Rubicon Beach (3 page)

One was sitting or kneeling in the sand. He was motionless and silent, facing away from me, and he held his hands behind his back. The other was standing before him as silent and motionless as he; with one hand she touched his head, as though she was running her fingers through his hair. Her face was as clearly visible to me as his was not. She looked very young; I doubted she was all of twenty. She wore a plain dress, and in the bright moonlight it had no color but pale. As the boat turned southward it came closer to shore, and at one point I could see her eyes though she wasn’t looking directly at me. She didn’t seem aware of the boat at all. Against the embankment behind her, white in the light of the moon, her black hair was like a cloud of gunpowder, which framed her brown face; she looked Latin or Mediterranean. I kept expecting her to acknowledge the boat but the boat had cut its engines. I kept expecting her to look my way, but she touched the head of the other man. In the moment I saw her I stopped grieving for my losses. It seemed impossible to see her eyes from the boat or to know her face that well. I despised the guy at her feet; I would have told at that moment any lethal joke that would have hanged him too.

He turned to look at me.

As his face shifted into the light of the moon there was another light, a flash that went off between his face and my own. It was soundless and instantaneous, and as it dimmed I expected I would get a good look at him. Except that his face wasn’t there to be seen. I looked again, and again, and nothing else had changed; there were still the two of them on shore; but his face was gone: and then I saw it in her hand, the source of the flash, a two-foot-long blade that had flown from beneath her plain pale dress and caught the light of the moon and very efficiently separated the head she held in her hand from the rest of the man’s body. It was all in an instant, and with her blow I turned to follow the orbit of a small human sphere launched out into the dark above the water.

Next thing I knew I was sitting in a car overlooking the quays drinking some coffee, and all over the beach below me were local cops and feds. The feds drove the large brown coats they wore as if they were army tanks. The car I was sitting in was the first I’d seen since getting on the boat in Seattle; it was unadorned and functional. I didn’t drink much of the coffee they gave me. I didn’t need it. After a while I saw him coming over and my throat tightened. My head and heart were already pounding. I kept seeing over and over that other guy’s head flying off into space, and how long it took for his body to drop in the sand, how long it took for his body to understand what had happened. I kept seeing her in that dress that had no color, and the whites of her eyes like fireflies beneath her swarm of hair, and the way the clean knife changed in an instant to something wet and red.

Wade made a motion to me to get out of the car. Unlike our first meeting we were both standing now, and I was even more aware of how he loomed over me. In the dark it looked as if he had no hands. “First of all,” he said in the same whisper as when I’d met him before, “you want to tell me what you were doing on that boat?”

I took the radio out of my pocket. “This dangerous instrument came into my possession,” I said. “I wanted to get it as far from centers of population as possible before it went off. I was ready to throw my body across it if need be.” It was supposed to sound clever but my voice cracked and when I held out the radio my hand was shaking. Wade didn’t take the radio; I put it back in my pocket. “I saw a woman decapitate a man tonight,” I said after a moment.

He didn’t miss a beat. “Yes?”

“ ‘Yes?’ It’s not enough?”

“It’s not enough,” he said. He took my coffee cup from my other hand and threw it on the ground. “Not without a body, with or without a head.”

“Meaning you don’t believe me.”

“Meaning maybe I believe you saw something, since the captain of the boat says you were stone quiet all the way down canal and then went off like a string of firecrackers. You remember that?”

“No.”

“So I believe something made you lose it, and someone getting his top lopped off might be as good as anything else.”

“But maybe I imagined it,” I said, “maybe it’s in my mind.” There was still a funny sound in my voice, I could hear it.

“Who are you arguing with?” Wade said, with something that finally approached irritation. “Were you heading for Yuma-Sonora, or contemplating the bottom of the canal?” He motioned back to the car and I got in, and then he walked away, heading back for the beach. Another cop came along, a thin wiry little man with red hair, and drove me back into town. I went to the station and gave a statement, but I had blank spots all night. Only later did I remember the sun coming up sometime before I got to bed, but when I went to sleep I could have sworn it was in the dark.

I did not dream. Later, thinking about it, I expected that I would have dreamed, since the next day and the day after I kept seeing it in my head. But when I slept there was nothing but a pitch-dark sweep of water before me, and then I’d wake to see her at the foot of my bed with her long bloody knife and him on the floor not yet bleeding. The head always rolled off somewhere in the shadows, and sometimes I got within inches of its face before the whole thing faded.

They came and asked me one or two more questions but that was it. That first month I presumed a rhyme or reason to the way they’d let my leash out and then pull it in, but now I saw there was no rhyme or reason. Now I saw they didn’t know what to do with me. They kept saying I was on their side now but they didn’t know that, because I didn’t know it. Sometimes you can know someone better than he knows himself but I wasn’t necessarily that guy, or at least no one could be sure. If you can’t be sure then everything’s a gamble, and I was their gamble. They were trying to decide whether I was of any advantage to them or whether the best they could do was neutralize whatever disadvantage I might be. After that night they must have thought long and hard about taking away possibly important keys—if they were possibly important at all.

I spent some time in possibly important rooms, arranging the manuscripts and writing files on each. Their significance escaped me. Letters between people never heard of, brochures and programs and articles, sometimes an extended piece of writing either factual or not; some of it was handwritten and some of it was in typescript and some of it was published. It was difficuIt to imagine that any of it was of any value to anyone. It all looked old but in this town that didn’t mean anything.

