Gaha: Babes of the Abyss Read online

  Gaha: Babes of the Abyss

  Jon Frankel

  Whiskey Tit

  New York City and Twenty Miles West of Nowhere

  Text copyright the author.

  First print and digital editions copyright the author and Whiskey Tit.

  If you wish to reproduce, distribute, or transmit any part of this text, in any form, please do so in good faith and with some form of attribution, if not effusive praise.

  This book was produced using PressBooks.com.

  For Maja, Elizabeth, Catherine, Zofia, Jesse and Andrew

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Acknowledgements

  The author gratefully acknowledges the following people for their friendship, generosity and insight: Cara Hoffman, Michael Salwen, Nancy Moss, Eric Maroney, Billy Coté, John Fousek, Julia Kreutzman, Steven Adkins, Joel and Julie Copenhagen, Ubaldo Valli, Bob Stratton, John Newman, Oskar Eustis, Miette, and Maja Anderson.

  For the story, and one felicitous phrase, I am indebted to Bernard O’Donnel, who wrote The World’s Worst Women (of the twentieth century). In it you will find Chapter XI: The First Acid Bath Murders, about the sisters Katherine and Philomene Schmidt and the lawyer Alexander Serrat. They dissolved their victims in acid.

  The title, as well as some names, come from The Complete Enochian Dictionary, “A dictionary of the Angelic language as revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley….” Gaha is the Babe of the Abyss, an angel.

  For language, I have been wayward, promiscuous and omnivorous, unapologetically. All errors are mine. Malaprop uses of languages other than English are not to be corrected.

  Thank you Mike Salwen, for proofreading, yes, and enumerable, incalculable acts of love and friendship for 40 years.

  Deep gratitude and love to Oskar Eustis, cousin, comrade, and friend, and the greatest analyst of narrative on the planet.

  I owe a huge thanks to Cara Hoffman for everything.

  I wish especially to acknowledge the unending loyalty, friendship, encouragement, intelligence, determination and kindness of Miette.

  What lies beyond gratitude, beyond measure, my love for Maja Anderson, who makes all things possible, including the cover of the book.

  “I see the girls go by

  Dressed in their summer clothes

  I have to turn my head

  Until my darkness goes.”

  – Jagger/Richards, Paint it Black

  “My advice is to not let the boys in.”

  – Bob Dylan, Tombstone Blues

  Chapter One

  LA: 2540

  She was seventeen and all leg, banging the hell out of a pinball machine. I watched her play, my back to the bar. There was a cigarette going in her left hand with a cone of ash hanging off the end. The muscles in her bare thighs tensed up every time she bumped her pelvis into the coin box. As the ball shot toward her flippers she turned her feet in and banged with the right and then the left hand, knocking the ash to the floor. The red light on top of the machine started to turn and a police siren went off. It barked, “Pull off to the side of the road!” and she slapped the flipper, sending the ball up into a thousand-point hole. While the lights flashed and sirens sang she took a long drag off the cigarette.

  I should have known better. I was on the job for Junior. There were two kilos of cocaine in my briefcase. I had only stopped off for a shot before going home. It was not the time to be messing around with girls who play pinball. But I felt like one night with her would light the fuse to another big bang. So I hopped down off the stool and stood beside her. She waited for the ball to release, her head held back, still, poised as if about to strike. “What are you drinking?” I asked.

  She eyed the ball, breathing through her nose. “Fuck you, I am shooting,” she said, in some kind of an accent I didn’t know.

  “It’s just a game,” I said.

  “Game? No.” Thwock. The ball knocked around making bing-bing noises and then disappeared in a shade. Her neck tightened. She had short tufted hair in a jumble of mismatched dyes and cuts. Her skin was lit up in neon beer signs and pinball. She wore a green tank top and orange cotton shorts that rode up her butt and lime green jellies on her feet, toenails painted red. A black pearl on a gold chain bounced on her chest. The machine exploded to life and the ball shot down the center. She hit both flippers and missed. “Chinga tu madre,” she muttered. “You did this. You owe me a drink. Oaschloch.”

  “I never heard that one before. What’s it mean, Okschlott?

  “Oaschloch. Asshole you would say.” She made an ‘o’ with her thumb and forefinger and held it up to me. “Not the jerk, where the shit comes out.”

  “Let’s sit,” I said. We took our seats at the bar. I called Tony over. “Make it Mekong and bironga this time, and whatever the perrucha wants.”

  “Bironga and Mekong is good,” she said. She had the high triangle face and eyes of an Egyptian cat and two little bumps on her chest.

  Tony went about getting our drinks. He wore shabby pants and suspenders that seemed to drag his ass from one end of the bar to the other. His eyebrows were big salt and pepper tufts and his cheeks were pitted like old concrete.

  “So what do you do?” I asked. I had her in the stool—so far so good—but she was bored, staring at the bottles with her chin propped up on her hands. Her eyes were the color of the room.

  “Nothing. Why do you ask? Where’s my drink?”

  “Relax, it’s coming.”

