City of Strangers (10 page)

They had been told the radio would play for exactly five minutes, wired to a timer, and then blow. Or until somebody hit the OFF switch. But it wouldn't switch off. If he were to switch off, it would blow instantly. That thought gave him another chill. Something about the accessibility of that tiny chrome switch; the force it contained seemed to dare his hand to reach over and flick it down. It was like standing at the edge of a precipice—that terrible vacuum that tugged you toward the edge.

The teen lament wailed on. Fariborz wondered if Allah could really be leading him down this profoundly distressing course. A month or so back things had seemed so much clearer, his decisions God-directed, each step leading forward and upward to soothe some wounded place in him. There had been a real satisfaction in the tight group of them buckling down to studies and serious reading, Arabic and the Koran and their own Persian history. He'd had a sense of his murky and unhappy life clarifying before his eyes, of newfound purpose and deep satisfying moral activity. The four of them had come together as a cell, led more or less by him and Iman together, brain and brawn, as Pejman had joked, but that was not the real distinction between them.

“We have to get past our softness,” Iman had insisted. “That's the West in us. It's sentimentality. If you're always afraid of breaking eggs, you can't ever cook.”

But that's stupid—you can always cook
without
eggs if you want, Fariborz had thought. There was always another way to do something. Still, at the time, he had talked himself into the necessity of hardening themselves for action. They were the forerunners and had to get people's attention by making a little noise, risking a little material destruction. Not hurt people, though. They were all firm on that. That was wrong, definitely against Islam, and it would be counterproductive, too. It would make everyone hate them.

All they had to do was find some conspicuous and newsworthy ways to thumb their noses at pornography, prostitution, usury, and hate-mongering. Stink bombs. Paint bombs. Clever posters. It would win people over to see what they were doing. People would watch the six-o'clock news and secretly delight as the new moral Batman swooped down unexpectedly, once again discomfiting the foul and sinful.

In the best of all possible worlds, they might even get national publicity and begin to wake the moral conscience of the West. And even if their tactics turned out to be a bit too strong, or poorly chosen, or ineffective, they knew they were ultimately in the right. They were on the positive side of History, moving things toward the good. That was what he and Iman had felt at the time, with great certainty, and only now did Fariborz fear that some of that certainty had been manufactured within himself, pumped up out of loyalty to Iman, or maybe responding to something else within himself, something he dared not even think too closely about.

Suddenly Fariborz noticed that Pejman up the hill was crying out in a panicky voice, and then Hassan bellowed. But he wasn't worried. There was still plenty of time. He left the boom box and ran away from it through the creosote and bitterbrush. He had got only about twenty paces away when something knocked him off his feet. The noise was stupendous, and he found himself flat on his face, spitting out dirt. His arm stung and he glanced over to see a sliver of black plastic poking into his forearm. Then he was engulfed in a white cloud, breathing in the choking aridity of flour.

After a moment of coughing and spitting he heard footsteps. “You're such a daydreamer, Fari,” Pejman reproached him. “You gotta stop being like that.”

“I'm okay.” He sat up and brushed at himself, stirring clouds of white dust as Hassan looked down at him with a crooked smile and shook his head. Again he wondered about the bag of flour and what it represented.

“The coffee is pretty good here, but we might have a little trouble getting served.”

“Really?” Jack Liffey perked up, as if sensing a challenge.

They sat at one of the little outside tables at Nu-Age, a cafe across the street from the Braille Institute in Los Feliz. L.A. City College was just up the street, and what they could see of staff and clientele both favored black turtlenecks and nose rings and other piercings, though there seemed a general exodus inside just as the he and Aneliese sat down.

Jack Liffey got back up and poked his head inside the door. Little knots of the black-clad folk chatted away languidly here and there. “Two coffees, outside, black,” he called, loud enough to wake a few vampires.

One girl who stood bent over a table looked up at him and waved in an ambiguous way, so he rejoined Aneliese de Villiers. He had phoned and asked her to have coffee with him because he had an intuition it might be a good idea to talk to her away from the boy. And it seemed to him a pretty good idea to talk to her under any circumstances, since his imagination was already working overtime on her body. She looked a lot different in her business suit. Formal, younger for some reason, more confident. Her hair was pulled back severely, and her big eyes, one of her best features, bulged as if a warm soul inside were trying hard to burst out to get at those outside her to comfort, soothe, tend, love. Wishes working overtime, he thought.

“‘I didn't like the ugly way the whites talked about the blacks,' ” he quoted her words from memory. “That got my attention.”

