2.

By the time I make it from the scene of the morning’s drama all the way downtown to the offices of the Speculative Service and finish with the paperwork, I’m a half hour late getting to my own desk on the thirtieth floor.

“Hey, Mr. Alvaro,” I say in passing, palming my beard and scowling. “Ten is half of twenty.”

“But it’s twice five.”

“So it's ever been.”

“So it ever shall be.” Mr. Alvaro is the boss man, standing at the big board like always, endlessly updating the list of cases in progress, today’s assignments: anomalous facts to be sorted through, questionable statements to be followed up on. Accidental infelicities to be sorted out from purposeful misrepresentations.

“Sorry I’m late,” I say. “I had an incident report to file on the fourth.”

“So I heard. Chasing a bald-faced out of a breakfast joint on Pico, right? I got the whole story from dispatch. Explains why you didn’t answer your radio.”

“What?”

“Not a big deal. You’re next on the rotation, and we had an incoming. Car crash outside Grand Central, wildly deviant accounts of the moments preceding.”

“You radioed?” I look down at my unit, fiddle with the buttons. It might be a matter of someone’s honest mistake, it might be a mere misalignment of perceptions, or it might be something worse—someone trying to paint a fake picture for the regular police, escape consequences by bending what is So. Those tend to be fun. I don’t like to miss those.

“Arlo radioed. You musta missed it. No big deal, like I said. You’re too busy chasing petty liars down Pico Boulevard. Which, no kidding, is excellent work and will be reported up to Ms. Petras. If I remember, which I hopefully will.”

He probably won’t, but I say “Thanks” anyway. Laura Petras is the Golden State’s Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws—officially, Alvaro’s boss and my own. There’s a picture of her framed near the elevator, an older blonde woman with a careful smile and a tan blouse.

“And let that—excuse me a moment, Laszlo.” Alvaro makes his hands into a bullhorn to address the room. “Let that be a lesson to the rest of you mopes! Mr. Ratesic over here is collaring flagrant liars during his breakfast.”

This testament to my supposed virtues earns a smattering of sarcastic applause and a vigorous middle finger from Burlington with his big mustache. The gang’s all here this morning: Mr. Cullers, leaning back with a hot towel over his forehead, and Ms. Bright, and Mr. Markham—the small-ball Specs, pure ID checkers and paper-trail combers. But Ms. Carson is here too, with her pencil skirt and serene expression, her hair shellacked into a hard helmet under her pinhole.

I look around the room for Arlo Vasouvian, the senior-most Speculator on the floor, and there he is—at my desk with an individual I do not recognize, a young female standing at nervous attention. She’s wearing a pinhole, which means she is Service, but she’s also all in gray, not black, which means she’s junior. She’s in training. This I don’t like at all.

“Arlo?” I go over there. Put down my bag and the cup of coffee I got downstairs. “What’s going on?”

“Ah, good. Mr. Ratesic. Hydrogen is the lightest element.”

“And Osmium is the heaviest. What’s going on?”

He smiles slowly, peers at me from behind his thick glasses. “There’s someone I would like you to meet. A new member of our service. Mr. Ratesic, this is Ms. Paige.”

“Okay,” I say flatly, extending my hand. “Twelve times twelve is one hundred forty-four.”

“And, inversely, the square root of one hundred forty-four is twelve,” replies Paige, sharp as a paper cut, and then, while we’re still shaking hands, she rolls right on: “It’s Aysa, sir, Aysa Paige, and it is an honor to meet you, and I look forward to our working closely together.”

I let go of her hand.

“Arlo? Why did she just say that?”

“Well, you can ask Ms. Paige, but I imagine she said it because it’s an honor for her to meet you. And because she is looking forward to working closely with you.”

Arlo’s smile is knowing and roguish; Ms. Paige’s is earnest and guileless. She is young and upright, dark-skinned, well turned out, with the brim of her pinhole turned sharply to center, her thick curly hair carefully tucked away and bobby-pinned. Her shoes are shined and every button is in place. The keen care she’s taken with her appearance goes beyond the dress code and says something exacting about her character—exacting or eager to impress. Either way, her looking like that, with me in my poorly fitting blacks and battered pinhole, makes me feel like I just climbed out of a duffel bag.

