1993 - The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  It worked so well it cost me my job. The success of the Burbank mart meant that Meyersen and Fischer were approached by Ohman’s Retail Group to design their new store and restaurant complex on Wilshire Boulevard. I did the initial drawings and plans, and had a scale model constructed. Shortly before the final contracts were signed, Eric Meyersen called me into his office and informed me that I was fired. When I asked him why, he said, equably, “No real reason, honey. I just don’t want to see your face around here any more, I guess.” Meyersen had, to put it simply, got what he needed from me—a body of work, a small but growing reputation, a style. Now, with the Ohman deal secure, he figured he could go it alone. Fugal looked at the document of partnership I had signed so avidly five years previously and duly unearthed the subclauses that granted Meyersen this unilateral power. I told him to sue the bastard in any case. Writs were served as the Ohman’s Building contract was signed by Eric Meyersen Architects Inc. The Taylor house and the Burbank mart records were similarly altered. My only course of action was to go out on my own and show the world who really was responsible for these buildings. 2265 Micheltoreno would be the first nail in Meyersen’s coffin.

  TEN

  Philip was renting a small clapboard cottage in Venice, one street back from the boardwalk and the ocean. I walked up the two steps to its sunblistered porch, tucked the flask under one arm, set down my grocery bag on an old cane rocker and rapped loudly on the frame of the flyscreened door. From inside I heard a couple of plaintive coughs and then Philip appeared in a creased and grubby robe, his hair lank and greasy. He had shaved recently, but it had made little difference, his eyes were dark, his face slumped and pasty-looking.

  “Hello, sunshine,” I said. “Momma’s here.”

  He had made up his bed—a navaho blanket and three pillows—on a winded davenport in the living room. From next door the sound of his neighbour’s radio, playing ‘American Dreamer’, was thinly audible. By the time I had poured the soup into a bowl and brought it through to him he was back on the couch under the blanket, his knees drawn up, his face set in an expression of stoical suffering.

  “Potato soup and pastries, right? I got you pecan pie, lemon cheesecake and four assorted Danish.”

  “Bless you.” He took the soup from me and started to slurp it up eagerly, like a starving peasant. “I haven’t eaten for forty-eight hours.”

  I had seen the empty quart of bourbon in the kitchenette. “What’s wrong?”

  “I got fired. After four fucking days, they fired me.”

  “Well, it was a crappy movie—”

  “—It was work, Kay. Four hundred dollars a week work.” His voice was sulky and heavy with self-pity. I sat and watched him finish his soup, whereupon he immediately started on the cheesecake. He took too large a mouthful and swallowed painfully. He coughed crumbs on to the davenport.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “No one’s going to snatch it away. You want a coffee?”

  “I think I got a tumour in my throat. Could you take a look?”

  He gaped at me. I held his handsome, damaged face between my palms and tilted it so that the light from the window fell on his gullet. I saw nothing but pink pulsing gorge and a certain amount of lemon cheesecake but I knew Philip in these moods, he needed something to hold on to.

  “I don’t see much…Maybe it’s a little red.”

  “Jesus…What about my eyes? Any yellow tinge?”

  “Red’s your colour today, I’m afraid. Why yellow?”

  “I get these pains in my back. I worry my liver is shot—cirrhosis, or something. Maybe a cancer.”

  “I’d lay off the bourbon.” I stood up. “I’ll fix you a coffee.”

  I walked back through to the kitchenette and put a pan of water on the stove to heat while I looked for some coffee grounds. I heard Philip’s doleful footsteps shuffle up behind me and then felt his arms go round my waist. He nuzzled at the back of my neck, little pecking kisses.

  “Kay-kay, can I come and stay over a few days? I hate it like this on my own.”

  “No, Philip, you know it won’t—”

  “I just can’t cope. I just—”

  “—have to stop drinking. So you got fired. It’s not the end of the world. This town’s full of crappy movies looking for writers. And full of fired writers looking for crappy movies.”

  “It was a good job, Kay. The best.” He stepped away from me and thrust his fists deep into his robe pockets. “Six, eight weeks, I’d have been set up.” He pulled a crumpled slip of paper out of one pocket and looked at it strangely. “Jeez, I forgot, this is for you.” He handed it over. “They found your whatchacallim—Paton Bobby. McGuire at the studio…The fucking studio.”

