by Jim Nisbet
“Naturally, I get reimbursed.”
“Naturally.”
“With interest?” I sneered.
I could almost hear Ivy shrug. “Fifty bucks.”
This took me by surprise. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Sal thought this up?”
“I suggested the fifty. The rest is Mrs. Stepnowski’s idea. But Sal’s game. That keyboard is worth a lot of dough and the guy only made two or three payments on it.”
“This is way too complicated.”
“No it isn’t,” Ivy insisted. “Drive over there, give her the five hundred, get the keyboard. As soon as you’re out of there, call Sal.”
“What for? He’ll be closed by then.”
“He’ll be there. He’ll be waiting for the call.”
“I smell a rat. What’s the big deal?”
Silence.
“Spill it, Ivy. I want to know what I’m getting into.”
After a long pause he said, “As soon as you call Sal, he’ll dime her to the cops.”
After a pause I said, “Breathtaking. Simply breathtaking.”
“They want her for killing her old man,” Ivy explained helpfully. “And for reasons too deep and murky for us to plumb, like maybe Sal rents a sound system to the Policeman’s Ball every year with no competitive bids, maybe some cop has Sal’s nuts in a vice.”
“But Sal wants his action first.”
“That’s affirmative. If he doesn’t get it now, he’ll never get it.”
“That sounds affirmatively shitty to me, Ivy.”
“It’s business,” Ivy said. “What’s this chick to you? You fuck her or something?”
“Not like you and Sal are going to fuck her.”
“Well, what’d I tell you about drummers? Not to mention guys who run music stores?”
“Nothing I don’t already know.”
“Come off it, Curly. I’m being straight with you. That’s what’s going down. Get a move on.”
“What’s the catch?” Lavinia said.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” I replied.
“So what else is new?” Lavinia said.
“What’s to stop her from blowing me away like she did her old man?”
“Without you the synth is worth nothing to her,” Ivy explained sensibly. “It’s a straight up trade, and Sal knows where you are. So do I, for that matter. She’ll play nice.”
“I couldn’t feel more secure if I were wearing adult diapers.”
“This is getting more like a job every day,” Ivy groused.
“Until you break a sweat,” I said, “you will know from nothing about jobs.”
“Thanks for reminding me. You remember the address?”
“4514 Anza Street.”
“That’s correct. Either she’s there or at 4516, right next door. It’s the landlord’s house.”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“Beats me. Maybe it’s the only place she could go. Maybe he’s soft on her.”
“That’s true. He is.”
Ivy cared about sex like he cared about designer furniture. “Yeah, well, it’s a Kurtzweil FX-11.”
“We’ll find it.”
“At last. I’m beat. It’s time for me to go home.”
“You’re beat,” I said wearily. “Where are you?”
“I’m on the pay phone at the columbarium.”
A chilly bank of fog roiled the cypresses in the western reaches of Golden Gate Park, their limbs furled and bucked slowly in the gusts as if they were under water. By the time we got off John F. Kennedy at 36th Avenue, the sky was low and gray enough to have dimmed the Outer Richmond to a preternatural darkness. As we crossed Fulton at the northern boundary of the park, a wind blustering straight off the Pacific T-boned the Lexus hard enough to shake it on its springs. The shattered safety glass on the back shelf spun in the eddies of cold air like so much dust.
Nothing had changed at Anza and 36th, though it seemed like two weeks since we’d been there instead of 24 hours. By what was left of the daylight, 4514 was still the boxy, two-story, nondescript cottage it had been the night before, a single unit with neither garage nor ocean view, typical of the cheaper homes built on the edge of the continent after World War II, painted white then, and gray once since, in 1960 or so. Its foundation plates would prove to be dry-rotted, along with the first foot or two of wood above the ground. The boards of a small laundry porch out back will have rotted through as well. The double-hung windows on the weather side of the building would be painted or nailed shut on the first floor, except for the window in the bathroom, which would be propped open by a long-gone tenant’s paperback copy of Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip. A fifties-style TV antenna rotted nearly to transparency by the salt air titled and oscillated in the wind that slipstreamed over the flat roof, its vanes and feelers trained eastward like the limbs and even the trunks of coastal cypresses and Monterey pines, sculpted by two lifetimes of relentless afternoon westerlies. The roof itself would prove to have been layered with rolled asphalt time and again, one- or two- or at most three-year protection against the near-horizontal rains fed by the tropical moisture locals call the Pineapple Express, which travels 3,000 miles, all the way from Hawaii, several times per winter, to test every seam, joint, and crack in California construction mores.
