Hacker said, “Answer the lady.”
“Lyle.” It was a snap, but she sweetened it with a smile. “When I want basic muscle, I’ll request it.”
“Sorry,” Hacker said.
“Mr. Bender? I’m prepared to believe you’re an unusual man. But I strongly believe that higher education trains the mind. It’s not a matter of what you learn, it’s that you learn how to learn. Given the way your mind seems to work, I’m curious about your education.”
“I read a novel,” I said.
She tried to put her glass down without looking and missed the table. “You … read a novel.”
“In the one class I attended regularly, Modern American Literature. The novel was called The Recognitions.”
“One novel,” she said, as though she was trying to make sense out of the words.
“It was written by a guy named William Gaddis, back in the fifties. Came out, no reviewer knew what to make of it, and it sank without a ripple. Maybe the greatest novel of the twentieth century.”
She grabbed the bottle and poured her own wine this time, ignoring the sound of Eduardo tripping over his feet to get into the room. “I have to confess that this is a disappointment,” she said. “One novel? I don’t care if it’s War and fucking Peace. One novel?”
“With all due respect to your wonderful degrees,” I said, “a lot of people come out of college too dumb to exhale. I gave myself a better education out of The Recognitions than any college on this coast, including Stanford, could have offered.”
“That’s quite a claim.”
“You haven’t read it. It’s roughly a thousand pages long, and it’s about everything in the world. But most of all, it’s about forgery and faith, and between those things you can crowd most of life. I read it in five days, pretty much around the clock, and then I went back to the beginning and started taking notes. I got though the first hundred and fifty pages, writing all the time, and then I got every book I could get my hands on about the things Gaddis talks about in those pages.”
She had angled her head slightly to one side by way of demonstrating that I had her ear. “For example.”
“Spanish monasticism. The Gnostics. Authorship of the New Testament. The Flemish masters, especially van der Goes and van Eyck. The music of Pergolesi. Inherent vice-that’s the tendency of certain artistic materials to deteriorate over time, the way most frescoes eventually peel and chip. The Catholic Church’s use of fictitious martyrs to convey the faith. The international trade in art forgery. How to mix seventeenth-century pigments. Greenwich Village society in the early fifties. The spatial organization of triptychs. The symbolism of the elements in a painting of the annunciation-with your last name, that might interest you. And about fifty other things. And I had eight hundred fifty pages to go.”
I drained my wine, reached past her, and poured myself some more. She watched me, her mouth drawn in at the corners and her eyes on my hands. “And this continued,” she finally said, “for how long?
“About five years. Some books led me to other books. Other topics. The Spanish Inquisition, for example, led me to the Jewish diaspora, which led to a million things, including the invention-speaking of your new chain of opticians-of eyeglasses. Did you know that Spinoza ground lenses all his life?”
“Do tell,” she said. “Maybe I should call it Spinoza’s.”
“And then I did the same with Moby-Dick,” I said. “That leads you to an entirely different world of stuff.”
“A wetter one, certainly.”
“For the last three or four years, I’ve been working out of a seventeenth-century Chinese novel called The Dream of the Red Chamber. Just to get away from the Western tradition.”
“And what, of any possible practical use, could you get out of that?” she said.
“Your hairpins,” I said. “They’re seventeenth century, probably from a tomb near Nanjing. And the Chinese government would like them back.”
For a count of three or four, she just looked at me as though I were a trinket she was thinking about buying. Then she reached over, picked up the bottle of wine, and topped up my glass.
“So,” I said, “I may not be a whiz with spread sheets, accrual accounting, and business plans, but I’m not Barney Flintstone, either.”
“No,” she said. “No, you’re not.” She put down the bottle and her glass, and clapped her hands twice, and Eduardo shot into the room as though he were propelled by a slingshot. Without turning, Trey Annunziato said, “Eduardo. Bring us some food.”
8
Snor-Mor
“So I got a chance to watch Hacker eat,” I said. “Not an experience I’m eager to repeat.”
