Bonita Avenue (11 page)

Instead of chewing me out, which maybe I deserved, he fed me that story about his father. “If you must bring up Belfast,” he said, “my old man …”

I remember thinking: if there’s one thing I do not need to hear, Rusty Wells, it is some sob story about your father. In San Fernando Valley people don’t have parents. Forget them, I wanted to say, that’s what I did—but I restrained myself.

“My pa,” he mumbled, and I still thought it was all an act,
“worked on the payroll for twenty years, he was a traveling linoleum salesman. Iceland. New Zealand. Indonesia. Linoleum roller-skating rinks—it’s what he said to anybody who would listen. When he was home, that is.”

I have to say that I wouldn’t have missed this story for the world. Until that moment Rusty was like an ancient Egyptian on a roll of papyrus: a total badass, the whole package, but two-dimensional. He stepped off the page by telling me that his father had one great “passion,” and that was
magic
. Magic—the word said it all. For half of Rusty’s youth, his father sits up in his attic fiddling with marked cards and pulling rabbits out of a hat, spends the spare hours of his business trips scouring hole-in-the-wall magic stores on the outskirts of town. At age fifty-two, a coronary bypass already behind him, he makes a decision. The man who, according to Rusty, has spent his entire life vexed, no,
infuriated
that he has a boss, turns his back on linoleum. He borrows 400,000 pounds from the Bank of Ireland and falls for a small theatre just outside downtown Belfast. A small but pricey theatre.

“So you’ve got showbiz in your blood,” I said. “What was it called?”

“Wellington’s Magic Venue.”

I attempted a smile, tapped my racket against his pointy knee, but he did not react.

“The place was a dump. And
expensive
. I had just started working in the City, my job was to evaluate investment plans, and so I flew my dad over to London to go through the whole enterprise with him. Buy or rent, he asked—buy, I advised. What could possibly go wrong?”

“Don’t tell me,” I sighed. A chill started coming up through the floor. But Rusty, never at a loss for words (particularly during
meetings), kept on going. He told me his father spent two solid months polishing his act, had double-sided color pamphlets printed that he and his wife distributed all over Belfast. The act opened four months after he’d turned in his notice. I didn’t dare ask how it ended. “Three years later, my mother sat on a hard plastic garden chair in that stripped-down barn, still shuddering from the public auction. They even ripped out the velvet theatre chairs. My folks tried everything, but they couldn’t get it off the ground. Not far enough, anyway. Magic is a tricky business.”

“Whew,” I said. “And your father?”

“Dead. Heart attack. Mortgage stress. Millstone cancer of the heart. You get my drift?”

I didn’t get his drift, none of it. I had never heard such rubbish, the Barracks had little to do with Rusty’s late father’s Magic Venue, absolutely zilch, to be precise. It started to dawn on me that my business partner had more of a sensitive side to him than I suspected. Under Rusty’s tough, jovial, rebellious exterior he was all white meat, squishy and irrational. What he did not know, not in detail at least, was that I had been working on Sotomayor for some weeks already—according to the
L.A. Business Journal
, the most powerful real estate baron in the South. He owned the L.A. Barracks and was itching to get rid of it, this was common knowledge. Everyone knew that for four years Sotomayor had been trying to peddle the former National Guard Barracks to a whole parade of real estate developers, up to and including a pair of Hungarians. Everyone also knew that it was first supposed to become luxury apartments, then a social housing project, after that a rehab clinic, then a parking garage—but neighborhood committees managed to scuttle one plan after another. The highest bid he’d been offered was fourteen—everybody knew that too. We’ll top that, I promised
him, and quietly arranged a preliminary and non-binding tour of the premises, just me and one of Víctor Sotomayor’s little helpers in that enormous brick fortress; it was terrific.

“I understand, Rusty,” I said. “But you could at least go have a look.”

I finally got around to taking him over to the Barracks the week after that squash game; until then all he’d seen were site plans and photos. Accompanied by yet another of Sotomayor’s girl Fridays, we drove for nearly an hour straight through Los Angeles, heading for what not only looked like a medieval fort, but also
was
a medieval fort. The Barracks, built in 1916, mimicked, in a grim, evil way, a Moorish fortress. For some sixty years the National Guard insignia fluttered above the thirty-four-meter-high corner towers; Sotomayor flew the Stars and Stripes as well as a single Cuban flag. Behind the battlements, cadets were trained and the lead-reinforced vaults had stored ammunition and matériel. The façade had a rough, unpettable brick skin: for every five normally laid bricks was one that stuck out from the wall, sometimes at an angle, sometimes half broken off. The drill court, covered by a large arched roof, used to be the place, in the ’30s and ’40s, where boxers faced off: “Joe Louis and Max Schmeling,” I told Rusty, who promptly broke into shadow boxing. The Army pulled out in ’78, leaving behind 160 empty rooms—cinder block dormitories, walnut-paneled dining rooms, oak ballrooms, massive staircases, an industrial kitchen, swimming pool, indoor shooting range, bathrooms, engine rooms, basements, dungeons. All for Rusty.

