Mortality Bridge (8 page)

Niko grips the back of the front seat. “Where’s he trying to get to?”

“Red Line tunnel.” The cabbie points down. “Underground.”

They pass the entrance to the Red Line station on their left and Niko sees long steep escalators and staircases. “He’s trying to get in there from here?”

“Not with us on his tail. He’ll head to the next station at Fourth. We’re riding above the Red Line route right now.”

A few streets over to their left is the quaint old gumshoe movie backdrop of City Hall with the Lindbergh light revolving like a lighthouse beacon warning traffic not to founder on some downtown shoal.

They cross Second Street and the light turns green for them. Bunker Hill a clump of skyscrapers above them and to the right. The twin towers of the California Plaza with their neonbanded tops. The palegreen robot of Library Tower. The glossy tiled tube of Second Street tunnel whips by. Beyond this a black and orange gateway reading ANGEL’S FLIGHT RAILWAY stands alone along the sidewalk at the foot of the hill, railtrack slanting up to meet a matching gateway on the hilltop at the California Plaza. On the track two black and orange railway cars are shaped like parallelograms to fit along the slope.

“He’s slowing down again.”

The cabbie nods. “Red Line station on both sides at Fourth. And he might give that a try.” She points to a building up ahead on Fourth Street. Niko stares out at trompe l’oeil window-washers cleaning painted-on windows. “The old Subway Terminal Building. In the Twenties there was a mile’s worth of subway running under Bunker Hill. The tunnel’s still there, they broke into it when they dug the foundation for the Bonaventure in the Seventies. Runs all the way to where Beverly and Second meet.”

“Why isn’t he going faster?”

“He’s trying to time it so he loses us at the lights.” As if to illustrate her point the traffic light turns yellow as the Franklin speeds across Fourth Street. The Checker Cab is close behind and the light turns from yellow back to green. Two cars run the light in opposite directions and without even looking at them the cabbie taps the brakes just so and avoids a broadside.

“I like your greenlight trick,” says Niko. Because if he doesn’t say something he will scream.

“Good one, huh?” They pass the defunct Subway Terminal Building and the cabbie waves her cigarillo at it. “There’s a huge copy of The Thinker in the lobby of that.”

“Do you sell maps to the stars’ homes too?”

She arches her eyebrows in the rearview. “The Thinker was originally the figure on top of Rodin’s Gates of Hell. Which he never finished.” She smiles. “You should look up what he was working on when he died.”

Niko studies the cabbie’s profile as they chase the Black Taxi toward the Jewelry District. Crow’s feet but her eyes seem young. Beautiful color really. Forehead that wrinkles when waiting for an answer. Beautifully sculpted lip, the upper wanting to favor one side. Barely glancing at traffic as she drives. She knows this cab and its surround like an old pair of jeans. Dark hair without gray. Hardworked hands. How old is she I wonder.

They pass Fifth Street and the Red Line station entrance across from the yellow and purple building blocks of Pershing Square. The Black Taxi puts on speed and cuts left onto Seventh.

The cabbie hangs a long and screaming left to follow. “I bet we’re really pissing him off,” she says. “There’s no point in him getting in there if we just follow him on through.”

“Where’s he headed now?”

“I’m betting Union Station. All roads lead to Rome. It’s what I’d do if I was still driving black cab.”

The bottom falls out of Niko’s stomach. “When was that?”

“Oh, a long time ago. In London.” She hits the gas and the engine misses once then surges and they pull around a Prius with a Harley-Davidson sticker on its rear windshield.

Niko relaxes a bit. Driving black cab in England and driving the Black Taxi are two very different occupations. “You were on the knowledge?”

The cabbie glances back at him. “Boy, not too many Americans know that phrase.”

Both cars thread through sparse traffic down Seventh past jewelry stores, past grand old movie palaces fallen to ruin or converted to swap meets. The State. The Palace. The Orpheum.

Ahead the Black Taxi fishhooks left onto Wall.

The cabbie shakes her head. “He should’ve gone down San Pedro. This puppy deadends at Third.” The Checker Cab chortles around the corner and avoids a shopping cart in the middle of the road.

Police station on their left, listless crowd near the L.A. Mission on their right. A man in a torn shirt steps off the curb in the midst of some tirade and brandishes a crutch at them as they speed past Korean toy marts.

