“Eventually, there were more miners than could be supported by the wealth of the earth. At many strikes, gambussinos were more successful than anglos who left Philadelphia or Kentucky for fabulous riches without troubling to discover, for instance, what fresh-mined gold actually looked like. Many expected to unearth shining bricks, brush off a little dirt and take them to the bank.
“It was from these men that I first heard the expression ‘greaser’. It was to these men that I first applied the expression ‘gringo’. Both words cannot be said without a snarl of hate.
“The new-born State Legislature, flexing anglo-dominated muscle, passed laws with official names like the Greaser Act of 1851, which limited the rights of the pobres to stake mining claims, raise livestock or buy land. Of course, laws only applied selectively. Rico and anglo embraced like long-lost cousins, each searching for the other’s purse. Don Patrón was never a greaser to his face.
“It was to be expected that ill-educated anglos would be unable to comprehend the finer points of our new laws. Documents subtly worded to weight a balance in their favour were interpreted in the field as bestowing the legal right to murder Mexicans and steal their goods. Towns appointed Sheriffs and Vigilance Committees to do the murdering and thieving.
“Under the light of the full moon, gold shines pale like silver, like the faces of those I must kill. Fox was almost blinded by shining silver-white faces in an ocean of gringos. Diego learned quickly that he could not visit all who deserved the zig-zag-zig on their cheek.
“But I still had to try.”
“There was a man, surnamed Murieta, called Joaquin. He lived, he died, he did few of the things ascribed to him. He was a miner, then he was a bandit. Driven from his claim by anglos, he raided the makeshift banks of the mining camps for the gold he was no longer allowed to dig with his hands. There were very many like him. Sheriffs put up posters offering a reward for anyone by the name of Joaquin. There were many Joaquins, and many were bandits. When the gringos said Joaquin, they meant upwards of five men who were called by that name.
“I was myself a notorious Joaquin.
“Another man, named Salomon Maria Pico, was a bandit also. Often, it could not be decided whether a thing had been done by a Joaquin or by Pico. To the gringos, we were all one. When they pickled the head of Joaquin Murieta, they were satisfied. He had come to stand for us all, a legend more than a man. The head of ‘the renowned bandit’ was exhibited at various places throughout California. As an added attraction, the hand of another ‘notorious robber and murderer’, Three Fingered Jack, was also exhibited.
“But a legend cannot be killed like a man. This, I know. Many were convinced that Joaquin Murieta lived still. And there were many called Joaquin, ready to take his place.”
VII
It was hard to believe Millennium Plaza, a cross between a high-tone shopping mall and a Japanese Garden, was part of the same city as the Jungle. It was impossible to believe the hanging dead boy was in the same California demographic as the ornamental creatures grazing all around.
Everything was new in this Pastel Inferno. Men and women wore chinoiserie robes over swimming costumes and ambled with remote, beatific smiles. A few retro sharpies in shoulderpad suits moved faster than the herd. Discreet public speakers inside statuettes of Buddha and the Tasmanian Devil broadcast whale songs and purred reminders that smoking was illegal outside the red-marked areas.
After less than three hours of hotel sleep, Stuart was in a headachy fug. The Plaza’s air of reassurance and safety was subtly aggravating. He was sure the security guards registered his black face and typed him as a zonkbrain, marking him for a back-clap with a palm-pad stun-gun.
High above the walk-ways, sun-screens stretched across sky, a parasol for the Plaza. Parasol, that was another one. Stuart was noticing the number of Spanish loan-words in California English. Millennium Plaza was a controlled environment, with musical fountains and an artificial, rose-scented breeze. Finally, a Californian dream was achieved: outdoor air conditioning.
The smiling security guards were bulked out in white Star Wars armour. A young black goon with a gold nostril-plug played with bejewelled kids, lumbering like Frosty the Snowman. Tan mothers in wide hats with scarf bands exchanged bleeping business cards by an espresso robot. Their children dressed like mini-adults, with child-sized Rolexes, Rodeo Drive harem outfits and thousand-dollar Nikes.
A street market for millionaires, Millennium Plaza was a subliminal laxative for the bank account. Tasteful products were displayed on stands, like art objects in an exhibition. A card in a slot and a tapped-in code number could make payment in a second. The purchase would automatically be delivered to your upscale address.
All buildings were identical so he couldn’t find New Frontier. He was twenty-five minutes late for the meeting and wasn’t one of the personnel in whom tardiness was permitted. He was to be kept waiting, not to keep others waiting.
He queued by a free-standing mapscreen. A console listed companies, individuals and institutions he might wish to visit. If you pressed a stud next to the name, a path-way lit up from this spot to the address. A father and son team were taking advantage of the mapscreen’s general function to decide which film to see. Pressing “Movie Theaters”, they made the grid light like an electrified web. There were over a hundred screens at six locations in Millennium Plaza, offering upwards of forty movies. The map could access information on films by classification (automatically excluding NC-17), start time, finish time, genre category (teenage zombie comedy), box office gross, and star rating averaged from a poll of ninety nationally-syndicated critics. Stuart felt as if he were in a Post Office with one small parcel, stuck behind a pensioner who hadn’t talked to anyone since last week and needed a full half-hour of therapy with the bewildered counter clerk.
The family unit (a divorcé spending court-ordered quality time with his son) finally opted for the film which had made the most money: if so many others had seen it, they must know something the crix didn’t. Stuart, trying not to be desperate, returned the father’s shrug-and-grin combo and stepped casually up to the console, then ran his eyes up and down columns. There were dozens of companies called New Something; he found New Frontier between New Front and New Fruitz. A tiny squiggle appeared by the pulsing You Are Here dot. The New Frontier offices were just across the Square.
Alerted, he could see the NF logo on a building’s shieldlike marker-plate. The quickest path was through the crowded grass-and-pool area.
As he force-walked, Stuart saw a lot of white armour. Goons gathered around a group of chanting women in black. Old and young, the women didn’t fit with Millennium Plaza: their clothes were not only an unfashionable colour but shapeless. Bodies deviated from the emaciated ideal: some had light moustache furrings, others wore unsubtle face paint. Thick ankles, barrel-waists, angry faces. They chanted in sing-song Spanish. A young woman hooded like an agonized nun held a placard which listed, in micro-letters, hundreds of names, almost all obviously latino.
The guards were antsy, armour plates shifting in insectile clicking. A young man with a rank insignia on his breastplate argued reasonably with an emotional spokeswoman. Stuart didn’t have time to find out what it was about, but a wide woman blocked the walkway and chattered at him in rapid Spanish he couldn’t follow, presenting a clipboard and a pen. On the board was a sheet half-covered with signatures.
This was all to do with Los Disaparidos, the Disappeared Ones. That usually meant political dissidents “vanished” by the apparatus of a police state. He knew about these women: mothers, wives, sisters, sweethearts, daughters. This must be some Latin American protest. He looked about for an Argentine Consulate or a Paraguayan Trade Commission.
The woman would not let him by, so he scribbled his name on the petition. The goon he’d seen earlier, with the gold in his nose, glared as if he were giving succour to the enemy. Once Stuart had signed, he became the large woman’s best friend. He was embraced and passed on
to the other women.
A banner was held up. Comité de los Disaparidos de los Angeles, Committee of the Disappeared of the Angels. No, Committee of the Disappeared of Los Angeles.
He was uncomfortable. The chanting was louder, the goons’ smiles set in concrete. The black guard forced his gauntlet palms close together and an arc crackled between them. The spokeswoman gave up arguing with the ranking guard and joined her voice with the chant.
Stuart managed to get out from between the factions. The officer spoke into a throat-mike which amplified his voice to a Crack of Doom, instructing the women to “kindly disperse and clear the square.” One woman fell on him and stabbed his armoured chest with something black and stubby, a marker-pen. In a swift movement, she scarred the officer with a thick black streak. It looked like the Mark of Zorro, a zig-zag-zig . . .
The officer made a pass by the woman’s scarved head with his open hand, as if to cuff her ear. There was a crackle, and the woman fell, twisting and spasming, to the ceramic tiles.
