these things — I'm always pretending to know more than I do. Since I was a naughty kid, I've been like that, faking one thing or another; there are so many selves rollicking around in here and it is a harmful indulgence for a man often out of control. I had the thought that 'Kam Roberts' was like the secret password, I could ask a few more questions once I'd said it, but something, the peculiarity of the name or my odd tone of enthusiasm, seemed to deaden the air in the room.
In response, Lumpy and Lucien more or less withdrew. Lucien said he wanted to play cards and nudged his pal along, both of them shoving off with only a bare goodbye and a quick look back in my direction.
I stayed put in the steam, blanching like some vegetable and considering my prospects. Heat has its odd effects. In time, the limbs grow heavy and the mind is slower, as if gravity's increased, as if you'd taken a seat on Jupiter. This thing of men being men amid the intense heat revived some lost thought of my old man and the firehouse where all those guys spent so much of their lives together, bunking down in that single large room in which they dreamt uneasily, awaiting the hoarse call of the alarm, the summons to danger. We always knew when there'd been fires. You could hear the engines tearing out of the little fire-house four blocks away, the clanging of the bells, 'the sheens', as my father said, the enormous roaring motors that sounded big enough to power rocket ships. My dad came home sometimes still carrying the fire with him, a penetrating scent that hung around him like a cloud. 'Smellin like the sinners down in hell' was how he put it, weary and beaten in by physical exertion and fear, waiting for The Black Rose to open so he could have a snoot before he slept. My dreams since are full of fire, though I can't say for sure if that's from my pa or the way my ma, when she was scolding, would pinch my ear and tell me I was in league with Satan and would need to be buried in britches of asbestos.
Cooked out, I stumbled back up to the seedy locker room. I was trying to squint up the number from my key when I heard a voice behind me.
'Hey, yo, mister, you. Jorge wants to see you.' It was a kid with a bucket and a mop. I wasn't sure he was talking to me, but he tossed his head of sleek jet hair and waved for me to follow, which I did, clip-clopping after him in my thongs and wet sheet, leaving the locker area for something a hand-drawn sign called 'The Club Room'. Maybe somebody wanted me to buy a membership, I figured. Or to tell me about Bert.
Here again the furnishings were the latest, if the year happened to be 1949. Cheap mahogany paneling. Brown, speckled asbestos floor tiles such as would give any OSHA inspector an instant coronary. Red vinyl furniture with the stuffing oozing out the corners and, in one case, a black spring so long exposed it was beginning to rust. At a gray Formica table, with one of those old designs of vague forms like the sight through an unfocused microscope, four men were seated, playing pinochle. The youngest of them, a smooth-looking Mexican, nodded, and behind me the kid with the bucket scooted a chair.
'You lookin for Kam Roberts?' the Mexican asked. His eyes were on his cards. Lucien and Lumpy were nowhere in sight.
'I'm a friend of Bert Kamin.'
'I asked you 'Kam Roberts.'' He considered me now. This fella, Jorge, was a thin guy, one of those unshaved stringy-looking Mexicans who make such amazing lightweights, always whipping the fannies of these sleek black guys with bulging muscles. Unforeseen strength like that always impresses me. 'You got some ID?'
I looked at my sheet, heavy and almost translucent from the steam.
'Give me two minutes.'
'How far you think you get in two minutes?' he asked and threw down a card. I took a while on that.
'My name is Mack Malloy. Bert's my partner. I'm a lawyer.' I offered my hand.
'No, you ain,' said Jorge. Story of my life. Lie and I make you smile. The truth, you only wonder.
'Who are you?' I asked.
'Who am I? I'm a guy sittin here talkin to you, okay? You're lookin for Kam Roberts, that's who I am. Okay?' Jorge studied me with what you might call Third World anger — this thing that really goes beyond skin color and echoes back across the epochs, some gene-encoded memory of the syphilis that Cortez's men spread, of the tribal chieftains that the helmeted European troops tossed into the steaming volcanic crevices. 'Mr Roberts here, that's Mr Shit. You know what I mean?' 'I hear you.'
He turned to a guy beside him, a thick old brute who was still holding his cards.
'He hears me.' They exchanged a laugh.
Overall, this was not a good situation, being naked with four angry men. Jorge put both hands down on the table.
'I say you're a cop.' He wet his lips. 'I
The three guys watching thought this was a terrific line.
I smiled faintly, that primate fear-flight thing, still trying to figure what it was this guy thought he knew about me. It had been more than twenty years, but I would bet I could remember every guy I cracked. Sort of like the kids from grade school. Some faces you don't forget.
'Whatever you lookin for,
'I'm looking for Bert.'
Jorge closed his eyes, heavy-lidded like a lizard's.
'Wouldn't know him. Don' know him and don' know nobody he knows. I tole the first copper what come around askin Kam Roberts, I tole him straight up, I don' want none of this shit. I tole him, see Hans, and now we got some fucker here playin What's My Line. Don' fuck with me.' He worked his head around completely as if it were on a string, so that I knew I'd had it right to start: a former boxer.
I got it now, why he thought I was a cop, because the cops had already been here looking for Kam Roberts. I wanted to ask more, of course — which coppers, which unit, what they thought Bert had done — but I knew better than to press my luck.
Jorge had leaned in his confidential way across the table once again.
'I'm not supposed to have any this shit.' That's what he paid Hans for, that's what he was telling me. I knew Hans too, a watch commander in the Sixth District, two, three years from retirement, Hans Gudrich, real fat these days, with very clear blue eyes, quite beautiful actually, if you could say that about the eyes on a fat old cop.
‘I was on my way out,' I said.
'See, that's what I thought.'
'You were right.' I stood up, my sheet wetting the floor beneath me. 'We all have a job to do.' My impression of an honest policeman didn't sell. Jorge pointed.
'Nobody got no jobs to do here. You want to sweat, that's fine. You come here runnin any scams, Mr Roberts or whatever, we'll take a piece of your candy-ass, I don' care what kind of star you carry. To me, Mr Roberts, man, I better not hear no Mr Roberts again, you know?'
'Got it.'
I was gone fast. Bert may have been a fake tough guy; these fellas knew a thing or two about making hard choices, and I was dressed and on the street in a jiffy, bombing down the walk, my insides still melted down in fear. Nice crowd, I told Bert, and, once I'd started this conversation, asked a few more questions like why he was calling himself Kam Roberts.
I was now up to the intersection of Duhaney and Shields, one of these grand city neighborhoods, the league of nations, four blocks with eleven languages, all of them displayed on the garish signs flogging bargains that are pasted in the store windows. Taxis here are at best occasional, and I stomped around near the bus stop, where a little bit of the last snow remained in a dirty crusted hump, my cheeks stinging in the cold and my soul still seething from the trip into that inferno of tough men and intense heat. Near my native ground, I found myself in the thick grip of time and the stalled feelings that forty years ago seemed to bind my spirit like glue. I was hopelessly at odds with everyone — my ma, the Church, the nuns at school, the entire claustrophobic community with its million rules. I took no part in the joy that everybody here seemed to feel in belonging. Instead, I felt I was a spy, a clandestine agent from somewhere else, an outsider who took them all as objects, surfaces, things to see.
Now this last couple of years, since Nora scooted, I seem to be back here more and more, my dreams set in the dim houses beneath the Callison Street Bridge, where I am searching. Four decades later, it turns out it was me who was secretly infiltrated. Sometimes in these dreams I think I'm looking for my sister, sweet Elaine, dead three
