Half World: A Novel (21 page)

9

Summer 1972

Dickie drove up to a head shop in North Hollywood that he’d passed on his citywide tour, a place that caught his eye because of the hand-painted sandwich board out on the sidewalk:
Smoking Accessories, Magazines, Comix
. The air inside was damp, smelled like dust and decomposing newsprint. A heavy, bearded guy sat on a creaky stool behind the counter, visible only from the neck up behind a jumble of water pipes. The guy looked at Dickie and made him for a narc, started to struggle up from his stool. Dickie raised a hand in a sort of half-wave, don’t-sweat-it gesture, walked deeper into the shop, scanning the shelves. Bongs, Zippos, beaded bracelets, death’s-head belt buckles, bundles of incense.

The promised
comix
half filled a metal spinner rack in the back corner: black-and-white underground stuff, talking animals smoking joints and taking hits of acid, big-nosed cavemen chasing big-assed cavewomen. Not really Dickie’s cup of tea. But there was a box on the floor filled with issues of
Justice League of America
and
Showcase
and
The Brave and the Bold
and, at the end of the box, a handful of
Detective Comics
. He opened the
Detective
issues, flipped to the final pages. More than half of them had Martian Manhunter backups.

Dickie called up to the front of the store. “How much for the comics in the box?”

“Two bucks.”

“Two bucks apiece?”

“Two bucks for the box.”

“You got a lid for it?”

“No lid.”

Dickie carried the box up to the counter. “Are there any more of these?”

The heavy guy coughed, turned his head a second too late. He thumbed through the comics. “A dude comes by every couple of weeks with the Robert Crumb stuff,
Zap
and whatnot. He’s got a big stash of old DCs he’s itching to get rid of. Come back in a few days.”

“My name’s Dick.”

“Pat.”

“Sell a lot of comics, Pat?”

“The Crumb stuff. Old Marvels if I can get them.”

“Sell anything else?”

“You a cop?”

“Do I look like a cop?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Then what do you care what I sell?”

Dickie put his money on the counter. “I just want to know you’ll still be in business when I come back for those comics.”

*   *   *

Nice morning for a break-in. Dickie heads down Sunset, passing Buñuel on his steps, continuing farther east, parking the Cutlass a few streets away from the house on the hill. What he might find up there is anybody’s guess. Something to tie Buñuel to the Orange County robberies, maybe. Probably too much to hope for a ski mask, a couple of handwritten notes:
Stick ’em up!

Broad daylight, but this seems like the kind of neighborhood where a semi-overt B&E might not be a completely unusual sight. The fence down at street level is a high wrought-iron number, nothing he can cut or squeeze through, and the lock looks ridiculously complex, so it seems
Fosburying it is the only real option. He takes a quick look around, jumps, and grabs the top crossbar. Dickie thinking that he hasn’t done a pull-up since basic training, many pounds ago. It isn’t going to happen easily. He finally gets himself up to his elbows, pulls his fat ass over to the other side. Not a pretty sight, he’s sure, or a particularly fleeting one. Taking so much time getting his weight to shift from one direction to the other that it’s a wonder the cops aren’t there already.

There we go, finally. Dickie flopping like a walrus over to the yellow grass on the other side. He gets back to his feet as quickly as possible, brushing off his jeans, nonchalant, everything’s cool, just hanging out here on the other side of the fence, folks, nothing to see.

He climbs the stairs, almost turning his ankle a couple of times on the uneven flagstone. The house is, quite literally, perched at the top of the hill. Dickie isn’t sure if it has moved toward the edge over time, or if it was built in that position for some reason, but either way it appears to be
leaning
toward street level, or, more precisely, leaning toward the steep drop that will eventually end at street level.

Another look around from the top. Some view from up here. He can see all the way back through the burnt haze over to Hollywood, the tops of the buildings there, billboard backs and radio antenna, the observatory dome and the infamous sign.

