Fever City (26 page)

‘Say, that was a fifty-dollar jacket.'

Roselli handles the wallet as though it's just been retrieved from a piss trough, peering at what's inside. ‘A private dick wouldn't spend more than twenty bucks on a suit, even if it was for his own wedding . . . ' Dark eyes, hollowed by all the evil they had witnessed, ride up from the badge, staring into mine. ‘Let alone for his fucking funeral.' He tosses the wallet back to one of his Neanderthals, who shoves it into my outside jacket pocket, the shriek of the pocket tearing filling the room. ‘Jeez, you're falling to pieces. I think a visit to your tailor is in order.' Roselli laughs at his own joke, always the first sign of a man without class.

Roselli nods towards the centre of the room. I slowly walk towards the fireplace, the goons two steps behind. Escape routes are scarce. Either into the great unknown behind the kitchen door, or up the chimney.

Then it hits me.

The chimney in the star chamber, in the cellars of the Bannister joint.

The old entrance in the north well had been transformed into a chimney for the fireplace there. That's why I hadn't notice it, and when I went back to look, the door to the star chamber was locked. But it wasn't locked when I first went there the night of the kidnapping. That's how Elaine entered the old aqueduct system. Via the chimney. The question was—

‘Wake up, scumbag!' Someone slaps me hard across the face. ‘I'm talking to you.' I rub my face, coming back to immediate, painful reality. ‘I said: how do you like my home . . . ?'

The joint's certainly swanky. ‘Must have cost a bundle . . . '

The asshole preens. ‘It don't come cheap . . . ' He smiles, the proud homeowner of a five bedroom Spanish Colonial in Beverly fucking Hills, and me, a poor sucker living in a dump in Westlake.

Well, fuck him. ‘Sure . . . They're all smart operators out here. They know a pigeon when they see one.'

A right to the solar plexus.

Gasping pain.

Thank God it was Roselli. If it had been one of his goons, they'd have busted my ribs, burst my spleen. Maybe punctured a lung. I wheeze my way back to an upright position, sucking in enough air to speak. ‘Face it. No matter how much you puff out your chest, they see a chump, not a champ.'

Roselli turns, bends down to pick something up from the table. I flinch, expecting a gun. Schiller always said I never knew when to keep my mouth shut.

He always said it would end just like this.

But Schiller is wrong—this time at least. Roselli hasn't gone for a gun, he's gone for a cat. A white cat with a grey cap around its ears. Two green eyes gaze into mine as its whiskers come forward. I feel a soulful communication. How did either of us wind up in the same room with this hoodlum? Roselli cradles the cat in his arms. In the silence, I can hear it purring a message at me: help me escape and I'll do the same for you.

‘I don't like dogs,' Roselli says. ‘There's something about them. The way they bark. The way they see things us humans can't see . . . Ghosts.' He takes a shot at a smile; almost gets there. ‘Can you imagine what it would be like if there was a mutt in this house? Nonstop fucking barking. Barking all the fucking time. Yapping at a crowd of dead fucking men.'

‘Worried about the neighbours, huh?'

The way he's staring at me leaves no doubt: as far as he's concerned, I'm already a member of his household's ethereal congregation. I rifle in my trouser pockets for a pack of cigarettes. One of the goons already has my arm, slowly pulling my hand out, his thumb almost breaking my wrist with its pressure. Roselli sees what it is I'm holding and nods. After all, a condemned man is entitled to a last smoke, especially if he has to listen to a speech about cats and dogs.

‘But I like cats. Know why I like 'em?'

‘Cute and cuddly?'

‘Wise guy . . . ' He slowly puts the cat back down on the table. It springs away fast, disappearing under a sofa. ‘It's because they're like people. They don't hunt just to eat, they do it for fun. A cat will keep a mouse alive for days. Just for amusement.'

My hand is shaking as I light my cigarette. They all notice. It's always that part of ourselves we trust the most that betrays us. He nods to the goons. There's a brass candlestick on the mantle above the fireplace. And a framed mirror behind it. It's not going to be pretty. They'll get me in the end. But I'm going to separate them from as many pieces of their anatomy as I can before they do . . .

Roselli clicks his fingers and the goons both freeze. He cocks his head, and then I hear it too—a sound slowly seeping into the room, changing the air pressure like a tidal flood, bringing us back to the now of the city outside, not the mayhem and murder about to erupt in this room. The approaching sound begins to build in layer upon layer of keening volume.

