“No,” said Amelia, “he won’t. He brings me rum and candy.”
The living girl who had been Amelia would have been at least somewhat concerned about the kidnapped girl. We each owe God our mind, Torrez thought, and he that gives it up today is paid off for tomorrow.
“Yes,” said Torrez. He lifted the coffee cup; his hand was shaky, but he carefully poured the rum over the cloth head of the doll; the rum soaked into its fabric and puddled on the counter.
“How much is the ransom?” he asked.
“Only a reasonable amount,” the voice assured him blandly.
Torrez was relieved; he was sure a reasonable amount was all that was left, and the kidnapper was likely to take it all anyway. He flicked his lighter over the doll, and then the doll was in a teardrop-shaped blue glare on the counter. Torrez stepped back, ready to wipe a wet towel over the cabinets if they should start to smolder. The doll turned black and began to come apart.
Amelia’s voice didn’t speak from the answering machine, though he thought he might have heard a long sigh – of release, he hoped.
“I want something,” Torrez said. “A condition.”
“What?”
“Do you have a Bible? Not a repaired one, a whole one?” “I can get one.”
“Yes, get one. And bring it for me.” “Okay. So we have a deal?”
The rum had burned out and the doll was a black pile, still glowing red here and there. He filled the cup with water from the tap and poured it over the ashes, and then there was no more red glow.
Torrez sighed, seeming to empty his lungs. “Yes. Where do we meet?”
I wrote this story after watching the movie Man on Fire, caught up with the idea of a kidnap negotiator who finds that he has somehow got to the point where he must sacrifice himself in order to free the victim. And I used my local San Bernardino neighborhood as a setting, which led inevitably to the peculiarly pragmatic Hispanic style of magic.
For the Subterranean Press limited edition I did several illustrations, and a reader at Amazon.com noted that I’m not a very good artist. Glancing at the limited edition, I was forced to agree. The reader of this book is fortunate that those illustrations haven’t been reproduced here!
–T P.
A SOUL IN A BOTTLE
The forecourt of the Chinese Theater smelled of rain-wet stone and car exhaust, but a faint aroma like pears and cumin seemed to cling to his shirt-collar as he stepped around the clustered tourists, who all appeared to be blinking up at the copper towers above the forecourt wall or smiling into cameras as they knelt to press their hands into the puddled handprints in the cement paving blocks.
George Sydney gripped his shopping bag under his arm and dug three pennies from his pants pocket.
For the third or fourth time this morning he found himself glancing sharply over his left shoulder, but again there was no one within yards of him. The morning sun was bright on the Roosevelt Hotel across the boulevard, and the clouds were breaking up in the blue sky.
He crouched beside Jean Harlow’s square and carefully laid one penny in each of the three round indentations below her incised signature, then wiped his wet fingers on his jacket. The coins wouldn’t stay there long, but Sydney always put three fresh ones down whenever he walked past this block of Hollywood Boulevard.
He straightened up and again caught a whiff of pears and cumin, and when he glanced over his left shoulder there was a girl standing right behind him.
At first glance he thought she was a teenager – she was a head shorter than him, and her tangled red hair framed a narrow, freckled face with squinting eyes and a wide, amused mouth.
“Three pennies?” she asked, and her voice was deeper than he would have expected.
She was standing so close to him that his elbow had brushed her breasts when he’d turned around.
“That’s right,” said Sydney, stepping back from her, awkwardly so as not to scuff the coins loose.
“Why?”
“Uh …” He waved at the cement square and then barely caught his shopping bag. “People pried up the original three,” he said. “For souvenirs. That she put there. Jean Harlow, when she put her handprints and shoe prints in the wet cement, in 1933.”
The girl raised her faint eyebrows and blinked down at the stone. “I never knew that. How did you know that?”
“I looked her up one time. Uh, on Google.”
The girl laughed quietly, and in that moment she seemed to be the only figure in the forecourt, including himself, that had color. He realized dizzily that the scent he’d been catching all morning was hers.
