Scotchman slowed the cruiser as he turned a corner off Van Ness Avenue. Kids in highly-coloured windbreakers stood outside a barricaded liquor store, conversing with what looked like sign language. Even through armoured glass, Stuart heard savage scratchrap rhythms from boomboxes. García craned to clock faces, but Scotchman looked without seeming to look. The white cop had a billion dollar brain for mug shots and rap sheets.
Scotchman shook his eyes without moving his head. No one worth busting. The kids were black or somewhere thereabouts, and they all wore badges even Stuart could identify as gang colours. Back in Britain, he’d heard of the Crips and Bloods, but they were Old Hat, long split into other factions, superseded by newer waves of ethnicity and criminality. Last night’s lecture on the nomenclature and uniforms of Los Angeles gangs had been about as intricate and dull as an account of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Stuart knew he should be writing another novel, not traipsing around the Big Car Park (which was what LA looked like from the air when he first saw it) with a cowboy film company trying to wring some sort of commercial movie out of Shadowstalk (Soon To Be A Minor Video Release).
This year, black writers were onstreet; even a company as low down on the Hollywood food chain as New Frontier needed to buy one. Black and Brit was a whole new spin; Ray Calme was congratulating himself on having hooked a live one in Stuart Finn.
Raymond Chandler, one of Stuart’s idols, said: “If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood. If they had been any better, I should not have come.”
The roof was suddenly thumped. The interior of the patrol car rang like a bell.
“Bee-bee, man,” García laughed. “Onstreet shot. Feel up there, Stuey.”
Stuart ran his hand over the roof. It was armour-plate covered with thinning and holed foam rubber.
“Can you find a bump?”
Stuart couldn’t.
“What was that?” he asked.
“A steel ball-bearing,” Scotchman said. “Kids fire them from pistolgrip catapaults like miniature crossbows. They’re for hunting birds. You can punch through a crash helmet if you aim at the visor. Go through a skull like a walnut through wet ricepaper.”
“Fockin’ kids, man,” García said, tolerantly.
“Someone shot the car?”
“Don’t call it a shot unless there’s a dent. No time for paperwork.”
Neither of the cops seemed to care about the attack. Stuart was sure a London copper would mind very much if someone propelled a steel missile at him with killing force. This was a different culture; he had to keep notes until he knew it well enough to translate Shadowstalk into its language.
Scotchman scoped out the roofs of the single-storey buildings lining the street. The Catapault Kid was up there, somewhere. It might not be worth filing a report, but the cop was certainly filing a grudge. One night, he’d get his payback.
Thanks to jetlag, Stuart was perfectly adapted to the ridealong life. He was awake at night and sleepy in the day, just like the cops. Only he felt lousy about it.
“You got Projects back in England, man?” García asked.
Projects? Oh yes, housing estates. Council houses.
“We have Projects.”
“Like in your book?”
“Yeah.”
“Onstreet book, man.”
When he found out his ridealong was a writer, García read Shadowstalk. Stuart, interviewed to death on publication, didn’t have anything more to say about the novel, but García kept bringing it up.
“Must be heavy, man. What you say the name of that Project was, Bridgwater Farm?”
“Broadwater Farm.”
“Yeah, heavy.”
“Certainly is.”
Actually, Stuart had spent about four afternoons in his life trudging around Broadwater Farm, visiting his uncles with Mum and Dad. In Autumn, the place was boring rather than threatening. Kids made fun of his school uniform, but that was it. No guns, no knives, no ball-bearings. He had noticed all the concrete litter bins had had fires lit in them and been rained out, leaving streaks of sooty sludge. He’d used that in Shadowstalk.
“You like that, Scotchman? They got a barrio in Britain. Drive-bys, man. Gangstas, zonk houses, riots. Whole enchilada. It’s in Stuey’s book. Should read it, man.”
Scotchman, who only read rap sheets and law enforcement magazines, made no answer.
