The Waning Age Read online

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Also maybe of interest are some articles he’s written on empathy. I sent them to you.”

  I waved a hand. “He gave me that spiel.”

  We were all silent for a moment. “You probably know what I want to do,” I said, “and you probably don’t like the idea, but as far as I can tell it’s the only thing that would work.”

  Cass and Tabby looked at the coffee table and left their eyes there awhile. The coffee table didn’t move, but it seemed to shine a little bit, cheered by the unexpected attention. Joey and I exchanged a glance.

  “We don’t know where Calvino’s father is, Natalia,” Cass said finally, looking up at me.

  Cass and Tabby have very defined views on relationships. Those views are strictly by the book and somewhat unforgiving. In their eyes, the absence of emotion is not an excuse for the absence of commitment. On the contrary, they believe commitment is about making a plan and sticking to it. You can commit to a job without emotion. You can commit to a house. You can commit to any number of things. So commit to a person. That’s what they say, anyhow. Thus their being married and even wearing rings and raising Joey and being our foster parents. Some people make exactly the same set of choices entirely for the government benefits, but I think for Cass and Tabby it’s purely rational conviction. I get it, in the sense that I’m committed to them and to Cal and nothing would ever change that. But I also find the idea of it unimaginable with every adult male I’ve ever met, apart from Joey, and with Joey it’s not like that. So while I understand their lofty view, I also understand why Mom had a couple flings and quickly moved on.

  “I know,” I said. “All I need is for you to tell me everything you know about him and I’ll find him.”

  Cass and Tabby shared a long look, and finally they seemed to reach a decision. “Lila met him at the bookstore,” Tabby said. That was the bookstore on Grand Avenue where Mom had worked since I was four. See? She was very capable of commitment in some areas. “She met up with him a few times and really liked him, but she didn’t want him as a father for you. She said he was ‘too establishment.’” Tabby smiled at the thought. “So she stopped seeing him.”

  That was news to me. Mom had always made it sound like Dylan was a momentary diversion who had turned boring after forty-five minutes. What Cal and I knew about him wouldn’t fill a teacup. Mom had said that he was funny and gentle and had beautiful hands, which was a typical description from her—not the most helpful for tracking him down. I didn’t even know his last name.

  “He was a philosophy professor,” Tabby continued.

  “At Berkeley?”

  Tabby and Cass both nodded.

  “Well, that should make him easy to find.”

  “It should,” Cass said, “but it doesn’t. Lila tried to look him up a few years ago and he was gone. Dylan Hoffman hasn’t been at Berkeley for at least five years.”

  Okay, I thought, but Mom wasn’t motivated by the need to save Cal from lab-rat purgatory. It was a place to start, anyway. I said as much. “I’ll go see what I can find about where he went after Berkeley.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Cass asked. I liked that she was letting me direct the show.

  “Get June to prep the paperwork. Or if she can’t do it, maybe she can recommend someone. Dylan will have to prove paternity and then there’s probably something else he has to do to challenge the adoption claim. I don’t know what that is.”

  Cass nodded. “Okay, yes. I can do that.”

  “I’m not sure if you wanted me to or not, but I called the Landmark and said you’d had an emergency,” Tabby said.

  I took a deep breath. “Yeah. Thanks. Let’s make it a short emergency.”

  * * *

  —

  I insisted that Joey go to work because, like me, he didn’t have any days off to spare. I promised him that I would ask for help when I needed it. I also promised him, with a silent nod, that I would tell him later about the part I hadn’t mentioned to Cass and Tabby. He could sense it was there.

