The Perpetual Summer Read online

  “You’ve brought up some interesting points,” I said, deflecting by not directly responding to his question. Paul was on an obvious fishing expedition to gauge my level of interest in the newly open role as head of the group. There were two clear contenders, assuming the firm didn’t look outside for potential candidates, and they both were in the room at that moment. I had zero interest in taking on the enhanced responsibilities of running the entire group, but I would never tell Paul that. I secretly got pleasure from watching him squirm.

  “I wonder what Faber thinks of all this,” he tried again. Pat Faber was the director overseeing all of us.

  “Yeah, I wonder.”

  “I bet you he sees it our way,” he answered. Apparently we were of one frame of mind.

  “You never know,” I told him.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s a hard one, Paul.”

  “If you had to guess?”

  “It could go either way.”

  “But if you were forced to answer?”

  “I can see both angles.”

  This banter played out long past the point where I got amusement out of it. The telephone offered me a convenient excuse to disengage. It was an unknown outside number, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to needle Paul one last time.

  “It’s Pat Faber. I should take this.”

  “Really? What about?” he sputtered.

  I picked up the phone and cupped the mouthpiece. “I guess I’ll find out in a minute,” I answered and gleefully watched Paul tailspin out of the office. “This is Chuck,” I spoke into the phone.

  “Mr. Valenti wants to see you,” the voice came back. The hair tingled on the back of my neck. I was told an address in Chinatown and then the caller abruptly hung up.

  The car I’d ordered stopped a block short of the address on Hill Street. If he went any farther, he’d be funneled up on the on-ramp to the 110 Freeway, which led north to Pasadena. I made it the remaining way on foot. The building was literally the last one on the block, where the hum of traffic from above washed down between the buildings.

  I recognized Valenti’s driver standing on the sidewalk. He wore a black suit with matching tie and mustache. His slicked-back hair, evenly corrugated by the teeth of a plastic comb, was colored with the same black shoe polish as his eyebrows. His gray eyes were the only bit of variation on the ensemble and spoke of his pronounced age. As I approached, I half expected him to introduce himself as the Great Zoltar and pull a set of plastic flowers out of a cane. Instead, he wordlessly pointed me to a nondescript door propped ajar by a stray brick.

  The door led to a dingy emergency stairwell. Over the sounds of traffic above, I heard faint voices, and I thought of Valenti as I climbed the stairs. It had been over a year since we last spoke. His actions had set off a chain of events that killed four people. One of them was my friend. Valenti had had no direct involvement in their deaths. He’d had no indirect involvement either. But I still blamed him.

  Coming out onto the roof, I was greeted with the sight of the ever-present line of cars on the 110 bending around the hills of Dodger Stadium and descending into downtown Los Angeles. The cars were close enough that I could make eye contact with their drivers. Behind me screeched a high-pitched, slightly accented voice engaged in an impassioned plea.

  “You can’t just create in a vacuum,” said the slender man, motioning to the surrounding neighborhood. “We must take our cues from the beauty that already exists. What I’ve done is create a sense of space that is true to the cultural and social fabric of this community. It is harmonious with the people who reside here, and that is the great accomplishment.”

  Valenti let him have his speech, at least for a little while. He brandished the rolled-up architectural drawings and pointed them at the man’s chest.

  “You have two choices,” Valenti responded, calmly. “Your very noble ideals or this commission. I’ll wait for your decision.”

  Valenti left the frustrated architect and walked over toward me by the stairwell. He thanked me for coming and suggested we go across the street to talk. I had no choice but to follow him like a lackey trailing his master.

  We made the short walk over to Chung King Road. This was the chop-suey-and-fortune-cookie part of Chinatown, where everything was lit by paper lanterns and where foo dogs outnumbered people two to one. We settled in at an empty bar in one of the older restaurants, which was tucked in an alley. It smelled of sweet-and-sour sauce and ammonia. A surly bartender stared at me with an arched eyebrow. Feeling the need to appear culturally enlightened, I ordered a Tsingtao with the correct pronunciation. Valenti ordered a ginger ale.

  “I never touch alcohol before five,” he told me as I took my first sip of beer. I was certain that, had I ordered a ginger ale, he would have told me that he never trusted a man who didn’t drink before five.

  Valenti unfurled a set of architectural plans on the bar and studied them in silence. It felt like a put-on, like he was waiting to be asked about them. I gave him no such satisfaction and let him pretend to pore over the drawings until even he grew tired of the charade.

  “It’s going to be my legacy,” he said flatly.

  Why his legacy would reside on a random lot in Chinatown was unclear. He had no cultural connection to this part of the city or the people who lived here. If anything, he was constantly at odds with them. His developments were almost exclusively in the white neighborhoods of Los Angeles or in the pure-white neighborhoods of Orange County.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Valenti took a few seconds for dramatic effect.

  “The seminal museum of contemporary American art,” he answered with a smug look of satisfaction, not so much at the accomplishment of having his own museum, but at the fact that I was interested in hearing about it. “You know I have the largest collection in the world?”

