Dangerous (38 page)

She nodded, understanding me perfectly. It was truly over between us.

And now that I had nothing to lose, and nothing to fear from this woman, I broached the question that had gnawed at me for a week.

“I want to know what happened to Tyler.”

“Pardon me?” She looked confused.

“The security guard I told you about, on the pier. He’s gone missing, and they fired him, too. I want to know what you did.”

I’d hoped the blind accusation would smoke her out. It failed.

“Ah. I vaguely recall you mentioning him, now that I think back on it. But I had nothing to do with his disappearance.” She said it so innocently I almost believed her.

“But—”

“Koishi, you called him a creep yourself. I’m sure he deserved whatever happened.”

That would have chilled me to the bone, if I’d had time to think about it. But just then her phone rang. “Yes?” she said, answering it.

A man’s voice, indistinct, probably someone from her work. He spoke for half a minute.

As she listened, her eyes focused on something far away.

“All right, Gordon, thanks for the heads-up. No, no, it’s okay. I’ll stay in touch. Goodbye,” she said, and hung up. Val flagged our waitress and handed her a credit card.

“Thank you for coming to dinner with me, Koishi. I apologize for having to cut this short.”

“What is it?” I said, with rising concern.

“A work matter,” she assured me.

“You’re lying. Tell me,” I demanded.

I thought she wouldn’t answer, but after a moment’s hesitation she said, “The fires have changed direction. My neighborhood was warned to prepare for evacuation.”

That rocked me. “My god, Val. Is there anythi—”

“No dear, I’ll be fine, but I face some difficult choices tonight. First, though, we must get you home.”

I wouldn’t hear of it. “Screw that, I’ll take the bus. Go do whatever you need to.”

I thought of the Bruegel painting of Hell she kept in her study, and how prophetic it might yet be.

Val smiled gratefully and put a twenty-dollar bill on the table before me. For cab fare, I guessed. In a benedictory voice she said, “Thank you, my dear Koishi. You have enriched me beyond words. Ta.”

And, after drawing stares by placing a lingering kiss on the top of my head, she left with a
tip tap
of heels on polished tile.

A dozen pairs of eyes watched her depart, only to flash back to me when she had gone; eyes bright with lurid imaginings that, no matter how scandalous, fell far short of the bizarre reality we’d created.

A reality now ended.

29     
holocaust

WHEN WE DATED in college, Brent had been darkly amused by my inability to walk past a homeless person without giving them money, or to hang up on telemarketers without making a polite refusal first.

“You have too many mirror neurons,” he’d teased, then explained that empathy was the result of specific brain wiring, activated by our observations of others. “You’re a sucker for anyone with a sob story. It’ll be your undoing.” On the other hand, a massive
deficit
of mirror neurons was probably the reason for his own meteoric success in Hollywood.

It was maddening, the smug way Brent trivialized my feelings, shoehorned everything into the latest theory from
Scientific American
. In fact, his mechanistic view of life had been one of the reasons for our split, though I didn’t know it at the time.

But he might have been right after all, because Val’s plight gnawed at me. Even though I wanted nothing more to do with that relationship, I couldn’t stop worrying about her.

Apart from Milton, Val had no real friends I knew of, and in any event was far too proud to ask anyone for help. Despite being better prepared for catastrophe than most people, this would hit her hard.

I unlocked the front door and dumped my things on the kitchen counter. The phone rang, so unexpectedly it made me yelp. I let the machine answer, ready to pick up if it was Val. But it wasn’t.

“Hi Koishi, it’s Paul. How are you? I haven’t heard from you in a while. I hope everything’s okay…”
Damn you and your psychic thing
, I thought, in the slight pause which followed. Was he expecting me to pick up? “Anyway,
Speed Racer
opens this weekend and I’d like to see it with you. My idiots-for-friends think it’s a kids’ movie, but of course you know better. You probably even worked on it, huh? No pressure, just call if you’re interested. Bye!”

I’d deal with that later.

For now, however, all I wanted was to curl up on the couch with a half pint of expensive ice cream and follow the fire’s progress on TV. But the fires had been headline news for so long everyone was numb to the story. Except for me, of course; I’d been living under a rock named
Pretty Death Machine
for weeks. No one was covering it live. I’d have to wait for the eleven-o’clock news.

§

Channel 11 played helicopter footage of wild flames climbing into the night, enhanced by elaborate 3D flyover graphics that were less informative, yet far more expensive, than a simple map. Channel 9’s report mentioned the threat to several communities, including Val’s, and warned those nearest the fire were likely to be evacuated over the next twenty-four hours, while others still had time to salvage their most important possessions.

I considered driving out to Val’s, to offer help, but thought better of it. I was willing to brave the police checkpoints, but I feared Val would simply turn me away, and I couldn’t bear that. Or was that merely an excuse? With a throb of guilt I put my car keys down, and tried her cell phone again. If she accepted my offer of help, I’d go.