“I honestly don't know where that feeling came from. My parents were racists—it was just natural there—and all my friends, too. I'd like to say it was because I had a wonderful black friend, but I didn't have. I might have, had I been raised in the city, in Lusaka, but the social gulf was just too wide out in the dorps. Do you say ‘boondocks'?”

“It's a bit old hat.”

“The countryside, then. The African kids my age were all children of peasant farmers, and only a few ever went to school past standard six. Plus there was a war of independence on, and we all had to insulate ourselves from blacks a bit. Oh, too much is coming back.” She shook her head as if to shake off the oppressive memories. “That horrible butcher's fridge in the market. Northern Rhodesia had stamped out rinderpest and tsetse, so we had beef coming out our ears. There were white packets of chops, minced beef, frying steak, stewing steak, and then over at the side of the cooler there were always two more rows of packages—dogsmeat and boysmeat. I can still see those horrible handwritten labels. Can you guess what boysmeat was?”

“I'm afraid I can.”

“Our ‘boy' was about sixty and lived in a little concrete hovel called a
kia
out back when he wasn't cooking and cleaning for us. It didn't even have a door, just walls that wrapped around like a public toilet. One cold-water tap, stuck on the outside, and no electricity. That's why I had to get out. How could anybody not see that was all wrong? I left for England by myself when I was fifteen. I say by myself, but my future husband left at about the same time and we ended up at the same school in Birmingham.”

A couple of retro hippies in sandals and tie-dye strolled out the door and past, agreeing intensely about Herman Hesse. Three or four blocks of Vermont Avenue here in the lee of the Hollywood Hills had been trying to upscale for years, centered on the Los Feliz Theater, one of the oldest art houses in the city. Jack Liffey remembered that there had once been a terrific independent bookstore next door, Chatterton's, but it had died under the onslaught of the giant chains and later come back as the Skylight, but still had a ways to go.

“I think I'd like some coffee,” Jack Liffey mused, since it was becoming clear no one was going to show up. He went inside and no one had stirred, so he went behind the counter to the brewer, fetched two cups from a wire tray and poured from the pot. “Two cups, black,” he announced and carried them out.

“I guess they don't serve old geezers,” he said, when he delivered the coffee to Aneliese de Villiers.

“If we got nose rings, we could probably come here more often,” she said.

He smiled. He liked the “we” part. “I don't really understand all this self-mutilation. I don't like sounding like some old coot, but a lot of those spots they use are
tender.
” He couldn't help remembering the aging movie star he'd known who had had nipple rings, a tongue stud, and another piercing off center on her vagina. She'd been old enough to know better, too.

“Is it self-mutilation? Or just a stab at being more interesting? No pun intended.”

“I can't imagine getting that bored,” Jack Liffey said.

They both sipped. The coffee was strong and good, though it might have been fresher.

“I think sometimes the kids just need a little attention,” she offered. “You know why Billy got so upset last night?”

“I guess that's what I came to talk about.”

“He admitted that he'd been in love with Becky. He asked me why we're always so attracted to things that are bad for us.”

She waited, and her eyes sought him out as if it had been a real question. “If I could answer that,” he said, “they'd make me king.”

She smiled ruefully. “And if I knew, I'd never have fallen for Billy's father. Anyway, according to Billy, she played the two of them against each other, Billy and Fariborz, until she worked out which of them had money. Then the best she'd offer Billy was a sort of brother-sister friendship.”

“That can be rough.”

“I knew her, Jack. Though it is hard for any adult to know a teenager very well. I don't think she's quite as bad as—” she tilted her head as she considered—“as one might be led to think from some of the given facts. Though maybe that's my forgiving nature. She's going to grow up a strong woman. Did you ever read Stegner's
Crossing to Safety
? I just finished it.”

He nodded.

“She'll probably end up like Charity Lang. Willful and domineering, but that's not the very worst measure of a person. Nobody's all one thing. She'll have a kindhearted side—she might just apply herself to something positive and use all that power in her to get things done. If she'd been born a man, I think people would just say she's determined and ambitious.”

“Like Stalin.”

She smiled. “Or Churchill.”

They both looked up in surprise as a big black stretch limo came up the street backward. It was a Lincoln Town Car, moving fast, and if you looked closely you could see that the body had actually been reversed on its chassis so the driver sat at what should have been the rear window as he drove. A magnetic plaque on the door said:
s'omiL s'treboR.

“There's something you won't see in Northern Rhodesia,” Jack Liffey said. “Or just about anywhere else.”

“It's called Zambia now.”

“Second apostrophe is wrong, too, or the first one, I guess,” he corrected.

They watched the
omil
out of sight. “There was something Billy wanted to pass along to you,” she said softly.

