Los Angeles (19 page)

“I have a Porsche,” he admitted.

I laughed, not at the fact that he had a Porsche, but at the fact that he didn’t want to tell me, at the fact that he was
embarrassed. It was like Darth Vader was blushing.

I pressed him. “What color, Frank? What color is it?”

“Red,” he confessed.

“How long have you worked for my dad?”

“Since before you were born. You know that.”

“How many years?”

I could see by the way he looked up at the ceiling that Frank was counting the decades. “More than thirty-five, Angel, almost
… Jesus, more than forty.”

“You have other clients?”

“Not like your father.”

“Not like my father,” I repeated.

He laughed like Ed McMahon. “No.”

“You don’t see the absurdity of this?”

He blinked.

“You’re a lawyer,” I said, “a fucking attorney. You should be at the courthouse. You should be suing somebody or defending
a criminal. You should be doing something important, something legal, or even illegal, but instead, you’re being sent to pick
up your client’s son, like you’re some kind of houseboy. Don’t you see how pathetic —”

“Your father,” Frank said evenly, “is my most important client.”

“Would he do it for you? Would he go pick up your son for you?”

Frank shrugged. “I don’t have any kids.”

I sighed. This was getting nowhere, and the feeling was becoming familiar. “That’s not the fucking point.”

“Then what is the point, Angel? Why don’t you tell me?”

It’s a long way from West Hollywood to Malibu, and the traffic, especially at that time of day, and especially since Frank’s
driver took all the most obvious streets, moved tediously, like a swarm of ants stuck in a puddle of evaporating Pepsi. I
was exhausted, depleted, having driven all over the city myself last night. The day had become harshly bright, and even through
the tinted windows, the light felt like acid against my skin. I wore the same clothes I had been wearing since I had come
home from Victor’s, black cargos, a long-sleeved black shirt — it seemed so long ago now — and I was grimy, polluted, covered
in sweat and salt. Even in the air-conditioned splendor of Frank’s limo, I felt suffocated. Those hot winds were blowing again,
and a fine, particulate dust was making its way into every pore of my being. I watched the corrosive light trace the asphalt
horizon. The sun glowered through the smog, creating a gloomy haze over the flattened pavement.

I was staring out the window, having given up, when Frank slapped my knee. “And here we are,” he said.

The limo pulled into the long drive that led to my father’s all-glass, ocean-view house. I could already see a servant moving
toward us, ready to open the door and escort us inside.

I got out and followed him across the granite-tiled causeway toward a house made entirely of glass and steel, where every
interior millimeter was exposed to blinding natural light.

Frank walked behind me, and we both stepped through the front hallway, passing the cavernous living room of museum-quality
midcentury modern furniture, where an artificial stream ran beneath a plate-glass floor. We walked directly back to the rear
patio, which faced the Pacific and featured a black, perfectly rectilinear infinity swimming pool that soared out over the
waves like a gleaming piece of polished onyx.

My father was seated on a lounge chair with his brown, bumpy chest on full display, an amber glass of iced tea clenched in
his manicured fist. He opened his arms, gesturing like a beneficent king at my arrival. Melanie and Gabriel, meanwhile, sat
nearby in a plastic, blow-up baby pool, the ever-present nanny abiding quietly at their side. Gabriel, no longer a baby, sloshed
morosely in the shallow water.

I looked at my dad, then back at Frank.

Melanie got up and came toward me. Whenever she saw me, she was compelled to give me a motherly hug. She put her wet arms
around my shoulders, and I felt her soft lips graze my cheek. “It’s so nice to see you, Angel.” Her display of affection was
simultaneously condescending and imploring, I thought. She wasn’t sure if I was above her or below her in the family hierarchy,
and I wondered what perverted logic she used, a relatively attractive young woman, to have sex with this repulsive old man.

Or maybe they didn’t have sex, I thought. Maybe that’s why they’d had to adopt.

Halfheartedly, I hugged her back, then took a seat under the shade of an umbrella, and waited sullenly for Dad to speak.

