THIRTEEN 8 page

“And of course I believe you, since you’ve never lied to me.”

“Come,” Paul Vane beckoned them. “All will be revealed.”

He led them back up the flight of stairs to the main level where Lila was still waiting, then through the double door that opened into a large, sunny white‑walled room with high windows and a beautifully redone blond wood floor. There were rolled backdrops and reflective umbrellas. Stationary lights were mounted on aluminum poles and a 35mm camera on a tripod. A pair of handcuffs and a silk top hat were left on the sofa, props from a recent photo shoot. At least Stein hoped they were props. But what arrested his attention was the life‑size, three‑dimensional cutout of the Espe bottle; the same icon he had seen that morning in Milli‑cent Pope‑Lassiter’s office.

“You’re David Hart, the photographer,” Stein declared. “I’ve seen your work.”

Hart replied a suspicious but flattered, “Really?”

“You shot the Espe box?”

“Yes,” David replied, puffing up.

“And no,” Vane added.

“But mostly yes,” David insisted. “Uncredited and unheralded. And of course unpaid.”

Lila poked Stein in the neck. “I’m still here by the way. In case you were wondering.”

Paul Vane told an extraordinary tale, the gist of it being that marketing strategy for “New Millennium” would feature a new face, one who would replace Nicholette Bradley. Of course that created a tremendous buzz. Thousands of girls were interviewed. And finally‑

“Don’t tell me,” Stein interjected. “Is her name Alex?”

Lila hooted at him, “Stein, you don’t know anything about that.”

“How did you know?” Vane marveled.

“You mean he’s right? ” Lila spent the next ten minutes wondering how that could possibly be.

Vane went on. “They tried to keep it hush hush. They began shooting the national ad campaign last summer. Print ads. Billboards. TV spots. But of course no secret is safe in the ad business. Once it leaked that Alex was the next big thing, clients were lining up to hire her after her exclusive with Espe expired. Twin Peaks, the sports bra company, won the bidding. They paid her a million dollars, and the deal was she had to shave her head.”

Stein remembered he had seen those pictures. His mind, which did strange things like this, presented the proof sheet he had seen in Nicholette’s bedroom. “So she must have known she was being replaced.

“Nikki’s a darling. She helped find Alex.”

“She wasn’t irked about being replaced?”

“It’s show biz. Everyone replaces somebody.”

“Do you think you can get to the part about me before the dinner break?” David Hart pouted.

Vane smiled at his lover, who did not smile back. “Alex’s last contractual obligation to Espe was for the shoot that would create the package. Ray Ramos was the photographer. It was there that I set eyes on Ray Ramos’s magnificent, young, overworked, under‑appreciated assistant for the first time.” Here Vane bowed in David Hart’s direction.

“At last.” Hart fumed.

“It was the assistant’s job to do everything. Make coffee. Load cameras. Set the lights. Process the film. After the last shot was done, Alex came to my salon. She had agreed to the deal with Twin Peaks and wanted her head shaved immediately because if she let herself think about it too long she knew she’d back out. I had just finished doing her when my darling David (of course he wasn’t my darling yet!) came bursting in. His face was the color of blanched mushrooms. He had screwed up all fifteen rolls of film that Ray Ramos had shot. The negatives were ruined. There was no shot for the box, nor for the billboard. It was a disaster of global proportion.

“David’s plan was that he would reshoot the Ray Ramos session and substitute his film for Ramos’s without anyone knowing. He knew the entire lighting setup and all the lenses and angles that Ramos had used. He had never shot before but he was sure he could do it. All I had to do was to get the world’s new top model to agree to work with an unknown photographer when all that was at stake was her entire career and the success of a ten million dollar ad campaign.

“He swore he would do anything for me in return which was a very tempting offer. And then he saw my wicker basket filled with her shorn auburn hair. I thought he was going to stroke out on the spot. His jaw froze. His eyes fluttered. He lost the power of speech. He grabbed me around the neck and begged me to perform a miracle, to make a wig out of Alex’s hair.”

“Don’t embellish,” David complained. “You always embellish.”

“My darling, I am nothing but embellishment.”

Stein stepped in to short‑circuit the domestic spat. “So you made a wig for Alex out of her own hair that you had just cut off her? Is that what happened?”

