Sole Survivor

The willowy brunette having dinner with the movie-star-slash-heroin-addict developed an instant attraction for the guy with the Mick Jagger mouth, in spite of his rose-bloom nose. She stared at him so hard and so insistently that he responded to her as quickly as a trout would respond to a fat bug bobbing on the surface of a stream — though it was difficult to say which of these two was the trout and which the tender morsel.

The actor-addict became aware of his companion’s infatuation, and he, too, began to stare at the man with the melancholy eyes -­though he was glaring rather than flirting. Suddenly he rose from the table, almost knocking over his chair, and weaved across the restaurant, as if intending either to strike or regurgitate upon his rival. Instead, he curved away from the two men’s table and disappeared into the hall that led to the restrooms.

By this time, the sad-eyed man was eating baby shrimps on a bed of polenta. He speared each tiny crustacean on the point of his fork and studied it appreciatively before sucking it off the tines with obscene relish. As he leisurely savoured each bite, he looked toward the brunette as if to say that if he ever got a chance to bed her, she could rest assured that she would wind up as thoroughly shelled and de-veined as the shrimps.

The brunette was aroused or repulsed. Hard to tell which. With some Angelenos, those two emotions were as inextricably entwined as the viscera of inoperable Siamese twins. Anyway, she departed the actor-addict’s table and drew up a chair to sit with the two men in leather jackets.

Joe wondered how interesting things would get when the wasted actor returned — no doubt with a white dust glowing around the rims of his nostrils, since current he**in was sufficiently pure to snort. Before events could develop, the waiter, Gene of the twinkling eyes, stopped by to tell him there would be no charge for dinner and that Demi was waiting for him in the kitchen

Surprised, he left a tip and followed Gene’s directions toward the hallway that served the restrooms and the cookery.

The late summer twilight had finally arrived. On the griddle-flat horizon, a sun like a bloody yolk cooked toward a darker hue.

As Joe crossed the restaurant, where all of the tables were now occupied, something about that three-person tableau — the brunette, the two men in leather jackets — teased his memory. By the time that he reached the hallway to the kitchen, he was puzzled by a full-blown case of deja vu.

Before stepping into the hall, Joe turned for one look back. He saw the seducer with fork raised, savouring a speared shrimp with his sad eyes, while the brunette murmured something and the nervous pink-faced man watched.

Joe’s puzzlement turned to alarm.

For an instant, he could not understand why his mouth went dry or why his heart began to race. Then in his mind’s eye he saw the fork metamorphose into a stiletto, and the shrimp became a sliver of Gouda cheese.

Two men and a woman. Not in a restaurant but in a hotel room. Not this brunette but Barbara Christman. If not these two men, then two astonishingly similar to them.

Of course Joe had never seen them, only listened to Barbara’s brief but vivid descriptions. The hound-dog eyes, the nose that was ‘bashed red by decades of drinking,’ the thick-lipped mouth. The younger of the two: pink-faced with the ceaselessly flickering smile.

Joe was more than twenty-four hours past the ability ever to believe in coincidence again.

Impossibly, Teknologik was here.

He hurried along the hallway, through one of two swinging doors, and into a roomy antechamber used as a salad-prep area. Two white-uniformed men, artfully and rapidly arranging plates of greenery, never even glanced at him.

Beyond, in the main kitchen, the heavy-set black woman in the voluminous muumuu was waiting for him. Even her bright dress and the cascades of glittering jewellery could not disguise her anxiety. Her big-mama, jazz-singer face was pretty and lively and made for mirth, but there was no song or laughter in her now.

‘My name’s Mahalia. Real sorry I couldn’t have dinner with you, Presentable Joe. That would’ve been a treat.’ Her sexy-smoky voice pegged her as the woman whom he had named Demi. ‘But there’s been a change of plans. Follow me, honey.’

With the formidable majesty of a great ship leaving its dock, Mahalia set out across the busy and immaculate kitchen crowded with chefs, cooks, and assistants, past cooktops and ovens and griddles and grills, through steam and meat smoke and the eye-watering fragrance of sautéing onions.

Hurrying after her, Joe said, ‘Then you know about them?’

‘Sure do. Been on the TV news today. The news people show you stuff to curl your hair, then try to sell you Fritos. This awful business changes everythin’.’

