by Mel Gilden
We passed the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a flat-fronted grey edifice. Hanging over the pavement were flags and banners that decorated the building as subtly as markings on a surfboard. Mr Chesnik said, ‘In The Long Goodbye Chandler called this place the Beverly Ritz.’ I watched the place over my shoulder for a long time as Mr Chesnik drove on.
The traffic thickened as the average price of the cars went up. Carefully dressed men and women drove as if they knew that life would not surprise them with anything they didn’t want to surprise them. The shops got smaller, but brass gleamed on their doors, and tasteful awnings shaded their windows. There were a lot of French names and cute puns. It was that sort of neighbourhood.
‘Downtown Beverly Hills,’ Mr Chesnik said.
‘Los Angeles County’s money clip.’
Mr Chesnik expelled some air that might have been a laugh. We drove past Victor Hugo’s Restaurant and were a block or so away from a big white ghost of a building that Mr Chesnik identified as Beverly Hills City Hall.
I said, ‘A place full of secrets and big money and no more ethics than a pampered poodle.’ Marlowe had never said that, but he could have. It had a nice ring.
From there we rolled up the hill at Doheny and passed the spot where Mavis Weld’s apartment used to be, at least in The Little Sister. Mavis Weld was Orfamay Quest’s older sister. The one who was in pictures before she got in trouble. At Sunset, Mr Chesnik turned right, and we rolled past strip joints and comedy clubs and places where you might be able to get a cup of coffee for a dollar or two if you had a good agent or weren’t so thirsty that you couldn’t wait half an hour.
We took La Brea up from Sunset to Franklin, passing through the disaster area that is still called Hollywood, but has nothing to do with the searchlight-and-satin fantasy I heard about on Lux Radio Theatre.
Franklin was a clean street with big houses on either side. A few of them were protected by ivy-covered walls you couldn’t see over. The ones that didn’t have walls had columns like Greek temples and were so impressive, you’d want to wipe your feet just walking by.
Mr Chesnik said, ‘Old General Stemwood of The Big Sleep lived around here somewhere. Remember, he had those two wild daughters? One of them was played by Lauren Bacall in the Bogart picture.’
I nodded, having no idea who he was talking about. But I didn’t say anything, figuring he had enough to think about for one day.
We pulled up in front of a house no bigger than most of them, which is to say, it was only two storeys high and each member of the immediate family could have his or her own wing. But beyond that, it didn’t resemble the other mansions in the neighbourhood. More important, I couldn’t place it in any of the Chandler stories I’d read or heard.
The house had no grace. It had been built by some rich man, but not to show the world he was rich. This was a place the rich man came to hide. It was a big stone block with a thing like a guard tower at each corner. They may have been guard towers for all I knew. Windows facing the street were no more than slits, the kind of thing from which Robin Hood might shoot arrows. The place looked as friendly as a penitentiary.
The house was an island of stone in the centre of a grass ocean dotted at tasteful intervals with trees. A smooth curve of cement driveway swept by the front of the house and ducked under a big car the colour of the inside of a rabbit’s ear.
‘This isn’t part of the tour,’ Mr Chesnik said, ‘but it might interest you.’
‘I’m fascinated already.’
‘If you can turn down the volume on the patter for just a moment, I’ll tell you who this house belongs to.’
I waited.
He said. ‘This house belongs to Knighten Daise, the owner of Surfing Samurai Robots.’
I took another look at the house. Suddenly the day was a little darker. The house was no longer just a block of stone but a sinister fortress. A guy in a cloak and a mask lurked behind every corner and every tree.
I said, ‘Is it built like the Alamo to keep something in or something out?’
‘I don’t know. Mr Daise don’t confide in me very much.’
We stared at the mansion for a while, but it didn’t tell us anything. ‘Had enough?’ Mr Chesnik said.
I nodded and said, ‘If there are dungeons underground, I can’t see them.’
‘Don’t you folks in Bay City have X-ray vision?’
‘What’s an X ray?’
