Switchback

by Susan Dunlap

  ‘Is that how you Zen people—’

  ‘This one, yeah.’

  ‘Why don’t you just ask your roshi? Ask him about the trafficking in your neighborhood. What does he know? Then ask him how he knows it. Ask him about the routes through the “respectable” strip joints along Broadway. Ask him—’

  I laughed. ‘Here’s what’s going on. You tell me where I’m wrong. You’re digging for a story on trafficking. You heard about the pimp fight in our courtyard six weeks ago and you’re salivating at the idea of involving a Zen priest. It’d be a break-out story for you. But you’re not getting anywhere. Because, Westcoff, there is no connection. The cops arrested the pimps. You know zip about Leo, and maybe you’ve tried talking to him – you can believe I’ll ask him that – but now you want me to excavate what he knows and bring it back to you.’

  ‘I know he knows …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s involved.’

  ‘You know that because?’

  ‘I’ve got sources. I can’t reveal them.’

  ‘Sure. Call me when you’ve got something more than hope.’

  The outside doors flew open. A gurney with pole, plastic bag and three paramedics swept in, a buzz of comments all around. It had nothing to do with me, but now, in here, it seemed like all crises scraped off the outer layers of us all. When the far doors banged shut, silence settled back, as if the medical team had dragged that bit of life with them, leaving all of us to sink back into the miasma of waiting.

  All except Westcoff, who was gone.

  Time stretches in the tension-laced boredom of the waiting room. Each check of your watch signals a longer time spent in surgery, required for a condition more serious with a prognosis more dire. All of which are just thoughts, I reminded myself, as Leo would remind me. Thoughts masquerading as facts, just as Westcoff had dressed his suspicions as truth.

  Within an hour, every one of Renzo’s relatives had arrived and settled in clumps. Apparently not all of them cared for all the others. His friends – the people he called when he needed eyes-only information about public works or public housing, the opera, the bridge barrier – filtered in. A couple in pastel shorts and sweaters, tourists from Arkansas whom he’d guided to the Legion of Honor exhibit after giving them breakfast, announced they were praying for him, and a woman who might have been one of his aunts thanked them.

  I started toward her, then reconsidered. Choosing the wrong team in a family standoff can mark you for life. Instead I moved to the middle of the room. ‘I wonder,’ I said in a loud voice, ‘about Lila, the woman Renzo was trying to protect. Do we know how she’s doing?’

  ‘The doctor can find out when he comes to tell us about Renzo,’ a short woman in a blue dress said.

  Skepticism must have been clear on my face.

  The woman patted my arm. ‘Trust me, honey.’

  More people arrived. At some point food appeared in hampers. Guards complained ineffectively. Before or after that I sat on the floor, leaned against the wall and fell asleep. I had the feeling the family was prepared to take over the halls and camp out in Renzo’s room as soon as they could get him one.

  Still, it was three in the afternoon before a weary woman in scrubs stepped through the door and asked for Mr Renzo’s wife.

  The doctor thought Renzo was his last name?

  ‘Renzo has a wife!’

  ‘My brother,’ a plump, dark-haired woman shook her head, ‘is married to that cafe of his.’

  ‘He’s under sedation. His shoulder was torn quite badly,’ the doctor, a short woman with olive skin and pale green eyes announced in a slightly British accent. ‘Ligaments torn from the bone. Two cracked ribs. Ulna fractured in two places. Metal plates. Pins.’

  ‘Which arm?’ a woman demanded.

  ‘Will they stay in Uncle Renzo, or come out?’

  ‘Rehab?’

  The doctor seemed stunned. A man repeated, ‘Which arm?’

  ‘Left.’

  Sighs came from all directions.

  ‘Nothing else? Organ damage?’

  I gave up searching for the source of the questions. The doctor seemed to, too.

  ‘Nothing serious.’

  Someone demanded just what that meant. Someone else hushed him. The doctor soldiered on, moving into the mushy area of prediction. ‘No reason not to regain full control … Take some time.’ And more firmly, ‘Still sedated.’ Most firmly, ‘Two visitors max.’

  ‘Lila?’ I called out as the doctor turned away.

