This Storm Page 12

  The walls now.

  He brought a stethoscope. He attached the earpieces and began downstairs. He walked room-to-room. He tapped the walls and listened. He got all solid thunks. He worked downstairs to upstairs and wall-tapped. He got all solid thunks.

  He walked back downstairs. He retapped the walls, higher up. He turned down a side hallway and tapped the right-side wall. He got solid, solid, solid, solid, and—

  Hollow thunks. Pitch-perfect—tap, tap.

  He brought a pry bar. He ran to the living room and grabbed it. He ran back to the hallway and swung.

  The wall was wood-reinforced plaster. Two hits crumbled it. The boards snapped. Plaster grit swirled. Twelve hits ripped a floor-to-ceiling hole.

  A hidey-hole. Rendered inaccessible. There was no latch entry, no wall-panel hinges and slides.

  The hole ran twelve by twelve. It was carpeted. There were light fixtures, clothes racks, and shelves.

  Dudley brushed off grit and sawdust. He stepped in and tapped a light switch. Well, now. What’s this?

  Mahogany walls. Well buffed and gleaming. A flag spray at the rear. Pole-mounted banners, elegantly fringed and draped.

  Dudley unfurled them. They were smooth silk. They proclaimed stark alliance and devilish intent.

  A swastika flag, a rising-sun flag, a hammer-and-sickle banner. Flags for Franco’s Falange. Ku Klux Klan flags. Redshirt Battalion flags. Flags ablaze with “SQ”s and coiled snakes.

  Lovely silk twill. Bright yellow fringe. Lurid emblems, ablaze.

  Dudley smelled mothballs. They hung from gauze sachets. They protected haute-KKKouture threads.

  Nazi uniforms. Winter- and summer-weight wool. Gray Wehrmacht tunics and breeches. Black SS dress kit.

  Collar and shoulder insignia. All field-grade rank. Creased trousers and puffed jodhpurs. Jackboots on foot racks. Peaked hats on a shelf.

  Dudley time-machined. Brentwood, north of Sunset. It’s winter ’39 again.

  That costume party. The Jewish Maestro’s house, sublet. It’s done up Bauhaus-moderne. He’s an SS Sturmbannführer. The party replicates a Nazi purge. The party swirls out of sync.

  More uniforms. Jap Army and Navy issue. Cut small. Hanamaka is small. The yellow peril boys run tiny and shrill.

  Soviet uniforms. Coarse olive wool. Drab beside Herr Hitler’s couture.

  The People’s Army. Drab comrades. Godless Bolsheviks hooked on dead-Jew Marx and stiff potato brew.

  Dudley plucked a Nazi hat and tried it on. It was too small for him. He saw a leather-bound diary, stuffed behind the foot rack. He grabbed it and leafed through.

  Kyoho Hanamaka wrote in English. He introduced his historical memory book and stated that he saw it all firsthand. “Please be credulous. I witnessed the following events.”

  He ignored chronology. He hopped locale sans explanation. He did not justify his presence at moments of pitiless terror. He remained mutely complicit then and broke his silence on these pages.

  He witnesses the Rape of Nanking. Jap soldiers make Chinese fathers fuck their own daughters. Those soldiers behead one thousand Chinamen a day. Jap flyers toss Chinese children from airplanes at five thousand feet.

  Witness Hanamaka heads northwest. He visits Hermann Goering. The Reichsführer drinks the morphine-laced blood of Aryan virgins.

  El Jefe Franco needs help. He calls El Supremo Jefe Hitler and requests air support. Witness Hanamaka cozies up to the Condor Legion. He joins the bombing runs over Guernica. He describes the firestorm and Basque civilians burned alive.

  Witness Hanamaka heads east. He drinks vodka with Joe Stalin and tours Red Square. Uncle Joe predicts the Nazi pact back in ’36. He murders the army brass and Party apparatchiks he deems potential refuseniks.

  He kills 100,000 men. Witness Hanamaka views mass murder. NKVD death squads burst into homes and blast perceived traitors. Wives and children scream. The death squads blast them point-blank.

  Hanamaka views Stalin’s booze-blitzed rages. Uncle Joe issues five hundred death decrees a day. Hanamaka views torture sessions at the Lubyanka prison. He’s there for the Moscow show trials. They couch all loose talk as sedition.

