THIRTY-SIX
The last boat over.
Jimmy liked the idea of that. It matched what he was feeling. He was on one of the piers, leaning against the stub of a piling, smoking the last of the American Spirits. He had left Mary in the house on Russian Hill, blew off all of them up there, and the sense of purpose they rode in on. They didn’t have to show him out. He knew the way. He walked over a block and came down to the waterfront on the cable car, on the Hyde Street line, the last run of the night. The car was almost empty, just Jimmy and a Chinese man who looked a hundred years old. It was after two by the time he made it back down to Fisherman’s Wharf. The Sailors had had it to themselves all night and had trashed it good. The tourists were all still instinctively hanging back, waiting in their hotel rooms until this particular unearthly storm passed. Most of the Sailors had already cleared out, made the crossing to Alcatraz. The ones left milling around, asking questions of each other, of anyone who’d half listen, were the lost ones. The uncertain ones. The undecideds. The ones even more conflicted than Jimmy. Walkers, most of them, with the faintest red or blue auras of all.
He watched the coming and going. Whitehead’s strange black ship made four trips over and back just while Jimmy was standing there, taking aboard anybody who wanted a ride over, north or south, friend or foe, before it was too late. The name was on the stern. White Rose.
He turned and looked at Alcatraz, the turtle shape of it, the sweep of the light. In Time. Wasn’t that the name of the painting in Hesse’s office? The sailboat making it into port just ahead of the black storm, just in time. If Hesse was a doctor.
How could you hope to be with someone if you started with a lie? With a host of lies, interlaced, one feeding off another after a while. As soon as he thought it, he heard Mary’s answer: You started with a lie. You started us with a lie. She was right, he had lied to her from the first minute. The first word he spoke to her was probably a lie.
He remembered it. “Let’s hear your clever first line,” she had said, on the sidewalk on Sunset Strip.
“I don’t have one,” he had said. I . . . I was a lie. He didn’t exist, not in the way she knew.
“I don’t have a clever last line, either,” he had said. At least that wasn’t a lie.
He threw away the tailings of the cigarette and got on board the black ship. Jimmy was the only passenger, the last of the night to go over.
094
Alcatraz.
Every city, every society of Sailors had its place. The Place. When they met all together, for whatever ceremonial necessities, they met there. In L.A., it was aboard the Queen Mary. Here, it was Alcatraz. There were always enough Sailors in high places in any city to give their brothers and sisters some space. To facilitate. Sailor cops and Sailor firemen would be there to direct Norms away, to declare the glare of lights or the cars or the lines of people filing into a public place hours past midnight “nothing” or “a private party.”
Sailors covered the island. As the black ship angled in to bump against the dock, Jimmy saw them. Everywhere. The hundreds, the overflow from the main gathering inside the prison. Whoever was in charge had sure enough fired up the place with blazing lights. It was so bright, so alive, there were bound to be calls in the morning to the Chronicle. Groner would probably take them.
The local Sailors still thought Jimmy was somebody. As he came off the ship, they stepped out of his way, cleared a path across the dock and up the Z of the ramp, to the big prison buildings on the cap of the rock.
Up top, there was really only one big building. It was two or three hundred feet long, two-thirds as wide, tall, with thick walls angling in. Like a fort. Like a prison. Like a structure used to test bombs. The walls were a cream color in the daytime, and peeling under the almost constant salt wind, but at night they just looked gray. There were support buildings down the slope and out on the point, but they didn’t matter, just the big building. There was a concrete and grass yard in front, the front facing San Francisco, and another, all concrete, on the back corner, facing Tiburon.
The light of the lighthouse swept around like a scythe.
Jimmy ducked it, went through the crowd and inside.
They called the main cell block Broadway. It was two tiers high, “oft-photographed.” The factions of Sailors had divvied up the space the way they’d divided up the parking lots over at the Wharf. But most of them seemed to be thinking outside the box. Any box. Half were drunk, the other half high, high either from pills or pot (or acid, this being San Francisco), or just from the unsettling mix of order and chaos. Like a prison.
Or maybe it was the cold that had them jumping. It was freezing. Beyond the main cell block was the cafeteria, tables long ago ripped out, but not the clunky apparatus in the ceiling where they could spray out gas in the old days, “to quell a disturbance.” Some of them spilled over into that.
On the back wall of the main cell block was the gunrail, a balcony of sorts on the dividing wall. One end of it was against a high, barred window. A man was posted there, looking out the window, looking up at the sky. At intervals, he would broadcast a number. And then repeat it. Wherever he’d started with it, he was down, or up, to thirteen.
