And Other Stories (14 page)

But those who lived dug channels
for your past,

Made art of you,

And art makes sense.

So crude despair or drunk mischance
gave place

To murder: thundering vengeance
come at last.

That’s an end that makes a
tale;

That’s a villain makes a
hero.

The point of all your restless,
angry life

Was that it ended. Choice, chance,
or retribution:

How would you have lived, knowing
your dead man’s fame?

A final joke: the boomtown
survived.

It breathes now as a place you’d
not have lived in,

But dead, you are a model
citizen,

Necessary, as all coins have two
sides.

To those who want forever for their
names

You say, “Choose big enemies, and
hope for bigger lies.

Then sit down by the
road.”

You were dead. But not for
long.

De la
Tierra

Emma Bull

The piano player drums away with
her left hand, dropping all five fingers onto the keys as if they
weigh too much for her to hold up. The rhythms bounce off the
rhythms of what her right hand does, what she sings. It’s like
there’s three different people in that little skinny body, one
running each hand, the third one singing. But they all know what
they’re doing.

He sucks a narrow stream of Patrón
over his tongue and lets it heat up his mouth before he swallows.
He wishes he knew how to play an instrument. He wouldn’t mind going
up at the break, asking if he could sit in, holding up a saxophone
case, maybe, or a clarinet. He’d still be here at 3 a.m., jamming,
while the waiters mopped the floors.

That would be a good place to be at
3 a.m. Much better than rolling up the rug, burning the gloves,
dropping the knife over the bridge rail. Figuratively
speaking.

They aren’t that unalike, she and
he. He has a few people in his body, too, and they also know what
they’re doing.

The difference is, his have
names.

“¿Algo mas?
” The wide-faced
waitress sounds Salvadoran. She looks too young to be let into a
bar, let alone make half a bill a night in tips. She probably sends
it all home to
mami
. The idea annoys him. Being
annoyed annoys him, too. No skin off his nose if she’s not blowing
it at the mall.

He
actually
is
too young to legally swallow this liquor in a
public place, but of course he’s never carded. A month and a half
and he’ll be twenty-one. Somebody ought to throw a party.
“
Nada.
Grácias.
”

She smiles at him. “Where you from?
Chihuahua?”

“Burbank.” Why does
she care where he’s from? He shouldn’t have answered in
Spanish.

“No, your
people—where they from? My best friend’s from Chihuahua. You look
kinda like her brother.”

“Then he looks like
an American.”

She actually seems hurt. “But
everybody’s from someplace.”

Does she mean “everybody,” or
“everybody who’s brown like us?” “Yep. Welcome to Los
Angeles.”

He and the tequila bid each other
goodbye, like a hug with a friend at the airport. Then he pushes
the glass at the waitress. She smacks it down on her tray and heads
for the bar. There, even the luggage disappears from sight. He rubs
the bridge of his nose.

Positive contact
, Chisme answers
from above his right ear. Chisme is female and throaty, for him,
anyway.
All numbers optimal
to high optimal. Operation initialized.

He lays a ten on the table and pins
the corner down with the candle jar. He wishes it were a twenty,
for the sake of the Salvadoran economy. But big tippers are
memorable. He stands up and heads for the door.

Behind him he hears the piano
player sweep the keys, low to high, and it hits his nerves like a
scream. He almost turns—

Adrenal limiter enabled.
Suppression under external control.

Just like everything else about
him. All’s right with the world. He breathes deep and steps out
into the streetlights and the smell of burnt oil.

The bar’s in Koreatown. The target
is in downtown L.A. proper, in the jewelry district. Always start
at least five miles from the target, in case someone remembers the
unmemorable. Show respect for the locals, even if they’re not
likely to believe you exist.

He steps into
the shadow that separates two neon window signs and slips between,
fastlanes. He’s down at Hill and Broadway in five minutes. He rubs
the bridge of his nose again.
Three percent discharge
, says
Chisme. After three years he can tell by the way it feels, but it’s
reflex to check.

The downtown air is oven-hot, dry
and still, even at this hour, and the storm drains smell. They’ll
keep that up until the rains come and wash them clean months from
now. He turns the corner and stops before the building he
wants.

There’s a jewelry store on the
first floor. Security grills lattice the windows, and the light
shines down on satin-upholstered stands with nothing on them.
Painted on the inside of the glass is, “Gold Mart/Best prices
on/Gold/Platinum/Chains & Rings.” Straight up, below the fifth
floor windows, there’s a faded sign in block letters: “Eisenberg
& Sons”.

Time to call another of the names.
He massages his right palm with his left thumb.

Magellan responds. Not with words,
because words aren’t what Magellan does. Against the darkness at
the back of the store white lines form, like a scratchboard
drawing. He knows they’re not really inside the store, but his eye
doesn’t give a damn. The pictures show up wherever he’s looking.
This one is a cutaway of the building: the stairwell up the left
side, the landings, the hallways on each floor. And the target,
like a big lens flare...at the front of the fourth
floor.

They’re always
on the
top
floor. Always. He focuses on the fifth floor of the diagram
and massages his hand again. The zoom-in is so fast he
staggers.
Vertical axis
restored
, Chisme
murmurs.

The fifth floor seems to be all
storage; the white lines draw wire-frame cartons and a few pieces
of broken furniture in the rooms.

Not right, not
right. Top floor makes for a faster getaway, better protection from
the likes of him. Ignoring strategy can only mean that the strategy
has changed. He probes his upper left molar with his tongue, and
Biblio’s sexless whisper, like sand across rock, says,
Refreshing agent logs. Information
updated at oh-two-oh-three.

