The Straw Men Page 5

  'Do you still want to eat?' she asked, eventually.

  The car was getting cold. Two couples had already wandered past the car, on their way to the main building, their faces round with the contented prospect of food.

  He stirred, as if returning from a long distance. 'Up to you.'

  She tried for cheerful: 'I'm easy.'

  'Not out here you're not. Supper's six-thirty until nine. We eat now or in the morning. Breakfast's seven until eight. And small.'

  'What—there's nowhere you can get a burger in between? Or this place can't lay on a sandwich a little later?'

  Zandt turned his head, and this time his smile looked almost real. 'You're not from around here, are you?'

  'No, thank God. Neither are you. Where we come from you can eat when you want. You hand over money and they give you food. It's modern and convenient. Or have you been in the country so long you've forgotten?'

  He didn't answer. Abruptly she dropped the file in the foot well and opened the door. 'Wait here,' she said.

  Zandt waited, watching out of the windshield as she marched purposefully toward the main building. The hunger he'd felt after the day's walking was long gone. He felt chilled, inside and out. He was unaccustomed to dealing with someone who knew him, and felt awkward, his thoughts and feelings out of sync. He had spent a long time on the move, as background texture: the man at the counter who was due for a refill; the guy who was working out the back for a couple days; someone at a wind-swept gas station, staring at nothing over the top of his car as he filled it up, and who then pulled back out onto the road and was soon gone. For long periods he had thought of almost nothing at all, aided by a complete absence of any hooks into his past existence. Nina's presence changed that. He wished he had moved on a day earlier, that she had arrived to find him gone. But Zandt knew more about her doggedness than most people, and knew she would have kept on going once she'd set her mind to find him.

  He looked at the file lying in the foot well. It was thick. He felt no desire to touch it, still less to see what was inside. Most of it he knew too well already. The rest would be more of the same. The feelings it inspired were a rank mixture of numbness and horror, razor blades wrapped in cotton wool.

  He heard the sound of a door closing, and looked up to see Nina walking back from the main part of the inn. She was carrying something in one hand. He got out of the car. It was much colder now, the sky leaden. Snow.

  'Jesus,' she said, her breath clouding around her face. 'You weren't kidding. Food on a need-to-eat basis only. I got this though.' She held up a bottle of Irish whiskey. 'Said it was needed in evidence.'

  'I don't really drink any more,' he said.

  'I do,' she said. 'You can sit and watch.' She opened the door and retrieved the file. Zandt caught her checking its position on the floor, as if to see whether he'd taken a look in her absence.

  'Nina, why are you here?'

  'Come to save you,' she said. 'Welcome you back into the world.'

  'And if I don't want to come back?'

  'You're already back. You just don't know it yet.'

  'What's that supposed to mean?'

  'John, it's colder than a nun's pants out here. Let's get inside. I'm sure you can do your new thousand-yard-stare just as effectively under a roof.'

  He was surprised into a grunt of laughter. 'That's kind of rude, isn't it?'

  She shrugged. 'You know the rules. You sleep with a woman, she's got the right to be superior to you for the rest of your life.'

  'Even if she started it? And ended it?'

  'You fought tooth and nail on neither occasion, as I recall. Which of these rustic barns is your current abode?'

  He nodded toward his building and she marched off. After a moment in which he considered and rejected the notion of getting back in the car and driving away, he followed.

  Chapter 4

  He built a fire while she sat in one of the threadbare armchairs, her feet on the coffee table. He was aware of her assaying the surroundings in the lamplight: the tastefully worn rugs, shabby chic furniture, paintings only a hotelier could love. The floorboards were painted creamy white, and a spray of local flowers sat perkily in a vase a few inches from Nina's feet.

  'So what time's Martha Stewart dropping by?'

  'Just as soon as you've gone,' he said, heading to the bathroom for glasses. 'Me and her, it's like an animal thing.'

  Nina smiled, and watched the kindling in the grate. The fire clicked and crackled, pleased to be wakened, ready to consume. It seemed like a long time since she'd seen a real fire. It reminded her of childhood vacations, and made her shiver.

