Джеймс Эллрой - Clandestine

Michael slammed a bony elbow into my stomach. I let go of him and he tore off like an antelope in the direction of the rest area. I let him get a good lead, then followed. He was fast, and sprinting full out, and I knew in his condition he would run until he collapsed.

We ran through the wooded area into a miniature box canyon laced with scrub pines. Suddenly there was noplace left to run. Michael fell down at the base of a large pine tree and encircled it fiercely with his skinny arms, rocking on his knees. As I came up to him, I could hear a hoarse wail rise from his throat. I knelt beside him and placed a tentative hand on his shoulder and let him cry until he gradually surrendered his grip on the tree and placed his arms around me.

“What is it, Michael?” I asked softly, ruffling his hair. “What is it?”

“Call me Mike,” he sobbed. “I don’t want to be called Michael anymore.”

“Mike, who killed your mother?”

“I don’t know!”

“Have you ever heard of anyone named Eddie Engels?”

Mike shook his head and buried it deeper into my chest.

“Margaret Cadwallader?”

“No,” he sobbed.

“Mike, do you remember living on Hibiscus Canyon when you were five?”

Mike looked up at me. “Y-yes,” he said.

“Do you remember the trip your mother took while you were living there?”

“Yes!”

“Ssssh. Where did she go?”

“I don’t...”

I helped the boy to his feet and put my arm around him. “Did she go to Wisconsin?”

“I think so. She brought back all this gooey cheese and this smelly sauerkraut. Fucking German squarehead bastards.”

I lifted the boy’s chin off his chest. “Who did you stay with while she was gone?”

Mike twisted away from me, looking at the ground at his feet.

“Tell me, Mike.”

“I stayed with these fly-by-night guys my mom was seeing.”

“Did they treat you all right?”

“Yeah. They were drunks and gamblers. They were nice to me, but...”

“But what, Mike?”

Mike screamed, “They were nice to me because they wanted to fuck Marcella!” His tears had stopped and the hatred in his young face aged him by ten years.

“I don’t know, Uncle Claude, Uncle Schmo, Uncle Fucko, I don’t know!”

“Do you remember the place where you stayed?”

“Yeah, I remember; 6481 Scenic Avenue. Near Franklin and Gower. Dad said...”

“Said what, Mike?”

“That... that he was going to fuck up Marcella’s boyfriends. I told him they were nice, but he still said it. Fred?”

“Yes?”

“Dad was telling stories last night. He told me this story about this guy who used to be a cop. Did you used to be a cop?”

“Yes. What—”

“Michael, Fred, where the hell are you?” It was Doc’s voice, and it was nearby. A second later we saw him. Michael moved away from me when Doc came into view.

He walked toward us. When I saw his face up close I knew that all pretense was gone. His expression was a mask of hatred; the hard, handsome features were drawn inward to the point where each plane melded perfectly in a picture of absolute coldness.

“I think we should go back to L.A.,” Doc said.

No one said a word as we made our way back to Los Angeles via a labyrinthine network of freeways and surface streets. Mike sat in back, and Doc sat up front with me, his eyes glued straight ahead for the entire two hours.

When we finally pulled up to the house all three of us seemed to breathe for the first time. It was then that I smelled it, a musky, sweaty pungency that permeated the car even with the top down: the smell of fear.

Michael vaulted out of the backseat and ran without a word into his concrete backyard. Doc turned to face me. “What now, Underhill?” he said.

“I don’t know. I’m blowing town for a while.”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll be back.”

Harris got out of the car. He looked down at me. He started to smile, but I didn’t let his cold face get that far.

“Harris, if you harm that boy, I’ll kill you,” I said, then drove off in the direction of Hollywood.

Scenic Avenue was a side street about a mile north of Hollywood Boulevard. Number 6481 was a small stone cottage on the south side. There was a small yard of weeds encircled by a white picket fence. It was deserted, as I knew it would be; all the front windows were broken and the flimsy wooden front door was half caved in.

I walked around the corner of the house. The backyard was the same as the front — same fencing, same high weeds. I found a circuit box next to the fence, attached to a phone pole, and wedged a long piece of scrap wood under the hinge, snapping the box open. I toyed with the switches for five minutes until the dusk-shrouded inside of 6481 was illuminated as bright as day.

I brazenly walked across the wooden service porch and through the back door. Then I walked quietly through the entire house, savoring each nuance of the evil I felt there.

It was just an ordinary one-family dwelling, bereft of furniture, bereft of all signs of habitation, bereft even of the winos who usually inhabited such places; but it was alive with an unspeakable aura of sickness and terror that permeated every wall, floorboard, and cobweb-knitted corner.

On the oak floor of the bedroom near an overturned mattress I found a large splotch of dried blood. It could have been something else, but I knew what it was. I upended the mattress; the bottom of it was soaked through with brownish matter.

I found what I knew to be old blood in the bathtub, in the living room closet, and on the dining room walls. Somehow each new sign of carnage brought forth in me a deeper and deeper sense of calm. Until I walked into the den that adjoined the kitchen and saw the crib, its railings splattered with blood, the matting that lined the inside caked thick with blood, and the teddy bear who lay dead atop it, his cotton guts spilling out and soaked with blood from another time that was reaching out to hold me.

Then I got out, knowing that this was the constituency of the dead that Wacky Walker had written about so many years before.

I watched from my window as the propellers churned their way through a billowy cloud bank over the Pacific. The plane then arced left and headed inland for the long trip to a middle America I had never seen: first Chicago, then a connecting flight to southern Wisconsin, birthplace of Margaret Cadwallader and Marcella DeVries Harris.

As California, Arizona, and Nevada passed below me, I shifted my gaze from that arid landscape to the whirring propellers and became hypnotized by their circuitous motion. After a while a process of synchronization took over: my mind started to run in perfect circles, logically, chronologically, and in thematic unison: Marcella DeVries was born in Tunnel City, Wisconsin, in 1912. Tunnel City was eighty-five miles from Waukesha, where Maggie Cadwallader was born in 1914. Two years and eighty-five miles apart.

“ I’m just a Wisconsin farm girl, ” Maggie had told me. She had also gotten hysterical when she’d seen my off-duty revolver. “ No, no, no, no! ” she had screamed. “ I won’t let you hurt me! I know who sent you! ”

Six months later she was dead, strangled in the very bedroom where we had made love. The time of her death coincided with Marcella Harris’s abrupt journey to parts unknown.

“ You can’t go home again, ” Marcella had told her neighbor, Mrs. Groberg.

“ Gooey cheese and smelly sauerkraut ” her son had remembered — ethnic foods from the German/Dutch/Polish-dominated state of Wisconsin.

A comely stewardess brought me coffee but got only a distracted grunt of thanks. I stared at the propeller closest to me, watching it cut the air, feeling a deepening symbiosis of past and present, and a further unfolding of logic. Eddie Engels and Janet Valupeyk had been lovers. Eddie had been intimate with Maggie Cadwallader. Eddie had told Janet in the early summer of ’51 to rent Marcella Harris the apartment on Hibiscus Canyon. It had to be related, all of it. It was too perfect not to be.