Flashback

Professor Emeritus George Leonard Fox thought that he might be physically ill. He’d met very few of Val’s friends over the five years since Nick had sent his grandson to live with him, but the always smiling, respectful, courteous, and, somehow, Leonard knew from forty years of teaching, Eddie Haskell–devious Billy Coyne had been one who’d been to the house often.

“I think I have to get Val out of this city,” said Leonard. Emilio had moved his white pawn forward, starting the second game, but Leonard wasn’t focusing on it.

“Si, it might be a good idea, my friend. Do you have the money for the airfare?”

Leonard laughed bitterly. “With fares now going for more than a million new bucks per ticket for a Los Angeles–to-Denver flight? Hardly.”

“His father, perhaps? He was able to pay the boy’s fare here five years ago.”

Leonard shook his head. “Nick used almost all of my daughter’s life-insurance money to buy that ticket.”

“But he was a policeman…”

“Was,” said Leonard. “He’s nothing more than a flashback addict now. I used to have Val phone him monthly, but now Val doesn’t want to speak to his father and Nick doesn’t return my calls when I leave a message. I think he’s forgotten that he has a son.”

“Are there other relatives?”

Lost in thought, Leonard shook his head again. “You know about my family, Emilio. Four marriages over all those years but only three daughters. Dara dead in that Denver car accident. Kathryn married that French Muslim and moved to Paris more than twenty years ago—she’s lost in dhimmitude there. Under the veil, as they say. I haven’t heard from her at all in fifteen years. Eloise calls me from New Orleans three times a year—always to borrow money. She and her husband are both flash addicts. Neither has a job. The three ex-wives I loved are dead; the one I learned to hate—and who always hated me—is alive and rich and wouldn’t take a phone call from me, much less my grandson from another wife.”

“So,” said Emilio, “the father.”

“Yes. The father. Val says that he hates his father—when he says anything at all about him—but it would still be for the best, I think. And it would only be for eleven months until Val goes into the army. This city is getting too dangerous for the boy.”

Emilio was looking at Leonard with a mournful expression. “It may soon be too dangerous for you as well, my friend. You should both go. Soon. Very soon.”

Leonard blinked out of his reverie, all thoughts of chess gone. “What are you telling me, Emilio? What do you know?”

The older man sighed, raised his ivory-handled cane from where it was propped against their table, and leaned his weight on it. “The forces of La Raza and reconquista are very restless. There may be an effort to seize all power in Los Angeles soon.”

Leonard laughed out of sheer surprise. The two rarely discussed politics per se. “Seize power?” he said too loudly. “Don’t the spanics already run everything in L.A. except a few neighborhoods? Isn’t it already a law that the mayor must be spanic?”

“Spanic, yes. But not true reconquista, Leonard. Not governing all of Los Angeles as a province of Nuevo Mexico. This is… coming.”

Leonard could only stare. Finally he said, “That would mean civil war in the streets.”

“Yes.”

“How much… how much time do we have?”

Emilio leaned more heavily on his cane, his doleful expression becoming even sadder. Leonard was reminded of his Cervantes and the Knight of the Woeful Countenance.

“If you and your grandson can go, you should go… soon,” whispered Emilio. He took a business card and a beautiful fountain pen from his pocket and wrote something on the card in Spanish and handed it across the table. Leonard could see that the card showed only Emilio’s name and an address about two miles east of Echo Park—he’d never asked Emilio where he lived—and a brief handwritten sentence telling anyone who read the note to allow this man to pass, that he was a friend, and to convey him to the address on the card. The signature was Emilio Gabriel Fernandez y Figueroa.

“But how?” asked Leonard, folding the card carefully and setting it in his billfold. “How?”

“There are the convoys, both the eighteen-wheeler truck convoys that sometimes carry paying passengers and the groups of motorists who band together.”

“I don’t own a car.” Leonard was feeling the kind of vertigo that he’d always thought must assail a man just before a stroke or massive coronary. The heat of the September sun was suddenly too much to bear.

“I know.”

“The checkpoints and roadblocks…”

“Come see me at that address when you are certain that the two of you are leaving,” Emilio said in Castilian Spanish. “Something may be arranged.”

Leonard set his hands flat on the concrete chess table and stared at the liver spots and raised veins, at the knuckles swollen with arthritis. Were these his hands? How could they be?

“Do you remember what the Roman legionnaire Flaminius Rufus said about the City of the Immortals in Borges’s story ‘The Immortal’?” Emilio asked, speaking in English again.

“Flaminius Rufus? I… no. I mean, yes, I remember the story, but I don’t… no.”

“Borges had his legionnaire say that the city is ‘so horrible that its mere existence… contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars.’ ”

Leonard stared at the older man. He had no idea what Emilio was talking about.

“That is how the Nuevo Mexico reconquista warriors view the remaining gringo and Asian parts of Los Angeles, my friend,” said Emilio. “There will be much blood shed. And soon. And if your grandson had anything to do with the rape of Maria Hernandez, he will not live long enough even to see the shedding of this blood throughout the City of Angels. Get out if you can, Leonard. Take your grandson. Go.”

1.04 Denver—Saturday, Sept. 11

You going to sit out there drinking beer and looking at the stars all night or come in to bed?”

Dara’s voice drifts out through the screen door to the tiny veranda where Nick sits looking up through the gaps in the old Siberian elms toward the tiny patch of visible late-summer sky. The night is rich with insect sounds, TV and stereo noises from the surrounding houses, and the occasional scream of sirens from distant Colfax Avenue.

“Third choice,” says Nick. “You come out and sit on my lap while I teach you some of the constellations.”

“I’m too fat to sit on anyone’s lap,” says Dara but she comes out through the squeaky screen door.

She is fat… for Dara… late in her eighth month of pregnancy and showing it. She’s carrying another can of Coors but hands it to Nick. She’s been very careful during her pregnancy.

Nick pats his lap but she kisses him on the forehead and sits in the old metal lawn chair next to him. She looks up and says softly, “I don’t see many stars, much less any constellations.”

“You have to let your eyes adapt to the dark awhile, kiddo.”

“Not very dark here with all the city lights, is it? Wouldn’t you like to live in the country—the mountains somewhere—where the stars are clear and so you could buy that astronomical telescope you’ve been ogling in your catalogue?”

“We’d go nuts in the country,” says Nick, pulling the tab off the cold beer and setting the tab next to him on the chair rather than dropping it in the dark. He’s proud of how neat their little backyard and veranda are. “Besides, city cops have to live in the city. It’s the law.” He sips and says, “But yes, I’d love to have a telescope and the dark