He backtracks until he finds streetlamps, pavement, houses with lit windows: old couples playing gin rummy, families gathered around TV sets. The neighborhood streets lead him to the freeway. He’s jogging now, blood drying on his ankle, uncertain of the time; Claudio said to meet in an hour, but of course they have no watches. Stanley feels like it’s been at least that long since they split up.
When he comes to the bus-stop, Claudio’s not there. Stanley throws the combat pack on a bench and sits and waits. Then he stands up. Beyond the padlocked studio gates he sees no movement, not even the occasional glint of headlights. To the east, the dark form of Cahuenga Peak slowly takes shape against the purple night sky, and after a few minutes a reddish moon bubbles up behind it, not quite full. Stanley watches as it rolls across the sky, going yellow, then white.
He sits again, opens the pack, takes out The Mirror Thief. A streetlamp overhead gives plenty of light, but Stanley doesn’t read, can’t concentrate. For a second he has the urge to throw the book, as hard as he can, at the studio gates. He imagines it flying from his hand and flaring into a wall of fire that sweeps the whole valley clean — or taking wing, swooping through the dark like a great brown owl, finding Claudio and carrying him to safety. Stanley believes the book to be capable of such feats. He believes it has promised him as much.
But Stanley doesn’t throw the book. The Mirror Thief stays shut in his lap, inert like a jammed pistol, as Stanley revisits its contents from memory.
Westward rise the twin oneiric gates, horn
and ivory, each one skull-sprung from sleep.
Half-awake, Crivano laughs at the asperity
of fire. So spake the alchemist, “Calcination
is the very treasure of a thing; be not you
weary of calcination!” In this manner only
can the foul substance by red levels be reduced:
bot bar bot
unglimpsed behind the white-hot furnace door,
made new behind the unfurled cloak of night.
How would Crivano handle a fix like this? It’s a dumb question, for a bunch of reasons. Crivano would have come alone, for one — or at least he wouldn’t have come with anybody he’d think twice about leaving behind. Stanley may not know all the stuff that Adrian Welles knows — history, alchemy, ancient languages, magic — but he ought to understand this much. He ought to know how to act like a thief.
The bus has stopped running for the night. Stanley wonders how he’ll get back to the waterfront. He puts away the book and stands up again to pace around the bench, stopping sometimes to scrape crusted blood from his leg. A police cruiser swings by, slows down. The cops stare at him; he stares back. They stop for a moment, then pull away. He curses them aloud as they go. Then he curses Claudio, then himself, muttering obscenities as he makes his tight oval circuit. After a while he folds his arms across his chest and moans, doubled over by a feeling that’s entirely strange to him, less a fear than an urge, like the need to sneeze or shit.
Headlights shine from the studio lots. Stanley sinks onto the bench and watches them come. A white sedan, unmarked, draws parallel to the gates. Its rear door opens. Claudio gets out. He leans to talk with the driver for a moment, then raises a palm in goodbye and steps over the low gate. The white car turns back into the studio property, accelerating as it drives away. Claudio walks toward Stanley, his hands in his jacket pockets. Stanley waves to him. Claudio doesn’t wave back.
When Claudio reaches the edge of the circle of light shed by the bus-stop’s streetlamp, Stanley rushes forward and grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him. Goddamnit, kid! he says.
Claudio breaks his hold, shoves him away. Stanley backpedals until he’s sitting on the bench again. Claudio’s chin juts; his mouth bunches with rage. Do not touch me, damn you, he says.
Hey! I’m just glad to see you in one piece, is all. What’s the matter?
Claudio turns his back, shakes his head. Then he faces Stanley again. The film your man was making by the ocean, he says. What is the name of it?
I don’t remember, Stanley says. I don’t think the barber told me.
It had big stars. You said this, yes? Even you knew their names. Now, tell me, Stanley, what stars did it have?
Ah, shit, kid, I don’t know. That Hollywood stuff doesn’t mean—
Was Mister Charlton Heston perhaps one of these big stars?
Stanley thinks about that for a second. Yes! he says. It was Charlton Heston! The barber said he even met him. He came right into his shop. Charlton Heston, and some famous actress, too.
Marlene Dietrich? Claudio says. Janet Leigh?
The second one. Janet. I think.
Claudio steps in very close. His breath is shallow and rapid. He glowers down at Stanley with bottomless eyes. Are you quite certain, he hisses, that the barber said Adrian Welles?
19
On foot they work their way back toward the city, navigating by moonlight, the earth’s downgrade, periodic glimpses through the trees of the HOLLYWOOD sign. By the time they reach Santa Monica Boulevard they’re stupid with exhaustion, and they hop the stone wall of a cemetery and break open a mausoleum door and spend what remains of the night half-asleep on its hard marble slab, without so much as a word passed between them.
In the morning the fog is thick but burns off quickly, sliding off the city like a drape. While he waits for Claudio to wake, Stanley shakes out his stiff legs and walks among the graves: low rectangles flush with the trimmed grass, angels and obelisks and boxy sepulchers among them, poking between dark trunks of cedars and palms. He has never imagined a place like this. Crossing his arms, rubbing his shivering elbows, he thinks of dead people he’s known and wonders what happened to them, where they went.
In the combat pack he locates the canteen and a mostly clean rag, and he washes and bandages his wound. The rip in his jeans is already fraying, brown with crusted blood; he’ll need to steal a new pair soon. Once he’s tied the rag he digs out some crackers and a tin of sardines and The Mirror Thief, and he sits and eats and reads and listens to the drone of cars on the boulevard, the bawling of gulls lost in the clouds: the sounds of the city waking up.
Crivano hides among
the bones and serpents.
On the wings of Argeiphontes
he passes the White Rock,
the shadow-land of dreams.
There, Okeanos, where Arian drowned!
No such martyrdom for Crivano.
Brave traitor!
His flute conjures a harvest of sleep