I walked over to the railing, gripped it so hard my knuckles turned white. “What were you going to do with her?”
Tono Kuruma joined me at the rail. “You know, Mr. Marlowe, in the old days samurai, forbidden to act in certain ways by bushido, their code of honor, hired others to carry out those acts. These people were sometimes called ‘ninja.’ Private eyes, of a sort.”
“Forget it,” I said, disgusted. “I know what you’re thinking.”
He shook his head. “No, Mr. Marlowe, I don’t believe you do. I wish to hire you to find Asia. I see now that she is like certain animals: incapable of surviving in captivity.
“It is my grandchild who matters to me.” Tono’s eyes had that moist, incomprehensible look you see in new parents when they trot out the billfold full of baby photos. “I want you to make sure that she does not abort its life. You see, Mr. Marlowe, I believe that is why she came to Los Angeles. To screw up her courage, as you would say, to find a doctor who would—”
I looked at him, and he dug in his jacket pocket. He handed me a card. “I found this in Asia’s pocketbook.”
I knew the name all too well. One of those sleazy lizards who call themselves doctors, who take money to perform their butchery.
“Of course, she’s too smart to go to him now. But she’ll find another.”
I let it go, and the card disappeared into the night.
“What about justice? She murdered your son.”
“You and I, Mr. Marlowe, have differing ideas of justice. But consider this: is there not justice in seeing Yoshi’s child grow into adulthood? Penance may be paid in a variety of forms.”
He had a point. Or maybe I was just losing my mind.
“I want my grandchild,” Tono Kuruma said.
I knew what he was asking of me, and I wasn’t at all sure I liked it. “I think you’ve got the wrong man,” I said.
He smiled. “On the contrary, Mr. Marlowe. Though you are gaijin, a foreigner, you possess honor, the most important quality a man can have. Such a man finds a way to honor his commitments.”
“I wasn’t aware that I had any commitment to you or to Yoshio.”
Tono Kuruma said: “You’re quite right. If you don’t feel it, then you haven’t any.”
I watched him, the moonlight shattered against his sharkskin suit. I wondered what it was like to lose a son, and hoped that I would never find out.
“Do you know what Asia will do when she sees the baby? She may not want to give it up.”
Tono Kuruma’s face was utterly expressionless. “Mr. Marlowe, neither of us knows what she will do. We can only be aware of what she is capable of.”
I thought about that for a moment. I couldn’t get Lieutenant Oliver to put Asia in jail; she hadn’t broken any laws while she was here. But she had committed murder in Japan, and I wondered how I’d feel for the rest of my life if I told Tono Kuruma, No, and just walked away when we docked. I knew I couldn’t do that either. So what was left?
“I’ll see that she has the baby,” I said, knowing that I had just answered my own question.
“And after that?”
“When the time comes, I’ll have to see,” I said. “What I have to do now will be tough enough.”
Tono Kuruma nodded. “You have made the honorable choice, Mr. Marlowe. I have full confidence in you. L.A. is, I think you say, your turf. Besides, it has not escaped my notice that over a short period of time you and she have developed—what shall we say?—a rapport. In Asia’s case, that is highly unusual—and for you useful, neh?”
Well, he was right about one thing: L.A. was my turf. I knew every square inch of it. I knew I’d find Asia, all right, but what then? Was the rapport Tono Kuruma spoke of real or another of her illusions? She had already killed once. Talk about the beauty and the beast.
One thing at a time, Marlowe, I told myself. You’ve just come back from the dead, and you’ve got the case of a lifetime.
What more could you want?
When I came upon Raymond Chandler’s work for the first time, I was electrified. Here was a master stylist who brought to life with astonishing clarity the fevered, almost surreal atmosphere of Los Angeles. The rather sad, rather tawdry underpinnings revealed by Chandler’s neon-glow prose painted a realistic portrait of a city traditionally regarded as having no soul. He breathed character and life into an American icon, making of it a legend.
Chandler’s work showed me the ultimate importance of atmosphere. His novels and short stories compelled me to realize the power such beauty can have to enlighten and enthrall a reader.
Eric Van Lustbader
MICE
* * *
* * *
ROBERT CAMPBELL
1959
THEY MADE ME feel a little funny. I don’t mean ha-ha. I mean the feeling you get when someone doesn’t seem quite right but you can’t put your finger on what it is at first. It’s like a kind of lurch in the stomach, a bad oyster going down before you can cough it back up, a slice of guilt when you start figuring out what’s not right and then a slab of pity which isn’t even as honest as the first two.
I stood there watching them and finally felt a good feeling like the one you get watching children with their innocent eyes always ready to laugh or cry.
They were what some people still call Mongoloid idiots, though they never were idiots, just slow and capable of only so much. And they never were exclusively Asiatics, in spite of their flat faces and narrowed eyes, but simply people suffering from Down’s syndrome.
I reckoned them to be somewhere in their late twenties, pretty old for what ailed them, since they don’t usually live much beyond their teens. The man seemed older than the woman, but it might just as easily have been the other way around.