“It’s technically called a fall, not a wig, because it’s her own hair, but yes. And David did the reshoot and it came out brilliantly.” Vane bowed to his protege. “More brilliantly than the original, I’m sure.”

“And then everyone started proclaiming Ray Ramos a photographic genius,” David sulked.

“Yes,” Paul Vane commiserated. “The injustice.”

The picture began to coalesce in Stein’s mind. “So you gents decided to start your own underground distribution arm? You whipped up your own private batch? You enlisted the girl at the warehouse to distract Morty Greene and diverted a few shipments of Espe bottles… How am I doing so far?”

“Stein, all this talk is getting me hungry,” Lila pouted.

“We’re done here in a second. As soon as they tell me which of them wrote the extortion letters.”

“What letters?” Vane blurted before he could stop himself.

It became clear in a flash that the extortion letters had not been part of the plan the two had agreed upon and that David Hart had written them without Vane’s approval or knowledge. The Fall of the House of Espe. Stein got the joke now. Hart knew that the hair on the label was not real. The truth‑in‑advertising laws were very clear now that beauty products had to be accurately represented. The notes were thinly veiled threats that Hart would blow the lid off the campaign. The lid of the Espe box was where the false hair fell. Of course David Hart knew that. He had shot the damn thing.

“Oh my God,” Paul Vane cried. “We’re going to jail and I look ghastly in orange.”

“Nobody is going to jail,” Stein assured him. “If you do exactly what I tell you to do.” Stein’s patience was losing its patience. “You’re going to pay for a truck and return all their bottles along with an apology. And then you are going to leave Espe Shampoo alone. Is that cool with everybody?”

It was so cool with Paul Vane that he practically fell into Stein’s arms. Hart was a line drawing of disappointment. “Why don’t you just roll me over and fuck me missionary style,” he groused. “What do I get?”

“How about for openers you get not to go to jail,” Stein said, “And your partner gets not to go to jail.”

“He promised to take care of me,” David wheedled. “In perpetuity.”

Stein envisioned how he would take care of the little weasel in perpetuity. It involved carpet tacks and his eyeballs. He addressed Paul. “Last question and I’m done with you. How did you get the bottles here?” At that moment the sound of the service elevator clanged to life. Summoned from above, it began its labored ascent. “Ah. Perhaps this is the answer to my question,” Stein observed. He began his own laborious climb to the surface.

“Stein, wait.” Lila pulled her shoe on and hurried after him.

In the hour they had spent indoors, winter evening had fallen and life on the street had undergone a radical transformation. The main strip through town, which earlier had been about as lively as a doily, now had become a teeming, volcanic landscape of college students on winter break. Boys leaned out of their cars, hooting mating calls at the constellations of girls, whose every movement of torso and limb released crackling trails of pheromones. The flash of an incongruous image on the far side of the road caught Stein’s eye‑a truck carrying a load of hay. It was only a glimpse but its afterglow remained printed on his retina as it moved through the parting crowd of pedestrians, and disappeared. He was certain that it was Morty Greene’s truck or a reasonably close hallucination. “Wait here,” he instructed Lila.

“Stop saying that.”

She clutched his arm and together they serpentined through the moving maze of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. “I hope you appreciate that I’m running,” Lila gasped. “The only thing I ever ran for is secretary of my stock club.” They crossed on a long diagonal to the other side. An unbroken protoplasm of humanity flowed along the sidewalk. Stein stopped for a moment to scan the terrain. But the red pickup truck was nowhere in sight.

“I see a sign for hot food. Is that what we’re looking for?”

The blind alley appeared out of nowhere. The angle at which it met the street concealed it from view until he came upon it. The red pickup was parked catty‑corner to the side of the brick building, tailgate open, directly alongside an open elevator shaft. Stein sidled up to the entrance and peered down. He could see the tops of a load of wooden crates descending into the sub‑basement. He muttered to himself as he thought of Morty lying to his face. All he’d been trying to do was keep him out of trouble.

The elevator’s gears clanked, and the car began to ascend. Stein’s mind raced through a dozen possible next moves. The one he chose probably wasn’t the best of them. He grabbed Lila around the waist and hoisted her up onto the hood of the truck and told her to sit there and look serious.

