Internecine (36 page)

“Is there something wrong with being gay?”

I spluttered. “No, of course not, it’s just—”

“Stop. I’m not. I wish you could see your face right now. You’re blushing.”

“Yeah, right, make fun of the straight guy.”

“Zetts is just a wheel. An in de pen dent contractor who’s reliable. Most of the time.”

“I thought maybe it was a surrogate son thing.”

“That’s ridiculous. Cheers.”

We had ferried Cody Conejo to an address in Compton. He didn’t have to be told to lay low for a while. After we procured another vehicle and performed the license plate trick, Zetts signed off with his usual jaunty salute and headed home to collapse. I passed the tapes I had stolen from Alicia Brandenberg’s suite to Zetts, who was sure to review them at leisure. It was a surer thing than waiting for a chance to do it myself; besides, if there was lascivious humping to be exploited, with Alicia making sure the camera could see faces, Zetts would pay attention. As “evidence,” it didn’t really matter. You’d be amazed what can be accomplished with digital forgery today.

Our “anonymous” carjack was somebody’s Audi A6; our options were limited, and we were pressed for time. It turned out to be one of the 4.2 models with the 300 horse power engine. While I tried to guess
the shape of the option package, Zetts and Dandine went at the car like swarming wasps, and within fifteen seconds (I’m not exaggerating), both the LoJack and the alarms were useless. Dandine could drive a stick as expertly as he helmed the yachtlike Town Cars he seemed to favor; the Audi ate glassphalt like a fighter plane with no wings. (All over Los Angeles, the slurry-sealing on the better roads is embedded with tiny bits of sparkling glass, hence, “glassphalt.”) I was sitting in the suicide seat when the idea of the Wily Toucan surged into my brain the way a recovered memory surfaces after years buried in the mental marl.

As proof of my fuzziness, I tried a different tack: “Do you live in LA?”

Dandine put his glass down, empty now. “No, I don’t live in the city.” Pause. “I was seeing a woman. Up until about a year ago.”

I tried to visualize what sort of girlfriend Dandine might court.
Where’s the girl?
I was crazy to see what one of those deep-dish files on Dandine would look like,
before
NORCO
. Where were the low points and embarrassments and failures in
his
life-line?

Closed book. No further information was forthcoming. He turned to me directly and said, “You game for Jenks?”

“Why . . . you going to cut me loose? Don’t answer that. Yeah, I’m in. Whither-ever thou goest—”

“Don’t drink any more tonight.”

“Sorry.”

We had made it through the day, to the cocktail hour. In a hysterical, perverse way, it was almost normal.
Normal.
As if any of us has a right to define it.

The Wily Toucan wasn’t the only place in LA that was open dusk to dawn. Dandine next shuttled us to the residence of a gentleman he referred to as Rook, who lived high in the switchbacks of Hollywood Boulevard, west of Laurel Canyon, where it abruptly becomes residential. Celebrities you’ll never find on any Star Map live up there, hiding in plain sight. Rook’s place was a split-level, ranch-style house built sometime in the fifties; basically a huge rectangle anchored into the sheer drop of a bluff that overlooked the Sunset Strip, which lost a considerable degree of its charm when right-thinking petitioners managed to pull down
the billboard of the Marlboro Man. As I have said, more than any other city, Los Angeles gleefully demolishes its own architecture—a holdover lust from the early days, when it needed to prove it was the most progressive city on the West Coast. The Strip isn’t what you think you remember from that old TV show. Now it’s a riot of sushi bars and trendoid neon. The Trocadero is still there, but it’s no longer a nightclub, has been remodeled front to back, and has operated under different managements for decades. I should have said the three original front steps of the Trocadero are still there; that’s all that remains of its original incarnation. Nowadays, most drones on the sniff venture into this neck of the enchanted forest to go to the House of Blues, or leer at the women who sleep behind the plate glass in back of the registration desk at the Standard. The Brown Derby, which used to be on Vine Street (it opened on Valentine’s Day, 1929, and was the nightspot where Clark Gable proposed to Carole Lombard a decade later), has been moved so many times even I can’t tell you where the hell it is today.

