The evening the storm cleared I went out to the lagoon. In the twilight and the smoke from the sea the mansions sat in a green and silver cloud threaded by a tangle of empty trees. I found the boatman I’d talked to the week before. I’ll put you out there buddy, he said, but I won’t hang around to bring you back. We run into any feds I turn right around, I don’t need trouble with them. Feds go out there much? I said. Every once in a while, he said. It’s not the girls they care about, the girls have got their system. It’s the others, the ones they don’t know. Guys like you, said the boatman, guys with their own reasons. The feds hate people with their own reasons.
As we got closer to the mansions he told me of the pimps who used to live in town and bring the men out there. The pimps had operated under the assumption that they kept the girls out there in the lagoon like animals in a wildlife sanctuary. As usual, such a mistaken assumption, said the boatman, leads to other mistaken assumptions. The girls put up with it for a while. Then one day someone noticed there weren’t any more pimps around. They were found by the cops on the banks of the Rossmore Canal, one of the three main waterways of Hancock Park. An entire beach of pimps, every last one with his throat slit, lined up along the canal, said the boatman, gulls perched on their foreheads shitting. The girls dawdling under the trees twirling their hair and smoking cigarettes, watching bored as the pimps were hauled away by their feet. Not a witness in the bunch of course.
Now we roared up one of the smaller canals and the boat man cut his engine. The girls had already been at work. On the sand I could see the imprint of couples. The tide came in and went out and the imprints were filled with white foam, so the sand was spotted with the wet white pictures of lovers. The sun was down when he dropped me off; his farewell wasn’t exactly profuse. Ten feet from me there was nothing left but the noise of him. I was standing in front of a huge earthen house that was dark except for one gaslight coming from a front corridor. The house was arabic and like all Los Angeles houses it could have been buiIt anytime in the last five thousand years. As I walked up to the gaslight the sound of the boat disappeared completely and there was nothing but the faint din of the coast in the distance, the sound of the city buildings slivering through the stripped webbed trees. I got to the corridor which led to a door but off to my left were some steps upward and I took them. They led to a veranda. From there I could see the rest of the canal and some of the other houses; for a moment the water ignited from the sun as if someone had set a match to it and then went dark, a new fog drifting in and hanging on the fences like foliage. Creaking wooden bridges swung in the wind over the water between the houses. Three or four small boats were tied to shambling makeshift docks and someone was moving from dock to dock lighting the lanterns on the posts. After a while I could make out lights all over the lagoon, lanterns and gas lamps and a few fires.
I came down from the veranda and walked back out where the boat had left me off. The woman who’d been lighting the dock lanterns was coming my way in one of the boats, a torch burning in her hand. She sailed past me and then beached about fifteen yards away, where I could now see another dock in front of another house. We were separated by a small slough. She lit the lantern and got back in the boat, and I waited for her to see me. I called to her and she looked at me across the water. Who’s that? she said in a voice that didn’t carry very well. I’m from the city, I called. She said nothing but the boat came in my direction. The boat had no motor or oars; I couldn’t figure how she got it going where she wanted. About five feet from me I could make her out: she was blond with a small face and slight body, and she wore loose casual clothes, jeans and a blowzy top. She could have been any age between twelve and twenty-five. What are you doing here? she said when the tip of the boat touched the shore. I started to pull the boat up but she said, Leave it. She sat in the boat with the fire of the torch burning by her face, looking at me. There’s nothing over here, she said. “I’m looking for someone in particular,” I said. “About your height. Black hair, she might be Latin. She may not speak English.”
“Listen,” the girl said laughing, “I can manage the black hair and some words so nice you’d never know they meant nothing at all.” She said, “But I have the torch shift tonight and I don’t guess improvisation’s what you had in mind. Get in and we’ll see who we can find. Like I said, there’s nothing here anyway.” I got in the boat. I pushed off from shore and she watched me as we seemed to drift in exactly the direction she wanted to go. “You must be very undercover,” she said. “Whoever dropped you off out here didn’t want to be seen by nobody.”
“I’m not a cop,” I said.
She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to anyone here if you are. Actually I assumed the opposite.”
“What?”
“Forget it. Your business with cops is your business.” The mansions of the park were gliding past us now, becoming more and more colossal. I could see into the houses where the tide flooded the lobbies and lights shone on the water lapping against the inner marble stairs. The first steps were covered with sea debris and the original drapes on the upper landings were rotted by the saIt air, hanging in tatters and bleached in color. Every once in a while we could hear low laughter in the dark and sometimes arguing. In the distance on the southern shore of the main canal was a huge structure sitting alone on a knoll. “That’s the old hotel isn’t it?” I said.
“Yes.”
I watched for a while, then I said to her, “Do you know the person I’m talking about?”
“There’s a woman named Lucia, up near the next river.”
“You think it’s her?”
“It might be her.”
“Are we going that way?”
“Eventually. I have another live or six lights.”
I looked around me. “Can I ask you something?”
She became impatient. “Not why am I doing this for a living.”
“Two questions, actually.”
We pulled into another dock and she leaned across the boat, bringing the torch within inches of me. With one sweeping motion she lit the lantern. “Well?” she said.
“How do you direct the boat?”
“I know the water,” she said.
“Were you born in America?” I said.
“No.” She waited. “Were you?”
“I’m sure of it.” We sailed beneath a row of overhanging trees and then into the lobby of the mansion where the woman named Lucia lived. The mansion was buiIt in an antebellum style. Inside the lobby were several very small fires burning in different wall alcoves; the light from them was dim. We sailed through some doors in the back of the lobby, and at the end of this second room I could make out the stairs. We bobbed around a little from wall to wall. For the first time she had to physically push the boat where she wanted it to go. Back here, she explained, the water’s unknowable. She got us to the stairs and I got out; it was impossible to be sure but my guess was the water came about a quarter of the way up the steps. She also got out and we pulled the small boat up the stairs to the top. We were standing in the dark and the girl called Lucia’s name, and when she didn’t get an answer we started down the hall. After a minute we saw some faint light coming from a room; she called Lucia again. I was thinking of her peering out at me from the dark corner here; I was looking for the flash of the knife but there was no moon, and the fires were too dim to catch the glint of it. Walking down the dark hall it occurred to me I didn’t really want to find her here. If she lived here then I would know the man at her knees was just another pimp for whom a little throat-slashing was not enough; I didn’t want to believe that. I didn’t want to believe the man at her knees was any common stranger other than Ben Jarry, because I needed him to be there, I needed to save his life. When I’d done that I knew I would free all of us, Jarry and myself and this Lucia; then he and I would be through with each other. Then she and I would be just beginning.