  I told him I didn’t. He took my answer as an invitation to tell me about it in excruciating detail. His tone shifted to feigned boredom as if he was annoyed that he had to explain it to me. He rattled off names—Diebenkorn, Ruscha, Baldessari—two-thirds of whom I had never heard of, and prattled on about this movement and that school, and only a graduate art-history student could have told you if Valenti knew what he was talking about. Each acquisition followed the same formula—an important piece purchased directly from the influential artist when they were unknown or out of favor or flat broke. He knew exactly what he paid and he knew exactly what it was worth today. His lips glistened as he categorized pieces as “10x” or “100x” or even “1000x,” which referred to the level of price appreciation they had garnered since he purchased them. Not once did he talk about a specific piece outside of its monetary value.

  Valenti then removed a pen from his jacket pocket and crudely started scribbling on the impeccably rendered drawings. In a few strokes, he added a fourth floor and in big bold letters the words, “VALENTI ART CENTER.”

  “Subtle,” I said.

  Valenti looked at me askance but then smiled. “It has to be taller,” he told me, “so when all those prigs from Pasadena come downtown for the opera, the first thing they see is my name.”

  The random building at the far end of Chinatown wasn’t so random anymore. It was a lousy spot to put a seminal museum of contemporary American art but it was the ideal spot to tell everyone that you’re so rich you can put a seminal museum of contemporary American art wherever the hell you want to.

  As a first-generation multi-billionaire, Valenti had the money to elevate himself into the stratosphere of the elite, but he lacked the currency of credibility among that set. Some years ago he realized that fine art was his ticket in and set off on a buying spree unsurpassed by even the city’s preeminent museums.

  “Well, like you said,” I said, smiling and motioning for another beer, “it’s all about the art.”

  This time he laughed.

  “I’m worth ten billion dollars, but that means nothing to you. Or it means a lot but
you don’t want to let me know it.”

  “The latter,” I told him truthfully.

  “That’s why I trust you. That’s why I need you to help me find my granddaughter.” I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly and looked at the surly bartender as if expecting him to repeat it for me. “She has been missing for four days.” Valenti offered no further details. He carefully folded up the drawings.

  “Have you called the police?”

  He ignored my question.

  “One hundred thousand dollars if you can find her,” he said and stood up from the bar stool. “Please give me your answer this evening.”

  He left me with the bill.

  On the walk back to the office, I cursed myself for not telling Valenti where he could shove his hundred-thousand-dollar offer. We’d spent the entire time talking about his artwork and the incredible capital gains he’d made off the artists’ works, and only at the very end did he get to the real reason for the meeting. He spoke of his missing granddaughter with none of the passion he displayed in the retelling of his art conquests. She sounded like an afterthought, a loose end that needed to be tied. And I hated him at that moment. Not because of his coldness toward a missing human being, but because I didn’t decline his offer on the spot.

  With distance from the meeting came indignation. And by the time I reached 1st Street, I nobly climbed up on my high horse and worked through the perfect zinger to tell him off. The great one-liners always come much later than when you need them.

  But then the wonderfully pragmatic mind took over.

  As I began the long ascent up Bunker Hill, an internal pitch session made a very convincing, very one-sided case for taking Valenti up on his offer. Post-divorce, I was cash-strapped and house-poor. My ex-wife got the Benedict Canyon home and half of my retirement. I got an overpriced fixer-upper in Eagle Rock that came with a thirty-year mortgage and no air conditioning during a brutal heat wave. Valenti’s hundred-grand cash infusion would solve many of my earthly problems.

  Plus, I was bored.

  I thought of Bob Gershon and the retirement party and the words he said. We shared a similar view of our roles, and although I was not quite at the point of total despair that he had reached, I was definitely hurtling toward a similar outcome. I could envision myself in that same boardroom in twenty years, giving that same speech.

  And it scared me.

  By the time I got back to the office, most of the people had left, trying to catch the early trains back to Orange County. I passed by Bob’s empty office. You can say this much—the machine certainly was efficient in eradicating cancerous cells from the corporate ecosystem. His office was completely wiped clean, and no trace remained of the man who had given forty-five years of his life to the company. Except for one thing—the row of crystal trophies, the culmination of a career, that spanned the wall-to-wall shelf above his desk. They were that constant North Star of accomplishment that I’d gazed at during our weekly touch-base meetings. But I couldn’t figure out why they’d left the awards when they had clearly gotten rid of everything else, including the used pencils.

  I pulled the desk chair over and climbed up to reach for one of the statuettes. It was a heavy obelisk with a granite base. The crystal was a little dusty, but I could clearly read the etched words next to my fingers:

  YOUR NAME HERE

  They were all samples from various corporate-appreciation gift companies, but he’d displayed them like the trophies of a grand master. Bob said he’d only recently come to the conclusion that his life spent here was meaningless. But it was clear he’d come to that conclusion long before then.

  ONE CONDITION

  There comes a point in life when people simply stop evolving. They settle on the haircut they’ll get for the rest of their lives, the wardrobe that will never get updated, the speech that defies the passing eras. The Coverdale Club had reached that point forty years ago.