It only takes a few minutes to rake the locks on the front door, nothing too complex, just a lot of them. Dickie had learned his lockpicking skills from a kid underground who got the group into recruiting centers and research labs after-hours. Dale was his name, a good kid, and Dickie had turned out to be a good student. Dale giving Dickie his own little snake rake as a sort of graduation present, the rare gift Dickie had actually managed to hold on to, pressed into a credit-card slot in his wallet, which might, now that he thinks about it, account for some of that poor circulation in his right leg.

The last lock turns and he steps inside. No booby traps, no alarm, no dogs. There’s a single large room with boxes everywhere, stacked in some places higher than the windows, none of which have any kind of covering or treatment, no curtains or blinds, so Dickie feels completely
exposed, standing there on great display. He’d be visible to anyone watching from the houses in the surrounding hills, certainly anyone coming up the steps. Buñuel home for an unexpected lunch break, say, would see Dickie long before Dickie saw him. Best to look around and get out as quickly as possible.

The boxes are stuffed full with copies of Buñuel’s tracts. Seems like Dickie already has the whole set, but he checks to be sure before moving to the back of the house. There are ants on the kitchenette counter, multiple trails, heading down into the sink, where they’ve found half a cruller, shining with glaze. Nothing but condiments in the fridge, ketchup and mustard and pickle relish. An open can of tomato soup toward the back, age indeterminate, fuzzy-rimmed, covered with a loose square of plastic wrap.

Dickie looks out the windows down the hill every few minutes, sure each time that he’ll see Buñuel ascending the stairs, shaking his fists, his signs, shouting through the microphone.

He parts a beaded curtain and steps into the small bathroom. He flips the light switch, jolting the fluorescent tube over the mirror to life. More ants, marching in a long line from the drain in the sink down and across the floor and then up and over the side of the tub, disappearing behind the drawn shower curtain. There’s a small linen closet with no actual linen, just more piles of tracts. No hidden cash, nothing about banks or getaway routes.

Back out through the tiny dark space between the bathroom and kitchenette, Dickie ramming his knee on a low, flimsy dresser pressed against the wall. He checks the windows again for any sign of approach. Stands in the main room with the towers of boxes, hands on his hips, scanning for something he might have missed the first time through. There’s nothing he hasn’t checked, except, well, the tub back in the bathroom, Dickie having sort of convinced himself that there’s probably nothing to see in there, the curtain drawn for propriety’s sake, knowing full well, though, that he’s really more than a little chickenshit to pull back that covering, find a body, or bodies, or body parts, or whatever dark things a head case like Buñuel collects and stores in his tub behind a floral-print curtain. Those ants are heading in there for a reason.

He forces himself back into the bathroom, turns on the fluorescent again, waits for the room to fill with sickly light. Grabs one end of the curtain, takes a deep breath. Pulls, ready to scream or run or just generally freak out, throwing his arm wide, the curtain rings scraping along the rusty rod, the fabric folding back to reveal, once Dickie has opened his eyes, a bathtub full of paperback books. Hundreds of them, must be. Thin, cheaply printed novels from the looks of the volumes on top, sci-fi stories with Day-Glo covers. A few feature trippy paintings of screaming men and women with radio waves or gamma rays extending from or into their skulls. A number of others have characters cowering from advancing hordes of dark, indeterminate figures, or, on one of the covers, an army of what looks like TV G-Men, clean-cut white guys in suits and sunglasses.

Dickie digs deeper, still half sure he’ll find a body, but except for another ant-mobbed cruller there’s nothing but books, multiple copies of six or seven novels, some with different covers, slightly varying page counts. Twenty or thirty copies of
The Night Visitor
and
Watching, Waiting, Watching,
and
Good Morning, Dr. Lucifer.
All by the same author, someone named Robert Zelinsky, though there are no photos, no author bio on the backs of any of the books.

There’s a loud thump from the other room, so Dickie kills the light and crouches down on the floor with the ants, breathing hard, waiting for Buñuel to fling open the front door and howl at the intrusion. Or maybe it’ll be a gang of bank robbers, busting in and kicking through the place, spraying bullets indiscriminately.

