She pulled back and looked at me. “You’ve changed. You’ve lost weight. What else do I need to know?” she quipped with her usual sense of humor.
“Well, if you must know, I gathered a harem full of Arabian beauties, met a Chinese virgin whom I seduced, almost got killed by a Hatchet Man, made love to a teenager from out of town and had a dream about an alien creature who’s gonna lead me to a castle in the clouds someday.”
She laughed. “Maybe half of it is true, darling, but I missed you anyway. Can you stay with me tonight and take me to the train station early before you go to work? The train leaves at six from downtown.”
“Sure.”
“And speaking of castles, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks have invited me to Hearst Castle for a weekend. Seems the newspaper bigwig, Hearst, has a movie star girlfriend—Marion Davies—you may have heard of her?”
The floor almost dropped out from under me. How weird life is—or was it planned that way? Was Lei-tao pulling psychic strings and opening doors in her secret world? I pretended not to be too excited about it all. “Nope, never heard of her. Hearst Castle, eh? I’ve heard of it. Do you think you might need a bodyguard on the trip?”
“What a great idea, Cable! Yes, I’m sure Charlie won’t mind. He promised to talk about City Lights with me. Damn, Mister, if I get that role, I can name my ticket in Hollywood—do you realize that, Mr. Policeman?”
“Yeah, babe. I’m proud of you. You’ve already come a long way. How was that picture you just shot?”
“Boring. I hate these stupid little roles. The director says it adds to my credits. Talking about harems, it was some silly Valentino-like thing. I think the producers just liked to see me with almost no clothes on.”
“So do I,” I quipped, putting my hand on an ample breast. “Crap, Valentino’s been dead a couple of years now—don’t they have to move on?”
“You’d think so. Hollywood is slow to new trends. They’re still stuck in the silent era. Talkies, like you said, are going to be the future.”
“Well, when are you through so we can go home?” I asked.
“I’ve got two more sets. I’ve got a new song for you. It’s a new Jerome Kern tune I hear he wants to put in a new show. He just hasn’t found the show yet.”
“So, what’s the name of the tune?”
“Yesterdays. I love the lyrics. It’s almost like I’ve already lived them, but then I’m really too young to have lived them, aren’t I? Kind of crazy, huh?”
“ Yeah, babe,” I said, feeling inside that Honey and I were already leaning toward those yesterdays that used to be and our tight togetherness had already begun to unravel. But maybe it was up to me to stop it. Maybe if I put the brakes on my restless balls and settled down with her, we’d pull back together. But some things you can’t stop, you can’t put the brakes on because everything has an expiration date written on the inside of the package.
Honey was wearing a warm, fall-colored gold and orange gown with light-green trim and pearl shoes. The dress was cut low so her feminine assets could be easily admired. It was more or less the policy of the house. The mobsters loved Honey and drooled for her on the sidelines, but never touched her. Only Laggore had wanted to invade the henhouse and take away the prize hen. Now he was gone and apparent peace had come to the Bella Notte. I wouldn’t know for some time just how wrong I was, but it goes to show…a false sense of security is just another word for a stick of dynamite with a long fuse.
When my beautiful Honey Combes, now increasingly known as Lana Loren, stepped up behind the microphone and blasted the audience with When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob Bobbin’ Along, the crowd went nuts. But then when she launched into Yesterdays, an unusual silence fell upon the room and Johnny Origin’s velvety piano background provided all the accompaniment Honey needed to sell the song to tears. I think even her eyes were misting by the time the song ended. A tumultuous applause arose that night at the Bella Notte. Lana Loren had arrived!
