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“You better not stay here. They might come back.”
“Hold on,” I said. “I know you, yes? Roy’s friend … Tom …”
“Shipway. Better get out. They were crazy. Come on.”
I followed Tom Shipway out of the empty apartment.
He unlocked his own door with two sets of keys. “Ready? Set! Go!”
I jumped in.
He slammed the door and lay against it. “The landlady! I can’t let her see!”
“See?!” I looked around.
We were in Captain Nemo’s undersea apartments, his submarine cabins and engine rooms.
“Good God!” I cried.
Tom Shipway beamed. “Nice, huh?”
“Nice, hell, it’s incredible!”
“I knew you’d like it. Roy gave me your stories. Mars. Atlantis. And that thing you wrote on Jules Verne. Great, huh?”
He waved and I walked and saw and touched. The great red-velvet-covered Victorian chairs, brass-studded and locked to the ship’s floor. The brass periscope shining down out of the ceiling. The huge fluted pipe organ, center stage. And just beyond, a window that had been converted into an oval submarine porthole, beyond which swam tropical fish of various sizes and colors.
“Look!” said Tom Shipway. “Go on!”
I bent to peer into the periscope.
“It works!” I said. “We’re under water! Or it seems! Did you do all this? You’re a genius.”
“Yeah.”
“Does … does your landlady know you’ve done this to her apartment?”
“If she did, she’d kill me. I’ve never let her in.”
Shipway touched a button on the wall.
Shadows stirred beyond in the green sea.
A projection of a giant spider loomed, gesticulating.
“The Squid! Nemo’s antagonist! I’m stunned!”
“Well, sure! Sit down. What’s going on? Where’s Roy? Why did those bums come in like dingos and leave like hyenas?”
“Roy? Oh, yeah.” The weight of it knocked me back. I sat down, heavily. “Jesus, yes. Roy. What happened here last night?”
Shipway moved around the room quietly, imitating what he remembered.
“You ever see Rick Orsatti sneaking around L.A. years ago? The racketeer?”
“He ran with a gang …”
“Yeah. Once, years ago, at twilight, downtown, coming out of an alley, I saw six guys dressed in black, one guy leading them, and they moved like fancy rats dressed in leather or silk, all funeral-colored, and their hair oiled back, and their faces pasty white. No, otters is more like it, black weasels. Silent, slithering, snakelike, dangerous, hostile, like black clouds smoking out a chimney. Well, that was last night. I smelled a perfume so strong it came under the door.”
