Inevitably, over the next few decades, the film industry moved west, pushed by a landslide of money that demanded hills with views, and houses on lots large enough to qualify as city-states; and the Western Avenue neighborhood started a long economic skid that continued through the 1970s. The big houses were cut up into apartments, the apartments went unimproved and became undervalued and overpopulated, sometimes with two and three families to a unit. When land values reached their nadir, a secretive, cash-only Korean syndicate bought the China apartments and brought them back to their original state of glory on the inside while distressing even further the buildings’ exteriors until they looked like convalescent homes for rats. They even pulled up the lawns and planted weeds. The absolute poster of urban decay.
But inside, if you could get past the inconspicuous Korean guards, they were perfect palaces: big rooms, high ceilings, Art Deco windows, endlessly polished mahogany and marble floors, such long-forgotten amenities as cold pantries, nurseries, and libraries. The units were marketed to those who had a lot to hide, many of them “small businessmen” with huge profits, men with second and third secret families, and a staggering variety of criminals—representatives of virtually all the major tribes of Crook Nation. Almost all of them were Korean.
I had been given possession of unit 302, a six-room beauty with a view of the downtown lights, five or six years earlier by a Korean plausible named Winnie Park whose life I had saved in an uncharacteristic moment of physical bravery. Several of her schemes had simultaneously gone rancid and she’d fled the country, handing me the lease as a thank-you before taking off for Singapore. But she blew it in Singapore, too, and now she occasionally writes me wistful letters from prison, where she’s serving a really solid chunk of time.
With one last, cautious look in the mirror I pulled into the basement garage beneath the edgwood. By bribing every building inspector in sight, the syndicate had knocked the previously separate underground garages into one vast subterranean space. Since the buildings stood on a corner, it was possible to dip down into the edgwood’s parking basement and emerge a moment later from beneath The Royal Doult, on a different street altogether. If, like me, you kept an extra ride down there, you could come out not only from a different building, facing a different street, but also driving a different car. I thought this arrangement testified to the management’s deep and thorough understanding of their customers’ needs.
For years after my wife, Kathy, and I split, I had lived in off-brand motels, moving frequently from one dump to another, trying to stay ahead of the rapidly growing list of crooks whose bad side I had managed to locate. After Winnie’s departure I had tossed her stuff and filled Apartment 302 with the simple but expensive period furnishings it deserved. I’d signed up for the syndicate’s cleaning service to keep its surfaces gleaming, and I’d filled the shelves in the library, but I visited it only rarely, and even then with one eye on the mirror. It had been my sole real secret, my one-person bomb shelter for the day the world turned on me, as it had on Winnie Park. Even Kathy and my daughter, Rina, didn’t know about it. But, at a turning point in my relationship with Ronnie, when I had been modestly unfaithful in spirit if not in body, I’d gone full metal jacket on commitment: I took her to the place and asked her to live there with me. Together we had created my first real home since Kathy and I broke up.
The pretense of squalor extended from the dim garage to the battered elevator with its preprogrammed lurches and jiggles, its recorded soundtrack of alarming noises no one wants to hear in an elevator, and its hidden camera so the guards could stop you on the ground floor if they didn’t recognize you. It extended even to the corridors on each floor, whose ceilings dropped flakes of plaster, like architectural dandruff, on the slightly squishy carpets. It took me three keys to open my door, both bags of books held tentatively in my free hand as I fiddled with the locks.
Once inside, I released a long breath I seemed to have been storing up forever, since the moment Lumia’s wretched little gun went off. The place was blessedly dim and silent and cool; Ronnie didn’t like the heating system, which produced warm but faintly dusty-smelling air. A vase of out-of-season carnations radiated its pungent scent all the way from the living room. I went into the library, floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls, and put the supermarket bags on my favorite place to sit in the world, an old armchair made of a leather so supple it seemed to have been buttered for decades. Then I tiptoed to the door of the bedroom, moving burglar-quietly, and peeked in at Ronnie, who had one foot poking out from the blanket. Its Technicolor rainbow of toenail polish (she never did them all the same shade) served as a sort of cheerful flag of greeting. I gave her a Laurel and Hardy fingertip wave, eased the door closed, went to the kitchen, wrapped the grinder in a couple of dish towels to shut it up, and made some coffee.
The fragrance of the coffee, steaming on the little library table beside my chair, combined with the carnations to create a scent almost pungent enough to scrub the stink of Miss Daisy’s baby powder from my memory. I unpacked the first editions and flipped through them, putting them to my nose to catch another favorite scent, the perfume of old books. These volumes were in good shape; no Philistine had dog-eared them or underlined in them (a sin I commit compulsively), no children had enlivened the color scheme with their crayons, and the pervasive damp of Horton House seemed to have given them a solicitous miss. It was relatively late in life that I’d begun reading—reading seriously, anyway. I’d read as a kid primarily as a way of hiding in a world my father wasn’t in. My mother was fond of really thick books, the originals of the “condensed” versions I’d seen on Miss Daisy’s shelf, thoughtfully de-boned and reduced to gruel by Readers Digest, but I’d learned early that fatness in a book wasn’t a warning sign but rather a promise that you would be allowed to remain in its world for a longer time.
