She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me (24 page)

Chapter 20

Alfonso was staring at me across the table at Ensenada on 16th Street off Valencia. That's more chic than saying 16th off Mission. He was thinking and thinking and not talking to me about Trenton or Alfie. In the two weeks since he'd been back, his son had been our main subject of nonconversation. If he wanted to talk, and when he wanted to talk, he would inform me.

What he wanted to say was something different. “Okay, so the man don't want to leave you be. He nagging and nagging at you, got a bug up his butt. I think he handing out what we in the law enforcement field call an opportunity. Will you listen? Ain't hard to 'splain at all. Why should he be the only one with a plan?”

I listened and after a while felt my head moving up and down. It meant I chose to follow the line Karim had in mind. You could say it was fate and my state of mind. I'd prefer your saying it was my choice.

“We get a free shot,” Alfonso said.

“I don't know if I like this.”

“He need you not just 'cause he treasure your funky soul, man. No encumberments, nolo encumbered, amigo. You clean so long, you like a fucking virgin to him.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Not to me. So we don't know if it's skag the man into or maybe he delivering some of that frisky dog kibble to the yup-pie pups on Chestnut Street, our good buddy Xavier help him out with that, or the gay clubs down on Folsom. They sure 'preciate that friskiness, don't they?”

I needed to take this in—“our good buddy Xavier”—without giving up too much in the way of surprise and off-balance behavior. “Don't like this.” But I could allow Alfonso a little peek. “Don't need Xavier playing stupid games with my wife.”

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” My buddy in his pigeon salesman mode stopped his rap to consider what I had just brought up, good bargaining, nice recovery. “I promise, word of faith, your wife—ex—don't know nothing about it. Listen up, pal. Even if she know—”

He had all my attention.

“—even if Xavier let her in just for the fun of it, she don't know, y'unnastan what I'm sayin'? She not gonna be implicated any way or form.”

“That's a commitment.”

“Even if she is, she isn't. Your friend the junkie doc, neither.” Since I wasn't responding, he looked at me tight and unfriendly and sincere. “Word, man.”

Shit, shit, shit was what I was thinking. In this spot a person gets down to basics:
Shit.
“Still doesn't feel good, Alfons.”

“Uh-huh.” He was relieved. He tossed me a bone. “Partake of entrapment, that kind of bother you?”

I tried to figure if Karim and Xavier were entrapping me. I was supposed to be snaring them. This wasn't my usual way of life, not the way my career was supposed to shape up, but then my life wasn't a usual way of life either, especially in recent times.

“I've got that bad-taste feeling.”

He brooded upon this. Matters of taste are hard to argue with. A man gets a bad taste, his pal really can't tell him it tastes good. It seemed that Xavier might want to do me harm, but on the other hand I had already done him a little harm. It seemed that Karim just wanted to enlist me as a soldier—well, low-ranking officer—in his enterprises. It seemed I needed a new and stupid path at this turn in my late middle age.

“Sometime,” Alfonso mentioned consolingly in that caramel rumble that served him well even when he was doing harm, “you deal with certain people, sometime you got to get down to certain people's level.”

“My own level isn't too good these days, Alfons.”

“That's an opinion you want to change eventually. You goin' do it?”

Karim didn't mention figures, how much I might walk away with. The police didn't mention reward, what was in it for me. It was as if I was just a good citizen for one, a good soldier for the other, a loose hire for everybody in sight. I was pretty sure the satisfaction I might feel about taking Xavier down wasn't going to cost him any lasting trouble; he and his lawyers would find deniability in ample amounts. I tried not to dwell on Priscilla's opinion, especially if she knew how Xavier was filling the idle hours in San Francisco. “Right. Right,” I said.

Having sold his encyclopedias, Alfonso now took a rest and measured his client for what conditions he could offer. “Uh-huh,” he said, just passing the time. Then: “You don't have to be wired. Clumsy like you are, probably you electrocute yourself on the battery. You just go along with him, I'll be there, the narc detail be there—”

I wondered how he knew the cops weren't under Karim's control.

“Man, you are suspicious. Trust me on this.”

That was always a recipe for disaster, wasn't it?
Trust me on this.

