The old man with a memory like an elephant.
The old man who always waited until it really hurt.
Souls burning
by Bill Pronzini[6]
Civic Center
Hotel Majestic, Sixth Street, downtown San Francisco. A hell of an address — a hell of a place for an ex-con not long out of Folsom to set up housekeeping. Sixth Street, south of Market — South of the Slot, it used to be called — is the heart of the city’s Skid Road and has been for more than half a century.
Eddie Quinlan. A name and a voice out of the past, neither of which I’d recognized when he called that morning. Close to seven years since I had seen or spoken to him, six years since I’d even thought of him. Eddie Quinlan. Edgewalker, shadow-man with no real substance or purpose, drifting along the narrow catwalk that separates conventional society from the underworld. Information seller, gofer, smalltime bagman, doer of any insignificant job, legitimate or otherwise, that would help keep him in food and shelter, liquor and cigarettes. The kind of man you looked at but never really saw: a modern-day Yehudi, the little man who wasn’t there. Eddie Quinlan. Nobody, loser — fall guy. Drug bust in the Tenderloin one night six and a half years ago; one dealer setting up another, and Eddie Quinlan, smalltime bagman, caught in the middle; hard-assed judge, five years in Folsom, goodbye Eddie Quinlan. And the drug dealers? They walked, of course. Both of them.
And now Eddie was out, had been out for six months. And after six months of freedom, he’d called me. Would I come to his room at the Hotel Majestic tonight around eight? He’d tell me why when he saw me. It was real important — would I come? All right, Eddie. But I couldn’t figure it. I had bought information from him in the old days, bits and pieces for five or ten dollars; maybe he had something to sell now. Only I wasn’t looking for anything and I hadn’t put the word out, so why pick me to call?
If you’re smart you don’t park your car on the street at night, South of the Slot. I put mine in the Fifth and Mission Garage at 7:45 and walked over to Sixth. It had rained most of the day and the streets were still wet, but now the sky was cold and clear. The kind of night that is as hard as black glass, so that light seems to bounce off the dark instead of shining through it; lights and their colors so bright and sharp reflecting off the night and the wet surfaces that the glare is like splinters against your eyes.
Friday night, and Sixth Street was teeming. Sidewalks jammed — old men, young men, bag ladies, painted ladies, blacks, whites, Asians, addicts, pushers, muttering mental cases, drunks leaning against walls in tight little clusters while they shared paper-bagged bottles of sweet wine and cans of malt liquor; men and women in filthy rags, in smart new outfits topped off with sunglasses, carrying ghetto blasters and red-and-white canes, some of the canes in the hands of individuals who could see as well as I could, and a hidden array of guns and knives and other lethal instruments. Cheap hotels, greasy spoons, seedy taverns, and liquor stores complete with barred windows and cynical proprietors that stayed open well past midnight. Laughter, shouts, curses, threats; bickering and dickering. The stenches of urine and vomit and unwashed bodies and rotgut liquor, and over those like an umbrella, the subtle effluvium of despair. Predators and prey, half hidden in shadow, half revealed in the bright, sharp dazzle of fluorescent lights and bloody neon.
It was a mean street, Sixth, one of the meanest, and I walked it warily. I may be fifty-eight but I’m a big man and I walk hard too; and I look like what I am. Two winos tried to panhandle me and a fat hooker in an orange wig tried to sell me a piece of her tired body, but no one gave me any trouble.
The Majestic was five stories of old wood and plaster and dirty brick, just off Howard Street. In front of its narrow entrance, a crack dealer and one of his customers were haggling over the price of a baggie of rock cocaine; neither of them paid any attention to me as I moved past them. Drug deals go down in the open here, day and night. It’s not that the cops don’t care, or that they don’t patrol Sixth regularly; it’s just that the dealers outnumber them ten to one. On Skid Road any crime less severe than aggravated assault is strictly low priority.
Small, barren lobby: no furniture of any kind. The smell of ammonia hung in the air like swamp gas. Behind the cubbyhole desk was an old man with dead eyes that would never see anything they didn’t want to see. I said, “Eddie Quinlan,” and he said, “Two-oh-two,” without moving his lips. There was an elevator but it had an OUT OF ORDER sign on it; dust speckled the sign. I went up the adjacent stairs.
The disinfectant smell permeated the second floor hallway as well. Room 202 was just off the stairs, fronting on Sixth; one of the metal 2s on the door had lost a screw and was hanging upside down. I used my knuckles just below it. Scraping noise inside, and a voice said, “Yeah?” I identified myself. A lock clicked, a chain rattled, the door wobbled open, and for the first time in nearly seven years I was looking at Eddie Quinlan.
He hadn’t changed much. Little guy, about five-eight, and past forty now. Thin, nondescript features, pale eyes, hair the color of sand. The hair was thinner and the lines in his face were longer and deeper, almost like incisions where they bracketed his nose. Otherwise he was the same Eddie Quinlan.
“Hey,” he said, “thanks for coming. I mean it, thanks.”
“Sure, Eddie.”
“Come on in.”
The room made me think of a box — the inside of a huge rotting packing crate. Four bare walls with the scaly remnants of paper on them like psoriatic skin, bare uncarpeted floor, unshaded bulb hanging from the center of a bare ceiling. The bulb was dark; what light there was came from a low-wattage reading lamp and a wash of red-and-green neon from the hotel’s sign that spilled in through a single window. Old iron-framed bed, unpainted nightstand, scarred dresser, straight-backed chair next to the bed and in front of the window, alcove with a sink and toilet and no door, closet that wouldn’t be much larger than a coffin.
“Not much, is it,” Eddie said.
I didn’t say anything.
He shut the hall door, locked it. “Only place to sit is that chair there. Unless you want to sit on the bed? Sheets are clean. I try to keep things clean as I can.”
“Chair’s fine.”
I went across to it; Eddie put himself on the bed. A room with a view, he’d said on the phone. Some view. Sitting here you could look down past Howard and up across Mission — almost two full blocks of the worst street in the city. It was so close you could hear the beat of its pulse, the ugly sounds of its living and its dying.
“So why did you ask me here, Eddie? If it’s information for sale, I’m not buying right now.”
“No, no, nothing like that. I ain’t in the business any more.”
“Is that right?”
“Prison taught me a lesson. I got rehabilitated.” There was no sarcasm or irony in the words; he said them matter-of-factly.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“I been a good citizen ever since I got out. No lie. I haven’t had a drink, ain’t even been in a bar.”
“What are you doing for money?”
“I got a job,” he said. “Shipping department at a wholesale sporting goods outfit on Brannan. It don’t pay much but it’s honest work.”
I nodded. “What is it you want, Eddie?”
“Somebody I can talk to, somebody who’ll understand — that’s all I want. You always treated me decent. Most of ’em, no matter who they were, they treated me like I wasn’t even human. Like I was a turd or something.”