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Chapter 1

I turned off Sunset Boulevard and drove up Micheltoreno to the site. The day was cloudy and an erratic and nervy wind rattled the leaves of the palmettos that the contractor had planted along the roadside. As I pulled into the kerb at number 2265 I saw the old man. It was the first time I had really noticed him but in doing so now I immediately, for some reason, remembered I had seen him loitering around the site before. When he spotted me staring at him he looked first at his hands and then, most oddly, with some awkwardness, at the soles of his shoes, as if he had stepped in dogdirt or on a ball of chewed gum, and then, finding nothing, he turned and walked briskly away.

I thought little of it, he looked scruffy and unsure of himself, perhaps someone searching for work. Perhaps, also, he didn’t realise that I was the architect – it happened all the time. I forgot about it as I slipped off my shoes and pulled on a pair of galoshes. The house was built on an incline and last week’s rain had left the exposed earth and clay around the house moist and slidy.

This small almost finished house on its steep plot was my future, and whatever future frustrations it held for me, every time I saw it I still experienced a small frisson of … of what? Of love, I suppose, or something akin to that emotion. I had dreamed that house, had designed it, was overseeing the building of it and, nailed to the fencepost, was the ocular proof of this fact – my shingle. K. L. Fischer, architect. The small blue sign was only slightly marred by the blunt erasure of my ex-partner’s name – no more Eric Meyersen – a simple stripe of black paint obscuring his identity. I wished I could obliterate as easily the memories of our association: Meyersen and Fischer, five years of lies and duplicity, of cheating and bad faith. The only consolation was that I knew that one day he would get what he deserved.

I stepped across the threshold into the shadowy hall. From upstairs came the noise of hammering and sawing and the enthusiastic tenor of Larry Rugola, the foreman, singing ‘If you was the only Girl in the World’. I walked slowly through the downstairs rooms. The house was small, its size dictated precisely by the shape of the site, and of two storeys: the second floor consisting of two bedrooms, a bathroom and a wide porch – which I rather fancifully called the ‘wind landing’ – and the first of a large living room with dining room, kitchen and patio garden. The roadside facade presented a series of cream stucco curtain walls, flat rectangles of painted cement arranged to reveal gaps – of glass, of space – or to overlap slightly, giving a sense of the house’s volumes receding. The strict geometry of this composition was highlighted, and counterposed, by the two pine trees that I had left growing at the road edge. The juxtaposition of sinuous knotted pine trunk and flat sunwashed cement with clear hard shadows worked exceptionally well. The valley facade was pure International Style: sheer walls of glass with hard horizontals and odd vertical stucco panels. The gap formed by the wind landing looked as if an entire segment of the building had been removed, as if by a giant hand, but the integrity of its space remained, formed by the big oak beams of the trellis.

Inside it was all simplicity. Low ceilings, teak cabinets, closets and panelling, walls either of glass looking out to the view or of smooth buff stucco. The floors were a pale buttery oak and where I thought a softer texture would complement the severe planes I had had laid a rough-weave, taupe carpet. All this took on a life in my mind’s eye, of course, as I stood amongst the stacks of lumber and blonde curls of woodshavings and discarded tools, walls unpainted, wiring dangling from would-be sockets. We were still a short way from perfection.

‘Ah, Mrs Fischer.’ Larry clattered down the stairs, a ballpeen hammer spinning in one hand like a hoodlum’s sixgun. ‘We never got that panelling. Lumber yard said …’ He grinned at me shyly, knowingly. ‘They said, ah, they can’t take an order that size, without there being a cash deposit.’

‘But we have a credit account there, for God’s sake.’

‘That’s what I said. But the guy says it’s Meyersen and Fischer, the account. He don’t have no K. L. Fischer.’

