Circle of Attachment

By Elizabeth Gallagher

Retired FBI Agent Warren Marshall retreats from postwar Europe to the seedier side of late 1950s San Francisco. He supplements his income working for Harry Franks, a local private detective.He struggles to focus on his writing career but is drawn to the promise of a reunion with a woman half a world away. Will he escape the seedy underbelly of the Bay or will he meet his own end here?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diamond River Books
• Release date: Nov 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781927105016

Elizabeth Gallagher

Elizabeth Gallagher was raised on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. She was educated at the University of Victoria. She lived in England for many years and worked in London for M.I.T, Harvard and Pluto Press. She and a crew sailed her own boat across the Atlantic from the UK to West Indies where she lived on the boat for several seasons. She now lives on Vancouver Island. She runs her own small independent press and writes whenever time permits.

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Copyright© 2009 Elizabeth Gallacher

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All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

E-book ISBN – 978-1-927105-01-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgement

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter2

Chapter3

Chapter4

Chapter5

Chapter6

Chapter7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Acknowledgement

As writers of fiction we tend to believe that we work alone in the garret of our mind but in fact many people contribute to the final story. For the many friends, family and strangers who have contributed untold wealth to this story I offer my unreserved thanks and affection. And to D.C.S., I offer a special thank you just for being in my life at this time.

Dedication

To BMS for all that she has taught me.

"Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere

They’re in each other all along."

Rumi

(translated by Coleman Barks)

Chapter One

He sat on the edge of the bed, hunched over, naked except for a pair of shorts. She pressed her face against his neck, wound her arms around his shoulder and sighed in his ear.

He still drifted on the edge of sleep vaguely wondering who she was. She didn’t smell like Angelicka. Fear began to rise in the pit of his stomach. He was afraid to open his eyes. He tried to listen hard but the silence drummed somewhere deep in his head, then he heard the distant playing of a saxophone.

Seeking the sound, he broke free of her hold and stumbled to where he remembered the window should be. It was that quiet time of the evening; the hours between day workers scurrying home huddled into themselves and the night people arriving at the bars and cafes in his neighbourhood. His neighbourhood. He was surprised he called it that.

He watched the street darken and grow greasy in the half hearted February rain. He reached over and poured himself a drink from the bottle on the table next to him, piled a stack of Coleman Hawkins records on the turntable, took a long hard swig of the liquor and drifted back to the window. Soon the view fogged over with his breath. Idly, he traced an outline of his face, gently touching the silhouette almost like a lover. Then with one motion he erased the whole image only to find that the sea fog had rolled in and the view was still hazy but in a different way. He went to the sink to splash some water on his face hoping to clear his head. Towel in hand, he turned to see who the woman was but the room was empty except for her scent. For a moment, he memorized it. Gardenia, he thought.

He shivered and sought out some clothes from the heap beside the bed. He’d been in San Francisco almost four months now. The shine on his original optimism had dulled a little but he knew his big break would come. It just took time.

After a couple of weeks at the YMCA, Warren had found this room on the third floor of the San Marco Hotel, on the edge of North Beach in that area of Mason Street that is bordered by Bay and Chestnut. Like much of the neighbourhood the San Marco had been rebuilt after the great fire and earthquake of 1906. It had subsequently become a refuge for genteel down and out immigrants and the odd painter or musician on his way up or down. As far as he knew, he was the only writer who lived there.

Warren sat down at his typewriter and reached for the carriage return in order to roll in a clean piece of paper. His mind was wandering over the next chapter of his novel working it out. He looked down and found his fingers drooling over the keys, dripping booze from the spilled glass of whiskey, the amber liquid falling to the floor in puddles adding yet another stain to the carpet. He reached down and mopped it up with some loose pages of his manuscript. The stain wouldn’t hurt it. His writing was crap anyway. Still, he was angry that he had wasted the booze. He was getting low on funds. Harry hadn’t had any work for him this week.

Harry Franks was a beefy ex-fighter who ran the Franks Detective Agency. Warren picked up some surveillance jobs from him, mostly tracking spouses suspected of having affairs. It was tedious work but it paid the rent and bought the booze until he got his novel published.

Had he eaten today? He couldn’t remember. Sometimes the days and nights tumbled into one another. He grabbed his hat and coat and hit the street before he had time to change his mind.

