My phone rang.
“My little thief,” Ronnie said. “What time are you going to be home?”
“By home, you mean Birdie’s?”
“Bitsy’s. No, I mean, let’s have dinner together. Someplace nice.”
The tightness in my chest loosened. “That’s a great idea.
Where?”
“Why not meet me at my apartment? I’ll do some laundry and pick up a few books, and we’ll go to the French Marketplace.”
“I’m on that side of the hill,” I said, and then figuratively kicked myself. Ronnie knew nothing about the Wedgwood.
But she let it pass. “Seven sound okay?”
“Absolutely.”
“Did you take the thingamabob with you?”
“The—”
“You know. The bird. I mean, the birds, remember the birds?”
I touched my front pocket, just checking. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got them.”
“Well, do something about them. I’m curious. Go see the awful man.”
“How do you know he won’t shoot me?”
“Duck,” she said. “People always duck in the movies.”
“If it doesn’t work, you’ll be eating dinner alone.”
“I did that last night,” she said. “It was okay.” She hung up.
I was surprised to find myself back in the kitchen. I washed the glass and dried it, then put it back into the cupboard. Everything ship-shape. Why, I asked myself, didn’t I just live here?
Because eventually I’d get careless, I answered myself, and someone would find it. By going to it only after a precautionary sequence of double-backs, around-the-blocks, waiting at curbs, and other dodges, I had a chance of its being here if I ever really needed it. If, for example, a gorilla, or several gorillas, ever wanted to kill me.
Ducking doesn’t actually work.
Through the chain link fence, I watched eight women in their fifties and sixties, all wearing big-brimmed hats and flowing scarves against the whiskey-colored afternoon sun, looking like figures on some Impressionist’s beach. They moved across an acre or so of dark earth ribbed with straight, almost military, lines of green, dawdling between the plants and stooping every now and then to pull a weed or sniff something or whisper encouragement. Beside each woman, as though tethered to her by an invisible cord, was a smaller figure, a girl of eight or ten, her face shaded by the bill of a baseball cap. The girls were narrow-shouldered and slight, their arms bare to the sun. When the women stooped, the girls stooped, too.
“That’s kind of pretty,” I said.
“I got no argument,” Louie said. We were in the car he liked best—the black Caddy, buffed to showroom perfection—and the laughter of the little girls poured in through the open windows. They laughed quite a lot. Louie had an unlighted cigar between the fingers of his right hand. “First time Alice told me about it, about the garden, I mean, I thought, oh, yeah, it’ll be like the pots. You remember the pots?”
“Vaguely. Which one is Alice?”
“Who can tell?”
“Well, what color is she wearing?”
“A regular color,” Louie said. He lifted his chin in the general direction of the field. “Maybe that one. Anyway, the pots, Alice and her women’s group were throwing pots, you remember, and you probably also remember that when people throw pots, it’s not what it sounds like, it’s not like anger management or anything, it just means they’re making pots. Problem with Alice’s group is that they start things and then drop them because—well, pots, for example. You can only throw so many pots before it’s pretty clear that some people are a lot better at throwing pots than other people, and at that point a lot of them don’t want to throw pots any more. The way Alice put it, she said she’d Achieved Her Potential in throwing pots. And I figured with this thing here, you know, the field and the little girls, some people’s beans wouldn’t come up, and it’d be over.” He looked longingly at the cigar. It was part of his routine, a prolongation of desire before the physical act. “You bring my money?”
I’d wound up trekking back over the hill to the Valley to give him the $7,500 because I didn’t think it was fair for him to be fronting money for me, and also because I had a half-formed intention of dropping in on Stinky, not far from here, and risking my life to show him the birds. I said, “Seventy-five hundred.”
“Don’t forget to give it to me. So I figured this would be the same as the pots, but with beans, but I was wrong, you know why?”
“The little girls,” I said.
“The little girls,” he said, as though I hadn’t spoken. “When it was just Alice and her group, it was all about them and whatever they were doing, their pots or whatever. Now, it’s about the little girls. They all just love the hell out of these little girls. It’s like they get a chance to be mothers again, even if it’s only two days a week. Except Alice. Alice never had a kid, so this means extra to her.” He sat forward and pointed a stubby finger through the windshield. “There, the one with her arm in the air, that’s Alice. Nice-looking woman, huh?”
“She sure is. Where do they get the girls?”
“Hell do I know?” he said. “Little Girls R Us, maybe. But they’re all from places where they don’t have dirt, just pavement, or if they have dirt they grow, like, tin cans on it. Old tires and used needles and things. They don’t get to play in the dirt much.”
“Louie,” I said, “they’re not playing in the dirt. They’re growing things.”
“Yeah. The little girls just wait for this all week, Alice says. Well, almost all week. They get Tuesdays and Fridays out here. It’s been going on for a couple months now, and no one has dropped out. I mean, they lost a couple of the kids, they had to, jeez, I don’t know, go to work or something, but they got replaced like next day and all the women are still out there, getting dirty.”
“I think it’s great.”
“Softie,” he said. “You know what those tall green ones are, third row away?”
“No idea.”
“That’s broccoli.” He nipped off the end of his cigar, spat it out the window, and watched it fall. “I thought broccoli was a root vegetable.”
“Any word about Ghorbani?”
“I got the name of someone who hired him for a hit. But I really had to pull on a string to get this, so you got to make sure you make a good impression.”
“And the name?”
“Well, yeah. Problem is, you know her.”
“She?” I said. “Trey Annunziato? I’m not sure I can make a good impression on Trey. She’s not a fan.”
“No, you kind of screwed her over.” Trey Annunziato was the boss of one of the biggest criminal families in the Valley, although she’d been working for a year or two on taking it straight. I had let her down rather decisively the only time I’d met her.
I parked the thought of Trey for a while as Louie fished out his lighter and resisted the impulse to kiss it, and then said, “Listen, if Alice ever wants some advice about this garden, here it is. Have these kids grow radishes. Radishes could grow on the moon. They could grow in a working microwave oven, on the downslope of a volcano. You don’t fertilize them, they grow. Plant them where there’s no sun, they grow. Don’t water them, and they cough all night until you get up and turn on the hose. They’re going to win, no matter what.”
“Imagine that,” Louie said. “You hang on and fight for life like that for months and months, just trying to make it outta the dark and into the world, and then you find out you’re a radish.” He lit the cigar, and I rolled down my window.
“Are you allowed to smoke near these kids?”
“There’s a fence.” Louie said. “So you want me to talk to Trey for you, set it up, or you want to do it yourself?”
“I’ll handle it.” I added her to my mental list. Then I crossed her off my mental list. Life was too short to meet with Trey.
“Good. She gets mad at you, I’d just as soon not be involved.”
“Who told you
Ruben had done a hit for her?”
He shook his head. “Don’t ask. It cost me eight-fifty, which I’ll take out of the money you’re not going to forget to give me, but you don’t need the name. That’s the only thing this guy knows about Ruben.”
“You know, the problem with all this is that people don’t tell me names. You won’t tell me who told you about Trey, Debbie Halstead won’t tell me who might have hired a hit done in the last week or so, and Wattles won’t tell me who got hit on the end of the chain I’m supposed to be following.”
“Ask him again.”
“He’s in Limpopo.”
“Why you asking Debbie who mighta hired a hit? If Wattles started the chain,” Louie said, “he ordered the hit.”
“Yeah, but who paid for it? Wattles doesn’t take things personally. He wouldn’t arrange a hit for himself, someone he’s got a motive for. He’d hire someone like him to set it up.”
Louie took a big drag on the cigar and looked at it like it was the female cousin he’d been dreaming about since they were both eight. “Yeah, yeah, that’s right,” he said. “You know, if Wattles took off, there’s something with real big teeth out there. It’s not like he scares easy.”
I’d been thinking the same thing, but the phrase real big teeth brought it into sharper relief. “Just keep the women with the guns at Kathy’s house. I’ll worry about myself.”
“You thinking about when they’re not at the house? Rina’s going to school. Kathy’s going shopping or whatever she does.”
“This is a problem,” I said, waving smoke back at him. “I can’t hire a whole platoon of armed women to gather outside the house all night and then split up whenever one or both of them go anyplace. Sooner or later, Rina, or maybe Kathy, will notice.”
“Lookit this,” he said, pointing through the windshield with his cigar.
The women in the hats and scarves were moving between the rows of plants to the far end of the field, their charges in tow. The girls called back and forth to each other in a mixture of Spanish and urban English, and one of them took her baseball cap off and sailed it high into the air, then ran after it, skillfully jumping over the row of broccoli to catch it. Both the girls and the women laughed and applauded, and the girl took a sweeping bow with the cap in her hand, and Louie said, “Babies,” in the tone a sugar addict might use for chocolate.
“How did you know she was going to do that?”
“I didn’t. This is what I wanted you to see.”
At the end of the field, each of the women bent and picked up a long, shallow basket with a big woven loop to pass an arm through, and handed it to the nearest girl. “This is the best part,” he said. “They’re going to pick stuff. They wait all day for this, just all together out here picking food right out of the soil.” He sniffed, once, and his eyes were a little bright.
The girls had separated, each to a different row with a woman beside her, down on their knees, studying the plants. They only seemed to take anything off every third or fourth plant, and once in a while one of them looked up and I heard a sharp interrogative and the nearest woman would reply, and the girl would pick something or move on.
Two of the girls began to sing, and others joined in. Why can most girls sing so sweetly?
“They’ll remember this their whole lives,” I said.
“Probably. You want me to ask who got hit in this past week?”
“Didn’t I already ask you to do that?”
“How much do I forget?”
“Okay, okay.”
“So I’ll do it,” he said. “And you might want to think about doubling up on Rina and Kathy,” he said. “You’d only need two more girls. One could wait near the house with the other one on the next block. When Rina goes out, the one watching the house follows her to school and the other one pulls into the spot the first one just left and waits for Kathy.”
“Make it so,” I said sonorously.
Louie said, “I fucking hate Star Trek.”
“Yup,” I said, “that’s a problem, all right.”
The sun was at a pretty good slant now, and the women and girls were lined in gold as they moved between the plants. The light picked out the colors of the women’s scarves and made them glow like scraps of sunset. “What’s this field doing here in the middle of the Valley?”
“It’s part of the junior high back there. It’ll be a couple of buildings in a year or so.”
“Too bad.” We watched the harvesting girls and women for a minute or two, and I said, “Louie. Why are you here?”
“What? Whaddya mean?” He sounded defensive. “We been looking at this for—”
“I mean, why are you here in your car? In this car? Alice can drive, Alice has a car.”
“Yeah, but, come on, look at her, she’s squirming around in the dirt. She gets all muddy and, and crappy. She doesn’t want to track it into her car.”
I said, enjoying myself for the first time that day, “So you drive her here and wait for her and let her get your car all dirty, and—”
“It’s a guy’s car,” Louie snapped. “Guys don’t care about things like that.”
“No,” I said. “I forgot. You don’t care about your cars. And Alice is the only one who wishes you’d had kids. You don’t care at—”
“Awww, come on,” Louie said, sounding like he’d been kicked in the stomach. “Why’re you busting my balls? You’re a father. You know that every grownup’s gotta do something to make things better for some kid. If you don’t have kids, then you go get some other kids and do it for them, ’cause otherwise, what’re adults for? I mean, we’re useless right?” He pointed with the cigar again, so vehemently it looked like he was going to stub it out on the inside of the windshield. “Just look at that.”
I looked at Louie instead, and the affection I felt for him brought Herbie back again, yanking the ground from beneath my feet and leaving me suspended over something dark and deep and starless. I said, “Do you ever regret the way we live?”
He drew on his cigar. “Whaddya mean, regret?”
“Lying all the time, keeping so many secrets. Being in the game. Being, you know, a crook.”
“Is this a joke?” The words came out in a cartoon dialogue balloon of smoke. “You’re kidding me, right? Lookit that,” he said, nodding at the field. “Gorgeous afternoon—little smog but that’s okay, it’s a regular calendar shot—a bunch of beautiful women and girls just over there, playing farmer while we sit here looking at them, and ninety-five percent of the people within two hundred miles of here are stuck someplace they don’t want to be, surrounded by people they don’t want to be with, doing something they don’t want to do. Selling their lives an hour at a time and getting shortchanged on payday. One day at a time, day after day after fucking day, until they’re too old to do anything, and then what they get is poverty and doctors’ bills and worse places to live in and their backs hurt and bad eyes.”
I looked back at the field and said, “I’ll take that as a no.”
“I am either in a meditative state or helping someone penetrate the veil,” Handkerchief said. “But your problem is as important to me as it is to you. Please leave a number, and I’ll be with you as soon as we’re on the same plane of existence. And don’t forget, if you’re tight for time, our telephone readings are quick and relatively inexpensive. Or, in an emergency, write your question on a piece of paper and send it to me mentally, and then burn it. When the answer arrives in your mind, a check for thirty-five dollars will clear the karmic imbalance. The All-Seeing Eye is as close as your ear.” There was a beep, and I disconnected.
The school where Louie and I had met was only a few miles from the All-Seeing Eye, and I had about ninety minutes before I was supposed to meet Ronnie in West Hollywood, so I tabled the idea of seeing Stinky about the birds and pointed the car in Handkerchief’s direction. I was feeling guilty that I hadn’t been more emphatic about the precariousness of being a part of Wattles’s latest chain.
> I’d dialed Hankie, as Dippy had called him, the moment I wheeled out of the parking lot and this was my second try, so the obvious conclusion was that he was scanning someone’s palm or putting her in touch with the Egyptian princess she’d been back in the days of King Tut. Or maybe, I thought a bit self-critically, just demonstrating the kind of sensitivity and perception he’d shown me.
But way down deep inside, I didn’t think he was. Perhaps it was something I’d picked up from him, a kind of spiritual contact high, but I didn’t like it at all. I was getting a kind of formless dark thing, a psychic ink spot as amorphous and as potentially toxic as an amoeba, that had crowded into the space between my lungs, and it was changing shape and weight as I drove.
I tried to push it away with good, old-fashioned cynicism, since I definitely didn’t believe in any of it, but it sat there, sloshing around unevenly and uncomfortably, and just when I thought I’d finally dismissed it I found myself shouting and pounding my steering wheel and trying not to accelerate straight through the driver in front of me, who waited the duration of a long red light before flicking on his turn indicator. The fact that I didn’t believe in woo-woo of any kind didn’t mean I could fight the conviction—carried through the air like a djinn on some evil wind from the Arabian Nights to take up residence in my chest—that something had gone badly wrong for Handkerchief Harrison.
It was close to six, and traffic was clotting in all directions by the time I got to Ventura and made the right that would take me to Handkerchief’s awful little mall. As it was, I got there in time to see the red lights flashing, the police cars and the yellow tape and the waiting ambulance. The blue cluster of cops drinking coffee in a formal-looking semicircle around the wide-open door. I pulled past all of it, past the All-Seeing Eye and the first Thai restaurant and Dixie’s Duds, swearing silently at myself. In the empty Thai restaurant at the rear of the mall, I ordered a Thai iced coffee at a table by the window, and before I could take the first sip they wheeled out the gurney with the body on it, oddly collapsed and diminished beneath the blanket that draped it from head to foot.
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