Sole Survivor

‘Alone?’ Fittich asked, puzzled.

‘You’ve got the whole purchase price there on the desk,’ Joe said. From his wallet, he withdrew his driver’s license and handed it to Fittich. ‘I see you have a Xerox. Make a copy of my license.’

The guy at the bus-stop was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and slacks, and he wasn’t carrying anything. Therefore, he wasn’t equipped with a high-power, long-range listening device; he was just keeping watch.

Fittich followed the direction of Joe’s gaze and said, ‘What trouble am I getting into here?’

Joe met the salesman’s eyes. ‘None. You’re clear. You’re just doing business.’

‘Why’s that fella at the bus stop interest you?’

‘He doesn’t. He’s just a guy.’

Fittich wasn’t deceived. ‘If what’s actually happening here is a purchase, not just a test drive, then there’re state forms we have to fill out, sales tax to be collected, legal procedures.’

‘But it’s just a test drive,’ Joe said.

He checked his wristwatch. He wasn’t pretending to be worried about the hour now; he was genuinely concerned.

‘All right, look, Mr. Fittich, no more bullshit. I don’t have time. This is going to be even better for you than a sale, because here’s what’s going to happen. You take that money and stick it in the back of a desk drawer. Nobody ever has to know I gave it to you. I’ll drive the Suburu to where I have to go, which is only someplace on the West Side. I’d take my own car, but they’ve got a tracking device on it, and I don’t want to be followed. I’ll abandon the Suburu in a safe area and call you by tomorrow to let you know where it is. You bring it back, and all that’s happened is you’ve rented your cheapest car for one day for two thousand Bucks tax free. The worst that happens is I don’t call. You’ve still got the money — and a theft write-off.’

Fittich turned the driver’s license over and over in his hand. ‘Is somebody going to ask me why I’d let you make a test drive alone even with a copy of your license?’

‘The guy looked honest to me,’ Joe said, feeding Fittich the lines he could use. ‘It was his picture on the license. And I just couldn’t leave, ‘cause I expected a call from a hot prospect who came in earlier and might buy the best piece of iron I have on the lot. Didn’t want to risk missing that call.’

‘You got it all figured out,’ Fittich said.

His manner changed. The easy-going, smiley-faced salesman was a chrysalis from which another Gem Fittich was emerging, a version with more angles and harder edges.

He stepped to the Xerox and switched it on.

Nevertheless, Joe sensed that Fittich had not yet made up his mind. ‘The fact is, Mr. Fittich, even if they come in here and ask you some questions, there’s nothing they could do to you — and nothing they’d want to bother doing.’

‘You in the drug trade?’ Fittich asked bluntly.

‘No.’

“Cause I hate people who sell drugs.’

‘I do too.’

‘Ruining our kids, ruining what’s left of our country.’

‘I couldn’t agree more.’

‘Not that there is much left.’ Fittich glanced through the window at the man at the bus stop. ‘They cops?’

‘Not really.'

“Cause I support the cops. They got a hard job these days, trying to uphold the law when the biggest criminals are some of our own elected officials.’

Joe shook his head. ‘These aren’t any kind of cops you’ve ever heard of.’

Fittich thought for a while, and then he said, ‘That was an honest answer.’

‘I’m being as truthful with you as I can be. But I’m in a hurry.

They probably think I’m in here to call a mechanic or a tow truck or something. If I’m going to get that Suburu, I want it to be now, before they maybe tumble to what I’m really doing.’

After glancing at the window and the bus stop across the street, Fittich said, ‘They government?’

‘For all intents and purposes — yeah.’

‘You know why the drug problem just grows?’ Fittich said. ‘It’s because half this current group of politicians, they’ve been paid off to let it happen and, hell, a bunch of the bastards are even users themselves, so they don’t care.’

Joe said nothing, for fear that he would say the wrong thing. He didn’t know the cause of Fittich’s anger with authority. He could easily misspeak and be viewed suddenly as not a like-thinker but as one of the enemy.

Frowning, Gem Fittich made a Xerox copy of the driver’s license. He returned the laminated card to Joe, who put it away in his wallet.

