Against the Day (203 page)

Merle now had cranked a small
gasoline motorgenerator into action, brought two carbons together at right
angles, and eased them apart again with a blinding arc sizzling between them.
He made some lens adjustments. On the wall appeared an enlarged photo of
downtown L.A., monochromatic and still. Merle rocked the carbons, turned some
knobs, took from a wall safe a brilliant red crystal, brought it over to a
platinoid housing and carefully slid it into place. “Lorandite—brought
out of Macedonia before the Balkan Wars, pure thallium arsenosulfide, purer
quality than you can find anymore.” Highvacuum tubes glowed eerily purple.
Humming came from two or three sources, not what you’d call in harmony. “. . .
Now watch.” So smoothly Chick missed the moment, the photo came to life. A
horse lifted a hoof. A streetcar emerged from inertia. The clothing of city
strollers began to flutter in the breeze.

“Ain’t it just the damndest thing you
ever saw?” cried “Dick” Counterfly, whose growing familiarity with this rig had
only increased his astonishment. One by one over the next halfhour Merle
projected other ~tranparencies onto the walls, which pretty soon were covered
with scenes from American lives, unquestionably in motion. The combined effect
was of a busy population the size of a small city. Inside each frame they were
dancing, saloonfighting, drinking, playing pool, working day jobs, loitering,
fucking, strolling, eating in lunchwagons, getting on and off streetcars,
dealing pinochle hands, some in black and white, some in color.

In the years since they’d come up
with the process, Merle confided, he had begun to understand that he was on a
mission to set free the images not just in the photographs he was taking, but
in all that came his way, like the prince

who with his kiss releases that Sleeping Beauty into
wakefulness. One by one,

across the land, responsive to his desire, photos trembled,
stirred, began to move, at first slowly then accelerating, pedestrians walked
away out of the frame, carriages drove along, the horses pulling them shit in
the street, bystanders who had their backs turned revealed their faces, streets
darkened and gas lamps came on, nights lengthened, stars wheeled, passed, were
dissolved in dawn, family gatherings at festive tables were scattered into
drunkenness and debris, dignitaries posing for portraits blinked, belched, blew
their noses, got up and left the photographer’s studio, eventually along with
all the other subjects liberated from these photos resumed their lives, though
clearly they had moved beyond the range of the lens, as if all the information needed
to depict an indefinite future had been there in the initial “snap,” at some
molecular or atomic fineness of scale whose limit, if any, hadn’t yet been
reached— “Though you’d think because of the grainsize situation,” Roswell
pointed out, “that sooner or later we’d’ve run out of resolution.”

“It might be something wrapped in the
nature of Time itself,” Chick speculated.

   
“Way
beyond me,” smiled Roswell, “nothin but old gaffers around here.”

“There’s a fellow on board my ship,
Miles Blundell, who often sees into these matters deeper than most. I’d like to
tell him about your invention, if you don’t mind.”

   
“Long
as he ain’t connected with the picture business,” said Roswell.

“You’ll be sure and look up Detective
Basnight now,” said “Dick” as they were leaving. “Sometimes all he needs is to
make a phone call.”

“Shootin somebody’d be better,”
suggested Roswell with a chirp in his voice.

Walking out through the fog to the
Packard, Chick said to his father, “Good thing I never had a snap of
you—those fellows could’ve shown me everything you’ve been up to all
these years.”

“Same to you I’m sure, sprout.” As
they were about to climb in the auto, “Dick,” as if it had just occurred to
him, said, “Maybe you’d like to drive some?”

   
“It’s
embarrassing, but I don’t know how.”

“Gonna be in L.A. for long, guess
you’d better learn.” He started the engine. “Teach you if you like. Wouldn’t
take too long.”

Back at the airfield, they found
Inconvenience
in a glare of unaccustomed electrical light frequencies just blossoming into
the fragrant desert night. Smells of cooking came from the galley. “Dick”
rested his forehead on the steering wheel for a moment. “Guess I should be
gettin back to old Treacle.”

“Would
you like to come on board and have supper, Dad? It’s red beans, shrimps and
rice tonight, bayou style. You could meet Viridian—that’s if she’s
talking to me again—and later we could take the ship up, go for a little
spin over the Basin . . .”

Surprisingly
after their years apart his father’s face was not as unreadable as Chick might
have expected. “Well. Thought you’re never gonna ask.”

ew’s offices in L.A. were in one of those swank new buildings
going up along Broadway, with elevators and electricity throughout, looking
into a vast interior court below a domed skylight which admitted blues and
golds somehow more intense than the desertbleached ones you usually saw around
town. The outer suite was verdant with dwarf palms and Dieffenbachia, and there
were three layers of security to be got past, each featuring a deceptively
sylphlike receptionist. These girls also worked at the movie studios up in
Hollywood as “stunt” performers whenever a scene, in the wisdom of those
insuring the picture, might endanger a star actress obliged, say, to dangle
from a skyscraper ledge or drive a roadster back and forth across a railroad
track in front of a speeding locomotive. Thetis, Shalimar, and Mezzanine, whose
stylish flapperstenographer turnouts concealed bodies designed for the pleasure
of intimates as well as the discomfort of strangers, were all crackerjack
drivers, licensed gun owners, and surefooted as burros at the Grand Canyon,
knowing how to descend a stairway highheeled into a hotel ballroom without
tripping, though sometimes for fun the madcap Mezzanine liked to do just that,
staging shrieking thirtyfoot descents just to draw the crowd reaction.

