East is East (9 page)

In the end, he was over an hour late to pick up Turco, whom he'd never met and had only that morning spoken to for the first time on the phone. What complicated matters, after the rain had eased up and he'd gone home to pack his bag and dig out his waders, tape recorder, notebooks and the rest, was that he couldn't find the place. He'd only been in Savannah six months and he'd always been lousy with maps. There were all these one-way streets and this endless succession of old squares that you had to drive all the way around, each one, one after another, and they all looked alike. He finally found De Lesseps, but he couldn't locate the store, which, as it turned out, was stuck up in the ass end of an alley anyway. After he'd gone up and down the street twenty times he finally pulled up alongside a red-faced yokel at a stoplight and motioned for him to crank down his window. There was a strong, faintly astringent smell of freshly shucked oysters on the air, of sea sludge and fish scales and worse; the rain pattered down. “Tran Van Due's Grocery,” he shouted, “you have any idea where it is?”

The red-faced man leaned toward him. He was wearing a suit and his wispy blond hair was parted in the middle. He was fat, Abercorn saw now, bulbous, an elephant seal heaved up out of the
sea and wedged, as a joke, into the impossibly narrow confines of the cab of his mini-truck. He mumbled something in a heavy accent that sounded like “Roy's hair” or “rye chair.”

“I'm sorry,” Abercorn said, trying his best to control his winning smile, the smile he wore like a necktie when he needed to, “but I didn't—rye chair?”

The man looked away in exasperation. Mist rose from the pavement. “Rye chair,” the man repeated, turning back to Abercorn and pointing a thick finger to the towering, unmistakable, aniline red-on-yellow sign—TRAN VAN DUC—that hovered over the alley not fifteen paces from them. Then the light changed, and the man was gone.

The store was tiny, a central aisle of loosely stacked cans and two low wall-length freezers, and it smelled worse than the fish-stinking pavement outside. Abercorn pulled the door shut behind him and took in the entire place at a glance: a pair of shrunken ageless Asian faces staring up at him in horror, the cans of pickled this and salted that, the strange little fishes in frozen plastic envelopes, the dried spices and chilies and sauces no one would ever buy. He'd raided a hundred places just like it in Arcadia and Pacoima and San Pedro, and he knew that the two behind the counter had residence permits but the twenty in the basement didn't and he knew too that they had to be bringing in more than fish sauce to survive, but that was somebody else's problem. “I'm looking for Lewis Turco,” he said.

Nothing. No reaction. He might just as well have been talking to himself, humming, singing, gargling, he might as well have been a dog or a monkey. The couple behind the counter—a man and a woman, he saw now—didn't flinch. They were holding their breath, controlling their heartbeat—their eyes didn't even blink. “Lewis Turco,” he repeated, lingering over the syllables, “I-look-for-Lew-is-Tur-co.”

“Yo,” said a voice behind him, and a man in fatigues stepped out from behind the bead curtain at the back of the store. He was short—five-five or so, Abercorn guessed—and he wore a noncommital
expression. His shoulders were too wide for his height and he had a weight lifter's build, strong in the chest and upper arms. He wore a beard and his long flat greasy blond hair was tied back with a leather thong. “Abercorn, right?” he said.

Detlef Abercorn was six-five, he wore his hair short, and at thirty-four he preserved the same lanky narrow-hipped build he'd grown into as the pitching ace of his high-school baseball team in Thousand Oaks, California. “Yes,” he said, smiling, “and you're Lewis Turco.”

Turco wasn't smiling. He sauntered up the aisle like a cowboy, each stride too long, too wide, sauntered as if he were sprinting up the side of a hill in slow motion, and then he halted abruptly at the counter, wheeled on the wooden couple and said something in a burst of what Abercorn took to be Vietnamese. They came to sudden life, as if they were wired, and the man ducked behind the counter to produce a tightly bound and visibly swollen Army-issue backpack, from the frame of which dangled an entrenching tool, a baton, a pair of handcuffs and several esoteric-looking devices Abercorn didn't recognize, while the woman handed over a cellophane package that appeared to contain some sort of foodstuff—dried meat or roots or something.

