Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  In time for Jimmy to be waiting at dusk for Hesse to exit the medical center. To tail him. Maybe in time for Mary to pick up the kid and make it home and shower and change into evening clothes for a reconciliatory dinner with her husband someplace nice in the City, because Hesse never went home. He drove from the UCSF med center to the Sequoia Club to get cleaned up, emerged a half hour later in a slick suit for a dinner date.

  Only the doctor met someone else for dinner. A woman not his wife is the phrase.

  Great gears turn. And not-so-great ones, too.

  Jimmy had seen all the detective movies, so he knew, Jake Gittes and Chinatown aside, no self-respecting investigator did divorce work. The money wasn’t any good, the hours blew, and the customers were never satisfied at the end of the thing, were more likely to hate you more for telling the truth than the guilty party for living the lie. When he started “looking into things” for people, formally and informally, for money or, more often, for his own private reasons, he knew what he wasn’t going to do. He wasn’t going to follow husbands to dinner dates. But here he was.

  Why was it always husbands? Because husbands tried to pull it off in town. Women at least had the sense to go out of town. Out to some sleepy little beach town for instance. On a Thursday afternoon.

  Jimmy didn’t have any reason to think Hesse had identifie d the Porsche, so he’d only stayed two car lengths behind the corpuscular red Mercedes as it left the Sequoia Club. He had the top up, but that was because it felt like rain, the air thickening, clouds descending onto the hills of San Francisco like a stage curtain dropping. He was working. He had half a pack of the American Spirits left. Angel’s pint of Courvoisier was in the glove box if he needed it. There was good music on the radio. He’d made love hours ago in a motel at the beach with the only woman he cared about, still had her scent on him. Life was confusing, but it was good. A wave bigger than Mavericks might be building a thousand miles offshore, but it wasn’t here yet.

  Hesse and the woman met at the restaurant. Separate cars, meet out front. They’d picked a restaurant on top of a high-rise with glass elevators on the outside of the building, right downtown. Maybe they thought it would look like some kind of business meeting, on the up-and-up. Sophisticates in a sophisticated city. The woman wore a stylish hat, a two-hundred-dollar version of a skateboarder’s sock hat. Nothing sexier than that.

  They left their cars, rode up together.

  Somebody else was there. The man who’d been on the Half Moon Bay beach with the dog was there, too. Minus Rex.

  Jimmy waited a beat, dodged the dog man, rode on up after them.

  Their first courses arrived.

  She had her head bare now. It was the short-haired woman Jimmy had identifie d as The Lady, the Sailor the New Leonidas girl had talked about, the one from the mess hall with the candelabra who’d reminded him a little, but not all the way, of a young Teresa Miles.

  There didn’t seem to be much passion to the thing. But, just as Jimmy thought that, Hesse reached across the table to touch her hand, to make some point. They almost looked like lovers. She drank. He didn’t. The view of the city was lovely behind them. It was a very businesslike date. Jimmy remembered Groner’s line about cardiologists and their cold, cold hearts. And Hesse a Mormon on top.

  Jimmy was almost enjoying it, watching them, a great position at the bar, a gin to make it look right.

  Then The Lady said something, and he said something back. And the lovebirds flashed red. Mauve, actually. And he remembered the twisted-together threads of story that had brought him here, that had twisted tighter with this.

  A half hour later, Hesse and the woman were coming down in one elevator, and Jimmy was in the other. They were a bit ahead in the race for the street level.

  While they waited for their cars, they stood close and talked. She even touched his hand.

  Jimmy watched from the Porsche.

  Hesse kissed her lightly. She pulled him back for another, this one with a little more intent behind it. She walked to her car, and he walked to his. He didn’t look back at her. She didn’t look back at him. The two cars pulled away, the red Mercedes and a silver Prius. The Mercedes with a refined roar, the Prius with an electric hum.

  So what did it mean? Jimmy had seen the San Francisco movie called The Conversation, too, knew lovers’ talk was code, that there was always something else being said, that it could look like one thing but be something else.