I swivelled round and walked to the plate glass of the window wall and looked out at the view. Silver Lake was the fancy name given to the area bordering an artificial reservoir cut between two ranges of hills, north of downtown and east of Hollywood. Narrow metalled roads swerved and looped around the contours through the pepper trees and the oaks. Micheltoreno was one of the longest, starting on Sunset and rising and falling, weaving and winding all the way up to the reservoir. At the top views were to be had both east and west, but here the steep sides furnished a panorama of the sprawling city below which, in certain cases, could stretch all the way to the ocean, its fishscale glitter a lucent line of shimmer on the horizon. I concentrated hard on what I could see, noting the burnished glare off the roofs of the traffic moving up and down Sunset; a small man hanging out a big Mexican blanket on a line; a woman in a cobalt two-piece sunbathing on a tarpaper roof. I rested the palps of my fingertips on the warm glass and felt the tiny sonic vibrations of the city shiver through the transparency. The girl on the tarpaper roof smoothed what looked like Oleo margarine on her midriff. When I was calm again I reassured Larry that I would go down to the lumber yard and sort everything out myself.

‘Oh, yeah. That old geezer was here again looking for you. Least I figured it was you.’

‘What do you mean? What old geezer?’

‘He was just here. He asked if your name was, ah, let me get this right … Carriscant – I think. Yeah. Miss Carriscant.’

‘Carriscant?’

‘I said he must be mistaken. There was a Mrs Fischer, but no Miss Whatever. Always had been Fischer too. Far as I was –’ He paused and peered at my taut frowning face with, for Larry, some genuine concern.

‘I hope I didn’t – I mean –’

‘No. Strange, I just … No, fine. Absolutely no problem.’

Chapter 2

My name is Kay Fischer. My name is Kay Fischer and at the time of this story I was thirty-two years of age, divorced and by profession an architect. I was five feet six inches tall (I still am) with dull brown hair and bright brown eyes. I had a pretty round face and a keen intellect. And, like most people who know themselves to be cleverer than the vast majority of their fellow human beings they encounter as they go through life, my intelligence inclined me to be a little cruel, sometimes. In those days I smoked too much and I drank and I ate too much as well, because, I suppose, because at the time I was more often sad than happy, and as a result my once neat figure had become plump and haunchy. But I didn’t care, really. I didn’t care.

I drove back from the lumber yard where, after enjoying years of trouble-free credit facilities, I had to pay 200 dollars down in order to open another account. Clerks who had dealt with me since I began to practise now sorrowfully quoted rules and regulations and referred me to the young manager in his glassed-in office. ‘You don’t understand,’ I said to this blinking, grey person, ‘Meyersen is the bankrupt one, or at least he will be when I’m through with him.’ Bravado made my voice boom. Rules is rules, the manager said, skilfully avoiding my eye, and in the end I meekly paid.

At my home, a small apartment in a newish apartment court off Laurel Avenue in West Hollywood called, shamelessly, the Escorial Apartments in tribute to its Spanish Colonial roots, I brewed myself a pot of coffee, potent and viscous, and brooded again on betrayal and Eric Meyersen. The Taylor house in Pasadena, the shopping mart in Burbank … Three years of work, my work, now belonged to Meyersen and his glossy new firm. In a sudden, squally rage I called my lawyer, George Fugal, but his answering service said he was out of town for the weekend. Still, the coffee tasted just fine, scalding and aromatic, and I smoked three Picayunes one after another just to keep my dander up and paced vengefully about my neat room.

There was not much I had been able to do with the sturdy functionality of the Escorial. I had reduced my furniture needs to a minimum and had had the whorled featured plasterwork of the interior walls smoothed flat and painted white. Two Breuer leather and chrome armchairs faced each other across a glass coffee table which was set upon a blue and yellow Gertrud Arndt rug. The only other furniture in the room was my drawing table. There were no pictures on the walls, either, and I kept my books in my bedroom. The result was as spare and soothing as could be achieved in a Los Angeles bungalow court, I maintained. My watchword had been borrowed from Hannes Meyer: necessities, not luxuries.

The Escorial Apartments were knocked down in 1963 by a realtor and three ugly new houses were built in its place. When I lived there the choicer apartments – mine not included – surrounded a small aquamarine swimming pool. If I leaned out of the corner of my kitchen window (which I did as I rinsed the coffee pot) I could make out a bright triangle of the shallow end. The afternoon sun lit the tiled roofs and the tangerine stucco of the apartment walls and sent jostling rigmaroles of light from the water shuddering along the glass fascias of the balconies. I heard the splash of water and the delighted laugh of a girl – deep in her throat – and I felt a powerful urge to swim, to immerse myself in that overchlorinated blue, and wash Meyersen and the small humiliations of the lumber yard away. In my bedroom I selected a swimsuit and stepped out of my dress, but then caught sight of my thighs and buttocks in the square of mirror on the dressing table and decided instead to do some work. The larger humiliations of disrobing in front of the residents of the Escorial were an unignorable disincentive.

