By way of answering, he reached over and pulled me to him. We didn’t kiss. I could barely breathe. My face was mashed into his tie, my rib cage was getting crushed right where I’d been stuck in a bathroom window, and there was that console thing between us and a gun attached to his waist where one of my hands held on to him, but love is a strange thing.
Love. That word he was whispering in my ear. It covers a multitude of sins and a lot of other things. Pain. Awkwardness. Doubt.
Half an hour later he pulled into a parking lot near Hugo’s and smiled at the attendant, who stared at us like a monk greeting the pope, nearly weeping over the Bentley. It’s only the cheap Bentley, I could’ve told him, but why spoil his day?
The “L” word, once said, changes things. There are people who throw it around like salt on popcorn. Others are more comfortable with profanity than endearments. I’d have bet Simon was in the latter camp, that I’d heard it wrong, that he must’ve said, “dove” or “glove.” But I couldn’t come up with a good reason for someone to whisper “glove” with such heat.
I felt myself undergoing metamorphosis.
Simon told our waiter to bring us two spinach-and-mushroom egg-white omelets with sides of fruit, and that brought me back to earth. It’s one thing to hear someone say “love” and another to let them order your breakfast.
“And pancakes for me,” I said, snapping my menu shut. Simon smiled, but he didn’t say anything until the waiter had gone. We were back in business. I was a CW, a cooperating witness for the FBI. He was my handler. For one last day.
“At three P.M.” he said, “a man named Esterbud will drive you to the set, get you wired, and go over your instructions. You’ll sign a waiver, acknowledging your consent to wear recording equipment and have your voice recorded. If you have problems, he’ll be able to reach me. You won’t. Anything you need in the next twenty-four hours, go through Esterbud.”
My stomach clenched up at the news that he was going to disappear. Even for a day. I don’t like people disappearing.
“Tonight’s shoot will use all six contestants, to deflect attention you might attract for being on the set. Don’t ask how I arranged it. The show will use a boom microphone, so the only body mike you’ll wear is ours. You’ll activate it at ten P.M. At that point an Indian woman and a companion will enter the restaurant and sit in a booth near you.”
“American Indian or Indian Indian?”
“Calcutta. Heavy accent. One of ours.” He paused while a waiter refilled our coffee cups, waiting for him to leave. “The woman will have a conversation with her companion. This is what you’re picking up. When you hear her say, ‘The best part of Thanksgiving is the leftovers,’ stop talking, clanking silverware, all extraneous noise. When she says, ‘It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,’ it’s over. She’ll go to the restroom. Notice who in the cast or crew her companion makes contact with. Esterbud will go over all this again.”
I nodded, wondering who in the FBI made up the code sentences and whether they took courses in that sort of thing at Quantico. Wondering if anything would be more hazardous than Fredreeq, Venus, Savannah, Kim, and me in the same room at the same time. “Why can’t Miss Calcutta wear the wire?” I asked. “Or just memorize the information?”
“Big Fish’s people will frisk her. And we need the conversation on tape, later, to elicit . . . cooperation.”
Cooperation. A nice word in other contexts. In this context, code for blackmail.
“Not to sound petty,” I said, “but again, what about the quid pro quo? Annika.”
“In twenty-four hours I’ll contact you. I’ll explain things I’m not able to talk about now. Anything you need before then, Esterbud will be nearby.”
“Simon, what about Annika?”
“Twenty-four hours, Wollie.”
I saw in his face the stress I’d been feeling myself, the lack of sleep, the proximity to danger. I thought about what it was he wasn’t telling me, the thing so big I might not want to see him after tomorrow. Something in me went cold. “Simon,” I said softly, “I just have to know she’s not already dead, that you haven’t found Annika in the last day or two, and you’re not telling me, because—”
“Because?”
“You need me to keep working for you.”
He stared. “You think I’d do that?”
“I think that you—” I couldn’t say love me. Yet. Even though he’d as much as said that. Even though I believed him. I said, “I think for you, the end justifies the means.”
“That depends on the end.”