Shadowstalk was about killings on a North London Estate, and the young black policeman (a convenient author’s stand-in, as everybody rightly said) who realizes the murderer isn’t just a psycho but the voodoo incarnation of all the social misery abroad in the land. It wasn’t exactly a thriller, more a portrait of life in the dead end of the twentieth-century United Kingdom. Ray Calme saw it as about a younger (i.e., cheaper) Wesley Snipes or Denzel Washington tracking down and totaling a bad-ass monster motherfucker. It could certainly be read that way, Stuart admitted, but he hoped to keep some content in the screenplay.
“Where Stuey comes from is just as onstreet as the Jungle, man,” García said. “Only with a different accent.”
Stuart didn’t mention that his Dad was a doctor in Bath, and that he’d been a day boy at a private school. There were plenty of blacks and Asians at Sexey’s (yes, that was the real name, by Damballah); members of Royal Families or the sons of coup-elevated Third World army officers.
No one could say it hadn’t been tough, though. He always wished he had gone to an inner city Comprehensive. At least, then, he might not now be a twenty-three year old virgin.
“Real riots in Britain, man. They kill cops just like here. Stuey, in the last LA riots, me and Scotchman got cut off in the Jungle. Crowd turned the car over, started kicking in the windows . . .”
He tapped the reinforced glass with his knuckles.
“. . . only they couldn’t crack it. Tried to get in the gas tank to fry us up, only it’s got a bullet-proof combination lock. The end, they just got bored and went away. Scotchman, though, he remember the faces.”
Stuart was a member of the Charlie Aziz Group, founded in memory of a Pakistani killed in police custody. They were still trying to get some lads who had been fitted up for assaulting police officers out of prison. He signed petitions and wrote letters to his MP but deplored direct action. When one of the CAG was suspected of throwing a petrol bomb at a police station, he personally made the resolution calling for his immediate expulsion and censure.
“We ran into some of those cholos from the riot. Scotchman, he make them strip naked and walk down a corridor, whistling the Andy Griffith Show theme while me and other officers beat on them with rubber flashlights, man. Was real payback.”
Stuart had heard similar stories about London police, who apparently made you whistle Dixon of Dock Green. That was a weird international police tradition.
“The Jungle out there, man,” García said, proudly. “We’re the beasts. We’re the kings of the Jungle. Gotta be, to survive. Put that in your screenplay, man. Give the cop guy claws that cut like razors and a roar that chills the blood of evildoers. Like us.”
If he couldn’t write for the movies, García would like to act in them. He said he became a cop because the first thing he could remember on TV was Erik Estrada in CHIPS. That was culture for you. For Stuart, it was Fawlty Towers repeats.
The patrol car had its route marked out, but Scotchman put his own random spin on the detail. He had explained that it was important in the jungle not to be predictable, so he superimposed his own course. They started out and finished up where they were supposed to be and hit certain points along the way, but there were any number of deviations he made sure to work into the schedule. Scotchman called it a skedule, of course.
They were covering the LA grid, taking as many cross-streets as possible. Names which sounded exotic in Bath (Sepulveda, Pico, Figueroa) had turned out to be nondescript thoroughfares stretching for miles, for all the world like Surbiton High Street with more
palm trees and fewer pedestrians. This route was away from those names, threading from Downtown to the South-East, through the bitterly-contested territory called the Jungle. The neighbourhoods were mainly Chicano, most blacks having been driven out. A wave of Koreans was coming, García said. Stuart wondered where the people who were driven out went.
Most cross-streets were dark, streetlights shot out and businesses shuttered up behind graffiti-covered steel rollers. Scotchman drove slower, and Stuart felt the crunching caltroplike obstructions under the armoured tyres. The roads were very poorly maintained, far worse than in Britain.
To the left, a shutter rolled up like a broken blind, and light flooded out of a garage. Stuart flinched: the shutter reminded him of flaps going up over a pirate ship’s gunports as the cannons delivered a broadside.
A sleek black van slid swiftly out, crossing a forecourt in a liquid instant like a panther. The van nudged the patrol car’s nose as it took possession of the street. Stuart felt the impact in his teeth as Scotchman braked.