  After they all went back across the hall, I put the unspoken part of my plan into action. I took a quick shower, ate more toast, and dressed respectably. At nine I left the house wearing a gray pantsuit, laced oxfords, and a cartwheel hat trimmed with a canary-yellow ribbon. All my necessities were nicely packed in a straw purse. I took the streetcar into downtown Oakland so I wouldn’t get my suit all sweaty. Near Jack London Square, in a junky shop barely larger than a closet, I bought a nickel-sized decal that I didn’t plan on using. But it gave me a hard-hitting backup plan, and I needed at least one of those. One of Raymond Chandler’s lesser-known gumshoes is an amateur named Walter Gage who makes a detour mid-denouement for a roll of quarters. What for? To hold in his fist when, a few scenes later, he has to punch a guy twice his size. So. The decal was my roll of quarters. From what I’d seen, RealCorp looked more than twice my size.

  With that done, I made my way to the central police station, where the officer at the desk directed me to the police gym, a block down. I had been there a couple times before, so I had no trouble finding it. It’s a nice gym. Law enforcement can afford to live large. With 25 percent of the country’s population in prison, no one is complaining that they don’t do their jobs. I think most people would be happy to see that number become 35. Without the cops, this country would probably be run by Fish. So yeah—they can pretty much have anything they want.

  The Oakland gym is a warehouse with an indoor basketball court, a prodigious assortment of free weights, cardio equipment, a matted area for mixed martial arts, and a boxing ring. I saw Officer Gao right away. He was standing beside the boxing ring, watching a man and a woman throw their gloves at each other like they were swatting at flies. His arms were crossed and he had that familiar look of thunderous disappointment, expressed by the half-millimeter lowering of his eyelids. Fortunately the look was trained on the boxers, not on me. I stood next to him quietly and waited. After a couple minutes he said wearily, “All right. Stop.” The boxers stopped and looked at him, waiting for the consequences. “Take a break, please. A long one.” He turned to pick up his jacket. To me he said, “Peña, how did you hurt your hip?”

  He hadn’t even glanced in my direction yet. I smiled. “Someone with mace in his eyes got in the way of it.”

  Officer Gao pulled on his jacket and looked me in the eye. “Clumsy of him.”

  “Very.”

  “Shall we walk outside?”

  “Sounds good.”

  I followed Officer Gao back out and across the street to a curbside café that seemed an unlikely cop hangout. It had scalloped yellow awnings and window boxes filled with purple pansies. The name was stenciled in white cursive on the picture window: PANSY’S CAKES AND COFFEE. Gao sat down comfortably at one of the white bistro tables. He handed me a handwritten paper menu. “The brioche is excellent,” he advised.

  We ordered two coffees and two brioches from Pansy herself, an aproned, middle-aged woman who patted Gao on the shoulder with an air of faint reproof, like he was a roguish nine-year-old. Then Gao crossed his arms over his chest. “Let’s negotiate,” he said.

  When I first met Gao I thought he was just a typical hard-ass—one of those guys who walks into the room and is immediately measuring his testosterone level against everyone else’s, is immediately eager to put people down for the sake of showing he can. A guy who worships his own strength. It took me a while to realize he’s not like that. He looks like that: only four inches taller than me and roughly twice my weight, he has the strength of a bodybuilder and the agility of a gymnast. Once I saw him disarm a six-foot man using only his left hand up to the elbow. (There was lots of quick jabbing.) Crew cut, thick neck, thin lips, and small ears. He has a cluster of scars on the left side of his jaw shaped like a pigeon’s foot that he’s never explained and I’ve never asked about.


  One time early in our training, Gao had a little wrestling tournament going, and somehow this big bully in our class, Sal, ended up scrabbling with a girl named Libby who was maybe four foot five on her tiptoes. Gao watched them impassively as Sal played pretzel maker, and the rest of us watched Gao, wondering when he was going to stop them. Finally Libby, out of desperation, found an angle and shot her knee into Sal’s undercarriage. Sal let out a high-pitched squeal and curled up on the mat. Libby extracted herself and stood there, looking frazzled and sorry. “She’s not supposed to do that,” Sal howled, when he could speak. “It’s against the rules.”

