Fields Where They Lay, page 10
“Is a gift certificate,” he said.
“For how much? It’s been left blank.”
“For as much as you need to get yourself a nice briefcase for all that money I just gave you.”
“I’m not really a briefcase guy—”
“Then get yourself some reins and a bit. I don’t give a fuck.” He stood up.
“Is this my present?”
“No.” He gave the part of the mall he could see a quick but careful look, and it seemed to me, just for a moment, that his assurance slipped and I saw a little fear hiding back there. “Your present is in the second envelope, the one in your left rear pocket. It should assure you of my sincerity in the matter of last night.” He scanned the place again and then turned and headed for the escalator, and across the mall I saw Mini-me watching him go. He caught me looking at him and bared his teeth. He probably hissed, too, but I was too far away to catch it.
I waited until they were both out of sight and then changed seats so that I had my back to Wally’s camera. For a second I considered the possibility that Vlad had chosen that chair for a purpose, and the thought sent a little, many-legged bug skittering up my spine—who was Vlad afraid of?—followed closely by another, possibly even scarier—why did he want video of my face?—but there was no way I could think about either of those questions right now, so I dismissed them and opened the envelope, being careful to keep my back between the envelope and the camera.
Money, money, money, photograph.
The photograph showed a car, shot at a diagonal that favored the front bumper on the driver’s side. The bumper was punched in pretty decisively, and the headlight above it was an empty socket framed by broken glass. The driver’s door stood wide open. Hanging out of the passenger compartment at a forty-five-degree angle, held in place only by a fully extended seat belt, dangled a very large man with a squarish head and half a lower jaw. The other half of the jaw was spattered across the surface of the car. The little white things on the ground were teeth.
Four or five minutes later I walked up to Santa, who was momentarily between children, and said, “I need to sit on your lap.”
Santa said, “Can you fit under the sign?”
“If I go down on my hands and knees.”
Shlomo shook his head. “I get lunch at twelve forty-five.”
12
Average Yelp Rating 2.4 Stars
An hour later I’d made a couple of yawning loops on both the second and third floors, watching the customers trickle in and the kids line up for Shlomo. I’d also taken a brief and somewhat hair-raising break sitting in the bathroom stall I was beginning to think of as my office. I’d needed someplace private in which to review the photograph of the golem hanging out of his battered car.
It was much worse than I’d thought at first. I had assumed the lower jaw had been taken off by a close-range blast from a good-size gun. The jaw had grabbed my eyes and held them when I first pulled the picture out of the envelope. I hadn’t noticed the actual message that went with the present.
It was a golf club, a driver, leaning casually against the chassis just behind the rear door. Probably taken right out of Vlad’s own designer bag. His way of telling me first that he’d taken care of my little problem in person, and second, he’d been working on his drive just in case he and I ever got down to it.
It struck me for the second time as I sat there that he was afraid of something. Okay, he was a brutal mass-market pimp who’d risen to Advanced Thug level, where one wears blazers and sips tea and pretends not to enjoy it when the country club help licks his zippered boots, and guys like that will do a lot to protect their status. But he already owned me, or thought he did: we’d come through our little spat last night without actually breaking up, and I’d put a price on my soul, which he paid without a murmur of protest. This kind of—excuse the term—overkill was unnecessary.
Unless he was scared half to death of something, and that something was related to the shoplifting in this wretched mall. And I was the one who was supposed to hand him the map out of his problem.
And I asked myself again: Scared of whom?
Since I was behind a closed door and out of view of Wally’s cameras, I took off my belt and used the point on its tongue to scratch large letters into the paint, which was already a bulletin board for low achievers. It took me a few minutes and I had to check my phone for the number I needed, but by the time I got up with my belt back in place, I’d gouged into the wall—in letters that looked big enough to be seen from the air, like the help a castaway stomps into the beach—FOR A GOOD TIME CALL TIPPY, followed by Vlad’s phone number. Beneath that, written left-handed so it looked like a second opinion, was Average Yelp rating 2.4 stars, but there’s a short line.
As I said earlier, junior high school, but my options were limited.
By the time I came back out to the second-floor railing, I could see that Dwayne was still in position, although he seemed to be staring at his lap as though he wasn’t sure it belonged to him. There were eight or ten children waiting, a few bored and a few looking fretful, but the majority staring slack-jawed at the screens on their phones. Right in front of them was Santa, in the deeply marinated flesh, and the kids were fascinated by pixels. Down at the other end of the mall I could see Shlomo with a kid on his lap and a much longer line of waiting children. Kids have pretty good instincts.
The crowd below me still wasn’t big enough for me to begin trying to find anything unusual in the way it was behaving. A year or two earlier I’d become interested in the way large crowds of people tend to move, especially in the kinds of deviations from essentially random movement that often occur under certain circumstances, and what those certain circumstances tend to be. Obviously no single person actually moves at random—possibly barring the ones who had written the graffiti in my bathroom stall—but when a crowd achieves any of several specific ratios between density and the amount of space it’s filling, certain group behaviors, too disorganized to call patterns, begin to emerge. You can call them random in that they seem to be driven by individual whim, in the absence of some kind of mass attractor that would draw a significant portion of the individuals in the crowd. Think of a large number of birds taking off in any old direction before they achieve flock formation.