  I smoothed out the sheet of paper and read what was written there: ‘Sheriff Paton Bobby, Los Feliz Ranch, White Lakes, Santa Fe’…

  “Santa Fe?”

  Philip said: “He wasn’t even in California. Just as well you told me he was a cop. We’d never have found him.”

  I turned and looked out of the kitchen window. I could see a stunted, abused cypress, its top three feet broken off and hanging there and beyond that a chainlink fence which marked the boundary of a spur track of the Electric Railway. So Paton Bobby was a sheriff in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What could Dr Salvador Carriscant want with him?

  “Any chance of that coffee?” Philip said. “My throat’s killing me.”

  I met Carriscant at the railroad station in Pasadena early in the morning. He had asked me to come with him to Santa Fe and, for some reason, and much to my astonishment, I agreed at once, without any reflection or any regrets.

  He had asked and I had said yes, and it was only later that this had struck me as presumptuous on his part and paradoxical on mine. But he had fired my imagination, had Salvador Carriscant, and his easy assumption about the bond that existed between us was one I was ceasing to be on guard against or question. But I steered my reasoning away from this particular motivation to another that was more acceptable, if quixotic. This was an adventure, I told myself, an intriguing quest, and one that I would regret not seeing through at least a little further along the way. We could make the return journey in two days and my curiosity about Carriscant and Paton Bobby was acute—and besides, I had never been to New Mexico.

  The waiting room at Pasadena was clean and redolent of carbolic, the first commuters were arriving and the newsstands were still plump with unsold newspapers and magazines. Carriscant was standing at our prearranged rendezvous at the entrance to the coffee shop looking apprehensive and lost. The smile on his face when he saw me was genuine. He held up two tickets as I approached.

  “I bought your ticket,” he said. “There is no need to reimburse me.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I haven’t changed my mind.”

  “I’m very grateful that you’re accompanying me,” he said, as we made our way towards the platform for the Santa Fe express. “You might find this hard to believe but the last time I took a train was from Glasgow to Liverpool in 1897.”

  Paton Bobby’s ranch turned out to be south of Santa Fe, a few miles outside White Lakes on a grassy butte with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains dark and solid in the background. We hired a taxi for the day (a modest twenty dollars) and set out from our hotel near the railroad station after breakfast. I asked Carriscant if he had taken the precaution of cabling ahead to warn Bobby of our arrival. He said he had decided against the idea.

  “But what if he’s not there?” I said, irritated.

  “Oh, I made sure he was there. I just didn’t want him to know that I was coming.” Carriscant’s English accent had the effect of making him at times sound insufferably smug, and this was one of those times.

  “Who is Paton Bobby?” I said. “How do you know him?”

  “We met a long time ago. We were quite close friends, for a while.”

  I did not press him further, deliberately; I did not want to give him the satisfaction of practising his maddening obliquity on m
e any more. As far as this quest was concerned Carriscant was very reluctant to tell me anything. Facts about his aims and his past were eked out sparingly, and usually when unsolicited. From time to time a nugget of information would be placed in front of you like an amuse–gueule, the better to whet your appetite, but if you sought for information he withdrew. I was not sure whether he was playing some complex, teasing game with me or whether he was simply guileless—an old man whose memory was occasionally stimulated—or whether he was one of the most sophisticated liars I had ever met. What prompted the reference to the train journey from Glasgow to Liverpool in 1897, for example? Was it just his insecurity, his vulnerability manifesting itself, or was it a piece designed to fit some larger puzzle? I had given up trying to extract information for the time being: I too could play at being indifferent and opaque with the best of them.

  We turned off the Albuquerque–Las Vegas road and followed the signs for Clines Cors and Encino. In White Lakes we were directed up a white dirt road running along the edge of a wide sagebrush mesa. We hit a line of splitrail fencing and soon saw the gateway and the sign ‘Rancho Los Feliz’ burnt deep in the wooden lintel.

  “What’s that? Ranch of the Happy Ones?” Carriscant said. “Funny how the Spanish saves it from the vulgarity.” The smile on his face died. “I would never have imagined Paton Bobby in a place like…” He tailed off. All of a sudden he seemed a worried man.

