As soon as I could without being obvious, I scoped out the crowd, which was mostly young though not exclusively so. In fact, the Last Exit seemed to be frequented by two distinct groups—college students and unreconstructed hippies. The older crowd wore ponytails if they were men and buzz cuts if they were women; the young ones were of opposite inclination. The old ones wore multicolored costumes that smacked of verve and celebration; the young ones wore threadbare flannels and perforated denims that smacked of enervation and depleted self-esteem. The old ones had age spots and sun blotches; the young ones had tattoos on every dermal surface including neck and scalp. The old ones had maybe a single earring, the young ones were pierced at every point that was pierceable—lip, nose, ear, eyebrow, and God only knew where else; I’d heard rumors they even pierced their scrota. I couldn’t help wondering how those kids were going to feel about those indelible tattoos when they got to be my age. The perforated scrota would be less of a problem.
My waitress was so deferential I doubted she had a historic perspective on the place. When I told her I was fine with what I had, she seemed pleased that I had reached a state of grace rather than disappointed that she wasn’t moving product. A month from now, she’d be pushing Doppios and puff pastry on anyone with the temerity to make do with drip.
The waiter busing the next table with a sullen indelicacy was sufficiently lethargic to peg him as a more productive source of information. When he drifted my way, I dared a generic question. “Hey,” I said when I caught his eye. “How’s it going?”
He swiped at my table with a sodden rag. The poster above his head read, AMERICANS BOUGHT 8 MILLION GUNS IN 1993—FEEL SAFER? “I’m adequate, man,” he muttered. “You?”
“Same here. Seen Nina lately?” I continued, as if we’d shared the subject previously.
“Nina who?”
“Evans. Nice-looking. Artist type.”
“They’re all artists if they don’t have a job. What do you want her for?”
“Got work she might be interested in.”
“What kind of work?”
“Art work.”
He inspected me more closely; I think he branded me a narc. “Don’t know the lady, man. Don’t know you, either.”
“This isn’t about trouble. This is about money.”
He shrugged. “So maybe you could leave a note.” He pointed toward a board on the wall by the door, a feathery collage of writings from personal messages to business announcements to handmade ads for everything from massage to music lessons. “Or run an ad in the Salmon,” the waiter added with what sounded like sarcasm.
“Nina’s brother works for the Salmon,” I said, to show I knew more about her than a narc would. “Jeff. I talked to him about her but he blew me off—he and sister don’t get along.”
My fable made the waiter reassess. “That Nina,” he said finally. “I was thinking of the other one.”
“So do you know how I can reach that Nina?”
“She’s got a crib in the place next door.”
“Not anymore, she doesn’t.”
“Then I’m tapped. Come to think of it, she hasn’t been in for a while.”
“When you saw her last, who was she with?”
“You mean other than Richter?”
“Yeah. Other than Richter.”
He thought about it. “Girl named Roan, sometimes. And some guy I’ve never seen before tried to hit on her a while back. They’re the only ones I can think of.”
“Where can I find Roan?”
“Hawking on the Ave.”
“Hawking what?”
“Jewelry.”
“How about Richter?”
“Gary? What about him?” The waiter had turned suspicious—I’d asked one question too many.
I took a chance at indirection. “He still in the old place?”
The gambit didn’t work. “Far as I know,” he said indifferently. “I heard he came into some bread, though. Movie money, or something.”
Someone across the room yelled, “Hey, Lance. Order’s up.”
Lance pocketed the rag. “Catch you later, man.”
By now I was attracting enough stares to know that my time in Brooklyn was up. I left a big enough tip to encourage my waitress to retain her family values, then strolled south toward what the natives apparently called the Ave.
The portion of University way south of 47th Street was Seattle’s version of Telegraph Avenue, a tattered strip of record/pizza/health/copy/computer/book/sports/ and Middle Eastern import stores that paralleled the campus one block removed from its western border. Like Telegraph, the street seemed to meet the needs of the students and, more precisely, those of the auxiliary community of intellectuals and idiots that leeches onto a college campus the way whorehouses leech onto an Army post. I strolled the Ave and took inventory.
