Fogtown (16 page)

Undressing and then donning the gown, she did as he instructed, allowing him to insert her feet in steel stirrups. Rough and clumsy, he was unconcerned with her discomfort. He clapped on a pair of latex gloves, lubricating the fingertips with KY jelly. He asked, “How many months along are you?”

The question eliminated all the pride she had. It reminded her that she was naked in the presence of a strange man and that she was eighteen years old and on her own. Things couldn’t get any more basic. There was nothing for her to give up, except what he wanted to know. “I’m three months pregnant.”

His flinty eyes evinced dislike for her. When he spoke, his eyebrows went up and down, but his lips didn’t move. He said, “The procedure is curettage without anesthesia. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“I can’t put you under because that might cause complications.”

She accepted this without knowing why. “Okay.”

“You have the money?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Cash?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“One thousand.”

“What size are the bills? Are they fresh and clean?”

“They’re in twenties.”

“Where are they?”

“In my overnight bag.”

He picked up the satchel. “This?”

“Yes.”

The doctor found the cash and stashed it in a cabinet. “Good, very good. Now let’s begin.”

Lying on the table, she hyperventilated as he went to work and scraped the walls of her uterus. She dissociated, using her mind to get out of her body. She hardly felt a thing though blood ran over the table’s edge, splatting on the floor. The only sound in the room, other than the surgeon’s breathing, was the neutral ticking of a clock on the wall.

She didn’t remember how she got back to her parents’ house in the city. By then, she was bleeding profusely. She walked in the door and said to her mother, “I’ve got a problem,” and foundered on the living room carpet.

Streaming down her legs, blood made a puddle between her feet. Her two-year-old son bumbled into the living room, sucking his thumb. She groaned miserably, cranked her head sideways to avoid his gaze and quavered, “Richard, get the hell out, okay? Mommy’s not feeling too good right now. She needs to rest. It’s been a long day.”

The mockingbirds in the palm trees awakened Richard Rood. The sky was buttery and low over the city. Fog blurred the streetlights.
Gunshots went off a block away. He heard a man cough and sensed something close by in the dark. He reached out with his hand to find out what it was. His fingers made contact with a regulation police department riot boot, size twelve.

A cop in a gas mask was kneeling at his side. The policeman’s eyes were magnified behind the mask’s lenses. He was holding a male mannequin dressed in a chic continental suit. The facsimile had a pink plastic face and a corn-yellow wig woven from synthetic fibers. Richard reflexively reached for the man he’d been sleeping with. When he found nobody at his side, he looked at the mannequin again, and drawled, “Aw, hell.”

The policeman straightened up and hurled the dressmaker’s model into a garbage dumpster. The dummy’s legs jutted out of the bin. Getting out a pad and pen, the cop said to Richard, “Name, please.”

“Richard Rood.”

“Residence?”

“The Tenderloin.”

“Street address?”

“Fifty-six Mason.”

“House or apartment?”

“Hotel.”

“Tourist or residential?”

“Residential. The Bristol.”

“Telephone number?”

“I don’t got one. It’s been disconnected. I couldn’t afford the bill.”

“No cell phone?”

“Nope.”

“No beeper?”

“No.”

“Occupation?”

“Self-employed.”

“As what?”

“Salesman.”

“In what line of goods?”

“General merchandise, whatever people in the community need.”

“Age?”

“Forty-eight.”

“Birthplace?”

“San Francisco. I was born in General Hospital.”

“Next of kin?”

“Don’t have any.”

“Social Security number?”

“I don’t know it.”

“Person to contact in case of an emergency?”

“No one.”

“Now what the hell are you doing out here?”

“I was going somewhere, but I got tired and went to sleep.”

“That’s illegal. You can’t do that in public. It’s a misdemeanor. I can ticket you for it. Where were you going?”

“The Allen Hotel.”

“That snake pit? You have a residence there?”

“No, I live on Mason Street.”

“You got business at the Allen or what?”

“Nah.”

“Who do you know that lives there?”

“A friend.”

“His name?”

“Jeeter Roche.”

“That dope fiend scumbag?”

“Uh huh.”

“You in cahoots with him?”

“Nope.”

“You selling drugs for him?”

Richard was impudent. “For that fucker? Hell, no.”

