City of Ghosts (A Miranda Corbie Mystery) (6 page)

Rick arrived fifteen minutes late, breathless, hat and tie askew, mustard on his display handkerchief. Starch in his back when he walked up to the table, jaw squared and stoic, handshake stiff and abrupt.

“Inspector. Good to see you again.”

Gonzales wiped his mustache with the dinner napkin, eyes glistening. “You too, Mr. Sanders.”

Rick pulled a chair out and sat down, and Jorge appeared like a genie in a bottle, smiling as if he knew a secret.

“Drink, sir?”

“Bourbon and water. And the usual, Jorge … Miss Corbie and I will have to leave soon.”

The waiter nodded, eyes flickering over Gonzales, who flushed, looking back and forth between Miranda and Rick.

“You did not tell me you had an appointment, Miranda.”

She glanced at Rick, whose jaw muscles popped in and out while he studied his nails.

“I told you I’m working, Mark, and this is work. Rick’s taking me to the Picasso exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Art.”

The Inspector raised his eyebrows, swallowed another portion of wine.

“I know something of Picasso. My family purchased several of his drawings at a Mexico City gallery.”

She asked quickly: “Which one?”

“I believe it was the Count Lestang Gallery. It was several years ago.”

He turned to Rick, glancing down at the mustard stain.

“I did not take you for a fan of modern art, Mr. Sanders.”

Rick’s blue eyes bored into Gonzales’s brown ones. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

Jorge and the new waiter arrived with a highball glass and steak and spinach for Rick. The reporter tucked his napkin in his collar and draped it over his tie. Picked up the knife and fork, and said, aiming at Gonzales: “You mind my digging in? Missed lunch today, and I’m as hungry as a mama wolf with a litter of pups.”

Miranda plucked a Chesterfield out of the cigarette case.

“I’d like another Blue Fog. We have time, Rick?”

The reporter nodded, mouth full. Gonzales stretched across the table with his gold lighter, flame flickering. She lightly held his hand and took a deep drag on the cigarette.

Gonzales looked around the room and raised a hand. The waiter Miranda didn’t know threaded his way past tables and palms and a middle-aged woman drowning in mink and black crepe.

“The lady would like another cocktail. Or would you like to try my wine, Miranda?”

She looked from Rick, bent over his plate and furiously eating, to Gonzales and his unfocused eyes. Gulped the cigarette until she could feel her lungs warm up with smoke.

She told the waiter: “Go ahead and bring another wineglass.”

The inspector smiled, leaned back, arm draped behind his chair. Rick looked up and swallowed.

“You look swell, Randy. Sorry I didn’t mention it before.”

She winced at the old nickname. “Thanks, Rick.”

The waiter brought another wineglass, and Gonzales poured, pushing it toward her with a smile.

“Drink, Miranda. You will like it. It is not as good as what the Mark Hopkins serves, of course.”

Rick raised his fork. “Not as expensive, either, Inspector. Personally, I think Joe runs a pretty classy joint.”

Miranda held the wineglass in her hand and raised it to her lips. Gonzales turned to Rick, a slight sneer stretching his perfectly proportioned face.

“I do not think you would recognize a well-cooked steak, let alone the right wine, Mr. Sanders.”

The Burgundy hit Gonzales and dripped from his chin, mouth hung open, eyes shocked and stinging, red tears on his cheek. Gasps at nearby tables, several middle-aged women trying to peer through thick glasses for a more focused view.

Rick set the fork and knife down, looking back and forth between Miranda and the Inspector. Gonzales fumbled for a napkin, started to wipe his eyes and mouth. Red drops clung to the white of his ruffled tuxedo and dripped down the black satin lapel.

“You’re drunk or I’d have thrown the glass. Don’t kid yourself, Gonzales. You don’t want to get to know me. You want to change me. You don’t like my license, don’t like that I eat at the Club Moderne, don’t like my friends. You think you can control and own me, change me to what you want me to be. Not want me for who I am.”

She stood up, face white. Clark and Jorge hurried from the back of the room.

“Put everything on my tab, Jorge. I’ll settle up tomorrow.”

The waiter looked around the table, eyes big, and disappeared quietly.

Rick was out of his chair, body tense, posture unsure. Gonzales calmly wiped wine from his tuxedo.

