The Chinese Beverly Hills (7 page)

She tried to imagine what sort of woman would be attracted to this abomination. He offered her his canteen—was it a bad joke?—and she shook her head. The muscles in his neck rippled as he threw his head back to drink, and she tried to remember it all for later. The
New Yorker
had no idea quite what they would be getting in her piece on the Border Guardians.

He’d sauntered over to his castor beans. She registered the cockiness, the brutal angular voice, the sheer physical beef of him. He was the sort of tempest force that young girls imagined they’d fancy sweeping over them—until one actually showed up. Someone threw an old sack over the dead dog.

He sauntered back. “I think your anger says I interest you.”

“My anger says nothing. I’m always angry. I’m assigned to write about you.”

Why had she said that? She turned to walk back to her room, and froze in place when she heard Hardi Boaz speak in a soft lilt in Afrikaans.

“What did you say?”

“An old expression. ‘It is not the loudest moo that makes the most milk.’”

“Go to hell.” She took three steps and stopped, remembering the spider in her room. “Do you know a hairy brown spider around here about this big?” she asked, turning back and making a big O with her fingers.

“Does it like bathrooms?” he asked.

She nodded.

“The hermit spider. Almost all of them are Communists.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Very.”

“How can I kill it?”

He was backlit by the bright sunlight and it was hard to make out his face.

“You need an experienced killer.” He came toward her.

“I was asking for advice, not help.”

“Don’t insult me. If I need some good English words, I come to you. When you need a killing, you come to me.” He walked past and finally she fell in behind him. “This is the bonus that life gives you out on the frontier: you have a killer on duty.”

“Not everyone would consider it a bonus.”

“Let us track down this hermit spider and teach him the meaning of fear.”

He walked with a slight bandy-legged roll, the rifle in one hand like a long piece of fruit. Simian, she thought, still taking mental notes. That might be too obvious.

Hardi Boaz wrenched open the door. “Freeze, motherfucker!” he shouted.

Everyone knew American films, she thought. She waited behind, scanning the threadbare carpet.

“Ah, the room smells of you,” he said happily. With the barrel of his rifle, he disturbed the bath towel on the floor, prodded and lifted it. She wished she had sent him away. Having him prowl her room made her feel exposed and helpless. Her notes were on the table beside the coffee jug, her suitcase open on the bed with a black brassiere and black panties beside it, which reminded her that she was not wearing either.

He opened the bathroom door. “You’re in the deep shit, my little spider.
Kom, liefling
.”

While he was out of sight, she flipped a corner of the bedspread over her underwear.

“
Een twie drie
. Come out, little comrade. Your pals have betrayed you.”

Eventually Hardi Boaz came back into the main room like a predator. Hair was his motif, she decided. Even his knees were hairy above the rolled socks, and more hair spilled out the neck of his safari shirt to give her the willies. He passed close to her, his presence pushing her back like the bow wave of a tugboat.

“I think the little
kak
has escaped.”

The voice was terribly close behind her, a swelling imminence.

“But you have not, my lovely friend,” he whispered.

She gasped and her vision went pink. His voice had been very soft and close and now two powerful fingers held her neck. Another sound escaped her throat when his roughened fingers flexed slightly on her neck, immensely strong. She was near fainting. Blood thundered in her ears.

“Someday you must watch the lion mount his mate.” The voice was very near her ear. “He comes from behind with great purpose and takes the neck hard to convince her to stay still.”

She couldn’t make sense of what the voice was saying, so calm and insistent. Tears started in her eyes. Her right knee shook violently.

“Stop it!” she insisted.

“Why?”

“
Stop
.”

“All right.”

The pressure vanished from her neck. She clamped her burning eyes shut.

“I am on duty now. I will come back later, sweetling, to make love not war.”

She could hear the small rattles of his rifle as he walked away.

“By the way, missy, the hermit spider is harmless.”

When he had gone, a shuddering took her uncontrollably. Megan remembered her first story assignment for
Mademoiselle
, and the way the editor had praised her writing, how promising her future had seemed back then. It wasn’t that it hadn’t panned out, it’s just that it had never gone anywhere that made her happy. She sat on the bed and wept with abandon.