“I'm all ears.”

“Just before Becky disappeared something was up. The Iranian boys were abuzz with it and very secretive, and so was she. Maybe in a different way for her. Nobody was sharing anything with Billy by then, but Becky did tell him that she intended to teach them a lesson.”

“Nothing else?”

“No. But it all centered somehow on Fariborz, not the other boys.”

“Yes, I think so, too.”

“I have to get back now, Jack. There's a staff meeting in my department.”

He liked the way she said his name. “I don't think we're going to get the check, somehow.” He went inside as the staff seemed to be gathered around a table, debating semiotics.

A rail-thin girl said something, fiercely, about postwar structuralism being nothing but a lot of fetishizing of linguistics.

“But reality always invades with a bigger army,” a boy countered.

Jack Liffey thought of saying something nasty but he was feeling too good about himself and instead he found a wall menu that listed coffee at $1.50 and he waved three dollar bills overhead before setting them on the shelf of the cash register. “Two coffees!” he announced. “I tipped myself generously.”

Outside, he walked with Aneliese de Villiers down the block, past a dress store with long dark Lady Dracula gowns, a shop that sold artifacts of the '60s like kidney-shaped coffee tables, and a reptiles-and-amphibians-only pet store, and then they crossed Vermont in a loudly chirping crosswalk for the blind toward the blank fortress of the Braille Institute. Not much point in windows there, he thought, but he didn't say it. Obviously they had some sighted employees. She seemed to be brooding on something as they walked, then she touched his shoulder softly once.

“Would you like to come to dinner sometime, Jack?”

He thought of a lot of snappy answers, but, with his heart, he said instead: “Oh, yes. Soon.”

“Arturo, any luck on that question I asked about?”

“Uh … you might say that.” Art Castro's voice sounded strange on the other end of the line. There was something pretty squirrelly in his tone, and Jack Liffey sat up and paid attention. “You were asking about the Sheik of Leeward Street. Well, Jack, if they made a documentary about this guy and his associates, they'd call it
Don't Fuck with Us, We're Crazy.
Remember the size of my office? I am told if I ever utter his name around here again, I'll be working somewhere else entirely, and it won't be a place anywhere near this comfortable. It'll be somewhere like Terminal Island or Boron. Do you get me?”

“Those are federal pens.”

“This is not a joke.”

“Oops.”

“Oops it is. That is right on and exact; it is the authentic and real deal. This is an FBI-type thing, Jack. You know, a big ongoing post-9/11 investigation. As in, federal offense, don't butt in. Does that warn you off?”

“It'll do. I hope I didn't mess things up for you.”

There was something like a laugh at the other end. “That'd be hard to do right now. Maybe if I pushed the old man into a vat of molten lead, things would be worse, but I doubt it. Wanna come over, see the Dodgers this week?”

“Not particularly.” Art Castro knew the way he felt about baseball.

“Okay, well, I'll find some other way to make you suffer.”

It was Jack Liffey's turn to laugh. “How about I hire Rosewood for some real work? Nothing to do with that sheik. Would that help you out?”

The line went silent for a moment. Jack Liffey figured he could get Auslander to pay for it. “Explain.”

“I'm sure you've got a reciprocal agreement with some outfit in Tijuana or Ensenada, right?”

“Oh, sure, Jack. The sun never sets on our eye.”

“I want to find out if an eighteen-year-old gringa from Bel Air showed up there about two months ago with a bit of money and rented a luxury apartment. My guess is Ensenada. But there's a lot of Americans living up the coast along Rosarito, too. Could be there. Maybe she moved in with a student from the university. I can get you her picture.”

There was another long pause with the electronic hum keeping him company. Loco came up and nuzzled his legs, and Jack Liffey bent to scratch the dog behind the ears. For some reason, the aloof half-coyote was slowly turning into a real dog. Then all of a sudden Jack Liffey realized that Art had been subtly offering him a leg up, for all his professed loyalty to Rosewood and the FBI: “the Sheik of Leeward Street,” he'd said. That was probably enough to find him himself, if he wanted to. “You still there, Art, or you on your way to some federal pen?”

“We can go two ways with this. I can send it upstairs to management, and they contact
Cervantes Servicio de Investigación
in Tijuana. That's gonna be full price plus, and in my current state of repute here, it doesn't buy me very much slack, anyway—not really. Or I can go to my brother's wife's cousin, who's a cop in Ensenada and it's maybe half price and it keeps me in good stead with that branch of the family. Just in case I need to run away some day.”

“A Mexican cop. Is he honest?”

“Jack!
Shame on you.”

Jack Liffey waited.

“Jaime has a base pay of thirty-eight dollars a week. You ever been to New York? Do you go around asking people there if they ever jaywalk or double-park? If everybody in New York obeyed every law, the city would break down. If it comes up, you ask your friends there if they ever break
real
laws, like extortion or murder. Everybody turns up just enough corners of the page to let the grease leak under so things will run.”

It would have taken a long time to sort through all the layerings of that mixed metaphor, but he knew perfectly well what Art meant.

“Jaime won't screw you, at least not if it means screwing me. And he knows the town.”

“How much to turn up the corner of Jaime's page?”

“I'll bet five hundred bucks would go a long, long way.”

Right after he hung up he called Dicky Auslander, who agreed to messenger a check and a photo of Becky to Art Castro. When you got anywhere near the high end of things in L.A., Jack Liffey had noticed long ago that pretty much everything was done by messenger.

“How's your arm?” Pejman asked.

“It was nothing; praise belongs to Allah.” Fariborz cranked his shoulder around to show the simple Band-Aid where he'd plucked out the plastic fragment of the boom box. Certainly nothing in comparison to Iman's hand.

They carried the tuna sandwiches and lemonade they'd made to Iman, who was just waking up and still groggy. He sat up on one of the mattresses that lay on the floor of the back room, and he very nearly rubbed his eye absentmindedly with the bandaged stump before he caught himself. Then he glared at it and grunted angrily. He'd been taking refuge recently by doubling up the painkiller and sleeping a lot.

Hassan was away somewhere. He'd said he was going to the store for supplies, but they suspected there was more than that going on.

“Iman, how do you feel?”

“How am I supposed to feel?”

Even an oblique reference to the martyred hand inaugurated a certain seriousness among them.

“Sorry, man.”

“Would you like tuna?” Fariborz offered the plate, and Iman's eyes glared at it.

“I would like a trip to Mecca and I would like the whole world to acknowledge the might and oneness of God.”

“And that Mohammed, may the blessings and peace of God be upon him, is His messenger. I'll leave the sandwich. We need to talk about what's going down here, Iman.”

“So, talk.”

Fariborz settled on one of the other mattresses and wrapped his arms around his knees. Pejman stayed on his feet. “I'm worried about this radio thing. When we were making our own bombs, we used black powder and we knew exactly what we were going to do with them. But C-4 is a lot bigger deal, and these guys won't tell us anything.”

“You didn't use very much C-4, and the burst wasn't in a confined space. If it had been, you wouldn't be here. Or your hand would be visiting the martyrs, like mine.”

“I don't like the bag of flour, Iman. We don't know what it represents.”

“Maybe it'll be paint. Or some stinky chemical. Maybe they have the same idea we did. They're going to point an angry finger at corruption and exploitation. How bad could it be in something that small?”

Fariborz sighed. “I'm not going to do a single thing more until Hassan lets us know. We have a right to know. You guys should see this.”

He stood and hurried out of the room. Iman and Pejman glanced at one another. “He's going softheaded,” Iman declared. “He wants to go back to his girl.”

“I don't know. I think going to the girl is pretty much out of the question, don't you?” Pejman said with a shrug.

They heard Fariborz bang something on the outside of the shack. Soon he stomped back in and set down a gallon plastic bottle of pills. They'd apparently been bought in Mexico, since the label was in Spanish, but it was clear from what they could read that they were generic potassium iodide, plain white oval tablets.

“The bottle was hidden in the water-heater cabinet out there. And this right next to it.”

He showed them a folded sheet of thin yellow paper, a page torn from the yellow pages. When he handed it around, they could see a listing of the names, addresses and phone numbers of synagogues in 310, the West L.A. area code.

Iman looked up, but his eyes hadn't softened. “You just worried because your mom's Jewish?”

“Are we going to start hurting Jews? Is that what we've come to?”

Iman raised the bandaged stump of his arm, as if that refuted any argument whatever. “We've already hurt a Moslem. You have to learn that the Moslems constitute one united brotherhood, and we show no weakness to our enemies.”

“Allah best knows your enemies,” Fariborz quoted, “and Allah suffices as a Guardian.”

Just as Jack Liffey settled in at his dining table for a session of his do-it-yourself meditation to try to calm his nerves, the annoying door ringer clanged away at him. He'd been meaning to replace the mechanical contraption for years. It was a big brass key on the outside, right in the middle of the door. The visitor cranked the key around to jangle a brass bell on the inside. He peered through the fish-eye lens. Since he lived in a guarded complex and the guard hadn't phoned to announce anyone, it meant either a burglar checking out who was at home, a local kid trying to sell him chocolates or magazines, or somebody who simply didn't have to ask the guard's permission. The dark suit suggested the last option.

