L.A. 46, page 11
Romero’s self-pity turned to belligerence. He stood up in the booth and rested his fingertips on the table to steady himself. “Look. You tell Patsy—”
Kolowski materialized beside the waiter. “Come on, Marty,” he said quietly. “Give both of us a break. Don’t make any trouble for me.”
“Why not? What will you do, call the cops?”
“No,” Kolowski said, still quietly. “It might take them some time to get here.” He lifted the bung starter dangling from his right hand and tapped his left palm with it. “I think I can handle this myself. At least I’m willing to try.”
Romero began a hot retort and thought better of it. He wasn’t afraid of Kolowski, but Kolowski was an old man. If he hit him, he might kill him. Then, too, he’d seen Patsy handle a bung starter before.
“Okay,” he salvaged his pride. “So who wants to drink in your crummy bar?”
“Fine,” Kolowski said. “Remember that, please, will you, Marty? I know you live near here. But the next time you pass by, you say to yourself, ‘I don’t want to drink in that crummy bar.’ ”
There was a light ripple of self-conscious laughter from the couples seated at the nearby tables. Romero glowered at them for a moment, then picked his bills and change from the table and walked the length of the bar to the door and out of it into the night.
Nobody, but nobody, liked him. He tried to be a good guy. And what did he get? Crapped on. First Mama. Then Alicia. Now an old Polack like Patsy Kolowski, a stumblebum who’d never fought on tee-vee in his life, was telling him what he could and couldn’t do.
There was a liquor store on the corner. He straightened the knot of his tie, made certain of the set of his sport coat, then walked in without weaving and bought a fifth of bourbon and a six-pack of beer.
The walk back to the Casa del Sol was longer and steeper than he remembered it. He was perspiring profusely when he walked through the stone arch. The pool looked cool and inviting. There were a half dozen couples in it. As many more were clustered around the open door of Mr. and Mrs. Katz’s garden apartment. Everyone in the building was lousy with friends. Everyone but him.
He climbed the stairs to the second floor balcony and wove down it toward his apartment. It sounded like Alicia was still crying. She would be. Anything he hated was a bawling woman.
On impulse, he stopped in front of Apartment 23. The Venetian blinds were closed but light shone through the cracks. He could hear or thought he could hear a Carmen Cavallaro recording on the record player. Perhaps if he apologized to Miss Arness for the way he’d acted in the garage, the model and her roommate would have a drink with him. One thing was for sure. Now that he knew what she was, the tall lesb wouldn’t think he was after her.
Romero knocked lightly on the door. “Miss Arness.”
When no one answered he knocked harder, then tried the knob. Finding the door unlocked, he opened it a few inches and looked in.
“It’s all right,” he said thickly. “Don’t be frightened. I just want to apologize. You know. For this morning.”
There was no one in the apartment. The record he’d heard wasn’t coming from their record player. He opened the door all the way and walked in. The cool air in the room was heavy with incense. A pair of stockings was lying over the arm of a chair. A bra and a pair of filmy panties were on the seat of the chair. Romero fingered them with alcoholic interest, then drank from his bottle. Even if they were lesb and pigeon, the two models in 23 were attractive broads. Alicia wasn’t in the same weight with them. After all, she was only a little Mex kid who’d been convenient at the time. And now he was stuck with her.
He drank from his bottle again and coughed, then walked into the kitchenette and filled a glass with water from the cold water tap. The half case of wine the taller of the two girls had been carrying, two of the bottles open and empty, was standing on the sink beside two scarcely touched sandwiches.
Seeing the sandwiches reminded him he hadn’t eaten since morning. Not that anyone cared. No one cared if he starved to death.
“Get out. Get out and don’t come back,” his own mother had told him. To his face. To her own son. With chicken and yellow rice cooking on the stove.
He ate one of the sandwiches, then the other. It was difficult to tell what was in them, one of the concoctions that girls made.
