The Infinite Blacktop

by Sara Gran

  We were done with the interview and we finished our coffee.

  “Hey,” she said. “This all reminds me of a joke. A really good joke. What did the guru say to the hot dog vendor?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and suddenly we were both smiling.

  Tiffany started to laugh in the bright hot sun and I did too. Suddenly I saw him in her. Merritt. He had left something of himself, something I’d seen in his art and his pictures and his story, behind in Tiffany, and she loved it and held it close. She’d figured out how to lose him and keep him at the same time.

  And Merritt, I saw now, had figured out the ultimate puzzle—how to live forever. How to leave enough of yourself behind, even if it was scattered in little pieces, that your presence on the earth was no longer temporary, but permanent.

  “Merritt loved this joke,” Tiffany said. “So the guru goes up to the hot dog guy. Hot dog guy says, ‘What can I get you?’

  “And the guru says, ‘Make me one. With everything.’ ”

  * * *

  I woke up the next morning at nine to the hotel phone ringing.

  “I’m calling on behalf of Christopher Collins at the Richter Agency. He was wondering if you’d like—”

  “To talk to his assistant?” I said. “Not really. Can you put him on the phone.”

  I heard the woman on the phone grit her teeth, but she said, “Of course,” and put me on hold while she found Christopher Collins. He was the Richter PI who actually worked Merritt Underwood’s case. As it were. As famous as the Richters were for collecting information and hiring the brightest minds of the Ivy Leagues, snapping up the Skull and Bones men just before IBM and the CIA got to them, I didn’t know how much they actually investigated. Never trust a corporation with your life or your case.

  While I was on hold I peed and brushed my teeth and put on a pair of pants.

  “Claire DeWitt,” a man’s voice said a minute later, full of fake good cheer and a bad imitation of friendliness. “What an honor.”

  I knew I had a reputation and I knew he’d heard of it and I knew no one would be particularly fucking honored by meeting up with that reputation in the flesh.

  “I bet,” I said, not being in the mood right now, and never having been in the mood, for this particular kind of bullshit. “So Mr. Richter said you’d be cooperating with me on this.”

  I heard him smile a fake and tight smile and say, “I was told that we’re giving you full access, which is not common around here. Not common at all. Came right from Mr. Richter. Whom I’ve never met, by the way. So whatever I can do, just let me know.”

  “How about I come by and look at the file?” I said.

  “OK,” he said brightly. “How about, let’s see, Friday at—”

  “How about now?” I said. “How about right now? Or more like a few hours from now?”

  “Of course,” Christopher said. “How about twelve thirty? You can come by, get the file, see the place, and then we can have lunch.”

  “Sure,” I said, figuring I would cut out after I got the file. “Sounds great.”

  We hung up with bright goodbyes, and I got to work.

  * * *

  The Richter headquarters were in a big glass tower nestled snugly on the border of Beverly Hills and Century City and whatever came next, within spitting distance of a dozen other big glass towers that radiated black arts and dark power—banks, talent agencies, law firms. No one had picked this location by accident, the meeting point of ley lines that stretched back to China and dragon lines that flowed around from London and Paris.

  Christopher’s office was on the eleventh floor. He had a long title that I didn’t understand, but from the size of his office, I could tell he was on his way up, but not at the top yet. I guessed he was my age, twenty-nine. He was handsome if you like that kind of thing: clean boys, fake boys, boys who kept their hair trimmed and never let their hands get too dirty. I did not.

  We went to a conference room that had a bang-up view of the other glass towers, plus a couple of golf courses. We sat at the large conference table. On the table lay a thick manila folder, brimming with well-organized papers. It was the case file.

  I reached for it. Christopher pulled it away.

  “First,” he said, still holding on to his fake smile, “I need you to sign something.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He put a piece of paper with lots of writing in front of me. I signed it at the bottom and slid it back across the table to him and reached for the file.