The usual stew of commercial establishments was in evidence, spiced with the ubiquitous espresso carts. I saw more Asians than Caucasians, more skinheads than frat boys, and more women than men. I might have been back in the East Bay.
When I reached a string of sidewalk vendors huddled together for warmth, I asked the first one I came to if she knew where I could find a woman named Roan who sold jewelry. The woman was rail-thin and nappy-headed; her shirt was short-sleeved and diaphanous and she was trembling like a rabbit from the cold.
She pointed south. “Roan usually works the next block.”
“Which side?”
“This one. Everyone likes sun but the candlemakers.”
The sun she referred to was not in evidence. “What kind of jewelry does she sell?”
“Silver, mostly. Some pewter. She tried gold a while back but she’s too wired to work it right.”
“What’s she look like?”
“Roan? She’s tall. Taller than you, I bet.” She seemed to regard it as a feminist achievement.
“Be hard to tell tall if she’s sitting down,” I pointed out.
Helpful in the way most of the natives seemed to be, she trolled for another detail. “She’s got a silver nose ring,” she said finally, as though it was an incidental accoutrement hardly worth mentioning.
I glanced at two girls strolling past. “So does half the town.”
“She’s got a tattoo of a bee on her tit, but you’ll only see it if she likes you.” Her grin turned mischievous and her lips stopped quivering; double entendre warmed her up. “When she got pregnant, the bee looked more like a B-52.”
I laughed.
“Ask around. You’ll find her if she’s here. Roan’s been on the Ave longer than anyone.”
I thanked her for the information. As I started to leave, she reached for one of the objects on the walk beside her and raised it for inspection. “Need a wallet, mister? Calfskin; hand-tooled; triple fold. Makes a nice gift.”
I told her I didn’t know anyone who had anything to put in it.
Roan wasn’t hard to spot. She was sitting cross-legged on a dingy blanket in the middle of the next block, her long legs barely leaving room on the blanket to display her wares, her long arms crossed for warmth on her chest. Her dress was dark and shapeless, a muslin drape long enough to cover everything but her toes. For ornament she was featuring earrings and finger rings and nose rings, with a necklace and bracelets as well. Similar jewelry was clustered near her on the blanket, as though she’d birthed a hundred silver children.
The designs were simple yet arresting, suggesting droplets of rain and pools of water. In Berkeley, the sidewalk stuff is mostly unremarkable—I suspect a family in Mexico makes it all and the local vendors sell it on consignment. Roan’s output was a cut above, but a degree or two short of elegant.
I told her she had nice stuff. She thanked me. The woman selling dried flowers on the next blanket said something about the cop on the corner and Roan turned her way and laughed.
When she turned back, she said, “He gives us an hour, then rousts us. Fucking city attorney thinks we’re a threat to civilization. We
are civilization,” she added bitterly, then asked if I was looking for anything special.
“I am, but you don’t seem to have it,” I said with what I hoped was a disarming smile.
“What’s that?”
“Nina Evans.”
Roan frowned and recrossed her arms. The wings of the bee peeked over the front of her bodice. “What do you want with Nina?” she asked with chilly reserve.
I repeated my earlier lie. “To talk about a job.”
“What kind of job? Modeling?”
I nodded.
“Paint or photography?”
“Pardon me?”
“Are you a painter or a photographer?”
I took a stab. “Painter.”
“Nina doesn’t do paint.”
“Yet,” I bragged.
Roan squinted into the suddenly emergent sun. “Rhonda does paint.” She pointed. “She has the pinecone candles across the street.”
“I’ll check her out later, maybe, but I hear Nina is special. I’m betting I can convince her to diversify.”
Roan shook her head. “I doubt it.”
