Night work (22 page)

One high point was a phone call from Martina Wiley, sounding like a
cat at the cream. She practically purred as she told Kate that a rather
firm interview with Melanie Gilbert had given them some prime hints not
only about the Banderas sex life, which had been far kinkier than
Gilbert had been willing to admit at first, but also led to a storage
locker in Novate It was currently being gone over with the
finest-toothed combs in the Crime Scene repertoire, but it looked to be
where Matty had stashed his rape souvenirs. His victims, and the police
departments across the Bay Area, would begin to sleep more soundly.

On the Larsen homicide, a follow-up series of interviews at the
airport turned up a fellow baggage handler who had run across Jimmy
Larsen in a bar, and remembered Larsen mentioning sleep problems due to
a strange woman calling in the middle of the night to hassle him. About
what, he hadn't said, just that he was tired and fed up, but
didn't want to leave the phone off the hook in case Emily phoned
(his wife, he had hastened to tell his co-worker, was just off visiting
her father, and would be home soon).

Kate worked long hours over the weekend, trekking south to the
airport to question airport personnel, north of the bridge to talk to
computer programmers, and closer to home to listen to the bereft and
guilt-plagued Amanda Bonner.

On Monday, Kate had scheduled a few hours off to go with Lee, Roz, and Maj to see
Song.
They were to meet Jon there, and after the performance they would
finally meet Sione, and have a late dinner together. However, the
day's lack of any real progress meant a reluctance to call it
quits, and at six o'clock Kate was still at her desk. When the
phone rang, she knew who it would be before she picked it up, and
indeed, Lee's voice came strongly over the line, demanding to
know when Kate was planning to appear.

"I'm leaving in two minutes, honest," Kate
pleaded, scribbling her signature on one report and reaching for the
next.

"No, you're not. You are leaving right now."

"Yes, right now. As soon as I finish the--"

"Kate."

"Okay. I'm leaving. That's the sound of my desk
drawer you hear. It's closing. I'm out the door."

"Now."

In three minutes Kate actually was heading out the door when she was
greeted by the startling sight of a slim woman being viciously
assaulted by a burly man in the hallway right outside the homicide
division, while a group of police officers, uniformed and plainclothes,
looked on in nodding approval. Kate came to a sharp halt, then realized
that the woman was actually a cop, and the man as well, and that the
hard blows they were practicing were more noise than contact.

"What's this?" she asked a
vice
detective she had worked with on a couple of cases.

"Decoys. They're going to troll the parks tonight, see
if we can get a bite from the LOPD when he starts slapping her
around."

"Nice," she said. The woman of the antagonistic couple
she now recognized as a patrol officer who had been twice commended for
bravery, who had a black belt in some arcane form of martial art, spent
her free time producing intricate oil paintings that sold for a small
fortune, and loved life on the streets so much she refused to take the
exams that she feared would move her up and behind a desk. At the
moment, she looked remarkably like a suburban housewife.

"Makes for a change from playing a dealer or a hooker," the man from vice commented. Kate had to agree.

On the way home, however, she had time to reflect on the assumptions
behind the scene she had witnessed. Without a doubt, fear was growing
among the men of the city--ironic, that those normally most secure
in the streets at night were those who were feeling an unaccustomed
discomfort in the hours of darkness. The City's night life was
suffering, its all-important tourist trade threatened, and if the quiet
night streets made life easier for those responsible for patrolling
them, the economic dip added to the fears felt by half the population
meant that the pressure was on. At times like these, Kate was very glad
she was not one of the brass.

Kate came through her front door at a trot, shedding equipment and
clothing as she went, aware of Lee's disapproval floating up the
stairs and following her into the shower. Kate's clothes were
laid out for her, black silk pants and blouse with an elaborately
embroidered vest to go on top. The shoes were as close to heels as she
would wear, her hair was too short to worry about, and she even took
thirty seconds to swipe some makeup across her eyelids. All terribly
civilized, Kate thought, trotting down the stairs again and out to the
street, where Lee waited in the passenger seat of Kate's car,
pointedly studying her watch.

