Harbor Nocturne (25 page)

Uh-huh, Hector thought, I’m back home in Pedro. And for no other reason than a wish to assuage the nostalgia, he toured the area in his Mercedes SL, hoping to see someone from the old neighborhood, and to be remembered and admired.

There was nobody out in front of the Italian American Club. No old men gassing about the good old days. Ditto for the Croatian Hall, but at least there was still the “God Bless Croatia” sign, which nobody had tagged as yet. There’d been weddings there, he recalled, where six hundred guests had attended. He remembered the time when some incompetent Serbs had tried to set off a puny bomb there, but it had detonated while still in their car.

Hector had always liked hearing stories from his father about how, in the old days, the longshoremen’s unwritten law said that if a container broke open, the dockworkers could help themselves to the contents. The containers full of toys somehow always managed to break open during the Christmas holidays. There was a reason why most longshoremen drove pickups back in the day.

Pedro had been like a European town then, but just before he was born, it stopped being a white workingman’s paradise. By the time he was in his junior year of high school, masses of Latinos and blacks walked east after school, and white kids like Hector Cozzo walked west to the hills. Pacific Avenue was the dividing line.

Hector cruised his Mercedes past the old YMCA by Harbor View Park. Now it housed four floors of resident patients, many of who wore a key hanging from a shoestring around their neck. He recalled one of the loons that everyone called “General MacArthur,” who would march about the nearby streets wearing an army surplus uniform, chewing on an unlit corncob pipe, debating an imaginary President Truman, and periodically shouting, “Old soldiers never die!”

Another of the crazies was called “the mayor of San Pedro.” One day he’d wear a gray suit and carry a briefcase. The next day it’d be a brown suit, but he’d be shoeless. The next day he’d wear a suit and necktie, but no shirt under the tie.

The fruit loop Hector remembered most clearly was the one they called Julius Caesar, who wore a red cape with a Burger King crown. He’d parade up and down the promenade beside Ports O’ Call on his way to and from the Cruise Terminal, telling all to beware the ides of March. People using the Red Car line would give him pocket change, and kids riding by on the bike path would try to steal his crown.

Hector’s best boyhood memories were of Sunken City, at the southern tip of San Pedro, a strange and eerie place where in 1929, for inexplicable reasons, the oceanfront residential properties and the land beneath them started to slip into the sea at the incredible rate of almost one foot per day. Soon the houses were gone and the land was a litter of
uprooted trees and broken sidewalks, with streets that went nowhere—
a mayhem of junk and debris.

Over the course of Hector’s life, graffiti artists had taken over Sunken City and painted almost everything they found down there. Despite the “No Trespassing” signs and the dangerous footing, young daredevils like Hector Cozzo would squeeze through holes in the fence with their girlfriends. Sunken City turned out to be a perfect place to drink and smoke dope and to look around at a vanished neighborhood and realize that nothing is forever, and you can’t fuck with Mother Nature, who is one scary bitch that can sweep you away with the tides. It was there that a girl two years older than Hector, from one of the most established Italian families, had popped his cherry. He wondered whatever happened to her. How he wished she could see him now, cruising Pedro in his red SL.

Hector looked at his watch and decided it was late enough to do what he’d come down there to do. He drove to the family home of Dinko Babich, the big, comfortable house he’d envied as a child, where only three people had lived. He recalled that he was never in the house for long before Mrs. Babich would give him something to eat and ask why she never saw him at Mass.

He parked a block away, between two other houses on the hill where he didn’t think anyone would get nosy and question why he was parked there. After all, he wasn’t some “onionhead,” which was what he always called Latinos with shaved heads. And how many burglars drove cars like his?

He rolled the windows down and lit a cigarette and waited for Dinko’s car to either leave the garage or return home. He remembered that Dinko was on suspension, and he felt certain that they would be at home in the late afternoon. He also thought that if they were at home, they might leave to go to the market or maybe to get some takeout food. Or maybe Dinko and the girl would head out to a motel so they could do what Hector knew they could not do in the traditional home of Mrs. Babich. And what else could Dinko want from a Mexican whore anyway?

