Shining City Read online

  Shining City

  A Novel

  Seth Greenland

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgments

  By the same Author

  A note on the Author

  Praise for Shining City

  Imprint

  Once again, to Susan

  “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.

  The eyes of all people are upon us.”

  —John Winthrop

  Prologue

  Julian Ripps was too fat to be reclining in a hot tub between a pair of naked women, unless he was rich or they were prostitutes. He wasn’t, but they were. And they worked for him, so it was an office party, only with group sex. The three revelers had just performed an aquatic Kama Sutra in Julian’s hilltop backyard and now were resting underneath a canopy of stars. It was a warm September night, and the San Fernando Valley sprawled in the distance like a corpse strewn with festive lights. Unlike Julian, who was pushing forty with a short stick, his companions were young and lithe. One Brazilian, a product of the world economy, flesh flowing north and south, a corporeal commodity. Long dark hair lay wet against her back, her implants bobbing in the churning water, two bulbous boats with nipples for prows. The other girl from some state in the Midwest he couldn’t bother to remember. Illinois? Maybe it was Kansas, but who cared, it was all the same in the waving wheat. A blonde dye job cut spiky, and too much piercing for Julian’s taste: ears, nose, labia.

  The hot tub was flush with the flagstone deck, and its overflow sluiced through a gap in the masonry and into the adjacent infinity pool that glowed eerily blue from the underwater lights. Julian leaned back and draped his arms over the shoulders of the women in a desultory show of post-coital solidarity, but he was preoccupied, restless. He reached for his lighter and fired up a Montecristo, his dark eyes squinting against the smoke. Despite Julian’s fleshy nakedness, there was nothing soft in his expression and the women watched him warily.

  Julian looked at his house, a glass-and-metal box built in the bright flash of his first success, and wondered if he would have to sell it. He had laundered his money, but it was not clean enough. Now the IRS was sweating him, and he’d been warned by his attorney that a criminal indictment could arrive with his coffee any morning.

  “I gotta get going,” the pierced girl said. Then: “Do you have any more blow?” Julian liked how she spoke, do you have, not got any or you got. He enjoyed it when someone made an attempt to sound civilized, life being so debased these days.

  “On the kitchen counter,” Julian told her. “Leave some for me.”

  When she emerged from the hot tub and began toweling off, the Latina (working name: Tabitha) took it as her cue and got out too.

  “You both have to leave?” he asked, loneliness appearing from nowhere.

  “You tired me out,” the Latina lied, wrapping up in the terry cloth robe Julian provided. Her colleague was walking to the house now, carrying the towel, still naked. The Latina blew him a kiss, and as he turned to watch her go, he noticed the blue glow of the plasma TV in the otherwise dark living room. The local news was broadcasting footage of a high-speed freeway chase. Julian liked the high-speed chases that were a staple on local television news in the Southland. He watched them to relax, the way some people contemplate a fish tank. He was counting the police cars when he noticed a slight tightening in his chest.

  Julian settled back into the water, flexing his shoulders, trying to loosen the muscles in his upper back. The chest tweaked again, then nothing. He looked down at his manhandle but couldn’t see it, his paunch having reached the point of no return, a level of obesity that augured crash diets or surgery. This was emasculating under any circumstance, but particularly to a man in his line of work. Julian knew he was going to have to get serious about his physical condition. He felt the two cheeseburgers he’d had for dinner bouncing off the walls in his gut, cartwheeling, doing backflips, a couple of acrobats. And how much coke had he done before climbing into the hot tub? Beads of moisture were glistening on his slick forehead. It seemed to him that he was perspiring more than usual. Didn’t matter, he’d get out in a minute anyway.

  Through the glass walls of the house he could see the girls walking around the living room; one of them on a cell phone, the other drinking a diet soda. He suddenly found himself hoping these two would leave. He needed some time by himself to figure out how he was going to handle this money situation.

  He could move dope, certainly. That was something for which the market was bottomless, and he’d done it before. He had some contacts in that area, clients whose needs he had serviced and would perhaps be willing to cut him into a deal. But there was little margin for error in that business, and if anything went wrong, it usually went spectacularly wrong and could reliably be counted on to end in either a hail of bullets or a prison cell.

  Julian noticed that he was feeling slightly nauseous. He thought maybe if he drank a beer, it would calm his stomach. The girls were getting dressed now, preparing to leave. He wanted to call out to them but couldn’t remember their names. The one with the spiked hair was pulling a stonewashed denim jacket over a tiny white tank top when his recalcitrant brain suddenly fired. “Manna!” he yelled, but she didn’t hear him. She was talking to Tabitha now, who had gotten off the phone. Julian tried again. “Manna!” His voice slightly weaker this time. A shortness of breath. The water getting hotter. In the distance a coyote was howling, his plangent cry echoing faintly off the moonlit hillside. Ordinarily Julian would have pulled himself up and walked unclothed into the kitchen, but the spreading of his ample middle played with his ordinarily reliable self-confidence. He didn’t want to parade around wondering if these two slim twinkies were thinking he was a fatty-boy, a roly-poly tub of nearly middle-aged lard. Nearly? Who was he kidding? He was middle-aged.

