His skin was more deeply pitted than the mug shot had suggested, so rough it qualified as a disfigurement. His hair may once have been naturally black, but now it was dyed, and the dye had been applied so long ago that there was a white half-inch of hair between his scalp and the black. It created a kind of 1950s two-tone effect. The nose was thick and blunt, as though it had been hit many times, the mouth surrounded by deep lines and pulled down sharply at the corners, the nyet-mouth I associated with pictures of Cold War Soviet prime ministers.
But there was also something diminished about him. The steroid-pumped muscles had gone slack and softened into fat beneath his polo shirt, and the eyes, despite their fierce greenness, weren’t as energetic as I’d expected. Maybe I’d just built him up too much in my mind. I gave him a long look, trying to seem puzzled, and then stepped away and said to DiGaudio, “No.”
He nodded slowly, looking at me as though I’d just drawn an inside straight and it confirmed what he’d known all along: the fix was in. “I’m telling you,” he said. “Anything happens to this guy, I’m coming after you.”
Ronnie said, “He’s not the man.”
“ ’Kay, honey,” DiGaudio said to her. To me, he said, “Just so’s you know.”
“He’s on foot,” Louie said on the phone. “Heading for the parking lot.”
“Okay.” I kissed Ronnie and said, “Thanks.”
She said, “That poor man.”
“We’ll talk about it later. I’ve got to get—”
“You’re all heart, Junior.”
“I feel terrible about DiGaudio, Ronnie, but there’s nothing I can do about him. I can do something about Ruben Ghorbani, but only if I get my ass moving.”
“It can take the rest of you with it,” she said, turning away. I watched her walk away, hoping she’d look back, and when she didn’t I did what any guy would do and sprinted for my car.
“He’s turning onto Victory,” Louie said three or four minutes later as I fought my way into traffic. It was four thirty, the overture to rush hour, and it was starting off with a timpani bang. “Where are you?”
“Behind another Goddamned SUV. It’s like driving behind a movie screen for all I can see what’s in front of me. Okay, he’s signaling to turn right, so that’ll clear him out of the way, and in front of him is, Jesus save me, another one. Why are these things legal?”
He said, “You want an answer?”
“No.”
“He’s heading west, pretty much, on Victory, as west as Victory goes, anyway. He’s got his blinker on for a right, might be going to get on the 405.”
“North?”
“Yeah. South is a left.”
“Stay with him.” I zigged the wheel to the left just enough to see around the SUV and nearly experienced a head-on collision with another one, and zagged back into my own lane.
“Nice talk,” Louie said.
“Sorry. I thought I was just thinking it.”
“So maybe I’m a mind reader. Poor old Handkerchief, huh?”
“I’m going to find the person who did it, and did Herbie, too. And I’m going to neuter the sonofabitch, one nut at a time.” Herbie’s ball peen hammer, used on Ghorbani in the Angeles National Forest, popped into my mind. Not really the Herbie I’d known.
“You think it’s the same per—he’s taking the ramp onto the 405 North.”
“I’ll bet I know where he’s going. Yeah, I think it’s the same person. I think it’s some sick mo-fo who gets off on pain. What’s he driving?”
“Junker,” Louie said. “Old Plymouth Neon. Purple.”
I saw daylight to my right and cut into the lane, earning a disciplinary blare from a horn loud enough for a cruise ship. “I thought the Neon was a Dodge.”
“It was a Plymouth first,” said Louie. “They started pretending it was a Dodge when they closed down Plymouth. 2001, that was.”
“The walking encyclopedia of automotive history,” I said, running a yellow and, arguably, getting through it legally. I suddenly remembered the Glock in the trunk and slowed down.
“Kinda sad,” Louie said. “He’s heading to the left lane, so he’s staying on the freeway for a while. First Plymouth hit the street in 1928, did you know that?”
“It will surprise you to know that I didn’t.” I made a right onto a residential street, heading north toward Sherman Way which, I thought, might be running better.