“You better not be.” The cop wiggled a finger at the mannequin in the dumpster. “Looks like you’ve got all kinds of friends.” He jabbed Richard in the leg with his nightstick. “Now book on out of here before I arrest your sorry ass.”

T
HE HOUSES IN EUREKA VALLEY
off Market Street cost a fortune, running between a half-million bucks for a one-bedroom condominium, and up to five million dollars for a two-storied house with a yard. The 130-year-old mansion on Caselli Street was an Italianate Victorian, easily worth twenty million smackers. All the windows in the place were shuttered; no cars were in the garage. A hedgerow the height of a grown man’s head cordoned a sumptuous flower garden; the vast lawn was centered on a three-hundred-year-old Ponderosa pine.

Standing on his toes, Stiv sniffed the air and checked his bearings. Ninety-foot-tall redwood trees bordered the Victorian’s property. Oleander bushes fronted the sidewalk. The streetlights on Caselli had burned out months ago and the road was pitch-black. Other than the moon and the fog over Kite Hill, he couldn’t see anything.

Treading over a flagstone path, he walked toward the house. The garden was blooming with red, white, and pink autumnal carnations. A pensive owl hooted in the Ponderosa’s upper branches. A dog with what sounded like bronchitis bayed from inside a neighbor’s house.

Shuffling up a flight of marble porch steps to the front door, Stiv politely rang the doorbell. A gong chimed, reverberating beatifically throughout the Victorian. When no one answered, he tried the doorknob. Not surprisingly, it was locked. A raccoon squeezed through
a hole in the oleanders and turned its manic eyes in Stiv’s direction, and then did a fadeout into the garden.

Done with the front door, Stiv headed into the backyard. He lurked past a patio with a barbecue grill and an empty Olympic-size swimming pool; a cabana with a wet bar and a hexagon-shaped gazebo ran the length of the fence. A woman’s drunken voice from the next street was pushed along by the wind and drifted over him.

He held his breath and pretended he was dead. It was a family trait that he’d acquired from his grandmother, a tiny Jewish woman from the Russian seaport of Odessa. She had taught him how to walk on his toes, how to open and shut windows without a sound, how to move in and out of crowded rooms without attracting an audience, and how to walk the streets without anyone seeing him.

Finding himself at the kitchen door, Stiv finagled a strip of linen cloth from his pocket and wrapped it around his hand. Clenching his fingers, he punched out the door’s window. The glass tinkled to the floor—it was music to his ears. Reaching inside, he unlatched the dead bolt and darted indoors.

Trespassing was at the core of his personality. It was, as far as he could tell, fundamental to his identity. He’d been breaking and entering into houses since he was nine years old. In the beginning it had been no big thing, a small cottage here and there. Then it became an addiction. He started busting into larger houses. Nothing compared to going in an unlighted window without any regard for what was on the other side. The owner might be waiting in the dark with a gun to kill you. Or there might be a million dollars in a pillowcase under somebody’s bed.

Once inside the Victorian, certain that no one had seen him, Stiv acquainted himself with the kitchen. He turned on and off the electric stove and the microwave oven, and looked in the refrigerator. There was nothing in the fridge except a gallon jar of organic mayonnaise.

He sneaked into a long hallway, and groping his way in the blackness—like a dancer with a new partner—he came upon a study with a fireplace. He bumped into an oak desk with a reading lamp. The
walls were lined with books in shelves. He went to a shelf, extracted a hefty volume, and barged over to the window to read it. Moonlight underlined the hardback’s cover, a book of fiction, the collected works of the Russian writer Isaac Babel. There was a photograph of the author on the back—a man in glasses with a Mona Lisa smile. Stiv had never heard of the guy and dropped the tome in a chair.

Plunging deeper into the hall, he floundered into a living room with a high-beamed ceiling. A figure-eight-shaped crystal chandelier hung from brass chains. Chairs upholstered in split-grain cowhide made a half-circle around a coffee table. A handwoven Navajo rug lay on a sofa. Carved wooden Haidu and Seneca Indian tribal masks and four large unframed abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter decorated the walls. The carpeting was plush acrylic piling. A selection of choice liquors cluttered a maple wood sideboard.