  But it sure looked like unfaithfulness, betrayal. Or maybe Jimmy was just hoping to dirty up his rival.

  He saw movement across the street. It was the man with the dog from the beach, coming out of the shadows, on the phone, with a little hurry in his step. Out at Half Moon Bay, Jimmy had decided that he worked for Hesse, was tailing Mary, Mary and the new man in her life. Now, he didn’t know what to think.

  He started the Porsche and pulled forward.

  Dog Man walked four blocks, fast, with Jimmy lagging behind in the Porsche. The man stayed on the phone.

  He went down a side street.

  Jimmy drove by and looped back. Mary’s black SUV was parked down the alley, and the man was at the driver’s-side window.

  He finished reporting in. He nodded. He walked away from her.

  She sat there a minute, then left her car, walked away toward the waterfront.

  THIRTY-TWO

  He had left so many hanging out there.

  Angel.

  Machine Shop.

  Les Paul.

  George Leonidas. His daughters.

  Duncan Groner.

  Maybe even Lucy.

  Now Mary.

  And with the wave building, big enough to cover them all.

  He parked the Porsche on Battery and walked down to the Wharf. He was looking for Mary. But he was looking for Angel, too. For any of the rest of them, all of them. Unfin ished business. It was as if they were all Sailors now. Left hanging until it was finished. Or until It was finished with them.

  On Fisherman’s Wharf, things were Balkanized. Territorialized. Any Thursday night tourists left were clearing out, looking over their shoulders as they split for higher ground.

  Because tonight the waterfront was all Sailors. Sailors from the south. San Francisco Sailors. Blue. Red.

  The blues were around the restaurants and bars to the west. The reds were gathering to the east, closer to the piers. The docks for the Alcatraz boats were dead center between them. There were further divisions within the two nations, subsets, breakout groups of fifty or a hundred Sailors formed around some leader. Or wannabe leader. There were a thousand Sailors all counted. It felt like the flo or of a political convention, minus the signs on staffs. They weren’t needed. They knew who they were, and any who didn’t, didn’t care, didn’t care where they stood as long as someone else objected, as long as someone else claimed it as theirs, wanted to push and shove for it.

  Whitehead moved among the crowd.

  Steadman and his crew.

  Jimmy thought he saw Hesse.

  He saw Sexy Sadie and Polythene Pam, but just a glimpse, not even enough to tell if they were with the Sailors or in among the last of the escaping Norms.

  He’d see them again.

  He jumped onto the top of a Dumpster to see over the heads of the others, looking for Angel. In seconds, dozens of Sailors gathered around him. He knew some of them. L.A. Sailors. Some good, some bad. A kid named Drew he’d taken off the streets himself two years back, a nurse, an L.A. cop in street clothes. S.F. Sailors. Two of the women from the Yards, who’d been at the long table. Eighties Girl. There was Angelina, the first-night Columbus Street bartender who he’d wanted to go home and curl up with after seeing the suicides on the docks, who gave him the glass of Chianti from his secret admirer. So she was a Sailor.

  But the rest of them were strangers to him.

  Jimmy heard his name. Then he heard his name repeated, passed from one Sailor to another, from one to the others around him, and others drawing in. A w
hisper at first, then openly. He’d never heard his name repeated by a crowd. Who had?

  The kid Drew raised his hand to wave.

  Jimmy jumped down and tried to get away from it. They only pressed in closer. It started to rain. Soft, steady. Nobody seemed to notice. Jimmy only managed to move another few feet.

  Suddenly the kid Drew was pushed up against him.

  “Hey, bud.”

  “Hey,” Jimmy said.

  “How ya been?”

  “I’m looking for Angel.”

  “Haven’t seen him,” Drew said. “He’s here?”

  “Somewhere. Why are you even here?”

  “I don’t know,” the kid said and smiled about it. “I just went with everybody else. The bus up was a trip.”

  “Be careful,” Jimmy said.