Just to hear himself, Abercorn said, “It's a bitch, huh?”—meaning the rain, Georgia, the INS and the rat-crazy, house-burning, Japanese son of a bitch holed up with the slugs and centipedes on funky, dripping, hopeless Tupelo Island.

Turco didn't respond. He'd shouldered the pack and taken the parcel of food from the woman, and now he was studying Abercorn with a cagey look. “Jesus,” he said finally, “what happened to you, man—napalm, car wreck or what? Don't tell me you were born with that?”

Abercorn stiffened. He'd heard it all his life and all his life he'd been touchy about it—who wouldn't be? He was a good-looking guy, good bone structure, strong nose and chin, hair as thick as a teenager's. But he knew what Turco meant, knew what he'd had the bad grace to bring up—most people, anybody with any sensitivity,
anyway, would have left it alone. What Turco was referring to were the white patches on his face and hands—a lot of people thought it was scar tissue or eczema or something, but it wasn't. There was nothing wrong with him, nothing at all, just that he had less pigment than normal, less melanin in his skin and hair. He'd been born an albino. Or part albino. His coloring was fair to begin with, but the albinism—or vitiligo, as the doctors called it—manifested itself in dead-white patches that mottled his entire body—even his hair. He'd been able to dye his hair, of course, but there was nothing he could do about his skin. And even that wouldn't have been so bad, but for his face. He'd got used to it now, but as a kid it used to drive him crazy—he looked as if he'd been splashed with paint. A rough oval, two inches across, framed his right eye and six paper-white blotches dribbled across his jaw, bleached the bridge of his nose and made his left ear glow in the dark. And his eyes, his eyes weren't blue or gray or green or brown: they were pink, like the eyes of a white rat or a guinea pig. “Beagle Boy,” they called him in elementary school, and later, when he got taller and stronger and knocked them down with his big-league curveball, they called him “Whitey.” But now he was an adult, and no one, ever, called him anything but Detlef.

He felt the eyes of the Vietnamese on him and the blood rose to his face. “What's it to you,” he said, holding Turco's eyes, “I'm part albino, okay?”

Turco stood his ground, smiling now, smiling up at him with the serenity of a man who's never made a mistake in his life. He was taking his time. “Hey, no offense intended, man. It's like I've seen a couple dudes over there that caught it, their own people dropping the shit on them—typical fuck-up—it's like this jellied gasoline, right? Sticks to you like glue. But hey, if I'd known you were so sensitive about it—”

“I am not sensitive,” Abercorn said, but even as he said it his voice rose to give him away.

In the car, while the wipers beat uselessly at the smear of rain and they settled in for the seventy-minute drive down to Tupelo
Island, Abercorn, not yet realizing that they'd have to wait three hours for the next ferry and that there were no motels on the island and never had been, began to soften a bit. He had to work with this guy, after all. And Turco was going to do all the grunt work while he, Abercorn, sat in the motel and coordinated things. “Listen,” he said after a while, the tinny strains of some moronic country song whining through the speakers, “this Japanese guy. I mean, in L.A. we never had to deal with the Japanese. What do you think?”

Turco was chewing a stick of whatever it was the woman had given him. It was black and hard and had a forbidding alien smell to it. “Piece of cake,” he said, chewing. “What you got to realize about the Nips is they're the squarest people in the world, I mean the hokiest, bar none. Shit, even the paddy Burmese are downtown compared to the Japs. They're all part of this big team, this like Eagle Scout thing where everybody fits in and works real hard and makes this perfect and totally unique society. Because they're superior to everybody else, they're purer—that's what they think. Nobody but Japanese in Japan. You fuck up, you let the whole race down.”

Rain beat at the windshield. Turco gestured with the pungent black stick of whatever it was. “Even the far-out types, the rebels, the punks with the orange hair and the leather jackets—and there are precious few of them, believe me—even they can't break the mold. You know how they get down, you know how they really thumb their nose at society and show what bad characters they are?”

Abercorn didn't know.

“They all go down to Yoyogi Park in Tokyo on Saturday afternoon from one to three and turn up their boom boxes and dance. That's it. They dance. All of them. Squarest people in the world.”

