California Fire And Life

20

"This is Jack Wade from California Fire and Life," Jack says into the tape recorder. "The date is August 28, 1997. The time is 1:15 p.m. I am taking a recorded statement from Mr. Nicky Vale and his mother, Mrs. Valeshin. I am making this record with the full knowledge and permission of both Mr. Vale and Mrs. Valeshin. Is that correct?"

"That is correct," Nicky says.

"Correct."

"And will you validate the date and time for me?"

"It is correct as stated," Nicky says.

"Then we can proceed," Jack says. "If at any time I turn off the tape, I will make a note for the record of the time we go off record and the time we resume. Now, could you each state and spell your full legal names for me?"

It's a delicate thing, taking a recorded statement. On the one hand, you have to observe the formalities so you get a useful record that will stand up in court. On the other hand, it's not a sworn statement or a legal proceeding, so you have to walk a fine line between the formal and the casual. So after they state and spell their names, Jack flips back into talk show mode and says, "Mr. Vale-"

"Nicky."

"Nicky, why don't you start by giving me a little background on yourself?"

Because Jack knows that the first thing you do is get the subject talking. About anything, it doesn't matter. The idea is to get them into the habit of responding to your questions and just plain talking. Also you learn something right off the bat: if your guy balks at talking about himself, he's going to balk at everything else and then you have to wonder what he's protecting.

There's a more cynical reason. Jack knows it like every other investigator knows it – the more a subject talks, the more chance he has to lie. To fuck up, give inconsistencies, lie on the record. Get his feet stuck in the concrete.

Most people hang themselves.

It's a basic truth that Jack knows: if you're dragged out of your bed by the cops at four in the morning and they want to talk to you about the Kennedy assassination, the Lindbergh kidnapping, or aiding and abetting freaking Pontius Pilate, what you do is you keep your fucking mouth shut. Doesn't matter if they ask you your height, your favorite color, or what you had for breakfast that morning, you keep your fucking mouth shut. If they ask you if night is darker than day, or whether up is higher than down, you keep your fucking mouth shut.

There are four words, and only four words, you can say.

I want my lawyer.

When your lawyer gets there he'll give you some sage advice.

He'll tell you to keep your fucking mouth shut.

And if you do that, if you follow that sage advice, you will in all probability leave the police station a free man.

There are usually three reasons people talk.

One, they're scared.

Nicky Vale isn't scared.

Two, they're stupid.

Nicky Vale isn't stupid.

Three, they're arrogant.

Bingo.

Nicky Vale starts talking about himself.

He was born in St. Petersburg, which was Leningrad when he was born but now is St. Petersburg again. This name thing matters like shit to Nicky Vale, because it wasn't any more giggles being a Jew in Leningrad than it was being a Jew in St. Petersburg.

You can change your name as often as you want ("I should know, right?" Nicky adds), but you can't change your spots, and those Bolshevik bastards are the same and will always be the same. Czarist, Bolshevik, Stalinist, or glasnostnik, it's all the same because they're still and always anti-Semites.

"We have served," Nicky observes, "as an indispensable factor knitting the Russian social fabric. We have done them an enormous favor: over the centuries of conflict we have provided a unifying focus of hatred."

So Nicky grows up as an outsider. Excluded from sports clubs, social clubs, and the Young Communist League, young Nicky lives in a physical and social ghetto.

"What we had," Nicky says, "is what those Bolshevik bastards will never have: a legitimate culture. We had God, we had literature, we had music, we had art. We had an immutable past, Jack, that could not change and did not change with the tides of political purges and the shifting sands of doctrine. What makes a Jew is the Jewish past. So they excluded us. Excluded us from what?"

Well, not the army.

Nicky gets drafted. Greetings, Jewboy, here's hoping you get smacked.

So if you think it's fun being Jewish in Leningrad, try being a Russian Jew in Afghanistan. They hate you twice. They can't figure out if they hate you more for being a Russian or for being a Jew. It's like hatred squared or cubed or something.

Nicky doesn't help matters.