Her voice was low and cutting. “I was hoping we could be friends. But you’re just another client, Gonzales. Just another fucking client.”

Miranda shoved her chair in hard, the empty wineglass on the table shaking. She strode across the dance floor and climbed the short stairway between the false marble columns, not once looking back.

Five

Rick found her on the corner of Sutter and Mason, braced against the brick wall of an apartment building, looking up the hill toward her apartment. Her left arm hugged her stomach. She was finishing off the Chesterfield Gonzales had lit for her.

The crowd waiting at the Moderne pushed against the red velvet ropes, still gawking at the woman in green who’d run through the chromium doors.

Rick’s broken-down fedora was in his hands, along with Miranda’s velveteen coat. He slapped the hat on his head and pulled her away from the wall, draping the coat around her shoulders.

“It’s foggy as hell out here. You’re goddamn well going to catch pneumonia if you’re not more careful.”

College boys in a depot hack drove by, necks craning out between the pillars of the wooden framework. One let out a wolf whistle. Rick left a hand on her shoulder, walked around to face her.

“Gonzales was obviously tight. I wouldn’t have slugged him. Probably not, anyway. Miranda … Miranda, look at me.”

She tilted her head up, blew a stream of smoke from the corner of her mouth.

“You ready to go to the Picasso show?”

He took off his hat and ran fingers through his dark brown hair, thick strands separating, a few falling in his face. Frustration made his voice scratchy.

“Jesus Christ, Miranda, you can’t just pick up and leave and not talk about this. What the hell happened in there? I mean, I appreciate you defending my honor and ability to choose a good Porterhouse and all that, but I thought—I thought you liked the guy. What happened?”

She dropped the cigarette stub, stamped it out three times. Looked down at her feet and the new open-toed pumps she’d had dyed to match the gown.

“I wasn’t just defending you. He asked me to marry him.”

Rick’s eyebrows climbed into his hairline.

“He what?”

“You heard me.”

He stood staring down at her, breathing hard, then grabbed her by both shoulders, hands rough and voice sharp.

“And you said what?”

Miranda shook him off angrily. “What the fuck do you think I said, Sanders? He’s not in love with me. He doesn’t even know me. It’s ten to nine, let’s get to the Picasso show. And tell me your idea about my mother.”

His eyes roamed hers, blue against brown, and he took her by the shoulders again in a tight grip.

“Goddamn it, Miranda…”

He kissed her. Hard and deep and angry, and she caught her breath at the fury in it, surprised, relenting, until she realized what was happening and brought up her arms as hard as she could, shoving him away. The sound of applause rippled through the waiting crowd at the Moderne, along with shouts and a few jeers.

His lips were smeared with Red Dice lipstick, eyes burning, jaw set.

She wiped her mouth with her hand, out of breath, voice shaking. Legs shaking.

“I’ll forgive you for that, Sanders, as long as you forget it. But if you ever try to treat me like a piece of meat again, I’ll break your fucking arm.”

Rick swallowed a few times, eyes on her face.

“Guess I was overcome by your perfume. They ought to put a warning label on that stuff.”

She straightened her coat and buttoned it. Tried to sound casual.

“Bought the last bottle of Vol de Nuit at the City of Paris. No more French perfume until it’s really French again.”

He gave her a crooked smile, wiping his mouth with his dirty display handkerchief.

“Maybe that’s a good thing.”

She held his eyes for a few seconds, then turned and nodded toward Market Street.

“Let’s catch a cab to the Picasso exhibit.”

*   *   *

Academics and socialites trickled in by the score, fashionably late to the fashionable show, cabs and chauffeurs pulling up to the Veterans Building, twin to the War Memorial Opera House across the landscaped Memorial Court.

San Francisco, the city that rose from the dead to shimmer like a pearl at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, just nine short years after the Quake and Fire nearly killed her. Rebuild her for the opera lovers and aging Russian ballerinas, rebuild her for the symphony creaking by with Mendelssohn, rebuild her for the arts. Make her look like Paris, the Paris of the West.

Then the Great War, inconvenient interlude for the fund-raising class. But once it was over, the War to End All Wars, they named one of the buildings for veterans, Green Room lounge on the second floor, boys who were no longer boys but only half men able to meet, to congregate, to talk, a temple to memory.

A temple to sacrifice.