When he finished the sandwiches, he washed them down with whiskey and water and felt better, but cheated. He’d come to apologize. He meant to. He thought he knew where the girls might be.
Licking the crumbs from his fingers, Romero closed the door of the apartment and rapped on the next door.
“Yes?” a male voice asked over the record on the hi-fi.
“It’s Marty Romero. From down the balcony.”
The hi-fi continued playing for a long moment. Then someone shut it off and the younger of the two pilots, wearing a natural color silk shantung kimono that looked as if it might have been purchased on one of his frequent flights to Hong Kong, opened the door part way.
“What do you want?”
“I want to talk to Miss Arness.”
“What about?”
“I want to apologize for this morning.”
“Grace isn’t here.”
The sofa was back of the partly opened door. From where he was standing Romero couldn’t see into the room, but the bottom half of the sofa and half of the girl lying on it were clearly reflected in the mirror hanging on the wall on the far side of the room. It also reflected her slippers and the dropped negligee on the floor. “Don’t give me that,” Romero said.
“It’s the truth.”
“Then who’s in there with you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
The girl lying on the sofa raised one of her knees. “Who is it?”
The pilot turned his head. “Romero. He says he wants to apologize to Grace.”
“Apologize to Grace? For what?”
“He didn’t say.”
The girl sounded a little drunk. “Well, don’t just stand there. Tell him she isn’t here. Tell him she’s working a fashion show at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Tell him to go away.”
The pilot turned back to Romero. “Miss Arness isn’t here. She’s working a fashion show at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
“I heard what she said.”
“Then beat it.”
The pilot closed the door and the half girl in the mirror was gone. All that was left was the heat and the night and the murmur of the voices of the other tenants in the lanai.
Romero lurched down the balcony to his own apartment. Burdened with the six-pack of beer and the bottle of whiskey, he had trouble unlocking the door. Alicia had put Pepe to bed and was sitting in the chair by the window.
As he stood with his back to the door, scowling at her, mentally comparing her to the fragile white and gold femininity of the half girl he’d just seen in the mirror, she stopped crying and got to her feet and tried to smile.
“I’m sorry, Marty. I know you don’t like me to cry. It’s just you were gone so long, and I was worried.” Romero continued to study the girl. Even now Pepe was six years old, Alicia was only twenty-one or twenty-two. If a man liked his women tawny, with lots of black hair, a thin waist, and big breasts that nothing ever seemed to really cover, Alicia was still quite pretty in a lush, foreign sort of way. Anything he did or said was all right with her. She was his any time, any way he wanted her. Not that he intended to risk it, but the chances were he could even slap her around a little and while someone else might tell Mama, she never would. All she would do would be to get the familiar hurt look in her oxlike eyes.
He was her man.
The thought made Romero a little ill. He walked on to the kitchenette and put the six-pack of beer in the refrigerator, then, the whiskey he’d already drunk roaring in his head, leaned against the sink, nursing the neck of the bottle.
Who did Patsy think he was? Or the fly-boy and the little pigeon. Or, for that matter, old man Katz. Just because he’d clowned around a little with his fat wife, the old Jew had told him:
“From now on leave Mrs. Katz alone or I’ll beat your goddamn brains in. And if I can’t do it with my fists, I’ll use a baseball bat.”
The nerve of them. All of them. Katz, Mama, Patsy, the long-legged lesb in Apartment 23, her pigeon, the fly-boy she was cheating with.
“Whenever you’ve had your fun.”
“Don’t madre mia me. A goosequill I should have used before I brought such a son into the world.”
“Fine. Remember that, please, will you, Marty? I know you live near here. But the next time you pass by, you say to yourself, ‘I don’t want to drink in that crummy bar.’ ”
“Tell him to go away.”
“Then beat it.”
Great tears of alcoholic self-pity rolled down his cheeks. All of them had treated him like he was dirt. But two could play at that game. No one could push him around and get away with it. He was Marty Romero. He was Marty the Wonder Boy. If it hadn’t been for a couple of bad breaks and bum decisions, he could have been the light heavyweight champion of the world.
