Shalimar the Clown (45 page)

W
hat was justice, the old ladies chorused, the toothless old ladies from Croatia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, the widows in their dark cassocks swaying in slow unison with Olga Volga the house super naked at their head, grinding her hips, rotating her lumpy white body like a giant peeled potato, there was no justice, the women keened, your husbands died, your children abandoned you, your fathers were murdered, there was no justice but revenge.

After a while India Ophuls didn’t even have to be asleep to see the dream, it came to her whenever she closed her eyes, whenever she sat stiff-backed in a Shaker chair in her little vestibule, waiting for whatever she was waiting for. When she saw the gossipy old ladies in the corridors now she immediately pictured them dressed in cassocks and when she ran into Olga Simeonovna she imagined her without her clothes on, which made an intimacy between them. The former Astrakhani sorceress had taken the grief-distracted younger woman under her

wing, becoming her newest surrogate mother, tidying her apartment for her while she stared silently into space, and cooking her thick-gravied meat stews with dumplings and potatoes, or potato soup, or, when time was short, getting organic vegeburgers and Ore-Ida french fries out of the freezer. She was putting potatoes to work in other, more occult ways as well. The manhunt for Shalimar the assassin was coming up empty, infuriating Olga. “The LAPD, excuse me, they couldn’t catch a cold in a Russian draft,” she said contemptuously. “But by the power of potato magic we will haul in that asshole’s ass.”

In a distant part of her consciousness India knew that she was filling the hole in Olga Simeonovna’s heart left behind by the two departed daughters whose names she never spoke, the twin sisters who had offended against their mother’s moral code by posing for saucy pictures and developing an innuendo-rich blond bombshell sister act to go with them, and who were probably languishing now in some Vegas flea pit or worse, some Howard Johnson hell of multiple ruinations, their noses ruined by drug habits, their mouths and breasts ruined by cheap plastic surgery gone wrong, their finances ruined by the managers slash husbands who ran off with such pathetic assets as they had managed to amass. They had dropped off the map, probably too ashamed to come home and face the mother who daily cursed their names but in whose ample bosom they might nevertheless find redemption, or, at least, themselves.

People were moving out of the building in a hurry, and some of the remaining tenants had suggested unkindly that India should be the one to move, that she was putting them all in danger by staying. Olga reacted to these suggestions with unconcealed maternal fury. “They say me it once, maybe, if they dare,” she told India, bridling, “but, I swear, they don’t gonna say me it twice.” There was a large sign outside the apartment building advertising vacancies but blood takes time to wash away. The arrest, or, to use his preferred word, the word his lawyer used, the
surrender
of Mr. Khadaffy Andang had spooked many residents already rendered fearful by the murder on their doorstep, the, to use a word that had appeared in the newspaper,
execution.
The word
sleeper
was frightening. “All that time I thought he was only waiting for his wife,” Olga Simeonovna marveled in her dark apartment with postcards of Roublev icons and travel agency posters of the Caspian Sea pinned to the wall, pouring India many cups of dark tea—the cups were glasses, really, glass receptacles held in beaten-metal frames—and sighing a deep, Caspian sigh. “Turns out he was a bad guy in spite of his silk dressing-gowns. Asleep, like Rip Van Winkle, but gone over to the Dark Side.” Mr. Khadaffy Andang had shouted up at India as she stood on her balcony and watched his last shuffling exit, his hands cuffed behind his back, the burly LAPD officers ungentle all around him, the street ablaze with the flashing lights of police cars and journalists’ cameras, the air full of megaphoned orders and microphoned reports,
everybody go inside,
but she stayed on her balcony with her arms crossed over her heart, with her hands hugging her shoulders, not caring about the upturned snouts of the cameras in the street, looking at the police operation, the white vans of the information media with the uplink dishes on their roofs, the police snipers on the building across the road, the crime reporters filing copy, the pool photographers taking her picture; and because she was out there, floating above the event, feeling a little crazy, she heard what Mr. Khadaffy Andang shouted out, twisting himself around and looking right at her just before a police officer put a hood over his head,
I don’t buzz him in, Miss India,
he shouted.
Miss India, he want me to buzz him but I don’t buzz.

She guessed then that Mr. Khadaffy Andang might have surrendered in part on her account, partly because he had chatted to her in the laundry room and she had listened to his tales of his homeland and he didn’t want her blood on his hands, but probably also because he was just a silver-haired cuckolded old gent nowadays, a loser with a fondness for silk who might have agreed to be a sleeper years ago but who never expected to “awake,” and he just wanted out of the sleeper business, because it scared him, too.