  “Manna!” This time he could barely hear himself as he looked at the glass house, receding before him. He tried to inhale but could only take a shallow breath, the twin pumps in his chest cavity apparently having clocked out for the night. The pain that began to radiate down his left arm was nothing at first except a distraction from suddenly being unable to fill his nicotine-stained and straining lungs. Then it hit him like a hollow-point bullet and he felt his torso exploding, thirty-nine years old, way early for a myocardial infarction, so he barely knew what was happening—although he would have had some indication if he’d been to the doctor recently. Arteriosclerosis wasn’t that hard to diagnose, and you could see Julian’s from an aerial photograph. He knew if he was to save his life, yes, his life, because it was finally dawning on him that something big was going on, he would have to climb out of the turbulent water, stagger naked, never mind the love handles and retractable cock, to the house and get one of these girls to phone an ambulance and tell the operator Julian Ripps was dying, dying, yes! And would they please get someone up to his place, just off Mulholland on the Valley side, with some nitro and a set of shock paddles.

  Julian placed his hands on the side of
the bubbling cauldron and, with arms entirely lacking in muscular definition, pushed as hard as he could. Then he entered a realm of pain more extreme than any he’d previously experienced. Realizing the stakes, Julian called forth a degree of will heretofore unknown and, grunting, wheezing, he propelled his bulk to the deck. Lying on his side like a beached sea creature, he contemplated his home. He could see Tabitha drifting out of the chrome-and-marble kitchen. Manna had already gone.

  Julian was able to get one leg under him, and finding a trace of strength in the upper reaches of his thigh, pressed his foot to the wet stone. Dripping and racked with pain but buoyed by an enviable survival instinct, he was determined to make it back to the house, the phone, and the licentious life he believed awaited him.

  The hot wind continued to blow in from the desert. He could hear the coyote howling again, closer now. The sky seemed lower, the stars increasingly near as consciousness began to soft-shoe toward the shadows. His mouth hung open, and he once again attempted to call for help, but nothing came except a sledgehammer blow to his chest that sent him twisting to the side and then tumbling back and splashing into the hot tub, where he was found the following morning by a Salvadoran pool man in a tableau that so upset the poor net-wielding illegal that he took the rest of the day off and spent it praying in Our Lady of the Freeways.

  Chapter 1

  The previous April, Julian’s younger brother was attending a bar mitzvah in a ballroom at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Marcus Ripps was an unassuming height, trim, and possessed of such conventionally pleasant looks that you could watch the man commit a crime and not be able to identify him. He had brown, slightly wavy hair that he kept short and dark eyes hooded by a thoughtful brow, knitted lately as the complications of an ordinary life began to add up. His lips were often curled in a sardonic smile, and they were surrounded by smoothly shaven cheeks ready to sprout a beard thick as winter if he didn’t shave. Not exactly handsome, Marcus exuded an ineffable goodness and his open expression and easy manner made him a well-liked man.

  As he gazed around the capacious room, he noticed an expansive stairwell sweeping down from a magnificent pair of gilded faux doors and marveled that so much attention could be lavished on something with no discernible function. It lent the room the feeling of a stage set, which made sense to Marcus, who was acting the part of someone enjoying himself. Around him, several hundred expensively dressed revelers floated among tables laden with lobster, prime rib, cracked crab, caviar, champagne, and a scale model of the Staples Center built entirely out of sushi. Two chocolate fountains gushed toward the ornate ceiling. Elaborate floral arrangements flown in from Japan sweetened the filtered air. In one corner a famous professional wrestler was signing autographs for the younger guests. In another, a photographer from Vanity Fair shot portraits of the attendees, and a video crew roamed freely, taping the event for posterity.

  Marcus didn’t care much for this kind of bar mitzvah. He believed the intended function had been leached by a combination of a society that stripped most spiritual practices of meaning, and the bar mitzvah boy’s craving for lucre and a celebration. It was an empty exercise in his view, an opportunity for the hosts to throw a wedding-sized party for two hundred and fifty of their closest friends. The guests put on their best clothes, ate fine food, and behaved as if they were at a fund-raiser for a trendy disease that just happened to feature klezmer music during the cocktail hour. That Marcus was consuming a succulent hors d’oeuvre lamb chop served from a silver tray by a kohl-eyed aspiring porn star did nothing to mitigate this thought.

  His antipathy for these events had not been a lifelong condition. Growing up in a home where no formal religion was practiced, Marcus had envied the Jews their bar mitzvahs, the Catholics their communions, the Mayans their human sacrifices. Anyone who chose to plumb the depths of the universe in a ritualistic manner was all right with him. Marcus was a deontologist, a believer in unbendable rules. Religion had rules, ergo it was good. Alas, the requisite belief in God made it more complicated for him. But Marcus wasn’t thinking about eschatology right now. What he was thinking about, as he watched an animal trainer in gold lamé harem pants and a bejeweled turban give children rides on a baby elephant, was this: the Mississippi River could be re-routed for what they’re spending today.