What Edgerton Mall hosted at the moment was a relatively low concentration of shoppers, moving according to a few rules so ordinary that they wouldn’t draw the attention of someone looking for deviations. Those of us who are educationally invested in the Western alphabet read from left to right, and since most Americans read ABCs, a predictable majority of us choose the left aisle in a movie theater or, the left door into a structure large enough to have two entrances, assuming the two doors are essentially equidistant to our parking space. On the other hand, groups in circular or oval spaces, like most malls, tend to move clockwise—in other words, to the right of the door they entered through. The fact that people are usually more comfortable moving with a crowd rather than against it multiplies these preferences and magnifies them. People are drawn to light much the same way moths are, and a brightly lit space in a relatively dim area will draw almost everyone in a crowd over time, and a statistically predictable percentage of the individuals in the group will usually be moving toward that light source at any given moment. The same holds for something in repetitive motion, an attracting effect often exploited at Christmastime by shops with blinking lights.
This may all sound theoretical and devoid of real-world value, but insights like these—plus factors such as proximity to escalators, to food, and to the outer doors, to name a few—were all integers in the hardheaded math that went into determining the rental value of virtually every square inch in a large retail structure like the one I was in.
I’d seen something that was off the previous day, but I hadn’t watched long enough to know whether it was just a brief anomaly or something more interesting, and I couldn’t conjure it up sharply enough to superimpose it on the sluggish group below me, so I gave it up and chatted with a few more shop employees and supervisors and shoplifted a couple of small items just to keep my hand in, although nothing as good as yesterday’s poker-playing dog. I was sure one clerk had spotted me but it didn’t rouse her from her torpor. Yes, most of the managers said when asked, they were losing considerably more to theft this Christmas season than they had in prior years. The few chain stores said that losses were up a bit, but nowhere near as sharply as in the little independent shops. Three more owners echoed Bonnie of Bonnie’s Bric-a-Brac in saying that this was probably their final year in business.
Some of the stores I went into had a lot of customers and some had none or few. Given their essential exterior sameness, I couldn’t account for that using the little I knew of crowd mechanics, but it gave me an idea, probably the first of the day.
“Been watching you,” Wally said when he opened the door for me. Then he retreated back behind his console and put his hands in his pockets, usually a sign of anxiety.
“Yeah?” I took a little yellow bathtub duck out of my pocket. “Did you see me take this?”
He looked like I’d betrayed him. “No.”
“Well, don’t worry about it. This time through, the cameras were the only thing I was really thinking about.”
He was having trouble with the entire concept. “I saw you take those sunglasses, though. How many things have you boosted?”
“Eleven or twelve, but I put them all back within an hour or two.”
“Not the duck.”
“I will.”
He said, “Honest?”
“Wally,” I said moving the duck over imaginary waves, “what am I going to do with this?”
It took him a moment, but he said, “Okay.”
“You can watch me put it back if you want. You could even come with me. Listen, how far back is the surveillance video kept?”
“One month,” he said. “On, for instance, December seventh, the stuff from November seventh is erased and overwritten.”
“Can you pull out certain material and save it longer?”
“You mean, like if somebody falls down or there’s a fight or something?”
“I suppose.”
“All I gotta do is transfer it to a different storage system. In case we get sued. People sue all the time. Their car gets scratched in the lot, they sue.”
“I don’t see the parking lot on any of these things.”
“We don’t watch it, but here.” He flipped six switches, and suddenly those screens were showing us the lot. “It’s recorded, but the only time we check it is when somebody makes noise about it.” He toggled back to the interior views of the stores.
“So you have all the video for the past month. Do you also have the weekly store spreadsheets—you know, profit and loss, shoplifting stats—for that period?”
“No.”
“Can you get them?”
“Sure. I just need a reason.”
“Tell them that the theft consultant wants to see them. If that doesn’t do it, tell them to phone Mr. Poindexter’s office.”
“Okay,” he said, straightening at the sound of Vlad’s alias. “I’ll give it a try.”
“And here’s what I want you to do. Fast-forward through the tapes for the month, looking for stores that are unusually crowded, and make a note of which day and which store. Then go to the weekly spreadsheets once you get them and see whether those crowded days fell during a week or weeks when those stores reported a significant level of theft.”
He was looking at me as though he was waiting for the simultaneous translator to finish, but then he said, “You want graphs?”
“Graphs,” I said, “would be peachy.”
