Gilrein comes down with a knee into his chest. Perez tries to roll and Gilrein drives a foot into his stomach. Perez loses his air, hunches into a fetal tuck, one arm up waving, trying to signal surrender.
Then Gilrein takes a step back and as the adrenaline recedes, he realizes what he’s done. His own body is throbbing and he goes down on his knees, gets his hands under Perez’s arms and helps him into sitting.
“Jesus Christ,” Perez’s rasping.
“I’m sorry” is all Gilrein can say. “You okay?”
Perez shifts and cradles his wrist, tears in his eyes, sniffing in blood and mucus, trying still to get a good draw of breath.
“What the hell happened to you?” he whispers.
Gilrein needs to get outside now. He reaches into his pocket, takes out a fold of bills and, without looking at it, lays it on the floor next to Perez.
Neither threatening nor pleasing, but in an overly controlled voice, Gilrein says, “You call Wylie. You tell her to meet me at the greenhouse. You tell her it’s an emergency.”
Perez clears his throat and says, “You out of your mind, Gilrein. You can’t do this. You ain’t no cop no more.”
Gilrein gets up and goes to the door. Without turning back he says, “I don’t want to come back here, Rudy. You make sure Wylie gets my message.”
7
Moving down Granada Street, walking faster than his age and condition should allow, the Inspector has a moment of mild satori, understands in a flash of enlightenment that what he is feeling is a common but over-whelming fear. It is not an emotion with which he has had a great deal of experience and there is no way to tell whether it has been triggered by his suspicions regarding the status of his health or his exposure to the ravings of the old cabdriver, the ever-expanding myth he has come to think of as Otto’s Tale. As if it were already a long-held oral tradition. The kind of story that over time transforms itself into the best definition of a race of people.
He hates the old cabdriver and he hates the myth he is forcing himself to endure, several times a week, as a kind of penance. He is beginning to believe the old man’s insane story is the very thing that is making him sick. As if the story could be a virus or an infection. But the truth is, the fear currently flooding his body — the elevated heart rate, the shortness of breath, the tidal perspiration — probably has more to do with finding himself visible and vulnerable on a street filled with people he has spent a brief career terrorizing.
He stops for a moment beneath a shattered streetlamp and reaches into the breast pocket of his tunic, withdraws a crumpled scrap of paper that bears a name and a location. He stares at the paper as he catches his breath, then throws the scrap away, lets the wind carry it south, and moves around the corner onto Voegelin where a krewe of Bedoya’s whores are waiting to ambush him.
They descend like overly perfumed locust, propositioning him bilingually in a chorus of lewd suggestion. He pushes away what hands he can, lets the rest pull money from his pants pocket.
“Célibe, célibe,” he cries. “Soy un hombre de Dios.”
The women, and the few transvestite moles, get a great kick out of this, and Voegelin fills for a block with the cackle of junkie laughter. But the Inspector’s pleas work after all. These are merchants who will accept amusement if it’s the only currency offered and in a moment they’ve turned their hive-attention to a pair of stretch limousines rounding the corner and rolling to a stop for some appraisal and bartering.
Technically, the Inspector has told the whores the truth, a kind of Jesuitical veracity. But though he has not known a woman sexually in over forty years, he has given himself away in what he considers a more intimate manner, a consummation more perfect in its carnal purity, a union still unbridled if not physically erotic.
Her mind and her soul belonged only to me, he thinks as he scans the storefronts of Latino Town looking for a meat dealership called Brasilia Beef. It’s a stale mantra, an old balm that he uses out of habit, a justification that he can’t seem to stop employing, though it has never assuaged even a portion of his loss or lessened the burden of his many transgressions. All you had was her body, Gilrein.
He spots the beef shop and makes his way down the adjoining alley. At the far end is the promised Chevy van, twenty years old and perched on concrete blocks, painted a dull pumpkin orange but for the front end, which is charred black from a long-ago fire-bombing. On the side of the van, in faded but still-legible glitter paint, reads the pronouncement DAMASCUS OR BUST. The Inspector approaches the rear double doors with little caution. If it’s filled with his old enemies, he decides, their attack could only be called an act of mercy at this late hour.
He gives a weak knock on a spray-painted window, hears some movement inside, and the doors swing open to reveal an emaciated individual dressed head to toe in filthy denim. It’s impossible to estimate this man’s age. He’s missing full tufts of hair as if his skull has sported some analog to canine mange. He’s also missing half a dozen teeth and the ones left rooted are all variations on a caramel tone. His face is death-camp gaunt and zombie white but his neck features some sort of raw, scarlet rash that glistens a bit before disappearing down into his mechanic’s coveralls.
“Can I help you?” he says, and though his voice is choked with the ongoing paranoia of a lifelong methedrine shooter, there’s the definite ghost of a French accent.
The Inspector sighs and looks down at the ground, wondering why he’s come. He looks up and says, “Are you Mr. Clairvaux?”
“You here to be tested?”
The Inspector nods, unfastens several buttons on the tunic, reaches to an interior pocket and withdraws a bill so old and thin it resembles tissue paper.
Mr. Clairvaux takes the money, shoves it up a sleeve and offers a shaking hand to his newest client. The Inspector ignores the assistance and pulls himself inside the van, secures the doors behind him without being asked. The interior is dark and musty. The floor is covered by a multicolored shag rug, white and orange with flecks of brown and crusty in spots. The rug, in turn, is covered with heaps of what appears to be medical equipment — loose syringes, drug vials, tongue depressors — tangled indiscriminately with typical junkie refuse — old potato-chip bags, discarded clothing, crinkled balls of dollar bills. The walls are lined with used and split mattresses, a cheap attempt at soundproofing. The Inspector forces himself into a sitting position, legs folded painfully into a broken lotus. There’s a heavy smell, something like a mix of garbage and sweet incense. He glances toward the front of the van where the bench seat has been removed. There’s no steering wheel. The cab has been transformed into something resembling the nest of an enormous and slovenly bird. Door to door is packed with an eclectic and copious pile of trash — plastic wrappings and soda bottles, yellowed newspapers and orange peels, rubber tubing, bubble-gum cards, corroded battery casing. And there’s a low-grade rustling sound emanating from the nest’s interior. As if a small creature is buried in its core and has found a way to move through this maze of debris but never to exit.
“So you think you got the Grippe,” Mr. Clairvaux asks, not a question, simply words to fill the air as he lights a flame in a Sterno rig, then slides a series of IV needles out of his coverall pocket and into a dented coffee can resting on a cake rack above the burner.