It paid off. I noticed his transformation as we rambled through the labyrinth, an hour-long hike through the Barracks’ filthy corridors, offices where half-disintegrated files lay stacked on sagging shelves, officers’ quarters with forgotten regimental tunics draped over dusty chairs; his footsteps began to echo, his expression turned
greedy, he became more and more chatty with Sotomayor’s bimbo. When we got back to the covered drill court, the size of four ice hockey rinks, she said: “This is where George Lucas shot the outer-space scenes in
Star Wars
”—and at that moment, on the ceiling of Rusty’s head, a fluorescent lamp sprang on.

But after that Thursday afternoon in Compton, Sotomayor suddenly started playing hard to get. Phone calls and e-mails went unanswered. Only after sending three faxes to his head office in Dallas did I get a roundabout reply from some secretary or other, what it boiled down to was that the Barracks was suddenly no longer for sale. Fuck you, Víctor. I assume he had got wind of our plans, he’ll have envisioned flack from the neighborhood, negative press, God knows what. So in my next fax I suggested executing the sale quietly. After that, the Compton shopkeepers and hoi polloi were
our
problem. “Everything’s for sale,” read the fax, “I don’t think I need to explain that to Víctor Sotomayor—and not everything has to get into the papers.” And even if it did get into the papers, there were advantages to that too. I reminded him that since Villaraigosa became mayor of L.A., it had escaped no one’s attention that he and Sotomayor were buddies. A few years earlier, the real estate baron grudgingly admitted to the
Los Angeles Times
that he—a fellow Latino—had contributed generously to Villaraigosa’s election campaign. Since then the allocation of public works contracts seemed to tip quite blatantly his way. “Víctor, my friend,” I wrote, “maybe this is your chance to do something the mayor is
not
keen on. Think about it. We’re offering you fifteen. I can be in Dallas next Monday at four o’clock.”

No reply. Of course not. Sotomayor didn’t care for my upfront tone. He was a more-luck-than-talent Cuban with a sweaty boxer’s nose, not accustomed to negotiating with women. His corpulent, pear-shaped body was clad in shoddy pastel-colored suits on which
he wiped his beringed fingers before giving me a tepid, flabby handshake.

“So I take it that’s a yes,” I said to Rusty. Last Monday I boarded a flight to Texas, and at five to four in the afternoon I stepped out of the fingerprint-smudged mirrored elevator on the eleventh floor of Stone Tower in downtown Dallas and knocked, without an appointment, on the matt-glass door to Sotomayor’s office.

I disappeared back up the stairs earlier than my celebrating colleagues, under the pretext of getting back to work, setting an example—but in actual fact, with an unexpected knot in my gut. That e-mail. With every step, the bustle downstairs ebbed and the mystery swelled. Was it wise to have deleted his e-mail unread? What was Aaron after? Back in my office—formerly a bridal suite—with the door closed, the only sound was the soft hum of the PC. What did he want? Reading it couldn’t hurt, I thought, whether or not to respond was the next choice, and that was more the point. I retrieved the message from the trash folder. The rush of success and the relaxing effect of three glasses of Armand de Brignac Ace of Spades apparently allowed me to overcome my reluctance. Without giving it any more thought, I opened Aaron’s e-mail.

Her wonderful grandpa? A haze hung over the Valley, a blend of mist and smog. Below, on the broad sidewalk along Coldwater Canyon Avenue, an Asian kid in a Dodgers jersey gingerly opened the wrought-iron gate that separated our front yard from the street
and climbed up the sandstone steps with a newspaper he’d taken out of a shoulder bag.

Her wonderful grandpa. I went out into the corridor. Danny and Deke were hanging in the Recruiting doorway, glass in hand. I greeted them, silently went down two flights of carpeted stairs and in the kitchenette I found a tray of used champagne glasses. I took the cleanest of them and filled it to the brim from one of the open bottles on top of the fridge. Sipping, I walked back upstairs and sat down at the computer. I opened Microsoft Office and sent an official reply to Sotomayor in which I indicated I wasn’t prepared to fly to Dallas a second time. He could just organize a lawyer in L.A.

I pulled the elastic band from my hair, shook it loose, and stared out over Coldwater. The paperboy opened a gate across the street. The cuffs of his formless jeans were squashed under the soles of his sneakers.

So Aaron was still off his rocker. I opened the letter again and as I reread his garbled missive an unpleasant mix of pity, relief, and disgust settled over me. For the time being I was relieved; it seemed to me to be a completely harmless e-mail from someone with no plan or ulterior motive. The guy had just sat down and let himself go, apparently in one confused spurt. I’d forgotten he had this e-mail address, I had opened the account during my McKinsey internship. The last time I saw Aaron was at the end of December 2000, when he went off the deep end. It seemed like half a lifetime ago, an oldtime newsreel, it genuinely hurt me to think that he still …