He walked a couple of blocks in the fog to the Lost Riff. He threaded his way through the crowd of early drinkers, nodding to several people as he made his way to the bar. From behind the bar, Hawk poured him a whiskey without stopping to ask what he wanted. The fog surrounding him now seemed nicotine stained in the low lamplight. All around the room people appeared to be nodding at him as though he’d been coming to this bar for years. Then he thought he saw Fats Waller at the piano. God, Fats Waller had been dead for years. He’d have to stop drinking soon. These hallucinations were getting bad.

Out in the street black buildings reared up like a tidal wave. Shadows, like adders reached out and coiled around him. He caught a glimpse of himself in the neon lit reflection. His image was fractured in red, silver and green as the wind changed and sent streaks of rain down the glass window. His face seemed to dissolve into hundreds of pieces and fall onto the street. He huddled down into his coat and remembered he was on his way a couple of blocks over to his favourite Chinese restaurant. Rain began to fall in earnest now and soon the storm was raging full mouthed on all sides. He saw the welcome lights of the Lotus Flower Diner and ordered his favourite meal from Mr. Chen. Clutching the warm cardboard boxes to his chest inside his coat he hurried back to his room.

He could feel the rain and the wind stinging his face, silently as though they were not what was happening to his skin but something that was happening deep within him. Startled, he turned to see a taxi ghost through the steam that gushed from a cracked vent in the street. He was glad find his front door.

He didn’t even wait to clean the plate of yesterday’s food but dove immediately into the cardboard containers. He stood before the window in his room inhaling the food and shivering as the old radiator grumbled and wept.

A spasm of lightning spread like mercury on the street. Thunder rumbled somewhere blocks away. A prowl car floated by cutting the rain with a red and blue swirl. His mind wandered as he set the half empty boxes on the table. He looked down at the street again. He was mesmerized by a pool of gasoline coated water illuminated by the street lamp. The sound of two cars drifting into one another at the end of the block brought him back to reality. He watched the two drivers get out and shadow box a dance of rage. Soon the gestures slowed and he lost interest. He sat back down at his typewriter. This was the hour that his best writing came. Even when his novel eluded him he seemed able to lose himself in writing some pulp fiction.

He’d heard that there was good money in it. With his background, and his current work for Harry, the research was easy. Still, did he want to make his career as a pulp fiction writer? His mother was appalled that he wanted to be a no good writer. She’d never be able to stomach his becoming a pulp fiction writer.

His eyes wandered over to René’s painting, the one from his blue period. It was an abstract titled Surveillance. Warren was sure he could see the fractured face of a woman behind the veil. He wondered, given René’s devout Catholicism, if it was an image of the Virgin Mary. He must remember to ask him the next time he wrote. But, here in his room in America, it reminded him of his mother. How fractured their relationship had become since he’d moved west. After the first month or so she had stopped writing every week. Oh, she still wrote and she still talked about making the trip west next summer but without the frequency and diligence he expected from her.

Warren went back to his detective story and for the next few hours he made his hero more heroic and the violence that surrounded him more violent. It allowed him to express his own anger through the typewriter keys.

As dawn broke he fell fully clothed on the unmade bed and slept until the afternoon sun lit the room.

Warren crawled off the bed feeling much better than he had for a few days. He cleaned up the festering food remains, collected his dirty clothes into a bag and opened the window to air the room. In this buzz of activity he decided that he would drop his clothes off at Louie’s Laundry across the street and have a coffee at the Trieste before going around to see Harry.

The Italian patrons who frequented the Trieste drank espresso in frightening quantities. Several cups of that could really pump you up. Warren wanted to be up when he went to see Harry and besides perhaps the espresso would chase his headache away.

Next week he would look for a job on a newspaper again and try to meet up with that movie producer who was a client of DeeDee’s. She was sure the guy knew some publishers or could at least shop his novel to some movie studios in L.A. They were always looking for good ideas. God, he felt good.

As he walked towards the Franks Detective Agency, Warren imagined Harry as he knew he would find him. He was a big man, over six feet tall and about as wide as a bus. His arms rested on the papers on his desk. He would peer at all comers from this hunched forward position. A half forgotten cigar smoldered unnoticed between his sausage sized fingers. His face hung in several layers. The layer around his huge bulbous nose was flecked with purple acting as a supporting document to his nose which proclaimed