“First cheap car Chrysler ever made,” Louie said. “Chrysler was very hoity-toity, all limousine trade until then. So the first Plymouth rolls off the line just in time for the Great Depression, and it keeps Chrysler alive until people got money again, and how do they show their gratitude? They close it down with a really crap model.”
“Not with a bang but a Neon,” I said, watching the stoplight go green half a block in front of me and accelerating toward it. “Got any more sad car stories?”
“Anybody who likes American cars,” Louie said, “they got a lot of sad car stories. Poor little Neon, such a sad bag of crap. Trying to compete with the Japanese for twenty years and they still hadn’t figured it out.”
I made the left through the light, and Sherman Way opened up in front of me, traffic blessedly and improbably sparse. Just the other side of the stoplight was the overpass above the 405 freeway and the ramp that would drop me down onto it. “Figured what out?” I said, gliding through the green light, feeling as entitled as a funeral procession and almost as stately. I don’t have a license for the Glock. For any of the Glocks.
“Making good cars,” Louie said. “After the Japanese started eating their lunch, they, and by they I mean Detroit, they made them cheap, they made them small, they made them outta metal so thin that when you hit a hundred thousand miles and it fell apart you could crumple it up like a beer can and throw it away. And in the meantime, people driving Sushis and Konnichiwas are getting a hundred and fifty thousand miles without a tune-up. Fucking tragedy, that’s what it was. All the Japanese were doing was what we used to do, make good stuff.”
“Where are you now?”
“Past Roscoe, still going north. He’s not changing lanes. Thing is, the Brits, you know the Brits?”
“I’ve heard of the Brits.” I merged left and stamped on it. Everyone else was doing 70, 75, trying to put some miles between them and the 5 P.M. tsunami that would stop the whole freeway dead in its tracks.
“The way Brits made cars, they’d break if you scowled at them. Jaguar? Forget about it, those things needed five thousand bucks’ worth of work every time you put them into reverse. But people bought them, because the Brits made out like it was good breeding to break down, it was sensitive to break down, and that was because the car was a thoroughbred, and it had to be a thoroughbred because it cost so much. Good and cheap, the Japanese got. Bad and expensive, the Brits got. What we got was bad, cheap, and ugly. Not the best formula, huh?”
“Where are you?”
“What, you’re not interested? This is the Great American Decline we’re talking about here.”
“There have been several,” I said. “Where are you?”
“I don’t know.” He sounded sulky. “Still going north.”
“It’s okay, I know where he’s going.”
“You gonna tell me?”
“No,” I said. “I’m going to preserve my air of mystery. But I’ll tell you what offramp he’s going to take.”
Ten minutes later, Louie said, “How the hell did you know that?”
Ghorbani was out of sight ahead of me in his purple Neon, but when he’d gotten off at Roxford, I’d felt certain enough about his destination to send Louie home. What with the shooters guarding Kathy’s and Rina’s house and what I’d already paid Louie, I was most of the way through Wattles’s deposit, and since Wattles was in Limpopo and I was absolutely not going to sell those two brooches to Stinky, the only additional money was in my necessities box. People don’t usually picture crooks worrying about their alimony and child support, but I had ne
ver missed a month since the divorce, and I was committed to keeping it that way. There was no way I was going to do anything that might suggest to Rina that she wasn’t the most important thing in the world to me.
I’d done that already.
The parking lot for the half-bulldozed shopping center was empty except for the purple Neon, a bruise on wheels, in the slot right in front of the surplus store. I parked in the same space I’d taken before, in obedience to the ancient and mysterious imperative that makes us sit in the same place at the table every night or always choose the left-hand row in a theater, perhaps something as primitive as a few cells in the oldest part of the brain saying We did this before and we didn’t get killed. I pulled the Glock from the trunk and tucked it into the center of my back. With the righteousness of someone doing something he knows is futile but which is the right thing to do anyway, I pushed the button on my remote and heard the little toot that told me that my car was now locked down and fully alarmed and absolutely defenseless against anyone with a little electronics know-how and twelve dollars’ worth of junk from Radio Shack.
