The physical suffering, Leo could bear. Pain had limits. At its zenith, a piece of his brain seemed to explode, and when the smoke cleared there remained a dead zone between the pain and his feelings.
Anguish was harder because it flogged him with blame. It insisted that nothing happened without reason. Every joy was a reward, every torment a punishment for something he’d done or failed to do. So when the punks clobbered him or sliced a line across his eyelid, even though after the shock, when the body part numbed, he could curse Bass, the driver, Denny, Mickey Cohen, or Tom for diverting him from the chores Southland Insurance threw his way—such as littering a sidewalk with dimes and quarters, then lounging in his Packard, camera at the ready, until Lester Fortenoy came out for his newspaper, walking stiffly in the back brace, then gingerly bent to scoop up some change—he could blame lots of guys, but Leo Weiss got the darkest curses. It was Leo who’d risked the grief of Violet, Magda, and Una for the sake of revenge. He’d plunged into the water with the sharks, like Tom, only twice as stupid. Tom had leaned on some hammerheads. Leo had taken on the great white.
The blame was doubly tough to endure when you couldn’t make a vow to right things, because your time was up. And memories besieged you. Maybe if death gave some warning, the memories would treat you gently—if you could count on a month or so to savor them, rein them out a little farther every day, and finally release them from a distance. Leo would’ve preferred meeting death step by step, the same way he tiptoed into the cold ocean on his daily constitutional. But when, over lunch, the punks talked of carrying him out in a sack at first dark, so Denny could meet a skirt of his at Ciro’s by nine, the memories walloped him. Exquisite memories. Seldom of victories or occasions when anybody sang his praises. Instead they recalled when some person, or some glimpse of beauty, had touched him and his heart swelled. There was a runny-nosed Filipino kid in Manila who begged him for a coin, whose toothy grin still shone after fifty years. And one foggy morning when the gray whales were migrating past his beach, and the dolphin fins, a dozen or more, spiked out of the water just beyond the breakers. Pelicans, gulls, and cormorants hovered. Back in paradise.
The driver tugged and Denny kicked him to his feet and Bass placed the hat on Leo’s head and they dragged him upright, out of the cellar. When he saw dark had fallen and knew he was still alive, a small dose of hope invaded him. If he could get to Cohen, maybe he’d find a word that’d sting the bastard. One final satisfaction. Or convince him to lay off Tom. One last good deed.
Through the living room and off the porch he struggled to move his legs. He didn’t want the punks carrying him. He tried to shake their hands off. They gripped like crabs.
“Shove him into the junk heap,” Bass commanded.
The punks cut across the lawn and through the row of pansies. Denny opened the Packard’s passenger door. The driver pushed Leo in. Bass hustled around and got into the back from the driver’s side. As Denny stooped to climb in, Leo mustered the breath to stammer, “Where’s my satchel?”
“Aw, shit. Go get it, Denny. In the dining room, I guess.”
“What’s he gonna need the suitcase for?”
“Think a minute, genius.”
“What?”
“We leave the satchel, you wanta leave a note too, all about how we treated the old man?”
Nodding glumly, muttering, “Oh, yeah,” Denny skulked out and ran across the lawn.
“Where we going?” Leo’s tongue was like chopped meat, his lips swollen and bonded together with blood and the ooze that wouldn’t scab.
“Hey, I’m tired of your voice, Pancho. All I wanta hear’s the name of this fanatic.”
“I’m gonna tell Mickey his name.”
Bass groaned. “What’d I do made you think I’m a moron? We knock you around all day, you say there ain’t no such fanatic. Now, when time’s up, you wanta talk to Mickey, buy a couple hours more. You weren’t such a tough old guy, I didn’t like you, I’d of iced you a long time back.” He plucked a case out of his coat pocket, inserted a stubby French cigarette into his mouth, and flipped open his shiny lighter. “Tell you what. Feed me the name, maybe we can work something out. Could be I’ll save your old ass, just for the hell of it. You give me the name, we check into a hotel. Tomorrow, who knows? How about it?” He sparked the lighter, made a three-inch flame.
“Naw.”
Denny tossed the satchel into the back seat, climbed in, and started the motor. Without letting it warm up, he pulled out and lugged down the street, while Bass unzipped Leo’s satchel, searched it with his hand. “Nothing but underwear and this old Luger.” He laid the gun on the seat beside him and lifted the satchel over the backrest, dropped it onto Leo’s lap.
The old man leaned onto it, used it for his pillow. For a while he let his brain scan his body, separate the pains from each other. There was his big toe with the nail plucked out, the kneecap they’d cracked, the ribs that felt like a bundle of splinters, a couple of them jabbing his lungs. The eyelid they’d slashed. A sliver of light glared through.
Denny made a fast right turn, slinging Leo against the car door. As he bounced off, his mind spun away as if it’d gotten seized by a whirlwind. After a second, when he landed, he was a young cop. His third year: 1906. Vi was a sophomore at Pasadena College. A creep had been stalking the girls from her boardinghouse. On patrol, Leo spotted a character in some bushes down the street. Tall, pale, curly-haired. Leo snuck up, grabbed and cuffed him, and marched him straight to the boardinghouse, where the girls sat around their supper table.
The house mother jumped up and railed at Leo. Said she’d given the description a dozen times, and this guy was twice as tall as the culprit. While the old buffalo read him off, all the girls snickered except the small brunette, who followed him outside to say thanks for his zeal. On the sidewalk, hallowed by the moon, she told him her name was Violet, then raised onto her toes, pecked his chin, and ran off.
