by Rowan Casey
A few stitches. I couldn’t even tell where tear had been. I darn stuff all the time, believe it or not, keep a dollar-store sewing kit in my desk. Little rips in my jacket, tears in my trousers. Something you pick up when you’re low on cash and too proud to admit it to your father. But my handiwork usually ends up looking like its first name is Frank and its last name is Enstein. I’d been worried it was a goner. But she looked good as new. Vintage new, anyway.
“Thank you,” I said. “This is, like, awesome. I don’t know what to say. You’re the best.” I looked around the office. “Say, Pip? What did you do with that .45?”
“The firearm? I put it your desk and locked it. I don’t think you should be carrying that around. It’s illegal. If you were to be arrested, Mr. Grimm would be very upset.”
I downed the rest of the coffee; it had cooled to almost room temperature. I set the mug on the small table next to the sofa and stood, holding the clutch of papers in front of me below my waist.
“Well, now we know what your primary job is for the rest of the day,” I said, smiling. “Make sure I don’t get arrested.”
There was a knock at the door just as I said the last word and Claudia walked in without waiting for a response.
She stopped a few feet away hands on hips. “Hey, will you please go talk to Pops? He says it’s really important. You’re not wearing any clothes.”
“What gave it away? Was it the no pants? It was the no pants, wasn’t it? I knew it. You look in the mirror, you think no one will notice, but they always do.”
“Ha ha. Will just go see him? He called me, like, three times yesterday and I’ve already talked to him again this morning.”
I glanced at Pip, who receded behind the desk and took a seat. She shrugged, but more in a I-don’t-think-that’s-a-good-idea way than a whatever-it’s-totally-up-to-you way.
“As bad as I feel over the absolute hell that must be for you, this is really a bad time. If time were money, right now I couldn’t afford to pay attention.”
“C’mon, Rex. Please? Just swing by the park, get him off my back. I’m sure it won’t take long. He keeps saying to tell you it’s important. He’s, like, ‘tell him it’s really important!’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, Pops, I know. And he’s like, ‘Really, really important!’”
I fanned my gaze over to Pip again, who frowned, dimpling one cheek.
“Fine. Where?”
“The park. You know, down from the school, on the other side of the highway.”
“Griffith?”
“Yeah. He plays checkers there all day. Everyday.” She let out an audible sigh. “Thank you.”
“Anything else?”
“Nope!” She spun on her heels and headed back to the door. She paused as she opened it and looked at me with a wide expression. “Yes! If I told you I’ll sneak you a bunch of free t-shirts, would you go like that?”
Pleased with herself, she walked out and shut the door without waiting for me to respond.
GRIFFITH PARK WAS a postage-stamp of grass with a few trees surrounded by a neighborhood across the street on one side, apartments across the street on the other, and a few commercial buildings on the ends. It was almost certainly built for kids, part of the many post WWII community initiatives when local governments were pouring money into such things and higher levels of government were encouraging it. But at some point along the way kids stopped coming and it became a magnet for old people, who now sat in varying degrees of hunched-over decrepitude at the concrete benches and tables to play games. Or maybe it’s the same people. Maybe some of them played here as kids and now came back as geriatrics, wanting to be close to that part of their youth. Hoping to enhance the memories enough to relive the feeling.
I didn’t know. I wasn’t old and had no plans to get there anytime soon.
Finding him wasn’t too hard. He was in a wheelchair, wearing a bright red Marine Corps trucker-style baseball cap with the Globe-and-Anchor logo on it. He was also loud and cussing like he was still on active duty.
“Are any of you fuckers gonna give me a game or what?” he said, clapping his checker piece down on the cement repeatedly as he jumped his opponent, crisscrossing the board. “King me, you son of a bitch.”
Major Hector Poppy “Pops” Morales was a decorated war hero. One of the youngest fighter pilots in Korea, there were rumors he took out aircraft in dogfights that never happened in airspace we never entered over territory we never crossed into. He was shot down twice, was captured once and escaped. I’d met him a couple of times, but I didn’t really know the man. I had, however, heard a lot about him. Like how he survived behind enemy lines by killing patrols who wandered too close with his bare hands, won the Navy Cross for actions that are still classified, and once stopped a bank robbery by disarming three men, only to lose a leg to diabetes and a lung to the cigarettes he refused to give up until roughly a year ago.
“Heard you wanted to see me, Pops.”
He looked up at me, staring through thick spectacles. “Who the hell are you?”
“Rex Bishop. I lease the space upstairs. Your shop? Genuine Accents?”
“Oh, right. Hell, yes, I wanted to see you. Got bad news, son. You’re out.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Out! Opposite of in!”
“Hold it, you mean, you’re kicking me out of my office?”
“Not me. New owner. Bought the building. Paid a pretty penny, but seemed to know what he wanted. I tried to negotiate an extension on the lease, but he said fuck all to that. Said it wasn’t his call, was going to flip the place to someone else or something.”
“Son of a…that’s just friggin’ great. How long?”
“I figure thirty days, which is about how long this candy-ass is going to take to make his next move. Were you planning on today, you limp-dick bastard?”