  The paneled dining room was empty on a late Saturday morning except for a few dusty old-timers enjoying the most popular appetizer in the house—double rye Manhattans. Audubon and foxhunting prints decorated the walls and harkened to a simple, bucolic life full of nature and slaughter. A tuxedoed waiter clutching a leather-bound menu padded across the burgundy carpet, but he needn’t have gone to the trouble, as I could have guessed the menu’s contents without looking: salad of iceberg lettuce wedges and blue cheese dressing, London broil, potatoes dauphine, and thick asparagus with hollandaise, all washed down with a ruby claret.

  “Good afternoon,” the elderly waiter intoned. “May I inquire as to whose guest you will be today?”

  He apparently was familiar enough with the entire member roster to know that I didn’t belong to the club, although that feat wasn’t too impressive, since I was the only person under sixty in the entire place. He watched me make one last scan of the dining room.

  “Are you meeting a member?” he asked with a growing sense of annoyance.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Carl Valenti.”

  The osteoporosis posture suddenly became a little straighter and the voice became a little more helpful. For a name that normally drew my ire, this time it actually felt good to say it. The waiter eagerly led me to a small elevator with another vestige of the past, a human operator. The directory called out the gymnasium, a lyceum for guest speakers, and then “residences” at the top, which was code for rooms to entertain young women on the make. They also served as actual residences for when the young woman got you kicked out of your mansion in San Marino. We got off at the floor with the gym.

  The waiter led me into a room lined with mahogany lockers and covered in hunter green carpet that smelled of camphor and foot powder. The room was full of big, white bellies in towels and older black men who waited on them. It evoked an unpleasant “yes’m” era, when African Americans served as the backbone of the service industry in Los Angeles.

  I followed my guide into one of the saunas hidden behind a groaning wooden door. Valenti was the only occupant. He sat hunched forward on one of the benches. He had old-man skin, like an over-stretched sweater, with rivulets of sweat running through the folds. The door thudded shut and the waiter left us alone.

  “Do you want to talk outside?” I asked. I was already sweating and clearly not dressed for the occasion.

  “It’s quieter in here.”

  “Okay,” I said. “How should we start?”

  “You tell me. You’re the investigator.”

  The man clearly never missed an opportunity to needle.

  “No, I’m not an investigator.” I loosened the collar of my shirt. “But maybe that’s where we should start. Tell me why you didn’t hire a real one.”

  “I’ve worked with private investigators in the past. They’re nothing more than blackmailers in disguise. I can’t invite that sort of temptation into this.”

  “What would they be tempted with, Mr. Valenti?”

  He didn’t like that question.

  “Every family has its unseemly side. Mine is no different. I’d rather not have that be exploited.”

  “Tell me about your granddaughter.”

  “There’s nothing unseemly about her,” he snapped.

  “I didn’t ask for the dirt on her,” I said, though now it made me think I should have. “I was just asking for some general information.”

  Valenti spent the next five minutes describing his grandchild. Jeanette was the daughter of Meredith Schwartzman, Valenti’s only child through a second marriage. The girl lived with her mother, who was permanently separated from her husband. He talked about the missing girl like a proud grandfather but relayed the information with a reporter’s distance. The words matched but the tone didn’t.

  I did a stint in recruiting before my current role with the firm. There I developed an invaluable skill called the Bullshit Detector. Over the last two decades, résumés had become so bloated with fluff and jargon that it became nearly impossible to discern what someone actually did in their past roles.<
br />
  “Facilitated discussions among teams of senior managers.…”

  “Liaison for strategic external clients.…”

  “Workflow oversight of core content deliverables.…”

  Like those red-lens glasses that kids use to find the secret word, the Bullshit Detector allowed you to see through the spin and get to the heart of what someone actually did.

  “Scheduled meetings.”

  “Answered phones.”

  “Did nothing.”

  There was so much nonsense coming out of Valenti’s mouth that I had to shut off the detector for fear of it overheating. My head swirled from the maddening array of evasive answers and half-truths. Or it could have been the fact that the room was 180 degrees and I was wearing wool. Thankfully an attendant came in and poured another ladle of water on the hot stones.

  “Your granddaughter is sixteen years old. Why didn’t you call the police?” I asked.

  “There was a time when you could own the police,” he lamented, “but now you have to own the union to own the police, and that is too expensive a proposition. They have an insatiable appetite. I don’t want the publicity that comes with an official investigation.”

  “It’s your granddaughter,” I said flatly.

  Valenti didn’t appreciate the recrimination in that statement.

  “I know it means nothing to you, but that museum means a lot to me.” It was the first thing he said that I actually believed. “The building won’t go up without a fight. There are a lot of people who would like to see me fail. Do you know about the ballot initiative?”

  I remembered reading about a local proposition sponsored by the offspring of one of Chinatown’s scions. It was an innocuous-sounding change to a certain cultural heritage provision, which was, in reality, a thinly disguised maneuver to block the construction of Valenti’s museum. It was a bit of a local scandal because one of the sponsors of the proposition was none other than the art foundation that Valenti founded and would use to populate the museum itself. Adding to the controversy was the fact that the person leading the charge was the head of the foundation, Valenti’s own estranged son-in-law.