I left him. I made my way through the high reeds that blew back and forth between the remains of two stone pyramids, rumored to have been built by Chinese barons back before the marshes shifted. They gleamed a tarnished gold in the sun, and in all the gaping holes pocked by the sea burned the fires of nomads. I headed for this bar I knew over on Main Street. By the time I got there it was dark and a few of the streetlights were on. Old boxes blew up and down the sidewalks, and scurrying across my path were what I took to be huge rats until I saw the eyes of men looking out at me from under their black coats. I had come to this bar a couple of times before; it had a red door with no knob and a window smeared with silt. The counter inside had a total of four different brown unlabeled bottles. There was no point being very particular about what was served to you in this bar. I wouldn’t have come back after the first time except for an old man who sat at the end of the bar talking to himself. The bartender called him Raymond. Though Raymond may or may not have cared that anyone listened to him, there were always three or four who did, and it was never the same three or four. The bartender explained Raymond sailed in from the desert every day to sit in this bar and talk to himself. More interesting was the bartender’s claim that Raymond actually used to work in the Downtown library. I have no idea whether or not this was true. I have no idea whether the bartender knew who I was when he told me this. But I tried to imagine Raymond living and sleeping in the tower where I now lived and slept. Raymond looked to me about seventy or eighty years old but I knew from firsthand experience this meant nothing; like the buildings in this city there was no telling how ancient he really was. Raymond talked of the early days. He was a walking history of the town with the chapters out of order; but it wasn’t Raymond who had the chapters out of order, it was the town itself. I sat in the bar and listened to him tell of when the Asians first settled the blank little islands of Los Angeles: Chinese warlords with palaces in the Hollywood moors who rode the plains all the way to Nevada and clashed with the huns and samurai who lived in the caves along the coast where wild children now banded in tribes. A barbaric context, Raymond rumbled to himself at the bar, but at least it was a context, until the Portuguese gamblers brought in their South American slave girls. And now there’s no context at all.
I left the bar and wandered a while, waiting for someone with some sort of official responsibility to pick me up. After half an hour I realized I’d walked to the underground grotto where I had talked to Wade and seen the woman with the camera. There I overheard sailors murmuring about a score that night in Downey. I didn’t expect to see Wade. I didn’t expect to see the woman with the camera either, but she was at the same table as before. The bartender watched me casually. I looked around and sat at another table with my eye on the other side of the room. A few people straggled in and out, and after about five minutes I got up and went over to her. Like the first time I’d seen her here, she was fooling very intently with the camera. Sitting in the ashtray on the table next to her was a cigarette and two or three burned butts. The smoke smelled like Sonoran hemp, but when she looked up at me she didn’t appear narcotized; the distracted look in her eyes was something else. She also had three glasses sitting in front of her, all of them empty; she seemed just as impervious to the liquor. There was a pause in the way she looked at me. It seemed a long time—five or ten seconds—after I said hello that she reacted, and then she gave me the same smile she gave the others; it was goofy, which was interesting because she didn’t have a goofy face. It was a sculpted face, high cheeks and eyes far apart except thinking about it now maybe her mouth was just a little off-center and that was what made it odd. At any rate the effect of the smile was calculated to be both pleasant and unpromising, and she used it with success. It got her many drinks and no trouble.
I didn’t offer to buy her a drink. I’d given the boatman out by the lagoon too much money and now I was short. I told her my name and she smiled again in a way that said she already knew it or that it didn’t matter. Her own name was Janet Dart or Dash or Dot; Wade would tell me later. Come here often? I asked. She laughed; it looked like I was putting the make on her. I decided I should say something that would change that. “Are you a cop?”
She looked down at the camera and then back up, sort of surprised. “No,” she said.
“But you were over at the library, the night of the murder.”
“Was it murder,” she said, “I didn’t hear anything about a murder.” She looked at me cautiously. I hoped she wouldn’t say something like What did you say your name was again?
“But you were there at the library.”
“I was taking some pictures.” She picked up the hemp and took