I focused on my napkin. “That’s the wrong answer. It should depend on the means. There are lines you don’t cross, even to serve a greater good.”
“But whose lines? Drawn where? Good people cross lines all the time. On your behalf.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want them to.”
“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to know about it.”
Was he right? I raised my eyes to his. A waiter came and plunked down two small bowls of sliced fruit on the table between us. Neither of us looked at him. “But if I don’t want to know about it,” I said, “what am I doing with you?”
He picked up his fork. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
Leaving Hugo’s, Simon drove east, toward Laurel Canyon.
“Where are we going?” I asked, alarmed.
“I’m driving you to work. We’re carpooling.”
“Carpooling? Nobody carpools. I need my car. How am I going to get home?”
“Esterbud.”
“No.” I could feel my temperature rise. “I’m not kidding. No. My God, this is L.A., you don’t leave people stranded without a car. What happened to civil liberties?”
“I’m not taking chances. I want you on the set tonight, not in jail in San Pedro.” He glanced at me. “I guess you don’t watch the morning news. I hope Joey’s got a lawyer. She’s getting slapped with a lawsuit.”
I closed my eyes. This was turning into a very long day, and it wasn’t even noon.
“Want to tell me what you were doing there?” Simon asked.
“No.”
“All right. We should have a talk one of these days about which laws you obey and which ones you ignore when it suits you.”
“We should,” I said. “You can explain the nuances of crime, like how driving people to the Valley against their will doesn’t constitute kidnapping. Seriously. What if I need to go to the store while I’m working, what if I need paints? How do you know I have keys with me?”
“I imagine your whole apartment’s in that backpack. Whatever you need, send Esterbud.”
“So nice seeing our tax dollars at work.”
“Wollie, you’d make my job easier if you kept your cell phone on. And returned your calls occasionally.”
When we got to Sherman Oaks, to the Mansion, which he found without asking directions, I did not say good-bye. I did not kiss him good-bye. I got out of the car with as much grace as possible and slammed the door behind me. I did not look back.
The way he gunned the engine and took off down the street, they could hear his cheap Bentley in San Pedro.
I looked out the window of the Mansion. There he was, not even bothering to hide. Esterbud. Parked in some kind of big Chevy with tinted windows. Drinking out of a liter bottle of Coke. That must be lunch. He’d be knocking on the door in an hour to introduce himself and use the bathroom.
I turned my back on Esterbud and his liter bottle and looked into the yellow eyes of my West African goliath, Conraua (Gigantorana) goliath.
He was monumental.
I’d avoided him for days, so the effect was stupefying. Either he’d grown recently, or the wall had shrunk. It was a poster for some low-rent sci-fi horror movie, it was an amphibian the size of a bear, a bald green grizzly holding the kitchen hostage. It was impossible that something that big existed, I don’t care what the book said, maybe it was a printing error, that ninety centimeters, no frog could be that long—
<
br /> I opened up my favorite frog book, and found it. No, there it was. Ninety centimeters. I had it right.
Uh-oh.
The measurement was not SNV, snout to vent, the standard frog measurement. My favorite frog book was illustrating a point, measuring the length from nose to . . . toe. Ninety centimeters stretched out.
I opened up a second book. The snout-to-vent measurement of a West African goliath is thirty centimeters.
No. No, no, no. I’d given the West African goliath the torso of a normal-sized human. No wonder he looked like a freak. He was a freak. A mutant. Ninety centimeters is three feet. Three times the size of any frog inhabiting the earth.
My hand went to my mouth, stopping my exclamation. Technical accuracy, my last defense for this monstrosity, was no longer on my side. It never had been. I’d made a large math error. Science error. Whatever.
The phone rang. I answered. It was my brother.
P.B. started right in talking about his halfway house, and I stood, thinking about paint. White paint. Somewhere in this house were extra cans of Blush White paint. I’d find a paint roller and put the West African goliath out of its misery. No bridal couple wanted to walk into their new home and face a frog the size of a Saint Bernard. Three to five coats of paint ought to do it. If I started immediately, if the pain was quick-drying—
Except—the goliath wasn’t alone.
