A Bar Behind

The car came along Stetson Drive at a quarter to one with a crack across the whole of its windscreen from one corner to the other, like a river on a map, and pulled in at the kerb outside DJ’s, where Kimura was standing, and Castellanos got out.

He was in a short-sleeved shirt with a pattern on it. Kimura had worked beside him for two years and had never seen him in a pattern. It was blue, with small brown birds.

“Sergeant,” he said.

“Inspector.”

“Where are we?”

“A bar behind,” said Kimura. “We’ve been a bar behind since eight o’clock.” She looked at the windscreen. “What happened to your car?”

“A stone. On the Ten. At Picacho. In March.” He shut the door. “I keep meaning to.”

“It’s very bad.”

“I can see through the left half.” He looked up Stetson Drive at the people on the pavements, in the heat, under the lamps, going in and out of doors with music behind them. “Tell me the rest.”

He had had the first part on the telephone at a quarter to eleven, in a car park in Ahwatukee. She told him the rest the way she had told it to herself every half hour since, in order, without adjectives, the way he had taught her to tell things in a car at the side of a road.

Ahwatukee, empty. Five bottles on a bench in front of a mattress shop, in a row, with their caps on. Back over the mountain, with nothing to go on, and every bar on Scottsdale Road one after another, with the King’s photograph on her phone and her fringe in her eyes. Boondocks, at a quarter past twelve, where they had been, and gone, and where a man in a baseball cap was still talking about a German boy who had beaten him at cornhole without saying a word, and where the man on the door, with a roll of orange wristbands on his wrist, had looked at the photograph on her phone and said, before she had asked him anything, was that, and she had said no. And DJ’s, a few doors along, at forty-one minutes past twelve.

“I missed them by a minute at DJ’s,” said Kimura. “One minute. The barman said five lads, just gone, the tall one had a lemonade. I heard the side door.”

“Anything else?”

“The television was on. The water works, again.” She looked at the street. “He looked at the television, and at the side door, and at me. And he said, was that.”

“And you said.”

“No.”

Castellanos nodded.

“You didn’t go after them.”

“I went out the front.” She looked at the street. “They went out the side.”

Castellanos nodded. He did not say anything. He did not need to. She had been on the detail two years and had learned in the first month that the side door was the thing you lost people through, and she had gone out the front anyway, because she had been running for five hours and her legs had made the decision before her head.

“And Kessler,” he said.

“Still behind them. Still in his car with the lights off. Still not answering.” She looked at Castellanos. “He’s never once reported. Not to me. Not to Berlin. When I rang him at ten he said the Emperor was asleep, in a voice I’d have believed if I hadn’t stood in the suite myself. He’s very good.”

“He is very good,” said Castellanos. “I trained with him once. In Bonn. For a week. He doesn’t drink, and he doesn’t lie, and he doesn’t speak.” He thought about it. “Except tonight. When he’s lying.”

“Because the Emperor asked him.”

“Then he’s not lying,” said Castellanos. “He’s on duty.”

---

They drove.

She left her own car where it was and got into his, and he drove, with his head on one side to see through the left half of the windscreen, at a walking pace, along every street in Old Town that had a bar on it, which was all of them, and she got out at every door.

Old Town at one in the morning on a Tuesday in August was not what she had expected. She had expected a town asleep in the heat. It was the opposite. Every door was open and every patio was full, and the pavements were full between them, and the road was full between the pavements, of people who had come out of one bar and not yet gone into the next and were standing in the heat in groups talking very loudly about what had just happened to them, which was, Kimura discovered, going from door to door with Castellanos crawling along the kerb behind her, a great deal.

At every door she asked the same thing, and at every door somebody in a black T-shirt with a torch looked at the King’s photograph on her phone and said no, sorry, and then looked again, and said huh, and then said no, sorry again, more slowly.

At twenty-seven minutes past one, on a corner, she stopped, because a girl in a cowboy hat was saying to another girl in a cowboy hat:

”… and he kissed it. He kissed the hitching rail. And then he cried.”

Kimura turned round.

“Who did?”

The girl looked at her. At a woman of about thirty in a dark jacket in ninety-two degrees with a short black fringe and a face that had not been surprised by anything since half past seven.

“Some kid,” said the girl. “Back there. By the corner. He had a watch on his chest. Upside down. He kissed the hitching rail and said the Travellers’ Act and cried.”

“How long ago?”

“I don’t know. Five minutes?” The girl looked at her friend. “There were five of them. One of them was really tall. One of them stood in the middle of the road and wouldn’t move.”

“And then they went,” said the friend. “That way.” She pointed. Then she changed her mind and pointed the other way. “Or that way. Everybody went every way.”

“Which way did they come from?”

Both girls pointed, together, and for once the same way: back towards Indian School Road.

“From the old place,” said the friend. “The Christmas one.”

“Thank you,” said Kimura, and got back into the car.

“Hartigan,” said Castellanos.

“With a watch on his chest.”

“Upside down.” Castellanos was quiet for a few yards. “His mother wears one of those. On the ward.”

“I know.”

“The King gave it to him.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know that,” said Castellanos, and turned the car towards Indian School Road.

“They’re five minutes away,” said Kimura. “On foot. In that.” She looked at the crowd. “And I don’t know which way.”

“No.”

“So we go where they came from.” She said it to the windscreen, to the crack in it. “You don’t find out where people are going by guessing. You find out from the last place they were, because that’s where they were deciding.”

“Who taught you that?”