“It’s actually kind of nice. The metal is still warm.” She adjusted her legs around the hood ornament.

“A little bit more serious.”

“Is something bad about to happen?”

“Define bad.”

The wide purple brim of the felt hat first emerged, then the face of Morty Greene’s partner dude, Roland Dupuis. He had seemed diminutive alongside Morty Greene, but here alone he looked full‑size.

“The fuck?”

Roland thrust the iron gates powerfully aside. The tomato slug on his face seemed to crawl closer to his eye as his expression assumed full battle alert. He was dressed elegantly for driving a truck: a white silk shirt and purple silk trousers. “I know you. The man who doesn’t take good advice from his friends.”

Stein gestured toward Lila. “She’s Federal. You got yourself into some deep shit.”

Roland took one cursory glance at her and scoffed. “She’s no damn FBI.” He came toward Stein, who raised neither his hands nor his voice.

“She could be a crossing guard and you’d still be looking at five years if those bottles cross a state line. You ever hear of the Federal Racketeering act?”

Roland lost a bit of his bravado. “Nobody said anything about state lines.”

“Of course nobody said anything. The fall guy is for taking the fall.” It was important not to break eye contact with Roland. But Lila, trying to scooch herself down off the truck, caught her heel on the hood ornament and was stuck with her legs splayed apart.

“Stein, would you get me down off this thing? It’s toasting my buns.”

He removed her shoe and lifted her down. “Thanks that was excellent timing,” he whispered.

“My foot got caught.”

He set her down and turned back to Roland in time for Roland’s fist, traveling toward Stein’s body at great velocity, to make impact with the unmuscled pit of his solar plexus. All the air blew out of his system in one huge “OOOF” and he folded like a slab of melting cheese. Roland vaulted into the cab of Morty Greene’s truck, proclaiming that he was not taking the fall for anyone. Its eight‑cylinder engine roared to a start. Other people nearby gasped and screamed and held their faces the way witnesses do in the aftermath of sudden violence. Most kept doing what they had been doing.

Lila bent over Stein’s body and kept repeating, “Are you all right? Is there anything I can do?”

TWELVE

Everything about the Hotel Mirador was picture‑postcard perfect. The hacienda‑style main house was built harmoniously into the rolling rugged desert hills. The landscaping design consisted solely of desert blooms‑coral aloe, Natal plum, Chinese lantern‑except that the plants were not indigenous, they came from Africa‑ and the hills never existed in nature. They had been manufactured to fit a computer‑generated artist’s concept of western/rugged. Six hundred thousand cubic yards of limestone had been shipped in by companies located in Yuma, Arizona from East Meadow, New York and twelve thousand miles away from Yokohama, Japan.

Millicent Pope‑Lassiter had been so ecstatic when Stein called her with the news that the bottles had been found and would be returned that she had upgraded Stein’s accommodation at the Mirador from a room to a suite. He made sure that she understood that Roland had borrowed Morty Greene’s truck without Morty’s knowledge of what its purpose would be. All he wanted from her was the assurance that the charges against Morty would be dropped and for this whole horrifically trivial episode to be stamped CLOSED AND DONE. He was not naive enough to believe Morty had not signed on for a little taste, but Stein was was less interested in criminal justice (that grand oxymoron) than he was in karmic harmony. And if he would make Edna Greene’s life a little less complicated, that would be a day worth living.

In one of the two separate bathrooms in their suite at the Mirador, the cascading shower massage bathed Stein in a hot monsoon of melancholy. He had called home and checked his phone messages as soon as he and Lila arrived. There was nothing from Schwimmer, nothing from Goodpasture, nothing from Winston’s old lady.

He had called Police Chief Jack Bayliss’s office, but they had not called back either. He was exhausted by minutia and wanted to crawl under the covers and wake up thirty years ago.

Lila was blow‑drying her hair when Stein came out the shower. He was wearing the boxer shorts he had purchased at the hotel gift shop that were a size too small and decorated with pictorial representations of local attractions. Lila displayed her thoughtfully packed overnight bag that contained a nightgown, slippers, and travel‑size portions of nine different items of makeup and toiletries.

“I always keep one packed in the car,” she chirped. “Just in case something like this happens.”