So I sat at my drawing board, adjusted the lamp and unrolled the interior elevations of 2265 Micheltoreno. My credo as an architect was the simplest I could devise: what space did I require, or my client require, and how was it to be confined. The great liberation bestowed by the new materials of the twentieth century had re-emphasised the architect’s priorities: the space enclosed became more important than what enclosed the space. Others have put it more eloquently than I but for me stucco sheathing, glass bricks and reinforced concrete, bakelite and chrome, plywood and aluminium were blessings in so far as they served the space they were to contain. My second criterion was simplicity. The task was to design the space and employ the minimum to construct it. The house on Micheltoreno had been conceived, if you like, as an assemblage of blocks of air. Some of these blocks were to be found between stucco walls, some were bounded transparently by sheets of glass, some by beams and wood battens and balcony outriggers and some by the organic shapes of the trees that I had ordered left when the site was first cleared.

My current dilemma was that I needed a closet in the main bedroom but to build one in would mean diminishing the square footage of the bedroom. Not too grievous, in the scale of the world’s problems, you might think, but if I did so the bedroom would no longer possess exactly the same square footage as the wide balcony porch on to which it gave – the space I had designed, and the harmony I wanted, would be compromised. I toyed with the dimensions a while and made a few sketches before a solution presented itself. Build in the closet and then echo it on the porch by placing two wooden struts as off centre ‘supports’ to the shade trellis. Their function would be notional but the symmetry would be maintained, the wind landing would remain a spatial replica of its neighbouring room. So much, so perfect. Now I began to worry what a bed would do to my empty blocks of air …

The concierge called up from reception.

‘There’s a gentleman here to see you, Mrs Fischer.’

I checked my watch: Philip Brockway (my ex-husband) was early. I knew he wanted to borrow money. I had accused him of this when he telephoned and he denied it with such vehemence that I knew I was right. He merely wanted to see me, he said, and added some lame tosh about ‘old times’.

All the same, I strolled along the walkway towards reception thinking not too unkindly of Philip – he was so pretty, with his pretty handsome weak face, his small girl’s nose and his thick tawny hair. I would play with him a while, make him take me out for a cocktail, before I gave in and paid him to leave me alone once more.

I pushed through the swing doors into the lobby and saw the man from the site, the man who had asked for Miss Carriscant. He was old, grey-haired, but broad-shouldered and stocky, dressed in black as he had been at the house. He clutched his homburg in front of him like a steering wheel and took three paces towards me, staring at me intensely, as if searching for some sign of recognition. His own manifest apprehension put me at some ease.

‘What do you want?’ I said. ‘Why are you –’

‘Miss Carriscant?’

‘No. No, I am not Miss Carriscant.’

He reached out and touched my bare arm, fleetingly, as if to reassure himself. His fingers felt dry, abrasive, heavily calloused.

‘Peter?’ I called the concierge. ‘This gentleman is leaving.’

‘You are Kay Carriscant.’

‘I am Kay Fischer. You are making a tiresome and irritating error, Mr –’

‘All right, all right. You were once Kay Carriscant. You were born on the ninth of January 1904 in the afternoon. You see, I –’

‘Would you please leave me alone, Mr Whoever-you-are? This nonsense is beginning –’

‘My name is Carriscant. Salvador Carriscant. Do you know who I am?’

‘Of course not.’

The pungent denial in my voice, its plain tetchiness, caused the look in his eye to change. A shadow of sadness crossed his gaze and a deep hurt was revealed there for an instant. For some reason this mellowed me and I felt sorry for him and his hopeless quest for his Miss Carriscant.

‘What do you want?’ I said, with more kindness in my voice. ‘Who are you?’

His face seemed to tighten, drawn down as if there were a pain in his gut. He closed his eyes a second and pursed his lips. He sighed.

‘I am your father,’ he said.

Chapter 3

Philip accepted the five ten-dollar bills I gave him as casually as if they were cigarettes. Trying not to smile, he folded them into a calfskin wallet.

‘Thanks, Kay. I owe you.’

