Black Angel Read online

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  He called for his mother at eight o’clock. The fog was beginning to clear, but the city still looked blurred at the edges, as if he were looking at them through steam-fogged spectacles. His mother wore a black Chanel summer coat and her hair was fastened back with a diamond-studded Chanel clip. She looked elegant and handsome and he was proud to take her out. He just wished they were going to the Washington Square Bar & Grill for dinner, instead of Wilbert Fraser’s, for a conversation with dead people.

  She had trouble climbing into his Toyota. “Your father would never have bought a Japanese car,” she complained. “For him, it was a Lincoln Town Car or nothing.”

  “My father wasn’t a cop.”

  “God forbid he should have been.”

  They drove slowly to Wilbert Fraser’s house. The fog lay thickly in the dips but the hilltops were almost clear. For the first time in days, Larry could see Coit Tower. For some reason, he had always felt reassured by the sight of Coit Tower. It was a reference point in his life; from the days when he was small and had watched its high lonesome light from his bedroom window to the days when he had dropped out and tuned in and believed that the only family was the family of peace, love and good grass.

  He could still recite Gregory Corso’s Ode To Coit Tower which had been his own particular psalm of rebellion.

  “O anti-verdurous phallic were’t not for your pouring height looming in tears like a sick tree or your ever-gaudy comfort jabbing your city’s much-wrinkled sky you’d seem an absurd Babel squatting before millions.

  “Ah tower tower that I felt sad for Alcatraz and not for your heroes lessened not the tourist love of my eyes.”

  These days he wondered how he had managed to understand what any of that poetry meant. Had it meant anything? He had believed in those days that he had understood it. Maybe even Gregory Corso hadn’t understood it.

  In any case, those hippie days had faded like the sunshine had faded, and Larry had been left at the age of eighteen with the choice of returning to the bosom of his traditional and prosperous family—standing short-haired and respectful and dark-suited at his father’s elbow at charity dinners, shaking hands with the Ben Swigs and the Louis Luries and the Mrs. Hans Klussmanns of this world—or of doing something else rebellious and different.

  Eleonora said, “You don’t have to drive too fast, my darling. Better to be late in this world than early in the next.”

  “Seems like tonight we’ve got the choice of both.”

  “You won’t mock Mr. Fraser, will you? He’s very sensitive to any kind of skepticism.”

  “Who said anything about skepticism?”

  Eleonora directed him to a large Victorian frame house on Jackson; a shabby survivor of the great earthquake of 1906 and of countless lesser disasters since, not the least of which appeared to be its sale to Wilbert Fraser. Its shingles had slipped, the paint on its shutters was flaking like eczema, and its front yard was nothing but a pale tangle of thistles. Its front porch was heaped up with dry and flowerless wisteria, as if it were wearing a saucy but decayed toupee.

  “Wilbert isn’t rich,” said Eleonora, as if that explained everything.

  Larry cramped the front tires and locked the car. Then he followed his mother up the front steps with a sense of increasing reluctance. He had walked into the back room of a Chinese restaurant once, looking for an iced-out killer called Henry Kwo, and he had felt the same sense of reluctance then, terrible reluctance, as if a small child had seized hold of his ankles and he had to drag him across the floor with every step. The only difference was that when he was looking for Henry Kwo, he was able to draw his .38, and dodge from doorway to doorway. He wouldn’t be able to do that here, at Wilbert Fraser’s.

  The front door opened before they reached it. There was a bright plain-glass lantern shining high up in the hallway ceiling, so that it was difficult for Larry to see anything of Wilbert Fraser but shadows. He could make out silvery greased-back hair, however, and a large loose-fitting sweater, and large-lensed designer eyeglasses.

  “Mrs. Foggia, you don’t know how good it is to see you again,” he crooned, holding out his hand. Larry caught the quick needle-sharp twinkle of diamond rings. “And who have you brought along with you tonight? This can’t be your son! I don’t believe it!”

  Larry grasped Wilbert’s hand. It was like taking hold of a bunch of tepid, slippery, overcooked asparagus. “I’m Larry, how do you do,” he told him. “Actually my mother is as young as she looks. It’s just that I’m, well, very mature for my age.”