By this time it was just after noon. Clouds had moved in from the ocean, elbowing each other like bumpkins while they mobbed over the city. Mr Chesnik talked about somebody named Superman. Superman had X-ray vision. He could see through things. I told Mr Chesnik that as far as I knew, nobody in Bay City had X-ray vision. He seemed disappointed and continued to shake his head while he fought his way through the traffic on Highland, slid over to La Brea and through a fairly nice area where apartment buildings were built as close together as slats in a fence.
On Venice Boulevard
, Mr Chesnik said, ‘Used to have a good rapid transit system here between the two directions of traffic. I could go any place on a Red Car.’
‘What happened?’
‘Somebody thought it would be nice if they sold more cars.’
At Acme Robots I unlocked the gate for Mr Chesnik, then rode with him to the back of the yard. Benny was so glad to see us, he barked and leaped at Mr Chesnik’s window, festooning it with strings of dog spit. While the dog danced around us, we walked to the front of the yard, pushed the gate back into place, and locked it. It was the kind of neighbourhood where that always would be a good idea.
Benny barked for a while after we went back into the office, Mr Chesnik sat down behind his desk. I stood in the office doorway and said, ‘Thanks for the tour.’
‘You couldn’t buy a tour like that,’ he said as he wiggled a finger at me.
‘I guess I’m one lucky guy. If my luck holds out, you’ll have the address of Surfing Samurai Robots.’
He said nothing but backed away from the desk and fished around in the crowded middle drawer until he came up with a card. From it he copied an address onto a scrap of paper and handed it over. On the paper was the printed legend, ‘Get Your Grommets from Comet’. Sounded like a plan.
By this time Benny had given up barking, probably in favour of scratching. While Mr Chesnik and I shook hands, I said, ‘If you hear anything interesting about surf-bots, give me a call.’ I tore an even smaller scrap from the bottom of the scrap he’d given me and wrote the phone number of the house in Malibu on it. He threw it into the middle drawer and pushed the drawer closed with his stomach.
‘Hell of a filing system,’ I said.
He shrugged and said, ‘It works.’
After pondering the map book for a few minutes, I was out of there and driving back to Hollywood. Traffic was heavier than it had been, and I was not as good a driver as Mr Chesnik. I played touch-and-go up Highland and at last hit the Hollywood Freeway, where I ran into lumps of traffic as thick and inexplicable as the lumps in Whipper Will’s yoyogurt.
I found Surfing Samurai Robots at last. It was a vast two-storey building in the middle of an even vaster car park. To one side was an empty space where high grass partly obscured a sign offering the land for sale. On the other side was another car park and another building and another For Sale sign. The car park was empty. I parked there and watched people come in and out of the Surfing Samurai Robot building, wondering how I would do the same.
Chapter 8
No Admittance
WHEN I got out of the car, heat struck me like the palm of an enormous hand. I stood up to it, and I was tempted to leave my trench coat in the car but decided against it. The trench coat was part of the uniform. I compromised by folding the trench coat over my arm and pushing my hat back on my head.
That sweaty palm kept me in its grip all the way across the car park. If that wasn’t bad enough, the smell of hot asphalt nearly strangled me. The guard at the front of the SSR car park didn’t se
e me because he was busy with somebody in a big white car so shiny it hurt my eyes to look at it.
I wasn’t interested in cars anyway. I peered under my hand through the double glass doors into the SSR lobby. A couple came out. The woman was tall and wore shoes that made her even taller and a short green dress that matched the shoes. The man wore a grey suit and a dark tie that was so thin he needn’t have bothered with it. The man said something, and the woman laughed. It was a nice laugh, but none too sincere. I wondered if these were the people I was up against.
Before the door swung to a stop, I was inside the lobby and glad I’d kept my trench coat. The lobby was a big marble box filled with the echoes of people talking earnestly and walking across the smooth floor as if getting somewhere else were important. Most of them were dressed more or less in the style of the two I had met at the door. Everybody has a uniform. The room was cold enough to stiffen my nose, but it was just right to impress people coming in from the heat outside, if you impress easily.
