‘Gloria!’ Jack Liffey hollered down the staircase. He ducked out of the way, awaiting the gunshot, but nothing came, and he peered out again. ‘You’re exposed!’
‘Jack! I hear you.’
‘Take care! There’s a hot steam leak one landing up, right at face level on your left. And there’s two thugs down there somewhere. I’m sure they’re armed. One is a big guy with gold ringlets like Shirley Temple on acid, and the other is a crazy midget with a knife.’ He intended the descriptions to enrage and draw them out.
‘We’ve got so many badges here there’s nothing to worry about,’ Gloria called. ‘We brought a whole tac unit. If these guys want to die quick, all they got to do is step into plain sight and wave a weapon.’
‘Let’s see if we can keep everybody alive!’
‘Good to hear your voice, Jack! I mean it.’
‘Yeah. At this end, too. We don’t have a working phone up here. We were about to …’ Oh, Jesus, no, he thought – not send smoke signals. ‘I don’t know, throw out bottles with messages.’
He heard her talking much softer, as if to a partner. ‘Stay where you are, Jack!’ she called. ‘We’ll take care of the police business.’
‘Yes, please.’ He could feel the relief in his voice. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d saved his bacon. If only he could work out the hidden wrinkles in their relationship, the spleen that reared up so unexpectedly. He really loved her, but he was frightened that she was gradually drifting away from him. It couldn’t have been easy tending a mute paraplegic, he knew. And the duty of that had probably covered up a lot for a while.
McCall slid a barrel bolt across the basement door as quietly as he could. Shirley Temple on acid, he thought to himself. ‘Fuck you, wise guy.’ Luckily Thibodeaux had been down at the bottom of the wooden staircase, playing with his huge K-Bar knife and hadn’t heard himself described as – what? – a crazy midget with a knife. Not so far off, really.
‘We got to hang down here a bit,’ McCall said as he descended quietly. ‘There’s cops in the lobby like shit in the cowhouse.’
Thibodeaux snorted lightly and went on flipping and spinning the big killing knife with his index fingers, emulating a cheerleader’s baton. The weird serrated knife must have been eighteen inches long, some kind of fetishistic nonsense. The boilers were leaking down here, too, jetting hot steam into the room with a hissing damp in several places. The sizzle was like a cheap short-order grill frying a number of eggs.
‘Which one you becoming?’ Thibodeaux asked lightly, as he went on performing with the knife.
‘Say what?’
‘You still a camel?’
‘I don’t smoke no more.’
The small man looked up with great scorn, but somehow he kept the knife laddering up and down his fingers without watching it.
‘Nietzsche’s camel, you mutant. You’re the one told me you once read the master.’
‘I don’t remember no camel. Jesus H. Christ, Rice. We got a situation here.’
They both froze as the door up the staircase rattled, then really gave a whoomp, as if taking a shoulder. McCall raised his Desert Eagle. The bolt on the door was nothing mighty, and it might have busted wide open, but it didn’t.
The shadowy, hissy room taunted them for a minute or two before Rice said, ‘The camel is the stage of evolution where you take on big heavy tasks and really get into enjoying your strength and how you can persist. Maybe we’re both camels right now, huh?’
‘Sure, why not?’ This guy was going to get them in trouble for sure, McCall could see that. ‘Maybe we can persist forever, just you and me. Let’s see if we can get past the cops.’ He hoped to nudge the man back to some kind of reality.
‘The next stage is the lion,’ Thibodeaux said with a maddening serenity. ‘That’s a whole lot better. The lion goes against all convention and morality. It kills whenever it wants. It does what it wants. Nietzsche says this is the secret wish that our dreams protect.’
Abruptly Thibodeaux snatched the long knife out of the air. McCall could see, for all his bravado, he’d caught the blade wrong-side round in his fist. He gave no indication of pain. There were shadows everywhere in the maddening hissy basement, almost like a third presence, and Thibodeaux tried to hide his blunder in the shadows, but McCall could see the dark fluid begin to drip down the man’s fingers and off his wrist. His own blood. Oh, Jesus Christ.
‘I’m already like the lion, mutant,’ Thibodeaux went on, unfazed. ‘Lion goes for the kill.’
‘Where you getting this shit?’
‘Also Sprach Z. I thought you read it, man.’
