"The Blue Afternoon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Boyd William)

SEVEN

I sat with Salvador Carriscant on the slatted wooden bench of a red car as it rolled and rattled as we crossed over Pico Boulevard at Sawtelle and headed out westward through the beanfields towards Santa Monica. Here and there the boulevard was being widened and long stretches of the small one-storey shops had been flattened to take the new roadway. Soon everyone would be able to drive to the beach. The trolley car stopped at the Ocean Avenue depot and Carriscant and I wandered down to Ocean Park. Once again I noticed that the press of people, the noise and the vivid colours of the sunshades seemed both to attract and disarm him. We stood at the Japanese gambling galleries watching men and women gambling for merchandise rather than money, and strolled past the beach clubs and the many piers, the loop-the-loop and the ride-the-clouds attractions; the air jangling with the shouts of children and the fretful buzz of the speedboats carrying anglers from the shore to the fishing barges-old mastless schooners, and wooden-hulled clippers-anchored a hundred yards or so out in the ocean. Only the Monkey Farm seemed to upset him. The crowd around the cages was six deep and when we managed to push through to see what the lure was I saw the expression on his face change at once from curiosity to disgust when he contemplated the melancholy chimpanzees and the neurotic mangy gibbons in their close-barred pens. He took hold of my elbow and steered me away.

'What's wrong?' I asked.

'Those monkeys in the cages, I don't like it… They remind me of someone.' He changed the subject. 'Let's eat,' he said. 'I want to eat fish.'

We went to one of the new apartment hotels, the Sovereign, which had a public dining room. Carriscant ordered broiled Spanish mackerel which he ate with his usual concentration. 'This is fresh,' he said, grudgingly, 'the best food I've tasted in America.'

The success of the menu dispelled the anger caused by the Monkey Farm and I sensed he was beginning to enjoy himself.

'I could never get enough fish,' he said, 'for all those years, even though we were not far from the coast. We sold all the fish we caught.'

I did not press him, or ask him what 'those years' were he was referring to. There would be time enough later for interrogation, and, besides, I thought he would tell me everything in his own good time, if he felt like it. I realised that this jaunt to the sea was just a means for him and me to become further acquainted – very much the father reestablishing his relationship with his long-lost daughter-and my silence, my reticence, encouraged this mood and that would please him, I knew.

And then I wondered why I should want to please him, why I was encouraging this-what?-this friendship, this evolving relationship. He knew my date of birth, but what did that prove? He knew what time of day I was born but that could have been an inspired guess, a lucky shot… But there was a quality of confidence about his dealings with me that seemed different, indicated a fundamental certainty of purpose that I felt no trickster or flim-flam man could simulate. It was not striven for, did not seek to impress. He appeared relaxed in my company – as if my company were all that he wanted-and that in turn relaxed me.

He looked up, now, from his meal and gave me a quick, strong smile, his broad face creasing momentarily. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps because Rudolf Fischer was so manifestly not my father, and Hugh Paget possessed all the substantiality of myth, I was seizing too firmly on to this new candidate, all attractive flesh and blood, all very much here and now? It was a form of temptation, I knew, a kind of seduction and, I realised as I contemplated this sturdy, handsome old man, it was one I was not as well equipped to resist as I thought.

When I asked him if he wanted a dessert he said he would prefer to eat another fish. He ordered a poached steak of yellowtail tuna which he consumed slowly and with much intense savouring of its flavours as I ate ice-cream and smoked a cigarette. After his second fish he ordered a cognac, the cheapest in the house. He discreetly picked his teeth with a quill tip (he carried a small packet of them with him) and then seemed to rinse his mouth with the brandy. I started to chatter – most uncharacteristically – to cover my mild embarrassment as this dental toilette, this boccal sluicing, went on. He listened politely as I told him about Santa Monica, Venice and the Malibu as I had known them over the years, but all the while I was aware of him sipping brandy and then, more disturbingly, I could hear the foamy susurrus in his mouth as he swilled and flushed the liquid between his teeth.

' – and the Roosevelt Highway didn't exist,' I was saying. 'I mean, now you can take it all the way up the coast to Oxnard, but I remember I came down here with Pappi once-I must have been about twelve – '

'Twelve?'

'Yes, I -'

He frowned. 'That would be about 1916?'

'Thereabouts. Twelve or thirteen, I guess. Pappi had this client – it was J. W. Considine, in fact – who had a house at the Malibu and we had to catch a boat out there from the Santa Monica pier. It was real cut off in those-'

'Kay I stopped talking at once. I realised he had not been listening to me.

'-If I was looking for a man in California,' he said, 'how would I set about finding him?'

'It depends… Do you know his name?'

'He's called Paton Bobby. All I know is he lives in California. He used to, anyway.'

I stubbed out my cigarette. 'Paton Bobby. Have you got any more information?'

'He's a little bit older than me. And I think he was a policeman.'

'That might help. Anything else?'

'That's it.'

I looked at him. I knew that our business, whatever it would turn out to be, was beginning, now, irrevocably.

'May I know why you want to find him?'

He smiled a faint, dreamy smile. His mood had changed ever since I had mentioned my childhood trip to the Malibu, my age and the date. It had sent him back through time, perhaps to that place where he could never get enough fish, and his thoughts had stayed there.

'I'm sorry, my dear, what did you say?'

'Why do you need to find this Paton Bobby?'

He sighed, looked down at his empty plate, turned his fork so that its tines pointed downward, and returned his gaze to mine.

'I suppose you could say,' he said, his eyes innocently wide, his expression bland, 'that I'm looking for a killer.'