Rubicon Beach (25 page)

Inside, the suite still displayed Richard’s fastidiousness. The only thing about it not fastidious was Richard. He was lying on the living room floor in his underwear. An open bottle of liquor sat on the table, a glass overturned in the midst of a stain. There was also an empty pharmaceutical bottle on the sofa. Catherine stood behind the bellhop, who softly called to Richard and then bent down to gently shake him. At the frigid touch of Richard’s body he jumped back. Oh shit, he said.

He nearly ran over her trying to get out of the room. Catherine remained staring at the body. She heard the sound like a baby from the other room and, not taking her eyes off Richard, she stepped around him. In the other room she made the discovery. Trapped in the window was something that had once been a white kitten. The kitten had been trying to get out the window; she was moving, animated, but not really alive, caught rather in a last nervous reflex, like something that continues to move several seconds after its head is cut off. The window in which the kitten was caught had several long horizontal panes of glass which opened to an angle by a latch on the side. At some point the kitten had maneuvered the latch, squeezing between the panes of glass and pushing herself toward a crack at the side of the screen. So desperate had she been to get out, so frustrated had she been by how securely the window was fastened, that she became determined to escape at any cost. Now Catherine saw the side of the kitten’s head pressed flat against the pane of glass and its emaciated body twisted in the window; she had no idea how long the kitten had been like this. She might have been this way before Richard’s death; she might have grown from a kitten into a cat within the panes of this window, and he might have sat on the sofa drinking and taking his evil medicine as he listened to her howl. The last sun of this June night was gleaming through the glass at this moment and the new angle of each pane cast a different hue while the trees of the Hancock veldt cried hideously in the distance. The cat was drowning in the colors of the glass and the noise of the trees, and when she moved, the glass moved and the colors changed. The more hysterical her capture, the more vibrant the light, until she was writhing in the dark red of the spidersky that was caught in the window with her. When Catherine put her hands on the cat, the creature was crushed in the light and din. Both girl and animal made a low and barely audible sound, this low hiss of refuge, like the familiar glint of refuge Catherine had seen in the animal’s eyes.

Dazed, she took the kitten in her hands and walked hack out into the other room where Richard’s body lay. Several of the guests from down the hall were standing there watching. The bellhop had not yet returned. Catherine moved toward the door with the kitten; the others moved out of her way. In the hall, momentarily disoriented, she began going in the wrong direction, then turned around and headed back. She got to the elevator and stepped into an empty one going down just as another arrived coming up with the bell hop, a security man and two medics.

In the lobby Catherine stepped out of the elevator, still holding the kitten. The manager behind the front desk saw her immediately and signaled to a man across the room. Catherine crossed the lobby toward the ballroom where it was shadowed and hushed and stung by candle fire. Two men came up on each side of her and grasped her arms. She flinched and they held her firmly. For a moment they were deciding which way to take her; they decided against the lobby and started her along the wall of the ballroom toward a back entrance.

Later, during the police investigation of the matter, the various accounts of what happened would all differ. It was agreed that there was a man, apparently in his thirties, with brown hair and a mustache, milling aimlessly around the ballroom. He had, according to those who noticed, gotten there some thirty minutes before, and those who watched him for any amount of time at all found him odd. He said odd things. He didn’t weave as though drunk or drugged, but he seemed lost and disturbed. At any rate the strange girl with the black hair stopped dead in her tracks when she saw him, and he dead in his tracks when he saw her. One of the security men tried to move him out of the way. The other security man insisted he heard the man speak to the girl in a way that was familiar even though it was prefaced by no sort of salutation or cordiality. I have this poem in my head, the security man heard him say.

You know this woman? the security man asked him.

I have this poem in my head, the strange man went on. Twenty years ago tonight I became a man who quoted poetry rather than write it, here in this place where they kill such men.

The security man placed his fingertips on the strange man’s chest. Uh, excuse us, buddy? he said, pushing him slightly.

Then, according to various accounts, the girl dropped something she held in her arms, tore control from the two men who held her, and seized from the wall one of the burning candles. She flashed it before her across the strange man’s throat as though to send his head soaring to the ballroom rafters. Of course the candle did nothing of the sort; the man touched his neck and looked at the cooling wax on his hands. The candle broke in two, its end flying behind them, where it fell at the foot of the curtains. For several moments there was only a harmless flicker.

