LOVELY KNEELS and digs through the detritus with his bare hands. Flashlight clenched in his mouth. Searching.
On the lip of the arroyo, an Aerojet Laboratories security Jeep has found, in the moonless Flintridge darkness, Lovely’s Morris nosed into the fire road brush again. Down below, a solitary trespasser picks through the remains of Barn Number 5, white shaft of a flashlight stabbing down.
High beams coming fast up the access road pin Lovely to the rubble. He stands and shades his eyes as black federal sedans skid to a halt and agents hop out, lively with guns and rifles. The generation that just missed the war, Lovely notes: Buddiger, Johnson, Kapnik . . . and DeSpain, who was there and then some.
“What’s buzzin’, cousin?”
“Does it at all bother you,” Lovely says to him, “that some rocket scientist’s tall tale about stolen secret plans and the Red Menace gets everyone in Justice aquiver, and it’s you poor overworked G-men who have to make it hold water?”
“Fidelity, bravery, integrity.”
“Oh, uh-huh. And the G stands for gullibility.”
DeSpain comes forward, his expression wary. “You don’t know when to say when, do you?”
“I’ve got a thing about loose ends.”
“Welp. Even though you called me, I can’t give you a pass for this one, Rylan. It’s a federal crime, your being here. Trespassing, secure facility. Not to mention poking through classified material.”
Lovely is bemused. “This?” He aims his flashlight down at the shards of barn again, and resumes rummaging. There’s the chilling sound of bullets chambered, guns cocked—
—and Kapnik screaming, “DO NOT MOVE!”
DeSpain shrugs. “They want any excuse to shoot you.”
Lovely keeps working. “All this extra light helps, thanks.”
Kapnik, brittle: “Sir?”
DeSpain waves them off and steps between his soldiers and Lovely, who grunts and yanks at something stuck in the ruins.
“What are we looking for? I hope it’s that missing ten grand, I’m getting a lot of static from my section chief.”
Lovely straightens and shakes his head. “A doorway.”
“Literally, or figuratively?”
“Literally.”
DeSpain wades in to help—braces himself, gets a grip, and they both tug and Lovely’s find releases: the big, blasted wooden remainder of the barn’s faded green back door, still in its rectangular doorframe. Together they drag it free, lift, and Lovely stands it up, crooked. Backlit, it takes on the character of a strange gallows. Lovely fingers a couple of crooked twelvepenny nails still embedded along the jamb to prevent the shattered door from opening.
“Your Paul Lamoureux’s a monster,” he says. “And a murderer.”
“Mine? Funny. Pentagon, Joint Chiefs, Congress—Ike himself—think he’s one of the most important American scientific assets of the Cold War.”
“More important than Strughold?” Lovely wonders darkly.
“Okay right. Play the Nazi mad doctor trump card, go ahead, Lovely. Cheap shot.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t smart. Hell, he out-conned a con man sharp enough to start his own religion. Drummond. Convinced him to lure me to the barn and blow me up in a ‘lab accident.’ Walks me in the front and then intends to slip out the back”—Lovely bangs on the broken door; it won’t budge from the frame—“only the back way . . . was uncooperative. And God’s servant got to meet his maker.”
Lovely lets it all clatter back into the jumble of barn remains.
DeSpain stares at it. “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Big deal. We can’t touch him, Lovely”—he’s irritated—“goddamn it, why did you show me this? You think showing me this will change anything?”
Lovely says, “A man can dream.”
DeSpain fumes. “Who put the red S on your chest?! You can’t prove it was Lamoureux! You can’t prove a goddamn thing!” DeSpain’s voice echoes through the arroyo.
“No, I can’t.” Lovely says it softly. “That is the bitch of it, Ed. Some men get blinded so others can see.”
Nobody says anything for a while. Kapnik and the young Feds let their weapons sag and their boots scrape the gravel. On the horizon, Hollywood searchlights sweep black cotton skies as if trying to find the stars.
DeSpain breaks the quiet, his voice bitter and sardonic. “Yeah, well. At least he’s our monster, huh? Like you said.”