I turn to Arlo, who looks back at me mildly. No longer a field officer, Arlo wears no pinhole, no hat of any kind. and his thin white hair drifts in several directions.

“Yes,” I say. “I wasn’t calling the woman a liar. I was wondering why she has the impression that we are working together.”

“Well, that is my hope,” says Arlo. “If it’s all right with you. I had mentioned it to Mr. Alvaro”—he nods at Alvaro, over by the board, and Alvaro grunts—“and I did hope you would find the arrangement amenable.”

“I do not.”

Arlo’s wrinkled brow furrows, very slightly. “Oh, now. Laszlo, my boy. Can we discuss it?”

“You can.”

“Oh, now, Laszlo.” He speaks the heavy syllables of my name with paternal disappointment.

Arlo Vasouvian is serene and equanimous, seventy-seven years old, with gigantic ears, with small eyes behind thick glasses, with hair so thin and white it is close to transparent. He is emeritus now, semiretired, but once upon a time, Arlo had Alvaro’s job—he did when I started, and he did when my father started, thirty years before that. Now he occupies a rickety desk toward the back of the room, slowly odd-jobbing his way through each day—helping new Specs get adjusted, putting the finishing touches on other people’s paperwork, sipping endlessly at a mug of hot tea. He could, if he wanted, be at home, puttering and humming to himself through an easy retirement in his little Ballona Creek cottage, but Arlo never married; the Ballona Creek cottage is essentially unfurnished. Arlo’s home is here. Every once in a while, someone teasingly asks Arlo when he plans on retiring, and he always has the same answer: “Maybe you’ll get lucky—maybe someone will shoot me!” This retort never entirely manages to hide the shadow of truth behind it, which is that the Speculative Service is his life, it is his soul’s strong purpose, and he fears that if the crutch of it is kicked away he will fall right over and never get up again.

I feel comfortable averring as to how he feels, because I feel more or less the same. I’m fifty-four now, but soon enough I’ll be making the same excuses, finding the same reasons to keep coming in here every morning.

I’m using my chair, so Arlo settles himself onto the edge of my desk, tilts his small body toward me, gathering his sport coat around his narrow chest.

“I had only hoped, Laszlo, that you would find it in your heart—”

“Nope.”

“—to offer Ms. Paige the benefit—”

“No thank you.”

“—of your many years’ experience, and mentor her as she—”

“Listen, Arlo.” I push back from the desk, look him in his owl’s eyes. “I’m going to say no just one more time, but I’m going to say it nice and loud in case, because you are old, you are having trouble hearing me. Because you are very old.” I lean back toward the desk and my office chair squeaks beneath me. “No.”

I start fussing with the stack of papers on the desk so I can be doing something, anything, other than look at Arlo. I’ve got a court appearance coming up, testimony I’m supposed to give in the Court of Small Infelicities, one of these knucklehead kerfuffles where an automobile dealership advertises “the lowest rates around” and a competitor hauls them in, challenging the veracity of “lowest” and the generality of “around,” and the courts insist on having someone from the Service in to weigh the litigants’ relative sincerity. So now I’m here, aggressively shuffling the papers, reviewing my prep materials, ignoring Arlo and the young woman, but I can feel them—this Paige character looking anxiously at Arlo, Arlo giving her a reassuring look: Don’t worry, I’ll handle this. Meaning handle me.

The last thing I need is an apprentice; the last thing I need is a shadow, dogging my heels.

“Listen. Laszlo.” I glance up in time to see Arlo give Ms. Paige a meaningful look, and watch her step discreetly away. I recognize this is an imposition.”

“That is one thing it is, Arlo.”

“I do not come to you lightly, Laszlo. I know how you are.”

“Do you?”

“I do. However. I consider the opportunity to mentor a high honor.” Arlo looks at me solemnly, his thin white hair pointing in all directions.

“Okay,” I tell him, “so why not give it to Burlington? Come on, Arlo. Or give it to Cullers.”

I point across the room, and, as if to neatly undermine my attempt to evade this high honor, Cullers groans, adjusts the hot compress he’s holding to his forehead. Maybe Cullers was up early too, chasing fugitive truth-benders down city blocks. Or maybe he was out late getting drunk. With Cullers, either possibility has an equal chance of proving out.

