Sandy’s friends’ house is near the end of the road, on the ocean side, therefore on the crumbling edge of Torrey Pines Cliff. They find parking with difficulty, go to the door and are only let in after Sandy’s friend Bob Tompkins comes and okays them. Bob is fortyish, tanned, golden-haired, perfectly featured, expensively dressed. He shakes all their hands, ushers them in, introduces them to his partner Raymond. Raymond is if anything even more perfect than Bob; his jawline could open letters. Perhaps they got their start in modeling.
But now the two are partners in major minor drug dealing, and this is sort of a party for field reps. Sandy recognizes quite a few people he knows. He starts pingponging among them, and rather than follow him his OC friends grab drinks and go out onto the cliff-edge lawn, which is on three terraced levels some three or four hundred feet over the black sea. They’ve got a perfect view of the hilly curve of La Jolla jutting into the dark water, its sparkling skyscraper hotels reflecting like fire off the bay in between; and to the north stretches the whole curve of the southern California coast, a white pulsing mass of light. Major light show, here.
It’s a class-A party. Among the guests on the lawn are some Lagunatics they know, and happily they fall to drinking and talking and dancing.
Jim notices Arthur disappearing down the wooden staircase that leads down to the beach below, following—was that Raymond? Arthur was caustic indeed about the mansions on this road, so seeing him with Raymond is a bit of a surprise to Jim.
This turns some key in Jim’s sense of curiosity. Ever since their raid on Parnell Jim has been asking Arthur questions, and Arthur has been putting him off. It’s better if Jim doesn’t know too much, he says. Jim is up on the theory of revolutionary cells, sure, but it seems to him to be going too far not even to know the name of the group he’s part of. Sure the cause is just, but still… And Arthur—well, who knows exactly why he came along tonight? It isn’t something he’d ordinarily do. And once he said he got his equipment from “the south”… could be that Raymond used drug smuggling as a cover… well, that would be crazy, but…
Jim’s curiosity is aroused. He wanders down the wooden steps of the staircase, into the dark.
The stairs switch back from platform to platform down the steep sandstone cliff: thick planks are nailed into parallel four-by-fours that are bolted to telephone poles driven into the cliff face, and the whole structure is painted some bright color, yellow or pink or orange, hard to tell in the dark. Spectrum band, no doubt. Iceplant and some bushy trees have been planted all around the staircase in semisuccessful efforts to stop the erosion of the cliff. Through one thick clump of trees the stairway proceeds in a groomed tunnel of foliage, and beyond that, on the next platform, Jim sees two dark figures standing. Above them stereo speakers facing westward challenge the even roar of the surf with the majestic end of The Firebird Suite, cranked to high volume.
Curious, and pitched to a bolder level by the music, Jim slips off the staircase into the iceplant. Ho, it’s steeper than it looks! But he can hold his footing, and very slowly he descends through the bushy trees. Any noise he is making is overwhelmed by waves below and music above, which has segued from the Firebird to “Siberian Khantru,” brilliant lead guitar piercing the night and leading the supple bass on a madcap ramble. Fantastic. The last knot of trees overhanging the stairway is just above the platform, fine, Jim wiggles his way down through the low branches, slips on iceplant and jerks to a halt jammed down into the fork of two thick branches. Ribs a little compressed. Hmmm. Seems he might be a little stuck, here. On the other hand, he’s just above the platform, and the two figures, seated on the rail looking down at the faint white-on-black tapestry of breaking waves, are just within earshot. Wouldn’t want to be much closer, in fact. Jim gives up struggling to escape, accepts the salt wetness of his perch, concentrates on listening.
Arthur seems to be making a report, although the booming of the surf makes it difficult to hear everything. “What it comes… the campaign has got its own momentum… supply material and give… do a one-night… bigger operation than there really is.”
“Do any of your” krkrkrkrkrkrkrrr asks Raymond.
“… assume, well, whatever. They don’t know anything.”
“So you guess.”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“And you think a concerted action could bring in the people we’re trying to find?”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it? They” krkrkrkrkrkrkrrrr
“Possibly. Possibly.” Raymond jumps down and stalks the deck of the platform nervously, looking right up at the clump of trees that holds Jim. “If that happens, we might have a hard time finding out about it. Being sure.”
Arthur’s back is now to Jim, and Jim can’t hear his voice at all. But he can hear Raymond’s reply:
“That’d be one way to find out, sure. But it would be dangerous, I mean some of you might just disappear.”
Jim feels his throat and stomach take a big swallow. Disappear?
His paranoia quotient soars into the megapynchons, his understanding of his sabotage adventure with Arthur trapdoors out from under him, leaving him hanging like, well, yes, like a man stuck in a tree on the side of a cliff. His ribs begin to complain vociferously. But he definitely doesn’t want to move until Arthur and Raymond leave.
Relief for his ribs, and frustration for his mounting curiosity, arrive in the form of night beach partyers climbing back up the stairs. Raymond greets them cheerily, and he and Arthur ascend with them. Soon Jim is alone with Torrey Pines Cliff, in his tree. He’d love to take time and think over what he’s just heard, sort it out some, but his ribs protest at the idea and he tries to extricate himself. Arms up, hands on branches to each side, push out. This frees him to fall down the iceplant slope, he lets the branches go when his arms begin to snap out of their sockets, and one branch clips him in the ear as he slides by, heading down here uh-oh, turn into the iceplant and clutch, feet digging, thump, thump, thump! Stopped, thank God. Below him it gets markedly steeper, in fact kind of vertical. All alarms go off in the McPherson body, he convinces one hand to declutch with great difficulty, resets it a foot over toward the stairway. Footwork is trickier, need knobs or clumps of iceplant, the usual spread of the stuff is damned slippery, not that he’s complaining; without it he would be one with the sandstone blocks on the beach, still a couple hundred feet below. Carefully he makes ten or twelve heartstopping handhold transfers, and traverses to the stairway. Leeches onto it, heaves up and over the banister. A group descending the stairs catches him in the final act of rolling over the banister to safety, and they laugh at his evident inebriation. “Fell off, hey? Come on down with us and swim it off.”
“Is he sober enough to swim?”
“Sure, a blast of ocean water will do him good.”
Jim agrees in as calm a voice as he can muster. It’ll be a good way to wash some of the dirt and crushed iceplant off of his hands and face. They descend to the beach, strip, walk to the water. The white, almost phosphorescent rush of broken waves over Jim’s ankles feels good. It’s cold but not anywhere near as bad as he expected. He runs into the water, dives into the chill salt waves. A great rush, cleansing and refreshing. Broken waves tumble him about and he lets them. Maybe Tashi has something in this night surfing idea. Jim does a little desultory bodysurfing in the shore break.
While he’s at it he tumbles into a young lady from the group; she squeaks, clings to him, her body incredibly warm in the ocean chill. Legs wrapped around his middle, arms around his neck, a quick kiss, whoah! Then a wave knocks them apart and she’s off, he can’t find her.