One of Us (26 page)

"Kind of a high price to pay, isn't it?"

Jamison smiled. "Aren't they all? And as you know, I manage to get around it, and not just with professional ladies. And just how do you know all this, by the way?"

I pulled out his piece of paper from my pocket, handed it to him. "There may be other records."

He shrugged, a man at peace with probability, and pushed the paper into his pocket. "Thank you, anyway."

He saw us to the door, chattering happily about the movie he was in. I walked behind him and Helena, trying to work out what difference this all made. I couldn't see it yet, but I knew it would come.

As we stood outside, I watched Jamison's eyes run over the road, a twisting lane high up in the hills overlooking the Valley. Not a stupidly big house, but a nice one, with one of the greatest views in the world.

"If people knew that I really am what I say I am" he said, "you know they'd never forgive me."

"Don't worry," I said. "Your lack of a secret is safe with us."

I DUMPED THE DIRUTZU outside Applebaum's, where we picked up my car. Debated whether to head back to Deck's, but in the end decided to go to my apartment. There were two messages on the machine, both from Stratten's office. He'd obviously not given me credit for having figured out what he'd done. Helena listened to me shouting for a while, then asked to borrow the phone. To call her boyfriend, I assume. I went and had a shower with the water on as loud as it would go.

When I came back she was stretched out on the sofa, asleep. She had always been like that—ball of action one moment, out cold the next. I watched her for a long time, as I often had. It used to make me feel more equal, the fact that I could watch over her sometimes. Now it just made me feel tired, but I wasn't ready for sleep. Instead, I scanned in the remaining two records. Two more names, one male, the other female, both rather well-known residents of LA. It doesn't matter who they are. Take it from me, you've heard of them. I read through their histories, and Schumann's, too. Afterward I just felt more exhausted.

Indiscretions, illegalities, perversions. Some buried deep in the past, the rotten kernel at the heart of success; others current and ongoing, a parallel life run in darkness. All of it easily bad enough to run a successful blackmail scam, and who knew how many other sheets lay hidden in Hammond's shelves.

I thought about the blackmailees, integrating my new knowledge of them into the picture I already held. I couldn't help it: Once you know, it changes things, taints the glass through which you see the world. I guess some people might get a feeling of power knowing what movies play inside other people's heads, what tracks their minds are running along behind their outward faces. I didn't. I've been there, done that. Everybody's got secrets: It's part of who they are, a constant cloud in the internal weather system. Everybody's done things, or had things done to them. The most important parts of life and character, the defining elements, are always hidden. The invisible is the underlying determinant. The things we don't want other people to know are the very things that make us truly real, truly ourselves. They don't even have to be bad things, merely personal. Just matters which should remain private: Because once they are known they create a feeling of sickly overfamiliarity, when in fact you don't really know the person at all. Everybody's password-protected, living in a hidden context that only they understand—until someone like Hammond comes along and cracks the code, leapfrogging over the walls and revealing you squatting frightened and alone within.

I burned the two pieces of paper and wiped all three translations off the organizer. I debated canceling the email to Travis, but Nicholas Schumann was already dead, and his secrets couldn't hurt him now. Maybe at some point I'd go back to Hammond's house and toss the remaining bookshelves, though I still believed his other apartment had been the center of his operation, and someone else already had the primary files. Presumably the guys in the suits, though how they tied into this, I couldn't imagine.

It was after two by then, but my mind wouldn't sleep. I was worried about Deck. Laura, too, I guess, but especially Deck. For once in his life he needed some help from me, but I didn't even know where to start.

I settled back into the chair and waited, but still sleep didn't come. Instead, all I got was context, going back down through the years. My first girlfriend, back at school: both of us sixteen and nervous and afraid to take the initiative. A few other friends, none of whom I'd seen in years.