English girls in the seventeenth century, I had read somewhere, were often criticized for reading novels rather than sermons. The printing press, like every other technological advance, had been demonized as the death of civilization even as it opened life up and even made it bearable for so many, as it did for me when I was a kid. After I escaped my father’s house I entered into the slightly schizophrenic existence of someone who was a college student when it was light out and a burglar after dark, and I pretty much quit reading anything that wasn’t assigned and likely to be on a final. And then an English professor, an avuncular, brilliant, big-hearted, basso profundo Faulkner scholar named Marvin Klotz, with whom I had taken two classes, said to me, “You know what the curse of being a teacher is, Mr. Bender? It’s constantly looking at some kid and thinking he or she is brighter than the external evidence would indicate, and being wrong over and over again.” I had said something like, “Yeah?” because I wasn’t used to having faculty members address me as a person rather than a paying customer, and he said, “Yeah.” He reached into his briefcase and took out a book that was fat even by my mother’s standards—more than nine hundred pages, as I would learn almost immediately—and he handed it to me and said, “Let’s see what you get out of this.”
What I got out of it was that I didn’t know shit.
The book, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, was about an art forger who is tormented by the questions of what he owes to God and which God he might owe it to. It opened to me the worlds of religious history, the names and idiosyncrasies of some now-obscure gods and their avatars, the painters of the Flemish Renaissance, the lives of some of the quirkier saints, and the world of Greenwich Village in the 1950s, to name just a few. It also put me on a long-term course of reading that, in the short haul, completely replaced my college curriculum and, in the long run, was responsible for the books on the shelves of the room I was sitting in. It was very satisfying to know that I already owned a first edition of The Recognitions to share the shelves with Trollope, Eliot, Conan Doyle, and the others I had just brought home.
A yawn ambushed me.
I blinked away the tears and asked myself where I would put Mr. Horton’s masterpieces. Rearranging bookshelves, especially full bookshelves that will require some deletions to make way for the newcomers, is sort of like adopting a clutch of kids when your bedrooms are all filled to capacity: Which children will you push prematurely into the world? I thought about the three little actors whom Harried Mom had used as props and made a mental note to visit, later in the day, the person who might be able to help me identify them. Without warning, time imploded completely, just folded up and disappeared, and the next thing I knew, someone was tapping lightly on my knee.
10
Swifty
“You came in quietly,” Ronnie said. She was standing a couple of feet away, silhouetted against the flow of morning light in the doorway behind her, and she had a fresh, steaming cup of coffee, complete with saucer, in her hand. She waved it around as I sat up and blinked at her, my eyes feeling so crusted they could have belonged to a century-old tortoise.
“I was singing opera when I came in,” I said. I yawned. “You could sleep through Armageddon.”
“Better than being awake for it.” She was wearing the yellow T-shirt, which she had claimed and laundered in water hot enough to take it down two sizes. Ronnie liked yellow. She even looked good in it.
I squinted at the yellow and said, “What time is it?”
“Just past ten-thirty.” She stepped forward, looking down at me. “You were all collapsed in here like a crumpled newspaper. I didn’t have the heart to wake you up.”
“It was a long night,” I said. “Is that coffee for me?”
“Sure. The stuff you made had turned into asphalt.” She backed up a step instead of handing the cup to me and said, “Want to drink it in the living room? That way, I can sit down, too.”
I said, “Why don’t you sit on my lap?”
“It’s just one grim condition after another. Angle around so I can get my pretty little feet on the footstool.” She set the coffee on the table, put both arms around my neck—she was still minty with toothpaste—and slid onto my lap. It always amazed me how someone I loved so much could weigh so little; you would have thought the sheer volume of affection I’d poured into her would weigh her down, if only a tiny bit. Maybe love is lighter than air. She said, “Rough night?”
“A stinker.” I picked up the cup, leaned to one side so I wouldn’t spill any on her, and drank about half of it. It was much better than mine. When I went to put it back, I hit the edge of the table with my forearm, and only her reflexes kept the saucer from sliding off and hitting the floor.
“It must have been a bad night,” she said, putting the saucer back. “Usually you’re as precise as a cat.”
“Cats knock all kinds of stuff over.”
“Yeah, but they do it on purpose,” she said. “What went wrong?”
I gave her the two-minute summary. When I’d finished, she snuggled up against me and said, “I don’t like this chair half as much without you in it. Did you know her very well?”
“She was one of Herbie’s pets for a while. A nice person who kind of undervalued herself. Always looking for a version of her she could like better. She, um, she got the hiccups when she was nervous.” To my surprise, I’d had to take a deep breath to finish the sentence.
“I never met her,” she said, but it was partly a question.
“No, you didn’t. We hadn’t seen each other in years.”
“And you didn’t get the McGuffin. Does this mean that we’re in danger?”
