by Paul Neilan
He was holding out on me. They always do. There’s always more. It’s always worse.
I looked at the money like I was thinking about it, but I didn’t need to. I already knew where I was headed.
* * *
I walked down Hollywood Boulevard the wrong way in the rain. Away from the Strip and the stars in the sidewalk. Towards the ragged end where the street people in blue tarps huddled in doorways and camped under disused bus stops. I walked past the hourly motels with bars on their windows, their flashing signs—The Starlet, The Big Break, The Afterglow—scripted in neon that dripped onto the sidewalk and puddled in the gutter like spilled dreams. I walked past the girls on the corners, their shimmering short dresses, spinning like disco balls unraveling. Past the old park with the crumbling Frank Lloyd Wright house, its ruin still scaffolded, another Zodiac renovation never begun—not on this side of town—now a shooting gallery for climbers. All of it passing by until I saw the lurid red sign for Fatales, 4181 Hollywood Boulevard.
I went through the door. Waved the coat check girl off before I took the body scan. Then through a curtain, around a curve in the wall that opened to the main room. Cards and dice were set up along the far wall under spotlights. A few suits rolling, all of them losing. There was a bar along the opposite wall with cocktail tables scattered in between—candles flickering in red globes with the lights down—where guys were sitting close to girls in sheer teddies and negligees, all of them wearing heels to the same slumber party. The girls threw their heads back, laughing, mismatched couples holding hands across the table as they drank.
I stood there, taking it in. The septic tank beauty, subterranean and full of shit. Without it the whole town would stop running.
I felt a hand on my arm. Soft fingers, trailing.
“Do you play?” she said.
She had long black hair pulled over her shoulder, hiding one of her dark eyes.
“Not if I can help it,” I said.
“Shall we take a mark on the tables?” she said. “They’ll stake you, if you prefer.”
“I just got here,” I said. “I’m easing into it.”
“I like a man who takes his time,” she said, smiling up at me. “Would you sit with me?”
I told her I would.
She led me to a table in the middle. I watched another couple stand from nearby and disappear through the long red curtain in the back.
“What’s your name?” she said as we sat down.
“Harrigan,” I said.
“I’m Aoki,” she said. “Do you like champagne, Harrigan?”
“I do,” I said.
“Shall we have a bottle?” she said.
“Let’s start with a glass,” I said. “See where that takes us.”
She smiled, raised two fingers. The bubbles floated over on a silver tray.
“You’ve never been here before,” Aoki said as the girl set the tall glasses down before us.
“How can you tell?” I said.
“I can always tell,” she said, looking into my eyes as she raised her glass. “To our first time together.”
She tipped her head back slightly, hair still masking half her face.
“You’re not like the others,” she said.
“Why’s that?” I said.
“You haven’t started talking yet,” she said. “Most men can’t wait to get going. They’ve got so much to say.”
“What’s behind the curtain?” I said, looking to the back wall.
She smiled, combed her hands through her hair.
“That’s better,” she said. “We can have more privacy back there. Our own room where we can relax, get to know each other. Would you like that, Harrigan?”
“I’m good here,” I said. “For now.”
She sat back, crossed her legs. She was wearing a long white dress shirt, loosely buttoned so her collar bone showed. Her heels laced up her calves, slender strictures. She took a drink.
“Do you live around here?” Aoki said.
“Not too far,” I said.
“What do you do?” she said.
“Not too much,” I said.
“Why not?” she said.
“I was in the business for a while,” I said. “I got out.”
“What made you leave?” she said.
“It was time,” I said.
“I know what that’s like,” she said, taking another drink.
I took one myself.
“Is Anna working tonight?” I said.
“Who?” Aoki said.
“Anna,” I said. “Danish girl. Blonde.”
“What’s the matter?” she said. “I’m not enough for you?”
She was playing wounded, but she’d given me a subtle shake of her head. It was quick, but I caught it.
“You’re plenty.” I drained my champagne. “How about we have another glass and you tell me all about yourself?” I said.
“What do you want to know?” she said, cocking her head as she raised her two fingers.
Before I could answer a meaty hand came down on my shoulder. I saw a gold signet ring with the image of a bull on one of the thick fingers. Taurus. Zodiac. I looked up into the face of a bruiser in a maroon dinner jacket with a head like a canned ham. His nose had been flattened. Two cauliflower ears stuck out on either side.
“You want to come with me,” the big guy said.
“I’m fine where I am,” I said.
“I wasn’t asking,” he said.
Aoki dropped her eyes as I stood from the table.
“It was nice meeting you,” I said before he pushed me away, through a curtain behind one of the craps tables. We went down a long hallway that ended at a heavy wooden door.
“What’s this about?” I said as he knocked twice and opened it. Shoved me through.
I stumbled into a wide office with a leather couch along the wall, a guy with slicked-back hair sitting behind the desk. The big guy sat me down in an uncomfortable chair. The guy behind the desk looked at me and said “You want to hear a joke?”
saturday
That’s the thing about champagne,” Clyde Faraday said, the first time I sat across a table from him, all those years ago. “It doesn’t have to be the good stuff. If it’s got bubbles, it’s good enough.”