Miranda craned her neck, looking up at lights on the top of the roof, shining gold on the stout fluted columns.

Rick took her by the arm. “Let’s go inside.”

The large formal and dimly lit gallery was crowded with the well-to-do and curious, intellectuals and Sausalito painters of ocean scenes, with a sprinkling of the anemic breed of lunch club ladies who thought all art began and ended with Raphael. Chatter and clatter of heels on marble, Blue Book hostesses and quiet art students, gimlet-eyed dealers frantically estimating, and once in a while a hush amid the glittering conversations before they renewed themselves, words upon words, rushing to fill the vacuum.

“Blue Period, clearly” and “Can you really see a mandolin?” “I prefer Rivera, myself, and you can see him paint in person at the Fair…,” fragmentary conversation floating past, as Rick headed toward
The Red Guitar
to scribble notes and find a curator, and Miranda scanned the walls. She was hunting a man and a painting. Neither one was there.

Her gloved hands unclenched. The painting she’d been afraid to see wasn’t part of the new retrospective. No need to brace herself, to try to pull away from
Guernica.

She’d waited in line patiently last year, August 27th, 1939, a foggy Sunday, day off from Sally’s and in between the divorce cases that were coming her way. She’d eaten at the St. Francis in the morning, wanting good coffee in her stomach, a full breakfast of hotcakes, eggs, and ham. She remembered the old lady with crinkled white hair on the number 5 White Front that morning, the
click-clack-click
of knitting needles, pink woolen blanket for a grandchild.

Funny thing to remember.

Picasso intended the painting to raise money for Spanish refugees, homeless, like the canvas itself, and so it too traveled America on rails of steel, hobo, vagabond, celebrated protest of a new kind of war.

DAR dowagers in old beaver coats and young earnest bluestockings from art history seminars stood on the Veterans Building steps and hawked pamphlets for the “Sanity in Art” organization, pressing them eagerly into receptive hands, protesting Communist propaganda and the degradation of good taste.

“Fight Foreign Influence and Modern Art” the pamphlets exhorted, DAR lady nodding a feathered hat vociferously at the message, why I know good art when I see it, Mildred, my dear father painted ships at the Golden Gate. This Picasso fellow can’t even draw. Keep American art American I say, these so-called artists are just degenerates, them and their ugly, foreign propaganda …

While Franco and the Fascists marched through what was left of Spain, the painting wandered through San Francisco and Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. It played the sad song of the
alboka
and told the story of a small Basque village, about what happened to the women and children, the cows and horses, what happened to life on April 26th, 1937.

Broad brushstrokes. Oil and canvas, mind and deft fingers, passion and prayer and eyes of a Spanish artist. Bold, savage lines, black with the shadows of Junkers, gray with painted screams.

Town and canvas, herald and victim.

More real than Hemingway’s dispatches. More real than film.

Guernica.

The dowager-critics sniffed, thinking of Grandpapa’s
Et in Arcadia ego
landscape in the attic, while Stanford art professors stroked their beards and mumbled, wondering if Picasso had lost his way. A veteran from the Green Room hobbled down the marble steps, clawed hand clutching the ornate wrought iron of the staircase. He stood rooted before the painting, staring, before stumbling away, back to the light of the Memorial Court.

Miranda didn’t know how long she’d been there or when she arrived. All she could hear were the planes. Low, throbbing buzz and whine and deep, deep rumble and thunder, primal bass rising up from her feet to her gut, shaking her, shaking the earth.

A little girl in shock, blood on the dirty dress between her legs. Eyes vacant, half-empty bag of beans clutched in her arms.

Woman in black and white, smeared with yellow and red, rosary clutched in rough, soiled hands, she touches the girl on the shoulder, ushers her in the dark, ancient cathedral, gaping hole in the roof, candelabras long gone.

Shattered wine bottle. Bloated, dead bull, flies buzzing.

Johnny’s face.

The guard on duty that day touched her arm. Her hands were as wet as her cheeks. He looked at her and tried to understand. She never went back.

Five days later, the Nazis invaded Poland.

*   *   *

The current retrospective included a few of the preliminary drawings for
Guernica
along one section of a wall, and Miranda resolutely stood with her back to them, focusing on her search for Jasper. Anyone in San Francisco who professed a knowledge of contemporary art was already here or due to arrive, and given his predilections, she expected him to make a showing.