But there are also things that Stanley wants to do alone.
When the rind is gone and the gulls are scattered, Stanley takes a deep breath and turns back toward the boardwalk. The late-morning sun is high over the city: buildings and streetlamps and palmtrees angle their shadows at him, marking channels in the sand, and the storefronts are blacked-out beneath their porticos. Stanley checks the signs over the arcades as he draws closer: Chop Suey, St. Mark’s Hotel, Center Drug Co. On the corner of Market Street, blue and red stripes coil around a white column; he smoothes his frizzed hair as he passes it by.
Beachfront characters are out enjoying the weather—an old lady in an opera coat, stooped under her parasol; a bearded man in paint-spattered chinos, chasing two laughing women across the sand; a stout burgher walking an ugly dog, singing to it in a strange language—but Stanley pays them all little mind. He broadcasts his attention among the buildings, mindful of shapes and textures, of the attitude of sunlight on walls and streets. Patterns catch his eye, then slip into the background: rows of lancet windows, bricks emerging from stucco, mascarons grinning atop cast-iron columns. There’s an absence here that he’s training himself to see, something he can only glimpse sidelong, as if by accident. It’s bound up with the past, with the lapsed grandeur of this place, but even that is insubstantial, a shadow cast by the thing itself, flickering behind the scrim of years like the ghost of a ghost.
This is Welles’s city, so named in the book—which makes it Crivano’s city, too, as much as any earthly city can be. Stanley will learn to move through it as Crivano would: silent, catlike, on the balls of his feet. Unhidden yet unseen. Whenever his path clears, he shuts his eyes to walk a few blind steps, imagining the feel of cobblestones under soft boots, of a slender blade at his hip, of a black cape fanning his ankles, billowing in the night air. The night itself another cloak. He’s not sure how he came to have so clear a picture of Crivano; in the book, Welles never really says what he looks like. It occurs to Stanley that he could gotten this idea from someplace else: from Stewart Granger in Scaramouche, maybe, or even from a corny Zorro movie that he saw when he was a kid. He opens his eyes, blinks and winces in the sun, corrects his course.
Ahead is a cluster of old Bridgo parlors, some boarded up, some converted to penny arcades. Young men’s voices inside. The frantic chime of pinball machines. He’d like to go in, play a few balls—he’s good at it—but Dogs will be nearby, and he’s not quite ready for another scrap. He hasn’t yet settled on a strategy with those guys. He’ll go to war if he has to; he’d probably only need to take two or three of them out before the others would fold. But he’d have to hurt those two or three pretty bad—hospital bad, maybe graveyard bad—for the rest to take him seriously, and he’s not sure he wants the trouble that would come with that. For now he’ll just steer clear and lie low.
He crosses the Speedway and heads inland, past dilapidated shops and orange brick apartments. The avenues are rain-washed, weirdly bright, laid out for inspection. The usual boardwalk sidestreet smells—fried food, spilled liquor, puke and piss—are erased, but this just uncovers the subtler ripe-fruit and rotten-egg odors of the oilfield. Past Abbot Kinney the buildings fall away, opening space for weedy lawns fenced by splintered pickets, gardens bordered by railroad ties. Flowers and green leaves are everywhere, even this early in the year: myrtle and boxwood, bottlebrush and oleander, jasmine and clematis on trellised porches, cosmos and hollyhocks at fencerows. The plants are long-stemmed, unsteady in the sandy soil, slouching against clapboard with scapegrace charm, ready to take ruthless advantage of any kindness shown to them.
Across the street, a geriatric with a shaggy white mane pushes an old-fashioned gang mower over a tiny lawn; damp grass clumps at his sandaled feet. He stares at Stanley, his eyes reduced to flecks by his spectacles’ thick lenses. Stanley looks away.