“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing. I’ve been in there a couple times. They’ve left it open at night once or twice when they’re painting. But they never show it.”
“Why not?”
“I asked one of the older tenants, Mrs. Knight down in four. She’s been here for twenty-five years. Right after she moved in someone killed herself in there. A wanna-be actress. Hung herself in the closet.”
“Hanged,” said Nate.
“Don’t be one of those people.”
“So a woman kills herself and they never rent it again? That’s a bit odd.”
“Yeah,” said Veek. She looked at him. It was a look he remembered from college, when he had a few less pounds around the waist. He was being
considered
. She spent another moment examining his face and made a decision.
“You want to see something mind-blowing?”
He gave her a faint smile. “I don’t know, I’ve seen some pretty wild tattoos, but go ahead.”
Her smile faded. “I’m serious. I can show you something else about this place but you might lose a lot of sleep over it.”
They looked at each other for a moment.
“Okay,” he said. “Show me.”
Veek led him to the back stairwell. They walked down the concrete steps and out the fire door to the small lot behind the building. She gave a sweeping wave with her arm. “What do you see?”
He glanced around. “What am I looking at?”
“It’s better if you figure it out on your own.”
Nate studied the back lot. There was a chain-link fence between them and the building the next street over. Two small trees grew in either corner of the lot, their trunks forced up through cracks in the concrete. A few faint outlines stood out on the ground, the shapes of things that had been spray-painted red, black, or blue.
He looked at the back of the building. There weren’t any concrete decorations or decorative pillars on this side. A cinderblock propped the door open. Another fire escape clung to the brick wall, and the ladder hung a few feet above the door. He followed it up to the windows of his kitchen and Mandy’s studio. “I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to see.”
Veek shrugged off her Oxford shirt and tied it around her waist, leaving her in the black tee. “Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s go out front.”
They walked back through the building, past the ever-empty room 5 and the never-functional elevator. She led him out the front stoop and down to the first landing. “Now what do you see?”
“I’m still not sure of the point of this.”
“Just look,” she told him. “Once you see it you’re going to kick yourself for not noticing before.”
He shrugged and looked at the building again. It was the same mismatched brick as the back. On this side it was broken by the two slabs of concrete and the pillars flanking the front door. “This fire escape zigzags the other way,” he said. “Is that it?”
“No. Keep looking.”
The stone lintel had KAVACH engraved in bold letters, but Nate couldn’t see anything else on it. He squinted up at the concrete over Oskar’s windows and beneath Xela’s. It didn’t look like there’d ever been words or numbers on them, just the image of a shield. He stepped off the landing and peered over at the cornerstone with its pair of monograms. They still didn’t mean anything to him.
He counted the windows, then used his hands to make sure they lined up. He looked up at the edge of the roof for any gargoyles or angels or anything else he may have missed. After another few minutes, he shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Across the street,” she said, opening the gate.
“What for?”
“I told you, it’s better if you figure it out on your own.”
“Right,” he muttered. “No one can be told what the Matrix is.”
She smirked. “Something like that.”
They walked across Kenmore and she guided him up the steps of another building. It was one of the brighter ones on the street, with a lot more Spanish influence. It might’ve been a small mansion at one point before being broken up into apartments. He glanced up at the building. “Are we going to get in trouble for being here?”
“For what? Standing on the stairs? If anyone asks, we’re looking at our place.” Veek gestured at the far side of the street. “Now?”
He looked at the apartment building, then at the ones on either side. The one to the north, the one his window looked down on, was more of a Victorian style, painted bright blue and white. The one to the south, higher up the hill, was another Spanish-style place. Past that was a wider brick building that looked like it might be distantly related to theirs.
“Still not seeing anything,” he said.
“What’s on the roof of this building?”
“This one?” Nate turned and craned his neck back. There was a small balcony with a flowerbox blocking his view. He took a step back, but the edge of the roof was still lost in the cluster of wires leading into the building. He could see the orange-red tiles of the roof, but nothing else. “I don’t see anything,” he told her. “Can you give me a hint what I’m...”
Nate stopped and gazed over his shoulder at their apartment building. He looked over at the quasi-Victorian and the fan of power cables and phone lines running into it. He glanced up the street at the larger brick building and the web stretching between it and the phone poles.
He crossed the street. Veek stayed a few steps behind him. He got to the gate and looked up at the Kavach Building. The bricks and concrete stared back.
“There aren’t any power cables,” he said. “There’s nothing.”
Veek pointed at the single line running from the phone pole to the corner of their roof. “Pac Bell and Comcast,” she said. “The one in the middle is the phone line, the one spiraling around it is the cable.”
Nate was still staring up in the air. “But where’s everything else?”
“There
is
nothing else,” said Veek. “There’s no electrical lines running into the building at all. There’s also no meters out back or in the basement. No one here notices because we’re not paying for it. No one else notices because it’s not their job.” She nodded at the building. “We’re not hooked into the L.A. power grid.”
“So where’s the electricity come from?”
Veek shrugged and shook her head. “I have no idea.”
It took Nate half an hour to get his head back in order. He sat on the end of Veek’s bed and stared up at the ceiling fan and the three bulbs mounted to it. She cracked open a can of Diet Pepsi from the fridge, swallowed a few mouthfuls, and then topped it off with generic rum. She handed him the can and he took a long drink from it.
