The Night Crew

Chapter 2

All done.

Anna sat in comfort and quiet at her kitchen table, a cup of steaming chicken-noodle soup in front of her, pricking up her nose with its oily saltiness. She yawned, rubbed the back of her neck. Her eyes were scratchy from the long night.

At moments like this, coming down in the pre-dawn cool, Creek and Louis already headed home, she thought of cigarettes; and of younger days, sitting in all-night jointsa Benny's, maybeeating blueberry pie with a cardboard crust, drinking coffee, talking, smoking. Chesterfields. Some old name. Luckies. Gauloises or Players, when you were posing. She didn't do that any more. Now she went home. Sometimes she cried: a little weep didn't make her feel much better, but did help her sleep.

Anna Batory was a small woman, going on five-three, with black hair cut close, skater-style, or fencer-style. And she might have been a fencer, with her thin, rail-hard body. The toughness was camouflaged by her oval face and white California smilebut she ran six miles every afternoon, on the sand along the ocean, and spent three hours a week working with weights at a serious gym.

Anna wasn't pretty, but she wasn't plain. She was handsome, or striking, a woman who'd wear well into old age, if that ever came. She thought her nose should have been shorter and her shoulders just a bit narrower. Her hands were as large as a man'sshe could span a ninth on the Steinway upright in the hall, and fake a tenth. She had pale blue killer eyes. One of her ancestors had ruled Poland and had fought the Russians.

Anna pushed herself away from the table and, carrying her cup of soup, prowled her house, making sure that everything was right. Looking out windows. Touching her stuff. Talking to it: 'Now what happened to you, old pot? Has Creek been messing with you? You're over here by the picture, not way out at the edge.'

Sometimes she thought she was going crazy, but it was a happy kind of craziness.

Anna lived on the Linnie Canal in the heart of Venice, a half-mile from the Pacific, in an old-fashioned white clapboard house with a blue-shingled roof. The house made a sideways 'L'. The right half of the house, including the tiny front porch, was set back from the street. The single-car garage, on the left side, went right out to the street. The small yard created by the L was wrapped in a white picket fence, and inside the fence, Anna grew a jungle.

Venice was coming backwas even fashionablebut she'd lived on Linnie since the bad old days. Anyone vaulting the fence would find himself knee deep in dagger-like Spanish bayonet, combat-ready cactus and the thorniest desert brush. If he made it through, he'd fall facedown, bloody and bruised, in a soft bed of perennials and aromatic herbs.

The interior of Anna's house was as carefully cultivated as the yard.

The walls were of real plaster, would hold a nail, and were layered with a half-century's worth of paint. Hardwood floors glistened where the sun broke through the windows, polished by feet and beach sand. They squeaked when she walked on them, and were cool on the soles of her feet.

The lower floor included a comfortable living room and spare bedroom, both filled with craftsman furniture. A bathroom, a small den that she used as an office and the kitchen took up the rest of the floor. The kitchen was barely functional: Anna had no interest in cooking.

'The fact is,' Creek told her once, 'your main cooking appliance is a toaster.' Creek liked to cook. He considered himself an expert on stews.

On the second floor of Anna's house, under the steep roof, were her bedroom and an oversized bathroom. Creek and four of his larger friends had helped her bring in the tub, hoisting it from outside with an illegal assist from a power company cherry-picker.

The tub was a rectangular monstrosity in which she could float freely, touching neither bottom nor sides nor ends; in which she could get her waas smooth and round as a river pebble.

In the adjoining bedroom, the queen-sized bed was covered with a quilt made by her mother, the material taken from clothes her parents had worn out when they were young. Under the canal-side window, the quilt looked like rags of pure light.

Creek and Louis had dropped her at the corner of Dell and Linnie just after dawn. The truck couldn't conveniently turn around on Linnie, a dead-end street no wider than most city alleys.

'Sorry about the Witch,' Louis said. The Witch would be calling her. Anna hated to bring work back to her house.

That's okay,' Anna said. 'For this one time, anyway.' She waved good-bye with the cell phone, and walked down the narrow street to her house. A neighbor in his pajamas, out to pick up the paper, said, 'Hey, Anna. Anything interesting?'

'Guy jumped off a building,' Anna said.

'Nasty.' He smiled, though, as he shook his head, and said, 'I'll watch for it,' and padded back inside.

Anna had sold thirteen packages of the jumper wrapped with the animal rights raid. At fifteen hundred dollars for local transmission, she'd sold to nine stations, and at three thousand for the networks Southern California stations outshe'd sold four. Hatton at Channel Three had called back twice, pushing. They wanted it, had to have it. Finally said the Witch would call.

She did, five minutes after Anna got home. The cell phone buzzed, and Anna went to the kitchen table and picked it up.

