In the Court of the Yellow King (38 page)

It could get ugly around here, Ganz thought, and began a mental checklist of items he’d need to secure for his home, should shit go south in a hurry. At the same time, he thought of the people in the game that he knew – snitches, mostly, but also street-level dealers, couriers, and stick men – who worked in the local gang scene. He smelled a big story brewing, and wanted to be close as it developed, and hopefully be the one to break it. He had so few joys left in life, but uncovering a truth that would eventually fold itself into history was one thing that kept him going. He wasn’t paid to take down the bad guys anymore, so he might as well tell their stories, especially when “bad guy” and “good guy” were often only separated by differences in membership cards. Country clubs catered to more killers than any neighborhood gangbanger bar or backyard Inglewood barbeque.

Ganz paused to gather himself, feeling that familiar prickling sensation spidering up his spine that always meant he was on the cusp of a worthwhile new project, when he saw the smoke. It was rising hot and fast in black billowing waves, gathering over downtown like a shroud. Ganz left his beer on the bench and ran across the street, running toward the source of the smoke as the sirens took up their song in hidden fortresses all around the city.

ords to Smoke

He knew what was burning before he even got close. The layout of the downtown map was branded inside his brain from his time at the LAPD Headquarters on 1st and Spring and then the Times Building just across the street on Broadway. He came of age down here, and then slowly began to die, all within the same cement Skinner box.

By the time he got to Figueroa and dashed up to 5th, Flower Street a block over was closed off by the fire department, as the Los Angeles Central Library disintegrated from the inside out and spilled up its dead magic into the darkening sky. A million books and a trillion hard-won thoughts lost to the angry flames. The burn area was so vast that it must have been set in a dozen locations inside by a tanker truck of gasoline sprayed onto the moldering stacks.

Onlookers crowded the sidewalk, traffic froze, and still the library burned. Firemen fanned out and jacked their hoses into rarely used hydrants. It was clear by their positioning that they weren’t going to attempt to save the building or its precious contents. They were just going to cut off any spread. Containment.

All around Ganz, amid the jostling mass of bodies both on the sidewalk and in their cars, a single arm of every person was held up in salute, cell phone in hand and pointed at the destruction, to capture a moment for social media and maybe the 11 o’clock news instead of experiencing with their eyes, feeling it inside that part of their being that wasn’t connected to the goddamn Internet. These fools saw nothing and felt nothing but recorded everything for some later date that would never come.

Ganz became nauseous. His knees buckled and he collapsed to the curb, covering his face with his hands. He could feel the heat from the flames a hundred feet away and fifty feet up. They started from the top, eating away the roof and announcing themselves to the sky, then chewed their way down.

This was the place that had grown Henry Ganz, drawing him from the dirt and giving fiber and vein to the lost seed blown west, girding in tough bark the man in full who put down roots – thin, thirsty roots, but roots nonetheless. He’d spent rainy days and winter nights wandering the shelves, pulling books at random and forcing himself to read the first ten pages. More often than not, he read the entire book, immersing himself in worlds and subjects he’d never seek out on his own. For a boy who never found anything more substantial than Redbook around his childhood home, this was a revelation. An unlocking of a kennel door, with an unexplored wilderness waiting beyond. Everything Ganz knew – everything he
was
on a cellular level after he evolved from the muck – came from this place that was dying in front of him. The library was more of a father and mother than he’d ever had at home, or ever cared to wish for.

He rubbed his eyes, not sure if the brightness of the flames was making them water or actual tears were leaking out. He’d become a stranger to real feelings two hundred cases of Dickel ago, and they reemerged from the blur at unexpected times like acid flashbacks.

Ganz staggered to his feet and pushed through the gawkers. Their hunger for the train wreck was palpable, sickening. He had to get away from these goddamn vultures, and get his head around what was happening. He broke from the crowd and made a wide circle around the pyre, ending up on 3rd and Broadway. He stopped, realizing that he was heading for his former places of employment as if on autopilot, as that was exactly how he had arrived on so many occasions toward the end. Intoxicated to the point of blackout, legs moving stiffly, directional compass dug out of his lizard brain and hardwired into the robot.

Today was different. He wasn’t drunk. He was in mourning. Ganz felt a presence behind him, high up and looking down. He turned, and while his internal map of the area expected to show him the vibrant Anthony Quinn mural painted on the old Victor building, what greeted him was an upturned rectangle of pale yellow. The mural was gone. The “Victor Clothing Co” lettering was gone. What replaced it was pure theatre:

TO UNCOVER THE CONSCIENCE
OF A KING

Now it was time to get drunk.

mperor’s New Clothes

It wasn’t until his third whiskey and water that his brain finally returned to the matter at hand. The work. The story. Had to get back to the story, and kick everything else back down deep into the bucket.

They didn’t have Dickel, and even if they did, Ganz couldn’t afford it. His disability had been cut in half thanks to the generous nature of the new California taxpayer taking marching order from Orange County, Utah, and a string of glittery megachurches. The writing gigs had slowed, as print media transitioned to digital, and no one wanted to pay for anything they found online. So, he’d suck down whatever they had in the well while he fueled up for the dark walk home. It had been one hell of a shitweird day.

