He waited. Grace said nothing. “Oh, bosh,” he finally said. “Ook-la. Palm trees and pedagogy?”
Grace stared.
One-Eye exhaled in frustration. “Ookla? Numero Two campus? Predicated on this place being Uno.”
It took a moment for Grace to decode that. “UCLA.”
“Finally! Sí, sí, the wilds of Westwood, back before the hippies and the libertines took over. Before everyone talked about social justice but no one did anything about it. More like so-called justice. Or should I say SoCal justice and we all know about the morality of manipulative movie moguls.”
A withered hand gestured toward the construction site. “Case in point. Green. Ha. So is snot.”
“You don’t approve.”
“It’s not up to me to approve, daughter, the die is cast.”
“For the project.”
He shifted closer to her, brushed away nonexistent crumbs. “It’s perfidy grounded in hypocrisy, mendacity, and two-facedness. The prior owner of that rather homely pile of mud was a villain who had the good graces to die but also the poor judgment to sire a second-generation villain who trumpets social justice and greases the palms of forward-leaning politicians. Same old story, no? Caligula, Putin, Aaron Burr, name any petty alderman of Chicago at random.”
“Politics corrupts—”
“Think about it, daughter: You inherit a decrepit pile of bricks, what should you do with it... hmm, shall I ponder — I know, let’s sell it to the city at an inflated price then propose a snot-green project to build cubicles for yet more bureaucrats and manage to insinuate ourself as the builder.”
Now Grace was on full alert. “One-stop shopping, huh? Doesn’t look as if much has been done.”
He frowned. “Was a time a man could find refuge in there.”
“In the building?”
Three hard nods. “Was a time.”
So the place had served as a squat. Grace said, “When did that stop?”
“When the family tradition recommenced.”
“What tradition?”
“Have you not been paying attention?”
Grace shot him a helpless look.
He said, “All right, I’ll slow down and enunciate — where did you say you went to college?”
Grace said, “Boston U.”
“Not Harvard-grade, eh? All right, you’re too young to remember this but once upon a time an unpleasant shifting of tectonic plates wrought devastation upon the land upon which we now sit. Bridges crumbled, a baseball game was interrupted, and if that’s not spitting in the eyes of all that is patriotic and sacred, I don’t know what is—”
“The Loma Prieta quake.”
The old man’s single functional eye widened. “A student of history. At BU, no less.”
Grace said, “It’s not exactly ancient history.”
“Daughter, nowadays anything prior to five minutes ago is ancient. Including the messages transferred into here by the powers that be.” Tapping his forehead again.
He stood, smoothed his trousers, sat back down. “So... the plates shifted and the dishes shattered. Heh heh! Then the second disaster ensued, villains profiteering as they always do when collectivism and the collective unconscious collude to triumph over the will of man and by man I mean both sexes so please no whinnying about sexism, daughter.”
Grace looked at the construction site. “The people involved with that profiteered from the quake?”
“Insurance,” he said. “Essentially, a game of chance with infrequent payoffs. But even in Vegas machines pay off occasionally.”
“They didn’t.”
He crooked a thumb in the direction of the high school. “The young are essentially unsocialized savages, correct? Lords, flies, et cetera, if anyone should qualify for capital punishment it’s fourteen-year-olds. But one villain easily sniffs out another and those Fly Lords were entrusted with the task of pressuring the common folk not to pursue recompense.”
“The guy in charge of that project hired students to intimidate—”
“They might as well have worn suicide vests. These were terrorists, nothing more, nothing less, and they enabled the villain to buy up distressed properties for an off-key song and sell them back to the you-know-who.”
“The government,” said Grace.
“Agency A, Agency B, Agency Zeta — that one implanted an iridium electrode right here and attempted to convert me to Islam.” He tapped his right temple. “Fortunately, I caught on and managed to deactivate it.”
He yawned, dropped his head, began snoring.
Grace said, “Nice talking to you.”
She was a few yards away when he said, “Anytime.”
Chapter 40
Okay, so now she had a confirming source.
Psychotic to be sure, but with enough occasional lucidity — and premorbid intelligence — to take seriously.
She found a moderately busy Internet café farther up on Center Street, brought a latte and a bagel she had no intention of eating to a corner booth. One sip later, sitting among students and those pretending to be students, she’d logged onto the wide wide world of random knowledge.
Municipal green workspace pulled up a dozen hits, mostly government documents composed in agency doublespeak. After wading through a few choice sections, Grace got the gist: The construction project had moved quickly through numerous city and state committees and subcommittees, received approval a little over a year ago, with the contract awarded on the basis of “specialized bidding contingency” to DRL-Earthmove, Inc., of Berkeley, California.
From what Grace could tell, “specialized bidding” meant there’d been no competition at all, with DRL judged to possess unique qualifications: “eco-sensitivity,” “foreknowledge of site history and ethos,” and “emphatic local emphasis, including employment of Berkeley residents with set-asides for inner-city applicants from Oakland and other nearby economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.”
Grace hoped to see Roger Wetter Junior’s name surface in the documents but DRL’s CEO and sole proprietor was one Dion R. Larue. Disappointed, she Googled and pulled up three hits, all squibs from fund-raisers Larue had attended.
The recipients of the developer’s generosity included a local food collective called the Nourishment Conspiracy; the Trust Trust, an Oakland gang-rehab program; and UC Berkeley’s experimental film festival of four years ago, the theme being Liberation: National and Personal.
The Nourishment folk had thanked their donors with a vegan banquet and provided photos on their Facebook page.
Grace scrolled through shot after shot of glowing, smiling countenances.
And there he was.
Tall, handsome, well-built man in his thirties, wearing a black-and-gold silk brocade tunic over black jeans. Shoulder-length blond hair was parted in the middle and worn loose, Anglo-Jesus style. A gray-blond stubble beard was film-star correct.
Dion Larue’s stance was relaxed as he held a glass of something orange in one hand and draped his free arm over the lean, bare shoulders of a brunette in her late twenties. Not a stunner but attractive. Dramatic cheekbones, as if an ice cream scoop had been taken to her face.
Azha Larue, wife of the boss. Exotic name but nothing but Celtic in her features.
Her smile seemed forced. His was high-wattage.
But the emotion of the moment was irrelevant; his eyes told the story. Piercing yet strangely dead. Eyes Grace had seen before.