‘You surely do. Two hundred and counting.’

‘Ho hum. It’s only money.’

‘Only my money.’ I laughed, all the same, Philip was being sweet tonight, as only he knew how, and I was enjoying it. We sat in a piano bar called Mo-Jo’s. It was downtown, on Broadway and Third, a joint Philip knew, where his credit was good. It was a curious place, a unique blend of Polynesian idyll and Nantucket fishing village. In the lobby you parted a bead curtain and crossed a log bridge over a moving stream to be confronted by a dark room with a bar decorated with signal flags and cork floats. The barmen wore striped matelot jerseys and red neckerchiefs. Lush groves of potted palms screened intimate booths made from packing cases and driftwood. Carved backlit native gargoyles served as sconces and cast a fuggy crimson-orange light on a bamboo-framed, wall-sized mural of a square-rigged clipper running before an icy, eye-watering wind. It represented the antithesis of everything I believed in, architecturally, and it made me laugh. Philip and I would fantasise about Mo-Jo’s brief to his interior designer: ‘Sorta Moby Dick meets Paul Gauguin, ya know?’, ‘Kinda hot and steamy but cool and unpretentious at the same time’, ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wet dream’. On every table was a gilt electric bellpush designed to summon one of the browned-up cocktail waitresses – halterneck tops over grass skirts, flowers behind ear – who sulked in the gloom behind the bar bickering with the matelots. As Philip reached over to press the button he allowed his knuckles to graze my breasts.

‘You look different, Kay. So … you know, bigger. I like it. You, ah, you carry it well.’

‘That’s meant to be a compliment?’

‘OK. Try this: can I come home with you tonight?’

‘Won’t Little Miss Peroxide object?’

‘That’s not fair. It’s over, long gone. You know that.’

‘No.’

‘Please –’

‘No, Philip. No.’ That particular tone of weariness crept into my voice, memories of ancient arguments, and he knew that he should not ask any more.

He stood up. ‘I’ve got to go to the john. I’ll have the same again.’

I watched him stroll easily through the tables, light-footed. His tall thin body swayed past waitresses and drinkers as he led with his left shoulder and then with his right, as if he were dancing. Like a Scottish dance, figure of eight … Why did I think of a Scottish dance? I smiled, as I recalled Philip’s pale body, almost hairless, and his slim ankles, the Achilles tendon stretched and exposed, like a catwalk model’s. He used to make love to me proficiently but selfishly, his head buried in the angle of my neck and shoulder, never looking up, never seeing my face, never looking me in the eyes, until he was finished.

I ordered us both another drink and thought about the man, Salvador Carriscant, who said he was my father.

When Carriscant had made his bizarre claim I told him at once that my father was dead but it gave him no pause at all, he merely gripped my forearm more fiercely and said, softly, insistently, ‘Your father is here now, before you, alive and breathing. I know I have done you wrong but now I need your forgiveness. Your forgiveness and your help.’

I called again for Peter and wrenched my arm free of Carriscant’s grip.

Peter came quickly up behind him and clutched his elbows, pulling them together. ‘OK, brother, outside.’

‘Release me,’ Carriscant said, his voice suddenly uneven with anger. ‘Do not lay your hands on me, I warn you.’

Some rare quality of emphasis in his voice made Peter comply. Carriscant backed away towards the wrought-iron gates of the Escorial’s entrance, still holding me with his persistent, pleading gaze.

‘We just need to talk, Kay,’ he said. ‘Then everything will become clear.’ He pronounced the last word ‘cleah’, in the English manner, and for the first time I registered that his voice had an accent: English, in a way, but unlocatably so, with the slightly formal perfection of the complete bilingual. ‘Please Kay, it’s all I ask.’ His jaw muscles clenched and his square face seemed to redden, as if the effort of suppressing what he had to declare to me was bursting within him. Then he turned and left, striding off – surprisingly jauntily for an old man – down the concrete path and across the street.

Philip and our fresh drinks arrived simultaneously. Philip dipped and slid himself along the banquette until his thigh was brushing mine.

‘I’ve got a lunch party at the beach tomorrow. Lisa van Baker’s house. Want to come with me?’

‘Can’t, I’m afraid.’

‘But there’ll be movie stars,’ he said, hands spread, eyebrows raised, mock-horrified at my indifference.

