Incinerator sg-4

by Timothy Hallinan

  “You won’t like Des Moines,” Eleanor said as the headwaiter hovered, looking down at our neglected entrees.

  “Then we’ll go to Thailand,” I said. “I’ve got five thousand dollars in my pocket. We’ll leave on different flights, you first by a couple of days, both of us going someplace else, and after I check every single passenger on my first flight and make sure he’s not on my second one, we’ll meet up in Seoul, and then we’ll check all the passengers again and go to Thailand and wait for Willick to catch the Incinerator. Then we’ll come home.”

  “Not so fast,” Eleanor said. She looked up at the headwaiter and said, “Do you mind? ” He stepped backward suddenly, bumping into the table behind him. “Simeon,” she said as the headwaiter apologized to two anorexics who were picking at their salads, possibly seeking the deadly radicchio, “we’ve got our own problems to work out. Also, I’ve got a book contract to fulfill.”

  “It’s a lot less pressing than the possibility of burning to death,” I said.

  “True,” she said. “But there’s Burt.”

  Burt was the publisher, an inexhaustible optimist who had pronounced her upcoming book, Eastern Roots, based on her recent visit with her own extended family in China, a Really, Really Important Book. More important even, in the Universal Scheme of Things, than her last, The Right-Brain Cookbook, a collection of recipes that were supposed to enhance creativity. I had my own opinion of both the book and its publisher. My opinion of the book was based on the fact that its inspiration had been a sarcastic remark I’d made about the old belief that some foods were supposed to be brain food, and wasn’t that a pregnant topic for the New Age? She’d taken me up on it. My opinion hadn’t been changed by the sales, which were, as they say, brisk.

  My opinion about Burt was more complex. “Burt’s a nit,” I said. “He wears imitation everything. Imitation Gucci, imitation Armani, an imitation Rolex. He’s got an imitation smile, and his vocabulary is an imitation of Norman Vincent Peale. Even his hair is an imitation, for Christ’s sake. It looks like something that a misguided housewife would put on the lid of a toilet seat.”

  Eleanor was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read.

  “Except that it isn’t pink,” I added. “I’ve seen better rugs for sale on the sidewalk. In bad neighborhoods.”

  “What he thinks about me is real,” Eleanor said stubbornly, “which is more than I could say for some.”

  Hammond looked from her to me and got up. “Pit stop,” he said tactfully.

  “Have a lube job while you’re at it,” I said. “This could take a while.”

  Eleanor regarded me steadily as Hammond headed for the John.

  “So much for Thailand,” I said.

  “You don’t have to like him,” Eleanor said. “I think we’re past the point where you have to like him.”

  “As someone who’s halfway to being a guru, you should know more about male psychology.”

  She looked out the window, and I wondered who might be looking back in. “It’s supposed to be a surprise that you’re possessive?”

  “Oh, bull’s-eye,” I said nastily. “And you don’t go all white around the mouth every time Baby Winston’s name comes up, do you?”

  She turned back to look at me. “Are you sleeping with her?”

  “It’s not just possessiveness,” I said. “A large part of my self-esteem is anchored in the fact that you fell in love with me. How am I supposed to feel when you fall in love with this bedbug, a guy who couldn’t tell an ounce of iron pyrite from the Lost Dutchman’s mine?” I wasn’t whispering, and the headwaiter was glaring at us.

  “How are you supposed to feel about yourself, or how are you supposed to feel about me?” Eleanor demanded. “Disregarding your insults about Burt, it usually seems to come down to yourself, Simeon.”

  I took a breath and used it. “About both of us. It works both ways. I guess one of the reasons I love you is that you had the good taste to fall in love with me.”

  Eleanor laughed, then stopped abruptly. “I can’t have you,” she said. “Or, at least, you can’t seem to have just me. There always have to be a bunch of other females on the fringes. What am I supposed to be, a quasi-widow? Sleeping in a virginal bed and going on alternate Sundays to clip the grass around the gravestone, while you’re still alive and kicking everybody in sight? You haven’t got any right to ask that.”