“Hacker,” Louie the Lost said. “What a fuckin’ guy. Sets like a new global asshole standard.”
“He holds his spoon in his fist, like a three-year old, and scoops straight out of the serving bowls, like he’s trying to keep anyone from having to wash his dish. And in the meantime, there’s Trey at the other end of the table cutting peas in half and looking like she’d prefer to be at a hummingbird feeder. One of the odder meals of the week.”
Louie leaned toward me, took another look at my face, and winced. “If I’d seen how banged up you was this morning, I’da bought a bunch of stock in Johnson and Johnson.”
We were sitting at the tiny, cigarette-scarred table in room 204 at the Snor-Mor motel on Sherman Way, my current address. I pretty much live in motels, and while the Snor-Mor-with its sagging beds, flyspecked mirrors, and thriving trade in one-hour rentals-would barely earn a single star in the Bender Blue Book of Dumps, it’s a place no one would look for me unless they knew which website to check and which name I was posting under. There are maybe half a dozen people who know the FIND JUNIOR rules, and Louie was one of them.
Louie was a top-rated wheelman until he took a memorable wrong turn after a jewel heist about six years back and wound up rattling around in Compton in this big Lincoln town car, four jacked-up white guys inside, everyone outside black and staring in at them, and about 600 K in diamonds in the trunk. They made it out somehow, and Louie got off easy-ended up with nothing more permanent than a nickname and a change of jobs. He’s still a good driver, and at the moment I needed a good driver.
Louie put the butt of his cigar in the center of his mouth, looked crosseyed down at the coal for a second, and then inhaled. “So somebody’s sabotaging Trey’s movie,” he said, in a cloud of blue smoke. “And you’re like her cop or something, got to figure out who’s the bad guy.”
“It feels odd to me, too.”
Louie burped. “Fuckin’ Mexican food,” he said. “Don’t know why I eat it. It’s like here I am again every ten minutes for the rest of the night.”
“You have no idea,” I said, “how sorry I am for you.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. You got a real problem, and I’m gassing at you about enchiladas. Here’s one of the things I don’t get. This movie that somebody’s trying to fuck up, it’s a hand-job flick, right?”
“To hear her talk about it, it’s The Birth of a Nation.”
“Yeah? Didn’t see that one. But, come on, there’s only so much money there. It’s not like ten years back. Right now, those things have a shelf life shorter than an oyster, and then they’re all over the Internet. Only way to make enough money to fold is to crank out a couple or three a week and keep them cheap. Don’t sound like an empire-saver to me.”
“Well, she thinks it is. And she’s going to make the movie even though she wants to close down the porno operation. Sort of a final climax, if you’ll forgive the expression. She thinks it’ll make millions that she can use to finance everybody’s transition to the straight life. She’s in a rough place, Louie. She’s putting all these extortionists into legitimate collection agencies, loan sharks into payday check-cashing operations, car thieves into auto mechanics’ shops, and I don’t know what else. Stuff that’ll pay off in the long run, but probably not right now. And these guys, I’d imagine, are sort
of happy being extortionists and loan sharks. It’s what they know, you know? Break a kneecap, steal a Porsche. Go home early and kiss the little woman. Or the little man, I guess. It’s part of their identity, like former presidents. What are they going to do when they can’t dial the red phone any more? These guys feel the same way, on a lesser scale, probably.”
“Feels big to them, though,” Louie the Lost said.
“To make it worse for her, she’s the first woman to run the operation. They already didn’t like it, and now here she is, saying, okay everybody, time to join the chamber of commerce.”
“And then there’s her dad,” Louie said. “He was a popular guy. Some guys would like to do her just for that.”
“I think that cuts both ways. Yeah, they liked the old man. But they’ve got to figure, if she’s icy enough to gun down Pops, she’s not going to be real slow about taking out anybody who gets out of line. Do you know about the dog collar?”
