I see him as the elevator doors open. Standing uneasily in the lobby. His gray hair falls lank around his face. There are broken blood vessels, the color of an eggplant, under his right eye, that fade to yellow in a long smear. His nails are brown. He wears combat pants and a dated-looking jacket. I wave from the elevator. “Hey man,” he says, his voice strung out, soft and low. “Come on up,” I tell him as I hold the elevator doors open.
Janine has laid the food out across the table in the meeting room. A pizza, paper plates, two bottles of Coca-Cola and a pile of napkins left over from a lunch my boss threw last week. It looks like a five-year-old’s party. You’re a saint, I say, then I ask how long we have before our editor gets back from lunch. I watch her leave, then close the door to the meeting room. I tell Bernstein we have pizza this week and that I hope that works for him. It takes a moment for my words to register through the haze. “Pizza, yeah, thanks, man,” he says. I ask him if he wants to take a shower, and putting my hand on his shoulder, I say I’ve only got an hour this week. It’s like talking down a line long distance.
I show Bernstein through to the shower my editor’s predecessor at the paper had installed and which the current editor allows the few of us who sometimes cycle to work to use. I turn it on for him and the white cubicle fills with steam. As I wait, I stand over my desk and delete a string of e-mails. After Bernstein has showered and dressed, I go back into the restroom and push the used towels toward the laundry hamper with my foot. We sit at the meeting table and look out across the street.
I could give him the statistics: 198 murders this year so far, how even our mild winter will see a spike in morbidity in the people who live on the streets, how living rough here will take on average 36 percent off your life expectancy. I could tell him all of this. I could offer him the house I grew up in in Mar Vista. The house my mother got sick in after years of living alone and hoarding boxes of junk. The house where we never visited her enough and when it came to the day of the auction did not fetch its reserve price and after which I could not bring myself to sell. The house I sometimes take women I meet in bars back to when it’s between tenants. I could offer him this. And if he promised to stay clean and off the booze, I could probably find him work and maybe get that rattle in his chest, which gets worse week by week, looked at by a specialist I know.
I could tell him how after I met him that day in 1979, my mother was so proud when I got home that night that she cried. And how I saw then her response as a poverty of ambition and how it galled me. Or how when he was in prison I thought of visiting once or writing to him but did neither. Or how the piece I wrote about the Bio-Gas franchise that he ran out of the rental in the old bank downtown for a few months in 1999 eventually ran in the Askov American in Minnesota, and the Clay County Leader in Henrietta, Texas. But only after I’d contacted their editors directly. Or how when I lost my job at the Post and we decided to move back west to be near Molly’s father, I had often thought about Michael Hogan Bernstein and had hoped that I might one day run into him. How I had rehearsed what I might say to him, until it became a game I would play. But I don’t tell him any of this and I never have. Not all the weeks he’s been coming up to the office to eat lunch with me.
We sit in silence with the pizza between us. I look down at the blistered dough. He takes a bite, chews it slowly, then sips from a red party cup full of warm Coca-Cola. The plastic cup trembling as he brings it to his lips. I tell him I like his jacket. Yeah, it’s real nice, he says. Then, like he’s recalling some language he doesn’t quite understand, says, “Oleg Cassini.” He shows me the label, hanging from the frayed lining. His eyes brighten for a moment. “He was a friend of mine, you know, a close personal friend,” he says. Then he pauses. “Just like you, Christopher, just like you.”
Rambla Pacifico
The white fins glistened on Lindberg’s Pontiac Bonneville as he drove along Rambla Pacifico. Glancing from the road he saw a stray dog dragging its hindquarters through a grove of cypresses. The wires between the telephone poles sagged as if melting under the California sun. Lindberg shifted in his seat, the new leather creaking as he squinted through the windshield at the numbers of the mailboxes to his left, looking out for the address he had scribbled on a paper napkin. On the radio a newscaster was announcing that an airliner had hit the water a hundred miles off Galway Bay. Lindberg spotted the number he was looking for and swung the long frame of the Pontiac across the opposing highway, bumping up the dirt track, red dust rising in clouds around the bright white automobile.
