SUMMER 1979
The address for Gabe’s party was on Broadway, across the street from the Million Dollar Theatre. Jess carried a bottle of wine, looking for the correct number above the gated storefronts. She hardly ever had reason to come downtown, to what seemed like an abandoned city within the larger L.A. sprawl, with its vacant office buildings and desolate streets, newspapers blowing across empty courtyards. But there were occasional pockets of life, where cheap rent attracted artists and quinceañera dress shops, and at least one theater still drawing a Friday-night crowd.
A long line rambled from the Million Dollar’s ticket booth, couples in pressed blue jeans and short skirts, cowboy boots and high heels, polished belt buckles and candy-colored vinyl purses reflecting the marquee’s cycling incandescents. A coffee vendor wheeled his cart down the line, ringing his bell, chatting with the men, complimenting the ladies, tipping his straw hat before moving on.
RICARDO MONTALBÁN IN BORDER INCIDENT. Jess knew the film. It was one of the few Zack had screened for her during the early days of his movie-collecting mania. She didn’t recall much of the plot. It was Zack’s disappointment she remembered, his frustration that she didn’t appreciate the film the same way he did, or that she appreciated different things, the wrong things. Halfway through, exasperated, he had switched his projector off, so she didn’t know how the movie ended.
Turning back to her side of the street, Jess heard shouts and a tambourine keeping a ragged beat. The noise came from a storefront church, its doors open to the warm night. Inside, a crowd swayed in loose rows, men and women, white and Hispanic, clapping along with the tambourine’s rhythm. A young white woman stumbled up the center aisle, thrusting her hands toward the low ceiling, shouting in a garbled language. The crowd shouted along with her. She made her way toward the back of the room, where a man in a fringed leather vest stood on a plywood altar. His bare chest gleamed with sweat. He shook the tambourine and the woman moved toward him in time with the sound. He watched her approach with a hunger in his eyes that made Jess recoil.
She turned from the doorway and almost collided with another man blocking her path on the sidewalk. Long-haired and bare-chested, he gave Jess an unsettling smile.
“What do you say, sister? Time to come into the light?”
Jess circled around him. He called out something she couldn’t hear, and then she finally found the right address, a locked door between two more gated stores. She pressed the buzzer, looking back to where the man had turned his attention to a young woman, his hand on her shoulder, guiding her toward the gathering inside.
Jess hit the buzzer again and the lock popped open. At the end of a short, dim hallway, she found an open elevator that smelled like mold and minty mouthwash. She pressed the button for the top floor. The doors closed. In fits and starts the small box jerked upward, then shunted to a stop.
A muffled bell chimed and the doors opened again, revealing a large room, an old office, maybe. A string of low windows ran along each side wall. Most of the light came from candles set on tables and crates and the flashing of the Million Dollar’s marquee outside. The room was packed and loud and smoky. Everyone was young. There was music playing: howling guitars and an insistent spoken-word monologue—Patti Smith, maybe—from overdriven speakers in a corner of the room.
Jess hoped the doors would close again, taking her back down before anyone noticed, but then a girl turned from a large group and cocked her head, trying to make sense of this new arrival. The girl was tall and pale, all sharp angles and black leather. This was Gabe’s student, the hostess. Jess recognized her from the description Gabe had left with the answering service, along with the address.
Hostess, Jesus. Her mother’s term just appeared, incongruously, in Jess’s brain. That word probably wasn’t even in this girl’s vocabulary. Or if it was, she would consider it a slight, a word associated with her own mother, maybe, pouring cocktails in a plushly carpeted living room down in Orange or Laguna, entertaining other couples from her bridge group. Hostess as an insult, a cupcake.
Jess couldn’t remember the girl’s name. Gabe had left it in the message, but her memory was for shit these days.
Stepping from the elevator, Jess smiled and offered her hand.
“I’m a friend of Gabe’s.”
The girl took Jess’s hand and nodded slowly. Her fingers were rough with calluses. She was a guitarist and singer, that was what Gabe had said. Maybe that was her rather than Patti Smith on the stereo.
The girl stared hard at Jess, and then her eyes widened with recognition.
“Holy shit. Jess Shepard.”
The other kids in the group stopped talking. They turned to look at Jess. She felt like she was glowing now, radioactive.
“Zero Zone,” someone said. “Holy shit.”
They were all staring at her with a sickening mix of fear and reverence. She wanted to deny it all, her name, her history, to tell them they were mistaken. She wanted to back into the elevator, drop down to the street, but the elevator doors opened again, disgorging another group of kids, and Jess moved forward with the wave, fleeing deeper into the party. She could see Gabe now, a friendly beacon, looking happy and trim in jeans and a tight black T-shirt, talking to a couple of students by the far windows. Jess squeezed toward him, flinching at every barked laugh and drunken stumble, forcing herself into the heart of the crowd.
And then there he was, Anton Stendahl, stepping into her path as if out of a bad dream, tall and thin in a fitted white suit.
“Jess?”
She wondered if she had finally snapped. But no, it was Anton, cocking his head with that familiar smirking smile of whimsical disbelief. With his conspiratorial murmuring and indeterminate accent, Anton had always reminded her of a B-movie character, a slippery underworld informant or the shoddy impresario of a low-rent speakeasy. Jess hadn’t seen him since the night of the gallery attack two years ago. He stepped closer, ducking his head to create some privacy between them.
“What are you doing here?” Jess said.
“I’m in town for my show,” he said, as if stating the obvious. Then he waved his hand, dismissing the misunderstanding. That wasn’t important; it was not why he was here, now, in front of her. Jess could see his concern. She was missing something.
“Didn’t you hear?” Anton said. “About her?” The music grew louder, more insistent, but somehow Jess still heard Anton clearly, the urgency in his voice cutting through all the noise.
“Who?” she asked, knowing the answer but trying to delay the inevitable. Her stomach turned liquid with the thought of the name about to be unleashed into the room.
“Isabella Serrano,” Anton said. “She’s out. She’s free. Three years down to two for good behavior.”