  When Zandt returned she screwed the cap off the bottle and poured two measures. He stood a moment longer, as if still unwilling to commit himself to joining her, but then took the other chair. The room slowly began to warm.

  She held the tooth glass up to her lips with both hands, and looked at him across it. 'So, John—how've you been?'

  He sat, staring straight ahead, and didn't look at her.

  'Just tell me,' he said.

  •••

  Three days previously, a girl called Sarah Becker had been sitting on a bench on 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California. She was listening to a minidisc, on a player she'd received for her fourteenth birthday. She had printed out a neat little label on the computer at home, and her name and address were stuck to the back of the player, fixed with invisible tape to prevent the ink from wearing off. While she'd hated to compromise the machine's sleek brushed chrome, she disliked the idea of losing it even more. When the player was found, it emerged that the album she'd been listening to was Generation Terrorists, by a British band called the Manic Street Preachers. Except, as Sarah knew, you called them The Manics. The band wasn't big at her school, which was one of the reasons she listened to them. Everybody else mooned over feisty pop princesses and insipid boy bands, or else bobbed their heads while some hip-hop yahoo bellowed last year's slang over someone else's tune from the safety of a walled compound in Malibu. Sarah preferred music that sounded as if, somewhere down the line, someone had meant something by it. She supposed it was her age. At fourteen, you weren't a kid any more. Not these days, and not by a long shot. Not in LA. Not here in 2002. It was taking a while for her parents to come up to speed, but even they knew it was so. In their own ways they were getting used to the idea, like Neanderthals warily watching the first Cro-Magnons coming whistling over the rise.

  At the end where she was sitting, by the fountain opposite the Barnes and Noble, the Promenade was pretty empty by this time in the evening. A few people came and went from the bookstore, and you could see others through the two-storey plate-glass window: leafing intently through magazines and books, geeking out over computer specs or scouring for magic spells in screen-writing manuals. Her family had gone on a two-week vacation to London, England, the year before, and she'd been baffled at the indigenous bookstores. They were utterly weird. They just had, like, books. No cafe, no magazines, no washrooms even. Just rows and rows of books. People picked them up, bought them, then went away again. Her mom had seemed to believe this was cool in some way, but Sarah thought it was one of the few things she'd seen about England that really sucked. Eventually they'd found a big new Borders, and she'd fallen upon it, discovering The Manics at one of the listening posts. British bands were cool. The Manics were especially cool. London was cool in general. That was that.

  She sat, head nodding in approval as the singer loudly proclaimed himself a 'damned dog', and watched down the Promenade. Down the other end of the three-block pedestrianized zone was mainly restaurants. Her father had dropped her off twenty minutes before, and would be coming to pick her up at nine sharp—a once-monthly occurrence. She was supposed to be meeting her friend Sian at the Broadway Deli. They were ladies who dined. The supper club had been the brainchild of Sian's mom, who was adapting to her daughter's adolescence by throwing open all the doors she could find, for fear that leaving the w
rong one closed might ruin their special relationship. Sarah's mother had gone along with it pretty easily: partly because everyone tended to go along with Monica Williams, but also because Zo Becker was sufficiently in contact with her younger self to realize how much she'd have liked to have done the same at her age. Sarah's father had occasional right of veto, however, and for a long, bad moment she thought he was going to exercise it. A few months prior there had been a spate of gang-related killings, part of the seasonal undertow of corporate restructuring in the crack industry. But eventually, after proposing and reaching agreement on a battery of precautionary measures—including dropping and picking her up at closely defined times and places, demonstration of a fully-charged cellular battery, and a recitation of the key common-sense means of avoiding the chaotic intrusion of the fates—he'd agreed. It was now part of the social calendar.

  Problem was, when they'd pulled up this evening, Sian hadn't been standing on the corner. Michael Becker craned his neck, peering up and down the street.