He opened the door on a tall man in black, with very shiny shoes. The city cops called the feds “Shoes,” but they could just as well have called them “Creases.” The man looked like he'd just picked up his dark suit from the cleaners. He was attracting a following, too. Behind him, Jack Liffey could see a whole gaggle of black kids peeking curiously from bushes and around corners.

“You've been made,” Jack Liffey said, nodding to the boys, a few of whom giggled. “But these kids would have made you even if you weren't wearing your neon sign.”

“Mr. Liffey.” It wasn't a question. “I'm Special Agent Johnson, FBI. Could I come in so we can talk?”

“At least show me the badge.”

It was actually a wallet, but the ID card looked pretty official. He made a point of peering closely at it. “You guys all seem to be
special
agents. Is there, like, a
regular
agent, and then, maybe, a step up, a
very
special agent?”

Jack Liffey stepped back and the man almost smiled as he came in. “Thank you.”

Poor Art Castro, Jack Liffey thought. The request really had touched a nerve.

“I hope I haven't got him in trouble,” Jack Liffey said.

The agent frowned a little, betraying incomprehension, and Jack Liffey decided it would be a good idea to keep his mouth well shut. Maybe the man was just collecting for some federal pension fund.

Loco started to growl—he had a fine nose for enemies—and Jack Liffey had to shut him into the bedroom. When he came back he said, “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Soda? Truncheon?”

The curtains were open out onto his patio, and many of the one-inch gaps between the fence palings were filled now with eyes. It was like jacklighting deer in the woods at night.

“No, thanks.” The man wouldn't be drawn. They sat and Jack Liffey settled into his Mad Dog stare. His composure lasted all the way up to the second word the man spoke.

“Your daughter—are you aware of where she was today?”

Still, he decided not to give an inch. “How do you even know I have a daughter?”

“We've had a file on you for a long time, Mr. Liffey. Don't take this wrong. It's not necessarily a hostile file, at least since you left the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but it is thorough. Your shadow has crossed a number of our open investigations. There was that business about organized crime and gambling in East L.A. several years ago. Then the Lee Borowsky kidnapping. The dumping of toxic waste out on old U.S. 60 in the Mojave. The Hillside serial killer in Orange County. They had an FBI profiler on that one. There was even the matter of those white racists in the Pledge of Honor movement who died mysteriously in the riots last year, connected somehow to you.”

“You said something about my daughter.”

“I can't believe that you would purposely put your daughter in harm's way.” Then he stonewalled a bit.

“Please.”

“There's an unofficial mosque and compound in a corner of Mar Vista that has been under surveillance for a long time. Just a kind of preemptive surveillance, you might say, since we missed the bet on 9/11. So we naturally were a bit surprised when two young girls started peeking into the compound with binoculars.”

He experienced a chill, imagining his daughter climbing some great big chain-link fence toward a coil of barbed wire and then a guard dog rushing up and yapping away. In his imagination, the dog wore a black leather collar with spikes on it like the ones in cartoons.

“And we were also watching when the girls got in trouble with two young men who came home and surprised them. The girls were hiding on their roof. Your daughter and a friend of hers. All of this was unknown to the people of the compound, luckily.”

Jack Liffey bent forward and put his forehead in his hand. “Got in trouble, you said.”

“Oh, nothing too bad. Basically the boys just embarrassed the girls, but we'd rather not have them—or you—near that compound again. Luckily, the compound's residents were out of the picture the whole time.”

“I can promise to discourage my daughter. To my knowledge, I've never given the Bureau any trouble—not on purpose—and I don't plan to start now.”

“Do you know why the girls were there?”

The boys outside were waving over the fence, trying to draw their attention. The two men did their best to ignore them.

“I'm afraid so.” He didn't like the odds in trying to bamboozle the FBI. He told the agent that he'd been hired to find Becky Auslander, and to do that he was also looking for the missing Iranian boys. In his search he had been told that the boys had once gone to Sheik Arad for spiritual guidance. And, unfortunately, he had told his daughter all of this because she was nosy and because he had made a deal with her that she would stay out of it if he told her everything that was going on. In fact he did not have an address for the sheik, so she must have found that out on her own. He didn't mention that Art Castro had just given him a street name.

“So she broke her word,” the special agent suggested.

“It does appear that way, on a kind of preliminary basis, yes. You could make double sure we all stay away from the sheik if you were to tell me that those missing boys are not at that compound.”