“We’re not focusing on intent,” Kathy said, showing many of her teeth. “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow didn’t mean to burn down Chicago, either. Junior just drags this kind of thing behind him.”
Rina said, “That’s not fair,” and Eaglet said, “Who’s Annie Oakley?”
“You,” Kathy said to Eaglet, “go clean your gun or something. Work on a frame of reference. And you,” she said to Rina, “you and I will talk when all these—interesting people are gone. You and Tyrone.”
Ronnie uncrossed her legs, got her feet under her, and said, “I’m not his paramour. I’m the person who takes care of him now, since you’ve decided that your marriage vows don’t apply.”
Kathy said, “Hey, you. You’ve got no idea, and no right, to—”
“You knew who he was when you married him. I mean, has he misled me about this? Did you think he was studying for the ministry?” She waited, but not long enough for Kathy to formulate a reply. “No? Then you knew he was a crook? Am I mistaken about this? And you figured he’d wear the ring around, what, his neck? And once there was a kid, you’d have him by the—”
Kathy was up. “Out,” she said. “Out right now. Go back across the tracks to wherever you—”
But Ronnie was just getting warm. “Once you had him glued down, or pinned to the display case or whatever—”
“Whoooo,” Eaglet said, raising a fist in the first Black Panther salute in decades.
“—you figured you could turn him into a substitute teacher or a male nurse, as though you’d promised—”
“That’s it, honey,” Kathy said, walking toward the kitchen.
“—promised to take in holy matrimony not this man, but whatever man you could turn him into. Was that the idea?”
“When I come back out,” Kathy called, “I want all of you gone. That means you, too, Tyrone.”
No one looked at anyone. The only sound was Ronnie’s breathing.
“Golly,” Debbie said. “That went well.”
Rina said to me, “She’s scared. She gets like this when you scare her.”
I looked at Rina, seeing in her still-half-formed face the ghost of Kathy as a teenager. I sighed and got up. “I’ll go talk to her.”
“Won’t do any good,” Rina said, and Tyrone said, “You listen to her.”
“They’re both right,” Ronnie said, getting the rest of the way up and following Kathy in the direction of the kitchen.
I said, “Hold it.”
“What’s she going to do?” Ronnie said. “Throw me out? She’s already thrown me out.”
“But—but what can you say to her?”
She put her hand on top of my head and pushed me back down. I hadn’t even realized I was getting up. “I can remind her why we both chose you and stayed with you, for years and years, in her case. Maybe I can make friends with her.”
“Let Ronnie go,” Rina said.
“Like I get a vote,” I said.
Ronnie said, “If I need you, I’ll break a window,” and followed in Kathy’s tracks.
I called after her, “The door right across the hall from the kitchen.” A door slammed. “That one,” I said.
We lapsed into the kind of silence that can end a party in its first ten minutes. It was broken by Debbie, ever the people-pleaser, saying to Rina, “Look at you, look how lucky you are. You got the best from both parents in your face. Your mom is beautiful, and you got her eyes and that tremendous mouth, and Junior passed along his cheekbones, which are too good for a man, anyway.”
“Thanks,” Rina said, rubbing her right cheek. “I’ll bet you look like your mom.”
“Do I ever,” Debbie said. “Caused problems with her, too.” She broke off and fanned herself as though the room had suddenly become warm. “But you don’t need to know about that.”
Rina bent forward to look at her around Tyrone, who leaned back. “Sure, I do.”
“Well, she drank a little. Not true, not true, she drank all the time. When I was about fourteen, she started looking at me and then looking in the mirror.” Debbie glanced around the room. “Feels like group therapy. So then she’d beat me up. She said it was like the worst part of being a movie star, without any of the good things. They’ve always got their young faces following them, no matter how terrible they look now, and she had me, just tagging around behind her with my face on.”
Eaglet said, “That’s, like, tragic,” and then her gun fell out from beneath the only tie-dyed cape I’d seen outside the movie Woodstock and hit the carpet with a thump. She said, “Far out,” and picked it up, doing an automatic and very professional quick-sight down the barrel and blowing some dust off it before putting it back.
