City of Strangers (13 page)

“I don't think so. It's best not to keep any of the same initials, you know. I know it's comforting but it can be a giveaway, just a hint that catches the observant eye in an otherwise-featureless list of possibilities.”

“You're an expert on disappearing?”

“Finding.
It can amount to the same thing. I'm on your side here, but I think you'd better tell me who the bad guys are. I found you. You can bet they will.”

“Oh, shit!” That realization seemed to be dawning hard on her, and she picked up the pistol again for comfort. “Damn, damn, damn! You're right, of course. Stay here.” She climbed a staircase up to a widow's walk on the roof and surveyed the road that climbed the flank of the hill, then came back down.

“You think anybody might have followed you?”

He shrugged. “This isn't my country. It's hard to tell. I've only had one lesson on what
judiciales
look like.”

She shuddered. “That would not be good news. Okay, I'll tell you what happened, like, just the newsbreak. Film at eleven.”

She settled back into the wood chaise, sipped at the lemonade, and made a face. “This is
awful,
isn't it? Contrary to what people may have told you, I was deeply in love with Fariborz Bayat, really, really in love. He was a wonderful guy, thoughtful, smart, kind and passionate, with an amazingly dry sense of humor. I was head over heels. Right up until that religion stuff got its hooks into him. Well, he was still all those wonderful things, he just directed it elsewhere and his gurus made him, like, cut me off cold. I wasn't Moslem, wasn't moral, wasn't a good influence.” She smiled. “We
did
get it on some, and the Prophet seems to disapprove of that, just like Jesus.

“While this is going down, without us knowing much about it, his dad is, like, sinking into deep economic doo-doo. The market for new housing in Southern California is in the tank, nobody's building anything, and consequently, like, nobody's buying his ugly fake rocks.”

“So, something has to give. I think the bright idea to solve his cashflow crisis comes from his number two, Mahmoud. You meet him?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Mahmoud talks to some guys in T.J. who specialize in … importing stuff across the border. Mr. Bayat shudders and says no. He's not a bad guy—a lot like his son—but Mahmoud has already made some arrangements and you don't back down on these guys. So finally, I think to save Mahmoud's neck as much as anything, Mr. Bayat Senior says he'll do this thing just one time, and that's it. Unfortunately, this comes just as the boys are getting all holy at Kennedy. Fariborz found out about his dad's deal. Which is part of how I found out about it. Fariborz had worked down at the plant in T.J., and he's a bright boy.”

She poured herself some more lemonade. There was a look of relief on her face, telling her secret to someone at last. Jack Liffey guessed most of the rest, but he sat silent.

“The Kennedy Four decide to, like, liberate the money and trash the dope, to the greater glory of Allah. The dope money would buy a lot of prayer rugs, or whatever. They sneak into the warehouse in Bev Hills and find it's not so easy to trash the dope. It's sealed inside hundreds of those fake rocks.” Jack Liffey recalled the sloshy feeling of the rock with fluid inside. “It's dissolved in some solvent used for the purpose, but it would take them all night to empty the rocks, one by one. They do get the money in their surprise raid, though; a big pigskin suitcase full of cash. Lord knows where the buy-money would be now”—She grinned—“I blindsided them while they were busy trying to empty out the rocks. They're just boys. It took me three solid hours to count the money when I got it away. Almost two million dollars in used bills: hundreds, fifties, and twenties. I'd been wanting to run away and, like, what better nest egg, huh?”

“I can think of a lot better one,” Jack Liffey said. “A nest egg that doesn't belong to the Arellano
drogistas.
”

“I didn't have much choice.”

“You know, they tend to machine-gun everything in the area on general principles and sort out who's who later.”

She shrugged. “Everybody disappeared at once. The Mexicans probably think Mr. Bayat took them off, or some L.A. gang took
him
off. Mr. Bayat probably thinks his son took it, so he's not going to squeal. Only the boys know
I
took it. I'm not afraid of them.”

“There's a cop in this town who found you pretty easily, when I asked. He says the Border Patrol and the
judiciales
have Rebecca Auslander listed as a class-one offender. I think they reserve that for serial killers and the heads of drug cartels. It's just a measure of their seriousness in looking for you. I wouldn't count on cheap hair dye going very far.”

