Nighttown

by Timothy Hallinan

  When we hit the bump before dropping down into the underground garage, Eaglet made a little eeep sound that I knew she hoped I hadn’t heard. Anime, who had been peeking between her fingers for blocks, was quick enough on the uptake to say, “Whoops” so that she’d sound surprised, too.

  Eaglet, to my amazement, was playing fair, her jacket pulled up above over her eyes. She said to me as we sloped downward, “If you ever tell anybody I let you talk me into this, you’re going to be looking behind you for months.”

  “I won’t. And you can look around now.”

  I was used to the place, but seeing it through their eyes, it was creepy in the extreme. It was so big and so deep and so badly lighted that the farthest wall disappeared into apparent infinity, like a hallway leading into a black hole. Eaglet looked around and said, “Where are the seven dwarfs?”

  “This is fine,” I said to the driver as we approached the elevator to the edgwood. Like the other elevators, it lacked both a name and an address. You either knew which elevator you wanted or you had a sixty-six percent chance of winding up in the wrong building. I gave him a twenty as a tip as I climbed out, and he nodded thanks and said, “Take care of the little one,” and I promised I would, then went and pushed the button for the elevator,

  Anime squeaked a bit at the first jolt-and-slip-back effect, and neither of them looked reassured by the creaking cables and structural groans on the sound track. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Even if we went into free fall it’d probably just be broken hips, something like that.” They both moved to the walls of the compartment, seeking reassurance in contact with something solid, so I said, “That part falls just as fast as the middle.” Anime responded with a barely audible puff of irritation.

  When the doors opened and they saw the corridor, Eaglet said, “Do the people who live here name the rats?”

  I said, “Shhh,” pulled the automatic out of my pocket and said to Eaglet, “You go check the fire stairs at the end of the corridor. If anyone is there, make them stay there.”

  “Until,” she said. She took a gun from her purse. It was pink.

  “Until I see who they are or they’re dead. Do you have a silencer?”

  “I do.” As though it were a nail file, she took from her purse a black tube that I recognized as a Gemtech, although I didn’t know the model number. “They don’t make it in pink,” she said, fitting it to the barrel and giving it a twist. Anime’s eyes widened. “Although God knows I’ve complained. What’s the signal to shoot?”

  “The moment it seems appropriate.”

  Eaglet said, “Fine,” and moved quietly down the hall.

  Looking around, Anime said, “How can you live here?”

  “Whisper, please,” I said. “It’s not as bad as it seems. Stay here for now.”

  “I want to go with you.”

  “Okay, make a deal. You go with me to the door and then keep going, all the way to Eaglet. But for now we’ll both wait here until she’s had a look, okay? Then you can go wait with her while I peek inside.”

  “Okay,” she said. She had the sneakers box with the stuff in it pressed to her chest with her arms folded over it like a shield. She took a step forward and I put a hand on her shoulder to stop her as, at the other end of the hallway, Eaglet pressed an ear to the door. She stood there, immobile, for a long moment and then she stepped back, very slowly turned the knob, and opened the door a few inches at a time, staying out of sight behind it. When it was halfway open she went onto her knees, holding the door steady, and then very quickly looked around its edge, her head well below the area anyone on the other side would probably have been aiming a gun at. Then she stood up, stepped through the doorway, and stood there, her back to us, obviously listening.

  Anime was holding her breath.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “She shoots extremely well.”

  Eaglet came back in and shook her head. “Nobody,” she mouthed.

  “Here we go,” I said. I led Anime down the hall, and she kept going when I stopped and keyed the locks. When I’d finished with the third I turned and whispered to Eaglet, “If anything happens, you get her down those stairs.” Then I pushed the door open and waited.

  The place was cool and silent, and the sun was low enough that dust motes air-waltzed in a rectangle of light falling across the end of the entrance hall. The place looked, sounded, and felt empty, but I went in quietly anyway, leaving the door ajar and waiting at the end of the hall to listen for another minute before I stepped into the sight lines of anyone who might be in the living room.

  No one was. Ronnie had left half a cup of coffee on the table in front of the couch. The surface was filmed with non-dairy powdered limestone or whatever the hell it is, which she generally skipped when I was around. Beside the coffee was one of the books I’d taken the previous evening, which felt like six weeks ago. She’d used a nail file as a bookmark, and it slipped out and hit the table with a tinny protest as I picked up the book, which was Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, the story of the ambitious and only marginally honest Lizzie Eustace and the stolen necklace that gave her so much trouble. Great book, even if he did bag some of it from Thackeray.

  I put the nail file back—page 34—and toted the book one-handed through the rooms with the gun in the other. It took me about three minutes to know that I was alone. Then I went to the front door, said, “It’s okay” to Eaglet and went into the library.

  I had just decided to keep Mr. Horton’s first editions together, giving them their own two feet of shelf space, and was pulling out some things I figured I’d never open again when Anime came in, still carrying the sneaker box.

  “This place is like a movie,” she said. “Who would have known, from how ratty it looks in the hall—”

  “That’s the point,” I said. “And you should see the outside.” From the living room I heard a low whistle of appreciation.

