ecks grabbed the man’s wrist and pulled him to the side while making eye contact with the man in the tie. He could have broken the white man’s wrist but instead he just bruised it. The thug was a big guy and tough-looking, but he squealed when he felt the strength of the shorter man through the pain up his arm.
“Hold up,” the black guard said. “We just workin’ here, man. Keepin’ the peace.”
“The best road to a peaceful resolution is lettin’ me see Lenny O for five minutes,” Ecks said. “I don’t wanna cause no trouble, man.”
It wasn’t true. In his heart Ecks wanted to kill somebody, to make someone pay for the coming death of his friend.
The black guard could read the passion in Ecks’s eyes, and so when his humiliated partner roared and jumped he put out both hands and pushed the man back—hard. The white guard hit the receptionist’s desk and tumbled over it, disappearing off the other side.
He was up immediately, rage and confusion smeared across his face.
The pale receptionist screamed, stood up, and backed away from her post.
The fuck-film hopefuls were all astir, jabbering meaninglessly.
“Hit the showers, Simmons,” the black guard said.
For a moment the minion felt the pulse of rebellion in his veins. Had he been Ecks or Swan the revolution would have started right then and there. But this was a workingman. He
swallowed the rage, turned away, and exited through a door that Ecks had not noticed before.
The hubbub of the assembly began to die down.
Ecks took in a deep breath through his nostrils. This had a singular effect on him. He felt as if this were the first breath that he had ever taken, like Adam inhaling the fragrance of the garden, the second breath that ever existed, counting the one his Maker had used to inspire him. This innocent puff of air brought a deep calm and new insight.
“Burt Tyler,” the black guard said, holding out a hand.
It took Ecks a moment to remember how to shake hands but he managed it.
“Egbert Noland, Mr. Tyler.”
“Sure you are,” Tyler said. “Follow me, Eggy. I’ll show you where the little rat bastard’s at.”
Through the swinging door Burt Tyler led Ecks across a vast soundstage where, in various corners and jury-rigged rooms, people were having sex under bright lights, being scrutinized by film crews and high definition digital cameras.
There were men on women and the other way around, women together and men too; there was a foursome of men and women on a raised dais where they were all being penetrated at the same time, one way or another.
The smells and sweaty humidity brought to mind the whorehouse he and Swan ran in the Bronx in the old days before drugs superseded their business. This reminded Ecks of Swan again, but now the memory of his old friend conjured up that first breath of calmness.
“You plan to put the hurt to Lenny?” Burt Tyler asked.
“No.”
“You could say yes,” the burly security man said. “Nobody likes him. If you had waited a week we’d’a probably fired his ass. Way I hear it the boss is getting ready to cut him loose.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Lenny is a rat, a cockroach, a maggot, and a pile’a shit all rolled up into one.”
They arrived at a professional-looking door heralded by a blinking red electric sign that said, Quiet—Filming in Progress. Despite the message Burt pressed a yellow button on the side of the extra-wide door. A moment later a man with earphones around his neck came out.
“Yeah, Burt?”
“Tell Lenny I got a man here looking for him. We’ll come in when this scene is over.”
The tan-skinned crew member nodded and ducked back into the room.
“Follow me,” Burt said to Ecks.
“I thought we were going to wait to see Lenny.”
“We’re going to see him, all right.”
Burt moved at a brisk pace around the big, closed soundstage until coming to a small exit door. From the distance could be heard the moans and shouts of half-real sexual encounters—scenes, Ecks thought, that would last as digitally coded memories for centuries, maybe millennia.
The exit door swung open and a skinny young man in a violet shirt and copper felt pants ran out. He made it one and a half steps before Burt grabbed him by the arm.
The young man kept on moving, like a lizard expecting to separate from the ensnared limb. When this didn’t work he turned—the look on his face was wide-eyed, desperate, and contradictorily cunning.
“Burt,” he said, and pulled against the grip.
“Burt,” he said a bit louder, tugging twice as hard.
“Burt!” he yelled, yanking with both arms to free himself from the powerful hand.
Burt slapped the boy pretty hard.
“There’s no need for that, Mr. Tyler,” Ecks said. His voice carried authority.
“You don’t understand, Eggy. Lenny here needs a good slap now and then. He gets carried away—afraid of authority figures, my boss said.”
“Who are you?” Lenny cried. The words made sense but he pronounced them as if taking them from disparate sentences. The emphasis was all off. He spoke like a foreigner who had mastered the English language under the template of a different diction. This was the effect of lifelong abject fear. But what caught Ecks’s attention were the two dimples so incongruously cute on the desperate young man’s cheeks.
“I’m a friend, Lenny,” Ecks said. “I only need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
It was then that Ecks saw, maybe forty feet away, the white thug, Simmons, with three other muscular men in similar suits.
“Your man over there is making a mistake, Mr. Tyler.”
Tyler looked up and saw what Ecks saw.