García swore in rapid Spanish.
The van slipped into the night, at once beyond sight. With its one-way black windows and reflective paint-job, it could be swallowed by shadow. Stuart had seen no visible license plate.
“Shouldn’t we go after that?” he suggested.
Neither cop said anything. Light from the garage still filled the car.
“Should check for damage,” García said, at last.
Scotchman nodded. He unlocked his driver’s side door, and stepped out, hand easy on his gun.
“Stay here, Stuey,” García said, also leaving the car.
Stuart bridled. He couldn’t pick up much from sitting in the back while the world went on outside. Then again, he wasn’t sure how much he wanted to pick up.
The cops examined the hood, where the van had side-swiped. They talked intensely, maybe argued, but Stuart couldn’t lip-read. He looked at the garage. It seemed floodlit and yellow light poured down the forecourt. In the yellow were trickles of red that gave him a bad turn. Knowing he’d regret it, he opened the door and got out.
II From the Corrido of Diego
“I was born within a day’s ride, as distances were measured then, from El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de la Reyna de los Angeles de Rio Porciunculo. My mother was an Indian, my father was a Jesuit. They were, of course, not married. Such arrangements were common in our neglected corner of the Empire.
“My father baptised me Diego, and finally, grudgingly, left me his family name. My mother birth-named me Fox, for her totem animal. You may know me by the Spanish form of my Indian name, Zorro.
“This was 1805; five years before the Grito de Dolores, Father Hidalgo y Costilla’s call for revolt against Spain; sixteen years before the end of the rule of Madrid over Mexico; forty-three years before California was ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; forty-five years before the territory attained statehood . . .
“Had I merely lived out my expected years, I should have experienced history enough for any man. As things happened, history and I have become intertwined until we are each inseparable from the other.
“Mine is not a story, as an anglo would have it, but a corrida, a song. What is true and what is not have long ceased to matter. From the very beginning, I have been a legend as much as a living creature. Often, I lose myself inside the legend.
“Sometimes, I am Diego, masked as Fox; sometimes, I am Fox, hiding inside Diego. In this, what you know from motion pictures and television, is true. Little else is.
“I was born hispanic if not a Spaniard, and I shall die an American if not an anglo. Stories represent me as of the ricos, strutting around a hacienda in absurdly embroidered finery, galloping over peon-tilled land on a purebred Castilian steed, elegantly dueling with a Toledo blade. Such men were fewer than stories would like, and rarely made themselves evident. I was of the pobres, the nameless thousands who were born, dug out goods from the ground with their hands, and, in the normal course, died.
“The ricos left behind their names (the streets of this city bear them still), but the pobres passed utterly from the land, leaving not even a memory.
“Except mine.”
“The viejo had changed me. That I knew from his last touch, which struck like lightning. I thought myself dead but trapped in my body. I felt the weight of my limbs but could not make them move. Then I realized my body merely had an unfamiliar shape. With a little concentration, I could move.
“I was different.
“Since early childhood, my back had been bent in field labour, my hands had fought earth and rock. Pain was as much a part of my body as the taste of spit in my mouth. Now the pain was gone. For the first time, I had pleasure in movement. Simply raising my hand to my face was an exhilaration.
“Against sky, I saw my long-fingered, sharp-nailed hand. It was dark and thinly furred. The knuckle of my forefinger burned with pain. My finger lengthened, joints popping. See, my forefingers are as long as my middle fingers. That is part of the old stories.
“I no longer felt the cold of the night. My clothes were stretched in some places and loose in others, and confined me intolerably. I looked at the full moon and saw not the familiar silver disc, but a ball of light brighter than the sun, containing all colours of the rainbow.
“As I looked about, the dark was banished. Each rock, each plant, was as plain as if under a frozen streak of lightning. Bright, moving forms were animals. I saw movement as well as colour, and could discern a grey rabbit which would by day have been hidden in similarly-coloured scrub.