“Do you know where I can find her? I can’t seem to raise her at her place on Fifty-second.”
“I think she moved.”
“Do you know where?”
She shook her head with what looked like sadness and maybe a little irritation.
“Do you know anyone who might know where she is?”
“Only the asshole.”
“Which asshole is that?”
“Gary Richter. Nina used to pose for him even though everyone told her he was shit with lips. She saw what happened to Mandy, but she went ahead anyway. Well, she learned her lesson, didn’t she?” The conclusion carried a trill of triumph.
“What happened to Mandy?”
“Gary stole her soul and did the same to Nina.” Roan turned toward another customer, but my presence brought her back. “If you want to see how, take a look at Erospace.”
“What’s Erospace?”
“Gallery on Brooklyn. Across from the pharmacy.”
“Thanks. Where can I find Mandy?”
“Somewhere near the doorstep to hell.” She narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. “You’re not the guy who’s been following her, are you?”
“Nina?” I shook my head. “What guy?”
“Old. Grungy. Smells. He’s been hanging around her for months.”
“I’m not him.” I gave her my name and pulled out a motel card and presented it. “If you see Nina or the creep or Mandy, will you call me?”
Roan shrugged and stuck it in her purse. “You need any jewelry, mister? I’m on sale today—twenty percent off. Makes a nice gift for the special woman in your life.”
I thought of Peggy and her man, and Betty and hers, and then I thought of Eleanor. Then I told Roan that at the moment I didn’t have any women in my life who were old enough to wear it.
CHAPTER 7
After a week of searching she finally finds him. Finds him, then follows him, to see where he is getting the money for the car and the clothes and the equipment that have blossomed in his life. One evening in April, she trails him out of the Triangle Tavern, down to the edge of the lake, then east toward Gas Works Park. At the pace of a dawdler, he leads her to a secret lair.
The new place is as different from Gary’s studio in Fremont as diamonds are from coal. It sits atop a brand-new building nestled between the Harbor Patrol and a shipyard full of rusting fish processors with names like Yardarm Knot and Dakar. The gleaming white structure is as incongruous in that neighborhood as is Gary’s presence in it.
She returns three nights later. Because he is new to the job, the super lets her in, on the premise that she is Gary’s latest model just off the plane from New York, a guise furthered by her lie about his sainted mother’s heart condition and by the aged super’s appreciation of a pretty face. As he lets her in the apartment and wishes her a pleasant stay, she stifles an exclamation at its opulence.
The place is fit for a playboy—sleek soft furnishings, exotically contoured lamps, gleaming sets of stemmed glasses, sumptuous oriental rugs, plus a view of the lake and the boats and the mountains and the vertical lights of downtown. All of which is the least of it. What he also has is a windowless room in the back where he does the work she has suspected him of.
The lab is crammed to the ceiling with stuff—when she flips on the light they seem to jump at her, the hulking beige machines, like animals too long in a cage surging toward a friendly face. There are computers and monitors and workstations and printers and enlargers and half-a-dozen devices she’s never seen before, along with bottles of developers and toners and bleachers and fixers, stacks of variable contrast papers, and enough film to fill a refrigerator. It is as different from a conventional darkroom as Gary’s encrusted kitchen is from this one, which is out of Martha Stewart.
She pokes around in a daze of wonder, looking for something inchoate. She avoids the machinery in favor of something she can understand, which is books, but they are either art books or computer manuals: she suspects the latter are the source of the images at Erospace, that they offer instruction in the black magic that taught Gary how to put innocence and art in one end and come out with obscenity and evil at the other, but she hasn’t the time to decipher them.
She heads for the filing cabinets, which come in a rotary design that presents a series of trays that revolve in the manner of a Ferris wheel. She spins the cylinders, examining the labels as the drawers pass by. She is not surprised when she sees her name, nor when her tray contains copies of the Erospace prints as well as lesser libels of that ilk. When she finds nothing worse than what she has seen already, she is relieved.