Everyone—the security men, the girl and the man with the mustache, men in dark coats and women in vanilla gowns—watched the flicker, immobilized. And then, like a wave very far on the horizon that rushes forward faster than anyone can imagine, the curtains were a wall of fire that stretched from one end of the ballroom to the other in a bare moment. The air was gauzed in smoke before anyone thought to even scream, and then, like the fire, the reaction was roomwide. Catherine looked around her and the men were gone. Llewellyn was gone. On the other side of the room the doors flew open, and the floor was a swamp of blue flames. In less than a minute the ceiling above became shimmeringly hot, like liquid. Beams of the ceiling began to collapse.

She ran for the doors. Colliding with the other people, she could hear the fall of the ballroom behind her. She reached the lobby to see the carpets smoking and the chandeliers dripping like the colored ice of a cavern. Around her were the molten lines of people consumed and displaced by small eloquent puffs, dark glows left where the forms had existed moments before. Either there was remarkably little shrieking from those trying to get out or it was drowned by the fire’s roar, but the silence was tomblike and malignant; there was a dreadful smell. Only when Catherine reached the street did she hear the sounds of a world outside: footsteps, voices, sirens, wheels. She fell on the long grass outside the hotel with other people, and got up to run and fell again; it was impossible to get away from everyone else. The sirens came closer and closer and still seemed as if they would never arrive. The first of the fire trucks pulled up the drive by the time Catherine had crossed the lawn to the west knoll. Near the end of the hotel’s west entrance she heard the crash of a milk truck that had just arrived with the night’s delivery; the hood of the truck was burrowed into the corner of the building. Someone was caught between the building and the truck. Milk gushed out over the lawn; people ran through puddles of it and their shoes left white tracks gleaming in the firelight. Hoses were hoisted from the fire trucks and Catherine could feel the spray of the water turning to steam.

By now the upper floors of the hotel had caught fire. Flames coursed up the sides of the building like veins. People were streaming out onto the fire escapes in nightgowns and pajamas, women carrying furs and men holding briefcases. The bottom level of the hotel shone a brilliant gold. Catherine heard a terrific crash and screams from the lobby, and through the glass doors she could see the hotel’s chandeliers crashing to the floor. From around the corner came a sharp dry crack and a resounding rumble and then a gush of white light and from the crowd its first and only collective outcry. When the air cleared, half the hotel had disappeared. Those who could still run ran everywhere. Catherine jerked from the electricity in the air, and around her people began running into each other and into the sides of limousines and fire trucks. They held their hands in front of them and called for directions. The firemen began aiming their hoses wildly, showering the dark with water. More fire trucks rolled up the drive, blasting their horns at the people who were holding their hands over their eyes and howling from the flash of the explosion. More women and men poured from the hotel, wandering down to Wilshire Boulevard in white robes, black soot falling on them like snow. Many people were perched high in the windows of their rooms. They shouted down to the firemen to tell them where to jump, and the firemen stood at the base of the hotel with a canvas in their hands listening to the cries above them. Finally the people just began dropping from the windows. Everything went silent, mute firemen and people dropping quietly from the windows. High on the sixth floor a woman clung to her window, gray hair blowing and her sightless eyes glittering like ice. Catherine watched the woman spread her arms and take off like a bird.

At the bottom of the knoll on Wilshire Boulevard scores of police cars flashed red and blue lights; troops crawled up the hill as though in an invasion. In the middle of the drive Catherine saw a group of children in nightclothes screaming and crying; a tall thin woman with her hair in a bun was trying to calm them. They kept groping in front of them. Moving blindly in a group, they left one behind, a small blond girl who reminded Catherine of the Edgars’ child. Catherine picked the girl up and carried her in the direction of the group. Who is it, the girl said, where are we going? Catherine said something in her own language, and the girl reached for her eyes. You can see, the small girl said; and then, to anyone within earshot, she cried, This one can see! Catherine felt the child reach for her eyes again, as though she wanted to take them from her head. This one can see! the child kept screaming, and then someone else reached for Catherine’s face too. This one can see! yelled a man with black gnashing gums. Catherine pushed him away.