'Screw us on this, we'll never use your stuff again.' The Witch opened as she usually did, with a direct threat.

'We can live with that,' Anna said. She looked out the kitchen window, at the dark line of the canal. In a couple of hours, the reflected ball of the morning sun would start crawling down its length, steaming the water, bringing up the rich smell of algae soup. She'd been asleep in bed, this whole conversation no more than a pleasant memory. 'We already told Hatton that. I only agreed to talk to you as a courtesy.'

'Courtesy my large white Lithuanian butt,' the Witch snapped. Anna could hear the pause as she hit on a cigarette. 'If we don't buy, you lose a big source of your income. Gone,' she said. Exhaling. 'Outa here. I promise you, we won't buy again.'

'You take a bigger hit than we do,' Anna said. 'You never know when we're gonna come up with something like this jumper.'

'You're not thatgood.'

'Yeah, we are: we're the best crew on the street. And your career life at Three is what? Four or five years? And you've been there three? You'll be gone in a year or two, and we'll sell to your replacement. And we'll make our point: You don't steal from us. Even if it's swimming cats.'

'I apologized for that,' the Witch shrilled.

'What?' Anna shouted. She banged the cell phone three times on the table top, then yelled into the mouthpiece. 'Did I hear that right? You laughedat us.'

'So I'm sorry now,' the Witch shouted back. 'Name the price.'

'Network price,' Anna said. She sipped at the soup. 'Three thousand for the package. Plus two grand for the cats.'

'Fuck that,' the Witch said. 'Network for the package, okay, but the cats we did, we did with our own crew.'

'C'mon, c'mon,' Anna shouted. 'I'm making a point here.'

'So'm I. Five hundred for the cats.'

'I'm serious, we don't need you. Network plus a thousand for the cats.'

'Deal,' the Witch said. 'I want to see the fuckin' pictures in ten fuckin' minutes.' She slammed down the receiver.

Anna called the truck, and spoke to Louis. 'Send it to Three.'

'How much you get?'

'Four thousandI got a thousand for the cats.'

Louis said, 'Examonte, dude,' and repeated the price to Creek, whose laughter filled the background. Anna grinned and said, 'We're dropping thirty-five thousand bucks in the potthat's three times the record.'

Creek shouted at the phone, 'We might as well quit, we'll never do this again.'

'How're the radios, Louis?' Anna asked.

'Good. Nothing happening.'

'Call me.'

Anna hung up with Creek still laughing about the money. She'd wait until Creek had dropped Louis, and there was no chance of recovering for a quick run. Good stuff sometimes broke just at dawn, although the regular station trucks would be out prowling around fairly soon.

Waiting for bed, Anna trailed by the Steinway, touched a few keys, yawned, flipped through the sheets for Liszt's Sonata in B Minor. She'd been trying to clarify the fingerwork in the fast passages.

She didn't sit downher head wasn't quite right yet. She put the music on the piano, said hello to a couple of plants, enjoyed the quiet. Went into the utility room and got a plastic watering can and filled it.

Barefoot, humming to herselfsomething stupid from Les Mis‚rablesthat she couldn't get out of her mindAnna took the watering can out to the porch, and started watering the potted plants. Geraniums, and some daisies: plants with an old-fashioned feel, bright touches in the shade of the jungle.

Back inside, she refilled the can and walked through the house, checking with two fingers the soil in a hundred more plants: some of them were named after movie stars or singers, like Paul, Robert, Faye, Susan, Julia, Jack. Most were small, from a desert somewhere.

On a broken-down Salvation Army table, the first piece of furniture she'd bought in California, she kept a piece of Wisconsin: a clump of birdsfoot violets, dug from the banks of the Whitewater River, and a flat of lilies-of-the-valley. Just now, the lilies-of-the-valley were blooming, their tiny white bell flowers producing a delicate perfume that reminded her of the smell of dooryard lilacs in the Midwestern spring.

Behind the California tan, Anna was a Midwestern farm kid, born and raised on a corn farm in Wisconsin.

The farm was part of her toughness: She had a farm kid's lack of fear when it came to physical confrontation. She'd even been in a couple of fights, in her twenties, in the good old days of music school and late-night prowls down Sunset. As she climbed into her thirties, the adrenaline charge diminished, though her reputation hadn't: The big guys still waved to her from the muscle pen on the beach, and told people, 'You don't fuck with Anna, if you wanna keep your face on straight.'

The toughness extended to the psychological. Farm kids knew how the world worked, right from the start. She'd taken the fuzzy-coated big-eyed lambs to the locker, and brought them back in little white packages.

That's the way it was.