Lavinia parked across the street and reached for the glove compartment. I stayed her hand. “Haven’t we had enough gunplay for a first date?”
She looked me frankly in the eye. “A girl likes to play with a full hand.”
“I’ll keep it full,” I said, moving her hand to my lap, “later. For now, let’s just get Sal’s keyboard and get out of here.”
Lavinia gave me a tentative squeeze. “I almost forgot what it’s like.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. “As a rule, it’s worth remembering.”
She nodded; whether thoughtfully or skeptically, I couldn’t tell. “Let’s go.”
Both stories of 4514 were dark, but Lavinia touched the bell button anyway, twice. No answer. We walked next door.
There had probably once been a lawn, but someone had paved it with pink cement. This in turn had faded to a mauvish flavor of gray discoverable in the plumage of road-killed pigeons. A brick path between these two forlorn patches divided around a blasted bird bath of pebbled concrete, streaked with guano, in whose bowl lingered unwanted beach detritus—shards of sand dollars and of mussel and abalone shells, pebbles and bits of coral, the arm of a starfish, collected no doubt by children long since become park bench pensioners—and out of whose center spiraled the corroded remains of two strands of reinforcing wire, about which once perhaps twined a comely cement naiad, her smooth integument reduced by willful teenage baseball bats long since to armature and crumbs.
Hardly had Lavinia fingered the bell button on this building than the door flung wide open to reveal a perspiring Eritrion Torvald. His hair was tousled, his sallow complexion flushed; he wore a pinstriped dress shirt, tail out and like himself much worn, like himself unwashed. His bridge, consisting of four upper front teeth, was askew, and there was fervor in his eyes. His shoelaces were loose, his fly half open, and he had a keyboard synthesizer under one arm.
“Mr. Torvald?” Lavinia said, a tad disconcerted, “I’m Lavinia Hahn, from Kramer’s World of Sound? We … met once before.” A strange look darted through Torvald’s eyes, which I interpreted as a gleam of triumph. It faded when Lavinia added, “This is Curly Watkins, my associate.”
Torvald peered up at me nearsightedly. “Well if it isn’t the brother from Philadelphia.” This perspicacity came my way unexpectedly, and he knew it. I bade him a good evening. Torvald didn’t acknowledge the greeting. He adjusted his bridge, which decreased his overbite, and let his lower lip dip into a smile. Abruptly the muscles around it went slack and the smile concentrically dissolved, as if sinking into the quicksand of his face.
Lavinia said, “Your tenant, Angelica
Stepnowski, is expecting us. Is she here with you, by any chance?”
Torvald took a step back into the room, away from the door, but did not usher us in, saying. “She’s been spending a lot of time with me, poor thing. Such a shock. You heard about her husband?”
“We heard,” Lavinia said. “On behalf of all of us at the World of Sound, I’d like to express our sympathies.”
“The poor thing. Such a nice boy, too. I’ve always liked musicians. Rented to a lot of them over the years. Surfers, too. They always have nice girlfriends. Some of them can cook. You know, like, Hey Daddy, what’s cooking!” He showed a completely mechanical smile of mostly false teeth. He hadn’t shaved, and the stubble was the dirty white of over-the-hill tile grout.
“Yeah,” Lavinia said without enthusiasm. “Cooking.”
“I’ve just come from the apartment.” He showed us the keyboard. It was a Kurtzweil, a fancy item with lots of buttons, a built-in hard drive, and fifty-five keys that, I happened to know, have a grand piano feel to them. A power cord and a couple of MIDI cables encircled it. “Angelica asked me to retrieve it for her.” He looked at Lavinia uncertainly. “She said you would bring it back to the dealer?”
Lavinia nodded. My rôle as The Muscle was to remain in the background, silent and ominous, but I nodded, too.
“You can trust the King,” Lavinia assured him.
Especially, I thought sourly, if you’re Angelica Stepnowski.
