Internecine

by David J. Schow

  The Wily Toucan wasn’t the only place in LA that was open dusk to dawn. Dandine next shuttled us to the residence of a gentleman he referred to as Rook, who lived high in the switchbacks of Hollywood Boulevard, west of Laurel Canyon, where it abruptly becomes residential. Celebrities you’ll never find on any Star Map live up there, hiding in plain sight. Rook’s place was a split-level, ranch-style house built sometime in the fifties; basically a huge rectangle anchored into the sheer drop of a bluff that overlooked the Sunset Strip, which lost a considerable degree of its charm when right-thinking petitioners managed to pull down the billboard of the Marlboro Man. As I have said, more than any other city, Los Angeles gleefully demolishes its own architecture—a holdover lust from the early days, when it needed to prove it was the most progressive city on the West Coast. The Strip isn’t what you think you remember from that old TV show. Now it’s a riot of sushi bars and trendoid neon. The Trocadero is still there, but it’s no longer a nightclub, has been remodeled front to back, and has operated under different managements for decades. I should have said the three original front steps of the Trocadero are still there; that’s all that remains of its original incarnation. Nowadays, most drones on the sniff venture into this neck of the enchanted forest to go to the House of Blues, or leer at the women who sleep behind the plate glass in back of the registration desk at the Standard. The Brown Derby, which used to be on Vine Street (it opened on Valentine’s Day, 1929, and was the nightspot where Clark Gable proposed to Carole Lombard a decade later), has been moved so many times even I can’t tell you where the hell it is today.

  And nobody in Hollywood can tell you who the hell Daeida Beveridge was.

  To the narrow street, our destination presented only a wall with an iron-banded door that looked imported from some castle keep, and a modern comm panel with touchtone buttons, gently illuminated for night owls. I didn’t hear a buzzer or bell when Dandine entered a number sequence on the keypad, but I could hear dogs barking. Not small dogs. I could also hear an annoying, almost subaural whistling—canine frequency?—that cut through my gray matter like a migraine spike, and made me squeeze my left eye shut.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked.

  “Hear what?” Dandine leaned close to the speaker grille and said, “The word of the day is ‘miasmata.’ ”

  “Is that Spanish for ‘my asthma’?” I asked.

  “Plural of ‘miasma,’ ” said Dandine, not amused. “Look it up.”

  A low dialtonelike sound emitted from the speaker as relays withdrew the gate bolts.

  “Is that what you heard?” said Dandine.

  “No,” I said. “And I can still hear it. Maybe I need one of your sinus pills.”

  We stopped midway inside a claustrophobic walkway between the featureless outer wall of the house, and the obverse of the security wall.

  “Cover your ear,” he said. “Still hear it?”

  Distressingly, I did.

  “Your bodyguard friend may have busted your ear drum,” he said. “You’ll have to give it a day to clear, then we’ll see.” We arrived at the terminus, about thirty feet away, and a rustic door, rounded at the top and surrounded by ivy. It would not have looked out of place on a Hobbit hole, especially since both of us were taller by at least a foot and a half.

  It was a suitable height and width for someone in a wheelchair, and guess what?

  “Now there’s a face that hasn’t darkened my stoop for a bit of a while,” said the occupant, who I took to be Rook. He was a large gray-beard who reminded me of an old-school biker after a spill, or maybe Santa Claus gone to seed as the result of a tragic sleigh wreck. He was flanked by a pair of German shepherds incapable of being distracted when they were on the job. Their coffin-shaped heads came up to about his shoulders as we peered downward through the absurd little door, because, yes, he was in a wheelchair. Every surface on the chair, save for the rubber on the wheels, was chromed. “Let the kids get a whiff of ya, then come on in. Be sure to duck.” He pointed out the dogs, one pure black, the other equally white, both with massive chests. “That’s Gunner, and that’s Klaus.”

  “Hey, Klaus,” said Dandine, going first. “Long time.” He extended his hand slowly, palm down, and the white dog sniffed, then looked to his master. “What happened to Dutch?”

  “Ole Dutchie took the big dirt nap about two years ago, amigo,” said the man who had to be “Rook.” “Which proves you’re shit at staying in touch. Gunner there is the newbie.”

  Gunner—the black one—sampled my scent and looked for a go-ahead sign. If the man gave it, I never saw it. But both dogs broke away at the same time.

  “Rook, meet my new compadre Mr. Lamb. Mr. Lamb, say hello to the one and only Rook.”

  I hadn’t had anyone whip a power handshake on me in a long time. We stooped through the low-bridge lintel of the door and Dandine pushed it shut. I heard at least three electronic bolts slide into the jamb, automatically. I kept covering my ear and experimenting with the new sound that lived inside my skull. Dammit.

  “Give you a hand?” asked Dandine, moving forward as if for a repeated handshake. I thought it was another goofy code, but Rook clasped firmly, hoisted himself out of the wheelchair, and stood up.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” Rook said to me with an evil grin. “Being a cripple can give ya an edge, when you’re dealing with certain people.” His voice was soft, yet deep and arid, one that could cut under noise and still be heard. It came from the anterior of the throat, and was hollow but not resonant, as though his nasal tones had been deactivated or compromised. It was like a “cemetery” voice.

  I accepted the beer he offered; imported German stuff that had to be poured into a pilsner glass to mix properly. Dandine took a club soda. The house was essentially four gigantic rooms stacked one on top of the other, connected by a descending zigzag of long stairways. We stood amid a strew of comfortable furniture, suborganized into more intimate groupings of chairs around low tables. Most of the tables were stacked with books. The theme of this room seemed to be war memorabilia—display cases of painstakingly rendered miniatures: model tanks, other vehicles, and battle scenes. Framed documents—including ones signed by Omar Bradley, Curtis LeMay, Oliver North, Abraham Lincoln and, sure enough, Adolf Hitler—hung on the walls.

  “It’s real,” Rook said, noting my interest. “It’s an official letter to SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Ing Wilhelm Brandt, commending him for his design of ‘disruptive pattern material,’ and recommending that Hermann Goering use the Waffen SS design for his regiment’s uniforms; which Goering did, in 1942.”

  “Disruptive—?”

  “Camouflaged uniforms. The Germans invented them. Rather, they made practical tests of it in the late thirties, and discovered their field casualties went down by fifteen percent. So they were the first to introduce camo gear. Some of their designs are still used today, by NATO armies.”

  On the second floor what appeared to be original paintings—mostly real pigment on antique canvas—crowded all the available wall space. Rook must have caught my quizzical expression as I did a double take at Monet’s The Houses of Parliament, Sunset.

  “It’s a forgery, but a good one,” said Rook. “Not as good as the one that still hangs in the National Gallery. Most of the authentic firsts went out of public circulation in the early fifties—thefts, switcheroos, private auctions.”

  The third floor down was a multimedia library with a lot of high-end tech gear; black boxes patch-wired into disc burners, and a fly-vision bank of flat wall monitors. “Ask me for any movie you can think of,” said Rook, “and I can rip ya a copy. New, old, released, unreleased. I dare ya.”

  “London After Midnight,” I said.

  “Oww, the cineaste goes right for number one on the hit list!” He slapped my shoulder. “It’s got to exist, first, my man.” To Dandine, he said, “Where’d you find this guy?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Dandine said. “I just sort of dropped in on him.
”

  The fourth floor was mazed into a lot of worktable space interspersed with enough photo, duplication, and printing gear to run a full-service Kinko’s. He even had an old Linotype machine dominating one corner, as well as drum scanners, laminating machines, and a darkroom.

  “I could do ya a French passport,” Rook said. “And you’re gonna say, why not a U.S. passport, and I’d say, think more globally, because we’re not living in America anymore.” He shrugged, massively. Standing, he was now taller than either of us. “And I could show off like this all night, but I bet my man here wants to cut past the chit and the chat.”

  “First,” said Dandine, “I want to thank you for this.” He handed over the NSA identification he had used at Ripkin’s house. “It served us well.”

