I burned the two pieces of paper, and wiped all three translations off the organizer. I debated cancelling the email to Travis, but Schumann was already dead, and his secrets—easily the worst of the four I’d seen—couldn’t hurt him now. Maybe at some point I’d go back to Hammond’s house and toss the remaining bookshelves, though I still believed his other apartment had been the centre of his operation, and someone else already had the primary files. Presumably the guys in the suits, though how they tied into this I couldn’t imagine.
It was after two by then, but still my mind wouldn’t sleep. I was worried about Deck. Laura too, I guess, but especially Deck. For once in his life he needed some help from me, but I didn’t know where to start.
I settled back into the chair and waited, but still sleep didn’t come. Instead all I got was context, going back down through the years. My first girlfriend, back at school: both of us sixteen and nervous and afraid to take the initiative. A few other friends, none of whom I’d seen in years. A couple of years ago my mother told me that Earl died in a car crash: the others gone for parts unknown.
I left home at seventeen myself, leaving them all behind, and worked my way across to California. It took a year and a half. I did it slowly, got cold or dusty in a lot of different places. At the time I guess it was a big adventure, but all I remember now from the journey are fragments of towns, the counters of bars I worked in, the strength of the motel showers—like a story recounted by someone who wasn’t paying much attention when they heard it the first time. Wherever you go, and whatever you do, the first thing you’re going to see in the morning, and the last thing at night, is the inside of your own head. An unchanging landscape, a still photograph.
When I got to the ocean I stopped, and that’s when I met Helena. I was working in a bar in Santa Monica, she came in with friends. She bought the first round, and after that my evening was set. I kept elbowing the other bartenders out of the way so I could serve her. I don’t listen to music much these days, and when I do it tends to be classical. My father used to listen to it a lot—still does, presumably—and it gets into your blood. The thing I like about it is its rightness. So much music sounds arbitrary, its marriage of influence and milieu too close to the surface to ignore: but when you listen to someone like Bach it’s like you’re hearing the thoughts of a god. There are things in life which are supposed to be a certain way. You can predict how the next passage will sound because it’s right, because that’s the way it’s supposed to be—because you are looking at the facets of a perfect crystal as it revolves slowly in front of you. Anyway, when Helena walked in the room I thought I’d heard the piece of music I’d been waiting for.
Earl and I used to have an expression: ‘The lost tribe of beautiful sane people’—our point being that the two qualities seemed mutually exclusive. But Helena looked like she was one of them, and the world settled itself around her to hold her up to me. ‘Yeah,’ I thought: ‘That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s what all this tiring evolution crap has been about—to culminate in someone like her.’
I was young and full of shit, and tried to strike up a conversation: she was equally young but full of nous, and politely kept me at arm’s length. On the other hand, she didn’t turn to her girlfriends and say ‘Hey—this guy’s a creep. Let’s go somewhere else’, and maybe I even got a little wave at the end of the evening, as they left. Accounts differ: Helena says she did, I never saw it, and believe me—I was looking. When I was feeling especially maudlin in the last couple of years I’d often tried to picture that wave. Wallowing deep in drunkenness, sitting round some motel pool in the night when everyone else was asleep, I’d think maybe if I could see that wave in my mind’s eye then our relationship would become something complete, something that had a beginning, middle and end, which I could hermetically seal in time and walk away from.
I could never see it.
Our families brought us together, indirectly. I was missing mine, she was close to hers. Neither of us had really bought into the idea that the previous generation was there to be transcended. She came in to the bar with her dad one evening. I watched them like a hawk, or some other especially sharp-eyed and observant creature, wondering what was going on. The next time she came in with friends I asked who the old guy was, and she told me. I told her about mine. It went from there.
We hung, we fell in love, we moved into a horrible apartment in Venice. Neither of us had any money, and I can honestly say that’s the one time in my life when it really didn’t matter. We were young and invincible, and we believed the money would come. In those days we didn’t realize how scary money was, how it could capriciously grant and withhold its favours, how in the end it could hold you up against the wall in some dark alley and beat you to within an inch of your life. You walk around LA and you see them, the people who lost the fight: the fizzing and bewildered with their dry, mad hair, living out their angry lives in apartments with polystyrene tiles on the walls and the potential of blood in every room. We won, in the end, but it took a while and cost so much that I’ll never know if it was worth it.
We got married on the spur of the moment: called my parents from the registry office. Our honeymoon was five days in Ensenada. We borrowed Deck’s old Ford and clanked down the coast road in the dark, talked the people at Quitas Papagayo into letting us have a place dirt cheap, because it was way out of season and they were empty. We ate fish tacos three meals a day for the rest of the week, spent the rest of our money on Pacificos and trinkets for each other. Helena bought me an ornamental box to keep my guitar picks in: I got her a turquoise bangle. We watched seabirds, walked dusty streets, and cooled our feet sitting on rocks down by the waterline. I scouted around for bits of wood and dried palms in the late afternoon, and at night we lay in front of the fire and listened to each other’s breathing until it became the only sound that mattered.