‘I hate movie stars.’

‘OK, what’s the alternative attraction?’

‘Home cooking.’

Chapter 4

I watched my mother slice peeled, cored apples into a tin colander. The sharp worn knifeblade slid easily beneath the pale yellow flesh as she cut slim discs with a sliding, crunching noise, like cautious footsteps on icy snow. She was meticulous in her slicing, each disc a precise thickness, her concentration fixed exactly on her task. She was a small woman, shy and modest. She wore her hair always in the same way, as long as I could remember, combed back from her face and held in a vertical roll from crown to nape. Her features were ordinary and unexceptional: it was only when she put her spectacles on that her face acquired some personality.

She lived with my stepfather, Rudolf Fischer, in a small house in Long Beach. It was an old fading canary yellow clapboard bungalow with a shingled hip roof, and there was a newer addition of a two-car garage which took up most of what had been a patchy lawn. A cypress hedge separated it from a house of identical design painted flamingo pink. This was where I had grown up but it was not where I was born. My birthplace had been in the former German colony in New Guinea. It always seemed to me one of my life’s crueller oppositions: born in New Guinea, raised in Long Beach. I possessed no memory at all of my real father. Rudolf – Pappi, as we called him, my mother included – had always been there in my life, with his big ruddy face, his fuzzy, balding pate, the curious wen on his face, half an inch below the right side of his mouth, hard and shiny like a sucked boiled sweet stuck there. ‘Like Oliver Cromwell,’ he used to say, ‘I come wart and all.’ He was a big-boned friendly man whose easy geniality hid a weak character. My neat, timid mother was the real centre of force in that household, something that Pappi’s large shambling loud presence seemed to belie. Only the family really knew the truth.

Pappi was an American, second generation, son of Westphalian immigrants, who, in a conscious act of assimilation, had ceased speaking German as soon as they could string some English sentences together and ensured that their children had grown up monoglottally American. My mother had stopped talking German when she married him, she said, claiming that she even dreamed in English now. But I still heard her singing to herself, favourite songs: ‘An die ferne Geliebte’, and ‘Es war, als hatt’ der Himmel’ when her guard dropped.

I looked over my shoulder into the parlour. Pappi sat in an easy chair listening to the radio, his mouth open, ready to laugh. My mother carefully spooned the apple discs into a shallow pie base.

‘Tell me about Father,’ I said.

‘Pappi? Oh, his leg is still sore. I told him –’

‘No. I mean my father.’

She ran her hands under the faucet, thinking, then glanced at me, one of her keen, sharp looks, watchful. It was at moments like these – when I surprised her – that I saw her toughness and knew where I derived my own.

‘Hugh.’ She said his name quietly, like a sigh, as if testing it, a strange fruit, an exotic dessert. ‘What’s there to say? It’s been so long now.’

Hugh Paget, my father, an Englishman, a missionary and teacher, who met and married my mother Annaliese Leys, a schoolteacher, in German New Guinea in 1903. In 1904 I was born and two months later Hugh Paget was dead, burned to ashes in a fire. Two years later Mrs Paget and her baby daughter were taken under the capacious wing of Rudolf Fischer, widower, merchant and coir and hemp importer from Los Angeles, USA. Seventeen per cent of the doormats in southern California were made from coir supplied by Fischer Coir, was the company’s proud boast. Rudolf and Annaliese were married in 1907 and settled in Long Beach.

‘What about his parents, relatives?’ I said casually, searching in my pockets for my cigarette pack.

‘His folks were dead when I met him. There was a sister, Meredith, in Coventry. Or maybe Ipswich. They moved a lot. We would correspond, but I lost touch.’ She smiled. ‘It’s like that. You work hard at first to keep a memory alive. It’s hard, everybody’s life goes on in different directions. After a while …’

‘Have you still got her letters?’

‘I doubt it. Why all this interest?’

‘I … I just got curious. You know, you get to thinking.’

‘Sure. I think about him too.’ She looked sad, bringing to mind this stranger, my father.

I lit my cigarette. ‘Can I see the photograph?’

‘Of course. When?’

‘Now.’