  “Get up,” Gao barked at him. He waited for Sal to drag himself up to his feet, where he stood next to Libby like a leaning skyscraper. Gao looked around at us to make sure we were all listening. “The rules are not there to be followed blindly. That is not the purpose of them. Blind rule following is for the brainless. I mean really brainless. You have been declared legally incompetent and you have to do what someone else tells you to. All the time. And last I checked, no one here was brainless. So what is the purpose of the rules?” None of us could tell him. “The rules are designed to create parity and fairness.” He watched us. Libby started to look a little better, like maybe she would make it out of this alive. “This fight was not fair. It was entirely correct for Libby to break the rules.”

  Gao doesn’t worship his own strength, and he doesn’t worship the rules, either. He just uses both of them. He’s not like many other cops, and that’s what I was hanging my hat on.

  “Okay, let’s negotiate,” I agreed, because if Gao didn’t want to beat around the bush, I certainly wasn’t going to. “I’m trying to get an address. Tanner Philbrick. The CEO of RealCorp.”

  The coffee and brioches arrived. Gao thanked Pansy and did not move his arms. “Why,” he said.

  I knew this was an invitation to tell the long version, so I described everything from the first letter we’d received about Cal to this morning’s decision to find Dylan Hoffman. Gao didn’t express any phony grief over Cal’s dilemma, but I could see his eyes making silent calculations, and he was clearly displeased with the numbers. “If you’re going to find Hoffman, why do you need Philbrick’s address?” Gao asked.

  “Because I don’t know if I’m going to find Hoffman. And I am not only interested in legal avenues.” I looked Gao straight in the eye. “I will do anything it takes to get Cal out of RealCorp. And I’m figuring ‘anything’ might involve Philbrick, since he’s the one in charge. If I have to hold a knife to his neck to get him to release Cal, I will do it. I’d prefer some other way, but at this point I’m not setting boundaries.” Notice that I said “knife” rather than “gun,” because Gao thinks guns are for idiots. Weapons for weaklings, he calls them.

  Gao considered my explanation. He drank his coffee and ate brioche, and I did the same. The brioche was, in fact, excellent. When he had finished his and was tapping at the crumbs with his fingertips, he spoke up. “All right. But,” he added, before I could make a move to thank him, “there are strings.”

  I waited.

  “I give you Philbrick’s address, and you agree to train with me three times a week.”

  I gave a long, silent, inward groan. “That is a very high price for one address.”

  Gao lifted his shoulder an inch. “That’s what it costs. I’m breaking the law to give you an unlisted address. Three times a week.”

  “Okay. But,” I said very seriously, “I’m in a day-to-day situation here. I don’t know if I’ll be in Oakland tomorrow, let alone next week for a friendly karate match.”

  “I don’t teach karate,” Gao said.

  I sighed. Even though the words had not been spoken, we were veering into familiar territory. “Officer Gao, I am never going to become a cop. Now there’s even less of a chance. I’ll probably be running away to Canada with Cal, if I’m lucky, and we’ll be settling down in some suburban tundra near Manitoba.”

  “I didn’t say you had to become a cop. This is purely for the short term. The situation you have described to me has the potential to be very dangerous, perhaps even fatal—high stakes, people with a lot of power, and a willingness to break every rule on your part. I would be remiss if I let you go into a situation of this kind without trying to train you better, Peña.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that. I had known from the beginning that I would have to agree to his terms anyway. But it was nice to know he was doing it to look out for me. “Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Gao drained his coffee and paid for both of us, which was considerate of him. I didn’t know when I’d be seeing another paycheck. Then we walked back to the central police station, and Gao left me waiting outside while he went in to get the address. He returned with a slip of paper, which he showed me before handing it over. “Philbrick’s details,” he said, pointing to an address in Pacific Heights, “and the time and date of our first training. Tomorrow night at eight thirty. Eat your dinner early—you’ll want your stomach very empty.”

  I took the costly scrap of paper from him and tucked it into my straw purse. “Thanks, Officer Gao. See you tomorrow night.”