They’re at Fourth and Wall when the Franklin’s brakelights flash where Wall deadends at Third. Niko thinks the Black Taxi will turn left onto the oneway street but instead it screams a one eighty, headlights sweeping cansprayed doorways and aimless homeless people and scores of soiled sleeping bags arrayed along the sidewalks like the detritus of some apocalypse. The black sedan now faces them with wheelwells smoking like a monster breathing in the cold.

The radio’s playing some forgotten song.

“Boy, on the knowledge.” The cabbie shakes her head as the Black Taxi rushes toward them in their lane. Ahead and to their left is Boyd Street but they’ll never make it in time. “For most of a year I slept with a map of London taped to my ceiling.” Niko stiffens in expectation of sudden impact and metal roar. “Hundred percent on my exam too.” The cabbie leans forward and presses a sequence of radio buttons. The froglike headlights grow before them. Niko stomps a nonexistent brake and draws a hissing breath as metal interpenetrates oncoming metal. Molecules that would collide instead find empty spaces in the hurtling metal, empty space of which most things consist. The utter wrongness of this instant realignment tastes of bitter iron.

The cars pass through each another.

The sharp planed face of the Black Taxi driver flashes through him and he feels a terrible wrenching at his core, voracious entropy and churning chaos, leaching cancerous famished death that thrills to strip him from the fabric of his being. For a single breathless thoughtless moment he knows what it is to be hulled from self and sealed inside that mason jar.

And past.

The cabbie pops a match against a nail and lights another cigarillo. She yanks the wheel and stomps the brake. Niko slides right on the broad bench seat as they power onto Boyd.

The cabbie grins at the rearview. “And you thought the greenlight trick was something.”

Nighttime Boyd Street is a corridor of zombies. Shambling figures leached of color who threaten empty air before them with their fists, stand and stare at nothing, inventory shopping carts and grocery bags. Souls consigned to sad perdition before their death has found them.

The cabbie weaves the big car through their wary ranks like a ship through risky shoals. They ease past vestibular Boyd, then pick up speed as they turn left onto Los Angeles Street. Still accelerating as she cuts right onto Fifth and picks up the Black Taxi speeding west ahead near Spring. Engine valves clatter like raked poker chips. On the radio Jimi Hendrix scratches out the “Steel Town Blues.”

Traffic lights turn green or stay green for them as they rush down Fifth through the old theater district, once more heading toward the cluster of skyscrapers and Bunker Hill.

Jimi Hendrix never recorded “Steel Town Blues.”

They hang a right on Hill and there the Franklin is, waiting at the traffic light at Second.

“Well well,” the cabbie says. “The fiendly stranger in the black sedan.”

“Why’s he stopped?”

The cabbie slows down, suddenly in no hurry to overtake the Franklin. “Listen,” she says. “There’s one place where he won’t have to force an entrance. The old Belmont Tunnel where Beverly, Glendale, and Second all come together. It’s a portal where the old Pacific Electric Railway used to go to ground. The old subway from the Twenties.”

“It connects to the Red Line?”

“It connects to the same thing the Red Line connects to.” The cabbie swerves around a wide-eyed mendicant standing in the middle of the road holding high a cloudy squirt bottle and a filthy rag with no more thought than if he were a roadcone. “Same thing all tunnels connect to if you know how to work em.”

The light at Second Street turns green but the Franklin still sits motionless.

“Why’s he letting us catch up to him?”

“He knows he can’t shake me so he’s about to push back.” The cabbie catches his eye in the rearview. “This might be rough.” They’re coming up on the Franklin now.

Niko throttles the strap. “I’m holding on.”

“You’ll need to hold on to more than that.”

Ahead of them the twelve-cylinder engine revs and the tires shriek and the Black Taxi hangs a left at Second and howls down the night before them. The Checker Cab follows, baying tires blending with the mournful wail of Jimi’s ghostnotes on the haunted radio as they pursue the Franklin down the throat of the Second Street tunnel. Glossy tiled walls pale orange and wetlooking in the sodium lights.

The tunnel dims, the throat constricts. Niko starts to ask the cabbie to turn on the headlights but stops when he realizes he can’t even see her in front of him. Her everpresent cigarillo glow has vanished. Peripheral dashboard light is gone as well. The pressure of the seat beneath him and the hardcase against his hand his only reassurance of the solid real. The only light the twin red taillights up ahead.

