Strip

17

MANCO KAPAK WAS in Wash, his dance club on Hollywood Boulevard. He found the place much more alien than his two strip clubs in the Valley. He leaned on the wall behind the bar just to be out of the crowd for a bit and squinted his eyes to see through the dark and the flashes of light.

Wash looked as prosperous as he needed it to. The dance floor was full, and all the bodies merged into one mass compelled by the same sound, looking from his vantage point like the sea, with waves of movement sweeping across it and back. The tables on the far side of the big room were more than full, often with a girl sitting on a lap, or two of them sitting on one chair. The bartenders near him were pouring drinks as fast as they could.

The lights in Wash were throwing a reddish cast over everyone right now, and it gradually changed to yellow, then green, then blue. Laser beams swept across the room far above at the fourteen-foot level, thin green lines of light intersecting to make a moving web ceiling.

The whole spectacle was mesmerizing—the lights and music and the young men and women stepping, turning, gyrating to one beat. Kapak looked beyond the long bar at a group of girls dancing together in the crowd, and they reminded him of the girls in Budapest so long ago—faces with that fresh, smooth look, the long, shining hair, the bodies so perfect. He felt a sudden emptiness, a terrible longing to go back that was so strong that he could feel a film of moisture forming in his eyes. He blinked it away. The place he missed so much wasn’t Budapest. It wasn’t a place at all. It was being young.

He squared his shoulders, opened the hinged section of the bar, and began to walk. He made his way around the edge of the dance floor, patrolling the building, making sure every waitress, every bouncer, every busboy saw him. In all of these years in America, he had learned plenty of management secrets. One of them was showing up and displaying interest. All most employees needed to know was that the boss was paying attention. They could forgive the owner for being rich, because they could see for themselves that the price of getting rich was getting old. But if the boss didn’t care about the business, he didn’t care about them either. And they’d make him pay for it, punish him by stealing and being lazy.

Kapak made a second circuit around the cavernous club. Once he was sure everyone had seen him, he could go inside to the office where the music was shut out. He unlocked the thick, padded door in the back wall, went inside, and closed it. The anteroom he entered held a bank of television monitors above a control desk and an unoccupied table and chairs. At the control desk staring at the monitors was the club’s security manager, a retired cop named Colby. He picked up a hand radio and said, “Bobby, take a walk over to the bar and get a look at the tall guy with the mustache and the wife-beater shirt. He looks like he’s thinking of starting a fight.” Then he set it down again.

Kapak said, “Hello, Colby.”

Colby only nodded and said, “Mr. Kapak.” His manner was slightly cooler than it must have been when he had pulled speeders over in the old days. Kapak liked it, because it seemed to him to indicate a kind of integrity. Colby had spent twenty years watching people like Kapak very closely, and he hadn’t liked them. Now that he was left with an inadequate pension and had to work for one of them, he didn’t pretend he had changed his mind. He spoke to Kapak with the respectful formality that cops used to speak with people they considered enemies.

Kapak passed through the door at the other side of the room into the inner office, where Ruben Salinas, the manager of Wash, was expecting him. As soon as the door was closed, even the muffled beat of the music in the club was almost undetectable. Salinas stood up and came around his desk. He was young, and he dressed like his customers in tight designer jeans and a T-shirt, but he had the dead eyes of a fifty-year-old business executive. “Nice to see you, Mr. Kapak. Everything all right out there?”

Kapak was aware that it wasn’t especially nice to see him, but said, “Nice to see you too, Ruben. Everything seems fine. I’m pleased.”

“Thank you.”

“Have we heard from our friend yet?”

“I just saw two of Rogoso’s girls come in the front door on the monitor. It should only be a minute or two.” He pointed at the monitor mounted on the wall where he could see it from behind the desk.

Kapak stepped up beside him and turned to look where he was pointing. There were two young women with long, straight black hair, short skirts, sandals, and tank tops like all of the two hundred other female customers. They both had big leather purses with the straps over their left shoulders and clutched under their left arms. Kapak was happy with them. If Salinas had not pointed them out, he would never have seen any difference between them and the others. He watched them make their way across the crowded dance floor, sidestepping or turning to avoid dancers as they came. Their movements had a graceful, playful quality, as though they were dancing their way through the crowd, half-unconsciously giving in to the rhythm, even though the world knew that there was nothing unconscious about the way twenty-year-old girls looked.

They reached the line for the ladies’ room, stood watching the dancers and the lights and appraising the men who had noticed them and had not looked away. Kapak saw the other girl now, the blond who worked for Salinas. She moved in close to them, and he could see she had a purse that was identical to the purse one of Rogoso’s girls carried. They leaned in close and talked for a few seconds, and then she turned and stepped away from them.

“Something’s up,” Salinas said.

“What?”

“She’s supposed to switch purses with the taller one in the ladies’ room, and bring the purse in here. She’s coming in, but I didn’t see a switch.”

They waited, watching the monitor. The two girls waiting in line for the bathroom went in.

There was a knock on the office door, and Salinas stepped to open it and let the blond woman inside.

“What’s wrong?” said Salinas.

But she looked at Kapak. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kapak. They want you to go with them to see Mr. Rogoso.”

Salinas stood completely still and watched Kapak, but Kapak sighed. “Ruben, you’ll need to count the take for the night and fill out the deposit slip. Don’t put in a date. Leave that blank. Drive it up to Siren and give it to Voinovich, and he’ll put it in the safe. I guess you’d better call the office at Temptress and tell them to do the same thing. I’d like all the money locked in the safe at Siren tonight.”