  I pushed my luck. It’s a life-long habit. “Are you sleeping with him?”

  She looked away. “I just asked you the same question, except for the pronoun at the end of it. You answer me, I’ll answer you.”

  “No,” I said, with all the force of the righteous.

  She picked up her glass and took a ladylike sip. “Yes,” she said.

  It was a little bit like being kicked in the stomach, and picking up a glass seemed like a very good idea. I picked up mine and polished it off and then picked up Hammond’s. Eleanor put her hand over mine to keep it on the table. Somebody behind me whispered.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “He’s a very nice man. What good is that?”

  “It’s better than listening,” I said. I shrugged her hand free and knocked back Hammond’s drink. I’d been expecting this, but not just yet.

  “You never want to listen,” she said. “That’s why our talks never work out. You never want to listen. You only want to talk.”

  “I don’t get surprises when I’m talking,” I said. “I know how it’ll come out.”

  “You know how you want it to come out. But what about me? What about how I want it to come out?”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s up to you and Burt now, isn’t it?” I hoisted Hammond’s empty glass. “Here’s to two-way conversations,” I said. “May you have many of them.” I poured some more wine, feeling the alcohol hit the complicated traffic pattern of my central nervous system and turn it into gridlock.

  “He’s not like you,” Eleanor said earnestly.

  “No kidding. Are his teeth real?”

  “Get off it,” she said. “I’m an adult female with adult needs. These aren’t your precious Victorian times. Trollope and Dickens are dead. We’re not supposed to turn our heads, grit our teeth, and bear it just to keep the species going. Yikes, Simeon, what am I supposed to do? Haven’t you heard from Freud?”

  “Just today,” I said. “Has he found your G-spot?” The headwaiter, six feet away, cringed.

  “My G-spot is in Delaware,” she said, her jaw tight.

  “Buy him a plane ticket,” I said.

  “He’s afraid of flying,” she said.

  I started to laugh. I always laugh at the wrong time. After a moment, Eleanor laughed, too.

  “You kids have made up, huh?” Hammond said, dropping a heavy hand onto each of our shoulders.

  “In a manner of speaking,” I said. “We’ve made our beds and decided to lie in them. You been lubed?”

  “I’ve had my fucking tires aligned,” he said loudly, sitting down and looking at the table. “Where are the drinks?”

  “Coming up,” I said, pouring. “Eleanor drank yours.”

  Hammond made a fist and put it under my chin. “This is for you if you made her need it,” he said genially.

  “I’m no longer the one who can make Eleanor need anything,” I said. “The torch has been passed.”

  “And you passed it,” Eleanor said. “And never, ever, say that I wanted you to.”

  The headwaiter cleared his throat assertively. “The entrees are not acceptable?” he asked. If his life had depended upon it, he couldn’t have kept his upper lip down. It had a life of its own, and its life depended on heading north.

  “Are the entrees acceptable?” I asked Hammond. “Perhaps we’d like them flambe?”

  “We don’t do flambe,” the headwaiter said, losing control of his upper lip entirely. It flapped upward like a beached flounder. Flambe was yesterday’s culinary news.

  “No flambe,” I said. “Gosh, too bad. You t
wo still hungry?” I asked Hammond and Eleanor. They both shook their heads. “Check, please,” I said. The headwaiter, nearing the part of the Dining Experience during which the Tip usually appeared, mastered his upper lip long enough to smile and headed upwind, away from us.

  “You two leave,” I said. “The drill begins now.”

  “He’s not following you yet,” Hammond insisted, putting down his wineglass.

  “The odds against getting AIDS in the course of normal heterosexual contact are about four thousand to one,” I said, looking not at Hammond but at Eleanor. “Fooling around much?” I asked him.

  Eleanor got up. “Good night,” she said. She headed for the door.

  “That’s one down,” I said.

  “You don’t know shit about women,” Hammond said, watching her go. “You know that? Piss her off and send her home into the arms of that clown with the bad toupee.”