"You look delicious," Kate told her, kissed her, and turned the key in the ignition.

Mollified, either by the compliment or by the speed with which Kate
had dressed, Lee's irritation subsided. They were going out for
the evening, and Kate could feel Lee decide that she'd be damned
if she would let even her own righteous indignation get in the way of
pleasure.

Lee did look delicious in a shimmering gold blouse and loose white
crepe pants. Jon wore velvet, Maj looked as majestic as a sailing ship,
and Roz, though she swept in late, puffing and apologetic, was dressed
in festive formality rather than a power suit and minister's
collar.

The night before, Kate had braved Lee's study to refresh her
memory of the Song of Songs, that Old Testament book attributed to
Solomon (he of the many wives) that she remembered as being endearingly
erotic, filled with odd descriptions of breasts like gazelles and
cheeks like pomegranates. Lee had apparently had the same idea, because
the Bible lay open on her desk. Kate sat down to read. Ten minutes
later she closed the soft leather covers, vaguely disquieted. Erotic,
yes, but some of the passages were also puzzling, others almost
troubling. Perhaps, she thought, Roz was right, that more than the
words had changed when the Bible was rendered into English. Certainly a
reader was left with the distinct impression of various translators
along the way tidying up and applying generous quantities of whitewash,
and that underneath their quaint images lay a fairly explicit picture
of ancient sex.

In
Song,
the whitewash had been pretty thoroughly scrubbed away.

When the women entered the small theater to take their seats beside
Jon, the lights were dim, the buzz of anticipation damped down under
the sensation that the performance was already beginning--as
indeed it was, for on a platform raised up over the right side of the
stage sat three figures dressed in white. They perched there
motionless, their heads bent, but the audience was very aware of them
and incomers took to their seats with hushed conversation and wary
glances upward. Kate looked at the program and saw that the two main
characters would be "Lover," played by someone called
Kamsin Neale, and "Beloved," the part played by Sione
Kalefu.

The set, as Maj had said the other night at dinner, was striking.
Black dominated, punctuated by draped lengths of intensely colored net
fabric, gold and ruby and lapis curtains against the dark. Some were
supple, drifting and changing colors with the currents of air. Others
were static, rigid as frozen flames leaping up from the stage to
disappear into the hidden heights. The small overhead spots picked them
out as clouds of sheer color, some of which sparkled as if they had
been sprinkled with finely ground rubies and emeralds and sapphires.
The set was both stark and sumptuous, empty and powerful.

The seats gradually filled, the anticipatory hush intensified, and
the three figures crouched on the raised platform might have been
statues. Finally came movement, as five black-clad men and women filed
across the stage from the right, came down the short flight of steps on
the left that led to the orchestra pit, and took up a peculiar variety
of instruments: oboe, viola, drums and an assortment of bells and
percussion objects, an electronic keyboard, and a sitar. They spent a
few minutes tuning this unlikely chamber orchestra, the weird atonality
of the notes mingling slowly until a sort of music came out, and then
the instruments fell silent, and the audience slowly became aware that
at some point the actors had entered the stage.

Song
was a story, much more of a narrative than what Kate
had read in Lee's black Bible. The two main characters, who in
the original had been heterosexual lovers, were in this production both
profoundly androgynous, to the extent that it took Kate a good twenty
minutes to decide that Lover, the big muscular one dressed in reds and
oranges, was played by the woman Kamsin, while the slim, dark, pursued
character in blue-- Beloved--was actually Jon's new
friend Sione.

The viola began, to be joined a short time later by a throaty voice
from the seated trio above, reciting the words of the Song of Solomon.
"O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth,"
the voice murmured, and the two dancers began to move slowly around
each other, becoming acquainted, flirting, moving apart, glancing back
at each other, until finally they came together in an exploratory
embrace. Lee's fingers crept into Kate's in the dark,
caressing palm and wrist, playing under the silken cuff of Kate's
blouse. Kate shivered at the scrape of Lee's nail, and could feel
Lee beside her smiling into the dark.