  Rook dropped it into a shredder that automatically obliterated it, with a coffee-grinder noise. “These are kind of like subway passes; they run out of credibility the more they’re exposed. Hey, I could make ya a special subway card, if you like—one that never expires?”

  “I need NORCO IDs for two.”

  Rook returned a slightly comic squint. “Hairy,” he said. “But doable. To get into NORCO?”

  “Possibly. To fade us past one of NORCO’s tools. But they should pass muster in the scanners, if you can manage that.”

  “Slightly harder.” Rook rummaged through a card file on one desk and held up a sample. “This is what ya want. They change the design—”

  “Several times a month, random dates. How old is that one?”

  “Day before yesterday.”

  Dandine inspected the card. Photo, name, optical fingerprint, bar-code, security striping. It reminded me of our mutant twenty-dollar bill.

  “See the embedded tape? It’s platinum. They’ve coded their scanners to read for platinum, for god’s sake. How paranoid can ya get?” He turned to me. “Mr. Lamb, is it? Take a seat on that stool right there and prepare to get immortalized. Ya might wanna run a comb through your hair.”

  After Rook photographed us, he led the way to a bungalow that waited on the far side of the pool terrace, outside the lowest floor of the main house. The area was engirded with pine and fir trees and, I’m sure, was bristling with security. “Ya know the drill,” Rook said to Dandine, “so show Mr. Lamb the amenities. I should have these items polished off by the time you wake up.”

  “I thought we were going to hit them tonight,” I said. “What about all that crap you told me about hit them at night, when they’re tired or stressed?”

  “No longer applies,” said Dandine. “We’re too far up the food chain for that, now. The people we need from now on are such hard targets . . .”

  “That they never sleep?”

  “Basically.”

  In the parlance, a “hard target” was traditionally one shielded by every conceivable form of protection, and a “soft target,” with an almost Japanese simplicity, was “a hard target plucked from its shell.” In Rook’s guest house, I felt secure for the first time. Perhaps I was just running games on myself, but I found it insanely easy to drop off to sleep there in my own little room, with Dandine across the living room, doing his mental exercises or pre– power nap, Doc Savage calisthenics, or whatever he did to unwind. If he ever unwound.

  And just below us, the head-and-taillight snake of the Strip slithered onward, completely unaware.

  The wife of a man named Horace H. Wilcox gave Hollywood its name in 1887. Daeida Wilcox Beveridge was known as “the mother of Hollywood” when she died in her home near the Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue (named after her husband) in 1914. “Hollywood” was the name of the country home of a woman Daeida spoke to during a train trip back east. Daeida was so enamored of the name that she used it for her own home . . . and Hollywood was born. The city has never honored or accredited her in any way, but there’s a plaque, if you know where to look, put up privately.

  You think we remember anything, or learn from our past mistakes, ever? Think again. Think the way I was learning to, and say to yourself, what would I do?

  Rook’s guest bathroom was provisioned much like a hotel one-shot—disposable everything. I no longer needed to bandage my wrists and my forehead had cleared of damage, but the keen of tinnitus in my right ear was distracting, pestersome, and still mildly painful. I had hoped it would heal down while I slept. Maybe I just didn’t sleep enough. I probed in there with a cotton swab and did not extract the blood crusts I feared.

  On the sofa I found a fresh dress shirt still in crisp plastic packaging, and a silk tie that must have cost eighty bucks. Finally, I could retire from my stint in the Gay Mafia.

  Dandine, per usual, appeared to have been up and functioning for six hours already. I imagined him stretching and kicking head-high at the door moldings for practice, then using a lava stone to sand off his outer layer of skin in an ice-cold shower, scrubbing right over the melted-wax, nerve-dead skin patches where his nipples used to be, feeling nothing there. I wondered what other blind spots he had; what other places in mind or body that had been scoured of the ability to feel anything. No looking back, there.

  His black Halliburton was open, the center of a compact workspace. He had nasty looking bullets lined up in a row on the coffee table. Disassembled gun parts were scattered around, as well as cloths, plungers, cleaner, and lubricant. Arcane, specialized tools in a layout similar to field surgery.

