John Belushi Is Dead (31 page)

“He was sad,” I said, as if that explained everything, and Roberts looked at me like I was crazy. A maid came out with a mop and started to clean up the blood, swirling it in big, ineffective circles so it just smeared across the courtyard, and everyone went back into
their rooms. A sign was placed next to the pool saying it was closed for cleaning. The party in bungalow 3 went quiet. Benji had given everyone a hell of a show.

Johnson's cell phone started to ring. He scooped it out of his belt.

“Okay, thanks,” he said, and snapped it shut. “Your friend is going to be just fine,” he said. “The cuts are superficial. Nothing serious.”

Nothing serious. I didn't know if I was relieved or not.

“You want me to call someone for you?” Roberts asked.

“Could I use your phone?”

“Sure.”

I took his phone, dialed a number, and waited while the other end rang. The pool was once again deserted except for a couple of cops still lingering, and some guys from the party who were sitting by the pool, answering questions and looking miserable. Finally the phone picked up.

“What?”

“Hank?”

“Who else would it be?”

“Um, do you think I could come over?”

“It's sorta late, isn't it?”

“I just, um, need to talk to you.”

All that blood. All that blood running down Benji's arms.

“I need to talk to you, too,” Hank said.

“Why?”

“It's time.”

“Time?” I was still dazed. “Time for what?”

“Just hurry. Please.”

Hank had never said “please” in his life. I snapped the phone shut and handed it back to the officer. No, Hank. Not tonight. Not now.

“You need a ride?” the cop asked.

I shook my head.

“Suit yourself.”

I picked up my heels and ran through the foyer of the Chateau and down to the boulevard, bare feet hitting the hard pavement. I thrust my hand in the air to flag down a cab, and as we sped away I became aware of the flash of cameras and the paparazzi who had chased me down, convinced I was someone else.

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED AT
Hank's apartment, it looked like no one was home. The lights were off and the curtains drawn. Jake's were drawn also, but I could see the faint light of a reading lamp coming from behind the blinds. As I climbed the stairs I strained to hear the sound of Hank's television, constant and reassuring, but there was only silence. I crept toward the door, feet bare, heels still in hand. When I tried the doorknob it turned. Hank had left it unlocked for me. I opened it and padded inside.

I had to squint to see in the darkness. I saw a small sliver of light emanating from Hank's bedroom. I pushed the door open. Hank was lying in bed beneath the covers, his breathing shallow. Beside him on the bedside table was a lamp emitting a glow so dull and flat it barely illuminated his face.

I remembered the scene from
Apocalypse Now
when Martin Sheen confronts Marlon Brando at his compound in the jungle. All you can see is the top of Brando's head, bald and glistening, the rest of his body obscured by the darkness. At this moment I felt like
Martin Sheen in that movie, come to kill Brando while the natives dance outside. Brando had a hard life. His son Christian shot his own sister Cheyenne's boyfriend in Brando's living room in Beverly Hills. Christian was convicted of manslaughter and Cheyenne hanged herself at her mother's house in Tahiti. Everyone paid the price for the crime; everyone was punished.

All this raced through my mind as I watched Hank from the doorway. I wasn't even sure he'd heard me enter. His mouth was wide open and facing the ceiling. His eyes were closed. I was about to leave, thinking with relief that he had fallen asleep, when I heard his voice in the darkness.

“Sounds like you were having a fun night,” he said.

“I hope it's about to get better, but from the sounds of things, I don't like my chances.”

“Close the door. Did anyone see you come in?”

The single lamp gave the feeling of being inside a cave. “The CIA was trailing me for a while, but I gave the cabdriver a fiver to lose them.”

“This is no time for jokes.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, squinting to adjust to the light, and Hank sat up. He was a little skinny, but otherwise he appeared strong. As he pushed himself up on his arms, I could see the long, thin scars of his suicide attempt running up his wrists like reeds on a river bed and thought of Benji. The scars cut right through the blurred tattoo on his wrist, and I saw for the first time what the bandages at the hospital had been covering. In the middle of the tattoo the skin glistened wet and pink, looking infected. It was as though he had tried to cut it out.

