Chance (12 page)

Chance went on through the store. He paused at D’s work window but was unable to lay eyes on his furniture. A noise from outside led him to the rear door and a view of the alley where D was wrestling what appeared to be a new radiator into a 1950 Studebaker, a Starlight coupe, to be exact.

“What’s with Carl?” Chance asked, moving outside. “New boyfriend?”

“How’d you guess?”

“The look of love, as they say.”

D nodded and heaved. The radiator dropped into place. He snatched up a rag, set about wiping his hands. “Ever heard of the Frozen Lake?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Then you haven’t heard of it. It’s the thing you want so badly you’ll go to the center of a frozen lake to reach it.”

“Where the ice is thinnest.”

“But you won’t think about that. Everyone else will, just not you. I learned it in the Teams. Let’s say I’m rolling with my guys and someone says to me, ‘You’re on your frozen lake, bro.’ What that means is . . . I need to stop and think,
what
ever it is that I’m doing. . . . I need to stop
’cause he sees something I don’t. May even be we’re stateside, may be I’ve got eyes for my buddy’s wife and he picks up on it. Whatever. Everybody has his frozen lake. In conflict . . . you discover your opponent’s, you’re one up. The old man likes his leather boys.”

“You point that out to
him,
about the frozen lake?”

D’s sigh was one of resignation. “About a thousand times. What are you going to do? Fucker’s as old as the hills.”

Chance smiled but he was thinking about frozen lakes and not the old man’s. He studied the coupe, a brilliant lemon yellow. The vehicle was pointed fore and aft in the manner of a boat. “That’s a Starlight coupe,” Chance said. “My grandmother had one just like it.”

“No shit?” D was either interested or he was fucking with him a little. Chance suspected the latter but chose to indulge himself. The car was a time machine. “I was little, I thought they looked like flying saucers. What my grandmother and I did, we went to the army surplus and bought an old gas mask. Then she would prop the trunk open with a stick and drive around while I rode back there wearing the mask and shooting at things with a plastic gun.”

“Lucky she didn’t get rear-ended.”

“She was about four and a half feet high; barely see over the wheel. The car was covered in dents. It was like Destruction Derby.”

“And you got back there.”

“With great enthusiasm,” Chance said.

D had taken to tightening bolts on radiator mounts. “He’s no good either.” He nodded at the back of the store. “You’ve seen that bumper sticker: ‘I Brake for Hallucinations’?”

“This is his then?” He meant the Studebaker.

“Picked it up at some estate sale. I’m restoring it for him. Ought to be good for something.” The comment served to remind Chance about why he’d come, to inquire after his furniture.

“It’s gone,” D said.

Chance was not certain that he’d heard correctly. “Gone?” he asked.

“Yesterday. Figured that was why you were here.”

It was at just this moment that the old man appeared at the rear of
the building. Bandages still peeked from beneath the brim of his hat although the swelling about his eyes had gone down. The yellow scarf draped about his neck was a dead-on match for the Starlight coupe.

“Young man!” Carl intoned. He was looking straight at Chance, a golden tooth prominent in his smile. “Would a check in the amount of eighty thousand dollars brighten your day?”

C
ARL HAD
photographed the furniture before it left the building, mounting the pictures on black paper then arranging them in a black cardboard folder that Chance now carried. He’d thought, after visiting the warehouse, to get back to his office and Bernie Jolly. His report was due by week’s end and there was still the matter of arranging for an interview. But the sale of his furniture had put him off stride and late afternoon found him having a beer on the waterfront, Oakland across the bay. He’d placed the eighty-thousand-dollar cashier’s check from Allan’s Antiques in a safe-deposit box at his bank. Given his troubles with the IRS, it seemed prudent to consult with his attorney before actually depositing the money. But that was only the half of it and did not account for the intermittent waves of vertigo, palpitations, and excessive perspiration the check had inspired. The furniture had been sold as a set of originals.

“But I thought it was what we had agreed upon,” Carl had said, surprised by Chance’s initial reluctance to accept the check. “It
was
why we did the work.” And so it had been, but hadn’t he also imagined
some final opportunity to rethink his position when the time came and the buyer at hand? The set had gone to a Mr. Vladimir of San Francisco for the sum of one hundred thousand dollars with Carl holding back twenty for D’s work and his own commission. “And that’s a deal,” Carl had added. “D likes you. So do I. And we know what you’re going through.”

