A few seconds later the telephone in Chinese Gordon’s booth rang and Kepler’s voice said, “He still hasn’t called anyone else. He’s got three with him, no second car. Got to go.”
Chinese Gordon bought a hot dog and stared out at the ocean. A squadron of brown pelicans skimmed the calm, shining surface a few hundred yards offshore, pumping their wings several times in unison and then gliding in single file and finally soaring upward to bank and plummet into the water. He shared the hot dog bun with an inquisitive sea gull and then went off to make the final telephone call. “Ocean Land,” he said.
“I’m getting tired,
“You’ll love it,” said Chinese Gordon. “You’ll be in time for the twelve-o’clock dolphin show.”
At twelve o’clock Chinese Gordon was eating popcorn and sitting in the last row of the gallery surrounding the dolphin pool. Below him two young men who looked like lifeguards were taking turns talking in abnormally cheery voices into a public-address system that made their p’s and b’s explode in the ear: “…we want to remind you ladies and gentlemen that everything the animals do here at Ocean Land is absolutely natural. It’s not a trained animal act, it’s an exhibition of several of their natural behaviors. And now let me introduce two of the members of our cast, two Pacific bottlenose dolphins, Perky…and…Jerky!” Chinese Gordon watched as two dolphins approached the trainer by balancing on their tails in the water, churning their flukes furiously to remain erect. Strapped to their heads were two oversized plastic hats, one a top hat and the other a fireman’s helmet.
Chinese Gordon turned away to scan the crowd. Lined up at the railing were Jorge Grijalvas and three other men, all wearing suits. “Jerky!” shouted the trainer in exaggerated frustration. “Why can’t you be more like Perky?” Chinese Gordon watched as one of the dolphins did a one-and-a-half flip through a hoop and the other spit water at the trainer.
Then Immelmann sat down beside him. “It looks clean. All four together in plain sight, one car. They haven’t been near a phone, according to Kepler.”
Chinese Gordon glanced up at the rail and saw Kepler standing behind Grijalvas and his men. Chinese Gordon followed Immelmann up the concrete steps, past Grijalvas and across the plaza beside a pool where the fat, leathery shape of a walrus rolled off a ledge into the water.
They entered a building marked “Aquarium,” and walked along a dark corridor lined with windows opening into luminous blue. Now and then a large fish would glide past, a big unblinking eye would scan across them without surprise, and then there would be a flurry of smaller fish, fluttering like bright birds to scatter ahead into other windows before the cruising monster. The corridor curved and rose, a spiral ramp circling the tank. At some of the windows parents held small children up to peer into the lighted water, the children’s faces glowing blue in the dim hallway.
At the top of the ramp there were three doors along the wall. Chinese Gordon and Kepler entered the door marked “Men” and waited.
When Grijalvas and his companions came in, Kepler stood at the door. “I’ll watch for interruptions.”
Chinese Gordon was settled on a toilet. “Hi, Jorge. Sorry about all this.”
“Let’s get it over,” said Grijalvas. “Let’s see the cocaine.”
Chinese Gordon lifted his shirt and showed an array of plastic bags taped to his body. “Your turn.”
One of Grijalvas’s men reached into his coat, but Kepler was on him, the barrel of his pistol jammed against the man’s throat. Kepler pulled open the coat to reveal a shoulder holster. Chinese Gordon said, “Now dig deeper. There better be money somewhere near that gun.”
“There is,” said Grijalvas.
Chinese Gordon waited while Kepler extracted an envelope, examined it, found another and another. “All right,” he said. “Unload.”
Each of the four men pulled six envelopes from various pockets and tossed them on the floor. Chinese Gordon examined each carefully and put it into the knapsack at his feet. Finally he stripped off the bags of cocaine and stood up to stretch while Grijalvas and his men loaded their pockets.
Kepler snatched up the knapsack and tossed it onto the floor outside. He watched as the door of the Ladies’ room opened and Margaret walked out, picked up the knapsack, and disappeared down the dark corridor.
“Now what?” asked Grijalvas.
“Now we have a nice afternoon,” said Chinese Gordon. “You saw the dolphins, Perky and Jerky. Now we’re going to see one more show and then go our separate ways.” He glanced at his watch. “Come on.”
They filed through the doorway to the upper deck, where there was another gallery surrounding another large pool. Another pair of young men were standing at the edge of the pool, and one was saying, “We’d like to remind you that this is not a trained-animal act, but a display of certain natural behaviors of these magnificent creatures of the sea, the killer whales.” A gigantic black and white snout emerged from the water, and the glistening black body rolled after it. A fin that appeared to be the size of a car hood slapped the surface and drenched the front row of the audience, who gasped and giggled, but Chinese Gordon wasn’t watching. He was staring past Jo-Jo, the Madcap Joker of the Sea, and into the distant parking lot. In the far corner, a tiny bright yellow Volkswagen was moving past the exit gate onto the coast highway.
“Racine.”
“Hello, John. It’s Ben Porterfield. What time can you meet me?”
“Dinner is on you at Musso and Frank’s. Seven-thirty.”
THE POLISHED WOOD WALLS didn’t seem to end in a ceiling at all, just in a dimness somewhere above the level of the lights. Porterfield sat alone in his booth, thinking about how much Musso and Frank’s reminded him of railroads. The waiters in their bright red jackets moving up the aisle at almost a run, their trays piled high with covered dishes, gave the impression that the whole long, narrow room was on its way to some destination, but there was an unmistakable feeling that when the passengers got there it would be another time, probably around 1925. It wasn’t as though the restaurant stimulated the imagination or evoked the past. There was nothing archaic or antique about it. There was just the simple, unarguable fact of continuity. Each day for the past sixty years the stoves got lit and the tables set and the waiters put on their red jackets and somebody unlocked the door. When the red leather on the seats wore out, the upholsterers came and replaced it, exactly as it had been, as it always would be, taking care to be ready for the next day, the next customer, paying no attention to what year it might be outside the front door on Hollywood Boulevard.
Out there it had been a steadily evolving stream of people walking past the windows, first orange growers and next film people from the directors and actors to the grips and gaffers and then almost instantly the multitude who grew up around the studios, the film processors and advertisers and rental agents and drivers and the people who sold them all clothes and food and houses and cars and insurance, and next the ones who were there to sell sex or drugs and finally, for the past few years, ones who weren’t even on the boulevard to do that, people who were here because there were bright lights that made it look warm, or maybe a parking ramp nearby where you could sleep most of the night if you still had enough of your brain left to memorize the schedule of the patrol cars.
Inside the door it was still 1925, and the lineal heirs, if not the original clients, were still ordering the big salad and the side of oysters, and one of the fat men at the booth across the aisle from Porterfield’s was saying, “My lawyer can piss rings around his lawyer,” and another answered, “Yeah, but his accountant can make an elephant disappear up its own ass.”
Racine followed a red-coated waiter up the aisle and slipped into the booth before the next waiter overtook him. “Well, Benjamin,” he said, leaning on the table with both elbows, “I read one time that William Faulkner went behind the bar here to show them how to make a mint julep. Want to see if they wrote it down?”
“No, thanks,” said Porterfield. “He was probably the last person to order one. Scotch.”
Racine shrugged. “Martini.” The waiter disappeared. “How did you get stuck with this one?”
Porterfield watched a waiter pass by with a tray of what looked like five identical steaks and felt a dull longing. He still wasn’t used to the three-hour time difference. “Oh, proximity. I had already been scheduled to take