I walked to the building directory and studied it as if I knew who I was looking for. A man in a grey uniform walked up to me and said, ‘Can I help you, sir?’
The man had no interest in helping me. He was not quite as old as Mr Chesnik, and he was cut from different cloth. He had a hard look to him. There was no expression in his face, but his eyes would never believe anything. Some of his belly rode over the top of his wide black belt. He was probably a retired cop trying to fill out his pension with a couple of extra bucks. I wondered if his gun was loaded and decided it would be, just for the sake of pride.
‘Sure. Uh, thanks. I’m looking for the showroom. I’d like to buy a robot.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The face could have been made from the same marble as the lobby. It wasn’t built to smile. ‘Just there, sir,’ he said as he pointed across the lobby to more glass doors.
I tipped my hat to him and set off, feeling his eyes prodding me the whole way. I pushed through a glass door that had You Can Depend on an SSR Robot stamped on it in gold. The room beyond was not much smaller than the lobby, but it was warm enough that my nose thawed a little and began to itch.
There were a lot of robots in the room, everything from big muscular galoots, that might have been human if their muscles hadn’t been moulded out of golden metal, down to little runts that looked like mechanical can openers. The one thing each of them had in common was a cloth band tied around its head.
I turned around, looking for the source of a strong, harsh smell, and found a kid not much older than Thumper polishing a silver beachball that had legs and octopus arms. He spit on the thing and polished it vigorously. From the gleam of every piece in the room, spitting and polishing was a full-time job. It was the polish that smelled, not the kid.
Despite the number of robots standing around, the room was not crowded. Scattered among the robots were hooded television sets showing SSR robots in action and big display boards listing features. Posters on the walls were paintings of the most expensive robots serving drinks and playing tennis. Light and shadow, all very artistic. Not one of the posters showed a robot surfing.
A slim guy in a pinstripe suit hurried over to me. You could have cut cheese with the crease in his trousers. He was the guy the suit salesman at For Men Only wanted to be when he grew up. He smiled at me and rubbed his hands together and said, ‘Good morning sir. What can I do for you?’ He didn’t quite lick his lips. The guy was good. Even after he got a close look at me, his smile slipped only a little.
In a polite voice I hadn’t used since leaving T’toom, I said, ‘I’m looking for a surf-bot.’
That shocked him. He saw big-nosed, whiteskinned fellows from T’toom every day, but my question about surf-bots made his eyes wander and the smile go where smiles go. He said, ‘I’m afraid we’re a little short of surf-bots right now. Could I interest you in something else? A robotler, perhaps?’
‘Maybe I better talk to another salesman.’
‘You can’t do better than talking to me,’ he said as brightly as a new tin spoon. ‘I’ve been salesman of the month three months in a row.’ He pointed to where a row of photographs defaced the wall. One of the photographs was of him, with a big paper star taped over it.
‘I see,’ I said, hoping I sounded impressed. ‘Then maybe you can answer a question for me.’ I made it sound like a question men had waited a thousand years to have answered by some oracle on a mountain top.
‘If I can.’
‘What the hell is a surfing samurai robot?’
He opened his face and made a big hearty laugh. I smiled politely, just to be one of the guys. He handed me a sheet of paper that was almost as slick as he was. The paper told me again why an SSR robot was the best. At the top it said, ‘Surfing Samurai Robots: The Agility of a Surfer and the devotion of a Samurai. That explained a lot — except that I didn’t know what a samurai was. According to the salesman, they wore headbands, just like the SSR robots.
Lance — he insisted I call him Lance — spent a lot of time showing me around the showroom. He acted as if he were showing off his children. A high point that Lance was unaware of was a door marked NO ADMITTANCE. I leaned against it and felt it give, There was not one surf-bot in the place. Lance said they were waiting on a shipment. He frowned. ‘We’ve been waiting for a while.’ The wait seemed to bother him. If he was faking, he was damned good at it. Of course, he would.