  However vulgar its name, the ranch had a well-run, neat and tidy air to it. Big boulders set at the entrance were freshly whitewashed, the twin rutted track up to the ranchhouse was weedfree, its central stripe of grass clipped short, like the verges. On either side horses grazed in well-irrigated meadows. Prosperity and order seemed to breathe from the alfalfa grass and the manzanita trees.

  I looked again at Carriscant. He sat rigid, now, tense, his teeth chewing vaguely on his bottom lip. His eyes seemed lost, distant, barely aware of his surroundings. It was as if he had never decided to come on this trip of his own volition, but was being led here somehow, like a prisoner to a scaffold, or a conscript to a battlefield, passive, powerless to change whatever would ensue. I felt sorry for him, and oddly protective, aware suddenly of his strange helplessness in this big country, and was glad that I had come with him.

  Dogs set up a barking as we drew up in front of the ranchhouse, a new building, with stone gables and a long shady porch with bright borders of flowers along its facade. I told a Mexican ranch hand that we were here to see Mr Bobby and we were directed to the front door where a maid duly showed us into a small parlour. Presently, a woman, not much older than me, joined us and introduced herself as Estelle Bobby. I had her placed as the daughter but it soon became apparent she was a new wife. She was shy and pretty with slightly bulging blue eyes and fair hair. If Bobby was in his late sixties he had a thirty–year start on his wife, it was clear.

  I introduced myself and Carriscant, who was by now so totally subdued that I felt like his chaperone. When I said his name it seemed to mean nothing to her.

  Estelle Bobby directed us to chairs as if she had learned her manners from a correspondence course.

  “My husband will be back within the hour,” she said. “He’s out riding. May I pertain what your visit is concerning?”

  I turned to Carriscant.

  “I, ah, I’m an old friend of your husband,” he muttered, gracelessly. “I haven’t seen him in over thirty years…”

  “We were in Santa Fe on business,” I improvised. “Mr Carriscant thought it would be worth calling in on the off chance.”

  “Certainly, of course, you’re more than welcome,” Mrs Bobby said and went off to fetch us some coffee while we waited.

  Two cups later, with Mrs Bobby busying herself elsewhere in the house, we heard the sound of a horse’s hooves and saw a neat buggy with a high-stepping bay between the shafts enter the yard and move out of sight behind the back of the house. I glimpsed a large stout man at the reins, quite bald and with a big wide moustache. We heard a rear door open and the sound of voices conversing. I turned to Carriscant. He was pale, his mouth slack.

  “I feel sick, Kay,” he said, hoarsely. “I think I’m going to vomit.”

  He extended his hand shakily and, without thinking, I took hold of it and squeezed. “Come on, drink some coffee, you’ll be fine.”—

  “I think we should leave. Now.” Panic lit his eyes.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve come all this way. What’s he done to you, this man?”

  Carriscant shook his head wordlessly. To give him some time I rose to my feet and went through to the hall, closing the parlour door behind me. Paton Bobby was emerging from the kitchen. Under his perfectly smooth, shiny pate he had a square seamed face, with kind eyes, and a wide neatly trimmed grey moustache that effectively bisected his face from ear to ear. He was broad-shouldered and carried his big belly easily, almost proudly. Some men seem to suit being fat and Paton Bobby was one of them, comfortable, attractive even, in his solid obesity.

  He shook my hand and I introduced myself and apologised for arriving unannounced.

  He looked at me shrewdly. “My wife says this gentleman is an old friend of mine. I have no old friends called Tarrant.” He had a slow easy voice, with a harder rumble somewhere at the back of his throat. I saw a leather cigar-holder, like a Pan’s pipe, jutting from the breast pocket of his jacket.

  “No,” I said carefully, flashing a smile at Mrs Bobby. “Not Tarrant. Carriscant. Dr Salvador Carriscant.”

  The genial curiosity on Paton Bobby’s face vanished instantly, transformed completely into an expression of astonishment that would have done justice to a cartoon character. His brows arched, his eyes wide, his open mouth forming a soundless “What?” He began to blink rapidly.

  “Salvador Carriscant?” he repeated. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “No, Paton, she’s not.”

  We turned to see Carriscant, framed square in the parlour doorway, composed, clear-eyed. Paton Bobby took half a step back, as if to focus better, still frowning, staring.

