In the Court of the Yellow King

by Tim Curran

  Ganz was drinking in the King Eddy Saloon on East Fifth, another one of his autopilot destinations programmed into his circuitry back in the Clinton Administration. He didn’t venture out much these days, and when he did, he never made it this far east, so taking down cheap drinks in dirty glassware felt like a bankers’ holiday. The place was mostly empty. The usual cast of vagrants and penny ante hustlers was cut down to a few choice stragglers, flavored by a stereotypical sampling of Silver Lake dropouts and intrepid West Siders who had dared cross the La Cienega Divide. A Latino woman with shock wig hair dyed orange and eyebrows painted up over the center of her forehead stared at the wall covered in old boxing paintings and a framed photograph of FDR. A toothless man with mechanics’ hands mumbled over his nearly empty pilsner glass of beer. Two hipsters with newly minted 70’s togs, strategically messy hair, and Amish beards strolled through the place, clutching cans of Pabst like they were vessels of holy water and looking at the pictures and faded out signage on the walls, peppering their discussion of a screenplay in progress with cooed exclamations of “gritty ambiance” and something called “gutterpunk.”

  The bartender walked over and asked if he wanted another. Ganz nodded and looked around the place one more time for the sake of the coming small talk, scratching behind his armpit.

  “Kind of dead around here, huh?”

  The bartender sighed, pouring another double with a heavy hand. “Everyone’s checking out the library fire.” Sully used to work the sticks back when Ganz haunted this place. Sully wouldn’t be caught dead sighing in front of a customer, or even by himself. Sully killed two-dozen Koreans back in the forgotten 50’s.

  “You notice the city painting over the murals around town?”

  “Nope,” the bartender said. “I live in Santa Monica. Don’t really see many down there.”

  Good Christ. A 310 tending bar in an honest to goodness 213 joint. Ganz was appalled, and looked at him more closely. The tailored jeans, the factory-aged t-shirt, the ridiculously expensive shoes made from repurposed leather stitched with Humboldt County hemp. Who hired this fucking guy? Where the hell was he right now, anyway? Ganz glanced around, noticing that the barroom looked like the King Eddy Saloon, but something was definitely different. New ownership. Goddamnit. Some enterprising Millennial had bought the wormy old place, taking everything down, cleaned off the filth and grime and crime and motherfucking character, and rebuilt King Eddy to look like the potentate he once was. But these cash maggoting culture pimps never understood that they couldn’t put the soul back into the revived body, as it had already fled this mortal coil at the registered time of death. History withers in the face of bleach and paint, even in a place built basement deep by dead bootleggers.

  “It ain’t the city.”

  The voice shook Ganz, who looked down the bar. A man he hadn’t seen come in was sitting on the corner stool and holding a pilsner glass in front of him like he was waiting to make a toast. He was a Hispanic guy, deeply tanned and even more deeply wrinkled, wearing his slate gray hair long and slicked back, curling up at the nape of his collared white dress shirt. He wore thick tinted glasses, like BB King. There was a distinguished air about him, from the way he held his drink to the golden pinkie ring on his left hand. In another version of Hollywood, he’d be a leading man on the decline, or a producer who owned half of the Hills. The fact that he was down here meant he was neither of those things. Old guys didn’t go in for irony. “It’s the street painting over them murals,” he said. “The new street.”

  Ganz swiveled in his chair, every cell erect. “How do you know?”

  “Because I got eyes under these things, and ears next to ‘em.”

  “Then you’ve seen it, too.”

  The man drained his glass of dark beer, foam still rimming the top, and pushed it back away from him.

  Ganz finished his own glass and motioned to the bartender for another round for the both of them. “What do you mean by ‘street’?”

  The man laughed, deep and wet. Smoker. “Come on, man. You know what I mean, right? The street. You know the street. You know it just like the rest of us.”

  Ganz squinted through the low light at the man’s face. He looked familiar, but he couldn’t place him. Maybe he saw him on TV.