Louie’s eyes went into soft-focus. “Ohh, man, I knew a chick once, wore a black leather-”
“It’s red,” I interrupted. “Bright red, impossible to miss. And it’s got three tags, solid gold, hanging off it.”
With some reluctance, Louie let the memory pass. “Tags?”
“Three tags, three names. To hear her tell it, each of them is someone she aced personally. They jingle when she walks. So I think she’s maybe overcompensating a little, but it’s a pretty clear message: I’m a girl, but don’t get silly.”
Louie eyed the cigar, now shorter than his thumb, with what looked like profound regret. I thought for a moment he was going to kiss it goodbye. But then he smashed it flat in the pumpkin-colored salad bowl he was using as an ashtray, leaned to the window, and pulled back the greasy curtain an inch to peer outside. The bright red on-off neon sign that said SNOR-MOR hit his face, making him look intermittently demonic.
“Your company. They’re still out there.”
“And likely to stay, until we do something about them.”
Louie let the curtain drop. “Did you like her?”
“Like her?” I pushed my chair back, took the salad bowl into the tiny bathroom, and flushed the corpse of Louie’s cigar. When I came back in, he was doing that finicky little trim thing to one end of a new one. “She’s not someone you like or don’t like. She’s Mount Rushmore with hair. She doesn’t do anything on the spur of the moment. You get the feeling that people have been studying her for reactions for so long that she practiced a bunch of them in front of a mirror, so nobody will bury her prematurely. I think she’s got a body temperature in the low sixties.”
“On the other hand,” Louie said.
“On the other hand, what?”
He pulled out his lighter, a miniature silver propane tank, and flicked it, producing a blue flame an inch long and as sharp as a needle. “If there wasn’t something on the other hand, you wouldn’t of got up and gone in the bathroom.”
“On the other hand, she’s trying to do something that could get her killed. Maybe will get her killed, in spite of all the show she puts on. And, you know, it’s not a bad thing to try to do. The guys are going to bitch about it, and maybe try to cap her, but their wives and kids-sorry, or husbands and kids-are going to breathe a lot easier knowing that their significant other isn’t going to wind up doing fifteen to twenty pumping iron behind razor wire and getting ugly tattoos.”
“I guess,” Louie said. “Gonna be a lot duller, though.”
“And she’s doing what she can to avoid getting capped. She’s living behind metal gates, surrounded by a bunch of try-me guys wearing Valentino Kevlar. Her car’s been bulletproofed. But she can’t control what’s going on around the movie, and she’s made it the big symbol of the transformation. That’s what she calls it, the transformation. Also, she’s smart, and I like smart. After she gave me the whole Hallmark version of the transformation, complete with the string section, about living on the right side of the law and sleeping well at night, and all the wives and husbands who won’t have to wait up every night to see whether Thuggo comes home on a slab, she told me the real reason. You want to hear it?”
“What am I gonna do?” Louie said. “Stick my fingers in my ears? Go outside?”
“She said, and this is pretty much a quote: The government’s not going to be worrying about terrorists forever. And when it’s not, all the new laws saying nobody has the right to privacy or untapped phone lines or unread e-mail, all that stuff is going to get turned on us. And she plans to be as clean as a whistle by the time that happens. A hundred percent legal, tax-paying, highly diversified multi-millionaire.”
Louie said, “Yikes.”
“That’s pretty much what I thought. So she’s cold and she’s smart and she’s willing to try to do something that’s going to be dangerous as hell for her. So, yeah, I kind of like her.”
“I don’t know how smart she is,” Louie said, “if she thinks she’s gonna pay for all this with a skin flick.”
“Not one, three. And what she’s selling is the idea that these are going to be the biggest one-hand movies ever made, and they’re going to earn millions and millions of dollars, and those dollars are going into a retirement fund and a health care plan, if you can believe that, for all these thick-necks who are suddenly teaching Sunday school. She calls it a trilogy, like it has a Dewey Decimal Number or something. It’s supposed to produce a big fat legal flow of porno dollars, and it all gets salted away to secure the future of her guys. And girls.”
