In the Court of the Yellow King (39 page)

Ganz wanted to say something, but couldn’t. The words stuck in his throat. Instead, he watched the man take a luxurious drink of his beer, then dab at his handlebar moustache with a white hankie.

“They don’t talk on the street. None of them. They do what they do, quiet, then they put on the play again. Started around Olvera Street, under the church. Lots of things happen under churches. Lots of
things
under churches... Our Lady Queen of the Angels.” The man chuckled to himself, finished his beer. “Angels.” He slowly drained the bottle into his glass, the sediments dropping to the bottom as the foam built carefully on top, rising to the rim and stopping just short of spillage. “More people come, talking about Cassilda. Cassandra... One of them white girl names...” He sniffed, sitting up straight in his chair, freeing up the war in his lower back. “Everyone gathers round, goes down into the basement. Catacombs where the lizards hide out. See what the play says. Then they go out again. Marching orders. They snatch up the books, anything that ain’t the play, and have themselves a barbeque. Fires all around town. Up in them hills around the stadium, north up the Arroyo Seco. Cops blamed the homeless, bored kids, but they know better. Maybe you seen something today, huh? Heard they had a big one.”

Ganz wished he had his notepad in his hand, but knew if he reached for it, the story would be over.

“Then all the old
vatos
disappear. All the big boys. OGs. Then the little ones. Then...” He blinked under those thick lenses, long eyelashes fluttering. “Then they do another play. Then another. Same show, different showing, see? All over the
barrio
. Boyle Heights. El Sereno. Lincoln Heights. They grow, moving out from the underneath, from the back yards. Bell Gardens, Southgate, up to Highland Park, Eagle Rock. All along the Arroyo Seco. The river walls, that cement, that’s their theatre now—” The man snapped his fingers in front of his left ear, then laughed. “After every show, it just gets more quiet. This city wasn’t meant to be quiet.”

Ganz mulled this over. “Play... You mean theatre?”

“A week ago or so, a group of kids was standing on the corner, just down the block from here, over by skid row, all wearing them masks. They wasn’t just hangin’ out, they were
standing
on the street corner, like at attention. Like military. Just standing there, not doing nothing. Not even moving. Four in the morning. Kids don’t hang out down there. Not without baggies in their pockets, and that’s a no-no with them guys.”

Ganz’s mind raced, looking for connections, angles... and found none. He’d need more fuel, so he shook his glass. “Weird.”

“Fuckin’-a, weird. This shit happens every night, on different corners. Next day, them corners are all clean. Dope dealers gone. Graffiti, colors... gone.”

He laughed again and motioned for another beer. Ganz tried to intercept the order, but the man shook his head.

“Your buddies roll up on them one night. Two cops, a black guy and some Italian dude. They grab a kid from the group and slam him on the hood of their car, cussing him. Scream at him to ‘cooperate’. Kid don’t move. They keep screaming, then the Italian pulls off the mask.”

“What did the kid do?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean ‘nothing’?”

The man turned to face Ganz for the first time. “I mean nothing, motherfucker. The kid didn’t do shit. Didn’t do shit or say shit. He just stared at that fucking WOP who cuffed him.”

“And then?”

“And then the ambulance comes.”

“Why?”

“Cuz someone died.”

A new beer arrived and was set in front of the man, who filled his glass, the statement lingering like a serial cliffhanger.

“Who died?”

The man turned to Ganz and held up his full glass. “
Salud
, Detective Ganz, for my 25 years in Pelican Bay.”

Ganz nearly choked on one of the slushy ice cubes in his glass. “I... I...”

The man drained half his beer, and set it down very slowly onto the bar napkin in front of him. “You put me away for what my brother did.” The man dabbed his moustache. “You didn’t have shit, but you had enough. You had the spic who did it, even when he didn’t. Didn’t matter which spic it was, as long as you got one, to throw to the wolves riding on the back of a white girl’s honor.”

Ganz sat back, replaying his three previous lives as if it was a 70’s living room slide show, trying to find the right cell with all of the smiling and waving family members. But he couldn’t. After a moment or two, he gave up. His brain was tired, and he knew he wouldn’t make the connection, recall the damning collar, so he just lowered his head. “I’m sorry,” Ganz said, hearing how trivial that sounded, considering. “I don’t remember.”

The man just nodded very slowly, taking another long drink that finished his beer, still not looking at Ganz. “Yeah, I suppose you’re sorry for all of it, ain’t you?”

“Yeah, I really am,” Ganz said with a long exhale of breath, before draining his new glass in one gulp. He grimaced, sat up straight in his chair, and attempted to commiserate by pulling out a tiny shard from his personal litany. “Police work is a gymnastics routine between heaven and hell. Sometimes we stick the landing, sometimes we don’t.”

The man turned in his stool and looked straight at Ganz, his dark eyes large and inscrutable behind those thick tinted lenses. After a few moments, he nodded. “Yeah, that landing is a bitch.” He got up, headed toward the door. “The play’s the thing, holmes.”

