A JOURNEY OF ONLY TWOPACES
She had ordered steak tartare and Hennessy XO brandy, which would, he reflected, look extravagant when he submitted his expenses to the court. And God knew what parking would cost here.
He took another frugal sip of his beer and said, trying not to sound sour, “I could have mailed you a check.”
They were at one of the glass-topped tables on the outdoor veranda at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, just a couple of feet above the sidewalk beyond the railing, looking out from under the table’s umbrella down the sunlit lanes of Rodeo Drive. The diesel-scented air was hot even in the shade.
“But you were his old friend,” she said. “He always told me that you’re entertaining.” She smiled at him expectantly.
She had been a widow for about ten years, Kohler recalled – and she must have married young. In her sunglasses and broad Panama hat she only seemed to be about twenty now.
Kohler, though, felt far older than his thirty-five years.
“He was easily entertained, Mrs. Halloway,” he said slowly. “I’m pretty … lackluster, really.” A young man on the other side of the railing overheard him and glanced his way in amusement as he strode past on the sidewalk.
“Call me Campion. But a dealer in rare books must have some fascinating stories.”
Her full name was Elizabeth St. Campion Halloway. She signed her paintings “Campion.” Kohler had looked her up online before driving out here to deliver the thousand dollars, and had decided that all her artwork was morbid and clumsy.
“He found you attractive,” she went on, tapping the ash off her cigarette into the scraped remains of her steak tartare. He noticed that the filter was smeared with her red lipstick. “Did he ever tell you?”
“Really. No.” For all Kohler knew, Jack Ranald might have been gay. The two of them had only got together about once a year since college, and then only when Kohler had already begged off on two or three email invitations. Kohler’s wife had always thought Jack was inwardly mocking her – He forgets me when he’s not looking right at me, she’d said – and she wouldn’t have been pleased with these involvements in the dead man’s estate.
Kohler’s wife had looked nothing like Campion.
Campion was staring at him now over the coal of her cigarette – he couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark lenses, but her pale, narrow face swung carefully down and left and right. “I can already see him in you. You have the Letters Testamentary?”
“Uh.” The shift in conversational gear left him momentarily blank. “Oh, yes – would you like to see them? and I’ll want a receipt –”
“Not the one from the court clerk. The one Jack arranged.”
Kohler bent down to get his black vinyl briefcase, and he pushed his chair back from the table to unzip it on his lap. Inside were all the records of terminating the water and electric utilities at the house Jack had owned in Echo Park and paying off Jack’s credit cards, and, in a manila envelope along with the death certificate – which discreetly didn’t mention suicide – the letters he had been given by the probate court.
One of them was the apparently standard sort, signed by the clerk and the deputy clerk, but the other had been prepared by Jack himself.
Kohler tugged that one out and leaned forward to hand it across the table to Campion, and while she bent her head over it he mentally recalled its phrases: … having been appointed and qualified as enactor of the will of John Carpenter Ranald, departed, who expired on or about 28 February 2009, Arthur Lewis Kohler is hereby authorized to function as enactor and to consummate possession … In effect it was a suicide note. It had been signed in advance by Jack, and Kohler had recently been required to sign it too.
“Kabbalah,” she said, without looking up, and for a moment Kohler thought he had somehow put one of his own business invoices into the briefcase by mistake and handed it to her. She looked up and smiled at him. “Are you afraid to get drunk with me? I’m sure one beer won’t release any pent-up emotions, you can safely finish it. What is the most valuable book you have in stock?”
Kohler was frowning, but he went along with her change of subject. Jack must have told her what sort of books he specialized in.
“I guess that would be a manuscript codex of a thing called the Gallei Razayya, written in about 1550. It, uh, differs from the copy at Oxford.” He shrugged. “I’ve got it priced high – it’ll probably just go to my,” he hesitated, then sighed and completed the habitual sentence, “my heirs.”
“Rhymes with prayers, and you don’t have any, do you? Heirs? Anymore? I was so sorry to hear about that.”
Kohler stared at her, wondering if he wanted to make the effort of taking offense at her flippancy.
“No,” he said instead, carefully.
“But it’s about transmigration of souls, isn’t it? Your codex book? Maybe you could … bequeath it to yourself.”
She pushed her own chair back and stood up, brushing out her white linen skirt. “Have you tried to find the apartment building he owned in Silver Lake?”
Kohler began hastily to zip up his briefcase, and he was about to ask her how she knew about the manuscript when he remembered that she was still holding the peculiar Letter Testamentary. “Uh.?” he said, reaching for it.
