The thing I most wanted to do was find Thistle, but Los Angeles is a big city with a lot of places to hide. I could spend a month on it and get nowhere. On the other hand, there were two people I needed to see face to face pretty soon, and I knew exactly where both of them were. But which one first? Left shoe, right shoe?
Right shoe. Make the more difficult of the calls now, while there was still time to beat the deadlines for tomorrow’s entertainment trade papers.
Every burglar in Los Angeles knows where Jake Whelan lives. The house is famous, an eighteenth-century French chateau that had been dismantled, shipped to Los Angeles, and reassembled stone by stone in the middle of fifteen hilly acres in Laurel Canyon, where it hosted some of the most memorably debauched parties in Hollywood’s memorably debauched history. This had been back in Whelan’s sunny years, when he had the golden touch, when every film he made took in a zillion dollars and won every award in sight, when the studios bred starlets under the warm film lights like baby chicks, and Whelan had his pick. Before the studio system fell to pieces, making guys like Whelan secondary to stars in terms of clout, and driving the price of filmmaking into the stratosphere. Before starlets began to form their own production companies. Before white powder arrived on the scene and Jake Whelan fell to pieces, losing his touch, his sense of story, and his credibility.
But Whelan had hung onto the ancillary rights to his films; and television, video, the global explosion of DVDs, and now high-definition streaming, had kept the money flowing, faster than even Whelan could spend it. Which was saying quite a lot, given his undiminished appetite for white powder and colored pictures, many of which had been bought from people who didn’t, strictly speaking, own them.
Rabbits Stennet’s Klee, for example.
Whelan’s pictures-a small museum’s worth-were one reason every burglar in Los Angeles knew where he lived. The other was the white powder. Unlike an underground Klee, which can be paid for via wire transfer, white powder is exclusively a cash commodity. Everyone had heard the stories: two inches of hundred-dollar bills beneath half an acre of wall-to-wall carpet, whole sliding walls with bricks of money where the insulation should be, a wine cellar full of currency. Cold cash, so to speak.
Every burglar in Los Angeles also knew that Jake Whelan supported a tidy posse of muscle on twenty-four hour duty, to discourage anyone from getting touchy-feely about his financial reserves. So the house was much talked about but rarely attempted, the subject of many extravagantly complicated schemes that had been hatched over bottles of whiskey or wine late at night and abandoned in the cold, sober light of day.
And here I was, ringing the buzzer outside the black wrought-iron gates and looking up at the television camera trained directly on me.
The man’s voice was gruff and unpolished, as Jake Whelan no doubt intended. “Yeah? Who is it?”
I said, “Tell Mr. Whelan it’s Paul Klee.”
“Hang on.”
I sat there, wondering whether to wave at the camera, for a minute, and then two. Time goes very slowly when nothing is happening, and half an hour or so later, it had been five minutes, and I was wondering whether to turn around and go home or back up, gun the engine, and knock down the gates.
The voice came back. “Drive in slow. Stop about twenty feet from the house, near the bushes. Get out of the car and wait.”
“Slowly,” I said. “Drive is a verb, and it should be modified by an adverb. Drive in slowly.”
“Awww,” the voice said, “Fuck you.”
“Nothing wrong with that sentence,” I said as the gates opened.
The driveway was slate, black and shining in the rain, and it curved its way uphill between ferns big enough to shelter a whole platoon of soldiers wearing camouflage. Every ten or twenty feet I saw another camera, trained right at me. More attention than a burglar generally wants.
The first bits of the house I saw were the turrets, two of them, pointing their dark stone tips at the sullen sky. Then the drive took a final sweeping turn to the right, widening as it did so, and the whole structure came into view. It was enough to make me hit the brakes and just sit there like some yahoo from Yazoo City, staring at it.
The chateau sprawled over half an acre, all rough-carved stone in shades of dark brown and deep gray, muted even further now that they were wet. The lights were on inside, since the day was so gloomy, and the light through the mullioned windows-dozens of them, it seemed-threw the falling rain into relief exactly as it would have done two hundred years ago, when the lights inside would have been torches and oil lamps. Just a combination that’s looked good since people moved out of caves: light, water, and stone.
The front door was arched, made of massive beams of wood with wide bands of rusted iron across them, and it opened as I pulled the car over to the bushes, as directed. Three guys came out, two of them bulked up and hard-looking, wearing T-shirts and jeans, the third slender and nicely turned out in a dark suit. He was carrying an umbrella. They fanned out as they came, one of the muscle boys going left and the other right, and the dapper gent with the umbrella making a beeline for me.
When I opened the back door of the car, everyone froze. The umbrella-toter just stood there patiently, but the hard guys watched my hands as I leaned in and picked up the Klee, which I’d covered with an old Dodgers jacket I keep in the trunk. Everybody watched as I took it out, held it up, and turned it from side to side so they could see I wasn’t hiding a cannon behind it. Mr. Umbrella smiled and covered the rest of the ground to me, extended the umbrella to share it, and walked me back to the front door. One of the muscle boys preceded us, and the other followed.
“To your right,” Mr. Umbrella said, folding the umbrella as we passed through the door. “Please remove your shoes and put them in the rack.”
And there it was, a wooden rack from Japan, perfectly plain and ordinary except that it was beyond the attainable perfection of the mortal world and it looked four hundred years old. I put the Klee down gently, the jacket still covering it, and leaned it against the wall. Then I took off my shoes and put them on the rack, feeling like I was committing sacrilege. In the meantime, everyone else had kicked off loafers, and one of the bodybuilders went to the right, down a couple of stone steps.
“This way,” Mr. Umbrella said, and we followed the body builder into a room that Henry the Fifth would have felt at home in.
The first myth to bite the dust was the cash tucked beneath the wall-to-walls. The floor was dark stone, buffed to a dull shine by several centuries’ worth of feet, and only the central quarter-mile or so was covered by carpet, an enormous all-silk Afghan that was probably older than the house. A couple of couches, two deep-looking chairs, and some dark wood tables had been arranged in front of a fireplace big enough to host the Chicago fire, with room left over for a couple of neighborhood barbecues. In defiance of the warm weather, a fire was roaring in it, nothing much, just a couple of trees’ worth of wood.
“Sit anywhere but the yellow chair,” Mr. Umbrella said, glancing at one that was covered in butter-colored leather. “That’s Mr. Whelan’s chair. Would you like some coffee? Something stronger? Something much stronger?”
“No, thanks.” I sat at the end of one of the couches. “I’m fine.”
“Mr. Whelan will be with you in a few minutes.” Mr. Umbrella turned and went back the way we’d come, climbing the two steps to the entrance hall and going on straight across. The muscle guy who’d preceded us into the room leaned up against a wall and gave me the alpha-male stare.
“I’ve always wondered,” I said, “how you get those muscles on the tops of your shoulders and the sides of the neck. You know, the ones that make your head look so small.”