  15

  NATALIA

  OCTOBER 12—MORNING

  Before heading across the bridge to track down Philbrick, I took the BART to Berkeley. I probably could have called, but I preferred to be there in person in case something unexpected came up. It did.

  A long block of cheap eats connected the Berkeley BART to the campus entrance, marked by a grove of towering eucalyptus. Beyond the fragrant trees, with their illusory air of dusty repose, I found the sprawling, incomprehensible Humanities building, in which the office layout challenged my slim claim to numeracy. There were too many entrances and not enough signage. Floor two somehow became floor four. Or was it five? Finally I arrived at the philosophy office, not entirely lost but befuddled enough to believe I had earned my way to a straight answer after making it through the labyrinth. I put my purse firmly on the counter to draw the administrative assistant’s attention.

  She didn’t see me. Just like most people, she had an array of screen decals streaming lives, mundane and momentous, to the dozens or hundreds or millions of suckers more interested in watching strangers go about their distant days than in going about their own. They make a low, constant din in every room, and I honestly don’t get the appeal. The tackiest are the Fish streams, with their predictable and apparently irresistible bone-crunching. The admin had one of those, as evidenced by the octopus tattoo around the subject’s left eye. The Fish was standing at a kitchen table, using scissors to cut what looked like a big piece of flayed skin. There was one of a diva in New York who liked to scream at people. Another one I recognized of a prison inmate in Nevada who was battling lung cancer. Not sure how either of those got so popular, but I’m apparently a luddite where streaming is concerned. I didn’t recognize the other three. The admin was glued to the one she had pasted on the bottom left. From where I stood, it looked like the person in question was fixing a leaky faucet. No wonder she was mesmerized.

  “Excuse me,” I said loudly.

  “Yes?” she asked, turning to me with obvious reluctance.

  I’m the only Marlowe knockoff I know, but I’m not the only one who’s had the bright idea to latch on to a character as a way to navigate the world. Lots of us witty people do it. Books and old screen dramas are like disorganized bargain stores where you hunt for an angle: someone memorable, someone to imitate, someone who gives you a usable script. Someone behaving with emotional coherence so that you can follow along, seeming both emotional and coherent without being either. I’ve seen more Elizabeth Bennets in my day than I can count, and the admin assistant was apparently going for one of the downtrodden minor characters at the periphery of an Austen novel. She had pale eyes, hunched shoulders, and hair permed so often it had become wayward and brittle
. Her clothes were fussy and demure at the same time. There was something thin and cheap from the pharmacy working its way through her bloodstream, giving her an expression of permanent disenfranchisement. Sagging eyes. Visible pout. The tip of her nose was sunburnt.

  “I’m trying to locate a professor who used to teach here, Dylan Hoffman, and I’m wondering if you might be able to help me find him. It’s a personal matter of some importance.”

  By the way her eyes softened on “Dylan” and narrowed on “personal,” I got a pretty clear picture of how well she had known Professor Hoffman while he was still at Berkeley. Good thing I was here in person. I hastened to amend my explanation. “It has to do with my brother.”

  This did seem to strike her as less threatening, but she still took a few seconds to come up with anything. Then she stalled. “He hasn’t been back here since he left the department, and that was seven years ago in May.”

  Hm, very precise. No doubt the date was etched in her mind. She still looked wary, and I could see I would need to give her more. “My little brother is in a lot of trouble,” I said, “and I think Professor Hoffman might be the only one who can help him.”

  It’s tough to play on people’s sympathies when they don’t have any, but with the right kind of person, you can still play on what they think their sympathies ought to be. That is, you can press on their ideas of right and wrong, if they’ve learned them by the book and decided to follow them.

  The admin assistant had. She sighed. “It was very unfortunate,” she said. “Dylan—Professor Hoffman—was a very popular professor.”

  Uh-huh. I had already figured that out.

  “But he had an experience in his final years here . . .” She trailed off and looked out the window. There were some dry leaves there on the branch of one of the eucalyptus trees, and she studied them hard. “He had what he called an awakening.”