“You’re not actually going with those girls, are you?”

“Rogoso wants to talk to me. Maybe he’ll tell me something I need to know.” He turned to the blond woman. “Where do these two want to meet me?”

“In the back of the building by your car.”

“All right.”

Salinas frowned. “Aren’t you a little … worried?”

“No,” he said. “Just take care of the money, and things will be fine.” He turned and went out through the security office and into the noise of the club. It was after midnight now, and the crowd was as big and active as it would be tonight.

He had lied about not being worried. Rogoso was a savage. He was a man without any sense of how a human being was supposed to behave. A couple of years ago, he’d had his first difference of opinion with him. Rogoso had sent a delivery of money to be mixed in with Kapak’s nightly take, and when Kapak had opened the bag, he had found blood had soaked into the top thirty or forty bills in each stack and dried. Kapak had met with Rogoso and returned the stained bills to him.

Rogoso looked down at the pile of reddish-brown paper, some of the bills stuck together and some not. “It’s just a little blood. You’re supposed to be the money launderer, aren’t you? Wash them.”

Kapak sat quietly without moving for a few seconds. “There’s no such thing anymore as just blood. It’s somebody’s blood. As soon as they do a couple of tests on it, they know who it belongs to. I’m assuming the cops already have the body this came from.”

“Could be.” Rogoso appeared bored and uninterested.

“I’ve already deposited all the bills that were clean in the bank, but not these. If this makes you short for the week, I can help you out. And I’ve already made out the check for the rest.” He took it out of his coat pocket and held it out to Rogoso.

Rogoso reached out and took it, then tore it up. “Don’t act like I’m some small-time guy. I can make my payrolls.”

“Do I need to know whose money this was?”

“He was my brother-in-law.”

Kapak had asked no more questions. He had simply passed over the topic and taken the first opportunity to go home.

Kapak knew he was being watched, so as he walked through the club past the surging crowd, he looked up at Takito the DJ in his glass booth and waved, and Takito waved both his arms and grinned. Takito was an almost unnaturally skinny Japanese man of undeterminable age. Each night he took off his shirt to reveal his stringy muscles and the impression of bones, tied a headband around his forehead, and began to play a selection of music that the customers seemed to think could not be heard anywhere else, all the while dancing behind the glass and shouting down at the customers. Takito already had enough notoriety to get lots of other jobs at after-hours clubs and parties, so he probably would be moving on before too long. For this moment—these few seconds—he and Kapak were useful to each other. Takito looked good, and Kapak looked brave.

Kapak stepped out the front entrance into the line of young people waiting to be admitted and made his way around to the back. The two girls were leaning against the hood of his car, waiting and smoking cigarettes.

He pushed the remote control on his key chain, and the buttons popped up and the door locks opened. The two girls dropped their cigarettes on the asphalt, opened the rear doors, and got in, so Kapak had to sit alone in front like a chauffeur. “All right,” he said. “Where are we going?”

The one over his left shoulder said, “We have to go the long way and make some turns to be sure your people aren’t following us. Okay?”

“I guess it’s all right, but I don’t want to be out all night, because I have things to do. You tell me where to turn, and I’ll do it.”

“Left up at the light.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror to find her. She was looking straight ahead, but the girl beside her was on her knees on the seat staring out the rear window, watching the traffic behind them. The taller girl had him make three turns in rapid succession, then told him to head west.

“Are my people following us, Maria?”

“My name is Ariana, not Maria.”

“Well, hello, Ariana. People call me Manco.”

“We know who you are, Manco,” she said irritably. “We came to pick you up.”

“Oh,” he said. “That means you two like me, doesn’t it? Do I make your hearts beat faster? Do you get butterflies in your stomachs when you see me?”

The two girls laughed, and then the other one said, “Stop making fun of us.”

“Oh!” he said. “What voice is that? Ariana, aren’t we alone?”

“You know we’re not. That was Irena.”

“Is Irena your imaginary friend? A lot of children have imaginary friends.”

“No, I’m not her imaginary friend,” Irena said. “I’m just as real as she is and more real than you are.”

Kapak took his hands off the wheel, pretended to knock his right fist on his head, but made the loud rapping noise by tapping the dashboard with his left. “Hear that? It seemed real to me. How could you be more real than I am?”

“Nobody’s taking me to see Rogoso. Pretty soon you could be a ghost.”

“Irena!” said Ariana. “That’s not funny.”

“Are you both afraid of Rogoso?”

“Yes.”

“None of the people who work for me are afraid.”

“Why would you say that?”

“I’m just making conversation,” said Kapak. “A lot of the time that means comparing one thing with another, or talking about the way things could be if they weren’t the way they are. How far do we have to go to find Rogoso? Remember, I said I have some other things to do tonight.”

“He’s at the beach.”

“What beach?”

“You know, the beach. Malibu.”

“That’s quite a drive.”

“Irena! We weren’t supposed to tell him that ahead of time.”

“Oh, who cares?”

“What if he decides he doesn’t want to drive out there? Rogoso will have Alvin and Chuy beat the shit out of us. At least.”

“Oh my God. You have a gun. Nothing has to happen that you don’t want,” Irena said.

“It’s not very smart to say that either.”

“Well, it’s true.” Irena sat facing forward. “Manco. Drive west to PCH and go north. Ariana will tell you where to stop. Okay?”

