“See?” I said, trying to sound happy about it. “Nobody home.”
We got back into the car together, both disappointed. He lay down on the backseat, dispirited, with his ears flat. “I know,” I said. “I love her, too.” We made the long slow drive to Topanga in silence.
The fog had preceded us. Topanga Skyline was blocked by a police car parked lengthwise across the street, its flashers firing red and blue into the mist.
“You can't get up,” the cop said. “Fire equipment.”
“I live there.” I showed him my driver's license.
He shrugged. He had small, uninterested eyes and nostrils you could have saved quarters in. “Back it up. Go somewhere else.”
I started to say something snarky and then remembered that I still had the Vietnamese kids' semiautomatics in the trunk. “Thank you, Officer,” I said. “Always nice to talk with a servant of the people.”
I took Alice around the back way, up an unpaved fire road and then down again until it struck Burson, which in turn intersected Topanga Skyline at the top of its arc. We were above the fog here, and I could see it brimming silver like a ballet lake below us, cradled in the cup created by the sides of the hills. It wasn't hard to imagine the ghosts of plesiosaurs paddling through it.
I parked Alice at the foot of the steep, rutted, unpaved driveway, and Bravo charged up it ahead of me. I huffed up at my own speed, toting the two guns, and joined him at the house. He was too busy sniffing to notice me until he heard the door open, and then he barreled past me and went to sit in his cave under the table that holds my computer. I put the little warriors' semis away the way I put most things away, which is by dropping them behind the largest object in sight. In this case, it was the couch. I made a note to take a look one of these days and see what else was back there. When I got the courage.
We are creatures of habit, and my habit when I get home is to go out on the deck in front of my living room and look at the best view in Southern California. I was anticipating a placid vista of pale mist and dark mountains. What I saw made me swear out loud and brought Bravo out to stand next to me and stare down through the darkness at 1321, on fire for the second time in four years.
PART II
G. Kramer of the Max Planck Institute in Germany noted that when migration time arrived, starlings tended to take off at a certain angle with respect to the position of the sun. If the apparent position of the sun was changed by mirrors, the migrating starlings tended to take off in a direction which had the same angle relative to the sun's position in the mirror. .
6
She finally emerged from the bar a little after two-thirty in the morning, looking smaller and chubbier than she had inside. I waited in the shadow of a van and watched her come, dressed in pressed jeans, white sneakers, a T-shirt, and a white unzipped windbreaker, the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms. Her shoulder-length hair looked like she'd wet it and then combed it with her fingers. She'd turned the collar up against the drizzle. She was humming.
The name of the bar, according to the scrawl of darkened neon tubing across its front window, was Behind the Fan. I'd missed that last time I was here. It shared a tiny mall with a Korean liquor store and a laundry. Both were closed and dark. At this hour, there was virtually no traffic behind me on Western Avenue. Being there again brought Uncle Lo to mind, and I found that I couldn't really remember his face as a whole. It had disintegrated in my memory into a collection of Identikit options: a mass of downward-sloping wrinkles set off by a black eye, high, sloping cheekbones, a mouthful of gold teeth.
I let her get well past me before I stepped into the light and called her.
“Lek,” I said.
She wheeled immediately, the heel of her sneaker making a faint squeal against the asphalt, and her hand came up out of her little purse with a white canister in it. She extended her arm to its full length and pointed the can at my face. Bracelets jingled on her wrist. “Stop there,” she said.
I stopped. “Mace?”
“You bet,” she said. “Put you away good, too. What's your problem?” Her English in the bar had been heavily accented. She'd left most of the accent inside.
“I was here on Saturday night,” I said. “With two Chinese guys, one young and one old, remember?”
“So what?” The hand with the mace didn't shake at all. I hadn't paid much attention to her in the bar, but now I was struck by the size of her eyes. They seemed to take up half her face, and their whites were as clear as porcelain under the streetlight. “I didn't ask you who you were, I asked what your problem was.”
I slowly held my hands up, palms toward her, two feet apart. Gave her my Harmless Smile, just a big Boy Scout looking for a good deed. “Nothing up my sleeve,” I said. “I want to talk for a minute.”
“I get paid to talk,” she said tersely.
“And you sound different when you do.”
She made a small raspberry sound. “Oh, shooah,” she said, “everybody like pidgin, na? Make everybody feel same-same Rambo, got too-big gun.”
I couldn't help it. I laughed. Her face darkened, but then her Thai good nature carried the moment and her teeth gleamed, sudden and white in her face.
“Well, it's the truth,” she said. “You think the guy wants to know that his little piece of sweet-and-sour has a day job translating English news for the local Thai paper? Will he tip her more if he knows she went to school longer than he did?”
“You have a degree?”
“I have two from Thailand, in English. Ning's a nurse, three-quarter time.” She turned her head slightly to one side, regarding me. “I remember you now. You're the one who was no fun.”
“You can put down the mace, then,” I said.
“No way,” she said, “but I'll change hands and lean on my car. My arm's getting tired and my feet hurt.” She backed up against a gleaming little white Toyota that was parked facing out. The mace went from the right to the left hand. Her chin lifted a quarter of an inch, a prompt for me to talk. “So?”
“I want to ask you about the old man.”
“Lo,” she said.
I nodded, faintly surprised that she remembered him.
“Funny old guy. Still likes the girls, maybe too much. Like a dog sniffing, but funny about it. Some old guys never seem to run out, you know?”
“Lucky him,” I said. “Some of us run out almost immediately. You were with him when he made his phone call.”
“No.” She raked damp hair back from her forehead with her right hand, and her eyes suddenly seemed even larger. “I was in the toilet, trying to look younger.”
“Could you hear him?”
I got the sidelong gaze again. “I liked him,” she said.
I spread my hands in what I hoped was an international gesture of reason. “I don't want to do him any harm. I just want to know who he called.”
“Why?” It was thick with skepticism.
“I can't tell you.”
“Go away.” She started to back around the Toyota, mace still pointed at my face. “Go to the end of the parking lot and stay there until I've driven away.”
“Wait,” I said. “Um, wait, look here, I'll put my driver's license and my business card and whatever else you want right here on the hood, and then I'll back off and you come and check it out. Would I do that if I was going to hurt him?” I slipped my wallet out of my shirt pocket and started to pull pieces out of it. “Oh, hell, look at the whole thing.”