  “You’re trying to remember, ain’t you? You will. I ain’t wearing no mask. I ain’t seeing that shit.”

  Ganz’s eyebrows shot up. “Seeing what shit?”

  The man said nothing, flipping a Zippo between his fingers. A long thin cigarette was stowed behind his ear, poking through the drape of his hair.

  “So the masks figure in somehow?”

  The round arrived, and the man pulled out a twenty from a large roll of green, pushing it toward the bartender. “For mine.” The bartender shrugged, took the bill and rang him up. The man poured the Modelo slowly into his glass.

  “Yeah, they figure in.” The man didn’t elaborate, instead sipped his beer.

  “Is this a gang thing? Some bullshit theatrical twist on colors?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Look, friend—” Ganz said, getting up from his stool and moving toward him.

  “— I ain’t your friend,” the man said without turning, stopping Ganz in his tracks by the flat tone of his voice. “And you ain’t mine, so why don’t you stay where you’re at.”

  Ganz slid back into his chair. He knew this drill and wasn’t fazed. No matter how many years he had lived here, he was still the tourist. The interloper. White man on the bus.

  “So what’s with the masks?”

  “You working a case, gringo?”

  “No, I—”

  The man laughed, cutting him off. “I know. You can’t, right? Maybe writing a story for the paper?”

  “Wait a minute—”

  “Nah, that can’t be it either. Maybe you just scared. Scared gringo. Gringos down here always been scared, ever since Avila Adobe. Maybe you got The Fear.”

  Ganz wanted to say something, but couldn’t. The words stuck in his throat. Instead, he watched the man take a luxurious drink of his beer, then dab at his handlebar moustache with a white hankie.

  “They don’t talk on the street. None of them. They do what they do, quiet, then they put on the play again. Started around Olvera Street, under the church. Lots of things happen under churches. Lots of things under churches... Our Lady Queen of the Angels.” The man chuckled to himself, finished his beer. “Angels.” He slowly drained the bottle into his glass, the sediments dropping to the bottom as the foam built carefully on top, rising to the rim and stopping just short of spillage. “More people come, talking about Cassilda. Cassandra... One of them white girl names...” He sniffed, sitting up straight in his chair, freeing up the war in his lower back. “Everyone gathers round, goes down into the basement. Catacombs where the lizards hide out. See what the play says. Then they go out again. Marching orders. They snatch up the books, anything that ain’t the play, and have themselves a barbeque. Fires all around town. Up in them hills around the stadium, north up the Arroyo Seco. Cops blamed the homeless, bored kids, but they know better. Maybe you seen something today, huh? Heard they had a big one.”

  Ganz wished he had his notepad in his hand, but knew if he reached for it, the story would be over.

  “Then all the old vatos disappear. All the big boys. OGs. Then the little ones. Then...” He blinked under those thick lenses, long eyelashes fluttering. “Then they do another play. Then another. Same show, different showing, see? All over the barrio. Boyle Heights. El Sereno. Lincoln Heights. They grow, moving out from the underneath, from the back yards. Bell Gardens, Southgate, up to Highland Park, Eagle Rock. All along the Arroyo Seco. The river walls, that cement, that’s their theatre now—” The man snapped his fingers in front of his left ear, then laughed. “After every show, it just gets more quiet. This city wasn’t meant to be q
uiet.”

  Ganz mulled this over. “Play... You mean theatre?”

  “A week ago or so, a group of kids was standing on the corner, just down the block from here, over by skid row, all wearing them masks. They wasn’t just hangin’ out, they were standing on the street corner, like at attention. Like military. Just standing there, not doing nothing. Not even moving. Four in the morning. Kids don’t hang out down there. Not without baggies in their pockets, and that’s a no-no with them guys.”

  Ganz’s mind raced, looking for connections, angles... and found none. He’d need more fuel, so he shook his glass. “Weird.”

  “Fuckin’-a, weird. This shit happens every night, on different corners. Next day, them corners are all clean. Dope dealers gone. Graffiti, colors... gone.”

