by Blake Banner
At my apartment door the lock had not been tampered with and I could hear no sounds inside. I let myself in and found no sign that anybody else had been there. I had a shave, changed into a light linen suit and decided to take the Brigadier’s advice and go out on the town. I was mixing myself a martini and wondering where to go when my cell rang. I took it out onto the terrace to watch the sun set over the ocean while I answered it.
“Bauer.”
A pretty, slightly breathless voice answered.
“Mr. Bauer, Harry, this is Sheila…”
I injected a warm smile into my voice. “Sheila, it’s nice to hear from you.”
A small laugh, and then, “I just thought you’d like to know that I spoke briefly to Mr. Cavendish this afternoon,”
I felt a hot jolt in my gut but controlled my voice. I made a point of not asking what he thought, but focused on her instead.
“Oh, that’s fine. Good to see you don’t hang around. Good work.”
“He was really quite impressed and said he’d like to meet you…”
I interrupted. “Listen, Sheila, forgive me for interrupting. I was just about to go out to dinner…”
“Oh! I am so sorry!”
“Please don’t be. I was delighted to hear from you. There are actually a couple of things I wanted to discuss with you before meeting with Mr. Cavendish.”
“Oh,” she said again, a little uncertain. “Oh, I see. Well, he wanted me to arrange a meeting tomorrow, if that was convenient…”
“Exactly, so we are a little short of time. Sheila, I know it’s short notice, but how would you feel about having dinner with me? We can go over the details, I’d love to hear your thoughts and I can run a few of my ideas by you.” I heard her draw breath and interrupted again. “I know you said earlier that it was too soon, but consider it a working dinner. I have been very busy this afternoon arranging some things I think you will be very pleased with. And I really would value your input before tomorrow.”
“Well.” Another small laugh. “I was going to wash my hair, but I guess that can wait.”
“Excellent. Where shall I pick you up?”
She gave me her address in Palms and hung up.
It was a two-story apartment block on Motor Avenue. The architect had obviously thought that fake dry-stone cladding would be a nice match for Dutch-style slate tiles on the roof and upper floor. Why he thought that is one of those eternal mysteries, like why nature thought it had to make the giant centipede. It was grotesque the way only LA knows how.
I was about to climb out and ring her bell when I saw her run out on the balcony and wave. Then she ran back in and two minutes later the wrought-iron gate opened and she came running out. She had on a nice, low-cut, purple velvet dress that didn’t want to let go of her, and a mauve silk scarf around her neck that made me want to bite her shoulder.
She climbed in beside me and smiled as she put on her seat belt.
“I didn’t know what to wear.” She said it like the task had been exhausting fun. “My mom lent me this. The dress. I hope it’s OK.”
I returned the smile. “I’ll try to keep my mind on the project, but I can’t make any promises.”
She flushed agreeably and settled into the seat.
We went to La Prim, on South Figueroa Street, on the thirty-fifth floor of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. It was a fancy, New York-style steak and seafood house with stunning views and seven hundred different wines in the cellar. But I was not there to enjoy the food and wine. I was there to give her something to take back to Cavendish.
For the first course I ordered a seafood platter for two, composed of Maine lobster, Pacific prawns, oysters and crab, and a bottle of Krug Champagne, Grande Cuvée. For the main course she had a filet mignon and I had a primal cut New York strip. With that we had a 1997 Château Margaux.
To consume these wonders we sat beside a vast, plate-glass window overlooking the Financial District and the vast ocean beyond. Even the moon made an appearance, casting an alluring path of false, golden promise over a very dark sea. And while we waited we had a couple of Vesper Martinis, shaken, not stirred.
When the waiter had gone with our orders, we sat a moment in silence, she biting her lip and looking down at her hands on the table.
“Mr. Bauer, Harry, I have to confess I feel a little out of my depth. I’m not sure…” She trailed off.