I kissed Honey good-bye at the train station and watched the Daylight chug out of the train yard, its huffing and puffing belching black smoke into the morning air. I turned and went to the trolley stop and caught a streetcar down to the station. I knew it was early, but I called Adora. Her mother answered and told me she was groggy, but she’d come to the phone. When she did, I asked her if she’d like to spend Thanksgiving Day with me at my Mom’s. She said she would be privileged to do so, but she had to divide her day between me and her own mother and sister. I agreed and I’d come by to pick her up Thursday morning around nine. Damn, I missed that beautiful, sincere and sensual young woman. Tall and elegant with a warmth that called out to me, I could tell that part of me was hooked on the dame. But it wasn’t just about sex. It came with another call, the one deep inside that asks you why in the hell can’t you settle down with someone so wonderful? Why can’t you be happy with one doll in your bed so you can wake up together and smell that first cup of coffee in your robes?
The sun shone a dreary half-light and the fog was burning off from the ocean’s nightly visit as Adora and I rode the #10 Line out to Lincoln Heights. I had forgotten how ramshackle and run down my old neighborhood was. Adora was familiar with early poverty, so she knew the score and shared with me the most humble of beginnings. She was holding my hand tightly and had her cheek against my shoulder as we rode. Finally, when we got off and walked the three blocks to my old trappings, the sun came out a little brighter. We came to the rickety old wooden stairs that led up to the porch. My mother was already watching at the screen door awaiting us. She opened the door and I greeted her, taking her into my embrace and kissing her strong all over her wrinkling face. “Ah Mom! Good to see you!” I hugged her. “Oh…and Mom, this is Miss Moreno—Adora. I’m glad we’re doing this. It’s been much too long.” We brought a bag of things that I knew my mother liked, including pumpkin pie, coffee, spices, and whatever else I could think to stuff into it.
“Yes, it has, Cable…sometimes I think you’ve forgotten you have a mother—who’s still living. Miss Moreno—”
“—por favor, Mrs. Denning, call me Adora.” My little Mexican lady came forth and extended her hand to my mother. “Con mucho gusto, Señora.”
“Okay, Adora. Happy to meet you, too.” I knew my mother. She sized up every broad I ever brought to the house and made severe judgments on them later. She looked at me. It’s an interesting phenomenon to see your parents shrink as they get older. In fact, everything in the house seemed small. Her eyes were still laced with the surprise of life, that blow it hits you with when dreams shatter and death comes in singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t afford a turkey, so we’re having good old Irish lamb stew, and apple pie, if that’s okay.”
I looked at Adora. She smiled. “Yeah, Mom, great. Everyone else is having turkey anyhow. I’m ready for something different—and probably a lot more delicious.” I came over to her and kissed her on the cheek. “And nobody…I mean nobody makes lamb stew like you.”
“Sí, mi madre y hermana have roast squash pudding with sweet potatoes in guava. So I like anything you serve, Señora Denning. Gracias.”
We visited for a while, but it was Adora’s gentility and graciousness that pulled my mother to her. In all my life, I had never heard her ask a person to call her by her first name, but this day she did. “Please, Adora, call me Flo or if you prefer, Florence. I would like that.”
“Sí, Florence. That is Irish, no? Like this hombre here?” she giggled.
My mother laughed. “Yes—at least half of me, Adora. My mother was Irish and my father was from Norway. He got lost in Ireland and kissed my mother at a dance one night, so I heard tell, and that was that.”
I looked across the table to Adora whose beautiful eyes seldom left me all afternoon. My mother’s warm brown eyes were observing it all and I could tell she felt the warmth between Adora and me. “So, Mom, how are you fee
ling?”
“It’s terrible getting old, Cable. New aches and pains, now my ankles swell in the morning. But, what is one to do?”
“Is there un médico you go to, señora?” Adora inquired.
“Doctors? What can they do? Break an arm, he can set it. Break a leg, he can fix it—but break a heart—and there are no cures in his bag, Adora.”
Adora and I looked at each other. It was the first time I ever heard my mother speak of never getting over my father’s death. In that minute I realized a big part of her life also stopped on that day. “Lo siento mucho, señora. Dolor del corazón, que triste. Sometime, pain in the heart never heal. So la vida es muy difícil.”