‘Well, it was a long time ago. I sort of got with the idea and shit.’
‘We ain’t even got near the idea yet. So what you think the idea is?’ The short man gave a private smirk.
McCall had backed accidentally into a small plume of steam off the noisy boiler and quickly moved aside. He wriggled his shoulder. Even through his jacket, the scalding heat smarted. ‘We got us a kind of cop predicament out there right now, Rice-aroni. Can we hold off the fucking camels and armadillos for later?’
‘Relax, we ain’t going nowhere for a while.’ Slowly, without emotion, Rice extracted the big knife from his fist, and he pressed his hand tight against his hip to try to stop the bleeding. ‘How come you said you liked my Nietzsche so much?’
‘He ain’t your Nietzsche, man. I had a philosophy course in JC and I loved him. The guy threw out all the sentimental crap. He was hard as nails. Them that can, takes what they want. We walk right over the pussies with our size elevens.’ The brute edge in his own voice surprised him. He knew perfectly well that Thibodeaux’s foot probably didn’t even come to a size five. Cruelly, he thought the man had to buy boys’ shoes.
‘OK, you say you’re on the case,’ the small man said. ‘So what’s the third stage, after the camel and the lion?’
‘Jesus, I don’t know, man. The psycho-killer?’ He wanted to go back to worrying about the cops, but Rice was like a mockingbird who wouldn’t stop worrying a hawk, whirring around him and squawking and pecking.
‘After the strength of the camel and the ruthlessness of the lion, you become a child again,’ Thibodeaux said with satisfaction. ‘The infant who’s going to grow up to be the superman. The first self-propelled man.’
‘OK, great. We’re supermen – red tights and all.’
‘Mutant, you’re the one said tonight was the night. I say we make all these people dead.’
They both looked at the gallon cans of gasoline they’d cached at the top of the basement steps. Three of them.
‘Pain way or easy way?’ Thibodeaux said.
‘Man, how can you say that so casually? Are you some kind of evil emanation?’ McCall said. He realized that Thibodeuax was sliding out of control.
‘I thought we were way past that.’
‘Jack, for Chrissake!’ Gloria called. ‘Clear this shit off the stairs. We can’t help you with this in the way.’
Paula had her flashlight and pistol aimed together, over-and-under, as they’d been taught, and the two women stared in utter surprise at the complex barricade. They’d just done a thorough search of the street level and then floor two for any thugs, and Gloria’s only worry had been the locked door behind the counter, with an old enamel plaque saying Boilers. She was also concerned that she hadn’t made up some plausible story and called for backup. A team from downtown would have had the standard Blackhawk Thunderbolt Entry Tool – really just a heavy ram with handgrips. When they couldn’t open the door – the only hiding place they’d bypassed – Paula had piled half a dozen wooden chairs precariously against it, set to topple on anyone who pulled it open from within.
‘We’ll clear the barricade!’ Jack Liffey called down. ‘You’re sure the bad guys are gone?’
‘No, we’re not. Their truck is still outside. But they’re not on floor one or two unless they can hide inside a toilet tank. We’ve blocked the basement. Please stop chattering, Jack, and clear this junk.’
‘I miss you, too, Glor.’
‘Utter nonsense.’
‘Give me a minute to organize.’
‘Don’t take long. I have a bad feeling.’
Gloria and Paula conferred, and Paula agreed to wait down on the ground floor, beside that one questionable basement door.
Vartabedian parked at the valet stand at the head of the driveway. He could hear a live jazz band riffing softly inside the amazing cantilevered house that jutted out over the Hollywood Hills. The whole of the evening city, spread to the horizon, was beginning to light up in the rain-sparkly air, a million pinpricks through some dark surface to a fiery underworld. He had reluctantly decided to come to Eddie Wolverton’s housewarming party. He had a feeling he’d be better off watching over his new loft building downtown, sweetening his last offer to the rump residents and waiting with a board-up crew to rush in. Warily he handed the valet the keys to his AMG-tuned Mercedes, the big SL-65 coupe with twin turbos.
‘Careful with that, Señor, it’s got almost seven hundred horses.’
‘Que? Caballos?’ The valet tossed the keys in the air once and grinned. ‘Relax, Granddad. It’s safe with the ace.’