“No reason, Sheila. It’s important to remember that it’s just food. Shall I tell you the most exquisite meal I ever had?”
“I wasn’t actually talking about…” She smiled. “But yes, sure.”
“I was in the mountains above Kandahar. I hadn’t eaten anything but dry biscuits for a week, but on the seventh day I managed to catch and kill an old goat. It was as tough as boiled boot leather, but I spit-roasted it over an open fire and it was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten in my life. The lizard I ate in the Colombian rainforest comes a close second. So you see, setting, surroundings and circumstances aren’t everything.”
She stared at me a moment and then laughed. “Is that supposed to put me at my ease?”
“I guess, having had to survive on what there was at hand a few times, and seeing how some people live in the Third World, I don’t take all this tinsel and razzle-dazzle too seriously. It’s glamour, smoke and mirrors, but there is a truth, a reality, which once seen and touched, cannot be hidden.”
She became serious. “I know what you’re saying. It’s tough sometimes living in a place like this, where the least street bum is a master of illusion, and they are all trying to blind and fool each other for a few bucks. It’s hard sometimes to stay real.”
I tried to fight down another stab of guilt and raised my glass. “I’ll drink to that, keeping it real.”
As I set down my glass I said:
“I’ve been talking to Angels Fund Raisers, in Westwood. I want to launch this project with a fundraising event. I am going to have lunch with Shauna Cooper tomorrow and she is going to suggest a few possibilities.”
“She owns the company. She’s also their top person. She is very good.”
“I want to attract a lot of money to this project, and I want to inject a lot of cash into the foundation. I…” I nodded a few times, struggling with the word “honestly” in my mind. In the end I went with, “I really think what Charles Cavendish is doing is extraordinary.”
“He’s keen to meet you, Harry. He told me to ask you if you’d go and see him tomorrow, either for lunch or dinner. Can I tell him you’ll have dinner with him tomorrow?”
She had reached unconsciously for her purse, where her cell was. I smiled at her for a moment without answering, then asked her, “Will you be there?”
Her cheeks flushed again. “Yes.”
“Then you can tell him I’d love to go.”
“Harry.” She put down her purse and minutely rearranged her cutlery and her napkin, frowning, smiling, looking worried and pleased all at the same time. “Are you hitting on me?” She raised her eyes to meet mine. “I need to know.”
“Maybe a little. Shouldn’t I?”
“Not really.” She faltered, half-smiled, “I mean, don’t get me wrong,”
I laughed and placed my hand on hers. “Sheila, I apologize. You’re absolutely right. It’s not professional, and please don’t think this is typical of me. Mostly I’m like a cross between a sergeant major and a miserable bastard!” I laughed and she laughed with me. I let the laughter die away and got serious. “But I like you. I like the way you think and operate, and I like the way you feel.” I let the word linger, in all its ambiguity. Then, “But we should focus on the project and get it up and running.”
She looked relieved, and a little sorry. “Agreed.”
The martinis arrived, we toasted and sipped. She spent a second or two gazing out at the mirage of Los Angeles, a haze of luminous blue steel and glass peppered with amber lights. I drew breath to break in on her thoughts and suddenly, for a moment, I was somewh
ere else.
I hadn’t eaten for thirty-six hours. I had been sleeping in the open under a couple of woolen blankets. I had been hunting with a sixty-five-pound Osage orange bow. My six senses were alive, listening, sensing the hundreds of sounds, smells and tastes that are woven into the breeze in the mountains and the forests. They talk to you, about the eternal cycle of life and death in our world of three painful dimensions. They whisper about the animals that come and go on silent feet, that hunt in the shadows, that drink and fish in the creeks and rivers which furrow the land. They whisper about the twig that snaps under the prey’s hoof and the brief, lethal beating of an eagle’s wings. They whisper about the leaves that rustle and hide the hunter’s gaze.
