Against the Day (205 page)

differences for them, no thunder, no cyclones, no hail or
snow, the house roofs of Southern California all pitched at shallow angles
because there was nothing to shed
. . . .

Lew found Merle discussing
potatosalad recipes with a bunch of Iowans. “Gettin up early is built into it,
you need to have ’em cooked and marinating in oil, vinegar, and mustard for at
least three or four hours before you even start thinkin about mayonnaise and
spices and all that,” whereas other philosophies held addins like bacon and
celery to be of the essence, or sour cream preferable to mayonnaise, and by now
it had turned into quite the lively discussion, with everybody who came
wandering into earshot eager to put in a few words of comment, otherwise
easygoing wives and mothers, thresherdinner veterans from way back, getting
into screaming matches with roadsidediner cooks who handled easily five hundred
pounds of potato salad a day for truck drivers who’d forgot more about
jobrelated eating than seasonal farm laborers ever knew to begin with
. . .
and everybody with an opinion also
seemed to have brought along their own tub of potato salad, and each
punctuating his or her argument with a huge forkful of a particular recipe, all
but forced into the face of some potatosalad heretic—“Here, just try
this, tell me these li’l redskinned potatoes don’t make all the difference.”
“Hardboiled eggs are all right ’s long as you don’t use the whites, just the
yolk part, mash it up in with your mayonnaise, not only makes it taste better,
it looks better, and if you can find those green peppercorns . . .”

For such a
calmlooking fellow
,
Merle sure took some nervous precautions. After a quickly whispered set of
instructions, Lew went back to where he’d parked, drove to a lot near the
office, switched cars, went back around the other side of the Grove to pick up
Roswell, eventually parked near a P.E. stop, where they boarded the electric
and rode the rest of the way to the beach.

Merle and Roswell tried running the
situation through for Lew, but it might as well have been Chinese for all he
could understand of it. He looked at the rig in question doubtfully.

Then something occurred to him. “Say
I had a, just some ordinary photo of somebody, and wanted to know where they
were right now and what they were doing . . .”

“Sure,” Merle said, “we just dial in
the year, date, and time of day we’re interested in, it all speeds up, runs
through the time between the picture was taken and now in a matter of seconds.”

“Then
maybe you could help me,” Lew said, bringing out the glossy of Jardine Maraca,
“you think it’d work on this?”

“Let me just take it in the darkroom
a second,” Roswell said, “run us a transparent copy, and we’ll see what we can
see.”

What they saw was Jardine, snappily
turned out in something shiny and tight, climbing into a Model Τ and
driving east along a recognizable Sunset Boulevard, beneath massive fluted
columns with elephants rampant on top and various other gigantic and indeed
hallucinatory sets from the movie
Intolerance,
continued almost all the
way downtown, took a left up Figueroa, crossed the river, passed Mount
Washington and went on through Highland Park to Eagle Rock, made a couplethree
turns Lew was able to keep track of, and stopped at last in front of an iron
gate in a wall of arroyo stone, with a sign above it reading Carefree Court.
Inside among palms and eucalyptus trees were a dozen bungalows in Mission
Revival style grouped around a swimming pool with a fountain in it throwing
pulses of water into a blurred gray sky
. . .
.

Jardine sat for a while, as if having
a long talk with herself, perhaps about some choice she had to make, which was
turning out to be harder than she’d thought.

“
And
not only
can we unfold the future history of these subjects,” Roswell
was saying, “we can also reverse the process, to look into their pasts.”

“One photograph of a suspicious
corpse,” it occurred to Lew, “and you could watch who did the deed, catch them
in the act?”

“You begin to see why certain
interests might feel threatened. All those old longstanding mysteries of the
past like, say, the
Times
bombing, all you’d need to do’d be get a shot
of First and Broadway where the old building was, ran it back to late September
1910 just before the bombing . . .”

   
“It’ll
go back that far?”

   
Roswell
and Merle looked at each other.

   
“You’ve
done it?”

   
“It
was night,” Merle a little embarrassed. “They could’ve been anybody.”

“. . . only maybe tricky part,” said
Roswell, “being to find the constant term in the primitive, which
differentiation has taken to zero. Usually to look back in the past it’s got to
be a negative value. But unless we get it right on the nose, there’s always the
chance that those little folks in the pictures will choose different paths than
the originals.”

   
At
which point Lew finally remembered bilocation—how in England long

ago he had even found himself now and then going off on these
forks in the road. Detours from what he still thought of as his official,
supposedtobe life. Since coming back to the States, however, as if they had
been no more than vivid dreams, these sidetrips had tapered off and presently
stopped altogether, and with nobody to talk to about it, Lew had no choice but
to take care of daytoday business and not spend too much time brooding. But
here seemed to be those old bilocational powers emerging now once again, only
different. “You mean,” trying to control a tremor in his voice, gesturing more
broadly than he meant to at the breathing image of Jardine, still waiting, “you
could watch somebody go on to live a completely different life?”

“Sure,
if you wanted to.” Roswell giving him a puzzled look that fell just short of
annoyed. “But why?”

“Now
you’ve seen the unit in action,” said Merle, “let us just give you the rundown
on why we asked you in. Some funny things’ve been happening around here lately.
Gorillas out in the alley just standing, smoking, watching. Telephones ring in
the middle of the night but nobody’s ever on the line. Cars cruise past, closed
sedans, smokedglass windows, very slow, and some of the licenseplate numbers
show up more than once. And then just out in the course of the day’s work,
somebody’ll pass along a word or two of caution, or concern, never too loud,
never allowin their lips to move.”

