Now everyone on West Street just calls the two-story brick mill house “the abattoir,” as if this were a generic name for all empty brick arcs, or as if the sound of the word implied something more exotic and maybe sexual, a Latino dream of Gallic brothels, the floors stained forever with perfumes and talc rather than fifty years’ worth of steer blood and the sand of band-sawed bones.
Hannah has her gun out, gripped in her right hand, held down by her thigh. She approaches the building by the rear alley and comes up the fire escape to the second-floor entrance. The old steel door is ajar the way Iguaran promised it would be.
She steps into a loft-office area, a place that once processed paperwork, filled orders for a gross of steaks, a thousand center-cut roasts, ten thousand pounds of ground chuck. The office is empty now except for a large gunmetal desk pushed against a wall and missing all its drawers. There’s a sunfaded, oversized calendar still hanging from an opposite wall, nailed into the bricks with a large rusted spike and announcing, perpetually, that it’s May 1972.
Moving across the loft to a wrought-iron balcony, Hannah looks down to see three figures clustered in a far corner below. The only light is a white beam that fans out to shine on a far wall. Stray wisps of smoke drift through the light. There’s a familiar ticking sound echoing through the brick cavern and it’s a second before Hannah realizes it’s the sound of a movie projector. She pivots and is able to make out the images playing against the bricks — a grainy shot of rats scrambling out of the hold of a ship, first one, then a few, then a swarm, crawling over each other, seemingly frantic. It’s a film she’s seen before, a silent black-and-white classic—Nosferatu. German, she remembers. Around 1922, she thinks. The first adaptation of Dracula.
She moves to the narrow iron stairway and descends into what was once the largest meat processing plant in town. She can recall walking with her father once, just before the abattoir closed. They passed one of the front loading ports just as a delivery truck had pulled away and the huge metal rolldown door was still open. It was late fall and the air held a hard chill. White steam hung around her father’s mouth as he spoke to her, holding her hand, keeping her close. But the talk ceased as they passed the loading door and both took in the scene: a man in a heavy-looking white smock, stained everywhere with rust-colored blotches, a green rubber garden hose held with both hands, a jet of water spurting from the nozzle down onto the concrete floor. The man was hosing away steer blood, and the water from the hose was hot, and as it mixed with the cold November air, gusts of steam flew everywhere, making vision into some hyper-real dream, some trace memory that seemed to be climbing back to the here and now. The concrete floor was sloped slightly, like a movie theater, and there was a round, grate-covered drain set into the lowest point and the blood and water eased into an ongoing whirlpool around the edge of the drain. And beyond the drain, where the flooring rose back to level, there were racks of metal frames fitted with thick steel hooks, huge, mutant fishing hooks out of your most troubling nightmares. And, of course, hanging from these industrial hooks were sides of beef, almost-whole steers, headless and hideless but with legs intact, the run of their powerful bodies completely evident, totally recognizable for what they once were and looking enormous. They hung in a uniform row, like pressed suits in a walk-in closet.
Hannah remembers her father pulling her past the loading door, but not before a burst of nausea exploded through her stomach and something like a mix of fear and pity and guilt and confusion broke on her neck and arms and legs. She remembers her father tried to start talking again, to pick up their conversation as if it had never been interrupted. And Hannah loved him for his effort, but resented him for not realizing its futility, for not accepting that there was no way to steal back the vision she’d just been given. And trying to was something like a loving insult.
She advances toward the three figures. A small table lamp is turned on and things become clearer. She sees a large man sprawled on a ratty, black leather couch. He’s beefy-looking but not fat or flabby, a full face with a conspicuous dark mole angled out below his right nostril and above his bushy Zapata mustache. She’d place him in his mid-forties. Traces of gray filter through his closely cropped dark hair. His eyebrows are still completely black and very thick, his forehead lined with permanent creases. He’s got deep, purplish circles under his eyes that might betray a tendency to insomnia or maybe a vitamin deficiency, but the eyes themselves are stunningly vivid, even in this poor light, completely alive and focused on her. Her first impression is of a patriarchal presence that has somehow solidified before its time. He projects the bearing of a wise grandfather without the number of years to account for it. And he dresses young — a stylish black V-neck sweater, the sleeves pushed up on his arms, and a pair of gray pleated pants with cuffed legs.
There’s a small monkey, like an organ grinder’s monkey, lying prone on the man’s shoulder, asleep and nuzzling near his neck. There’s an old-fashioned black round-topped doctor’s bag on the couch next to him, open, revealing dozens of plastic vials. He’s chewing on the end of a red felt-tip pen. Open in his lap is a newspaper Hannah’s not familiar with—Pacific Rim Journal. Various sections of newsprint are corralled with red circles.
Next to the man is a small, dark woman wearing royal-blue spandex bicycle pants and a leather bra with intricate stitching that looks somewhat like a harness. The outfit shows off an assortment of perfectly toned muscles. Her face is all cheekbones and lips. Hannah thinks the woman could make a fortune as a model, a pouty, postmodern mannequin sneering at a camera lens while seated on the hood of some glitzy sports car. She has a waterfall of black wiry hair that’s been pulled back and tied into a loose ponytail. Her function seems to have something to do with the silver IV pole next to the couch. The pole supports a clear plastic bag that hangs from a small S-shaped hook. The bag is filled with a brownish solution that’s dripping at scheduled intervals into a plastic vein that, in turn, is plugged into the man’s arm.
Sitting behind the couch is the projectionist, a younger, leaner version of the patriarch. He’s hunched on a stool, working with a rag, silently cleaning a sawed-off shotgun that rests next to the movie projector on a rickety wooden worktable. He’s handsome in a threatening, predatory kind of way — huge eyes, brown to the point of blackness, a square jaw, clean-shaven, an alertness to his bearing. His hair looks like it may have once been as wiry as the woman’s, but he seems to have had it straightened, an old-time conk job. There’s a short, fat scar on the side of his neck.
Spray-painted on the wall behind the worktable are huge block letters of neon scarlet that spell out Welcome to the Last Wave. Hannah thinks it’s like a message you’d read entering the fun-house ride at some malign traveling carnival.
The man caps the felt pen, slides it behind his right ear, takes a breath, and says, “Thank you for dropping by, Detective Shaw.”
Hannah gives a formal nod and says, “Thanks for having me, Mr. Iguaran.” She head-motions toward the graffiti and adds, “You’ve got to find yourself a new designer.”