Manco shrugged. “I guess it’ll be okay. I hope you were kidding about me being a ghost, though. I don’t think I’d like that much.”

“She was kidding.”

Kapak drove toward Santa Monica, and when he got there he took the exit down the incline onto Pacific Coast Highway. To his right was the high bluff and to the left was the ocean, shining black at this time of night. “See the moon?” he said.

He heard the two moving around to see it. “Beautiful,” said Ariana. “I love to see it shining on the ocean like that.” Almost immediately after she said it, the first of the houses cropped up on the left. After that, for a time the view consisted of a succession of garage doors and high gates, the houses shoulder to shoulder as though they were trying to hide the whole Pacific Ocean.

“Sometimes I don’t think anybody ought to be able to own something like that—put something up so he can see the ocean, but nobody else can,” said Irena.

“I wouldn’t say that if I were you,” said Ariana. “You know who owns a house here.”

Irena sighed.

“Okay, Manco,” said Ariana. “We’re almost there. When we go by it, you’ve got to hang a U-turn and pull forward to stop in front of the garage. There’s no other place for a car.”

“Okay, but watch for cops.”

“See the big white place up there, the one that’s about three stories?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s it. Now go past. Turn around. There. Nice. Now pull up there.”

Kapak stopped the car, looked into the rearview mirror to be sure nothing was coming in the right lane, and then got out and stood at the back of his car and watched the two girls get out. He studied their bodies closely while they weren’t aware of it and decided there was no place for a gun on either of them except their purses. When they came closer, Ariana said, “He’s waiting.”

She went to the front door and opened it, and Kapak followed the girls inside. Rogoso came into the foyer from a brightly lighted living room. He was not as tall as Kapak. Although he was at least forty-five, he looked no more than thirty-five years old, with thick dark hair that seemed to sprout from halfway down his forehead, just above his bushy eyebrows. He wasn’t smiling.

Kapak said, “Nice house, Rogoso. How are you?” and held out his hand.

Rogoso kept his hands at his sides. “I’m not happy, Kapak.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve been hearing all kinds of stuff about what’s going on with you.”

“What?”

“This Joe Carver guy is robbing you blind and killing your men, and you’re too scared to go to the bank to move money around, and there’s a police lieutenant downtown making a full-time job out of watching you.”

“Who told you that?”

“Everybody!” he shouted. “Every-fucking-body!” He spoke more softly. “The whole town knows all about it like they were all there at the time and saw you get robbed, and people are saying that you’re too old to do this anymore. That you’re weak.”

Kapak laughed. “I don’t feel weak. Do you want to arm-wrestle?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Well, none of my men has been killed. One of them got clipped by a ricochet off the sidewalk. It was a girl just firing wild all over the place, and she managed to get him a flesh wound down by his calf with like ten shots. He’ll be fine. I got lots of other guys. And Joe Carver is nothing. There are guys like him all the time. Always have been. They come from some unknown place that they’re goddamn glad to get out of, and they show up here and cause trouble for a little while, and then it gets too hot for them and they go away. I’m putting some pressure on him right now, and he’ll either turn up or go someplace else. Don’t worry. He can’t hurt you. He doesn’t even know about you.”

“But he’s got the cops watching you all the time.”

“Not really. I just drove out here, and your girls can tell you that nobody followed us.”

He looked at Ariana and Irena, standing a few feet to his right. Their dark, heavily mascaraed eyes watched Rogoso warily, waiting for him to turn to them.

“They’re just a pair of drug mules. What the fuck do they know?”

“Probably more than we do. If they had ever let themselves be followed, they’d be dead or in jail.”

“That’s not proof of anything.” He extended his arm and looked around him. “Take a look at this place. I just bought it a month ago. You know who owned it? Nick Criley.”

“The singer?”

“The fucking legendary singer,” he said. “It cost me eighteen million bones. Do you see what I’m saying, Manco?”

“You have an expensive house.”

“That I’m building an empire. And let’s talk straight here. I’m not a nightclub owner, and I don’t have a few chicks pole-dancing and wiggling their asses to pay my bills. I’ve got over three hundred dealers on the street. If the cops get something on you, they’ll fine you. At the worst, they’d take your liquor license so you’d have to retire. You know what happens if they get me?”

“I didn’t find you and tell you to become a drug dealer. You were already doing everything you’re doing now when I met you.”

“You’re missing the point, Manco. I’m not surprised, because your thinking is old-fashioned, like you were still dancing around a gypsy campfire in some part of Europe that God forgot a thousand years ago. I’m an important man, and that puts me in the center of the target. I can’t have somebody who handles any of my money making this kind of spectacle of himself. You’re attracting little small-time guys to come and steal from you, and that’s a sign that they know you’re weak. And when you try to fight back, you don’t even win. All you do is attract the cops. Alvin, Chuy? Come in here.”

Out of the living room came the two big bodyguards who went everywhere with Rogoso. As always when he’d seen them at night, they both wore lightly tinted shooting glasses to cut the glare from headlights and floodlights, and black sport coats that covered their weapons.

“Hello, Alvin. Chuy.”

The two bodyguards nodded at him and waited in the doorway.

Rogoso said to Kapak, “I’m sorry I have to do this, but you and I can’t do business anymore. You’re too old and soft, and you’re putting everybody in danger. Take him somewhere and get rid of him.”