“Google?” she said. “Sounds like a Chinaman trying to say something. Are you always so nice to dead people?”
Her black linen jacket and skirt were visibly damp, as if she had slept outside, and seemed to be incongruously formal. He wondered if somebody had donated the suit to the Salvation Army place down the boulevard by Pep Boys, and if this girl was one of the young people he sometimes saw in sleeping bags under the marquee of a closed theater down there.
“Respectful, at least,” he said, “I suppose.”
She nodded. “‘Lo,’” she said, “‘some we loved, the loveliest and the best …’”
Surprised by the quote, he mentally recited the next two lines of the Rubaiyat quatrain – That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest, / Have drunk their cup a round or two before – and found himself saying the last line out loud: “‘And one by one crept silently to Rest.’”
She was looking at him intently, so he cleared his throat and said, “Are you local? You’ve been here before, I gather.” Probably that odd scent was popular right now, he thought, the way patchouli oil had apparently been in the ‘60s. Probably he had brushed past someone who had been wearing it too, earlier in the day.
“I’m staying at the Heroic,” she said, then went on quickly, “Do you live near here?”
He could see her bra through her damp white blouse, and he looked away – though he had noticed that it seemed to be embroidered with vines.
“I have an apartment up on Franklin,” he said, belatedly.
She had noticed his glance, and arched her back for a moment before pulling her jacket closed and buttoning it. “‘ And in a Windingsheet of Vineleaf wrapped,’” she said merrily, “‘ So bury me by some sweet Gardenside.’”
Embarrassed, he muttered the first line of that quatrain: “‘Ah, with the grape my fading life provide … ”’
“Good idea!” she said – then she frowned, and her face was older. “No, dammit, I’ve got to go – but I’ll see you again, right? I like you.” She leaned forward and tipped her face up – and then she had briefly kissed him on the lips, and he did drop his shopping bag.
When he had crouched to pick it up and brushed the clinging drops of cold water off on his pants, and looked around, she was gone. He took a couple of steps toward the theater entrance, but the dozens of colorfully dressed strangers blocked his view, and he couldn’t tell if she had hurried inside; and he didn’t see her among the people by the photo booths or on the shiny black sidewalk.
Her lips had been hot – perhaps she had a fever.
He opened the plastic bag and peered inside, but the book didn’t seem to have got wet or landed on a corner. A first edition of Colleen Moore’s Silent Star, with a TLS, a typed letter, signed, tipped in on the front flyleaf. The Larry Edmunds Bookstore a few blocks east was going to give him fifty dollars for it.
And he thought he’d probably stop at Boardner’s afterward and have a couple of beers before walking back to his apartment. Or maybe a shot of Wild Turkey, though it wasn’t yet noon. He knew he’d be coming back here again, soon, frequently – peering around, lingering, almost certainly uselessly.
Still, I’ll see you again, she had said. I like you.
Well, he thought with a nervous smile as he started east down the black sidewalk, stepping around the inset brass-rimmed pink stars with names on them, I like you too. May
be, after all, it’s a rain-damp street girl that I can fall in love with.
She wasn’t at the Chinese Theater when he looked for her there during the next several days, but a week later he saw her again. He was driving across Fairfax on Santa Monica Boulevard, and he saw her standing on the sidewalk in front of the big Starbuck’s, in the shadows below the aquamarine openwork dome.
He knew it was her, though she was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt now – her red hair and freckled face were unmistakable. He honked the horn as he drove through the intersection, and she looked up, but by the time he had turned left into a market parking lot and driven back west on Santa Monica, she was nowhere to be seen.
He drove around several blocks, squinting as the winter sunlight shifted back and forth across the streaked windshield of his ten-year-old Honda, but none of the people on the sidewalks was her.