I stood there for a moment, not knowing whether there was more to be said. Grasping, I asked, “Any chance the people he’s planning on selling it to would let us stay? Maybe work something out with us ahead of time, so it would already be occupied with tenants?”
Pops looked up at me, his eyes beady through the reverse magnification of those lenses. “Boy, do you not listen? He said it’s going to some young guy I took to be a hipster punk or something with a trust fund but he wouldn’t tell me who and said he doesn’t want it to be encumbered or some shit. We’re out. Game over.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Game over.”
As I wandered away, feeling almost dizzy, I heard him say, “And that goes for you, too, Sanchez! Can’t anybody in this goddamn park win at anything?”
7
Thirty days wasn’t a long time, but it was far enough out. I couldn’t afford to worry about it any more than I could afford to do anything about it. Not now. Not with all the crap I’m dealing with. I’d have to find another setup. No biggie. So what if I didn’t have any money, any visible means of support, and no permanent home address? There had to be plenty of massage parlors and adult video stores who would welcome someone renting their back room for the solemn promise of cash at some vague point in the future.
Like I said, there wasn’t any time for that. I got behind the wheel of my Mustang and followed the directions on my phone’s GPS to the Pacific Coast Museum of Military History. I was almost halfway there when Pip buzzed me to let me know she was onsite and awaiting my arrival.
It was a majestic southern California day, the kind where the colors seem to glow and everything from the sky to the landscaped flowers and the newly laid asphalt look like they were painted by some magical brush.
Magic.
My mind started churning the questions without actually asking them. Same questions I’d been chewing on for a while. How the hell did I get here? Why was I even doing this? Two different questions, one answer. I decided I didn’t want to go there, not again, so I switched on the radio and found some music. I settled on some classic rock.
The museum was housed in a modest, if mo
dern, building in a transition area between a residential neighborhood and a scattering of commercial properties. A buffer zone of well-manicured lawns and non-profit headquarters for interests I’d never heard of. The museum itself was gray stone with a gray metal roof and a stylish sign of cement and stucco on a corner lot. A parking lot wrapped around it. Finding a spot on a weekday was not difficult. I had my pick.
I had to wait for someone to come to the window inside the entrance. She told me entry was free, but that donations were encouraged. She suggested ten dollars. I faked a smile and obliged.
At first glance, the layout seemed to consist of one large center area with displays along the walls and in the middle under glass, with at least four other rooms off the main one that visitors could stroll through and wander into. The place was quiet, and empty. I realized I should have called ahead.
The woman who’d taken my donation exited the booth and headed toward another door. I called out to her, my normal conversational voice more than loud enough to create the hint of an echo in the space.
“Do you have any tours? Guides who explain things?”
Her smile managed to be even more phony than mine had been. She must have thought it was a stupid question to ask in an empty museum the size of a large residence.
“We have tour groups by appointment, yes.”
“Is there anyone here who might answer some questions? A curator, perhaps?”
“Dr. Winch. He’s not here, but I’m expecting him shortly.”
“How long?”
She pulled a phone from her pocket and checked the screen. “I’d say a half-an-hour.”
“Thanks,” I said, nodding. “Say, would he have been the one hosting a talk a few weeks back? One about the future of body armor?”
“Dr. Winch is the advisor for all our sponsored events,” she said. And with that, she continued on to the interior door and disappeared behind it.
I pulled out my phone and texted Pip, let her know what was going on. Even her simple typed response that she understood and would stand by managed to sound full of cheerful alacrity.
Half-an-hour. It felt like time I could ill afford to waste, but with nothing else to do I figured I could walk the museum, study everything that looked interesting, and that would only leave me about twenty-five minutes to kill.
Okay, that wasn’t fair. I wasn’t big into militaria, so the prospect wasn’t exciting, but as I passed from display to display much of the stuff kindled the fires of my curiosity and made me want to see more. The main room was dedicated to American conflicts, from the Revolutionary War through the Civil on one side, WWI and WWII on the other, and more recent conflicts in the back. There were genuine uniforms of Minute Men and Kentucky Long Rifles and Gatling guns and small cannons and officers’ sabers and brittle, tan-yellow letters in careful script. There were knives and bayonets that still had the blood of those they had ended, or at least tried to end.
I made a circuit, passed by the same displays again, this time noticing different aspects or hidden points of intrigue. I crossed through the first pathway into another room, this one dedicated to the classical period with Roman swords and shields, Greek daggers and breastplates, Spartan spears and distinctive headgear. The Spartan shield, in particular, was impressive, a bruising weapon that was apparently used to bash the skull of an enemy soldier in close quarters combat.
I passed to the next room, this one focused on Medieval combat. There were crossbows and longbows and broadswords and shields with crests and a small catapult. There were maces and chainmail and lances and battleaxes. There was a hoist with a pulley that was apparently used to lift knights onto their horses, and an array of weapons I’d never heard of: the polearm and the quarterstaff and the caltrop and the flail and the halberd and the war hammer.
This room captured my imagination.