I left home at seventeen myself, leaving them all behind, and worked my way across to California. It took a year and a half. I did it slowly, got cold or dusty in a lot of different places. At the time I guess it was a big adventure, but all I remember now from the trip are fragments of towns, the counters of bars I worked in, the strength of showers in motels I stayed—like a story recounted by someone who wasn't paying much attention when they heard it the first time. Wherever you go, and whatever you do, the first thing you're going to see in the morning, and the last thing at night, is the inside of your own head.

When I got to the ocean I'd stopped, and that's when I met Helena. I was working in a bar in Santa Monica. She came in with friends. She bought the first round, and after that my evening was set. I kept elbowing the other bartender out of the way so I could serve her. I don't listen to music much these days, and when I do it tends to be classical. My father used to listen to it a lot—still does, presumably—and it gets into your blood. The thing I like about it is its rightness. So much music sounds arbitrary, its marriage of influence and milieu too close to the surface to ignore: But when you listen to someone like Bach, it's like you're hearing the thoughts of a god. There are things in life that are supposed to be a certain way. You can predict how the next passage will sound because it's right, because that's the way it's meant to be—because you are looking at the facets of a perfect crystal as it revolves slowly in front of you. Anyway, when Helena walked in the bar I thought I'd heard the piece of music I'd been waiting for. Earl and I used to have an expression: "The lost tribe of beautiful sane people"—our point being that the two qualities seemed mutually exclusive. But Helena looked like she was one of Them, and the world settled itself around her to hold her up to me. "Yeah," I thought: "That's the way it's supposed to be. That's what all this tiring evolution crap has been about—to culminate in someone like her."

I was young and full of shit, and tried to strike up a conversation: She was equally young but full of nous, and politely kept me at arm's length. On the other hand, she didn't turn to her girlfriends and say "Hey—this guy's a creep. Let's go somewhere else," and maybe I even got a little wave at the end of the evening as they left. Accounts differ: Helena says she did, I never saw it, and believe me—I was looking. When I was feeling especially maudlin in the last couple of years, I'd often tried to picture that wave. Wallowing deep in drunkenness, sitting around some motel pool at night, when everyone else was asleep, I'd think maybe if I could see that wave in my mind's eye, then our relationship would become something complete, something that had a beginning, middle, and end, which I could hermetically seal in time and walk away from.

I could never see it.

Our families brought us together, indirectly. I was missing mine, she was close to hers. Neither of us had really bought into the idea that the previous generation was there to be transcended. She came into the bar with her dad one evening. I watched them like a hawk, or some other especially sharp-eyed and observant creature, wondering what was going on. The next time she came in with friends I asked who the old guy was, and she told me. I told her about mine. It went from there.

We hung, we fell in love, we moved into a horrible apartment in Venice. Neither of us had any money, and I can honestly say that's the one time in my life when it really didn't matter. We were young and invincible, and we believed the money would come. In those days we didn't realize how scary money was, how it could capriciously grant and withhold its favors, how in the end it could hold you up against the wall in some dark alley and beat you to within an inch of your life. You walk around LA and you see them, the people who'd lost the fight: the fizzing and bewildered with their dry, mad hair, living out their angry lives in apartments with polystyrene tiles on the walls and the potential of blood in every room. We won, in the end, but it took a while and cost so much that I'll never know if it was worth it.

We got married on the spur of the moment: called my parents from the city hall. Our honeymoon was five days in Ensenada. We borrowed Deck's old Ford and clanked down the coast road in the dark, talked the people at Quitas Papagayo into letting us have a place dirt cheap because it was way out of season and they were empty. We ate fish tacos three meals a day for the rest of the week, spent the rest of our money on Pacificos and trinkets for each other. Helena bought me an ornamental box to keep my guitar picks in: I got her a turquoise bangle. We watched seabirds, walked dusty streets, and cooled our feet sitting on rocks down by the waterline. I scouted around for bits of wood and dried palms in the late afternoon, and at night we lay in front of the fire and listened to each other's breathing until it became the only sound that mattered.

It seems like such a long time ago now, part of someone else's life. Nothing is real until it's gone: Before that it's just shadows playing.