“What
it comes down to,” said Roswell Bounce, “is we don’t want to meet the same
melancholy fate as Louis Le Prince, who back in the late ’80s had his own
system all up and running, basically the same as what the picture business has
today, film on reels, sprocket holes, intermittent motion, so forth—one
day he climbs on the ParisDijon Express and is never heard from again. His wife
tries to find out what happened, everybody clams up, seven years later he’s
legally dead, one or two pieces of his machinery find their way into museums,
some of the patents are already on file, but everything else has mysteriously
vanished along with ol’ Louie.”

   
“And
you think somebody actually—”

“Oh,
sorry—do you think it’s just my P.Q. acting up again? for Pete’s sake Mr.
Basnight, you’ve had a long career in gumshoeing, seen your share of the bent
and evil, and you must’ve run into some of these studio big shots by now, what
do
you
think?”

“That
first they’d try to steal it—bearing in mind that ‘theft’ as defined in
this town often includes the payment of cash, and can even be quite a tidy
sum.”

“But
just makin
it
all disappear,” said Roswell, “might not be enough for
them.”

“What
makes you think they’ve found out anything? Are there records on file? Did you
see a lawyer about patent applications?”

“Ha! you ever run into one lawyer
you’d trust with a nickel fallen from a blind man’s tambourine, why, grab us a
flyin pig while you’re at it, we’ll take ’em both out on tour and make our
fortune.”

   
“Seems
a little risky, ’s all.”

   
“Any
ideas on how to proceed?”

“I can post some strongarm talent
outside, but even nonUnion like everything else in town, after a while that
runs into considerable mazuma—so we should be thinking about longerterm
solutions.”

“But hell, it’s an unlimited
scoundrel supply up in ’em studios, every errand boy’s a producer waitin to
happen, we’ll never kill ’em all—”

   
“I
was thinking more of finding you some legal protection.”

   
“We
need a miracle we’ll wire the Pope,” said Roswell.

It was late
afternoon
by the time
Lew motored over to the address Emilio had given him. He parked a few doors
down from a chaletstyle bungalow with a pepper tree in the yard, went up and
knocked politely at the front door. And was shocked, or as much as he could be
anymore, by the malevolent glamour of the face that so abruptly appeared. Shady
side of forty, presentable, but also what he had long come, regretfully, to
recognize as haunted. Maybe he ought to’ve turned and ankled it, but instead he
took his hat off all the way and inquired, “This the house that’s for rent?”

   
“Not
so far. Should it be, do you think?”

   
Lew
pretended to look in his daybook. “You’d be . . .”

“Mrs. Deuce Kindred.” The door screen
cast over her face a strange rectilinear mist, which somehow extended to her
voice and which for no reason he could figure, thinking about it later, he took
as a sexual signal, proceeding to get an erection out on the front porch here
and everything— “Did I come to the wrong place?” He watched her eyes
flicker down and up.

   
“Easy
to find out.”

   
“The
husband home?”

“Come on in.” She took a step back
and turned, with the beginning of a smile she almost contemptuously would not
allow him to see any further stages of, and led him through the olive light of
the little front room toward the kitchen. Oh this was going to be sordid as all
hell, he knew the feeling by now. At first he had thought it must be him, and
some toughguy sex appeal, but after a while he understood that out on this
coast it was nothing personal, it only happened a lot. She wore her stockings
rolled just above the

knees, flapper style. She paused short of the sociable yellow
sunlight ahead of them, pouring into the kitchen just out of reach, and stood
in this dimness still with her backside to him, her head tilted, her nape bare
beneath the beautyparlor bob. Lew came ahead, grasped her skirt hem and pulled
it all the way up.

   
“Well.
Where’d them stepins get to?”

   
“Where
do you think?”

   
“Maybe
you want to be down on your hands and knees.”

   
“Just
try it, you fucking animal.”

   
“Oh
it’s like that, huh?”

   
“You
don’t mind.”

He
didn’t. This one was sure not about to cooperate, struggling all the way and
fairly convincing too, hollering “shameful” this, “brutal” that, “disgusting”
eight or ten times, and when they were finished, or Lew was, she wiggled and
said, “You ain’t fallin asleep back there, I hope.” Got up, went on into the
kitchen and made coffee. They sat in a little dinette nook, and Lew got around
finally to Jardine Maraca and the peculiar reappearance of her roommate
Encarnación
. . . .

“You’ve
probably heard about these wild parties,” Lake said, “that the movie people
have out at the beach or up at their mansions in the hills, it’s in the scandal
sheets all the time.”

   
“Oh,
sure, them Hollywood sex orgies.”

“I
believe it’s a soft
g,
but that’s the idea. Deuce brought me once or
twice, though as he thoughtfully explained, the whole point is not having your
wife along. It seems Encarnación was a regular at these affairs until that
Syncopated Strangler started tearin up the pea patch, then she disappeared.”

   
“Now
I just heard she’s surfaced again.”

   
“I
thought she was . . .”

“One
of the victims, yeahp so’d everybody. You think your husband might’ve heard
anything?”

   
“That’s
him pullin in the drive right now, you can ask him.”

Deuce stomped in, a cigarette stuck
to his lower lip, holding himself in that certain way the little bantamweight
fellows have. Lew could see some kind of a shoulder holster with most likely a
companyissued Bulldog in it. “Well! what’ve you two been up to?” beaming more
than glaring in Lew’s direction. Lew had become a connoisseur of jealous
husbands, and this was as close to plain indifferent as he’d seen lately.