1. The detective — Chapman Caddell

does little business, he is tall, he has good hands. His desk is free of clutter. Each morning he is up early, he shaves his face and gels his hair. His suit is clean and ragged, it is threadbare at the joints, it is tailored to the proportions of a rogue. It has worn him through many districts, across Chinatown and the Richmond, Boyle Heights and Studio City, through Stinson, Moss, and Pismo, down San Tapeta’s tangled streets. It has driven him to Watts and on vacation to Monterey Bay. Years have passed since they vacationed . . . so devoted is the detective to his punctilious work, the suit drives his modest hatchback only as far as the Brausen Building, where it stops in the basement garage. The suit wears him into the elevator, which he operates as its attendant, and not until the key turns the lock on the waitingroom door does the wearer, the detective, claim his executive rights. The room exhibits cautious neglect. Dust lies across it as thick over the broad colorless table as on the stiff low couch behind it. A stale shaft of light from the west is parked on the eastside wall, but his shoeprints are so close a match to yesterday and last week’s that nothing is kicked up, the light on the wall is dull but unimpeded except for the shadow of whitewashed wood that cleaves the window in two. It is dimmed by mist or pollution. When he stands in the light, the detective, and faces the second door, which bears his peeling name in gilt across the frosted glass, he feels his good side flattered. A gentler glow from the second room softens the contrast on his brow. It is just like in the movies, though he does not own a hat. In the glow or the light from the east can be read the faded titles of magazines he has spread across the table, namely eight National Geographics, a catalog from Hammacher Schlemmer. A chess book is among them. With pleasure the detective unlocks the second door, he shuts it behind him and strides to the chair pushed in under the desk. The desk is readied for his work. It has been cleared of dust and objects but for the green telephone, he is liable when absentminded to twist the cord around his fingers. He has contracted with a firm in Phoenix for his receptionist offsite, she ensures it does not ring. He needs focus to be receptive to the ambient information, and to focus he needs quiet. Noise comes when it must, but noise is not his business. He has known many adventures, many dangerous affairs. They are still known on the street, they are recalled by others. He spins the chair in line with his desk and away from the office window, identical to the waitingroom’s, that he might stretch his legs and tap the fingers of his right hand over the surface in cyclical succession toward their shadow. The desk has lines and divots . . . the detective has known many pianists in many hotel bars. His recollections are carefully ordered, and he recalls them always the same, he is not one to wing it . . . the Debacle at String Lake, the Mingalonis’ Affair, the Chilean Who Disappeared, the Cal-Edison Killer. He did the Zerr Case, the Hammond Case, the Barré-Ohanian Case. He recalls the fugu smuggling ring he crossed at the edge of Sawtelle, the kingpin’s den in the Avenues where they held him drugged five days, where he outwitted Dzievitsky and lashed him to his chairback  . . . a kidnapped heiress, a runaway heiress, a disinherited blackmail artist. The detective has known oil country, the permanent dusk of her sumptuous parlors, the elderly barons who divulged to him the bare minimum of secrets in their greenhouses, from a sickbed, in the shade of Spanish courtyards. Their butlers pass him envelopes of cash from phthisic fingers. He has known moments of distress. A scene of exceptional color may draw him to his feet, he will sway, he will shape his left hand like a gun and point its barrel toward the wall. Bang, he will mouth, BANG! This business is a serious one, in the middle drawer of his desk he keeps a .38-caliber pistol. He cannot be called unserious. There are days his recollection is sufficiently alive for him to pull an identical pose but wielding the revolver. He has released its safety before, under duress, in this room. A gentleman cloaked in ermine once appeared in the office doorway, a tough made up as a dandy, and reached beneath his coat to tender an ostensible photo of a starlet who left the city with no trace. He said information was his business, but that business was the detective’s, and he was the quicker draw. The gentleman backed away and three days later was found a corpse, swollen afloat at the mired backend of a Venice canal. He has known crooks with a heart of gold. He knows the inside of interrogations. At the palace of a dirty cop, he recalls, in the low hills to the south, he has looked from floor-to-ceiling windows on the blanket of flashing lights, he has seen it draped across the pit down which he is ever falling, and recollecting as he falls, and he has turned and seen through opposite windows, also floor-to-ceiling, the first hint of orange flame on the high stalks of the pampas grass. He has never known cops to sleep. The vast city is early to bed in its ubiquitous jurisdictions, but delegates from each have roused him at all hours, they have shaken his door on its hinges and startled him up with its rattle, they have rummaged his cupboards for coffee and made themselves a pot, they have questioned him hostilely and conspiratorially. He has returned to his apartment late to find one idly sifting through a drawer in the livingroom desk while the partner, from the armchair, craned his neck toward a scenario the detective found in Nimzowitsch. The black knight was raised to survey the field between an index finger and thumb, swaying gently. They wore the hats and ample coats of their department’s homicide squad. They questioned him, they threatened him, they smoked and vanished in the dark. Their cigarette butts still glow on the open kitchen’s counter. He has known cops with a heart of gold, he knows Lieutenant Ruben Weld. They have escorted him to the gray stations where he believes they live, where all but the dirty chiefs make their permanent homes, where there is always the sound of typing, water boiling, significant rumor . . . and from a station in one precinct he has been ejected hours later, deep in a third night, into separate jurisdictions     . . . Glendale to South Central, Culver City to Manhattan Beach, San Tapeta to Laurel Heights. He has known bootleggers and mediums to the elderly, bored, and rich, he has known far worse, but now the sun is a long time down and he has returned to his chair, he has resumed his rhythmic tapping on the surface of the desk. His hair has fallen out of place. His eyes are shot with red from the strain of his recollections. At some point he has turned on the sole overhead light, now he stands, pushes in the chair, and goes to the switch on the wall. The phone has made no sound today. Though the city is early to bed, its cool light is not, enough is shed through his window that he can read the mirrored silhouette of his name on the frosted glass. He adjusts his suit and smooths it, that it might see him home. Then he opens the door to the waitingroom and, what is essential, shuts and locks it behind him, that he might open it the following day and again remember his work.