  Christopher looked at my paper, and then snatched the file back.

  “I need you to sign YOUR name,” he said. “Sorry if I wasn’t clear.”

  “Oh,” I said. “My name.” I’d signed it Alice I. Wonderland. Usually no one checked. He gave me another piece of paper, identical to the first. I wondered if he always brought a few copies in with him or had anticipated me fucking the first one up. This time I read it. It was a standard nondisclosure form and I signed it with my own legal name.

  I slid it back across the table. Christopher looked it over carefully, nodded, and then I took the file. This time he didn’t stop me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “So,” he said. “Wow. Claire DeWitt. So far it’s all true.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Can I ask you something?” he asked.

  “OK,” I said, since it seemed like it was happening anyway.

  I thought he was going to ask me about my tattoos or if I really believed in the crazy book or if I’d really killed two men.

  “I was wondering,” he said instead, “if you ever came across anything in the antiquities world?”

  Of course I knew what he wanted. One of the first things Constance taught me was that as much as people would laugh at us—us Silettians, us misfits, us mad ones—for each of them, a day would always come when they stopped laughing, and asked for favors.

  “And the louder they laugh,” Constance said, peering at me over the edge of a cup of coffee, chicory steam curling around her face, “the more they’ll think you owe them.”

  We were in the Rue de la Course on Carrollton, waiting for a meeting with a bank manager that would never come. The café smelled like coffee and chicory and chocolate and flowers. Days later would we find out the bank manager had shot himself rather than answer Constance’s questions.

  “Fortunately, I don’t owe anyone anything,” I said in the café, trying to sound clever, hoping to sound tough.

  Constance raised an eyebrow. “You owe everyone the truth,” she corrected me.

  Now I sat in a sterile, expensive conference room in Beverly Hills across from a man who I knew had laughed at me before and would likely laugh at me again before the sun had set.

  “Gee,” I said. “You mean like the Case of the Curse of the White Pearl of the Tomb of—?”

  “We always called it the Jackson Affair,” Christopher interrupted, with a little smug tinge, as if his name for it had any relevance at all.

  “Sure,” I said. “But when I actually worked the case, with Constance Darling—well, Constance and me, we called it the Case of the Curse of the White Pearl of the Tomb of the Lost Golden Lotus. When we actually solved the case Together.”

  Christopher took me to lunch at a fancy place in Beverly Hills. I got poached salmon and french fries and he got meat and I told Christopher a little about the market for stolen art and how to find it. He tried to tell me some things but I knew his things—things about bills of sale, about international treaties, about auction-house records.

  “You met him?” Christopher said. “Richter?”

  I told him yeah I did. Christopher asked what he was like. I was a little drunk and I said he was just like everyone else. Taller, maybe. Christopher asked about his house, Richter’s house. I told him it was big and modern and very expensive. I didn’t tell him that the man and the house were both so lonely it hurt. I didn’t tell him about Richter and Constance, about the things I did kn
ow and didn’t know. Richter hadn’t told me anything especially confidential but his whole existence was, obviously, some kind of a secret, and he’d been kind enough to let me in for twenty-two or so minutes, and that seemed worth respecting, possibly.

  After lunch we stayed in the fancy restaurant and drank a bottle of wine and then another. Christopher asked me about Silette. About how I found the book. If it was true that we didn’t bother to collect evidence and prints and things like that.

  “Well, no,” I explained. “We do. We just look at it all differently.”

  Although by then there wasn’t really any we. It was me and a few other people around the world, some of whom, like Hans Jacobson, would be there if you needed them, maybe, sometimes. But only if you really, really needed them.

  “Then how do you . . . ?” Christopher said. “I mean, at Richter they teach you to, you know, stick with evidence. ‘Facts are king’ and all that.”

  Facts are king was Richter’s famous motto and lone piece of advice to his operatives.

  “Yeah. We don’t really see it that way,” I said.