“If it's a delivery, we'll have people watching. If he got people watching, we'll have people watching the peoples. Just go along.”

“Why am I doing this, Alfonso?”

“You a loyal American. You want the reward money. You looking for
something.
”

“I don't like him threatening me.”

Alfonso heaved one of his juicy sighs. “Now you got it. I knew I give you a chance, you figure it out.”

“Okay, okay,” I said.

Alfonso just grinned. “Be interesting.”

“I said okay. Don't oversell.”

But for Alfonso and me, “interesting” was a factor not to be passed over at this wedge moment between our troubles. I wondered if my brother, who usually thought so intelligently about everything but his eating habits, was thinking up to par these days. The same question could be asked about me.

*   *   *

I also wondered if I was rectifying any personal rationality deficits as I drove past the Mission Dolores, where I remembered showing Priscilla grave markings one Saturday when the sun slanted over the walls where the tombstones stood in a garden that celebrated both the vigilantes who killed the men of violence and the men of violence who were hung by the men of peace, strung up with their bare feet tickled and teased by torches as they jerked and tried to climb up the ropes. It did the men of violence no good. The men of peace cheered, rubbed their hairy chins, and watched the men of violence bubble and cook.

I was on my way to tell Karim yes, I'd do one more job to see what it felt like and to meet a few bills; just one for now, just to see, with no permanent commitment.

On the wide boulevard a sidewalk sale was closing down. An offbooks merchant with drooping mustachios was loading his used Lawrence Welk LPs and his new
SKI CANCUN
T-shirts back into the Chevy station wagon. He had a face that expressed bearing up under the injustices done century by century and day by day to all part-Aztec peoples, plus traditional tribal confidence that someday, someplace, someone would surely need to complete a used polka repertory or funny T-shirt collection (skiers swooping down a beach around a sitting-up sleeper in a wide-brimmed tasseled sombrero). In the great spirit scheme of themes, sun-warped and scratched Lawrence Welk didn't sound any worse to him than any other Lawrence Welk.

I was uneasy about this visit to Karim. I drove slowly, trying to work matters through. Karim seemed to have convinced me, although I wasn't convinced. I turned out not to be as right about people as I thought I was: Priscilla, Xavier, Fred Weinberg, now Karim. I still believed in Alfonso. But did I really need to protect Priscilla with immunity if she had gotten into some stupid, profitable,
interesting
connection with Xavier? I didn't even know for sure, but I knew one thing about the lady. Having her best interests in my heart would be considered dire meddling. I was already a confirmed meddler of the dire kind. I put Dan Kasdan along with the others—Karim, Fred, Xavier, Priscilla, maybe even Alfonso when it all came out—in the category of folks who weren't what they seemed to be.

A bongo crew was working its goatskins in Dolores Park. The audience of men holding their beer cans, doing beer can isometrics, was drifting in front of the crew, sinking into wet grass, moving as if they had to pee but didn't want to break the rhythm by heading elsewhere. Some looked too blissful for mere bongos; they were deep into the day's ration of reindeer dust. Even from the street, trying to get clear in my own head, I could smell beer, stepped-on grass, marijuana.

Then, no matter how slowly I drove, Karim's house stood there on Guerrero, high and towered, with its wooden turrets, projections, and overhangs—jagged carpenter gothic decorations—a falcon perched on a branch near the gutter, red paint flaking from its beak; carved gargoyles with drool added later, probably a relic of communal flower-child squatting years ago. The driveway slanted steep in the sunlight. The house looked different today, its eyes blinded, shades pulled. I parked on the street (didn't want to be blocked), hurried out and up the steps. My right big toe hurt sometimes, a little arthritic; this was one of the times. I bounded up the slope, twinging at the toe but wanting to seem as young and agile as if I were really agile and young. I was sure someone was watching. It wasn't necessary to locate the shadow behind the curtains. Here in the Mission District, with its semitropical microclimate, the light of sun through palm trees made the neighborhood look like a Caribbean port, Port-au-Prince in a good decade.

Alfonso had changed his mind about the wire, but I refused to wear it. Alfonso and his buddies thought this was a mistake, but just shrugged and looked bored when I said I knew what I was doing. Most serious police errors come when a cop thinks he knows what he's doing. Well, I wasn't a member of any strike force.

