I turned back on my way to the door. ‘Do you care?’
He shook his head. ‘Get you a better one.’
The address was in the district up behind the University of San Francisco; I gave it to the taxi driver and asked him what kind of neighbourhood it was.
‘Bo-ho’, he said.
‘Huh?’
‘Kinda slummy but not a jungle. I’ll take you right there. Some places I’d just drop you close.’
We went over some hills and I got glimpses of the water before the next dip snatched it away. The street was a mixture of residential-apartments dating I guessed from the 1920’s, when they re-built after the earthquake-and shops and blank, anonymous buildings whose functions I couldn’t guess at. The number I had was one of the apartment blocks; stucco with grey peeping through the white paint and water-stained from the rusted guttering. I told the cabbie to go on a little.
‘Undercover huh?’ he said as he made change.
‘Mafia.’
He struck his forehead lightly. ‘I shoulda known. Spread to South Africa, eh?’
I didn’t tip him.
Brave men march up to the front door; men in their forties who think it might be interesting to live into their fifties go around the back first. Along the street and down the lane, and we weren’t bo-ho anymore. The back part of the apartment building had been scarred and broken by a fire. Windows were boarded up, woodwork was scorched and charred; and the wooden handrail that had run beside the metal fire escape was gone, leaving the steps naked and dangerous.
I stood behind a car in the lane and looked at the ruin and let the bad feeling creep over me. There was no VW van, but sticking out of an open window on the top floor was a hand. The hand wasn’t stuck out to feel for rain, it wasn’t doing anything.
I went up the fire escape feeling like a tight rope walker without his pole. I had the gun but you use a gun for ballast rather than balance. The back door to the top apartment was half-open and I listened at it for what seemed like an hour. There was nothing to listen to there and nothing down below where the building had been gutted. Up here there were signs of life of a sort, if you count an ashtray brim full of butts on a window ledge inside.
I pushed open the door and walked down the short passageway on broken boards laid like a walkway on top of charred bearers and between water-streaked walls. In the kitchen the water came in through a hose and went out through a hole. The floor was a sea of wine jugs, newspapers and take-away food containers.
In the room at the back I got my first sight of American flies in any number. They had four bodies to swarm over. Two men lay on their faces along one wall. Big pieces of their backs were missing and their T-shirts were gory ruins. The hand sticking out the window belonged to the Dark Stranger; his dark clothes were darker and glistened where the blood had soaked in. He d taken two in the body but had still made it to the window. He and the other pair were neat compared with Vin Harvey: he was lying naked on his back in the middle of the room. He’d been worked on with cigarettes and razor blades. One eye was a black ruin. Thin and bearded he looked like something El Greco might have dreamed up on a bad afternoon. All the fingernails were missing on one hand, and I recognised the object nestling in the congealed blood of his left nostril as a front tooth.
I went over to the window for some air; and after I’d got some and was trying for some more, I heard the dark man speak.
‘Muerto’, he whispered, or something like that.
I bent down, it seemed impossible that he could still be alive.
‘English’, I said, ‘no Spanish’.
‘Ozzie’, he said, like in the Nelsons.
‘That’s right, where’s the girl?’
‘Away. Afortunado.’
‘Harvey told them?’
The movement he made was slight but it looked like a nod. Some blood seeped out of his mouth to join all the blood from everywhere else. The flies buzzed so loudly I had to put my ear down near his mouth.
‘Agua’, he whispered. I knew that much and went out to the kitchen to the hose. I brought it in a throwaway cup that should have been thrown away. His lips were nearly black and the glint in his slitted eyes was from pain. I wet the lips but he couldn’t swallow.
‘Priest?’ I said.
‘Shoot me. I beg you.’
I realised I still had the. 38 in my hand, although I could have been holding it by the barrel for all I knew.
‘Where’s the girl, where did she go?’
‘Shoot.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Shoot’, he breathed.
‘The girl?’ I didn’t mean to make it sound like a condition but maybe it did.
‘Dreamland.’ He’d echoed Percy Holmes. His voice was just a touch stronger, as if it had synched with the last beat of his pulse. There was no need to shoot him.
The smell of the guns was still faintly in the air, the dead were still warm and the vomit around Vin Harvey’s body was fresh. The killing and torturing had happened a few hours ago at most. There was a light dusting of something on the floor near the wall where the two dead men lay. I didn’t touch it and haven’t seen enough of it to be sure, but it looked like heroin. Insurance. The thing could look like a drug dispute, a little extreme maybe.
There wasn’t much else in the place. Every possible hiding place had been ripped apart. Books, notes and manuscripts were torn and there were a couple of piles of ashes. There were student clothes, student food and a little grass. There was a. 22 handgun in the kitchen in a drawer that stuck. Vin Harvey had seriously overmatched himself.
Two things worried me: the poster on the wall in the passageway was the same one I’d seen at Stanford, singing the praises of the Santa Cruz boardwalk. The hit men might make something of that. The second thing was the absence of the third muscle man I’d seen at the lecture. That could mean a lot.
I felt like Bony examining the road and car marks in the dimming light. It wasn’t hard to read: a big oil stain showed where the van usually stood and fresh oil drops showed where it had stood briefly. These led away over the rubber laid down by a car leaving in a hurry.
No one saw me in the apartment or the lane; if they did they decided not to make it their business. I got a taxi back to my hotel, picked up some money and hired another Pinto. I bought a jug of wine with a narrow, drinkable-from neck and a box of oatmeal cookies and set them up carefully on the passenger seat. I studied the map carefully and set out for Dreamland.
After some false turns around Daly City I picked up the Cabrillo Highway which hugs the coast all the way south to Santa Cruz. Along the way Moss Beach and Half Moon Bay were nice names to roll off the tongue and the road had that hopeful, optimistic feel coast roads have. I drove just above the speed limit and drank wine from time to time. I felt more at home when I passed the greyhound track and had some wine and a cookie on the strength of that. A signpost to Bonny Doon amused me more than it should have, and I laid off the wine.
Santa Cruz was quiet; it was after eleven and everyone was inside watching the news about the poisonings and muggings and the fires in the trailer parks. I drove fast along Pacific Avenue down past the back of the Greyhound depot. The town shops were mostly new and or newly appointed and half of them seemed to sell things made of leather. Beach Street was at the end of Front, past the used car yards and the tyre repair place that had been in business since 1937.
It was a wide, palm tree lined boulevard swinging around in front of three quarters of a mile of beach. I drove slowly south past closed cafes, a big parking lot and several motels. The VW van was parked just short of where the road followed a narrow bridge across a creek. I stopped on the other side of the street a block away, and watched. There were a couple of other cars in the street under a high, half-moon and some desultory street lights; but nothing moved. I took the gun out of the glove box, put it in my jacket pocket and walked up to the van.