Jimmy heard a few more repetitions of his Christian name.
Sailor men and women dressed for occasions like this, usually arch versions of whatever they wore living. Whatever that was. The parade down to the docks hours past midnight must have been a sight for any insomniac Kansans peeking around the hotel curtains. There were men in bowlers, men in stevedore caps, men in those slanted knit caps union organizers fancy. Men in oversized Vietnam cammies. Among the women, there were festive Mae Wests and Marilyns and Jackie O.’s. And too many hippie chicks, who probably still had daddies out there somewhere wondering what had happened. A couple walked around wearing real Mae Wests, inflated life vests, glow sticks glowing. Most of the Sailors wore black arm-bands, but it wasn’t a grim scene. What it felt like was a nightclub, a disco minus the music, a meat market in some urban deconstructed space with a cynical name like Regrets. And a rope to keep the wrong ones out.
None of the principals were in sight, not on the floor. There was probably a VIP lounge somewhere.
Security wasn’t perfect. A few Norms made it in. There was Les Paul, walking around wide-eyed, with his guitar case and his stingy-brim hat, with a bottle of beer in his hand.
Jimmy saw Angel. Angel had spotted Les Paul, too. He made it over to the kid even before Jimmy did.
“What are you doing here?” Jimmy said to Les.
“He thought it would be interesting,” Angel said. “Maybe he’ll write a paper about it for school.”
“There’s a boat out there, you should go get on it,” Jimmy said to the boy. “You don’t need to see this.”
Les Paul put the beer on the floor and started away.
“I talked to him for a long time,” Angel said. “I explained it. Sort of. You know how it is.”
“She was his sister? For real?”
“Yeah. I just told him his sister was mixed up in something. He always wanted to come to San Francisco. It’ll be hard to get him home.” Angel scanned the heads. “Machine Shop is somewhere. With that Jeremy, in with those people. He’s gone over or something.”
“Yeah, he had a lot of back and forth in him,” Jimmy said.
“Are you all right?” Angel said.
“I don’t know what I am.”
Angel was used to lines like that from Jimmy. “Did you find out what it was? Who wanted you here, why?”
“Yeah, I did,” Jimmy said. And stopped right there.
They had found a small space next to a cell wall where there weren’t others pressing in on them, but now somebody touched Jimmy.
Mary. Mary looking like Mary Magdalene in a hooded cloak, a cassock, though fashionistas probably called it something else. It was black, closed in around her face. One minute she was Mary Magdalene, the next Death in The Seventh Seal.
Angel saw her, saw the edge of red light.
It took a lot to surprise Angel. He wasn’t surprised. He stepped away.
Jimmy dropped a little of his attitude. “Have you ever been to one of these?” he said. “A little of it goes a long way.”
“Can we go somewhere, talk?” Mary said.
“No,” Jimmy said. But then he said, “I’m going to go. I don’t care about this. Look, when this is over, maybe—”
The man at the window said, “Nine. Nine.”
“Number Nine,” Jimmy quoted. He opened the curtains over Mary’s face. “Turn me on, Deadman,” he said.
“Jimmy . . .”
“Come with me,” he said.
People around them began to recognize her.
“Mary! It’s Mary . . .”
It drove her away.
Or maybe it was the Watcher at the window, whose excitement was growing.
“Eight. Eight!”
She looked at him, then went away. Jimmy watched her go, the way people crowded around her, reached out to touch her. He didn’t know if he’d ever see her again. If he could. Or if he wanted to.
The clotting crowd pressed in around him. He might have waited too long to escape.
“Seven! Seven!”
“That’s bullshit,” a voice beside him said. Jimmy turned. It was somebody he didn’t know. The man was looking up at the town crier on the gunrail. “He doesn’t know shit,” the man said. “You can’t call phases of the moon by the minute. It’s bullshit. They’ll call it. When the time comes. Just like they’ll call the results.”
He wore black, head to toe. Right down to the motorcycle boots.
“But I guess some people like that hocus-pocus,” he said.
He had a good blue glow on. He offered his hand to Jimmy. There was a studded leather band around it.
“Kingman,” he said. “Like Arizona, only farther out.”
Jimmy didn’t think they looked at all alike.
Kingman had others behind him. They now moved in a pack around Jimmy, closed in intentionally. A semicircle. It was the junior members of the L.A. board of directors. Boney M, Perversito. Even the fat man.