Flitting upstairs Stiv ghosted into the first bedroom on the second floor. It was an adolescent boy’s room, furnished with athletic pennants and several concert posters of Van Halen featuring Sammy Hagar. There were other posters of the Scorpions, a seminal German metal band. In the comforting dark, he searched the closet. Nimble fingered, he dug into underwear, socks, photo albums and ceramic pots, stashes of cigarettes. He unearthed a vial of Oaxacan weed that he put in his jacket, and two pharmaceutical Quaaludes that he considered taking, but didn’t.

The story was the same in the other bedrooms. There was nothing of value and an unpleasant feeling crept over Stiv. Ransacking bureaus and dressers, he shredded pants, socks, and sweaters with his switchblade. He went through the medicine cabinets in the bathrooms and located five ampoules of Demerol, Dilaudid and morphine, and a prescription bottle of phenobarbital, but came across no money. Irate, he broke a terra cotta lamp against the wall. What was wrong with these people?

There was a ringing in his ears; the hallucinations had left behind an auditory residue, a sign that heralded their inevitable return. Stiv redoubled his efforts in the two bedrooms on the third floor. He went
to work on the beds with his blade and slashed the mattresses and pillows, hunting for secret caches. All he found was a box of Japanese porno magazines, worth no more than a hundred bucks at the flea market in Oakland.

Disgusted with his luck, he kicked an antique rocking chair and was rewarded with a sprained toe. He pogoed up and down on one foot and tumbled onto a bed. He lay back, dumbfounded by the mattress’s softness. There wasn’t any question about it: rich folks slept better than he did.

Lacing his hands behind his head, Stiv stared at the ceiling. Market Street’s far off lights did a minuet on the knotty pine–paneled walls. Through a part in the curtains, he had a glimpse of the house across the street. A simulated plaster-and-wood Tudor that had an imitation thatched roof and a Japanese maple sapling in the front yard; two BMWs and a Land Rover were in the driveway. The 1960s acid jazz of Gene Ammons was blasting from the living room.

A paunchy white male was undressing a younger woman in a second-floor dormer window. She had her hands around his bullish neck. He rubbed her heavy breasts as they kissed. His countenance was dignified. Hers was hopeful. He put his finger in her vagina, moved it, and said something in her ear. Then he pulled the woman by her wrist to a king-sized bed. The sheets were in knots, blankets on the floor. A print by the Spanish painter Goya was framed on the wall above the headboard.

Together they fell on the sheets. He got on top of her and mauled her breasts. He kneeled, his hairy ass above her, and sucked on her neck, biting and kissing the tender skin around her hairline. His hand shot out to grab a condom off the nightstand; she reached between his legs to manipulate his cock.

Tired of watching their lovemaking, Stiv uncoiled and wearily rose to his feet. His mood was bleaker than a lunarscape. Taking a matchbook from his jacket, he lit a match. It sparked in the darkness, burning down to his fingertips. In the meager light he saw his grandmother’s wizened face. She was saying, I knew you’d turn out like this.

He threw the matchstick on the blankets. For a second it didn’t catch, and then a flame erupted from the bed, spiraling waist-high, tinting the ceiling magenta and salmon pink. The fire, newly born and ravenous, laid into the mattress and sheets like it was starving, broiling the pillows into marshmallows. Stiv sat down on the bed and waited for the flame to reach his feet. But it moved away from him toward a wall overlooking the garden. The fire climbed onto a window; the pane was blown out in a cream of glass—Stiv flung himself to the floor as white-hot shards shrieked by his ears.

Putting his head down, he wormed his way out of the room and into the hall. Unable to see where he was because of the growing smoke, Stiv butted his nose into a cabinet. Securing the staircase, he hurdled the steps to the second floor. The fire had eaten through the floor upstairs and had burned a hole in the ceiling. Fist-sized embers were raining into the rooms below. A cinder slashed him in the face, instantly blistering his cheek. Another cinder fizzled in his quiff.

He tripped and did a belly whopper down the next flight of stairs to the ground floor. Knocking aside chairs, he vaulted through the hall into the kitchen and scrammed out the back door, swan diving onto the grass as the Victorian’s roof imploded in a mushroom cap of flames.

Trampling through the garden to the street, the first thing he saw was the woman and the man that had been making love in the Tudor. They were standing naked in their driveway and gawking at the burning Victorian. The woman’s breasts were mirrored orange with the fire. The man’s flaccid penis was enveloped in a condom.