Flashback

“If you and your grandson can go, you should go… soon,” whispered Emilio. He took a business card and a beautiful fountain pen from his pocket and wrote something on the card in Spanish and handed it across the table. Leonard could see that the card showed only Emilio’s name and an address about two miles east of Echo Park—he’d never asked Emilio where he lived—and a brief handwritten sentence telling anyone who read the note to allow this man to pass, that he was a friend, and to convey him to the address on the card. The signature was Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa.

“But how?” asked Leonard, folding the card carefully and setting it in his billfold. “How?”

“There are the convoys, both the eighteen-wheeler truck convoys that sometimes carry paying passengers and the groups of motorists who band together.”

“I don’t own a car.” Leonard was feeling the kind of vertigo that he’d always thought must assail a man just before a stroke or massive coronary. The heat of the September sun was suddenly too much to bear.

“I know.”

“The checkpoints and roadblocks…”

“Come see me at that address when you are certain that the two of you are leaving,” Emilio said in Castilian Spanish. “Something may be arranged.”

Leonard set his hands flat on the concrete chess table and stared at the liver spots and raised veins, at the knuckles swollen with arthritis. Were these his hands? How could they be?

“Do you remember what the Roman legionnaire Flaminius Rufus said about the City of the Immortals in Borges’s story ‘The Immortal’?” Emilio asked, speaking in English again.

“Flaminius Rufus? I… no. I mean, yes, I remember the story, but I don’t… no.”

“Borges had his legionnaire say that the city is ‘so horrible that its mere existence… contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars.’ ”

Leonard stared at the older man. He had no idea what Emilio was talking about.

“That is how the Nuevo Mexico reconquista warriors view the remaining gringo and Asian parts of Los Angeles, my friend,” said Emilio. “There will be much blood shed. And soon. And if your grandson had anything to do with the rape of Maria Hernandez, he will not live long enough even to see the shedding of this blood throughout the City of Angels. Get out if you can, Leonard. Take your grandson. Go.”

1.04 Denver—Saturday, Sept. 11

You going to sit out there drinking beer and looking at the stars all night or come in to bed?”

Dara’s voice drifts out through the screen door to the tiny veranda where Nick sits looking up through the gaps in the old Siberian elms toward the tiny patch of visible late-summer sky. The night is rich with insect sounds, TV and stereo noises from the surrounding houses, and the occasional scream of sirens from distant Colfax Avenue.

“Third choice,” says Nick. “You come out and sit on my lap while I teach you some of the constellations.”

“I’m too fat to sit on anyone’s lap,” says Dara but she comes out through the squeaky screen door.

She is fat… for Dara… late in her eighth month of pregnancy and showing it. She’s carrying another can of Coors but hands it to Nick. She’s been very careful during her pregnancy.

Nick pats his lap but she kisses him on the forehead and sits in the old metal lawn chair next to him. She looks up and says softly, “I don’t see many stars, much less any constellations.”

“You have to let your eyes adapt to the dark awhile, kiddo.”

“Not very dark here with all the city lights, is it? Wouldn’t you like to live in the country—the mountains somewhere—where the stars are clear and so you could buy that astronomical telescope you’ve been ogling in your catalogue?”

“We’d go nuts in the country,” says Nick, pulling the tab off the cold beer and setting the tab next to him on the chair rather than dropping it in the dark. He’s proud of how neat their little backyard and veranda are. “Besides, city cops have to live in the city. It’s the law.” He sips and says, “But yes, I’d love to have a telescope and the dark skies of some high valley, say up by Estes Park. There’s always the glow from the Front Range, but surrounding peaks or high foothills to the east could block out a lot of that.”

“Maybe Santa Claus will remember you want a telescope,” Dara says. She’s still looking at the sky. A police helicopter is tacking back and forth over the rooftops.

Nick shakes his head adamantly. “No. Too expensive. There are a hundred things we can use that amount of money for that are more important… if I get the overtime this fall to earn the money.”

“You will,” Dara says sadly. He knows she hates it when he works weekends and late nights, even though the union-earned overtime pay is so important to them. But this weekend—it’s Friday night—this weekend Nick is free and will spend it with her.