He tried not to consider that he could be wrong about where she was. Lita Medina could’ve taken a taxi or a bus to Union Station, in downtown L.A., and by now be on her way to anywhere in the country. Or maybe she could’ve met some bucks-up player in the few days she’d worked at Club Samara, some guy she was lap-dancing. She was certainly hot-looking enough to have affected some rich guy the way she’d affected Dinko Babich, so maybe she was ensconced in some six-million-dollar crib in the Hollywood Hills without a thought in her head about Daisy’s murder. He had to admit that he
could
be wrong, but he did not think he was. He believed that Lita Medina was in that house, and if he was patient and didn’t spook anybody, she’d be worth fifty thousand to him.

He passed the time by thinking that he’d make Markov pay all of it upon receipt of the street address. Hector once again tried to assure himself that Kim would simply give her a few grand and that she’d be glad to get out of town with more money than she’d ever seen in her short but miserable life of poverty and whoring.

The housecleaning and the long bath had made Brigita Babich very sleepy, and she decided to take a twenty-minute nap, which ended up lasting two hours. She had vague and mixed-up dreams of her youth, about hula hoops and lava lamps and sock hops. When she awoke, she could almost remember dancing slow and sexy to “Donna,” not with the man she’d eventually married but with an Italian boy named Tommy DeFranco, who’d been the dreamiest boy in their class. It occurred to her that she wore her hair in the same style at age sixty-three that she had at age fifteen, in short layers with curling-iron waves and teased up tall. The difference was that now it had to be dyed.

Then she smelled the aroma from the kitchen, and it didn’t smell like anything she was used to cooking. She threw on a sweatshirt, loose-fitting long pants, and bedroom slippers. After running a comb through her hair, she went out to the kitchen.

Dinko, who was only a fair cook but could eat huge portions despite his lanky build, was watching Lita at the stovetop sautéing chicken cutlets.

When Brigita appeared in the doorway, Dinko said to his mother, “Lita’s making something she says is a chipotle chicken sandwich from whatever she found in our fridge and the cupboard. I offered to go out and buy some tortillas or whatever she was used to cooking with, but she said she’d work with what we have.”

“It smells divine,” Brigita said. “What’s in it?”

Lita smiled. “Oh, is hard for me to say in English. I learn from a family in Guanajuato where I work, but they are Greek people who love Mexican cooking. I do not have the Greek bread, so I am making with the bread you have here. Is Italian bread, no?”

“French,” Dinko said, “from a local bakery.” To his mother he said, “I can tell you, some of the ingredients are chipotle peppers, but I don’t know how you happened to have those, and yogurt and peanut butter. Yes, peanut butter! And oregano and garlic powder. Then she shredded lettuce and grated cheddar cheese, and sautéed onion and red peppers, and now she’s sautéing the chicken. It’s all gonna be stuffed into the French baguettes, and I’m salivating and dying to bite into one of her chipotle sandwiches.”

Brigita took a bottle of California pinot grigio from her small wine fridge and poured three glasses for the table. Then she sat and said, “Okay, I’m game for anything.”

And it turned out that she loved their supper almost as much as Dinko did. Lita dropped her gaze every time they praised her culinary talents, which they did often during the meal, and finally she said to Dinko, “Is nothing like what your
mamá
can do. I wish to learn much from your
mamá.
”

Perhaps it was her growing admiration for this young girl from God knows where, or perhaps it was the bolstering that her courage got from a tasty meal and a second glass of wine; in any case, Brigita said to them, “All right, you two. I think you’re pretty serious about each other, aren’t you?”

“As tumors and taxes,” Dinko said.

“But so
soon
!” Brigita said.

Lita said nothing and only stared at the glass of wine on the table in front of her.

“What do you wanna do about it?” Brigita asked.

“What you would expect two people who love each other to do,” her son said. “We wanna get married.”

“Is that true, Lita?” Brigita asked. “Do you wish to marry my son?”

Lita Medina looked up at Brigita Babich and then at Dinko and said, “I do love him very much. He is very kind.”

“I’m gonna be a different longshoreman when I go back to the job,” Dinko promised his mother. “I’m gonna work all the hours I can and do what you’ve wanted me to do for years. I’m gonna grow up.” He looked at Lita. “This girl did it to me. Don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t.”