  “Better him than the Incinerator,” I said. “When are you leaving, Al?”

  “Give this fish a good tip,” Hammond said, rising. “You put him into a new life-insurance category. Well, ‘night.”

  “Night yourself,” I said. “Half, huh?”

  “And the house,” he said. “Women don’t fight fair. She’ll get the kids. Kids aren’t community property. They’re all that matters, but they’re not community property.” People were looking at us again. Hammond glared around the room, and people suddenly found something very interesting on their plates.

  “Kids need houses,” I said.

  “They need fathers, too,” Hammond said defiantly. “What do they need more, fathers or houses?”

  “Al,” I said to the room at large, “don’t ask me. My former girlfriend is sleeping with a publisher.” The few brave ones who had looked up dived back into their plates.

  “Yeah,” Hammond said. “So we’ll all sleep on it.” He picked up a knife and made fencing motions in my direction, to the genteel embarrassment of all in sight.“ ‘Bye,” he said, dropping the knife onto the table.

  “ ‘Bye,” I said. He wove his way to the door, heading for the car that would take him to his empty house. People watched him go, an extravagantly overmuscled man in a tight suit.

  “Thank you so much,” the headwaiter said, dropping the check onto the table as though it were a leper’s shirt. “And please come back.”

  “If I do,” I said, handing him a hundred and ninety bucks, “you could get a terrific chance to learn about flambe.”

  9

  Mirrors and Hindsight

  The rearview mirror was more or less empty.

  It had been more or less empty for four days.

  It was an old rearview mirror. Alice, my car, was almost thirty, and I had no reason to believe that the mirror wasn’t original. That made it almost as old as Eleanor. Some of the silvering had given way to a kind of powdery blackness, and there was a little continent of black, shaped vaguely like Australia, in the upper left-hand corner. The rearview mirror was falling apart. Eleanor, on the other hand, was in great shape.

  I’d spent most of the last four days either watching the rearview mirror or thinking about Eleanor. The two activities had been equally productive. I had decided to replace the mirror, and Eleanor, at long last, had decided to replace me.

  I pulled into a hot, flat little cul-de-sac in the Valley and waited for nothing.

  Eleanor and I had met more than ten years ago, at UCLA. I’d been finishing a master’s degree in English lit, and she’d been a visitor from the Department for Asian Studies, looking into early British translators of classic Chinese novels. At the time, The Dream of the Red Chamber, probably the best of the bunch, was my favorite book in the world, and I’d had the pleasure of introducing her to David Hawkes’s wonderful modern English version, which he calls The Story of the Stone. Six months later, we were living together.

  Within a year, she had threatened and cajoled me out of smoking a pack and a half a day, and she’d managed somehow to get me out of my armchair and onto the jogging track. In doing it, she taught me a great secret: I had never known it could be pleasant to perspire. I’d never understood that it could feel good to have aching muscles. I hiked. I ran. I surfed. I dropped thirty pounds. I swam happily in the love of a good woman. I also found a vocation, after almost nine years of meandering in the Halls of Academe, seeking initials to string, like magic talismans, after my name.

  It began when a cokehead, his dipswitches permanently fused in the manic configuration, dropped a sweet Taiwanese girl named Jennie Chu off the roof of one of the residence halls. Jennie had been a pianist and a gymnast with a shy smile and a wicked sense of humor, and she’d been Eleanor’s closest friend. She died by mistake. The cokehead couldn’t tell Asians apart. As my contribution to Eleanor’s recovery process, I worked out who did it and delivered him to the police with his elbows broken. I later regretted the elbows.

  Eleanor discovered the dreadful little shack in Topanga Canyon and fixed it up. We lived happily for a few years, me practicing my new job part-time while I earned a few more useless degrees, and even teaching for a couple of semesters, and she working on her writing and turning out her first book, Two Fit, about how couples could help each other to become healthy. It sold like radishes. Then, for reasons I still don’t understand, I started fooling around, stupid, pleasureless, meaningless betrayals with people whose names I barely knew. Eleanor put up with it for a while, and then she didn’t. She moved to Venice on her royalties, and we entered into a new stage of the relationship. It didn’t make either of us particularly happy, but it was better than nor seeing each other at all. She remained the most important person in my life.