“Did your cop pal tell the
judiciales?
” Her eyes were as big as saucers.

“Not yet. They'd be swarming up the hill right now. You can bet there's a hell of a reward, though, and I can't promise he won't. As I see it, you've got two choices. Come back with me now. I'll protect you and try to find a way to return the money to mollify the narcos. Or run. Now, today. Abandon everything, leave the car, dye your hair black with shoe polish and take the bus out of here, and don't look back. I'd head for Europe, get out of this hemisphere completely. Or Australia. You'd probably be even better off in Idaho, though our own feds are looking for you, too. I'm not sure why.”

“Shit!” She stared out over the town. “I guess it was just a false sense of security, wasn't it? Like, I hardly got settled. Wanna buy a nice house with a view for $2.98?”

He laughed. She was pretty self-possessed for someone her age. Her father must have done something right. “Come back with me. I'll do everything I can. You can probably go into witness protection.”

“I don't know a thing that would make the FBI bargain with me. I just, like, grabbed a bag of money and ran. I think you'd better go now.”

“Sure?”

“The longer you're here, the more dangerous for me, right?”

He told her his P.O. box number and asked her to write, and promised he would forward stuff to her father with no return address.

“Sure, sure. Beat it. Wait.” She considered. “Tell Dad I'm growing roses now. He'll know what it means.”

“All the luck in the world.”

“Go straight back to the States—okay?—so nobody can torture my location out of you.”

“Yeah, well, you be gone in a half hour, and then I can tell them everything I know before I lose all my fingernails. I'm no hero.”

He stopped at a bright-colored roadside place called El Mirador on the sea cliffs halfway back to the States and had a Coke on a patio that overlooked a steep drop-off to the surf below. Now that he'd found Rebecca Auslander, he finally knew why wanting to talk to her
first
was such a big deal. The first one to get to her got the brass ring, the two million bucks. He decided he'd tell her father, and that was it. The FBI could do their own hunting, and he certainly wasn't going to snitch to Bayat Senior, since that would bring on the
drogistas.

That seemed to be all he had left to do, really: Report to her dad that she was okay, and hopefully she would be in touch. She was growing roses, he remembered. Whatever that meant.

It was a real letdown he felt there in the Mirador, the job suddenly over. A moroseness settled over him as he sipped the Coke, and he thought of Aneliese, wondered if he ought to buy some Viagra on the way back. You could buy anything at all over the counter here. But, Jesus, he wasn't an old man yet. He was just under some kind of psychological stress, just knocked off balance.

Below him the water crashed and foamed, trapped in a rocky inlet, a fair analogue of his troubled psyche, he thought. Various kinds of dread and distress banging one way and another in there. Was he just afraid of getting old and ending up alone, tottering home from the convenience store every day with tiny frozen dinners? He registered that the Coke tasted better than the ones across the border, fizzier and less sweet, more like the Cokes of his youth. Nearby, Mexican children played recklessly on the cement walls. He was about to go shoo them back when a heavyset woman bellowed at them and they scattered with squeals of delight. The men's room demanded a quarter before it would let him in to pee.

The wide toll-road from Ensenada circumnavigated the west side of T.J., up the coast, and then it ran due east hard along the border for several miles. Scores of bored-looking men lounged against the steel border wall right next to the road, as if waiting for the moment to make their break for it. Coming down the slope earlier, he'd seen over the high wall into the U.S., and it was clear that jumping the border fence wouldn't get anyone very far right here. The rolling scrub beyond had been cleared of any trees or cover for miles, and big white-and-green four-wheelers from the Border Patrol held lookout on all the hillocks. In between, other agents putted about in those three-wheel dune buggies, or whatever they were called. And then you'd have to wade through what was left of the Tijuana River as it flowed out north of the border into the sea, which would probably etch your shoes right off your feet. Finally, you'd have to cross twelve lanes of 1-5.

