Lost Angels

by David J. Schow

  "Well, er, Monsieur, I ... "The voice trailed off. The cheesy grin remained. The dwarf shrugged.

  "Let's have a drink, you and I," Peter said. Changing tack was a good way to keep the upper hand. "Sounds like you could make good use of a spot or two. Shall we?" He waved the dwarf toward the kitchen, but the tiny man did not budge, unsure, nervous. "Come on, come on. A drink is what you want, right?"

  The dwarf looked around to make sure Peter was addressing him.

  As he approached, Peter thought of Poe's character groping around the rim of the Pit. Once the dwarf was settled onto a stool at the breakfast bar, Peter pulled down the Chivas.

  "Ah, good!" said the dwarf. "I was going to request something more potent than wine."

  "Ice?"

  "Do I look like a barbarian?"

  "No offense," Peter handed across a thick-bottomed highball glass. The dwarf gulped the full whack and handed it back for more, smacking his lips.

  "Sounds like you're in trouble for goldbricking, mate," Peter said as he poured.

  "Eh?" His eyes never left the glass.

  "You called yourself a flaneur, a goof-off. You always so charitable to yourself?"

  "Of course not!" He banged the glass on the countertop for emphasis. "It was him. My employer. He watches. He checks. God help you if you fuck up." More scotch was within range and his truncated reach was sufficient to win it. When he made the grab he eased his hold on the bundle of keys he'd kept fisted tight and they hit the polished bar-top with the jangle of small change.

  Peter recognized Alea's keys as much by their unique sound as by the snapshot glimpse of them he caught before his guest executed a noisy recovery and swept them into a dark, dirty pocket.

  The keys were grouped, Peter knew, by a circlet of ball-and-socket gold chain, not plated, but apparently solid gold. Where a conventional person would have attached an oval Gucci plate with embossed initials, or one of those stamped metal ticket facsimiles for eats or Les Misérables, there was a tarnished brass knickknack the size of Peter's thumbnail. It was rectangular, with a raised border like a miniature playing card, and enclosed a deep-cut contour of a human figure, arms extended - the same outline that had previously appeared in bas-relief on Alea's waxen seal. The figure no longer looked to Peter like it was flying. It looked like it was plummeting toward some uncertain and ugly end, helpless to arrest its fall.

  The dwarf downed two more burly swallows of scotch and muttered on about his philistine boss. Peter canceled the lunatic urge to laugh in favor of strategic timing.

  He watched the dwarf's glass ascend, then caught him with a mouthful of liquor. "You made some kind of mistake?" he said. "Involving Alea?"

  "Oh, no, she was perfect. But I'm not supposed -," His gaze bounced up to Peter's triumphant face as the firebolt of Chivas burned its way down the wrong tube. It was a perfect double-take. He spluttered and turned an alarming shade of scarlet, veins bulging at the temples as he spluttered and gagged. "Zut!You!"

  "You thought I was just a fellow burglar, right?"

  The dwarf mopped at himself.

  "See, pal, I'm an absolute security nut. Only Alea had the key combination that would open the front door. I changed the upper deadbolt myself; not even the building manager has a key to that one. But you did."

  Swallowed air resolved into a broad panic fart. "I - I only saw your - back before."

  "Tell me about your employer." In a taut suspense script, the next line would be: His name, for starters. Peter leaned across the counter and pointed. "His name, for starters. Window's right over there."

  "Monsieur Rogoff." The dwarf's tone was exasperated.

  Peter thought that alcohol and self-interest were melding to get admirable results so far. "And does this Mister Rogoff know where Alea is?"

  The dwarf shrugged again, sighed. "Ah, Monsieur. She is gone for always. Of her you will never see again." Said with the species of bogus regret the French believe is terribly sympathetic. "She was very beautiful ..."

  "Does Monsieur Rogoff know where she is?" Peter's face crimsoned, his eyes growing starkly white.

  Maurice recoiled. "Monsieur Rogoff knows - everything!" He hiccuped and silence lagged between the two men.

  Peter poured himself a belt - over ice - and tipped it back.

  "You will take me to meet Mister Rogoff tonight?"

  "Oh, no, Monsieur, I cannot! He would terminate me! Not for any price!"