Hugh Paget stood in front of a square corrugated iron building with a palm-thatched roof with wooden cross-shaped finials at either end. He wore a drill-cotton coat and trousers tucked into canvas mosquito boots and at his throat was the white band of his dog-collar. I could see a slim tall man with blurry features that I knew not even a magnifying glass could force into anything resembling an individual face. A breeze had lifted a lock of hair off his forehead and the photograph had fixed this one dishevelment in time, for all time. It seemed – specious thoughts, I knew – a clue of sorts, a gesture, a hint as to his nature. Boyishness, enthusiasm, an awkward gaucherie … I tried to paste some sort of personality on to this nugatory image with my usual lack of success.

Fair hair. Fair hair. Mine was dark.

‘You must have had wedding photos.’

‘I told you, we lost everything in the fire. This was in the chapel, I was lucky.’

I left it at that, for the time being. I knew she would go on talking quite contentedly but soon she would begin to wonder what prompted all these questions and would start asking some of her own. And then what would I say? In fact I could not really explain my own newfound curiosity about my father. Why was I acting on one strange man’s allegations, and ones so evidently preposterous? Who was Salvador Carriscant and why had he singled me out for this filial identification? Los Angeles was full of crazy people but what unsettled me about Carriscant was that he did not seem particularly unbalanced. And what could he possibly know about Hugh Paget? And why should he appear now, over thirty years after my father’s death, insinuating that the man was an impostor …? The whole idea was ridiculous, I said to myself, and I was about to tell my mother about this odd fellow I had encountered when my stepsister Bruna arrived at the front door with her two children, Amy and Greta, and interrupted me. Pappi’s histrionic cries of love and adoration filled the small house.

My mother slid the pie into the oven and wiped her hands carefully on her apron.

‘When was I born?’ I asked. ‘I mean, what time of day?’

‘Oh, about 4.30 in the afternoon. Why?’

‘I was just wondering. Just curious.’

‘I like that suit, Kay,’ she said, smiling faintly at me. ‘You look smart. Very efficient.’

So the matter was closed, anyway. I thanked her, complimented her in return on the brooch she was wearing and we walked through into the living room.

Chapter 5

I saw the corner of the envelope peeking from beneath the front door of my apartment when I inserted the key in the lock. I stooped, slid it out and put it in my pocket. Inside, I placed it on my drawing board and went to pour myself a small Scotch. I knew it was from Carriscant even though it was not addressed.

I sensed, immediately, that I was at some kind of watershed, now. You know that feeling, when you can almost see the two or several directions your life might take ahead of you, a moment when you know that the next choice you are about to make is going to be crucial and possibly final, that there is no going back, and that nothing will ever be the same again? I could tear the letter up, unopened, ignore the man in future and call the police if he continued to pester me. Or I could open the letter, read what it had to say and thereby allow myself to be drawn in even further to his curious world and his strange obsession about me and our relationship.

I opened the letter:

My dear Kay,

I know you must be wondering if you are dealing with a lunatic. Believe me, you are not. I am as sane as you are. We must talk properly without fear of interruption. I shall not bother you further but will let you know that I am staying at 105 Olive Street for the next ten days only. Please do communicate with me, there is so much to say.

Dr Salvador Carriscant

I had made my choice.

Chapter 6

I emerged from the Third Street Tunnel and drove down Hill Street, swinging back up Fifth and up on to Olive Street high on Bunker Hill. From up here I could see the tower of the new City Hall, tall and white, shining in the crossbeams of its searchlights. Between the ancient houses and over vacant lots I caught glimpses of the glowing electric arrow of Wilshire Boulevard thrusting west its sixteen miles towards the ocean and the last cinnamon stripes of the setting sun.

105 Olive was an old Queen Anne mansion, probably built in the 1880s. It was nicely asymmetrical and not as overdecorated as some I had seen. It had a roof of fishscaled shingle and a big domed turret with a bent lightning conductor. Its verandah circled three-quarters of the house and its elaborate carved porch frieze was badly broken, looking like the tattered edge of a paper doily. A dusty pepper tree with a tyre swing stood in the patch of beaten earth that had once been a lawn. The old mansion was now doing humble duty as a boarding house for transient workers. A handwritten cardboard sign in the window said ‘ROOMS $1’. A few men sat and smoked on its front steps, small brown men in cheap but clean clothes. I assumed they were Japanese.