Torvald bowed in a courtly manner entirely out of keeping with his physical appearance. By a bum out of Beckett, the gesture might have been funny. By Torvald it was almost unnerving. When he straightened up, he cradled the synthesizer like a toothy papoose. “Angelica said Mr. Kramer would refund the down payment so she’ll have enough money to cremate poor Stefan. Is that so?”
Lavinia was at a loss to respond to this. How were we to know what kind of story Angelica had cooked up for the old man? “Five hundred dollars,” I said, “regardless of the amount of the down payment.”
Torvald blinked as if he’d forgotten I was there, and fixed his stare on my boots. From there he let his eyes crawl up me like a pair of snakes re-entwining a caduceus. When they met mine, he said, “…Cremate…”
Lavinia spoke. “I guess you have all experienced quite a … an unpleasant shock, Mr. Torvald.”
As if eagerly, he smiled in her direction. “Yes,” he said, a little saliva moistening his fricatives. “A shock.”
“We have the refund,” Lavinia said, “in cash. But I need to hand it over to Mrs. Stepnowski in person, and she needs to sign a receipt.”
Torvald was stealing glances at Lavinia, trying not to show too much interest, but in fact appraising her much in the way a needy teenager might, who had a compulsive imagination fueled by unlimited access to internet pornography. I was beginning to see what Lavinia saw in him.
“I’m sure….” He stopped and cocked his head, as if listening. He looked behind him. He shifted the synthesizer under one arm. He fumbled in the breast pocket of his shirt and came up with a rectangular metal tin. He thumbed open the hinged top and extended it, still looking over his shoulder. “Care for a mint?”
Lavinia, again, seemed at a loss for words. I said, “No thanks.” Lavinia nodded faintly, but she said, “No, thank you,” too.
Torvald pinched out a mint for himself, capped the tin, and replaced it in his breast pocket. He set the mint on his tongue, already whitened by earlier mints, and closed his mouth. His cheeks hollowed as he began to suck, looking thoughtfully, now, at Lavinia.
“Uh,” Lavinia said, “you say that Mrs. Stepnowski is here? With you?”
A fierce draft of chill wind blustered down the street behind us. It ruffled the pair of tapered junipers flanking the front door and peppered the backs of our legs with particles of sand.
“Damn,” Lavinia shivered, “I’m dressed for Oakland.”
Torvald squeezed his eyes nearly shut and relinquished one hand from the synthesizer to grasp the stile of the front door, to keep it from crashing against the hinge jamb. For a moment it seemed as if he were about to close the door behind him and leave us shivering on the sidewalk. Whatever he was thinking, he suddenly recollected himself. “Angelica’s lying down in the guest bedroom.” He stepped aside, gesturing with the keyboard. “Please. Come in.”
Despite the cold Lavinia hesitated, clutching the lapels of her blouse to her throat.
Torvald bowed slightly, looked up at her, and smiled politely. “Please. We’re all a little out of sorts this evening.”
Lavinia wavered, then stepped over the threshold.
I followed.
Torvald closed the door behind us.
I heard the click of the dead bolt. An urban reflex on Torvald’s part? But across the room on a low cabinet stood a very large television monitor, perhaps four feet on the diagonal. It was on and it depicted a bare room with beige walls, badly lit. The camera angle shot up from the floor, not ten feet from a woman with cornrowed blonde hair, who was strapped to an unpainted wooden throne in the center of the shot. She wore only shreds of undergarments. Though her head had sunk to her chest, bobbing slightly with her breathing, it was plain to see that a gag encircled her head. Her skin glistened with sweat.
Lavinia saw this too. It was impossible not to see it. In the stunned silence strange sounds came from a pair of big speakers flanking the television. The bound woman was mewing, like a kitten.
I spun to face Torvald, but he was ahead of me. I had time to see his move but no time to react. Already the synthesizer had been in full swing, impelled by all the strength he could lend it at arms’ length, arcing like a baseball bat, and it cracked the side of my head with enough force to fell me like a lamppost struck by lightning.
“Congratulations!” Torvald spat out the mint and his incisors with the word, upended the keyboard, and tamped my head against the floor, with prejudice. As my senses swam like so much spilled beer through the fibers of the carpet pile, he thanked me for delivering to him the “final woman,” and hit me again.