  "I didn't name a price." The dwarf's protest sounded a bit too rehearsed, so Peter kept on his deadly smile and lunatic-calm demeanor. "I'm offering you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – a chance to get back to the ground floor via the elevator instead of the fast way. Cheers."

  Maurice lent the window a queasy glance. "It is useless for me to argue, I suppose."

  "Bingo," Peter toasted. "Or splatooey."

  Maurice winced at the indelicacy. He regarded his empty glass as a gallows-bound convict might his final taste on this world, with regret that he had not made it last longer. "Ah. So be it, then."

  "I'll need my keys back to seal our little pact," Peter held out his hand.

  The dwarf's phoney expression of camaraderie under fire dissolved into an acid look of daggers and poison. He rifled within his several coats, kicking up dust and gnats, every contortion punctuated by a grumbled checklist of curses in French, just in case Peter did not sense what an inconvenience he was causing.

  But he relinquished the prize.

  Peter's grasp closed on the keys, affirming their reality, his heart surging almost as if he had physically recaptured Alea herself. On its tiny ingot of gold, the man-like figure fell, and fell

  Kind of like the pose Maurice would strike on the way down, as he picked up speed. If…

  "Don't fret, Shorty." Peter felt gruffly hale now. "I'll put in a word with your boss, after he and I take a meeting." He hesitated just shy of the sunken portion of the living room. "Unless, of course, you really do know where Alea is right now." He raised his eyebrows and considered the window again. "Hm?"

  "That is something I wish with all my heart, mon ami," Maurice said in his saw-toothed voice. He spread his open palms in a theatrical gesture of impotence. "But, truly, I cannot say because I do not know. If Monsieur Rogoff wishes to divulge more to you, he shall."

  Maurice's exaggerated courtliness was as grotesque as his expressions of sympathy were patently false. Peter found himself wishing for a pistol, something big and phallic and lethal, loaded with lead wadcutters. A mushrooming slug to the head; instant checkout. He was still thinking of death, and that was inappropriate, and he glimpsed in a flash just how absurd he was.

  Play tough, he thought. Let's see if you can maintain a degree of physical intimidation for this little errand, at least. Can you keep it up?

  "I think I might just be able to charm Monsieur Rogoff," he said. "Just look what I've done for our relationship in such a short time. Move. Now." It was essential tough-guy dialogue.

  Maurice belched, picked snot, moved as ordered.

  The grandfather clock stubbornly bonged four times. It was two-fifteen in the morning.

  "Useless!" the little man snorted from his vantage, at one of three high, narrow windows that took up most of the north wall of his cramped quarters. He was far up enough from street level, that security bars would have been paranoid in the extreme. His exasperated comment formed a corona of mist on the chilly glass; from across his customary anarchic disarray, the cantankerous clock endured another of his mordant glances. "Old World craftsmanship ... don't make 'em like they used to ... pah!"

  He fantasized sweet-talking the senile timepiece closer to one of the vaulted windows, then defenestrating it. It was fully twice the little man's height and might offer a heroic struggle, if it could anticipate anything other than a splendid view of nighttime Los Angeles all the way to the Hollywood sign. He could watch it somersault end-over-end as it achieved terminal velocity, the building's floors blurring past ever faster, and then the sweet har
sh kiss of impact, the sundering of oiled mahogany, the splintering of joists, the glittering spray of cogs and gears and an end to years of temporal suffering.

  He remained at the window, imagining himself a thane in a high keep, and watched as car headlights curbed on Highland Avenue and extinguished. The railroad watch in his fob pocket declared the arrival of two-fifteen a.m. Maurice, as expected, was spot on.

  The Victorian clutter of the workroom resembled the overstock of an antique shoppe and a thrift store, ignominiously mingled by one of California's over-hyped quakes. There was no obvious regard lent to cataloging, and none for display - the little man knew how to locate whatever he might require. He gently shifted a dust-laden afghan, so as not to precipitate a barrage of sneezing. He thought: I am healthy but I am old, and would spare my pipes the violence. Beneath the afghan was a maplewood chest, rough-hewn like a rural coffin. It might adequately accommodate Maurice, should the dwarf ever decide to decease. From the chest the little man lifted out a cloudy bottle of very old, venerable brandy. Maurice's well-earned reward, for Peter Deutsch was a prize of rare worth. The little man resisted the temptation to puff the dust from the bottle, remembering to spare his pipes.