“I’ll keep it for a while,” she said gaily, tucking it into her purse. “I bet you couldn’t find the place.”
“That’s true.” He lowered his hand and finished zipping the case; the letter signed by the clerks was the legally important one. “I need to get the building assessed for the inventory of the estate. The address on the tax records seems to be wrong.” Finally he asked, “You … know a lot about Kabbalah?”
“I can take you there. The address is wrong, as you say. Do you like cats? Jack told me about your book, your codex.”
Kohler got to his feet and drank off half of the remaining beer in his glass. It wasn’t very cold by this time. Jack had always wanted to hear about Kohler’s business – Kohler must have acquired the manuscript shortly before they had last met for dinner, and told Jack about it.
“Sure,” he said distractedly. She raised one penciled eyebrow, and he added, “I like cats fine.”
“I’ll drive,” she said. “I have no head for directions, I couldn’t guide you.” She started toward the steps down to the Wilshire Boulevard sidewalk, then turned back and frowned at his briefcase. “You’ve followed all the directions he left in his will?”
Kohler guessed what she was thinking of. “The urn is in the trunk of my car,” he said. “You can drive. Your car is smaller, better for the tight turns.”
Kohler followed her down out of the hotel’s shadow onto the glaring Wilshire sidewalk, wondering how she knew what sort of car he drove, and when he had agreed to go right now to look at the apartment building.
She directed him east to the Hollywood freeway and then up into the hills above the Silver Lake Reservoir. The roads were narrow and twisting and overhung with carob and jacaranda trees.
Eventually, after Kohler had lost all sense of direction, Campion said, “Turn left at that street there.”
“That? That’s a driveway,” Kohler objected, braking to a halt.
“It’s the street,” she said. “Well, lane. Alley. Anyway, it’s where the apartment building is. Where are you living these days?”
In an apartment building, Kohler thought, probably not as nice as the one we’re trying to find here. The old house was just too unbearably familiar. “Culver City.”
“Did you like him? Jack?”
Kohler turned the wheel sharply and then steered by inches up onto the narrow strip of pavement, which curled away out of sight to the right behind a hedge of white-blooming oleander only a few yards ahead. Dry palm-fronds scattered across the cracked asphalt crunched under the tires. The needle of the temperature gauge was still comfortably on the left side of the dial, but he kept an eye on it.
“I liked him well enough,” he said, squinting through the alternating sun-glare and palm-trunk shadows on the windshield. He exhaled.
“Actually I didn’t, no. I liked him in college, but after his father died, he – he just wasn’t the same guy anymore.”
“It was a shock,” she said, nodding. “A trauma. He had heartworms.”
Kohler just shook his head. “And Jack was sick, he said. What was wrong with him?”
She shrugged. “What does it matter? Something he didn’t want to wait for. But –” And then she sang, “We’re young and healthy, so let’s be bold.” She giggled. “Do you remember that song?”
“No.”
“No, it would have been before your time.”
The steep little road did seem to be something more than a driveway – Kohler kept the Saturn to about five miles an hour, and they slowly rumbled past several old Spanish-style houses with white stucco walls and red roof-tiles and tiny garages with green-painted doors, the whole landscape as apparently empty of people as a street in a de Chirico painting. Campion had lit another cigarette, and Kohler cranked down the driver’s-side window, and even though it was hot he was grateful for the sage and honeysuckle breeze.
“It’s on the right,” she said, tapping the windshield with a fingernail. “The arch there leads into the parking court.”
Kohler steered in through the chipped white arch between tall trees, and he was surprised to see five or six cars parked in the unpaved yard and a big Honda Gold Wing motorcycle leaning on its stand up by the porch, in the shade of a vast lantana bush that crawled up the side of the two-story old building.
“Tenants?” he said, rocking the Saturn into a gap beside a battered old Volkswagen. “I hope … what’s-his-name, the guy who inherited the place, wants to keep it running.” A haze of dust raised by their passage across the yard swirled over the car.
“Mister Bump. He will, he lives here.” She pointed at the motorcycle. “Jack’s bike – running boards, a windshield, stereo, passenger seat – it’s as if his RV had pups.”
Kohler hadn’t turned off the engine. “I could do this through the mail, if I could get a valid address.”
