THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE (41 page)

'It's constituents are available from most chemical supply houses and drug stores,' Goldman said. 'However, the proper sequence of cooking them, as I've detailed, is paramount.'

'Uh-huh,' Sorenson said with rising optimism.

'As the sole manufacturer of 7-21, you'd have complete control of the MPA market. Volume. Price. Everything.'

'Damn right.' Sorenson looked up sharply at Goldman. 'As long as
you
don't start making it, or worse still sell the formula to
someone else
.'

'Hey, Rick, you have my word.' Goldman paused and held out his hand. 'Heck, you and I know each other. Consider it a gentleman's agreement. As far as I'm concerned once I've sold you the formula, it's yours.'

'Sure, sure.' Sorenson stroked the two-day growth on his chin and reluctantly shook hands with Goldman. He glanced at Thirteen who nodded solemnly back. The leader of Fast Cash Boys smoked his Marlboro and seemed pleased to have Sorenson as a business partner. It wasn't hard to guess why. The money kept rolling in.

From what Goldman had heard Thirteen was keen to move up the food chain, to lock Fast Cash Boys into more lucrative revenue streams. The Black Scorpions had recently declared all-out-war if Sorenson's speed kept turning up in the neighbourhoods the gun-toting gang claimed to control. Thirteen was never one to back down from a threat, but knew just the same the amphetamine market was growing increasingly more hostile and complex. And now a perfect exit strategy had presented itself. Thirteen was confident Goldman's new drug would prove popular in the nightclub and dance party circuits. Hefty profits were bound to accrue. Best of all, the stuff wasn't even illegal.

Still Thirteen wasn’t treating the Black Scorpions' threat lightly. He had a handgun holstered under his suede jacket. His right-hand man Eighteen was similarly armed. The senior gang members didn't want to take any chances with feisty new punks out to prove themselves.

Of course Goldman hoped the Chicano gang wouldn't make good of their threat any time soon, most particularly this night. He already had too much was on his plate without a turf war thrown into the mix. He watched Sorenson light a cigarette and study the part of the formula outlining the isomerization of Sassafras oil.

He looked over at the L-shaped divan. A wide-eyed Holly sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, the most famous of Nazarenes a crumpled portrait on her top's front. She pressed her Cartier lighter on and off and half-heartedly watched a television game show. Beside her, Pamela also watched the show, but seemed from her comments to have a better grasp of the game show's rules. Goldman thought the homely Puerto Rican woman looked as much out of place in this rough and ready house as she did at the Subway Slaves concert.

On the far end of the divan Michelle and Trinda girled it up as they looked through one of Trinda's photo albums. With an opened bottle of champagne at their feet, the girls were in high spirits.

People playing cards. People watching television. People looking at photographs. Sorenson looking for a new way to make money. All normal enough, Goldman thought, but he felt uneasy. He put his disquiet down to the underlying criminality of the youths about him. And the ongoing tension with Eighteen who'd raised his hackles at Goldman from day one hardly helped matters, either. In any case, there seemed nothing for the renegade chemist to do but wait it out until Sorenson finished studying the formula, which knowing Sorenson's thoroughness could take an hour or more. Goldman exhaled heavily and sniffed his shirt sleeve.

'Jeez,' he openly remarked. 'I really reek from the cigarette smoke at the Slaves gig. Rock concerts make you smell so stale afterwards, and that damn warehouse had no ventilation. Yeah, I've never been a great fan of live performances, you know, the crowds, the smoke ...'

Sorenson looked up from the formula and said perfunctorily, 'Yeah, right,' before returning his attention to the page in hand. Thirteen stared as if hypnotized at the glowing tip of his cigarette. Seeing Goldman as the goose that had laid the golden egg, he said with a halfway hospitable air: 'Well if you're that worked up about it, you can shower upstairs. The downstairs shower's got no hot water.' He took a hefty drag on his Marlboro. 'Feel free. There's bound to be a fresh towel up there someplace.'

Goldman thought over the offer, and feeling bored (Sorenson was only quarter way through the formula), said with an awkward chuckle, 'Oddly enough, I just might take you up on the offer.'

Thirteen raised an eyebrow, lackadaisically, as if to say, I really don't give a shit. He spun round and flicked his cigarette into the room's empty fireplace, before staring at the rowdy card players behind him. Young runaway Aaron was remonstrative over the way Eighteen had laid off his last card.