He'd read that Tijuana was the busiest border crossing in the world, and one of the few where the Third World met the First directly. The road to the crossing carried on straight and dusty, the ugly graffiti-filled border wall on the left and a continuous barrio to the right. Most of the exits into the barrio were walled up, but here and there a road left at an angle up into a dismal-looking shopping street. At one of those breaks, a beige Jeep with a light bar on top appeared abruptly and hustled up to keep pace with his VW, right behind him. He checked his speed and kept it well down.

Glancing nervously into his mirror, it was as if a UFO had landed—he'd never seen so many flashing lights on a vehicle. Red and white flares chased back and forth across the roll bar, a steady red light on each fender and a spinning blue light behind the windshield. They pulled alongside as he slowed, and a man in a dark suit pointed to the next opening ahead into the barrio. A sign said
COLONIA CASTILLO
and took him into a narrow
calle
of shops. He hadn't had time to read the legend or the seal on the Jeep's door, but it looked official enough.

He parked and had the presence of mind to pocket his car keys. He got out and two men in dark suits came toward him, one grinning and the other frowning darkly, as if to make up precisely for the grinner. They were wearing off-white cowboy shirts, and the grinner sported a string tie.

“Manos arriba, señor,”
the frowner said. “The hands op.”

“Was I speeding? I'm sorry.”

They patted him down thoroughly, but he wasn't crazy enough to bring a gun into Mexico.

“Manos
… behind they back.”

The grinner was carrying a roll of duct tape, and he tore off a strip and lashed Jack Liffey's hands together behind his back.

“Run out of handcuffs?”

“Si,
we run out of handcuffs. Now, welcome to Mexico, shut the fock op.”

Another strip of tape went over his mouth, and he panicked for an instant until he satisfied himself he could breathe easily through his nose. A third strip of tape went tight over his eyes, and he could tell it was going to hurt coming off—probably take his eyelashes and some of his eyebrows with it. He felt himself pushed into the back of the Jeep, and they drove away, making no attempt to avoid potholes as he bounced in back like a big bag of doorknobs.

He wasn't sure of the time, but he was pretty sure it had been about an hour since he'd left Becky. He hoped she had taken him seriously. He was not going to be able to hold back much when the
judiciales
started asking questions in earnest.

It hadn't been a short trip; he knew that much. The vehicle had joggled over its share of potholes, banging his hip hard against the steel floor, and they hadn't climbed any hills of note, as far as he could tell. Occasionally he had gone into breathing panics, since his hands were immobilized and there was absolutely nothing he could do about the tape across his mouth, but he had forced himself to inhale long and slow. Each time, eventually, he had calmed himself again. His abductors had spoken to one another in Spanish, which hadn't helped him very much. The word
buscar
or
busquen
a few times. Finally they had braked to a stop with a jolt and he'd been manhandled out of the vehicle and marched forward blindly across dirt then up some steps onto a smooth hard floor. The echoes of their footsteps seemed to suggest a cavernous building; next he heard the unmistakable rattle of a roll-up door descending and banging shut.

Somebody kicked the backs of his knees to send him down again to where he could smell dusty cement. His ankles were taped to immobilize him completely, and then the footsteps faded. A door shut, apparently to leave him alone with his thoughts. They weren't very happy thoughts. His abduction was seeming less and less like police business, even if the abductors had been
judiciales,
and he doubted if he was in anything remotely like a police station. He could smell some plasticky chemical in the air. If he listened hard, he could hear machinery somewhere not far away. One sound was intermittent, a pounding like a stamp mill, and the other steady, like a big air-conditioning unit, but the room he was in was not cool. It was hot and stuffy and seemed to be getting hotter.

Eventually he heard a door come open, boosting the machinery noise, and then he heard the approach of several men. Without warning, the tape was stripped off his eyes in one hard yank. His cry of pain was muffled by the tape still across his mouth, but that went next. His first sight from where he lay was the grinning cop, balling up the silver tape between his palms into a compact mass. He lobbed it in front of himself and soccer-kicked the crude ball sideways. The frowner was there, too, but Jack Liffey's eye went quickly to a third man, who was new.

