Among the Living (70 page)

Whitehead moved among the crowd.

Steadman and his crew.

Jimmy thought he saw Hesse.

He saw Sexy Sadie and Polythene Pam, but just a glimpse, not even enough to tell if they were with the Sailors or in among the last of the escaping Norms.

He’d see them again.

He jumped onto the top of a Dumpster to see over the heads of the others, looking for Angel. In seconds, dozens of Sailors gathered around him. He knew some of them. L.A. Sailors. Some good, some bad. A kid named Drew he’d taken off the streets himself two years back, a nurse, an L.A. cop in street clothes. S.F. Sailors. Two of the women from the Yards, who’d been at the long table. Eighties Girl
.
There was Angelina, the first-night Columbus Street bartender who he’d wanted to go home and curl up with after seeing the suicides on the docks, who gave him the glass of Chianti from his secret admirer. So she was a Sailor.

But the rest of them were strangers to him.

Jimmy heard his name. Then he heard his name repeated, passed from one Sailor to another, from one to the others around him, and others drawing in. A whisper at first, then openly. He’d never heard his name repeated by a crowd. Who had?

The kid Drew raised his hand to wave.

Jimmy jumped down and tried to get away from it. They only pressed in closer. It started to rain. Soft, steady. Nobody seemed to notice. Jimmy only managed to move another few feet.

Suddenly the kid Drew was pushed up against him.

“Hey, bud.”

“Hey,” Jimmy said.

“How ya been?”

“I’m looking for Angel.”

“Haven’t seen him,” Drew said. “He’s here?”

“Somewhere. Why are you even here?”

“I don’t know,” the kid said and smiled about it. “I just went with everybody else. The bus up was a trip.”

“Be careful,” Jimmy said.

“Dude, what’s the light about? Up there.”

Through the rain, the violet light on one of the city hills was still burning. Steady, iconic, cloud-piercing.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

“It’s
Russian
Hill,” a man beside Drew said.

“What does that mean?” Drew said.

The man put a hand on the kid’s shoulder and started talking to him, leading him away, putting the word on him.
Some
word. Jimmy tried to move, but a new set had discovered him, crowding in, crowding him, whoever they thought he was. With the soft rain, now it felt like a rock concert, without the music, without the mud. With what was already in the air, more Altamont than Woodstock.

A hand seized him by the wrist. Jimmy looked down. A silver hand.

He found the face. Under the silver top hat.

“She’s over here,” Machine Shop said.

Shop pushed and shoved, cleared a path, like a bodyguard. Now the crowd really had something to look at.

Jimmy and Shop made it to a place between two dockside buildings, a space that seemed to be guarded by two or three of Jeremy’s crew. They stepped aside when they saw Machine Shop coming and Jimmy behind him.

“I saw him over in here about ten minutes ago,” Machine Shop said.

“You said
she
.”

“No, I said he.”

“Who?”

“Angel,”
Shop said. “That’s who you’re looking for, right?” The rain was beading down his face and hands, off his painted skin, huge rolling drops of it. He looked like he was sweating like a runner, or crying great tears. “I maybe saw those girls, too,” he said. “The ones from last night, who hold hands.” It sounded suspicious. It sounded too much like,
Whatever you want, I got it.
Something, or someone, had gotten to Shop. Gone was the verbal tic that characterized him, the self-correction. Everything he said tonight he said once and stuck by it. He was on message. It felt wrong.

“What’s the matter with you?” Jimmy said. “You’re acting like you’re high.”

“I haven’t been high since 1976. Gerald Ford.”

“So where’s Angel? Did you talk to him?”

“He said everything was cool. He was looking for you. To tell you. You stay here; I’ll go get him and bring him here.”

This was beginning to feel like a trap.

“Go back to work, man,” Jimmy said, shaking his head.

He’d had enough. He started toward the wall of people on the other side of Jeremy’s boys, disappeared into it.

Behind him, Machine Shop said, “Yeah, you’re right, I got to get back over to Pier 41.”

Jimmy was finished with the Wharf, but it wasn’t finished with him. As he pushed his way through the edgy throng, he caught sight again of Sadie and Pam.

One and one, on a bench, on either side of a woman who looked like she needed a couple of friends.

On either side of Mary.

Jimmy tried to get through the sea of Sailors, but they seemed to have something else in mind for him, and he was taken away by it and lost sight of Mary and the women, forced to watch the three of them get smaller and smaller, like the victims of a shipwreck drifting away.

And, in the end, the ocean spat him out elsewhere.

He walked back up to Battery Street. He got in the Porsche and fired it up. He didn’t know where he was going.

He didn’t get
any
where.

A black Bentley Arnage rolled out of an alley to block his path.

Groner had only gotten a Lincoln Town Car when they came for him.

It was another house that looked black, but it was probably just the rain. It was large, four stories, a blockish gingerbread Victorian but done in dark colors, greens and browns and black, with gold edging where it counted. A slate roof.

It was a man’s house, you could see from the curb.