He savored a long swallow.
“There’s a lesson in there somewhere, if you want to learn it,” he said. “But you don’t, do you kid. Not yet.”
I took a drink.
“You know how to handle a gun,” he said. “That much was obvious when you pulled it on me. But it’s not enough.”
“I do all right,” I said.
“Stick-up jobs on street corners only take you so far,” he said. “And it’s not any place you want to stay. How long you been in town?”
“Long enough,” I said.
“Not yet you haven’t, kid. Not yet,” he said. “If you want to survive in this racket you need people. Somebody looking out for you. A crew.”
“I can take care of myself,” I said.
“Can you? You’d be the first,” he said. “I’m offering you an opportunity. They don’t come around often. This one won’t pass your way again. What do you say?”
We had history, me and Clyde Faraday. Not all of it bad. That was more than I could say about most people. It ended wrong, like it always does, but it wasn’t over. Not yet.
I made a few calls, found out what Charlie Horse meant when he said it was a shame, old Clyde ending up in a place like this. I sat in the small room, a crepe shade pulled over the narrow window, and listened to the machines. An accordion valve compressed and expanded above the bed, sighing with every shallow breath. The steady drip from an IV marked time as a bag full of clear liquid slowly drained. The jarring beeps of a heart monitor squealed, scrawling its inscrutable line across the monitor. It played like a doomed symphony, the savage susurrus of sickness, end stage.
He had a tube in his arm, a magnetic clip on his finger. Wires attached to his ches
t. His hair had gone white at the temples. His face was pale, but not sallow. He hadn’t lost his jaw. Even flat on his back in a hospice bed, he was still Clyde Faraday.
Clyde’s eyelids rustled. I leaned forward in the chair and he opened both eyes, looked at me strange and vacant. Like he was staring into a clouded pond, trying to see bottom.
“Clyde,” I said as he lay there. “It’s me. Harrigan.”
His eyes didn’t register the name. Or anything else.
It was too late. I was too late. Clyde Faraday was gone.
I wanted to stand up. Walk out. Never come back. I knew how. I’d done it before.
His eyes didn’t move as I got out of the chair.
“Good seeing you, Clyde,” I said. “Take care.”
“When I was a year old, my parents found me under the Christmas tree, eating dog crap with a spoon,” Clyde Faraday said, his voice monotone. “It wasn’t even our dog.”
“Whose dog was it?” I said.
“The neighbor’s basset hound,” Clyde said. “We were watching him while they were on vacation. His name was Baxter. And instead of calling an ambulance or shooting the dog or just cleaning me up and never, ever mentioning it again, my parents grabbed a video camera and started recording. The part where I dropped the spoon and smeared dog shit all over my face with my tiny hands was dramatic, but the real climax came when Baxter wandered into the frame and howled at the ceiling as I clapped like the happy child I would never again be, splattering crap all over myself before giving the camera a shitty grin.”
A cloud passed over his face. A lengthening shadow.
“We watched that tape every Christmas,” Clyde said. “Whenever anybody came by the house. My parents would pull people in off the street—carolers, neighbors out making snowmen with their kids, fucking Jehovah’s Witnesses—so they could all gather round the TV and glance at me uncomfortably as they laughed in horror and disgust. They showed it to everybody. My father even played it for the first girl I ever brought home, even though I begged him not to. Later, when I tried to kiss her good night she took off screaming, whipping her head around and waving her arms like she was being swarmed by bees. It was a long, long time before I found another girlfriend, and she wasn’t pretty at all.”
The machine attached to the tube in his arm began beeping steadily, louder and louder. I wasn’t sure what any of it meant.
“After years of talking about it, my dad finally sent the tape in to one of those Funniest Videos shows,” Clyde said. “The ones that ran home movies of people getting hit in the nuts with Wiffle ball bats and falling down drunk at weddings. But he waited until I was a senior in high school to do it. That’s when I was shown, in prime time across the nation, laughing in a diaper as I ate dog shit. We didn’t win any money, and I didn’t go to my prom. The things they wrote in my yearbook were unspeakably filthy.”
Clyde’s hands were folded tightly in his lap, a clenched and squandered prayer.
“I’ve always understood why people get depressed around the holidays,” Clyde said. “But I could never figure out why there weren’t more suicides.”
“Hello, Mr. Clyde!” a lady in floral print scrubs said as she stood in the doorway. “Time for your medicine!”
“I’ll get out of your way,” I said, moving aside.
“Is OK,” she said, swapping out the bag of clear fluid and checking the IV in his arm. “Only take a minute.”
She pressed a button on the machine and Clyde closed his eyes. When he opened them he looked right at me and said, “Harrigan. What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” I said.
“I’m fucking dying is what I’m doing,” Clyde said.
“Mr. Clyde,” the lady said, clucking her tongue.
“There she is. There’s my Rosalita,” Clyde said. “Anybody ever tell you you put the spice in hospice?”
She smiled, shook her head as she raised the crepe window shade and left the room.
“Sit down, Harrigan,” Clyde said. “I don’t like people standing over me. Feels like a fucking funeral. How long you been here?”
“Not long,” I said.