“Will you please kindly disperse and clear the square!”
Shaking and queasy, Stuart got away from the action. The building recognized his temporary tag and automatically opened for him. The doors were tinted, soundproof glass. When they hissed shut, he saw white guards, ungainly like marooned spacemen, tussling with crow-black protestors, but could not hear the kerfuffle.
Tansey, a tiny girl introduced days ago as a “personal expediter”, greeted him in the foyer. She was eye-candy, a knock-out blonde who decorated New Frontier as a bikini extra decorates a beach party movie. She put a paper cup of decaf in his hand and escorted him to the elevator. She ordered him to have a good time and sent him up to the conference suite.
There was no table in the conference suite, and few items of furniture recognizable as chairs. Stuart was invited to loll on an inflated beanbag. Electronic equipment towers rose between the cushions, like hookahs in a cyberpunk Arabian Nights. A spherescreen revolved, quietly playing a video clip whose images stuttered along with scratchrap vocals.
Ray Calme, President of New Frontier, knelt on a karate mat, white robe tented about him. Its thong-laced neckline disclosed a scrub of grey chest hair and a tan, corded throat. On his chest, a penphone, a slimline tabulator and other gizmos hung like a generalissimo’s medal cluster. The company fortune was founded on pictures like Gross and The Cincinatti Flamethrower Holocaust, but New Frontier had climbed to mini-major status with franchises: the Where the Bodies Are Buried horror films and the Raptylz urban youth comedies. Nestled securely in a portfolio of media interests, New Frontier was shooting its wad on hard-edged genre merchandise, to wit: Shadowstalk.
There were two others: the haggard bikette with an enormous trollcloud of bleached hair was Ellen Jeanette Sheridan, soon to sign as director of Shadowstalk; the fat boy in the one-piece orange skinsuit was Brontis Machulski, the richest teenager Stuart had met since school. Ellen Jeanette had gone from Metalhead promos to a Where the Bodies Are Buried sequel to A-list star vehicles, working with hot comedy and action names. Machulski designed interactive software and had invested his obscene profits by buying into New Frontier (in effect, he was Calme’s boss), developing movie projects to tie in with computer games. Synergy was the watchword: a movie might bomb, but the ancillaries (games, merchandizing, spin-off, cable, laser) could turn over major money.
While Calme talked script ideas, Machulski tapped keys on a personal note-pad. He could have been making a shopping list or zapping flying saucers for all Stuart knew. Ellen Jeanette sniffled badly as if she had flu coming. On being introduced to Stuart, she’d offered him a demi-squeeze and told him it was important to stay onstreet if he was to keep his creative cojones pumping story sperm. García told him Beverly Hills zonk was so diluted as to be barely illegal.
Machulski had brought Shadowstalk to New Frontier. Though Stuart had never got up the nerve to raise it, he was sure the kid was also the only person involved who’d read the book rather than glanced at coverage. Ellen Jeanette refused to read anything: scripts, treatments, contracts and even personal mail had to be recorded on micro-cassettes she could playback through helmetphones while tooling around the Secure Zones on her “hundred thousand dollar hog”, a vintage Harley motorcycle.
Calme had word of last night’s escapade from his LAPD fixer. When he commiserated with Stuart, Ellen Jeanette perked interest. Stuart haltingly went through the story, trying to balance the onstreet callousness they expected from the author of Shadowstalk with his genuinely conflicted feelings about patrols through the heart of darkness. Much as he hated to say it, he felt it was equipping him to write better, if not this script then the next book.
“Hung up like meat?” Ellen Jeanette squirmed, “Guh-ross!”
“I saw that footage on CrimiNews, Channel 187,” Machulski said. “The kid looked like he’d been crucified, with his arms stuck out.”
Machulski’s arms rose as if he were pretending to be an aeroplane.
“We should get Zonk War shooting soon, Ray,” Ellen Jeanette told Calme. “Before we’re eclipsed by events. The script is nearly whipped. A few more tweaks, and Muldoon will commit.”
Muldoon Pezz was a black comedian looking for a serious role. Zonk War was a project Ellen Jeanette was more enthusiastic about than Shadowstalk.