“You did,” said Kimura. “In Santa Monica.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You said it to a pier,” said Kimura.

---

They went into Coach House at twenty-nine minutes past one.

It was small and low and full and cold, and loud the way bars are loud at that hour, and the woman of about forty working along the tables with a tray and a cloth had her hair tied up and her sleeves pushed back and the look of somebody who could do six things at once and was doing seven.

“I’m looking for some friends,” said Kimura. “Five young men. One very tall and fair. One with a watch.”

The woman stopped with her tray.

“The birthday boy,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Oh, they were lovely.” The woman put the tray down on a table. “He made a speech. The birthday boy. Stood up and made a speech. To the alphabet.” She shook her head. “Half the bar drank to it. I don’t know why. I drank to it. I had water.”

“When did they go?”

“Ten minutes? Quarter of an hour.” The woman picked up a glass from the corner table, a pint glass, empty, and under it, flat on the wood, was a receipt. She picked it up and looked at it and held it out. “They left this. The English one paid. On a card. The tall one tried to pay in coins and the English one wouldn’t let him. They had a whole argument about it at the bar without saying anything.”

Then she stopped, with the receipt still held out, and looked at it, and at Kimura.

“The birthday boy said Hanover,” she said slowly. “In the speech. Hanover, Hartigan. I’ve been thinking about it for ten minutes.” She looked at the door. “Was that…”

“No,” said Kimura.

The woman looked at her a moment longer. Then she smiled, the way you smile at a table that has asked for the bill, and said, “No. Course not,” and picked up her tray.

Kimura took the receipt.

On the front of it was the tab. 2 DRAUGHT. 1 DRAUGHT. 6 LEMONADE. The time, 1:14. The total. Paid, card.

Six lemonades.

She looked at it for a long moment.

“He hasn’t had a drink,” said Castellanos, quietly, reading it over her shoulder.

“He can’t. He hasn’t got ID.”

“Nobody ever made him any,” said Castellanos.

“Nobody ever made him any,” said Kimura, and felt something in her chest, very small, let go, that had been held since twenty to eight, and that she had not known was there. Six hours. Four bars. Three buses. And he had not had a drink. He had been sober all night, with two boys round him who had been drinking since eight and two who were seventeen, in the heat, in the dark, at half past one in the morning, with nobody standing at the edge of the room.

Which meant somebody had been.

“He’s been looking after them,” she said.

“Yes,” said Castellanos.

“The whole night.”

“Yes.” Castellanos looked at the receipt. “Turn it over.”

She turned it over.

On the back, in biro, in big square capitals, somebody had written a list.

BOONDOCKS? (REMATCH)

And under it, the word BOONDOCKS underlined twice, hard, so hard the pen had nearly gone through.

And under that, in the same big square capitals, not underlined at all:

GILIGIN’S (TILL 3)

Kimura looked at it.

“Boondocks,” she said. “Underlined twice.”

“That’s Hartigan’s writing,” said Castellanos. “The capitals. He writes everything in capitals. He did his homework in capitals for three years in the back of my car.” He looked at the receipt. “The underlining isn’t his.”

“Whose is it?”

“Somebody who presses very hard,” said Castellanos, “and doesn’t say much.”

Kimura looked at the two lines. Boondocks, with a question mark and a rematch and two lines under it, pressed nearly through the paper. Giligin’s, with nothing.

“Underlined twice,” she said. “That’s a decision. You don’t underline something twice and then not go.” She looked at him. “They’ve gone back to Boondocks. For the rematch. The cornhole. The German.”

Castellanos looked at the receipt for a long moment. He looked at it with his face doing nothing at all, the way he had looked at things on Ocean Avenue, and at the bottom of six stone steps in Soho, and at a great many ceilings.

Then he looked at her.

“You’re in charge, Sergeant,” he said.

“I know I’m in charge.”

“Then it’s your call.”

She heard it. She heard exactly what was in it, and what was not, and she knew that he had seen something on the receipt that she had not, and was not going to tell her, because it was not his detail any more, and had not been since June, and he had been very careful since a quarter to one to stand where he was told and not one inch to the left of it.

She looked at the receipt again. Boondocks, underlined twice. She was tired. She had been running since twenty to eight.

“Boondocks,” said Kimura.

“Yes, Sergeant,” said Castellanos.

---

They went out of Coach House into the heat, onto Indian School Road, where the pavements were as full as ever, and got into the car with the crack across its windscreen like a river on a map, Castellanos driving, with his head on one side to see through the left half.

Kimura put the receipt in the breast pocket of her jacket and kept her hand on it.

“How far?” she said.

“Five minutes. Ten in this.” He started the car. “I’ll go round the back.”

“Then go round the back.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

He went round the back, through the old part of the town, past dark windows and shut shops and the last of the people on the pavements, where the streets were narrower and quieter and the noise of Old Town came from a block away, like the sea.

At one corner the car slowed, by a fraction, for no reason she could see. She looked up from the receipt. Castellanos had his head turned, very slightly, towards a short lane of low buildings off to one side, where most of the windows were dark and one door was open, with yellow light coming out of it and music, and a sound like something wooden going round and round and slowing down and clicking, and then a cheer.

The lane was empty. There was nobody on it at all.

Then the car was past it, and his head was straight, and he was looking at the road through the left half of the windscreen with his face doing nothing at all.

“What?” said Kimura.

“Nothing, Sergeant,” said Castellanos, and drove on, a bar behind, and getting further.