For me, it's the cavalry.

For Roselli, it's a killjoy teacher, breaking up a schoolyard brawl.

Sirens.

Roselli looks out across the killing fields of his front lawn, past the trunks of felled trees to the sidewalk curb, the first squad cars already pulling up, strobing the windows with the insistent flutter of red. ‘What the . . . ?' He looks back at me.

Improvise a lie before he's tempted to shoot me anyway. ‘Mr. Bannister wanted to make sure I'd come back safe and sound.'

Roselli's curse is dark and savage. Even the goons step back in shock. He snatches my tie, pulling me so close, I can smell the acrid tilt of digestive acids stewing on their problem. ‘Listen, you smartass fuck. You tell the Old Man he's not welching out of the deal. He keeps the kid, but we keep the money, got it?'

‘ . . . But the kid's dead.'

There's the pucker of internal detonation, his eyes quivering as though about to shuck themselves out of his skull in phosphorescent amazement. ‘Are you fucking nuts? That kid was dug out of a grave—of course he's fucking dead.'

The banging at the front door makes him turn. Maybe he didn't see the look on my face. I knew it: the dead kid was a ringer. One question nailed. But the most important one is still unanswered: what happened to the real Ronnie Bannister?

The racket at the door's getting louder. The goons go over and lean against it, as though expecting battering rams. Roselli shakes his head like a man whose rent money just came in fourth at Hollywood Park. ‘What a fucking hullaballoo!' He looks at the police through the window, then back at me. ‘Do you have any idea what the neighbours are going to think?'

The cops are coming through the door. I've got maybe five seconds on my own with Roselli. I grab him by the throat, either side of the Adam's apple. ‘Tell me where I can find the real Bannister kid or I'm going to pluck me a piece of fruit.' I let go just enough to let him talk. ‘You dumb fuck,' he wheezes, ‘there never was a Bannister kid.' His last word comes out as a squeak: ‘Period.'

Someone grabs me by the shoulders and spins me round. It's my old pal from LAPD, Sergeant Barnsley. He goes up to Roselli. ‘Everything all right, Mr. Roselli?' His cap may as well be in his hands.

Roselli has to massage his throat before he can answer. He points to my torn jacket. ‘I was just fixing a sandwich for this itinerant type, you know? This here vagrant.' He catches the look Barnsley gives me. ‘Well, no big deal, right? Robin Hood shit. Do it all the time. I even help out at the church, ask anyone . . . '

‘Thank you, Mr. Roselli . . . ' Barnsley turns to me. ‘You're under arrest.'

‘Cute.'

There is the hard snap of cuffs on my wrists. ‘Grand theft auto.'

‘What the . . . ?'

‘A 1957 Chevrolet Nomad, stolen earlier today, abandoned on Hawthorn Parade.'

‘You have got to be kidding?'

‘Well, what do you know? And to think I let this miscreant into my own home.' Roselli turns to me, sucking his lower lip in false regret. ‘Look at you . . . I brought you into my house, offered you the hand of friendship, and what do you do? Bite it. You lousy crumb. Do you have any idea how much you let me down?'

‘You can never be too careful, Mr. Roselli . . . '

‘Ain't that the truth?' He looks away then sucker punches me in the balls. ‘See ya, chump.'

‘We're very sorry, Mr. Roselli, it won't happen again.' Barnsley pulls me back up to my feet and drags me through the front door, nearly stepping on the cat, which knows an escape route when it sees one. Roselli calls out. I slip my leg back, blocking the screen door from closing behind us. There is a flash of white as the cat leaps to freedom. Roselli shoves pass me, nearly tripping on my leg, racing after it. ‘Lily! Lily, come back, goddamn it.' He loses a slipper as he disappears into the neighbour's garden. Perfect. Both of us get away in the end.

Barnsley heaves me across the porch and frog-marches me towards a patrol car. ‘You fucked up once too often, Alston.'

‘How the hell did you know I was here?'

‘Gillis radioed you in.'

Well, what do you know? ‘The kid deserves a medal for looking out for me.' I glance over at Gillis and nod my thanks.

Gillis flips me the bird. ‘He wasn't looking out for you, you dumb fuck, he was looking out for us. We've got families. Mortgages. How could we get by without Mr. Roselli's help?' Gillis opens the back door of the squad car with a mocking bow. If he weren't in uniform, he would have mooned me. Barnsley slams me against the trunk of the squad car. ‘You're stepping on all the wrong toes, Alston. If you don't wise up, we're going to have to order you some custom shoes . . . '

‘Is this the part where I'm supposed to cry?' There is the stern wood of a nightstick cracked across my skull. I hear a noise like a branch snapping. Then my face is in the lawn. Ants riot down there in the Forest of the Great Green Blades. Hard hands hoist me up, potato-sack me into the car. My eyes sting with the hot salt of blood.