A million years ago, Milos Veronchek came to this country with his parents from Brno, an obscure city that is currently part
of the Czech Republic. He tells stories about sleeping on the floor in the single room he’d shared with his parents when they
first arrived in Brooklyn. His mother died of a mysterious illness shortly thereafter, probably an untreated respiratory infection,
and my grandfather had simply disappeared, making Dad one of those street urchins you see in photographs of the early twentieth
century. Picture a soot-smeared face with hard, coal-black eyes, an ugly boy wearing a floppy black hat and newspapers wrapped
around his feet. That’s my father.

Anyway, the story has a happy ending. He ended up in a progressive program designed to rescue kids from the streets and was
sent upstate to an orphanage near Rochester. He was never adopted — he was never cute enough for that, believe me — but by
the time he was fourteen, Dad was working full-time for Kodak. I’ve never been very clear on the events of this early, pre-Hollywood
part of his life, except that he worked his way through every department in the company, learning all there was to know about
cameras, lighting, and film, and that at some point he started directing technical demonstrations. On one such project in
the fifties, they actually flew him out to Los Angeles to sell Hollywood on a new color process.

He never returned, of course, finding the Los Angeles sun too seductive to leave. He quit Kodak and took a job in the lighting
department at Universal. By the sixties he was a young producer and technical advisor who had worked on nearly a dozen movies.
By the seventies he had become one of Hollywood’s biggest directors, at the helm of western epics, disaster films, and car-chase
features. The last movie he directed was a caper story about a retired jewel thief who has to pull off one last heist so he
can save his brother’s failing grocery store. It wasn’t a bad script, I guess, but it never found itself. Was it a comedy,
a drama, an action picture? No one knew, and it was universally regarded as one of the biggest turds of the decade, virtually
ending the careers of its entire cast, including a former Academy Award nominee.

Dad turned to producing after that, putting together a string of minor commercial failures until the advent of the star vehicle,
a concept he practically invented, and that made him one of the biggest movie producers in history.

He had always been successful, my father, but this made him into a monster. I have no idea how much money he has now — hundreds
of millions, maybe more. His movies have become larger and larger, and his Eastern European face has developed a permanent
smirk, a countenance that is at once arrogant and disbelieving, amazed at his own magnificent good fortune and basking in
it. He’s like Gatsby, only without the aspect of tragedy. Everything he touches turns to gold, platinum, diamonds — and, in
my opinion, shit.

“Do you want to know my secret?” he once asked me.

I shrugged. I didn’t want to know his secret. I have never been interested in the business side of moviemaking.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t tell the writers how to write. I don’t tell the actors how to act. I don’t tell anyone how
to do anything. I just put them all in a room and say, ‘Make a movie!’”

My dad is completely bald now except for a shimmering ring of gray stubble around his head and these bushy-white Leonid Brezhnev
eyebrows that curl up like flames. “I’m just happy to be here,” he says all the time, “happy to be a part of it.” His skin,
like all Hollywood megaplayers’, is ludicrously tan, even shiny. He is only around five foot five, much shorter than me. I
inherited his mind, my mother always insisted, if not his physical features. I share his technical proclivities, his interest
in science and math. Sometimes he drinks, and when he is drunk, he tells me that he loves me, that he loved my mother, despite
leaving her, despite the fact that he treated her like an unwanted possession, and he says that I never have to worry like
he did, that a true father would never abandon his son, that he will leave me his fortune, and that I’ll be rich forever.

In the matter of our skin, of course, we are opposites. He is always outside, my dad, always standing in the bright Los Angeles
sun, his dark brown eyes open wide to absorb the sky’s golden intensity.

I could feel those eyes staring at me for a full minute before he finally shouted, “Angel, that is your brother over there!”

I looked up and saw Melanie smiling expectantly, pitiable.

Then I looked at the kid, Gabriel, a dark cherub in bright pink swimming trunks, a glum expression on his round, permanently
sullen face. I didn’t know what to say; I guess I was supposed to hug him.

“So you can’t even greet him?” My father, not a bad actor himself, appeared genuinely hurt. “You can’t even say hello?”