Right down the street was the Pacific
Electric Building and its new Coles P.E. Buffet, where Lew liked to grab
breakfast, when breakfast happened to be in the cards. When it wasn’t, it was
usually after a prolonged and hectic night, Lew having taken up what he
recognized as serious drinking at an advanced age, around the onset of
Prohibition.

Lew had stayed in London as long as
he could, but by the time the War was over, Britain, Europe—it seemed all
a dream. He could smell those steaks

clear across the Atlantic and down that Erie Line, and was
dismayed at how long it had taken him to remember that Chicago was home. All
that running around. He returned to find that White City Investigations had
been bought out by some trust back east and now mostly provided “industrial
security,” a term for breaking the heads of those either on strike or maybe
just thinking about going out, with the ops now all wearing twotone brown uniforms
and packing Colt Automatics. Nate Privett was retired and living in
Lincolnwood. Anybody who wanted to see him had to call up his personal
secretary and schedule an appointment.

Not that Lew was doing that bad.
There was a lot of money from someplace overseas, some said from gambling
interests, others insisted it was gunrunning, or some extortion
racket—the story always came down to how the storyteller felt about Lew.

But all it took was a couple of years
in L.A. to turn him into one more old goat of the region with a deep sun tan,
who’d seen things, taken part in activities, in the toilets of the wealthy, on
the back slopes of the dunes of the beach towns, in the shack cities, in
highdesert washes, up Hollywood alleyways full of leafy exotics, that made
Chicago seem innocent as a playground. He still had faith in his own rough
clairvoyance, his aim and speed with a pistol. He drove down to a range near
the beach and practiced a lot. Occasionally, ladies here and there around the
L.A. Basin, former movie actresses, realestate agents, badgirls encountered out
on various cases, might, out of policy, not mind spending a half hour with him
in bed or more commonly upright in some dimlylit swimming pool, but no, what
his alienist Dr. Ghloix called, longterm relationships.

He knew that other lawfolk of his
day, those who worked both sides till they’d forgot which they were on, who’d
came to rank, some of them, among the baddest of the bad, now, their gray
mustaches long shaved away, at peace on this western shore, were getting rich
off of realestate deals only slightly more legit than the train robberies they
used to depend on for revenue
. . .
desperados
more modest but once lethal as they come were settled in in little chaletstyle
houses down in the flats around Pico with their cheery, piebaking brides,
hiring on up the hill as script consultants for the shadowfactories
relentlessly turning those wild ancient days into harmless packages of
flickering entertainment. Lew had never thought he’d see the day, but out here
he found himself saying that every day.

   
“
It seems to be
some sort of Negro,” announced Thetis. “Again.”

   
“That
disapproval, Miss Pomidor?”

   
She
shrugged. “I don’t mind when it’s bootleggers. They know how to act like
gentlemen. But these jazz musicians.”

“If it isn’t in that Erno Rapée
movietheme book, she doesn’t want to know,” Shalimar commented. “Mezzanine,
now, she’s always out on dates with these fellows.”

“Once you’ve done black,” Mezzanine
crooned to a sort of blues melody, “never go back.”

   
“Mezzanine
Perkins!” the girls practicing shocked gasps.

Chester LeStreet had on a luminous
gray worsted suit, shirt and display handkerchief in the same vivid shade of
fuchsia, icecreamcolored Homburg hat, handpainted necktie. Lew, who had had
holes in his socks since the weekend, looked around for his sandals and slipped
them on.

Chester beamed at him over dark
sunglasses with tortoiseshell frames. “Here’s what it is. I play drums in the
house band down at the Vertex Club on South Central, maybe you know it?”

“Sure, Tony Tsangarakis’s
joint—the Syncopated Strangler case, couplethree years ago. How’s the
Greek?”

“Still ain’t back to normal. So much
as tap on a temple block, his teeth starts to chattering along.”

   
“I
heard they finally closed the case.”

“Tight as the gates of San Quentin,
but now here’s the thing. Miss Jardine Maraca, who was the canary with the band
back then?”

“Roommate of one of the victims, as I
recall, left town allegedly in fear of her life.”

Chester nodded. “Never heard from
since—up till last night anyway. She calls the club longdistance from
some motor court up in Santa Barbara with a crazy story about how that other
girl, Encarnación, is still alive, she seen her, knows enough not to go
yoohooing in public, but now somebody’s after her. Tony remembers you from the
goround before, and wonders if you’d like to look into this.”

   
“Any
personal interest here, Mr. LeStreet, if you don’t mind my asking?”

   
“Just
running an errand for the boss.”

   
“You
have a picture of Miss Maraca?”

“Tony gave me this.” The jazzman
reached into a briefcase and handed Lew what seemed to be a publicity shot,
with creases and thumbtack holes in it, one of those eightbyten glossies you
see in lobby displays outside small nightclubs, surrounded by gluedon glitter.
Technically she was smiling, but it had that Hollywood rigidity to it that Lew
had learned to recognize as fear of somebody else’s power.