Other dancers swirled onstage and off: Beloved's disapproving
brothers, Lover's friends, but each time the pair shook the
others loose and returned to their increasingly passionate
self-absorption. "Black am I, and beautiful," chanted the
three narrators. "Sustain me with raisin cakes, strengthen me
with apples, for I am faint with love." Beloved's brothers
stormed in, angrily trying to separate them, but the two lovers slipped
behind a cloud of glowing red voile, and were safely lost in each other
again.

The dancing grew more intense, the music wilder. To a quickening
beat, the pair on the stage caught up lengths of crimson and cobalt
gauze that swirled about them, first concealing, then revealing (and
going far to explain the production's X rating). The flurry of
colors came to a climax in a rush of atonal music, and then
breathlessly subsided. The spotlights dimmed on the entwined figures,
the voices grew to drowsy murmurs. ("When the day breathes out
and the shadows grow, turn to me, my love, like a buck, like a young
stag on the mountains.")

The lights fell further, until the stage was dark and utterly
silent. The silence held for a dozen or more heartbeats, broken only by
a cough from the audience, and then a faint light flickered and grew
off to the right, a beam that illuminated a section of wall and a
single figure, lying alone in a heap: Beloved. Sione stirred, stretched
languorously, and then rose, looking around with growing agitation for
Lover. The distraught figure snatched up a small lamp, using it to
search the room, and then burst through an opening in the prop wall and
directly into the arms of a troop of uniformed guards. The voices
identified them as "guards of the city, armed and trained against
the terrors of night," but instead of protecting (and indeed,
though clothed in khaki, one of them bore a startling resemblance to
the burly cop Kate had seen at the Hall of Justice, preparing to
"beat" his "wife" as bait for the night's
avenging Ladies), the guards seized Beloved, began to laugh and pluck
at the diaphanous blue garments. The voices for Beloved pleaded with
the guards, asking them to say if they had seen Lover, but the guards
merely laughed, and reached out, until Beloved twisted away from them
and escaped.

Immediately, Lover appeared from offstage. Beloved flung
"herself" at the strong figure, who wrapped strong arms
around Beloved and snatched "her" away into a room. The two
lovers embraced, but the note of the oboe, which had dominated the
scene with the guards, remained, quiet and disquieting, in the
background of the scenes that followed.

The reunited lovers, surrounding themselves with armed and uniformed
soldiers of their own, retreated in safety and triumph to an enclosed
garden, a womblike bower of shimmering green where they sang and danced
and fed each other morsels of fruit until the night grew up to hide
them, and silence fell.

For a second time, lamplight flared in the dark; again the solitary
figure reached for Lover, and again set out to search; and this time,
too, the five guards were waiting. But unlike the first harassment,
Beloved did not slip away. In utter, appalled silence the audience
gaped as the khaki-clad figures brutally tossed the slim blue one back
and forth between themselves, accompanied by the oboe, the sitar, and
the panicky heartbeat drum of the tabla. The harsh whispers of the
narrators and the inarticulate cries of Sione punctuated the texture of
sound:

They who patrol the city.

the narrators sang.

They hit me.

They hurt me.

They stripped me.

The guards.

Over and over the last four lines were chanted, faster and faster.
The guards sprouted gray and black and khaki veils, and Beloved sank
down beneath a swirl of obscuring darkness; one slim blue arm emerged
in protest from the huddle, and was overcome. One by one the guards
detached themselves and stormed offstage, boots beating on the
floorboards, leaving behind them a half-nude figure, heaped up beneath
a drift of drab cloth.

After a while, a stir came from the wings, and in washed a flock of
five giggling girls wearing the brightest of colors who emerged
startlingly, almost painfully from the dark. The abused figure pushed
laboriously upright, and made an effort to rearrange hair, pull
together clothing, and pluck away the gray and khaki shrouds. The girls
came up, laughing and teasing, to inquire where Lover had gone; Beloved
asked them, in a hoarse, faltering voice, if they would help look for
Lover. Completely oblivious of their friend's suffering, the five
colorful figures danced and primped and gossiped about Lover's
charms, speculating teasingly about where Lover might have gone, and
with whom. Desperately, Beloved reached up to seize an apricot-colored
skirt, and cried out: