Jack Jr. stood rooted to the spot by the black leather blocks of his hi-tops, clenching his fists. Unruffled, Jack Sr. had stepped neatly aside, the pleats of his pants like two plumb lines, his mouth pursed in distaste. Delaney was reaching for his keys when the altercation swept toward them, and now he stood poised over the trunk of his car, groceries pressed like a shield to his chest, keys dangling limply from his fingers, looking on numbly as the dark man got shakily to his feet, muttering apologies in his own dark language. The Mexican seemed dazed-or maybe deranged. He lifted his heavy eyes to focus blearily on Jack, then Jack Jr. and finally Delaney. Faintly, from inside the car, came the thin tinny sound effects of Jordan's electronic war. The man stood there a long moment, squinting into Delaney's eyes, the rag of a sling hanging from his arm, his face sunk in its helmet of bruises, and then he turned away and limped across the lot, hunched under a rain of imaginary blows.
“See what I mean?” Jack said.
“What would you do with all this space?” Kyra heard herself asking, and even before the question passed her lips she knew it was wrong. She should have exclaimed, _And look at all this space!__ with the rising inflection of a cheerleader, but somehow she'd put a negative spin on it, the very question implying that the expanse of brilliantly buffed floors and high beamed ceilings was excessive, de trop, somehow too much, that the living room was the size of a basketball court and the master bedroom bigger than most people's houses-and who needed all that? Who but a monster of ego, a parvenu, a robber baron? It wasn't the sort of question a closer should ask.
Louisa Greutert gave her a curious look-nothing more than the briefest darting glance of surprise-but it was enough. Kyra knew what she was thinking.
Louisa's husband, Bill-thin, nervous, with a tonsure of silver hair and the face of an ascetic-was wandering through the immensity of the dining room, hands clasped behind his back. He was president of his own company, Pacific Rim Investments, and he'd lived in Bel Air for the past twenty years, the majority of that time with his first wife, who'd kept the house as part of the divorce settlement. Kyra pegged him for sixty-five or so, though he looked younger; Louisa was in her late forties.
“You know we know the Da Roses socially,” Louisa murmured, running a jeweled hand over the surface of a built-in mahogany china cabinet, “or we did, that is, before Albert took his life… They made some bad investments, is what I hear…” This wasn't so much a statement of fact as a supposition, an opening: she wanted gossip. And gossip was a commodity Kyra readily served up, if it suited her purposes. This time, though, she merely said: “She's living in Italy.”
“Italy?”
“Her family has an estate there. Near Turin. Didn't you know?” In fact, Kyra barely knew Patricia Da Ros-the referral had come to her from an associate at the Beverly Hills office, and aside from two long-distance calls, all the arrangements had been made via fax.
Louisa was silent a moment, lingering over some ceramic figurines displayed on a brightly painted Gothic Revival dresser; then she lifted her head like a hunting dog attuned to the faintest distant sound. It was four-thirty in the afternoon and the curtains of the big central room were aflame with light. “They were funny about this house. Did you know they never entertained. I mean never?”
Kyra let a small vaguely interrogatory noise escape her. This was her signal to talk the place up, rhapsodize over the views, the privacy, the value and exclusivity, but something held her back. She was reticent today, not herself at all, and as she watched this lithe busy woman stalk through the corridors and poke into the cupboards she had a revelation that took her by surprise-she realized that deep down she didn't want to sell the place. She wanted the listing, yes, and she was born to move property and the commission would put her over the top and ensure her of the sales crown for the fourth consecutive year, but she'd never felt this way about a house before. The more time she spent in it, cushioned from the hot, dry, hard-driving world, the more she began to feel it was hers-really hers, and not just in some metaphorical sense. How could these people even begin to appreciate it the way she did? How could anyone?
“Of course,” the woman went on now, trying the lower drawer of a locked sideboard, “they were a bit out of the way up here… and yet it's a terrific location, I don't mean to say that, right on the edge of Malibu and only, what, twenty minutes from Santa Monica? Still, I wonder who'd want to schlepp all the way out here even if they were the type to entertain…”
Kyra had nothing to say to this, one way or the other. Bill Greutert had already confided to her that he and his wife were looking for something out of the way and had specifically asked about this house. _It's just so crowded down there, he said, you get this feeling of the city closing in on you, even in Bel Air. There's just so many__-he'd waved his hand in exasperation, searching for the judicious term-people, _you know what I mean?__
Kyra knew. Since the riots she'd met dozens of couples like the Greuterts. They all wanted something out of the way, something rustic, rural, safe-something removed from people of whatever class and color, but particularly from the hordes of immigrants pouring in from Mexico and Central America, from Dubai, Burundi and Lithuania, from Asia and India and everywhere else in the known world. Brown people. Colored people. People in saris, _serapes__ and kaffiyehs. That was what Bill Greutert meant. He didn't have to say anything more.
An hour later, Louisa Greutert was still making the rounds of the house, poking through drawers like a detective at the scene of a crime, while her husband paced back and forth against the backdrop of the canyon, hands clasped rigidly behind his back. Kyra tried to remain attentive, tried her best to look sincere and helpful, but her heart wasn't in it. She stood to make a commission on both ends of the deal-there was no other realtor involved-but still she just couldn't seem to motivate herself. By the end of the second hour she'd settled into a leather wing chair in the library, gazing out into the hazy sunstruck distance, idly thumbing through one of Albert Da Ros's leather-bound volumes-poetry, as it turned out. Louisa Greutert had to come looking for her finally, her voice echoing through the vast empty space of the house, the sound of her heels like gunshots coming up the corridor. “Through already?” Kyra murmured, rising guiltily from the chair.
And there was that look again, the head tilted to one side, the cold hard eyes fixing her with a look of amusement and disdain. “We've been here nearly two and a half hours.”
“Oh, well, I didn't mean-I didn't realize it had been that long.” Kyra let her gaze wander over the shelves of books, the leather-backed chairs, the wainscoting, the lamps in their sconces, and it was as if she were seeing them for the first time. “It's just that the place is so restful-”
She was aware in that moment of the presence of the husband in the hallway behind her, a ghostly figure like some unsettled spirit of the place. He crossed the room to his wife, there was a brief whispered consultation, and then the wife's voice came back at her with the suddenness of a twig snapping underfoot: “I'm afraid it's not for us.”
In the morning, Delaney sat at his keyboard, his face illuminated by the pale glow of the monitor. Over breakfast, he'd watched a pair of starlings crowding out the wrens and finches at the bird feeder, and an idea came to him: why not do a series of sketches on introduced species? The idea excited him-the whole thrust of the “Pilgrim” columns was that he himself was a recent transplant, seeing the flora and fauna of the Pacific Coast with the eye of a neophyte, and a series on creatures like the opossum, the escargot, the starling and the parakeet would be perfect. The only problem was, the words wouldn't come, or the images either. When he tried to envision the canyon, the white dust trails threaded through stands of mesquite and yucca till the very bones of the mountains lay exposed, or even the parking lot at the Woodland Hills McDonald's, swarming with one-legged blackbirds and rumpled, diseased-looking starlings, he saw only the Mexican. His Mexican. The man he had to forget all over again.