Jesus Porfirio was stacking boxes out back when he heard the car pull up. He wiped his palms on his apron and walked into the store just in time to see a tall man stooping to enter. The man held a brown fedora above his heart. As the sound of the ringing bell spent itself, Jesus turned down the volume on the radio on the counter. The tall man walked toward him.
“Hear about the crash?” he said, casting a finger wearily at the radio as one might cast a fly rod after a long day fishing on the river. He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed at the beads of sweat gathered on his forehead.
“Terrible business. Ninety-nine dead. Just dropped out of the air.”
The voice was urbane, brittle, East Coast. He reminded Jesus of Puller, the major he served under in the 1st. “Chesty” Puller who took two bullets from a sniper on Guadalcanal. The man in front of Jesus looked like a scarecrow, too thin for the broad beam of his shoulders: as Puller had looked in the pictures in the Army Gazette when they pinned the purple heart to his chest.
“Can you imagine it,” the man continued, “some poor bastard’s job to pull all those corpses from the water.” He slowly shook his head at the terrible tragedy, as if he might have done something to avert it. “They’ll be picking pieces of those bodies from the beaches for weeks.”
Jesus nodded and placed his fists on the wooden counter. A fan rattled in the corner of the store. There was a pause. Then the tall man changed the timbre of the conversation.
“Arthur Lindberg,” he said, extending his hand, a smile curling on his thin lips. “I was told you might be able to help us?”
“He says he is no longer in that line of work,” the fat boy with caramel skin, puffing at his inhaler, said to Lindberg as the three of them sat on upturned egg crates in the backyard of the grocery store. The boy swatted at his friends as they beckoned him back to their game of stickball. Hands folded on his lap, Jesus stared at Lindberg, expressionless, as if he was cut from Sierra brown stone.
“Please explain to Senor Porfirio that this is a matter of some urgency. If money is the object . . .”
In sonorous rapid Spanish the boy addressed Jesus. Jesus shook his head.
“Well, that leaves us at an impasse,” Lindberg said, twisting the signet ring on his pinkie up to the knuckle, exposing a white band of skin.
“Tell you what, sport. Give this to Mr. Porfirio. Tell him to be in touch if he changes his mind. We’re very keen to employ his services.”
The boy nodded disinterestedly and passed the card to Jesus.
In the store Lindberg, still shaky from last night’s booze, hadn’t known what to make of the man standing in front of the shelves that held enough tins to stock a nuclear bunker. This was Jesus Porfirio? This was the man he had driven two hours through the desert to come and see? A stocky storekeeper with a downturned mouth and a pudgy, impassive face that looked like it had been formed by a cookie cutter? The small man with the apron tied tightly below his breastbone, this was the Beast of the 1st? This was the man who had taken a Japanese blockhouse single-handed the day “Manila” John Basilone was blown into a thousand pieces by a 75 mm round above the airfield at Iwo Jima? The day they said the bodies of Japanese servicemen were piled so high one GI mistook them for sandbags and slumped down against them to flick through his copy of Life magazine.
Chase Labouchere had been there the day Basilone died or so he liked to boast. It was a story Chase would tell, dressed in one o
f his loud Hawaiian shirts, his vermilion slacks, propping up the bar in the Lamu Lounge. His feminine mouth twitching as he spoke, his eyes with their dark lashes darting from side to side, a face at odds with his prematurely balding head. Lindberg had never liked Chase, the way he used to brag about the war, to talk about himself in the third person. Boasting that his company commander had been so impressed by his accuracy at four hundred yards ( learned, he said, killing bucks east of the mainline Mississippi River) that he had paid for Chase’s mother to ship out his hunting rifle. Chase would mime fixing the telescopic sight, pulling back the bolt, loosing a round at the unsuspecting head of some salesman or honeymooner who stood talking by the piano at the far end of the bar. Then all the cocktail-sipping ladies of Palm Springs would break into laughter as Chase blew a cloud of cigarette smoke from the imaginary barrel. The Old Man had hired Chase a few months before Lindberg had arrived. Lindberg heard a rumor from some of the girls in the typing pool that Chase had been an orderly during the war at a convalescent hospital in Georgia and had never seen active service.
