by Dan Vining
“So is that what the business down at the Wharf was about, people looking at me as if I was somebody?”
The man took the question as rhetorical.
“I’m not up for your job,” Jimmy said. “It’s a joke somebody’s playing. I’m not built for it. I don’t lead, I don’t follow.”
The man reached down and unlatched the brake on the chair.
“Take me over to the window,” he said.
Jimmy stepped behind him and wheeled him twenty feet across the room to the window. A refle ction of the two of them rolled out of the night sky to meet them.
“Help me stand, James.”
There was rustling in the wings. The attendant had never left.
“Go away!”
The rustling quieted.
“Help me.”
Jimmy reached around him in the chair with both arms to the small of his back. His body was dry. He didn’t hold much heat. Jimmy lifted him to his feet. His hip popped. He felt to Jimmy like he weighed less than a heavy winter coat on a hanger.
The man took a second to steady. He tightened his dressing gown around himself modestly, around his straight hips, over his bony white legs, over the knobs of his knees.
“They said you came north on a mission of mercy, a favor for a friend,” he said, standing there at the glass, a shaky pile of sticks. “A favor for another Sailor.” He drew in another labored breath. “There was a time when a sentimental gesture like that would have impressed me.”
“Well, it all pretty much went bad,” Jimmy said. “My ‘mission of mercy.’ So I’m with you.”
There was another dry, rasping laugh. “You remind me of myself,” the other said. “A hundred years ago, when I was foolish.”
“Thanks,” Jimmy said. “I guess.”
“Ah yes!” the man said suddenly. His focus had shifted, his depth of field.
The rain had lifted. Some hand had moved aside the clouds. There was Alcatraz, alone amid a range of black like the electrified capitol of a dark, dead, desert country.
With that nothing moon overhead.
THIRTY-THREE
The Bentley boys deposited Jimmy back where they’d found him and whispered away up the rain-slick street.
He drove over a couple of blocks. Mary’s SUV was gone.
He took a minute. What he hoped was that the dog man from the beach had found Mary down on the waterfront, gotten her home, and calmed her down. And then he had come back for the car.
Hope. It came and went. And was always ridiculous, if you stared hard enough at it.
He put the Porsche in gear, but before he could pull out, there was thunder. Familiar thunder.
L.A. thunder.
Coming at Jimmy from the far end of Battery was a lowrider. But not just any lowrider: a lowered and sectioned ’56 Mercury, white over midnight metalflake blue.
Angel’s lowered and sectioned ’56.
He parked nose to nose with the Porsche, but ten yards out, killed the headlights. There were two heads in the frame of the windshield. There was some talk between the two, or Angel talked and the other nodded. And waited.
Angel got out. Jimmy got out.
“You all right?” Angel said.
“Yeah.”
Jimmy waited for an explanation, but wasn’t going to wait for long.
“I went back to .A.,” Angel said. “Twelve-hour turnaround. I’ve been driving around, looking for you. I just saw Machine Shop down on the waterfront. He said you were somewhere around here. Said to tell you he was sorry, for some reason. It’s crazy down there.”
Jimmy was looking at the Mercury. At the girl in the front seat. Angel looked back at her, too.
“Get ready for something heavy,” Angel said.
He walked back to the car, to the passenger side, and opened the door. The woman got out. She was wearing a full skirt, like a fifties girl. She had dark hair. She straightened her skirt. She looked as if she’d like to be almost anywhere else.
Angel walked her forward. She was in her twenties.
“This is Lucy,” he said. “Lucy Valdez.”
She looked scared. She looked guilty. She looked away. She looked like nobody had had to make up the part about her being sad.
“Tell him,” Angel said to her. “It’s all right, he’s cool.”
“I couldn’t see how anyone would get hurt,” Lucy Valdez said. She had almost no accent. L.A. raised. L.A. Unified School District. “I tried to think it through. I couldn’t see how anyone would get hurt by it.”
Jimmy wanted to hit her. He knew he wouldn’t, couldn’t, knew his anger had other targets. One of them the man in the mirror.
“They come to her,” Angel said. “A guy.”
“Let her tell it,” Jimmy said.
Lucy took a step back, a step that put her halfway behind Angel.
“A man called me, from up here,” she said. Lucy said. “But he didn’t say where he was. The phone said four-one-five. He said, ‘A man will come see you.’ He said that when the other man came, he would tell me what it was, the details. And how I would be paid.”
Jimmy said, “Do you have a brother?”
The girl shook her head and started to cry.
Jimmy turned his back on them and walked away, halfway up the block.
Angel came after him.
Jimmy turned.
“They gave her five grand,” Angel said. “The guy who came down to L.A. did. All she had to do was be there at her house that one night, the night I saw her in the window from the street, and be out of there at two that next morning. The guy would take things over from there. And she had to leave the keys to the Skylark.”
“Who was the girl I was following?”
“A friend of Lucy’s. From an acting class she took. They asked her if she had a friend.”
“What did they tell her it was about?” Jimmy said.
Angel didn’t want to say the next word. “Me.”
“How?”
“They told her that some men wanted me in San Francisco.”
