When the knock came at the door he clomped his uninjured foot twice on the floor, and Johanna let herself in.
Shadroe inhaled. “Draw me a bath, sweetie,” he said levelly, “and put ice in it.” Again he drew air into his lungs. “Today I gotta start re-wiring the units, and then I think I’ll re-pipe the downstairs ones so the water’s going north instead of south.” His voice had gone reedy, and he paused to take in more air. “If I can find the ladder, I think I’ll rearrange all the TV antennas later in the week.”
Johanna brushed back her long black hair. “What for you wanna do that, lover?” The seams of her orange leotards had burst at the hips, and she scratched at a bulge of tattooed skin. “After the painting men the other month—your tenants are gonna go crazy.”
“Tell ’em…tell ’em November rent’s on me. They’ve put up with worse.” Gasp. “As to why—look at this.” He bent down with a grunt and picked up the front section of the paper. “Here,” he whispered, pointing out the article. “I need to change the hydraulic and electromagnetic…” Gasp. “…fingerprint of this place again.”
She read it slowly, moving her lips. “Oh, baby!” she finally said in dismay. She crossed to his chair and knelt and hugged him. He patted her hair three times and then let his hand drop. “Why can’t she forget about you?”
“I’m the only one,” he said patiently, “who knows who she is.”
“Couldn’t you…blackmail her? Say you’ve put the eddivence in a box in a bank, and if you die the noosepapers will get it?”
“—I suppose,” said Shadroe, staring at the dark TV screen. It was set on CBS, channel 2, with the brightness turned all the way down to blessedly featureless black. “But nobody thought it was…murder, even at the time.” He yawned so widely that pink tears ran down his gray cheeks. “What I should do,” he went on, “is go to her office when she’s there”—he paused to inhale again—“and then take a nap in the waiting room.”
“Oh, baby, no! All those innocent people!”
Too exhausted to speak anymore, Shadroe just waved his hand dismissingly.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry. “
“I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
IF you follow the Long Beach Freeway south from the 405, the old woman thought, you’re behind L.A.’s scenes. To your left is a scattered line of bowing tan grasshoppers that are oil-well pumping units, with the machined-straight Los Angeles River beyond, and to your right, train tracks parallel you across a narrow expanse of scrub-brush dirt. High-voltage cables are strung from the points of big steel asterisks atop the power poles, and the fenced-in yards beyond the tracks are crowded with unmoored boxcars. It’s all just supply, with no dressing-up. Even when the freeway breaks up and you’re on Harbor Scenic Drive, the lanes are scary with roaring trucks pulling big semitrailers, and the horizon to your right is clawed with the skeletal towers of the quayside cranes. The air smells of crude oil, though by now you can probably see the ocean.
Loretta deLarava sighed and wondered, not for the first time, what the stark logo on the cranes stood for—ITS was stenciled in giant black letters on each of them, easily readable across the water from where she stood high up on the Promenade Deck of the Queen Mary.
Its? she thought. What’s? Will it be coming back for its branded children one of these days? She imagined some foghorn call throbbing in from the sea, and the cranes all ponderously lifting their cagelike arms in obedient worship.
She gripped the rail of the open deck and looked straight down. A hundred feet below her, the narrow channel between the Queen Mary and the concrete dock was bridged by mooring lines and electric cables and orange hoses wide enough for a kid to crawl through. Down there to her left the dock crowded right up against the black cliff of the hull, and the morning shift was unloading boxes from trucks. Faintly, over the shouts of the seagulls, she could hear the men’s impatient voices, not far enough away below.
The mechanics of supply and waste disposal, she thought. Always there, if you look.
She turned away from the southward view and looked along the worn teak deck, and she took another bite of the half pound of walnut fudge she’d just bought. In a few hours the deck would be crowded with tourists, all wearing shorts even in October, with their noisy kids, stumbling around dripping ice cream on the deck and gaping at the glassed-in displays of the first-class staterooms and wondering what the bidets were for. They wouldn’t recognize elegance, she thought, if it walked up and bit them in the ass.
During World War II the Queen Mary had been a troopship, and the first-class swimming pool had been drained and stacked with bunks, all the way up to the arched ceiling. Before that, in the thirties, the ceiling had been lined with mother-of-pearl, so that guests seemed to be swimming under a magically glittering sky; but the top shelf of soldiers had picked it all away, and now the ceiling was just white tile.
She tried to imagine the ship crowded with men in army uniforms, and trestle tables and folding chairs jamming the pillared first-class dining room under the tall mural of the Atlantic, on which two little crystal ships day by day were supposed to trace the paths of the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth. The crystal ships had probably been stopped in those days, with around-the-clock shifts of soldiers inattentively eating Spam below.
The unconsidered life, she thought as she took another bite of the fudge, is not worth living. And in spite of herself she wondered if the soldiers would have considered her.
The tourists didn’t. The tourists didn’t know that she lived aboard, on B Deck, in one of the nicest staterooms; they just thought she was another of themselves, fatter than most. And sometimes older.
Such tourists as might be around on this upcoming Saturday would at least see her in a position of some importance, when she would be directing the filming of her Ship of Ghosts feature aboard the ship.
Her scalp itched, and she scratched carefully over her ear.
It was time to be starting for the studio. She wrapped up the end of the fudge-brick in the waxed paper it had been served on, tucked it into her big canvas purse, and started walking toward the elevators. She had of course been careful to leave the door of her stateroom not-quite-closed, so that a push would open it, and today there was a big, diamond-studded 18-carat gold bangle on the bedside table, right where the light from the porthole would show it off. Attractive to a thief, and too heavy for a ghost. And the doors of the Lexus in the parking lot were unlocked, with the key in the ignition. Maybe today she would wind up having to rent a car to drive to work in—there was an Avis counter in the lobby area of the ship.