"The Subterranean Man"
Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from my novel The Subterranean Man, available here. It's about a man named Niko, who's a fixer that started his career by solving problems for Los Angeles' organized crime elements and now works for a higher-class clientele. The rules are still the same, though. If you want to hire him, you get a phone number and nothing more. Once he's done with the job, you never see him again.
His newest case threatens to destroy this carefully constructed life. A famous actress has hired him to recover a sculpture she thinks her son has stolen from her. At the same time, Niko has found himself in possession of a $10 million dollar painting from an art-forgery heist gone bad. Now the cops are after him from one side, a European mafia boss is coming at him from the other, and young women all over the city are disappearing in incidents that seem to be related to his cases. And the further he's drawn into the mystery, the more Niko realizes that survival is going to mean encountering things no one ever should.
The Subterranean Man is a hardboiled L.A. noir that explores celebrity, wealth, the degradation that can attend them, and the biggest question of all: What happens when finding the answer to a mystery means facing your own destruction?
Chapter One
Niko stood on the corner half a block from his bungalow, scratching the cheek of a black and white cat. In front of a one-screen theater to his right a line of people was forming for a midnight showing of The Road Warrior. It was a cool, windless night. Above him in a palm a mockingbird sang three repetitive notes. High, high, low. High, high, low. He gave the cat a last scratch and went across the street and along past the brick wall under the high small blue neon sign of the Scientology complex, turned again and followed another of the complex's brick walls to Sunset, which he crossed when the traffic broke. He walked slowly back up toward the theater, scanning the streets that came into view at this odd intersection: Sunset Boulevard, Sunset Drive, Hollywood Boulevard, Hillhurst, Virgil. At the corner where they converged he lounged against the wall of the used clothing store for fifteen or twenty minutes, finger trailing across the screen of a burner cell phone, watching a doorway half a block up Hillhurst with a sign over it that read "GOOD." People went in and came out. Nothing caught his eye. He crossed Sunset with the light. The people in line at the theater were in high spirits. Some were dressed in apocalyptic black leather like the insane marauders of the film. Niko went into the doorway under the sign, nodding at the bouncer as he passed.
Behind the small room with the bar was another, also small, with low furniture. Both rooms were crowded with young attractive people eying each other hungrily. Everything was lit red. In the back room sat a man in a suit behind an untouched tropical cocktail.
"You're the guy?" the man asked when Niko sat down.
Niko said: "I'm the guy."
A girl at a nearby table said: "It's so incredibly hard to be an actor. I don't think that, like, critics understand this. They just say good or bad. But audiences totally get it, you know? They connect."
Niko and the man across from him spoke quietly, under the flow of this and other conversations, inaudible to anyone else in the room.
"Marty Brenham said you conducted a piece of business for him," said the man, "that could have been embarrassing. He said you are very quiet, and very clean."
Niko said nothing. He made the man as ex-military: fit in a lethal way, straight hard features, high and tight haircut, firmly tanned, an athlete's understanding of instructions and goals and spontaneity. The man smiled icily.
"So tell me something about you."
"That's not how it works. I know you know this, because I know you've been told it. You ask me to do a job, pay me a day rate. If I complete the job successfully, you pay me a full fee. Both transactions are conducted in cash. No small talk, no interview, no get to know you."
The man's smile was so unmoving that for a moment he looked like a still shot of an actor, frozen in the red dimness. The boy across from the girl at the nearby table said: "Audiences are just so much more sophisticated than they used to be."
The man said: "All this secrecy because you don't have a license as a P.I."
Niko waited.
"Or because you're a felon. Or because you're on some agency's wanted list, or in trouble with some organized crime group. Or all of the above."
Niko waited.
"Marty Brenham said you'd done your business without either the insurance company or the cops realizing what was-"
"Tell me what the job is," interrupted Niko, the patience drifting out of him, "and I'll tell you if I can do it."
The smile left the man's face. He leaned forward, pointed at Niko. "I don't need your cagey super-spy bullshit. If you want the job, tell me why you think you're qualified. If you don't-"
Niko said: "I don't."
He stood and started back through the crowd.
So much for that, he thought. The man reminded him of other men he'd worked for a long time ago, when he was too young to know better. A blond girl stepped in front of him. She was attractive and had the kind of magnetism that Niko had seen in so many of the women who ended up in this city, a thing granted to them by a higher power, or perhaps simply by luck, so natural that it could not be feigned and yet so forceful and sexual that you can hardly believe it was not learned at some secret school somewhere. She was also quite drunk. She put her hand on the lapel of his jacket.
"You must know Megan," she said, her voice giving that little kick at the end that indicates someone significant has been named.
"Megan's my favorite."
She nodded at the man in the suit at the table Niko had just left, who was watching them. "I saw you with her boy there, and I figured you must be doing a deal with her."
"Yeah, you're right. It's a major...well, it hasn't been announced yet. But we're looking for talent. You're an actor, right?"
She smiled and brushed her hair back. "And a writer."
Niko returned the smile.
"Go hit up my man. You never know what can happen in this town."
She looked at him, that warmth in her eyes beginning to fade. She wanted to believe him. But then she knew better. "You're full of shit," she said, "you know that?"
"Yeah. I do know that."
This made her smile and her mood swung again. She said something else in a flirtatious tone, but he didn't catch it. Over her shoulder and he had seen someone watching him, surreptitiously. The man was small and hard and on the clock. He was looking away now. A degree too studiously. Niko looked at the man he'd come here to meet. He was still sitting at the table, still staring. It was impossible to tell if he was aware of the one at the bar.
"What?" asked the girl.
"Nothing," said Niko. "Take care of yourself. It's a tough town."
"It's a fucking awful town. You take care of yourself."
Niko walked out past the bouncer on his stool and turned in the opposite direction from the theater. Two women had come out to smoke cigarettes. They were dressed younger than they were. The shorter one had been crying and the taller one looked worried but like she was determined to make her friend have a good time.
"At some point, you just have to get used to the fact that men, not some of them, but all of them-" the taller one was saying when Niko asked her if he could bum a cigarette. She gave it with a glare. He stood smoking. From this side, the sign over the door said "LUCK." The small hard man had come out of the bar and was standing under the sign, looking at his phone.
He didn't look at Niko. But he didn’t go anywhere either.
Niko walked north up Hillhurst, tossing the cigarette away. The ground rose steadily toward the park and he passed the rental car place and the auto repair shops and moved into the stretch where there were more restaurants and bars. He waited for the light at the corner of Finley, the traffic rolling past. The man was not following him, or was not visible, but Niko knew he had not been wrong.
He walked west on Finley. He thought these blocks were some of the most beautiful in the city, with their fantastically tall palm trees bent gracefully to the south by the winds that beat down off the desert and over the hills. The moon slid by the trunks of the palms. He passed a homeless woman in full makeup pushing a neatly organized shopping cart.
"Hello, Vera," he said. She was too stoned to acknowledge him.
At the corner of Vermont stood the Sikh temple with its ornate white and gold facing and several more blocks down Finley was an apartment building in the Hollywood style, a two story horseshoe with an iron gate at the front. Niko pulled out his ring of keys, found the right one. As he did, the car that had been tailing him for the last block stopped and a man got out. Not the small man from the bar; most likely a man that the small man had put onto him.
But definitely police.