looked at Vangie.
Vangie’s eyes lit up as if she’d seen an old friend and she disappeared into the crowd.
Marvia and her new friends fought through the crush to reach the bar. Somehow they succeeded. Marvia found herself with a new friend on either side. Two black women, both of them in sweat-stained T-shirts. Marvia wore a sweatshirt, its sleeves chopped at the shoulders. She missed the familiar weight of a piece on her hip or in a shoulder holster. The bar was dark wood, had a real brass rail, a huge mirror on the wall behind the bartenders. Clearly, the heritage of some earlier incarnation of the Crash Club.
One of Marvia’s new friends yelled at a female bartender. She slapped a bill onto the wood. The bartender drew three beers into plastic cups and set them on the mahogany. There was a stack of paper napkins printed with the Crash Club’s logo, a huge, ancient Buick convertible wrapped around a tree.
The woman to Marvia’s left raised her glass and said, “To us, honey.” They all drank. Marvia took as little beer as she could; it wasn’t the old drinking-on-duty taboo, she just needed to keep her wits as sharp and her reflexes as fast as she could.
The club was already dark, Marvia thought, when she came past Chuff Fernández. Now it got darker. A spotlight hit a man standing on the stage. Marvia recognized Solomon San Remo, but just barely. He’d been a heavyset man when she’d known him—or known of him—in the past. She hadn’t seen him for a long time, not since a couple of years before she moved to Nevada and not since she’d moved back. Now he looked emaciated. He wore his iron gray hair in a pony-tail and a hippie-style headband straight out of the Summer of Love.
He announced the first band.
Hitler Youth pounded and screamed at the audience. They wore fatigue caps with death’s head insignia and they flashed Nazi salutes. The audience shifted like a giant organism. By osmosis, skinheads moved toward the stage. They returned the salutes and shouted. “Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”
The room seemed to grow hotter. Marvia was sweating. She realized this was no illusion. The body heat of a couple of hundred young, sweating, jumping humans could raise the temperature to any level. One of Marvia’s new friends had her arm around her shoulder.
Marvia said, “I have to—” She left the sentence hanging. She’d put her beer back on the wood. She headed for the bathroom. She managed to squeeze into the room. It was as crowded as the club itself. She smelled a too-familiar odor, pungent and slightly sweet. Somebody was passing a joint around. She didn’t care. She was looking for bigger game. The city council had ordered the police to give marijuana offenses the lowest possible priority anyway, lower than throwing gum wrappers in the street, and she wasn’t going to waste her time on a simple weed bust.
She squeezed into a stall and relieved herself and headed back to the floor. Hitler Youth was taking an encore. An ancient advertising clock shaped like a DeSoto sedan showed that they’d played for forty minutes. Marvia didn’t know about that. For a while there it had seemed as if they’d been pounding and howling for centuries.
A fight broke out between a skinhead and a fat white woman in a PRYZN GYRLZ T-shirt. From nowhere, a squad of bouncers appeared and surrounded the fighters. Marvia recognized Chuff Fernández among them, giving directions. In seconds the skinhead was out of sight, the woman returned to her friends. It was as if nothing had happened.
Marvia was at the edge of the stage. From her perspective she could see into the wings on the opposite side. There wasn’t much room there, but some paparazzi were crammed into a few square feet of space. Marvia recognized Vangie Rhee, her classic Korean features distinctive.
For a moment Vangie looked down into the audience and Marvia caught her eye and nodded. Vangie made a gesture with her head.
A figure emerged from the shadows on the far end of the stage and Solomon San Remo walked to the microphone and announced Smutnik.
They were less abrasive than Hitler Youth. The Nazi wanna-be’s drifted away from the stage. Maybe they were leaving the club, headed off to meetings somewhere to practice goose-stepping or read selections from Mein Kampf. If they knew how to read. Smutnik played a kind of slow, pulsing dirge. A singer slithered up to the microphone and mumbled monotonous lyrics in an androgynous voice.
The audience took its signal from the band, swaying slowly, looking as if they were interested only in slow, dreamy oblivion.
The skinheads had been candidates for ice, for crank, for whatever form of speed was this year’s charted hit. Hitler himself, Marvia had learned, liked uppers. Cocaine had been the drug of choice in the Fuhrerbunker. Smutnik fans were a different breed. They would go for reds, booze, Quaaludes, ecstasy.
If anybody came to the club stoned, there was no way the police could control that. Marvia would have staked a week’s pay that half the audience, at least, had some form of illegal substance in their bloodstream. But there had been no evidence of pushing in the Crash Club. At this rate, the night’s efforts were going to come up with a fat nothing.
Marvia drifted through the club. The wall opposite the bar was covered with a mural left over from an earlier era. She recognized some of the faces from her childhood. She and her brother, Tyrone, had been too young to participate fully in the Sixties phenomenon, but living in Berkeley they had been exposed to all of the controversy and all of the euphoria of that brief, colorful era.
There was Jimi Hendrix, there was Janis Joplin, there were Mama Cass Elliot, Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia. All of them dead. All of them victims.
The powder flowed, the needles gleamed, the crack pipes glowed and still they died. They never learned.
She thought of a black boy in a box.
She saw a familiar face, recognized a Berkeley cop in beard and army fatigues. He was dancing with another Berkeley cop. The bearded officer locked eyes with Marvia, nodded, gestured toward the stage with his head.
Smutnik was off the stage and Solomon San Remo was giving the featured band of the evening a big buildup. Women were crowding toward the stage, some of them yelling at San Remo and gesturing at him, urging him off the stage. He took the hint and disappeared.
PRYZN GYRLZ charged onto the stage.
Their fans cheered as if nothing else in the universe mattered.
The band leaped into their first number, the drummer pounding at her drum-kit, the bass player thundering deep notes, the guitarist making her instrument screech and wail. Marvia felt tears of pain come to her eyes.
The leader of the band was a tall, bony young woman with vaguely Asian features. She clutched a cordless mike, panted into it, rubbed it on her body. She used the stage name Apryl Pyzn, Marvia knew from her briefing.
The PRYZN GYRLZ fans jumped and chanted.
Apryl Pyzn retreated to the back of the stage. There wasn’t much room. The singer ran full-tilt to the front of the stage and launched herself into the air.
A dozen arms emerged from the crowd and caught her. She was passed across the heads of the crowd, the microphone still in her hand, holding it to one ecstatic fan after another, to add a word or a phrase to the song. The rest of PRYZN GYRLZ stayed on the stage, working their instruments to the max.
The singer came within inches of Marvia. She saw the woman, her face covered with perspiration, her expression entranced. An arm came up from the crowd. Marvia couldn’t see who wore it