“Did I?”
DeSpain sighs, jams his hands into his pockets, and starts to walk back to the cars, signaling for his men to follow, waving for the headlights to dim and give them all some measure of the comfort of shadows.
—
BEHIND HIS FARMER’S MARKET COUNTER, his apron smudged with doughnut jelly, Hal is surprisingly philosophical about the new H-bomb, once he’s read up on all the Operation Castle tests, Bravo to Koon. “Knowledge makes us more dangerous. Always has, always will. Rocks, spears, broadswords, crossbow, catapult, cannon, rifle, and so on and so forth. The closer we get to our Creator, the closer we risk his final embrace.” Lovely suspects Hal heard this on the radio, from Arthur Godfrey or Norman Vincent Peale. “I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on underground shelters,” Hal admits. “There’s a company in Lancaster can do you one in the backyard, deluxe, soup to nuts, for about five hundred bucks.”
The fact that Hal doesn’t have a backyard and lives in a Fairfax fourplex with his mother seems not to figure in. Two weeks have passed since Lovely found the door that Lamoureux used to murder Drummond. Summer has burned through the marine layer and sent it packing; bright, hot, rich blue cloudless skies as unreal as Technicolor. Fourth of July promises to be a scorcher.
“With proper air filtration and food management, a family of four can survive not just the initial attack but also the aftermath: fallout and radiation. What they call a nuclear winter.”
“Yeah, but doesn’t that last for, like, five hundred years?” From the other end of the counter a wag who Lovely has never seen before pipes up.
“Scientists tend to exaggerate,” Hal says. “So they won’t be caught with their pants around their ankles come a doomsday scenario. Plus, it plumps their funding.”
Lovely sorts through the new messages Johnny Leong has collected for him while he and Lily went south to sort themselves and their relationship in Ensenada: more possible studio gigs, a teenage runaway, this philandering housewife that he’s already caught in flagrante delicto once, and warned the poor forgiving spouse that she would be an unapologetic recidivist. A probate lawyer’s call looks promising, surely boring and procedural, which is something Lovely would be craving just now if he could just get the foul taste of Lamoureux out of his mouth.
On the balcony of their Baja room at the Hotel Riviera del Pacífico, Lovely had shared Isla’s diary with Lily. She flipped through it as if disinterested, found the blank braille scrap right away and lingered. Lovely had assumed it was a love note from Buddy. Lily, running her fingers over the bumps, closing her eyes, said, after a while, “No, baby, I think it’s lyrics to a song.”
There happened to be, in El Sauzal, a blind Mexican accordion player Lily had met when Django Reinhardt toured the States in the wake of the war. They brought him Isla’s journal and a bottle of reposado, and he recognized both immediately, by touch.
“Ah. Brahms. Volkslieder,” he said, grinning, touching the braille after they’d sampled the tequila. “De un poema checo de filósofo Daumer.”
German love song. A composition by Johannes Brahms, Lily explained. With lyrics from a poem by some philosopher.
The Mexican sang:
Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen,
Beschloß ich und beschwor ich,
Und gehe jeden Abend,
Denn jede Kraft und jeden Halt verlor ich.
“To visit you no longer,” Lily translated, “did I resolve and swear. Yet I go to you each evening, for all strength and resolve have I lost.”
Ich möchte nicht mehr leben,
Möcht’ augenblicks verderben,
Und möchte doch auch leben
Für dich, mit dir, und nimmer, nimmer sterben.
“I long to live no longer, I long to perish instantly. And yet I also long to live for you, with you, and never, never die.”
The Mexican shut his sightless eyes and sang the final verse softly, his voice high, quavering:
Ach, rede, sprich ein Wort nur,
Ein einziges, ein klares;
Gib Leben oder Tod mir,
Nur dein Gefühl enthülle mir, dein wahres!
And Lily half sang it, too, then, almost a whisper after he’d finished: “Ah, speak, say only one word, a single word, a clear one; give me life or death, only reveal your feelings to me—your true feelings!”
Lovely’s throat grew thick, and his eyes were wet, and he didn’t have the strength to tell her that he understood the German just fine, or that it was Buddy who had introduced him to the lieder of Brahms.