2. The detective

longs for a taiga. He was not designed for Santa Anas and fog, he has realized. He has been spied on Fillmore and Montana on the arm of a Russian heiress, her father is a prince, he is the prince of copper. She is regarded a sensation, she has modeled in New York, her English is not so strong as her Italian, French, and Spanish. She is ravished by the detective, say the gossip rags, and in fact she takes him to clubs and gallery debuts, she feeds him olives from martinis, she wears faint smiles that only he can see. She has other traits that only a detective can tease out. When they are pressed against each other in the corner of a booth and his lap is hidden beneath the long skirt of her fur, he sees through her hazel eyes to the white wastes behind them. Her warm breath on his neck turns, as it rises across his face, to an arid chill off Arctic plains, reindeer leave quick hoofprints up his cheek. When in her halting Spanish she stutters to him of her homeland, of its crystal deserts, he tumbles through her pauses and lacunae into a landscape emptier and more appealing than the liquid one she speaks. Her maudlin flocks of dachas with smoke and rustic fences do not move him, but when she cries from joy or the effect of her dissolute ways, he removes the tears from her face with the smooth back of his hand and exhumes from them the frozen rivers wide as San Tapeta Bay, he inspects them for their thickness. He has heard though she does not say aloud that on these rivers could be galloped far into the night over a hundred horses abreast without trying the surface, without facing any narrows, and without once seeing firelight in the dense pine on either bank. He has heard or read as much. In her silence he detects a solitude of which talk would not be possible, and he longs to call it home. The detective does not drink, it is she who pulls him to her bust and then again to premieres, hilltop mansions, and extralegal casinos, she rushes to the watering holes of the allies of her class. From Bel Air to Millionaires’ Row, Cow Hollow to Topanga, he clings to the hem of her gown and is dragged across many highways, he is scraped and he is bruised and he clings to the thin legitimacy swept up among her ermine. The California rich find his presence an amusement, they are accustomed to more sharply delimited relations with PIs, including the detective, in rooms with covered windows or through the soliciting doubles and toughs who are their unspeakable business. To them it is obvious that his aims are the heiress’s looks and money, but in the detective’s eyes only the price is obvious, the benefit is displaced. He is enduring, he dreams his vicarious taiga, he does not have the habit of being observed, he is not much for acquaintances. There is Lieutenant Ruben Weld, and there is the woman in Phoenix whose job is to hang up the phone. He hopes the faraway cold will alleviate the discomfort of his appearance before these lookers-on, he fears their capacities are not unlike his own, long whetted by detection. Friendship is a custom that he has unacquired. To the detective it is not obvious that the heiress is an heiress, not a fake . . . not obvious that her father’s mines have ransacked every hilltop past the Urals, that she will be their sole beneficiary when he dies, that his cancer of the liver has lately reached his throat. A possible shame has dogged him since she exposed him to society on her arm, in her wake. His doubts are fundamental. Though in her sphere she is a beauty by unanimous assent, when pulled against her bust he is aware of smells that are not right, he sees her bottom teeth are cramped, her makeup is theatrical, the blush spot on one cheek seems to drop below the other when she drinks the way she likes. There is hair on her top lip, very sparse, not sparse enough. When they are alone and close, he is persuaded to forget, he sees the breath condense before her and freeze across the ends of that pale shadow of mustache, it is very faint already, fainter beneath the ice. The night she found him he did not notice the grounds for his later suspicion, before the affair was public he did not harbor doubts. At the start he had no time to exercise doubt. He was walking to his office from the diner where he takes the odd evening meal when, in silence, she pressed against his chest. He had not seen her approach, he felt the warmth of her body on his and looked to see two cool eyes watching him intently. She wore her smile that seems almost a smile but is indeed a smile, which he would come to know in identical embraces in booths and the backs of limousines. She spoke to him in Spanish, she did not try her Russian, and when she pulled away she took his hand in hers. He was seduced not by the body but by the frigid hands. Backlit by incoming traffic the others on the sidewalk were small, black, and swift but she is swifter, and she leads him as if skating from one cone of light to the next, alone beneath each streetlamp, she turns cement to ice, she skates him into a bar and pulls him close in a dark booth where she purrs and leans and whispers, and he hears allusions and windy pauses that concern her native land, his suit is made of sealskin, he feels near to Lake Baikal. She has led him down many blocks. When she comes tearful to his office he has not left her quiet snows, it is still dark at his camp near the river, interruptions have fallen away and the dogs now are stirring, she asks him to come away with her to claim her vast inheritance, the prince has lost his stomach, she is dressed to go. It seems she has not deceived him but he is already there, he has followed her out on her breath between the streetlamps, he is in that soundless place, when she begs he cannot tease it from the silence of the unflowing river. When the dogs paw at the snow they find the surface is beyond them, the fire has long been ash. His solitude is impregnable, the sled may at last be readied . . . many hours have passed by, and he turns the key in the lock. The marine layer is in from the west, she is gone for another country.

