The Mirror Thief(39)
He turns to make a snide comment, but the look on Claudio’s face brings him up short. The kid’s expression is so transparent, so supersaturated with longing and awe, that Stanley immediately cracks up laughing. He has to sit down for a minute—next to the hoofprints of Champion, Gene Autry’s trusty horse—to catch his breath.
The 22 makes a brief stop at the white shell of the Hollywood Bowl before climbing the dry hillside and dropping them near the entrance of Universal City Studios. Stanley expects a steady stream of cars from the other direction—showbiz footsoldiers knocking off work—but nothing’s coming in or out of the gates. One look at the guard’s booth convinces him that this is a waste of time, but he and Claudio stroll up anyway.
Excuse me, Stanley says. I’m here to see Adrian Welles.
The guard is a flat-nosed man with deeply lined skin. He marks his place in his Herman Wouk novel with a pencil from behind his ear and looks at Stanley and Claudio. His eyes are blue, sharp, devoid of judgment. Adrian Welles, he says.
That’s right.
I don’t think I know him, the guard says. Where does he keep his office?
He’s editing a movie here. He’s a writer. And a director.
The guard shakes his head slowly. He’s not one of ours, he says. Maybe he hired out one of the cutting rooms?
Maybe so.
Well, the guard says, if you find out what building he’s in, and then you have him phone me and put your name on the cleared list, I can let you through.
Stanley has been trying to figure out what he’ll say if the guard asks if he’s got an appointment, but now it’s clear he isn’t even going to ask that. You can always tell a man who’s been to war, Stanley’s dad used to say, although he never said exactly how to do it. Stanley’s pretty sure this guy has been to war.
I don’t want to make no hassle for nobody, Stanley says. If you just let me and my pal poke around a little, I’m sure we can hunt him down.
The guard gives him a tiny smile. Well, he says, I’m not so sure. I got better than two hundred acres of property over my shoulder. I don’t want to have to come looking for you when you get lost.
Stanley nods, looks down at the concrete. Tiny hairs left by the barber’s electric razor are pricking him around his collar. He looks up again. Listen, he says. I came a long way to see this man. And I’m not going to bullshit you. I know your whole job is to keep people like me out. But I’m giving you my word. If you let us through, we are not gonna be a problem for you. Okay?
The guard’s expression doesn’t change. You know, he says, your friend’s probably going to be punching the clock soon anyway. Maybe you fellas should just meet him someplace for a drink. The guard’s eyes move from Stanley to Claudio, then back. Or a milkshake, he says.
Thank you for your time, Stanley says.
He and Claudio turn and walk. A few hundred yards south along the Hollywood Freeway a road climbs the western edge of Cahuenga Peak; they hike its incline through a eucalyptus glade into a quiet neighborhood of narrow streets and widely spaced houses. One house that backs up on a scrubby rise has three days’ newspapers scattered in its weedy lawn; Stanley crosses the flagstone path and opens its wooden gate.
The backyard is strewn with gnawed tennis balls and dry lumps of dogshit, but there’s no dog. A gap interrupts the picket fence—two boards wide, worn on both sides, tufted with black hair in its rough spots—and Stanley slips through while Claudio vaults over. A short scramble among yucca and needlegrass brings them to a wedge-shaped cliff over a small arroyo, a vantage from which they can watch the sun nestling into the mountains, the Los Angeles River in its concrete channel, and the great oval of the Universal property just below. A chattering swarm of bushtits bursts from a sumac, disappears down the slope. Swallows streak the air, returning to roost along the freeway. Far below, a pale stretch of cyclone fence peeks between sagebrush and liveoak; Stanley sees a spot a quarter-mile northeast where it’s sagging inward. Scanning the streets between the studio’s lots and buildings, he sees nothing moving at all.
They sit for a while, eating bruised apples as the shadows of the mountains creep over them. Then they throw the cores into the arroyo and start their descent.
For another half-hour they hide in the bushes, watching the studio property through the fence until the sky goes deep blue and the streetlamps inside glow. Aside from a single sweep of headlights against a faraway building there are no signs of life. Stanley and Claudio take off their jackets. Stanley puts one inside the other, pulling the sleeves of Claudio’s through the sleeves of his own. Beach sand left over from their first night in town trickles from the pockets, and he thinks for a moment about places he’s been, distances he’s crossed. Then he hands the jackets to Claudio and runs hard at the fence, hitting it square on its leaning post.
Claudio catches his foot, boosts him upwards. The concrete plug at the linepost’s base shifts in the dirt, and Stanley tips forward. When he’s reached the four strands of barbed wire over the toprail, Claudio hands up the jackets; Stanley drapes them over the three lower strands, pulls himself over the topmost, and drops, rolling on the dusty incline. By the time he’s upright and brushing himself off, Claudio is over too, jumping to pluck the jackets from the wire.
They pass a courthouse’s imposing fa?ade—no building behind it—and detour around a paved lakebed, its sides slick with black algae. A breeze blows through Cahuenga Pass, swaying the crowns of trees; the screen of their leaves sieves the light of scattered streetlamps. More fa?ades emerge as Stanley and Claudio head west: thatched jungle huts, a decrepit mining town, a rustic Mexican village. Here and there they find scatterings of cigarette butts, slashes of black graffiti: they’re not the first ones to hop the fence. Headlights wash over them from somewhere in the distance—the double-tap of a slow pulse—and they freeze for a moment before moving on.