  The woman in the blue dress materialized at her side. ‘Lila Suranaman,’ she said in the tone of one who had insisted two or three times before.

  ‘Suranaman.’ The doctor massaged the syllables. ‘I will check.’

  The woman in blue put a hand near but not on her scrub-covered shoulder. ‘You can call, right?’

  ‘No.’ She whipped through the doors and was gone.

  I doubted we’d see her again.

  Right I was. A sturdy, dark-haired man who could have been a wrestler or a bouncer but must have been an intern appeared ten minutes later. ‘Lila Suranaman,’ he said, ‘is no longer a patient here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She checked herself out an hour ago.’

  This sure was one easy institution to leave.

  Questions were shot at him. But it became clear he’d been fronted up not due to knowledge of Lila’s condition but the lack of it.

  Bad shape as she was in, she had to be desperate to even think of leaving the hospital. In here she’d been cared for and safe; on the street she was neither. She was a sitting duck for the guy who’d sent her here. If someone didn’t find her, help her, she was going to end up dead.

  I checked my messages. Leo texted that he had decided to cancel tonight’s zazen. I was more relieved than I would have expected. Probably everyone was. How could they sit facing the wall, watching their breath while wondering if every creak or rattle signaled a new attack?

  I thanked the woman in blue and got her promise she’d alert me to the smallest change in Renzo’s condition.

  Then I did the last thing I wanted to do. I called Westcoff.

  SEVENTEEN

  I’d seen the Tink Pitty before but apparently I’d put it out of my mind. In the world of strip and sleaze it was seeping toward the bottom. At least for San Francisco, where strip clubs like Carol Doda’s Condor have become close to historical landmarks and kids from the valley come for a night of pretend bad. They could, of course, count on real pole dancing and real, if speedy, lap-dancing and real fleecing.

  Westcoff had eyed the Parking $10 sign near the club and laughed. ‘Ten bucks, that’s the surcharge, on top of the regular twenty-five. They don’t mention that till you pull in. Welcome to Broadway.’ Four blocks farther on he stuffed his Fiat next to a tiny bit of curb. The man had answered my call so fast I’d barely had time to pop in to check on Leo, to let him know that Renzo would mend and I was headed off to find Lila Suranaman. ‘With Westcoff.’

  Leo had raised an eyebrow. He was good at that.

  ‘’S what you get for insisting I ride to the hospital with him.’

  He nodded. ‘Karma.’

  Meaning, actions have consequences.

  I’d been tempted to call one of my brothers to stay with him. Gary? Not unless I could drop Leo in his law office, and Leo’d be willing to read over depositions. John? I’d hesitated and ended up saying to Leo, ‘Likely, I’ll be late. Will you be OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. Much better. I’ve been downstairs – don’t look so shocked. Be pleased. Now, go, before you let that reporter up here.’

  ‘He thinks you’re a drug and trafficking kingpin.’

  I expected Leo to laugh, to say something like: Then we’d have padded zafus. But he just shook his head as if to say that was too serious an issue to be taken that lightly.

  Now dusk was turning dark as Westcoff and I strode the four uphill blocks from the shiny new buildings of the tech wave, past c
onstruction to defunct and graffiti’d strip joints of yore, to Indian and Chinese restaurants mixed in with the faux exotic and those clubs not yet on life support – the life cycle of Broadway in four blocks. Westcoff’s hands were stuffed hard into the pockets of his tweed jacket as if to demonstrate just how he’d gone about ruining it. His head was thrust forward and he was panting, trying to match my pace. ‘Hey, slow down there, Lott. I just brought you for the muscle.’

  I kept up the pace another half block. Take that for bad-mouthing Leo!

  As if intuiting my thoughts, he said, ‘Tink Pitty’s right behind your Zen place.’

  ‘Not right behind. No one’s going to be tunneling in for evening zazen.’

  ‘Broadway backs Pacific. That’s close as you can get.’

  ‘Close in walking distance as any place within four blocks.’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘When you start with a conclusion and work the facts to fit, that’s called fiction.’