“They get mail here, sort of informally. Somebody will tell you how to address it.” She had opened her door and was stepping out onto the dry dirt, so he sighed and twisted the ignition key back and pulled it out. Now he could hear a violin playing behind one of the upstairs balconies – some intricate phrase from Scheherazade, rendered with such gliding expertise that he thought it must be a recording.
With the wall around it, and the still air under the old pepper trees, this compound seemed disconnected from the surrounding streets and freeways of Los Angeles.
“These were Jack’s friends,” Campion said. “Bring the urn.”
Kohler was already sweating in the harsh sunlight, but he walked to the trunk and bent down to open it. He lifted out the heavy cardboard box and slammed the trunk shut.
“Jack is who we all have in common,” said Campion, smiling and taking his free arm.
She led Kohler across the yard and up the worn stone steps to the porch, and the French doors stood open onto a dim, high-ceilinged lobby.
The air was cooler inside, and Kohler could hear an air-conditioner rattling away somewhere behind the painted screens and tapestries and potted plants that hid the walls. Narrow beams of sunlight slanted in and gleamed on the polished wooden floor.
Then Kohler noticed the cats. First two on an old Victorian sofa, then several more between vases on high shelves, and after a moment he decided that there must be at least a dozen cats in the room, lazily staring at the newcomers from heavy-lidded topaz eyes.
The cats were all identical – long-haired orange and white creatures with long fluffy tails.
“Campion!”
A tanned young man in a Polo shirt and khaki shorts had walked into the lobby through the French doors on the far side, and Kohler glimpsed an atrium behind him – huge shiny green leaves and orchid blossoms motionless in the still air.
“You bitch,” the man said cheerfully, “did you lose your phone? Couldn’t at least honk while you were driving up? ‘’Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden.’”
“Mr. Bump,” said Campion, “I’ve brought James Kohler for the, the wake.”
“No,” said Kohler hastily, “I can’t stay –”
“Can I call you Jimmy?” interrupted Mr. Bump. He held out his hand. “Mentally I’m spelling it J-I-M-I, like Hendrix.”
Kohler shook the man’s brown hand, then after several seconds flexed his own hand to separate them.
“No time to go a-waking, eh?” said Mr. Bump with a smile.
“I’m afraid not. I’ll just –”
“Is that Jack?”
Kohler blinked, then realized that the man must be referring to the box he carried in his left hand.
“Oh. Yes.”
“Let’s walk him out to the atrium, shall we? We can disperse his ashes in the garden there.”
Over Mr. Bump’s shoulder, one of the orange cats on a high shelf flattened its ears.
“I’m supposed to –” Kohler paused to take a breath before explaining Jack Ranald’s eccentric instructions. “I’m supposed to give him – his ashes – to somebody who quotes a certain poem to me. And I think it would be illegal to … pour out the ashes in a, a residence.”
Behind him Campion laughed. “It’s not a poem.”
“Jimi isn’t literary, is all,” said Mr. Bump to her reprovingly. He crouched to pick up a kitten that seemed to be an exact miniature copy of all the other cats.
I’m a rare-books dealer! thought Kohler, but he just turned to her and said, “What is it?”
“I quoted a bit of it just now,” said Mr. Bump, holding the kitten now and stroking it. “‘’Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden; the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.’”
Kohler nodded – that was it. The will had specified the phrase, Consumption for fear they shall never get out, and he had assumed it was a line of anapestic quatrameter.
“What’s it from?” he asked, setting the box on a table and lifting out of it the black ceramic urn.
“A play,” said Campion, taking his free arm again, apparently in anticipation of walking out to the atrium. “Webster’s The White Devil.”
“It’s a filthy play,” put in Mr. Bump.
The cats were bounding down from their perches and scurrying out the far doors into the atrium, their tails waving like a field of orange ferns in a wind.
The three people followed the cats out into the small, tiled courtyard that lay below second-floor balconies on all four sides. The atrium was crowded with tropical-looking plants, and leafy branches and vines hid some corners of the balconies – but Kohler noted uneasily that more than a dozen young men and women were leaning on the iron railings and silently looking down on them. The air smelled of jasmine and cat-boxes.
“The character who says the birdcage business,” remarked Campion, “rises from the dead, at the end.” “And then gets killed again,” noted Mr. Bump.
Campion shrugged. “Still.” She looked up at the audience on the balconies. “Jack’s back!” she called. “This nice man has been kind enough to carry him.”
The men and women on the balconies all began snapping their fingers, apparently by way of applause. Kohler was nervously tempted to bow.
They didn’t stop, and the shrill clacking began to take on a choppy rhythm.