Calme showed the ad that was going in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, announcing that the project was in development. Stuart thought they’d taken artwork from an old Where the Bodies Are Buried and retouched it to fit his story. Maybe they would retouch his story to fit the art.
Stuart, almost bursting, asked if anyone had notes on his four page treatment, which they’d all had for three days. Ellen Jeanette pinched her nose and looked out of the panoramic window. Calme admitted his reader hadn’t finished going through the document yet. Machulski pressed a button on his gadget and a tickertape chittered out in a coil. His comments were about the game, which demanded a multiplicity of scenarios, rather than the film, which needed a single plot. One thing about the game business was that no script draft was ever discarded, it simply became another path the player could take through the maze of the story.
“Know this,” Calme began, “English is a minority language in the Los Angeles school system. I’ve had to send my kids to some rich brat academy so they don’t come home spieling Spanish. I mean, it’s snazz they can talk to the maid, but it’s getting so they can’t talk to me. Sometimes, I feel like the last white man in my neighbourhood.”
Calme realized what he had said and swallowed. Stuart was fed up with having to speak for an entire race, anyway. The British reviewers had gone on about his blackness, and his publishers tried to make him seem a lot more onstreet than he actually felt. Whenever he was profiled in the press, his parents would chide him for trying to come on like a tough kid from a broken home, battering a word-processor because it was either that or push zonk.
“It’s what Shadowstalk should have,” Calme continued, recovering. “The sense of threat of the barrio, the way it swallows the city, dragging it down. Like a monster, like a disease. You know now why they call it the Jungle, Stuart. It’s a great image, the jungle getting thicker, growing over everything, everyone. That’s what I love about this project, the chance to say something about the way the city is going. We’re not after Academy Awards, but maybe we can make a difference.”
“Look,” Ellen Jeanette said, suddenly, “isn’t that pretty.”
Columns of pink and blue smoke jetted towards the sunscreens and swooped down again like the exhaust trails of an invisible jet. Calme was aghast. He talked into a gizmo.
“Tansey, shut off the a-c and seal the building. They’re gassing again.”
Stuart looked out of the window, down at the Square. Everything was blurry and silent. The goons wore snoutlike masks now and were spreading coloured smoke over the protesters, who shook and fell as if speaking in tongues. Millennium people fled, or produced mouth-and-nose breathers from inside r
obes. Some of the protesters were hauled out, twitching but manageable, and piled onto an electric cart like an old-fashioned milkfloat. The large woman with the petition could hold her breath long enough to fight back and had to be stunned with a palm-touch, then have her wrists plastic-noosed behind her back. The petition clipboard probably got lost in the melée.
“I wish they’d find the goddamned Disappeared and get those harpies off our necks,” Calme said. “It’s the third time this month. There ought to be a law.”
Stuart’s eyes followed the smoke as it pooled around the writhing protesters, layering pastel over black.
VIII From the Corrido of Diego
“Chispa del Oro was like any other mining camp. It was strung out along the banks of a creek, where men, women and children panned for sparkles among the sands.
“It was an hour before true sun-down. I was at the creek, circling the grit in water, holding my batea up to the light, hoping the last red rays would coax a gleam my eyes had missed. As the moon neared the underside of the horizon, my sight changed. The water swirled heavily, like quicksilver.
“Fox crept up on Diego. At first, there had been pain with the moonchange. Now I could pull on Fox as easily as one pulls on a cloak. If I concentrated, Diego could resist Fox and pass a moon night in human form, if with considerable discomfort.
“I had a woman and children, then. At least one of the children, the youngest, was mine. The baby boy’s elder brothers were fathered by a man who had been killed, one of numberless Joaquins. The woman, Julietta, was part-Indian, like almost all of us. She loved Fox but lived with Diego, even became fond of him. She came to me because I killed the men who murdered her true husband. I marked them with my zig-zag-zig.
“A trickle of gold was coming in and I fed my family. In evenings when there was no moon, I would listen to Julietta play the flute with another woman who played the guitar. This was all a man could want; I wished to grow old and die like others, mourned by my children . . .
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 60
