L.A. 46, page 7
As the Edens climbed out of the pool, Eden chanced to look up and, seeing him on the balcony, raised a hand in salutation.
“Good evening, Paul.”
Mazeric acknowledged the greeting. “Mr. and Mrs. Eden.”
“Hot today, wasn’t It?” Dulcy called.
“Very,” Mazeric agreed. “It must have been over a hundred in the shop.”
As she toweled herself, the young matron added, “Did Eva get back all right?”
“From where?” Mazeric asked her. “I’ve been looking for her since I came home half an hour ago.”
“Lord,” the English girl said. “I haven’t any idea where she went. But I was getting a spot of sun this afternoon when Eva came down all dressed up and told Mrs. Katz and Mrs. Morton that she was going out for a few hours and if you came home before she did, to tell you she wouldn’t be long.”
“What time was this, Mrs. Eden?”
“I’d say oneish. Maybe a few minutes later.”
“And she didn’t say where she was going?”
“No, she didn’t. But Mrs. Morton asked her if she thought it was wise for her to go out alone. You know. Because of the baby and the heat. And Eva said she’d be fine. And Mrs. Katz warned her not to walk too far and as soon as she got tired to take a cab.”
“I see,” Mazeric said.
“Are you certain she isn’t in the building?”
“I don’t know where she’d be. I’ve asked everyone I’ve met since I came home and none of them had even seen her.”
“She probably got caught in a traffic jam,” Eden said. “Traffic was more than usually fierce when I came in from the Valley tonight and there was a tie-up in the outbound lanes that had cars backed up for miles. Why don’t you come up and eat with us, Paul?”
“Do„ please,” his wife urged. “I’ve a very nice leg of lamb In the oven. More than Barry and I can possibly eat.” She tempted, “With mint sauce and Yorkshire pudding. And when Eva comes home she can join us.”
“Thank you,” Mazeric thanked her. “You make it very difficult to refuse your kind invitation. But, with your permission, I will wait for Eva. As your husband says, she probably got caught in the rush-hour traffic. And if that is the case, she should be home shortly.”
“Do as you like,” the English girl said. “But if you get tired of waiting, come up. We won’t eat for another ten or fifteen minutes.”
As the Edens disappeared under the overhang of the balcony, Mazeric unlocked and opened the door of his apartment. He hadn’t noticed it when he first came home but the air smelled stale and after the heat on the balcony the apartment was uncomfortably cold. He turned off the air conditioning and propped the door open, then looked in the refrigerator. Before she’d left for wherever she was, Eva had taken two steaks out of the freezer compartment. They looked very appetizing and obviously were intended for their supper, but the only thing he could see that was readily edible was some sliced bologna and two leftover hot dogs in the meat tender.
Mazeric ate one of the hot dogs, then put the bologna and a bottle of beer on the table in the kitchenette, and added a half-sack of potato chips he found pushed back in one of the cabinets behind some packages of instant mashed potatoes and dehydrated soups. The collection didn’t look very tempting, certainly not as tempting as Mrs. Eden’s offer of leg of lamb and mint sauce and Yorkshire pudding.
Mazeric considered Mrs. Eden’s offer again and again decided against accepting. Barry and Dulcy Eden were charming people. Eden was an electronic engineer working on one phase of the space effort. He had a thorough knowledge of his field and a good grasp of the world situation. Mazeric enjoyed talking to him. But while, judging from her fund of trivial information imparted when he came home, Eva was in and out of a half-dozen apartments a day, it was difficult for him to socialize with people he’d known for so short a time.
For as long as he could remember it had never been easy for Paul to make small talk. Not even when he’d been a boy alternating between his father’s country seat in Koszeg and the academy in Budapest, before the Red tide had rolled over Hungary killing his father and mother and the baby sister he’d barely known.