Kapak had been studying the two girls for the past minute—their exact positions, the clasps on their purses, even their breathing patterns. Kapak’s left hand shot out and grasped Ariana’s thin arm. He tugged her to him, reached around her into her purse, and pulled out her gun. He fired once into the center of Alvin’s chest, twice into Chuy, and pushed Ariana away from him. He was already moving fast into the living room.

Rogoso was only about ten feet ahead of him, sprinting for the staircase. Kapak wasn’t as fast, but he fired once, hitting him in the back. As Rogoso’s dash became an uneven stagger, Kapak ran him down and shot him in the back of the head.

Kapak turned and moved to the wall of the living room, hurrying back toward the foyer. He reached the portal and stopped to listen, then spun around into the open marble space. He fired one round into Chuy’s head and one into Alvin’s. Then he took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped every surface of the gun.

The two girls were cowering in the corner of the room, their eyes wide and their mouths open. “Please don’t,” said Irena.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I wouldn’t have hurt them either. I just couldn’t let them kill me.” He stepped close to Irena so he could watch her expressions. “Is there anybody else in the house?”

“No. He thought he might decide to kill you, and he didn’t want anybody but Chuy and Alvin to be around.”

“Do you know where he kept his books?”

“Books?”

“The papers where he kept track of his business—the money that came in and the money he paid to other people.”

“He would never let us see anything like that,” Ariana said.

“All right. Do you two have a car?”

“No.”

“Those two cars along the highway in front of mine. Whose are they?”

“Alvin’s is the black BMW.”

Kapak stepped to the spot where Alvin’s body lay on its back, bent over, reached into the jeans pocket, and produced a set of keys. He tossed them to Irena. “I’ll give you two ten minutes to get as far from here as you can. If you ever say anything about this to anyone, you’ll have to die too.”

“We know that,” said Irena. She and Ariana backed their way to the door. As Irena opened it, she said, “And thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “For telling me about the gun.”

They both went out, and a moment later he heard the sound of a car pulling away toward the city. Kapak looked at his watch. It was 12:36. He began to search the house, moving from room to room, but he could see that the task was hopeless. There were too many spots to hide something important, and too many reasons not to keep searching. He looked at his watch, and it was 12:45. He found an office on the second floor, but he had seen nothing in it that might contain the records he wanted. He went to the desk, pulled the drawers out, and piled them up on the floor against the big wooden desk. He threw all the papers he could find around them. He opened the windows so the breeze from the ocean blew in and ruffled his hair. Then he moved on.

In the kitchen Kapak found the stairway down to the garage beneath the house. Two cars—a Maserati and a Bentley—were parked in the narrow space facing outward. He sighed. How could Rogoso have been foolish enough to buy such visible, obvious cars and drive them to this ridiculous house? Did he think the Internal Revenue Service wouldn’t wonder where all the money was coming from? How could Kapak not have continued to check on him and found out about it? He was ashamed. He looked around the garage, found a can of paint thinner and a can of charcoal starter, and set them aside. He found a length of hemp rope, cut it into two twelve-foot lengths with a hedge clipper, then opened the two cars, popped the fuel doors, opened both gas caps, and stuffed the ends of both ropes into the tanks. Then he soaked the rest of the ropes with charcoal starter and left them trailing across the floor to meet near the steps.

He took the two cans with him as he climbed the stairs to the top floor. It was furnished as a recreation room, with a pool table, video games, a telescope on a tripod, an aquarium with three little spotted sharks gliding over lighted sand, and a full bar. He put a few bottles of liquor on the floor beneath the bar, poured some paint thinner over the wood, and opened the window. Then he lit a match to start the fire. When the flames went upward and began to lick the ceiling, he hurried out and descended the stairs into the office. He poured the rest of the paint thinner on the desk and empty drawers, lit another fire, and moved on. When he reached the bottom of the stairs to the garage, he splashed the last of the charcoal starter over the walls, lit the two ropes that led to the two cars, then tossed a match against the nearest wall. In a second there was a sheet of orange flame rolling up the wall. He turned and ran up the stairs, went out the front door, got into his car, and drove.

He kept listening for the two explosions that might occur when the fire reached the gas tanks, and he thought he heard a thud, but he was already a half mile away with the wind blowing and the car windows closed, and he thought it might be his imagination. As he drove back the way he had come, toward the start of the Santa Monica Freeway, he looked at his watch again. It was 1:10. He had given the girls plenty of time—much more than he had promised.

It wasn’t until he was on the Santa Monica Freeway and moving into the right lane for his exit, climbing up on the elevated half-loop to swoop down again onto the northbound San Diego Freeway, that he felt the lightness in his head and the fullness in his lungs that he had known would come. In sixty-four years he had felt it many times. The fear-induced adrenaline that suddenly flooded the bloodstream eventually burned itself up with the exertion—the fighting and running—and then left him feeling weak and shaken.

He was an old fighter, a man who had arthritic knuckles because he’d fought with his fists, three long knife scars on his arm, chest, and back, and light-colored spots on his body where fire had turned skin into scar tissue, because this was not the first house he’d been in that was no more. Tonight had been a near thing, an unwarranted, unexpected attack that he had fought off, and he had known that his body, the animal self, would need to take these deep, sweet breaths to recover and reassure itself that no harm had been done to it. He opened the car windows a few inches and deeply inhaled the night air that rushed in.

But almost immediately his mind began to bring down his pulse, slow his breathing. He had not died. But the futility of this night’s work, the stupid wastefulness of it, was impossible to forget.