After that she accepted she was possibly in danger herself, just as the police officers had told her she was, she knew she should move out in spite of her obstinate desire to stick around here just to spite her cowardly neighbors,
Maybe a few weeks with a family member or friend,
the police officers suggested,
you could use the emotional support,
she was her father’s only heir, the lawyers told her, all of it came to her, starting with the big house on Mulholland Drive, fully staffed, with all the latest high-security equipment and twenty-four-hour Jerome security, all the codes had already been changed, procedures reviewed, and personnel numbers would be augmented if she moved in, so Shalimar’s inside knowledge of the property, of security configurations and staffing levels, wouldn’t help him. But she wasn’t ready to move back, to live up there on the skyway again, to step into her dead father’s outsized shoes and sleep in his bed and go through the papers in his mahogany-paneled study, she wasn’t ready for the smell of his cologne or the secrets in his safe, so she stayed on in her apartment and found herself thinking that if the killer showed up to finish the job she really didn’t care, let him come, she might even welcome him in.

The world does not stop but cruelly continues, the widows chorused in the hallways. At a time of tragedy you wonder at it, the world’s capacity for continuing. When our husbands left us we expected the planet to cease its spinning so we could all float off into space, we expected silence, respect, but the traffic doesn’t care what the heart needs, the billboards don’t care, things move right along. There’s a new giant lady holding a golden beer bottle up near the Château. There’s a new place a mile east, women dance on the bar while the smart kids howl with lust. Lust continues, sure it does, honey, power continues, bargains are struck, hands are shaken and arms are twisted, winners and losers continue, honey, dog walking continues, right on our block the dogs walk past the scene of the crime every morning, dogs don’t care, they move on. The new horror movies open every Friday, business is business, and real-life horror continues too, here it is on TV, the unexplained sacrifice of goats at the Hollywood Bowl in the middle of the night, the discovery in the morning of maybe forty stinking carcasses and the blood, all that congealing blood, craziness continues, black magic continues, the darkness never ends. Clothes are on sale all around. Clothes go on, also goes on the hunger of the citizens and the relief of hunger. There is fine pizza to be had. Valet parking continues. The stars come out to play. A woman’s father dies, she mourns alone. His death is already old news.

After her father died she sat on the Shaker chair in the vestibule of her apartment, for how long, an hour, a year, looking straight ahead, seeing nothing, while in the corridors and by the courtyard pool the old ladies gossiped and on the sidewalk the “guy community” of whom Olga Volga idly and not ill-naturedly complained came to scope out the scene of the crime, the guy gym rats, the guy girls in the haircut business, the guy Hispanic builders whose work a block away was never done, the guy Emperor of Ice Cream who woke the street up every morning when he reversed his van out of its parking bay, its tinkling ice-cream melodies turned up high like a mechanical dawn chorus or his empire’s national anthem. The (straight) young man who wanted to marry India had climbed across onto her balcony from the apartment next door and hammered on her sliding glass doors but he was an irrelevance now, she was done with him, he didn’t even have a name, and what did he think he was doing hammering like that out there, what was she supposed to do,
open up and put out?
but that was disgusting, this was no time for sex.

Where was justice? Shouldn’t justice be done? Where were the forces of justice, where was the Justice League, why weren’t superheroes swooping down out of the sky to bring her father’s murderer to justice? But she didn’t want the Justice League, really, those goody-goodies in their weird suits, she wanted the Revenge League, she wanted dark superheroes, hard men who wouldn’t meekly hand the killer over to the authorities, who would gladly kill the bastard, who would shoot him down like a dog, or like wild dogs themselves tear him to bloody bits, who would take his life from him slowly and with pain. She wanted avenging angels, angels of death and damnation, to come to her aid. Blood called out for blood and she wanted the ancient Furies to descend shrieking from the sky and give her father’s unquiet spirit peace. She didn’t know what she wanted. She was full of thoughts of death.

We don’t fully understand his motivation, Ms. Ophuls, it looks political at this point, your father served his country in some hot zones, he swam for America through some pretty muddy water, yes ma’am, and the assassin’s a pro, no doubt. Used to be the case that they didn’t make war on women and children, it was kind of a code-of-honor thing, the target was the target and you got no points in heaven for killing kids or spouses. But things are rougher now, some of these guys aren’t so squeamish anymore, and in this case there’s some stuff we don’t understand yet, we have some blanks to fill in, so we’ve got to have a degree of concern, ma’am, we respect your feelings but we want to get you to a secure location.