  Christopher looked confused and so I dragged my chair so we were closer and reached over and put my hand on his chest. Under his clean dress shirt was another clean shirt and under that was his chest, flat and hard, a layer of muscle built up so I could just barely feel his ribs under the flesh. I figured he was going to the gym a couple times a week and maybe a hundred push-ups in the morning before work. Under his young, taut chest I felt his heartbeat, strong and dull and too-steady. Even his own heat was embarrassingly innocent, like a little boy.

  “Close your eyes,” I said. “Stop thinking.”

  He closed his eyes. But his eyes moved under the lids and I could tell he was still thinking.

  “Stop thinking,” I said again. “You were made for better things than thoughts. Feel my hand.”

  I felt him feel my hand, felt his chest rise to meet the heat from my palm. His breathing and his heart slowed as his thoughts slowed. I tried to help, pushing a little heat into him, pushing a little of my breath into his. Constance knew all the advanced techniques; she had taught the lama and they had both tried to teach me. I’d learned a little and Christopher, with his lack of defenses and deficit of knowledge, was easy.

  I leaned closer to Christopher.

  “What do you know here?” I whispered into his hot ear. “Feel my hand. Feel your bones. Feel your tendons and your fascia. Something in here knows.”

  Christopher’s breathing slowed. His heart deepened, tripped, dug in with each beat.

  I moved my hand down to his belly. Like his chest it was tight. He was holding his flesh in place with his will and control; holding himself up and keeping everything else out.

  I leaned in to Christopher and brought my lips to his ear again.

  “You know something here,” I said. “Where your nadis cross at your spine. Where your kundalini sleeps. You know something here.”

  I felt something rise in Christopher, something shudder and come to life, incrementally, with fear and hesitation.

  “There is a snake coiled at the base of your spine,” I whispered to Christopher, dragging my hand, the warmth I now shared with him, the pieces of him it carried, down to his lower belly. “And there is nothing that snake doesn’t know. You just have to let it speak.”

  Christopher fell into something black and frightening and I kept whispering in his ear.

  “There is nothing you have to do,” I told him, as Constance had told me. “Nowhere you have to go. All things are known to you and all things are known to all. Knowledge is your birthright. All you have to do is grab it—”

  Christopher’s eyelids flew open and he looked at me with his eyes open wide and his mouth in an O and all of a sudden it was all back: the restaurant and the noise and the food that had fallen away. Something had scared Christopher, scared him bad, and he shut the door as soon as it opened.

  “Wow,” he said, trying to shake it off. “Cool.”

  But he shifted in his seat and I could tell it was the furthest thing in his mind from cool. He’d learned something, and whatever it was he didn’t like it.

  Psalm 52:3: “You love evil rather than good, and falsehood rather than truth.”

  After lunch we stood outside the restaurant surrounded by people older than us, people in suits and expensive dresses and shoes that looked like no one had ever worn them before today. A valet was getting Christopher’s car. He’d driven us from Richter to the Beverly Hills restaurant. We should have walked. Christopher drove a Saab. I didn’t know what to make of that; I didn’t know where a Saab fit into the cosmological anthropology of cars in Los Angeles.

  Christopher’s apartment was clean and dull and looked like an old person lived there. Everything was expensive and perfect. Almost as soon as we got back to his place I knew I’d made a mistake. In the restaurant I thought I’d seen something in Christopher, maybe felt it—something better and darker and richer and more interesting, something worth my time, something worth fucking, something worth sleeping next to, something you could maybe trust a little. Something that could not be faked.

  But in his clean apartment as he made us drinks I remembered that everyone had that inside them. It didn’t matter what people had inside. It mattered what they decided to share with you. What you could reach in and steal didn’t tell you anything at all.

  Christopher treated sex like a test of skill; no parties would leave without orgasms and answers; nothing would surprise; the plan would be fulfilled to the letter; no rough edges would irritate.