On the last night of their stay, with the lights of the harbored yachts shimmering on the sea swell and the rattle and thrum of bar-crawl traffic below them, they began to talk about the boy.
Lovely’s point was that he couldn’t do it alone.
Lily wondered if he was proposing.
He wasn’t, in any conventional sense. “Where I’ve been the past ten years, what I’ve seen,” he said. “We fought a war to get rid of evil, but it had already leached out, and we were covered with it. The world we knew, the one brave men in Europe and the Pacific died to come back to, it’s gone, Lil. I’ve seen what’s coming. Not just the bomb.”
Lily pointed out how a country that still prevented people of a darker skin tone from sharing drinking fountains with their pale brothers and sisters was splitting hairs, where Evil was concerned. And that Lovely couldn’t protect the world from itself, if that was what he was saying, she wasn’t quite sure. She said his intentions sounded frighteningly similar to the rationale Ike and the Dulles brothers were using to go around the planet making trouble in the name of Freedom and the American Way.
He didn’t want to admit to her he’d been a part of that effort. “No,” he started to argue, then thought better of it. “Well, yeah. But maybe I can hold it off for just those around me. Friends, family. And people who come to me for help.”
“And boys about to be orphaned.”
Lovely allowed that it was probably a fool’s errand. But he was the perfect fool for it.
Lily had laughed and kissed him and stretched out long and lovely on the balcony recliner. The sky held that same terra-cotta glow they’d left behind in Los Angeles; no stars, a veiled crescent moon.
“What’s his name?” she asked finally.
“Gilbert.”
—
“FOR YEARS the problems of burning high-energy fuels in rocket engines has stymied us. At stake, quite literally, was the future of mankind . . .”
Blah blah blah. Standing, hatless, next to the chunky television news cameras aimed at a lectern under the replica Wright Brothers’ biplane that hangs from the great room rafters in the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park, Lovely—grim, jaded, and intractable—should be able to just let this go, but when he read in the Herald that Dr. Paul Lamoureux, noted rocket scientist, was due to receive the city’s Man of the Year Award, he couldn’t stay away.
“. . . This new Aerojet Zip Fuel means that our ICBMs can soar farther and higher, and our glorious B-29s will have greater ability to rule the skies and protect this great nation and its allies with a thermonuclear arsenal second to none.”
This kind of jingoistic blather always gets enthusiastic applause, and Lamoureux, flanked by shit-grinned company executives, a few USC senior faculty, the usual local government suspects, and some well-fed Pentagon brass, takes a professional pause to allow the tribute to settle on his deserving shoulders.
“In the titanic clash with those who would enslave free men under the brute lies of socialism, it’s not just Science that leads the way, but Science in the service of defending our American Way of Life, in which every man is allowed to pursue his dreams.”
Even if they include casual rape and murder, Lovely observes. It goes on for a while, and ends with a standing ovation, the rocket scientist flashing a winning smile; a general pats him on the back, the governor shakes his hand. Flashbulbs pop. A reporter’s shouted question: “Elis Mankiewicz of Caltech says this puts you on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Professor. Care to comment?”
One of Aerojet’s PR flacks steps up, but Lamoureux is happy to respond. “I would never disagree with Dr. Mankiewicz on matters of pure scientific reasoning.”
The admiring crowd laughs. A second ovation erupts and Lamoureux mimes “Thank you” and steps away from the lectern microphones. His federal escort materializes from the wings, DeSpain in a new pale summer-weight suit.
Lamoureux posing: with the generals, with Aerojet executives, with the mayor, with a pretty girl who drapes a ceremonial medal around his neck while his hand drifts down to her ass.
The whole entourage falls in behind as Lamoureux makes his exit like a king leaving court. DeSpain and his Feds clear an aisle through the lingering well-wishers pressing in. Touch of hands, vague smiles. A yellowing Tyrannosaurus fossil skeleton leers down at them.
