“I haven’t been down here in a while. Let’s check this out.”
They cut through the circular courtyard where the padres blessed the animals every Easter and then past the Instituto Cultural Mexicano. They followed the curving arcade of cheap souvenir booths and churro stands. Recorded mariachi music came from unseen speakers, but in counterpoint was the sound of a live guitar.
They found the musician sitting on a bench in front of the Avila Adobe. They stopped and listened as the old man played a Mexican ballad Bosch thought he had heard before but could not identify.
Bosch studied the mud-walled structure behind the musician and wondered if Don Francisco Avila had any idea what he was helping to set in motion when he staked his claim to the spot in 1818. A city would grow tall and wide from this place. A city as great as any other. And just as mean. A destination city, a city of invention and reinvention. A place where the dream seemed as easy to reach as the sign they put up on the hill, but a place where the reality was always something different. The road to that sign on the hill had a locked gate across it.
It was a city full of haves and have-nots, movie stars and extras, drivers and the driven, predators and prey. The fat and the hungry and little room in between. A city that despite all of that still had them lining up and waiting every day behind the bomb barriers to get in and stay in.
Bosch pulled the fold of money from his pocket and dropped a five in the old musician’s basket. He and Rider then cut through the old Cucamonga Winery, its cask rooms converted into galleries and artists’ stalls, and out to Alameda. They crossed the street to the train station, its clock tower rising in front of them. In the front walkway they passed a sundial with an inscription cut into its granite pedestal.
Vision to See
Faith to Believe
Courage to Do
Union Station was designed to mirror the city it served and the way in which it was supposed to work. It was a melting pot of architectural styles-Spanish Colonial, Mission, Streamline Moderne, Art Deco, Southwestern and Moorish design flourishes among them. But unlike the rest of the city, where the pot more often than not boiled over, the styles at the train station blended smoothly into something unique, something beautiful. Bosch loved it for that.
Through the glass doors they came into the cavernous entry hall, and an archway three stories tall led to the immense waiting room beyond. As Bosch took it in he remembered that he used to walk over here not only for cigarettes, but also to renew himself a little bit. Going to Union Station was like paying a visit to church, a cathedral where the graceful lines of design and function and civic pride all intersected. In the central waiting room the voices of travelers rose into its high empty spaces and were transformed into a choir of languid whispers.
“I love this place,” Rider said. “Did you ever see the movie Blade Runner?”
Bosch nodded. He had seen it.
“This was the police station, right?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever see True Confessions?” he asked.
“No, was it good?”
“Yeah, you should see it. Another take on the Black Dahlia and LAPD conspiracy.”
She groaned.
“Thanks, but I don’t think that’s what I need right now.”
They got cups of coffee at Union Bagel and then walked into the waiting room, where rows of brown leather seats were lined up like luxurious pews. Bosch looked up as he was always drawn to do. Six huge chandeliers hung forty feet above them in two rows. Rider looked up, too.
Bosch then pointed to two side-by-side seats open near the newsstand. They sat down on the soft padded leather and put their cups on the wide wooden armrests.
“You ready to talk about this now?” Rider asked.
“If you are,” he answered. “What was in the file you saw in Special Archives? What was so sinister?”
“For one thing, Mackey is in there.”
“As a suspect in Verloren?”
“No, the file has nothing to do with Verloren. Verloren was not even a blip on the screen as far as the file goes. It’s all about an investigation that went down and was buttoned up before Rebecca Verloren was even pregnant, let alone snatched from her bed in the night.”
“All right, then what’s it got to do with us?”
“Maybe nothing and maybe everything. You know the guy Mackey lives with, William Burkhart?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s in there, too. Only back then he was better known as Billy Blitzkrieg. That was his moniker in this gang, the Eights.”
“Okay.”
“In March of ’eighty-eight Billy Blitzkrieg went away for a year for vandalizing a synagogue in North Hollywood. Property damage, graffiti, defecation, the whole thing.”
“The hate crime. He was the only one they bagged?”
She nodded.
“They got a latent off a spray can they found in a gutter trap about a block from the synagogue. So he went down for it. Took a plea or they would have made an example of him and he knew it.”
Bosch nodded. He didn’t want to say anything that would interrupt her flow.
“In the reports and in the press Burkhart-or Blitzkrieg or whatever you want to call him-was portrayed as the leader of the Eights. They said he called for nineteen eighty-eight to be a year of racial and ethnic upheaval to honor their beloved Adolf Hitler. You know the crap. RaHoWa, revenge of the white trash and all that. They all ran around in Minnesota Vikings jerseys-the Vikings apparently were a pure race. They all wore number eighty-eight.”
“I’m getting the picture.”
“Anyway, they had a lot on Burkhart. They had him cold on the synagogue and they had the feds chomping at the bit to do a civil rights dance on his pointy little head. There were a lot of crimes, beginning right at the start of the year, when they toasted New Year’s by burning a cross on a black family’s lawn in Chatsworth. After that there were more cross burnings, threatening phone calls, bomb scares. The synagogue break-in. They even trashed a Jewish daycare center in Encino. This was all in early January. They also started going to street corners, picking up Mexican laborers and taking them out into the desert, where they assaulted or abandoned them or both, usually both. To use their terminology, they were fomenting disharmony, which they believed would help lead to a separation of the races.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard the song.”
“Okay, well, like I said, they were ready to make Burkhart the poster boy for all of this and, if they went with it to Justice, he could have ended up going away for a ten-year minimum in a federal pen.”
“So it was a no-brainer. He took a deal.”
Rider nodded.
“He took a year in Wayside and a five-year tail, and the rest of it went away. And the Eights went away with it. They were broken up and that was the end of the threat. All of this went down by the end of March, long before Verloren.”
As he thought about all of this Bosch watched a woman in a hurry as she pulled a young girl by the hand toward the gateway to the Metroline tracks. The woman was also lugging a heavy suitcase and her focus was only on the gate ahead. The child was pulled along with her face turned upward as she looked at the ceiling. She was smiling at something. Bosch looked up and saw a child’s balloon trapped in one of the ceiling’s vaulted squares. One child’s disaster was another’s secret smile. The balloon was orange and white and shaped like a fish, and Bosch knew because of his daughter that it was an animated character named Nemo. He had a flash of his daughter but just as quickly pushed it away so he could concentrate. He looked at Rider.
“So where was Mackey in all of this?” he asked.
“He was sort of the runt of the litter,” Rider answered. “One of the minions. He was thought to be the perfect recruit. High school dropout with no life and no prospects. He was on probation for burglary and his juvie jacket was full of pops for car theft, burglary and drugs. So he was just the kind of guy they were looking for. A loser they could mold into a white warrior. But once they jumped him in they found out he was-to use a quote from Burkhart-dumber than a nigger off the boat. He apparently was so stupid that they had to take him off the graffiti runs because he couldn’t even spell their basic racist vocabulary. In fact, his homey name in the group became Wej. Not like you wedge your way into a door. Wej like Jew spelled backwards because that was how he sprayed it once on a synagogue wall.”