A couple of blocks south of Santa Monica he passed a fenced-off motel with plywood over its windows and several shopping carts in its otherwise empty parking lot. The 1960s space-age sign over the building read RO IC MOTEL, and he could see faint outlines where a long-gone T and P had once made “tropic” of the first word.
“Eroic,” he said softly to himself.
To his own wry embarrassment he parked a block past it and fed his only quarter into the parking meter, but at the end of his twenty minutes she hadn’t appeared.
Of course she hadn’t. “You’re acting like a high-school kid,” he whispered impatiently to himself as he put the Honda in gear and pulled away from the curb.
Six days later he was walking east toward Book City at Cherokee, and as was his habit lately he stepped into the Chinese Theater forecourt with three pennies in his hand, and he stood wearily beside the souvenir shop and scanned the crowd, shaking the pennies in his fist. The late afternoon crowd consisted of brightly dressed tourists, and a portly, bearded man making hats out of balloons, and several young men dressed as Batman and Spider-Man and Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Then he gripped the pennies tight. He saw her.
She was at the other end of the crowded square, on the far side of the theater entrance, and he noticed her red hair in the moment before she crouched out of sight.
He hurried through the crowd to where she was kneeling – the rains had passed and the pavement was dry – and he saw that she had laid three pennies into little round indentations in the Gregory Peck square.
She grinned up at him, squinting in the sunlight. “I love the idea,” she said in the remembered husky voice, “but I didn’t want to come between you and Jean Harlow.” She reached up one narrow hand, and he took it gladly and pulled her to her feet. She could hardly weigh more than a hundred pounds. He realized that her hand was hot as he let go of it. “
And hello,” she said.
She was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt again, or still. At least they were dry. Sydney caught again the scent of pears and cumin.
He was grinning too. Most of the books he sold he got from thrift stores and online used-book sellers, and these recent trips to Book City had been a self-respect excuse to keep looking for her here.
He groped for something to say. “I thought I found your ‘Heroic’ the other day,” he told her.
She cocked her head, still smiling. The sweatshirt was baggy, but somehow she seemed to be flat-chested today. “You were looking for me?” she asked.
“I – guess I was. This was a closed-down motel, though, south of Santa Monica.” He laughed self-consciously. “The sign says blank-R-O-blank-I-C. Eroic, see? It was originally Tropic, I gather.”
Her green eyes had narrowed as he spoke, and it occurred to him that the condemned motel might actually be the place she’d referred to a couple of weeks earlier, and that she had not expected him to find it. “Probably it originally said ‘erotic,’” she said lightly, taking his hand and stepping away from the Gregory Peck square. “Have you got a cigarette?”
“Yes.” He pulled a pack of Camels and a lighter from his shirt pocket, and when she had tucked a cigarette between her lips – he noticed that she was not wearing lipstick today – he cupped his hand around the lighter and held the flame toward her. She held his hand to steady it as she puffed the cigarette alight.
“There couldn’t be a motel called Erotic,” he said.
“Sure there could, lover. To avoid complications.”
“I’m George,” he said. “What’s your name?”
She shook her head, grinning up at him.
The bearded balloon man had shuffled across the pavement to them, deftly weaving a sort of bowler hat shape out of several long green balloons, and now he reached out and set it on her head.
“No, thank you,” she said, taking it off and holding it toward the man, but he backed away, smiling through his beard and nodding. She stuck it onto the head of a little boy who was scampering past.
The balloon man stepped forward again and this time he snatched the cigarette from her mouth. “This is California, sister,” he said, dropping it and stepping on it. “We don’t smoke here.”
“You should,” she said, “it’d help you lose weight.” She took Sydney’s arm and started toward the sidewalk.
The balloon man called after them, “It’s customary to give a gratuity for the balloons!”
“Get it from that kid,” said Sydney over his shoulder.
The bearded man was pointing after them and saying loudly, “Tacky people, tacky people!”
