“That’s…that’s my job,” Kelsen said softly, a crooked grin frozen on his face. “What is this, a joke? Candid Camera? What’s going on?”
“I’m deadly serious, Mr. Kelsen. Are you a religious man?”
This guy’s not a cop! Kelsen thought. He’s a freakin’ nut! “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “Listen, what’s your name?”
“If and when someone comes to this gate tonight,” Palatazin continued, ignoring the question, “you should pray. Pray very loudly, don’t pay any attention to anything they say to you.” He squinted when the watchman’s light hit his face. “Perhaps if you pray hard enough, they’ll leave you in peace.”
“I think you should go, mister,” Kelsen said. “Get out of here before I call a real cop!” His face was contorted, and his once friendly eyes turned mean. “Go on, buddy, get out!” He started for the telephone on his desk. “I’m calling the cops right now!”
“All right,” Palatazin said, “all right, I’m going.” Kelsen stopped and looked back; the flashlight in his hand was shaking. “But remember what I’ve told you. Please. Pray, and keep praying.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah! I’ll pray for you, you crazy freak!” Kelsen disappeared into his station and slammed the door behind him. Palatazin turned, walked quickly to his car and drove away; he was trembling, his stomach churning slowly. Hope Hill Cemetery, did the man say? This has happened before? Oh my God, he thought, trying to keep down a rising wave of nausea. Please, no. Don’t let it happen again! Not here! Not in Los Angeles!
He hoped he was crazy; he hoped the pressure of the Roach killings was beginning to get to him, that he was seeing grinning shadows where nothing existed but the warped antics of—What had Kelsen said?—kids who belonged to some crazy cult? A hundred cults, a thousand of them, would be easier to deal with than what he was beginning to fear had ripped those coffins out of the ground. He had been sleeping in his bed less than six blocks away when it had happened, and perhaps when he’d awakened from the dream about his mother, the things were here at work.
Too late, Palatazin realized he’d turned off Santa Monica Boulevard and driven right past Romaine Street, heading south on Western. He touched the brakes for only an instant and then drove on because he knew where he was going.
The gray-bricked building on First Street was empty now—it had been condemned years ago—and the broken edges of glass gleamed in the windows. It looked desolate and forlorn, as if it had been abandoned for a very long time; the walls were smeared with old graffiti—he could see one faded white declaration that read Seniors Fine in ’59. Somewhere in that graffiti would still be two painful statements scrawled by the hand of a vicious child—Palatazin Sucks ’em and Old Lady P. Is Gonna Burn In Hell For Crazy People.
He lifted his gaze to the top floor windows. All broken now, all dark and empty; but for an instant he thought he saw his mother up there, much younger of course, her hair almost fully gray but her eyes not nearly as haunted and wild as he remembered them at the end. She was peering out onto First Street, watching the corner where little André, now in the sixth grade, would cross carrying his green Army backpack filled with notebooks and pencils, math texts and history homework. When he reached that corner, he always looked up, and his mother would always wave from the window. Three times a week a woman named Mrs. Gibbs would come by to help him with his English; he was still having difficulties, though most of the teachers at his elementary school spoke Hungarian. Up in that small, dark apartment, the extremes of temperature had been almost unbearable; at the height of summer the place was an oven even with all the windows open, and when a cold winter wind blew down from the mountains and shook the ancient window frames, André could see the faint, wraithlike plume of his mother’s breath. Every night, no matter what the season, she peered fearfully down onto the street, checked and re-checked the three dead-bolt locks on the door, and paced the floor muttering and crying until the downstairs neighbors slammed the ceiling with a broom and shouted, “Go to sleep, you witch woman!”
André was never liked or even tolerated by the other children in the neighborhood, a hodgepodge of Jewish, Hungarian, and Polish families, because their parents were afraid of his mother, because they discussed the “witch woman” over their dinner tables and told the children they’d better stay away from her son, he might be crazy in the head, too. His friends were those awkward, shy, or backward children who do not quite fit in with the others, who can find no place to exist except on the outer rim and consequently play alone most of the tune. On some occasions when he grew nervous, André the witch woman’s son lapsed into speaking Hungarian with a thick accent. Then he would be chased home from school by a pack of children who threw stones and laughed whenever he tripped and fell.