3. The detective

is to meet the nervous man, the blond with ruddy cheeks, in a San Tapeta garret. He drives to the west and south or north, he is soon on Sunset Boulevard, he is deep in Laurel Canyon, after the Robin Williams Tunnel he is over the Bridge to San Tapeta, where garrets are uncommon. The little man has found perhaps the only one for rent. On the road the detective keeps one eye on his mirrors for tails, he was driving home from the Brausen Building when he clocked the previous evening’s. The tail drove a low dun-colored car, he lacked the skill to measure distance, his method was plainly amateur. It was simple enough to lure him to a hotel where, in a previous scrape, the detective had been drawn into collaboration with the dick, though as a rule he does not collaborate. He parallel-parked across the street from the hotel and waited, the tail passed him and turned right after a pause at the end of the block. The detective locked the doors and crossed the empty road. There was a lighted sign at the entrance that read hotel boulez, there was not much other light. He talked baseball with the doorman until the tail had finished his circle and parallel-parked four cars ahead of the hatchback, but the detective waited to go inside until he saw reflected in the tinted glass of the doors the quivering skirt of the little man’s coat, he saw him trot to catch up. The detective allowed himself to be seen then slipped indoors and crossed the lobby and up the three stairs to the hotel bar. The piano was unoccupied. He asked for a glass of ice water and retired to a high table close to the mirrored back wall, he remained the only patron until the tail came breathless up the stairs, he did not shut his mouth. The tail smoothed the breast of his coat before he stepped onto the carpet, he lurched and stood very straight at the bar and looked smaller when he did. He took his drink to a low table at the opposite unmirrored wall and left it undisturbed, he concerned himself with the nut bowl . . . his features are gentle and sad, his cheeks do not look taut. The detective watches the tail’s reflection heavily sweat in front of him. He sees him pull a trepidant lock of hair from his blushing forehead, his hair is paler than the tawny coat, his efforts to remain unnoticed immobilize him to his naked edge, where the play of wayward air descended from the fan pulls at his sleeves, at his fingers, at the salt he has spilled on the table out of his bowl of nuts. The air sets them in constant tremulous motion, each extremity. He is unable to eat, he is making adjustments, he tries not to change positions. The detective stands and drapes his jacket across the back of his chair, it will watch his tail while he fakes a trip to the toilet from the bar. Down a narrow hall back from the lobby, out of view of the tail, are the restrooms and small offices, and at the third door the detective knocks twice, It’s me, I come bearing information . . . a tigerish growl bids him enter. The detective shuts the door behind him and examines his acquaintance. The hotel dick is a large man, the walls are gray and moist. The desk is visibly cheap. Resting in his feral languor in a tattered easy chair beneath the harsh light in the ceiling, he shows his teeth but declines to smile. He is strong but not well-exercised, his skin is hard, dark, and spotted, his eyes are blue and marble. There is no second chair, the detective leans against the door. Without his jacket the world is too near to the skin of his back, the dick demands he tell him what he means by information. He explains to him about the tail . . . the detective says, It’s easy, he’s here and he could mean trouble. The dick removes a bottle from the shadows under his chair and sets it on top of the desk. He pushes it near the edge. Back here it’s free, says the hotel dick, and the detective remains at the door. They examine each other in silence, only the dick makes noise when he breathes. He leaves the bottle where it is, he asks what the hell does he want him to do. Encourage the kid, says the detective, entice him a little to go. The hotel dick retorts, When you’re the bastard that got him here . . . the detective explains he was thirsty but he is not thirsty any longer, he will gather his effects and leave. When he steps from the door to return to the bar, the dick has his eyes halfway shut, he allows one arm to hang from the chair while the detective slips away and disappears in the meager hall, out to his twilit table. The tail has remained in his seat in the state of half-contained excitement in which he was lately abandoned, he hums with immobility. The detective sits again with his water, he fixes his gaze on the mirrored wall. The bartender has stepped out. It is not long and the detective becomes aware of an intrusion, he hears its heaving inhalation before it reaches the third step. A reflection comes into view and proceeds with its dull uneven gait up to the little man’s table, it takes a shallow breath and says, Maybe you and me can help each other, but the tail does not see how, and the detective turns and watches him try to indicate as much to the dick with his hands and a lively stammer. Maybe I pay for your drink, says the dick, and maybe you fuck off for good. The detective gathers his effects while he monitors the scene, he stands and lifts his jacket by the collar, he hangs it from his shoulders and does not use the sleeves. Meanwhile the hotel dick has placed his hands below the tail’s arms, he has reached across his table and lifted his body above it, the tail is not equipped for a struggle, he closes his eyes and tosses his head to evade the reek of tonsil stones. It is in this state of concession he is hauled out the double doors with the detective twenty steps back, he is counting them out. Fuck off forever, says the dick, and when he drops the tail on the curb, the detective palms the doorman a wet, creased dollar bill. The tail scuttles into the street and across, the detective counts his steps again. On the sidewalk behind the parked cars the detective stops and waits to see if the tail turns to confront him, he is limping away fast but he does soon turn and speak, he limps to the detective and says, Maybe you and me can help each other . . . no joke, he whispers to him, and the detective does not respond, he has never been discursive. We can’t talk here, he continues, they put a tail on me, man, me and you we could join up, pool information, tips, leads . . . no shit, you’d have my back! He limps toward the detective, he is shaking. To look in his face when he stands this close, the detective bows his head as if to inspect the concrete, he hears the tail whisper, My name is Anderson Nordquist, I’m from Mankato, Minnesota, I rent a garret in San Tapeta a piss away from the Bridge, here, you have my address. He hurriedly pulls a card out of his pocket, and without a veil of indoor light drawn across his features, the detective sees he is delicate, more delicate than he had appreciated. Anderson Nordquist turns around and limps into the night. Sweat has smeared the ink on the card. The detective watches his former tail’s car into the road, he returns to his small hatchback, he lays his jacket in the passenger seat, and the following night it lies there again when he drives to the garret apartment. He is not sure, as he crosses the Bridge, why he agreed to see Nordquist, but when he recalls the night before he is certain he did not respond to him when they met outside the hotel. The detective did not say a word, he only spoke to the dick, he had no agreement with anyone. The talk outside was Nordquist’s and that was a private matter, the detective accepted no invitation to start any affair, there was no start to anything . . . no end could follow without a start, the case could be encompassed by a present without a shore, he reasons he could have it in one glance, so he determines to examine the ending that the case will not achieve, it is more lucid to the detective than his prismic recollections, there is no time that removes him from what is and will not be. He is below a sloping roof in a room where Nordquist will not be seated at the end of his low cot. The little man will not go shirtless, he will not have bruises on the ribs where he was held by the hotel dick, they will not be exposed, he will not reach with a fleshless arm deep in his left pocket, and his hand will not reemerge with a cigarette and a lighter. He will not set the cigarette between his lips. His sternum will not be sunken, he will not run his thumb over the sparkwheel, it will make no orange sparks. The lighter will not remain unlit, he will not do it again, and Nordquist’s hands will not tremble as he does not pull his thumb across the sparkwheel over and over, and when he does not look in beseechment into the detective’s eyes that do not watch from above, the detective will not extend his empty palms, he will give no silent indication that he is not a smoker. The detective will not notice the arrayed heaps of comic books that hide the joint between the ceiling and the floor, he will not see a tarnished hotplate. He is not party to the little man’s business . . . he will not see his unlined face before it is not pressed behind his hands, he will not see the activity of his mouth about the cigarette as he does not try to plead, he will not say, Christ . . . Christ. There will be no hint of faraway eyes in the gaps between his fingers and that which cannot be said will be neither attempted nor considered. The detective will not wander to the diminutive window that faces the street, there will be no second dun-colored car idling beneath a eucalyptus tree, he will see no streetlamp, pale knuckles over a wheel will not be visible in a windshield, it will not be too late for him or for Anderson Nordquist. The detective will not stop at 1739 Franklin Street, he will turn to round the block when he reaches Colorado, he will drive to his apartment, he is over the Bridge as before.

