napkin.’
Gorge spat out the sodden wad of cotton. The action of his jaw had been so powerful that it was already frayed at the edges. ‘Napkin! Right. Beg your pardon.’ He laughed industrially. ‘Fine prank, Krauto. Damned fine prank.’
Woodkin, who had presumably observed Rackenham’s guilt and Loeser’s innocence, said: ‘Actually, sir, it might be that not everyone at this table is quite familiar with the details of your condition.’
‘Oh? All right — explain: can’t tell the difference between pictures and the real thing. Got it? Just can’t. See the difference, not blind, just don’t realise it. Damned confusing. Have to get Woodkin to remind me. Used to be all right, but it’s the polish. Sky-Shine. Huffed too much of it over the years, working on the formula, testing the product, sleeping in store rooms. Polished part of the noggin clean away. Don’t know what to do, the doctors. Don’t blame ’em. Why I can’t drink: makes it even worse. Get by all right, though. Still whip smart at everything else. Except spelling. Never could spell, though, since I was a cub — nothing to do with the polish, that. Waste of time, anyway, spelling. Waste of fucking time!’
‘As Colonel Gorge says, his severe visual agnosia has not affected his business acumen,’ added Woodkin. ‘He is simply required to work in an office with no photographs, diagrams or figurative art of any kind.’
‘Right. Can’t have pictures of anything. Just like the damned Musselmans! Can’t go to the movies, either. Went to see
‘When the film started, Colonel Gorge assumed he must have been drugged, kidnapped, and taken to China. He assaulted one of the popcorn boys, fled, and found himself outside on Hollywood Boulevard. Thereupon he observed an advertisement for a depilatory product that made comical use of an image of a mountain gorilla, and attempted to wrestle the animal to the ground before it could endanger a nearby lady.’
‘Saw my mistake pretty soon after that, of course. Felt like a fool. Paid for all the damage.’ Gorge applied seven or eight spoonfuls of mustard to his hamburger and then turned to his newest acquaintance. ‘Living whereabouts, Krauto?’
‘The Chateau Marmont,’ said Loeser, who had hoped he might have misheard the first time Gorge called him ‘Krauto’.
‘I don’t know how you can stand to live in a hotel,’ said Marsh. ‘There’s no privacy.’
‘Yes, he should certainly move. Don’t you have a few properties near here, Colonel?’ said Rackenham.
‘Think so. Woodkin?’
‘Only one at present, sir. You own a house in that inconvenient triangle of land between your tennis courts and the Sprague mansion. It is currently untenanted.’
‘Why the hell untenanted?’
‘It’s quite small, sir, and there is nowhere to a park a car.’
‘Want it, Krauto?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Want to rent it? Work out a price with Woodkin. Needn’t pay much. No use letting it sit empty.’
‘Hold on, Colonel, not everyone wants to live in Pasadena,’ said Plumridge. ‘You haven’t even asked him.’
‘Good point. Want to live in Pasadena, Loeser?’
‘It’s nice here, but a bit out of the way,’ said Plumridge.
‘Not if you work at the Institute,’ said Marsh.
‘But he doesn’t,’ said Plumridge.
‘Loeser, may I say this,’ said Rackenham. ‘Everyone else who arrives in Los Angeles from Berlin seems to be settling in Pacific Palisades. And there is hardly any part of Los Angeles further from Pacific Palisades than Pasadena.’
Just then Loeser began to make out something now that he had first glimpsed in the shadows as he fled Bevilacqua’s office: the fear that he wasn’t going to find Adele tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that — that dispersion fortified you not just against coincidence but against serendipity — that two blind men wandering in a village square might die before they collided — that no amount of desire or determination could overcome the sheer brainless size of this place — that even though he’d extracted more than enough from his parents’ trust for a holiday to Paris, if he stayed on at the Chateau Marmont he would soon run out of money and have to go home with nothing to show for his sojourn.
All this was probably true. But he didn’t care. There was no way he was staying out here in this nonsensical country for one day longer that he had to. ‘I’m sorry, Colonel Gorge,’ he said, ‘but as I’ve already told Rackenham, I won’t be in California long enough to require a house of my own. I’m going back to Berlin soon.’
‘Tell me, Herr Loeser, what are the streetcars like in Berlin?’ said Plumridge.
‘Fantastic,’ said Loeser with some fervour. Apart from Nerlinger, who made paintings of the S-Bahn, no one at home ever seemed to want to talk in detail about public transport.
‘You fellows had the first electric trams in the world, of course.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Sure. Siemens. Beautiful engineering. I used to have one of their radios. Had to throw it out, though. They’re bankrolling the Nazis and my wife’s family are Jewish.’
‘I rode one of your American streetcars this morning,’ said Loeser. ‘It was adequate.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Hollywood to Pacific Palisades.’
‘On the Santa Monica Air Line, I guess? Second oldest line in California. Used to run all day, Red Cars, USC to the coast. Now it’s just for rush hours, and barely even that. Damn shame. You know, Los Angeles used to have the finest public transportation system in the whole country. Now we’ve got squat, practically.’
‘I heard it’s General Motors who are killing the streetcars,’ said Rackenham. ‘Some sort of conspiracy.’
‘Red propaganda!’ said Gorge, slamming the table so hard with his fist that Loeser thought he saw his half- eaten burger separate momentarily into its constituent vertical sections.
‘Our host is just about correct,’ said Plumridge. ‘The streetcar companies are dying for plenty of reasons, but a conspiracy’s got nothing to do with it. The main point is, people hate them. And so they should. Those companies run the minimum number of cars they can get away with. They don’t give a thought to safety or hygiene. They cheat and bribe. A lot of them only got started to manipulate real estate values, anyway. And even if they were a consortium of saints, they couldn’t last much longer. The traffic’s the problem. Who’s going to take a streetcar when it has to wait in downtown jams like any other jalopy? You can’t turn a profit like that. Hard enough before, and then the Depression came. No, we can’t leave anything to the streetcar companies. The city has to do it. Pittsburgh just bought up all their private railway companies, and they’re going to run them at a loss for as long as it takes to turn them around.’
‘How can the city afford to buy up the streetcar lines?’ said Rackenham.
‘It can’t. The streetcar companies overstate the value of their assets to keep the banks and the shareholders happy. But even if they’d give us a fair price, it wouldn’t be worth it. We’ll just let them fail. Meanwhile, we start fresh. Los Angeles isn’t Pittsburgh. We have to be a hell of a lot more ambitious. First and foremost, the lines have to be elevated to beat the traffic. We would have gotten elevated lines in twenty-six if it weren’t for Harry Chandler.’
‘Who’s that?’ said Loeser.
‘The tyrant of the