When I pulled open the door of the church, seven old folks sitting around an empty table looked hopefully up at me. It was barely five, but no one seemed to be competing for their free time.
I said to the people at the table, “Dr. Angelis?”
“In there,” said a lady with very bright blue eyes and immaculately waved white hair. She was wearing fire-engine red coral earrings, and I hoped someone had told her how nice they looked. She pointed a curved index finger, all swollen knuckles, at the dark curtain. The hand didn’t shake at all.
The curtain parted, and Dr. Angelis came out. He said, “You’re not welcome here.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, “but I’m going to talk to Mr. Ghorbani anyway, unless you and Felipe carry me out of the building, and even then I’ll just sit on the hood of his car in the parking lot, which would probably dent it.” I spread my arms, holding them well away from the sides of my body. “I’m not armed.” It was a lie, but worth trying. “You can check.”
Angelis closed his eyes and lowered his head, but I thought he was considering rather than praying.
“Tell you what,” I said. “You and Felipe take me in there, and put Ghorbani in the bathroom. It locks, right?”
“Of course.”
“Fine. Put Ghorbani in there and lock the door. You two stay with me, keep an eye on me, and I’ll talk to him through the door. Five minutes. At the end of five minutes, he can come out or not, and if he does I’ll talk to him a little more. If he doesn’t, I’ll go away. Better still, put me in the bathroom and lock the door.”
Angelis said, “Felipe’s not here.” He looked at the floor again. “I have your word?” His voice was soft, but there was no mistaking the will beneath it.
“You do.”
“I don’t need no bathroom.” The words sounded like they’d been spoken in the center of a very large and very empty room. The curtains opened again, and Ghorbani was standing there. He was bigger than he’d looked through glass.
“Ruben,” Father Angelis said apprehensively.
“They’re going to come sooner or later,” Ghorbani said. He had one of the deepest voices I’d ever heard, the kind of sound that might echo for miles over the hills on the seabed. “It might as well be now.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
Ghorbani said, “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend,” I said, “of Herbie Mott.”
Ghorbani pulled his face back half an inch, as though I’d tried to slap it. He said, “A good friend?”
I thought for a second and said, “Yes.”
“Dr. Angelis,” Ruben Ghorbani rumbled, “this man is in pain.”
“No,” Ghorbani said. He shook his head, and his jowls rippled. “I ain’t seen Herbie Mott in years. I ain’t seen nobody in years, not from that part of my life.”
“Ruben is not the man he once was,” Dr. Angelis said.
“Yeah?” I said. “Who is he now?”
“I’m a worthless piece of shit,” Ghorbani said, “but I ain’t that worthless piece of shit.”
“The one who did this, he means,” Dr. Angelis said, turning a palm toward his face. The three of us were on folding chairs in a little room at the back of the shop. A fluorescent buzzed and flickered overhead, as though debating with itself whether just to give up and go dark.
“And who did you?” Ghorbani said, studying me. He nodded something that looked like professional approval. “Had to be a pro, or else there was three or four of them.”
“Well,” I said.
“I used to know a couple guys,” Ghorbani said, “who could, like, team up for that, hurt you that bad, I mean. Got top money, too.”
“It wasn’t a couple of guys,” I said. I could feel myself blushing. It was hired muscle from the Philippines. What’s happened to you?”
Ghorbani said, “I beat up the wrong guy.” His smile wasn’t so much sudden as it was unexpected.
“Ruben,” Dr. Angelis said, “is a minister now.”
“Downtown,” Ghorbani said. “At the mission on Skid Row.”
“They listen to him,” Angelis said.
“I still look scary,” Ghorbani explained.
Angelis swatted Ghorbani on the knee. “You know better than that.”
“Grace,” Ghorbani said to me. “It comes when you can’t see a foot in front of you.”