And nobody in Hollywood can tell you who the hell Daeida Beveridge was.

To the narrow street, our destination presented only a wall with an iron-banded door that looked imported from some castle keep, and a modern comm panel with touchtone buttons, gently illuminated for night owls. I didn’t hear a buzzer or bell when Dandine entered a number sequence on the keypad, but I could hear dogs barking. Not small dogs. I could also hear an annoying, almost subaural whistling—canine frequency?—that cut through my gray matter like a migraine spike, and made me squeeze my left eye shut.

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

“Hear what?” Dandine leaned close to the speaker grille and said, “The word of the day is ‘miasmata.’ ”

“Is that Spanish for ‘my asthma’?” I asked.

“Plural of ‘miasma,’ ” said Dandine, not amused. “Look it up.”

A low dialtonelike sound emitted from the speaker as relays withdrew the gate bolts.

“Is that what you heard?” said Dandine.

“No,” I said. “And I can still hear it. Maybe I need one of your sinus pills.”

We stopped midway inside a claustrophobic walkway between the featureless outer wall of the house, and the obverse of the security wall.

“Cover your ear,” he said. “Still hear it?”

Distressingly, I did.

“Your bodyguard friend may have busted your ear drum,” he said. “You’ll have to give it a day to clear, then we’ll see.” We arrived at the terminus, about thirty feet away, and a rustic door, rounded at the top and surrounded by ivy. It would not have looked out of place on a Hobbit hole, especially since both of us were taller by at least a foot and a half.

It was a suitable height and width for someone in a wheelchair, and guess what?

“Now there’s a face that hasn’t darkened my stoop for a bit of a while,” said the occupant, who I took to be Rook. He was a large gray-beard who reminded me of an old-school biker after a spill, or maybe Santa Claus gone to seed as the result of a tragic sleigh wreck. He was flanked by a pair of German shepherds incapable of being distracted when they were on the job. Their coffin-shaped heads came up to about his shoulders as we peered downward through the absurd little door, because, yes, he was in a wheelchair. Every surface on the chair, save for the rubber on the wheels, was chromed. “Let the kids get a whiff of ya, then come on in. Be sure to duck.” He pointed out the dogs, one pure black, the other equally white, both with massive chests. “That’s Gunner, and that’s Klaus.”

“Hey, Klaus,” said Dandine, going first. “Long time.” He extended his hand slowly, palm down, and the white dog sniffed, then looked to his master. “What happened to Dutch?”

“Ole Dutchie took the big dirt nap about two years ago, amigo,” said the man who had to be “Rook.” “Which proves you’re shit at staying in touch. Gunner there is the newbie.”

Gunner—the black one—sampled my scent and looked for a go-ahead sign. If the man gave it, I never saw it. But both dogs broke away at the same time.

“Rook, meet my new compadre Mr. Lamb. Mr. Lamb, say hello to the one and only Rook.”

I hadn’t had anyone whip a power handshake on me in a long time.
We stooped through the low-bridge lintel of the door and Dandine pushed it shut. I heard at least three electronic bolts slide into the jamb, automatically. I kept covering my ear and experimenting with the new sound that lived inside my skull. Dammit.

“Give you a hand?” asked Dandine, moving forward as if for a repeated handshake. I thought it was another goofy code, but Rook clasped firmly, hoisted himself out of the wheelchair, and stood up.

“Sorry ’bout that,” Rook said to me with an evil grin. “Being a cripple can give ya an edge, when you’re dealing with certain people.” His voice was soft, yet deep and arid, one that could cut under noise and still be heard. It came from the anterior of the throat, and was hollow but not resonant, as though his nasal tones had been deactivated or compromised. It was like a “cemetery” voice.