“Anybody here,” Tyrone said, “not carrying?”
“I’m not,” I said.
“I saw that,” Tyrone said with a quick smile. “You slapping at your back like that.”
“Luckily for you,” I said, “we’ve got the girls.”
Louie said, “I guess we could do some business, for a minute, since the kids here know what’s happening. You’re gonna need four more.”
“I figured.”
Rina said, “Four?”
“Two at a time, eight hour shifts, three shifts a day,” Louie said. “I’m Louie, by the way.”
“Louie the Lost?” Rina said enthusiastically. “Daddy talks about you all the time.”
“Yeah?” Louie said. “I know enough about you, I should be your godfather.”
“So what’s the deal?” Tyrone said. “You got a line in, uhh, gun girls? You’re like an agent?”
“That’s the problem,” Louie said. “I can’t find that many girls.”
Debbie said, “Women.”
Louie said, “Yeah.”
“Why women?” Rina asked.
“We thought it might go down better with the neighbors,” Louie said. “Better than some hard-timer in black leather.”
I held up a hand and listened. Kathy’s voice was raised, but well south of the red zone.
Rina said, “I can’t believe they’re both still in there.”
“So,” Louie said, reclaiming the floor. “Whaddya think? Three girls—” He caught Debbie’s eye and said, “and three boys. Sound okay?”
“I’ll get some more money tomorrow,” I said.
Tyrone said, “What’s the hourly rate?”
Debbie said to Rina, as though no one had broken in on her original train of thought, “And you’ve got a gorgeous boyfriend, too.”
Tyrone said, “Whoa.”
“He is, isn’t he?” Rina said.
“I am,” Tyrone said. “And getting better.”
“Rina,” I said. “You’re not driving with Tyrone any more unless there’s a licensed driver in the car. Tyrone, if she does, I’m going to assume it’s because you asked her to or because you said yes when she asked if she could, and no matter how gorgeous you are, I’ll have someone steal whatever car you’re driving and total it, and I know dozens of people who could do that by the time you’ve gotten from the curb to your front door. Do we need to talk about this any further?”
“No,” Tyrone said. “That’s my brother’s car.”
“And, Rina, you’re going to be careful. Don’t go places you don’t need to until this is over. And don’t lose your follower.”
“I’m not going to follow her,” Debbie said, “I’m going to drive her.”
Eaglet said, “I could drive Tyrone.”
“Not on my nickel. Rina, did you have time to check out that clergyman who got beaten up?”
“Got it all,” she said. She stood up. “I want to know what’s going on in there.”
“I do, too,” I said. “But what’s the deal with the clergyman?”
“Achilles Angelis,” Rina read off the palm of her left hand.
“Achilles?” I said.
“Angeles?” Debbie said. “Like the city?”
“With an I-S at the end,” Rina said. “Greek, I guess. First Valley Church
of the Eternal Redeemer.”
“Where?”
“Sylmar, sort of. He got banged up pretty badly.” She started to say something else and was interrupted by a peal of laughter from the bedroom. It was solo at first, but it quickly branched into harmony.
“ ‘Eternal Redeemer’ is a nice touch, isn’t it?” Rina said, visibly relaxing. “ ‘Temporary Redeemer’ just raises a bunch of new questions.”
The laughter started up again.
“Guess who they talking about,” Tyrone said.
“I’m just glad they’re not throwing things,” I said. “I’d hate to have to protect one of them.”
Rina gave me both eyes, double-barrel, and said, “Which one would you protect?”
I said, “Exactly.”
Ronnie and Louie were certain that no one had followed them from Cantor’s, so Debbie drove Ronnie back to Fairfax to get her car and grab a couple of pastramis on rye since neither Ronnie nor I had eaten dinner.
Louie followed me down the hill from Kathy’s house, both of us looking for a tag, leaving Eaglet chatting in sixties slang with Tyrone and Rina while Kathy did the suburban-mom thing and made dinner.