Alongside him was another frog, so tiny as to be nearly insignificant. I’d forgotten he was here, having avoided the wall recently. He was a blue poison-arrow frog, Dendrobates azureus, brilliant blue with black spots, his arms and legs a deeper shade of blue, sitting on a leaf, preparing to hop off in search of something to eat. A happy guy. Poisonous, dangerous, but happy. Beautiful.
“—to Santa Barbara,” my brother was saying. “But she won’t come.”
“Um, what? Your . . . girlfriend?” I asked, distracted. “With the body dysmorphic disorder? P.B., if she’s a patient, she can’t come. Maybe when she’s healthier.”
“No. She’s out of the hospital, but she still won’t come. She says her upper lip is too big. She says everyone in Santa Barbara will stare at her when she eats, so then she’ll stop eating and they’ll hospitalize her again. She says in her own neighborhood they’re used to her, but she can’t start over in a new town, she’s too old.”
I closed my eyes, awash with guilt. P.B. had never had a girlfriend before. This was a big moment in his life. I should be celebrating. I should be taking the time to discuss the mental problems of a woman I’d never met, whose name I didn’t know, instead of wishing he’d get off the phone. If you can’t take time for the people you love, what’s the point? If I’d taken time for Annika, ten minutes one fateful night, everything might’ve turned out differently.
I told P.B. I’d happily pick up this girl every Thursday from wherever she lived and drive her up to visit him at his halfway house in Santa Barbara, every single week, and anything else he could think up for me to do. Anything except encourage him to stay at the hospital, because I didn’t believe it was the right place for him anymore, and staying wouldn’t help his girlfriend’s upper-lip problem in any case. He told me I sounded subnormal.
“I am subnormal,” I said. “People’s lives are at stake, and I’m stuck in Sherman Oaks with a blue poison-arrow and a West African goliath that I need to drown in white paint.” If I can send the FBI out for paint rollers.
“You can’t paint over them,” he said. “That’s murder-suicide.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re the frog.”
Here we go. “The blue?” I asked, wondering why I’d even brought it up.
“No, the other one. The goliath. Female frogs are bigger than the males, you told me that. She’s big, she’s a girl; you’re big, you’re a girl. If you paint over her, you erase yourself. Suicide’s one thing, if you’re sad enough, but taking someone with you is murder. You don’t murder things, you save things. You put the blue next to the goliath as a talisman. You’re blackmailing yourself into staying alive.”
“P.B.,” I said, “I love you, but I don’t understand a word you just said.”
“I’m in a mental hospital,” he said. “Do the math.”
“Wise guy.” I hung up and started for the basement in search of paint, but my cell phone, now that it was on, had other ideas. It practically leaped out of my hand, frantic with unplayed messages.
“Hi, it’s Joey. Listen, something’s bothering me. Since Rico spent time around B.C., why is it the cops haven’t shown up there to question anyone? You think the Feds told them to back off? And check this out: Elliot’s at a meeting with Bing and Larry at Bad Seed Productions and he just called to say they need the whole cast and crew working tonight. How weird is that? And oh—we made the news this morning. That guy in San Pedro ran his videocam the whole time. Our housekeeper screamed and woke me up.”
“Wollie: Fredreeq. What in the name of Jesus Christ on the cross were you two doing? I swear, I leave you alone to rob one little office, and— There’s my other line. This is very bad for the show. Very, very bad. And we might be working tonight, did you hear that? Call.”
“Wollstonecraft, it’s Uncle Theo. Dear, I saw you and your friend Joey on the television this morning. Congratulations. It’s always so wonderful to see you.”
“Yeah, uh . . . hold on. Okay. Wollie? It’s Cziemanski. I saw that thing on the news and I’m a little—okay, I guess you’re okay. Call if you need anything. Well, I mean, not anything, but—okay. I gotta go.”
“Joey again. I forgot to say I didn’t find anything incriminating on Savannah, except that you’re right, she lies about her age. I have a photocopy of her driver’s license. She was born New Year’s Eve, the same year as you.”
