On the Nickel (27 page)

‘Sister, I'm sorry to bother you, but he swear it real real important.'

Tyrus yanked off a threadbare Dodgers cap. ‘I ain' sure you remember me, Sister ma'am…'

‘Chopper, I surely do remember you. You're a good man. You protected a mute and ailing human being, just as Jesus would have done, and then you brought him here for help.'

He smiled broadly. ‘Thank you, ma'am. Praise Jesus and all that.' Then his face wrinkled with disquiet. ‘But there more trouble tonight about this man Richard – I mean Jack. You know the Fortnum Hotel?'

‘Of course. The developers are in the process of grabbing it before the housing charities can put a claim to it.'

‘Well, your Jack – he done go in that place tonight,' Chopper Tyrus said. ‘On his own feet along with two of your womens from here. And now they's lady polices inside, too, and some pretty bad men.' He shook his head as if to disavow all of it. ‘A guy on the street, he say, Jesus, he absent from the Fortnum tonight. He say men belong with the devil camp, they at work in there.'

Everything was tiptoeing along on the very edge of Sister Mary Rose's comprehension – but that was really all she ever expected on The Nickel.

‘Kenisha, have you seen Millie and Felice come back?'

‘No, ma'am. Not so's I saw, and I been out front.'

Reluctantly, Eleanor Ong stood up. She didn't want to get involved with Jack Liffey again. It had nearly cost her her life the first time, and, worse, it had cost a significant part of her faith – which it had taken her a decade of renunciation and worship in the convent to repair. And, of course, this most recent visit of his, added so opportunely to her own weaknesses, had snatched away a lot of the soul-repair that had cost her so dearly. In pure human terms, it had kicked the traces right out from under what she had come to think of as her peace of mind. He could do that to you, Jack.

‘Would you come with me, Chopper? I may need to send you to the fire station for help.' The firefighters were the only reliable assistance on The Nickel, as everyone down here knew – with Fire Station No. 9 proud of having the most arduous EMT assignment in the city. Cops came to The Nickel when it was fashionable, or on somebody's political agenda. Then, for a time, officers fresh out of the Academy would flood Skid Row and do their best, but the agenda at the top always shifted and the cops always went somewhere else, slapping their hands clean and lining up for their gamma globulin shots.

Eleanor knew she was no Mother Theresa, but she shared the firefighters' compassion for the very worst off in the city. Only in her case, she suspected the feeling had its roots in pride, which was not something that she or God would treasure. It had been so simple in the convent, and it was so complex out here.
Oh, Jack, I missed you so. Oh, God, I miss Jack.

Conor hung back in the corner of the small squalid room, scribbling away as the others argued. He felt he was living in a strange kind of time that was basically unoccurring – waiting on pause so he could observe all around him and absorb it all. The newest arrival, Maeve's dad, was going around to the others demanding that they help him clear the barrier off the stairs. Basically, the man seemed to want to let the normal world reassert itself, and he didn't know how he felt about that.

‘I live with one of these policewomen,' he insisted. ‘She's my wife, really. They'll be fair to us and protect us, I promise. But we have to let them come up.'

‘Cops've evicted people before,' Morty Lipman insisted. ‘They're forced to do the dirty work for the landlords, I know. It's the law. Maybe you think you know a cop, but that's like taking an old video out of a box. You never know if it's been rewound.'

Jack Liffey just stared, struck worldless for a moment by the peculiar comparison.

‘Man, are you out of date,' Maeve objected. ‘The world's digital now. Tapes are gone. Anyway, my dad is right, we can't fight the police
and
fight these dangerous guys, too. What was your wonderful word for them?
Putzes.'

Morty almost smiled. ‘I don't know digital, but I know
putzes,
and I never trusted the police,' he said.

‘Yeah,' Felice said sourly. ‘I ast them over and over to help me find my old man, and they treat me like a shoo-bug.'

‘That policewoman downstairs is my stepmother,' Maeve insisted. ‘I love her, and I know we can trust her. Look, I can tell you what's going to happen. We either let her up to help us or we're gonna get SWAT. You want a bunch of shouting Nazis in black helmets to blow up our barricade and run up the steps waving machine guns?'