“Dad, come on.”

“Angel.”

I turned to face the kid, offering a quick, “Hello, Gabe,”

The boy slapped the water and turned his sulking face to the sun. He wasn’t even aware of my presence. The truth is, he had
no idea what the hell was going on.

Dad modulated his tone to a sing-song, having won. “So, Angel, how have you been?”

I thought for a moment. “I’m not sure.”

“Do you need anything?”

This made me crazy. “I thought you were going to tell me about Angela.”

He laughed and coughed at the same time. The sound of the cough was strange; it was dry at the surface, but there was something
gelatinous and tremulous at its source.

“Are you sick?” I asked.

“I’m old. This is what happens when you’re old.”

“You’re only as old as you feel,” Frank said obsequiously.

“I feel old,” my father said.

Suddenly, Melanie squealed. “Are those dolphins?” She picked up Gabriel and held the little kid over the railing that faced
the water. I could see his vacuous eyes scanning the air in front of him. He was panicked, completely confused. Did he even
know what he was looking for? Or did he believe his mother was dangling him over a cliff for no reason?

These people are deluding themselves, I thought. This kid is retarded.

“Dad” — I looked around — “are you going to tell me what happened to her or not?”

He threw a glance to Melanie, and she hurriedly clutched Gabriel to her chest and disappeared into the house. He was always
doing this, sending people away with a look, like a pasha who could make things happen with an arrogant clap of his hands.

Now my father brought one of those old brown hands to his chin and pretended to think for a moment. “Angel,” he said thoughtfully,
“you’re in trouble.”

“I’m fine.” I shook my head. “I’m absolutely —”

“That girl.”

I felt my own hands, white and fragile, grow cold. “Obviously,” I said, “you’ve been following me. I’m under some kind of
fucking surveillance. So the least you could do right now is tell me what you know.”

“Angel, please,” my father said, “we’re just making sure you’re all right, and usually you never leave that rattrap of an
apartment, which I still don’t understand, but when you started going out to that topless place…” His voice had become lilting
over the last phrase, a sliver of his Czech boyhood shining through.

I stared at the black pool, incredulous, and then out at the reflective ocean beyond it.

There was silence, furrowed brows, concerned faces. Frank and my father, the two of them always together, they were like a
tag team of parental dysfunction.

“This girl,” Frank said, “this is the one who works at the Velvet Mask, am I right?”

I looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“She’s the one you’re after, right?”

“As opposed to who?”

Frank closed his eyes, exasperated. “She dances under the name Cassandra?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I told you that already, Frank. But that’s… that’s not really her name. What do you know about her?”

Slowly, my father said, “We know… we know enough.”

“Something happened to her,” I said. “Something happened, didn’t it?”

“Let her go.” Frank’s voice was soft.

“Angel.” My father leaned forward in his chaise longue, clearly straining. “Listen to me.
Listen.
”

I remained silent, waiting to hear what he would say.

“We know you’ve been… looking for her, so we did some investigating ourselves. We have resources…”

“This Cassandra, she is not a good person,” Frank interrupted. “She has a criminal history. She has been brought up several
times for possession. She has been arrested for solicitation…”

“She’s a dancer,” I said defensively.

“Ten years ago this woman was arrested in Orange County for her involvement in an extortion racket,” Frank said. “There have
been numerous drug charges, domestic violence, assault… She’s got a file as long as my arm.”

“She’s a lowlife, Angel,” my father said. “What do you want with a woman like that? There is nothing wrong with you that you
can’t find a decent girlfriend. Melanie can set you up. She knows a thousand nice girls. And if you want a woman for a night,
call Frank.”

I sighed, putting my face in my hands. “Can’t you just tell me where is she?”

My father and Frank glanced at one another. They knew. Everyone knew where Angela was but me.

This came from my father: “She has a boyfriend. She went away with him somewhere. We don’t know where.”

“A boyfriend?”

“A musician,” Frank said. “She left the country. They left the country together.”

“She left the country?”

“Far away.” My father nodded.