“And does that happen fairly often?”

“Do you want to hear about the solar plexus?” Lila had purchased a pamphlet on the Chakras from the hotel’s New Age bookstore. “The third chakra is your emotional power center that projects love and light into the world. When one is pure and at peace with others all conflicts are stopped, facilitating learning instead of fighting. This is a good part for you. ‘If one stands humbly to solve the conflict, love is expressed. A resolution will eventually find itself thus the chakras of both parties remain balanced.’”

“I’m sure that’s exactly what he was thinking when he tried to do spinal surgery through my gut.”

“Sorry about distracting you out there but I didn’t want to have sex with a hood ornament.”

A bottle of champagne was on ice alongside a cart appointed with elegant silver dining trays. Lila had tied her bath towel the way women in forties movies did, knotting it just above the cleavage point. She had slender shoulders and a long elegant neck. She had reapplied her makeup and her hair was slicked back with a glossy gel that made her look sexy as Winona Ryder. Stein took the scene in with some bemusement.

“What is all this? Did you call room service?”

“You make it sound like a war crime.”

“It’s an indulgence.”

“It’s an amenity, Stein. I’m hungry! If we’re not going to sleep together, then at least I get to eat. I don’t think personal comfort is a crime against nature. I know I live in what a lot of people would call luxury. I’ve been lucky, and I don’t think this makes me heartless. But I do believe I’m entitled to eat well. And I sincerely hope I’m not fucking up the ozone layer, but I’m not going to be the only person in Palm Springs not to use air conditioning.”

She turned the switch back on that Stein had turned off and patted the cushion of the sofa alongside her for him to sit down. “You look so forlorn. Do you hate being stuck here with me?”

“I just wonder if I’m doing anyone any good,” he sighed and plopped himself down

“You just solved a big case.”

“It’s shampoo. Who gives a shit?” He sighed out one last deep pocket of air that even Roland Dupuis’ blow to his guts hadn’t dislodged. “Nicholette Bradley, the girl who died. I could have prevented it.”

“Stein, how?”

He realized that Lila had no idea what had happened last night after he left her at the warehouse. She listened now to the events unfold like she was hearing Alice in Wonderland for the first time. “Is any part of that really true? You know I believe anything you tell me.”

He nodded with rueful weariness that it was all true. “I just don’t know what to do next.” She kneaded his neck and shoulders. “Thanks. That feels good.” His chin dropped toward his chest. “Nothing I do changes anything for the better. Nicholette. Angie. You, for that matter.”

She resisted the urge to follow up on ‘you for that matter,’ and asked what the matter was with Angie.

“She’s always so angry at me. For things I did. For things I didn’t do. For existing.”

Lila got up onto her knees for better leverage. Her fingers probed deep into his back and knotted shoulder muscles. Her chin was close to his ear. “Listen to me. Number one, your daughter is a bright, sensitive, emotionally mature young woman.”

“This is Angie we’re talking about?”

“All of my friends have teenagers that are either in rehab or should be in rehab. They drink, they shoplift, they do drugs, they’re having sex.”

“You’re telling me this to make me feel better?”

“I’m saying you have a good kid. At this age, derision is the purest expression of love. And you are its legitimate target. If she thinks she has no effect on you, then later when adolescence is over and she rejoins the human race, she’ll always doubt her power. She’ll choose the wrong men to test herself. She’ll be hurt and disillusioned and she’ll blame you for everything that went wrong in her life because you didn’t accept her when she was horrid to you.”

“So the lesson is to be grateful that she’s abusing me?”

“Exactly.”

“What would I do without you?”

The bath towel came not quite down to her knees. Her legs were tanned and waxed. The champagne was disabling her inhibitions. “It wouldn’t take a Boy Scout to untie this knot.”

“Lila, you know we shouldn’t.”

“What are we saving up for? We die in the end anyway.”

“I do love you, you know that.”

“Yes,” she said with bored indulgence. “You’re just not in love. As if you had a clue.”

“Do you think I’m afraid to fall in love?”

“Stein, you’re afraid to fall into giving a shit.”

“You know what would happen if we slept together?”