He listened for over-revs that didn’t come as the car moved away, and Vartabedian went on toward the wooden bridge to the open doorway. After coveting it for years, Wolverton had just bought one of the great post-war Case Study houses, the Lautner-Domus, all glass and angled wood beams suspended far out over Hollywood. A dark moat cut it off on the hill side, and city lore claimed that the first owner, director Joseph van Sternberg, had electrified the water, and his staff had had to fish the bodies of would-be movie stars out every morning and incinerate them. None of that was true, of course, but the house was still a delicious part of the Golden Era, photographed by Julius Shulman, and you could imagine stumbling on starlets down on their knees in every room.5
‘Moses, man, good to see you!’ Wolverton gave him a hug and a cheek-buss. The jazz band sounded pretty good, not too hectic.
‘Congrats on the pad.’
Wolverton made a face. ‘It’s not as austere as one of those Frankie Wrights where the mandatory chairs are so square you have to sit with a pole up your ass.’
‘But you know better, my man. You know it all. Soon we’ll get started on the Fortnum. Want a cigar?’
‘Not inside, Mose. Too many vegans this night.’
Wolverton wagged his head toward the reflecting pool outside that was the logical and practical end of the moat, the water lapping right up against the glass wall. ‘Out there. Throw your butts over the edge. It’s all New Hollywood down there, drug dealers and feeb heavy metal headbangers from Florida.’
Vartabedian took one look around the beautiful people crammed into the open-plan house, men grasping cocktail glasses and chatting to women with too much of their breasts hanging out, and then he slid open a glass door and stepped out into the faint breath of city noise that rose off the startling panorama of lights.
A severe-looking woman in glasses was talking to a fat man nearby and it reminded him of a well-known tale about the house that he did believe – Ayn Rand with her whole retinue had shown up at an early party here and descended on the wrong man, an unassuming structural engineer named Marx Ayers, who looked a bit like the grand old architect Lautner, and she had brayed how much she loved rebel architects and wanted to fuck him right there and then. Supposedly Lautner had been watching from nearby and had taken his own retinue and fled the party.6
Moses Vartabedian stopped near the edge of the unrailed dropoff beside the pool, where it was perhaps 300 feet straight down a chaparral cliff to some lesser houses, and he clipped and lit up a Romeo y Julietta. He let himself savor that velvety fist-in-the-chest taste of that very best Cuban tobacco. Whatever came now, he could survive it. Fuck ‘em all. The sense of hovering above the whole city out there emboldened him immeasurably.
He heard another sliding door come open and he watched Wolverton circle grimly toward him. Something was up.
‘Mose, please tell me about those two loose cannons you got working for you. I had a run-in with them today. I don’t want my props in this town going to hell because of some goofballs you picked up in a bar.’
‘Just glance out there, Eddie.’ Vartabedian swept his arm across the basin, a sight that he felt should impress even the gods. ‘Man, you’re the guy who’s gone and acquired this narcissist’s house. What could matter beside that view?’
‘My reputation could matter. My bank account.’
‘A weakling concept. Look at the lights, man. Where’s your Nietzsche instinct?’ He indicated the southerly horizon again with a nod. ‘It’s so awesome it makes one’s own loneliness trivial.’ He found himself blowing smoke in Wolverton’s direction, not sure how intentionally.
‘Christ, that’s a strong stogie.’ Wolverton waggled a hand in front of his face. ‘Do you smoke like that expressly to piss me off, Mose?’
‘Don’t run any of your shit on me, Eddie. We got our universes. When we die, we’ll both start to be forgotten in less than a New York minute. I promise you it’s all going to be OK at the Fortnum. I have a feeling you’re never going to appreciate it, but truly letting yourself enjoy Cuban cigars and the best cognac and really fine shoes like Manolos or John Lobbs is a big part of what it’s all about.’
Eleanor Ong, formerly and once again Sister Mary Rose, by special dispensation, was wedged behind her desk in the cramped office, tapping away on a tiny giveaway calculator from a long-gone local bank to find a way to stretch out the subsistence allotment the shelter got from the diocese – actually from what she called the child abuse slush fund, she occasionally joked a bit too pointedly, on the rare occasions the archbishop deigned to see her. Abruptly Kenisha Duncan opened the office door and led Chopper Tyrus into the doorway behind her. They’d have had trouble fitting in the free space if they’d actually come all the way in.
‘Sister, I’m sorry to bother you, but he swear it real real important.’
