The Big Nowhere

A call to an old pal working the LAPD Metropolitan Squad and one to an ex-DA’s man now with the State Attorney General’s office supplied Mal with the true story on Saul Lesnick, MD, PhD. The old man was, and remained, a CP card carrier; he had been a Fed snitch since ‘39—when he was approached by two LA office agents, who made him a deal: provide confidential psychiatric dirt to various committees and police agencies, and his daughter would be sprung from her five-to-ten-year sentence for hit and run drunk driving—one year down, four more to go minimum— the girl then currently hardtiming in Tehachapi. Lesnick agreed; his daughter was released and placed on indeterminate Federal parole—which would be revoked if the good doctor ever broke his cover or otherwise refused to cooperate. Lesnick, given six months tops in his fight with lung cancer, had secured a promise from a high-ranking Justice Department official: upon his death, all the confidential files he had loaned out would be destroyed; his daughter’s vehicular manslaughter conviction and parole records would be expunged and all Fed/Municipal/State grand jury notations currently on official paper vis-à-vis Lesnick and his breaches of confidentiality with subversive patients would burn. No one would know that for ten years Saul Lesnick, Communist, psychiatrist, had played both ends against the middle—and had won his holding action.

Mal segued, new colleagues to old business, thinking that the lunger got what he paid for in spades, that his dance with the Feds was good value: a daughter spared broomstick rape and pernicious anemia from Tehachapi’s famous all-starch cuisine in exchange for the rest of his life—shortened by suicide via French tobacco. And he’d have done the same thing for Stefan—he wouldn’t have thought twice.

Paperwork was arrayed neatly across his desk; Mal, stealing glances at the huge grand jury pile, got to it. He wrote memos to Ellis Loew suggesting investigators to dig for backup evidence; he typed routing slips: case files to the green young Deputy DAs who would be prosecuting now that Loew was engaged full-time in battling Communism. A Chinatown hooker killing went to a kid six months out of the worst law school in California; the perpetrator, a pimp known for his love of inflicting pain with a metal-studded dildo, would probably walk on the charge. Two shine snuffs were routed to a youth still short of his twenty-fifth birthday—smart, but naive. This perp, a Purple Cobra warlord, had fired into a crowd of kids outside Manual Arts High School on the off-chance that there might be members of the Purple Scorpions in it. There weren’t; an honor student and her boyfriend went down dead. Mal gave the kid a fifty-fifty chance for a conviction—Negroes killing Negroes bored white juries and they often dropped their verdicts on whim.

The armed robbery/ADW at Mi

Home was in the Wilshire District: a big white two-story that devoured his savings and most of his salary. It was the house that was too good for Laura—a kid marriage based on rutting didn’t warrant the tariff. He’d bought it when he returned from Europe in ‘46, knowing that Laura was out and Celeste was in, sensing that he loved the boy more than he could ever love the woman—that the marriage was for Stefan’s safety. There was a park with basketball hoops and a baseball diamond nearby; the neighborhood’s crime rate was near zero and the local schools had the highest academic standing in the state. It was his happy ending to Stefan’s nightmare.

Mal parked in the driveway and walked across the lawn— Stefan’s lackluster mowing job, Stefan’s softball and bat weighing down the hedge that he’d neglected to trim. Going in the door, he heard voices: the two-language fight he’d refereed a thousand times before. Celeste was ru

Celeste was saying, “…and it is the language of your people.”

Stefan was stacking the spools, making a little house out of them—dark colors the foundation, pastels on top. “But I am to be an American now. Malcolm told me he can get me cit-cit-citizenship.”

“Malcolm is a minister’s son and a policeman who does not understand our old country traditions. Stefan, your heritage. Learn to make your mother happy.”

Mal could tell his boy wasn’t buying it; he smiled when Stefan demolished the spool house, his dark eyes fired up. “Malcolm said Czechoslovakia is a… a… a…”

“A what, darling?”

“A Bohunk rubble heap! A shit pile! Scheiss! Scheiss! In German for mutti!”

Celeste raised a hand, stopped and hit her own pinched-together knees. “In English for you—little ingrate, disgrace to your real father, a cultured man, a doctor, not a consort of whores and hoodlums—”

Stefan knocked over the end table and ran out of the room, straight into Mal, blocking the doorway. The small fat boy careened off his six-foot-three stepfather, then grabbed him around the waist and buried his head in his vest. Mal held him there, one hand steadying his shoulders, the other ruffling his hair. When Celeste stood up and saw them, he said, “You’ll never give it up, will you?”

Celeste mouthed words; Mal knew they were native tongue obscenities she didn’t want Stefan to hear. The boy held on tighter, then let go and ran upstairs to his room. Mal heard ting-ting-ting—Stefan’s toy soldiers being hurled at the door. He said, “You know what it makes him think of, and you still won’t give it up.”

Celeste adjusted her arms inside her overslung cardigan—the single European affectation Mal hated the most. “Nein, herr Leutnant”—pure German, pure Celeste—Buchenwald, the gas man, Major Considine, cold-blooded killer.

Mal braced himself into the doorway. “Captain soon, Fräulein. Chief DA’s Investigator, and climbing. Juice, Fräulein. Just in case I think you’re ruining my son and I have to take him away from you.”

Celeste sat down, knees together, a finishing school move, Prague 1934. “To the mother the child belongs. Even a failed lawyer like you should know that maxim.”

A line that couldn’t be topped. Mal kicked up the carpeting on his way outside; he sat on the steps and watched rain clouds hover. Celeste’s sewing machine started to whir; upstairs, Stefan’s soldiers were still dinging his already cracked and dented bedroom door. Mal thought that soon they’d be stripped of paint, dragoons without uniforms, and that simple fact would tear down everything he’d built up since the war.

In ‘45 he was an army major, stationed at a temporary MP barracks near the recently liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. His assignment was to interrogate surviving inmates, specifically the ones the medical evacuation teams deemed terminally ill—the husks of human beings who would most likely never live to identify their captors in court. The question and answer sessions were horrific; Mal knew that only the stony cold presence of his interpreter was keeping him frosty, contained, a pro. News from the home front was just as bad: friends wrote him that Laura was screwing Jerry Dunleavy, a buddy from the Homicide Bureau, and Buzz Meeks, a crooked Narcotics Squad dick and bagman for Mickey Cohen. And in San Francisco, his father, the Reverend Liam Considine, was dying of congestive heart disease and sending daily telegrams begging him to embrace Jesus before he died. Mal hated the man too much to give him the satisfaction and was too busy praying for the speedy and painless deaths of every single Buchenwald survivor, for the complete cessation of their memories and his nightmares. The old man died in October; Mal’s brother Desmond, the used-car king of Sacramento, sent him a telegram rich in religious invective. It ended with words of disownment. Two days later Mal met Celeste Heisteke.