4. The detective

arrives with his suit at the waitingroom door on a late summer morning. The key cannot turn as far as it does on most mornings, a slight application of pressure and the door swings inside, evidently it was left unlocked. A very small man with a square face and a sharp nose watches from below in the space that he has opened, his face is half in shadow, his lower jaw has descended and he is poised to howl or burst into dirty song, his head is bald and disreputable, he outstretches his left hand. The man offers to take the detective’s jacket, and the detective scolds himself for inferring character from appearance, he passes him his jacket and the man slips back of the door, he does not open it farther, the detective himself pushes it in. You never know, he muses, what awaits you in your waitingroom, and when he steps across the threshold it is populous as a dream. The dust has been unsettled, the morning light is thick with it, the cross he sees first thing each day cast on the opposite wall is swallowed in new shadows, three women kneel and press an ear against the office door, they keep their heads below the glass. Amid the talk and turning of pages the detective can distinguish a voice that begins on the other side, it is soft, he cannot parse it. To his right a recumbent client takes up the length of the hard couch, he is reading National Geographic or is examining its pictures, folded to the back is a huddle of blank faces, their septums are interrupted by luminous shards of bone . . . near the wall across the room another client walks its length with the Nimzowitsch collection held before his eyes, his grooming shames the detective’s, he pauses near the window, he wheezes aloud at intervals, Rook to ee-e-e seven, bishop to gee-e-ee two. In the expectant desert between them has been raised a mess of folding chairs, they have lost their aluminum sheen. They do not point in one direction. Certain chairs have occupants, others have been stacked or pushed in bunches by erstwhile occupants, who stand and make conversation in twos and threes, the detective does not attract their attention. He shuts the door and scans the room in hope of recognition, he cannot catch any gaze, what he believes is an unswerving eye is the sun on the gilded braid of an elderly man’s cap, his chair is apart from the others, near the northwest corner. The detective goes to him and crouches at his side to ask what drew the crowd today as though the glimmering braid were an invitation to talk. When he is so near as to almost touch the elderly man, he remembers his polished buttons, he knows his starched white collar, the flapped pockets on his breast look familiar, in both his cheeks descended from the bone is the trace of heavy round precursors, the uniform is fit to somebody else but he has maintained its condition, where it falls off his wasted calf it ends in a tight crease. He is the elevator’s old attendant . . . many years have passed, his posture is not as it was. To think we spoke every day, Donny, whispers the detective, did you wonder what I’d gotten up to? Do you remember seeing this face? The detective has a face that does not age like other faces. Donny does not respond and the detective’s cheeks flush, he never had a conversation with Donny, only such talk as could be contained in a trip up or down the elevator, beautiful day, take care of yourself. He considered Donny rarely after his dismissal, he had not much to consider, his most concrete impression was a young man’s generous smile, effaced now by the pointed years that had chiseled off his flesh. You tell me what you’ve been doing, Donny, maybe today we talk, he says, there wasn’t time before. He wonders what account he could make of himself to Donny if put on the spot, Donny who alone witnessed his life’s most formative period, But you were dismissed before I was made a man or a detective, you couldn’t know how it went. He crouches a long time, he has left a hand on Donny’s knee and the sun is far past the window, Donny does not move but to gently sway with his breath. He is impassive, his face is not shaved evenly. The detective turns and watches as at times, in the small chattering conclaves dispersed among the chairs, a talker reaches deep in a pocket, rescues a pen and a dirty receipt, and smooths it over an open palm to leave some hasty mark on it, the others push in their heads to watch and issue mumbled quick consent. Then the writer goes to the second door, bends very low at the waist, and slides the message into the office and between the legs of one of the women kneeling there to listen. Donny, says the detective, he is focusing on Donny, I have to know why you came, you can see it’s already late, my workday won’t last forever, I’m already goddamn tired. He is so exercised he stands, he looks into Donny’s face, he sees his eyes are pale and fogged in by cataracts . . . Donny angles his head to the office as though drawn to the light in the glass, he touches the detective’s sleeve and whispers, He is a great detective, Domínguez, and the detective also looks to the glass and admits, though they have not been replaced, that the gold letters that spelled his name are not recognizable now, each has flaked away. In the frosting appears a diffuse, orange flash that must correspond to a flame, he sees a matchlight in the office doubled in its reflection on a stranger’s tarblack hair. He does not know a Domínguez. He sees one of the women listening at the door stand and step into the crowd, it parts before her, she slips between the chairs without having to push them aside. She has dark skin, her torso is long, her hair is not below her shoulders. She takes the hand on Donny’s knee and leads the detective down her path, the sun must now be low in the west. Near the table he sees a mound of coats, and the small man is on all fours among them, he is running his cupped hands through the detective’s pockets as though he wants to scratch out a hole, a pile of keys glints on the table, he has his snout below the detective’s collar, the detective moves to run him off but the woman is too strong . . . she pulls him to the office door and then down to the others, he is on his knees and she urges him press his ear into the wood, she drags fingers through his hair, the gel has dried, he feels the warmth of her chest against his back. He listens and can distinguish two voices he cannot place, a man’s and a woman’s, he cannot join their phrases into a sentence, still he can place many phrases, they sometimes raise their voices or enunciate with precision, he hears pinched but it won’t stick, he hears homicide department, he hears pickpocket and slum-bred, he hears talk of Ruben Weld. There are sharp, clear whispers of the boat in San Tapeta Bay, there are complaints of fog. Her breath is on his other ear and he hears the woman say, Domínguez is a great detective, the tissues and receipts pass below him and beside him and underneath the door, strange knuckles pass along his thighs, the detective would like to push his ear deeper into the wood but it does not give, he hears them close a drawer in the office. He does not notice the dark-skinned woman is not against him anymore until the overhead light is out, his arms are lifted into his jacket, he is pulled to his feet by small but persuasive hands, they take him by the belt and rush him from behind into the hall, the room has fallen silent, he turns back to the closing door and sees in the brief gap violent grooves in a naked head, it is not higher than his waist. When it is closed he turns the knob and finds it will not move. However deep he pushes each of his keys into the lock, it does not turn. Outside the night is immaculate.