At the desk again, Fittich stared at the money. He seemed to be disturbed about cooperating — not because he was worried about getting in trouble but because the moral dimension, in fact, was of concern to him. Finally he sighed, opened a drawer, and slid the two thousand into it.

From another drawer, he withdrew a set of keys and handed them to Joe.

Taking them gratefully, Joe said, ‘Where is it?’

Fittich pointed at the car through the window. ‘Half an hour, I probably got to call the cops and report it stolen, just to cover myself.’

‘I understand. With luck, I’ll be where I’m going by then.’

‘Hell, don’t worry, they won’t even look for it anyway. You could use it a week and never get nailed.’

‘I will call you, Mr. Fittich, and tell you exactly where I left it.’

‘I expect you will.’ As Joe reached the open door, Fittich said, ‘Mr. Carpenter, do you believe in the end of all things?’

Joe paused on the threshold. ‘Excuse me?’

The Gem Fittich who had emerged from the chrysalis of the cheerful salesman was not merely harder edged and edgier; he also had peculiar eyes — eyes different from what they had been, full of not anger but an unnerving pensiveness. ‘The end of time in our time, the end of this mess of a world we’ve made, all of it just suddenly rolled up and put away like an old moth-eaten rug.’

‘I suppose it’s got to end some day,’ Joe said.

‘Not some day. Soon. Doesn’t it seem to you that wrong and right have all got turned upside down, that we don’t even half know the difference any more?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and feel it coming? Like a tidal wave a thousand miles high, hanging over us, darker than the night and cold, going to crash over us and sweep us all away?’

‘Yes,’ Joe said softly and truthfully. ‘Yes, I’ve often felt just that in the middle of the night.’

The tsunami looming over Joe in dark hours was of an entirely personal nature, however: the loss of his family, towering so high that it blocked the stars and prevented him from seeing the future. He had often longed to be swept away by it.

He sensed that Fittich, sunk in some deep moral weariness, also longed for a delivering apocalypse. Joe was disquieted and surprised to discover he shared this melancholy with the car salesman.

The discovery disturbed him, because this expectation that the end of all things loomed was profoundly dysfunctional and anti­social, an illness from which he himself was only beginning to recover with great difficulty, and he feared for a society in which such gloom was widespread.

‘Strange times,’ Fittich said, as Joe had said weird times to Barbara a short while ago. ‘They scare me.’ He went to his chair, put his feet on the desk, and stared at the ball game on television. ‘Better go now.’

With the flesh on the nape of his neck as crinkled as crepe paper, Joe walked outside to the yellow Suburu.

Across the street, the man at the bus stop looked impatiently left and right, as though disgruntled about the unreliability of public transportation.

The engine of the Suburu turned over at once, but it sounded tinny. The steering wheel vibrated slightly. The upholstery was worn, and pine-fragrant solvents didn’t quite mask the sour scent of cigarette smoke that over the years had saturated the vinyl and the carpet.

Without looking at the man in the bus-stop shelter, Joe drove out of the lot. He turned right and headed up the street past his abandoned Honda.

The pickup with the camper shell was still parked in front of the untenanted industrial building.

When Joe reached the intersection just past the camper truck, there was no cross traffic. He slowed, did not come to a full stop, and instead put his foot down heavily on the accelerator.

In the rear-view mirror, he saw the man from the bus stop hurrying toward the camper, which was already backing into the street. Without the transponder to guide them, they would have to maintain visual contact and risk following him close enough to blow their cover — which they thought they still enjoyed.

Within four miles Joe lost them at a major intersection when he sped through a yellow traffic signal that was changing to red. When the camper tried to follow him, it was thwarted by the surging cross-traffic. Even over the whine and rattle of the Suburu engine, he heard the sharp bark of their brakes as they slid to a halt inches short of a collision.

Twenty minutes later he abandoned the Suburu on Hilgarde Street near the UCLA campus, as far as he dared from the address where he was to meet Demi. He walked fast to Westwood Boulevard, trying not to break into a run and draw attention to himself.

Not long ago Westwood Village had been an island of quaint charm in the more turbulent sea of the city around it, a mecca for shoppers and theatregoers. Midst some of the most inter­esting small-scale architecture of any Los Angeles commercial district and along the tree-lined streets had thrived trendy clothing stores, galleries, restaurants, prosperous theatres featuring the lat­est cutting-edge dramas and comedies, and popular movie houses. It was a place to have fun, people-watch, and be seen.

