Kind of Twilight (eBook)

Alan J. Bloch (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
296 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
9798350999051 (ISBN)

Infos

Rudy Bustamente, LAPD's elite anti-terrorism chief, is tasked with unraveling a case that defies logic. The victim, Jim Blake Arnold, has no ties to crime or terrorism. The sole lead is Jeremey Eaton, an international banker whose charm and wit mask a troubled personal life. Jeremey, who is visiting the serene Triple Bar Ranch with his daughter, becomes a focal point in a mystery that spans from L.A.'s gritty streets to the sweeping expanse of the Southwest. Sybil Quartermaine, an anthropology professor at NYU, has been invited to spend the summer at the ranch. Here she meets Jeremey and is drawn into the unfolding drama which reaches its climax beneath the imposing silhouette of the Rockies. With sharp insight, Alan J. Bloch weaves a tale that fuses suspense and a vivid tapestry of American cultures, where personal and collective histories collide in a climactic reckoning.

ALAN J. BLOCH spent over fifty years in the financial services industry as a stockbroker and money management partner. He spent decades working for civic, cultural and social justice organizations including LA Theatre Center, CAST LA-the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Human Trafficking and LA's Jewish Television Network. He received his MA in philosophy from Yale University. His scholarly publications include 'With a Rush of Archangel's Wings' Paul Celan: Jewish Orpheus and 'Time and Transcendence' in Studia Philosophica vol. 18 (Switzerland). He is a Founder Trustee of The Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation. He is the father of six children and six grandsons.

---

In A Kind of Twilight, a brazen and ruthlessly executed attack at LAX-one of America's busiestairports stuns the nation and dominates headlines worldwide. Rudy Bustamente, the highest-ranking Hispanic officer in the LAPD and head of the elite anti-terrorism division, is assigned the case. But nothing adds up. The target of the attack, Jim Blake-Arnold, is a family man nearing retirement, seemingly happily married to his wife of 32 years,with no apparent connection to crime, drugs, or terrorism. The only lead in this high-profile assassination is Jeremey Eaton, an international banker for J.P. Morgan and a long-time friend and business associate of Arnold. Having accompanied him to theairport, Eaton was the last person to see him alive. Still reeling from the murder, Jeremey retreats to Triple Bar Ranch, a sprawling estateoverlooking the majestic peaks of the Rockies, to spend time with his daughter. At the heart of the ranch is C.B. Moraine, a man devoted to his family, including his adoptednephew, Seth, who suffers from a rare neurological disorder. The ranch is the fulfillment of alifelong dream for C.B., who owns and manages it with his wife and sons. Also visiting the ranch is Sybil Quatermaine, a professor of cultural anthropology at NYU. Divorced and in her mid-forties with no children, she embodies the edginess and sophisticationof New York but is drawn to the mystery of ancient cultures and religions and the rich historyof Native America. Invited to spend the summer at the ranch to conduct research and engagewith guests, she soon senses that Jeremey's easy charm and British wit mask a deeply troubledpersonal life. As Rudy digs deeper, the trail leads from the gritty, crime-ridden streets of L.A. to the vast plainsof the Southwest. With masterful insight into the ethnic, cultural, religious, and spiritual diversitythat shapes America, Alan Bloch weaves a suspenseful tale through the vivid tapestry ofAmerican life. As the illusion of peace shatters, personal and collective histories collide in aclimactic reckoning beneath the imposing silhouette of the Rockies.

Textauszug

CAFE BLANCO

Cafe Blanco is one of the dwindling few Los Angeles restaurants which succeed in generating the illusion of ethnic confluence despite the city’s hardening social realities, and its racial and national divisions, which have turned Los Angeles into a Balkan tinderbox. Cubans, Guatemalans, Columbians, Argentineans, Peruvians, Brazilians, Mexicans, Blacks, white students and professors from USC, even Jewish seminarians from USC’s neighbor, the Hebrew Union College, all press into Tia Maria’s tiny wooden booths, bathe in its ambience of Hispanic chic, Tex-Mex illusionary, sit on crudely tooled chairs and at tables from Pier One, and peer at garish neon signs spelling out Cresta Blanca, Jose Cuervo, eerily glowing from the far walls, punctuating the cave-like darkness of the restaurant to drink, eat, argue, shout and forget.