“Nobody,” Louie said on the phone.
“Thanks. Say hi to Alice for me.”
“Wanna come on Friday and watch the kids again?”
“Maybe.”
“You gonna talk to Trey?”
“If I have to. Maybe I won’t need to. Maybe the Reverend Achilles Angelis—”
“Guy got pounded,” Louie said. “Him and Ghorbani, they’re probably not playing golf on weekends.”
Lights came on in a car parked a block ahead of me. “I’ll do anything before I talk to Trey.”
“Yeah. Well, be careful. You see that car?”
“Yeah, but I’ll just turn whichever way he doesn’t when we get to the Boulevard.”
Louie disconnected, and the car in front of me turned left as I turned right onto Ventura, feeling like I’d spent half my life running shady errands on this ugly street. The only ray of sunshine I could locate in the entire day was that I’d gotten out of Kathy’s house with all my skin. It wouldn’t have been entirely unreasonable for her to have been displeased with the ex-husband who endangered both her and her daughter, hauled two contract killers into her living room, and introduced her to his girlfriend, all on the same night.
I’d underestimated both her and Ronnie. They’d come out of the back bedroom cheerful and chatting, and neither of them had even glanced at me until the evening broke up half an hour later, and there was no way to avoid polite goodbyes. Kathy even kissed me on the cheek, although she also snapped her teeth together, hard, an inch from my ear.
So I could probably be forgiven for feeling blithe enough to believe my lucky streak would hold I could just drop in on Stinky, despite our recent problems. If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have remembered what Burt the Gut told me about that big rock.
Ting Ting opened the door and gave me a wide, white, spontaneous Filipino smile. He’d lasted longer with Stinky than any of the other boys he’d plucked from the folk dance troupes he kept bringing over from the Philippines. They’d been together a year and a half now, but apparently Ting Ting didn’t automatically share Stinky’s grudges, which made me happy because I’d always liked him.
He put a finger to his lips, leaned forward, and said, sotto voce, “One minute, I think. Let me see if Mr. Stinky still want to kill you.”
“Good idea.”
He patted the air two-handed, meaning, stay where you are, smiled at me again, and trusting me to stay put, left the door wide open. I watched a waist smaller than Ronnie’s shimmer down the hall, wrapped in some sort of shiny fabric that might have been ripped from an old ABBA costume. There were two new and exquisite small drawings on the hallway wall, certainly seventeenth-century, done in silver-point, a medium used to create miracles on parchment and paper by Van Eyck, Durer, Holbein, and Rembrandt. These weren’t by a brand-name artist I could identify, but they were achingly beautiful, with the fine, fluid, precise lines made possible by a master drawing a silver wire over parchment that had been coated by a gesso. The gesso was a sort of liquid glue made from rabbit tendons, plus some whitening agent, such as chalk. After the medium dried, the silver wire made a gray line over it, but the gray eventually turned a gorgeous pale brown, the same beautiful brown you see in the splotches on a foxed book. It’s a much warmer effect than gray or black; I think it’s the reason some people get sentimental about sepia.
Unfortunately for me, the technique was more or less vanquished in the seventeenth century by the sudden availability of high-quality graphite, which meant that drawing pens made of fine silver wire were essentially replaced by the lead pencil, one of thousands of developments that has, in my view, made the world coarser and more prosaic every year since the Renaissance sputtered to an end. Yet more lost filigree.
I practically had my nose pressed against the surface of the smaller drawing, a middle-class matron whose every flyaway hair had been drawn individually, when Ting Ting was suddenly beside me. I hadn’t heard him at all, and I hear very, very well.
“Very pretty, yes?” he said.
“Gorgeous. I could stand here for hours.”
“Mr. Stinky, he see you now.”
“Does he have a gun?”
“Ho,” Ting Ting said, poking me in the ribs. “Mr. Stinky, he never stay mad. He has very good heart.”
If he did, I thought, I’d like to know who stole it for him. But I poked Ting Ting back, getting a surprisingly hearty giggle, and he led me down the hallway.