One, two, three, four…a total of nine rings, before Val answered.

“You’d better have a good reason for calling…”

My heart stopped in a visceral response to the no-bullshit tone of command, before I realized it was that damned away-message, the one that always fooled me. I knew the next part, and said it along with her, “I look forward to hearing your explanation.” And as always, the harsh beep, an electronic slap daring me to speak.

I hung up, rendered mute by the challenge. And felt guilty about that as well.

Flogged by my own helplessness, I sipped wine and watched a sitcom on my DVR, hoping to untie the knot in my gut.

The wind picked up while I lay in bed, waiting for sleep. My potted plants on the balcony scratched at the sliding glass door. A neighbor’s wind chime sang a pentatonic dirge.

§

Time off from work is usually a welcome gift, but this time I missed having something to do. My next two days consisted of reading, eating, sleeping, watching the news, and letting my machine answer the phone. Outside, the air grew soupy with smoke, and burned my eyes and lungs whenever I went out.

On Thursday evening’s six o’clock news I caught a brief glimpse of fire claiming Val’s house. Flames obscured the structure, but I recognized the curve of that cul-de-sac, the loop of driveway within the gate. I wondered about the fate of the koi in her fish pond, and found myself rubbing the back of my neck where my own koi swam.

No sign of Val herself. The footage wasn’t live, so it might have been shot hours ago.

She wasn’t picking up the phone. Of course she was safe, right? Had she lost her cell phone in the fire? Not a chance; that phone was her lifeline. So either Val was ignoring everyone, or just me. Or something was seriously amiss. All three possibilities were equally troubling.

Damn it, I had to know if she was okay.

I used a map site to find the hotels and motels on that end of the Valley, close to Val’s house but safely beyond the fire’s reach. There were about a dozen. I started dialing.

“Thank you for calling Holiday Motel,” said a man with an Indian accent.

“Hi. Um, do you have someone named Val Stregazzi staying there? S-t-r-e—”

“No, Miss. There’s no one here with that name,” he cut in, a bit too abruptly. Maybe they had a policy against answering such queries. Or had Val told him not to take any calls?

“She’s a friend of mine. She just lost her house in the fire and I’m really worried. She said she’d stay in a hotel but I forget which one,” I lied. Maybe I could appeal to his sympathy.

“That’s terrible, Miss,” he said, with a singsong accent that made
terrible
rhyme with
edible
. “But I’m afraid we don’t have anyone here by that name.”

“Okay, thanks so much,” I said, and hung up.

Calling the other numbers produced the same result. But she had to be somewhere.

Screw that noise.

It was only six-thirty. I could use the remaining daylight to look for her car in the parking lots of the motels identified on my map. So I printed it out, grabbed keys and wallet, and locked the door behind me.

§

Thirty minutes later I found the Batmobile in Calabasas, parked outside a Hilton in The Commons, only a block from the Italian restaurant we’d had dinner together on April Fools’ Day.

This close to the fire, a churning smoke layer covered the sky, dense enough to turn evening into blood-red twilight. Ash particles fell like paper snowflakes, blanketing everything with a powder that cast an eerie hush over the world.
Mansions taking flight
, I thought, recalling my oddly prophetic haiku with guilt, as if the act of writing had caused this disaster. Val’s response had been sanguine, ending with
the blackened remains of wealth / becoming honest
. But all I saw was tragedy and loss.

As I pulled into the hotel parking lot, a fire engine and a pumper truck screamed past on their way to the fire line, only five miles away. Their sirens added to the end-of-the-world flavor.

After parking, I hustled into the hotel’s cool, well-lit lobby. It was one of those pretty, antiseptic spaces through which people pass but don’t linger, like museums and funeral homes. To my red-adjusted eyes, its bright lighting and gypsum walls now glowed an odd minty green. I was glad, however, to be out of that Boschian gloom.

“I’m here to see Val Stregazzi,” I told the middle-aged woman at the front desk, and gave my name. She studied the computer monitor over the rims of her square glasses, and picked up the phone.

“There’s a Miss Paz here to see you,” she said into the mouthpiece. “Yes of course.” The woman set down the handset and pointed. “She’s in room 213. Just up those stairs and to the right, Miss.”

I thanked her and made my way to the door bearing that number.

Before I could knock, the door swung open to reveal Val, looking so changed I might not have recognized her on the street. It wasn’t the tee shirt and worn jeans, or the loose ponytail and lack of makeup, but her expression which spoke of profound change: a forced normality which couldn’t mask her shock, fatigue. Her eyes seemed to focus on a point far behind me. She was thinner, too.

The room behind Val was lit by a bedside light and the icy flicker of a muted television. Heavy white curtains covered the room’s large window. An air conditioner hummed.

“Hello, Koishi. Forgive me for being unprepared, I didn’t expect guests. Won’t you come in?” She made a welcoming gesture and moved aside to let me pass, before quietly closing the door behind me. “Can I offer you a drink?”