“I say anything?” he said, uncertain.
“Not a word,” I said.
“This medicine,” he said, looking up at the clear plastic bag. “It gives me windows of lucidity. The rest of the time I’m out of my fucking mind.”
“I’m the same with whiskey,” I said.
“So tell me kid, what did I miss?” he said.
“You tell me,” I said, looking up at the machines. “What’s the story here, Clyde?”
“What does it matter,” he said. “Place like this, everybody knows how it ends.”
He looked away, out the narrow window.
“How’d you know I was in here?” he said.
“Charlie Horse said something about it,” I said. “I did some asking around.”
“Charlie Horse?” Clyde said. “What are you doing with that punk?”
“Job went sideways,” I said. “You know how it goes.”
“I thought you were done with all that, Harrigan,” he said.
“I was,” I said. “I am.”
“It’s not done with you though, huh?” he said. “That was your mistake. Thinking you had a choice. Thinking it was yours to make.”
“I’m not here to apologize,” I said.
“Neither am I,” Clyde said.
There was a hard light in his eyes. Like a barrel fire under an overpass in winter. I watched it fade as his face softened, went slack at the edges, until he was looking through me again. There was a muted screen on the wall playing an old game show. Wheel of Fortune.
The screen in my pocket vibrated.
Can you meet me at The Sinking Ship in an hour? It’s Aoki.
I sat there, waited for Clyde’s eyes to close. It wasn’t long.
* * *
The Sinking Ship was a bar on Fairfax with rippling blue walls and an uneven wood floor that sloped and dipped like a listing schooner. There were framed newspaper pages lamenting the Titanic and the Lusitania and a life preserver over the door stamped “HMS Hood.” Oil paintings were hung slightly crooked at haphazard heights showing a harpooned whale in anguish smashing a clipper ship in half and a pirate ship on fire, its crow’s nest ablaze as it sank beneath the waves.
Aoki was in a booth at the back, away from the porthole windows. I almost didn’t recognize her in her ripped jeans and olive drab jacket, hair piled under a slouching knit hat. I could see both her dark eyes. They told me nothing as I sat down.
The painting over our booth showed three girls in diaphanous drapery, sprawled and singing on the shore as a ship full of sailors dashed themselves on the rocks.
“Get you something?” the bartender said.
Aoki had a fishbowl glass of sangria in front of her, blood red and thick with soaked fruit.
“I’ll have one of those,” I said.
He nodded, walked away. There was nobody else in the bar.
“What do you want with Anna?” Aoki said.
“How did you get my number?” I said.
“You told me your name, Harrigan,” she said.
“That’s not enough,” I said.
I’d made sure of that. She took a drink as the bartender came back with my glass, speared an orange wedge with her straw, picked it clean.
“The body scan,” she said finally, after the bartender walked away. “It gave up your profile.”
“Body scan,” I said. “Everybody who goes into Fatales gets screened?”
“Stripped and searched,” she said. “Everything they’ve got on Grid. Some of what they don’t show there too.”
It was a breach. Zodiac had strict protection protocols in place. Formal data regulations giving everyone their imaginary privacy, all of it informally enforced. But there were ways around them if you knew what you were doing. Charlie Horse had found one. What he used it for was another question.
/> “They didn’t have much on you, but it was enough,” Aoki said. “So why are you looking for Anna?”
“A guy by the name of Stan Volga asked me to find her,” I said. “Thin mustache, sloppy drunk. Looks like he sleeps in his suit.”
She shook her head. “Anna’s got a lot of regulars,” she said.
“She make a habit of shaking them down?” I said.
Aoki looked at me, took a drink from her fishbowl. Cast her eyes at the bartender, idly polishing a glass. She leaned over the table.
“It’s what we do,” she said. “Fatales is wired. The whole place. The tables, the back rooms. If we meet a client after hours, Charlie picks the spot, sets it up. It’s all screened, all recorded.”
“Blackmail,” I said.
“Charlie knows who everybody is when they walk in the door,” she said. “What they have. What they’re afraid to lose.”
“That can’t make for much repeat business,” I said. “Poisoning the well like that.”
“You’d be surprised,” Aoki said. “Do it right, they end up thinking you’re the victim.”
She started ripping her cocktail napkin into neat little strips like ribbons.
“Some of them get off on it, having somebody to save. Some of them don’t,” she said. “What are they going to do, go to the cops?”
No, they’d come to me. Get me mixed up with a trigger-happy gangster without telling me why.
I took a drink.
“You work for Charlie Horse now,” she said. “Everyone who goes into his office does, or they don’t come out again.”
“I don’t work for anybody,” I said. “Especially not Charlie Horse.”
“What about Stan Volga?” she said.
“He paid me,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I’m in it for him.”
“Then what do you want with Anna?” she said.
“I just want to talk,” I said, not sure if I bought it myself. “Do you know where she is?”
“No,” Aoki said. “But I know where she lives.” She’d torn the napkin apart, piled the strips into a tiny pyre before her.
“Two thirty-three Mariposa Avenue,” she said. “Apartment number five.”
She took a drink. “I know people who can get her out,” she said. “They can help, whatever kind of trouble she’s in.”