Cafe Blanca’s proprietress, Tia Maria Valenueza-Batista started her career selling tacos, burritos and fajitas to downtown lawyers, accountants and stockbrokers from out of a downtown shed, twenty-five years ago. Over the years she and her brother Ruiz Pedro prospered through hard work, conscientious care about food standards, quick service and reasonable prices. Her reputation grew and more and more important men in blue and black pin stripe suits, who commanded hundred dollars an hour for their time, would wait fifteen to twenty minutes for her forty-five cent tacos and sixty-nine cent fajitas. While wolfing down the succulent morsels of beef and chicken in delicious gravies and fattening refried beans, these men of power conspired to destroy the competition, mastermind financial coups, win courtroom cases; their palavering had an intoxicating effect upon Ruiz, who, already tired of the long days and hard work of the stand, spent increasing hours away from work scouring the town for ideas which would better employ his time and Tia’s money. Because Ruiz was blood, she tolerated his flights of fancy; “beer bullshit” was her term for it. She had low regard for him and his cronies, in fact, she didn’t think well of men in general. Her two men—never married either, had children by both—were worthless carousers and drunken bums. If Ruiz wasn’t her brother, she would have given him the bounce long ago or kept him at home to watch over her kids and relieve their poor mother, who was now babysitting for two generations of Batistas.

Ruiz was undeterred by Tia’s recriminations and continued to eavesdrop on the small talk of local politicos when chance availed him of the opportunity. Recent stories had wetted his fancy. He had overheard some City Hall influence peddlers salivating over developmental possibilities around the University of Southern California. The men were black dudes who, in their rapid and disjointed rhythms and patois, spoke authoritatively of things to come.

He heard similar rumors around town, the talk just didn’t stop; even heard it from Eastside Latino attorneys, who were the last to know anything of value. Ruiz began his campaign in earnest to convince Tia that they should make their move. For the next eighteen months, he implored Tia to buy a small store in the decaying section of Vermont, a mile or so north of the university campus. Tia didn’t even own her own home, she wasn’t about to buy a store in the middle of a black slum, drunken riffraff and street bums breaking bottles everywhere, and amigos nowhere. Tia blasted him: “Ruiz, you are a fool, hate to work, love to bullshit all the time, make like a big shot, leave me to find another dog to work the taco stand!”

In the fall of 1969, Ruiz picked up, what he insisted was an unimpeachable tip—that Los Angeles’ Community Redevelopment Authority had just finished its grand redevelopment plan for the city. Even the mayor and the city council hadn’t seen the plan. Ruiz’s informant, it cost Ruiz fifty bucks to see the Xerox’s, proved to him beyond a shadow of a doubt that the University of Southern California area was a prime target for redevelopment. This was primo stuff; a big-time official insider’s tip. The city’s money was going to flow. A man could make a fortune if he owned property in the right place.

The previous several years had been very good for Tia; her cuisine was highly regarded; a modest catering trade now supplemented their stand enabling her to hire a crew of women to help out in the kitchen and make deliveries. She had money in the bank and her credit was good; the bank’s lending officer was always urging her to take out a loan. “Tia, money can make you grow. You are a smart business woman. We would be glad to lend you money.” Even she was tired of the long hours out of doors. The cold rains during the winter months and the downtown smog were tearing at her eyes and scorching her lungs; the last two summers were a bitch. Her coughing spells lasted for days on end. She thought she was coming down with emphysema; her doctor said it was a catarrh brought on by the smog.