  He looked out over the crowd and self-consciously fingered the lapel of his six-year-old blue suit. A discernible run had developed in the left sleeve.

  “I want to ask who their caterer is, not that we could afford them.” This was his wife Jan, nibbling on a lamb bone with no remaining traces of animal flesh. She wore a knitted blazer composed of innumerable variations of the color red, over a fitted white blouse. A pleated knee-length black wool skirt showed off shapely calves curving into black pumps. Jan co-owned a local boutique and was a walking advertisement for their clothes: trendy, but not aggressively so, fashion-hipster on a budget. She had wide hazel eyes, delicately shadowed this evening, a creamy complexion slightly tanned in the manner of all southern Californians who don’t habitually avoid the sun, a medium-sized nose the contours of which she had never considered altering (nor did she need to), and lips she thought were a little too thin but in actuality worked in concert with the rest of her physiognomy to produce a picture of forthright, if not overwhelming, attractiveness. She kept herself firm at the local branch of an affordable chain health club, and Marcus often thought that if she walked past him on the street, he would turn around for a second look. Despite this, they hadn’t had sex in over a month, a source of increasing consternation for him.

  Along with the hundreds of celebrants, Marcus and Jan were patiently awaiting the entrance of the bar mitzvah boy, Takeshi Primus. Although Marcus had grown up with Takeshi’s father Roon, he was here now because he worked for him, not because Roon had invited old friends. Roon Primus had hit it big in the novelty end of the toy manufacturing business, a success he had parlayed into other, non-toy-related activities, and had ascended to fawning profiles in business journals and a palatial home in Bel Air, far above their scrappy origins. Marcus, who was the production manager at the only one of Roon’s factories still in the continental United States, had not. So there were all the mixed feelings that working for an old friend could engender. Marcus was alternately grateful to be the beneficiary of Roon’s loyalty and, when he listened to the whispers of darker voices, resentful that his situation required it. Inwardly, although he would never acknowledge it, he was ashamed that he had not gone out on his own and made an entrepreneurial success of himself, as his father, who owned a shoe store in Seal Beach, had wished.

  Marcus had been a better student than Roon, who considered school nothing more than a way station on the path to his platinum destiny. Upon graduation from high school Roon had enrolled at Cal State, Fullerton, where he’d earned a business degree of no distinction. Marcus had majored in philosophy at Berkeley. He worked at the college radio station and for a time thought he might pursue a career as a disc jockey, one of those late-night denizens of the low-frequency world who plays music by bands nobody’s heard of and whines about how the “corporatocracy” has taken over the world. This plan lasted until he discovered that those positions generally came without salaries.

  When Marcus got out of college (B.A., cum laude) he found he had a talent for getting jobs, just not particularly good ones, which is to say anything with a future attached. So while working as an orderly in a hospital and sending fifty letters out, he finally found himself in the glamorous communications industry selling cable television subscriptions door-to-door in East Los Angeles. He dutifully read the want ads in the paper each day, and after four months of traipsing through the barrio hawking premium packages to querulous Mexicans (many of whom thought he was working for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and refused to open the door), managed to land a job in sales at a small AM station that was playing Top 40 hits in the twilight of the format. Marcus had moved home after college, and the commute from San Pedro to the
ir Glendale offices was ninety minutes each way. He didn’t like the job, but he had no idea what else to do. Unlike Roon, he lacked a grand plan, a vision. Everything he did was a placeholder for he didn’t know what, and while casting about for his next opportunity he made a sales call to a clothing store called Changes on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena and spoke to the manager, Jan Griesbach. Although the store did not have the budget to advertise on the radio station, Jan was charmed by his self-deprecating sales pitch, and when he asked her out she quickly said yes. Jan’s arrival took care of his personal life, but he was still dissatisfied in his job. As he was unhappily thrashing out a solution in between telephone pitches, he received a call from Roon, who needed to replace a production manager at a factory in the northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley. Roon wanted someone he could trust. Now Marcus had been working for his friend nearly fifteen years, and although he would have liked to do something more exciting than make toys, he knew it would be churlish to complain.

  Marcus assumed his own anodyne biography was far less impressive than those of the swells swirling around him and Jan at the bar mitzvah. It was a prosperous crowd and their expensive clothes, complexions, and teeth reflected an enviable absence of financial worries. Though he would have been loath to admit it, he was uncomfortable and slightly intimidated.

  “Dad, check this out!” Marcus looked down and saw his son Nathan displaying a henna tattoo of a smiling young woman in a bikini on his forearm. The words HELLO, SAILOR were stenciled above her head. Nathan was an eleven-year-old slip of a boy, small for his age, whose most salient feature was his wide mouth, where his blue braces contained enough metal to craft a small suspension bridge.

  Jan craned her neck to see the tattoo and began to laugh.

  “Can we get the tattoo dude to come to my bar mitzvah?” Nathan said. Although Marcus was not Jewish, his wife was. Like her husband, Jan was not religious, but Nathan had asked to have a bar mitzvah and his parents, after much discussion (mostly about whether they could afford the party), had decided to accommodate his request.