CHAPTER 22
Hermosa Beach was one of those gritty art colonies that had been invaded and occupied by the moneyed class. Higher rents chased away the artists who’d provided the seductive ambience, transforming a spunky commercial strip into an antiseptic strip of exclusive shops. The original cottages were replaced by twenty-first century castles that spilled out over every inch of the little lots. These monster replacements were crowded together like clowns in a jalopy. Many were second or third homes whose owners traveled from mansion to mansion at luxury locales around the globe. From time to time you could spot family members moving around and about their palaces. Multicolored signs stuck in the ground by security companies warned potential interlopers that armed rent-a-cops stood poised to ventilate them.
Bento, after parking Liz’s car, walked past a mansion shaped like a Picasso toilet. On a flowery patio atop its uppermost roof a middle-aged man and woman, both thin as death-camp inmates, jogged on side-by-side treadmills above the roaring sea. They shared an unobstructed view of thirty miles of coast from Malibu to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It was a privately owned panorama that would be there after the last Rembrandt crumbled into dust. The entitled couple appeared neither pleased nor displeased. Wearing audio gad-gets in their ears, they listened to separate or perhaps identical frequencies while jogging alone together. They could have stepped downstairs and run along the beach instead, but down there they’d be mistaken for schnooks who didn’t own a designer mansion overlooking the surf. Bento recalled reading Thorstein Veblen’s observations on conspicuous consumption. A century earlier the cogent Midwestern economist pointed out that the utter uselessness of jewel-encrusted walking sticks and hundred-room manors was what made them so attractive to Gilded Age tycoons. What better way to advertise the bizarre aggregate of their wealth?
The sun, poised to sink beneath the horizon, glowed with golden intensity as knots of beachgoers watched the last lick of flame disappear beneath the sea in a primeval ritual of death and eventual rebirth. Handfuls of bathers gamboled in the ageless surf while beyond the breakers a few die-hards in wet suits sat on their surfboards waiting for the last wave of the day. Bento turned inland half a block before coming to Sussman’s house. A dog barked as he approached.
Roland Sussman, in slacks and a collared polo shirt, opened the door, restraining a fair-sized yellow dog by the collar. They shook hands after Bento let the dog sniff him. “Hello,” said Sussman, who didn’t bother to introduce himself. When you have a celebrity face, Bento decided, that makes sense. Face to face, he was handsomer than most of the pictures Bento had seen. Canny blue eyes and a nose that wasn’t all that big, but had a hook in it you could hang a shirt on. He had a slight limp but otherwise moved effortlessly, not like an old guy at all.
Speed already sat in the dining area with a beer and some paperwork spread out in front of him. The home was less luxurious than Bento expected. Early evening sunlight still streamed across the rooms, the translucent shafts revealing the barest hint of floating dust. Declining a beverage, Bento joined Sussman and Speed at the table. The dog curled up next to them.
“It’s beautiful here,” Bento said.
“What I liked about it right away,” said Sussman, “was that I could look at those dumb-ass castles around the corner and tell myself I wasn’t spoiled.”
“What kind of car do you drive?” asked Speed.
“There’s a ’99 Chevy in the garage. I don’t know if it starts.”
Speed nodded, neither approving nor disapproving. “You know Ms. Pickford Manville drives a Porsche?”
“She’s driven me places,” said Sussman. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s no Porsche. A Toyota or something.”
“That’s her show car,” said Speed. “The one she lets you see. Like one of those Potemkin villages.”
“Only in reverse,” said Bento. “The Russians wanted the villages to look prosperous.”
Speed said that the cadaverous couple Bento had seen next door cofounded a multilevel marketing enterprise with participating entrepreneurs on every continent and were moderately famous. Sussman said they ran in place out there every day. “What do they sell?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Speed. “I guess the product isn’t the point. The point is to sell it to someone else.” Their home, he said, had been featured in some architectural magazine.
“On my way here,” said Bento, “I stopped by a guy’s house, but he wasn’t there. He went homeless today. Today was the day. They were changing the locks. He was one of our schmoes.”
“Schmoes are people on the collection list,” Speed explained. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” said Sussman. He likened the homeless schmo to a typhoon victim. “You hear eight hundred missing or dead. Eight thousand, whatever. Then you make breakfast, do the crossword puzzle.”
Speed: “You talked about that in Marching with Kings. I read it I don’t know how many times.”
“Some other time we can discuss my wit, clarity, good looks, bottomless genius, all that,” said Sussman, blending sincerity with self-mockery. “But . . . it just creates distance. Feel it?”
Bull’s eye, thought Bento. Only later did he consider that Sussman might have been reciting something he’d already said to readers on similar occasions. Still, they were almost certainly his words. A person can’t plagiarize himself.
“I guess we have to discuss it,” said Sussman. And they all knew what he was referring to. He invited them over to the cushiony furniture across the room. Bento noticed that Speed had reached that state of corpulence that requires the fatty to walk like a penguin, arms extended to the side so they don’t brush against the hips. Bento and Sussman took the sofa. Speed, after plopping onto a matching chair and ottoman, kicked off his shoes. His gray socks looked nice and clean. He had good hygiene for a slob.
Speed gave Sussman a cogent summary. Most of it came from Liz, who suspected that eventually she’d penetrate what looked to her like a complex web of straw deals involving the Cayman Islands and a dummy corporation in Delaware, all designed to loot Sussman’s assets. When Speed had asked her how she learned this, she said, “I’m a librarian. I can find anything.”
Sussman’s woman friend lived not in middle-class Culver City, but snotty Brentwood, where she apparently held title to a $2 million place across the street from Marilyn Monroe’s final residence. Five bathrooms and a tennis court, the Porsche in the garage. She’d taken at least one five-star trip around Europe. Sussman could be down to his last $120,000 and owed the IRS more than that. He was probably too late to stave off foreclosure on his home, which had been mortgaged during his absence. His situation was analogous to Manuel’s in Captains Courageous. After the mast cracked and fell he looked okay, but beneath the water line he was a crushed grape. Sussman asked a few questions, but it became harder to know what he was thinking, as though he’d drawn a curtain across his ideation.
Speed, who’d procured a joint from somewhere on his person, asked Sussman, “When’s the last time you talked to this Pickford Manville?” He took a giant hit and passed the joint to Sussman, holding the smoke in his lungs with ballooned cheeks.
“Maybe a couple weeks.”
Speed exhaled. “Why don’t you call her, see what she says? Skip the middle men. Just tell her you want it all back. What’ve you got to lose?”
“I’ll have to think about it, but thanks for your help. Both of you. All of you. Thank your friend Liz, too.”
“You are going to do something, right?” said Bento. “I mean, you can’t let her get away with this.”
Sussman looked perplexed, as though confronted by a giant math problem. Saddened, Bento yearned for a more just world. He wondered how people would behave if they really believed everybody got what was coming to them. He remembered his cellmate’s dream about the demons chasing him to a trapdoor in the ceiling that led to another room with another trapdoor. “I know I’m going to hell,” Lopez said. Maybe you can change, Bento told him. Too late, he replied. Narcissistic Lopez could mourn only for himself. He’d left a long trail of victims beaten, abused, double-crossed. Bento knew of other cons who’d dreamed the trapdoor dream, the same ghastly eternity of pointlessness and terror. All were psychopaths. Some of the other cons thought they made the dream up, but Bento was sure it’s what Lopez saw.
“Got anything else to drink?” he asked Sussman.