5. The detective

is invited on a safari by a friend who was his friend before he became a detective. For weeks the genial letter is stored in a drawer in his desk, it is not possible to join his friend, he will have to let him know. He is ashamed it is not possible, and his shame compounds with the knowledge that none of his imagined explanations is definitive, solutions could be found. All the same the safari is not possible and will not be. Sleepless nights are passed envisioning solutions he recomplicates, then resolves. There are months in which his first thought every morning is to respond at all costs to the letter, his drive to the basement garage is darkened by the shade of what remains unwritten, he can only cast it off in the morning light of the waitingroom, he retains his discipline. He hopes his friend will follow up and this hope is unfounded. Soon it is not possible to respond without apologies, apology is not possible. An excuse will have to invoke his work, and to be a detective is not so hard of work. It is said to be flexible. He hopes the woman in Phoenix will interrupt her silence to tell him an old friend has called her too many times, her conscience demands she violate her contract, his friend says he forgives him, they can talk as they did before he was a detective, he understands and will say nothing of the safari or his work. It is out of the question to discuss the nature of his work, it is not a topic for discussion, there is no call from anyone. The detective does not feel he is justified as a detective. The psychic effect of the letter is not reduced by the documents he layers above it in the drawer, there are more unanswered letters, his feelings toward himself do not improve. There are days his discipline is not equal to the weight, the letter from his friend makes his work not possible, recollections are displaced. Those afternoons when he is defeated, he lowers his head to the cool wood, he is near to his distress, he fears he is not forgotten and he cannot write his relief.