They brighten into burning suns and the assault begins.

CHRISTMAS MORNING AND Niko dumped his stupid Mr. Mechano to grab the just-unwrapped Sears & Roebuck guitar from Van’s hand and his mother told him You should be ashamed of yourself while little Van looked too bewildered to even cry.

Niko bathed in the light of his past thinks Oh you lousy motherfuckers.

Jemma’s face when she came home to their ratty little Hollywood apartment to find him drunk on the kitchen floor pathetically piecing together blue shards of the Cookie Monster jar that fell when Niko pulled it from the top shelf to use her emergency cash to buy himself another fifth.

Even knowing these little videos star someone Niko murdered long ago he feels the turning worm of shame for who he was.

Stephen’s sleepy smile in the motel room holding up the hypodermic and pushing out the air and Niko fixed already and sitting on the floor with his back against the wall halfnodding off saw how big the dose was and said Hey as Stephen slid the needle underneath his tongue and shot and sank back in the chair and stared at the ceiling and stopped breathing. And Niko took the dead man’s rig and smack and cash and left and never told a soul.

The unremitting truth. Well hell with you. I can weather this. I already did.

Niko smiling meanly in the quiet early morning as he slid Van’s cheap guitar behind the right rear tire of Dad’s new Ford because last night his father told him Nikkoleides your brother doesn’t mind you playing it sometimes but it still belongs to him now give it back.

He shuts his eyes but the images still come.

The strain behind Jem’s smile as she clutched tight his hand and slid into the little CAT scan. Niko smiling back while his demon voice said Take a bow, buddy pal, ’cause this is your work.

Faces gone these many years now, withered in the transmutating earth. He can smell Dad’s Old Spice, see the defiant tilt of Van’s jaw, hear Mom’s voice across a continent of wire,
You were there when he died and now you won’t come home to throw in a handful of dirt, what kind of brother is that, what kind of son can you be,
Jemma skeletal on the bed and pain a distant lightning in her eyes,
But you always land on your feet, Niko,
Van’s eyes unseeing and a flower of blood in one of them and why wouldn’t his brother blink it away, the boneless flop when Niko shook him with the very hand that might have stopped the death of one of them and the damnation of the other,
Sign right here, Niko-meister, keep the pen,
you fucking bastards I can fight anything you throw at me except myself. The dead arrayed behind me pointing.

The Checker Cab breaks from the tunnel into city night. The assault of memories cuts off and all is visible again. The two cars that are more than cars and yet not cars at all race down Second toward the convergence of streets, of worlds, of myth, toward the portal where in 1925 the old Pacific Electric Railway used to go to ground.

VI.

SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES

THE RAILS BENEATH the tires sing a happy hornet’s song below the syncopated beat of Robert Johnson calling out the “Coal Shaft Blues.” Far ahead and dimly seen the Franklin’s taillights glow like rateyes in the Stygian dark. The rusted rails are very old, the tunnel older still. The route they take is not on any map above the ground.

Robert Johnson never played the “Coal Shaft Blues.”

The humming rails unspool from out the skein of night itself. At some point they have linked up with the Red Line tunnel, for the rails within the old graffiti covered subway tunnel entrance where they drove into the midnight earth became modern level smooth and prestressed concrete sections gleaming as the headlights pulled them from the dark. But now the rails are raised and rusted resting loose on rotting wooden crossties. The conjoined fate of hurtling trains. Now the cabbie drives the Checker Cab upon two iron lines conscripted to the ground by iron spikes driven by what indentured hands for reasons that no living mind of man could fathom. Without guides and by her kinesthetic sense alone the cabbie holds them true and Niko marvels at her casual expertise. Now the chase is pure and plain, no stunts no tricks no strategies. Now is but a set of rails that narrows to a distant point above which shines the twin red lights of their objective.

The tunnel has darkened in the absence of signal lights or the cold bluewhite of an approaching or receding station. Now there is only the weak wash of the Checker Cab’s headlights, pale yellow as manila paper. What lies in their purblind view has changed from prestressed concrete to what looks like brown brick slick with darkgreen algae and large patches overgrown with moss and creeping vines.