The Burning Ground Page 3
As Debbie reads the letter, she coils a yellow corkscrew of hair around her index finger. She tells me to have a seat and then cautions me that Bernstein is a very busy man. I notice her eyebrows are tattooed onto her eyebrow arches; ditto a dark line around the circumference of her lips. My feet are hot. I want to slip off my Nikes and feel the cool of the tiles on my bare feet. Or better still slide across its polished surface in my tube socks. I imagine sliding along the office floor and Debbie’s chagrin as she chases after me down the hallway in her stilettos.
I’m still sitting there when the office begins its lunch-hour migration down to the sandwich stores and restaurants around Pershing Square. The office empties out quickly and eventually even Debbie makes to leave. She stands and I watch her apply a ring of tangerine lipstick, delicately and with great care. She seems to enjoy the feel of the lipstick against her mouth, and pouts slightly as she judges her handiwork in a compact mirror. I think about the other kids in my class and wonder what they are doing now, and despite the hour and a half I have been waiting I feel lucky to be here in this world of adults. Before she leaves, Debbie tells me to help myself to water, gesturing to the cooler in the corner. I sit and listen to the phones ringing in the deserted office. I look over my questions for Bernstein and notice two thumb marks on the paper where I have been gripping it.
“Christopher?” The voice from above sounds like an expensive car moving slowly over gravel. I look up from my questions. I recognize Bernstein from the signed black and white photograph that was included in the fact pack. He is a mountainous man and wears a plaid suit. The jacket’s wide shoulders emphasize his mass. The suit trousers come in tight at the waist, then flare out voluminously at the calf. He has a thick, reddish beard clipped to an even length all over. His hair is the same shade of reddish brown and, I notice, so close to the texture of his beard as to be almost identical. It is difficult to say for sure where one begins and the other ends. “Mr. Bernstein, sir,” I say, rising to my feet.
I follow Bernstein through a warren of gray high-sided cubicles. There are photographs of families pinned inside some of them. In one a man stands with a boy next to Jack Youngblood at a Rams game. All three of them wear the number 85 jersey and smile into the camera with large, white, even teeth.
When we reach Bernstein’s office he takes off his jacket. He asks me if I like it and opens the gray plaid to reveal the silk lining. “Oleg Cassini,” he pronounces the name as a shaman might a shibboleth. He tells me it’s from Cassini’s signature collection and then, as an afterthought, that he’s a personal friend. He drapes his jacket carefully over his tall-backed leather chair and then takes a seat behind his desk. The downtown skyline arrayed behind him. I wait in the doorway. He tells me to come in and that there must be a lot I want to ask as he saw I had some questions written down.
On his desk sits a matte snake-skin stationery set and a wooden cigar box with an ivory trim. He turns the box toward me with great ceremony, the way I’ve seen altar boys handle the offertory at the church my mother takes us to each Christmas and Easter, using the fingertips of both hands, and opens the lid. I hesitate, unsure how I should respond to his offer. He quickly spins the box back toward himself and tells me he’s kidding. I watch him select a cigar, the outer skin made from a single tobacco leaf, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger, as he runs it between his upper lip and his nostrils, which flare as he inhales. I feel my ears begin to redden. The band on the cigar is the color of my mother’s nail polish. It has a golden crown and above the crown the words “Juan Lopez.” Bernstein lights it with a series of low, throaty puffs. He sits smoking in the large office filled with sunlight. He seems to enjoy his cigar and is in no hurry to talk. I look down at the questions. He exhales and, behind the smoke, raises his eyebrows and says, “Hoagie’s stogie. Get it?”
Bernstein sends a mouthful of smoke up toward the grid of tiles in the suspended ceiling. He tells me my visit is due to a new member of his Public Relations team. How she suggested they get a local kid in from a school newspaper to counteract some of the smears his company has received in the press at what he calls a grassroots level. A photographer will be coming soon to take our picture. Bernstein turns his cigar toward himself. He taps the inch or so of compacted ash that has gathered at its tip into a cut-glass ashtray. I look at the wedge of ash, the gray layers and black seams curled in on each other, and I think of the men my mother has over to the house at night when I am in bed and she assumes that I am asleep. How the next morning the ashtray in the living room will be piled with cigarette butts, Newports, and sometimes Viceroys. Brands I know she does not smoke.