6. The detective

has wondered many nights what he would do without obligations, and he has no obligations, so he has left across the Bridge and is driving west down Geary toward San Tapeta Pier. He has heard of the casino boat, he would like to see it, in his mind it sings the prospect of a case. Tonight he is full of action. Near where Geary becomes the road that skirts the beaches into the hills that rise north of the Bay, where in its wide sweeping curve the many lanes are parted and what remains, condensed, he peels off early at a sidestreet and takes the last free parking. He slips his jacket on and points himself at the bluffs that cleave the beach from the town. He is on the south side of Geary, he is headed straight for the Pier, the strongest lights are those of the cars back from evenings gone too long in San Rafael and Malibu. The detective is attracted to later evenings, unspeakable evenings, but the goings-on of the casino boat are outside his jurisdiction. He will expand his jurisdiction. Tonight the air is heavy but fog is not collecting. His thought is to find an unscrupulous pilot among the roughs who frequent the Pier, they keep slightly to the side and each is distanced from the others. He cannot tell who sells what, as all remain in silhouette up to the moment they pass, then he does see a face unveiled but it is a liquid face, it passes under an eddy of night before he can ask his question. Long shadows cross on the pavement as they circulate in headlights, the dark cutouts at their feet above them hiss their wares in passing, they do not exchange information. The detective has the distinct sense of having fallen beneath the surface, and beneath there is no depth. Black figures in coats are arrayed on an undifferentiated plane. One or more of these figures will lead him off below the Pier, where he will have lashed a skiff to the timber under the algae. He will not have a license. Conditions do not favor the practice of detection. The detective has joined and become one among them, he is made a silhouette, they whisper every offer but a ride, he endures solicitations, green light from the Ferris wheel falls on the laughing waves, he notes it is not a friendly laugh, it washes back into itself, it is far too measured. He turns his head between the ocean and the trafficking shadows in hope of an abnormality that will lead him to his boat, and from that boat to the gamblers’ barge . . . his eye is caught on a shadow whose movements are less easy, a memory is set in motion by its uneven gait. A shadow is limping out of the crowd and into the relative shade of the path that follows the bluff. The detective believes he knows its voice, the shadow yells and cackles at the cars that glide to the south. He hurries after the shadow, it is a voice he has heard a thousand times, it must be a friend from long ago, it must be the Admiral, and though the Admiral knew the detective before he became a detective, the detective knew the Admiral before he became an admiral. He does not have a boat, it has been a generation since he was stripped of his command, he was made an admiral after. He does not have an apartment. There is no keener observer of the San Tapeta waterfront, the police have not his time nor his savantlike inclination. He wears a long coat, longer than is fashionable, he wears an officer’s cap, a spyglass is concealed in a deep interior pocket, he comes to abrupt halts to look through it far into the sea. On other nights he has stood on the wall at the cliff’s edge and held the spyglass to his eye for hours, stiller than Buddha. He prides himself on a singular vigilance. He cuts on and off the path and his coat brushes the greenery, his legs are both invisible and only weathered shoes are seen, the detective often wonders if the left leg is out of the picture, he expects that beneath the coat is concealed a strange prosthetic. The Admiral’s voluminous beard is gray but spotted black and white. His talk is very loose, it is not easy to say if he fought in any wars, or which war he claims to have fought in, some say his connection to the Navy is fantastical. The detective has spoken to gossips who say he was a fellow at the LAND Corporation, he was a cousin of Hiram Land’s, he was a minor strategic theorist who was coaxed into early retirement. The detective met the Admiral soon after his resignation or dismissal but never learned the cause, and he never confirmed where he left. The Admiral is preoccupied with countries across the ocean. The detective follows him over the path, he will ask for any leads. At present the Admiral has turned his vigilance on the cars stopped at the light, he cups his hands around his mouth, they are not stopped enough so he bellows, ava-a-ast, AVAA-A-AST, he limps beneath a streetlamp and is swiftly limping on, he has raised a fist on his good side, he is darting over the narrow lawn from the path by the cliffs to the sidewalk. He has menaced traffic before. The detective sees and sprints from behind him and catches the fist in his hands, the Admiral is taller but not as strong as he once was. His vigil is interrupted and he turns to face the detective, he calls him what he calls his friends, he will only call him Sailor. Whether the detective is recognized is impossible to determine, he wears the years so lightly that he is uncanny to recognize, to the Admiral he is a sailor . . . the Sailor gestures toward a bench that looks out over the sea, back across the lawn, the Admiral accompanies him there but prefers not to sit down, he does not need to be calmed, his agitation dissipated the instant he was touched. The red light has turned green. He faces away from the ocean, he clasps his hands behind his back, on the bench the Sailor tilts his head to see into his humid eyes. The Sailor says he is a detective, he is aware of a casino boat, he has come to see it himself, it is his vocation to sound any curiosities, he needs a man with a skiff. The Sailor has no skiff himself, he had no luck at the Pier. He throws his hands open in earnest supplication. Yes, a detective, here there are many detectives, says the Admiral to the Sailor, you aren’t the first tonight, it’s true, each detective is anticipated by an earlier detective . . . the Sailor envisions a long barge, it has various structures, lanterns are hung on cables above them, all along the naked edge wait men in furtive suits, they dangle their feet over the sea, they chew on unlit cigarettes, they hold felt hats against the wind, crooks and women pass among them unmolested and unwatched, in the reflected lights of silken gowns and the moon on polished barrels a detective casts no shadow, he is a gray man, each vanishes in another’s coat. The Sailor refuses to credit this vision, he is a man obsessed . . . he explains the boat is operated outside California, it cruises up the stateline, no police have jurisdiction, it is the dream of a lawless place. For a detective it means opportunity, says the Sailor to the Admiral, I need a quiet man with a skiff, there’s room for maneuver there. He insists on information and he is sure there is information. No doubt, replies the Admiral, that’s where all the trouble is, not a quarter mile over the border, you’re absolutely right. He motions for the Sailor to follow him to the edge of the bluff, he continues, That’s where we let our guard down, that’s where it’s bound to begin, I’ve tracked their movements long enough, I should know if anyone does. He limps to the low wall and the Sailor stands beside him, the Admiral’s arm disappears into his coat for the spyglass, the night is clear as before, the fog does not coalesce. Fewer cars are passing now, the waves are louder than the road, it is later, the Pier’s lights are not turned out but the amusement park is stationary. He passes the spyglass to the Sailor, he takes his wrist and points him to the far limit of the night. In the glass the Sailor locates a formless orange glow, it is bobbing across the swells and cutting over the horizon, he cannot see a horizon, it is less a boat than a warp in the lens and the Admiral speaks of Vietnam. For years he has watched the advance party, it is only a matter of time. He tells the Sailor it is common knowledge and in his case it is firsthand, he names the papers he must read. The Sailor does not know where one word ends and another starts, he cannot follow the Admiral, he has never read a paper that is not the Los Angeles Times. He says he does not need to be the first detective on board, only he would like to see the boat, the Admiral is convinced that an invasion is imminent and has been imminent many years, every day it is more imminent, his insistence does not diminish but his voice is growing soft, what remains to the Sailor’s ear is his friend’s implacable breath . . . his little world has shrunk, it is the breath and the glow, his world has become very small. When the Sailor lowers the spyglass he sees the Admiral has turned away, he looks northwest to a space a tarrier black than the farthest night, he watches the dark outline of a mountain out to sea, it is cold and the Admiral trembles, he sees a Channel Island. The Admiral’s coat hangs loose enough on his frame that there is room to house them both. He makes no sign he is aware of the Sailor who passes back the spyglass, his breathing has become labored, the Sailor’s sleeve touches the coat and he looks away, to San Miguel . . . he listens to the Admiral. He can hear him gasping out toward the contours of a memory, it has swum up close to him, it has made an apparition . . . it falls deep beneath the waves.