Deuce stopped at the coffee table with the inquisitive look of a seasoned cop out on the beat. 'What the
fuck
do you want, Deuce?' Thirteen asked. Deuce looked over Sorenson's shoulder, trying to take in as much as he could of the chemical formula spread out on the coffee table.

'Hmm ... nothing,' Deuce replied. The long-haired youth couldn't help but read down the Xeroxed page in Sorenson's hand.

'Well, fuck off then,' Thirteen snarled. 'This is
our
business!'

Eighteen looked up from the other end of the room while reshuffling a worn deck of playing cards, his hard brown eyes focused on the standoff between Thirteen and Deuce. The dark-haired gang member then fixed his gaze on Goldman. His dislike of the Australian chemist hadn’t waned, and he wasn’t backward in showing it.

Yeah, and fuck you too, Goldman thought, staring back at him. The Fast Cash Boys lieutenant turned away with a contemptuous mumble and dealt a new round of cards at the table.

Thirteen glared at Deuce. 'I thought I told you to piss off?' With a recalcitrant air, the lanky youth pushed his round glasses up along his nose. He took his time moving away from the table, all the while his gaze lingered on the Xeroxed formula. The tension in the room pressed in on Goldman. He wished he was faraway from these felonious youths. How was it that years of education and honest work had lead him to this desperate moment?

Though his person and clothes were soiled from the smoky concert, underneath the epidermal layers of his skin he felt tainted in ways only a passage of seasons could cleanse (if indeed unhindered years stretched before him). Still a quick shower would invigorate him for the anticipated moment of grabbing a swag of cash from Sorenson and disappearing into the night. He vowed never to return to this house with its labyrinth of rooms and corridors, with its pall of undefined menace seeping from the walls – especially as Thirteen had provided him with a reliable contact for fake ID.

He got up from his seat. No one paid him attention as he headed for the staircase rising up behind Deuce's music and light system. He stopped behind Michelle and Trinda on the divan as they gossiped over a particular set of photographs, Trinda's Siamese cat, Scarlett, curled beside Michelle. The bottle of champagne at the girls' feet was empty, and Trinda's boisterous manner suggested she'd drunk more than her share of the bubbly beverage.

'That's Eighteen hugging Eddie Van Halen backstage in Dallas,' Trinda gushed proudly. 'And that's me outside after being bounced for groping David Lee Roth. Yeah, I'm tellin' ya, babe, it was one helluva concert!' The two women giggled with the spontaneity of old friends, which they weren't. 'Too much Southern Comfort and pot,' Trinda said with sheepish embarrassment.

'I'm going upstairs to take a shower.' Goldman dropped his hand on Michelle's shoulder. She looked up and smirked. 'A shower?' She looked at Trinda and snickered drunkenly. 'What a crazy Aussie!'

'Yeah, mate, he sure is,' Trinda said, in mimicry of Goldman's accent. The two women giggled again and Trinda lifted her hand to give Michelle a high-five, but stopped just short of it. Goldman glanced at Trinda's attractive bronze features, at her braided and beaded hair, at her shapely legs branched beneath the photo album.

He looked up. Eighteen was eyeballing him from across the room. Again no love was lost between them. None at all.

'Well, babe, go for it then,' Michelle said, in high spirits. She winked at Goldman and slapped his forearm. Trinda gawked at Goldman in a clowning manner, arching her eyebrows in expectation, waiting for him to make good of her new friend's suggestion. Goldman turned to Michelle and a dark feeling they would soon be swept apart, possibly forever, washed over him and rooted him to the spot. Not sharing his ominous sentiment, Michelle blew him a kiss and returned to Trinda's photo album.

Goldman knew he'd look like a dork if he stood there any longer, but he couldn't shake the foreboding that had overcome him. He forced himself up the stairs, the baleful feeling weighing him down like a knapsack full of rocks.

'That's skanky Sonya.' Trinda pointed at a photo of girl hugging a street lamp in a desperate struggle to stay upright. 'Girl, she was legless.' Trinda giggled and tapped the snapshot with her long-nailed finger. 'You should've seen her. She even offered to blow this security guard to get backstage at the Van Halen concert!'