Stinky’s nickname comes from the fact that he’s one of the heirs of the family who invented the perfume strip, but he turned his back on a trust fund and three quarters of an Ivy League education to become an extremely discerning fence. In part because he’d grown up surrounded by beautiful things, he has an even better nose than I do, and dealing in them illegally brought through his big house an unending parade of the best of civilization. Isn’t that what art, even stolen art, is? The best we produce, minus the crap we create?
But Stinky’s nose was better than mine only if we mean “nose” metaphorically, as in the sense of being able to sniff out things of real value. Stinky’s physical nose had been sanded and shaved by a procession of plastic surgeons who had abetted Stinky in his lifelong desire to look like he was wearing a stocking mask even when he wasn’t. He’d had his ears pinned back, his hairline weeded into a widow’s peak, his cheekbones pared down, his skin chemically peeled and plumped. Burt’s wife Seven looked as though things chosen at random in a dark room had been thrown at her face: chin, cheekbones, a jawline. Stinky’s aerodynamic sleekness was the product of a decade of surgical subtraction, and what was left was the face kids put on their drawings of aliens: noseless, almond-eyed, sharp-chinned, soul-free. Maybe soul-free was what he’d been working toward all along.
The living room was an unpleasant surprise: the fine Early American and nineteenth-century English furniture from my previous visits was gone, and now the long, narrow room looked like it had been stolen intact from someplace deep in the heart of Texas: all heavy Western wood, massive and hand-worked, with blackened, riveted steel plates holding it together, plus more leather than a slaughterhouse, most of it rough and distressed. One couch offered that little-seen and, to me, quite alarming effect of still having its covering of short fur, in a pinto pattern. It looked like it might moo at me. As I entered, Stinky launched himself to his feet from behind the one thing in the room I might have slowed down to look at, an ornate French cylinder desk from the eighteenth century, possibly inspired (as many of them were) by the most famous cylinder desk of all, the Bureau du Roi made for Louis XV’s office in Versailles.
“Just totally over the top, uncalled for, completely unforgivable,” Stinky said, pushing his bulk around the desk. “Immature, short-sighted, inexcusable, especially between chums. Do forgive me.” He had both hands extended, palms
up, Papal style, as though I was supposed to grasp them, and he was doing British Stinky, an accent he refreshed daily with scones. Not as convincing as Handkerchief’s had been.
“Forgive you what?” I said, ignoring the hands. “You mean the attempt on my life?” I laughed lightly, feeling like I was in a scene by Noël Coward. “Don’t give it a thought.”
“Water under the bridge,” Stinky said, moving one hand to rest it over the place where his heart might or might not have been.
“The snows of yesteryear,” I said.
“What’s past is past,” Stinky said.
“Gone with the wind,” I said. “Written on water.”
“Well,” he said, and we stood there, breathing at each other. Now that he knew he wasn’t going to get shot he remembered his manners and said, “Please, please. Sit.”
“Where?” I said, looking at the couches. “I’m a vegetarian.”
“Isn’t it ghastly?” he said, surveying the room. “Some nights when I can’t sleep I come in here and brand things.”
“Nice desk, though.”
“It is, isn’t it? I think it’s important to have at least one thing that sings of the past. Not our personal past,” he added hastily. “But you know, the beeswax and tapestry and yellow-candle past. The past of empire, monarchy, the only really functional forms of government.”
“How old would you say it is?”
He gave it an appraiser’s scrutiny and then reached out and ran a hand over the satiny cylinder of wood, which he had drawn shut before he got up so I couldn’t see what he’d been working on. The cylinder desk is the direct ancestor of the roll-top, but instead of interlocking flexible slats, the cylinder desk has a single curved piece of wood that slides up into the back of the desk to reveal the workspace. This one had been inlaid with wood of various colors, probably ash, ebony, boxwood, and sycamore, to create a formal-looking floral arrangement in the center of the curve.
“Seventeen-seventies, eighties, I’d think,” he said dreamily. He looked like he wanted to lean over and sniff it.
“Definitely raises the tone of the room.”
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