The cats had all sat down in a ring in the center of the atrium floor – no, Kohler saw, it wasn’t a ring, it was a triangle, and then he saw that they were all sitting on three lines of red tile set into the pavement. The space inside the triangle was empty.
Campion had stepped away to close the French doors to the lobby, and Mr. Bump leaned close to Kohler and spoke loudly to be heard over the shaking rattle from above. “This is the last part of your duty as executor,” he said. The kitten he was holding seemed to have gone to sleep, in spite of the noise.
“It’s not the last, by any means,” said Kohler, who was sweating again. “There’s the taxes, and selling the house, and – and I don’t think this is part of my duties.” He squinted up at the finger-snapping people – they were all dressed in slacks and shirts that were black or white, and the faces he could make out were expressionless. Something’s happening here, he thought, and you don’t know what it is. The sweat was suddenly cold on his forehead, and he pushed the urn into Mr. Bump’s hands.
“I have to leave,” Kohler said, turning back toward the lobby. “Now.”
Campion stood in front of the closed doors, and she was pointing a small black automatic pistol at him – it looked like. 22 or. 25 caliber. “It was so kind of you to come!” she cried merrily. “And you are very nice!”
Kohler was peripherally aware that what she had said was a quote from something, but all his attention was focused on the gun muzzle. Campion’s finger was inside the trigger guard. He stopped moving, then slowly extended his empty hands out to the side, his fingers twitching in time to his heartbeat.
Mr. Bump shook his head and smiled ruefully at Kohler. “Campion is so theatrical! We just, we’d be very grateful if you’d participate in a – memorial service.”
The people on the balconies must have been able to see the situation, but the counterpoint racket never faltered – clearly there would be no help from them, whoever they were. “Then,” said Kohler hoarsely, “I can go?”
“You might very well prefer to stay,” said Campion. “It’s a leisurely life.”
Stay? Kohler thought.
“What,” he asked, “do I do?”
“You were his closest friend,” said Mr. Bump, “so you should –” “
I hardly knew him! Since college, at least. Maybe once or twice a year –”
“You’re who he nominated. You should step over the cats, into the open space there, and after everybody has recited Jack’s Letter Testamentary, you simply break the urn. At your feet.”
Mr. Bump pressed the urn into Kohler’s right hand, and Kohler closed his fingers around the glassy neck of it.
“And then I – can leave.”
Campion nodded brightly. “Yours will be a journey only of two paces into view of the stars again,” she said.
Kohler recognized what she had said as lines from a Walter de la Mare poem, and he recalled how the sentence in the poem ended – but you will not make it.
And belatedly he recognized what she had said a few moments ago: It was so kind of you to come! And you are very nice! – that was from Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” spoken by the Walrus just before he and the Carpenter began devouring the gullible Oysters.
Kohler was grasping the urn in both hands, and now he had to force his arms not to shake in time to the percussive rhythm of all the rattling hands. He glanced at Campion, but she was still holding the gun pointed directly at the middle of him.
“You really should have had more to drink,” she called.
God only knew who these people were, or what weird ritual this was, and Kohler was considering causing some kind of diversion and just diving over some plants and rolling through one of the ground-floor French doors, and then just running. Out of this building, over the wall, and away.
It seemed unrealistic.
He obediently stepped over the cats into the clear triangle of pavement.
“Now wait till they’ve recited it all,” said Mr. Bump loudly.
With her free hand Campion dug the peculiar Letter Testamentary out of her purse and flapped it in the still air to unfold it.
And then a young woman on one of the balconies whispered, “Having.” and a man on a balcony on the other side of the atrium whispered, “. been.” and another followed with “. appointed.”
The hoarse whispers undercut the shrill finger-snapping and echoed clearly around the walled space. They were reciting the text of Jack’s letter, and each was enunciating only one word of it, letting a pause fall between each word.
The glassy bulge of the urn was slippery in Kohler’s sweating hands, and he assembled some of the disjointed phrases in his mind: enactor of the will of John Carpenter Ranald … Arthur Lewis Kohler … to consummate possession.
And he recognized this technique–in first century Kabbalistic mysticism, certain truths could be spoken only in whispers, and the writing of certain magical texts required that a different scribe write each separate word.
As clearly as if she were speaking now, Campion’s words at lunch came back to him: But it’s about transmigration of souls, isn’t it? and I can already see him in you.
And he recalled saying, after his father died, he just wasn’t the same guy anymore.