“Yes, I’d be thoroughly addicted and ruined for other men.” With sweet humor she turned him to face the full‑length mirror. “Look at yourself! Do you think you’re some exotic rodeo boy who has to warn women they may get hurt? You’re a balding, paunchy, fifty‑year‑old, divorced single parent. You drive a Camry. You got a birthday card from AARP. You’re from the demographic group called normal. Get over it.”

“Maybe I’m just worried I’ll disappoint you.”

She turned off the light.

“Lila‑”

“Don’t think, Stein. It takes you to bad places.” She let the towel drop.

There was a knock at the door.

Lila yelled through the door. “If it’s room service, come back later.”

There was another knock. This time more insistent. Stein disengaged from Lila and went to the door. The man who stood in the threshold was definitely not the room service waiter.

“Well, well,” said Stein.

“Who is it?” Lila asked.

“Where the hell have you been?” Stein berated the visitor. “I called your hotel half a dozen times. They don’t have any Doctor Schwimmer registered there.”

“I’ve heard from our mutual friend,” Schwimmer said.

“Goodpasture?”

Schwimmer looked pointedly at Lila, meaning they shouldn’t talk in front of her.

“There’s nothing she wouldn’t wring out of me in five minutes. You may as well say what you have to say.”

“He’s in Amsterdam. He needs you to fly there right now.”

“Now?” Stein drew his head back and shook it for ironic effect. “Amsterdam, Holland?”

“There isn’t time for burlesque reaction,” Schwimmer said in his annoying, humorless way. “Are you on the bus or off?”

THIRTEEN

The Klm Royal Dutch passenger jet rose up off the tarmac at LAX, banked over the Pacific, and established its flight plan that would take it across Canada, Newfoundland, the North Atlantic, then down over Western Europe into Amsterdam. The aircraft weighed seven hundred thousand poundsat take off, carried forty‑eight thousand gallons of fuel and consumed four gallons per each mile during its eleven‑hour flight. There were three hundred eighty‑seven pillows and blankets, six tons of food and equipment, three hundred and ninety‑one frozen meals. Thirteen liters of hard liquor had been loaded aboard plus two hundred forty‑three liters of wine and beer, sixty‑seven of tea and eighty‑four liters of coffee. The captain was Jan Verheoff. The film was Jumanji. Stein did not watch it.

He thought that he had to be insane to be flying a quarter of the way around the world on a whim. At first he had flatly refused. Schwimmer had not begged or cajoled or offered the crown to Caesar a third or second time. He had shrugged his shoulders, as if to acknowledge Stein’s response was neither a surprise to him nor a matter of much importance but rather a diplomatic courtesy that had to be observed before putting the real plan into motion. Stein had to follow him down the hall through the lobby and into the parking lot to get a reaction. “You put a Stop Payment on my check? You disappear? You don’t tell me one goddamn thing that you know. Then you expect me to fly across the universe because you say he says he wants me there? This is bullshit!” In the end, with all of Stein’s ranting and railing, it was obvious to anyone half‑listening that he already knew he was going.

Lila had risen to the occasion like a friend. Like a really good friend. Like‑ he hated to acknowledge it because it made him feel like he was taking advantage of her or squandering a good thing‑like a steady, solid committed long‑term life companion. She made the drive back to Los Angeles utterly guilt‑free, devoid of complaint, knowing not to ask for any more information than she was given.

Once back at Stein’s she had packed a suitcase for him while he tried to find his passport. She had made a list of things she would take care of, which included collecting his mail, taking care of Watson and providing a contingency plan for Angie to stay at her house in case Stein was detained in Holland. She even headed off what appeared from his facial expression‑tilted head, soft smile of wonderment‑was going to be a sentimental declaration from Stein. “In moments like this,” she said, “love is better than being in love.” Stein agreed and loved her more for knowing that any declaration he made would have come out of a moment of weakness, and would be enforceable maybe legally but not in any way that really mattered. The practical side of her added, “Of course how many moments like this are there?”

Dr. Alton Schwimmer’s social affect had undergone no miraculous conversion now that he and Stein were officially allies. He remained dour and irascible. He had dispensed information in the tiniest doses, as if it were a precious commodity that needed to be husbanded over a long winter. Stein had still been unable to pry a gramsworth of new information from him‑just that everything would be made clear when he arrived. He had given Stein two envelopes containing small quantities of Dutch currency and the telephone number of a taxi whose driver would be expecting Stein’s call and who would know where to take him.