Then, too, he had so little in common with most of his fellow tenants. With the exception of the Edens and Dr. Gam and Mr. Morton and the wise old Greek whose ancestry dated back to the Minoan civilization that had flourished from 3000 to 1100 B.C., most of the couples who lived in the Casa del Sol were half-naked barbarians whose chief purpose in life seemed to be achieving a good suntan, self-confessed semiliterates who wouldn’t know Saint Sophia’s Dome from the Sistine Chapel or a Sophist from Sappho.
Mazeric uncapped the bottle of beer. Against that, while very few if any of his fellow tenants held degrees in the humanities or were intended architects, they were far from being stupid. They could do a variety of things he couldn’t do. He couldn’t figure the odds on a horse race, fight in a prize ring professionally, work on an airplane plant assembly line, straighten and paint a crumpled car fender, manufacture folding doors or women’s bathing suits, write a book, do a pleasing striptease, pilot a jet plane beyond the speed of sound, or pay his monthly rent and put money in the bank by prostituting his body.
Nor had he any reason to feel bitter toward them. With no exceptions, they had been very kind and helpful to himself and Eva.
He ate a slice of bologna and some potato chips. The bologna was quite good but the potato chips were so stale he could taste rancid grease even after he’d washed them down with a mouthful of beer. Definitely, he had to speak firmly to Eva. Very firmly. The least she could do was have his meals ready on time. She was no longer a child. In marrying, she had assumed certain responsibilities. A woman’s place was in the home, not, as Mrs. Katz so aptly put it, “running the freeways.” He didn’t think much of Germans. Few true Germans did. But as concerned their women, they had the right idea. Theoretically at least, their women were restricted to the three Ks, Ktiche, Kirche, and Kinder. Kitchen, church, and children.
Mazeric finished the bottle of beer and the bologna, emptied the potato chips in the disposal chute, then got his book on American citizenship and stretched out on the living room sofa and tried to memorize the presidents in chronological order while he waited for Eva.
George Washington had been first. Next had come John Adams. Then Thomas Jefferson, the first of the presidents to be inaugurated in Washington. Then the second Adams succeeded by Jackson who, in turn, had been succeeded by Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce . . .
Mazeric stuck there. Then who? Who had come between Pierce and Lincoln? He looked in his book. Oh, yes. James Buchanan. Then, of course, Lincoln and Johnson and Grant. That far he was on fairly solid ground. He could also start with John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower and go back down the list to the first Roosevelt without misplacing a name. It was the nineteenth to twenty-fifth presidents who threw him. Possibly because nothing of world-shaking importance had taken place during their administrations.
Mazeric ran his muscular fingers through his hair. Then, again, perhaps he’d taken too much glockenspiel. What was of world-shaking importance to one group of men was only worth a few paragraphs in history, as recorded by another nation. He got his World Almanac and read the paragraphs he’d marked:
In 1956, popular demands for the ousting of Emo Gero, Hungarian Communist Party Secretary, and for the formation of a new government by Imre Nagy, resulted in the latter’s appointment Oct. 23, but demonstrations against Communist rule in Budapest developed into open revolt when the security police fired on the people. Gero called in Soviet armed forces to crush the rioting as Revolutionary Councils spread through the country. The insurrection appeared halted by Oct. 28 when Premier Nagy announced the Soviet Union had agreed to withdraw its troops from Hungary. However, by Nov. 1, Soviet troops again surrounded Budapest and, despite Nagy’s protest to the USSR and United Nations, launched a massive surprise attack against the city Nov. 4 with an estimated 200,000 troops, 2,500 tanks and armored cars.
Despite the gallantry of the patriots, many of them youths, and some Communists, the bid for free government was crushed. Estimates of casualties varied from 6,500 to 32,000 dead. Many rebels were reported executed and thousands deported. Between 170,000 and 196,000 persons fled the country. The United States received 38,248 under a refugee emergency program.
Mazeric laid the book on the coffee table in front of the sofa. Now it was all but forgotten except by those few who’d fought through it and had managed to survive.