When Lindberg’s firm had folded, he had taken up the role of foreman on this new project out in the desert. A golden handshake from across the states. He came across the small ad in the back of a trade journal. “Major Building Project. Help wanted. Excellent rates. Experience a must.” He’d weighed it up before calling, pacing his tiny apartment on Avenue C, grimacing at the empty pints of Scotch that littered his floor like spent shell casings in a gun placement, the Puerto Rican portion of Manhattan loud outside his window. The divorce was almost through, Angelica and the girls were up in Maine. He’d heard that she had been seen out at a social with the head of the local Rotary Club. As he paced the apartment he thought about those last weeks in the office, only Loretta kept on at the front desk. Her scent catching at his throat each time he walked by: “Ambush,” The Tender Trap—A Romance in Every Bottle, the billboards proclaimed. Those afternoons of enforced idleness spent flicking through yachting magazines, staring at the fifty-four-foot cruising ketch he had once coveted but now knew he would never own. A spectator looking down from the bleachers as his life crumbled around him. Then the repo men arriving to take away the office furniture, right down to the ship in a bottle that had been a wedding gift from Angelica and had sat for two decades on his desk.
It had been hard to tell exactly when and how Lindberg QS had gone to the dogs. When Lindberg flunked out in his second year of architecture at Cornell, his father had insisted he take up a profession. He signed up to a series of night-school classes, hiding his attendance from the crowd from his prep school he was running around Manhattan with at the time. After four years he qualified as a quantity surveyor and after two, working for a small firm in Delaware, he set up on his own. Business had flourished, a steady stream of work channeled his way by Angelica’s father. But when her father had retired from his position in the city, work had been harder to come by. “Death by a thousand cuts,” Lindberg overheard Angelica telling a friend on the telephone one evening when he had come home late, half-drunk. Shocked at first to see him, the lipstick-red receiver cradled at her shoulder, she held his gaze as she explained in detail the intricacies of their predicament. He felt tiny standing before her, as a juvenile might before a judge as he was passing sentence and listing explicitly the crimes of which he was about to be convicted. Now, fifty-three and divorced, Lindberg had been overseeing the building of a new hotel in the desert. An eternity of time to drink his way through. A new car, a rented room in an upscale motel in Palm Springs and, as of 9:30 p.m., the daughter of his employer missing, feared dead.
Lindberg was sitting on the edge of his bed when he heard the news. Stripped to his boxer shorts, his undershirt hanging loose from his wilting, hairless body, running his finger around the indent his garters had left above his calf. It was a hot night and the door to his room was open. He watched a shining black vinyl disc rotate on his Dansette Deluxe. Mario Lanza was singing opera.
“Vesti la giubba,” Lindberg closed his eyes and mouthed the words.
“I don’t know it,” said a voice, “you got any Chuck Berry?”
Chase stood in the doorway, winking as he raised his hip flask to Lindberg, who exhaled heavily.
“I’m meeting Lynette and Francine at the Rose,” Chase said.
“Thanks. I’ll pass.”
Lindberg hated Chase’s intrusions, his frequent offers of hospitality. But when the bar called him back, tired of drinking alone in his room or buzzed from a quarter pint of Scotch, the liquor lending him the sensation he had something to offer the world again, he would find himself in the vicinity of Chase Labouchere. Lindberg couldn’t say for certain what Chase’s job involved. He was a fixer of some sort. The guy the Old Man sent to take some clerk in the building regulations’ office out for a steak dinner, or pass an envelope to a city councilor. Mostly these days Chase seemed to spend his time trying to track down Adella. Adella Smart, the Old Man’s daughter. Adella of the coal-black eyes and cinnamon skin. Adella of the mesmeric sashay. Adella whose grandmother had been the first Latina in a motion picture. Descended from Cortés or so the Old Man liked to boast. Adella Smart, twenty-one last September. Adella who loved jazz and jazzmen and Christ knew what else. Adella who would make the air feel heavy in your lungs when she walked through her father’s office. Adella whose fragrant specter rose up in Lindberg’s mind as he lay in his undershirt and boxer shorts in his single bed, head reeling from the malt, his member limp in his hand.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“I can’t tempt you?”
