Rubicon Beach (6 page)

I kept the poems in the tower with my hoarded documents of murders. I was constructing my own house of conscience with the transgressions of conscience on exhibit. I found myself poring over the verses for days and nights trying to break their code. There was another week or ten days of this snowy fog; the tide was up and the city became a cluster of dark lighthouses amid moats and rivers. About five in the evening a red mist came pouring out of the sun beneath the clouds. It got so you could set your clock by the moment the sun dipped beneath the clouds and the red mist poured out of it. I talked to a boatman one evening about navigating the lagoon; I’d been watching the Hancock Park mansions out there, their doors caught in the bare black trees and the ocean snarling around them. If there was a beautiful woman with black hair to be found in Los Angeles, she was out in the mansions with the other beautiful women. Can’t take you out in this fog, mister, the boatman said carefully. But he shot me a look while coiling a rope in his hands, and the look said not everything in this town was run by Wade and the feds, including guys who sold you boxes of music and guys who took you out in boats. The mansions in the distance turned to stars as the sun went down. I slipped the boatman some money and a look of my own that meant This conversation has been strictly between us.

I left him. I made my way through the high reeds that blew back and forth between the remains of two stone pyramids, rumored to have been buiIt by Chinese barons back before the marshes shifted. They gleamed a tarnished gold in the sun, and in all the gaping holes pocked by the sea burned the fires of nomads. I headed for this bar I knew over on Main Street. By the time I got there it was dark and a few of the streetlights were on. Old boxes blew up and down the sidewalks, and scurrying across my path were what I took to be huge rats until I saw the eyes of men looking out at me from under their black coats. I had come to this bar a couple of times before; it had a red door with no knob and a window smeared with siIt. The counter inside had a total of four different brown unlabeled bottles. There was no point being very particular about what was served to you in this bar. I wouldn’t have come back after the first time except for an old man who sat at the end of the bar talking to himself. The bartender called him Raymond. Though Raymond may or may not have cared that anyone listened to him, there were always three or four who did, and it was never the same three or four. The bartender explained Raymond sailed in from the desert every day to sit in this bar and talk to himself. More interesting was the barter1der’s claim that Raymond actually used to work in the Downtown library. I have no idea whether or not this was true. I have no idea whether the bartender knew who I was when he told me this. But I tried to imagine Raymond living and sleeping in the tower where I now lived and slept. Raymond looked to me about seventy or eighty years old but I knew from firsthand experience this meant nothing; like the buildings in this city there was no telling how ancient he really was. Raymond talked of the early days. He was a walking history of the town with the chapters out of order; but it wasn’t Raymond who had the chapters out of order, it was the town itself. I sat in the bar and listened to him tell of when the Asians first settled the blank little islands of Los Angeles: Chinese warlords with palaces in the Hollywood moors who rode the plains all the way to Nevada and clashed with the huns and samurai who lived in the caves along the coast where wild children now banded in tribes. A barbaric context, Raymond rumbled to himself at the bar, but at least it was a context, until the Portuguese gamblers brought in their South American slave girls. And now there’s no context at all.

I left the bar and wandered a while, waiting for someone with some sort of official responsibility to pick me up. After half an hour I realized I’d walked to the underground grotto where I had talked to Wade and seen the woman with the camera. There I overheard sailors murmuring about a score that night in Downey. I didn’t expect to see Wade. I didn’t expect to see the woman with the camera either, but she was at the same table as before. The bartender watched me casually. I looked around and sat at another table with my eye on the other side of the room. A few people straggled in and out, and after about five minutes I got up and went over to her. Like the first time I’d seen her here, she was fooling very intently with the camera. Sitting in the ashtray on the table next to her was a cigarette and two or three burned butts. The smoke smelled like Sonoran hemp, but when she looked up at me she didn’t appear narcotized; the distracted look in her eyes was something else. She also had three glasses sitting in front of her, all of them empty; she seemed just as impervious to the liquor. There was a pause in the way she looked at me. It seemed a long time—fie or ten seconds—after I said hello that she reacted, and then she gave me the same smile she gave the others; it was goofy, which was interesting because she didn’t have a goofy face. It was a sculpted face, high cheeks and eyes far apart except thinking about it now maybe her mouth was just a little off-center and that was what made it odd. At any rate the effect of the smile was calculated to be both pleasant and unpromising, and she used it with success. It got her many drinks and no trouble.