In that moment I saw with the eyes of a predator, looking not for the prey, but for the movements that surround him, that expose him and make him vulnerable. I saw a bull elk at fifty yards, standing among the shadows of the trees, the remaining moments of his life draining away, like bloody sand in an hourglass.
I hadn’t eaten for thirty-six hours, and that kind of hunger sharpens your senses. I lost myself in those senses. I listened, smelled the air, tasted the air and felt the forest. Lying beside a spruce at the edge of the sparse woodlands, a hundred yards away, the bull elk stood alone, smelling the morning air, the same air I, his predator, was smelling.
I waited. He turned his back on me, grazing the late summer grass. He moved a step at a time, unaware that death was closing in downwind. I closed the gap and got an angle on his heart. I nocked the heavy, wooden broadhead, leaned into the bow and drew till my thumb touched the angle of my jaw below my ear. I sensed the trajectory of the arrow and loosed…
She gave me a small, smiling frown. “Harry?”
I blinked, smiled back, said, “Tell me about Cavendish. What kind of a man is he? Do you have much contact with him?” I sipped my martini. “What should I expect from him tomorrow?”
“Sure,” she said, “I see him from time to time. I get included more often than not in his meetings, very much as the junior member. He is highly intelligent. He will interrogate you,” she laughed, “in the nicest way, elegantly and politely, he will find out everything there is to know about you. He is shrewd, very shrewd. And he has X-ray vision. He is nobody’s fool.”
I was smiling with her. “X-ray vision?”
“I don’t know, it’s some kind of intuition. But he can see through people and read what’s in their minds. If you’re out to take him, he’ll take you first, I guarantee it.”
“Fortunately I am not out to take him.”
With my objective achieved, I settled down to enjoy the food and the wine, and the company. I was aware, as the night drew on, that I was perhaps enjoying it too much. But I silenced that voice and allowed myself to be drawn in to the pleasure of being with a woman who was genuine, sincere and, for want of a better word, good.
Six
Lunch the following day with Shauna Cooper was of interest. She took me to 1 Pico, on the beach, and treated me to an exquisite seafood lunch which I did not enjoy because I was growing tired of exquisite food and dining, and was hankering for either a hamburger in a sesame bun, or a haunch of something, roasted over an open fire under the stars.
Her proposals involved a gala dinner at the Beverly Hills Dorchester, with tickets starting at five thousand dollars a piece and special invitations going to certain Hollywood stars who were known to support similar projects, an invitation-only showcase of exceptional talent featuring Hollywood actors and actresses performing appropriate solo pieces and monologues, followed by a gala reception where a Hollywood celebrity would invite guests to contribute generously, and, finally, the pièce de résistance, a “Hollywood Hands Around the World Day” with a whole collection of events lasting from nine AM to one AM. These would include (but not be limited to) a gymkhana, an open-air concert, a celebrity soccer match and various other events to be agreed upon. The day would conclude with a celebrity cocktail party followed by a gala diner and a keynote speech given by either Leonardo DiCaprio or Al Gore. The event would be held, possibly, at Griffith Park.
I told her the third option was the one I wanted and to get on it right away. I needed it in place and happening within a month. She turned a little pale and reached for her wine. She stammered something about six months and I told her whatever it took, whatever it cost, I needed it happening now, and I wanted something to show Cavendish yesterday.
“I’m having dinner at his house tonight, and I want to tell him something that will make him smile. There are…very large sums of money involved here, Shauna…” I gave her a lingering look to go with the lingering words, as full of sinful promise as an early spring morning in Manhattan. She yielded to the sinful promise and said she would do everything in her power to make it happen. I was sure she would.
After lunch she hurried back to her office to start doing everything in her power, and I took a drive to Griffith Park. It is nestled among the Santa Monica Mountains, beside the Golden State Freeway, which borders it on the eastern side, and contains amongst other things the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens at its northern edge, the Hollywood sign and the Cahuenga Peak. At its eastern end it contains a large lawn about a mile long and half a mile across, crisscrossed with pathways and dotted with trees. At the southern end is the merry-go-round.