Tyrus yanked off a threadbare Dodgers cap. ‘I ain’ sure you remember me, Sister ma’am…’
‘Chopper, I surely do remember you. You’re a good man. You protected a mute and ailing human being, just as Jesus would have done, and then you brought him here for help.’
He smiled broadly. ‘Thank you, ma’am. Praise Jesus and all that.’ Then his face wrinkled with disquiet. ‘But there more trouble tonight about this man Richard – I mean Jack. You know the Fortnum Hotel?’
‘Of course. The developers are in the process of grabbing it before the housing charities can put a claim to it.’
‘Well, your Jack – he done go in that place tonight,’ Chopper Tyrus said. ‘On his own feet along with two of your womens from here. And now they’s lady polices inside, too, and some pretty bad men.’ He shook his head as if to disavow all of it. ‘A guy on the street, he say, Jesus, he absent from the Fortnum tonight. He say men belong with the devil camp, they at work in there.’
Everything was tiptoeing along on the very edge of Sister Mary Rose’s comprehension – but that was really all she ever expected on The Nickel.
‘Kenisha, have you seen Millie and Felice come back?’
‘No, ma’am. Not so’s I saw, and I been out front.’
Reluctantly, Eleanor Ong stood up. She didn’t want to get involved with Jack Liffey again. It had nearly cost her her life the first time, and, worse, it had cost a significant part of her faith – which it had taken her a decade of renunciation and worship in the convent to repair. And, of course, this most recent visit of his, added so opportunely to her own weaknesses, had snatched away a lot of the soul-repair that had cost her so dearly. In pure human terms, it had kicked the traces right out from under what she had come to think of as her peace of mind. He could do that to you, Jack.
‘Would you come with me, Chopper? I may need to send you to the fire station for help.’ The firefighters were the only reliable assistance on The Nickel, as everyone down here knew – with Fire Station No. 9 proud of having the most arduous EMT assignment in the city. Cops came to The Nickel when it was fashionable, or on somebody’s political agenda. Then, for a time, officers fresh out of the Academy would flood Skid Row and do their best, but the agenda at the top always shifted and the cops always went somewhere else, slapping their hands clean and lining up for their gamma globulin shots.
Eleanor knew she was no Mother Theresa, but she shared the firefighters’ compassion for the very worst off in the city. Only in her case, she suspected the feeling had its roots in pride, which was not something that she or God would treasure. It had been so simple in the convent, and it was so complex out here. Oh, Jack, I missed you so. Oh, God, I miss Jack.
Conor hung back in the corner of the small squalid room, scribbling away as the others argued. He felt he was living in a strange kind of time that was basically unoccurring – waiting on pause so he could observe all around him and absorb it all. The newest arrival, Maeve’s dad, was going around to the others demanding that they help him clear the barrier off the stairs. Basically, the man seemed to want to let the normal world reassert itself, and he didn’t know how he felt about that.
‘I live with one of these policewomen,’ he insisted. ‘She’s my wife, really. They’ll be fair to us and protect us, I promise. But we have to let them come up.’
‘Cops’ve evicted people before,’ Morty Lipman insisted. ‘They’re forced to do the dirty work for the landlords, I know. It’s the law. Maybe you think you know a cop, but that’s like taking an old video out of a box. You never know if it’s been rewound.’
Jack Liffey just stared, struck worldless for a moment by the peculiar comparison.
‘Man, are you out of date,’ Maeve objected. ‘The world’s digital now. Tapes are gone. Anyway, my dad is right, we can’t fight the police and fight these dangerous guys, too. What was your wonderful word for them? Putzes.’
Morty almost smiled. ‘I don’t know digital, but I know putzes, and I never trusted the police,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ Felice said sourly. ‘I ast them over and over to help me find my old man, and they treat me like a shoo-bug.’
‘That policewoman downstairs is my stepmother,’ Maeve insisted. ‘I love her, and I know we can trust her. Look, I can tell you what’s going to happen. We either let her up to help us or we’re gonna get SWAT. You want a bunch of shouting Nazis in black helmets to blow up our barricade and run up the steps waving machine guns?’
Conor looked up from his scribbling to see where things had gotten, but nobody seemed on top of it – which to him meant Samuel Greengelb appeared undecided. The man had been good to him and had been the brains at the hotel so far, but now he sat on his rickety chair looking sad, looking defeated and confused.