D’s work was of course not the issue. He was welcome to whatever was fair, as was Carl. It was the other side of the thing that bothered him, what for lack of a better term he was coming to think of as the dark side.

“I thought you’d be happier,” Carl had said.

What was left but thank you and good-bye?

That done, he’d returned to the office just long enough to give Lucy the afternoon off. He’d imagined leaving the folder but found the pictures required looking at now and again as some means of reassurance, that the pieces really did look like other pieces, in other books, the ones with all their parts intact.

“Vladimir?” Chance had asked, his final query before vacating the warehouse. “He’s a Russian then?” The thing was complicating by the second. He was thinking of an article he’d read in the
Chronicle
on the presence of the Russian mob in San Francisco. But Carl had only clucked and shaken his head. “The stuff looked terrific, my young friend. Mr. Vladimir is very rich. And now he’s very happy. The set will probably be in his family for the next hundred years. You should be happy too.”

Chance had agreed to try. He placed the folder on the bar before him and sat looking at it yet again by the pale light of the room’s high windows with their views of the Bay Bridge and the Oakland hills but the happiness continued to elude him. The water separating the cities appeared gray and forbidding, lashed by a late wind and a good deal of the charred hills lost to a thick haze that lay across the entire region as might the gauze upon a weeping wound, but he knew what lay beneath, the treeless summits, the skeletal remains. He knew the score, as would the Russians, should his cover ever get blown, in which case it was hard to imagine them taking it well.

The haze had turned to a light mist by the time he left the bar for yet one more questionable destination. He supposed it not too late to phone, call the whole thing off. He held Carl’s folder containing his photographs flat against his leg in hopes of protecting it from the damp air. The evening seemed unusually charged, the citizenry agitated. It might have been him. Walking to a BART station near Powell Street, Chance was made witness to a homeless woman defecating in a phone booth. She was a woman of color and hopelessly obese. It was a booth of the old-fashioned sort that till that moment he might have thought extinct. This one seemed to have been restored, the gleaming artifact of an age gone by and yet absent the grotesque display he might well have passed without notice. As it was, the unfortunate woman filled it completely, her tremendous buttocks flattening upon the glass where they appeared to contend in the manner of bull seals or perhaps the phantoms of H. P. Lovecraft as she made to hike a crimson dress above ample hips. One could see what was coming. People averted their eyes, quickened their step. Some appeared to actually run. It was all too terrible. Chance was no exception.
That
, the exception, was to be found at the entrance to the station, propped against a tiled wall, a stick-thin man of indiscernible age, his scrawny arms tattooed like a sailor’s, if not homeless then surely the denizen of some Tenderloin flophouse, as in making for the underground Chance was brought close enough to see that till the moment when the man’s eyes met his they had been fixed with great interest on the horrid spectacle in the booth. Finding himself now eye to eye with Chance, the man favored him with the bright, sun-blasted grin of the long-haul drinker.

“Boy that’s rough,” the man said. He inclined toward the booth.

“History is coming for the empire,” Chance told him.

The man offered to high-five him but Chance went on by. Leprosy was not unheard of in the city, nor were the new, antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis, a product some said, in their most virulent form, of the Russian prison system.

For Chance, fearing earthquakes, the passage beneath the bay was unpleasant as always, made more so by some brief but irritating delay getting out of the Powell Street station. Lights flickered and went out then came on again. Passengers exchanged glances. A garbled announcement issued from the train’s sound system, impossible to understand. Chance, always a bit claustrophobic, reacted accordingly. The essential feature of a panic attack, as outlined in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
is a discrete period of intense fear in the absence of real danger that is accompanied by at least four of thirteen somatic or cognitive symptoms. Given that the Bay Area was the meeting place of at least three major fault lines and dozens of minor ones and years past due for a seismic event of catastrophic proportions, Chance was willing to categorize the current episode as at least marginally situational, this accompanied by two somatic and one cognitive symptom for a total of three and therefore short of a clinically diagnosable event. He was nevertheless, by the time of his arrival in Rockridge, not feeling altogether well.