Ganz shrugged off the specific guilt and overall white man’s burden that had poisoned his time at the LAPD long enough to process what he just heard. “What do you mean?”

The man stopped and turned his head slightly. “You done asking questions of me, Detective Ganz.” He headed for the door. “See you on the other side. We’ll all be waiting.”

The door opened, briefly letting in the murmur of the night, and then closed again.

Taste of Flame

Ganz left King Eddy’s a few minutes later, his whole body shaking, and dove headlong into those murmuring streets. He could have hopped the last bus, but decided to walk. His legs needed to move under him while his mind worked, processing what he had just heard.

The spider crouching on his spine was now dancing. There was something growing inside the city, moving out from the core to infect the rest of the whole like a cancer. The play. The burning of the library. Olvera Street, the birthplace of Los Angeles. The spread. The rivers. The play. What fucking play? Shakespeare?
The play’s t
he thing, to uncover
the consciousness of
the king
. Hamlet. College drama class. A poisoned king, a melancholy son. An immoral mother. Patriarchal bullshit. Still, those masks, those slogans... What did it all mean?

Following his legs while his head jagged elsewhere, Ganz caught Main and headed straight south until it found Olympic, the one major street cutting downtown that would allow him the best chance of getting home without getting rolled for his shoes. The fire at the library was out, but the smoke from all that smoldering parchment still filled the sky, white and fluffy and lighter than night above it. Ashes of dead books fell like a mockery of snow on a city that would never know it. Didn’t deserve it after selling its soul for blue skies and room temp and a citizenry that burned down libraries. Ganz held out his hand and caught a falling bit of ash on his fingertip, raising it on his tongue, like he used to do as a child in Nebraska when the earth froze and turned brown and white and quiet. It tasted like fire. Motherfuckers.

ugs

Downtown seemed to be in mourning with Ganz, or more likely annoyed by the heavy police presence, as it was nearly deserted, the major venues - Staples, LA Live, Nokia Theater, various spike heel clubs - shuttered for the night. The parking lot valets still manned their posts, waving their flags in the dark and ignoring Ganz as he walked past.

Ganz moved quickly away from the electronic circus at Olympic and Fig that advertised everything to no one in the wake of the big downtown revitalization launched a few years back that didn’t quite catch on. It was just like Hollywood and Highland to the west, with less TV coverage. Stripping off the grime and crime that made this city the chaotic pheromone that it once was and sterilizing it for minivan tourists and “Vegas baby!” cheeseballs. Ganz passed under the freeway and the cardboard campground that went up there every night, stepping around a few nodded-out sidewalk sleepers, and dove deeper into Pico Union. A fire was burning in a barrel behind an auto shop, like you see in those old movies about New York before Giuliani. Ganz wondered whose books were in that barrel. After several blocks, he noticed how quiet it was. And deserted. Street corners were free of shaved head Latinos, socks pulled up to meet their long blue shorts, waiting for west side party people to drive up and hand them money for a homegrown export shipped north.

Instead of loitering men, Ganz found mattresses. Up and down the block, every fenced-in yard and apartment building driveway featured rectangular slabs of fabric and stuffing propped up on the curb, on light poles, even on parked cars. On each mattress the word
BUGS
was scrawled in black spray paint. Ganz unconsciously itched under his armpit.

Minutes later at his house, Ganz dragged his mattress outside, pushed it through his gate and left it blocking the sidewalk, then headed back inside for a can of spray paint. Before he got to his door, he stopped and cocked his ear to the sky, listening. No revving engines, no shouts, no gunshots. He heard absolutely nothing. Nothing weighs on city ears more than an unexpected silence. Ganz headed back inside, flipping on his TV on his way to his tool closet.

Through his open door behind him, on the street corner opposite his yard, a figure wearing a featureless mask looked on. An identical companion joined him, then another, and another still.

ew Numbers

Victor Baumgartner rolled up Union Ave at 6:00 pm sharp three days later. Ganz was waiting at the curb, peering through pitch black gas station shades up and down the empty streets as if waiting for something. He looked like hell, like he had spent the last 72 hours draining his house of anything remotely fermented and mostly liquid, before finally returning one of Bum’s numerous concerned calls about an hour ago.

Bum’s Mercedes sedan pulled to a stop. Ganz lurched to his feet and poured himself into the passenger seat, slamming the door behind him.

“Drive.”

“Someone after you?”

“They told you?”

Bum laughed. “I was joking. The neighborhood’s dead.”

“Not dead, sleeping.”

Bum chuckled, assuming a joke. “It feels like driving on Christmas morning. Like everyone down here split town. Maybe went back home. Hell, the mayor’s already crowing about the new numbers, and they’re only a few weeks old.”

“What numbers?”

“Hasn’t been a shooting or an assault in all the favorite places since that...
thing
at the Park Plaza. All the gun boys must be on vacation. Or maybe they all found Jesus at the same time. East L.A. is like a friggin’ sewing circle right now. South Central is just as quiet. Highland Park, Bell, Venice. Ghost towns.”