The men he had outsmarted and killed weren’t supposed to be his enemies. They were allies. For years Rogoso had been paying him big commissions for moving his drug profits through the banks, to make it clean. Rogoso had been a regular, dependable source of money. And having an alliance with a man like Rogoso had probably been one of the things that had protected Kapak and his businesses.

That was gone now. Rogoso and his closest friends were dead. The big wooden beach house would be burning furiously now, would probably be dust and burned timbers in another half-hour. There wouldn’t be much left to conceal any papers that referred to Kapak or laundering money. For all Kapak knew, he might also have burned millions of dollars in cash and drugs, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Rogoso had decided he was weak and betrayed him.

He was heading toward his house, but then he changed his mind. He didn’t want to go back and sit around in an empty house tonight. He needed to be out, to see people. He needed an alibi. If he hurried, he would be in one of his clubs in the Valley in fifteen minutes. He steered toward Temptress, which was a bit west of Siren, and closer to the 405 freeway. He took the exit at Sepulveda and drove along the straight, long road, timing the lights and keeping his eyes open for police cars.

When he arrived outside Temptress, he parked his car close to the building, locked it, and hurried inside. He looked at his watch again. It was only 1:24. That was a little bit early for him to pick up the cash for the evening, but perfect for him to establish an alibi. He needed to be seen. He made a casual circuit of the bar and the tables, nodding at his employees or calling them by name and asking them how things were going.

He took a seat just inside the bar and looked around him. The pounding beat of the music and the sight of the four girls who were on the small black stages across the big room didn’t hold him in the present. He looked at the club and remembered the first time he’d seen it.

He had bought this building fifteen years ago, when he already had Siren and wanted to expand. The building had been a small factory and warehouse that made heavy packing cases for steel machine parts and screws and other devices that didn’t travel well in cardboard cartons. It had served the aircraft plants in Burbank and Long Beach, electrical equipment manufacturers in Hawthorne. But one by one, the big places had shut down until there wasn’t much to ship anymore.

Kapak had picked up the property cheap and remodeled the building quietly, using small crews one at a time. On opening day he had carpenters bring in the refinished bar from a failed German restaurant and install the four brass stripper poles. At 5:00 P.M., before the sunset, the sign that said TEMPTRESS in red neon script went up on the roof. The first girls had been hired as dancers for Siren.

Kapak watched the bar traffic for the final half-hour of the night. There were the usual number of young men who wanted to cheat the clock by ordering extra rounds of drinks at the end of the evening. He watched the waitresses scurrying from table to table to fill the last legal orders, scoop up their tips, and move on. He caught sight of Sherri Wynn across the room and thought about the payments on her Volvo. His gift to her hadn’t slowed her down.

He got up and moved slowly through the crowded room past the girls working the poles. They seemed to have caught the same sense of urgency as the night ended, trying to attract the attention of the customers who were just breaking bills of large denomination they hadn’t planned to spend and receiving cash back from the waitresses and bartenders. He saw a couple of men decide not to put the money back in their pockets, but tip one or two of the dancers.

The office was at the back of the building near the end of a corridor past the dressing rooms and the storerooms. Beyond it was only the kitchen, where he could see the cleanup was almost finished. The busboys and the kitchen floor man were mopping and wiping, and the dishwashers had the machines running hard. After closing, all that would be left were the last few racks of glasses from the late drinkers.

He opened the office door and stepped inside. Dave Skelley was on his feet, counting and banding the night’s take and setting the bills in stacks. He said, “Salinas from Wash brought his night’s take over here. He said you were busy tonight and asked him to do it.”

“That’s right. It turns out I’m not busy anymore. Somebody asked me to meet him, and then never showed up. Was Salinas worried about me?”

“No. The only reason he told me was that I asked him where you were.”

“Wasting my time is the answer. I’ll be back in a minute.” Kapak stepped out of the office into the bare corridor, but just as he was taking out his cell phone, the four dancers came toward him on their way to their dressing room. “Hi, Mr. Kapak.” “Hi, boss.” “Long night.” “So long.” They carried bits of fabric that had been parts of their costumes they’d picked up from the stage area as they’d left.

He spoke in the direction of the whole group, his eyes at the level of their foreheads. There was an etiquette to talking to four naked women. “You’re doing a nice job for the club, ladies. I hope the tips were good.”

“Not good enough.” It was the blond one whose name he kept forgetting. Mary Ann? Marian? Better not to guess and get it wrong.

Kapak snatched his wallet out of his coat pocket and extracted four hundred-dollar bills. “A tip from the house. Thanks for your effort.” He handed each of them a bill and shrugged off two attempts to hug him. “Good night.”

As soon as they disappeared into the dressing room, he used his cell phone to dial Salinas’s. “Hey. It’s me.”

“Hi,” said Salinas.

“Hey, pal. I wondered if Rogoso ever called the club tonight.”

“No. I thought you went to see him.”

“I went. They took me to a parking lot by the corner of Sepulveda and Roscoe where we’d met one time about a year ago, but Rogoso never showed up. I wondered if he had tried to reach me or anything.”

“No, not that I know of.”

“Well, okay. I didn’t want to bother you while you’re closing, but you know how it is.”

“Yeah, sure. Anything else up?”

“No. Good night.”