“You’re still acting like I’m the enemy,” Stein groused. Schwimmer looked for a moment like he was going to respond but dismissed the thought.

Six hours after take‑off with the plane racing over the Atlantic at five‑hundred miles per hour in pursuit of tomorrow, most of the passengers were asleep, their bodies Salvidor Dali’d into surreal fluid shapes dangling over the armrests or contorted against a shaded window. Stein’s shade was up. He couldn’t sleep. He watched an earlobe of moon that hung outside the window nestled between underlit clouds.

Stein hadn’t anticipated the strength of the feelings his returning to Amsterdam would engender. He had found something there that had defined his life. The sixties had happened to him there. In Amsterdam. When migrating hippies were shunned by most European cities as deterrents to tourism Amsterdam welcomed them. The Dutch were cool people. While they shared the Germans’ Teutonic love for order and cleanliness, they possessed a rogue chromosome in the deep end of their gene pool that gave them a goofy sense of humor in place of the need to exterminate people. Living below sea level must have taught them the futility of legislating against nature. Every night in Dam Square, sleeping bags opened out from the center fountain to the edge of the square like a giant mandala. The police were not concerned by the sounds of singing and guitars, the commingling bodies or the wafting aromas of Acapulco Gold, or the soft, sweet, orange hash from Lebanon, or the hard black, bricks from Afghanistan. It was there that he became Stein. All the goofy antics of the time, which for most people was a costume they put on for a while and then, after Stein went back to being their real selves. For Stein it was his life.

In the Autumn of ‘69, after Woodstock, after the moon walk, after Chappaquiddick, after Helter Skelter, either by coincidence or through a preordained Harmonic Convergence, Stein and Winston and five or six of their buddies had found themselves in Amsterdam, each of them happening to have with him a bud of the best weed they had smoked that year. Sitting in lofty judgment like the World Court of Cannabis, they awarded each other prizes for best in show. The following year without any of them mentioning it, leaving it in the hands of the universe to decide if it would become a tradition, they all convened again. Plus a few friends.

The year after that a hundred people showed up. This was no Woodstock II. There was no promotion. No hype. The people who knew just knew. They came with buds of the best weed they had found. People stayed high for record amounts of time. Prodigious quantities of Dutch chocolates were consumed. Contests evolved with gonzo prizes. An emperor was crowned. The crown was smoked. They knew with absolute certainty that the changes they were making in the world would last forever, that this was merely the dawn of the Age of Aquarius and that they were the first generation that would never grow old.

Thirty years later, now at the dawn of the false millennium, the festival had become so corrupted and commercialized, so mainstream and institutional it was like Disney Times Square. According to the brochure in the airline seat pocket, forty coffee houses were entered in this year’s competition. There were more than six hundred judges. Morley Safer, for God’s sake, was doing a segment on it for 60 Minutes.

He pictured Hillary in those days, dressed in her peasant blouse and perpetual smile. They were uncorrupted embryos, cells in the hippie jet stream that wafted down over Spain to Morocco, east across the Greek islands and Turkey through the Hindu Kush to Katmandu. “A long way to go for a shortcut to Enlightenment,” the people who did not go had scoffed. Stein and Hillary had been inseparable, revolving around each other like twin stars. It bewildered Stein now to wonder where all that heat and fire between them had gone.

He had tried several times to explain to Angie why he and her mother had gotten divorced, what had gone wrong. But he could describe it only in metaphors about adjacent raindrops on opposite side of the Continental Divide or comets whose orbits just touched for a brief moment on their ways to opposite sides of the Galaxy. But none of this explained to her why people married, had children, and then broke each other’s hearts.

Stein hadn’t slept in days but his mind was too wired to surrender now. Lila had told him it was good for his circulation to walk while flying. So he took an excursion up the aisle to the back end of the plane. A cute, dark‑haired flight attendant had taken her shoes off and was curled up in a window seat. Her lapel button said “Jana.” She patted the seat alongside her and invited him to sit down. “You are coming to Amsterdam for the Cannabis Cup?” she asked, though it was more of a friendly presumption of fact than a question.