By a stroke of luck, Jan had not been arrested, and Marcus knew that after absorbing the jolt she would immediately hire a lawyer. Unfortunately, he had been informed by the arresting officers there was nothing anyone could do to get him released before his arraignment which, since it was the weekend, would not take place until sometime the following day. His thoughts wandered from his predicament to Julian, who, for all of his crimes, had managed to avoid prison, and then to his grandfather, Mickey Ripps, Dublin tough guy, cock o’ the walk. None the worse for three years of hard time, he would have bedeviled law enforcement for years to come had he not been crushed by that errant crate of mayonnaise. But Mickey, he of the rhinoceros hide, was a lot tougher than his younger grandson.
Marcus wasn’t surprised by the handcuffs, but he was more than slightly taken aback at being shackled to the row of fellow moral relativists who sat with him in the prison van speeding along the 101 freeway taking them downtown to the Los Angeles County jail, where he would pass the night.
It was late afternoon and Marcus had spent nearly five hours behind bars. In his one phone call with Jan, she had assured him she was doing everything possible, but being that it was Sunday the situation was not going smoothly. He heard the strain in her voice and was thankful she was being spared the indignity he was enduring, at least for the time being. It was difficult for him to picture his wife in jail.
Marcus stared straight ahead as they hurtled down the freeway, listening to several conversations being conducted in Spanish. His linguistic skills had not progressed in the time since he’d been selling cable television subscriptions in East L.A., and the only words he was able to make out were dinero and madre. Elaborate tattoos crept down the arms and up the necks of the other prisoners, spider webs, hearts, and fantastical beasts, primitive elaborations of their bearers’ inner lives. The artwork on some of the exposed flesh was crude enough to suggest prison provenance, which Marcus did not find comforting. Several of the men had pronounced facial scars, the fresher ones purple, the more venerable raised and white, winding roads of violence and depravity, signifiers of lives lived at the end of a blade. He fervently hoped no one would speak to him.
“Hola, Gringo.” Marcus looked to his right. A Latino with dyed blond hair and a weight-lifter’s body bursting from a stained wife-beater was addressing him. “What did they get you for, tax evasion?” The inmates who understood English convulsed at this, laughing and wheezing. Had their wrists not been cuffed together, they would have pointed at Marcus, further emphasizing his otherness and isolation. In their amusement, these men exuded an ease with their plight not unfamiliar to the riders of commuter trains. Marcus envied their ability to maintain a barrio groove while chained together like a human charm bracelet in a speeding Correctional Services van. “Hey, pendejo, are you deaf?” the man with the fake blond hair said, louder this time. Marcus realized, to his chagrin, the guy actually expected a response.
“Pandering,” he said, continuing to stare straight ahead.
“What the fuck is that?” He leaned closer now, his breath warm and foul.
Marcus considered lying for a moment. No one in the van had a dictionary, and he knew he could define the word as he pleased. But he sensed that the truth in this context might actually elevate him in their eyes, make them realize that despite his outfit, which had obviously not been selected for intimidation purposes, he was a man of indefinable power, someone with whom to be reckoned. So he said: “I’m a pimp.”
At this news, the English speakers erupted into laughter so raucous, it nearly drowned out the sounds of the engine, which was not well maintained and had been making a clanking sound the entire ride. Upon witnessing this burst of jollity, the others leaned in, wondering what they had missed, looking at the dyed blond muscleman for an explanation. Marcus’s interlocutor translated for the English-as-a-second-language crew: “El dijo que es alcahuete!” instantly causing a second explosion of merriment, and filling the car with braying guffaws that pricked Marcus like a thousand gravity knives. Rapidfire Spanish ensued. It was debated whether or not this could possibly be true and, if it was, would Marcus please arrange introductions once they had been cleared of the crimes they all assured him they had not committed. Marcus knew being an object of their mockery would prevent anything worse from happening to him, and he endured the remainder of the ride certain that no one would want to kill the clown. Cool Breeze, indeed.
Standing in line with his traveling companions, Marcus strategized about how to survive the night. They were being processed for intake, and he wanted to request placement in protective custody. The line moved forward at a brisk pace, most of the prisoners being familiar with the drill. They were issued freshly laundered orange jumpsuits with the words COUNTY JAIL stenciled across the back, and rubber slippers. Marcus had already forfeited his wallet and belt at the previous stop. There were four other men with him in the greasy-walled changing room, and a stone-faced African-American guard with a large sidearm. Slipping into the jail clothes, the material scratchy on his delicate skin, Marcus found that if he concentrated on shutting down and performing the simple task with which he’d been charged, he could move through the moment, connecting it to another, and another, and so get through the remainder of this dreadful day.
Assuming he didn’t get killed.
This was something he willed himself not to think about, tamping the terror rising in his breast as he stood in his underwear pulling up the orange pants, regretting the elastic waist, which made him feel like he was dressing for a shuffleboard match at a retirement home.