  “How do you do, I’m sure,” said Wilbert. “You’d better come on in. It’s still so foggy and my bronchitis, you know. Once I’ve caught it I wheeze for weeks.”

  “How many are you expecting tonight?” asked Eleonora clearly, as they stepped into the narrow hallway. “Mrs. Sheraton Jardiner isn’t coming, is she?”

  “She was going to, poor dear, but she had to cry off,” said Wilbert, leading the way into the huge high-ceilinged sitting-room. “Mr. Jardiner had a climbing accident up at Yosemite. He went there with his secretary instead of her!”

  “You’re such a gossip, Wilbert,” Eleonora told him; although it was clear to Larry from the apple-tart expression on his mother’s face that she adored gossip; especially about those San Francisco society women who now looked down on her because her husband was long dead and his fortune had dwindled. There had been a time when all the Foggias were big time, don’t talk about Ghirardellis or de Domenicos.

  The sitting-room was relentlessly decorated in brown. Brown velour armchairs, brown velour couches, brown floral wallpaper, brown pictures, brown rugs, brown cushions. It had once been grand but it takes money to stay grand and now the velour was motheaten and the rugs had worn down to gray string patches. There was a smell of Safeway lavender room spray and Black Flag.

  Five people had already arrived. Two of them Larry recognized immediately as friends of his mother’s. A balding bespectacled man of sixty-six with the blueish complexion of a chronic angina sufferer. This was Bembridge “Bembo” Caldwell, who had once worked for Gene Autry as business manager for the Mark Hopkins Hotel, and who had overseen its decline in the mid-1950s into chronic Autryesque tackiness, with painted stallions on the walls, and the hideous slogan “Where Friends Get Together”. A tall fortyish woman with an English accent, fraying ginger hair, and a wild cast in her eyes. This was Samantha Bacon, whose dazzling film career in the Swinging Sixties had taken her from London to Hollywood; and then from Hollywood to nowhere at all; and from nowhere at all to San Francisco, where she had been rescued from vodka and cigarettes and barbiturates by a kindly old man who owned a chain of delis and who had been almost unhealthily obsessed with her first picture.

  Larry shook hands and tried to keep smiling. For some reason, he felt anxious and irritable, and the backs of his hands started to itch as if he had spent all afternoon tearing down poison ivy. The house seemed exceptionally stuffy and closed-in. Even though he could see that two of the living-room windows were half-open, no air seemed to penetrate, no drafts blew. The discolored net curtains with their patterns of birds and flowers hung motionless; shrouds; washing. Yet he could hear the noises of the street.

  “Larry, it’s been ages,” said Samantha. She wore a red satin dress with flouncy sleeves that clashed with her hair. Her eyes clashed with everything.

  Larry kissed her cheek. “How’re you doing, Sammy?” he asked her.

  “Do you know anyone in Traffic?” she said.

  He smiled. “How many tickets do you have?”

  “About a thousand. I’m not asking them to let me off: I just want time to catch up.”

  Larry laid a hand on her pale freckled shoulder. There were some women he liked to touch and some women he didn’t. Samantha had always felt too chilly; as if her body had recently been trawled from the Bay.

  “You can introduce me here,” he suggested.

  “Oh well surely,” she gushed. “This is John Fo
rth, he’s an architect.” Larry shook hands with a small evasive-eyed man of thirtysomething, with a bifurcated Karl Malden nose and no chin. “John redesigned the Garden Court at the Sheraton-Palace, but of course the city declared it an historical landmark and so they had to shelve his remodeling ad infinitum. I mean for ever.”

  “Hey, bad luck,” said Larry. “But I always liked the Garden Court, so, you know, maybe it all worked out for the best.”

  He was sure that he could hear John Forth grinding his teeth together, out loud. He was sensitive to things like that. He was also sensitive to the fact that Samantha had called the Palace the Sheraton-Palace. Born-and-bred San Franciscans still resented the takeover, even today, and called the hotel by its proper name.