I accepted the beer he offered; imported German stuff that had to be poured into a pilsner glass to mix properly. Dandine took a club soda. The house was essentially four gigantic rooms stacked one on top of the other, connected by a descending zigzag of long stairways. We stood amid a strew of comfortable furniture, suborganized into more intimate groupings of chairs around low tables. Most of the tables were stacked with books. The theme of this room seemed to be war memorabilia—display cases of painstakingly rendered miniatures: model tanks, other vehicles, and battle scenes. Framed documents—including ones signed by Omar Bradley, Curtis LeMay, Oliver North, Abraham Lincoln and, sure enough, Adolf Hitler—hung on the walls.

“It’s real,” Rook said, noting my interest. “It’s an official letter to SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Ing Wilhelm Brandt, commending him for his design of ‘disruptive pattern material,’ and recommending that Hermann Goering use the Waffen SS design for his regiment’s uniforms; which Goering did, in 1942.”

“Disruptive—?”

“Camouflaged uniforms. The Germans invented them. Rather, they made practical tests of it in the late thirties, and discovered their field casualties went down by fifteen percent. So they were the first to introduce camo gear. Some of their designs are still used today, by NATO armies.”

On the second floor what appeared to be original paintings—mostly
real pigment on antique canvas—crowded all the available wall space. Rook must have caught my quizzical expression as I did a double take at Monet’s
The Houses of Parliament, Sunset
.

“It’s a forgery, but a good one,” said Rook. “Not as good as the one that still hangs in the National Gallery. Most of the authentic firsts went out of public circulation in the early fifties—thefts, switcheroos, private auctions.”

The third floor down was a multimedia library with a lot of high-end tech gear; black boxes patch-wired into disc burners, and a fly-vision bank of flat wall monitors. “Ask me for any movie you can think of,” said Rook, “and I can rip ya a copy. New, old, released, unreleased. I dare ya.”

“
London After Midnight,
” I said.

“Oww, the cineaste goes right for number one on the hit list!” He slapped my shoulder. “It’s got to
exist,
first, my man.” To Dandine, he said, “Where’d you find this guy?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Dandine said. “I just sort of dropped in on him.”

The fourth floor was mazed into a lot of worktable space interspersed with enough photo, duplication, and printing gear to run a full-service Kinko’s. He even had an old Linotype machine dominating one corner, as well as drum scanners, laminating machines, and a darkroom.

“I could do ya a French passport,” Rook said. “And you’re gonna say, why not a U.S. passport, and I’d say, think more globally, because we’re not living in America anymore.” He shrugged, massively. Standing, he was now taller than either of us. “And I could show off like this all night, but I bet my man here wants to cut past the chit and the chat.”

“First,” said Dandine, “I want to thank you for this.” He handed over the NSA identification he had used at Ripkin’s house. “It served us well.”

Rook dropped it into a shredder that automatically obliterated it, with a coffee-grinder noise. “These are kind of like subway passes; they run out of credibility the more they’re exposed. Hey, I could make ya a special subway card, if you like—one that never expires?”

“I need
NORCO
IDs for two.”

Rook returned a slightly comic squint. “Hairy,” he said. “But doable. To get into
NORCO
?”

“Possibly. To fade us past one of
NORCO
’s tools. But they should pass muster in the scanners, if you can manage that.”

“Slightly harder.” Rook rummaged through a card file on one desk and held up a sample. “This is what ya want. They change the design—”

“Several times a month, random dates. How old is that one?”

“Day before yesterday.”

Dandine inspected the card. Photo, name, optical fingerprint, bar-code, security striping. It reminded me of our mutant twenty-dollar bill.

“See the embedded tape? It’s platinum. They’ve coded their scanners to read for
platinum,
for god’s sake. How paranoid can ya get?” He turned to me. “Mr. Lamb, is it? Take a seat on that stool right there and prepare to get immortalized. Ya might wanna run a comb through your hair.”

After Rook photographed us, he led the way to a bungalow that waited on the far side of the pool terrace, outside the lowest floor of the main house. The area was engirded with pine and fir trees and, I’m sure, was bristling with security. “Ya know the drill,” Rook said to Dandine, “so show Mr. Lamb the amenities. I should have these items polished off by the time you wake up.”

“I thought we were going to hit them tonight,” I said. “What about all that crap you told me about
hit them at night, when they’re tired or stressed?
”