“They thought you’d tail her? It doesn’t make sense. Like you didn’t know what she looked like?”
“They knew I’d send somebody, one of my guys or somebody, and then I’d come up here eventually.”
“When the bait was dead,” Jimmy said.
“She didn’t think that far,” Angel said. “She’s just a kid. She’s convicted, man. She knows she did wrong. I found her still out at her cousin’s in Duarte. She can’t even go home. She can’t stand to be there.”
“You have enemies here?”
“I didn’t think so until now.”
Jimmy turned and started back toward the cars, with a sense of purpose that sent Angel after him. “What are you doing?”
Lucy backed up when she saw Jimmy coming, the look on his face.
He grabbed her by the wrist. “Come on,” he said, already pulling her up the street, toward the waterfront. “We’re going to find the man you met with. You’re going to point the finger at him. Lucky for us, seems like everybody’s here . . .”
“Maybe he isn’t even a Sailor,” Angel said.
“It’s a start,” Jimmy said.
“I never said anybody was in the navy,” Lucy said.
“Shut up,” Jimmy said.
They were all there. It was like a living mug book of Sailor suspects.
Jimmy still had Lucy by the arm. Angel was on the other side of her.
Things had gotten even rougher. It was all in boldface now. The segregation had only become more pronounced, the lines drawn clearer. Each knot of Sailors had a speaker at its center, only most of them weren’t speaking, just on display, like a dictator on his palace balcony with his arms outstretched to receive the love of the people. But it wasn’t love exactly. For some, it was fear. Or that crash at the intersection of admiration and fear that is respect.
Fights were breaking out everywhere. There was Steadman, with the L.A. Sailors around him, bad and good, and a few converts from
the north. And a few undecideds, whatever that meant in this context. They’d brought one of the tricked-out buses over from Fort Point, positioned it in the middle of the parking lot. Steadman stood atop it. On the polished, curved aluminum of the bus like that, he looked like Howard Hughes on the wing of a plane. He looked like what he had been in life, an airplane man.
Jimmy didn’t imagine that Steadman was behind bringing him or Angel north, but he still made Lucy look at his face and at the faces of his men. The fat man was beside the bus. The hat man was there. And Steadman’s muscles, L.A. handlers, one named Boney M and a particularly singular-minded little man they called Perversito.
Lucy just kept shaking her head no at each face Jimmy made her judge. She was scared. She was still crying. She wasn’t a Sailor. It was hard to take this in, in one big dose. And she was just a kid.
They came upon Hesse. With him it was hard to tell if he was a focal point, a point of attention, or just another lieutenant moving through the crowd. Maybe he was looking for a crowd, waiting for one to gather around him.
Jimmy dragged Lucy right up to him.
Hesse didn’t know who Jimmy was. Or didn’t betray it if he did.
“No,” Lucy said. “That’s not who came to see me. I don’t know him. Please. It wasn’t even—”
“Shut up.”
They pressed on, eastward, leaving a perplexed Hesse behind.
There were groups Jimmy hadn’t seen before, with men in the middle he’d never seen, either. There were News everywhere. They were the ones with the stunned looks, the ones with roaring red auras. The ones who shuffled from place to place, waiting for things to start making sense.
“The suicides,” Angel said.
“What?” Jimmy said.
“A lot of them are probably these suicides. Somebody trying to run up the numbers.”
“When did you start caring about the leadership?”
“I care about it when it touches innocence.”
They’d made it to Pier 35, Whitehead’s home base. Wayne Whitehead himself stood on top of the face of the building tonight, like the Leonidas girls a million years ago. Last weekend. Only he wasn’t naked.
He wore a white suit with a white rose in the lapel.
Jimmy pushed through to the front. Whitehead looked down on him. He raised a hand in greeting.
“Does he think we’re his guys now?” Angel said.
“I don’t know; I don’t care,” Jimmy said.
He knew Whitehead wouldn’t have made the trip to L.A. to meet with Lucy. He turned her so that she faced Jeremy, scarred Old Salt Jeremy, who stood in his cape at the door into the warehouse, where the ship was.
“Him,” Jimmy said. “Do you recognize him?”
She shook her head. “I told you—”
“I know what you told me.”
As Jimmy took her by the wrist again, to lead her away, Lucy said, “She looked a little like her. But not really.”
She.
Lucy pointed to a girl beside Jeremy. It was the nobody who’d ushered Jimmy and Angel into Whitehead’s hold, aboard the ship in the warehouse. That night, she wore a navy watch cap and peacoat. They hadn’t even noticed she was a girl.
“Just the hair,” Lucy finished.
“You said it was a man.”
“It was. On the phone.”
“You said another man came to see you in L.A.”
“The first man said it would be a man, but a woman came to see me.” Lucy touched her own hair. “She had short hair, like a man.”
The Lady.
It took awhile, but Jimmy found her, near where Hesse had been. Hesse was gone, and the short-haired woman was in his place. (Or maybe he had been in her place.) She wore the same clothes from the date with the doctor. The Lady.
“That’s her,” Lucy said.
“Who is she?” Angel said to Jimmy, lost.