  Stalin orders up slaughter. He’s the psychopathic god to rival Auden’s Hitler. Show-trial defendants stand mute. They are condemned and shot in their cells. Their last words are often “What for?”

  Witness Hanamaka hops back to Deutschland. It’s now summer ’34. It’s the Night of the Long Knives.

  Hitler’s purges are small scale beside Stalin’s. They are intimately conceived and plotted on the q.t. Brownshirt boss Ernst Röhm is a boy-buggering bully. He’s holed up in a spa hotel outside Munich. He’s there for an all-boy bacchanal. Witness Hanamaka and some SS lads fly down.

  They tear through the hotel. It’s a rude disruption. It’s sodomy and soixante-neuf interruptus. There’s death shots to the head. There’s slashed genitalia.

  Dudley stopped there. Winter ’39 tore through him. The party reprised the Night of the Long Knives. Tommy Glennon witnessed Sturmbannführer Smith’s nadir.

  Maestro Klemperer’s house. The Maestro’s recording of Tristan und Isolde. The prelude soars. The costumed guests caper.

  Dudley fondled Nazi uniforms. He touched silver thunderbolts and death’s-heads. He kissed stiff black wool. He loved beautiful clothing. Claire joshed him about it.

  He’d sweated through his clothes. He felt dizzy. He reached behind the foot rack and pulled out an oak box.

  It was two feet long and weighty. It looked ceremonial. A hinged lid lifted up.

  Dudley opened the box. A bayonet had been placed on black velvet. Swastikas were carved on the handle. The bayonet glowed.

  Dudley picked it up and cradled it. He gauged the weight as eight pounds. The bayonet was pure gold.

  23

  (SANTA BARBARA, 12:30 P.M., 1/6/42)

  Dissemble now. You’re here ex officio. It’s just a scholar’s lark.

  The probable widow played slow. Joan played off of that. Dr. Ashida authored the text. Joan improvised.

  I’m with the L.A. Police. This is strictly routine. Your missing-persons report. I’m compiling a lab-file update.

  Ellen Marie Tullock. Fifty-five and too thin. The wife of Karl Frederick. He’s on the CCC survivor list. He’s the probable Box Man.

  “I don’t quite understand what you do, young lady.”

  “I’m a biologist. I work in the crime lab, and we’re reviewing our missing-persons files. We’re up to January 1934, the month you submitted the query on your husband.”

  Mrs. Tullock frowned. “Are you a policewoman? I don’t understand why they didn’t send a man.”

  Joan smiled. “My immediate superior is Japanese. Given the times, he thought you’d rather speak with me.”

  Mrs. Tullock blinked. Joan plainly vexed her. The front parlor broiled. Heating vents audibly hissed.

  The house induced claustrophobia. It ran hot and overfurnished. Doilies and tchotchkes abundant. Too many too-stiff chairs.

  “Did you know that your husband was present at the Griffith Park fire of 1933? Many men died, but he survived.”

  Mrs. Tullock tugged at her skirt. “No, I didn’t know that. What month was this fire?”

  Joan said, “October.”

  “Well, Karl took off in August of ’33, and I’ve never heard from him since.”

  “You waited five months to report him missing. Was there a reason for that?”

  “Well, Karl just took off, and it took a while for me to start to miss him.”

  “Do you know why he took off?”

  Mrs. Tullock smirked. “He took off to pursue buried treasure, which was the onliest thing he ever did when the Sheriff’s Department canned him.”

  Joan said, “Could you explain that?”

  “Wel
l, Karl was a treasure seeker. If you don’t know the type already, you should take heed. Brazilian diamonds and pearls in Jamaica. That gold robbery off that train, back in ’31. Karl worked that one for a little bit, which is why it had such legs for him.”

  A memory popped. Joan recalled bar chat. Lee Blanchard talks to Wendell Rice. They discuss Elmer Jackson’s dead brother.

  He was torched in Griffith Park. He was this nutty rumdum. He was torqued by that big mint-train heist.

  “Young lady, are you all right?”

  Joan smiled. “Mrs. Tullock, are you saying that your husband was a wanderer? And that he had an untoward interest in that mint-train robbery?”

  Mrs. Tullock tugged at her skirt. She wore tennis shoes with threadbare tweeds.