It seems such a long time ago now, part of someone else’s life. Everything stands out, still and back-lit, so different to the ever-moving sludge of the present day. Nothing is real until it’s gone: before then it’s just shadows playing. Today is a joke, accidental and flawed. It’s only yesterday that sings.
Life carried on. Gradually I got involved in things, illegal things. Working in a bar is a good place to start along that road, and we needed the money. I started helping people out, getting paid for it. I was big, not too stupid, trustworthy. There’s always work for people like me, though usually not with long-term prospects. Helena scrabbled in dull jobs, coming home more frustrated and bored every day. She was so much more single-minded than me, so tough and black and white, yet spending nine to five in a world of grey with people who seemed to speak another language.
I met more people, started climbing up the ladder, earning a little more money. We bought a small house, and we got a cat, whom we loved. That was the best time. We were just starting out, and we didn’t know where we were going, but we knew we’d go there together. That sounds trite, but love is trite—and that’s why we need it. Clichés are true. We need our archetypes, because without them life turns into a farm scene painted by an incompetent child, where you can’t tell which animal is which and we’re all just brown blobs which barely stand out from a background of indeterminate grey. Cooks should be jolly women with red faces who heft their cleavers in a slightly disquieting way; priests grey-haired men of Irish extraction who evidently like a drink. When our food is cooked by young guys who think they’re rock and roll stars, it turns to ashes in our mouths; and when our faith is brokered by middle-aged women in sensible shoes it becomes nothing more than soul insurance. We combat life’s randomness through the simple things, the things you can say in one sentence, the things everyone understands. Love and death are lifelines, ropes to hold on to in a choppy sea. Without them nothing makes sense.
One night Helena’s parents were having dinner in the Happy Spatula, a once-a-month pasta treat. We often went with them, but that night we were at Deck’s instead, bombe
d out of our minds. At 10:15 a car pulled up outside the Spatula, and two guys got out. They walked calmly into the Café and shot five people dead. Helena’s mother made it through to the next morning before dying, but her father was DOA. Helena identified the bodies with a hangover.
I had a gun. Helena took it, hunted down the two guys and killed them. I knew nothing about it until I came home from work to find her curled in a ball in the bathroom, sobbing and covered in blood. I burnt her clothes, filed the serial number off the gun and dismantled it. We drove over the city, throwing pieces out of the window. When we got home again I locked all the doors and put her to bed and got in beside her.
She asked me if it made a difference, if I didn’t love her any more. I told her I was proud of her, and kissed her to sleep. We spent two weeks bonded in fear, but the knock at the door never came.
A month later we went back to the Spatula. Helena wanted to. She wanted to prove she could go back to the Café, and so we went. We ordered what we always had, and sat where we always sat. The service was much more attentive than usual, and at the end of the meal we were told the bill had been paid. As we sat drinking coffee, rather baffled, three men came to sit at the next table. They were very polite. They wanted to thank Helena for what she’d done: the three other fatalities in the restaurant had been made guys, hit by an up-and-coming gang. Helena’s parents had merely been accidents. They knew it had been Helena who evened the score—someone saw her fleeing the scene. I watched Helena smile as the oldest of the men kissed her hand, and knew everything was about to change.
They did us some favours. And they took some back, subtly holding the murders over Helena’s head. They said they hoped the cops didn’t find out it was her who did it, or—worse still—the other gang. It wasn’t concern for our well-being. It wasn’t even a threat. It was just Business. They manipulated her into killing someone else for them, and after that it was too late. It was all very courtly and friendly, but our lives weren’t our own any more. Like Laura said, there are some situations you just can’t walk away from. Dealing with the mob is one of them.
I killed for them too, but only once. A couple of creeps who’d rape-murdered an associate’s wife and child. I met up with them in a bar, on the pretence of wanting to make a big coke buy, got them to a back alley and shot both in the head. I lost it afterwards, driving around with the gun in my hand and blood on my shirt, and nearly got caught.
Self-defence is one thing: execution is another. I couldn’t hack it. They didn’t make me do it again. I loaned the money they paid me to Deck, on the condition he never gave it back. He went and deliberately lost it in a casino in Vegas, so it went straight back to them and I could pretend I never had it. Deck understands me very well.
Helena was different. Helena could pull it off, was good at it. She had a black-and-white job now, for better or worse. She got over the death of her parents, in time: stopped expecting it to be her mother whenever the phone rang, or thinking of things to tell her dad. But she got over it partly by becoming something her parents would never have recognized, by untethering herself from the past they structured and side-stepping into a different life.
I had a harder job coping with what she did. If someone asks you what your wife does, you can’t exactly say ‘Oh, she whacks people. For money. And yours?’ And if you can’t tell other people, it becomes a secret, and you have to work out what you tell yourself. But in time I got used to it. She was my wife. I loved her.