  “You might need to know about these, later,” he said, holding up one of the cartridges for my inspection. It was a little carbon-colored missile, with virtually no bullet head—just a flat steel dimple—and a yellow hazard stripe around the casing. “Minimal charge. It transports explosive over a short distance, then blows up when it strikes. Good if you want to throw light and concussion across a room. Like the firebacks in strength, but these impact the target, not the shooter. Sometimes it’s useful to plug these into a clip as a final shot. A full mag of these and you could make a lot of sound and thunder. The rest of the slugs are full-charge hollow points, government strength, max stopping power.”

  He handed over what appeared to be a featureless pewter cartridge.

  “Is this—?”

  “Fireback,” he said. “Instead of gunpowder and a bullet head, it’s a fake shell packed with what is called ‘fuel-air explosive’ made by the Austrian company that makes Kaurit, which is your basic plastique. This has a small flash primary and the enclosed case multiplies the explosive effect by a factor of about seventy-five times. Little but big.”

  When “Celeste,” a.k.a. Marisole, had experienced the joy of getting her face and hand blown off, the damage had looked (to my virgin eyes) the same as the blast from a small grenade. I was immediately wary of dropping the bullet.

  “What the hell is that thing?” I was pointing at another pistol, but leery of picking it up, or even touching it. The clip hung out far below the butt. A scary looking, sharp jut of metal was mounted beneath the trigger guard, under the barrel. The stretch muzzle was vented. “Looks like a Beretta.”

  “It is,” said Dandine, lifting it. “The M93R, built as an antiterrorist sidearm, basically a bodyguard gun for rich Italians who kept getting kidnapped in the eighties. This thing—” he swiveled the hinged metal piece until it locked into position “—is a handle, to stabilize the gun while you fire three-shot bursts, on full auto. Dumb idea.”

  “You mean like a machine gun?”

  “Just like a machine gun. Twenty-round mag. Otherwise it’s your basic nine-mil, except without the internal safety . . . so don’t drop it when it’s loaded.”

  “I don’t think I’ll even touch it.”

  He busied himself removing the metal handle. This required partial disassembly of the pistol, which Dandine accomplished with the swift deftness of a stage magician executing the Linking Rings trick—in reverse. In no time the handle was divorced from the gun.

  “So much for stability,” I said.

  Dandine did not look up. “It adds weight and bulk. Snags on clothing. Tempts
you to blow off your index finger. Pointless if you have decent trigger control.” He demonstrated. “If you can’t hold down one-handed, then you just aim for the lower torso, and the kick from the second and third shots carries your cluster right up into the triangle.” He traced an imaginary pyramid in the air, framing my pectorals to my nose. “Sniper’s triangle; the sweet spot.” I noticed the wooden handles on the gun frame were nicked and worn smooth. As Dandine replaced them with rubber grips, he added, “Heavier than the Glock 18s the DEA uses; I like this better. More familiar in the hand. They don’t make these anymore.”

  “Why? Was everybody killed?”

  His gaze became abstracted again. I was getting used to this, whenever he seemed to phase out to some other plane, where he was having a whole separate conversation with beings I could not perceive. “Do you always do that?” he asked. “Change the subject with humor?”

  “Sorry. It’s one of my weapons. Strictly defensive.”

  “Connie, pardon me for saying so, but you haven’t done that much that you’d have to dissemble about.”

  “You think I’m boring, right?”

  He extracted the “big stick” clip and put the reassembled Beretta on a clean cloth. “I didn’t say that. You’re smart, and you’re sharp, so why are you so afraid of what people will think of you? Who cares what anybody thinks of you? Where do you get off being insecure? You’ve got more grit than most normal people I’ve ever met.”

  “Thanks . . . I think.”

  “Seriously. You did well in gunfire, you did well at the airport, and you haven’t shit yourself once. Stand up.”

  I thought he was going to demonstrate some kung fu on my poor, beleaguered corpus. I hate it when people who have taken martial arts courses insist on “showing you something.” (It nearly always mean bruises, cocked wrists, inconvenience.) Instead, he wired a shoulder holster around me the way anyone else would help you on with your coat. Then he took it off.