“No.”
“Francine thinks you’re a dish.”
“Really, Chase, I’m tired. Let me go to bed.”
“Well, all the more for Chasey.”
He bowed at Lindberg, raising his hip flask as the needle crackled to static against the paper label of the record. There was a screech of tires on asphalt outside, then the sound of a car slamming into garbage pails and a long groan from its horn. A dog began to bark. Chase looked down from the first-floor balcony of the motel and saw Nicky, the office errand boy, sprinting across the parking lot toward Lindberg’s room, his tanned face visible against the darkness.
“Slow down, kid,” Chase shouted from the doorway.
As Nicky reached the room Chase laid his palm on the boy’s chest.
“Sir . . .” The boy could barely catch his breath.
“Mr. Lindberg, sir, it’s Adella,” he stuttered.
“Ah jeez, what’s she done this time?” asked Chase.
“Mr. Lindberg, Mr. Smart would like you to come to his house immediately.”
“It’s late,” Chase said, tapping his watch.
“Something has happened to Adella.”
The Old Man was based out in the desert but was buying up land in Los Angeles. He had a big residential development under way up in the Highlands, two hotels under construction in Palm Springs and a plan to run a monorail up Mount San Jacinto. He lived in what had once been a pink-walled finca out toward the mountains. He’d shown Lindberg around the place the weekend he arrived from New York. The Old Man had torn down the original farmhouse and erected a low-rise, sleek-lined, geometrical building. When Lindberg and Chase arrived the Old Man was pacing around the courtyard, anxious as a bridegroom before a rose arch on his wedding day. He escorted the men into the dining room, closing the heavy wooden doors behind him. At the head of the table, Lindberg at his right, Chase hovering behind nodding, the Old Man outlined the facts of Adella’s disappearance. Lindberg listened but only heard those words the Old Man chose to emphasize:
“Signs of scuffle . . . we think is blood . . . mother’s jewels . . . no note, yet . . .”
And then with emphasis that focused Lindberg’s attention, “Bas Rodriguez found her door kicked clean off its hinges . . .”
The Old Man left a pause at the end of his outline.
“The question is, gentlemen, how do we resolve
this situation?”
Lindberg noticed the Old Man’s hands were trembling.
“For reasons I don’t need to go into here, I’m loath to involve the police, at least not at this stage. Not until we know what’s what.”
Lindberg sat tense in the silence of the wood-paneled, windowless room whose four walls were hung with sporting prints.
“There’s a lot of this about,” Chase said, moving toward the sideboard and the silver tray that held a glass decanter.
“Last month I heard of a girl, Adella’s age, getting snatched down in Gardena.” Chase paused, then with the forced gravity of a TV anchor added, “They found her body part eaten by dogs behind a Dumpster in Nevada a few blocks from her father’s casino.”
Lindberg looked down. His face was reflected darkly in the polished mahogany table. He covered it over with his hand.
“But I know someone who might be able to help,” Chase said, pouring himself a generous tumbler of Scotch.
“Yes?” the Old Man said. Lindberg detected the note of frailty in his voice. This was the person Lindberg had watched only last week manhandle out of his office two Cuban businessmen who, having run casinos under Batista, had flown up from Miami to make an uninvited cash offer on one of his hotels. The Old Man had taken the shorter by the neck of his shirt, then twisted the arm up the back of his taller associate. His face flushed crimson as he pushed them out into the corridor and down past the rows of typists, who, although shocked, continued with their work.
“Yeah, I ain’t got a number but I got an address,” Chase said. “I ever tell you about Jesus Porfirio?” he looked over at Lindberg.
“Maybe.”
The Burning Ground Page 4