“I get it,” she said. “When I first noticed it last year I was in denial for a week.”
“Have you told anyone else about it?”
“Like who?”
He took another sip of the spiked soda and shrugged. “Scientists. The news. I don’t know, somebody.”
“I’d get evicted.”
“How do you know?”
Veek popped another can of Diet Pepsi and took a sip. “I tried asking Oskar about it when I first saw it, during my denial week. He got annoyed and told me I was being foolish. So I tried to come up with a rational explanation and couldn’t. When I went back to him he gave me this whole spiel about what a great deal the apartments here are, how much the owners like it being a quiet place, can’t I just be happy with it, all that sort of stuff. Then he told me if I tried to make a fuss out of this and become a disruptive influence, he’d have to ask me to move out. With deductions to my deposit, of course.”
“So you didn’t do anything?”
“Hey,” she said, “maybe you make a million dollars a year doing data entry, but believe it or not, I only make minimum wage. And despite what some people like to think, minimum wage means poverty level. This place is a godsend. I’m not taking any stupid risks.”
“Sorry.”
“Whatever.”
“I don’t actually make a million dollars a year doing data entry.”
“I figured.”
“It’s only about seven hundred thousand after taxes.”
“Fuck you,” she said, but her lips curled up a little bit on the ends. She dropped into the office chair by her desk. “I’ve tried looking up the builders, too,” she said. “You’ve seen the cornerstone, right?”
He nodded.
Her fingers guided the mouse through a few quick shifts and clicks. A picture of the marble block appeared on one of her monitors. “WNA and PTK,” she said. “I’ve been going under the assumption PTK is P.T. Kavach.”
“Who’s that?”
“No idea. The name doesn’t show up anywhere. Kavach is a Marathi name, and you’d think a Hindu in 1890s Los Angeles would stand out, but I can’t find anything. There was a Prateek Kamerkar who moved here with his family in 1898, but that’s it. I’ve tried looking with a dozen different search engines using a bunch of different variables. Architect, building, construction, Kenmore, Los Angeles.” She shrugged.
“What about WNA?”
“Also no clue. There’s millions of hits. Could be anyone.” She shrugged. “Heck, I’m even assuming they’re both male names because it’s turn of the century. Not a lot of women in construction back then, but it’s not impossible, I guess.”
Nate looked at the picture of the cornerstone topped with bricks. He sipped his Diet Pepsi and felt the rum slow his pulse a little more. “Do you know about the machine room up on the roof?”
“What about it?”
“I thought it looked too big when I first saw it. My next door neighbor, Tim, he agrees. He says it’s probably not a machine room.”
“What is it then?”
Nate shrugged. “Beats me.” He looked at her. “Two years here and you never noticed the big-ass brick room on the roof?”
“I don’t go up there much,” Veek said. “I’ll add it to my list, though.”
“You have a list?”
“Of course I have a list.” She had a sip of her own drink. Her face softened a bit. “Can I see your kitchen light?”
A few minutes later they were up in his kitchen. She closed the blinds, grabbed his Sprint bill, and passed the envelope back and forth under the bulb. The paper had an eerie glow in the dim kitchen.
She reached over to flip the light off. “That’s pretty cool.”
“Cool’s one word for it.”
“And you’re sure it’s not just a regular black light?”
“Positive.”
Veek looked at him again. “You know,” she said, “we could do a lot more with two of us. It’d be less risky.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think? Want to snoop around the building sometime?”
Nate blinked. “Snoop?”
“You know, investigate,” Veek said. “But not be obvious about it.”
“No, I know what snoop means. I just didn’t think anyone actually used that word out loud.” He smiled. “Is this like
Scooby Doo
now? Do we need to wait for Fred and Daphne or should we just start tiptoeing around?”
“Look, I just thought—”
“I’ve got an orange sweatshirt here somewhere. You’d make a passable Velma.”
“Shut up.”
“Don’t be mad. Everyone thought Velma was kind of hot when they got older.”
“If you don’t want to, you don’t have to be a jackass about—”
“I’m in,” he said. “Sorry. Whatever you’re up for, I’ve got your back.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“Oskar will throw a fit if he finds us,” she said. “Possible eviction.”
“If
he finds us. Both of us together means one person keeping watch.”
“You think it’s worth it?”
He looked up at the light bulb. He thought about the lack of power lines and the padlocks on apartment 14 and the ornate double doors in the basement and having no idea what he was going to do with his life.
“Yeah,” said Nate. “Totally worth it.”
Monday meant back to work, and Nate had a hard time concentrating. Sunday evening he’d been ready to start searching the building, but Veek commuted to Santa Monica so she had to be up early. Explorations had to wait.
He got home before Veek and spent two hours waiting for her. He walked down to her door four times to see if she’d made it home. On the fourth trip, he realized he was acting like a stalker. He turned on the television in the lounge. The only thing worth watching was
Jeopardy
, which he’d never been good at, but stumbling over the answers and questions made him feel a bit less stalker-ish.
Veek thumped up the stairs just as Alex Trebek gave the Final Jeopardy answer. She had a messenger bag slung over her shoulder. She raised an eyebrow when she saw him in the lounge. “Hey,” she said. “Are you stalking me?”
“No, of course not.”