I didn’t offer to buy her a drink. I’d given the boatman out by the lagoon too much money and now I was short. I told her my name and she smiled again in a way that said she already knew it or that it didn’t matter. Her own name was Janet Dart or Dash or Dot; Wade would tell me later. Come here often? I asked. She laughed; it looked like I was putting the make on her. I decided I should say something that would change that. “Are you a cop?”

She looked down at the camera and then back up, sort of surprised. “No,” she said.

“But you were over at the library, the night of the murder.”

“Was it murder,” she said, “I didn’t hear anything about a murder.” She looked at me cautiously. I hoped she wouldn’t say something like What did you say your name was again?

“But you were there at the library.”

“I was taking some pictures.” She picked up the hemp and took a drag.

“Been in Los Angeles long?” I said.

“No.” She looked at me evenly; she was remarkably composed for all the dope and liquor and questions. “I got here not long after you did,” she said. That was when I knew she knew who I was, and she knew I knew it.

“Where you from?” She still looked at me evenly and didn’t answer. “Did you come to take pictures?”

She thought about it. She wanted to be precise in her answer. “I don’t go anywhere,” she explained slowly, “with the primary purpose of taking pictures. The primary purpose is always different. But everywhere I go, taking pictures is the secondary purpose. Which makes it the thing all places have in common for me.” She smoked some more hemp. She picked up the most recent glass and stared into the bottom of it as though something might be there that wasn’t easily visible to the naked eye. She put the glass down and glanced at me wondering if I was going to buy her a drink. I bought her a drink with the rest of my money. “Aren’t you going to have one?” she said.

“No.”

“I don’t like that.”

“We’ll share this one.”

“I don’t like that either,” she said, but we did share it when it came, at least for a while; then it became her drink.

“I’m looking for someone,” she finally said after it had been her drink for a while.

“Yes?”

“Yes,” she said. The camera sat in her lap and for the first time she seemed completely unaware of it.

“Are we getting to the primary purpose now?”

“Yes,” she said, “we’re getting to the primary purpose now. Do you know where he is?”

“Who?” I said, surprised.

“Who I’m looking for.”

“Who are you looking for?”

She didn’t believe me in the least. “You don’t know?”

“No.”

“He hasn’t made contact with you?” And then she thought a moment and answered her own question, in a mumble, “No, perhaps he wouldn’t have,” and finished the drink.

“Who is it?” I said.

“Why don’t you tell me who you’re looking for?”

“Did I say I was looking for someone?”

She shrugged. “My mistake.”

I shook my head. I said, “Actually, I am looking for someone.”

“I know,” she said. “I saw her.”

“What?”

“I said I saw her.”

I adjusted myself in the chair and put both my hands flat, palms down, on the table. I must have sat there with my mouth open for half a minute. “You saw her?”

“That night,” Janet Dart or Dash said calmly. “I was by the library and she was in the door, or it was more on the steps I guess. Right there outside the library. I remember the light of the library behind her, so the door must have been open.

“I don’t think,” I slowly shook my head, “we can be talking about the same—”

“Oh hell,” she said suddenly in exasperation. “I’m talking about the dark girl, she looked like she was from one of the southern annexes. Maybe South America. Brown skin and black hair and she had a light-brown dress and no shoes. There was something all over her and I thought it was mud, but later of course I realized it was the blood. She had something in her hand that was hard and bloody too. You know we mean the same person.”

