"Speaking of Saffron," I said.
"Do we have to?"
"You're the one who wanted to come along. You could have spent the day sunbathing, brushing up your computer skills, seducing my birds."
"I wanted to be with you," she said. I shut up. A minute later she giggled. "Boy," she said, "are your buttons up front."
On Chatauqua I turned left and headed up to Sunset, hoping for a stretch of open road. We were lucky. For fifteen minutes or so we stayed within hailing distance of the speed limit, winding between eucalyptus trees, their tall crowns browsing the sky. Normally I like eucalyptus, but now all I could think was that they, too, were operating under false pretenses: the most Californian of all California trees, they'd been imported from Australia. Well, at least they hadn't changed their name.
"What's Saffron's real name?" I said as Nana twisted the dial of Alice's radio in search of heavy metal. She settled for something that sounded like an alcoholic's trash being emptied at four a.m. and sat back. "Jackie, I think," she said. "We're not what you'd call close. I think it's something dykey like Jackie."
"Jackie," I said. "Jack."
"Jack who?"
"Jack Sprunk. Toby, in other words."
"Look out for that stupid cat," she said, pointing through the windshield at a battered tabby scampering suicidally across the road. "Who's Jack Sprunk?"
"Toby Vane. Wake up, Nana. That's his real name."
She turned up the radio as an electric guitarist did a remarkably realistic imitation of a corpse's fingernails being dragged down a drainpipe. "I don't think so," she said.
I turned the radio down and slapped her hand as she reached for the volume knob. "You don't think what?"
"That Toby was ever a Jack. I think he was a Bob."
"Bob?" I said stupidly.
"Or Bobby. Maybe Bobby. Since he's Toby now, maybe he was Bobby then."
"Why Bobby?"
"Well, you know, Toby's such a dumb name. If he'd been a Bob, maybe now he'd be a Tobe."
"But why not Jack?"
"Because he used to be Bobby. When he told me that shitarooni story, you know, the one about the stove, I told it to you in the restaurant, he said Bobby. He said his father called him Bobby when he tied him up. He said, 'We'll come back when we smell Bobby burning,' or something like that." She sat back. "Am I going to get a pizza or not?"
"Not. Not until lunch, anyway. You're certain he said Bobby and not Jack?"
"They don't sound very much alike, you know. Even if I think in Korean sometimes, I can tell Bobby from Jack. Just like I can tell Kris Kringle from Robert Frost."
"How loaded was he?"
"Loaded enough to tell me something personal for a change, but not loaded enough to get his own name wrong. I mean, nobody gets that loaded."
She turned the volume up again, and I turned it back down. Her left hand landed lightly on my thigh, and her nails toyed with my inseam. "Ever do it in a car?" she said.
"More times than I can count." She yanked her hand away. "Let me think for a minute." I did.
"Okay," she said. "I'll bite. I always told myself I'd never ask a man this question, no matter how much he looked like he was thinking, but I'll make an exception in your case." She furrowed her brow and looked intense. "Simeon," she said, "what are you thinking about?"
"Why Toby lied to me about his name."
"Yaah," she said. "Toby couldn't tell the truth to the bathroom mirror. He said his name was Jack?"
"Jack Sprunk."
She shrugged. "Who could make up Jack Sprunk? Maybe he was lying to me."
"Bobby what?"
"Who knows? He was a little kid in that story. Little kids don't have last names. Is this important?"
"I don't know. Yes, I do. Anything that has to do with Toby is important now."
"So why are we going to see Saffron?"
"To learn something about Toby." I reached over and turned up the volume. Cats fought in stereo.
Saffron's neighborhood looked parched and curled at the edges in the morning light. The same cars were parked on the same brown lawns. Tools, engine blocks, and more esoteric components of the process of internal combustion glinted in the sun. A group of brown-skinned guys hunkered down in front of one of the cars, looking justifiably bewildered.
I stopped Alice illegally in front of a fire hydrant. A four-alarm fire was just what the block needed. Saffron's apartment house, a three-story affair made out of aquamarine Gunite with something sparkly mixed into it, reared rectangular in front of us. It looked like a swimming pool yanked inside out. Nana shut the passenger door behind her and took my hand.
"Now what?"
"Now we look around a little. Then we wake up Sleeping Beauty."
"There's nothing to look at. I mean, Drab with a capital D. Imagine living here?"
"People do."
"Well, that's a piercing insight. All these years, my life has been on hold while I waited for a man who could say something like that to me."
"Maybe you'd prefer to wait in the car," I said. "Or under it."
"Sorry. It's just that it's hard to keep a lid on all this irony. Lead the way and I'll be good."
The apartment house had seen its best days in the first forty-eight hours or so after it was built, sometime in the late fifties. It formed a garish U around a paved central courtyard with a minuscule pool in its center. Dying palms sprouted despairingly here and there. The concrete surrounding the pool was cracked and broken. Weeds shouldered their spiky way up through the openings, heading single-mindedly for the sunlight. You don't fool around with photosynthesis.
Once blue water might have sparkled in the pool, but now it was a sun-baked parody of coolness and wet. The same old trash lay jumbled in its bottom: cardboard cartons, paper cups and napkins, plastic utensils from fast-food outlets. What was new was a humming of flies, bluebottles, hundreds of them, crawling all over the cartons at the deep end beneath the diving board.
"God, that's grungy," Nana said. "Simeon? I have a request. Get me out of here. As soon as possible."
"As soon as we finish with Jackie. Or whatever her name is."
"She's in 1-E," she said.
"You've been here before."
"Loads party. Lots of vodka and head banging. But at least there was pizza and music you wouldn't like. And it was nighttime, so it didn't look so bad. There's a lot to be said for the dark."
I followed her to the door I already knew, and she stepped aside so I could knock. I had knocked three or four times before I saw that the screen over the sliding aluminum window was missing and that the window was open. A white curtain made of some indestructible synthetic was drawn inside. It billowed faintly in the breeze.
"Girl knows how to sleep," Nana said.
"Hold on. I'll show you a private detective's trick. Would you like to close your eyes so I don't give away any secrets of the trade?"
"Oh, sure," she said, putting a hand over her face. "I can hardly see through my fingers at all."
"If you peek, you'll ruin Christmas forever."
"I'm a Buddhist. Trust me anyway."
I leaned through the window and pushed the curtain aside. The first thing I saw was the screen, lying on the floor just inside the window. The second thing I saw was the devastation.
"Nana," I said, "get out of here."
"Oh, look," she said at the same time. "We don't need any tricks. The door's not locked." She gave it a shove, and then she said, "Oh. Oh, no."
She stepped back, and I put a hand on her shoulder. "I don't think you should be here."
Inside I could hear still more flies buzzing, cousins to the ones in the pool.
"Well, I am," she said. "Let's get it over with." She pushed me forward and followed a single step behind. I closed the door behind us and locked it.