They looked like brother and sister. That’s another thing about Down’s syndrome, it makes everybody look related. Maybe if we all looked like members of the same family we wouldn’t be so quick about killing each other off. On the other hand, there’s more violence among family members than among unrelated people. Ask any cop.
I noticed them right after I left Poodle Springs and went back to Los Angeles, walking up and down Franklin Avenue looking for a place to set up housekeeping by myself again.
I’d tried marriage. It went sour in six months. Maybe it was because my wife was rich and I was poor. Maybe it was because Linda wasn’t happy without a couple of dozen people kissing her hand, even if she knew they were trying to steal her rings, and I wasn’t happy unless there were just the two of us. Even then I wasn’t really happy unless there was just the one of me. At least that’s what Linda accused me of.
So she was there in the sun and I was here in the drizzle. It was a toss-up if I’d get to wanting her so badly that I’d give up holy poverty and go back to the Springs, ready to be the pampered husband of a woman with several million bucks, floating in the swimming pool, highball in hand, watching my toes turn brown, or if she’d get to wanting me so badly that she’d join me in the only town I ever called home and wait for me while I went out and sorted through the wreckage of a society that made garbage better than it made anything else.
I’d homed back to Franklin Avenue like a pigeon to the loft. I’d lived there just before my one great leap of faith into that mystery called marriage, maybe hoping that it would work some magic and put things back into perspective. I didn’t really want to give Linda up and I’d left a lifeline trailing in the water in case I wanted to climb back into the boat.
There was nothing available at the Hobart Arms, where I used to live, so I went up one side of the street and down the other, a block at a time.
It’s a nice street of shade trees, the occasional palm, and fairly new garbage cans lined up at the curb on pickup day, which looked like it was going to be tomorrow.
I say that because these two I’m talking about were struggling up the three steps from the basement of an apartment house with a garbage can between them, laughing when they tripped and bumpe
d the railings as though hard work was nothing but pure pleasure.
It all made a hell of a racket and I stood there for a minute, well back from the basement well, letting those feelings I just described go flashing through me.
When they spotted me they laughed harder, exaggerating their pleasure, inviting me with their grinning mouths and crinkled eyes to get in on the fun. I couldn’t help but laugh myself, now that I knew I hadn’t fallen into a trance and found myself among trolls or dwarfs in some enchanted land.
Then, just as in any decent fairy tale, the ogre stepped into the frame. A man with a head like a dum-dum bullet, flat and scarred, a fringe of aging black hair hanging over his ears and down his neck like moss, bull’s neck and bull’s nose, came into sight like a disembodied horror. He was standing below the level of the steps, but even so, I could tell he wasn’t much taller than the man lugging one half of the garbage can by the handle.
He yelled at them with curses half English, half Spanish. The word he beat them with the most was “feebs.”
They cringed like a couple of abused dogs. His fury cut off their laughter like he’d ripped out their tongues and wiped the smiles off their gentle kissers like you’d wipe a message of joy off a blackboard with a felt eraser. They looked at me as though they felt even worse because their master was scolding them in front of a stranger.
I was ready to walk on so my presence wouldn’t add to their humiliation when the bullet-headed sucker lifted his hand as though meaning to strike the woman. He was holding a sawed-off piece of broomstick. She startled and threw her head aside, dropping the handle of the garbage can and crying out.
The can dropped on the step and tipped over before her companion could wrestle it straight, and several pounds of wet garbage, fish carcasses, chicken bones, orange rinds, coffee grounds, tin cans, and soggy newspapers went spilling into the areaway.
It made an already angry bull madder than ever.
He started slapping the air near the man’s head with the broomstick, missing, but coming closer and closer.
I walked over and said, “Don’t do that.”
He looked at me as though I’d called his mother a filthy name. “Who you?”
“My name’s Marlowe.”
“I know you?”
“You don’t stop bullying that man, you’re going to know me pretty good.”
“Go mind your own business.”
I raised my hand to him like he’d raised his to them. I swung it one way and the other, slapping air, but coming closer and closer, letting him know what it felt like to be treated with such contempt.
He swung the stick right back and cracked me one on the wrist. When I snatched my hand back, I scraped my knuckles on the railings. I slapped him across the mouth then, and he ran into the basement.
I felt bad a second after. He’d had it coming, but I knew I could have handled it better. Nothing’s gained answering a threat with a threat, violence with violence.
“What’s his name?” I asked the two people, who were looking at me as though I was something heroic.
The man pointed to himself and said, “Benny. Her name’s Minnie.”
“No. What’s that other guy’s name?”
Benny stood there with his tongue poking out of his mouth, working it out. Minnie whispered in his ear.
He grinned and said, “Mr. Januaria.”
“He your boss?”
“He takes care of us.”
“You mean he’s your guardian?”
They looked at one another. The word was too much for them. They shrugged their shoulders, grinned, threw their heads back, and looked at me for a minute. Then they lost interest and started picking up the muck. Making a game of that, too.