He put an arm on her shoulder, halted her. ‘TV news?’

‘Some people been murdered after she talks to them.’

Even with the large culinary staff in white flurries of activity around them, they were afforded privacy for their conversation by the masking clang of pots, rattle of skillets, whir of mixers, swish of whisks, clatter of dishes, buzz, clink, tink, ping, pop, scrape, chop, sizzle.

‘They call it somethin’ else on the news,’ Mahalia said, ‘but it’s murder sure enough.’ - ­‘That’s not what I mean,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about the men in the restaurant.’

She frowned. ‘What men?’

‘Two of them. Black slacks, white silk shirts, black leather jackets—’

‘I walked ‘em to their table.’

‘You did, yeah. I just recognized them a minute ago.’

‘Bad folks?’

‘The worst.’

Baffled, she shook her head. ‘But, sugar, we know you weren’t followed.’

‘I wasn’t, but maybe you were. Or maybe someone else who’s protecting Rose was followed.’

‘Devil himself would have a hard time finding Rose if he had to depend on getting to her through us.’

‘But somehow they’ve figured out who’s been hiding her for a year, and now they’re closing in.’

Glowering, wrapped by bulletproof confidence, Mahalia said, ‘Nobody’s gonna lay one little finger on Rose.’

‘Is she here?’

‘Waitin’ for you.’

A cold tide washed through his heart. ‘You don’t understand ­the two in the restaurant won’t have come alone. There’s sure to be more outside. Maybe a small army of them.’

‘Yeah, maybe, but they don’t know what they’re dealin’ with, honey.’ Thunderheads of resolve massed in her dark face. ‘We’re Baptists.’

Certain that he could not have heard the woman correctly, Joe hurried after her as she continued through the kitchen.

At the far end of the big room, they went through an open door into a sparkling scullery where fruits and vegetables were cleaned and trimmed before being sent in to the main cookery. This late in the restaurant’s day, no one was at work here.

Beyond the scullery was a concrete-floored receiving room that smelled of raw celery and peppers, damp wood and damp card­board. On pallets along the right-hand wall, empty fruit and vegetable crates, boxes, and cases of empty beer bottles were stacked almost to the low ceiling.

Directly ahead, under a red Exit sign was a wide, steel exterior door, closed now, beyond which suppliers’ trucks evidently parked to make deliveries. To the left was an elevator.

‘Rose is down below.’ Mahalia pressed the call button, and the elevator doors slid open at once.

‘What’s under us?’

‘Well, one time, this was the service elevator to a banquet room and deck, where you could have big parties right on the beach, but we can’t use it like the joint did before us. Coastal Commission put a hard rule on us. Now it’s just a storeroom. Once you go down, I’ll have some boys come move the pallets and empty crates to this wall. We’ll cover the elevator real nice. Nobody’ll know it’s even here.’

Uneasy about being cornered, Joe said, ‘Yeah, but what if they come looking and they do find the elevator?’

‘Gonna have to stop callin’ you Presentable Joe. Better would be Worryin’ Joe.’

‘After a while, they will come looking. They won’t just wait till closing time and go home. So once I’m down there, do I have another way out?’ he persisted.

‘Never tore apart the front stairs, where the customers used to go down. Just covered the openin’ with hinged panels so you don’t really see it. You come up that way, though, you’ll be right across from the hostess station, in the middle of plain view.’

‘No good.’

‘So if somethin’ goes wrong, best to skedaddle out the lower door onto the deck. From there you have the beach, the whole coast.’

‘They could be covering that exit too.’

‘It’s down at the base of the bluff. From the upper level, they can’t know it’s there. You should just try to relax, sugar. We’re on the righteous side, which counts for somethin’.’

‘Not much.’

‘Worryin’ Joe.’

He stepped into the elevator but blocked the sliding door with his arm in case it tried to close. ‘How’re you connected with this place, Mahalia?’

‘Half owner.’

‘The food’s great.’

‘You can look at me the way I am and think I don’t know?’ she asked good-naturedly.

‘What’re you to Rose?’

‘Gonna call you Curious Joe pretty soon. Rose married my brother Louis about twenty-two years ago. They met in college Wasn’t truly surprised when Louis turned out smart enough to go to college, but I was sure surprised he had the brains to fall for someone like Rose. Then, of course, the man proved he was a pure fool, after all, when he up and divorced her four years later. Rose couldn’t have kids, and havin’ kids was important to Louis though with less air in his skull and any common sense at all, the man would’ve realized Rose was more treasure than a houseful of babies.’