  “My God Jesus Christ,” he said softly, almost fearfully, his voice ragged with emotion. “Salvador.”

  And at just that moment I felt a flush of anger rinse through me. I was so ignorant, had been so wilfully kept in that state that to witness now the profound shock of this reunion, to see plainly its melodramatic impact, made me feel used and exploited. Carriscant vigorously, two-fistedly shaking Bobby’s hand, the two of them manfully loud in their mutual exclamations of astonishment…This was the craven fellow who moments ago was threatening to vomit, who needed his hand reassuringly squeezed. I stood there watching them and resented, with special force, the way this man had insinuated himself so deeply into my life already. And with such ease…What did I owe him? What hold had he over me? What responsibilities were due? None, was the quick and simple answer and I resolved to have nothing further to do with him and his bizarre private schemes.

  “What’s going on?” I said, a little too abruptly. “What is there between you two?”

  Bobby turned, surprised. “Didn’t he tell you? My God, Salvador was—”

  “—Later, Kay, please,” Carriscant interrupted, courteously. “If you don’t mind. I have to talk to Paton first.”

  “Fine. I’ll be in the car. Let me know when you’re ready to leave.”

  I sat in the car for ten minutes, maddened and cross at myself, until the stickiness of the hot leather under my thighs drove me outside again. I paced around smoking a cigarette watched with only the mildest curiosity by the taxi driver, an old taciturn hacker called Arthur Clough, who had large uneven yellow teeth and a persistent sniff. From where I was standing I could see the top of Paton Bobby’s head, which seemed to do nothing but nod all the time. I asked Arthur if he knew of Bobby.

  “Sure,” he said. “I, think he used to be sheriff of Los Alamos—and didn’t he run for mayor of Santa Fe once? After he came out of the army or something. I seen his face in the
paper a while back.”

  He accepted one of my cigarettes and smoked it fastidiously, like a Victorian dandy, held palm upward between thumb and forefinger.

  Carriscant and Paton Bobby came to the front door about an hour later. From my position, although I could not swear to it, it seemed as if Bobby had been weeping, but the idea seemed so incongruous as to be almost incredible. But his posture was stooped, that canted-back, spread-legged confidence seemed absent, now, and I distinctly heard him say as they made their farewells: “—I hope you can forgive me, Salvador.”

  “Of course,” Carriscant said, with what sounded like genuine feeling. “I never blamed you, Paton. Never. You were doing your job, and,” he paused, “and it was a difficult time.”

  Carriscant climbed into the car beside me, stiff-faced, upset. He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes.

  “Poor Paton,” he said.

  “What’s happening?” I said, full of angry curiosity. “You can’t keep this from me any more.”

  “Oh, Kay, Kay, give me a moment.”

  The car pulled away from the house. Paton Bobby had not lingered on the porch. Carriscant looked at me and managed a smile of sorts.

  “I’m sorry, Kay…It’s not fair, Kay, I know, but this was crucial, essential for me, my dear Kay, if you could only—”

  “Stop saying my goddamn name!”

  My vehemence seemed to shake him out of his patronising complacency, his sense of triumph. For some sort of victory had ensued in that house, long overdue, I suspected, and he was savouring it. In the event, he stopped talking and reached inside his coat and drew out a small leather wallet, which he opened. Inside it was the folded page of an illustrated magazine. I glimpsed an advertisement for a beer I did not recognise and some phrases in Spanish, or so I thought. Without further explanation Carriscant handed me the sheet and I spread it open on my knees. On the page there were six photographs with captions beneath them. The language was Portuguese, I now saw, and the pictures appeared to be of routine society occasions or news events. My eye caught a wedding, an arm-waving top-hatted politician making a speech, an elaborate villa damaged by fire. Carriscant’s finger indicated the bottom righthand photograph. A man in tennis whites was being presented with an enormous silver trophy by a flamboyant young woman in a cloche hat and many strings of pearls. I noticed the date at the bottom of the page: 25 May 1927. I glanced at the caption trying to translate it. A charity tennis match…Jean-Claude Riverain the winner—I remembered the famous tennis player, and looked curiously at him now in his loose dusty flannels, a damp comma of hair pasted to his high tanned forehead—and Miss Carmencita Barrera, the celebrated motion picture actress, all winking sequins and lace, her face as white as pipeclay…