Bernstein looks into the raw orange embers of his cigar. He tells me his father was in the services, so he moved about a lot and that he spent a term at Venice High. And how when they asked my school to send over a list, he ran through it, saw my name and told Public Relations to get him in here. And here I am.
2
Tank man stands defiant in Tiananmen Square. I have graduated third in my class at Columbia’s J-School and am nine months into a training contract at the Chicago Sun Times. I’m traveling to Los Angeles to interview Bernstein for the second time in my life. I’ve taken a week’s leave from the paper to catch the Southwest Chief, forty-three hours across country. Evening is coming on but there is still a little light left in the sky. The horizon is dissected by telephone wires that run alongside the track. Their dark poles are flashing by. In the distance beyond the ochre sticks of corn stubble are three white farm buildings and a silver grain tower and because of the direction of the track they seem to be turning away slowly to my right.
My editor has promised me a full page if I can file my copy by next Friday. I’m sitting at a table in the observation car going through a folder of cuttings on the Bernstein case. So far he’s refused to talk to anyone. It’s a coup for me to get this hour with him. After six months on obituaries I was eventually seconded to the news desk to cover for a junior reporter who had shattered his spine when the car he was driving hit a tree on the way back from a bar in Bridgeport. I calculate it has taken almost twenty hours of phone calls to track Bernstein down and another five to set up and confirm the meeting. His people are specific about the date, place, and time. I figure I could use the week’s leave prior to this meeting to brush up on the facts.
Somewhere between Lawrence and Topeka a blonde woman, who I guess is roughly my age, wearing black spectacles and carrying a sandwich wrapped in cellophane, asks if the seat next to me is free. She has an air of seriousness, of someone whose beauty is a distraction that she would shake if she could. I pull the pile of cuttings toward me. She sits down. I watch her unwrap the sandwich then carefully pick it apart. First the wheat bread, then the wilted strip of lettuce, the white meat of the chicken, which she prods at before tearing it into strips. She seems to have little appetite for the sandwich. The seats behind us in the observation car are occupied by a group of ladies in their sixties. They all wear sunglasses and hold their handbags on their laps with their thin hands, as they gaze out across Kansas.
I ask the girl in black spectacles if she is going all the way through. She tells me she is but only because she wasn’t able to get a flight back to Los Angeles at such short notice. Then she tells me her name is Molly. I learn that she is training to be an attorney at John Marshall. When I ask her what’s taking her back to California, she tells me her father is a dentist in Calabasas and she is visiting him. But that doesn’t seem to tally with the speed of her departure from the city and I suspect there may be a man involved back in Chicago. Molly has a Superliner Roomette paid for on her father’s Amex. I have a seat back in coach. She asks me about the cuttings and I explain about the Bernstein case and the charges the federal government are looking to bring against him and how it’s funny as I actually met him, years ago, when I was at high school.
After a little over an hour of occasionally stilted, but not unpleasant conversation, Molly grows tired. I watch her w
orking a finger under the rim of her glasses, until the insides of her eyelids grow red against her blue irises. I sense that I’ve lost her attention. I wish her good night as she makes back for her car. A few minutes later a retired Amtrak engineer takes up the empty seat. He offers me a beer, dislocating it with a twist from the plastic web of the four-pack he is carrying. We talk about the route the train will take through the night. He knows the stretch well and makes the journey, he tells me, at least twice a year, sometimes more, to visit a cousin in Brentwood who he fishes with. Then he tells me a story about arriving at the scene of an accident near Gallup, New Mexico, where a man had driven the family station wagon across a barricade. The man had survived and was standing by the wreckage of the car shaking his head when he got there. His wife and children were all killed on impact. Looking out at the night sky and the growing starlight he describes the scene inside the car to me in detail.