Life carried on. Gradually I got involved in things, illegal things. Working in a bar is a good place to start along that road, and we needed the money. I started helping people out, getting paid for it. I was big, not too stupid, trustworthy. There's always work for people like me, though usually not work with long-term prospects. Helena scrabbled in dull jobs, coming home more frustrated and bored every day. She was so much more single-minded than me, so tough and black-and-white, yet spending nine to five in a world of gray with people who seemed to speak another language.

I met more people, started climbing up the ladder, earning a little more money. We bought a tiny house, and we got a cat, whom we loved. That was the best time. We were just starting out, and we didn't know where we were going, but we knew we'd go there together. That sounds trite, but love is trite—and that's why we need it. Cliches are true. We need our archetypes, because without them life turns into a farm scene painted by an incompetent child, where you can't tell which animal is which and we're all just blobs that barely stand out from a background of indeterminate gray. Cooks should be jolly women with red faces who heft their cleavers in a slightly disquieting way, priests gray-haired men of Irish extraction who like a drink. When our food is cooked by young guys who think they're rock and roll stars, it turns to ashes in our mouths; and when our faith is brokered by middle-aged women in sensible shoes, it becomes nothing more than soul insurance. We combat life's randomness through the things you can say in one sentence, the things everyone understands. Love and death are lifelines, the ropes to hold on to in a choppy sea. Without them nothing makes sense.

One night Helena's parents were having dinner in the Happy Spatula, a once-a-month pasta treat. We often went with them, but that night we were at Deck's instead, bombed out of our minds. At ten-fifteen a car pulled up outside the Spatula, and two guys got out. They walked calmly into the cafe and shot five people dead. Helena's mother made it through to the next morning before dying, but her father was DOA. Helena had a hangover when she identified the bodies.

I had a gun. Helena took it, hunted down the two guys, and killed them. I came home from work to find her curled in a ball in our bathroom, sobbing and covered in blood. I burned her clothes, filed the serial number off the gun, and dismantled it. We drove over the city, throwing pieces out of the window. When we got home again, I locked all the doors and put her to bed and got in beside her.

She asked me if it made a difference, if I didn't love her anymore. I told her I was proud of her, and kissed her to sleep.

We spent two weeks bonded in fear, but the knock at the door never came.

A month later we went back to the Spatula. Helena wanted to prove she could go back to the cafe, and so we went. We ordered what we always had, and sat where we always sat. The service was much more attentive than usual, and at the end of the meal we were told the bill had been paid. As we sat drinking coffee, rather baffled, three men came to sit at the next table. They were very polite. They wanted to thank Helena for what she'd done: The three other fatalities in the restaurant had been made guys, hit by an up-and-coming gang. Helena's parents had merely been accidents. The three men knew it had been Helena who'd evened the score—someone saw her fleeing the scene. I watched Helena smile as the oldest of the men kissed her hand, and I knew everything was about to change.

They did us some favors. And they took some back, subtly holding the murders over Helena's head. They said they hoped the cops didn't find out it was she who did it, or—worse still— the other gang. It wasn't concern for our well-being. It wasn't even a threat. It was just Business. They manipulated her into killing someone else for them, and after that it was too late. It was all very courtly and friendly, but our lives weren't our own anymore. Like Laura Reynolds said, there are some situations you just can't walk away from. Dealing with the mob is one of them.

I killed for them, too, but only once. A couple of creeps who'd rape-murdered an associate's wife and child. I met up with them in a bar, on the pretense of wanting to make a big coke buy, led them to a back alley and shot both in the head. I lost it afterward, driving around with the gun in my hand and blood on my shirt, and nearly got caught.

Self-defense is one thing: Execution is another. I couldn't hack it. They didn't make me do it again. I lent the money they paid me to Deck on the condition he never gave it back. He went and deliberately lost it in a casino in Vegas, so it went straight back to them and I could pretend I never had it. Deck understands me very well.