I held up a hand. “Okay. Look.” I thought for a moment, and rubbing my eyes seemed to help me organize it. “Herbie wrote a letter, supposed to be given to me if he died—you know—wrong. In it, he said if he got killed, you were probably the guy who would kill him.”
“I probably would have,” Ghorbani said. “But I kind of lost interest.”
Angelis said, “Believe him.”
“I do, I guess. But how? What happened?”
Ghorbani leaned back in his chair, which creaked, and closed his eyes. “Couple days after I messed the Rev here up, it was in the papers. Pictures and all.” He looked at me. “I seen the picture, which was taken the day after, when things look even worse—”
“I know,” I said.
“And I read he was a Rev and that he, you know, he refused to describe me to the cops, both him and Felipe. They wouldn’t say nothing about what I looked like. Said they didn’t want me punished, he wanted me to be reborn. At first I thought, oh, fuck him, reborn, what a bunch of crap.” He glanced at Angelis, who gave him a nod of encouragement. “But then the word came back, and when it did, I saw writing on the wall, swear to Christ—sorry, Rev—on the wall in my bedroom, and what I saw was, like—in the Bible?—the words on the wall at the king’s feast: Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin. I saw them. You know what those mean?”
“No,” I said.
“They’re weight.” He let the chair come down and leaned toward me as he bit off the final word, his eyes the green of lime leaves. “The shekel, or tekel, was the basic Babylonian unit of weight. Like an ounce or something.” He had both palms up, cupped, and he raised and lowered them like an old scale. “The mene was heavy, like fifty shekels. You following me?”
“Through a fog.”
“The upharsin was half a mene, or twenty-five shekels. I knew that because when I was a kid my parents dragged me to church, made me memorize most of the Old T.”
“Testament,” Angelis interposed.
“Yeah, testament. So I seen those words in front of me when I read who the Rev was in the paper, and I knew what I was seeing was my own weight, the weight I was pulling around. I was seeing that the weight I was carrying was ancient, it was as old as evil, and the reason I had all them muscles was to carry that weight, the weight of the bad things I done. It was fucking crushing—sorry again, Rev—it was crushing me. Evil was.” He looked down at his lap, and I thought for a second he was embarrassed, but when he looked back up at me, the green eyes were shining. “And something had wrote that on my wall. I cri
ed,” he said. “First time since I was eight years old, I cried. And it was like the whole earth had been lifted off my back. Like I’d been all bent over in a cave all my life, crawling through this tiny dark cave on my hands and knees under the weight of the earth my whole life, and all of a sudden I could stand up straight, and I was standing in the light. Like a person, not an animal. Then I found out where the Rev’s church was and I come down here.”
“I will confess,” Dr. Angelis said, “that I didn’t rejoice when I saw him coming.”
He and Ghorbani laughed.
“I stayed here three days,” Ghorbani said. “Me and the Rev and Felipe.” He pushed a knuckle against his lower right eyelid and blinked away a little moisture. “And that finished it. Never talked to none of them again, the people in the other Ruben’s world.”
“Bless their souls,” Angelis said. “The Lord has infinite mercy.”
Ghorbani brought his eyes back to mine. “You want me to talk to this Filipino bruiser? I mean, if I could be healed—”
“I think he’s beyond help,” I said. He and I looked at each other for a moment. “But I know someone you probably could help.”
“Who?”
“You remember Burt the Gut?”
Ghorbani’s face darkened, and for a moment I thought it was probably like looking at the man he’d been before. “I remember him. Don’t want to, but I do.”
“He’s old and sad and lonely,” I said. “He’s eighty and he hurts all over and he’s got a young wife who hates him, with good reason, I guess. Just waiting for him to die.” I inclined my head in the direction of the front room. “He’s like some of the people out there, except that they’ve got you and Dr. Angelis and Felipe. He rattles around in this big house with furniture jammed on top of furniture, and the only person he’s got wakes up every morning disappointed that he made it through the night.”
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