Jack Ranald had been executor of his father’s will.
“To,” whispered one of the black-or-white-clad people on the balconies. “Consummate,” whispered another. “Possession,” breathed one more, and then they stopped, and the finger-snapping stopped too. The silence that followed seemed to spring up from the paving stones, and the cats sitting in a triangle around Kohler shifted in place.
Mr. Bump nodded to Kohler and raised the kitten in both hands.
“Where do you want to go, from here?” whispered Campion. “Is there anything you want to wait for?”
Kohler sighed, a long exhalation that relaxed all his muscles and seemed to empty him. Go? he thought. Back to my studio apartment in Culver City … Wait for? No. I could do this – I could stay here, hidden from everything, even from myself, it seems.
He could hear the cats around the triangle purring. It’s a leisurely life, Campion had said.
“What have you got to lose?” whispered Campion.
Lose? he thought. Nothing – nothing but memories I don’t seem to have room for anymore.
And he remembered again what his wife had said about Jack – He forgets me when he’s not looking right at me. Kohler couldn’t look at her anymore –
– but to do this, whatever it was, would pretty clearly be to join Jack.
Kohler took a deep breath, and he felt as if he were stepping back out of a warm doorway, back into the useless tensions of a cold night.
And he flung the urn as hard as he could straight up. Everyone’s eyes followed it, and Kohler stepped out of the triangle and, in a sudden moment of inspiration, picked up one of the cats and leaned forward to set it down in the clear triangular patch before hurrying toward a door away from Campion.
The urn shattered on the pavement behind him with a noise like a gunshot as Kohler was grabbing the doorknob, but two sounds stopped him – the cat yowled two syllables and, in perfect synchronization, a voice in his head said, in anguish, Jimmy.
It was Jack’s voice. Even the cat’s cry had seemed to be Jack’s voice.
Helplessly Kohler let go of the doorknob and turned around.
The rest of the cats had scattered. Campion had hurried into the triangular space, the gun falling from her fingers and skittering across the paving stones, and she was cradling the cat Kohler had put there. Mr. Bump had let the kitten jump down from his arms now and was just staring open-mouthed, and the people on the balconies were leaning forward and whispering in agitation – but their whispers now weren’t audible.
“Jack!” Campion said hitchingly through tears, “Jack, darling, what has he done, what has he done?”
The cat was staring over Campion’s shoulder directly at Kohler, and Kohler shivered at its intense amber glare.
But he nodded and said softly, “So long, Jack.” Then he recalled that it was probably Jack’s father, and looked away.
He took two steps forward across the tiles and picked up the little automatic pistol that Campion had dropped. There seemed to be no reason now not to leave by the way he’d come in.
Mr. Bump was shaking his head in evident amazement. “It was supposed to be you,” he said, standing well back as he held the lobby door open, “into the kitten, to make room for Jack. That cat’s already got somebody – I don’t know how that’ll work out.” He stepped quickly to keep up with Kohler’s stride across the dim lobby toward the front doors. “No use, anyway, they can’t even write. Just not enough brain in their heads!” He laughed nervously, watching the gun in Kohler’s hand. “You’re – actually going to leave then?”
At the front doors, with his hand on one of the old iron handles, Kohler stopped. “I don’t think anybody would want me to stay.”
Mr. Bump shrugged. “I think Campion likes you. Likes you, I mean, too.” He smiled. “‘Despair to get in,’ and I think you’ve paid the entry fee. Stay for dinner, at least? I’m making a huge cioppino, plenty for everybody, even the cats.”
Kohler found that he was not sure enough about what had happened, not quite sure enough, to make the impossible denunciations that he wanted to make. It might help to read some of the books in his stock, but at this moment he was resolved never to open one again except to catalogue it.
So “Give Jack mine,” was all he said, as he pulled the door open; and then he hurried down the steps into the sunlight, reaching into his pocket for his car keys and bleakly eyeing the lane that would lead him back down to the old, old, terribly familiar freeway.
Los Angeles is my favorite city. Anybody can fall in love with San Francisco or New Orleans in ten minutes, but Los Angeles is more circumspect. There are lots of odd, secluded spots down in the canyons or up on the hilltops between the freeways – domed temples from the 1920s that still host some furtive sort of worship, eccentric gardens that stretch implausible distances, nearly inaccessible old apartment buildings whose tenants seem to be covertly united in some secret cause. The odd place in this story was based on one such apartment building where my wife and I one day found the street-side lobby door unlocked.
–T. P.