After a few minutes of nothing, Dickie crawls out to the doorway, peers around the main room, peeks up over the lowest windowsill. He stands, finally, to see a rubber-banded bundle of mail out on the front step, a postman way down on the sidewalk already half a block away. Some arm on that guy. Dickie pokes through the mail, nothing but utility bills and advertising circulars. Buñuel probably has anything of any importance delivered to his PO box.

Back in the bathroom, Dickie takes a copy of each Zelinsky book, hoping they won’t be noticed missing from the giant heap, though he
knows it’s possible that Buñuel counts them every night or something similarly insane. He pulls the curtain closed, double-checks that he hasn’t left anything else disturbed. Takes one last look out the windows to make sure the coast is clear, and then steps out into the heated morning, relocking the front door, heading back down the steps, girding himself for another attempt at getting up and over that fence.

*   *   *

The afternoon goes soft, rolling over into evening. Dickie sits out on the fire escape of his hotel room with the radio and a stack of Buñuel’s sci-fi books. He takes his Antabuse, wishing he had a beer, or a Jack and Coke, but you can’t have everything, and the books aren’t half bad. This type of stuff is not usually his thing, but Zelinsky writes hard and fast and lurid, has a way with a car chase and a shoot-out.

The novels were all published over the last ten years by various outfits, small firms, seemingly, publishers in the South and Midwest. The six were a series, starting with
The Night Visitor,
whose nameless main character starts the book as a mild-mannered accountant, a real man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit type with a wife and a couple of kids and a house in the San Fernando Valley. Most of the early part of the book is taken up by an incredibly detailed and fairly tedious meditation on his day-to-day routine, which is then, on about page 100, violently interrupted by a revelation where he recalls, with terrifying clarity, being admitted to a psychiatric hospital some years back for a nervous breakdown, where he’s then secretly imprisoned and tortured at the hands of a shadowy government agency. After his revelation, he starts to suspect that he’s been programmed to forget all of that, as some of the memories that return to him are memories of losing his memories, with that empty space then filled with new, artificial memories, including the relationship with the woman he’s always thought of as his wife, and these two strange children he’s always thought of as his kids, and his bullshit job, and et cetera. It’s a fairly convoluted sequence that Dickie has to read a few times in an attempt to get straight, or at least as straight as possible.

So obviously this guy’s only recourse, once he’s seen the curtain, is to
find the man behind it, the head government agent responsible for all of this, so he drops out of the straight life he’s been living, leaves his wife and kids, his house in the suburbs, and becomes the Night Visitor, breaking into top-secret government offices and installations, appearing at the middle-of-the-night bedsides of ex-Nazi scientists and the bureaucrats who helped them secretly repatriate so they could teach the local spooks their infernal methods. These guys then conducted their dirty work in prisons and psych wards or sometimes just grabbed unsuspecting folks off the street for mind-control experiments, trying to create brainwashed assassins for the inevitable Third World War. The Night Visitor, who now calls himself Mr. _____ (Dickie unsure, exactly, of how to pronounce this tenantless underscore, either when he’s reading in his head or aloud, sort of half whispering out on the fire escape . . . Mr.
Blank
?) slowly working his way up the food chain and shadow-government pay scale, piecing together the story of what had been done to him, torturing or killing those he finds and deems responsible, but always searching for the mastermind, the guy he believes ran the whole ugly plot.

Dickie takes a break every few chapters to stretch his legs, adjust the radio volume. He swallows a couple of pills to keep him up. Mary Margaret loved this kind of stuff. Dickie can’t remember these exact books, but she always had some pulpy sci-fi paperback close by. She was a pragmatist, a realist, at least most of the time, but these kinds of books were her escape, entering a world where a good conspiracy theory could explain war or deprivation or even personal tragedy. She took some comfort in reading about a place where someone was always responsible, could be taken to account.

The margins of Buñuel’s paperbacks are filled with notes, mostly illegible, his penmanship nearly microscopic. What Dickie can read seems to be Buñuel agreeing with passages in the books, corroborating them with personal recollections, while trying to remember, like Mr. _____, who had done this to him. Some chapters have lines or entire paragraphs blacked out, forcing Dickie to hold the pages up to the bulb in his room to try to make out what has been obscured, what was too awful to leave naked on the page.