“I’ll go talk to them.”
“That’s a good idea,” Ecks said. “ ’Cause you know if this was the Wild West they’d already be dead.”
The guard with the blue tie nodded. He walked toward the irate security staff holding out his arms like a shepherd warding his flock away from a snake-infested hollow.
Ecks wasn’t afraid. One way or the other he knew that he had come to the end of his search. A few angry men couldn’t deter him.
He turned to get a better look at Lenny O.
He was an inch taller than Ecks and twenty pounds lighter. Head shaved, he was festooned with clashing tattoos placed by impulse, not design. The most prominent tat was in the form of a choker necklace around his throat. This was a series of erect penises linked together by fraying rope made from what was meant to be black hair. Wherever the ropes pierced the dicks there was a red spot where the blood was let.
“That’s a crazy tattoo, man.”
Lenny O smiled for the first time. He actually grinned.
“How long you have that?” Ecks asked.
“Ten, twelve years.”
“Since you were a kid?”
The smile faded.
“Let’s go sit someplace and have coffee or something,” Ecks offered. “It could be where everybody else is. I don’t mean you any harm.”
Lenny started breathing hard. For a moment Ecks feared that the kid might hyperventilate.
But then the young man said, “Okay. Okay. Okay. It’s over here. On the other side of the barricade.”
The ceiling of the warehouse was at least sixty feet above their heads, and so the hallway they walked down was more like a supermarket aisle. Lenny led them to a big freestanding wall that seemed to be made from papier-mâché. At the center of the wall was an orange door. Lenny opened the door and went through.
This led to an enclosed courtyard where men and women in various states of undress were sitting at tables eating or standing in line at a food counter where their meals were being prepared and served.
Ecks and Lenny got in line behind a deeply tanned, muscular man who was naked and maintaining an upstanding erection that was at least a foot long.
“Hey, Lenny,” the muscular white man said. “How’s it hangin’?”
“Not like you, Lark.”
“Got me doin’ double today. Had to take an extra dose.”
“Doc Henry’s shit?” Lenny was watching the erection with both fear and awe in his gaze.
“Yeah. Why?”
“That shit’ll fuck you up. That’s what Momo says.”
“You think I give a shit about that faggot bastard?” Lark roared, moving toward Lenny.
Ecks stood between the big man and the slender one. He figured he was fourteen inches from Lark.
“Pardon any insult,” Ecks said pleasantly. “My friend misspoke.”
If asked, Ecks felt, Lark would have called himself a lover and not a fighter. He turned his big dick around and pulled a tray from a shelf in the counter.
When he found out that Ecks was paying, Lenny ordered fried chicken, meat loaf, corn on the cob, snap peas, corn bread, apple pie, and peach pie too.
Ecks ordered a pastrami sandwich and followed Lenny to an empty round table.
Lenny started eating ravenously. As he ate he spoke.
“Thanks for standin’ up for me, brother. Thanks. You know, I try to talk to people; I try to talk to them but I always say the wrong thing, the wrong thing. I mean, I don’t mean nuthin’ but when I get talkin’ it’s like my brain stops workin’. You know what I mean? I mean, especially when somebody’s big and
strong like that. And you know I couldn’t take my eyes off that big dick. I mean, girls like a dick like that. Shit. It was harder than mine ever gets even when I take Doc Henry’s—”
“I’m here to ask you about Loretta and Manly,” Ecks said, cutting off the stream-of-consciousness babbling.
Lenny’s face froze with his mouth open and filled with meat loaf. His head jerked to the side.
“If you try I’ll just run you down,” Ecks said.
Lenny looked back, his eyes quivering in his head like a child’s toy doll.
“What?” he said.
“I’m pretty sure that they aren’t your real parents.”
Lenny sniggered and wiped his nose with a violet sleeve. He gave Ecks a glancing look in the eye and put his plastic fork down.
“Prob’ly not,” he said after going through this obsessive routine. “Prob’ly not.”
“Definitely not,” Ecks said.
Lenny looked up again and then away. He shook his head as if he were a third person feeling sorry for the young man scarred with a necklace of bloody erections.
“You were kidnapped before your second birthday and sold to an underground child pornography film organization. They farmed you out to Manly and his wife.”
Lenny winced and slapped his hand down on the table.
“They made you do things for the camera, didn’t they?” Ecks asked.
Lenny made a yowling sound that he had inherited from a distant ancestor of humanity. People from other tables stared at the first true cry of passion heard in the sex warehouse that day.
Tears sprouted from Lenny’s eyes. His shoulders and arms began shaking. Ecks put a hand on the young man’s shoulder, not to calm him but to keep him from running off.
Lenny let his head loll to the right, gripping the killer’s hand between his cheek and shoulder.
“I met the people who stole you,” Ecks said. “It was a young woman and a man. The woman who did it wanted me find you. Maybe get you back in touch with your real parents.”
Parishioner Page 18
