“What’s that you’re writing?” asked Julia, glancing over my shoulder. “It’s awfully purple.”
“It’s just some poncey thoughts I’d been having since we got here.”
“Ravi,” she laughed. “You’ve caught the bug!”
The “bug” she was referring to was this impulse to write. I’d never been one to keep a diary, but lately I’d had the urge to jot things down. Maybe I just needed to capture my thoughts because of how batshit insane my life had become since I started at Golden Sentinels—and it wasn’t getting any less so. Julia’s hobby since we’d arrived was to immerse herself in books and novels about the city. She was obsessed with the mythology of Los Angeles. It wasn’t old like London. It was ethereal, a chimera in the heat-haze, and she took to that in a big way. In fact, she bloody loved it because it was so unlike London. It was naked in its dishonesty, without the pomposity with which the City of Fog liked to coat its deceits and hypocrisies due to snobbery and embarrassment. This was a city with no sense of embarrassment or need for dignity at all, and Julia found that liberating. With her English Rose looks and accent, the city took to her in an equally big way. Rooms stopped when she entered them. Some people remembered her supermodel sister Louise and would tell her they were big fans. This touched her. Louise was never far from her, from us. We kept mum that Louise was trans, though in this day and age, that would probably have gone down a treat and given her career a massive boost. It was a shame Louise hadn’t lived to see this. Julia wept for that.
As I held Julia in my arms during the night, I saw Bagalamukhi standing on the balcony of our rented apartment surveying the city. Roger had put us up in a one-bedroom condominium just off Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. It was no surprise she would like it here. It was full of deceit and façade. As she texted and tweeted about it on her phone to the other gods, she looked like she fit right in.
That was the thing about the gods, they fit in everywhere now. A god for every occasion. I had hoped they might have stayed behind in London, which had enough chaos and strife to keep any deity occupied, but of course they followed me, watching, being amused. They were my gods, after all.
TWO
Morning, Ravi.” Marilyn the receptionist greeted me cheerfully, as usual. “Would you like some water?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
Offering people water seemed to be the thing here in Los Angeles, the first courtesy in every meeting. I wondered if this had anything to do with the city’s having been built in the desert.
Chuck Feeney, the head of the firm in LA, ran the place with a laid-back, distinctly Californian air of casualness and a variation of Roger’s silver tongue. His charm was less abrasive than Roger’s, his tan a direct contrast to Roger’s paler London skin. Chuck had grown up in show business, a surfer dude in Malibu who had enjoyed a brief stint as an actor back in the seventies and eighties, done detective work as a favor to friends, and when the acting work dried up, been persuaded by Roger to get a license and run the LA office for job security. Apparently, a good health insurance plan was a huge incentive for them here, along with something called a 401(k), which someone would have to explain to me later.
“Listen up, kids,” Chuck announced to the staff the day Julia and I arrived. “Ravi and Julia here are from the mother ship in London. Roger sent them here to shadow us and watch how we do things out here, kind of a fact-finding tour. They’re not going to get in your way, just ask a few questions and pick up some pointers. Let’s make ’em feel welcome in the Golden Sentinels family.”
This was a busman’s holiday. Julia and I were here as Roger’s people from London, here to learn how the Los Angeles office did things. We didn’t have a license to practice as private investigators in California or the US, so we couldn’t officially work any cases. What was unspoken was that I was assessing whether they were slack or incompetent at the office here. They were kind enough to fix up a desk for Julia and me to set up our laptops. These were clean laptops that they kept at the office, part of a policy that Olivia had implemented for all the Golden Sentinels offices. Julia and I had flown into LAX with clean smartphones that didn’t have any social media apps installed, or contacts lists filled in, so the US immigrant officials couldn’t get any information off of the phones—and they certainly tried, after asking to inspect them. They let Julia in without a hitch since she was white, blond, and had a posh accent, but they kept me back at the airport to ask if I was Muslim. Even when I told them I wasn’t, they eyed me suspiciously. It wasn’t my British passport and the Visa Waiver rules, but whatever Very Special List Marcie Holder had put me on, that persuaded them that I wasn’t some enemy terrorist trying to infiltrate the country. The immigration officer took my passport and whispered something to his colleague, who typed something into his computer, then looked at me again, before they let me through without any further hassle. The Muslim couple who were in line behind me didn’t look quite so lucky. As I walked through Immigration, I glanced at them being led to the interview rooms and didn’t fancy their chances.
“I thought they were going to clap you in irons and that would be the last I saw of you,” Julia said, half-jokingly, when I met her out at the baggage claim section.
“This trip is still young,” I said.