Conor looked up from his scribbling to see where things had gotten, but nobody seemed on top of it – which to him meant Samuel Greengelb appeared undecided. The man had been good to him and had been the brains at the hotel so far, but now he sat on his rickety chair looking sad, looking defeated and confused.

‘Why are we always victims?' Greengelb said. ‘We just want a place to live. That's asking too much already?'

Something about the depth of feeling within the man's voice hit Conor like an electric shock. He knew a little of what had happened to the Jews over centuries – pogroms, hatred, the Holocaust. And still his friends at school, none of whom had ever even met a Jew, cracked terrible anti-Jew jokes all the time. The children of the deeply Protestant outer suburbs of San Diego County – morally asleep, he thought – knew almost nothing of what had gone on in America to the Indians or the poor, let alone what had happened in Latin America or faraway Europe. And if he happened to repeat a Jew joke at home, his father would always patiently explain the tragic history – and he, Conor, would be overwhelmed with guilt, feeling a thousand times a fool, unfairly caught between two worlds or two incompatible moral bubbles, or whatever labored phrase you used to name this impossibile contradiction.

‘We're legal tenants,' Greengelb insisted. ‘I've been here seventeen years. A man's home is his castle! You're all in my castle right now talking to me about leaving as if it's nothing at all. Don't tell me how to feel, sir! Don't anybody tell me how to feel about my home!'

‘I'm truly sorry, sir,' Jack Liffey said, touching the man's shoulder. ‘In my limited experience, if justice ever comes at all, it comes in by the back door, very quietly, while you're waiting for it at the front.'

Conor looked down at his lyrics, and quickly added a line:

Housing the poor they say

It's just an issue to solve

And I've never learned

The secret of moving on

I tried to root here but

I have nothing left now

That I can call a home

I have nothing left … nothing

Don't tell me how to feel!

Rice Thibodeaux walked his big knife up and down his fingers again like a tiny nonchalant George Raft. The basement grew danker and hissier as they waited.

‘Man, do you have to do that?'

‘Who's asking?'

‘Who? The guy who brought you on board, dickhead,' McCall said.

‘The guy who can't make a fuckin' decision? I see three big cans of gasoline. I see two legal proxies for the owner of this building hiding down here for no reason, when they should be acting. I
don't
see no supermen, ready to become or not. I don't even see no lions. Jeez, I don't even see no
camels,
mutant.'

‘Listen, Mr Densehead. Those are cops up there,
real
cops. It changes everything. Rule one in life is never ever antagonize the fuzz when you can get away clean.'

Thibodeaux screwed up his face in thought, without even slowing down the knife-walk that was whirling up and down his fingers. ‘I thought rule one was never back down.'

‘Even cats know you got to save your attack for when you're strong.'

‘Cats? You shitting me? Housecats? I
hate
housecats.'

‘The rules of guerilla war, man. You back off when you're overpowered and you wait for your chance. I'm sure Sun Tzu learned it all from watching his own cat.'

‘Uh-huh, loser – let's all learn our big life lessons from animals that clean their own assholes with their tongues. I'm getting tired of you, yellowhead.'

‘Well, I'm getting tired of you, too, dwarf. When this job is over, let's be splits.'

‘Get tired of this.' Rice Thibodeaux took one step and drove the large serrated knife hard up into Steve McCall's abdomen, just above the turquoise belt-buckle.

McCall's mouth dropped open wide, but no sound came out, and Thibodeaux twisted the big knife around and then changed the angle and yanked it upward, the way he'd read true believers were supposed to perform hara-kiri – or, more properly,
seppuku.
McCall hardly deserved the honor, but he'd had to be shut up.

Only a little blood came out, no sound issued, but Steve McCall, eyes and mouth wide open, began to list to his right, and Rice Thibodeaux yanked out the knife with a flourish, the way he imagined a true samurai would.

‘Not just yet,' McCall squeaked as he leaned farther and farther and then crumpled to the concrete floor of the basement.

‘Happy now, mutant?'