  'So where is the legendary Ms Williams?' he muttered, fingers drumming on the wheel. Something was bitched with the series he was developing on the Warner lot, and he was big-time stressed: heavy calm spiked with jumpiness. Sarah wasn't sure exactly what the problem was, but knew her father's credo that there were an infinite number of ways for things to go wrong in The Business, and only one way of them going right. She had seen proposals and drafts for the show's pilot episode, and he'd even picked her brains over a few things, gauging her reaction as part of the potential target audience. Actually, and to her slight surprise, Sarah had thought the series sounded pretty cool. Better than Buffy or Angel, in fact. She privately thought Buffy herself was kind of a pain, and that the older English guy didn't sound half as much like Hugh Grant as he seemed to think. Or look enough like him, either. The heroine in Dark Shift was more self-contained, less showy, and less prone to whining. She was also, though Sarah didn't realize this, loosely based on Michael Becker's daughter.

  'There she is,' Sarah had said, pointing up the way.

  Her father frowned. 'I don't see her.'

  'Yeah, look—up under that streetlight, outside Hennessy and Ingels.'

  At that moment some asshole blared his horn behind them, and her father swung his head to glare ominously out of the back windshield. He almost never got angry within the family, but he could sometimes lay it on the outside world. Sarah knew, having recently covered it in school, that this was a pecking order thing, hierarchy being established in the asphalt jungle—but she was privately nervous that one of these days her dad would choose to assert his will with the wrong naked ape. He didn't seem to realize that fathers could antagonize the fates, too, or that age made little difference to the vehemence of their retribution.

  She opened the door and hopped out. 'I'll run over,' she said. 'It's fine.' Michael Becker watched tight-mouthed as the impatient guy in the LeBaron pulled out around them.

  Then he turned, and his face changed. For a moment he didn't look like he had story arcs and demographics running behind his eyes, as if he saw the world through a grid of beat lists and foreign residuals. He just looked tired, in need of some hot caffeine, and like her dad.

  'See you later,' Sarah said, with a wink. 'Have a heart attack on the way home.'

  He looked at his watch. 'Haven't got the time. Maybe a little prostate trouble instead. Nine o'clock?'

  'On the dot. I'm always early. It's you who's late.'

  'As if. Nokkon, little lady.'

  'Nokkon, Dad.' She shut the door and watched him pull back into traffic. He waved at her, a little salute, and then he was gone: swallowed back into an interior world, at the mercy of people who bought words by the yard and never knew what they wanted until it was already in syndication. As she watched him disappear, Sarah knew one thing for sure—The Business wasn't getting her for a sweetheart.

  Sian hadn't been under the lamppost, of course. Sarah had only pretended, to help her father on his way, so he could get home and back to work. She continued to not be there for another ten minutes, and then Sarah's phone rang.

  It was Sian. She was currently standing by her mom's car on Sunset, and just about annoyed enough to spit. Sarah could hear Sian's mother in the background, imperiously letting off steam at some hapless mechanic, who'd probably seen mother and daughter in distress and developed visions of his own real-life porno film. Sarah hoped he now realized that not only was this not going to happen, but if he didn't get the car fixed pronto he'd be a dead man.

  Either way, Sian wasn't going to make it. Which left Sarah in a quandary. Her father wouldn't be home yet, and when he pulled into the drive he'd be a vortex of bullet points and plot fixes, maybe already on the phone to his partner, Charles Wang, conjuring ways to pull the project back into the comfort zone. There was some big deal breakfast meeting with the studio the next morning, a make-or-break powwow over decaf and cholesterol-free omelettes. She knew her father dreaded that kind of meeting most of all, because he never ate breakfast and hated having to pretend he did, toying with toast to avoid fiddling with the silverware. She didn't want him to get any more stressed than he already was, and her younger sister, Melanie, would be providing plenty of background noise by herself.

  So then she realized—she didn't actually have to call at all. She had a little under two hours, and then he'd be back. The Promenade was wall-to-wall browsing opportunities, most of them still open for business. She could get a Frappuccino and just hang. Wander round Anthropologie, on the lookout for gift ideas. Check the listening posts in B&N, in case they'd finally racked up something new. Even go sit in the Deli, and have a Cobb salad by herself. Basically, bottom line, simply make sure she was at the right place at the right time, and then—depending on what kind of mood he was in—either reveal that Sian hadn't showed, or pretend everything had gone as usual.