I found it hard to believe the things she’d done, as I watched the gentle rise and fall of her breathing as she slept there on my couch. When we’re asleep we become children again, innocent and untouched. Secrets put lines on our faces, road maps to interior landscapes. At night the territories become uncharted once more. I tried to imagine her going out with somebody else. It wasn’t hard. God knows I’d had the practice. Her telling me it had actually happened merely felt like a well-oiled lock sliding into place. She’d moved on, and that was that. Trophy girlfriend of a mob lieutenant, a fierce woman no-one would really understand because they didn’t know what she’d been like before. I understood, but that comprehension was of no interest to anyone but me. All that lay on the couch in front of me was a memento, like a plaster bust of a Disney character for sale outside a store in Ensenada. Subtly wrong, a copyright infringement of the way things had been.
Occasionally, usually late at night and when I’m thousands of miles away, I have a desire to go back to Cresota Beach. Half a mile out of town was an athletics field, where you were sent twice a week to burn off excess energy, to help prevent the teachers from being driven insane. There was a parking lot in front of the field, and at its end a building, where you changed for the game. Two-storey, small, like some secret military bunker: two floors of hooks on which to hang your clothes, and benches to collapse onto at the end of the afternoon, drenched with sweat and glad it was all over and you could go home. It was a place where you laughed and shouted, somewhere to plan an evening of mayhem and swap stories of weekend adventures. In my last couple of years the school started using a different field, and the building was locked up, and never used again. The last time I saw it was a few years ago, and it still looked like a tomb.
I wondered then if some piece of clothing got left there by accident and lay there still, mummified in stale air and peeling paint, forgotten by the boy who’d abandoned it and who now has children of his own. A mute testament to a different life, the past musty but still concrete.
I’d like to go stand by the building alone again some night, look up at the boarded windows. I wonder, if I listened hard enough, whether I’d be able to hear voices from inside; and I wonder, if I broke in, whether I’d find my girl and Earl and my childhood friends, sitting on the benches, wearing the same clothes, and waiting for me.
Whether I could sit cross-legged with them in darkness, and stay there forever, and nothing would have changed.
Eventually I fell asleep, and dreamed again. The predominant impression at first was of marbled green, a striated verdigris. It took a while for me to understand that this was the colour of the ceiling, only a few feet above me, and that I was lying on my back. I had a thundering headache, and my brain and body felt desiccated and empty, as if it had been destroyed and then reconstituted, with not quite enough water added into the mix. My lower arms itched as if spiders were walking along them, and I felt cold but not afraid. I couldn’t tell how long I had been there: the question didn’t seem to have much meaning.
I slowly turned my head, and saw Deck. He was lying on the floor some distance away. His face was pointing straight up, and it looked as though his eyes were closed. I tried to call out to him, but my throat was dry and what came out was not even a whisper, more a fading breath. I watched him for a while but he didn’t move. By angling my head a little further I could see that we were in a long, low room, big enough that the walls and corners were hidden in shadow. I wondered then where the light was coming from, because I couldn’t see anything that might be causing it. Then I looked back at Deck and realized that he was giving off a faint glow, like a firefly but golden.
I wondered if I was doing the same, and tried to raise my head to look at my body. It didn’t seem to be restrained, but the muscles weren’t working properly and it felt like I had to remember how to use each one. I’d never appreciated how many different muscles were involved in such a simple movement. It took an awful lot of effort to lift my head only an inch off the ground, and I couldn’t see anything from there. I let it fall again, which it did slowly, coming gratefully back to rest on what felt like a thin mattress. I lay still then, not so much exhausted as content to be motionless, floating in a state of benign confusion. Everything seemed to be okay.
After a while I got interested in the question of the glow again, and decided to try a different tack. Leaving my head where it was, I tried to lift one of my hands instead. This was a little easier, and little by little I raised it from where it lay by my side. Aft
er a few minutes it was high enough that I could see a blurred suggestion of it at the periphery of my vision. Feeling like someone pulling off an extraordinary feat of co-ordination and strength, I kept it in that position and turned my head towards it.
There was indeed a golden glow coming off the hand I saw, but it wasn’t my hand. It was slender, feminine, and there were stitches in the wrist below it.
It was Laura’s.
When I woke to find myself sitting upright in the chair in my apartment, I had a cigarette in my hand. It was alight, but hadn’t burned down to the filter. There was no cone of grey ash hanging off the end. It was smoked only half the way down, and had been tapped off neatly in the ashtray on the arm of the chair.
Helena was still out like a light on the sofa.
I hadn’t been asleep. It hadn’t been a dream.
It was a memory, or something like it, but it was happening now. And it was happening in a place where I too had been.
Fourteen
I spent the rest of the night standing at the window, staring unseeingly down on Griffith, trying to remember. It wouldn’t come. It was going to take something else, something concrete, for me to be able to break through. Some different way of seeing.
The phone rang at five minutes past six. I grabbed it and said: ‘You read the message?’
‘Jesus, yes,’ Travis said. He sounded tired. ‘I just don’t know whether to believe it. I met Schumann once. He seemed like a regular guy.’
‘They all do, Travis. You know it’s true.’
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