⁵
In the interest of historical accuracy, it was the Pierre Koenig House, Case Study House No. 22, at 1636 Woods Drive, that Julius Shulman famously photographed for one of the most iconic L.A. images of all time. The von Sternberg legend of the deadly moat refers to a very similar house built by Richard Neutra in Northridge across the San Fernando Valley. As usual for L.A., this second one was demolished in 1971 to make way for a commonplace and forgettable housing tract.

⁶
All true, but about Richard Neutra, not Lautner.

‘W
hat were you people thinking?' Gloria Ramirez stood down below with her hands on her hips as the motley crew yanked at their barricade. It came away faster than Jack Liffey had expected.

‘They couldn't get to sleep up here knowing the bad-doers could get at them,' he explained.

‘Uh-huh,' she agreed. ‘So you were all going to nest up here forever like a band of Robertson Crusoes.'

He and Maeve caught one another's eye, but said nothing. Was there ever a right time for pedantry?

‘Don't even try to explain where you were going to get your food,' she went on.

She really had her dudgeon on, Jack Liffey thought, but he was happy not to be the prime focus.

The two old men fought the sticky duct tape off the final bedsprings and pushed, and the denuded box spring swung outward like a cell door.

‘Welcome to our fortress, young woman,' Samuel Greengelb said kindly. ‘There was a kind of powerful logic residing inside our logic, but I admit the
seykhl
appears to be lacking. “Common sense” to you.'

For just an instant, Gloria smiled benignly back at him, probably at the ‘young woman.'

‘Paula!' she called. ‘Come on up here and meet the whole sideshow.'

‘I thought I heard something,' Paula called back, her voice cold and hard, on the job. ‘I'll stay on point a few more minutes.'

Gloria noted her tone with a raised eyebrow and then stepped through the big gap in the barricade. ‘Any other ambushes waiting? Big falling weights? Trap doors?'

Greengelb blushed, and Jack Liffey was pleased to see that Morty Lipman had hidden away his little .25 auto. Gloria's old Police Special .38 was snug in his pants, but he could tell that Gloria's X-ray vision had spotted it. She just wasn't going to make an issue of it right then. Later, he'd pay. He had no concealed weapon permit, and there wasn't a prayer L.A. County would ever give him one. Only a handful were ever given out and mainly to celebrities ducking stalkers.

Gloria glanced along the hallway at the litter that their hasty scavenging had left and sniffed a bit at the aroma on the air, not as bad as the lower floors – a suggestion of urine, a little unwashed body, and a little decline of human expectations. ‘You were preparing the Armageddon to save this garbage dump?' she asked.

‘Home is where you find it,' Greengelb suggested. His face seemed gray and exhausted. ‘It's like this, young lady. My family is dispersed from this place and that.
Nu,
to be honest, none of them are anxious to have a curmudgeon old
shmo
in their home eating their bread. I've been living here seventeen years and more. It may be a dump but it's my dump.'

‘In the Fortnum twelve years for me,' Morty Lipman snapped, as if she'd called for a count-off. In his voice, there was no hint of the possibility of self-deprecating humor, only a kind of simmering of wrath. ‘These
golem
who come to drive us out of our home for the master-builder – curse the
chozzer –
they give us no respect at all. Nothing I have touched will ever be touched by them, I assure you. Before I let them drag me out of my home I will kill myself.'

‘Whoa, let's just talk about tonight, sir, please,' Gloria said quickly, and Jack Liffey watched her better nature come alive in an instant, like a kindly old guru who'd been distracted for a while. ‘I'm on your side, sir. I represent the full legal authority of the City of Los Angeles, and I offer you my respect and my protection tonight. Could you make me some coffee or tea, please? We can sit down and have a talk.'

He bowed slightly. ‘A table is not blessed if it has fed no friends.'

Jack Liffey marveled at how quickly Gloria had calmed him to civility. In his experience Lipman had a tendency to fly off the handle with little provocation.

They all trailed toward Lipman's room. ‘Do you like English breakfast tea, ma'am? Typhoo. Our electricity is off, but I can boil some water on a Sterno.'

‘That will be perfect,' Gloria said.

‘I love it, too,' Maeve added, more or less on behalf of everyone.

