What Figman failed to realize was that he'd already had his fifteen minutes. They had started ticking one Friday morning in early spring on his way to work at Goetschke Life and Casualty. An adjuster in Accidental Death and Dismemberment, he had always prided himself on his ability to remain emotionally detached from his claimants, no matter how sad or grisly their predicament. AD&D was a heavy business, a job not everyone in the company could handle. It took a person like Figman— spiritual but not religious— to reach beyond the immediacy of life's tragedies and grasp the bottom line.
Traffic on the Ventura Freeway crept dismally through a heavy downpour. In nasty weather, it sometimes took Figman an extra forty minutes to get to work as slick roads played havoc with bald tires and engines stalled in the fast lane. Red taillights were all he could make out for miles ahead; behind him, the watery blur of headlights through rain. Cars jerked forward like the staccato movement of a symphony: Start, stop. Start, stop. Stop, stop, stop. Occasionally, they'd get up to speed, then come to a dead halt within seconds. Frequently, they sat idle for minutes. There was no logic to the traffic in L.A.
Bored more than annoyed by his delay, Figman pondered the Flechteau claim. He would have to be tougher next time he visited Flechteau at his home and not allow himself to be affected by the sight of the man's stub. His stub came into view whenever Flechteau's blanket slipped from his lap, an event that seemed regularly to coincide with Figman's explanation of limits of liability. He could have sworn, once, he'd even seen Flechteau give it a little shove when it had gotten hung up on the brake of his electric wheelchair. Then Flechteau, who'd been a pole setter for the phone company before his accident, asked Figman if he wouldn't mind helping him with his fallen blanket. This ploy ensured that Figman got a closer look at Flechteau's injury, a horrible sight with its whitish bulge where his severed femur pressed against his taut red skin, and its one remaining stitch, all black and waxy, which never seemed to fall off or be absorbed into his scar as normal stitches are absorbed but protruded from his wound like the single black hair that protruded from Jeff Goldblum's back in The Fly, a hair so thick and resilient that Geena Davis had to snip it off with kitchen shears. It was this terrible stitch that Figman was thinking about when the Pinto full of Mexicans cut directly in front of him and came to a halt just thirty feet from his windshield.
Figman liked Mexicans. He saw them as a proud, ancient people who had as much right to California as did he (if not more). On principle, Figman refused to refer to them in politically correct terms such as Hispanics or Latinos. They were Mexicans, an identity in which he believed they should take pride. He loved their food, their art, the lyricism of their language. Velasquez, his gardener in Encino, he'd hired solely because of the majesty of his name. Figman had first seen it on a business card left inside his mailbox:
Alejandro Arturo Cuevas de Velasquez
Lawns Trees Shrubs
There was history in that name. Conquistadores. Proud Aztecs defending their cities. In his childhood living room in Sepulveda, Figman's mother had kept a book about Aztecs on the coffee table. In it were pictures of golden cities, exotic parrots, and men in armor on horseback. Alejandro Arturo Cuevas de Velasquez. It was right out of the index.
There was history, too, in the name Figman, but not the kind one reads about in coffee-table books. The name spoke of tallithim and mezuzahs and dark shops in the back streets of Eastern Europe. His first name, Louis, had been his great-grandfather's, and while he liked the name intrinsically, people frequently mispronounced it as Louie. Occasionally, someone would shorten it to Lou, a choice that made Figman wonder if they didn't see him as some crotch-scratching lug with a plumber's wrench.
Since mid-childhood, Figman had gone simply by the name Figman. It stemmed from an age (around ten or eleven) when boys referred to each other by surname alone. Later, when his buddies reverted to their given names (around the same time they discovered girls), Figman opted to remain just Figman. It seemed easier that way. Still, he wished he'd been blessed with a name like Alejandro.
Alejandro Arturo Cuevas de Velasquez was, however, nothing like the moniker that announced him to the mailbox owners of Encino. Fat as a potato bug, he had a fondness for cheap tequila and expensive women. His face, brown and gnarly, reminded Figman of a gourd he'd seen hanging from a fruit stand on Olvera Street. Fine black hair grew down from his sideburns, a maddening fuzz that Velasquez refused to shave despite Figman's gift one Christmas of an electric razor.
Velasquez managed to sustain himself in the Encino community until he was caught fooling around with Sugar Tildeman, the wife of a well-known sitcom producer— something to do with jute net and a garden hose, a scene Figman could hardly imagine. Bernie Tildeman subsequently sent a letter to the entire neighborhood asking anyone who employed Velasquez to fire him. Several of Figman's neighbors complied, having had scripts or daughters in the man's office at one time. Figman, however, who had neither script nor daughter and who hated all things Hollywood, could hardly bear to see a man named Alejandro Arturo Cuevas de Velasquez lose a good-paying job. Furthermore, he found it a miscarriage of justice for some big-shot producer to use his power and influence to exact revenge on the weak and downtrodden of California, a populace whose ancestors had once owned the very land Tildeman now paid men like Velasquez to fertilize and weed.
Letter in hand, Figman watched as a shirtless Velasquez squatted in his flower bed. "Velasquez," Figman called from his dining room window. The gardener went about his pruning. Figman opened his French doors and stepped out onto his patio. The bricks felt cold beneath his bare feet. "Señor," he called, but still the man did not answer. In the driveway, Velasquez's primer-gray pickup blared music, something up-tempo and decidedly Mexican. Velasquez rocked on his heels to its catchy rhythm.
Approaching him from behind, Figman placed his hand on his gardener's back, brown and soft as a rotting pumpkin. The man twitched and gazed up at him. "Velasquez, have you seen this?" Figman leaned over to show him the letter.
With his shirtsleeve, the gardener wiped at his great winter squash of a face. "Qué?" he asked. His breath smelled faintly of tequila.
"Have you seen this letter? From that asshole, Tildeman?" Figman hoped that by calling Tildeman an asshole, he would let Velasquez know he was not about to be fired.
Velasquez smiled briefly (perhaps remembering Sugar), then frowned, his thick brows melding into a Frida Kahlo winged line. The down on his cheeks held beads of sweat. "No read," he said, waving his hands in that universal gesture meaning Don't talk to me about this. Figman had no way of knowing whether the man was telling him he hadn't read the letter, didn't want to, or didn't possess the ability. Velasquez muttered something in Spanish and resumed his pruning, a little more urgently than before. Returning to the house, Figman swore he would do two things: He would ask his friends to find work for Velasquez, and he would one day look up Sugar.
All this (and more) raced through Figman's mind as his Aion bore down on the idling Pinto. He knew about these swoop-and-squat scams. Aaron Litvak usually handled them and had explained to Figman how they worked. An economy car crammed with Mexicans (How many were in the Pinto? Eight? Ten, maybe?) would swerve in front of a car or truck and slam on its brakes, guaranteeing injury to all of its occupants. The Mexicans, illegal, illiterate, and desperate for money, would each be paid one thousand dollars by some con artist who would subsequently file insurance claims on all their behalfs. Usually, the con man would pose as an employer or relative; less often as one of the so-called victims. The injured would then be expected to limp back to Mexico one thousand dollars richer, while the fraud-mongering scumbag hung around to collect the big money. There were variations to this game, but this, basically, was how it was played. Figman knew it to be a dangerous business. Sometimes