Marcus was given a brown paper bag with his dinner in it. A short redneck guard with a crew cut escorted him to a large cell on the fourteenth floor. Marcus asked him what the procedure was for requesting protective custody. The guard said that if he wasn’t rich, famous, or transgendered, he should forget about that. “Watch yourself,” the guard drawled. “If a fight starts, be sure you stay with your own kind.” The sense of impending calamity was heightened by the idea that an altercation might break out and Marcus’s well-being would depend on the sufferance of some swastika-tattooed white power freak.
He walked along a row of holding pens filled with unlucky souls born so far behind the starting line that all their running couldn’t help them avoid the trap door that opened onto a jail cell. The circumstances for Marcus had been different, and he had hastily concluded that his current situation was a supremely earthly retribution for his transgressions. He tried to suppress a mushrooming sense of horror. In an attempt to calm himself, he recalled the deathless words of the dire German: That which is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil. They were cold comfort.
The cell door banged shut, and Marcus didn’t hear the guard walking away because the tension shooting through his muscles caused him to focus solely on the twenty men he was now with, mostly young, black, or Latino, and hard. The few white guys, unshaven, in various states of disrepair, all looked like this was a step up from where they’d spent the previous evening. As his arrival did not induce an immediate reaction from anyone, Marcus, affecting nonchalance remarkably well, given that he wasn’t even certain he could control his bladder, proceeded to an empty space on a metal bench and sat down, pressing his back to the cool cinderblock wall, confident no one could attack him from the rear.
He spent the next fourteen hours in that position, doing breathing exercises, chanting recently learned prayers, remembering old basketball games play by long-ago play, to stay awake, remain alert, anything to keep from losing consciousness in the company of these potentially murderous reprobates. The fear did it, poking and prodding, fighting off any glimmer of the restfulness that might bring dangerous sleep. An hour after he’d arrived there, Marcus ate the bologna sandwich on white bread that was in the sack dinner they’d given him. His stomach gurgled, the hissing and squirting of his intestines as he digested the food a southerly mirror of the silent whirlpool of anxiety spinning through his brain. To give him
self something to do, he ate the soft, mealy apple accompanying the sandwich. He had to urinate, but he knew he was going to hold it in.
The middle of the night was the worst. Men more at ease than he (which was everyone else who was there) were able to find positions in which to sleep. Their cacophonous snoring was gravelly in the foul darkness. From his command post on the metal bench, feeling incrementally less threatened each time another man slid into unconsciousness, Marcus began to think about how he had arrived at this juncture. Not in the larger philosophical sense—for that, he knew he had only himself to blame. But whose perfidy had landed him here? He had been sure it was Mink, but now he was less certain. It could have been anyone. And why hadn’t Jan and Lenore been arrested? He was thrilled they remained free—their incarceration would have been a catastrophe—but he had no explanation for the mystery. As he hovered on the edge of consciousness, his thoughts drifted to his son’s bar mitzvah, the sublimity of the service, the sparkling children at the glowing night party, drinking rainbow-hued cocktails, twirling wildly on the dance floor, ephemeral moments filled with grace and wonder. It was a chapter from a story spun in a gone world.
Jan arrived at the courthouse the following day and posted bail. Marcus squinted when he stepped into the midday light. His whole body ached with exhaustion as he walked down the steps toward the parking lot, holding his wife’s hand. He asked if she had found out anything about the charges. She had learned that the dead body was that of Mahmoud Ghorbanifar, Amstel’s final assignation. This knowledge simplified things for Marcus, since it narrowed the potential number of enemies he faced. When they pulled out of the parking lot, Marcus told her he didn’t want to go straight home.
Jan was driving, since Marcus thought he might fall asleep at the wheel. They were travelling west on the 101 through light traffic. He was staring out the passenger window.
“What did you tell Nathan?”
“I told him the police wanted to ask you some questions, and you had to go on a business trip. I didn’t get into any details.”
Her presence was reassuring to him, but there was nothing she could have said to make him feel less terrible. It was as if his entire life had burst into jagged shards that could never again be pieced together.
Marcus hadn’t been back to the beach at Leo Carrillo State Park since his day trips with Bertrand Russell two summers earlier. Years ago, he and Jan would come here with Nathan and hold his small hands so he could jump over the waves as they rolled to the shore. The beach felt decidedly different now, as they sat on the sand and stared at the ocean. Jan pulled her loose skirt above her knees. The autumn sun was hot and they hadn’t put sunscreen on, but Marcus didn’t care. The sea air was giving him a second wind. Both of them had taken their shoes off. Jan wriggled her bare feet in the sand.
“Did you ever want to dive into the waves and just keep going?” Marcus asked.
“What, like to Japan?”
“Japan, Thailand … anywhere.”
“Maybe we should have gone to China.”
“It’s a little late in the day.”
He wished he saw dolphins. Perhaps they might lighten his mood. A line of surfers straddled their boards, waiting for rides. Although Marcus had grown up by the sea, he had never surfed. He wished he could lock into the elemental nature of it now, the sky, the undulating ocean. He wanted to feel its force; its depth and power, to be carried along by unseen currents, tossed, and thrown, powerless, the water pressing down on him in a cold soothing embrace, swimming deeper and deeper into the cool depths, darker and darker until he only had a memory of light, and then no memory at all, and then nothing.