“This is seriously cracked,” Louie the Lost said. “This ain’t 1970. These days, everybody’s seen everything. What kind of peepshow can earn that kind of money?”
“She’s got a star,” I said. “Name doesn’t mean anything to me, but it seems to put everyone else in the drool zone.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Thistle Downing.”
Louie the Lost bit his cigar in half.
9
Thistle
Life is definitely not fair. First I had to watch Hacker throw food at his mouth, miss with about half of it, and chew openmouthed on the stuff that found its way in. Then I had to watch Louie cough and spit and pull long dark shreds of wet tobacco off his tongue. When he was finished, he had brown lips and there was a pile of something in front of him that looked like used carnitas. I decided to skip dinner.
“Thistle Downing?” he finally said. “You’re shitting me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Means something to you, too. But not me. There’s something familiar about the name, but I can’t place it.”
He shook his head pityingly, as though I were the only guy in Turin who’d never heard of the Shroud. “You ever steal a TV?”
“No. Too big, no resale value.”
“You live in these fucking motels,” he said. “Take a look around. Tell me what the second-biggest piece of furniture is.”
“I use it to put my spare change on.”
“Well, if you turned the damn thing on, you’d know who Thistle Downing is.” Louie looked at the remnants of his cigar and dropped it, with a surprising concentration of disgust, into the salad bowl. “But … but …” His head was shaking back and forth and he was practically spluttering. “They can’t put Thistle into that kind of movie. They can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s-it’s sick. Diseased, perverted, just wrong.” Louie is a short, stout guy who has a fat, cheerful little face that’s mostly forehead, and a dark Mediterranean complexion, and he generally looks like a happy olive. But he was actually flushed with indignation, and his lower lip was quivering. “They can’t.”
“Louie,” I said. “You’re acting like she’s your kid sister.”
“She is,” Louie said. “She’s everybody’s-wait, wait.” He looked at his watch and then looked at the TV. “Does that thing work?”
“I have no idea.”
“You ain’t never turned it on?”
“To tell you the truth,” I said, “it never occur
s to me.”
“You’re missing a lot.”
“It keeps me up nights.”
“Something wrong with you. Does this place get The TV Channel?” He got up, grabbed the remote and pointed it at the television.
“I don’t know. I suppose it gets a bunch of them.”
“No, no. The TV Channel. It shows, it shows …” He was punching buttons on the remote, flipping past earnest newsreaders with neon makeup on their faces; the newest retro-hip-inverse-ironic cartoon series; a bright orange Bob Barker, undoubtedly the oldest life form on the planet; and some just-possibly-not-entirely-naturally-well-endowed young women on a beach, empowering the hell out of themselves by wearing red bikinis. Then Louie stopped, frozen into immobility, the remote pointed like a magic wand at a completely unironic living room from the 1990s: couch, tables, bay window, stairs to the second story in the background, a room like a million I burglarized back then, when the words “twentieth century” sounded current. Everything on the screen, from the furniture to the lighting, looked cheap and slapped together in that way that-even to a non-TV watcher like me-says “sitcom.” And nothing about that impression was contradicted by the room’s sole inhabitant: a slender middle-age man who was standing next to the coffee table with a dinner platter glued to each hand. He was trying a bit over-desperately to get them off, and the electronically enhanced audience was finding it mechanically hilarious.
“This is the one about the cheese,” Louie said, sitting on the end of the bed. “Watch.”
“The one about the-”
“Cheese,” Louie snapped. “Forget it, it doesn’t matter. Here’s what matters.”
The director cut to a door stage right that opened about six inches, and a girl of eleven or twelve peered apprehensively into the room. Light brown hair above uptilted eyes with lots of intelligence in them. The word that came to mind was elfin. She registered the man with the platters on his hands, and her shoulders came up to her ears and she squeezed her eyes closed, and with those two simple movements she somehow conjured up someone whose deepest wish was to shiver herself into molecules and disappear forever from the face of the earth.
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