Salinas and Kapak both hung up. Kapak felt as though he was covered now. He walked back out into the club and spent some time talking with the waiters, bartenders, and kitchen workers. The security people cleared the club, trying to be firm but still keep the atmosphere cheerful and calm. After a time, he saw the last four dancers leaving through the swinging doors to the kitchen. With their makeup washed off and in their sweatshirts and blue jeans and boots and sneakers, they had transformed themselves from magical creatures to ordinary, plain, tired women. Two of the security guards went out the kitchen door with them and returned after they had driven away.

Kapak went back into the office, where Skelley the manager and Sherri Wynn had finished counting the money. Skelley said, “Twelve thousand seven hundred and seventeen in cash, nine thousand eight hundred and nine in credit and debit cards.”

“The credit thing just keeps growing,” Kapak said. “When I got into this business it was all cash. Nobody wanted to give his card and have his wife see the monthly bill.”

Sherri smiled. “Would you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“I haven’t been married in about thirty years. I just can’t quite remember having a wife to catch me at things. What I’m wondering is if we ought to install an ATM machine in the back of each of the clubs by the telephones and see if we can get more cash. It might make more money for everybody who lives on tips.”

Skelley shrugged. “I don’t know. I can call a few banks to see what they think.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll get started tomorrow,” Skelley said.

Skelley finished the deposit slip for the money and put the cash and the slip in the canvas bag. “Well, this is done. You don’t want it driven to the bank anymore, right?”

“Right. Two robberies outside that bank were enough for me. We’ll just keep everything in the safe at Siren and have a couple of guys stay with it all night. In a day or so we’ll work out another system that’s easier and less risky. Maybe we’ll have an armored car service come around each night and pick it up. Right now what I want is to be sure we don’t make it too easy for the bastards. We’ll do things a little differently each night.”

“Sounds good to me,” Skelley said. He put the cash bag into a briefcase.

“Want anybody to go with you?”

“Nah,” said Skelley. “I think it’s safer alone. We’ve never done it this way, and so nobody expects it. Nobody notices one guy driving alone.” He and Kapak walked through the club to the parking lot.

“No matter what, be careful,” Kapak said. “I don’t know what Carver is up to, or where he is at any moment, or how many people he has working with him. He could be out there somewhere in the dark, watching us right now and waiting for us to make a mistake. If it looks like somebody’s following you, drive right to the police station. If you can’t make it, toss the money out the window and let them chase it.”

“I’ll do that.”

He got into his car and gave a little wave, then drove off into the night. Kapak watched his taillights disappear, then went back into Temptress, where everyone but the bouncers had left for home. As he made his way back to the office, he considered telling the last couple of security men to go home, and then sleeping the night on the leather couch here. He stepped in and closed the door, then turned and saw that Sherri Wynn was perched on the edge of the desk again. “What’s up, Sherri?”

“I thought I’d wait for you.”

“Something wrong?”

“Not with me. You just seemed kind of lost tonight, as though you didn’t know what to do with yourself. Aimless, maybe.”

He smiled, but his heart had stopped and then begun again. He had to persuade her that nothing was different.

“Maybe it was the way you looked when you said you hadn’t been married in thirty years. Some nights a person just doesn’t feel like being alone.”

He looked down at his feet, then back up at her. She went on. “I thought maybe you’d like to come over for a while. I’m not sleepy, and I could make you a midnight snack.”

“Gee, Sherri, I don’t know. I’d like to go, but I wonder if it’s a good idea.”

She shrugged. “What are you worried about?”

“Is this because I gave you that bonus last night?”

“You mean do I feel like I have to be nice to you because you gave me money? No.”

“I didn’t give it to you because of something I wanted you to do. It was for things you’d already done. Good work, I mean. And being a cheerful person.”

“It meant something to me to know you were paying attention to me. You noticed that I was working my ass off for the tips, and you knew that I had a few bills I was worried about, because I’d bought some things that I really couldn’t afford unless everything went perfect. And it doesn’t. It never fucking goes perfect for long. And I was in one of those bad times last night.”

“So you’re trying to pay me back.”

“I’m not doing that. I realized that I had a friend, and it felt good. You looked down tonight, so I’m just trying to show that you have one too.”

“Sherri, I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll admit it. I’m having one of those nights when I don’t feel like being alone.”

“I could see that. I know you’re thinking about what you lose if you come over. Unless you’ve got a better-looking girl waiting in your car, you’ll lose nothing. Nobody will know, and I won’t remind you of it later. Just come over, and we’ll talk and have a drink, and relax a little. No promises, no pressure.”

“Thanks, Sherri. You want to ride with me?”

“No, thanks. I need my car tomorrow. You follow me. If you get lost, it’s 3907 Willow Oak Avenue in Sherman Oaks. Can you find it?”

“Off Moorpark. Right?”

“That’s it.”

“3907.”

She slid off the desktop and walked to the door. As she passed him, she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, but he wasn’t sure how to interpret the glance. “See you in a few minutes.”

“Right.”

Kapak couldn’t help watching her as she went out. In the tight waitress uniform with the long stockings, she still looked good enough to attract the wistful eyes of the young customers. He wondered whether he was just making a fool of himself. He turned off the lights, locked the door, and went out through the club. He stepped behind the bar, surveyed the shelves in front of the long mirror, and picked up a bottle of Hennessy’s cognac. He looked at it, put it back, and then reached up to a higher shelf and took an unopened bottle of rare Armagnac that cost over three hundred dollars, took the bartender’s pad, and wrote on it, “I took one bottle Armagnac. Kapak.” He was careful to put a big diagonal line below the name, so nobody later could write in “and a case of Dom Perignon” or something. He walked out with the last security man and watched him lock up before he got into his car.