I don’t see Molly again and pass an uncomfortable night back in my seat in coach. I wake around 2 a.m. and see a warehouse on fire in the distance. In the morning we arrive in Los Angeles and as we’re leaving the train, Molly comes up to me on the platform and gives me her number. She tells me she’ll look out for my piece and that if I’m free I should look her up when I’m back in Chicago.
“Christopher, right?” Bernstein holds the loaded pistol of his finger at me. We sit in a booth in the gloom of Cole’s Pacific Electric Buffet. He bites into a pastrami french dip, the ruff of pink meat spilling from its edge. “One thing I need you to know,” he tells me, “is that I’m going to fight this. All the way.” He moves around his seat, zipping and unzipping his tracksuit top as he talks, glancing side to side as if on the lookout for photographers.
Bernstein tells me there is a lot he can’t talk about. A lot of it would be unethical and inadvisable to discuss at this juncture. Over the course of the afternoon I fill three cassettes. An hour and a half into our conversation an aide comes over and tells us it’s time to wrap it up. As I get up to leave Bernstein tells me there’s really nothing to link the congressmen to those junk bonds. That if they want to defend his business from the regulators, that’s their business. It doesn’t make them corrupt, it doesn’t make them crooks. And it doesn’t mean he’s not clean. He looks up from the remnants of his sandwich, then tells me the last piece on the school paper, that I did a good job. I ask him if he really read that. He tells me he reads all his press.
3
In squares across Belgrade thousands of angry Serbs are calling for Miloševic´ to resign. I’m flying in from Washington, where for five years I have worked on the news desk at the Post, to interview Bernstein. Ten years now since I saw him last and twenty since that afternoon in the City National Tower. The plane is full. A toddler in the row in front has been crying ever since we hit a patch of rough air over Missouri. Her mother, who has alopecia, is unable to soothe her. I’m on my second Bloody Mary, the sachet of Clamato taking the edge off the warm vodka. Bernstein, according to his press release, is rebranding and bouncing back. It came through on the fax in the office a few weeks ago. Remember this asshole? Michael Naomi, a junior colleague, who I do not trust but who is the stepson of a former editor, said lifting the page to the air. I know that guy, I told him.
Bernstein isn’t the real reason I’m in town. I was practically the only person in the office who remembered, or cared to remember, the case. It’s my mother. I’m in town because of her. When the taxi drops me in Mar Vista, the driver turns around and tells me he recognizes me. He asks me if I ever played football. I say no, but he asks me again and tells me he’s sure I did. I hand him two twenty-dollar bills and get out of the car.
The house is exactly as I remember it. My mother’s things are everywhere, untouched, as if she just that minute stepped out to the Mini-Mart for a packet of Consulate. As I enter the house I have a vision of her standing on the porch the afternoon I got back from interviewing Bernstein for the first time. Over the years she accumulated more and more useless things. There are bags of fabric swatches and samples, stacks of videotapes labeled in her handwriting. There are three VCRs piled one on top of the other. That evening in her room I find a suitcase full of my clothes from childhood. In the end, my mother had amassed so much junk we stopped coming to the house when we would visit. Molly insisted. Instead we would take her and the kids to the IHOP on Sepulveda.
My mother’s house will be sold at auction in two days’ time. The realtor assures me it should reach close to the asking price. I will stay here to supervise the clearing out of all of her belongings. I wish there was something I could feel sentimental about. But it is as if in those last years alone in the house she tried to bury what was left of her life under all of these blankets, boxes, piles of old newspapers, empty orange tubes that held her prescriptions. When my mother got really sick we flew her out to Washington to be near us. Molly and the kids were happy to have her around. But it was rushed and the house in Mar Vista was left untouched. We would send her neighbor, a Korean woman with a large family, fifty dollars a month to check on the house. Molly and I talked of a second home but it was never practical.
I stand in the living room and look across at the neighbors. They are grilling large pieces of meat on the bone on a barbecue on the front lawn. I clear a space for myself on the sofa and pass the night watching reruns. I leave early the next morning to meet Bernstein.
Bernstein is operating out of a rental in the lobby of one of the old banks downtown. He is well liked by his neighbors. The unit next door sells chubby dolls in garish wedding dresses; the other, Chinese electronics. As he talks to me it’s as if he is trying to convince himself of the pitch he has prepared.