“What's the crisis, Hank?”

He pointed to the wall, as if that explained everything. For the
first time in the darkness I noticed stacks of old newspapers sitting in the corner of the room, piled high. It dawned on me that the newspapers in the living room had never been thrown out, just moved into his bedroom.

“What do you know about vigilantes?” Hank asked.

“That's a hell of a fire hazard, Hank. You drop a lit cigarette and this place would go up like the Wicker Man.”

“Not a bad idea. Fire would be clean, leave no trace.”

“What do you mean, vigilantes?”

“What do you know?”

“I don't know a thing.”

“You know a lot of things about a lot of pretty screwy stuff.”

“If by vigilantes you mean people taking the law into their own hands, can't say I've met many. Are you trying to tell me you're Batman?”

“I'm not the hunter, Hilda. I'm the hunted.”

“No, you're a paranoid old man. By the way, if you think people are out to get you, you shouldn't leave the front door unlocked.”

“It doesn't matter now.”

I smoothed down his bedcover, tucked in the corners. “Well you seem perfectly fine to me, apart from the obvious dementia, so if you're looking for someone to stick a pillow over your face, you'll have to find somebody else. Try Jake. He'd probably find killing you therapeutic.”

“Shut your yapper and get me one of those newspapers,” he said, pointing to the corner of the room.

“Can't we turn on a light or something?”

“No lights. Just the newspaper.”

“Fine,” I said as I stood, “but if I trip and fall, I'm suing your ass.”

I walked over to the towering pile of newspapers, stumbling on an empty beer bottle as I went. “Now I'm more scared of being crushed to death,” I said, looking at the mountain of newsprint in front of me. “Which one?”

“Christ, the one on the ground. Do I have to draw you a map?”

I bent down and picked up a newspaper off the floor, separate from the others. It was the
Los Angeles Times
from last Saturday. The headline was about a spate of carjackings in Long Beach. I threw it to Hank like it was a Frisbee. He rustled through the first few pages, found what he was looking for.

“There,” he said, jabbing at the article so forcefully he nearly poked a hole through it. I snatched the paper back, scanned the article.

“JWA in the US?” I read. “What are they? Your favorite band or something?”

“Justice War Alliance,” he said in a hushed voice.

“You mean like the Justice League of America? Is Superman their leader, too?”

Hank's eyes dropped, drifting to something invisible on the bedspread, but I could tell he was just avoiding my gaze. I looked at the article again, reading more closely. Apparently some group calling themselves the JWA had been hunting down war criminals since the fifties and dispensing their own special brand of justice. On first reading it sounded like something from the TV show
Get Smart
, about a vigilante organization executing Indian burns and wedgies on the bad guys. But Hank was taking this very seriously. I could feel him watching me as I read the article, waiting for my reaction. I looked at him, my face blank, and I could see his disappointment.
He'd been hoping this was the moment when all his ramblings and his failed suicide attempt finally made sense, but I was only more confused. I put the paper down on the bed but kept looking at it, not wanting to look at him.

“So what?” I said. “Sounds like an urban legend to me. Anyway, what's it got to do with you?”

“I've read the paper every day for nearly fifty years, looking for any mention of them. Last week a German was taken out on the freeway with a sniper rifle. The car crashed into a wall and when the cops dragged the guy from the wreckage they saw they had a goddamn homicide on their hands. They'd blown this guy's brains all over his windshield. I know it was them.”

“Do you know what this guy did? Why the JWA were supposedly after him?”

“He threw people against electric fences at the camps. To see what would happen.”

“So he got what was coming to him.”

“Some might say.”

“Is this why you're hiding out in here? Because you think some vigilante group is hunting you down? You're a Holocaust survivor, for Christ's sake!”