DeSpain doesn’t notice Lovely drift in and match stride, until he’s asking, sharply, “What’s the Zip Fuel death toll now, doc? Two? Three, if we count Sarah Blohm?”
“No need to make a scene.” DeSpain slides between them.
Lovely ignores the Fed and shrugs off Lamoureux’s glare. “Sarah Blohm, yeah—you remember her? Another one of your motor hotel trysts gone wrong.”
DeSpain’s last warning: “Rylan—”
Lovely feints, lags, slips back inside of the federal gauntlet, up against Lamoureux’s shoulder, low, intense. “It took me a while to figure, because I’m no rocket genius, but that’s what it was all about, right? Isla witnessed you recruiting from the ranks of Drummond’s Cosmic altar girls. One of the perks for you of being a church rainmaker. Pristine gash.”
Lovely is pressing for a reaction, and sure enough, Lamoureux slows and turns his face, eyes like ebony buttons, lifeless and dark. “Go away.”
“Saw,” Lovely continues, “Sarah Blohm pedaling around the drive-in. Then Isla saw her pictures in the papers: story of a murder-kidnap. And Isla, being smarter than me, puzzled it out a lot quicker. How’m I doing?”
Lamoureux glares at Lovely, but says to DeSpain, “Make him leave.”
DeSpain slips his arm through Lovely’s and finds the eyes of another Fed on perimeter detail and nods the man over. But Lovely keeps talking. “Isla hit you up for hush money. You told the Feds it was about secret documents, because the murder of a girl might be a hard pill for even them to swallow. No matter how many sweet bombs you build.”
“Tall tales.”
“Drummond helped you disappear Isla’s body. Just like the last time. Sarah Blohm.”
DeSpain says, “C’mon, Rylan. You’ve said your piece. Let’s take a hike.”
Lovely grabs Lamoureux’s arm to keep him from getting any separation, “You killed Isla to shut her up.”
“Rylan,” DeSpain warns, “that’s enough.” He starts to tug Lovely away, but Lovely still has Lamoureux’s arm in his grasp, so they all spin to an awkward halt.
“And killed Drummond, when he got all bent out of shape.” Lovely’s face is so close to Lamoureux’s that they nearly touch foreheads. A whisper: “And you just missed with me.”
“You’re a pointless little man. A speck of dust in the vastness of known space.”
“Yeah, so you keep telling me. Thanks.”
It should be finished, the Man of the Year should walk away because Lovely has nothing but empty threats, but Lamoureux can’t seem to stop himself now. “And even if your theory was true, what can you do about it, Mr. Lovely? We’re in the Age of Science. Big men, big ideas. The rules don’t apply to us.”
DeSpain looks troubled. As if this is too much for him. “Sir, can we just—let’s—”
Lamoureux’s face goes ugly; surface calm stripped bare, his corrupted soul revealed. “You, my friend, your ‘wife’ . . . any number of pretty trifles I may suffer and cast in my considerable wake . . . just don’t matter. Sorry.”
Lovely knows better, but jumps at him anyway, takes a wild swing and, uncharacteristically, misses. All the Feds react. A scuffle ensues, no blows landed, but eventually DeSpain finds purchase on Lovely’s shoulder and shoves him sideways against a display case, holding him there while Lamoureux backs away, smug, sneering, “I want to press charges. I want him arrested.”
Lovely struggles to get back into the fray, but DeSpain stands his ground. “Let it go,” he says to Lamoureux. “You, too, Lovely, let it go. You heard the man. We don’t factor in this equation, we never have. It’s about bigger weapons and better death. All we can do is duck and cover and pray.”
Lovely sags, relents. They watch Lamoureux go out a side door into Exposition Park, his retinue momentarily losing track of him.
The door gapes and stays open on an air-piston closing mechanism. The formal gardens of Exposition Park line a stone sidewalk in the shadow of the building. Sculpted trees sway in a warm breeze. Lovely sees that Lamoureux has stopped to light a cigarette, and flicks the match away. The piston sighs and the door slowly begins to close on him, squinting up into another glorious day.
There is a pop like a firecracker.
His head twists, jerks, spasms.