I pulled over to the kerb and settled down to wait – for what? I wasn’t exactly sure, but I felt that I needed to turn the tables momentarily, to observe Carriscant himself, covertly, as he had observed me, before we embarked on this momentous and earnestly entreated communication.

Carriscant appeared at the front door about forty minutes later. He was wearing a tight blue overjacket, with a naval cut, and had his homburg on. I left the car and followed him to the funicular railway that led down from the heights of Bunker Hill to Hill Street below. I felt relatively inconspicuous, almost masculine, in fact: I wore slacks and a trenchcoat and had a beret pulled down low on my brow.

Carriscant entered the little cream-coloured cable car and moved up to the front where he took his seat. I waited until it was about to depart and slipped in at the last moment and stood at the door. There was a small jolt and the car began to move down the gradient towards the busy streets below. It was a clear night, so clear I could see the lights of Huntington Park and Montebello and, over to the south, the glow of big orange flares burning at the Dominguez oilfields at Compton.

I followed Carriscant as he crossed Hill and walked over to Main Street. The sidewalks here were busy: on either side of the street were movie theatres, burlesque joints and dime museums, penny arcades and shooting galleries. There were many Mexicans among the passersby and groups of sailors up from the naval yards at San Pedro. Carriscant paused at a secondhand bookseller and browsed awhile through the boxes set out in front of the store. I turned to face the window of a steakhouse and concentrated my attention on a display of plank-steaks, unnaturally red against the bed of crushed ice upon which they were fanned out, like fat rubber playing cards. Eventually, Carriscant moved on and turned into an all-night lunch room, blazingly lit, and sat himself down at a rear table. I strolled to and fro past the window a couple of times and watched him place his order. I noticed he did not remove his hat from his head and as I turned to begin my third discreet trajectory I decided at once that any further delay would be foolish. I pushed open the glass door and went in to join him.

He did not seem at all surprised to see me, which made me irritated for a moment and made me regret my impulsiveness. He rose halfway from his seat and tipped his hat in a formulaic gesture of politeness. The act seemed to remind him he had the thing on his head and he removed it carefully, setting it down on the empty seat beside him, then he brushed his hair flat with the palms of his hands in two slow stroking movements. He looked fatigued, much older suddenly, and the bright lights of the lunch room cast sharp shadows across his face making the prominent lines deep, like gashes. I took the seat opposite him.

‘I would offer you some food –’ he began.

‘No, no. I came to see you. Your letter … You said you needed help.’

‘I do, indeed I do.’ He smiled at me. ‘Did you follow me here?’

‘Yes.’

He chuckled. ‘Dear Kay.’

I ignored this. ‘Are you in trouble?’

‘Trouble?’ He appeared to think about the word, as if pondering its semantics. ‘Not exactly, but I do need help. I am a total stranger, you see. Total.’

A waiter brought him his food, a large plate of dark pasty stew with mashed potatoes and what looked like squash. He ostentatiously searched for the meat and then cut the few cartilaginous strips deliberately into small cubes before beginning to eat.

‘More meat on a wren’s shin,’ he muttered, angrily. ‘This is disgraceful food,’ he said. ‘There’s no excuse, in this country of all places. I would have cooked myself but there are no facilities at the lodging house.’

‘Do you like to cook?’ I knew I was making conversation, gauche conversation, and disliked myself for it, but I felt strangely awkward with him, as if in responding to his invitation I had somehow lost the advantage of our encounters. He, by contrast, appeared very relaxed and smiled patiently at me.

‘I am a cook. I love cooking.’

‘What do you mean? It’s your job?’

‘Yes. At least it has been for the last fifteen years.’

‘On your letter you signed yourself “Doctor”.’

‘I was a doctor first, then a cook.’

to meet the next day. The little men sat on the steps up to the front door where we had left them an hour since: they stared at me curiously, with no malice or hostility.

‘Why are there so many Japanese here?’ I asked him quietly.

He turned and spoke to the men on the steps in a language I did not recognise. They all laughed, with genuine hilarity, it seemed.

‘Japanese?’ he said, reproachfully. ‘These men are Filipinos.’

Chapter 7

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 re-establishing 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.’

William Boyd

THE BLUE AFTERNOON

PENGUIN BOOKS

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