  Westcoff flinched, but just slightly, and we walked on in irritable silence; him trying to conceal his chugging breaths, me taking long strides up the hill, partly in reaction to too much sitting all day, mostly for spite. I was still wearing the black jeans, T-shirt and zip jacket I’d grabbed at four something this morning and trying to ignore greasy strands of unwashed hair that had slithered loose from the knot to snap at my face.

  He was wrong about Leo, of course. But had Leo and I been wrong about Lila? The way is not difficult for those without preferences, China’s Third Patriarch, Jianzhi Sengcan, taught. The way is not difficult except for picking and choosing. I understood that and yet …

  If I asked Westcoff, he’d be delighted to point out that every minute of the day was picking and choosing, opting for, declining, yearning for, running away from. Asking Lila if she needed help, waiting for a better time. We hadn’t been careless, we’d tried not to freak her. We’d—

  The words fell out of my mouth. ‘How do you know you’ve done the wrong thing when everything told you it was right?’

  Westcoff said, ‘Huh?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I’ll ask Leo.

  Leo, who had once been sure he was doing the right thing, and was wrong.

  The Tink Pitty’s neon sign, the pendulous peninsula of breast with the flashing red nipple, beckoned from an alley. We stopped and, like a tourist couple, stared.

  ‘Omigod. Westcoff, look!’ There, at the entrance, by a propped-open standard metal alley door, stood the guy who beat up Lila. Above him the bulbous breast’s flashing nipple extended out into the alley, so that the red bulb doubled as a suggestion of a brothel. The whole arrangement hung inside a frame made of metal bars about a foot above the creep’s head. The guy was short and thick, like a brick in a jacket. The flashing red light seemed to bounce off his black eye – a souvenir from this morning, surely. The end of his nose had been scraped and was crusted, and a bandage covered a good portion of his left cheek. ‘I can’t believe he’s here at work like nothing happened. Haven’t the cops—?’

  ‘Who’d give them a description? Not Lila. Not you; you didn’t see him. Not Renzo.’

  ‘Still—’

  ‘You know how to define “low priority?”’

  Two couples, in jeans, T-shirts and thin Low Hog jackets they’d gotten at a cut-rate place in some warmer clime were conferring in a huddle near the door. I started toward them.

  Westcoff grabbed my arm. ‘Hey, this isn’t like calling the hospital information desk. You got a plan?’

  ‘Of course,’ I lied. Play it by ear, that was my plan.

  I skirted the tourists, faced the bouncer and forced a smile. ‘I’m looking for Lila.’

  He shrugged me off. Not a word.

  ‘Tell me where she is and I’ll leave.’

  ‘Leave.’ It came out as a grunt, like he’d practiced that in the mirror. His face was square and bare, his features lumpy even without the bruises and patches.

  ‘Not without Lila.’

  He stepped toward me, his breath awful and sweat not smelling so good. He glared at Westcoff. ‘Get her outta here.’

  The Low Hog quartet had vanished. It was just us three.

  I sighed, shrunk and slinked off.

  ‘What was that?’ Westcoff’s face had turned to angry blotches.

  ‘Come on!’ I took his arm. ‘When I turn, drop your keys. Make noise.’

  ‘What?’ But softly.

  ‘Now.’ I started back toward the door. Westcoff’s keys hit the pavement. The bouncer glanced down. I leapt, grabbed the bar at the bottom of the boob sign and swung my heels into his nose.

  I heard the crack before his yelp. I leapt down beside him. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Fuff you, bith!’

  ‘Dammit, where is she?’ Dammit, where was Westcoff?

  ‘What the hell? Sendar?’ A man, taller and thinner, appeared in the doorway.

  ‘His nose may be broken,’ I said. ‘It looks awful. We can drive him to the hospital.’

  Taller-thinner was considering when Sendar growled, ‘No,’ pushed himself up, eyed me, shoved Taller-thinner aside and vanished into the building.

  Taller-thinner eyed first me and then Westcoff, considered again and said, ‘You paid yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ he shook his head. ‘No? Fifteen years and no one ever gave me that answer. No? Hell, go on in.’

  He was still shaking his head as we followed him inside.

  ‘Don’t lose sight of the door,’ Westcoff whispered.