12
Thirty-six . . . thirty-seven . . . thirty-eight . . . thirty-nine . . . forty . . .
As a youth in Shropshire, then as a young man in London, Barry Eden had always been an avid exponent of physical fitness. Because he was working in the States he saw no reason to change. Rather, because of the sedentary nature of his work, he expanded his program of rigorous self-discipline.
When he could, he walked instead of rode. He and Dulcy ate well but sensibly. He had a session with the barbells and the pulley every morning. He saw to it that both he and Dulcy swam the pool twenty times before they ate their evening meal, then, before retiring, he always topped off the day with still more calisthenics.
Now, working on fifty push-ups while he waited for his wife to return with, he hoped, good news of Eva Mazeric, he combined the exercise with listening to the familiar night noises filtering in through the window he’d opened after shutting off the bloody air-conditioning unit that made the apartment so cold a man could think he was back in Bishop’s Castle.
Once he’d become accustomed to them, they were mildly pleasing sounds: palm fronds rubbing together dryly in the continuing heat . . . the explosive whoosh of cars passing the front of the building . . . the muted roar of the not distant freeway . . . the drone of a plane passing overhead, en route to International Airport . . . a record player in the building playing a Carmen Cavallaro recording . . . the late news on Channel 9 . . . an old British movie on Channel 5 . . . the occasional click of high heels and murmur of voices and soft laughter in the lanai.
Life was composed of so many things, some of them i pleasant, some not.
Forty-four . . . forty-five . . . forty-six . . .
Eden was wryly amused at himself. As a youth he’d known so much. He’d been so certain. Now in his mid-thirties, after four years in the United States, three of them with Aerospace Tectonics, working against time on one of their missile guidance systems, at a fabulous stipend per annum, he was certain of only one thing.
If it was true that only Englishmen and mad dogs went out in the midday sun, the lineal and foster-descendants of the participants in the most expensive tea party the British Empire had ever known ran them a close psychiatric second.
Forty-eight . . . forty-nine . . . fifty.
Eden got to his feet and walked out onto the small private balcony and stood enjoying the lights and the stars and the night. All Americans, at least all he’d met, were mad, self-admittedly, frenziedly, delightfully so.
They complained bitterly about the heavy tax load they had to carry, yet gave away billions of dollars a year in foreign aid, a great deal of it to satellite countries of the world power dedicated to a promise to bury them.
They complained about foreign espionage and passed stringent measures to deal with it, then printed their top secret discoveries in scientific magazines and in papers that anyone with the inclination, could purchase for a few pennies.
They refused government aid to education in religious schools, then elected a Catholic president, and because they were in short supply of physicists and scientists and engineers for their all-out space and nuclear effort, imported engineers like himself, who had been educated abroad, at hundreds of quid more a month than they could earn in their own countries.
Then there was the racial problem. If a Negro were to try to rent an apartment at the Casa del Sol, the chances were, because of his color, Mrs. Malloy would turn him away on one pretext or another. This while a Negro was the head of the Federal Housing Administration and only a short while back the federal government had sent armed troops and spent over four million dollars to back the contention of an obscure Negro student that he had a right to attend and be domiciled in one of the higher seats of learning that happened to be situated south of a more or less imaginary line, first surveyed in 1763-1767 by two English astronomers, a Mr. Charles Mason and a Mr. Jeremiah Dixon.
They made a fetish of well-being. They spent fantastic sums of money establishing free clinics and dispensing free serums to protect their young, then turned around and ruined their own stomachs and lungs and livers by spending millions of dollars more on hot dogs and whiskey and cigarettes.
They opened shops that sold kippers and lawn mowers and women’s dresses and apothecary supplies and building materials at discount prices, hiring brass bands and giving away automobiles while they filled the night sky with revolving beams from aerial searchlights. And, somehow, made a profit on the deal.
