Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“I understand, Rusty,” I said. “But you could at least go have a look.”

I finally got around to taking him over to the Barracks the week after that squash game; until then all he’d seen were site plans and photos. Accompanied by yet another of Sotomayor’s girl Fridays, we drove for nearly an hour straight through Los Angeles, heading for what not only looked like a medieval fort, but also was a medieval fort. The Barracks, built in 1916, mimicked, in a grim, evil way, a Moorish fortress. For some sixty years the National Guard insignia fluttered above the thirty-four-meter-high corner towers; Sotomayor flew the Stars and Stripes as well as a single Cuban flag. Behind the battlements, cadets were trained and the lead-reinforced vaults had stored ammunition and matériel. The façade had a rough, unpettable brick skin: for every five normally laid bricks was one that stuck out from the wall, sometimes at an angle, sometimes half broken off. The drill court, covered by a large arched roof, used to be the place, in the ’30s and ’40s, where boxers faced off: “Joe Louis and Max Schmeling,” I told Rusty, who promptly broke into shadow boxing. The Army pulled out in ’78, leaving behind 160 empty rooms — cinder block dormitories, walnut-paneled dining rooms, oak ballrooms, massive staircases, an industrial kitchen, swimming pool, indoor shooting range, bathrooms, engine rooms, basements, dungeons. All for Rusty.

It paid off. I noticed his transformation as we rambled through the labyrinth, an hour-long hike through the Barracks’ filthy corridors, offices where half-disintegrated files lay stacked on sagging shelves, officers’ quarters with forgotten regimental tunics draped over dusty chairs; his footsteps began to echo, his expression turned greedy, he became more and more chatty with Sotomayor’s bimbo. When we got back to the covered drill court, the size of four ice hockey rinks, she said: “This is where George Lucas shot the outer-space scenes in Star Wars ”—and at that moment, on the ceiling of Rusty’s head, a fluorescent lamp sprang on.

But after that Thursday afternoon in Compton, Sotomayor suddenly started playing hard to get. Phone calls and e-mails went unanswered. Only after sending three faxes to his head office in Dallas did I get a roundabout reply from some secretary or other, what it boiled down to was that the Barracks was suddenly no longer for sale. Fuck you, Víctor. I assume he had got wind of our plans, he’ll have envisioned flack from the neighborhood, negative press, God knows what. So in my next fax I suggested executing the sale quietly. After that, the Compton shopkeepers and hoi polloi were our problem. “Everything’s for sale,” read the fax, “I don’t think I need to explain that to Víctor Sotomayor — and not everything has to get into the papers.” And even if it did get into the papers, there were advantages to that too. I reminded him that since Villaraigosa became mayor of L.A., it had escaped no one’s attention that he and Sotomayor were buddies. A few years earlier, the real estate baron grudgingly admitted to the Los Angeles Times that he — a fellow Latino — had contributed generously to Villaraigosa’s election campaign. Since then the allocation of public works contracts seemed to tip quite blatantly his way. “Víctor, my friend,” I wrote, “maybe this is your chance to do something the mayor is not keen on. Think about it. We’re offering you fifteen. I can be in Dallas next Monday at four o’clock.”

No reply. Of course not. Sotomayor didn’t care for my upfront tone. He was a more-luck-than-talent Cuban with a sweaty boxer’s nose, not accustomed to negotiating with women. His corpulent, pear-shaped body was clad in shoddy pastel-colored suits on which he wiped his beringed fingers before giving me a tepid, flabby handshake.

“So I take it that’s a yes,” I said to Rusty. Last Monday I boarded a flight to Texas, and at five to four in the afternoon I stepped out of the fingerprint-smudged mirrored elevator on the eleventh floor of Stone Tower in downtown Dallas and knocked, without an appointment, on the matt-glass door to Sotomayor’s office.

I disappeared back up the stairs earlier than my celebrating colleagues, under the pretext of getting back to work, setting an example — but in actual fact, with an unexpected knot in my gut. That e-mail. With every step, the bustle downstairs ebbed and the mystery swelled. Was it wise to have deleted his e-mail unread? What was Aaron after? Back in my office — formerly a bridal suite — with the door closed, the only sound was the soft hum of the PC. What did he want? Reading it couldn’t hurt, I thought, whether or not to respond was the next choice, and that was more the point. I retrieved the message from the trash folder. The rush of success and the relaxing effect of three glasses of Armand de Brignac Ace of Spades apparently allowed me to overcome my reluctance. Without giving it any more thought, I opened Aaron’s e-mail.

(No subject) From: Aaron Bever (a.bever@hetnet.be) Sent: Thursday, April 17th, 2008, 04:49 To: Joni Sigerius (jonisigerius74@hotmail.com)

i’ll bet you were surprised when your mother told you we spoke at brussels central what an amazing coincidence without realizing it we sat across from each other all the way from maastricht, we only recognized each other at the last minute, i hadn’t seen her in so long either. i’m doing fine, i hope she told you that too, boy did she look good, so thin, so cheerful, so feminine, i was pretty surprised to see her in brussels, but that was mutual, because how could she have known i live in linkebeek now, i’m not going to say exactly where, because i value my privacy. actually that’s why i’m writing to you, because you know better than anyone how badly that mess back in 2000 shook me up, you helped me an awful lot then, I heard that from dr. haitink, was i a little bit nice to you? when i saw your mother with your husband i could hardly believe you’d settled in brussels too, now there’s a coincidence for you, funny how these things go, i spotted you just a couple of days later at the playground of the klimOP, I HAPPENED TO BE TAKING CLASS PICTURES THAT DAY, ALTHOUGH WHAT’S COINCIDENCE, WHAT IS COINCIDENCE, JONI? AND I SAW YOU WALK ACROSS THE PLAYGROUND PUSHING A STROLLER, YOU WERE WITH YOUR HUSBAND, THE SAME GUY WHO CAME TO PICK YOur mother up at the station in his bmw, it was kind of comical, we looked at each other right away and knew we were rivals, i wish you two all the happiness in the world. it was easy to pick out your daughter on the photos, i spotted juliette in a jiffy, third grade, miss jeanne, front row second from the left, the spitting image of you as a kid, two little blond braids, and what an enviable last name, jalabert, juliette jalabert, it sure sounds a lot better than bever, maybe even better than sigerius, but what’s in a name? i’m sure that rich boyfriend of yours is awfully kind to juliette, but that’s not why i’m writing, the reason i’m writing is that i’ve had a bit of a setback the last few days, i just wanted to warn you, in fact it’s not going well at all, i’m sleeping so badly again, darling. tineke told me that terrible news about your father, siem has been dead for years, she said, i only half believed her, i believe it, i have to believe it. i had no idea, i didn’t know, really i didn’t, i swear, i’m so sorry, i could cry about it all over again. everything came flooding back, it’s washing over me from all sides, the past few nights it’s been gnawing at me constantly, i had to go through it again in my mind, everything that happened, whose fault it is, the fights we had, etc. etc., and it’s LOGICAL. DON’T YOU ALSO THink it all started with the fireworks disaster? that ruined everything. after that it all went so goddamn FAst, everything fucked up, fuck, fuck, fuck. what i want to ask you is if you’ll tell me whereabout you live and work, then i know where there’s a chance i might bump into you, because that one time at the klimop i nearly freaked, i followed you all the way through sint-jansmolenbeek, through scheutbospark, all the way to anderlecht, but then i lost you, until i saw you in a green bus heading for koekelberg. well it took me hours to get home, i was up to my waist in mud. that’s it. i hope everything is ok with you, you’ve got a nice husband and a pretty daughter, what a goddamn shame that her wonderful grandpa