  Anime said, “Most women don’t whistle.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Wow,” she said, her eyes going to the shelves, “have you read all of those?”

  “And others.”

  She nodded. “You’re smarter than you act.”‘

  “Reading doesn’t make you smart,” I said. “Reading makes you human.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t have to kill all these trees. Ebooks, you know?”

  “We all have our paradigms,” I said. “Every generation has different ones. For my generation, it’s books with covers. For yours, it’s selfies and what you ate for lunch and dwarfs doing calisthenics on YouTube.”

  “Thanks, Grampy,” Anime said.

  “You would think,” Eaglet said, coming through the door as she put the pink gun back in her purse, “that you two didn’t like each other, the way you talk. Jesus, look at all these books.”

  “You say that as though it were a beetle collection.”

  “Well, I mean, who’s got the time?”

  “Getting back to business,” Anime said, “I guess you want it pointing right at the front door, right? That’s the only way in.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  She shifted the shoebox to one hip and held out her free hand. “Give me your phone.” When I’d handed it to her and recited the code she jammed it into a pocket and went out, carrying her sneaker box.

  “Where did you find her?” Eaglet asked.

  “She, or rather she and her girlfriend, found me.”

  “Can you just go straight to any book on these shelves? Without having to walk around with your neck at that uncomfortable angle, reading the titles?”

  “With my eyes shut,” I said. From the other room I heard Anime pushing something across the floor.

  “Oh, bullshit,” Eaglet said. “Turn around and close your eyes.”

  “Well,” I said, “within two or three books.”

  “Hedgin
g already.”

  I closed my eyes, and a minute later I heard her back away from the shelf. She said, “The Snow Leopard.”

  “Okay. Here goes.” I knew which set of shelves and which actual shelf it was on, so it was easy to find the right set of shelves by touch and count my way down to the right shelf. Then, taking an educated guess, I ticked off six books to the right with my index finger. I pulled the book out about an inch and turned so my back was to the shelves, opened my eyes, and said, “Check it out.”

  “Ha,” she said. “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.”

  “Yeah, I missed. Two books to the right,” I said. “That’s The Snow Leopard. The one in between them is Shadow Country.”

  Eaglet said, “Wow.”

  “Useless, but a good trick,” I said. “You can probably do that with your handguns.”

  “Hey,” she said, sounding insulted. “I read. Once in a while.”

  Anime called out from the hall. “You’ve got a text.”

  “Ignore it,” I said. “On second thought, read it to me.”

  “It says, ‘Time to talk.’”

  “Well,” I said, “you can’t always get what you want.” I looked over at Eaglet. “Maybe you should be in the hall outside.”

  “Put it into the purse, take it out of the purse,” she said, opening her purse. “I should charge extra.” Gun in hand, she went into the hall while I went back to clearing a space on the shelves. I didn’t really care about the chore, but this kind of busywork allowed my mind to wander, and by the time Anime came back in, maybe four or five minutes later, I had the rest of the day planned.

  “Here,” she said, handing me the phone. “Why don’t you have any apps?”

  “I have a little speaker that talks in my ear,” I said, “I have a teensy microphone that’s sort of near my mouth. I have this little thing that makes bad guesses at the weather. I have the gizmo for the Apple Store if I ever want an apple.”

  “This phone is wasted on you,” she said. “It’s like giving a piano to someone who’s only got elbows.” She tapped the phone’s screen. “This one, the one with the eye, is called Eyes24,” she said. “Tap on it.”

  I did, and I was looking at my front door from inside.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Where’d you put it?”

  “The ceiling is really high,” she said. “Nobody’s going to look all the way up there, so I put it at the corner of the wall and the ceiling, pointing at the door.”

  “So I just sit around looking at this all day? Are there commercials?”

  She said, “Do you know what push technology is?”

  I said, “Give me a minute.”

  “I don’t know how you’ve lived so long—”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “—and learned so little. Okay, wait here.”

  She left the room. A moment later, my phone emitted a little sound, a new one, like a cello being played in mud, and a little rectangle surfaced on top of the few apps I hadn’t been able to delete, and inside it was Anime, waving at me. I watched her on the screen as she called from the hallway, “Tell me you figured it out.”

  I said, “You’ve changed your hair?”

  “It’s a motion detector. The camera is always on, and when something moves in front of it, it beeps at you like that, like a text. Do you know what a text is?”

  “Judging from the root,” I said, “I know it’s got something to do with words.”

  She rubbed her eyes. She really did look weary. “Well, is there anything else I can do? Want me to set your alarm clock? Get your TV off ESPN?”

  “No, Ronnie knows how to do all that. Let’s get out of here.” She had disappeared from the screen, and a moment later she came through the doorway. “Wow,” I said putting the phone next to my ear and shaking it, “how’d you get out of the phone?”

  “If I lived here,” she said, looking around the room, “I’d never leave.”

  “That was my plan, too. But in the darkness fate moved its heavy hand.”

  “So who do you think this setup, the camera and all, is going to show you?”