The first thing that struck me about Golden Sentinels Los Angeles was how pretty everyone who worked there was. Oh, Roger liked to hire good-looking people whenever possible. Apart from Ken and Clive, who looked like bruisers and ex-coppers of the old school, Roger made sure the rest of us were at least easy on the eyes when we wore business suits. The Los Angeles investigators were in a completely different league—their bodies were toned and athletic with not an ounce of fat, and their teeth were so white they could reflect the sun and provide lighting for the room. Julia recognized the signs of cosmetic surgery in some of them—a chiseled nose here, some cheek implants there, breasts so pert they could only have had the aid of medical science. Cheryl had told me a third of the staff were struggling actors earning a decent wage on investigations in between auditions, hoping to land a TV show during pilot season, which made sense, I suppose. And at least half the staff here were ex-coppers and struggling actors.
And despite their unreal, fantastical looks, Julia still turned their heads. The way she didn’t play up or make extra effort to draw attention to her looks drew attention wherever we went in LA. I also wondered if people here in the most oversexed city in America could detect the dangerous air of sex that Julia carried with her due to her addiction. At the end of the day, natural, unself-conscious, biodegradable beauty still trumped plastic perfection.
The LA office was in the most unreal and expensive part of town, of course—Beverly Hills—because it needed to be, to reassure clients the company was top of the line. It followed the same open-plan principles our London office did, looking more like a trendy tech start-up office than a private investigations firm. It had even more natural light and big windows, with desks arranged not as cubicles but a circle to encourage the investigators to engage and share with one another. The dress code here was much more casual, mainly tight T-shirts, polo shirts, and khakis for the men, shirts, denim jackets, and jeans for the women. The biggest difference from the London office was the recreational area, which had a mini gym with barbells, a treadmill, an elliptical machine, and exercise balls. The investigators there seemed to take breaks to do chin-ups and core exercises on the balls several times a day.
“Helps them think,” Chuck said, but Julia and I just thought they were obsessed with keeping their bodies fit for appearances, the ones that were addicted to the burn and endorphin rush. Back in London, everyone went to the gym on their own time and never bothered talking about it.
Hector and Dave from the New York office had told me a while back that private investigators in America needed licenses in order to operate legitimately as businesses. That suited me just fine, since I was still reeling from the Harkingdales case in London and wasn’t
really up for working anyway. I was still seriously considering chucking it all in, but what was the alternative? I still had bills to pay and wasn’t really qualified for any respectable, middle-class job now. Thanks to Golden Sentinels’ training, I was good at social engineering and illicit information-gathering and a whole range of illegal skills. Working at a McDonald’s was not going to do. Marcie also told me that I was an investment, for Roger on one hand and her on the other. They’d trained me very well and I was paying off in spades. It would be a waste for me and my skill set to drop out of the game now. And this was my break. I was perfectly content just to follow and observe the Los Angeles office on their cases. They had their groove going here. It wasn’t as if they would need the advice of a parochial Londoner in the unreal madness of Los Angeles. No, Julia was right. Best to treat this as an adventure, a book unfolding before our eyes, or better yet, a movie playing out just for us. She was on break from college, so she wasn’t even losing any time on her course work. She was reading Los Angeles novels and could get a paper out of it, so on top of spending time with me, this was a win-win for her. We both needed a change of scenery from the gray skies and gray morality of London. The vivid blue of the sky and the unfiltered sunlight was a harsh blast of culture shock that our systems seemed to need.
“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun,” sang Noel Coward. If that were true, we could expect to go completely barmy here. According to Noel Coward, us Hindus should be able to sleep through it, but I was also British, and madness was still too close for comfort for me.
“You would like that, wouldn’t you?” Kali whispered in my eye, her fingers brushing my shoulders lightly.
I shuddered at the thought. Going psychotic this far from home was not my idea of a fun holiday.
Julia was particularly taken with They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. For an airbrushed, sun-drenched playground, Los Angeles seemed particularly given to apocalyptic narratives even a century ago.
THREE
Darrell Chestwood was one of those men who looked like he worked out to within an inch of his life. There was not an ounce of fat on him, just hard lines all over his body. He was not untypical amongst the specimens in the office at Golden Sentinels LA, but he seemed to be the poster child. And yes, he was an actor, going on auditions and taking acting classes in between jobs for the agency.
“Darrell,” Chuck said. “Why don’t you take Ravi and Julia along when you go see your A-list client today?”
“Sure thing, Chuck.”
I still hadn’t decided if the pervasive amiability around the office was forced or not.
Darrell was a chatty one. So was Chuck. The whole LA office was, as if this was the law of the land. We liked Darrell well enough, but I imagined his overall affability was one of the qualities for which he’d been hired at the LA office. The first thing he did when we were introduced to him was give us his headshot.
“You never know,” he said, indicating that this was not a new practice for him. It was his version of giving us a calling card. His was a flawless postcard-sized photo with contact information and his résumé on the back.
“Nobody’s going to carry a letter-sized headshot in their pocket,” Darrell said as he drove us down Melrose to the movie studio.
“How do you like working at Golden Sentinels?” I asked.
“It’s cool,” he said. “Like, really cool. Beats working as a waiter or bartender, you know? The hours are even more flexible. I can make time for my classes and auditions, and some of the clients put me in touch with casting calls. I landed a commercial once from that. Too bad it was local, not national, or I would have been made.”