  Afterward, I never wanted to see him again. I pretended to fall asleep until he did, and then I got dressed and looked around the house for stuff to steal. I found nothing worthwhile aside from a few old prescriptions of painkillers and antibiotics, and I left and drove back to my hotel room and took off my clothes and got into bed and pretended to sleep there.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE CLUE OF THE CHARNEL HOUSE

  * * *

  Brooklyn, 1986

  It was the aftermath of the Case of the Broken Lily. October 1986. We were decompressing in Tracy’s father’s apartment in the projects. Her father was in a bar somewhere. Her mother had been dead since she was two.

  The case ended on a rare hopeful note. Amber Schwartz, fifteen, our client, had won her rightful inheritance from her grandmother because we’d proven that Amber’s stepmother had, in fact, altered the terms of a lease from 1969. The inheritance consisted of a dresser full of costume jewelry, two old cats with fleas, and rights to a rent-controlled apartment on Thompson Street. Amber loved the cats and she loved the apartment, the only home she’d ever known. Now she would likely be able to keep it the rest of her life. She paid us with the dresser and the costume jewelry in it. We sold the jewelry for forty bucks and the dresser for two hundred. Everyone was happy.

  Except Tracy. She was restless. But her restlessness seemed to have a focus. She’d checked the mailbox on the way up to her apartment. Now, as we sat in her bedroom with cigarettes and whiskey-spiked coffee, she checked the mail again. Kelly was already drunk and seemed not to notice. This time Tracy seemed to hit pay dirt: she came back in the apartment with a thick pile of catalogs, bills, and a letter.

  The first strange thing was that she didn’t want me to see the letter. Of course, she didn’t try to hide it. She was too smart for that. Like the Edgar Allan Poe story, she left it in plain sight; she brought up the mail, tossed it on her bed, and didn’t look through it.

  No one checks the mailbox and then doesn’t look at the results.

  It was strange but not that strange. People mailed each other letters then. Some of those letters were private. We had other friends. We had boyfriends. We had cases.

  I noted it in my mind, and then I left it alone. Or tried to.

  After a few hours we were drunk and tired. Kelly wanted to go to Brooklyn Heights for Chinese food. Tracy said she wanted to stay home and sleep. We hugged and kisse
d and exchanged I-love-yous and Kelly and I left.

  At 9:17 we left her apartment and started down the long hallway toward the stairs. At 9:18, on the third step on the stairs, I stopped.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the mail. The mail Tracy had been so eager to check but barely glanced at once she had it.

  “My keys,” I said. I looked in my pockets.

  “What?” said Kelly.

  “Shit,” I said. “I can’t find my keys. I think I left them in her apartment.”

  Kelly rolled her eyes.

  “I’m gonna run back,” I said. “Meet you on the street out front.”

  Kelly rolled her eyes back into their proper place and trotted downstairs.

  I turned around and went back to Tracy’s apartment.

  The door was locked. I knocked.

  She answered.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Keys.”

  “Come in.”

  I went inside. Nothing had changed. It had been less than three minutes.

  “Can I look in your room?”

  “Of course.”

  She sat on the sofa as if she were watching TV. As if, since the two minutes I’d left, she had been watching TV. But the TV wasn’t on.

  I went in her room and didn’t look for my keys. I looked for the mail. It wasn’t on her bed.

  I pretended to look for my keys.

  “Fuck,” I said. “Found them. In my bag. In the pocket. The inside pocket.”

  “Ha,” Tracy said. She was looking at the TV. It was off. Finally she got up and turned it on. Three’s Company sparked to life.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m going.”

  I went to the sofa and leaned over and kissed her goodbye. When I did, I saw: on the sofa next to her was the mail. On top of the mail was the letter. She’d started to open it and then put it back down, probably when I knocked.

  “See you tomorrow,” she said.

  “OK.”

  I left. I never figured out what the letter was, and I’d forgotten about it over the years.