  “O.K.” She scowled and stared at the bar and then at me. Tony put down the beers and poured the shots. She downed hers and drank some beer. I took a sip and watched her. She didn’t sit still. She was like a long guitar lick. Every minute she pulled a new face on me, or the mirror, or she twisted back and forth on the stool, her eyes spiteful and narrow, her mouth about to spit.

  “You don’t go to school— ”

  She stared at her hand, trying to pick out a finger to gnaw to the bone and asked, “To what? School? No. Do you take me for an idiot?” She looked me in the eyes and said, “Why don’t you tell me what you do?”

  “Real estate, mostly. I’m a small business man.” My old man always told me to go get a shingle, whenever he wrote from Alcatraz. Work your angle from inside the law, he said. Be a broker. Real estate, CPA, lawyer. Anyone who takes a cut. And that’s what I did, mostly.

  “Small business, right. Pimp?” She half smiled.

  “What the fuck is it with you?” I asked. “Pimp. Is that how I seem?” I didn’t like pimps much.

  “Forty-year-old guy, seventeen-year-old girl. What do you call that?”

  “Bad arithmetic. I’m 25. You’re in range.” I raised my glass to her and smiled, all 37 years of me. “I wouldn’t expect no remuneration or nothing, for my greater maturity.”

  “You think I don’t know those words? Because of my accent?”

  I didn’t know what to think. “It’s a lawyer joke. I can do that. I’m a lawyer.”

  “That must come in handy.” She rolled a thin cigarette up from a pouch of Kretek and lit it. The smell of cloves sweetened the air.

  “Are you really seventeen?” She held her wrist up and showed me a scar code, an ugly patch of red welts. “Who gave you that?”

  “The roller of big cigars. A Ruler on his giant horse.”

  “What the fuck are you doing here anyway?” I asked.

  “What the fuck is anyone doing here?”

  I wondered that all the time.

  The clock above the cash register said ten-to-five. I had hours to kill. If I could get her into my car, I could get her into my bed and still get to the party in time to set up, and deliver the tributo to Carlos at midnight. “You wanna go for a drive? This place is dead.”

  She shrugged and it was like she wasn’t there. She was a ghost, a sleepwalker. She had drifted. “Maybe. I’m waiting for someone.”

  “You tell me now? After all that? You break my heart?”

  “You never asked. She will be here soon.” Her face was flat and still.

  “She. A bloody tortillera. My fucking luck.”

  The door outside opened, letting in a flood of sun that lit up her face. Her eyes flared like matches a
nd then they were the dark unbroken blue of desert sky. In walked a woman, blinking. She shut the door and searched the room. The girl got off her stool and called, “Elma, over here, here.” Elma looked a little older, longer in the face, and she was a bad dresser. She wore paisley pants like bags and her feet were filthy from walking in sandals. She had an expensive hair cut. It hung straight down to her shoulders, and it was all one color of blond, except the front left side of her head, which was of LuminEssence flashing in the dark.

  “This is my sister Elma.”

  Elma nodded and tried to smile.

  “Now I know who she is but who are you?” I asked.

  Elma answered. “She’s my little sister, who should not be talking to people like you.”

  “People like me? Now what is that?”

  “I won’t say. Irmela, are you done playing pinball?”

  “Yes, I am all done.”

  I got down off the stool and faced Elma. “We were just having a drink. I hope you don’t mind. In fact, I invited Irmela to go for a drive. Why don’t you come too?” I figured, if it doesn’t work out with the perrucha, maybe it will with the big sister. And that would give me time to work on the little one. Like my old man said, from the inside.

  Elma examined my face like a plastic surgeon. She gulped and looked away. “This we cannot do.”

  “Now don’t be so harsh.” She smiled at the floor. The hook was set. “Irmela can sit in back. You sit up front with me. We’ll go along the coast. I know a bar with great food looking right out over the ocean. We’ll get steak and dance all night long.” She pretended to grimace and now, for me, it was a matter of pride. “If you don’t wanna do that, then I’ll drive you wherever you’re going.”

  “I have a car out front.”

  “Am I fishing in the wrong hole?”

  “Why don’t you buy me a drink here. Later I can decide about the roadhouse and all that stuff.” A sarcastic smile lit across her face and her hair glowed. She laughed at me. And I laughed back.

  I turned to Irmela with a big smile, thinking, now for you. But she wasn’t there. I looked down the bar at the same three old people with wrinkled, tanned and tattooed arms who’d been there for the past 30 years. The ceiling brightened and as I turned around the door closed down the light and the bar was dark again. Footsteps crunched on the stones of the parking lot. “What the fuck—”

  Elma’s said in a placid monotone, “Irmela does that a lot. She’s very moody. I must go after her.” She walked out the door and I sat down and took a sip of beer. Oh well, I thought. I really can’t be chasing after crazy girls who play pinball. I had a delivery to make, a party to set up. Things to do. Carlos didn’t like when a man was late.