I gasped. Savannah Brook was a Capricorn.
She’d put her astrological symbol on the drug she’d developed. Euphoria.
She was Little Fish.
One pill connected her, Rico, and Annika. And Simon knew this. But then why didn’t he know where Rico was? Or Annika?
Because he wasn’t looking for them. He wasn’t concerned with Little Fish’s victims; to him, Little Fish was bait. For Big Fish.
And when it was over? When the big meeting took place, tonight’s meeting, when Simon got what he needed, surely then he’d turn her over to the Sheriff’s Department—
Or not. I thought of Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, a confessed killer, living in the witness protection program, having ratted out the mob. If Sammy could do it, why not Savannah?
The Feds could make a deal to get her to testify against Tcheiko, offer immunity, and turn a blind eye to the plight of one little German girl. Who wasn’t a citizen anyway, so who cared? Maybe to the FBI, it was the cost of doing business, a small price to pay for a guy everyone wanted. Savannah would get witness protection, but Annika and her mother—would they stay missing? Afraid of what Tcheiko or his compatriots would do if they surfaced? Assuming they weren’t already dead.
Simon’s conflict of interest. The thing that would so appall me I wouldn’t want to know him after tonight: that Rico, despite his prominent father, would never be found, or his case solved. That Annika would not be looked for, ever. Or her mother.
And everything I’d found was of no use to anyone because the Feds didn’t care and the cops didn’t know, and without evidence—
But I had evidence. I’d had it since yesterday. In my dirty, malfunctioning Integra.
And now I knew what to do with it.
I walked out of the Mansion, introduced myself to Esterbud, and asked him to buy me some paint rollers. He wouldn’t take the twenty-dollar bill I offered. Special Agent Alexander, he said, had told him he might have to do a paint run.
But the cab driver was happy to take my money, forty dollars of it, to get me home.
Only the pill wasn’t there. Not in the Integra’s front seat, not in the back. I found the Williams-Sonoma shopping bag that had been rattling arou
nd in the car for ages, I found coins, paper clips, a valet-parking receipt, but I couldn’t find the evidence Britta had so kindly donated to the cause. I tried sitting in the driver’s seat to re-create the circumstances of the flying pill, and I still couldn’t find it. It was here somewhere, someplace I couldn’t see without dismantling the car.
Great. So now I was in permanent possession of an illicit drug.
There was only one thing left to do. I fastened my seat belt and started up the car. My pill had a twin, and if I was lucky Maizie Quinn had not yet flushed it down the toilet. I was betting she hadn’t. She was a lot like me. A woman who saved things.
38
The entire block of Moon Canyon where the Quinns lived was cordoned off for the film shoot, overflowing with cars and trucks and equipment and people. I hailed a sunburned man in a muscle shirt and the leather back-support belt of a weight lifter or furniture mover, who advised me to park on Moon Crater, two streets ahead, and walk back. From somewhere on Moon Canyon, the sound of a megaphoned voice intoned, “Background . . . and . . . action!”
I did as advised, wedging my car between an Explorer and a Lexus in front of an Italianate castle, and approached the Quinns from the opposite direction. The houses here were set close to the street. Presumably they had yards in the back, a place for the pool, but from the front they were like multimillion-dollar tract houses. Through windows I saw wallpaper, books . . . children. Maybe someday when I grew up I would live in a real house, rather than a succession of cramped apartments. Maybe not. Uncle Theo lived in a converted hotel. My mother lived in an ashram. P.B., in two days, would be living in a house, but it was a halfway house, which wasn’t the same thing. We probably weren’t house people.
I carried the Williams-Sonoma shopping bag. Since I was never going to return the utensils I’d bought there, I’d offer them to Maizie. If ever there was a person for kitchen gadgets, it was Maizie Quinn. Not that she was needy, with her fleet of cars and exquisite house, but I was always showing up unannounced and asking for things, so this felt right. A hostess gift. Even very wealthy people, in my experience, loved free stuff.
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