IV Hands in the Fire
Chapter Eleven
1
Two days later, I caught a TWA flight from Newark to San Francisco; I arrived there early in the morning and rented a car at the airport. I headed north on Route 101, passed through some yellowish hills, and crossed a neighborhood of identical houses made of prefabricated material; the legendary folk singer Malvina Reynolds sang about those suburban condominiums: “little boxes” of different colors, “all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.” Oh Clara, she liked that music, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Malvina Reynolds. And that bastard Junior must be listening to my records now. Two buses, painted in psychedelic colors and with their music turned all the way up, zoomed by at full speed: it was two garage rock bands with their groupies and roadies and banners announcing their concerts. The traffic was moving along quickly, moderate but chaotic. It was Tuesday, and everyone seemed to be going to the beach, carrying boats and surfboards on their car roofs or towing outboard motorboats.
On one side more luxurious houses could be seen, and also the long perimeter of the depot at a large computing company. It wasn’t a factory, but a laboratory of glass designed like a giant revolving surfboard. It was like Silicon Valley, where businesses merged for millions of dollars and the executives walked around in Bermuda shorts and Birkenstocks. And meanwhile I was heading down the highway in my rented Chevy through the pale mist of the bay, squandering what little money I’d managed to put away after my academic season. I was throwing it out the window in spite of having decided to spend it on shutting myself away in a hotel for a few months to finish the book I was writing. What was the book? I didn’t remember anymore, nor did I know that the book I was going to write would be this one, the one I was living through back then.
I crossed Bay Bridge on Route 80, and a few miles later, after turning north, I was already in Berkeley. Sun, girls in the streets, activity around the tables on the sidewalks, old hippies with ponytails selling trinkets in street fairs. Plenty of tattoos, plenty of cross-dressing, plenty of tourists.
Parker had given me two addresses in case I ran into any problems or needed help. One was that of Sam Carrington, a car salesman who dedicated himself to paying bail for delinquents who didn’t have the money to get a provisional release; the convicts helped him out later by doing certain jobs that Parker refused to explain to me. The other was that of a barmaid (that’s what he called her) from a pub on Telegraph Avenue, a big and raucous woman called Fatty Flannagan who knew everything about Berkeley and its surroundings. She’d been a well-known actress in the 50s, or such was the claim of the photos and posters decorating the place, which showed her in sentimental comedies along with Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn. It was she who showed me how to get to Sacramento and gave me several useful pieces of information (“Don’t speak Spanish if you want them to take you seriously; don’t get too close to junkies or policeman; don’t take out money from the ATMs or walk around with cash in your pocket”).
A few blocks from the bar on Shattuck Avenue was the French Hotel: at the desk I mentioned that Fatty had sent me, so they gave me a comfortable and quiet room and only wrote down my ID number and made a copy of my driver’s license.
I had the address of the last house that Ida had lived in, on a street with several low buildings near San Pablo Avenue, a block away from the Old Market where they sold a bit of everything and, it seemed, also pushed crack and other forbidden fruits.
It had been so many years since Ida had lived there that I kept going in circles around the area without making up my mind to ask about her, until finally I decided it would be best to look in the local post office, a building at 2000 Allston Way (between Harold Way and Milvia Street) with arches in a distantly Spanish style, facing a square where several young people in Bermuda shorts and hooded raincoats stood talking in a circle. The post office’s help windows were all out of service except for one at the end, where I was attended by a man with a simian face and a green mica visor, like the kind croupiers wear, and white cloth elbow patches on the sleeves of his jacket. I said I was a private detective and had been hired by the relatives of Professor Ida Brown, who’d died in an accident in New Jersey; she used to live here during her years as a graduate student. He listened to me without saying anything and then went to get another man who resembled him, also with a visor and white elbow patches, but this time a black man with a Haitian accent. I asked him whether Ida had left any address for her mail to be forwarded to. The man made a note of Ida’s name