Anna finished watering the plants, yawned again, and stopped at the piano. Liszt was hard. Deliberately hard. Her home phone rang, and she turned away from the piano and stepped into the small kitchen and picked it up. This would be the sign-off from Louis and Creek: 'Hello?'

'Anna: Louis.'

'All done?'

'Yeah, but I was talking to a guy at Seventeen about the animal rescue tape. I don't know what they did, but it sounds a little weird.'

'Like how, weird?' Anna asked.

'Like they're making some kind of cartoon out of it.'

'What?' She was annoyed, but only mildly. Strange things happened in the world of broadcast television.

'He said they'll be running it on the Worm,' Louis said. Channel Seventeen called it the Early Bird News; everybody else called it the Worm.

Anna glanced at the kitchen clock: the broadcast was just a few minutes away. 'I'll take a look at it,' she said.

She went back to the piano and worked on the Liszt until five o'clock in the morning, then pointed the remote at the TV and punched in seventeen. A carefully-coiffed blonde, dressed like it was midafternoon on Rodeo, looked out and said, 'If you have any small children watching this show, the film we are about to show you.'

And there was the jumper, up on the wall like a fly.

Anna held her breath, fearing for him, though she'd been there, and knew what was about to happen. But seeing it this way, with the TV, was like looking out a window and seeing it all over again. The man seemed unsure of where he was, of what to do; he might have been trying, at the last moment, to get inside.

Then he lost it: Anna felt her own fingers tightening, looking for purchase, felt her own muscles involuntarily trying to balance. He hung there, but with nothing to hold on to, out over the air, until with a convulsive effort, he jumped.

And he screamedAnna hadn't seen the scream, hadn't picked it up. Maybe he hadbeen trying for the pool.

Anna and the night crew had been there for the pictures, not as reporters: Anna had gotten only enough basic information to identify the main characters. She left it to the TV news staff to pull it together. At Channel Seventeen, the job went to an intense young woman in a spiffy green suit that precisely matched her spiffy green eyes:

'. identified as Jacob Harper, Junior, a high-school senior from San Dimas who was attending a spring dance at the Shamrock, and who'd rented the room with a half-dozen other seniors. Police are investigating the possibility of a drug involvement.'

As she spoke, the tape ran again, in slow motion, then again, freezing on the boy's facenot a man, Anna thought, just a child. He hung there in midair, screaming forever on Jason's tape. The Madsons, from Tilly, Oklahoma, were also shown, but their faces at the window were cut into the jump, so it appeared that the Madsons were watchingas they had been, though not when the tape was shot.

At the end of the report, the tape was run again, and Anna recognized the symptoms: They had a hit on their hands.

Too bad about the kid, but. she'd learned to separate herself from the things she covered. If she didn't, she'd go crazy. And she hadn't seen the jump, only the aftermath, the heap of crumpled clothing near the pool. Less than she would have seen sitting at her TV, eating her breakfast, like a few million Angelenos were about to do.

Anna drifted away from the television, sat at the piano and started running scales. Scales were a form of meditation, demanding, but also a way to free herself from the tension of the night.

And she could keep an eye on the television while she worked through them. Five minutes after the report on the jump, the blonde anchor, now idiotically cheerful, said something about animal commandos, and a version of the animal rights tape came up.

The tape had been cut up and given a jittery, silent-movie jerkiness, a Laurel-and-Hardy quality, as the masked animal rights raiders apparently danced with the squealing pig, and dumped the garbage can full of mice. Then the Rat was bowled over by the pigthey ran him falling, crawling, knocked down again; and falling, crawling and knocked down again: they had him going up and down like a yo-yo.

The guards, who'd come and gone so quickly, had been caught briefly by both Creek and Jason. Now they were repeatedly shown across the concrete ramp and up the loading dock; and then the tape was run backward, so they seemed to run backward. Keystone Kops.

The tape was funny, and Anna grinned as she watched. No sign of the bloodied kid, though. No matter: he'd get his fifteen seconds on another channel.

'Good night,' Anna said, pointed the remote at the television and killed it.

She worked on scales for another ten minutes, then closed the lid of the piano, quickly checked on the back to see that the yellow dehumidifier light wasn't blinking and headed up to the bedroom.

In the world of the night crew, roaming Los Angeles from ten o'clock until dawn, Anna was tough.

In more subtle relationships, in friendly talk from men she didn't know, at parties, she felt awkward, uneasy, and walked away alone. This shyness had come late: she hadn't always been like that.

The one big affair of her lifealmost four years long, now seven years pasthad taken her heart, and she hadn't yet gotten it back.

She was asleep within minutes of her head touching her pillow. She didn't dream of anyone: no old lovers, no old times.

But she did feel the space around herself, in her dreams. Full of friends, and still, somehow. empty.