Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

The cemetery wall ended abruptly, and its place was taken by a spear-pointed iron fence. I caught glimpses through it of a great lawn returning to wilderness, beyond it a flat field with a corrugated-iron hangar at one end, a wind-sock blowing from its roof. I slowed down.

A heavy wrought-iron gate hung between obelisk-shaped gateposts, one of which had a large FOR SALE sign bolted to it. I got out and tried the gate. It was chained and padlocked. Through its bars I could see a long straight drive lined with coconut palms, at its end a massive house surrounded with outbuildings. The sloping glass roof of a conservatory glinted at the end of one wing.

The gate was climbable. Iron leaves between the bars provided foot- and hand-holds. I switched off my headlights and went over it. Circling wide on the lawn away from the drive, I struggled through the waist-high grass and weeds. The traveling moon accompanied me to the house.

The building was Spanish Renaissance with a strong Inquisition hangover. Narrow windows barred with ornamental ironwork were set deep in its wide flat concrete face. A lighted window on the second floor formed a tall yellow rectangle striped with vertical bars. I could see part of the ceiling of the room, vague shadows dancing on it. After a while the shadows approached the window, grouping and solidifying into human form. I lay down flat on my back and pulled my jacket together over my shirt-front.

A man’s head and shoulders appeared at the bottom of the tall yellow rectangle. I made out dark eyes in a moony blur of face under a tangle of hair. The eyes were raised to the sky. I looked straight up into its dark blue well, moon washed and dripping with stars, and wondered what the man at the window was seeing there, or looking for.

He moved. Two pale hands sprang out from his dark silhouette and gripped the bars framing his face. He swayed from side to side, and I saw the white blaze on one side of his tangled head. His shoulders writhed. He seemed to be trying to wrench the bars out of their concrete sockets. Each time he tried and failed, he said one word in a low growling guttural.

“Hell,” he said. “Hell. Hell.”

The word fell heavily from his mouth forty or fifty times while his body tugged and heaved, flinging itself violently from side to side. He left the window then, as suddenly as he had appeared in it. I watched his slow shadow retreat across the ceiling and dissolve out of human shape.

Moving closer to the wall, I worked along it to the ground-floor window in which a faint light showed. This opened into a long hallway with a rounded ceiling. The light came from an open door at its far end. Listening closely, I heard some kind of music, a thin jazz scrabbling and tapping on the lid of silence.

I circled the house to the left, past a row of closed garage-doors, a clay tennis-court patchily furred with twitch grass, a sunken garden overgrown with succulents. From its end a barranca widened down to a bluff that overhung the sea. Below the bluff, the sea slanted up like a corrugated-metal roof to the horizon.

I turned back to the house. Between it and the sunken garden there was a flagged patio walled with flowerboxes. Its tables and chairs were sand-blown and rusting, old iron relics of dead summers. Light fell among them from a picture window in the wall overhead. The jazz was louder behind the wall, like music at a dance to which I hadn’t been invited.

The window was uncurtained but set too high to give me a view of the room. The black-beamed ceiling was visible, and the upper part of the far wall. Its oak panels were crowded with paintings of pigeon-breasted women in lace caps and mutton-chop-whiskered men, narrow-shouldered in black Victorian coats. Somebody’s ancestors, not Una’s. She had been stamped out by a machine.

Standing on my toes, I could see the top of Una’s head covered with short black curls like caracul. She was sitting perfectly still beside the window. A young man was sitting opposite her, his profile visible from the neck up. It was a heavy and amorphous profile, whatever strength it had concealed by pads of flesh under the chin, around the mouth and eyes. He had light brown hair bristling in an unkempt crew-cut. The focus of his attention was somewhere between him and Una, below the level of the windowsill. I guessed from the movement of his eye that they were playing cards.

The music behind the wall stopped and started again. It was the same old record, Sentimental Lady, being played over and over. Sentimental Una, I said to myself, just as the howling began. Distant and muted by intervening walls, the howling rose and fell like a coyote baying the moon. Or a man. The hair on the back of my neck prickled.

Una said, loudly enough to be heard through the plate-glass window: “For Christ’s sake shut him up.”

The man with the crew-cut rose into half-length view. He wore the white-drill smock of a nurse or orderly, but he had none of their air of efficiency. “What do I do, bring him down here?” He clenched his hands together in a womanish gesture.

“It looks as if you’ll have to.”

The howling rose again. The orderly’s head turned towards it and then his body followed. He walked away from the window, out of my sight. Una got up and marched in the same direction. Her shoulders were trim in a tailored black pajama-jacket. She turned the music louder. It poured through the house like a dark intangible surf, and like a drowning person’s, the man’s cry rose above it. His howling was stilled suddenly. The music went on, washing over the human echo.

Then there were voices in the room, Una’s voice weaving jerkily through the music: “Headache...get some peace...sedation”; and the growling guttural I had heard before, starting below the music and rising above it: “I can’t. It is terrible. Terrible things going on. I got to stop them.”

“Old man Stopper himself. You’re the one to stop them all right.” It was the younger man’s mezzo, with a titter running though it.

“Leave him alone!” Una cried savagely. “Let him have his say. You want him to yell all night?”

There was silence again, except for the swirling music. I stepped across a flowerbox into the patio and leaned my weight on one of the rusted tables. It held firm. Using a chair as a step, I got up onto the tabletop. The table teetered on its base, and I had a bad moment before it levelled back. When I straightened up, my head was almost even with the windowsill ten feet away.

On the far side of the room, Una was standing over a radio-phonograph. She turned it low and walked directly towards the window. I ducked instinctively, but she wasn’t looking at me. With an expression in which outrage and tolerance were combined, she was watching the man who stood in the center of the room. The man with the blaze of white like a lightning scar on the side of his head.

His small body was wrapped in a robe of red brocaded silk which hung in folds as if he had borrowed it from a larger man. Even his face seemed to have shrunk inside its skin. Instead of jowls he had pale loose wattles that flapped with the movement of his mouth.

“Terrible things.” His broken growl was loud in the silence. “Going on all the time. I caught the dogs at my mamma. They crucified my daddy. I climbed up out of the culvert up on the hill and saw the nails in his hands and he said kill them all. Kill them all. Those were his last streetcar I went down into the tunnel under the river and the dead boys lying the ragpickers strutting around with rods in their pants.” He trailed off into an obscene medley of Anglo-Saxon and Italian.

The white-smocked orderly was sitting on the arm of a leather chair. The light from a standing lamp beside him gave him the unreality of a pink elephant. He called out like a rooter from the sidelines: “You tell ’em, Durano. You got a beautiful engram, old boy.”