  She dialled Sian to make sure that this plan wouldn't be undermined by Mrs Williams calling her mom. She couldn't get through, which probably meant the car was up and running again and out of radio contact in a canyon. Sarah was confident that if her mother had been contacted then she'd know all about it already. Helicopters would be circling overhead, Bruce Willis being lowered down toward her on a rope.

  She left a message for Sian, then walked over and went into Starbucks. It had occurred to her that if she did go to the Deli she could have whatever she wanted, rather than ordering the Cobb salad because that's what they always did, dieting twenty years before they needed to. She could have, of all things, a burger. A huge great big burger, rare, with cheese. And fries.

  She was thinking that maybe this was what it was like to be a grown-up, and that it could work out kind of interesting.

  •••

  She'd come to the end of her Frap, and The Manics had bellowed their last this time round, when she saw a tall guy come out of the bookstore. He ambled a few yards, then stopped and peered up at the sky. It wasn't yet dark, but it was getting past twilight. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and struggled to extricate one from the packet while juggling what was evidently a heavy bag of books. This went on for quite a few moments, the man completely unaware of Sarah's amused scrutiny. She was thinking that in his position she might try putting the bag down, but this obviously hadn't occurred to him.

  Eventually, exasperated, he walked over to the fountain and stuck the bag down on the edge. Once he'd got the cigarette lit he put his hands on his hips, looking down the way, before glancing at her.

  'Hello,' he said. His voice was soft and cheerful.

  Now that he was closer she thought he was probably about forty, maybe a little less. She wasn't sure how she knew this, as there was a lamp behind his head and his face was slightly difficult to see. He just had that kind of older guy thing.

  'Say that again.'

  He said: 'Er, hello?'

  She nodded sagely. 'You're English.'

  'Oh God. Is it that obvious?'

  'Well, l
ike, you have an English accent.'

  'Oh. Of course.' He took another drag of his cigarette, and then looked at the bench. 'Do you mind if I join you?'

  Sarah shrugged. Shrugging was good. It didn't say yes, it didn't say no. Whatever. The bench was plenty wide. She was salad-bound within seconds anyway. Or burger-bound. Still undecided.

  The man sat. He was wearing a pair of corduroys, not especially new, but a light jacket that looked well-made. He had big, neat hands. His fair hair had been dyed a stronger blond, but expensively, and his face worked pretty well. Like a hip science teacher, or maybe social studies. The kind that probably wouldn't sleep with a student, but could if he wanted.

  'So are you an actor, or something?'

  'Oh no. Nothing as grand as that. Just a tourist.'

  'How long are you here for?'

  'A couple of weeks.' He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small object, made of shiny chrome. He flipped the top off and revealed it to be a small portable ashtray.

  Sarah watched this with great interest. 'The English smoke a lot, don't they.'

  'We do,' said the man, who wasn't English. He stubbed out his cigarette and slipped the ashtray back in his pocket. 'We are not afraid.'

  They chatted for a little while. Sarah reminisced about London. The man was able to join in convincingly, as he had returned from the country only two days before. He did not reveal that the Barnes and Noble bag he was carrying was full of books he had owned for some years, nor that he had spent a full hour in the bookstore sitting in the Politics and Economics section, his face averted from the other customers, watching out of the window for Sarah to arrive. He instead asked for suggestions for what else he should see in the city. He listed the parts of Los Angeles he had already visited, a selection of the usual tourist traps.

  Sarah, who took her responsibilities seriously, suggested the La Brea tar pit, Rodeo Drive, and the Watts Tower, which she felt would give a good span of where LA had come from, and where it was going. Plus, she thought privately, on Rodeo he could replace his corduroys with something a little more bon marché, as Sian—who'd vacationed in Antibes last year—was fond of saying.