I shouldn’t have to explain to Arlo why this won’t work. Whatever skill at this job I have amassed after doing it for nineteen years and counting, I am skeptical of my own ability to implant them elsewhere. And certainly Arlo in his semiretirement has no power to make me do it either, and neither does Mr. Alvaro, not really. That’s just not how the Service is organized.

Arlo is my colleague but he’s also my friend, and I have known him for many years—he knew my brother. He knew my father. Which means that in a way he is like a brother to me, and he is like a father too, and what he is doing right now, with a charming shamelessness, is employing all of those associations to bend me to his will.

“There is no one like you, Laszlo,” he says, imperturbable, flattering, shameless. “You know that. The Service needs you. Your State needs you. I need you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the best.”

“That’s subjective.”

“Stipulated. But listen.” He leans in closer. He lowers his voice. “This young lady is very special, Laszlo. I would like to see her mentored carefully. I need your help.”

I look over at Paige. She waits at full attention, her hands behind her back, her mouth a tight line, adopting what she must believe to be the expected stance of the law enforcement officer. But we’re not law enforcement officers, not exactly. Soon she will gather up the regular rhythm of the Speculative Service. The idiosyncrasy, the casual atmosphere. We don’t stand in line, we don’t salute, we do our own thing.

She’ll learn it all.

“Okay, look,” I say, and Arlo catches the answer in my voice and leans back, clasps his hands together in a restrained triumphant gesture. “When we catch a case, Ms. Paige, you can go ahead and ride along beside me. Okay? And you can…I guess you’ll just pay attention and everything, but try not to get in the way. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that what you’re after, Mr. Vasouvian?”

“I want you to do whatever you feel comfortable with, Laszlo.”

Paige begins, “And can I just say, sir—” I hold up a hand.

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ okay?”

“Okay, sir. If you don’t mind, though, I would like to. It’s a sign of respect, sir. You’ve earned it.”

“Stipulated,” I say. “But I’m just as happy for you to call me Mr. Ratesic.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hey Laz,” Alvaro hollers from the board. “Got something for you. Maybe a good one to break in the new kid. If you’re taking her on. Are you taking her on or not?”

I look at Paige. I hiss through my teeth, “Yeah,” and I extend my hand and Alvaro puts the piece of paper in it. “I’m taking her.”

Arlo slides off my desk, pats me gently on the shoulder, satisfied, as well he should be, having gotten exactly what he wanted.

  

We head up Vermont Avenue from downtown toward the scene, a simple scene of death on a lawn in Los Feliz.

It’s not clear from the report, but what it sounds like is that there is no specific anomaly, just the regular police requesting the presence of the Service, just to be certain. You get that a lot. When there’s a body, they want to be double sure all the facts are in good clean alignment.

I could take the 5, of course, a nice straight northbound shot, if I wanted to, and it might have bought us five minutes, but the stress of the highway isn’t worth it right now, not when I can give myself the pleasure of the surface streets, the pleasure of looking out the windshield at the various and beautiful Golden State rolling by. You get the streets and sidewalks of downtown, all the usual crowded midmorning bustle, the stop and start at the downtown intersections when you’re moving north and west around the administrative buildings and State services buildings that fan out from the Plaza. And then you escape the hive, pass under the highway and into the borderland, where you see the acres of industry, the factories and warehouses with their solar panel roofs winking back at the sun. And then, just north of that, the miles of farmland, lettuce and avocados, olives and all the rest of it, and then, just like that, you’re whipped back into the neighborhoods, the hip urban districts that line Vermont Avenue like a series of colorful beads: Echo Park, Los Feliz, Silver Lake.

There’s a place in Echo Park, actually, a quarter mile off Vermont, that sells some very solid crullers, some of the best in the State, but there’s no time for a cruller just now, not with a scene of death waiting for us uptown.

“Sir? Mr. Ratesic?”

“Yeah?”

Ms. Paige is looking at me avidly from the shotgun seat, but I am definitely not looking at her; I’m looking at the road. But I can feel her emotions in the shotgun seat, feel her anxiety and excitement, young Paige’s first-day jitters a living thing in the car with us.

“So should I just, like, jump right in?”

I scowl. “Jump right into what?”

“What?”

I feel her deflate. I feel it emanating from the shotgun seat, the crestfallen silence of someone who had a whole speech ready to roll out.