Fifteen minutes
ago is good enough. He thinks through the logs, looking for
surprises, new behaviors, deviations in the pattern.
Nada.
His
fourth-floor sighting will be in the next update as an alert, an
anomaly. He’s contributed to the pool of knowledge. Whoopee for
him.

He stands inside the doorway,
trying to look like scenery, but every second he waits makes it
worse. If the target gets the wind up, a nice routine job will have
gone down the crapper. And if the neighborhood watch spooks and the
LAPD sends a squad, the target will for sure get the wind
up.

But it’s not
routine. He knows it, he’s made and trained to know it. The target
is not where it ought to be. The names are no help: they follow
orders. Just as he does.
No
te preocupes, hijo
. Do the job until it
does for you; then there’ll be another just like you to clean up
the mess, and you’ll be a note in the logs.

Blood pressure adjusted
, Chisme
notes. Not an admonishment, just a fact. The names give him facts.
It’s up to him what to do with them. To hell with the neighborhood
watch. He touches thumb to middle finger on each hand, stands
still, breathes from the belly. Chisme isn’t the only one who can
do his tune-up.

He takes the chameleon key from his
pocket, casual as any guy who’s left something on his desk at
work—oops, yeah, officer, the wife’ll kill me if I don’t bring
those tickets home tonight. The key looks like a brass Schlage; he
could hand it to the cop and smile. But when it goes in the
lock—

He feels it under his fingers, like
a little animal shrugging. It’s changing shape in there, finding
the right notches and grooves and filling them. When it feels like
a brass key again, he turns it, and the lock opens easy as a peck
on the cheek.

Thirty seconds on the alarm,
according to the documents in the archives of the security service
that installed it. Biblio tells him what to punch on the keypad,
and the display stops flashing, “ENTER CODE NOW” and offers him a
placid, “SYSTEM DISARMED”. This part is never hard. If a target
showed up in one of the wannabe mansionettes on Chandler at four in
the morning, he could walk right in and the homeowner would never
know.

If nothing went wrong after the
walking-in part, of course.

The stairs in front of him are
ill-lit, sheathed in cracked linoleum and worn rubber nail-down
treads. He smells dust, ammonia, and old cigarette smoke. But not
the target, not yet.

He starts up toward the next
floor.

•

The evening before, he got an
official commendation for his outstanding record. He had to go to
Chateau Marmont, up the hill from Sunset, to get it, and on a
Friday, too, so he had to pay ten dollars for valet parking to get
his head patted. Good dog. If he could fastlane on his own time, it
would solve so many problems. But hey, at least there was still
such a thing as “his own time.”

She was out on the patio by the
pool, stretched in a lounge chair. From there a person could see a
corner of the Marmont bungalow where Belushi had overdosed. He was
pretty sure she knew that; they liked things like celebrity death
spots.

Some of them almost anyone could
recognize—if almost anyone knew to look for them. They’re always
perfect, of their kind. That’s why so many of them like L.A., where
everybody gets extra credit for looking perfect. Try going
unnoticed in Ames, Iowa, looking like that.

She had wavy
golden hair to her shoulders, and each strand sparkled when the
breeze shifted it. She wore a blue silk halter top, and little
white shorts that showed how long and tan her legs were. She
could’ve been one of those teen-star actresses pretending to be a
Forties pin-up, except that she was too convincing. She sipped at
a
mojito
without getting any lipstick on the
glass.

For fun, he
jabbed his molar with his tongue to see if Biblio could tell him
anything about her—name, age, rank.
Nada, y nada mas
. None of them
were ever in the database. Didn’t hurt to try,
though.

“Your disposal record
is remarkable,” she said, with no preface.

“I do my job.” He
wondered what other agents’ records were. He was pretty sure there
were others, though he’d never met them. She didn’t ask him to sit
down, so he didn’t.

“A vital one, I
assure you.” She gazed out at the view: the L. A. basin all the way
to Santa Monica, just beginning to light up for the night, and a
very handsome sunset. No smog or haze. Could her kind make that
happen, somehow? They’d more or less made him, but he was nothing
compared to a clear summer evening in Los Angeles.

She turned to look at him fully,
suddenly intent. “You understand that, don’t you? That your work is
essential to us?”

He shrugged. A direct gaze from one
of them had tied better tongues than his.

“You’re saving our
way of life—even our lives themselves. These others come from
places where they’re surrounded by ignorant, superstitious
peasants. They have no conception of how to blend in here, what the
rules and customs are. And their sheer numbers...” She shook her
head. “A stupid mistake by one of them, and we could all be
revealed.”

“So it’s a
quality-of-life thing?” he asked. “I thought the problem was
limited resources.”

She pressed her lips together and
withdrew her gaze. The evening seemed immediately colder and less
sweetly scented. “Our first concern, of course. We’re very close to
the upper limit of the carrying capacity of this area. Already
there are...” (she closed her tilted blue eyes for a moment, as if
she had a pain somewhere) “...empty spots. We are the guardians of
this place. If we let these invaders overrun it, they’ll strip it
like locusts, as they strip their native lands.”

A swift movement
in the shrubbery—a hummingbird, shooting from one blossom to
another. She smiled at it, and he thought,
Lucky damned bird
, even
though he didn’t want to.

“I still don’t
get it,” he said, his voice sounding like a truck horn after hers.
“Why not help them out? Say, ‘
Bienvenidos
, brothers and
sisters, let’s all go to Disneyland?’ Then show them how it’s done,
and send them someplace where they can have their forty acres and a
mule? They’re just like you, aren’t they?”