* * *

Rice Thibodeaux looked at the big sprawled thing lying there on the concrete floor with a frown of curiosity. Deep inside, he felt a bit lost now. He moved around the thing, as if he might make more sense of it from a different angle. He kicked once. It was both soft and hard, big boned and angular. He kicked again. The thing didn't budge at all.

‘Fuck you, clown,' Rice said tentatively.

The thing shuddered once and Rice hopped back. A wash of golden curls had come free, the baseball cap lying apart, and there was a pool of dark blood at the belly now, purplish in the dim hissing light. A soul patch grew beneath the man's lip, so blond it was almost invisible.

He reached out with his toe and nudged a hand that was splayed open on the ground.

‘OK, come on back now … mutant.'

The thing made no move, and he kicked the hand hard so the arm swung around to a ridiculous angle, making the thing look funny. Rice giggled once softly. The skin of the belly showed a little and a dark ooze was still flowing, barely. In the leather shoulder-holster, Rice saw the handgrip of the man's huge Desert Eagle pistol. Rice wasn't much of a gun man, but he'd used his share in Iraq, and just about everyone knew how to fire one.

He bent over and tapped the pistol gingerly, as if expecting it to be electrified. Nothing happened.

You get somewhere at first by standing out, he thought, and after that you have to try to fit in or you make enemies. It made no sense. He thought of New Orleans and how much easier it had all been, at least before Katrina. Upper Ward Five. People you could trust. All the way up to the Ponchartrain. Royal Street. The can factory across the bayou. L.A. was just not the same. Things weren't solid.

He plucked the pistol quickly out of the funny thing lying there. It was unwieldy, top heavy and far too heavy. Strange thing it was. Not elegant and simple like a knife.

They sat around the floor and the bed in the cramped room clutching mugs, tin cans, juice glasses and two proper teacups, each with a paper tag dangling over the side as the water pot on the Sterno can whisped a little vapor trying to boil.

There didn't appear to be any sugar and Jack Liffey knew he was not going to be able to drink much of it raw, but he figured they were all just being polite anyway, like some dreadful first campfire at a Scout Jamboree. He tried to make out the books in a blocks-and-board bookcase next to the bed where his back had come to rest, but the titles were mostly in angular Hebrew characters, and a few seemed to be in German. The only thing on the wall was a magazine photo that he took to be the massive hilly sugar-cubes and domes of old Jerusalem.

‘Don't get excited, please, but why didn't you report the harassment?' Gloria asked, sitting near the door for her own purposes. ‘For instance, I protected some women down in San Pedro when their landlord demanded sexual favors. But they had to
tell
me about it.'

Morty Lipman raised both eyebrows like a TV host with an awkward guest. ‘
Oy
, “for instance” is not a proof, Officer. It's not even an argument. You think the police here mobilize their big squads to protect poor single-room renters in The Nickel? Begging your pardon, for your police colleagues and their own problems, ma'am, but we really don't count.'

She opened a palm. ‘I'm here now. In everybody's defense, there probably weren't any obvious acts to report, were there?'

‘Sabotage of the elevator,' Greengelb took over with a sigh. ‘Sabotage of the heating system. Sabotage of our door locks. Pounding on our doors and yelling “Wake up, Kikes!” in the middle of the night. The manager disappears. Even human
kak
left in front of our doors.'

‘I understand, sir. But nobody saw who did any of this, did they? Don't tell me the owner you talk about came down here in his fancy suit and personally did this.'

Greengelb's head dropped a little. ‘Who is the witness to this? I call a man, and isn't that
exactly
what he says to me, word for word? The
shmo
in a police uniform actually asks me this
mishegoss.
Is the whole world populated with stupids? How is it so hard to figure out who goes home rich and who has to wash his hands?'

‘The law requires witnesses,' Gloria said. ‘I'm sorry. There's a reason it works that way, and I'll bet you can appreciate it.'

‘I understand. But isn't there some intermediate path between blindness and total observation?'

‘I'm
the intermediate path,' Gloria said, tapping her chest. ‘I can nail all this down. Is this harassment happening now?'

‘Did you see a manager downstairs? Did you see a working elevator? Morty and I had to fix the heater today, though very poorly, I'm sorry to say.' He touched the radiator with his fingertips and made a disappointed face. ‘This mysterious somebody removed a connecting pipe. I tell you, those
golems
are down there
somewhere
right now.'