He ran a handful of sand through his fingers. A cool wind blew from offshore. Marcus squinted. His remembered that his sunglasses were in the car, but the few hundred yards were too far to walk. He needed to make some sense of what had happened, try to fit it into a mathematical equation he could work out that would somehow allow him to balance the internal ledger. Marcus had made his money. Debt had released its bony grip from their collective windpipe. He was driving a car he didn’t need, but he had made no onerous financial commitments.
Marcus stared at the waves, suffused with a gray sadness. It was not the sadness of shame or regret that weighed on him. He had thought about this during his long night in the cell and concluded, no, he was not sorry for what he’d done. He was sorry he’d been caught before he brought the curtain down of his own volition. Although Marcus had worked through the moral implications of his actions long ago, the criminal life caused a certain ongoing strain on his psyche. So along with his sorrow came a feeling of relief. He suspected he would be able to apply the lessons he’d learned in his future endeavors.
Jan dropped Marcus off at the house and went to pick up Nathan at school. The scent of garlic greeted him when he walked in the kitchen door. Lenore was stirring something in a pot on the stove. A stained cookbook was open on the counter in front of her, and next to that a piece of meat was marinating in a mixing bowl. Marcus inhaled deeply.
“I’m making you osso buco for dinner,” she said. “You once told me you really like it. I have no idea if it’s going to be good.”
Marcus was deeply appreciative of Lenore’s gesture. He waited for her to mention what had taken place. Instead, she asked him to cut up some lemons and squeeze their contents into a pan for a dessert she was going to bake. He stood silently beside her and removed a lemon from a purple ceramic bowl filled with them. He sliced it in two, then placed the half-sphere in the squeezer and brought the handles together, the tart juice running into the pan. He took another lemon from the bowl and repeated the process. At that moment, standing in his kitchen on this autumn afternoon, he wished he could spend the rest of his life engaged in this simple task.
Later that day, Jan brought Nathan home from a math tutoring session. The house was suffused with the garlicky smell of the cooking osso buco and the scent of lemon cake. Marcus greeted him in the kitchen and tried to act nonchalant, making him a sandwich and watching as he ate it. Ordinarily Nathan would have asked what was cooking, but today he acted as if nothing special was going on.
“Anything happen at school today?”
“Not really.”
Had he heard anything? Probably not. And would he have said something if he had? Marcus had no idea. Had Nathan inherited his dissembling gene? That was a troubling thought.
The family ate dinner together that night, and although Marcus complimented Lenore on the food, he could hardly taste it. Later, he and Jan watched the news on Channel 9. After an update on the fire in the Angeles National Forest, the pretty Scottish-Hispanic anchorwoman appeared in front of a graphic that read PIMP DADDY and breathlessly intoned “Van Nuys man Marcus Ripps was arrested for running a call-girl ring yesterday.” Jan squeezed his hand and gave him a look that implied she felt sorry for him. Marcus tried not to resent her pity as he sank further into the sofa. When his mug shot appeared behind the news reader, he turned off the television and went upstairs to lie down. After a few minutes, he felt like his nerves were going to cause him to levitate. So he came downstairs to talk to Jan about what to do, now that his situation was public knowledge. He found her in the den, researching criminal lawyers on the Internet.
“Before we do anything else,” she said, “you have to tell Nathan.”
Marcus agreed and went back upstairs, where he knocked gently on the bedroom door and pushed it open. He saw Nathan seated at his computer, listening to music on headphones as he worked on the lab report for his science fair project. Marcus tapped him on the shoulder, and Nathan removed the headphones.
“You might be hearing something about me at school, Nate, something not so good.” Nathan’s face remained impassive. “I was arrested, and if we can’t get the charges dismissed, there’s going to be a trial.”
“Why did they arrest you?”
Marcus took a deep breath and launched into a slightly laundered version of the story, one in which th
e business was a dating service where sometimes people mutually agreed to have sex.
“Are you going to have to go to jail?”
“I don’t know.” Marcus waited a moment to give his son a chance to absorb this particular reality. “You know I love you, right?”
“So, Dad, are you, like, kind of a pimp?”
“That’s what they’re saying.”
Nathan’s face remained neutral. Marcus had no idea what he was thinking, couldn’t discern how his young brain was processing this information. Marcus sensed that Nathan was seeing him as if for the first time.
“What’s going to happen to me if you go to jail?”
“No one’s going to jail, okay?”
Nathan’s nervous half-smile did not indicate to Marcus that he was significantly reassured. The silence was pierced by the ringing of the phone.
Jan called out from another room: “Marcus, it’s Atlas, for you.”
The Winthrop Hall Middle School science fair, one of the major events of the academic year, took place the following evening. Nathan had been diligently working on his project, a scale model of a windmill that actually produced enough power to illuminate a small light, and he expected his parents to attend. Marcus begged off, but Jan did not want Nathan to go alone. She took longer than usual to get ready since this was her first time in public as the wife of an accused felon. She tried on several outfits before she found one she liked—jeans, a fitted white shirt, and a knitted green blazer. Her makeup was applied meticulously and, after taking a last look in the full-length mirror in the bedroom, she was prepared to face her new life.
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