The suspect had hung around to watch the encounter. “Ain’t that sweet,” he said. “She’s gotta hurry and wring out her panties. That’s the way those Mex gals are.”
Leo busted him for trespassing, cuffed him so tight he yelped and squealed all the way.
Every small hump sent the Packard bounding, and the pains seemed to jolt him awake as though out of a snooze. The satchel helped absorb the jolts. Leo only heaved himself up to look a few times. Once as they made the turn off Fairfax onto Sunset Boulevard. Once when Denny tapped the horn and waved at somebody stepping out of a Rolls in front of the Dancers, a supper club where Leo could’ve bought a cup of soup for about the value of his Packard. Cold soup, garnished with one sprig of parsley. And he noticed the violet buds and lacy finger-sized leaves on a jacaranda, along the foresty drive beneath Bel Air.
For a while he got lost, dreamed he was catching a lift up to the mountains, to Tom’s place. He got a whiff of redwood scent on thin air. Then Denny jumped on the brakes and pounded the horn, pitching him back to real life.
His eyes dripped, his throat blistered while he thought how he could’ve been with Tom by now, easily. He should’ve started out last night, the second he got off the phone knowing Tom wanted him up there. If he’d been a decent pal.
He tried to remember a single incident when Tom had let him down. There must’ve been one or two, but the memories got displaced by dozens of times when Tom had risked his neck, his marriage, or his savings. Every chance to strike it rich, Tom had invited him in. In a scrape, all he’d needed was to hint and Tom had come on the double. To imagine his pal thinking bitterly of him, when the chance to redeem himself was gone, felt insufferably wretched. He’d think about Tom no more, ever.
On some mountain road that he placed around the junction of Beverly Glen and Mulholland, he reached for the dashboard and boosted himself up. To the left, what at first looked like city lights he recognized as moonlight glinting off the mica embedded in the face of a boulder. Either there were hitchhiking midgets, a few yards off the road, or barrel cactus. The road turned to washboard. The punks were gabbing about movies.
“Roy Rogers is queer,” Bass said. “Gene Autry…let me tell you what my cousin Andrew says. Andrew, he’s a rancher.”
“For real?”
“Hey, I say he’s a rancher, it’s a fact. He says you’re risking your neck if you as much as light a smoke while you’re riding, and no damn fool gets away with sitting on a horse’s ass strumming a guitar.”
“You watch Stagecoach?” Denny asked. “Wouldn’t catch John Wayne picking anybody’s guitar.”
Bass proclaimed, “The only Western worth the quarter’s Ride ’Em Cowboy. Abbott and Costello.”
When Leo peeled his lips apart and tried to use the fat, raw tongue that lay throbbing on the floor of his mouth. The first phrase sounded like one long word in Arabic. The second try, he took more care.
“Suppose I’m telling you straight…the informer’s for real. He snitches, Mickey loses…his head.…Yeah? Asks why didn’t you bring Weiss to him?”
“Turn on the radio, would you, Denny?” The radio clicked on to Perry Como. “Not that bum,” Bass said. “Find something loud, with horns.”
Denny spun the dial while Leo dug through the rubble of his brain for a scheme, a way he could talk the punk into carrying him to Mickey, though he’d forgotten why he wanted to see the man, except it felt like you ought to meet the guy who was killing you. Maybe give him something lousy to remember.
Denny had found a jazz station. To the blats and wails of Charlie Parker, they started up a grade on a skinny road lined and sometimes overhung with pepper trees. They passed a field around which boulders were scattered like ancient headstones. Beyond it lay the ocean. Leo could spot the Pacific even in the dark, from the shade lines of its horizon. He placed them a few miles east of Malibu or the Palisades.
A strange lightness possessed him until, after one long free-for-all solo, they drove into a soupy mist. Leo stared into the gray dark. After all the rest, he’d lost sight of the ocean. There must be a God, he thought. How could blind fate treat a guy so wickedly?
But if God was actual, he argued for the thousandth time in the past dozen years since the Anschluss, why the hell would he choose a race of people, call them his own, then pitch them the nastiest curve balls ever thrown? No matter what their iniquities, Leo couldn’t imagine a father shooing his favorites into the wilds and loosing the wolves and jackals. If they were rotten kids, who was it made them so?
“Turn in,” Bass said. To Leo, it sounded like the command to fire.
The brakes screeched and tires slid across the gravel. Leo’d raised his head an inch or so when the blackjack whopped him just above and behind his right ear. It felt like somebody jabbed a trowel deep into his head. For an instant, as though wires crossed and sent a freakish signal, he didn’t hurt—rather he heard the pain. It bellowed like a great sea creature.
Maybe he died for a moment and returned just as fast. Anyway, he sensed himself rolling and tumbling like a skinny kid walloped and shanghaied by the surf. Inside a cloud of light, the Packard materialized around him. Two car doors slammed.
Somebody grunted. “You call that pushing?” a different man yelped.
“Damn! Ouch!”
“What?”
“The junk heap ran over my foot. Piece of crap!”
Every time Leo blinked, he got blinded by the light. As the last voice faded, Leo heard the Packard’s springs giving a mighty shriek just before the old workhorse seemed to vault upward, then topple and flip. It dumped him off the seat and under the dashboard, where he curled around the satchel and squeezed hard as if it’d been Vi or one of his girls suddenly come to his rescue.