Abercorn digested this information a moment, wondering how it applied to the case at hand, the case that had put him in this car, in this storm, with this root-chewing ex-LURP beside him. The whole thing was a real shame. Ninety-nine percent of the illegals just came in and disappeared—they got a tourist visa and vanished,
rode in underneath a bus, breezed in for a semester of college and wound up collecting Social Security. It was a joke. The borders were sieves, colanders, picket fences without the pickets. But when somebody came in and made a lot of noise and started raising hell with the people who bought new cars and registered to vote, red lights started flashing all the way on up the line to Washington, and that's where the Detlef Abercorns came in. “So, uh, what do you think we ought to do?” he said. “The Nips—the Japanese, I mean—tend to be pretty fanatical too, don't they?
Hara-kiri, kamikazes,
the human wave and all of that?”

“Yeah, I've been to the movies too. But the fact is, like I told you, they're just plain square. You know how you catch this clown?”

Abercorn didn't have a clue. But he figured if the barefoot crackers and their hound dogs couldn't bring him in, they were in for a real ordeal. He thought of the soldier they'd found in a cave in the Philippines, still fighting World War II thirty years later. “No,” he said softly.

Turco gestured at the pack on the seat beside him. “You know what I got in there? A boom box. Sanyo. Biggest shitkicker you ever saw, puts out enough amps to kill every woodpecker out there stone dead in two minutes flat. I've got a couple disco tapes, Michael Jackson, Donna Summer, that kind of shit, you follow me? I'm going to track the fucker, no different than if this was 1966 in the la Drang Valley, cross a trail, any trail. Then I'm going to set this thing on a stump and crank it up.”

Was he kidding? Abercorn couldn't tell.

Turco turned to him with a grin that showed off all his teeth, black now with the stuff he was eating. “Hey,” he said, reaching back to pat a conspicuous bulge in the pack, “I'm Br'er Fox and this here is my tarbaby.”

Owen's wake-up call—three sharp but reverential knocks accompanied by a gently insinuating whisper—startled her from a dreamless sleep.
“Es la hora,”
he whispered through the door, and Ruth forced open her eyes.
“Despiértese, señorita.”
It was one of his Spanish days—that much registered, though she was groggy and hungover and it didn't much matter whether she was summoned in Spanish, Norwegian or Navajo: all she wanted was to go back to sleep.

At 6:30 each weekday morning Owen Birkshead made the rounds of the still and shadowy halls of Thanatopsis House, performing the delicate task of rousing the slumbering artists without compromising their dreams. Depending on his whim, he would summon them in one of the Romance languages, sweet on the early-morning tongue, or in crisp and businesslike German or even Russian. One morning it would be
“Guten Morgen, Fräulein; ihre Arbeit erwartet Sie,”
and the next,
“Bum giorno, signorina, cbe bell agiornata!”
Once, he'd even tried Japanese—
“Ohay
ō
gozaimasu!”
—but he was afraid that the harshness of his accent would scuff the glossy patina of the artists' dreams, and so he gave it up.

“Yes,” Ruth gasped, “I'm up,” too fuddled to throw back her usual
“Sί, señor, muchas gracias; yo me despierto.”
She'd been up late,
too late, and she'd drunk too many bourbons. She listened as the faint shuffle of Owen's footsteps retreated down the hallway, and she heard his knock and the whisper of his voice at the next door:
“Es la hora, es la hora.”
She closed her eyes and felt the pain hovering there on the underside of her eyelids. Her throat was parched, her temples felt as if twin spikes had been driven into them, and she had to pee. Urgently. But even as she lay there she knew that the walleyed composer—Clara Kleinschmidt—had beaten her to the communal bathroom round the corner and that the half bath at the far end of the hall would at any moment resound with the thunder of Irving Thalamus's potent morning micturition.

But it wasn't the urgency of her need or the pain either that ultimately drove her from her bed: it was guilt. Wholesome, fruitful, old-fashioned, gut-wrenching guilt. She had to get up. She was a writer, after all, and writers got up and wrote. Her enemies—and here the specter of Jane Shine, in all her phony, scheming, hateful and shy-smiling beauty, seized her like a pair of hot tongs—would already be up and at their typewriters and monitors, already out of the blocks and hurtling down the inside track to usurp her rightful place in
Harper's
or
Esquire,
at Knopf or Viking or Random House. Besides which, it was so much easier to make use of the guilt if you were working well—and she was, finally, working well.