All those robots gave me ideas. I asked good ol’ Lance if he had a companion robot that knew the Los Angeles area. ‘Just the thing,’ he said and showed me a little silver jobber that looked like a duck. Its name was Bill. ‘Get it?’ Lance said, not quite prodding me in the ribs with an elbow, ‘Duck? Bill? Duck bill?’
While I nodded over the mechanical duck, thinking about how useful it might be. Lance asked me how I would pay for it.
The question was a good one and quick enough, it stopped me nodding. I had a hundred bucks in my pocket that would not go very far if I spent it all in one place. I had no credit rating anywhere on Earth. Before I knew what I was doing, I said, ‘I believe Mr Chesnik of Acme Robots has a commercial account with you.’ I tried not to show my surprise when this came out of my mouth.
After that, there were a lot of phone calls — from Lance to the Credit Department, from the Credit Department to Mr Chesnik, and at last from Mr Chesnik to me.
He said, ‘You got your nerve.’
‘If I don’t use it, it rusts,’ I said.
He chuckled without mirth. It might have been his chair squeaking. He said, ‘I shouldn’t do this.’
‘If you didn’t intend to do this, why talk to me?’
‘Always the patter, OK. I’ll take a chance. Can you really pay for the robot?’
‘Call that number I gave you. Talk to a guy named Whipper Will.’
‘I seem to be doing you a lot of favours.’
‘I noticed. Thanks,’
‘Smart mouth,’ he grumbled and hung up.
A moment later, the Credit Department called and gave Lance the OK, Lance went into high gear. He filled out a lot of papers. I signed them quickly, trying to make it look as if I’d signed papers before. I gave the surf house in Malibu as my address. Lance said that Bill would be delivered there in a few days. We shook hands. It was all very gentlemanly.
Now that our business was concluded, Lance was eager to be off to his next challenge. I said, ‘I’d like to look around a bit more.’
‘Sure,’ he said, his mind already on the meek couple glancing around from the centre of the room. ‘Let me know if you see anything else you like.’ He laughed and shook my hand again, and then, was trotting toward the meek couple with no more thought of me than what a bee has for its last flower. I wandered around the room, fiddled with the ball-and-socket joint exhibit, asked a computer some questions I didn’t care to know the answers to, always moving toward the NO ADMITTANCE door. Nobody watched me. I was boring. I had already bought something and was not likely to buy anything else.
/> Then I slid through the door and was in a short hallway painted an institutional green. It was full of dead unmoving air. At the end of the hall was another door, also not locked. Beyond it, a wide hallway carpeted with a sombre burgundy pattern crossed in front of me. The door I looked out of was just one of many. I stepped into the hallway, not knowing what I was looking for, but hoping to find it before somebody noticed my tie was too wide. I heard a buzzing far off, but getting closer. I kept walking but stopped abruptly when three small biwing airplanes banked around the corner and flew in formation down the hallway toward me.
I watched them in fascination. Without even slowing down, one of them casually used a red pencil of sparkling light to zap a white Styrofoam coffee cup that stood out like a welt on the burgundy carpet. The cup disappeared in a puff of vapour. The planes had nearly reached me. I backed against the wall, hoping that I was not on their list of things to zap. They circled in front of me like buzzards.
I ducked under the planes and ran down the hall. The planes flew after me, buzzing louder now as if they were angry. I turned the corner and saw a crowd of men in suits coming toward me. Being involved in manly conversation, they did not notice me, but it would not be long before they did. I looked back. The biplanes still wanted me. I backed into the first door I came to.
I leaned against the inside of the door, breathing hard. I inhaled the smell of humans, with a strong overlay of something chemical that was too sweet. It bit into the passages of my nose. I was in a long room covered in tile a lighter shade of the colour of the burgundy carpeting outside. Along one side of the room were white fixtures. Along the other were some grey cubicles. The whole place bounced hard light around, not letting it rest. I walked to the only fixture I recognized, which was a sink. I splashed some cold water onto my face, then drank some of it from a cupped hand. It was exactly what I wanted.
