“They were asking about you,” she says, suddenly full of wonder; her teeth are straight and white, a reminder that she was rich once, or at least her family was. “Like gangsters, but with real money. They were asking if I knew where you were, said they’d pay anyone who could tell them, and now here you are. Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“I’m in bad trouble,” he says, talking too fast. “I’ve got to go away and I might not be coming back. I’m going to get a passport and I might not ever get to see you again, and I think I killed someone but I had to.” He stops when he sees her realize something and in a hopeless, inward voice she says, “But I guess they’d probably have caught you anyway.”
“What?”
“But you’re strong, aren’t you,” she says. “I’ve seen you knock out guys twice your size. You can take care of yourself.”
He takes her limp hand, but she snatches it away, saying, “I can’t do this,” and then she’s striding away, which amazes him, because he’d thought that he’d somehow find the right thing to say, and it’s hard not to follow her, but he’s determined to keep his dignity, such as it is, a goal to cling to as his despair rises, and he’s wondering if there’ll be fighting on the rooftops tonight when she stops and turns back to him—humiliatingly, his heart rises—and calls, “Get out of here! You’re not safe. Don’t trust anyone—not anyone, okay? Would you please just run?” and then she’s gone into the crowd.
“This Lares who makes the passports,” the ghost says.
“Yeah,” says Kern, glad that at least she’d cared a little.
“Where does he live?”
“Deep. The old levels.”
“Easy to find?”
“Almost impossible, if you don’t know the way.”
“Ever take your little friend there?”
“Once, to show her his game.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to run her down and choke her ass out?”
“What?”
“Kidding! Now let’s go see Lares. You’d better run.”
21
Someone
Thales sits sweating in the hot sun on the patio over the hotel’s private beach and even behind his sunglasses the day is too bright. A container ship floats on the horizon among masses of clouds that could be mistaken for cities and closer to shore one of his brothers whoops from within the luminous green cavern of a cresting wave, which then collapses, burying him in foam, his surfboard shooting out to jag and bob on the water. The fences separating the hotel’s beach from the public one are topped with concertina wire, and even at this distance he can see the starving dogs roaming the sand speckled with filth and the vagrants huddled under ragged sheets of white plastic against the sun, and he reflects that if his family still had their money they’d be in a hotel good enough that this poverty would be invisible.
The tables are packed claustrophobically close and he turns in annoyance when a waiter bumps his shoulder which is when he sees the woman coming onto the patio from the hotel. She looks worried as she scans the tables, like she’s painfully late to meet someone, and then he realizes that the assurance of her bearing has distracted him from her ragged hair, her deep sunburn, the clothes she might have been sleeping in for days, and then he sees her gaze settle on him.
She starts pushing toward him through the press of tables and he half stands, wondering if he should retreat, but she’s already standing over him and about to speak but catches herself, looks amazed, says, “I know you. You’re the Brazilian prime minister’s son,” and with that everything is changed because he’s never seen her before in his life and what safety he has depends on his anonymity but she seems surprised more than hostile and he’s worried that the people around them will have overheard but they’re eating oysters, swilling prosecco, chattering away. Over her shoulder he sees two paunchy hotel guards coming at a trot, their uniforms of a noticeably better cut than the local cops’, and now they’re picking their way among the tables.
“We need to talk,” she says, sounding urgent, almost desperate. “I followed you from the clinic. Our interests overlap.”
“How’s that?” he says, wondering how she knew him and how he can get her to tell him and already convinced he’s missing some crucial piece of context.
“We’re both victims,” she says, and he can tell it makes her angry but even so she delivers the line so precisely that he has a sense of her interior chill, and he notices that under the grime she’s about his mother’s age, or rather agelessness, though somehow unmaternal—she’s someone, not someone’s mom—so she must have had money, once, and a lot of it, and wonders what violence, addiction or bad luck brought her to this pass. “Was your family killed too?” he asks.
Her face becomes still for a moment and then she says, “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but it’s possible. That’s the thing. I can’t remember anything. There was a drowning city and a friend I lost, and I don’t think I was ever really loved, and I don’t know how I got to Los Angeles.”
He notices the scar on her forehead and guesses that she, too, has the implant, which means she could be suffering from the dementia of her implant’s decay, which could be a foretaste of his own future.
As the guards arrive and ask her if she’s a guest in a way that makes it clear they know she’s not he takes money from his pocket and proffers it, saying, “Here—good luck,” but as the guards lift her to her feet her composure cracks for the first time and she swats the bills out of his hand and cries, “You’re not listening to me!”
He’s weighing the risk of letting her stay against the chance he could get her to tell him how she knew he had the implant but it’s a nondecision because with the guards events have already acquired a momentum and the most he can offer her is a moment of respect before she’s trundled away so he meets her eyes and says, “I’m listening.”
“How much do you remember?” she asks though it’s more like a challenge than a question, and then the guards have taken her by the elbows and are leading her away, the other guests barely seeming to register her passage.
Half an hour later he’s still staring blankly at the sea. He can recall a few scenes from Brazil—the house in the forest, beating his irascible uncle at chess on his tenth birthday, the airtight security around the house in Leblon—but there’s nothing else from his life before Los Angeles.
22
Shapes Purely