  A thin bustless woman in a very low-cut poppy-print dress came across the room and showed Larry her pearls and her horsey teeth. “Margot Tryall,” she announced. “My father and your father used to play golf together.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Larry, “Jack Tryall. How is he these days? How’s the yacht business?”

  “The yacht business is booming, thank you,” Margot Tryall lisped. “But I’m afraid my father left us in January.”

  “He left you?” asked Larry, unsure what she meant.

  “Yes, he—” and here she raised her eyes upward. Larry looked up, too, until he realized that Jack Tryall had gone even higher than the molded Victorian ceiling. Margot said, “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Margot had quite a conversation with her father the last time we met,” Eleonora explained. “They talked about all kinds of things. Yacht races, cocktail parties, how to trim the bushes.”

  “Good deal,” said Larry, apprehensively.

  The last guest was a man in his early forties; well built, obviously athletic; with hair that was partly gray and partly bleached by the sun. He had a self-confident idiot smile that Larry particularly disliked. He was the kind of guy who would football-tackle a plainclothes detective in the middle of making a bust because he mistook him for an armed mugger.

  “Dick Volare,” he said, grasping Larry’s hand. “Understand we share some of the old Neapolitan blood. Hah, gumba?”

  “How are you, Dick?” Larry asked him.

  “Oh… business couldn’t be better. I’m in oceanfront real-estate, that’s me. Volare Views, Inc., maybe you’ve heard about us. You want to see the sea? Come down to Volare Views. We can fit you up good.”

  Larry nodded and smiled. “Usually, if I want to see the sea, I go down to the beach. But whatever.”

  Wilbert Fraser clapped his hands for silence. In the stark light of the living-room, Larry could see him clearly for the first time. He had a big fleshy nose, perforated with large pores; a sloped-back forehead, and hair combed straight back in that 1939 style that was universally favored by Poles and Rumanians and Czechs. His skin was age-speckled, the pale color of liverwurst casing, his lips were purplish and thick. But his eyes glittered like the diamonds on his fingers. In spite of his skepticism about seances, Larry felt that he was in the presence of somebody whose knowledge extended beyond reality, beyond things that you could touch and feel and squeeze and clap into handcuffs.

  “I’d like to thank you all for coming tonight,” said Wilbert Fraser, a little breathily. “Particularly those of you who have never been here before; and for whom this meeting will be their first adventure into the hallways of the spirit world.” He turned toward Larry, and nodded, and Larry gave him a small wry smile in return.

  “Unlike other spiritual mediums, I prefer not to use a table,” Wilbert Fraser explained. “I always believe that we should stand facing each other, open and unencumbered. Some of my more successful forays into the spirit world have been carried out when all of my guests were completely nude; but—” seeing the sudden alarm on Margot Tryall’s face “—the way you are all dressed tonight, in your everyday clothes, simple and unpretentious, that’s good, that will suffice.”

  He closed his eyes for a long moment—so long that Larry began to wonder if he had fallen asleep on his feet. But at length he opened them again, and nodded to each of them in turn, and then raised both his hands, palms outwards, and smiled.

  “Don’t you usually hold hands?” asked Larry.

  Wilbert Fraser shook his head. “The mediums who insist that you all hold hands are doing so simply for their own safety. The power of the spiritual world is such that they are unable to control it at full strength—so they suppress it by with the mental and physical resistance of several human bodies linked together. It works in exactly the same way as an electrical resistor.”

  “But you prefer to work with the undiluted stuff, is that it?” Larry put in.

  “Quite right,” said Wilbert Fraser. “For me, there is nothing like dealing with the full, raw energy of the world beyond without any kind of muffling or suppression. You could say that I like to grasp the bare wires of the supernatural. That way, I can give you an experience of the spiritual world that you will never forget—not even when your life is over, and you yourself have joined those spirits in the hallway beyond.”

  “Wilbert, shall we be getting on with it, dear?” Eleonora suggested.

  “Of course,” Wilbert acknowledged. “I was simply trying to explain to your son that tonight I will be able to show him the supernatural with a clarity that no other medium in California can match.”

  “I’ve already told him how good you are, my dear,” Eleonora interrupted.