I spent an hour or so strolling up and down, exploring the paths and the wooded areas, trying to visualize how the whole thing would play out. At the westernmost edge, where Griffith Park Drive climbs into the hills, I found a small meadow with dense growths of monkshood, a pretty flower not dissimilar to the bluebell. Using my handkerchief and a great deal of care, I collected a large bunch of them and wrapped them in my jacket. They were going to make things a lot simpler.
I was also trying to visualize Shauna’s day-long event. Not that I had ever intended to see it through, but I needed a clear vision with which to infect Cavendish when I spoke to him that night. Because I had a strong feeling it was going to be necessary eventually to bring Cavendish to Griffith Park, if I was ever going to kill him.
I wasn’t wrong.
Sheila called me to tell me Cavendish was sending a car to fetch me. She also told me it was black tie and if I came appropriately dressed it would make a good impression. “These things are important to him,” she told me.
I got back to my apartment at three. Took a run along the beach, spent a while training, had a hot, cold, hot shower and dressed in a Savile Row black evening suit and bow tie. His car, a vintage 1960s Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, pulled up at precisely six PM, and I watched the uniformed chauffeur climb out and enter the building. Just for the heck of it I waited on the terrace, sipping a martini till he rang at the bell.
When he did I opened the door.
“Mr. Bauer?” I said I was. “Mr. Cavendish sends his compliments. His car is at your disposal downstairs when you are ready, sir.”
I followed him downstairs, he held the door for me as I climbed in and we glided for about a mile along the Pacific Coast Highway, then turned up into Pacific Palisades. Cavendish’s house was on Corona del Mar. It was a vast, Spanish-style villa behind an eight-foot wall topped with a box hedge. The gates were wrought iron, watched by cameras on the wall above, directly opposite on the façade of the house and on the roof, and were presumably controlled electronically from inside, because the driver climbed out, showed his face to the camera above the gate and a couple of seconds later it started to roll back.
As we rolled inside and the gate closed behind us, I noticed there were two armed guards in Italian suits on the steps which led up to the front door. They watched us carefully as the chauffeur came around the hood and opened the door for me. As I climbed out they approached and the nearest one, a crew cut ex-Marine, spoke to me with that kind of formal courtesy which is somehow vaguely menacing.
“Please raise your arms, sir, while I check you for weapons.”
I held his eye for a count of three, then t
old him, “I am not carrying any weapons, and I am not accustomed to being insulted when I am a guest in somebody’s house.”
He frowned, confused and out of his comfort zone.
“I have to check you sir.”
“I don’t give a solitary goddamn what you have to do. I didn’t ask to come here, I was invited. If you’re not going to let me in because you think I’m some kind of damned terrorist, then you and your boss can go to hell!”
He was now visibly worried.
“Sir, it’s not personal. It’s Mr. Cavendish’s policy, everybody who comes here…”
“I am not everybody. I am Harry Bauer! And I was planning on investing over one million dollars in your boss’s foundation. I do not appreciate being invited here and then treated like some kind of common criminal.”
His pal was talking on the radio as he moved in closer. I kept on mouthing off.
“Let me ask you something. If the president of the United States came here, would you frisk him? If the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff came here, would you frisk him? How about former President Bill Clinton?”
His pal put away his radio and interrupted. “Sir? We meant no offense. It is just standard procedure. We have very tight security here, but somebody is coming to collect you and take you to Mr. Cavendish. Please, accept our apologies.”
I nodded. “Not your fault, soldier. You were just following orders.”
The Marine scowled at me and the front door of the house opened. Sheila came running out in a purple satin dress that hugged her body and her legs. She was waving her hands and calling, “Harry! Harry!”
I gave the Marine an insolent smile and asked him, “What are you doing this evening?”
His frown deepened as Sheila reached us and took my hands. “Harry, please don’t take offense. It is standard procedure.”