Their poor, on relief, ate better than most skilled European workmen. Their idea of an austerity program was one in which every family was limited to one electric stove, one automatic waging machine, one eight-cylinder automobile, one telephone, and one television set.
They probably had more indoor plumbing than all the other nations in the world combined, but when one was on the street and in need, there was seldom any public place to go. When there was, one was expected to jiggle on one foot while one searched through one’s change for a nickel to drop in a slot.
Then there was the matter of sex. Most Americans pretended it didn’t exist. They formed purity leagues and censoring bodies to stamp out any mention of it, then gave their highest financial and artistic awards to trollops turned actresses, meanwhile beating their own mattresses so hard they had one of the highest birthrates in the world in Washington, D.C., thirty-five percent of it illegitimate.
It was all frightfully confusing.
Eden enjoyed the view a moment longer. Then, glancing at his watch and noting it was a few minutes of midnight, he left the balcony and the apartment and went to see how the search for Eva Mazeric was progressing.
Despite the lateness of the hour, Mr. Melkha and the Suddermans and Mr. and Mrs. Wylie were still sitting on the chaises around the pool, talking in subdued voices to keep from disturbing Mrs. Malloy and the other tenants who had retired.
“Any luck so far?” Eden asked them.
Mr. Melkha shook his head. “Not that we know of. But I think Mazeric is overworried. At least I hope so. We all know when a woman is carrying a child she often does odd, frequently thoughtless, things.”
“True,” Mr. Sudderman nodded.
Melkha continued. “After she left here this afternoon, Eva could have met someone she knew, possibly someone from one of the D.P. or refugee camps she was in. Or she could have gone to a movie.”
“Or,” Mrs. Wylie said, “pretty little thing that she is, some hopped-up punk, or punks, could have dragged her into a car and right now, now this very minute while we’re sitting here, have her up on Mulholland Drive, or back in one of the canyons, doing you know what to her.”
“You said it,” her husband contributed his bit to the conversation.
“Let’s hope not,” Mrs. Sudderman said.
Eden walked on to the open door of the Katz apartment. All of the lights were on. Mazeric was sitting at the table in the kitchenette, holding his head in his hands. Mrs. Katz was doing something at the stove, Dulcy assisting her. Mrs. Morton was sitting with her eyes closed as she told her beads. On the far side of the living room, his lean face almost as grim as Mazeric’s,
Mr. Katz was talking earnestly to a portly, white-haired gentleman seated in front of the telephone table.
Dulcy saw her husband and came over to the door.
“Anything new?” Eden asked her.
“Nothing,” his wife informed him. “And it’s getting a bit sticky. We’ve contacted all of the tenants, at least all of those who are home, and no one in the building has seen or heard of her since she rode down in the lift with Miss Arness and the two pilots in 21 shortly after one o’clock. And I saw her then myself. We even nodded.” Eden was concerned. “They’re doing something about it other than talk to the tenants, I trust.”
Dulcy put a hand on his chest and backed him out of the lighted doorway into the shadow of the overhanging balcony. “Now they are.”
“What do you mean, now they are?”
“Well, up to a few minutes ago when Mr. Morton came home, while Paul was willing to allow Mr. Katz to call the various receiving hospitals to ask if Eva had been admitted, he was adamant about not informing the police. I judge he doesn’t have a very high opinion of them.”
“After what they put him through, you can’t blame him.”
“But that was Hungary.”
“True.”
Dulcy glanced into the apartment, continued. “But you know I don’t think it was that at all, Barry. Oh, he’s worried about Eva, desperately so. But he’s also afraid if she should be in any trouble, it might go against him at his naturalization hearing.”
“Oh, come off it.”
“I mean it. I know it’s not a very nice thing to say. But they must have done terrible things to him. You know. To his mind. Paul talks big. Very big. But deep down inside him, I think he’s almost as afraid he might have to go back some day as he is in love with Eva.”
“I think you’re stretching that a little.”