It was very hard for him, because home was no refuge. It was a prison where his mother scrawled crucifixes on the walls and windows and doors with red Crayola crayons, where she shrieked out in the night from the images that seared her brain, where she sometimes lay in her bed for days at a time, curled up like a fetus, staring blankly at a wall. It became progressively worse and worse, and even Uncle Milo, his mother’s brother who had immigrated to America in the late thirties and owned a successful men’s clothing store, began to stop in and ask her if she would like to go someplace where she wouldn’t have to worry about anything anymore, where there were people to take care of her and keep her happy. No! she’d screamed during one terrible argument that kept Uncle Milo away for weeks. No! I won’t leave my son alone!
What would I find up there if I went in? Palatazin asked himself, staring up at the front room. A few newspapers all cut in pieces, lying in a thick sediment of dust? Perhaps an old dress or two hanging in a closet? Things best forgotten? Some of the crucifixes might still be scrawled on the walls, close to the nail holes where the religious pictures had hung in their gaudy gilded frames. Palatazin, grown-up André, looked up to the window where he thought he saw the pale, ghostly face of a woman waiting for her son to come home. He didn’t like to think about those last months; putting her in Golden Garden and leaving her there to die had torn him to pieces, but what else could he have done? She couldn’t take care of herself anymore; she had to be fed like a baby, and very often she spat up her food like a baby or soiled the awful rubber, diaperlike thing she wore. She was wasting away to nothing, alternately praying and crying. Her eyes had become the largest thing about her. As she sat in her favorite rocking chair day after day and stared down upon Romaine Street, her eyes became luminous, as large as pale white moons. So he’d sent her away where the doctors and nurses could take care of her. She’d died of a stroke in a small room with forest-green walls and a window that looked out on a golf course. She’d been dead for two hours before a nurse came in to check on her at six o’clock in the morning.
Palatazin remembered her last words to him, the very night before she died. “André, André,” she’d said softly, reaching up her frail, white hand to grip his arm. “What time is it? Is it day or night?”
“Night, Mama,” he replied. “It’s almost eight o’clock.”
“Night comes too fast. Always too fast. Is the door locked?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t, of course, but when he told her that it was, he could see that it comforted her.
“Good. My good André, you must never forget to…to lock the door. Oh, I’m so sleepy. I can hardly keep my eyes open. I heard that black cat scratching on the front door this morning, so I shooed it away. They should keep that cat in their apartment.”
“Yes, Mama.” A black cat had belonged to their next-door neighbors in the First Street apartment building; after all these years it must surely be dust.
And then his mother’s eyes had clouded over, and for a long time she’d stared at her son without speaking. “André, I’m afraid,” she’d said finally, her voice cracking like old, yellowed paper. The tears glimmered in her eyes, and Palatazin had carefully wiped them away with a handkerchief when they started to roll down he
r cheeks. She’d gripped his hand tightly, her flesh as dry as leather. “One of them…one of them followed me when I came back from the market. I heard him walking behind me, and when I…turned I saw his grinning face. I saw his eyes, André, his terrible burning eyes I He wanted me to…to take his hand and go with him…because of what I did to your papa…”
“Shhhhhh,” Palatazin had said, wiping tiny beads of perspiration off her forehead. “You’re wrong, Mama. There was no one. You were only imagining it.” He remembered the night she was recalling, she’d dropped a sack of groceries and run home, screaming. It had been the last night she’d ever left the apartment. “They can’t hurt us now, Mama. We’re too far away for them to ever find us again.”
“NO!” she’d said, her eyes widening. Her face was as pale as a china plate, her fingernails digging half-moons into his hand. “DON’T YOU EVER BELIEVE THAT! If you don’t watch for them always…ALWAYS!…they can come for you and find you. They’re always there, André…you just can’t see them…”
“Why don’t you try to sleep now, Mama? I’ll sit here with you until I have to leave, all right?”
“Leave?” she’d said, suddenly panicked. “Leave? Where are you going?”
“Home. I have to go home. Jo’s waiting for me.”
“Jo?” She’d looked at him suspiciously. “Who’s that?”
“My wife, Mama. You know who Jo is, she came with me to see you last night.”
“Oh, stop that! You’re just a little boy! Even in California they don’t let little boys get married! Did you get that milk I asked you to bring on the way back from school?”
He’d nodded and tried to smile. “I brought it.”