“So what’s the percentage of clients who are in show business?” Julia asked.
“According to Chuck, sixty to seventy percent,” Darrell said.
“And he doesn’t have a problem with you getting leads on acting jobs from the clients?” I asked.
“Nope. That’s stuff on the side, and outside the agency, so he’s cool with it, as long as we fill him in on any scheduling issues.”
When we got to the studio (which lawyers won’t let me name, but you can probably guess if you know Los Angeles), the guard waved us in because Darrell and Golden Sentinels were known to them by now. Darrell parked his Prius and we got into one of those golf carts to drive to the star’s trailer.
The client was filming his latest superhero sequel here at the studio in LA rather than a studio in London or Romania, a rare occurrence since so few films were even shot in Hollywood anymore. Darrell explained this to us. Tax incentives in other states and Canada made it cheaper to shoot almost anywhere but Hollywood. That was ironic. Hollywood had become a façade of itself; the movie factory didn’t make movies in its factories anymore. That was surreal enough, but what was even more surreal was that punters like me knew this, too, by now.
We arrived outside The Client’s trailer, and Darrell was about to knock on the door when he heard something from inside and refrained. (Lawyers have made me omit the client’s name.)
“He’s, er, getting serviced,” Darrell said. “We better wait till he’s done.”
“Serviced” made it sound like he was a car being worked on, but of course what it really meant was the A-list movie star was getting a blow job. As we waited, Darrell shook hands with Sean’s assistant, who stood by a small team of people Darrell told us were from the wardrobe department.
“Is my boy Darrell out there?” The Client cried from inside the trailer. “Get in here, bro!”
“Comin’ in,” Darrell said. “You decent? I brought some colleagues of mine.”
“They with you? Great! I need all the help I can get!” The Client cried.
“Hey, Sharon.” Darrell greeted the girl with the tattoos wiping her mouth and getting up from the floor of the trailer.
“Darrell,” she said curtly.
“Darrell, man, I relapsed.”
“Where is it?” Darrell asked.
“Drawer.”
Darrell walked over to the dresser and retrieved a few Baggies of white powder. I had thought his relapse was Sharon, not the white powder, or perhaps both. But no, it was the cocaine.
“Now I’m going to have to talk about this at AA and not get my anniversary medallion,” The Client whined. He was adjusting the compartment on the crotch of his superhero armor. The wardrobe department had seen fit to build a hatch to allow him easier access when he needed to pee. This had proved useful for when he needed to get “serviced” by his groupie Sharon. According to Darrell, she was originally the case. She had been stalking The Client, sending him emails, gifts, finding out his personal mobile phone number and directly texting him, to the point where his wife felt the need to hire Golden Sentinels to sort her out and see if she might harbor homicidal impulses towards him or his wife. She was an überfan, and fortunately for him, she was well fit. Or “hot,” as the Yanks might say. The Client and his wife, herself an A-list actress, were known around town for having an open marriage, but he didn’t tell her his stalker had become his latest bit on the side.
“Last chance, dude,” Darrell said.
“Do it!”
Darrell flushed the gak down the trailer’s toilet. The Client winced; his mouth pursed and grimaced at the sound of the waters swirling his favorite addiction away. Just as well he kept his second favorite addiction—sex outside his marriage—on tap.
“Think of your better and higher self,” Darrell said.
“Better and higher self,” The Client chanted like a mantra.
“Dollars to donuts he’s going back into rehab once this shoot is over,” Darrell whispered to me, the flushing toilet hiding his words from The Client.
Lord Vishnu stood in the trailer with us, looking on sagely. I glanced out the window and saw the other gods milling around, looking every bit like they belonged here, on a film set, completely at home. Kali dancing down the lot. Ganesha sitting
in the back of another golf cart cruising by. If you asked me, the gods had been even more at home on Hollywood Boulevard when Julia and I took a walk down there on Sunday, milling and mixing with the superheroes and the Jesus Christs. Mark once idly said superheroes were modern gods. The difference being that these modern gods were corporate-owned and served to make them billions in profits in movie ticket sales and toys. This was all from my head, of course. I was projecting my own apprehension about the world onto the gods appearing before me. That was what I kept telling myself.
“Consider that the modern-day version of the tithe,” Mark said. “After all, worshippers of gods give their dosh to churches and temples, ‘donate’ money for prayers, charms, and mantras. How is that really different?”
“I think there are differences in nuances of faith,” I said.
“That’s mainly semantics,” Mark said, puffing on his spliff.
“Superheroes began as heroic fantasies for children,” I said. “And given how fucked and chaotic the world is, a lot of people grow up and cling onto tokens and idols that give them succor and comfort.”
“That’s not so different from worshipping or praying to gods, is it?” Mark said. “It’s all a form of magical thinking at the end of the day. You’re the only bloke I know who’s stuck with his gods and wishes it wasn’t the case.”
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