“Where’s he headed now?”
“I’m betting Union Station. All roads lead to Rome. It’s what I’d do if I was still driving black cab.”
The bottom falls out of Niko’s stomach. “When was that?”
“Oh, a long time ago. In London.” She hits the gas and the engine misses once then surges and they pull around a Prius with a Harley-Davidson sticker on its rear windshield.
Niko relaxes a bit. Driving black cab in England and driving the Black Taxi are two very different occupations. “You were on the knowledge?”
The cabbie glances back at him. “Boy, not too many Americans know that phrase.”
Both cars thread through sparse traffic down Seventh past jewelry stores, past grand old movie palaces fallen to ruin or converted to swap meets. The State. The Palace. The Orpheum.
Ahead the Black Taxi fishhooks left onto Wall.
The cabbie shakes her head. “He should’ve gone down San Pedro. This puppy deadends at Third.” The Checker Cab chortles around the corner and avoids a shopping cart in the middle of the road.
Police station on their left, listless crowd near the L.A. Mission on their right. A man in a torn shirt steps off the curb in the midst of some tirade and brandishes a crutch at them as they speed past Korean toy marts.
They’re at Fourth and Wall when the Franklin’s brakelights flash where Wall deadends at Third. Niko thinks the Black Taxi will turn left onto the oneway street but instead it screams a one eighty, headlights sweeping cansprayed doorways and aimless homeless people and scores of soiled sleeping bags arrayed along the sidewalks like the detritus of some apocalypse. The black sedan now faces them with wheelwells smoking like a monster breathing in the cold.
The radio’s playing some forgotten song.
“Boy, on the knowledge.” The cabbie shakes her head as the Black Taxi rushes toward them in their lane. Ahead and to their left is Boyd Street but they’ll never make it in time. “For most of a year I slept with a map of London taped to my ceiling.” Niko stiffens in expectation of sudden impact and metal roar. “Hundred percent on my exam too.” The cabbie leans forward and presses a sequence of radio buttons. The froglike headlights grow before them. Niko stomps a nonexistent brake and draws a hissing breath as metal interpenetrates oncoming metal. Molecules that would collide instead find empty spaces in the hurtling metal, empty space of which most things consist. The utter wrongness of this instant realignment tastes of bitter iron.
The cars pass through each another.
The sharp planed face of the Black Taxi driver flashes through him and he feels a terrible wrenching at his core, voracious entropy and churning chaos, leaching cancerous famished death that thrills to strip him from the fabric of his being. For a single breathless thoughtless moment he knows what it is to be hulled from self and sealed inside that mason jar.
And past.
The cabbie pops a match against a nail and lights another cigarillo. She yanks the wheel and stomps the brake. Niko slides right on the broad bench seat as they power onto Boyd.
The cabbie grins at the rearview. “And you thought the greenlight trick was something.”
Nighttime Boyd Street is a corridor of zombies. Shambling figures leached of color who threaten empty air before them with their fists, stand and stare at nothing, inventory shopping carts and grocery bags. Souls consigned to sad perdition before their death has found them.
The cabbie weaves the big car through their wary ranks like a ship through risky shoals. They ease past vestibular Boyd, then pick up speed as they turn left onto Los Angeles Street. Still accelerating as she cuts right onto Fifth and picks up the Black Taxi speeding west ahead near Spring. Engine valves clatter like raked poker chips. On the radio Jimi Hendrix scratches out the “Steel Town Blues.”
Traffic lights turn green or stay green for them as they rush down Fifth through the old theater district, once more heading toward the cluster of skyscrapers and Bunker Hill.
Jimi Hendrix never recorded “Steel Town Blues.”
They hang a right on Hill and there the Franklin is, waiting at the traffic light at Second.
“Well well,” the cabbie says. “The fiendly stranger in the black sedan.”
“Why’s he stopped?”
The cabbie slows down, suddenly in no hurry to overtake the Franklin. “Listen,” she says. “There’s one place where he won’t have to force an entrance. The old Belmont Tunnel where Beverly, Glendale, and Second all come together. It’s a portal where the old Pacific Electric Railway used to go to ground. The old subway from the Twenties.”
“It connects to the Red Line?”
“It connects to the same thing the Red Line connects to.” The cabbie swerves around a wide-eyed mendicant standing in the middle of the road holding high a cloudy squirt bottle and a filthy rag with no more thought than if he were a roadcone. “Same thing all tunnels connect to if you know how to work em.”
The light at Second Street turns green but the Franklin still sits motionless.
“Why’s he letting us catch up to him?”
“He knows he can’t shake me so he’s about to push back.” The cabbie catches his eye in the rearview. “This might be rough.” They’re coming up on the Franklin now.
Niko throttles the strap. “I’m holding on.”
“You’ll need to hold on to more than that.”
Ahead of them the twelve-cylinder engine revs and the tires shriek and the Black Taxi hangs a left at Second and howls down the night before them. The Checker Cab follows, baying tires blending with the mournful wail of Jimi’s ghostnotes on the haunted radio as they pursue the Franklin down the throat of the Second Street tunnel. Glossy tiled walls pale orange and wetlooking in the sodium lights.
The tunnel dims, the throat constricts. Niko starts to ask the cabbie to turn on the headlights but stops when he realizes he can’t even see her in front of him. Her everpresent cigarillo glow has vanished. Peripheral dashboard light is gone as well. The pressure of the seat beneath him and the hardcase against his hand his only reassurance of the solid real. The only light the twin red taillights up ahead.
They brighten into burning suns and the assault begins.
CHRISTMAS MORNING AND Niko dumped his stupid Mr. Mechano to grab the just-unwrapped Sears & Roebuck guitar from Van’s hand and his mother told him You should be ashamed of yourself while little Van looked too bewildered to even cry.
Niko bathed in the light of his past thinks Oh you lousy motherfuckers.
Jemma’s face when she came home to their ratty little Hollywood apartment to find him drunk on the kitchen floor pathetically piecing together blue shards of the Cookie Monster jar that fell when Niko pulled it from the top shelf to use her emergency cash to buy himself another fifth.
Even knowing these little videos star someone Niko murdered long ago he feels the turning worm of shame for who he was.
Stephen’s sleepy smile in the motel room holding up the hypodermic and pushing out the air and Niko fixed already and sitting on the floor with his back against the wall halfnodding off saw how big the dose was and said Hey as Stephen slid the needle underneath his tongue and shot and sank back in the chair and stared at the ceiling and stopped breathing. And Niko took the dead man’s rig and smack and cash and left and never told a soul.
The unremitting truth. Well hell with you. I can weather this. I already did.
Niko smiling meanly in the quiet early morning as he slid Van’s cheap guitar behind the right rear tire of Dad’s new Ford because last night his father told him Nikkoleides your brother doesn’t mind you playing it sometimes but it still belongs to him now give it back.