Robot voices invade my brain, the shriek and stutter of radio transmission wobbling through the shadows. Barnsley protests, spraying spittle in his fury. ‘ . . . The captain said what?' Barnsley throws something. It slams against the dash then recoils backwards like a Slinky, the radio mic bouncing on its curly cord. Static protests its violent treatment. Gillis glances back at us. ‘What is it, Sarge?'

‘Fucking Schiller!'

‘What'd he say?'

‘We have to go to El Monte . . . '

‘Why, Sarge?'

‘How the fuck do I know, it's an order.'

‘Nelson Archer . . .' My voice sounds like a radio signal from Mars. ‘66 Kenton, El Monte.' Then we must have passed through an asteroid belt, because all further transmission is lost . . .

B
eing in Dealey Plaza is almost like standing on the moon. Wondrous and impossible; foreign yet intimately remembered, as if stepping into a recurring dream. This is the terrain of history, and there is a sense of awe and disbelief. It's like visiting the Coliseum. But Ancient Rome is linked only by imagination. With Dealey Plaza, you have the Movie of the Week version of history.

Despite the change in dress and vehicles, there is something eerily timeless about the location. It is the closest I have ever felt to stepping into the past. It's not the tug of nostalgia or the allure of conservation; it is visceral. It creates a yearning to go back in time and stay there, to start over, to rediscover one's youth; to avoid all your mistakes and to live your life once more; to be young again, to go on living forever, starting here in this most famous of killing fields.

I take out my iPhone and begin the process of lining up my present with these images from yesteryear. I align myself with the trees and retaining wall; with the picket fence. This is the spot where the brake lights came on, just as the presidential limo was approaching the Grassy Knoll.

The Grassy Knoll.

A name that conjures up a children's picture book, not a brutal public killing. A more famous location than the Sea of Tranquillity yet further from our comprehension than any heavenly body.

The characters who have been captured around the mythic terrain of the Grassy Knoll have passed through conspiratorial analysis and the collective unconscious and entered into folklore.

There, standing on John Neely Bryan North Pergola—a name that teeters between Shakespearean grandeur and parochial pomposity—is the figure of Zapruder, imperious and aloof, watching the assassination like Zeus surveying the fall of Troy; a pagan idol about to receive blood offerings.

By the curbside in front of the Grassy Knoll is the famous Umbrella Man, who pumps an open black umbrella into the air just as the shots rain down, as the president is hit; as he clutches at his throat with that gesture of terrible despair. Locked forever in the bright autumnal sunshine and the brilliant tones of Kodachrome and memory, the very incongruity of the preposterous Umbrella Man signals an intense alarm, like a stranger suddenly taking the father's seat at the family dinner table.

In the Zapruder footage, JFK appears to look directly at the Umbrella Man just prior to being hit. In that fraction of a second did the president see an eccentric or an enemy? Or did he not even notice the black umbrella, that sinister intimation of the storm cloud that was about to envelop the nation?

The suggestion by some conspiracy advocates that the umbrella was an assassin's tool, shooting poison darts or ice flechettes at the president, is frankly ludicrous. And yet it points to an even greater absurdity. At that very moment, in the apply-named Fort Detrick government facility they were attempting to develop exactly those kinds of weapons. When you play with the devil, you get what you deserve: bacteriological aerosols; platinum-tipped darts; ice flechettes; entomological warfare.

Kennedy was not shot by an umbrella gun as he passed in his limo. But for half a century the nation was taken for a ride by the mad-scientist brolly brigade. Unauthorized vulnerability tests on the New York subway. Thousands of troops marched into atomic mushroom clouds or sprayed with Agent Orange. Shellfish toxin. Anthrax. Tularaemia and Sarin. This was the Cold War. A plague—including
the
Plague—on both your houses. Thousands of innocent civilians were cursed with contamination, used as unknowing guinea pigs in a host of experiments involving everything from the secret administration of LSD and nerve gas to medically-induced syphilis, hepatitis and cancer. Criminality and impunity triumphed. Human rights were trampled. Liability was ignored, blame denied, records destroyed.