Jimmy didn’t have a quick answer for him. “She was down at the shipyards that night. She’s a leader. She wanted to meet me. Or at least she wanted something.”
“So what does this mean?”
“I means it’s about me, not you. They did this to bring me up here, not you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
The short-haired woman was talking to a cluster of women Sailors, some familiar from the Yards. When one turned his way, she was Christina Leonidas. This was about as far away as you could get from where she and her sister had jumped that night.
Selene, her father called her.
Jimmy looked up at the sliver of moon. The clouds were gone.
The woman finished her pitch, or whatever it was. She put her hands on the shoulders of the women around her, smiled, then stepped away a few feet to another group.
But something caught her eye.
Just as it caught a hundred eyes.
People pointed. Across the way, up the hill.
The violet light. It grew brighter and brighter.
When everyone was looking at it, it began to pulse.
In, out . . . Here, away . . .
And then it stopped.
They waited. It never returned.
Some began to cry. Some dropped to their knees.
When Jimmy looked for the woman with the short-cropped, mannish hair, she was moving away through the frozen crowd, the only one in motion.
THIRTY-FOUR
The Lady led Jimmy to the Haight. In her silver Prius.
He didn’t have any trouble keeping up. He’d left Angel and Lucy behind at the waterfront, left them and the others and almost everything else behind, left the gathered Sailors to cry and wonder what was next, for those so inclined. There wasn’t any traffic. Anywhere. It was as if the city had gotten the word: Tonight belongs to Others.
She parked in front of The ’Choke.
And the stories started to knit themselves together. The way broken bones are said to. And scar tissue.
She got out of the Prius in a hurry and didn’t lock it. She went into The ’Choke. Jimmy went past the coffeehouse and turned around and came back up on the other side of the street, stopping three storefronts away. He could use a cup of coffee. He already knew he was only hours away from the end, whatever it was.
The violet light of the story had begun to pulse.
He didn’t know exactly what he expected to find in The ’Choke, but what he found was Mary.
They were all working on her. Or at least they were all around her. She was in the center of the group, with her hands around a cup of tea or something. The hippie with the Vandyke and his people, Sexy Sadie and Polythene Pam, they were all there, listening to what Mary was saying and nodding. She had that end-of-a-long-day look but smiled more than you would expect, but the kind of wistful smile that admits defeat. That wants the day to end, whether there’s another one after it or not.
The Lady stood by, five feet away, almost at attention.
Mary finished what she was saying, and Sadie and Pam stood and leaned over her and hugged her, that way women do, draping themselves over the other. I understand.
Mary saw Jimmy.
He just stood there in the doorway. As if he was in charge, as if he was going to determine what happened next.
As if he could save her.
When the others saw him, they closed the circle around Mary, made her disappear. Like bodyguards. Like magic. They were already in motion, leading her away, out the other entrance, the one on Ashbury.
Jimmy went after them. “Don’t go with them,” he said.
He saw her eyes in the middle of them.
And then they were gone. All of them. They were already crossing the Panhandle at Ashbury, the whole merry band of them. And not waiting for the light. He went after them.
Beatles music was in the air.
With every mistake, we must surely be learning.
Maybe, maybe not.
So this was the black house. Inside.
They had left the door open. He had the
idea they never locked it. There probably wasn’t even a key.
The living room, the first room in the front of the house, had twenty-foot ceilings and red velvet drapes, Persian rugs on the floor. Mahogany furniture, a wall covered with prints of birds, in different-sized frames, gold frames. There were velvet pillows everywhere and a collection of hats on pegs on another wall.
It was a woman’s house. Or women’s.
He kept expecting to be jumped. Maybe hippies never attack. Next to the living room was a dining room, with a twelve-foot table. Fresh flowers. The kitchen was done in white octagonal tile with a strip of black around the backsplash, looked a little institutional, but on the glass of the window over the double sinks some hand had painted “Good Day Sunshine . . .” in clear acrylic, yellows and blues.
The Beatles’ music was coming from the back of the house somewhere. It only made clearer to Jimmy that they were gone already, that they’d run in here and then out the back, to buy time. The sound somehow said empty house.
I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love.
I don’t know how someone controlled you.
He found the CD player. There was a den in the back of the house. Painted purple, semigloss. The speakers were built into the ceiling, made it sound like God was listening to The White Album.
Jimmy eyed the stairs, thinking maybe they were still in the house, upstairs. But then there was a mechanical sound, from the anteroom outside the den.
An elevator stood open. It was integrated into the dark woodwork. He hadn’t noticed it before when he came through. It wasn’t standing open before. There didn’t seem to be a call button for it. He stepped in. He could smell Mary’s perfume, floating above the patchouli of the hippies.
There were three buttons. He went with Up.
But it had other ideas. As soon as he’d stepped into it, the elevator had started to make noises, motors and levers. Not-so-great gears turn, too. It went down. One flo or. It stopped, but the doors didn’t open. Jimmy pushed the bottom button, and it continued. A light over the door pulsed, a soft light behind a circle of ivory, that seemed to be measuring time and not distance. If it was distance, it felt like ten floors. It stopped, roughly.