“Well, guys, we can’t mope around in that kind of mood all day, can we? The apple pie was great, Mom—and I brought some bootleg rum to wash it down with. Let’s all have a toast to the lamb stew, the apple pie and the turkey we didn’t have and the wonderful time we did have.”
I got out a bottle of cheap, lousy rum and poured a bit for the ladies. We all toasted. But soon it was time for Adora to go, for she had promised her mother and sister she would spend the remainder of the holiday with them. My grey old mother sat opposite me, next to Adora. She looked directly at me with those wonderful brown eyes of hers. “Son, this is the finest young woman you have ever brought to meet me.” She took Adora’s hand and held it. “Forgive me, Adora, but I must speak. You see this lovely young Latina? She is in love with you forever, Cable. She will make you the finest wife any man could have on the face of this earth.” Then she looked at Adora. “Am I right—or is it only an old woman’s well-wishing for her son?”
Adora had tears in her eyes. “No, señora, I love your son with my whole life—in front of you—I say this.” Then Adora looked into my eyes…my heart. “Te amo para siempre. For always and always…I love him…”
All three of us sat there with eyes misting as if part of time stood still in that moment and it would mark a place somewhere deep in each of us, like someone carving love’s initials into a Valentine Tree. I didn’t know what else to say, so I just whispered under my breath. “Thank you. I thank both of you.”
By the time we left mother and our little old house on Alta Street, she and Adora were hugging good-bye. Adora started down the stairs and I went up to this little old lady who birthed and raised me. “I love you, Ma,” I said. I slipped a twenty-dollar bill in her hand. “I’m sorry it’s not more, but these damn cops are still fed scraps these days.”
She drew my head forward so she could whisper. “Make a life with this woman, Cable. She will settle your restless heart—like I did your father’s. I never told you how happy we were together. I couldn’t wait for him to get home each night so I could feel his body hold me, his rough whiskers, his whiskey breath—I loved all of him. So does this woman…for you, Cable—she adores all of you. One like her will not come again in your life.” She let me go and Adora and I waved good-bye from the sidewalk as we walked to get the streetcar.
When we got to Todo el Mundo, Adora used her key to let us in. I told her I couldn’t stay and I thought it best if she spent the afternoon with her family without me. It was dark in the big room and the blinds were drawn. She backed me up against a wall. “Por qué, señor? You no like me anymore? I come to your mama. You come to mine. But first I want to come.”
I could hardly believe the brazen boldness of this beautiful creature. She lifted her skirt and undid my belt. Then she reversed our positions, with her buttocks against the wall. She spread her legs and boosted me into her. As I pumped her against the wall, she moaned and whimpered in low tones so as to not alert her mother and sister. She clung to me like she was growing into my body as part of me and I got bigger and harder until I thought I would drive her through the wall. She let out a short shriek, which happened to be enough to alert her sister Flora. Adora immediately pulled her skirt down, leaving me there dripping, facing her in a quasi-embrace while Flora looked on in amusement. “Flora! Vaya para ahí! Por favor!”
The sister dodged back inside the door to the living quarters. I cleared my throat, still a little out of breath. “Uh…what heading do we put that under—caught in the act?”
She laughed as she grabbed my wet, shrinking manhood. “Ay, muchacho!” She wiggled in place. “I am so happy…you satisfy me mucho, mucho!” She put my hand back up under her dress and I could feel the hot, wet fluids still seeping out of her. “This…is naughty, no? Pero, Cable, how I love it—you make me free—libertad!”
We spent the rest of the day until early evening visiting Adora’s sister and mother full well knowing our secret passionate act was now well documented by Flora Moreno. But what the hell, I thought, life is what it is and great sex is also just exactly what it is—incredible—maybe that should have one of those capital “I” letters as well.
I got back to my little flat. It was pitch black. I pushed the “on” button to the light switch on the wall. Nothing happened. I lit a match, but before it did any good, someone grabbed me from behind and held me in a hammerlock. “Good evening, stupid policeman,” a familiar voice said to me there in the dark. Then on a bedside table he lit a small candle I kept there for emergencies. “Did you think I would allow your insults to continue unpunished? You live in fear thinking of me?”
