That night, when I got home, the flag on the mail box was up again. Inside it was an envelope that said, DELIVER BY MESSENGER. Within the envelope was an old-fashioned dance card from the late fifties, about Alice’s vintage. It had a carnation embossed on the cover and parallel lines ruled inside, each with a time indicated next to it. On the left-hand side of the card, written in metallic gold, were all the things I had done that day, up until I left Blinkins’s office, around four. Every single one of them. The times were all indicated precisely, in that infuriating straight-line lettering. At midnight it said SWEET DREAMS!!!
I got the prickles on the back of my neck again.
The right-hand side of the card had a slash drawn through it, dispensing with the first five dances. Under the slash was a double line, followed by the next day’s date, and the time 8:00 P.M. Below that was the message SHALL WE DANCE?
A stalk of fennel had been folded into the card.
As I dropped into the kind of sleep even Macbeth would have scorned, I heard Blinkins and Schultz say one word in unison. The word was “trickster.”
10
“It’s a phone booth at the corner of Los Angeles Street and Sixth,” I said to the second button on my shirt. I turned right through the heavy downtown traffic, feeling all the muscles in my back bunch and jump independently. They made me think of the frog’s leg through which we’d passed electricity in high school biology. It had bunched and jumped, too. And it had probably wanted to be on that ceramic tray about as much as I wanted to be driving through downtown L. A. at 8:25 on a Saturday night, on my way to a waltz with the Incinerator.
The wire tucked into the back of my jeans was about the size of an audiocassette. It bulged against the base of my spine, feeling bigger than a Cadillac Eldorado. Something no thicker than sewing thread connected it to the second button in my shirt.
“I’m slowing,” I said, trying not to move my lips and feeling like a fifth-rate ventriloquist. “Traffic. I may be late to the phone booth.”
No one answered, but, of course, no one could. I had to take it on faith that someone was on the other end. I might be able to meet the Incinerator wearing a concealed microphone, but I certainly couldn’t do it with a plug in my ear.
“It’s construction,” I said. “I’m going to be late.” I heard the unsteadiness in my voice. I went on, nevertheless. “Are the ground rules straight?” I asked no one who could answer. “Remember that it could be a trick,” I added, thinking about Prometheus. “It could be that he just wants to see if I’ve got cops with me. You don’t move unless I tell you to.” Trying not to move my lips, I sounded to myself like Humphrey Bogart. “Anybody moves, Al, I’m in Des Moines. This is the last pass, as far as I’m concerned.”
The traffic started to roll. I pressed Alice’s accelerator in the direction of fate.
We’d started the preparations on the previous evening, three minutes after I got the dance card. I’d called Hammond at home-with certain misgivings-to tell him about it. He’d been awake and morose and drunk, but he sobered up in seconds.
“You’ll need a wire,” was the first productive thing he said.
“And how are you going to get it to me? Al, I’m being watched, remember?”
“A girl. Have I got a girl for you. Got a great little wire, too, real hi-fi.”
“Al,” I said, backing up one giant step, “why do you assume that I’m going?”
“You want this geek preserved in amber,” Hammond said. “Same as me.”
“Well, I’m not going,” I said. “Not unless I make the rules.”
“Your rules,” he said instantly.
“I need to talk to Finch,” I said, although I knew it would piss Hammond off. “And Schultz. Why isn’t Schultz sleeping in the guest room?”
“You should write for TV,” Hammond said. He despised TV. “On the phone at ten, okay?”
“And Schultz,” I’d added unwisely.
“I heard you the first time,” Hammond said, banging the phone down.
The ten o’clock conference call with Finch, Hammond, and Schultz had been punctual, short, and unsatisfying.
“Goes without saying,” Finch said gruffly. “You call the shots.”
“No shots,” I said. “That’s the point. Nobody pulls a gun, nobody moves, nobody shows himself, unless you hear me ask for it.”
“Don’t worry,” Finch said. “You’re the boss.”
“Al?” I said.
“Yo,” Hammond said.
“You’re my guarantee.”
“Hell,” Hammond said, in spite of his injured feelings, “I’m your friend.” There, his tone told me, I’ve said it.
I looked at my bare feet. They would, I thought, catch fire easily. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go, and I’ll wear the wire. But nobody moves unless I give the word.”
And the wire had arrived at eleven the next morning, carried in the purse of a female police officer who looked no older than sixteen, dressed in a T-shirt and strategically slashed jeans, and the Incinerator had called at seven-fifteen and had said nothing more than “Dumpster at the Fernwood Market.” He’d hung up, leaving me looking at the phone. If I’d ever heard the voice before, I couldn’t place it.
Taped to the side of the dumpster facing away from the street, I’d found a tightly folded square of paper, no more than an inch on any side. It said SIMEON on the side facing me, in shiny gold lettering. It gave me precise directions to a pepper tree in Reseda Park, in the Valley. On the trunk of the tree in Reseda Park, a monstrous pepper that was methodically killing the grass beneath it, was another note, riven to the bark with a hatpin. It said, YOU’RE A GOOOOD
DRIVER, SIMEON. CAREFUL AND COURTEOUS. PHONE BOOTH, CORNER OF THIRD AND LOS ANGELES, downtown. Downtown. At the periphery of Little Tokyo. On his territory.
I’d driven quite a way before I called those directions in. I was having second thoughts about virtually every aspect of my life, and not least about my decision to involve the cops in this meet. I knew no one had me in visual surveillance-Finch had promised that the cars would use parallel streets and remain out of sight until and unless I yelled for help. I could, I reasoned, just stop calling in and meet the Incinerator alone, assuming that he’d actually be there, which I didn’t think he would be. I was pretty sure that he’d be positioned very carefully somewhere where he could see me, but I couldn’t imagine someone who preyed on the immobile having the recklessness to risk it all on a guess about my character. He just wanted to know whether I was friend or fuel. He would materialize in the flesh at the next contact, or the one after that.
On the other hand, what if I were wrong? So I called in when I was most of the way downtown and felt briefly grateful that I wasn’t wearing an earpiece and didn’t have to listen to the cops swear and scramble for position across the broad L.A. Basin.
The phone booth where I was supposed to wait for a ring and then do anything the Incinerator told me to do was one of those stingy little waist-high spatter shields, standing bravely on a corner that the homeless had claimed for their own. I leaned against it, wishing my legs were steadier, and it rang.
“Hello?” I said, forcing my voice downward from the tenor pitch it seemed determined to assume.
“Hello, Simeon,” the Incinerator said. “Remember me?”
“No,” I said.
“Aaahh,” he said. “That’s not polite. Not considering how well I remember you.”
“Memory,” I said. “It’s so selective. In what context should I remember you?”
I heard a chuckle. “Not very flattering,” the Incinerator said.
“When I see you,” I heard myself saying in the earpiece.