  “Someone,” I said. “I don’t know who she is, but I need to know when she’s here.”

  13

  Bride of Plastic Man

  “Here’s my number.” Eaglet pushed me sideways to reach across the back of the seat and hand a rectangle of paper to Anime, who had claimed the front again. “Any time you need to talk.”

  Anime said, “Thanks,” and looked at it.

  Peeking over Anime’s shoulder, I said, “Is that a business card?”

  “It is.” Eaglet reached into her purse and pulled out the pink gun, the barrel pointing toward me. I resisted an impulse to cross my legs.

  “What’s it say? ‘Have Trigger, Will Pull?’”

  “One-Shot Solutions.” She was keeping the gun down, out of sight of the window and the driver’s mirror, as she removed the silencer. She saw me looking at it and said, “It snags on the lining. This is an expensive purse.”

  “And One-Shot Solutions is?”

  “My sole-proprietor corporation. C-corp, if you know what that is.”

  Anime said, “Can I have Lilli call you?”

  “I think it might be better if we met each other,” Eaglet said. “This kind of stuff is best when people can look into each other’s eyes. It’s harder to dismiss them.”

  I said, “What’s the business description? You know, you need to give the state a—”

  “Public relations,” she said. “That’s what I do, isn’t it? I adjust relationships among members of the public. Ease strain, and so forth.”

  Anime said, “Okay, I’ll get something lined up. Is any day better than any other?”

  “Mostly, I sit around,” Eaglet said. “Listening to the marimba.”

  “I’m going to bail in a minute,” I said as we approached the off-ramp nearest to Louie’s terrible restaurant. “This gentleman will take you home. Off at Lankershim,” I said to the driver. “Then right.” I reached up and handed him a twenty. “For the extra stops.”

  The driver said, “Sure thing.”

  “Thanks, Eaglet. And thanks, Anime, for setting me up with the camera system.”

  As the driver swerved onto the off-ramp, Anime said, “You guys helped me, too.”

  To the driver, I said, “Up there, behind that parked car, is fine. Get them back safely, okay?” I got out, knocked twice on the window, and watched them pull off.

  The afternoon was dimming, dragging us all toward night, some of us possibly faster than others, and I needed to talk to the person who might be able to help me identify those three rented kids.

  I hadn’t been to the chateau for a while, not since I’d barely survived the high-voltage tango with the Hollywood studio head everyone called King Maybe. I’d been double-crossed into that confrontation by the lord of the chateau, Jake Whelan, and that betrayal had brought to an end the intermittent, almost nostalgic fondness I’d once felt for him, in spite of his extravagant collection of character flaws.

  Once the most powerful man in motion pictures, Jake was dwindling irreversibly, going from bold-face headline to footnote. For years I’d thought that time flowed around him, like water around a stone, leaving him untouched, and that hundreds of pounds of cocaine could vanish up that Roman emperor’s nose year after year without tarnishing his psyche or denting his bank accounts. Last time I’d seen him, though, he’d looked a little scraped and ragged at the edges, like someone who’d spent a long time facing down a high-velocity sandstorm, and the chateau, which he’d had shipped stone by stone from France and reassembled above Coldwater Canyon during his glory days, had already acquired some of the melancholy of a deserted building.

  But I wasn’t prepared to see the high gate at the bottom of the driveway sagging open and hanging on one hin
ge and the call box that had always stood beside it decapitated and lying upside down in the weeds. I was especially unprepared for the weeds; the condition of the gate and the call box could be recent developments, but the weeds had taken months.

  I had to get out and push the gate a few feet aside to get past it—making me, I figured, the first guest in some time—and then I drove up the curving pavement to the house.

  Never one to miss an opportunity to flaunt, Jake had designed the approach so that visitors caught details of the house like quick cuts in a film, a montage of overindulgence: a gray stone corner here, a mullioned window there, a turret floating above the trees, until, at the top of the drive, the structure finally revealed itself in its full, widescreen, quasi-royal, anachronistic splendor. But now the approach was a caricature of decline: a glimpse of missing roof tiles, a black diamond where a pane of glass had been punched out, military-green patches of lichen colonizing the walls. The expensive foliage, exotic bushes and flowers imported from God only knew where, was slowly losing its battle against those tireless peasants of the plant world, hillside scrub.

  I pulled into the circle in front, where there had always been several vehicles parked: a couple of Jake’s, some for the housekeepers, and a few more for the hard cases who had been providing security since the late 1970s, when rumors began to circulate about exchanges of really serious amounts of cash for glistening white buckets of Peru’s top export. (One urban legend among burglars was that the spaces between the walls were insulated with stacked cash.) The security doubled down later, when Jake started to build his private museum in the basement, extending long sticky fingers into the secret market for stolen paintings. In those days it was routine for a visitor’s car to be surrounded by guys whose suits bulged with heat before the driver had time even to get the door open. Cocaine has been known to contribute generously to its users’ paranoia.

  Today, my car was the only one there.

  A mockingbird let loose as I walked up to the front door. I put my finger on the bell, but before I could push it, the door opened and Jake squinted at me or, more likely, at the light of day.