  “Well, since you have been so complimentary, you should be the one to start our adventure,” Wilbert Fraser smiled. “I suppose you wish to see your husband again?”

  Larry gave his mother a quick, concerned glance. He had realized, of course, that his mother came to Wilbert Fraser in order to get in touch with his father, but it hadn’t occurred to him when he came out tonight that he might actually see his father for himself. The idea of it made the back of his neck turn cold with apprehension, and he could feel his wrists tingling—the same feeling that he had whenever he knew that he was going to see a particularly nasty dead body.

  For some reason, he experienced an instantaneous mental flash of the time that he had forced open the trunk of a bronze Buick Riviera that had been abandoned in the darkest drippiest corner of an underground parking-lot for a month and a half until somebody complained about the stench. The trunk lid had groaned, and then crashed upward, revealing a trunk that was filled with pale green slimy balloons, and two eyes that swam amongst these balloons like lost oysters. The smell had been so bad that Larry had felt as if he were still breathing it and tasting it a week later.

  Eleonora was intent on Wilbert Fraser when Larry first looked at her, but then she turned and smiled at him and caught his look of anxiety.

  “Wilbert, dear, let’s do Margot first, shall we? Larry’s never been to a seance before… it might help him to accept his father more easily if he knows what to expect.”

  “Of course,” Wilbert agreed. “We don’t want anybody upset now, do we?”

  He ushered them all into a circle in the center of the living-room. Before he joined them, he switched off all the lights except for a gloomy fringed standard-lamp in the corner next to the curtains. He gave a quick look around to make sure that the arrangement of the room was satisfactory—then he lifted his hands as before, palms outwards, and all of them did the same. Larry felt like a criminal putting up his hands at the point of a gun, until Wilbert said, “No, Larry, no. You’re not under arrest. You must stretch your hands, push them against the weight of the cosmos.”

  “Push them against the what?” asked Larry.

  “The cosmos, the weight of the world. Here—pretend that you’re a mime, like Marcel Marceau, pushing the palms of his hands against an imaginary sheet of glass. Push, that’s right; until you can feel the cosmos pushing back.”

  To be truthful, Larry couldn’t feel anything pushing back, but he stretched the palms of his hands and pretended to be Marcel Marceau pressing his hands against a window, a
nd that wasn’t especially difficult. He looked at Eleonora and wondered if he ought to smile at her. Maybe there was some kind of special etiquette at seances, like nobody smiled. Margot Tryall sure looked serious; and Dick Volare of Volare Views, Inc., looked as if he had eaten some bad fish for lunch. Not the time or the place for cracking the joke about the clairvoyant who punched his friend for going to bed with his wife next Saturday.

  “Very well,” said Wilbert Fraser. “We will look first for Margot’s father, Mr. Jack Tryall. Margot… would you care to step into the center, so that we can locate him for you?”

  Quivering with pleasure, Margot Tryall stepped forward into the middle of their circle, and they arranged themselves so that they were standing around her at evenly spaced intervals, their hands still raised.

  Wilbert Fraser lifted his eyes to the ceiling, and said, quite conversationally. “I’m looking for somebody who can help me to find Jack Tryall. I have his daughter Margot here with me tonight, and she’s real keen to chat with him some more.”

  This didn’t sound like seance-talk to Larry. He had expected the air to be heavy with incense, and Wilbert Fraser to recite mysterious and ancient litanies which would arouse the dead from their sleep on the other side. Well—even if he hadn’t expected that, he had at least expected something a little more formal, something with a bit of ritual in it. Not this “howdy, anybody home?” kind of stuff. He began to feel increasingly skeptical and increasingly idiotic. He was glad that nobody downtown could see him like this, with his arms up, playing pat-a-cake with the cosmos.

  Wilbert Fraser repeated, “I’m looking for somebody who can help me to find Jack Tryall. Is anybody willing to help?” He sounded as matter-of-fact as if he were calling the gas company on the telephone.

  Larry cleared his throat. Already his arms were starting to creak with the effort of holding them up for so long, and he promised himself that he would never again make prisoners stand for twenty or thirty minutes with their hands in the air.

  He cleared his throat.