“You happen to know of any apartments to rent around here?”
They stopped what they were doing. They couldn’t move and think at the same time. They held another whispered conference. This time Minnie pointed across the street.
I turned around and saw the sign in a window on the first floor.
In fifteen minutes I was signing a lease and handing over a check to a Mr. Bochos, a Greek with a happy face.
“Leases is okay,” he said, “but in my country we share a glass of wine to seal a bargain.”
“I honor the customs of all nations,” I replied.
While we were having our wine, Bochos looked at me and said, “I saw what you done. That was very kind.”
“Does Januaria do that sort of thing very often?”
“Ah,” he said, as though making small of that kind of man. “He don’t actually hit the mice. At least not that I know about.”
“Mice?”
“That’s what I call the dummies. I say to the wife, ‘They ain’t got the brains of a couple of mice.’ ”
“If you did actually know that he hit those people, would you do anything about it?”
The look of admiration and appreciation for what I had done left his face. “I don’t know. Januaria’s a violent man, I think. He might not actually hit the mice, but I don’t know about people like me or you.”
I could tell that Bochos was afraid of the janitor across the street, but I didn’t want to press it any farther. It would have done no good and there was no reason for me not to have friendly relations with the building manager.
“Are Benny and Minnie related to him some way?”
Bochos shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
“Where’d they come from?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. I notice them hanging around the block, over by the empty lot on the corner, every once in a while. Sometimes I see them picking through the dumpster behind the supermarket down on Hollywood Boulevard. You know the one I mean?”
“I think so.”
“So I started wondering about who they was and where they come from. I was just going to call the police and see what about them when I see them working over there for Januaria. So then I think I’ll mind my own business.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I said, knocking back the wine. “I think I’ll do the same.”
I went upstairs to my new apartment on the third floor. There was an overhead fixture with one working bulb out of three in the living room and another with a dead bulb in the bedroom. The fixtures on either side of the bathroom mirror worked too.
The water ran rusty into the basin for a minute and then cleared up. I washed my face with my hands and dried them on my handkerchief.
I’d rented the place unfurnished. There wasn’t a stick in the place except for two unmatched wooden chairs in the kitchen. I carried them into the living room in front of the gas fire. I took a wooden kitchen match from my pocket and lit it. I sat down in one chair and put my feet up on the other. I sat there as evening settled into night outside the window, thinking what a damn fool a man was who valued his pride and independence and solitude more than a lovely woman with bags of money.
You start feeling that way, sitting in a dark, empty room feeling sorry for yourself, and the next thing you know you’re looking for a puddle to stick your nose in and drown. So I stood up and looked down into the street hoping to see some action, a delivery boy dropping off a pizza or a dog lifting his leg against a tree.
In the well of the entryway to the basement across the street I could see a glow. It took me a second to get adjusted to it and then I saw that it was somebody sitting there hunched over his knees and shining a flashlight on a magazine or newspaper. While I watched, the basement door opened up. Somebody was standing in the doorway partially blocking the light. There was a minute and then another dark shape passed by the first one and the rectangle went black again.
I wanted to know who was sitting there reading by the light of a flash. I wanted to know who it was went inside the basement. I didn’t want to be alone in an empty room right at that minute.
I went downstairs and strolled across the street, stopping in front of the railing and looking down into the well.
Benny was
crouched on an old mattress, his legs covered with a tattered blanket against the chill. He was reading so intently he didn’t even know I was there until I cleared my throat. Then he looked up like a startled deer and his hand with the flashlight in it started to shake.
“Hey, excuse me, Benny. I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said.
“You gave me a start, you did,” he said.
“What you reading?”
He hesitated, then handed it up to me. “You need my flashlight?”
“There’s enough light from the streetlamp over there for me to see,” I said, as I looked the magazine over.
It was a comic book, boldly drawn and brightly colored. The title on the cover was Survival. Inside there were stories about trekking through the mountains with nothing but a knife, living in the desert with nothing but a plastic tarp, and defending yourself to the death with nothing but a stick or your bare hands. I’d seen similar magazines before in candy stores and drugstores. The kids bought them by the ton, the new comics for children born under the shadow of the bomb.
“This is pretty exciting stuff, Benny.”
“Oh, yes. I read it every night.”
“You read pretty good?”
“Well, I don’t really read it, but you can tell what’s going on from the pictures.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“I found it in a dumpster. I didn’t steal it,” he said defensively.
“I didn’t think you did. I was just asking.”
“Oh, that’s all right, then.”
“Where’s Minnie?” I asked, handing the magazine back to him.
“I take care of Minnie.”
“That’s good.”
“She takes care of me. We take care of each other.”
“That’s really good. So where is she?”
A strange expression passed across his face, like the face of a kid who’d just learned what it was to feel shame. “Mr. Januaria come out and asked was she cold. She said she wasn’t, but he made her go inside anyway.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 39