  He had described the Tink Pitty as seedy. Right he was. The paint was, of course, pink. Or it had been before years of smoke, dirt and rubbings, the source of which I chose not to consider. And the air – it was like airplane air re-circulated twice daily between SFO and Mars. The main surprise in the main room was the step down into the dark. I just caught myself in time and Westcoff smacked into me. The sole, dim light was a spot on a girl dancing, drugged but from her expression not nearly enough. Even as the thought struck me it seemed ridiculously obvious, still I wondered how she – how Lila – could stand doing this night after night. Points to Lila for not being drugged out of her mind.

  I knew I’d only seen the vestibule of awful. As my eyes adjusted, three forms at two tables took shape – a man at the far table, and nearer, a hetero couple, their faces lit by a faux candle. She was grinning; he was not. She was whispering, he not. Come morning she’d be telling friends every detail of this foray; he would not.

  The bartender was staring at us.

  Westcoff whispered, ‘Outside.’ When we cleared the door into the alley he grabbed my arm and hurried me toward the street. ‘No one in there can give us anything.’

  ‘Can or will?’

  ‘Right. That dancer wouldn’t remember Lila if she shared a room with her.’

  We were on Broadway. I stopped. He was still pulling on my arm. ‘Hey, I’m not a dog! We can’t just abandon Lila. Let her be shipped off to the next brothel or stuffed in a basement and left to die.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘As am I, Darcy Lott.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Not here. Trust me.’

  I balanced the options. Trusting him was better than nothing. He picked up pace and slipped around the corner onto Columbus and chin-motioned toward a space between buildings. It was about two feet wide, carpeted with weeds and rubble. And dead dark. I couldn’t see how far back it went. ‘Emergency exit from a number of Broadway operations.’

  ‘Really? I’ve walked this block hundreds of times.’ Renzo’s Caffe was at the corner. ‘I never gave this … thing … a thought. I guess a person could squeeze through – not a fat person – but it’d have to be an emergency all right.’

  ‘Plenty of those.’

  ‘I’d think the cops would station themselves here like ants by a termite hole. I’d think the strip staff would know that.’

  ‘Sometimes. But the cops are smart. They give the pimps and enforcers time to forget.
The girls, they come and go, shipped in from Asia, shipped out to Vegas. Most don’t even know about this. The other end’s even less inviting. Rat Alley. That’s what the old hands call this.’

  ‘Sendar? Is he an old rat?’

  ‘Old enough. I’ve seen him use this alley more than once. If we wait, we can follow him right back to his nest.’

  ‘As opposed to?’

  ‘We go out for sushi and he walks free.’

  So we stood silently, peering into the alleyway while trying not to look like we were doing just that. An ambulance sped down Columbus, op-op-op-ing its way to collect someone for the most terrifying ride of their life. A bus chugged along, windows lit like an Edward Hopper painting, the passengers – only two – looking downward, probably at their phones.

  Westcoff grabbed my arm. ‘Oh, shit!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s another rat hole. I forgot about that. Shit! One they’ve used when this one’s, you know, not serviceable.’

  ‘When the cops are watching this one?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That one’s worse than this trail of weed and garbage?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s trickier. Goes through a couple of basements that can be … bad. Trust me.’

  ‘Life’s hard for the fleeing bouncer.’

  Westcoff let that ride and I said, ‘So, now what? We wait and hope?’

  ‘Let me check the other exit. It comes out by a store on the next block, but the place was boarded up last time I went by. Sendar could get there if he’s desperate—’

  ‘Why would he be desperate?’

  ‘But he might have to climb rubble to get to the street. Let me check.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ve got time. He’s going to be half an hour to deal with his nose alone. You really did a number on that. It’s probably broken. Do you Zen—’

  ‘Stunt doubles take no shit.’

  ‘Say another quarter hour to decide if he’s going to stay on the job, which he won’t, believe me.’

  ‘So, you know him.’

  ‘Know enough.’

  ‘But not where he lives?’

  ‘Bad guys travel light. We could check his last-known address but then we wouldn’t be here. If we’re wrong, we’re screwed.’