  "Our Mister Deutsch has no idea of just how valuable he is," the little man said to the bottle. "Eh?" He hummed and laughed, in the manner of a child at play alone. "Right about now, our dear Peter is waxing tragic, pillorying himself in the most classical terms imaginable!"

  He settled back in his creaking office chair and steepled his fingers expectantly. "Hm. Some people just don't appreciate good melodrama."

  Peter Deutsch vacillated between waning anger and bewilderment, both dwindling to irrelevance in the face of his ever-amplifying exhaustion. He lifted and dropped each foot, climbing stairs again, thinking that the only reason people like great altitude is that it provides such a wonderful view when you fall.

  Hysterical laughter seemed the most viable of all his options.

  The dwarf, Maurice, no last name offered, had directed him over the hill of Hollywood proper, then to the ancient Bekins warehouse that loomed against the southern skyline as a decaying smog-tarnished colossus, way the hell down Highland Avenue. It looked like a decrepit Deco-era dirigible hangar.

  Then came the chain-link barricades, the locks and fences. Maurice, like a rat, seemed able to squeeze through any opening the size of his head. Peter was forced to scramble over. The rusty coil of razor security wire sharply depreciated the value of his tailored shirt. A deviously crooked nailhead did likewise for his trousers, once Maurice had lifted open a rotten plank hatch much like an old root-cellar door. Down in the darkness, Peter deftly sank ankle-deep into a cold engulfment that wasted both his shoes. Then Maurice led the way up flight after flight of groaning metal stairs barely a yard in width and sandwiched between mildew and verdigris-encrusted walls, like some forgotten fire escape. Peter's hand came away orange whenever he gripped the rail, which came and went like a cruel practical joke. He yawned. He was sweating. His socks were soaked through with something vile. Keep climbing.

  He was crazy, all right, to be following a dwarf who had burgled into his life with maddeningly vague tidbits about the fate of the creature he'd once thought of as a human being named Alea. Alea, who right now symbolized his entire capacity for love, sealed up in a bottle and thrown overboard. He felt as if his entire life had blown a tire.

  He thought of freeway wrecks, of the shucked husks of destroyed tire treads, of disintegrated safety glass, of tardy paramedics and lives permanently off-course thanks to an errant second of high-speed traffic. Some people who worked in Hollywood commuted from San Diego. Three hours plus, coming and going, nearly a fifth of each waking day consumed by travel and drive-time radio and maybe, just maybe, a collision that could unmake your existence. It could all change in an instant. Crash.

  Peter kept climbing.

  He began to hear the wind cooing through the structure; thought he could feel the mammoth building swaying. It was an illusion, of course. His body told him that he was nearing the very top. In Maurice's wake he completed the final flight of risers, then wrestled past an acre or so of junk in an attic the size of half a football field - the discards and obsolete detritus of hundreds of past lives. Then came a narrow stretch of planks laid across fat girders, sloping slightly downward, then more junk, now enclosed by close walls reaching not quite to the dim recesses of the ceiling.

  Then, incongruously, came an office door with a tarnished brass knob. The pebbled glass was cataracted to ivory at the borders and held despite a heroic, curving fracture through the lower left quadrant. Flaking gilt proclaimed the MORRIS BUTTS DETECTIVE AGENCY. Detective Butts had gone wherever failed private eyes go, decades previously. The door was still in the world, and its glass was lit from within.

  Maurice beckoned. "Enter." The door creaked. Peter thought: This is not real life. This is an episode of THRILLER and I'm about to meet Boris Karl off

  "Is it Deutsch as in Sprechen sie Deutsche?"

  Peter nodded. A small man behind the desk was squinting at a crumbling Rolodex card.

  "Maurice, show Mister Deutsch to a seat. The bar-stool will do."

  Peter's eyes tried to deny the input - the little man's vest, the faded dignity of old silk, the swallowtail coat in gray pinstripe, the musky ascot and vintage pearl stickpin. He noticed a watch fob, and, in a fall of light beneath the desk ... spats? The costume was natty, but had suffered rigors of wear. It made Peter think of that odd mixture of senility and majesty which characterized elders whose minds could lock with crystal-fine resolution into the minutiae of the Depression, yet got only fringe reception on the here-and-now. He watched the little man pay meticulous attention to the flicking of dust - real and imagined - from his outfit.