Sweat beaded his forehead. Standing stripped against a wall in subzero weather with a People’s Policeman or an N.K.V.D. man ready to lash out with a piece of rubber hose if you as much as moved a muscle hadn’t been pleasant. Nor had the strong light turned on your eyes, especially when you were weak from hunger and had been questioned for days without being permitted to sleep. In both instances, however, a man had usually been able to take it, somewhat consoled and strengthened by the knowledge that somewhere on the outside one group of comrades were asking:
“Do you think Paul will talk?”
While another group assured them:
“No. Not Paul.”
After all, when one was a man of honor, all they could do was kill you. But that wasn’t entirely true of the glockenspeil, that charming nonmusical instrument borrowed from the Gestapo and used so effectively by both the N.K.V.D. and the People’s Police. There were nights now, seven years later, when, according to Eva, he still screamed and cursed in his nightmares, but always defiantly, never, never mentioning any names.
And the glockenspeil had been such a simple affair. All they had done was put a tin pail over your head, then beat on the metal with sticks while a dozen men, some of them fellow countrymen who had sold out for a piece of bread and a pretty uniform, shouted, “Talk, you stupid Hungarian bastard. Who was with you on the roof? Who was firing that submachine gun? Who killed the guards at the radio station? Who blew up the power plant? What are the names and addresses of the students who pried up the hatch and dropped the bomb in that tank?”
For an hour, two hours, four hours, all night, beating on the pail incessantly until your head felt like so much throbbing pulp being beaten back down through your body until it was compressed into a space no larger than the aching signs of your manhood.
Mazeric wished Eva would come home. He didn’t feel so all alone when she was with him. He wished he knew what to do. She’d never been this late before. Something must have happened to her. She wouldn’t stay away this long of her own free will.
He got up from the sofa and walked out on the balcony. Now that they’d finished their suppers, the tenants were gathering in the garden again. There were even a few swimmers in the pool. Mazeric checked to make certain the Katzes’ windows were still dark and started back into the apartment and walked down the front stairs instead and rang the bell of the manager’s apartment. It was possible, barely possible, that Eva had confided in Mrs. Malloy where she intended to go and when she would return.
8
“No,” Mrs. Malloy said. “I saw Mrs. Mazeric this morning. Or maybe it was this afternoon. As I recall, she was dressed for the street, but she didn’t say where she was going”
“Well, anyway, thank you,” Mazeric said.
“You’re very welcome.”
Mrs. Malloy watched the blond man walk back up the front stairs. Even if they were somewhat foreign, he more so than she, the Mazerics were a nice couple. They were as nice a couple as she’d had in any of the buildings she’d managed. However, if the lanai gossip was true and Eva was pregnant she’d have no choice but to give Mazeric notice to move before the baby was born. If she made an exception in their case it would set a precedent, and within months the Casa del Sol would be overrun with children. And after the children came dogs.
Mrs. Malloy walked far enough out from under the balcony overhang to be able to see the lighted windows and drawn Venetian blinds of Marty Romero’s apartment. She herself hadn’t seen the newcomers but during the last hour four of her tenants had complained that Romero had a five- or six-year-old boy he claimed was his son, in his apartment. A five- or six-year-old boy and a Mexican tart.
If the allegations were as stated, there was nothing she could do about the girl. When the corporation that owned the building, one of thirty-eight multiple units they owned, approved a lease they assumed if die lessee was able to pay the rent, he or she was adult enough to know what, within reason, he or she wanted to do in his or her apartment. But if Romero had a boy in his apartment, the child would have to go.
Mrs. Malloy hoped there was a child. Romero was far from being a desirable tenant. From what she’d been able to see of the apartment from the doorway and through the window, he’d made a shambles of it and the furnishings. If there was a child and he insisted on keeping the boy in the building, it would give her reason to cancel his lease.
She patted the fat rolls of her bleached hair to make certain the hot wind blowing through the archway hadn’t disarranged them. There’d been a time when a manager had had to put up with a lot from her tenants, but that time had passed. The shoe was on the other foot now. You didn’t have to take any crap from anyone. According to the latest statistics she’d read, every one hundred and forty seconds a newcomer settled in Los Angeles County. And with the contractors and builders almost run out of level land on which to build multiple units, prolonged vacancies, at least in the better, close-in, neighborhoods, were a thing of the past. She’d rented both of the apartments she’d advertised before eleven o’clock that morning.