  And now there was Burt.

  Time, as everybody says nowadays, is relative. Sitting there in that stifling cul-de-sac, sending mental letter bombs to Burt and watching two Chicano kids squabble over a garden hose, the three minutes I’d promised myself that I would wait for nothing to happen seemed to take a decade. At two minutes and forty seconds, I decided to cheat. I started Alice and pulled out of the little circle of faded houses, making a right onto Sherman Way and cruising in Alice’s stately fashion past the hospital in which Abraham Winston had died.

  I’d been cheating on the surveillance times quite a lot lately. The four days had passed like sludge. The waiting, as infuriating as it would have been under any circumstances, was made all the more unendurable by the fact that I couldn’t pull myself away from watching the bloody pot. As a result, all the nothing that I experienced took a lot longer to happen. I felt like a particle physicist put on permanent standby until the elusive graviton-the Snark of subatomic particles-popped out of the void to explain why his feet remained anchored to the ground. And it didn’t.

  Even during the brief interludes in which I pursued my own business, it took five times as long to do anything because I had to drag myself through all the double-backs, loop routes, feints, detours, and parking stalls that make up the vocabulary of checking for a tail. With my Thomas Brothers map book open in my lap, I turned into every dead end and cul-de-sac I passed, waited for three minutes-or, lately, two and a half-and then came back out again with my eye on that blemished and blistering rearview mirror. So I drove and fretted and fretted and drove again and consoled myself with the knowledge that at least no one else had been burned to death.

  Wallowing through the slog of time, I knocked on more doors to apartments overlooking the various death scenes and got nothing. I’d talked to the homeless, to the extent that anyone can talk to the homeless. I’d distributed fifteen or sixteen of Annabelle Winston’s twenties, hoping for information, and purchased nothing more than fifteen or sixteen vicarious drinking binges. I’d talked to Eleanor and Hammond on the phone. More consolation: No one seemed to be following them, either.

  By the third day, I was so desperate that I’d let Hammond and Schultz, who had been surgically attached to Hammond, talk me into setting up a phony meet. The idea was to pick someplace relatively conspicuous and
let the cops station half a dozen watchers in the neighborhood, three on wheels, three on foot. The meet was set for 7:00 P.M., by which time some anonymous optimist in a uniform had decided that rush hour would have died down. With an unpleasant prickling on the back of my neck, I drove to the location-a motel in Santa Monica, nicely positioned at the end of a dead-end street off Ocean Boulevard-went to room 22, as directed, and knocked.

  Willick opened the door. He opened it very wide, as though he wanted to ensure good sight lines from the street.

  “I was hoping it would be you,” I said, fighting down a sudden desire to burst into tears. “This is very reassuring.”

  Willick beamed. He was wearing the worst set of plainclothes I’d ever seen. His tie was skinnier than pasta, and it made his face seem even fatter. His sport coat was the precise shade of green that electric eels are supposed to assume just before they give you thirty volts. His jeans were pressed and fresh from the laundry, and they were so short that you could see the white socks above his big black cop shoes. “Nice disguise,” I said.

  “The jacket’s my brother-in-law’s,” he said proudly.

  “I didn’t know you had a brother-in-law on the force,” I said, waiting for him to close the damn door.

  His smile slipped a little. “Whole family’s on the force,” he said.

  I used my foot to close the door for him. “That explains a lot,” I said. “Have we got watchers?”

  “They’re all over the place,” Willick said enthusiastically, turning to the window. “See? The guy fixing the Coke machine-”

  I slapped his hand away from the blinds, and he yanked it back and flapped it in the air a few times to cool it, looking like a little kid who was deciding whether to cry.

  “It’s not polite to point,” I said, smoothing the blinds down. “How long are we supposed to be here?”