Stern men offered her stiff-backed police-officer comfort and advice, some of them
—all
of them—secretly wanting to offer comfort of a more personal, informal kind: uniformed police officers and plainclothesmen from previously-unknown-to-her counterterrorist outfits, hunting for answers and issuing disgraceful interim warnings.
You owe it to the neighborhood.
They were siding with the jumpy residents. This wasn’t right. She was an innocent woman. She owed nobody anything and to suggest otherwise was ugly. It was, gentlemen,
unattractive.
She imagined the circling officers in oiled
Full Monty
undress, wearing police hats and studded leather posing pouches with their badges pinned on the front, imagined them swarming around her seated body, caressing her without touching her, and placing, against her unsurprised cheek, their cold, long-barreled guns. She imagined them in white tie and tails, soft-shoe shuffling
—gumshoe
shuffling—or tap-dancing with top hats and canes, imagined herself a ginger to their freds, being tossed lightly about from hand to manly hand. She imagined them as a second chorus to go with the cassocked gossips. Her thoughts were acting up, she couldn’t help it. She was a little crazy right now.

After a further while—a week, or a decade—she picked up her golden bow and drove to Elysian Park and rained arrows on a target hour after hour. She opened the little wall-safe where she kept her firearms and drove the DeLorean, her father’s absurd last gift to her, into the desert for a weekend at Saltzman’s range. She taped her hands and booked ring time at Jimmy Fish, where the other boxers watched her with the deferential respect accorded to those wearing the numinous mantle of tragedy, with the religious adoration accorded to those who have had their picture on TV and in
People
magazine as well. They looked like the citizens of Mycenae scrutinizing their grief-maddened queen after her daughter had been sacrificed, Iphigenia offered to the gods by Agamemnon to summon up a wind to blow his fleet to Troy. She felt like Clytemnestra, cold, patient, capable of anything. She went back to her Wing Chun master to practice her close combat skills and he spoke appreciatively of the new venom of her forehand smash. (Her defensive weaknesses, however, continued to be a concern.) She couldn’t sleep until she was physically exhausted and when she finally slept she dreamed of circling choruses. Her younger self was being reborn in her. She went out by herself at night looking for trouble and once, twice, had rough sex with strangers in anonymous rooms and came home with dried blood under her fingernails. She showered and went back to Elysian Park, to Santa Monica and Vine, to 29 Palms. Her arrows hissed into the heart of the target. Her handgun shooting, never of the highest quality, always a tad wild, grew a little more accurate. In Fish’s boxing ring she ordered her instructor to glove up, to put down the pads he wore on his hands, the flat pads she was supposed to hit without being at risk of being hit back. That was bullshit, she told him. She wasn’t showing up for exercise anymore. She was showing up to fight.

She had been planning a documentary feature called
Camino Real,
the Discovery Channel had been this close to green-lighting it. The idea was to examine the contemporary life of California by following the trail of the first European land expedition, from San Diego to San Francisco, an expedition led by Captain Gaspar de Portola and Captain Fernando de Rivera y Moncada, whose diarist had been Fray Juan Crespi, the same Franciscan priest who named Santa Monica after the tears of St. Augustine’s mother, and who, for good measure, named L.A. as well. She hadn’t thought of the historical angle as much more than a hook, she wasn’t really interested in the twenty-one Franciscan missions established along the trail, because the now stuff was what she was after, the changing gang culture of the barrios, the trailer-park families in the shadow of the freeways, the swarming immigrant armies that fed the housing boom, the new pleasantvilles being built in the firetrap canyons to house the middle-class arrivistes, the less-pleasantvilles in the thick of the urban sprawl filling up with the Koreans, the Indians, the illegals; she wanted the dirty underbelly of paradise, the broken harp-strings, the cracked haloes, the narcotic bliss, the human bloat, the truth. Then her father died and she stopped working on the film and sat on her Shaker chair and got up and went out and shot arrows and bullets and worked the punchball and tangled with her martial arts teacher and fucked strangers once each and drew blood and came home to shower and what she kept thinking was where are the angels, where were they when he needed them, the truth being that there weren’t any, no winged marvels keeping watch over the City of Angels. No guardian spirits to save her father. Where were the goddamned angels when he died.