'Oh deary me.' Michelle shook her head and touched her companion's slim chocolate hand. 'Look, I've got to go to the bathroom before I – '

'Of course, girl. It's third on the right down the hall.'

Michelle got up from the divan, waking Scarlett in the process. The pedigree cat yawned and stretched before nibbling the end of its crooked tail.

'Who's my favourite kitty, Scarlly-Warlly?' Trinda grabbed Scarlett and rubbed the animal's face against her cheek. 'You are, my precious sweetheart. You are.' She cradled the Birman Siamese cat in her arms and scratched its chin. 'Mummy lubbles you so much. Oh yes, she does ... oh yes, she does.' Scarlett could only purr from the lavish attention and Michelle could only clasp her mouth to stop laughing at Trinda's drunken display of affection towards the animal.

Michelle treaded along the carpeted hallway. She stopped at an open door and peered unknowingly into Eighteen and Trinda's bedroom. A bare bulb burned from the ceiling and discarded clothes were strewn about a carpet in dire need of a vacuum. A double mattress claimed much of the floor while an Iron Maiden poster hung askew on one wall. A concrete gargoyle Eighteen had wrenched from a cathedral roof one drunken night was perched against another wall, alongside a Marshall amplifier and a battered-looking electric guitar. Close by the doorway, a Royal typewriter rested on a graffiti-covered school desk. Michelle grabbed a typed sheet of paper from beside the typewriter:

la brea tar pits 

scenes flashed from bygone millennia, mastodons devouring, condors flapping and screeching, six hundred wolves sliding into a black pit, death again and again, heralding the mayhem and murder of dead loss angeles

A faint chill crept up Michelle's spine as she returned the poem. She remembered visiting the La Brea tar pits with her parents when she was a little girl: the bustling crowd of tourists and locals, the garrulous tour guide, the detailed signs explaining the pit's ancient history.

... heralding the mayhem and murder of dead loss angeles ...

The menacing words echoed inside her as she skipped into the bathroom, locking the door. Wind whistled under upper-floor eaves as she pushed her jeans down her thighs. She saw there was precious toilet tissue on the holder, and sighed with frustration. Nevertheless she grabbed some of the paper and cleaned the rim of the seat. She lowered herself onto the toilet, its stained chute a history of passage, her feet scrunching the car and surf magazines scattered about the floor.

She looked up. Startled eyes stared back at her from the full-length mirror on the back of the door. The bubbly high of the champagne had left her. A gritty sobriety in its place. She suddenly felt alone and unprotected. More than anything she wanted to return to the security of Sandy's Hollywood Hills home.

THIRTY

Ildefonso Carrasco tapped the steering wheel of his rented Oldsmobile sedan. He'd sat in the nondescript vehicle since early evening, and from his shadowy spot could see traffic going to and from the house he had under surveillance. A black Porsche had entered the grounds forty-five minutes earlier; not long after a gurgling yellow coupe pulled into the same driveway (from early-morning surveillance he knew these two cars belonged to the residents of the house). A new-model Datsun was the last car to arrive. Going by what he'd been told by Pelayo Guttierez, the sale of the drug formula was probably taking place.

It was time; he knew.

His hands were clammy, his heart racy. Still he was equal to the task. He was after all a proven professional who'd undertaken similar operations in Mexico, El Salvador, and in his home country, Cuba. He had a basic description of the man to be killed, as well as a head shot photo General Turner had copied from Silverwood Centre's personnel files. Once inside the house, finding his man would prove a simple process of elimination.

It was an important job; he knew.

Outside the boarding gate at Baltimore-Washington airport, Pelayo Guttierez had all but threatened to kill Carrasco if he bungled the operation. For some reason the DIA general was worked up over this one. For the sake of Commando C's long-standing relationship with General Turner, the stinking DGI
confrere
had to be killed. No, the urgency of the operation hadn't been lost on Carrasco. With Luis Ramirez's men for backup, he would make sure the hit went down without a hitch.

However the LA faction of Commando C was largely an undisciplined lot. Most of the men who'd broken away from Guttierez's command back east were once youths on Meyer Lansky's or Santo Trafficante's payroll in pre-Castro Havana. They'd helped in the everyday running of the powerful mobsters' sugar, casino and brothel empires. By contrast, Guttierez and his more senior fellows, like Carrasco (himself an ex-army sergeant), had been police and military officers in the pre-coup Batista government.