“That’s good.” And then she’d settled back and closed her eyes. After another moment her grip on his hand had loosened enough for him to pull away. He’d sat and gazed at her for a long time; she looked so different, but still there was something there of the woman he’d known a long time ago, the one who’d sat in the little stone house in Krajeck, knitting a sweater for her son. When he’d stood up very quietly to leave, his mother’s eyes had opened again, and this time they burned through to his soul. “I won’t leave you, André,” she’d whispered. “I won’t leave my son alone.” And then she was asleep again, just that quickly, her mouth half-open, and the breath rustling in and out of her lungs. There was an odor in the room like lilacs on the edge of decay.
Palatazin had slipped out of the room, and a doctor named Vacarella had called him just after six the next morning.
My God! Palatazin thought suddenly and looked at his wristwatch. Jo is waiting at home! He started the car, glanced up once more at the top-floor window—now empty, the broken pane catching a little leftover light from someone else’s house—and drove toward Romaine Street. When he stopped at a traffic light two blocks away, he thought he heard dogs howling very far away in a strange close harmony. But when the light changed and he drove on, he didn’t hear them anymore—or perhaps he was afraid to listen. Thoughts of Hollywood Memorial loomed up too quickly for him to cut them off. His hands began to sweat on the steering wheel.
They can’t hurt us now, he thought. We’re too far away. Too far away. Too far away.
And from the depths of his memory, his mother’s voice answering, Don’t you ever believe that…
SEVEN
Merida Santos had run a long way from the noisy tumult of Whittier Boulevard, and her legs were beginning to ache. She stopped and leaned against a half-demolished brick wall to rub her calves. Her lungs were burning, too, her eyes felt gummy with tears, and her nose was running. Damn Rico! she thought. I hate him, HATE HIM, HATE HIM! She thought of what she should do to him: Tell Luis he’d beaten her up and raped her, so the Homicides would go after him and cut him to pieces; tell her mother he’d gotten her drunk and had his way with her, so she’d call the cops on him; call the police herself and tell them she knew somebody who was selling cocaine to kids on the Strip and ask them if they would like to know his name.
But in the next instant her plans of vengeance broke apart in a single sob. She couldn’t do any of those things. She couldn’t bear to see him hurt; she would rather die than think of him being beaten up by the Homicides or put in jail. From a bitter spark of her anger and hurt, the hot flame of love—and of need, both physical and emotional—leapt up, its crazy brightness making new tears stream down her cheeks. She started trembling and couldn’t stop. A hole had opened up somewhere in the pit of her stomach, and she felt she was in danger of being swallowed into it, turned inside out, and then all the world would see the tiny fetus just beginning to take form within her. She hoped that the baby would be a boy with the same coffee-and-cream eyes that Rico had.
But now what was to be done? Tell Mama? She shivered at the thought. Her mother hadn’t acted right since Papa died last year; she was suspicious of every move Merida made—doubly suspicious of what Luis did, and that just made Luis stay away from home more—and lately had begun awakening Merida in the middle of the night to question her about the kids she was running around with, about what they did. Smoke that filthy weed? Get drunk on wine? Luis had told Mama that Merida had been seeing Rico and that Rico was a big man in the coke trade up on Sunset Boulevard. Luis, only twelve, was running with the Homicides almost every night now, and the barrio toughs hated Rico because he’d once been where they were and had made it out. Merida’s mother had gone into a screaming fit, threatening to lock Merida in a closet or turn her over to the social worker lady if she kept seeing “that Esteban mugre.” Now what would happen if she told her mother she was carrying his baby in her belly?
Or she could go to see Father Silvera first, and perhaps he could help her talk to her mother. Yes. That was the thing to do.
Merida wiped her swollen eyes and looked around to get her bearings. She really hadn’t noticed where she was running. The narrow street stretched out before her, lined with brown brick buildings that were gutted and desolate, bombed and burned out by the hands of the arsonist or feuding street gangs. Mounds of rubble glittered with bits of broken glass; layers of yellow mist hung over empty lots where a rat as big as a gopher occasionally scurried from shadow to shadow. Some of the buildings looked as if they’d been split right down the middle by a huge axe, the tiny rooms and hallways exposed as were the metal twistings of pipes, the toilets, and the tubs. And everywhere was the wild spray-painted scrawl: Zorro ’78; L.A. Homicides (and beneath that in a different color, Suck); Raphael High Conquistadors Best; Gomez was here; Anita does 69. There were also drawings of crude sexuality interspersed. On the side of a wrecked apartment building, staring impassively down at Merida, was a huge face, drawn in red with blood dripping from both corners of the mouth.