“I think it does,” I said. “How would you feel about going back to motels for a while?”
“No problem,” she said, “as long as you’re there, being as uncomfortable as I am.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“So you think two people are competing for this thing you didn’t get.”
“That’s what I think.”
“And they’re both dangerous.”
“From what I’ve seen so far, that’s an understatement.”
She sighed. Then she said, “One suitcase, right?”
I said, “I haven’t actually been to bed yet. You look like you might benefit from a little sleep, too.”
“Sleep, he says. Fat chance.” She got up and offered me a hand. “Come on, gramps. Morning’s slipping by.”
“You can call me gramps all you want,” I said, letting her pull me up, “but I’m still spry.”
Stinky yawned into the phone, and I involuntarily yawned back at him. He said, “You just left.”
“Who fences furniture, carpets, paintings, house stuff?” I was in the living room, looking at the skyline and working on my third cup of coffee, reinvigorated by the caffeine, a little friendly exercise, and a shared shower. Ronnie was in the preparatory stages of packing, a process with several phases.
“Well, paintings are a category unto themselves. The rest of it: contemporary or antique?” Then he said, “Thank you, Crisanto.”
I said, “Fences have specialties? What did he bring you?”
“If you must know, it’s a hot infusion of chamomile, blessed thistle, and black tea, Tanyang Gongfu from Fujian.”
“Easy for you to say. Does it wake you up?”
“I don’t require the same amount of waking up that you do.”
“Really. Are you aware that black tea was an accident, just some old crap tea that was left in the sun too long—”
“You are not going to spoil—”
“—and that the Chinese sold it to the British and made up this big story about it because they figured the Brits wouldn’t know any—”
“Three,” Stinky said, counting down. “Two.”
“Why can’t you drink coffee, like real people?”
“If you insist on an answer,” Stinky said, “coffee is blunt-force trauma for the nervous system. Fine, I suppose, for the insensitive and the low-strung—”
“Those of us who have to shave the backs of our hands.”
“Figuratively, of course. Most of the time. Yes, there are specialists. But if you’ve somehow bagged, or, rather, come across, something that would interest one of them, I’d be very happy to take it to the best—”
“I’m sure you would,” I said. “But what I need is information. I’d like you to give me their names and then call ahead and tell them they can talk to me.”
“Let me see,” Stinky said, “which favor am I returning?”
“The one I’m going to do you when I don’t tell the guy who banged on the door there last night that you’re the one who sent me to him.”
“You don’t know who—”
“I will,” I said. “And you know that’s true.”
“You’ll be walking into the lion’s den.”
“I have dealt,” I said, “with television and movie producers.”
“And, of course,” Stinky said in one of those dazzling reversals that are possible only to people whose innermost convictions are shallowly held, “you’ll tell me immediately after you’ve talked to him. Let me know how it went. If you’re still walking, I mean.”
“I will.”
“And if there’s money to be made from whatever you’re doing with this old furniture or whatever it is, you’ll remember who opened the door for you.”
“You’re so dependable,” I said. “It’s a comfort to have at least one friend, or maybe acquaintance, who always jumps the way you think he will.”
“So you want the name of a fence?”
“And a number, please.”
“And you promise you won’t start taking things to this fence, things that I should get.”
“And a number, please.”
“I’m waiting for your word of—”
“Do you remember when you said that if I didn’t find the gizmo, your visitor last night would come af
ter me? And do you remember who else you said he’d come after?”
Stinky gave me a long pause that was difficult to interpret as thoughtful and said, “Do you have a pencil?”
Ninety minutes later, Louie the Lost said, “That was a nice girl.” He chewed for a moment, but without his usual gusto, although, to be fair, gusto wasn’t the likeliest reaction to the food we were eating. “Little bit of a thing.” Louie and I were in yet another of his favorite San Fernando Valley restaurants, each of which was distinguished by one thing it did better than any other San Fernando Valley restaurant Louie knew of. In this one the highlight was pie which, unfortunately, we hadn’t yet gotten to. The courses preceding the pie were memorably forgettable.
“She was,” I said, and then I said again, “She was,” and realized that I wasn’t really ready to talk about her yet. Then I said, without knowing I was going to say it, “She was lonely.”
Louie gave me a quick glance with a lot of questions in it, so I changed the subject. “Are any of your restaurants good at more than one thing?”
“Nah,” he said. We were sitting in front of a big window in the full cold glare of the afternoon, and I was startled to see strands of gray in Louie’s ponytail. How long had I known him, anyway? Did I have gray in my hair? “Somebody tells you he can do two things great,” Louie said, “stand back because his nose is gonna grow. Most people work their whole lives to get to the point where they do one thing okay, not great, just okay. People who get great, they only do one thing. Most great singers can’t swim for shit.”
I said, “I’d love a look at the data that supports that.”
He blew on his coffee. It was almost gone, so I knew he was stalling before saying something he wasn’t sure of. “You wanna talk about her or not?”
Nighttown Page 9