*

“Stop!” Gustav Reik barked as he entered the big room.

His executive assistant, Bernadette Crouch, was writing with a squeaky felt pen on the whiteboard. She knew he couldn’t stand that sound.

The homely woman with short red hair went right on writing.

“Hope you were happy with that useful idiot with the safari suit.”

“What an odd clown,” Gustav Reik said. “What did you think of him?”

“You don’t care what I think. He’s so primal he’s probably a great lay.”

“So am I.”

“No, you’re not.”

The header on the whiteboard was
Freedom at Risk.
And the day’s lectures for the gathering, with times and speakers:

•  
The Myth of Climate Change

•  
How Taxes Kill Jobs

•  
Defunding Regulations

•  
Speak Money to Power

“That’s enough for now, Bern. Have you got the monthly audit?”

“It’s on the piano.” She gestured.

“It’s not a
piano
,” he said grumpily. It was a priceless Sabathil clavichord that his mother Wilhelmina had played every day of their enforced stays at what their father had called “the farm.”

“Saxophone, then. I’m not musical.”

“No, but you’re hot as a pistol, as usual.”

“How’s your wife, G?” she said with an edge.

He decided to take the question literally, not as a
bug off
. “She’s very busy with the ballet board that I bought her.”

“You can afford it, you big libertarian cracker.
Forbes
says you’re number four now after Warren Buffet.”

He smiled to himself, opening the monthly accounting. “
Forbes
doesn’t have a clue about the Bank of the Cayman Islands and several other places.”

“La-la-la-la-la.”

She had her fingers in her ears.

“What’s all that?”

“Please. What I don’t know, Gus-boy, can’t hurt you.”

“What you
do
know can’t hurt me either, my fine sex object. I can arrange an underground nap in the New Jersey pine barrens for anyone.”

He saw her puzzled expression, indicating she was not quite sure how serious he was, and he liked that.

*

“Nurse, is this the way to room 441?”

The short, dark woman, encumbered with an armload of linens, pitched her neck forcefully toward a side hallway. “Don’t give up hope.”

“Thanks so much.”

Walt Roski made his way along the corridor of San Pedro’s Little Company of Mary Hospital. Tony Piscatelli’s wife had insisted on moving him here, only a few blocks from her sister’s home where she could stay. The San Pedro hospital had no burn unit, but they made do.

He knocked once on the wooden door and walked in. There were two beds in the pie-shaped room, which was against the recent American fashion for making all hospital rooms private. On the far bed, near the window, a figure was rising up under the covers and groaning, then falling flat, over and over.

“Piscatelli?”

“Over here.” The near bed, a dim figure lying on his side facing the door. The bed burred noisily all at once and pumped itself up to lift the man’s body.

Shit, Roski thought. So much for thinking the man was pretty much okay. “Can I turn on some light?”

“Use the local one. This doohickey. My roommate doesn’t like light.”

A spotlight came on overhead, pooling on Piscatelli’s face and chest. He was propped up on his side with pillows.

A groan, then another, from across the room. This was going to be a lot of fun.

“How you doing?” Roski asked.

“As well as can be expected, sir—etc., etc.” The mattress, pumping and hissing softly, seemed to tilt the man a bit further onto his back. “It’s like living on a tilt-a-whirl. But without the cotton candy.”

“That could be arranged,” Roski offered.

Piscatelli seemed to drift for a moment. “You’re Arson, right?”

“Captain Walter Roski, County Fire. I won’t offer my hand. They told me to stay back three feet.”

“Infections and all that. I just had my cocktail of antibiotics and morphine, so I’m ready to talk. I’m actually floating a bit.”

Roski checked his notebook. “I’ll go right to it. Was your partner religious, Mr. Piscatelli?”

“Routt was about as devout as a chair.”

“Are you religious?”

“Yes, sir. Very much so. I’m a deacon of the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Vallejo. I was praying hard for both of us when the firestorm hit.”