“Lita,” Brigita said, “you came to America to earn money for your sick mother and brothers in Mexico. Has that plan changed?”

Lita looked at Dinko, who answered for her: “I’m gonna turn into one of the hungrys of the Dispatch Hall. I can easily earn enough to send a few thousand a month to her mother. That’s a lotta money in Mexico, and it should help. I’m gonna work enough to earn a hundred grand a year.”

Lita said apologetically to Brigita, “I tell Dinko my family is not his . . . what is the word, Dinko?”

“Responsibility.”

“Correct,” Lita said. “Is not his responsibility. Is for me to take care of my family. Is not for Dinko.”

“I can help, though,” Dinko said. “I wanna do it, and I will.”

“That’s fine, son,” Brigita said, “but wouldn’t you like to continue to learn more about each other first? My old family ways are not ironclad. I know I’ve gotta change with the times. If you and Lita wanna live here like . . . well, like husband and wife, that’s okay with me. We can get rid of the double bed in your room and buy a king-size, if it would be more comfortable for the two of you. Maybe in a few months you’ll both know better whether or not you’re ready to commit to each other for life.” She looked at Lita. “What do you say about all this, sweetheart?”

Lita said, “If you wish for me to go away, is okay. I understand.”

“No, I’m not saying that!” Brigita said. “I don’t want you to leave here. I worry that everything is happening too soon, that’s all.”

“Nothing’s gonna change for me, Mom,” Dinko said, “because I’m just like you in many ways.” He paused before adding, “I always loved hearing the story of how you first met Dad at Croatian Hall when he asked you to dance with him. During that very first dance you somehow knew in your heart that the young longshoreman was gonna be the love of your life. Remember?”

Brigita said nothing for a long moment. She started to take a sip of wine but changed her mind and put down the glass. Then she said, “All right, let’s go see the priest tomorrow and get things started.”

Dinko took Lita’s hand with a huge smile of relief.

It had been a tiring and emotional day for all concerned. Brigita turned in early, and Dinko and Lita sat watching television for an hour, then went to bed and made the most tender and fulfilling love Dinko had ever experienced. Before falling asleep, Lita said, for the first time, “I wish to be with you for all my life, Dinko.”

“You will be, I promise you, Lita,” he said. “When you’re beside me I feel so . . .
alive
.”

Then she said to him, “Please tell to me again what you always say. I like to hear how you say it.”

Dinko tenderly brushed a strand of hair from her cheek and said, “You are loved.”

Hector Cozzo passed the time while watching the Babich house by thinking about all the crime spawned by the incredible wealth that passed through the Port of Los Angeles every day. Like how this crew of a dozen thieves had followed a container truck from the port to Vernon, not far f
rom downtown L.A., where the cans were loaded onto train cars fitted for containers. After dark, when the train was on its way, one of the thieves jumped aboard and opened up the can they were after. Most of the others followed the train in SUVs through the Inland Empire, out to the
desert near the Palm Springs cutoff, where one of their point men had disabled a stolen car by flattening its tires, after first parking it on the tracks.

The train operators needed considerable time to get the car hauled away, and during that time the posse climbed onto the train car and rolled off the big-screen TVs, laying them flat on the desert floor. After the train was long gone, a rented box truck appeared and the crew retrieved all of the TVs, returning them to L.A., not far from where they had begun their short train journey. That’s the kind of crime that Hector felt could be profitable for him if he could only rely on gangs like Rancho San Pedro or the Dodge City Crips to follow orders and work for a white man of superior intelligence.

But there were even less complicated capers he felt were more feasible, like the recent big theft at the distribution warehouse in Pedro on the west side of the Harbor Freeway. An onionhead working in the warehouse simply made a routine call to the waste management company to replace a forty-foot dumpster that the homie had purposely damaged
after
he’d loaded it with stolen electronic goods.

His brother-in-law drove the trash truck that dropped a new dumpster and picked up the damaged one, transporting it to a housing project, where he left it while he went off to have lunch. Of course, when he got back, the dumpster was empty, and he picked it up and returned it to his company for repair. Hector figured that only half a dozen greasers were used in that operation, but one of them couldn’t keep his mouth shut after getting busted with a box full of “shaved” keys he kept for stealing Hondas and selling them to chop shops.