  “Dude, what’s the light about? Up there.”

  Through the rain, the violet light on one of the city hills was still burning. Steady, iconic, cloud-piercing.

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

  “It’s Russian Hill,” a man beside Drew said.

  “What does that mean?” Drew said.

  The man put a hand on the kid’s shoulder and started talking to him, leading him away, putting the word on him. Some word. Jimmy tried to move, but a new set had discovered him, crowding in, crowding him, whoever they thought he was. With the soft rain, now it felt like a rock concert, without the music, without the mud. With what was already in the air, more Altamont than Woodstock.

  A hand seized him by the wrist. Jimmy looked down. A silver hand.

  He found the face. Under the silver top hat.

  “She’s over here,” Machine Shop said.

  Shop pushed and shoved, cleared a path, like a bodyguard. Now the crowd really had something to look at.

  Jimmy and Shop made it to a place between two dockside buildings, a space that seemed to be guarded by two or three of Jeremy’s crew. They stepped aside when they saw Machine Shop coming and Jimmy behind him.

  “I saw him over in here about ten minutes ago,” Machine Shop said.

  “You said she.”

  “No, I said he.”

  “Who?”

  “Angel,” Shop said. “That’s who you’re looking for, right?” The rain was beading down his face and hands, off his painted skin, huge rolling drops of it. He looked like he was sweating like a runner, or crying great tears. “I maybe saw those girls, too,” he said. “The ones from last night, who hold hands.” It sounded suspicious. It sounded too much like, Whatever you want, I got it. Something, or someone, had gotten to Shop. Gone was the verbal tic that characterized him, the self-correction. Everything he said tonight he said once and stuck by it. He was on message. It felt wrong.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Jimmy said. “You’re acting like you’re high.”

  “I haven’t been high since 1976. Gerald Ford.”

  “So where’s Angel? Did you talk to him?”

  “He said everything was cool. He was looking for you. To tell you. You stay here; I’ll go get him and bring him here.”

  This was beginning to feel like a trap.

  “Go back to work, man,” Jimmy said, shaking his head.

  He’d had enough. He started toward the wall of people on the other side of Jeremy’s boys, disappeared into it.

  Behind him, Machine Shop said, “Yeah, you’re right, I got to get back over to Pier 41.”

  Jimmy was finished with the Wharf, but it wasn’t finished with him. As he pushed his way through the edgy throng, he caught sight again of Sadie and Pam.

  One and one, on a bench, on either side of a woman who looked like she needed a couple of friends.

  On either side of Mary.

  Jimmy tried to get through the sea of Sailors, but they seemed to have something else in mind for him, and he was taken away by it and lost sight of Mary and the women, forced to watch the three of them get smaller and smaller, like the victims of a shipwreck drifting away.

  And, in the end, the ocean spat him out elsewhere.

  He walked back up to Battery Street. He got in the Porsche and fired it up. He didn’t know where he was going.

  He didn’t get anywhere.

  A black Bentley Arnage rolled out of an alley to block his path.

  Groner had only gotten a Lincoln Town Car when they came for him.

  It was another house that looked black, but it was probably just the rain. It was large, four stories, a blockish gingerbread Victorian but done in dark colors, greens and browns and black, with gold edging where it counted. A slate roof.

  It was a man’s house, you could see from the curb.

  The Bentley waited in the stub of a driveway. Jimmy looked out the rain-streaked window at the Goth house. All that was missing were bolts of lightning. Maybe he was supposed to get out. Nobody had said the first word to him. Or to each other. There was a driver and the best-looking muscle Jimmy had ever seen.

  A garage door opened on its own, and the house swallowed the Bentley.

  The elevator was an ornate cage, black and gold wrought iron. And small. And slow. They’d deposited Jimmy in it and stepped back. It felt a little like carrying out a sentence.

  Another man in another black suit was waiting at the other end, with his hands folded in front of him like a funeral director. He made Jimmy remember the woman from Graceful Exits in the ninety-year-old chorus girl’s living room.