Merida shivered; it was getting colder, wind twisting savagely through the maze of wreckage as it sought a way out. And now she realized that she’d run too far. She had no idea where she was. She could turn around and see lights in the sky from Whittier Boulevard, but in this silent place the boulevard seemed a hundred miles away. She began to walk hurriedly, new tears wetting her eyes; she crossed the street and moved along another that became narrower still and was rank with the odor of old, charred brick. Of course her street, her apartment building, couldn’t be too far away; it would have to be only a few streets over. Mama would be waiting, wanting to know where she’d been.
She was wondering what she was going to say about her swollen eyes when she heard the footsteps behind her. She caught her breath and whirled around; something dark scurried for the shadows like a rat, but whatever it was was big enough to be a man. Merida narrowed her eyes, squinting to get a better look, and she stood very still for what seemed like hours. Then she started walking again, faster, her heart hammering in her chest. A young, pretty girl like you can get raped out there, she remembered her mother saying. Raped or much, much worse. She walked faster, and at the next desolate corner she turned again toward the distant lights of Whittier. She looked back and saw two figur
es this time, both leaping for the cover of open doorways. Merida almost screamed, but forced down the sound. She thought she’d seen a face as white as gossamer and within it a pair of eyes that shone in the dark like a lowrider’s headlights. Footsteps clattered somewhere close to her, echoing between the brick walls like muffled explosions.
Merida began to run, the breath bursting from her lungs in a high whine. When she dared to look over her shoulder, she saw five or maybe seven figures, running silently like a pack of wolves; they were gaining on her, and the one in the lead had a face like a grinning death’s head. She tripped over debris in the street, cried out, and almost went down. Then she was running as fast as she could, her mother’s warning echoing in her head—Raped or much, much worse. She looked back again and screamed in cold panic. They were almost upon her; one of them reached out to grip her hair.
And from the darkness of the street, three more of the things emerged before her, waiting for her. She recognized one of them—Paco Milan, one of Luis’s friends from the Homicides, except now Paco’s face was as pale as the belly of a dead fish, and his fiery gaze crackled through Merida’s skull. She thought she heard him speak, though his mouth didn’t seem to open, “No more running, sister,” he whispered, the sound like a wind through dead trees. “No more place to go.” He held his arms out for her and grinned.
A clawlike hand gripped Merida around the neck and jerked her head backward. Another clamped her mouth shut, freezing fingers digging into her flesh. The figures danced around her as she was dragged toward a doorway.
And in a crumbling hulk of brick, she learned that there was something worse than rape. Much, much worse.
EIGHT
It was almost midnight, and the party was just getting started. The hospitality bowls that had been brimming with Quaaludes and amphetamines, Black Beauties, Bennies, and uppers of a hundred different sizes and colors were now almost empty; the silver trays that had been crisscrossed with white lines of fine, pure cocaine were now only dusted with the traces of it, and the ceramic vases that had held dozens of red-striped McDonald’s drinking straws now contained only a few. But the house was still filled with people of all ages and in all manner of dress from Bill Blass suits to Yves St. Laurent disco dresses to denim cutoffs and T-shirts advertising Adidas or Nike running shoes. The huge sunken living room to which most of the party had gravitated was heavy with several layers of sweet, thick pot smoke; the beige, deep-pile carpeting had started catching cigarettes when the ashtrays had overflowed, and now the dime-sized burns looked like a natural pattern. Someone was hammering at the grand piano over by a plate glass window that looked out over the blue-lit swimming pool; someone else was playing a guitar and singing, all this plus the cacophonous noises of a hundred people battling the thunder of Bob Dylan’s voice from a pair of thousand-dollar Bose speakers. The house throbbed with bass guitar and snare drum backbeat; the picture windows shivered every few seconds. Somebody in a cowboy hat was trying to climb on top of the grand piano urged on by a stunning blond-wearing a tight black dress. A few women had stripped off their blouses, proud of what they had, and moved through the crowd pursued by young men with bulging crotches. Older men in suits, confident of the power in their bulging wallets, were content to wait. Dylan’s voice became a shriek when the stereo’s needle dug a trench across it; he was replaced by the Cars.