“No, you piece of crap,” I answered defiantly, “I forgot you the day I got back to L.A. I don’t think much about yesterday’s shit, you know.”
Wong Lo San came forth and slapped my face while the goon who was holding me tightened his grip on my neck. “You will remember what I give you tonight, one who destroys. My mistress become ruin because of you. You and your sex desire make trouble for all. Black Hand say ‘punish this man so he remember…’ So now I do this…with pleasure, shitty policeman.”
“Well, you’d better hurry, squat face, it’s getting late and I have to get up in the morning. You know how responsible these shitty policemen are.”
“Make fun, die harder.”
“You’re a coward, Wong Lo San. If you got your idiot here to release me and faced me man to man, then I might say you’d be spared by your ancestors from a very harsh judgment.”
There was a pause. “My ancestor not to do with this. But you right, I should face man I kill. It is way of Hatchet Man.” He barked out an order to the man holding me and he released me, pushing me to the floor. My neck hurt and my breath had been compromised. “Now you get up on knees.” The Hatchet Man’s shadow silhouetted against the far wall. I could see him slowly remove that terrible axe without a handle and hold it in his hand. “Now bow head so I have perfect split of skull.”
I kneeled there on the floor. What a hell of a way to end Thanksgiving Day, I thought. Just then two strange sounds emanated from another part of the room and both the Hatchet Man and his accomplice fell to the floor. I looked around. I saw no one. Then a little creature came out of the shadows holding what looked like a bean shooter. “Not too late, I trust, Mr. Denning,” a very nasal, low voice spoke. “I am Toggth. The late members of the Chinese Black Hand are dead. This tube shoots deadly poisonous darts, dipped in a very toxic liquid from a plant in your Africa—or is it South America—I always get them mixed up. Yes…South America…Colombia. I prepared the poison myself. I learned it from the Noanama tribe of the Choco region. It comes from the black-leg frog, which is really green and yellow with black on its little suction cup feet. Effective, wouldn’t you say?”
I was still rather stunned. I got up and faced the little creature who stood about four-feet five, maybe. His skin was rough, his nose sharp at the end and bent. His eyes were a kindly non-descript dark color and his body seemed filled with lots of unkempt long silver hairs. He had no hair on his head, however, and his ears were pointed. “Well, thanks, Toggth. Phew! That was a close call! I’m sure glad you decided to come by tonight. Did you know these guys were coming by to do me in?”
“The beautiful and ever-gracious Red Dragon Lady directed me to
come to your aid. She knew. You are protected by her, Mr. Denning. Consider yourself very fortunate. She can be a viper when crossed. Obviously, you did not cross her. She tells me you…trans-migrated with her, to the Cave of the Seven Truths.
“Yep. A hell of an experience. I think the world of your mistress. In fact, I should tell you, Lei-tao and I had this little thing going—”
“—I am not here to hear of your prurient assaults on our world, Mr. Denning. My instructions are to tell you that as soon as you receive the you-know-what, you are to hand it to me and I shall give you a vibrational duplicate. In securing this necessary time, our esteemed Red Dragon Lady will employ me to remove the etched microfilm from the golden capsule and replace it with the Tone of Creation.”
“I have a question, if you don’t mind. Weren’t you this guy, Rettini or Blinthe Rettini—or something? Anyway, the corpse my partner and I saw at the city morgue that night, you know, we saw your golden throat and after old Doc Sandor removed the larynx, I spied the cavity where the precious cargo must have originally been stored—temporarily of course.”
“Of course. Rettini or Blinthe Rettini, as you say, never really existed on this plane of existence. They were projection bodies without corelife.”
“Corelife?”
“Yes, the center of animated consciousness in a physical body was absent in Blinthe. Only the gold was real. He was a thief, one of the dark ones.”
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