  The room had the same air of the dead to it.

  The attendant stepped away into nothing.

  Jimmy was worried about Mary, adrift out there, but was afraid to give himself over to it.

  “I know that light switch is around here someplace,” he said.

  There was a rough laugh from the deeper darkness across the room.

  “You’re young,” a voice said.

  “Only here,” Jimmy said. “Everywhere else, I’m old. When I’m around kids, I correct their grammar.”

  Jimmy had come in out of a dark, rainy night, physically and emotionally, but it was darker still here. His eyes began to adjust from what, in retrospect, was the blinding brilliance of the elevator. There were a few candles. On tables. They had a scent he’d never caught before, the best candles in the world, from some country Jimmy guessed he’d never visit.

  He began to make out the man’s shape. The face came last. He was in a wheelchair, a wood and wicker chair. He was a bigger man than his voice suggested. And he’d been even bigger before. A diminished man. Chest sunken, arms gone thin. A man from then.

  The room began to establish itself. It was large, what once was called a drawing room. There were boxed beams on the ceiling. The floors were dark wood and uncovered. There wasn’t much furniture, so the chair could roll without obstructions. There was a large picture window, but the man wasn’t beside it. The window was uncovered. There was the waterfront far below, a grid of lights looking like a bed of embers.

  Mary was down there somewhere. The other night, down at the Yards, that roomful of women had reminded him of the women he’d known. There was something else about the women in his life: He’d thought he was rescuing each one, one way or another. It was what he did, or tried to do. Save them. More than a few of them threw it in his face on their way out the door.

  Now Jimmy could see the man. His hair was white. And full. His head was tipped back against the headrest, until he realized Jimmy was looking at him. He was dressed in dark silk, a jacket or robe. His legs were uncrossed. His feet were bare. His leathery hands were out to the ends of the armrests, as if the chair was a throne. He wore a ring with a red stone. The ring seemed loose enough to fall off.

  “Who’s next?” Jimmy said. To break the ice.

  “That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it?” the man said. “Do you understand the particulars of the process?”

  “I don’t even understand what you just said.”

  “Step closer. I’m having some diffic ulty getting a sense of you,” the man said. He took several breaths.
Labored. But then seemed to find himself again. “I don’t automatically assume that’s a bad thing.”

  Jimmy stayed where he was. “I’ve got things I could be doing. Why am I here? Why did you have me brought here?”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mene, mene, tekel, uparsin,” the man said. Under the circumstances, with this stagecraft, with the rain running down the outside of the picture window like anointing oil, it was a bit chilling.

  Jimmy said, “ ‘You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. ’ Daniel interpreting the words that appeared on King Belshazzar’s palace walls.”

  The man seemed impressed. “Are you a Jew?”

  “No. My parents were both in the movie business, if that counts.”

  “A Christian?”

  “No. So somebody has found me wanting? Is that why I’m here? Who? Found wanting for what?”

  “Actually I was talking to myself, about myself,” the man said. He hesitated for another couple of rough breaths, to force a little more oxygen into the blood. “The three words were three messages. Mene. God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end. Tekel. You have been weighed on the scales and been found wanting. Uparsin. Your kingdom is divided and given to your enemies.”

  Before the man spoke again, he waited almost a full minute, long enough for Jimmy to hear a clock ticking somewhere.

  “So,” the other said, “you see it is about me. Though I stopped believing in God a hundred years ago. Took from him his uppercase G. Corrected his grammar, you might say. Come closer, boy. Young Mr. Miles.”

  “Who are your enemies?” Jimmy said. “Wayne Whitehead? Red Steadman? Hesse? Marc Hesse?”

  “Who?”

  “Who else then? The Lady? Who’s next?”

  “Soon enough it will be beyond me. All that is certain is that this kingdom will outlive me. And someone will be king.” He shifted in his chair, uneasy, restless. “Come closer, I still can’t see you. My eyes . . . Everything is going away. What can I say about you if I can’t even see you, son?”