  He laughed again and motioned for another beer. Ganz tried to intercept the order, but the man shook his head.

  “Your buddies roll up on them one night. Two cops, a black guy and some Italian dude. They grab a kid from the group and slam him on the hood of their car, cussing him. Scream at him to ‘cooperate’. Kid don’t move. They keep screaming, then the Italian pulls off the mask.”

  “What did the kid do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean ‘nothing’?”

  The man turned to face Ganz for the first time. “I mean nothing, motherfucker. The kid didn’t do shit. Didn’t do shit or say shit. He just stared at that fucking WOP who cuffed him.”

  “And then?”

  “And then the ambulance comes.”

  “Why?”

  “Cuz someone died.”

  A new beer arrived and was set in front of the man, who filled his glass, the statement lingering like a serial cliffhanger.

  “Who died?”

  The man turned to Ganz and held up his full glass. “Salud, Detective Ganz, for my 25 years in Pelican Bay.”

  Ganz nearly choked on one of the slushy ice cubes in his glass. “I... I...”

  The man drained half his beer, and set it down very slowly onto the bar napkin in front of him. “You put me away for what my brother did.” The man dabbed his moustache. “You didn’t have shit, but you had enough. You had the spic who did it, even when he didn’t. Didn’t matter which spic it was, as long as you got one, to throw to the wolves riding on the back of a white girl’s honor.”

  Ganz sat back, replaying his three previous lives as if it was a 70’s living room slide show, trying to find the right cell with all of the smiling and waving family members. But he couldn’t. After a moment or two, he gave up. His brain was tired, and he knew he wouldn’t make the connection, recall the damning collar, so he just lowered his head. “I’m sorry,” Ganz said, hearing how trivial that sounded, considering. “I don’t remember.”

  The man just nodded very slowly, taking another long drink that finished his beer, still not looking at Ganz. “Yeah, I suppose you’re sorry for all of it, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah, I really am,” Ganz said with a long exhale of breath, before draining his new glass in one gulp. He grimaced, sat up straight in his chair, and attempted to commiserate by pulling out a tiny shard from his personal litany. “Police work is a gymnastics routine between heaven and hell. Sometimes we stick the landing, sometimes we don’t.”

  The man turned in his stool and looked straight at Ganz, his dark eyes large and inscrutable behind those thick tinted lenses. After a few moments, he nodded. “Yeah, that landing is a bitch.” He got up, headed toward the door. “The play’s the thing, holmes.”

  Ganz shrugged off the specific guilt and overall white man’s burden that had poisoned his time at the LAPD long enough to process what he just heard. “What do you mean?”

  The man stopped and turned his head slightly. “You done asking questions of me, Detective Ganz.” He headed for the door. “See you on the other side. We’ll all be waiting.”

  The door opened, briefly letting in the murmur of the night, and then closed again.

  Taste of Flame

  Ganz left King Eddy’s a few minutes later, his whole body shaking, and dove headlong into those murmuring streets. He could have hopped the last bus, but decided to walk. His legs needed to move under him while his mind worked, processing what he had just heard.

  The spider crouching on his spine was now dancing. There was something growing inside the city, moving out from the core to infect the rest of the whole like a cancer. The play. The burning of the library. Olvera Street, the birthplace of Los Angeles. The spread. The rivers. The play. What fucking play? Shakespeare? The play’s the thing, to uncover the consciousness of the king. Hamlet. College drama class. A poisoned king, a melancholy son. An immoral mother. Patriarchal bullshit. Still, those masks, those slogans... What did it all mean?