Definitely the trend back to urban living had begun, especially among older couples and younger couples without children. People in general were fed up with cracked picture windows and crab grass and spending an hour or more twice a day, five days a week, bucking traffic to and from their work. Then, too, living in one of the better multiple units, like the Casa del Sol, had become a status symbol.
While she was up and outside, Mrs. Malloy walked through the arch and turned on the front sprinkler system. She wished it would rain. The longer the drought continued, the higher the building’s water bill would be. And the less profit the corporation made, the less her small percentage would be.
There was a yellow cab waiting in front of the building. Mrs. Malloy glanced at it idly as she turned on the sprinkler system, then walked back through the arch, encountering Colette. Obviously answering a call, Colette was wearing a smart summer dress and shoes and stockings and short white gloves. She looked and smelled expensively beautiful.
“Good evening, Mrs. Malloy.” She smiled.
Mrs. Malloy returned the salutation, “Miss Dupar.”
The brief exchange amused her. It was a funny world. Because things were the way they were, you were nice to a whore and put a child out on the street. But then, on the other hand, Colette never disturbed the other tenants by crying in the night, leaving toys where they could be tripped over, monopolizing the self-service elevator, or peeing in the pool.
The manager of the Casa del Sol admired the girl’s slim back as she stooped to enter the cab. The girl was a pretty little thing, part Indian, she believed, from somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico. She envied her. It was a long time since she’d worn size nine.
Sighing, Mrs. Malloy continued on through the arch and stood a moment studying the other tenants in the floodlighted lanai, talking, swimming, listening to the piped-in music. This in the middle of a Santa Ana when all of them paid extra rent for air-conditioned apartments and had radios and televisions and hi-fi sets of their own. It didn’t make sense. But then few tenants did. Someone, she thought, ought to print a list or manifesto of the hazards and annoyances that anyone who went into building management might expect.
If you had a two-bedroom furnished apartment for rent, the lookers wanted an unfurnished one-bedroom or a single. If you had an unfurnished one-bedroom or a single, the lookers wanted a furnished two-bedroom. If the decor of an apartment was gray, would-be tenants wanted one painted mauve. If mauve, they wanted one painted dove-gray to go with the traveler drapes they’d bought for their last apartment.
If the apartment you had for rent had a range and a refrigerator in it, they had their own range and refrigerator and insisted you take yours out. If you’d taken the range and refrigerator out of an apartment, the lookers hadn’t either and insisted you buy new ones for them.
Handymen and gardeners came high and were highly unreliable. It cost a lot of money to heat and maintain an apartment house size pool. Drunks loved to fall into pools at four o’clock in the morning and then sue the building’s owner for not having more adequate lighting.
If you kept a lanai lighted all night, certain tenants always complained that the lights kept them awake. All tenants had neighbors whose hi-fi or television sets annoyed them to the point of threatening to break their leases, but were righteously indignant when requested to turn down the volume of their own sets.
“Why, it’s so low now I can barely hear it.”
Then there was the matter of dogs, big dogs, little dogs, middle-sized dogs, all of them certified to be house-broken, but all of them under the canine illusion that eight dollar a square yard broadloom was pissing cousin to grass.
The tenants who didn’t have dogs usually had cats or monkeys or children. Especially children. Sweet-faced, rosy-cheeked, miniature monsters whose mothers set them out to scream at eight o’clock every morning, from which time on, until their two o’clock nap, they whooped up and down the balconies, pounded on the doors of sleeping tenants, pretended the self-service elevators were cherry pickers at a missile base, gave apartment house managers and the insurance underwriters gray hair by falling into the deep end of the pool, and assiduously assisted their doting mothers in stopping up the plumbing with nonflushable objects peculiar to small children and young women of childbearing age.