Driving in the Valley at night was almost automatic for Kapak. He’d had various enterprises all over the more commercial parts of it, and he knew his way around. He arrived on Willow Oak just behind Sherri’s Volvo. He watched her pull it in the driveway and into a garage, then close the garage and lock it.

He watched her walk up an exterior staircase to the upper floor on the left side of a double duplex, then switch on a light. Then he took his bottle and followed. He had been thinking about Sherri all the way here and wondering. He reached the top of the stairs and found the door open an inch, so he pushed it inward and stepped inside.

Just as he was closing the door, she entered the kitchen. “You didn’t have to bring your own bottle. I have some things here to serve a guest.”

He held his hands out to his sides in a helpless gesture. “After two A.M. it’s hard to find fresh flowers.”

She smiled and shook her head to herself, then stood on her toes and reached up to a cabinet and took down two small aperitif glasses. “I don’t have snifters.” He uncorked the bottle and poured an inch for each of them. She lifted hers to the light. “It’s pretty, like amber.”

He sniffed his. “Salud.”

She sipped hers. “That’s nice. Come sit down.”

He brought the bottle and followed her into the small living room, set it on the coffee table, and sat beside her on the couch that faced the dark television screen.

“Thanks for inviting me over. Sometimes being the boss gets a little lonely. People get uncomfortable around you.”

“I didn’t think I’d get you to come. I’ve heard the women you went home with were much younger.”

He brushed the thought away. “How old are you?”

“How old? Who tells men how old they are?”

“I’m sixty-three.” He wasn’t sure why he had shaved one year off.

She took a bigger sip of her drink. “Forty-one.” She watched him with intense, furtive eyes like a small, distrustful animal.

“That wasn’t so hard. You’re twenty-two years younger than me, and you look terrific. You’ve got a sexy, healthy, woman’s body and a beautiful face. Be happy about who you are.”

“Men like younger women, like the dancers at the club.”

“Everything looks different from different spots. From where I am you’re young—in your prime right now. Most of the dancers could be my granddaughters. I look at the dancers sometimes, just to see how they’re doing—are they pretty enough? Is what they’re doing the right thing to keep the customers coming in the door? If it’s yes, then I start watching the bartenders.” He chuckled. “And the waitresses.”

She nodded. “I’ve seen you do it.”

“Too bad. I wasn’t always so clumsy that women knew I was staring at them.”

“That’s part of being the boss. You lose your fear that people notice what you do.” She pointed at the bottle on the coffee table. “That’s magical stuff.”

“Why? Does it make me look good to you?”

“No, it makes me look good to me again. I just noticed my reflection in the dark window, and I liked it.” She turned to look at him. “You just look the way you are.”

“How?”

“Strong.”

“Are you divorced?”

“You don’t see him here, do you?”

“And you’ve been happier since then?”

“I’ve lived alone in places like this and gone to work and come home again. After a year or so, I started to think it would have been better if I had pretended not to know about the girl, and not divorced him. By then I was serving alcohol in little costumes like this one. I had learned a lot that I didn’t know about normal male behavior. It occurred to me that maybe he wasn’t as bad as I’d thought he was. Fortunately it was too late to go back, so I saved my pride.” She sipped. “How about you?”

“She came from Romania to Hungary like I did when we were students. Eventually we came here. We had two kids here, and I thought things were working out, but I got caught doing something foolish and went to jail for about a year. She went with somebody else.” He gulped his drink and refilled his glass, then hers.

“That’s sad.”

“Pay your taxes. That’s how they got me.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant her.”

“It was a long time ago.” Kapak leaned close to Sherri and waited to see whether she would turn away and make it clear they were just having a drink together or if she would turn toward him to indicate she wanted him to kiss her.

She turned her face toward him, lowered her right shoulder to bring her the rest of the way around, and their lips touched in a gentle kiss. After a moment he was ready to let her pull back and end it, but she didn’t. She put her arms around his neck and prolonged the kiss for a minute, and then pulled back only a few inches so she could see him. “You’re sweet.”

“I like you, so I’m nice.” He shrugged.

“But I didn’t think you would be that way.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought … I don’t know. I was afraid that you might be like, I had already invited you, given you permission.”

“You haven’t done that.”

“No, but I thought maybe just making it personal and not business might make you think in a different way. You know, about me.”

“Do you wish it had?”

“No. Not then. Maybe I do a little bit now, though. Just a little.”

He kissed her again, and this time the atmosphere had changed. At first the change was so slight and gradual she might have thought she had imagined it, but this time there was no pulling back to talk, no pause or hesitation. In a short time he was removing her blouse and then unzipping and pulling off the black uniform shorts, then peeling off the shiny pantyhose, and then she was naked. The kissing and touching went on for a long time, and as it went on, at some point he finished removing his clothes too.

After a few minutes he could tell she knew there was a problem. She waited and appeared to be expecting nothing more to happen, as though the problem would solve itself, but Kapak could feel that he was doomed. He said, “I’m sorry.”

She sat up straight. “Just a second.” She got off the couch and disappeared into the bathroom. She returned with a glass of water and a blue pill.

“What’s that?”

“It’s medicine. Take it and it will make things nicer. You won’t be sorry”

“It’s Viagra, isn’t it? What if I have an erection that lasts four hours?”

“I don’t think you have much to worry about.” She smiled.

He took it and squinted at it suspiciously. “Where did you get it?”