Then, during a time when the city’s ruling elite was in one of its periodic moods to view certain forms of sociopathic behaviour as a legitimate protest, vagrancy increased, gang members began to loiter in groups, and open drug dealing commenced. A few shootings occurred in turf disputes, and many of the fun lovers and shoppers decided that the scene was too colourful and that to be seen here was to be marked as a victim.

Now Westwood was struggling back from the precipice. The streets were safer than they had been for a while. Many shops and galleries had closed, however, and new businesses had not moved into all of the empty storefronts. The lingering atmosphere of despair might take years to dissipate entirely. Built at the solemn pace of coral reefs, civilization could be destroyed with frightening swiftness, even by a blast of good intentions, and all that was lost could be regained, if ever, only with determination.

The gourmet coffee house was busy. From the open door came the delicious aromas of several exotic brews and the music of a lone guitarist playing a New Age tune that was mellow and relaxing though filled with tediously repetitive chords.

Joe intended to scout the meeting place from across the street and farther along the block, but he arrived too late to do so. At two minutes past six o’clock, he stood outside of the coffee house as instructed, to the right of the entrance, and waited to be contacted.

Over the noise of the street traffic and the guitar, he heard a soft tuneless jangling-tinkling. The sound instantly alarmed him for reasons he could not explain, and he looked around nervously for the source.

Above the door were wind chimes crafted from at least twenty spoons of various sizes and materials. They clinked together in the light breeze.

Like a mischievous childhood playmate, memory taunted him from hiding place after hiding place in a deep garden of the past dappled by light and shadow. Then suddenly he recalled the ceiling-mounted rack of copper pots and pans in the Delmanns’ kitchen.

Returning from Charlie Delmann’s bedroom, in answer to Lisa’s scream, Joe had heard the cookware clinking and softly clanging as he had hurried along the downstairs hall. Coming through the door into the kitchen, he saw the pots and pans swinging like pendulums from their hooks.

By the time he reached Lisa and saw Georgine’s corpse on the floor, the cookware had settled into silence. But what set those items in motion in the first place? Lisa and Georgine were at the far end of the long room, nowhere near the dangling pots.

Like the flashing green numbers on the digital clock at Charlie Delmann’s bedside, like the swelling of flames in the three oil lamps on the kitchen table, this coppery music was important.

He felt as though a hard rap of insight was about to crack the egg of his ignorance, letting spill a golden liquid understanding.

Holding his breath, mentally reaching for the elusive connection that would make sense of these things, Joe realized that the shell-cracking insight was receding. He strained to bring it back. Then, maddeningly, it was gone.

Perhaps none of these things was important: not the oil lamps, not the digital clock, not the jangling cookware. In a world viewed through lenses of paranoia — a pair of distorting spectacles that he had been wearing with good reason for the past day and a half —every falling leaf, every whisper of wind, and every fretwork of shadows was invested with a portentous meaning that, in reality, it did not possess. He was not merely a neutral observer, not merely a reporter this time, but a victim, central to his own story, so maybe he could not trust his journalistic instincts when he saw significance in these small, if admittedly strange, details.

Along the sidewalk came a tall black kid, college age, wearing shorts and a UCLA T-shirt, gliding on Rollerblades. Joe, puzzling over clues that might not be clues at all, paid little attention to the skater, until the kid spun to a stop in front of him and handed him a cellular phone.

‘You’ll need this,’ said the skater, in a bass voice that would have been pure gold to any fifties’ doo-wop group.

Before Joe could respond, the skater rolled away with powerful pushes of his muscular legs.

The phone rang in Joe’s hand.

He surveyed the street, searching for the surveillance post from which he was being watched, but it was not obvious.

The phone rang again, and he answered it. ‘Yeah?’

‘What’s your name?’ a man asked.

‘Joe Carpenter.’

‘Who’re you waiting for?’

‘I don’t know her name.’

‘What do you call her?’

‘Demi.’

‘Walk a block and a half south. Turn right at the corner and keep going until you come to a bookstore. It’s still open. Go in, find the biography section.’