“Could I have another cigarette?” she said as they stepped around the forecourt wall out of the shadows and started down the sunlit sidewalk toward the soft-drink and jewelry stands on the wider pavement in front of the Kodak Theater.
“Sure,” said Sydney, pulling the pack and lighter out again. “Would you like a Coke or something?” he added, waving toward the nearest vendor. Their shadows stretched for yards ahead of them, but the day was still hot.
“I’d like a drink drink.” She paused to take a cigarette, and again she put her hand over his as he lit it for her. “Drink, that knits up the raveled sleave of care,” she said through smoke as they started forward again. “I bet you know where we could find a bar.”
“I bet I do,” he agreed. “Why don’t you want to tell me your name?”
“I’m shy,” she said. “What did the Michelin Man say, when we were leaving?”
“He said, ‘tacky people.’”
She stopped and turned to look back, and for a moment Sydney was afraid she intended to march back and cause a scene; but a moment later she had grabbed his arm and resumed their eastward course.
He could feel that she was shaking, and he peered back over his shoulder.
Everyone on the pavement behind them seemed to be couples moving away or across his view, except for one silhouetted figure standing a hundred feet back – it was an elderly white-haired woman in a shapeless dress, and he couldn’t see if she was looking after them or not.
The girl had released his arm and taken two steps ahead, and he started toward her –
– and she disappeared.
Sydney rocked to a halt.
He had been looking directly at her in the bright afternoon sunlight. She had not stepped into a store doorway or run on ahead or ducked behind him. She had been occupying volume four feet ahead of him, casting a shadow, and suddenly she was not.
A bus that had been grinding past on the far side of the parking meters to his left was still grinding past.
Her cigarette was rolling on the sidewalk, still lit.
She had not been a hallucination, and he had not experienced some kind of blackout.
Are you always so nice to dead people?
He was shivering in the sunlight, and he stepped back to half-sit against the rim of a black iron trash can by the curb. No sudden moves, he thought.
Was she a ghost? Probably, probably! What else?
Well then, you’ve seen a ghost, he told himself, that’s all. People see ghosts. The balloon man
saw her too – he told her not to smoke.
You fell in love with a ghost, that’s all. People have probably done that.
He waited several minutes, gripping the iron rim of the trash can and glancing in all directions, but she didn’t reappear.
At last he was able to push away from the trash can and walk on, unsteadily, toward Book City; that had been his plan before he had met her again today, and nothing else seemed appropriate. Breathing wasn’t difficult, but for at least a little while it would be a conscious action, like putting one foot in front of the other.
He wondered if he would meet her again, knowing that she was a ghost. He wondered if he would be afraid of her now. He thought he probably would be, but he hoped he would see her again anyway.
The quiet aisles of the book store, with the almost-vanilla scent of old paper, distanced him from the event on the sidewalk. This was his familiar world, as if all used book stores were actually one enormous magical building that you could enter through different doorways in Long Beach or Portland or Albuquerque. Always, reliably, there were the books with no spines that you had to pull out and identify, and the dust jackets that had to be checked for the dismissive words Book Club Edition, and the poetry section to be scanned for possibly underpriced Nora May French or George Sterling.
The shaking of his hands, and the disorientation that was like a half-second delay in his comprehension, were no worse than a hangover, and he was familiar with hangovers – the cure was a couple of drinks, and he would take the cure as soon as he got back to his apartment. In the meantime he was gratefully able to concentrate on the books, and within half an hour he had found several P. G. Wodehouse novels that he’d be able to sell for more than the prices they were marked at, and a clean five-dollar hardcover copy of Sabatini’s Bellarion.
My books, he thought, and my poetry.
In the poetry section he found several signed Don Blanding books, but in his experience every Don Blanding book was signed. Then he found a first edition copy of Cheyenne Fleming’s 1968 More Poems, but it was priced at twenty dollars, which was about the most it would ever go for. He looked on the title page for an inscription, but there wasn’t one, and then flipped through the pages – and glimpsed handwriting.