Gloria glanced out at the hallway, listening hard. Her hand went to the radio-pack police mike pinned to her breast pocket. But it didn't respond to her touch, and she dug for her cellphone as her attention was yanked back by the shrilling of the teapot.

Thibodeaux had a hard time deciding which hand to use to hold the knife and which the pistol as he slowly climbed the wooden basement steps. He didn't feel right without the knife in his good right hand, but he wasn't a fool, and he knew the big pistol was a much more effective weapon. In the end he went for comfort and kept the big Special Forces knife in his capable right hand. Any idiot could probably shoot with the left.

He heard a scurrying behind him and spun around and nearly fired, but there was no chance of seeing anything in that gloom of conflicting shadows, and he remembered that something, another sentient being, had already fired this pistol three or four times and so he had little ammunition to waste on ghosts. Or brother rats, he thought.
Be with me. Evolve with me. Have I somehow contributed to a world in which all is doomed?
He felt that there was something wrong and froze halfway up the steps. I can feel my distrust of the life current, he thought.

Not at all, a voice told him.

Yes, I feel uncertainty.

No, not a bit. The world is dry and clear, with a steady wind pushing you forward. Go on about your business. But don't forget the gasoline.

‘I've already put the cans on the top landing,' he said aloud, but softly. ‘Why don't you know this?'

Your petty situation doesn't interest me very much.

‘I think it does.'

No, not really. Just don't do things half way, the way you often have in the past. Do things so they're definitive. Be a man, be a lion. And I'll watch you become a babe of the new order. That might just appeal to me.

Thibodeaux turned away from the basement and deliberately took the last few steps to the top landing. Very slowly, almost silently, he used his knife hand to turn the key that had been left on the inside of the old deadbolt. An oversight? Haste? Who had locked it? Who could tell the intentions of anyone at all? Ordinary minds were so disordered. Then he turned the knob and felt its catch release, and as he did he sensed a strong pressure against the door, a great weight leaning into it, and quickly he twisted the key to latch it shut again. What could be out there? A camel, leaning into it?

He moved the sloshing gas cans to the side to clear his path, then took a deep breath and readied the knife, his most reliable friend, though he kept Mr Pistol ready, too. He knelt slowly and gripped the head of the doorkey with his teeth, feeling like a pirate.
OK, whoever you are,
he thought.
I make you this promise. I'm reliably on the side of human evolution. I'm a fool in many ways but not in this one. I'm ready. Can you deal with it?

Go for it, the voice insinuated. Mr Nietzsche is in favor of first-strike. Always. He has nothing but contempt for the reasonable and the dutiful man.

He kept a shoulder against the door and bit down on the key. He twisted his head to rotate the key until he felt the beginning of give, and the pressure was just starting to overwhelm the furious push of his shoulder. One-two-three, he counted off for whatever sentient presence was watching over him and speaking back. Then he hurled himself to the side and let the door fly open. The opening brought bedlam, but a little light. He used the knife in his right hand to stab and fling a toppling chair down the staircase, as other chairs followed.

‘Freeze, police!' he heard. A woman's voice.

He'd braved the unpredictable clout and slap of falling chairs and then he was out the open door and flat against the wall. In the faint hall light he saw a silhouette, almost certainly going for a gun.
I'm prepared, O Future!
He flung the knife hard and then fired once at the silhouette.

‘Paula!' Gloria cried out. ‘I'm coming!' She was on her feet at the first cry of her voice and then the shot, and something that had been in her hand, a can of hot water, went flying aside, causing voices to yelp. Gloria rounded the staircase and then yanked herself backward on instinct as a small shadowy figure appeared below and fired twice at her with the biggest pistol she'd ever seen.

‘I am bringer of death!'

She darted around the corner low with her own pistol out but she didn't shoot, holding her fire-discipline because she lacked a definite target, as she'd been taught. The short figure was gone. She heard a deep
whoomp
and immediately a lick of near-transparent flame gestured around the corner in a tease, then yanked back.

She patted the radio-pack mike on instinct but it was still on the fritz for some reason. She pulled out her cell and hit the 911 button that she'd programmed.