“What’s that?”
“Where people go to study their lives so they could see their opportunities in a different light.”
“How’s that work?”
“I ain’t got the slightest idea. I make my own opportunities an’ then use my knife, or my gun, to keep ’em. But Hannibal is part’a the younger generation. That’s what started all this shit.”
“How’s that?”
“Some guy come into his office and said that he was tired’a workin’ for businessmen no better’n thieves.”
“What did your son say to that?”
“He said that that young man, Sasha is his name, he said Sasha should use all his knowledge to start a honest business on his own. They worked it out that he could start a import-export business from relatives he got in Europe. It was goin’ pretty good, until one day Sasha come in with this paper that he said was proof that his bosses was stealin’. He wanted Hannibal to take it to the authorities to do sumpin’ right. But I raised that boy good enough that he knew he had to at least think it out before actin’ a fool.”
That was a lot, more than I could process in front’a that poor man’s Greyhound.
“So you got no place to go?” I concluded.
“Not really. But, you know, I got a few dollars. Must be some SRO got a room.”
“I know a place.”
At a pay phone in the bus station, I called Fearless Jones at Paris Minton’s bookstore to ask if he could make a reservation for Anger. I said to make her name Carlinda Newgate. He called back five minutes later to say it was done.
Then I drove Anger to the N&T Hotel on Grand Street. It didn’t look like a hotel, nor was it registered with the Chamber of Commerce. This was an ultra-private residence for kings and millionaires, ex-presidents, ousted dictators, and lapsed communists who had abdicated, taking the lion’s share of the state budget with them. Fearless was registered as a bodyguard for the N&T and, therefore, was given a deep discount if there were any rooms empty.
Parked out in front of the unremarkable entrance of the residence, I turned to say so long to one of my oldest friends.
“You can stay here as long as you want,” I told her.
“Okay,” she replied, her voice maybe light with gratitude.
“You know any way I could find your son?”
“Not really. We ain’t talked in a couple’a weeks, like I said. I know he got a apartment somewhere in West LA, but I told him that I don’t wanna know the address. You know, loose lips and all.”
“Is there anything I should know about him? I mean, anything at all.”
“Well, after all this time I don’t know if it’s important anymore.”
“What?”
“Hannibal is your son.”
23
“Easy,” Amethystine said, holding my head against her breast.
We were reclining on the love seat next to the terrace, looking out over West LA all the way to the expanding darkness of the nighttime ocean. I was exhausted and so worn-out emotionally that I was having trouble just talking.
“Huh?” I grunted.
“What’s wrong, baby?” she cooed.
“Can we talk about that later?”
“Okay. But can you at least tell me where you’ve been the past couple’a days?”
“Sure. I... I helped a detective in training find a man that had seduced and then robbed his girlfriend. In the process we discovered that the man, who went by a dozen names, had robbed a bank robber. The girlfriend forgave him and took him back again. Then I went to see some gangster name of Orem Diggs who’d been hired to grab me and make me talk about a document that I never even heard of. Then I had dinner. After that I went to a guy’s house to talk but he’d been shot. I called emergency, they called the cops. I was arrested and taken to the county jail, where a guy, another inmate, hired me to look for his father. I got outta jail, took a nap, then went to three poker parlors, lost five hundred dollars, and found the woman I been searchin’ for, for days. She wanted to shoot me, but I got her to put away her gun, then I told her that the man I saw get shot was her son. We went to the hospital but soon after he died. That’s everything that’s important.
“Oh. Oh, yeah. Except that it turns out that the woman I was looking for was a one-night stand from forty years ago, and on that night we made a son that I never knew about.”
“Oh my God,” Amethystine said on a hollowed breath. “Your son is dead?”
“No. That was her other son, the bad one.”
“That poor woman.”
Sleep overcame me and stayed on course with no incursion from the worry or fear that I should have felt.
After that night I was convinced that something I’d often been told, but never believed, was true; that love is the most powerful and therefore the most dangerous human emotion. I came to this conclusion because, lying there with Amethystine, with us touching each other carelessly, and breathing the mountain air, I was unconcerned with the turmoil, danger, and utter helplessness of my life. I didn’t care because I had something that wound its way around the core of my being going all the way down to the soul. I was as deeply satisfied as a timber wolf is, baying at the moon and being at one with everything in his domain.
I awoke completely refreshed at 4:53 a.m.
Two hours later I was seated at the table ledge of the second-floor kitchen, drinking my fourth cup of French roast, thinking about all the things I had to do.
“Hi-i,” Amethystine said, making the word into two syllables.
“Hey.”
We shared a long kiss and then another.
“You gonna take the day off?” she asked.
“No time for that.”
“So, what now?”
“Now I track down Anger’s son, and mine. I think he holds the key to a problem.”
“What problem?”
“I don’t exactly know. It’s got somethin’ to do with a deed, a rich man that wants that deed, and people dyin’.”
“You want me to come with?”
“No. I’d like it if you stayed here. The guys guarding this place feed my dogs when I’m not around, but you could keep them company.”
“Now I’m a dog walker?” she asked, full of humor.
“If I could be the mutt.”
The Creative Mind: Different Alternatives for New World Living had its office on Sunset Boulevard, a few blocks east of Doheny. The building that housed the new age company was twelve stories high. The Creative Mind occupied the top three floors. It had a special elevator that went only to floor ten, the outer wall of which was made from glass. Taking the express lift, I read a little write-up etched upon a chromium plaque: The Creative Mind is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to helping people achieve their dreams. We are here to obliterate the humdrum, the nine-to-five, the drudgery of working to make other people rich, other people happy. In this travesty’s place we aim to offer the potential joy of living, a life that gives back.
The doors slid open, and I entered a world where oil and vinegar just had to be the best of friends. That much was apparent in the people who occupied the lobby. The outer walls of the upper floors were glass, tinted a faint green. The reception area ran the length of the front of the offices and had a ceiling that was three floors high, giving a feeling of what I can only call largesse.
Populating this futuristic, and definitely capitalist-leaning, nonprofit enterprise were long-haired, mustachioed, braless, patchouli-scented, multicolored, smiling, actually grinning employees who looked as if they were on a permanent break... from life. Some men wore colorful pants rendered in psychedelic patterns, and there were women in pants, miniskirts, maxiskirts, and some with single sheets of bright fabric wrapped around them and pinned.