“Do you have any idea why your partner would have a Catholic rosary with him in the fire shelter?”

A long pause. “Jerry Routt may have believed something, deep down, but he certainly wasn’t Catholic. I’ve known him for ten years.”

Walt Roski basically disliked religion. He’d arrested more than one young matcher over the years who swore that his beliefs required him to scourge the world with fire.

“Can you think of any reason your partner would be carrying a rosary? Maybe a new girlfriend gave it to him? We think it was made of amber beads and the heat ignited it.”

Piscatelli seemed to be trying hard to reclaim a memory from the abyss, but the sensation passed. “Honestly, sir, no. If something comes to me, you’ll be the first to know.”

Roski asked the rest of the questions from his notebook without eliciting anything useful, and then left his card on the far side of the bed table.

“My card is right there. Don’t touch it, it’s full of my germs, but you can have the nurse read my phone number if you think of anything. I’ll be in touch.”

“Thank you, Captain. God bless.”

“I can always use a blessing.” Particularly since he was about to be read the riot act by his chief, probably with a note in his file, for once again feuding with the Feds.

*

Megan watched the man from a county animal welfare truck scrape up the remains of the dog. What an alien place, she thought. The heart of my darkness.

She was having trouble resisting the tug of the vodka bottle across the room. She turned on the radio, but the only thing she could get was Mexican rancheras or American country music. She wondered if she had grown any less intolerant of cowboy culture.

She listened to a male voice keening about a manly trucker carrying steel to Texas, and she wondered if the driver would be any less manly driving Tampax to Delaware. It was exactly the kind of unexamined American lying that always left her cross.

It was growing accustomed to your unhappiness that made you so self-absorbed, she thought. After us, the savage god—she’d read the phrase somewhere and it resonated.

Tony Piscatelli could tell that the morphine was wearing off, and he was starting to feel the gnaw of medium-well-done soft tissue along his shoulders, but he resisted pushing the button on the nurse call. He was in a lucid time, and he wanted to stay in it. It was difficult to think productively against the pain—especially with his roommate groaning and humping away—but if he opiated again, his consciousness would become a vapor. He repeated a short prayer in his head, starting with an entreaty for the unknown groaning roommate. The nurse had told him it had been a motorcycle crash, and his roommate was only about nineteen. The age when everyone knew they were invulnerable.

Piscatelli recalled a visit from some arson desk guy, but didn’t remember his name. Something about Jerry Routt and a rosary. Probably a morphine dream. Routt was about as likely to carry a rosary as a lava lamp. The man had once laughed out loud when Piscatelli told him about Martin Luther’s big moment of crisis, throwing his inkwell at the devil.

“Dude,” Routt had said. “I
know
that’s not true. Europeans can’t throw. They can only kick.”

Yet something about the dream visit from the arson guy held him. Lying on his stomach, he did a few slow pushups before the airbed could start whirring and fussing with him again. He saw the arson guy’s business card on the nightstand, so it was real. Something inside you is trying to get out, Deacon Piscatelli.

“Tony, look at this!” Was that Routt? Frustrating maybe memories. The fire had been about to flame over. He’d just started getting worried, but Routt had yelled at him to come back. That was so like Routt, fastening on second things first. But he’d stepped back and they’d both seen something there on the ground. What?

Pain swept through him, and he thumbed the red button, then again, harder. Nurse, come now! Oh, Sweet Jesus,
now
. Our Father, who art in Heaven…

*

Ellen Chen, short blue hair and all, walked with intense self-absorption off the L.A. State campus into the empty parkland across Paseo Rancho Castilla. Spanish Ranch Walk. Another example of Southern California naming nonsense. The future, when it finally came, would be without such nationalist nonsense. Reason would rule, she thought.

Sabine hadn’t phoned or texted in ten days now. That was their agreed definition of a political emergency. She sat to look out over much of the San Gabriel Valley below. Home.

She and Sabine were the last of the Orange Berets—the two musketeers, she thought sadly—pledged to fight for immigrant solidarity, human rights, not to mention the Revolution. Rah, rah.