  Following his legs while his head jagged elsewhere, Ganz caught Main and headed straight south until it found Olympic, the one major street cutting downtown that would allow him the best chance of getting home without getting rolled for his shoes. The fire at the library was out, but the smoke from all that smoldering parchment still filled the sky, white and fluffy and lighter than night above it. Ashes of dead books fell like a mockery of snow on a city that would never know it. Didn’t deserve it after selling its soul for blue skies and room temp and a citizenry that burned down libraries. Ganz held out his hand and caught a falling bit of ash on his fingertip, raising it on his tongue, like he used to do as a child in Nebraska when the earth froze and turned brown and white and quiet. It tasted like fire. Motherfuckers.

  ugs

  Downtown seemed to be in mourning with Ganz, or more likely annoyed by the heavy police presence, as it was nearly deserted, the major venues - Staples, LA Live, Nokia Theater, various spike heel clubs - shuttered for the night. The parking lot valets still manned their posts, waving their flags in the dark and ignoring Ganz as he walked past.

  Ganz moved quickly away from the electronic circus at Olympic and Fig that advertised everything to no one in the wake of the big downtown revitalization launched a few years back that didn’t quite catch on. It was just like Hollywood and Highland to the west, with less TV coverage. Stripping off the grime and crime that made this city the chaotic pheromone that it once was and sterilizing it for minivan tourists and “Vegas baby!” cheeseballs. Ganz passed under the freeway and the cardboard campground that went up there every night, stepping around a few nodded-out sidewalk sleepers, and dove deeper into Pico Union. A fire was burning in a barrel behind an auto shop, like you see in those old movies about New York before Giuliani. Ganz wondered whose books were in that barrel. After several blocks, he noticed how quiet it was. And deserted. Street corners were free of shaved head Latinos, socks pulled up to meet their long blue shorts, waiting for west side party people to drive up and hand them money for a homegrown export shipped north.

  Instead of loitering men, Ganz found mattresses. Up and down the block, every fenced-in yard and apartment building driveway featured rectangular slabs of fabric and stuffing propped up on the curb, on light poles, even on parked cars. On each mattress the word BUGS was scrawled in black spray paint. Ganz unconsciously itched under his armpit.

  Minutes later at his house, Ganz dragged his mattress outside, pushed it through his gate and left it blocking the sidewalk, then headed back inside for a can of spray paint. Before he got to his door, he stopped and cocked his ear to the sky, listening. No revving engines, no shouts, no gunshots. He heard absolutely nothing. Nothing weighs on city ears more than an unexpected silence. Ganz headed back inside, flipping on his TV on his way to his tool closet.

  Through his open door behind him, on the street corner opposite his yard, a figure wearing a featureless mask looked on. An identical companion joined him, then another, and another still.

  ew Numbers

  Victor Baumgartner rolled up Union Ave at 6:00 pm sharp three days later. Ganz was waiting at
the curb, peering through pitch black gas station shades up and down the empty streets as if waiting for something. He looked like hell, like he had spent the last 72 hours draining his house of anything remotely fermented and mostly liquid, before finally returning one of Bum’s numerous concerned calls about an hour ago.

  Bum’s Mercedes sedan pulled to a stop. Ganz lurched to his feet and poured himself into the passenger seat, slamming the door behind him.

  “Drive.”

  “Someone after you?”

  “They told you?”

  Bum laughed. “I was joking. The neighborhood’s dead.”

  “Not dead, sleeping.”

  Bum chuckled, assuming a joke. “It feels like driving on Christmas morning. Like everyone down here split town. Maybe went back home. Hell, the mayor’s already crowing about the new numbers, and they’re only a few weeks old.”

  “What numbers?”

  “Hasn’t been a shooting or an assault in all the favorite places since that... thing at the Park Plaza. All the gun boys must be on vacation. Or maybe they all found Jesus at the same time. East L.A. is like a friggin’ sewing circle right now. South Central is just as quiet. Highland Park, Bell, Venice. Ghost towns.”

  “They’re still here, most of them, anyway. They’re waiting for something.” Ganz pulled down his glasses with a shaky hand and checked to see if they were being followed. DTs, Bum thought, as he could smell three days of whiskey worming its way out of his friend.

  “The dealers went with them. The junkies down in tent city are ready to riot, I hear. Climbing the walls, and each other.”

  “There’s a cleansing going on, from the top down.”

  “A cleansing? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Everyone with a rap sheet longer than my pinky has gone missing.”