Ben Winters - Golden State

I’m using my chair, so Arlo settles himself onto the edge of my desk, tilts his small body toward me, gathering his sport coat around his narrow chest.

“I had only hoped, Laszlo, that you would find it in your heart—”

“Nope.”

“—to offer Ms. Paige the benefit—”

“No thank you.”

“—of your many years’ experience, and mentor her as she—”

“Listen, Arlo.” I push back from the desk, look him in his owl’s eyes. “I’m going to say no just one more time, but I’m going to say it nice and loud in case, because you are old, you are having trouble hearing me. Because you are very old.” I lean back toward the desk and my office chair squeaks beneath me. “No.”

I start fussing with the stack of papers on the desk so I can be doing something, anything, other than look at Arlo. I’ve got a court appearance coming up, testimony I’m supposed to give in the Court of Small Infelicities, one of these knucklehead kerfuffles where an automobile dealership advertises “the lowest rates around” and a competitor hauls them in, challenging the veracity of “lowest” and the generality of “around,” and the courts insist on having someone from the Service in to weigh the litigants’ relative sincerity. So now I’m here, aggressively shuffling the papers, reviewing my prep materials, ignoring Arlo and the young woman, but I can feel them—this Paige character looking anxiously at Arlo, Arlo giving her a reassuring look: Don’t worry, I’ll handle this . Meaning handle me.

The last thing I need is an apprentice; the last thing I need is a shadow, dogging my heels.

“Listen. Laszlo.” I glance up in time to see Arlo give Ms. Paige a meaningful look, and watch her step discreetly away. I recognize this is an imposition.”

“That is one thing it is, Arlo.”

“I do not come to you lightly, Laszlo. I know how you are.”

“Do you?”

“I do. However. I consider the opportunity to mentor a high honor.” Arlo looks at me solemnly, his thin white hair pointing in all directions.

“Okay,” I tell him, “so why not give it to Burlington? Come on, Arlo. Or give it to Cullers.”

I point across the room, and, as if to neatly undermine my attempt to evade this high honor, Cullers groans, adjusts the hot compress he’s holding to his forehead. Maybe Cullers was up early too, chasing fugitive truth-benders down city blocks. Or maybe he was out late getting drunk. With Cullers, either possibility has an equal chance of proving out.

I shouldn’t have to explain to Arlo why this won’t work. Whatever skill at this job I have amassed after doing it for nineteen years and counting, I am skeptical of my own ability to implant them elsewhere. And certainly Arlo in his semiretirement has no power to make me do it either, and neither does Mr. Alvaro, not really. That’s just not how the Service is organized.

Arlo is my colleague but he’s also my friend, and I have known him for many years—he knew my brother. He knew my father. Which means that in a way he is like a brother to me, and he is like a father too, and what he is doing right now, with a charming shamelessness, is employing all of those associations to bend me to his will.

“There is no one like you, Laszlo,” he says, imperturbable, flattering, shameless. “You know that. The Service needs you. Your State needs you. I need you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the best.”

“That’s subjective.”

“Stipulated. But listen.” He leans in closer. He lowers his voice. “This young lady is very special, Laszlo. I would like to see her mentored carefully. I need your help.”

I look over at Paige. She waits at full attention, her hands behind her back, her mouth a tight line, adopting what she must believe to be the expected stance of the law enforcement officer. But we’re not law enforcement officers, not exactly. Soon she will gather up the regular rhythm of the Speculative Service. The idiosyncrasy, the casual atmosphere. We don’t stand in line, we don’t salute, we do our own thing.

She’ll learn it all.

“Okay, look,” I say, and Arlo catches the answer in my voice and leans back, clasps his hands together in a restrained triumphant gesture. “When we catch a case, Ms. Paige, you can go ahead and ride along beside me. Okay? And you can… I guess you’ll just pay attention and everything, but try not to get in the way. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that what you’re after, Mr. Vasouvian?”

“I want you to do whatever you feel comfortable with, Laszlo.”

Paige begins, “And can I just say, sir—” I hold up a hand.

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ okay?”

“Okay, sir. If you don’t mind, though, I would like to. It’s a sign of respect, sir. You’ve earned it.”

“Stipulated,” I say. “But I’m just as happy for you to call me Mr. Ratesic.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hey Laz,” Alvaro hollers from the board. “Got something for you. Maybe a good one to break in the new kid. If you’re taking her on. Are you taking her on or not?”

I look at Paige. I hiss through my teeth, “Yeah,” and I extend my hand and Alvaro puts the piece of paper in it. “I’m taking her.”

Arlo slides off my desk, pats me gently on the shoulder, satisfied, as well he should be, having gotten exactly what he wanted.

We head up Vermont Avenue from downtown toward the scene, a simple scene of death on a lawn in Los Feliz.

It’s not clear from the report, but what it sounds like is that there is no specific anomaly, just the regular police requesting the presence of the Service, just to be certain. You get that a lot. When there’s a body, they want to be double sure all the facts are in good clean alignment.

I could take the 5, of course, a nice straight northbound shot, if I wanted to, and it might have bought us five minutes, but the stress of the highway isn’t worth it right now, not when I can give myself the pleasure of the surface streets, the pleasure of looking out the windshield at the various and beautiful Golden State rolling by. You get the streets and sidewalks of downtown, all the usual crowded midmorning bustle, the stop and start at the downtown intersections when you’re moving north and west around the administrative buildings and State services buildings that fan out from the Plaza. And then you escape the hive, pass under the highway and into the borderland, where you see the acres of industry, the factories and warehouses with their solar panel roofs winking back at the sun. And then, just north of that, the miles of farmland, lettuce and avocados, olives and all the rest of it, and then, just like that, you’re whipped back into the neighborhoods, the hip urban districts that line Vermont Avenue like a series of colorful beads: Echo Park, Los Feliz, Silver Lake.

There’s a place in Echo Park, actually, a quarter mile off Vermont, that sells some very solid crullers, some of the best in the State, but there’s no time for a cruller just now, not with a scene of death waiting for us uptown.

“Sir? Mr. Ratesic?”

“Yeah?”

Ms. Paige is looking at me avidly from the shotgun seat, but I am definitely not looking at her; I’m looking at the road. But I can feel her emotions in the shotgun seat, feel her anxiety and excitement, young Paige’s first-day jitters a living thing in the car with us.

“So should I just, like, jump right in?”

I scowl. “Jump right into what?”

“What?”

I feel her deflate. I feel it emanating from the shotgun seat, the crestfallen silence of someone who had a whole speech ready to roll out.

“Jump into my—oh, I mean—just, like, my life story. When I first knew that I had the sense and everything. How I decided to go into the Service. The whole… I just meant… I don’t know. Sorry.”