  “I’m saying he read treasure magazines written for bums with big dreams, and he believed everything he ever read. The amazing thing is that he only got in trouble the one time—but it up and cost him his job.”

  “Would you explain, please?”

  “That gold robbery. Karl worked on the Santa Barbara end, and he got this fool notion that this dimwit colored boy was the thief. He did some beating on that boy, but some colored preacher with police friends in L.A. went to bat for the boy and got him released, and Karl got the ax for the whomping he did.”

  Joan sifted it. “Did Karl ever mention any friends he might have had with the CCC in Los Angeles?”

  Mrs. Tullock sneered. “Karl didn’t have friends. He had treasure magazines.”

  * * *

  —

  Hot potato. The old girl tossed it. Catch it—don’t drop it.

  Joan left the Tullock house and reparked down the street. Some sidewalk boys showed off for her. They chugged sneaky pete. They strutted and posed.

  A cloudburst drove them indoors. Joan sat it out. She chain-smoked and fumed up the car.

  She reprised the conversation. It ran circuitous. She sat in Lyman’s, two nights back. Lee Blanchard and Wendell Rice shot the shit.

  Kay’s in with these Jew exiles. Longhair-music types. Otto Klemperer. She dotes on him.

  Elmer the J. His dipshit brother died in the Griffith Park fire. This alky drifter. Always the big dreams. This big hard-on for that gold-train heist.

  We have proximity. We have Karl Tullock and Wayne Frank Jackson. We have two men and one fire. One dead man has been ID’d. One dead man has been unearthed. We have a probable identification.

  One ex-cop, one drifter, one idiot dream. Two violent deaths in concurrence. The ex-cop worked the gold heist. That event preceded and might have precipitated catastrophic arson.

  And she kissed Bill Parker. And Bill Parker kissed her back.

  I blew my shot at the war. Who cares? My new life’s aswirl.

  24

  (LOS ANGELES, 9:30 A.M., 1/7/42)

  A college kid approached. He glared and flashed his fangs. His intent beamed.

  He closed in. He leaned down. He said, “Filthy Jap.”

  The library was dead still. The kid employed stealth. He made like a Jap Zero. No one else heard.

  The kid strolled off. Ashida scanned his page book. He’d ordered up the L.A. Times. A clerk brought him bound photostats.

  From May 19–23, 1931. From October 4–12, 1933.

  Joan Conville called him last night. She described her talk with Ellen Tullock. They discussed death-by-fire and death-by-knife-and-gun proximity. Was it design or coincidence?

  He told her not to talk to Elmer Jackson. Elmer might go off half-cocked. He described his lab findings. He omitted just this:

  I found a gold nugget in that box you left me.

  He found it. He’s hoarding the lead. He’s studied under Dudley Smith. He’s learned to lie. He’s a Jap. He’s shifty and stealthy.

  He called Thad Brown last night. Thad was brusque. The dislodged-body job’s a dog. Chief Horrall wants it reburied. It puts a stink on the PD.

  He withheld from Thad. He omitted the gold nugget and two-dead speculation. Karl Tullock and Wayne Frank Jackson died at the same time and place. Both were gold heist–fixated. He knew the full Wayne Frank story. Joan had picked up bar scuttlebutt.

  The library was dead still. College kids studied and evil-eyed the Jap. Winos dozed in rock-hard chairs.

  Ashida skimmed news stories. He read the heist accounts first. The stat sheets printed out white on black. The coverage ran threadbare.

  The Frisco-to-L.A. mint train. Eight Quentin cons on board. There’s a track-switch snafu. Four masked men swarm the train. They overpower the crew. The cons escape en masse. The escape precedes the robbery. Seven men are hunted down and shot and killed that day. The unwritten law holds sway. Escape mandates death.

  One man eludes the dragnet. He’s still at large. Fritz Wilhelm Eckelkamp. DOB 10/12/98.

  He’s German-born. He’s a Great War stalwart. He wins the Iron Cross. He goes bad in ’20s Berlin. He toes the Sparticist line and skirmishes with Brownshirt thugs. He robs banks and jewelry stores. He stows away on a steamship and comes here. It’s ’27 now. He migrates to California and settles in Oakland. He reverts to armed robbery.

  Liquor-store jobs. There’s always cash on hand. It’s high risk for low yield. Fritz falls behind multiple counts. He gets twenty-five to life at Big Q.