7. The detective

longs for solitude, he is too much beset by dreams. Company has delivered him into a state of nervous exhaustion. He says to himself, Enough! If he continues to overexert himself he will end a piteous wreck. He cannot describe his office as a refuge any longer. Today he wears a khaki trenchcoat and hides his suit beneath it, he drives himself to the parking area at the far entrance to the Bridge, he takes an unusual route . . . through Pasadena into the Valley, the length of the Valley on Camino Real, up through the hills on Skyline Drive to where it meets Mulholland, the junction is near Topanga, and Topanga ends at Highway One. It is a clear and irrepressible day. The wind on the Bridge is hard through the arches and cables but the sun reveals their color, the windiest days in San Tapeta have the most visual appeal. Today the wind dissuades more than the sun attracts, the bayside walkway is uncrowded, the detective feels satisfied he has not erred in his choice. To his left, he sees Santa Rosa peek over the highway, in the blue at the edge of his field of vision a dark spot is the Farallons, Alcatraz lies to the right. They give his thoughts a healthy frame as he progresses toward the Headlands, he longs to recline in its folds. With the light, the breeze, and salt on his tongue, his caseload has never felt so insubstantial, the weight of recent months is off, may they press on somebody else. Memories conditioned by the salutary air have an effect on his mind that is salutary, they turn the detective outward, he feels receptive, he receives nothing but he will when presented with a scenario deserving of his attention, he believes his receptivity is the font of all great cases. The few other people on the walkway give him no points of interest, he sees their conventional faces, between each face the path is deserted a hundred yards or more. It is a long bridge. The detective is the one who steps aside when they meet, he is the one to brush on the fence kept no higher than the waist to safeguard pedestrians’ view. His gaze is drawn as much to the long uncurving walkway as it is to the sea. Pushed against the low barrier as an undistinguished shade hurries by, he is near the bridge’s midpoint, he is looking on its emptiest stretch and strains his eyes and tries to dissolve figures at the far end into a fog that has appeared, he did not see it materialize, tentative wisps are traveling up and across the highway, between them the sky is clear as before, the fog has gathered beneath a paradisiac blue. He sees a large pale bird alight ahead of him on the outer barrier, it is larger than a condor but he cannot make out its wings. It is so pale he could mistake a whorl of fog for a wing, he squints and he cannot say. It sways against the wind. He sees the fog or wing unfold not sixty feet in front of him, he believes it is poised to glide over San Tapeta Bay to the city. Then the fog slightly thins, wings do not unfold, what would be wings resolve into parts and he sees mechanical joints, it is a small person, she is a very small woman. He is moved to run but he does not, he continues at a walk, he sees no cause to startle himself, it is a weekly occurrence. The misfortune is he is here to watch . . . her hair is long and could in the wind also pass for a wing, she has left it loose. When she steps away the detective does not expect it to seem so incidental, he learns a jump from great heights can only be seen as a fall. The initial, hopeful rise is swallowed in the maw of the drop . . . it is a fall he has considered himself, he has made and cast off plans, he observes it is not a violent fall. She is gone. He hastens to the place where she dropped, there is fog between him and the water below, it has risen fast off the waves, he is reminded of Anderson Nordquist and he cannot recall his face, he can locate no connection to the woman who fell into the Bay. Some believe that this is where the Chilean disappeared. There is nothing to see in the cloud and he cannot turn away from it until he hears the even approach of leather on cement. He is slow to look but he does, he is facing a man with hair made to resemble Carlos Gardel’s, he wears a coat like the detective’s, he stands in the middle of the path. He says that he is also a detective but he is not so tall . . . I’ll tell you how it goes from here, the other detective says with a voice he cannot place, it’s an everyday, weekly occurrence, the only thing that changes is some of them make it out, that’s something I heard but never saw: I have heard of three. One is a kid that jumped and swam off, no problem, he claims that he was goaded, this is not a strong kid. It’s a graduation trip with his boys, when the Coast Guard comes he meets the boat halfway, he’s a pleaser, no one gets wet in the end but the kid, it’s clean. Then there’s a guy I know got out and he had a different attitude, says the other detective, he jumps and it’s not so clean, he claims a benevolent dolphin noses him to the surface, but he’s made his ribs a horror show, he fucks his back forever, so I say not so benevolent . . . the other detective does not move from the middle, no one approaches on the walkway. A pack of Marlboro Reds has appeared in his left hand. Somebody, he says, will have made the call, you stay where you are and the fog collaborates, you wait and you’ll see a Coast Guard boat. It’ll come up fast like it’s not too late and stop and pick the body out, then it goes back very slow, I don’t like your boy’s odds with a dolphin, I don’t like anybody’s odds . . . it is a voice the detective has heard before. The other detective says, I never saw your face at the coroner . . . it is an even voice, it is not the voice of a smoker. Now, he continues, if he stuck to the first trajectory, he’s in the Sierras in under an hour, and I knew a bodhisattva in Reno, and that would be the third . . . I think you know him too, I think you’re forgetting again. He is holding a lighter and his cigarette catches unimpeded by the wind, he does not cup a hand around it. The ends of his coat are unaffected. He holds out the cigarette to the detective, he is insistent, he tells him, It was Ruben Weld gave me this cigarette   . . . his smile does not show evidence of any movement beyond itself, it is a smile that can do without his lips. I work alone, says the detective, I’m sorry, I really am . . . he hews near the barrier and walks past the other detective who remains still, he continues his progress toward the Headlands though he cannot see through the fog, it is difficult to see the walkway. He does not look behind himself, the waves are quieter than the few passing cars and the wind. Sometimes something is resolved, calls the other detective after, and sometimes it cannot stop.

