then had a try at writing the stuff himself, to get the feel of it, to clamber up inside their heads and sit there awhile looking out.
There could be more to it, of course. Maybe this had been his ticketin, maybe he'd written these hate pieces to gain admission to the group. To prove his candidacy, his right-thinking, or to make himself useful to them.
Or maybe-and the thought wouldn't turn away; I remembered all too clearly the authority of the voice in Amano's fragmentarymanuscript-maybe the connections were deeper.
Maybe the connections were authentic.
Maybe led by things seen and heard at the trailer park, from a neighbor like Jodie early on in the manuscript, or at Studs, Amano had started poking about, learning what he could. Curious, appalled, intending at firstto turn over the stone, expose what was going on; later, to use it in fiction. But then as he got ever closer he began to find himself strangely attracted. Found himself being taken over by it.
I'd become so absorbed in Amano's papers and my own thoughts that I failed to hear anything until the door lisped open behind me. It sounded like hands being rubbed forcefully together. And when I turned, that's what was there, hands. One in my stomach, hard, the other, not to be disappointed, waiting for my face to come down and meet it.
'Right again,' a voice said.
I looked at the canvas-and-leather boot planted on my chest, then further up to close-set eyes and high brows.
'Missing that hungry look. Had to be up to something, all the way out here. Old Ellis is right again.'
He trod down hard and I heard a rib snap.
Then I went away for a while.
Chandler never wrote better than when Marlowe was being drugged or beaten half to death. Must have been tough out there in La Jolla. Something about British public schools, maybe, so many of them grow up with this masochistic bent.
When I was twelve or so, there was this kid who kept pushing me, wanting to fight. Every day at lunch he'd start up again. Couple of times he even had me down in a hammerlock, but I never did anything. Then one day when he stepped up, before he even had a chance to say anything, I put out my arms, walked him backwards onto some cement steps and started banging his head against them. A teacher out for a smoke ran over and made me stop.
'No you don't. Not that easy, boy.' His kick brought me swimming back into focus, coiled around the pain. 'First you tell me what you're doing out here. Then maybe I let you go to sleep.'
He held a knife loosely down along his leg, one of those hunting knives with a massive handle that's supposed to look like a stag's horn.
We both heard it without knowing what it was, a dull slap, the way a board might sound breaking under the bed. He pointed the knife towards me and half turned, listening.
No more.
'Wardell?'
Breath suddenly loud in the room.
Louder: 'Wardell?'
He leaned close to hold the knife against my throat.
'You move, I cut.'
Stepping to the door, he stood by it, poised, listening. Then reached and pulled it abruptly open. Where before it had lisped, now it screeched.
Joey the Mountain stood there filling the doorway, wearing a dark suit, maroon tie. Pomade in his hair glistened in sunlight. His lapels and shoulders, the creases in his slacks, were architecture. 'What the fuck you want?' Ellis said. Holding up the knife. 'Where's Wardell?'
Then, that quickly, it was over.
Joey glanced at the knife, and when Ellis's eyes followed his, reached up and grabbed his shoulder, squeezing. Whatever he did hit the nerve there. Ellis's arm went limp; the knife fell. Joey smiled momentarily, then hit him square in die forehead, once, with afist the size of a chicken. Ellis went straight backwards a foot or so before collapsing.
'Tough guys,' Joey said, shaking his head. 'Always got to talk to you first, let you know how hard they are, do this little dance. One outside was even worse. Fuck 'em.'
He took a couple of steps and looked down at me.
'You okay, Griffin?'
I sat up, managed to prop one arm against undercoun-ter shelving and push myself more or less erect. Joey stepped back as I rose.
'Maybe you oughta try getting to bed nights, not take so many naps.' Leg-breaking and stand-up comedy a specialty.
Stand up being easier said than done.
Joey threw Ellis over his shoulder. 'Taking this one with me.' Seeing he wasn't going to get through that way, he unslung Ellis and held him straight out a foot off the floor, pushing him ahead through the door, a lifesize marionette with broken strings. The security guard lay collapsed at the foot of the steps.
'That one ought to be coming around soon enough. Don't expect he'll waste much time removing his sorry butt.'
'Joey, what are you doing here?'
'What the fuck you think I'm doing, Griffin. Keeping you in one piece. Allyou tough guys are a pain in the ass.'
He started off through the trees with Ellis on his shoulder, walking at a full clip. Might as well have been a raincoat. The dark blue Pontiac would be his.
'You coming or what, Griffin?' he said, never looking back.
I RODE THE tail ofjoey's Pontiac back into town, to a deserted dry cleaner's just off the warehouse district, part of our intermittent inner-city ghost town. Tumbleweed blowing past skulls in the street wouldn't look out of place. New Orleans is riddled with these inexplicable lapses: you'll have whole blocks or sections abandoned, boarded up or kicked in, then right next to it everything's fine, commerce carrying on as usual, dragging life along.
Joey got out, retrieved Ellis from the trunk, and came over to my car. When he leaned down, Ellis's head swung forward and banged against the fender.
'Wait.'
He started off, then came back: 'Someone be with you to take your order soon.' He vanished into the building.
Not a creature was stirring.
Well, in truth lots of creatures were stirring. Rats the size of beavers that in other parts of the city took to the trees hunting squirrel; cockroaches that, you cooked them up, they'd serve a family of four; street-smart starved dogs and scrawny cats looking as if every extra day tickedoff on the chart of their lives was a victory over holocaust.
Just no human creatures. That you could see, anyway. Didn't mean none were there.
And after half an hour or so, one was.
Jimmie Marconi came down the outside stairs from the building's second floor, some kind of office up there probably, in the old days kept workers and management comfortably apart. One of Marconi's men, the wiry one from Leonardo's, followed him, stepping into the recess of a doorway at the bottom of the stairs to become shadow. His eyes peered out at car, street, buildings opposite.
'Here's what you need to know,' Marconi told me after he'd got in and sat a moment. 'Nothing.'
Then he laughed. He and Joey could have worked up one hell of a routine together.
'You do have a way of getting in over your head, Griffin.'
I allowed as how he had a point.
'We counted on that.'
A kid on a bike came into view down the street and proceeded up it, weaving in slow curves fromcurb to curb. Marconi's man's eyes tracked him from the shadowed doorway.