13
A Long, Steep Stairway of Fashionability
I chose several watching spots on the upper levels so I could observe the crowd resolutely refusing to do whatever had caught my eye the day before. They didn’t do much of anything, actually, except wander slack-jawed, bump into each other, and manage their kids with varying degrees of effectiveness. After an hour of that I heard three of the season’s most hellacious songs one after the other, “Jingle Bell Rock,” “I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus,” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and realized I’d heard them in the same sequence the previous evening, more than once, and the wad of money in my pocket began to feel kind of light. I went down to one of the armed security guards and, after he cleared it through Wally, got him to let me borrow the keys to the unoccupied stores.
They were uniformly dirty and sad, but there had been beams of imagination shining on them at first: Bonnie assembling her bric-a-brac and seeing all the sparkle and none of the cheese. The guy who loved music so much he sank whatever he had into a record shop, a lifetime of enthusiasm colliding with a fading technology. Connie’s Active Tots had sold exercise equipment for toddlers. The sign over the door said an active baby is a healthy baby. I thought I probably would have liked Connie. Two bookstores, shelves empty and echoing with all the words that had been lined up there, back when browsing meant actually holding a book in your hands, in a space that had been built for that purpose by and for people who loved books. I’ve never met a bookseller I didn’t like, and now, as a species, they were as endangered as the honeybee.
So the empty stores were depressing, but there were no secret caches of boosted merchandise under their counters, no hidden rooms or locked doors or ancient, fading maps of the ventilation system. They were husks; whatever energy had once animated them, it was gone now.
The same thing could be said about malls themselves. The shopping mall was a gift to America from a Viennese architect named Victor Gruen, who looked at American cities and decided that they lacked what one sociologist called third spaces, areas that serve as a kind of social point that was neither space one, home, nor space two, work. As a third space—analogous to European town squares—Gruen envisioned a huge enclosed area with retail institutions, amusement venues, places to sit, people watch, meet friends, fall in love, eat something. There was a Utopian element in Gruen’s design: he wanted his malls to serve as town squares, complete with libraries, childcare facilities, even areas offering health care.
He launched a new retail era when he opened the first one in 1956: Southdale Center, in Edina, Minnesota, chosen because it was a small enough town that the land was cheap and Gruen could be certain that the mall would be the area’s chief attraction, and also because it was a short hop over a good road to and from the fat wallets of Minneapolis. Southdale set the mold for what was to follow, ever bigger commercial developments, free of rain, snow, and heat waves, sealed off from the outside world in the same way casinos are, with the same effect: people lose track of time. The libraries and other public-service centers, though, never materialized: as the malls multiplied, the sheer cost of building them took them out of the hands of Utopian architects and the occasional liberal city government and put them into the claws of venture capitalists.
At one point in the nineties, malls had grown so grandiose and so ubiquitous that an American historian suggested that archaeologists thousands of years from now, digging them up, would assume they had been places of worship. And I suppose they were. But like the Mithraic temples knocked down to provide building material for early cathedrals, the malls ultimately lost their worshipers to a new commercial religion. In the nineties, when the Internet began its wildfire growth, cracks started to appear in the foundations of the country’s malls. The big department stores, the “magnet stores” that were the malls’ most essential tenants, began falling off the buy lists of influential stockbrokers. A little startup named Napster appeared in 1999 and started to toll the bell for hard copy distribution of all kinds of essentially digital content: music, films, television; and the lights of the big record store chains and the little enthusiasts’ shops like the one in Edgerton began to blink out.
Even before then, in 1994, an online shopping service called “Cadabra” had opened its virtual doors without making much of an impact. When one of the firm’s lawyers misheard the name as “cadaver,” it was changed to Amazon. As Amazon the company started with books; in its first week under that name, in 1995, it took in $20,000, and almost immediately began to diversify. Only five years later the “accidental” name became the basis of a logo in which a curved arrow beneath the word stretched from A to Z, implying an entire universe of products.
The image of the mall rapidly descended a long, steep stairway of fashionability: stale, retro, tarnished, passé, outdated, embarrassing, shuttered. Malls declined all over the country, hundreds of them closing to shoppers and opening themselves to the slow decay of damp and mildew. Photographers broke in to document the ruin in ghoulish images of color and rot. The mall at the center of the teenage world, the Sherman Oaks Galleria, featured in the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High and widely celebrated (and reviled) as the mecca of the “Valley Girls” phenomenon, shut its doors for “remodeling” in 1999, opened unremodeled in 2002, and limped into the sunset, only to lose its roof and return in diminished form as yet another open-air shopping area. In 2009, General Growth Properties, one of the largest mall owners in America, filed for bankruptcy.
The Edgerton Mall was surviving on fumes, offering a sad contrast to a very small number of developments in the LA area that had somehow flourished, like resilient elms that had dodged the blight. I didn’t know exactly when during that long industry-wide slide to the skids Edgerton had been built, but it seemed unlikely to me that the business plan would have made exciting reading to anyone who knew what he was doing. And yet a bunch of high-level crooks who were at least nominally not stupid had apparently invested millions in it.