A small-caliber bullet punches through Lamoureux’s temple and exits in a puff of red mist just behind his ear, and he drops clumsy, like a stringless marionette.
Judy stands over him, numb, sobbing, with the smoking gun.
The crowd inside reacts and cowers, but Lovely and DeSpain rush outside by instinct or training, it no longer matters; Lovely strips the gun from the crying girl and takes her in his arms while DeSpain tends to his rocket man.
“I put you on a train.”
“Track goes both ways,” Judy says emptily.
DeSpain, ear to Lamoureux’s gaping lips, just murmurs, “Holy cow.” Dead.
Lovely raises his hand and—bangbangbangbang bang—empties the .22 revolver into the sky, causing anyone in the museum who might have been thinking of coming out the door to scramble again for cover and make their muffled calls for help.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
“Buying us ten seconds,” Lovely says, and two of them tick by while the former spooks trade weary looks. “She won’t get a fair shake, Ed. You know she won’t.”
Sirens wail, approaching. Footfall of cops coming through the garden, and voices from inside:
“Agent DeSpain! Status?”
DeSpain shakes his head, “Aw, Rylan, for the love of—”
Lovely counts down their margin. “. . . five, four, three . . .”
“You gonna always want your stories to have a happy ending now?”
Lovely shrugs. “Can’t have a Cold War if the whole world is ice.” He offers DeSpain the girl’s gun, grip first, and the Fed takes it.
DeSpain’s man, inside, calls again, “DeSpain?!”
“All clear,” DeSpain shouts back. He considers the trifling mortal coil of what was once the Man of the Year and, to Lovely, wry as only an ex-spook can be, “Gee, I wonder who killed him.”
Cops and Feds swarm the scene from inside and outside, a flood of law and order. DeSpain slips the .22 in his pocket and holds up his badge for the LAPD blues. “FBI, officers. Establish a perimeter, Fig to Vermont. The shooter is still at large.”
Lovely hustles the girl away; gets lost in the chaos as reporters and rubberneckers press down the paths and out through the doors, causing the cops to be way too occupied with crowd control to be attendant to anyone casually moving away from the scene.
Refrain of flashbulbs and the dull roar of breaking news.
—
THE FOREST LAWN FUNERAL for Isla had been small and quiet, fanned by dry, hot desert wind that whirled and danced across the Griffith Park hills.
Buddy, in a folding chair, sat central, edge of the grave, restless. Surrounded by a few friends. Did he know that Lovely was in attendance? Lovely doubts it, seated now, here, days later, cooled by a fan in Isla’s courtyard apartment, just a couple crow-flies miles away from where she’s buried. He’s listening to a Chico Hamilton LP that Lily gave to him for his birthday. He’s drinking scotch. The diary is on the side table, within reach.
Last entry. June 10. Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter . . .
At the bottom of the page, skewed and rushed, like an afterthought, she’s scribbled the phone number for Leong’s Fresh Fruit and Produce.
All the furniture’s been rearranged.
Buddy has been back to Forest Lawn every day, sweating so much it fogs his Ray-Bans; Lovely has followed the cab that takes him there, knows when he arrives and how long he stays. It won’t be difficult for Lily to collect him today.
Lovely waits in the cool gloom of Isla’s flat until a car horn honks. He pushes himself up from the chair and walks out into the slanting sunshine, letting the screen door close softly so as not to announce himself.
A convertible Cadillac has parked beyond the archway. Miss Lily Himes is at the wheel, summer dress, floppy black hat and sequined sunglasses, Buddy just climbing out, with his white cane probing for obstacles.
He senses Lovely. “How many steps?”
“Five.”
Buddy swings his stick, finds the stairs, and comes up into the courtyard, counting. Lovely meets him there and offers an arm, so close that he can smell on Buddy’s breath the tinned mints Lily must have offered him on the way over.
“How’s your French coming?”
“Okay, spit it out, Ry. Don’t be a jerk.”
“Was it gonna be Paris or just some protectorate like Algiers? Isla had a ticket and a passport and ten thousand bucks.”