Up the steep incline, set with stone, a rusty iron railing at the left side of the steps, I followed the rules and checked out the terrain. Karim wasn't left-handed as I could recall, but someone who built the house must have been. No guard rail on the right. There were no longer farms in the Mission District, but sudden heat smells of compost wafted under the high eucalyptus and skinny palm trees. Branches stirred and let things fall. There were flying motes of light, dusty eye glints, a cloud of insects in a dense shrub shifting and tumbling in the air. I had never seen so many fireflies lift off in a hovering heap. The filmy bugs reflected the sun; not real fireflies, which didn't exist in San Francisco. Chickens weren't supposed to exist in San Francisco either, but I was sure someone around here kept them, maybe for ceremonies in the back room of the Botanica at 20th and Valencia.

It seemed that Karim managed to import his own climate from someplace else. A coo of doves from a dovecote sounded like the pulsing of a heart, but more shrill. The falcon with the glaring pink eyes stared down at me as I knocked. Falcons don't float among palm trees. Wooden pink-eyed falcons don't float anyplace. This falcon with its painted eyes was rotting on its perch and one day would come crashing through the branches. All I wanted in the whole wide world was to get back what I had lost.

I knew Karim had seen me. I rapped on the door to give him the satisfaction of receiving a polite social call.
Okay, I've decided.
No panic, but apprehension is a normal safety mechanism.
Okay, just like everybody, I can find a use for money.

Karim opened.

Okay, in my abnormal way, I'm a normal person when it comes to wanting things, will you take that in?

Karim stepped smiling and nodding onto the porch. He closed the door behind him. It clicked hard shut. There was someone in the house he didn't want me to see.

I always want to say something nice to people when I can, so I thought about saying to Karim, What a lovely clump of hair you have in your right ear. Instead I said, “Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready now.”

He didn't seem in a hurry anymore. He was dressed in a dark pinstriped suit, with a vest and white shirt and a yellow tie, a Karim version of business-meeting attire. “You enjoy?” he asked, nodding at the falcon in the palm tree. “I'm planning external restoration, gardening plus, for my property. My bird will retain its character, I promise you—”

“Let's talk inside.”

“Good point, an excellent point, my friend.” He extended his arms in the gesture of all-this-is-mine. He was stalling. Then he opened the door to let me enter and I sniffed something familiar, a tang like mint and sweat and anxiety. This was an item of interest I should have worked out before now, because it would have been a helpful inclusion.

I was sure Karim's partner was upstairs.

“I'll do it,” I said. “I can use the helping hand money sometimes provides. One more job, okay?”

“Oh dear, when you see how uncomplicated, my friend, I am proof positive you will choose to continue—”

“Once,” I said.

Karim beamed down at me. How can a helping hand, once taken, be refused? “Within your powers, dear friend, to come to an intelligent judgment. Please take that chair, it's my favorite.”

Cologne left behind evaporated out into the heat of the room. No need for the man waiting upstairs to hide while we settled the preliminaries. Karim's associate in this business was that old acquaintance of mine, wearing something like Sportsman, For the Guy Who Knows From Regattas—the assiduous investor, manly scent-enthusiast, and sharer of feelings. It seemed he diversified both his love life and his investments, financing a little trade in go-fast powder. It seemed he liked bringing me into his deals, himself moving out of sight, not wanting to confuse me, while once again his vinaigrette wafted into the stirred-up, riled-up air.

I should have known Xavier wasn't just an Enrico's terrace acquaintance for Karim. As Priscilla assured me, in his lazy way Xavier liked to keep in touch—would she settle for less than a man with an edge? The gaslit tradition of Aulde San Francisco included the fragrance of both coffee processing and the opium trade.

Xavier, depths I hadn't wanted to allow him, just because I felt petty envy of his great teeth, long legs, lovely smile. And I gave myself an excuse for jealousy only because my wife was striving mightily to help him do what less-well-bred men often do on weekends, national holidays, idle afternoons, or just when there's a fine woman in the vicinity and the impulse strikes them both.