"I was stupid," Nicky says. "I wore a Star of David on a chain around my neck. For what? So in case I'm captured they can torture me twice as long? But when you're young…"

Nicky survives his tour in mullah-land.

Comes home to what?

The same old crap.

So what he wants is out.

"Glasnost comes," Nicky says, "and the bastards try to curry favor by opening the gates to release people they don't want in the first place."

The hypocrisy is stunning to Nicky but all right with him. While the gate is open he's determined to walk through it. Mother wants to go to Israel but Nicky…

"Well, I have seen my war," Nicky says. "I've seen enough of people being blown up. And Israel, well, to be frank…"

Young Nicky has other ideas. Young Nicky has heard of the land of dreams, the land of golden sands and golden hair. The land where a young man with no money and no background and little formal education – but energy, smarts, and determination – can still make a splash. Young Nicky wants to go to California.

They have some family here. Some cousins who made the escape and live in L.A. and are doing all right. They give Nicky a gig driving town cars on the airport run. A couple of years of this, Nicky buys his own car. Then two, then three. Then a used-car lot, then a parts wholesale business. Then he goes in with several partners and buys an old apartment building. Fixes it up and sells it. Buys another. Then another. Now he has a fleet of cars, two used-car lots, and his parts business.

Leverages them to buy an apartment complex in Newport Beach. Converts them to condos and makes a killing. Leaves his money on the table, so to speak, and buys another. Pretty soon he's in the crazy '80s real estate market. Sometimes buying commercial property and selling it on the same day. Gets into development, buying raw land and developing town houses, condos, country clubs.

Orange County is booming and Nicky with it.

"The only problem with Americans?" Nicky says. "You don't appreciate what you have here. Every time I hear an American running this country down I laugh."

He's booming and blooming, enough to get into a sideline which is his true love.

Art.

Paintings, sculpture, fine furniture.

Especially fine furniture.

"It is, to use a hackneyed phrase, the craftsmanship," Nicky says. "In those days they cared about quality. About the quality of the wood, the quality of the workmanship. Attention to the smallest detail. Devotion to the aesthetic of the whole. They built furniture to be useful, to be beautiful, and to last. They didn't just throw it together, destined for the trash heap or the yard sale.

"And there is something about wood, isn't there? Do you know what I mean? For the sacrifice of a beautiful tree something beautiful should be created. To see those fine grains of mahogany and walnut shaped into something exquisite and lasting. And something that you use every day – a chair, a cabinet, a bed – you have a relationship with the wood, with the woodworker, with the designer. You become part of the continuum of history. Can you understand that, Jack?"

"Yes."

He really can. It's why he spends half his free time sanding old wooden longboards in his garage.

"So when I made my fortune," Nicky says, "I indulged my passion. I bought Georgian furniture. Some I sold, some I traded, most I kept to fill my home. To create a space around me that fed my soul. That's my story, Jack: Russian Jew turned California cabbie turned English gentleman. Only, as they say, in America. Only in California."

"Why only in California?"

"Come on, you know." Nicky laughs. "It is truly the land of dreams. That's why people come here. They say it's the weather, but it's really the atmosphere, if you will. In California you are unhooked from time and place. You can untie yourself from the bonds of history, nationality, culture. You can free yourself from what you are to become what you want to be. Whatever you want to be. No one will stop you, scorn you, criticize you – because everyone else is doing the same thing. Everyone breathing the same ether but from our own individual clouds. Endlessly floating, shifting, and changing shape. Sometimes two clouds drift together, then apart, and then together again. Your own life is what you want it to be. Like a cloud, it is what you imagine."

Nicky stops and then laughs at himself.

"So," he says, "if a Russian Jew wants the sunshine and the freedom and the ocean and the beaches and to be an English country gentleman all at the same time, in California he simply loads his house full of expensive furniture and creates his own reality… So much of it gone now. Gone in the fire."

Not to mention your wife, Jack thinks.

Which, in fact, you don't mention.

But the fire, Jack says. Not to be offensive, but please tell me where you were the night of the fire.

Now that we're, you know, chatting.