  I finished the shot. When I went to pick up the briefcase, my hand reached into empty air. It was gone. “Fuck!” I yelled. Tony looked up, his mouth hanging open. I ran out the door into the blasting sun. Elma was trotting across the parking lot, chasing my car on foot. I patted my pockets. Irmela had taken my keys and wallet too. “Goddamn it!” I screamed. I loved that car. I didn’t love anything more, except maybe the house I was living in, but that wasn’t mine. The car was mine.

  Elma stopped running and turned towards me. “She drove off in someone’s car. I tried to stop her, but….”

  “Yeah, my car. And she stole my briefcase too.” I was fucked. Two kilos of cocaine, gone! I never had to kill anyone before, never even thought about it and I’d only known her five minutes and all I could see in any direction was murder.

  It was the hottest part of the afternoon. 160-degree waves of heat radiated off the crushed stone of the parking lot and baked my face. My eyes winced at the wind. I needed a silver snood and goggles but they were in the trunk. She looked around the parking lot and said, “There. That’s where I parked. Come on.”

  I followed her to the car and my spirits fell as soon as I saw it. “Oh hell,” I said. It was pathetic, a solar toy made of Litewood and rubber with two solarsails. Useless at night after a couple of hours. And a maximum speed of 40 mph. “This will never work. I must be nuts,” I said and got in the car.

  “She’s always doing this, I’m sorry. What was in the briefcase?”

  “Important documents. I’m totally screwed with my firm if I lose those things. Like dead screwed.”

  “Well she doesn’t care about your documents!” Elma said, laughing. “You are like a child. She is only after money or drugs.”

  Chapter Two

  Elma checked her rearview mirror. The car shook as the sails lifted taut and she spun us out of there. “Put on your seat belt. We’ll go to her usual spots first.”

  I tightened the belt and tried to stretch my legs but there was little room on the floor and my stomach was in knots. The seats were like padded bowls. The car had a faint foul odor, of upholstery stained with sweat and glandular secretions. “She has a route when thieving? Where I come from that will get you a knife in the back of the head.”

  “You think she’s very beautiful?” Elma asked, craning her neck as she drove. I didn’t answer. Sure she was beautiful. That wasn’t even the word for what she was. But I wasn’t going to say so. Not to the sister. She looked in the rearview again. “Sometimes she follows me. I must drive around until she thinks she catches me, but I have really caught her; then I chase her around for a while. We learned that back home.”

  “Where would that be?”

  “Tell me your name first.”

  “Bob Martin.”

  “So you are the man from Mars.” Elma turned onto a dirt road that took us towards Beverly Hills. The small adobe domes on either side looked like igloos with kitchen gardens, grape arbors and orange trees. We raced along the ruts. Dust blew up around the windshield and rained rocks on the roof. She drove with one hand and put the other through her hair and said, “Montreal. Then New York, Vegas. We have a musical act.”

  We came to a fancier neighborhood with Spanish colonial houses behind stucco walls and gates and modern bungalows with fences. She pulled off the road and parked under a giant eucalyptus tree in front of a low, single story block building with a flat reflective roof. “Maybe she is getting a hair cut,” Elma said.

  “That’s just what I would do in this situation.”

  “She is young. She has not learned.” There were three unoccupied hair-drying units shaped like eggs against one wall and three sinks where three people were getting their hair washed by decrepit old men with long pink fingers. None of them was Irmela. We got back into the car. Midnight was creeping towards us.

  Back in the car I was so twisted around on myself I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Where does she drink?” I demanded.

  “She doesn’t drink. She plays pinball.”

  “She knocked the Mekong back today like they were old friends.”

  “We will go to streep mall next.”

  Elma kept her eye on her rear the whole way to streep mall. She got off the freeway and onto a local pitted road lined with shacks with goat and chicken pens and cactus hedges. The dust rolled up and engulfed the car. Up ahead three ceramic building ports shimmered in layers against brown dirt and dead grass. Horses and buggies, mule carts, cars and bikes were parked under the palm trees. At the turn off there was a sign that said, streep mall.

  “So what’s here?”

  “The bar where she knows a girl. They all have big breasts. Irmela could not get a job in this bar. She has boy’s body. The owner said, this ain’t some Ruler bar. I have heard of Ruler bars only in ludicrous stories in the newspaper, the kind you get at the train station, for the toilet and the waiting room. Where they make those lies to keep you quiet while the train goes.”

  “I’m familiar with them.”

  We entered the first port. The stairwell down stank of piss and rotting fruit. The climate control clanked. Inside the air was cold and wet. It smelled like mildewed carpet. There was a long bar full of men with boob jobs. The bartender was a six foot blond dressed from the neck down in black. Elma spoke to her in what she later said was French, but I didn’t know French from German.

  “We’ll look in back,” Elma said, taking my hand to lead me through a curtain into a dark circular room with ten pinball machines and a red light in the ceiling. We stood by the curtain watching. Their faces were lit up yellow as they stared unblinking into the game and rocked their hips and pushed their knees into the machines. Smoke filled the dark red light. There was a girl with unruly hair at one of the machines that looked like Irmela for a moment, but it wasn’t her.