  Fritz becomes a virtuoso jailhouse lawyer. He learns to write Federal writs. He secures a retrial. The Federal court’s in L.A.

  Fritz Wilhelm Eckelkamp. Missing since 5/18/31. Karl Frederick Tullock. Reported missing 1/12/34.

  Ashida chalked brain notes. He reviewed his stat sheets and compiled a checklist.

  Secure Eckelkamp’s Oakland police file. Secure his Quentin file. Secure Tullock’s Santa Barbara Sheriff’s personnel file.

  The mint train resumes its southbound journey. There’s a second track snafu. The heist occurs then. The theft is discovered at the Santa Barbara stop. Leander Frechette is grabbed for it. Karl Tullock “beats on him.” A Negro preacher intercedes and greases Frechette’s release. The preacher has “cop friends in L.A.”

  Frechette drops from sight. Where is he now? Who’s the preacher? What cop friends in L.A.?

  Ashida switched page books. He jumped from gold to fire. He logged more sketchy coverage.

  It’s late September ’33. We’re into Indian summer. It’s hot in L.A. The heat provokes unrest. There’s leftist agitation and a garment workers’ strike.

  It’s now October 3. The blaze occurs. The death toll mounts. It may or may not be arson. A pro forma query goes down. The Young Socialist Alliance proves suspect. The leader’s one Meyer Gelb.

  YSA sloganeers “prophesied apocalypse.” Their rants ran from mid-September to the blaze. Meyer Gelb urged “a workers’ revolt.” “One line burned memorably at a Pershing Square stump speech.”

  Gelb railed. He called out, “This storm, this savaging disaster.”

  The line drew oohs and aahs. The Times got pissy here. “The flowery sentence might have been lifted from a noted British poet of the homosexual ilk.”

  Ashida flipped pages. The fire was initially tagged “a spontaneous conflagration.” The death toll fluctuated daily. CCC workers tagged dead showed up alive. They’d been on booze binges and deserted their wives for a spell.

  A well-dressed man was glimpsed in Mineral Canyon. Eyewits described him as “Chinese or Japanese.” He vanished as the blaze whooshed. A studio carpenter got popped the same night. He set a blaze in Fern Dell Park. Eyewits nailed his car’s license plate.

  His name was Ralph D. Barr. He was a known firebug and public jack-off man. He was alibied up for the big blaze. He worked at Paramount all day.

  That was it. The PD tapped out. The fire department tapped out. Nobody proved arson or disproved it. Local leftists were grilled and released. News coverage fizzled.

  Ashida restacked h
is books. He stood up and stretched. He chalked more brain notes.

  Get more on the YSA. Get more on Meyer Gelb. Track the gold chunk. What does “648” mean? Does the attached key correspond to a storage locker someplace?

  He walked to the drop-off desk. A college boy waltzed by. He said, “Stinking Jap.”

  * * *

  —

  Dark clouds blew in. They unzipped and leaked rain. Ashida drove to Griffith Park and trekked the golf course.

  He was killing time. He needed privacy at the lab. The day-shift chemists clocked out at 6:00.

  Gale winds hit. Cloudbursts followed. Fairways and sand traps flooded. It occurred just like that.

  Ashida walked into it. He sketched brain pictures and transposed newspaper maps. He crafted a then-to-now terrain.

  He noted incipient mud slides. Hillsides with thin turf planes and exposed roots. He employed Man Camera and assumed killer and victim perspectives.

  It’s four-burner hot and dry. A Santa Ana wind fans flames. He set the fire/a cohort set the fire/the fire started itself. It’s deliberate arson or crime of opportunity. The box stands ready, either way.

  He lures the probable Karl Tullock someplace secluded. He shoots him and stabs him and dumps him in the box. He buries the box. He chokes on thick smoke. Approaching flames singe his eyebrows. He runs. He gets away or burns to death.

  The converse now.

  He’s lured. He’s stabbed and shot. He’s the probable Karl Tullock. He’s dead in the box. He did or did not know Wayne Frank Jackson. Rest in peace. The two men die the same day.

  Ashida walked back to the parking lot. The wind pushed him along. He saw a phone booth by the snack hut.

  He ducked in and went through the Yellow Pages. He tore out all the storage-locker ads.

  * * *

  —

  There was still time to kill. He had two hours to clock-out and assured privacy.