Sitting back in the recesses of these back rooms I’d play the radio as loud as I wanted. Maybe Wade figured he was doing me a favor letting me keep it but I wasn’t going to let him get away with thinking that. I wasn’t going to let him or any of them think I was on their side just because they let me keep a fucking little radio. So I played it and every once in a while a cop would wander through and peer in the doorway in the direction of the sound. Then one night I woke abruptly to another thud in the distance and the tower shaking like the time I thought it was a quake. Then there was another thud and then another. Three, including the one that woke me. Outside the symphony of the buildings went berserk; I didn’t sleep that night for all the shrieking. The next day and night were the same. After that a cop came by one afternoon and peered in the doorway as usual; this particular time I wasn’t playing the radio but he came in anyway. He was the thin wiry little man with red hair who had driven me to the police station. “I got to take the radio this time,” he said.

“That ungodly wail outside and you’re worrying about my radio?”

“Got to take it, jack.” I gave it to him and that was the last I saw of it. One could ignore the constant din of the days, but the nights were impossible. L.A. turned into a town of somnambulists. I went walking the fifth night of it. I got up from bed and came down from the tower and out into the streets. In fact the sound was a lot worse in the streets, but I still decided I’d rather be walking around in it than lying in bed listening to it. I headed back in the same direction as several evenings before because I remembered the part of town where there were bars and people’s voices.

The sound wasn’t as had once I got past Spring Street.

Going into one of the small dives next to the East L.A. Canal, I could lose the sound aItogether. The clientele wasn’t exactly the cream of society. Most of the men were smugglers from down coast, along with some out-and-out pirates, bringing into town under the cover of night dope or cheap Sonoran liquor or bits of outlawed technology, whatever it was this month the feds had decided was dangerous. There were few women, maybe half a dozen, all of them in their late forties. The younger prettier ones did their business out in the mansions across the water where traveling merchants with some money could afford to sail.

There was one woman, however, who looked no older than her late twenties. You couldn’t help but see her and none of the other men could help it either. She wore a dress that was either blue spotted with white or white spotted with blue, and she had long amber hair. She sat in the corner of the bar smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and fooling with a camera. The men, by and large, left her alone. They’d talk to her and buy her a drink, but in the half hour I was there no one put the make on her. She was so rare to this place and these men, and her presence was so valued, that it was worth it to everyone to have her in the corner in the dark and not scare her away. She kept getting free drinks and she’d smile at the guys who brought them, but her smile invited nothing except drinks and no one overstepped the terms of her invitations. She kept fooling with the camera and I decided cameras weren’t on the blacklist with radios; unlike sound, the images of the earth were not in conflict with the images of men.

The bar was an underground grotto, descending some twenty feet in the earth and entered by one long winding stairway a little like the stairway I took every night up to my room. The grotto was cut in stone and dirt, and one of the underground rivers of the city came roaring through in a ravine. Most of the booths and tables were constructed on an overlooking platform. Sometimes the water would lap over the shoulder of earth where the bar stood, splashing against a customer’s feet. The air was thick with the smoke of cigarettes and hemp and wet with the heat of the river, the flat roar of which was a lull after days of screaming cities. I sat watching the woman with the camera awhile. The shadows around her seemed to stretch to the grotto’s ceiling, and my own shadow shot in her direction. Only it wasn’t my shadow at all. I had a drink of something vile and waited for him to make his move; he sat down across the table from me. He had discharged the tan coat somewhere and looked hot.

He ordered a drink of something vile too. “Cale,” he said, “can a man hate himself so much he`s not even alive anymore?” He wiped his face with a handkerchief and pulled at a white shirt that actually looked baggy on him.

“You
sail
into town in that shirt, or parachute?”

Wade pushed the sleeves up his arms and opened the collar some more. He put the handkerchief away and drank half his drink. “It’s sweItering in here,” he muttered, gazing around at the water. It was the first time I’d seen him ruffled; it was hot all right, but it really got to him. “What are
you
doing here tonight,” he said.

‘“To tell the truth, I was getting away from the racket up above.”

“So something gets to you after all.”

“I was just thinking the same about you and the heat.”

“I think,” he nodded, “I prefer the noise to the heat.” He finished the drink and ordered another; he was sweating the alcohol as fast as he could consume it. His parachute shirt was turning into a white blotch.

“Any new developments on the other night?” I asked, and regretted it immediately. Initiating a conversation with him seemed a fundamental concession.

“What other night?”

I licked my lips. “‘The woman on the beach,” I said slowly, “with the knife.”

“What’s to develop?” he said. “No body, no head, no knife, no woman.”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“You keep saying that,” he said, getting his second drink. “Nobody else has said it, just you. I wouldn’t presume to suppose what your mind is or isn’t capable of inventing. My understanding of your state of mind is such as to lead me to conclude it’s capable of anything, except an outright lie.”

“You don’t think I’m capable of an outright lie?”

He thought a moment as though to be sure, but he was already sure. “No,” he said, “no, if you could live with a lie you would have begun with lying to yourself. You have a lot to lie about. Where were you born, Cale?”

“America.”

“As I thought. America One or America Two?”

“I never could get straight on that. I think it must have been somewhere in between.”

“You’re what, forty-five? Fifty?”

“Thirty-eight or thirty-nine.”

“You look rather poorly for a man your age. I guess that’s to be expected.”

I took his second drink and threw it in the river. In retrospect it was rather comic; we both calmly watched the glass float out of sight into the tunnel. The guy behind the bar gave me a look, as did a couple of others. “Why don’t you get off my back, Inspector?” I said. “You already said something once about taking my own prison with me, don’t you think I take this sort of shit with me too? There’s nothing I can confess to you I haven’t confessed a thousand times to myself.”