The last thing I heard was Lavinia’s scream.
Chapter Fifteen
ERITRION “ARI” TORVALD WAS A NICE MAN UNTIL HIS WIFE, Malita, died.
Then he became nicer.
Until you got to know him.
Weekly, Torvald hosed down the two patches of pink cement that flanked the path from the sidewalk on Anza Street to his own front door. Then he hosed down the brick walkway to the two story bungalow next door. “Income property,” he called his bungalow. “Aprons,” he called his pink patches. “Washing my aprons,” he would say, “rinsing my assets,” and he would touch an eyebrow, as he surveyed his property, preening before his real estate as if it were a reflective window. Inquiries about the ruined birdbath met with a sad, “Malita loved it so.”
The rental unit, social security, and an out-of-court disability settlement reached nearly four years after a ballpoint pen fell twelve stories onto his head as he was walking past a building full of non-profit art organizations on New Montgomery Street—these covered all his needs, as well as those of his lawyers, and then some. Torvald was one of those people who makes both money and trouble by apparently doing nothing. Nothing, that is, if you don’t count Torvald detailing his Mercedes with a toothbrush every Sunday morning. Nothing, that is, if you don’t count Torvald busing downtown to the Department of Parking and Traffic with a fold-up aluminum walker every business day for two months until the harried bureaucrat he had zeroed in on, a woman—whose husband disappeared after refinancing their house, cleaning out the bank account, and cashing in their life insurance policy, sticking her with their Down’s Syndrome two-year-old and a mortgage payment equal to thirteen-sixteenths of her annual salary—who, desperate to rid herself of Torvald, issued him a blue disabled parking placard to dangle off the stalk of the rear-view mirror of his Mercedes, enabling Torvald to violate municipal parking statutes throughout the stat of California with impunity.
Noth
ing, unless you count his secretly, by night, renovating the basement under his house. Minor excavation was required. San Francisco is a sand dune. Torvald transported some of the excavated sand to the parking lot below the Palace of the Legion of Honor and dumped it off the cliff there, scooping out four five-gallon buckets, the most he could get into the trunk of the Mercedes, a single one-pound coffee can’s worth at a time, like a man feeding pigeons. He also dumped sand at Chrissy Field while it was being restored, and at the Giants’ new baseball park while it was under construction. But it was the mammoth Catellus Project, nearly four hundred acres in the heart of the city, that received the majority of the sand. Nobody noticed the difference. Everybody thought Torvald was busy doing nothing.
Nothing, that is, unless you count the meticulous, incremental, glacial in pace, glacial in ineluctability, conversion of his basement taxidermy lab into two sound-proof rooms, which, as he almost let slip to the one neighbor who asked what was going on, just before that neighbor moved without leaving a forwarding address, Torvald intended to be a recording studio. Hence all the sound-proofing: fiberglass acoustic bats between staggered studs behind triple-sandwich walls—one layer each of plywood, fiberboard, and sheetrock glued and held in place with screws until the glue dried; then the screws were backed out and their holes caulked and sanded smooth; the entire wall covered with a special acoustic fabric—with a one-inch air gap between the sandwich walls and the surrounding eight-inch concrete retaining walls; ‘floating’ concrete floor; a ceiling built much like the walls, except it was suspended from the ground floor by special isolators, each carefully calibrated as to the amount of load it would be expected to carry.
Quite a project to have been carried out almost entirely in secret, entirely at night or on weekends, by a man who, to all outward appearances, did absolutely nothing the whole time.
Absolutely nothing, that is, unless you count the compulsive repetition of viewing and reviewing a meticulously curated collection of videos, some two thousand and forty hours of them, the temporal equivalent of one year’s attendance at a regular job, cataloging them by date, length and number of cassettes constituting each volume, and alphabetically, too. Each volume had a name associated with it, although two of them had the same name, purely a coincidence of course, for the name, Sheila, was common enough, which Torvald had resolved by the simple expedient of labeling the respective productions “Sheila I” and “Sheila II”. Torvald also indexed the collection as to male or female, race and age, stages and degrees, types and frequency of practices, as well as to his estimation of overall artistic value, both intrinsic and relative; as indicated by three to five stars.