Something moves, eclipsed behind the screen door opposite. Lovely can just make out the gentle slopes of the actress, as if behind a stage scrim, watching them. Her fingers touch the screen door and bloom small pools of pink.
“You never broke up with her, Buddy.”
They’re at the open door to Isla’s apartment. Lovely goes in first, and the door swings out all the way like an open arm, beckoning, but Buddy hesitates on the threshold, “I told you, she did to me what she did to you. Plus, I’m damaged goods. There was no future for us.”
While Lovely draws back farther into the shadows, Buddy stays at the doorway, head cocked to one side. Listening to the click of the tonearm on the spent record’s gutter.
“You’re lying,” Lovely says finally. “The baby was yours.”
Buddy snaps, “You know what, you surrendered whatever high ground you think you had seven years ago! You ran away, Rylan! You ran away and left her here, lonely, instead of staying and fighting for her.” Buddy steps into the apartment, not even bothering to use his cane, and—WHACK—immediately collides with a chair he clearly doesn’t expect to be there; he reels back, startled, and topples the floor lamp behind him, and it goes crashing down.
“I didn’t run, Buddy, I left. And this apartment was all set up for a blind man until I moved it around about an hour ago.”
Buddy is quiet. He doesn’t move; not so much afraid, it seems, as unmoored. Lovely can still see in his face that undersized sixteen-year-old Lovely taught to use a clutch, the ten-year-old who stole candies from Grand Junction’s only Five and Dime, and then, so racked by guilt he got sick and couldn’t sleep, brought them back untouched and confessed his crime.
“I got out of your way. So you could have what I had lost.”
Buddy’s head goes back and forth slowly. “But you wouldn’t divorce her. She thought that meant something.”
“No.” Lovely thinks. “Or maybe it did.” He didn’t want the conversation to take this turn. “I’m stubborn. And I have feelings. I’m sorry.” He lets a silence pass. “But the blackmail.”
“What about it?”
“Isla’s mind didn’t work that way. If she thought Lamoureux had hurt a girl she would have gone right to the police.”
“And the cops would have done nothing,” Buddy says, bitterly.
“Probably not,” Lovely concedes. “But the blackmail . . . that was your idea. Soup to nuts.” As Hal would say.
Buddy just lets this go unchallenged. He uses his cane now, weaves with caution into the room, finds the sofa, sits. Lovely lifts the diary off the side table and puts it into Buddy’s hands. This may be the hardest thing he will ever have to do.
“Isla’s diary.”
Pause. “I can’t read it. Why—”
Lovely talks over him. “I thought it might give me a clue to what happened, you know . . . with me and her. It was just the year past but, like you say, we were still married and she never pushed for the divorce and I guess some part of me hoped, sure, that meant something. But no. No, sir, it’s all major key, as Lily likes to say: upbeat, happy, eyes forward. On you,” Lovely adds, sadly. “It’s all on you.” And he flashes on the last time they were all together. Isla’s hand reaching out . . . to Buddy Dale’s face.
A face that now, here, in her apartment, has tears slick streaming down it. “We had no m-m-money, and a family on the way. Look at me! The broken man! I made one bad decision, okay, but I didn’t—”
“—you did.”
“Don’t. Hey, d-don’t, don’t say that.”
“Her blood’s on your hands. And I’m guessing you have the missing ten grand, so don’t kid yourself.” Lovely stares at the hunched shoulders of his oldest friend. His voice goes distant, cold. “Lamoureux balked. Isla got scared. She was calling me because now you had become part of the problem.”
He puts his hat on, tilts it against the bloody, dying sun streaming through the window.
Buddy shudders in the room’s deepening shadows, fingers unsettled on the journal’s pebbled cover. “You here to pass judgment on me?”
“No. I came to say goodbye to my wife,” Lovely confesses. “The cops have some questions, though.”
Detective Henry Paez has taken a position on the flagstone, respectfully hanging back, but peering in, curious, from outside in the Diablo Bonita courtyard. A couple LAPD patrol cops are just joining him, coming up the steps, gun belts squeaking.
Lily should be waiting in her car.
Lovely says, “Ready?”