‘She hasn’t been your sister-in-law for eighteen years, but you’re willing to put yourself on the line for her?’

‘Why not? You think Rose turned into a vampire when Louis, the fool, divorced her? She’s been the same sweet lady ever I met her. I love her like a sister. Now she’s waitin’, Curious Joe.’

‘One more thing. Earlier, when you told me these people don’t know who they’re dealing with . . . You didn’t say — “We’re Baptists?”

‘That’s exactly what I did say. “Tough” and “Baptists” don’t go together in your head — is that it?’

‘Well—’

‘Mama and Daddy stood up to the Klan down in Mississippi when the Klan had a whole lot more teeth than they do now, and so did my Grandma and Grandpap before them, and they never let fear weigh ‘em down. When I was a little girl, we went through hurricanes off the Gulf of Mexico and Delta floods and encephalitis epidemics and poor times when we didn’t know where tomorrow’s food was comin’ from, but we rode it out and still sung loud in the choir every Sunday. Maybe the United States Marines are some tougher than your average Southern black Baptist, Joe, but not by much.’

‘Rose is a lucky woman with a friend like you.’

‘I’m the lucky one,’ said Mahalia. ‘She lifts me up — now more than ever. Go on, Joe. And stay down there with her till we close this place and figure a way we can slip you two out. I’ll come for you when it’s time.’

‘Be ready for trouble long before that,’ he warned her.

‘Go.’

Joe let the doors slide shut.

The elevator descended.

2

Here, now, at last and alone, at the far end of the long room was Dr. Rose Marie Tucker in one of four folding chairs at a scarred work table, leaning forward, forearms on the table, hands clasped, waiting and silent, her eyes solemn and full of tenderness, this diminutive survivor, keeper of secrets that Joe had been desperate to learn but from which he suddenly shied.

Some of the recessed-can fixtures in the ceiling contained dead bulbs, and the live ones were haphazardly angled, so the floor that he slowly crossed was mottled with light and shadow as if it were an underwater realm. His own shadow preceded him, then fell behind, but again preceded him, flowed here into a pool of gloom and vanished like a soul into oblivion, only to swim into view three steps later. He felt as though he were a condemned man submerged in the concrete depths of an inescapable prison, on a long death-row walk toward lethal punishment — yet simultaneously he believed in the possibility of clemency and rebirth. As he approached the revelation that had lifted Georgine and Charlie Delmann from despair to euphoria, as he drew nearer the truth about Nina, his mind churned with conflicting currents, and hope like schools of bright koi darted through his internal darkness.

Against the left-hand wall were boxes of restaurant provisions, primarily paper towels for the restrooms, candles for the tables, and janitorial supplies purchased in bulk. The right-hand wall, which faced the beach and the ocean beyond, featured two doors and a series of large windows, but the coast was not visible because the glass was protected by metal Rolladen security shutters. The banquet room felt like a bunker.

He pulled out a chair and sat across the table from Rose.

As in the cemetery the previous day, this woman radiated such extraordinary charismatic power that her petite stature was a source of continual surprise. She seemed more physically imposing than Joe — yet her wrists were as dainty as those of a twelve-year-old girl. Her magnetic eyes held him, touched him, and some knowl­edge in them humbled him in a way that no man twice his size could have humbled him — yet her features appeared so fragile, her throat so slender, her shoulders so delicate that she should have seemed as vulnerable as a child.

Joe reached across the table toward her.

She gripped his hand.

Dread fought with hope for his voice, and while the battle raged, he could not speak to ask about Nina.

More solemn now than she had been in the cemetery, Rose said, ‘It’s all going so badly. They’re killing everyone I talk to. They’ll stop at nothing.’

Relieved of the obligation to ask, first, the fateful question about his younger daughter, Joe found his voice. ‘I was there at the house in Hancock Park with the Delmanns . . . and Lisa.’

Her eyes widened in alarm. ‘You don’t mean ... when it happened?’

‘Yes.’

Her small hand tightened on his. ‘You saw?’

He nodded. ‘They killed themselves. Such terrible . . . such violence, madness.’