Ruiz’s insistence was beginning to wear her resistance down and his proposal had the added merit; the restaurant was to have a brand-new air-conditioning system. She wouldn’t have to breathe those noxious fumes of smog and car exhaust. It was alright for Ruiz to dream his dreams of Eldorado gold once the city really moved on its redevelopment plans. It would be nice; but she thought to herself, such things like that never happened to the Batistas. They inherited the backs of donkeys and the hearts of oak, to do the work of the world and not let the world break their hearts. First things first, her health required a change. She didn’t want to hear about real estate speculation.

“Ruiz Pedro Batista find me a real estate agent; no Jew, no Black; Amigo, you hear me, Ruiz, I want to deal with an amigo ...”

Ruiz found the agent and together they found a deal. It was priced under the market because it needed a “little work.” A little work! It took two weeks just to scrape off the layers of paint which covered five layers of wallpaper; and the ceiling timbers, the termites have given up on them years ago. It cost thousands extra for an entirely new electrical system, for the air-conditioning unit, the kitchen. It took Tia Maria, Ruiz Pedro, six friends, paid carpenters and painters two solid months to turn the “steal”—“a stinken dump” was what Tia called it at this time—into anything at all. It took another year before Tia was making in Cafe Blanco what her old cart wagon and deliveries had brought in during a good year. And as for the tidal wave of cash which Ruiz predicted would come raining down upon them, after the CRA began to reinvigorate the area, Tia, and even Ruiz, gave up waiting ten years into their twenty-five-year mortgage.

Yet, clearly, in proof that there are saints in heaven, their patience and devotion to the area, the unfaltering standards of their native cuisine and quality service had not gone unnoticed. By the l980s, fifteen years after they took occupancy, after USC had raised the first half of a billion-dollar endowment drive, USC, no longer intimidated by its crosstown rival and nemesis UCLA, began to flex its redevelopment muscles, forcing gentrification along the northern edge of the campus up Vermont and Hoover Avenues and westward along Jefferson Boulevard. The green stuff began to flow; speculative money was finally making its way to that part of town that long ago slipped into ruin. The money came in too late to cure the human ruin, heal broken hearts, to arrest the decay of family life, to stop infanticide, and to assist prostitutes who had become walking plagues. But there was plenty of time and enough money to kick off one hell of a building cycle, fueled by high-powered money driven by mindless greed and utter disdain for the city’s growing class of miserable untouchables.

So many years after their start, Ruiz didn’t dare remind Tia of his earlier predictions. She had excoriated him several times daily, during the first three years of Cafe Blanco, for his insistence upon the “hidden values” of real estate on Vermont Avenue. She’d snarl: “goddam, hidden alright, you pisshead.”

But Ruiz, calling to Saint Theresa for patience and endurance, listened right past Tia. He knew in his heart that everything was possible in America. It was a blessed country. Maybe it took longer than you hoped; maybe it was harder, crueler than you imagined; maybe you felt someday that you couldn’t keep up the struggle much longer. But it was possible. Take the raw stuff of life, put it into the system for 13 hours each day and you could make it. “Making it,” was what America was all about. And they had made it. He exulted in the knowledge that when Tia and he were ready to sell the business, and sell it they would when they were too old to stand on their varicosed legs and move their arthritic hands, Cafe Blanco would be worth big bucks; a long established, successful restaurant buoyed by the rising tide of commercial development. By then they would have paid off the mortgage, own it free and clear. Ruiz no longer turned his face away when his older sister would glower at him for some alleged misdemeanor; he’d meet her eye to eye.

Tia Maria Valenueza-Batista was the uncontested queen of Latin cuisine, madre-de-madres to all her customers, her real children, those who had eaten her food—millions of beans, tons of corn tortillas, tacos—superb chicken mole with chocolate from the Yucatan, a Guatemalan rice specialty with carrots, peppers and saffron that the mayor orders when he drops in. Tia, with a sharp eye for marketing, asked keen questions of USC’s business majors. She had learned from these exchanges how to cater to a densely mixed clientele; a span which included affluent...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.5.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-13: 9798350999051 / 9798350999051