Ganz was drinking in the King Eddy Saloon on East Fifth, another one of his autopilot destinations programmed into his circuitry back in the Clinton Administration. He didn’t venture out much these days, and when he did, he never made it this far east, so taking down cheap drinks in dirty glassware felt like a bankers’ holiday. The place was mostly empty. The usual cast of vagrants and penny ante hustlers was cut down to a few choice stragglers, flavored by a stereotypical sampling of Silver Lake dropouts and intrepid West Siders who had dared cross the La Cienega Divide. A Latino woman with shock wig hair dyed orange and eyebrows painted up over the center of her forehead stared at the wall covered in old boxing paintings and a framed photograph of FDR. A toothless man with mechanics’ hands mumbled over his nearly empty pilsner glass of beer. Two hipsters with newly minted 70’s togs, strategically messy hair, and Amish beards strolled through the place, clutching cans of Pabst like they were vessels of holy water and looking at the pictures and faded out signage on the walls, peppering their discussion of a screenplay in progress with cooed exclamations of “gritty ambiance” and something called “gutterpunk.”

The bartender walked over and asked if he wanted another. Ganz nodded and looked around the place one more time for the sake of the coming small talk, scratching behind his armpit.

“Kind of dead around here, huh?”

The bartender sighed, pouring another double with a heavy hand. “Everyone’s checking out the library fire.” Sully used to work the sticks back when Ganz haunted this place. Sully wouldn’t be caught dead sighing in front of a customer, or even by himself. Sully killed two-dozen Koreans back in the forgotten 50’s.

“You notice the city painting over the murals around town?”

“Nope,” the bartender said. “I live in Santa Monica. Don’t really see many down there.”

Good Christ. A 310 tending bar in an honest to goodness 213 joint. Ganz was appalled, and looked at him more closely. The tailored jeans, the factory-aged t-shirt, the ridiculously expensive shoes made from repurposed leather stitched with Humboldt County hemp. Who hired this fucking guy? Where the hell
was
he right now, anyway? Ganz glanced around, noticing that the barroom looked like the King Eddy Saloon, but something was definitely different. New ownership. Goddamnit. Some enterprising Millennial had bought the wormy old place, taking everything down, cleaned off the filth and grime and crime and motherfucking
chara
cter
, and rebuilt King Eddy to look like the potentate he once was. But these cash maggoting culture pimps never understood that they couldn’t put the soul back into the revived body, as it had already fled this mortal coil at the registered time of death. History withers in the face of bleach and paint, even in a place built basement deep by dead bootleggers.

“It ain’t the city.”

The voice shook Ganz, who looked down the bar. A man he hadn’t seen come in was sitting on the corner stool and holding a pilsner glass in front of him like he was waiting to make a toast. He was a Hispanic guy, deeply tanned and even more deeply wrinkled, wearing his slate gray hair long and slicked back, curling up at the nape of his collared white dress shirt. He wore thick tinted glasses, like BB King. There was a distinguished air about him, from the way he held his drink to the golden pinkie ring on his left hand. In another version of Hollywood, he’d be a leading man on the decline, or a producer who owned half of the Hills. The fact that he was down here meant he was neither of those things. Old guys didn’t go in for irony. “It’s the street painting over them murals,” he said. “The new street.”

Ganz swiveled in his chair, every cell erect. “How do you know?”

“Because I got eyes under these things, and ears next to ‘em.”

“Then you’ve seen it, too.”

The man drained his glass of dark beer, foam still rimming the top, and pushed it back away from him.

Ganz finished his own glass and motioned to the bartender for another round for the both of them. “What do you mean by ‘street’?”

The man laughed, deep and wet. Smoker. “Come on, man. You know what I mean, right? The
street
. You know the street. You know it just like the rest of us.”

Ganz squinted through the low light at the man’s face. He looked familiar, but he couldn’t place him. Maybe he saw him on TV.

“You’re trying to remember, ain’t you? You will. I ain’t wearing no mask. I ain’t seeing that shit.”

Ganz’s eyebrows shot up. “Seeing what shit?”

The man said nothing, flipping a Zippo between his fingers. A long thin cigarette was stowed behind his ear, poking through the drape of his hair.

“So the masks figure in somehow?”

The round arrived, and the man pulled out a twenty from a large roll of green, pushing it toward the bartender. “For mine.” The bartender shrugged, took the bill and rang him up. The man poured the Modelo slowly into his glass.

“Yeah, they figure in.” The man didn’t elaborate, instead sipped his beer.

“Is this a gang thing? Some bullshit theatrical twist on colors?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Look, friend—” Ganz said, getting up from his stool and moving toward him.

“— I ain’t your friend,” the man said without turning, stopping Ganz in his tracks by the flat tone of his voice. “And you ain’t mine, so why don’t you stay where you’re at.”

Ganz slid back into his chair. He knew this drill and wasn’t fazed. No matter how many years he had lived here, he was still the tourist. The interloper. White man on the bus.

“So what’s with the masks?”

“You working a case, gringo?”

“No, I—”

The man laughed, cutting him off. “I know. You can’t, right? Maybe writing a story for the paper?”

“Wait a minute—”

“Nah, that can’t be it either. Maybe you just scared. Scared gringo. Gringos down here always been scared, ever since Avila Adobe. Maybe you got The Fear.”