The Bentley waited in the stub of a driveway. Jimmy looked out the rain-streaked window at the Goth house. All that was missing were bolts of lightning. Maybe he was supposed to get out. Nobody had said the first word to him. Or to each other. There was a driver and the best-looking muscle Jimmy had ever seen.

A garage door opened on its own, and the house swallowed the Bentley.

The elevator was an ornate cage, black and gold wrought iron. And small. And slow. They’d deposited Jimmy in it and stepped back. It felt a little like carrying out a sentence.

Another man in another black suit was waiting at the other end, with his hands folded in front of him like a funeral director. He made Jimmy remember the woman from Graceful Exits in the ninety-year-old chorus girl’s living room.

The room had the same air of the dead to it.

The attendant stepped away into nothing.

Jimmy was worried about Mary, adrift out there, but was afraid to give himself over to it.

“I know that light switch is around here someplace,” he said.

There was a rough laugh from the deeper darkness across the room.

“You’re young,” a voice said.

“Only here,” Jimmy said. “Everywhere else, I’m old. When I’m around kids, I correct their grammar.”

Jimmy had come in out of a dark, rainy night, physically and emotionally, but it was darker still here. His eyes began to adjust from what, in retrospect, was the blinding brilliance of the elevator. There were a few candles. On tables. They had a scent he’d never caught before, the best candles in the world, from some country Jimmy guessed he’d never visit.

He began to make out the man’s shape. The face came last. He was in a wheelchair, a wood and wicker chair. He was a bigger man than his voice suggested. And he’d been even bigger before. A diminished man. Chest sunken, arms gone thin. A man from
then
.

The room began to establish itself. It was large, what once was called a drawing room. There were boxed beams on the ceiling. The floors were dark wood and uncovered. There wasn’t much furniture, so the chair could roll without obstructions. There was a large picture window, but the man wasn’t beside it. The window was uncovered. There was the waterfront far below, a grid of lights looking like a bed of embers.

Mary was down there somewhere. The other night, down at the Yards, that roomful of women had reminded him of the women he’d known. There was something else about the women in his life: He’d thought he was rescuing each one, one way or another. It was what he did, or tried to do. Save them. More than a few of them threw it in his face on their way out the door.

Now Jimmy could see the man. His hair was white. And full. His head was tipped back against the headrest, until he realized Jimmy was looking at him. He was dressed in dark silk, a jacket or robe. His legs were uncrossed. His feet were bare. His leathery hands were out to the ends of the armrests, as if the chair was a throne. He wore a ring with a red stone. The ring seemed loose enough to fall off.

“Who’s next?” Jimmy said. To break the ice.

“That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it?” the man said. “Do you understand the particulars of the process?”

“I don’t even understand what you just said.”

“Step closer. I’m having some diffic ulty getting a sense of you,” the man said. He took several breaths. Labored. But then seemed to find himself again. “I don’t automatically assume that’s a bad thing.”

Jimmy stayed where he was. “I’ve got things I could be doing. Why am I here? Why did you have me brought here?”

“You don’t know.”

“I don’t know.”

“Mene, mene, tekel, uparsin,”
the man said. Under the circumstances, with this stagecraft, with the rain running down the outside of the picture window like anointing oil, it was a bit chilling.

Jimmy said, “ ‘You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. ’ Daniel interpreting the words that appeared on King Belshazzar’s palace walls.”

The man seemed impressed. “Are you a Jew?”

“No. My parents were both in the movie business, if that counts.”

“A Christian?”

“No. So somebody has found me wanting? Is that why I’m here? Who? Found wanting for what?”

“Actually I was talking to myself, about myself,” the man said. He hesitated for another couple of rough breaths, to force a little more oxygen into the blood. “The three words were
three
messages.
Mene.
God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.
Tekel.
You have been weighed on the scales and been found wanting.
Uparsin.
Your kingdom is divided and given to your enemies.”

Before the man spoke again, he waited almost a full minute, long enough for Jimmy to hear a clock ticking somewhere.

“So,” the other said, “you see it
is
about me. Though I stopped believing in God a hundred years ago. Took from him his uppercase
G
. Corrected
his
grammar, you might say. Come closer, boy. Young Mr. Miles.”

“Who are your enemies?” Jimmy said. “Wayne Whitehead? Red Steadman? Hesse? Marc Hesse?”

“Who?”

“Who else then? The Lady? Who’s next?”

“Soon enough it will be beyond me. All that is certain is that this kingdom will outlive me. And
someone
will be king.” He shifted in his chair, uneasy, restless. “Come closer, I still can’t see you. My eyes . . . Everything is going away. What can I say about you if I can’t even see you, son?”

“So is that what the business down at the Wharf was about, people looking at me as if I was somebody?”

The man took the question as rhetorical.

“I’m not up for your job,” Jimmy said. “It’s a joke somebody’s playing. I’m not built for it. I don’t lead, I don’t follow.”

The man reached down and unlatched the brake on the chair.

“Take me over to the window,” he said.

Jimmy stepped behind him and wheeled him twenty feet across the room to the window. A refle ction of the two of them rolled out of the night sky to meet them.

“Help me stand, James.”

There was rustling in the wings. The attendant had never left.