8. The detective

wakes up and cannot be persuaded to continue his routine, he must stop. He does not try to persuade himself and he does not share his bed, there is no one to urge him on. His work is not dependent on a place, he is not a land surveyor. Through the window at the foot of the bed he watches a vermilion sunrise, its advance over the flatland allows him to measure the time and the time it spills in the room is not that of a clock, it is undifferentiated, the demands of a given minute do not imbue its neighbors with urgency, in his room the minutes make no demands. The hours have no affect and they do not accumulate, each takes the place of the last and the last is filed away. The Admiral is not an admiral, the Russian is not an heiress, there is only one detective, he cannot be diverted from his work. He could think here many days. No advantage is conferred by his office, the Brausen Building does not offer cognitive enhancements. He is far from drawers and papers, they cannot be attended, his cases and affairs are stealing out and away, they are far past the shimmering jaws of the detective’s agile solutions, the detective does not see them go, he is occupied with work, he is producing better solutions. Here there is nothing to solve and solutions near perfection, they are growing sleek with hunger, they are lithe and near the ground, here they have no purpose and still they must be fed. Under the covers the detective is spurred into mechanical frenzy, without cases he must graze his solutions on former solutions, there is no time to leave the bed, no sooner is one fabricated than it has leaped to the floor, it has taken between its teeth a well-constructed starveling, it tears one at a time to bits, it learns to repeat their whimpers, it soon is sleek and hungry, when its strength is gone it decomposes into several. They pull their hindlegs over the carpet and into the jaws of the next, the next cannot be resisted. There will not be an end, it needs no outer sustenance, the solution is not limited, the detective sees each sunrise into its yawning lurid twin, his ecstasy is not false, there is not a case to be solved. On his face the light is immutable, it is the dream of pure detection.

9. The detective

is a nobody, says Lieutenant Ruben Weld. There is a placard on his desk that reads lieutenant ruben weld. You have heard his voice and you have smelled his cigarette. He says the detective will not be defeated, he can only be contained, it is a voice you cannot place . . . I am a great policeman, says Lieutenant Ruben Weld, and I know all the detective’s movements, I am the architect of his grooves, I made his circumscription, his world can be diminished to a finite set of gestures and displacements, he can be pinned under the weight of a moment that is repeated, his actions can be collapsed into types that are not his own, he will be confined. He can be ahistoricized in presents that do not end. I am a good cop, says Lieutenant Ruben Weld, and you see his face flickering above the unyielding orange glow of the end of a cigarette, there is no wall behind him, it is too dark to see. He says the detective can be weaned from life, he can be made to face outlines of the real and bounce off them, he can be pushed back in the jungle of phantom simulacra, the talent of Ruben Weld is he can follow him in the underbrush without his boots’ departing the pavement, he is too strong to be multiplied, he made lieutenant quick. When he found it suited him he resolved to progress no further. Once they were fond collaborators, the detective and his hunter, their disagreements have been sunk from ontology into practice, the detective does not understand that cases resolve to files, they lose names and turn to anecdotes, restoration is foreclosed, it is Ruben Weld who oversees the boxes where they lie. He certifies terminations, he observes when they are cold and when they reemerge. He excelled at the Academy, his marksmanship is unequalled. He has concealed the detective’s whereabouts from chiefs of every stripe, he has upheld the presumption of innocence against a finger on the trigger. He gave him a long leash in what he has called the Hammond Case, he gave him a head start in what he called the Reich Debacle, his were the eyes in the brush by the road at the rendezvous with the Vegas. Now he is the face that is not seen straight on, his is the voice that does not explain. They have sheltered together in a culvert under subautomatic fire, they have spent many nights at one desk in the same gray precinct. The detective does not understand that behind a hundred images there is one physical truth, behind the woman on the ramparts Helen has not left the Nile, what remains is evanescence, says Lieutenant Ruben Weld. He is a rank materialist, he is only behind the desk, he cannot be divided from his specter . . . you see his face is flickering, he has no other face, he says it is in marble opposition to the detective’s, you cannot place the smoke drifting toward you from his cigarette. It is familiar as the moisture of your breath across your lips . . . the detective is his copies, he has no final self. He will live forever so long as he cannot choose, he is sustained by indecision, there may be others like him and they will all be shadowed by men with other names. Ruben Weld will die and a face that has no precedent will appear behind the desk, it will flicker like mine before you, the placard will be changed, it will smoke its cigarette, it will follow the detective, the detectives and their kind, into cities that have not left any imprint on the earth. He will bring his own solutions. You will hear the even rhythm of boots against the pavement on the roads of San Francisco, of Los Angeles, of San Tapeta’s tangled streets. The detective, he is ahead of them . . . he is tracing Californias. His road is wide and empty, it is west of the Channel Islands, there are farther Californias. He will not say a word.

***