“Jump into my—oh, I mean—just, like, my life story. When I first knew that I had the sense and everything. How I decided to go into the Service. The whole…I just meant…I don’t know. Sorry.”

She wants to tell me about when she was nineteen years old, or fourteen, or twenty-two, whenever it was that she first saw something in the air, first realized what it was that she was feeling. She wants to tell me how she ignored it at first, because acknowledging and indulging this dangerous feeling would mean abandoning her desire to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an architect, or whatever, but how she eventually realized that she had a calling, a responsibility, that she could cultivate this new facility, this instinct, bring it up and bring it out, because then she could serve the State and it would be selfish not to, and it was, after all, the least she could do…

And then I would tell her my own version of the story, so similar, I’m sure, to hers, with the only additional complication being my father, and then my brother, Charlie, him having done it all first, sensed it first and followed it first, his brilliance like a sun casting a shadow over my own career.

My mood, which has already been spoiled by the encounter at Terry’s, by the unexpected burden of taking on a junior, is further clouded by this unexpected memory of Charlie, both welcome and unwelcome, a sudden flood of feeling: Charlie and what happened to Charlie. I can feel the smile slide off my face. Just then we pass the House of Pies, another favorite diner of mine, on the northern edge of Los Feliz; I am tempted to pull over, tell Ms. Paige to wait in the car, and get myself a piece of blueberry pie or something to take the edge off the day.

But I don’t. I keep going. We’re almost there.

“Listen, Paige.” I glance at her. “It’s Paige, right?”

“Yes, sir. Aysa Violet Paige.”

“I don’t want to hear your story. I don’t need it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I don’t need yours, and you don’t need mine.”

“Oh. Right. I mean—sure.”

Paige fidgets self-consciously in the shotgun seat, casting occasional nervous glances my way, otherwise staring out the window.

This girl is my opposite, and I darkly wonder if Arlo put her in my car purely for the physical comedy. She is short, neat, black, and fully earnest in her countenance. And here I am, this too-big creature, my pale face and my black pinhole, my thick fingers gripping the steering wheel, thick red beard like a bristling animal over the wool of the suit, and my irritation with the world—which is really an irritation with myself—like armor, a chain mail layer rattling across my broad chest. And I don’t know what it is, I can’t tell you, but this kid’s face, everything in her face is different from everything I feel: she’s excited, almost agitated with her own excitement, as if all the great days of her life still ahead of her are jostling inside, creating a field of energy. And she believes that I am someone worth looking up to, someone worth learning from. And if you want to hear something true—big true, deep true—that does not feel terrible. It doesn’t feel terrible at all.

“What matters is what happens now. In the field. What matters is how you marshal the abilities you’ve been granted, and how you harness them to real investigative skill. Okay?”

“Okay. Yeah.”

I drive a minute more. Dope shops and banks, coffee shops and dry cleaners.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be sorry.”

“I just—”

“I mean it, Paige. All of this?” I point at me, and then at her, meaning all of the interpersonal, all of the getting to know each other, all of the teamwork, the senior-junior BS, all of it. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens in the world. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I think that might be it for conversation—I hope it is—but no.

“So can you maybe tell me how it works?”

“How what works?”

“Oh, I just mean…where we’re going. Our interaction with the regular police, the different protocols. I mean, I know how it works, obviously. I’ve done plenty of simulations, and I’ve done all the reading and training and stuff. I just mean…in real life. In the field. Is there anything you think I maybe don’t know?”

“I am sure, Ms. Paige, there are many things you don’t know.”

And then I just keep driving; I just leave that flat piece of truth unadorned, add no further context. I’m being a prig, I am aware of that, I am being a special kind of asshole. Indulging in rigorous literalism, answering questions to the letter, ignoring the spirit in which they were asked is a nasty and childish trick. But I can’t help it—I’m already regretting agreeing to this. I should have held firm with Arlo, told him to pin this particular ribbon on someone else’s chest. I value my time alone. I like driving by myself; I like working by myself. I like knowing that if I’m on the way to a scene of crime, and I feel like taking forty-five seconds to run into House of Pies and pick up a slice of blueberry I can then eat in the car, I can do that without anyone judging me or asking questions.

Too late. We drive on. We’re almost there.