“Someone I know bought it online. I can tell you it’s real, and I know it works.”

“On who?”

“None of your business.”

He put the pill on his tongue and washed it down with the water, looking at her as he drank it. She took the glass, turned, and walked off. He followed her to the bathroom, where he found her running water into an oversized tub. She got in while it was filling, poured a little bubble bath in, and beckoned to him. “Get in with me.”

He stepped into it, facing her. “This is a really big tub.”

“It’s one of the reasons I chose this apartment. I always thought I would bring a man in here. It never happened until now.”

He sat in the water, and they found that they could both fit if he kept his legs straight, and she put hers over his. After a few minutes she straddled his thighs and leaned forward to kiss him. They stayed that way for a time, and then she said, “I think it’s time to get out, don’t you?”

“Yes.” He looked down and cleared some of the suds from the surface of the water. “How long will this last?”

“Long enough. Don’t talk now.”

They dried off and went into the bedroom. In concentrating on Sherri, Kapak almost immediately forgot that it was the medicine that had changed everything, and not some return of his youth. Then he forgot everything but her. She seemed to him tonight to be a composite and holder of the best qualities of all the women he had slept with when he was young: his wife, Marija; Ava the thirty-year-old whore he had paid with stolen money when he was fifteen and visited on the way home from school every day; the college girls in Budapest. She seemed to him to be a gift—maybe the final gift—the universe letting him remember why its creatures fought so hard to be alive.

Afterward, Sherri lay with her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes, and slept. He lay there staring at the ceiling of the unfamiliar little bedroom. He didn’t want to move because if he did, she might not come back to his shoulder. He lay still for a long time, and while he thought, he began to feel the sensation. It wasn’t exactly pain, just an uneasy awareness that something inside his chest wasn’t right. It was almost a sadness. This was happening too late, after he had gotten old.

It didn’t go away. He started to feel short of breath. It was as though each breath he took was more difficult, and when he exhaled, a belt tightened on his chest so the next breath would be shallower. Then there was a feeling as though weights were being piled on his chest. “Sherri.” He had to take two breaths before he could say it again, so he touched her foot with his and said it louder. “Sherri!”

“What?” She lifted her head and brought her face closer.

“Something’s wrong. It’s in my chest. I’ve got to go to a hospital.”

She got up quickly. She found his clothes and tossed them on the bed beside him. “All right. I’m going to drive you to Valley Presbyterian. It’s the closest, and it’s big enough to have a lot of doctors on duty.” She drew back the covers and crawled onto the bed beside him. “I’ll help you put on your clothes. If something hurts, just tell me.”

“It’s like a tightness. Hard to breathe.”

She dressed him efficiently, and then threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. They walked out into the living room. As he passed the couch where they had been sitting, everything looked different. The clear sides of the half-empty bottle of Armagnac had a film that looked sticky and nauseating. The uniform he had taken off Sherri was still lying crumpled on the floor. She snatched up her purse, led him to the top of the exterior staircase, and said, “Wait here.”

He gripped the railing and stood still, watching her lock the door, then run down the stairs to pull her Volvo out of the garage, then run back up to him. “Feel any different?”

“No.” But he did. Besides the tightness in his chest, or maybe because the tightness had gone on for a time and made his muscles tense, it hurt. And time was part of the discomfort. Everything seemed to take an eternity. He let her help him down the stairs and into the passenger seat of her Volvo. She ran around the car and drove.

She drove with care all the way to the emergency room of Valley Presbyterian Hospital. He sat in tense immobility on the end chair of four that were connected, while she talked to the receptionist, then the triage nurse, and then some kind of clerk who handled insurance matters. As soon as she had her back turned, people came and sat down beside him on the row of chairs. Every one of them sat by simply releasing the tension in their knees and letting their buttocks drop a foot or so onto the chair. Each time it happened, Kapak would be jolted suddenly, his muscles would contract, and the pain would increase.

Finally, to nobody in particular, he announced loudly, “I’m having a fucking heart attack.” All conversation in the room stopped while everyone looked at him. It was still a wait before the nurse called him into an examining room off the hallway, let him lie on a gurney, took his vital signs, gave him two aspirin, and disappeared. By then he had lost his sense of time. Sometime later another nurse took blood for a test, and he fell asleep. A young woman doctor in a long white lab coat appeared after that and spoke to him.

“Well, Claudiu, how do you feel now?”

“Like a crap sandwich.”

She hesitated. “Crab?”

“Never mind. It doesn’t seem to hurt as much, but I feel this weird pressure on my chest. Did I have a heart attack?”

She looked uncomfortable. “We looked at the test, and it’s inconclusive. There’s an enzyme we test for. If you haven’t had a heart attack, there’s no enzyme in your blood. If you did, there is. You had a tiny amount, so we can’t really be sure. A cramp in the esophagus feels exactly like a heart attack. If you had one it was small. It was like a warning.”

“A warning?”

“Your age is a risk factor for heart disease. So is your weight, and the fact that you get no exercise, and probably the cholesterol, fat, and sodium in your diet.”

“So what happens now?”

“I’m releasing you and recommending that you see your family doctor tomorrow. He may order more tests and help you work out a plan for a healthier lifestyle.”

Sherri drove him back to her house and helped him go back to bed. He fell asleep immediately. He woke up after two hours and saw her lying beside him. He touched her bleached hair, her sleep-closed eyelids and soft cheek, her smooth shoulder and thin waist and the swell of her hip. He had so much to regret.