Someone else had her nails near Catherine’s eyes, and someone else pulled at her; she felt a pain shoot from her elbow to her shoulder. It didn’t matter now that Catherine was possessed of a chameleon face; the only force her face could deceive now was the blinding explosion of moments before. She can see, she can see! they were all screaming at her, running into each other in order to get her. Catherine flung the child in front of her and struck back. People tried to tear from her head the face she had despised so long. Someone had his hands around her neck, someone had his arms around her chest. Backed against something solid and cold, she turned to hoist herself up onto it while people wailed beneath her. Where is she! they were screaming back and forth. She could barely stay on her perch, her arms and legs shook so badly. She had no idea how long she could keep from being pulled down. People around her were shoved and trampled; the children among them were laughing and chattering, their fingers wet with blood. The tall thin woman with her hair in a bun stood in the distance sobbing hysterically; none of her children paid her any attention at all. Then Catherine saw that the thing onto which she had crawled for safety was a police car: she recognized it from her nights in the Hancock veldt.

The door of the car opened.

It opened with enough force to throw many of the people on the ground; in the throes of hysteria, some of them laughed. Getting out of the car was a towering black mountain of a man, who turned to look at Catherine on his roof top. “Come here, girl,” he said quietly, and took her under her arms and lowered her from the roof, and then put her in the front seat of the car and got in, locking the door. He did it as though it were a picnic at the beach. She sank into the seat, looking at the faces of those outside, most of whom didn’t know or no longer cared that she was inside the car. The black man turned on his unit radio. “Lowery here,” he said to someone. “I got myself caught in a mob on the drive.”

“We’ll come in,” came a response.

“No,” said Lowery, “this bunch has spent itself, I think. But we’ve got a disaster here, and we can use more paramedics and ambulances. People in extreme shock, also apparent loss of vision among most of them when the hotel generator blew. That includes the fire fighters and people jumping from the upper floors. I got a girl here, they were trying to tear her eyes out of her head.” He snapped his fingers in front of her face and she blinked.

“How’d she get so lucky,” came the other voice.

“Good question. Maybe she didn’t see the blow. Maybe it didn’t see her. Anyway I have a few other theories about this one.”

“Yeah?”

“Remember,” said Lowery, “the Hancock Park business a few weeks ago?”

“No kidding.”

“Well, it’s a theory,” he said. He cut off the radio, and when he looked at Catherine again he sat up straight. Her eyes were still open but spinning in her head; he snapped his fingers again in front of her and this time she didn’t react. “Don’t flip out on me now,” he said to her, “I’ve got some questions for you.” He didn’t believe she had suddenly gone blind; he knew it was something else. He didn’t know that she was asleep with her eyes open, but he might have figured from the movement of her eyes that she was dreaming. He wouldn’t have any way, sharp detective though he was, of investigating where she went, of following her back through the hotel, which stood in her dream husklike and black, a mammoth tunnel ripped through the ceiling and starting toward the stars, lit only by a fire in the far lounge where a tall middle-aged actor waited for his last shot against failure while the other haunted incarnation of the poet approached her from out of the dark. “It . . . is you?” R. O. Lowery heard her say in awkward English. 

“It’s me,” he said, still snapping his lingers and waving his hands before her eyes.

But it wasn’t to him she spoke.

Catherine was treated for shock in the emergency room of General Hospital, then taken after several days to a sanitarium in Malibu. There she had a bed on the second floor, next to a window that looked toward the sea. Her eyes were always open and moving in a dream, and she answered to no one who called her. Doctors who examined her found nothing wrong physically. Psychiatrists, speculating on what might have happened to her, were at a loss to account for her condition. The police had no idea who she was or where she had come from, except that for two months prior to the Ambassador fire she’d been reported walking at night in Hancock Park, looking in people’s windows. There were witnesses who saw her start the fire in what appeared to be a dispute with an unidentified man in the ballroom of the hotel, and there were also witnesses who had seen her just prior to the fire on the fourth floor of the hotel, in the room of a man who had succumbed at some undetermined point to a toxic overdose, perhaps by his own choosing. The “Wilshire Holocaust,” as the papers called it (several other buildings in the proximity of the Ambassador had also burned), was one of the worst disasters in the city’s history. Catherine, a Jane Doe to the police until they determined differently, was charged with arson and one hundred and sixty-seven counts of second-degree murder.