But there was also something else. A feeling, one I couldn’t quite place. Strong, impossible to ignore, and very weird. The strange sensation that I shared a connection, beyond the obvious one. Not as in a wave of déjà vu, but more like a sense of belonging. Like a mechanic in a room of motors, or a writer in a library. I had never even seen pictures of most of these things before, never even heard of the majority of them, but they somehow seemed familiar. No, not merely familiar. More like, appropriate. Tools of a trade with which I’d had experience, a tradition of which I was a part. It was a bizarre feeling, and not at all unpleasant.
The displays revealed something else. The time we associate with knights and Camelot and chivalry was just plain brutal. Modern weapons such as firearms tend to result in clean kills, relatively speaking. At least, distant, detached kills. These weapons told a tale of graphic violence, up close and personal, of bodies rendered limb from limb. Of blood spilling like wine, pouring like rain.
I lingered over some of the pieces, studying them. I circled the room a few times, then turned my attention to the center. A mannequin in chain mail, another in some sort of cloth and leather soldier’s garb with a helmet. And a suit of armor, gunmetal black, posed leaning on a sword, one foot atop an iron-banded wooden chest.
“’There sat a knight all armed in black harness, and his name was the Knight of the Black Laund.’”
I spun to see a man of about sixty standing a few feet away. He had wavy hair the color of fading ash combed straight back from a receding hairline. He was of slight build and average height, but carried himself larger, his narrow shoulders set back and his hands clasped at his waist. His suit was charcoal, a thick worsted wool, which had probably fit him better a decade or more ago, when it had likely been custom-made. The sight of him, or, I should say, the sight of what his look suggested, made me suddenly sad. First Pops, now this man. It was a reminder that we all fade away eventually, little by little.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. James Winch.” He held out a hand.
I hitched a shoulder and we shook. “I shouldn’t be so easy to sneak up on. What were you saying? About the knight?”
“A line from Le Morte d’Arthur, by Sir Thomas Mallory. The first known reference in literature to a black knight.”
“This guy?”
“No, no, not the knight to whom this particular armor belonged. We don’t know much about the original owner of this one. Only that his name was Palamor, that he was quite feared as a warrior, and that his services were in high demand.”
“Services?”
“What you might consider mercenary work. Though it wasn’t quite as crass and venal as that implies. Mostly, he would have been hired to guard something, to help ensure safe passage. Here he’s depicted protecting something valuable, represented by the trunk. Someone’s treasure. What little information there is seems to be conflicting and murky, but we know that the set dates back, well, it dates back several centuries. We were fortunate enough to acquire it on loan.”
I stared at the dark metal, well-maintained but too aged to glisten. “As they say, if only this thing could talk.”
“Sheila told me you had a question? About armor?”
“Right. Not this kind of armor, though. I believe you hosted a talk a few weeks ago, something about the future of body armor?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Do you recall the man who gave the presentation? Professor Kirk?”
“Well, sure. Nice gentleman. Certainly well-versed in the subject matter.”
“Okay, this may sound strange, but…did he mention anything to you about an artifact he may have been analyzing? A piece of metal of historical importance?”
“No. We barely spoke, aside from exchanging a few pleasantries.”
Damn. “Do you remember who showed up?”
“If I recall, we had a few soldiers, reservists, I’d say, along with some local gun enthusiasts and our usual attendees.”
“Usual attendees?”
“We have a few military history buffs who are supporting members. Several show up to most of the presentations and panel discuss
ions we host.”
“What about Mr. Alonzo? Was he here?”
One graying eyebrow arched and the man cocked his head. “Why, exactly, are you asking me these things?”
“That professor who gave the talk, Allan Kirk, he’s missing. I’m trying to find him.”
The man blinked in a way that told me the question made him uncomfortable. But it was hard to say. Some people just don’t like questions.
“I see. I’m not sure what that’s got to do with the museum.”
“I have reason to believe Mr. Alonzo may have had contact with Dr. Kirk before he disappeared.”
“In that case, why don’t you ask Mr. Alonzo?”
“Mr. Alonzo has left the building and won’t be coming back. I’m trying to find out where the two of them may have crossed paths.”
A chilly expression washed over his face like the shadow of a cloud. “Who are you?”
“I’m an acquaintance of Mr. Alonzo. Former acquaintance.”
“I take that to mean you’re not with the police, so I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Even after my generous donation to Sheila?”
“The trustees of the museum thank you. Please, don’t make me contact the authorities. Good day.”
As he turned to leave the room, I said, “I wonder if the police would be interested to learn your museum is being funded by laundered money.”
He wheeled around and shot me a look that hit harder than some jabs I’ve taken. “I advise you not to threaten me, young man. I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I won’t tolerate the slightest hint of impropriety on the part of this establishment.”
“But surely a man of the world such as yourself was aware of Mr. Alonzo’s business practices? His unsavory connections?”
I was taking wild swings, I admit. But sometimes even those punches land.
Judging by the way he reacted—or, didn’t react—this one may not have quite caught him on the chin, but it seemed to have been a decent shot to the ribs. He just stood there, staring at me.
“I have no idea what kind of business or businesses Mr. Alonzo was involved in.”