Similarly, she is not surprised when she comes across a drawer marked Mandy. She expects more of the same within it, but when she examines the contents, she recoils. Finally she knows what has savaged Mandy’s life, what has reduced her from debutante to stripteaser to junkie to probably worse by this time.
Poor Mandy.
Poor Jeff.
She leans against the wall for support, her legs liquid beneath her. She has projected Gary Richter as capable of anything, but she has not considered this. She is furious, then terrified. The aura of the room is foul, an ominous fluorescence of a force that is sick and insidious, of a world that is ruled without regard for dignity or compassion by men who see such concepts as territory vulnerable to conquest.
She is tempted for a moment to destroy as much as she can, but she fears the consequences. She fears Gary, she fears his machinery, she fears the men who paid for it, she fears she will wither unto death like Mandy.
She gathers up the worst of his wares, then escapes as quickly as she can.
The Erospace Gallery was on Brooklyn Avenue, two blocks above Forty-fifth, between Top Video and the Weaving Works. A subtitle painted in bloodred calligraphy on the bottom of the window read, “A Gallery of the Sensual and Erotic Arts.” When I shoved on the door it was locked; the fine print told me that was the norm for Mondays.
I was about to head back to the car when I saw movement in shadows at the rear of the gallery. I pressed my nose to the glass and squinted. A light flashed on behind a rear partition and a woman walked out of one room and into another towing a vacuum cleaner the way golfers tow carts. I knocked on the door a single time, then rapped more insistently when there was no response, my drumming implying that I was such an important personage I had a right to off-hours admission. All of a sudden a pretty but mistrustful girl was framed in the glass of the doorway.
She was young and blonde and as unsure of herself as she was of me. Her green hospital shirt was smeared with grease and grime and her denim cutoffs had various messages spelled out in pen and ink. The only one I could decipher without being lewd declared, “Kurt Lives.”
She brushed at her bangs with the back of her hand. “We’re not open,” she said nervously, opening the door an inch to transmit a message that wa
s already inscribed on it.
I adopted an officious tone and informed her that I was aware of that fact. “However, I was told that a woman named Evans would be in attendance today, regardless. A Nina Evans, to be precise.”
“Sorry. I’m the only one here and I’ll only be here twenty more minutes.”
I became befuddled. “How odd.” I tried to become more imperious but I was handicapped by my attire, which wasn’t far removed in either cleanliness or cost from what the young woman was wearing. “May I know your name, young lady?”
“Why? Are you going to report me? I need this job, mister. No one’s hiring except Burger King and I worked so long for McDonald’s I still smell like a french fry.” She sniffed as if to prove the point.
“I’m sure a report to your superior won’t be necessary. I merely wish to address you more appropriately.”
“I’m Sharon.”
“Well, Sharon, I’m afraid I have a problem. I’m from out of town. I got in late last night, did some business downtown early this morning, and I have to catch a plane for Miami in three hours. I very much want to see the exhibition before I leave, and I was assured that Ms. Evans would be available to show it to me, an erstwhile docent, if you will, even though it is not the usual hour. But you say she is not on the premises.”
Sharon shook her head agreeably. “I’m definitely the only one around.”
“Then we’ll have to improvise, won’t we?”
She frowned. “I don’t play an instrument or anything, if that’s what you mean. I do karaoke sometimes. When I’ve smoked enough bud.”
“I wasn’t making a musical reference, although I’m sure you are a charming songstress, I was merely trying to decide how to proceed for the benefit of all concerned. You see, based on what I’ve heard about the exhibit, I have come prepared to make a significant purchase. Perhaps you know of my interest in this area. In my home in Miami I have one of the finest collections of twentieth-century erotica in the southeastern United States.”
Sharon shook her head. “Sorry. I don’t know that much about erotica. I guess I don’t get it. I mean, my boyfriend keeps bringing home X-rated videos, but they don’t light me up.”
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