Hank scratched at his arm. His nails were jagged and cut into his tender skin, causing blood to rise to the surface. “I was only eight when I went into the camp. I wasn't a Jew, or a homo, or even a Gypsy. I didn't have to be there. You know why I was there?”

I sat down on the edge of the bed, shook my head.

“I was there because I was a stupid son of a bitch. Threw stones at the Nazis as they goose-stepped into town. I still remember braining one. Four of them chased me down into an alleyway,
picked me up, and dragged me off. Threw me on the back of the wagon with the rest of them. No one saw it happen, and if they did, I guess they couldn't have done anything anyways. I didn't even get to say good-bye to my parents.”

“That was brave, Hank,” I said. I imagined a valiant young boy taking up arms against the invading forces, striking a blow while the adults were too complacent and scared to retaliate. Hank just laughed.

“Brave, hell. I was just a little shit. Threw rocks at everything in those days. I'd had my ass beat just days before for throwing stones at the Hooper shopwindow.”

“Why doesn't that surprise me?”

“Remember this ain't no movie, Hilda. This ain't no
Schindler's List
.”

“Obviously.”

“Sometimes your life can turn on a dime just for some stupid shit you done. I get taken from my family because I'm a stupid, shithead kid who doesn't know any better. I didn't deserve to be there. That's how I felt anyway. I wasn't part of the grand plan; I was just collateral damage. It made me angry. But not at the Nazis, no way. I was angry at the people in the camp. The other kids. The ones who were
meant
to be there. I kept away from them, sat on my own, ate with my back turned to them. I wanted to show that I was different, that it had all been a stupid mistake, and I wanted the guards to see that. They'd let me out and I could go back to my parents, but it didn't happen. Days and weeks and months passed and still I was there. Soon I forgot what my parents even looked like.”

I didn't know what to say. I felt frozen to my spot on the bed, wanting to run away but desperately wanting to know the truth.
All of Benji's horrible predictions about Hank seemed to be coming true, as did all of Jake's warnings. I tried to imagine what it was like for a boy in that situation, how he would feel, what he might do to survive.

“At first it wasn't so bad, all things considered. We got three squares a day and they put us to work. As the war dragged on, things started to deteriorate. That's when people started to disappear in the middle of the night. The guards made us fight for food. We'd stand in circles and kick the living shit out of one another, just to get a scrap of bread. I was a pretty good fighter, but it was tiring. There was more food to go around when kids just disappeared. Poof!”

Hank threw his hands up like he was a magician dispensing of a rabbit in midair.

“Because I was quiet, and a loner, the other kids didn't pay much attention to me. They didn't know I was watching them. Didn't know I was
plotting
against them. Like some stinking, slimy sewer rat. Like the worst kind of dog.”

I put my hand on his. “You were a kid,” I started to say, but Hank cut me off, shaking his hand free.

“Kids are cruel—is that what you're going to say? Kids do the darndest things? I know what I was. I knew right from wrong.”

“No, you didn't. You were a child in a
concentration camp
. How the hell would you know the difference between right and wrong? A whole country didn't know the difference!”

The light in the room dimmed a little, the bulb of the lamp running out. It was as if all the energy in the room was being sucked out by every word Hank said, as if the planet were growing darker just for us.

“I started to watch them,” he continued. “Listen to their conversations. Some of them were planning an escape. A girl called Mary, her brother, Eli, and some other kid. They were always whispering in corners, hiding behind their hands. They were going to try to squeeze through the fence at night. I told the guards.”

He looked at me for a response. I stared at the bedspread. There were oil stains and smears of blood from where his cuts were healing.

“Mary, Eli, and that other kid—they disappeared. The guards said I had done well. I got extra scraps of food and was allowed to take breaks while everyone else worked. It was a damn sweet deal. I started thinking about what else I could tell them. I spied on people. Looked for anything that would be worthwhile to tell. If some kid stashed a crust of bread beneath his pillow for later, I made damn sure those guards found out about it, and the crusts became mine. But sometimes there was nothing to tell. Sometimes I had to make shit up. I got more crusts. More kids disappeared.”