“You got it from the police report,” I said, but I knew there was something wrong with that: the light-brown dress and no shoes, I hadn’t told the police that because I’d seen her in a dress that had no color and, incredibly, I hadn’t noticed the shoes or no shoes. Except now in my mind I saw her on the beach and then I saw her in the back room of the archives and I still wasn’t sure about the color of the dress, but there was no doubt about the shoes. In my mind she was plainly barefooted now. How could I have not noticed that before? So the police couldn’t have known about it unless they knew about her all along; this might, I suddenly thought, be part of a plan to keep me unhinged. “You’re in with the feds on this,” I said to the woman across the table. “It’s part of a plan to keep me unhinged.” She looked at me as if I were already unhinged. “There is no such woman,” I said, but I didn’t believe that either. It didn’t go with the look on Wade’s face that night in the archives. It didn’t go with all the blood.

“All right,” she just said.

“What happened when you saw her on the steps of the library?” I said.

“She went back in.”

“Back in the library?”

“I think I frightened her. I think the camera frightened her.”

“The camera?”

“When I took her picture.”

I stood up from the table. “You took her picture?” I said.

“Perhaps it’s Indian superstition, about cameras. Are lndians superstitious about cameras?”

I came around the table and stood in front of her chair. “You took her picture?” It must have appeared a little threatening; she looked around the room and l looked too, and there were guys watching us as though they thought I was about to get out of hand. She smiled and said to me, with her eyes still on the other men, “I think you should sit down.”

After a moment I said, “Do you have this picture?”

“Yes.” She put out the hemp in the ashtray.

“With you now?”

“It’s with my other pictures. You know I wish you hadn’t pointed me out to the cops like that, the way you did that night. I’d just as soon stay clear of them.”

“Why?”

“Because I have somebody to find too and I don’t think I can with cops everywhere.”

“What were you doing there if you didn’t want to be around cops?”

She paused a moment and said, “To be honest with you, I thought something had happened. When I saw the girl come out of the library and she was all a mess like that. I thought something had happened to you.”

“So you knew who I was and that I was working in the library.”

“Yes I knew that.”

“You knew who I was the last time I was here in the grotto.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“You want to tell me what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean how you know me and why you know me and why what I do and what happens to me is important to you.”

“What did you say your name was again?”

“It’s too late for that line.”

“I should have used it before,” she agreed.

“Or not at all.”

“Would you like to see the picture?”

“Would you like to tell me what’s going on?”

“No. Would you like to see the picture?”

We left the grotto together. The other guys in the bar hadn’t stopped looking at me. Up above ground she was transfixed by the sound of the buildings; it stopped her in her tracks a moment as if it reminded her of something. Is it the same, she said to me, it’s the same isn’t it. What’s that, l said. The sound, if hasn’t changed has it? she said. No it hasn’t changed, I said, and I hope it doesn’t either. It takes me a long time to get used to it every time it changes, and every time it changes the sound gets worse. I don’t agree, she said. She said, I wish it would change every single day. l wish it would change every single minute.

We went to where she lived. It wasn’t far from the canals but in the direction of the library and the center of town. This was the former industrial section of Los Angeles; the buildings were lined up like bunkers, gray and windowless except for skylights near the roof some thirty feet off the ground. Janet Dart or Dash was living in an old warehouse where the merchants of Little Tokyo used to keep rice and fish that came into the harbors. The bulb in the warehouse doorway was the only light on the street; we could see it from three blocks away. Janet Dart or Dash had a possibly important key that, at the very least, opened up the warehouse; when we stepped inside and the door slammed locked behind us, I was for a moment back in Bell. The feeling didn’t change as we went up the stairs, and it didn’t change when she unlocked another door and it slammed behind us too. Then there was a long hall with no windows she led me down, and it turned left and went about ten or fifteen yards to another door, and through that we turned left again and zigzagged right. By this time I had no idea which direction was which, and that feIt like Bell too. She unlocked another door and it could as easily have led us into another hall; but here was where she lived.