“I rent apart my shirt, my thick pelt bristling as I let night air at my rough skin, and brought down the rabbit. The animal moved slowly as a muddy stream and I was swift as a hawk.
“Swift as a fox.
“The rabbit’s blood was like a pepper exploding on my tongue, like peyote blazing in my brain. My powerful jaws, lined with sharp teeth, could crunch through bone; my mouth was wide enough to finish the rabbit in three bites.
“Sights and smells and tastes blossomed. I was lost in a new world. I could stand straight-backed, as never by day; and I could run swiftly on all fours, my claws striking sparks from stone.
“The viejo lay in the moonlight, body dry, limbs like black sticks. The Indian, who my mother said was of the People Before Our People, might have been buried in the desert and unearthed after ages. His face had turned from leather to parchment. Dead for only a few moments, it seemed life had fled from him many years ago.
“As he died, something had passed from the tired old man to me. I, Diego, ran under the moon and fought beasts for my food. Soon, I would fight beasts for my people.”
III
Thin blue smoke swirled hypnotically under the striplights. Thick smell stung his nose and eyes like teargas.
A pedantic copy editor at Real Press had told him not to call it cordite (the stuff wasn’t used any more), but couldn’t suggest an up-to-date alternative term for the afterstench of discharged guns. Something Stuart had never smelled before, it was unmistakable.
The garage was filled with people. There was no doubt about how dead they were. The far wall was pocked with bullet-holes and splashed with bright blood. A line of young men slumped where the skirting board would have been, limp arms overlapping, surprised heads lolling on chests. It was his Dad’s usual suggested solution to industrial disputes; they’d been put against the wall and shot.
The predictable thing to do was bend over double and bring up his doughnuts and coffee. Stuart, in this case, was highly predictable.
García and Scotchman found him on his knees, coughing into a pool of chyme. Clear, bitter fluid hung in ropes from his mouth. His head was whirling.
Scotchman whistled and García swore.
Stuart shut his eyes, but his mind’s instamatic developed polaroids in his head. Gouting wounds in colourful jackets, puckered out and leaking meat stuffing. Criss-cross trails of blood like raffia strands on a concrete floor.
One man, a boy, hanging from chains, stripped not only to the waist but almost to muscle and bone.
“This fool got special treatment,” Scotchman said.
The hanging boy had been chubby; pockets of fat stood out in his flayed torso. Stuart was carrying around about half a stone more than he should have been.
His gut twisted again, but there was nothing left inside.
“Stuey, man,” García said, not unkindly, “clean yourself.”
He found a handkerchief and wiped his wet face. He tried to lick the ghastly taste out of his mouth.
Now he had stopped being sick, he had time to get scared.
When he opened his eyes, it wasn’t so bad. He told himself it was special effects. In movies, he had seen worse.
The hanging boy’s arms were wrenched upwards, probably out of his shoulder sockets to judge by the stretched tendons, and fastened to the chain above his head. His wrists were cinched together like beercans by one-piece plastic cuffs. Whoever had worked on him had known what they were doing.
Scotchman whispered a report into his wafer-phone, glancing over each of the dead. He mentioned that all the boys had been given a just-to-make-sure head shot. That was where a lot of the mess came from. García rooted around on a work-surface. He found some car mechanic tools, and a large chemistry set.
“Looks to be a zonk house, man.”
Zonk was the latest packaging of the product, cocaine. It came in squeezable plastic bulbs, like tomato-shaped ketchup containers. A single oily drop on the tongue was a force ten hit. Connoisseur zonkbrains preferred to drip it into their nostrils or onto their corneas. Chief Ryu had declared War on Zonk.
As well as taking out the zonk krewe, the killers had raked their equipment with gunfire. The chemistry set was smashed and odorous. Pools of different coloured liquids mixed and steamed on the bench-top.
“Party favours,” García commented, flipping open a deep Samsonite to reveal densely-packed zonk squeezers. “Couple of hundred K, easy.”
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 58