Bernstein tells me Bio-Gas is the next big thing and that before long everyone is going to have a unit in their backyard like the one he is standing next to. As he speaks he taps down his mustache with a series of quick strokes. He tells me those who don’t are going to be kicking themselves. We walk around the green dome. It looks like a child’s idea of a UFO. As I inspect the machine Bernstein tells me that this place will change you. It was low security which meant he had lots of time to read. That was how he got on to this eco-kick. It’s going to be big business, he says.
I ask him whose idea the press release was and he tells me one of the volunteers at the center he attends suggested it. She spent a year at Bernstein Inc. after college. He didn’t remember her but she helped him draft it and even let him send it out from her office fax machine one evening after they closed. He rests his hand on the side of the machine and tells me she thought that his reputation might drum up a bit of extra business. I ask him if the design is his. He shakes his head and tells me he’s just a kind of sales agent.
“I used to come down here as a kid,” Bernstein says to me. “My old man, that term we lived in Venice, he loved to take me downtown to the movie theaters. The Belasco, the Cameo, the Globe. Some days he’d even take me out of class to go watch movies. He’d turn up in his army uniform and whisper something to the teacher, then he’d signal for me to come to the front of the class. Then we’d walk out together side by side. Neither of us smiling until we’d reached the car. We’d go watch a movie, and afterwards he’d walk me down here to buy an ice cream. Riddles were his thing, always coming with the riddles. The more it dries, the wetter it gets. What is it?” Bernstein looks at me impatiently. “I don’t know,” I say. “A towel,” Bernstein snaps, then smiling asks, “What grows when it eats, but dies when it drinks? Fire,” he tells me before I have time to answer. “You know your old man?” he asks. I shake my head. “Mine, he died when I was sixteen years old. The transporter plane he was in hit a cliff on Pali Kea Peak. Shouldn’t even have been on that flight but he’d swapped with a buddy who was trying to get home to see his own son who was so sick with polio he’d had to be put in an iron lung. Back when I had money, I mean real money, I’d have given every cent to spend another hour with my old man. Every last single stinking cent just to hear another one of t
hose dumb riddles.”
At the entrance to the arcade I tell Bernstein I’ll do what I can. If it doesn’t run this time, it’ll go on file or get farmed out to some local paper. People always need copy. I lie and turn my cell phone over in my hand, thumbing the keys. Bernstein thanks me, offering his hand. Then he says congratulations and I look at him, puzzled. That last piece you wrote, that profile for the Sun Times, it won some kind of award, right? he asks. I tell him it did but that was the only award I ever won, and it did little good as I’ve been passed over for promotion every year since arriving at the Post. He seems not to hear me. He offers me congratulations again. Then he gives me the thumbs-up, like a settler with nowhere left to go, planting a flag in the ground.
4
Michael Jackson’s cadaver rests in the Staples Center. The skies outside our office are loud with helicopters from the networks. This morning my editor sent one reporter to gather quotes from the fans signing the condolence mural and had another follow the hearse down from the Forest Lawn Cemetery to see if he could get anything from the family. This was going to be my job but I made an excuse about needing to finish a cost analysis that our paper’s new owners were making each of their acquisitions undergo. Just after midday I get the call that Bernstein is waiting for me in the lobby.
Shortly after I arrived at the Downtown News—the Post had let me go and Molly had wanted to move home to be closer to her father who had early-onset dementia—I was sent to cover the opening of a new facility for the homeless. I stood behind a city councilor as he gave a speech standing on a hastily erected podium. I recognized Bernstein at the far edge of the crowd, standing next to a man in army fatigues who was asleep in a wheelchair. He was wary of me at first. Then I told him we’d met, a few times in fact. I asked him about himself. He told me he was living in a single-occupancy hotel on Spring Street. At night he hears people in the room above plotting to kill him. They are planning to slice out his eyes with a box cutter, then dump his butchered body in plastic bags in the LA river. He says he has hard evidence of this. I told him he was welcome to come over to the office for lunch sometime and that all he needed to do is ask for me at reception.