  "My young friend," the little man began while Maurice was still peering about for the location of the barstool. "Permit an introduction. The name is Rogoff."

  "Monsieur Rogoff" Peter said vacantly.

  A courtly nod, modest. "Thank you. Is something amiss, Mr. Deutsch? You're staring at me as if I had a third eye. Oh, Maurice, it's over by the clock, for heaven's sake!"

  Maurice grumbled and heaved. Butlering was beneath his station.

  "You look like one of those Hollywood Boulevard loons," said Peter. "The ones in the castoffs and theatre costumes you see picking in the litter baskets at three in the morning."

  "And just now, you, Mr. Deutsch, look like a news composite of a crazed killer." He waved Peter's notice toward a foggy bureau mirror leaning atop a dresser missing all of its carved knobs. "Or perhaps more relevantly, a hammer murderer, eh?"

  Maurice gave up trying to hoist the barstool and instead cleared it off and scrambled aboard. Let the new guy get his own goddamned seat.

  Peter saw, staring back at him, an overused face, barely organized around manic eyes, darkened, hollowed. His hair was lank and dirty and sticking forth in windblown licks. The corners of his mouth were pulled back in a smile he could not feel. His face was numb; but here was that face, grinning. Several days of stubble coarsened the view. He could have been a denizen of the alleys himself.

  "So let's forgo snap judgment by appearance, hm? Let's go for the meat, the substance, the inner man, the details - and not the 'high concept,' as you might say. If I may presume." He seemed enormously pleased with his own banter, his face aglow, ruddy and elfin.

  Peter abstracted past his own image in the mirror and took in the little man's bulb nose, the eyes like glittering chips of black quartzite. In defiance of cliché they, in fact, twinkled. His facial topography seemed to indicate the little man spent a great deal of time smiling. His hair was white as duck down, healthy but clipped very short, like that of an old Navy man. Peter rose, considered all the junk again, and sank his hands into his pockets. "I'll stand." He thought of poker.

  "There is a question that brought you here," the little man began. It had the quality of a rehearsed speech; dialogue, a script - perhaps that was w
hy the tone seemed weirdly jolly to Peter. "It caused you to follow Maurice into this strange place. Why bother? You're a fellow who knows how to cut his losses. Why indeed? I've devoted a goodly amount of meditation to my response to the question -"

  Peter fixated as though seeing Rogoff for the first time ever. "Where is she?" His voice was a whisper.

  "Ah, precisely! That question!" A look of vindication fleeted across the leprechaun countenance. His hands fiddled with air. He was excited. "I shan't tell you she does not exist, as Maurice might have awhile ago. That sort of answer was designed more for ... urn, titillation, don't you think? Wouldn't serve my purpose, now that you're here. And I surmise that your patience is probably as worn down as your demeanor. I notice everything, you'll notice..."

  M. Rogoff's voice was drubbing and hypnotic; Peter had to remind himself to ask again: "Where is she now?"

  "Ah. I put it to you, sir: Would you like to see her again; now, tonight?" M. Rogoff tossed Peter's card onto the desktop, and reclined to relish the effect. Good scenes were Peter's business. Here was a man who could appreciate pains taken. "Academic, really. Of course you do?'

  Peter fought the surging anger inside himself. He wanted to face this monsieur evenly matched, emotionless. It almost worked.

  "Of course I do." The rage, swirling crimson and cobalt, seethed just shy of boiling, and Peter's voice was low in the oppressive room.

  "And the car you have brought with you, I presume it is a two-seater?"

  "Oh, Monsieur!" exclaimed Maurice. "Such an automobile! Flashing green lights, little bells that ding when you leave your door ajar. Paine voices that tell you to fasten your lap belt. Like something from that space movie!" Maurice had liked Star Wars a great deal.

  "Don't hasten to invite yourself," M. Rogoff told the dwarf. "Mr. Deutsch and I have several private business matters to discuss, In the meantime, Maurice, as a reward for your sterling service, you'll find a bottle of extremely old brandy on the bookshelf right behind you, next to the clock. Also an envelope:'