Two industrial floodlights on stanchions popped on, aimed at the center of the gunrail.
“You need to remember who your friends are,” Kingman leaned close and hissed into Jimmy’s ear.
“You’re not my friends,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, that’s what I meant,” Kingman said.
The door at the far end of the gunrail, the end away from the window, opened.
Whitehead was the first through it.
“Five,” the window man said. “Five!”
“Shut up!” Kingman yelled at the window man. Some of the crowd laughed. The window man gripped the railing with both hands.
On they came. The candidates.
What followed the appearance of each man onto the gunrail, into the spotlights, shouldn’t be called applause, certainly not cheering. But it had a sound, a Sailor-specific sound, something that came out of the back of the mouth, halfway down the throat. Like the huzzahs in the House of Commons. Affirmative grumbling. The vocals were accompanied by the sound of shuffling feet, like walking in place. It was how they registered their respect.
Whitehead got a good reception. Jeremy stood on a bench under the gunrail and scanned the crowd, mentally taking names of any who thought otherwise.
Then it was Steadman. He was so big he had to duck to come through the doorway.
The L.A. contingent responded. And a few of the reds.
There wasn’t ever going to be a vote; that wasn’t the way it worked. But for now it seemed even between the two men, Whitehead and Steadman.
“The Next!” Kingman shouted out. “Steadman!”
The feet shuffle d louder. Then a rhythm came out of it. And the rhythm turned into stomping.
Led by the black motorcycle boots.
Jeremy glared at Kingman and the SoCal Sailors.
“What?” Kingman said, glaring back at Jeremy. “What!”
Jeremy seized one of the floodlights and turned it on Kingman. Jimmy was caught in the glare, too.
But the crowd’s attention wasn’t diverted for long.
Because now Whitehead turned toward the door.
To present Mary. In her hood.
Mary Magdalene. Death Mary. A surprise candidate.
“Queen Mary!” a woman shouted. Men joined her.
Jimmy fell the rest of the way. Facedown.
He knew she was known. He knew she had her friends. He didn’t know that she was poised to rule them, insofar as any of them allowed themselves to be ruled. He thought she had brought him here because she loved him.
She had brought him here to share a throne.
Christina Leonidas had seen Jimmy in the spotlight and now had squeezed in next to him.
“Can a woman be The Next?” she said.
The question was answered when Whitehead handed Mary a white rose.
“I yield,” Whitehead said. And bowed at the waist.
The crowd grumbled their approval.
News joined in, lifting all-too-trusting eyes to the hooded figure on the balcony, the moment’s Juliet.
“Your enemies watch you, learn from you,” Kingman said to Jimmy. “Red Steadman taught me that. Look at all these News. Fresh dead. They got all this from us. From the Cut thing. Run up the numbers, freak everybody out. But it’s not over yet.”
Mary looked down at Jimmy, in the other spotlight.
Kingman leaned even closer to him, to make it personal, to make it like a dirty joke, and said into his ear, “I stood over her, man, up in that white house up in Benedict Canyon, had the bloody, dripping knife in my hand. And something stopped me.” He laughed the ugliest laugh of all, an ugly breath blown in Jimmy’s ear. “Now here we all are . . .”
“One,” the now-chastised lookout said. “One.”
But it wasn’t over. Jeremy shifted the other spotlight from Mary and Whitehead to Steadman.
Steadman moved to the rail.
He looked like a king.
Battling rumbling began, a war of voices and marching feet. The prison seemed to quake with it. Maybe the walls of Alcatraz would crumble with the collective fear and anger and hunger.
Who would it be?
Steadman or Mary?
Jimmy had had enough. He wanted a door. He saw Angel. Angel waved him over. He was along the side. Jimmy started toward him.
“Wait,” Mary called down. “Wait.”
Her voice stilled the crowd. Completely. In a second.
The light was still on him. Jimmy Miles. The waning crescent moon was now in the frame of the barred window. The hour of decision. Steadman looked defeated, one way or another. A few voices called out Jimmy’s name. A few more.
Mary dropped Whitehead’s rose, held out her hand to him. To him.
Jimmy looked up at her and said, loud enough for any of them to hear, “Whose idea was all the killing?”
Just when it was starting to get romantic.
095
He came down the Z to the docks, to where one of the red-and-white ferries idled. A crewman leaned on the rail with a hand spotlight, teasing the fish.
Jimmy stopped and turned before he got on board. He could hear them, up the hill, receiving their queen. In his head, he could see her there, and suspected he always would, for whatever years he had left to serve.