‘Why are we always victims?’ Greengelb said. ‘We just want a place to live. That’s asking too much already?’
Something about the depth of feeling within the man’s voice hit Conor like an electric shock. He knew a little of what had happened to the Jews over centuries – pogroms, hatred, the Holocaust. And still his friends at school, none of whom had ever even met a Jew, cracked terrible anti-Jew jokes all the time. The children of the deeply Protestant outer suburbs of San Diego County – morally asleep, he thought – knew almost nothing of what had gone on in America to the Indians or the poor, let alone what had happened in Latin America or faraway Europe. And if he happened to repeat a Jew joke at home, his father would always patiently explain the tragic history – and he, Conor, would be overwhelmed with guilt, feeling a thousand times a fool, unfairly caught between two worlds or two incompatible moral bubbles, or whatever labored phrase you used to name this impossibile contradiction.
‘We’re legal tenants,’ Greengelb insisted. ‘I’ve been here seventeen years. A man’s home is his castle! You’re all in my castle right now talking to me about leaving as if it’s nothing at all. Don’t tell me how to feel, sir! Don’t anybody tell me how to feel about my home!’
‘I’m truly sorry, sir,’ Jack Liffey said, touching the man’s shoulder. ‘In my limited experience, if justice ever comes at all, it comes in by the back door, very quietly, while you’re waiting for it at the front.’
Conor looked down at his lyrics, and quickly added a line:
Housing the poor they say
It’s just an issue to solve
And I’ve never learned
The secret of moving on
I tried to root here but
I have nothing left now
That I can call a home
I have nothing left … nothing
Don’t tell me how to feel!
Rice Thibodeaux walked his big knife up and down his fingers again like a tiny nonchalant George Raft. The basement grew danker and hissier as they waited.
‘Man, do you have to do that?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘Who? The guy who brought you on board, dickhead,’ McCall said.
‘The guy who can’t make a fuckin’ decision? I see three big cans of gasoline. I see two legal proxies for the owner of this building hiding down here for no reason, when they should be acting. I don’t see no supermen, ready to become or not. I don’t even see no lions. Jeez, I don’t even see no camels, mutant.’
‘Listen, Mr Densehead. Those are cops up there, real cops. It changes everything. Rule one in life is never ever antagonize the fuzz when you can get away clean.’
Thibodeaux screwed up his face in thought, without even slowing down the knife-walk that was whirling up and down his fingers. ‘I thought rule one was never back down.’
‘Even cats know you got to save your attack for when you’re strong.’
‘Cats? You shitting me? Housecats? I hate housecats.’
‘The rules of guerilla war, man. You back off when you’re overpowered and you wait for your chance. I’m sure Sun Tzu learned it all from watching his own cat.’
‘Uh-huh, loser – let’s all learn our big life lessons from animals that clean their own assholes with their tongues. I’m getting tired of you, yellowhead.’
‘Well, I’m getting tired of you, too, dwarf. When this job is over, let’s be splits.’
‘Get tired of this.’ Rice Thibodeaux took one step and drove the large serrated knife hard up into Steve McCall’s abdomen, just above the turquoise belt-buckle.
McCall’s mouth dropped open wide, but no sound came out, and Thibodeaux twisted the big knife around and then changed the angle and yanked it upward, the way he’d read true believers were supposed to perform hara-kiri – or, more properly, seppuku. McCall hardly deserved the honor, but he’d had to be shut up.
Only a little blood came out, no sound issued, but Steve McCall, eyes and mouth wide open, began to list to his right, and Rice Thibodeaux yanked out the knife with a flourish, the way he imagined a true samurai would.
‘Not just yet,’ McCall squeaked as he leaned farther and farther and then crumpled to the concrete floor of the basement.
‘Happy now, mutant?’
5 In the interest of historical accuracy, it was the Pierre Koenig House, Case Study House No. 22, at 1636 Woods Drive, that Julius Shulman famously photographed for one of the most iconic L.A. images of all time. The von Sternberg legend of the deadly moat refers to a very similar house built by Richard Neutra in Northridge across the San Fernando Valley. As usual for L.A., this second one was demolished in 1971 to make way for a commonplace and forgettable housing tract.
6 All true, but about Richard Neutra, not Lautner.