He was immensely overweight, straining a very large polo shirt in every dimension under an equally large expensive-looking linen jacket. The fat man wore mirrored sunglasses in the dimly lit room, like a caricature of a Tropical Bad Guy. He kept the left hand of his treelike arm buried in his jacket pocket for some reason, and beckoned with his free hand. The frowner got him a folding chair immediately. Sweat prickled the fat man's forehead, as if just standing up in the big room were a terrible exertion, and he sat hard to spill off both sides of the chair. The frowner quickly brought him a second chair and, without embarrassment, the fat man shifted his large rump to rest on both of them, side by side.

The grinner squatted to tug out Jack Liffey's wallet and handed it to the fat man, who riffled through it.

“Liffey. Jack. Culver City. Fascinating. Do you know that was the home of the great Laurel and Hardy?” His English was not just good, like Jaime Torres's, but perfect, although it had the faintest accent. He had obviously lived much of his life north of the border.

“Not where they lived,” the fat man corrected himself. “But the Hal Roach Studios, where the movies were made.”

In fact, Jack Liffey had once been shown a location on a side street of tiny bungalows fairly near his condo, where quite a few of their short films had been shot. Stan Laurel had died in an ordinary apartment not far away in Santa Monica, but he said nothing.

“I have a sixteen-millimeter print of
Tit for Tat.
That is the one where the greatest of all comedy teams are selling Christmas trees door-to-door in July.” The fat man chuckled, increasing the strain on his taut polo shirt. “The famous James Finlayson with his big mustache is their foil, and he reacts in scorn and slams his front door on their tree, which of course cuts off the top of the tree. So Hardy knocks again and, after pointing out the damage to the tree and giving his wonderful slow burn, he retaliates by tearing off Finlayson's porch light. Then he nods with that finality he has. In due course, the exchange of destruction continues until Finlayson has destroyed their car and they have broken up the house and even thrown a piano out the window. They display the true Mexican spirit, in fact. Always get even.
Segundo
,” he called.

He handed the wallet back to the grinner, who took out the cash before putting it back in Jack Liffey's pocket. He didn't get much.

“You have been searching for Rebecca Auslander.” The fat man enunciated the name carefully.

“Yes. Her father hired me to find her.”

“Why did you look in Ensenada?”

Trussed up on the floor, Jack Liffey did the best he could to shrug. “Her family had gone there a lot. I heard that she liked the town.”

The fat man turned and glared at the frowner. Then he strained forward and reached out to slap the frowner's head quite hard with his right hand. Still, his left was caught up in his pocket, as if holding onto something it could not let go. “See,
Primero.
The way a
professional
does it.” He turned back to Jack Liffey. “Culver City is also the home of the Keystone Kops.”

It wasn't, but he didn't say anything.

“Our federal police have been known to make mistakes, but they are not the Keystone Kops, Jack Liffey. Don't make that mistake. Every taxi driver and vegetable seller—even the barefoot little Indio girl who insists you buy her Chiclets—reports to them and they know everything, absolutely everything, sooner or later. In this case, however, it seems to be later.” He glared at the frowner again, who did his best not to flinch away.

Jack Liffey wasn't going to be able to do much more than delay them. He knew that.

“Did you find her?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

That perked them all up.

“How did you do that? Does her family have a vacation house that our efficient police also didn't find out about?”

He wanted to leave Jaime Torres out of it, if he could, though it was probably Jaime's searching through town that had stirred them up. “I showed her picture around town. At El Gigante, someone knew who she was. After all, she was a new gringa in town, and pretty.”

“Very pretty,” the fat man agreed.

“I know she took some money that belongs to someone else, probably to you. She's very frightened about it. I think I convinced her to give it back, but she wants me to bring her father down here first so she can talk to him. I was on my way to get him. Why don't you let me bring him down here? She may have hidden the money away in some offshore account that you'll never find without her cooperation.”

When he risked a glance, the fat man was smiling. “Very entertaining, your imagination. Where does this girl live?”

“I don't know the address.” He hoped Becky Auslander had taken him seriously and fled—he wasn't about to risk a bout of determined persuasion by these thugs. “It's the house with the dolphins on Chapultepec Hill, but I'll be happy to take you there and negotiate with her.”

The fat man pointed to the frowner and made a telephone signal, a fist with the thumb and little finger stuck out, brought up to his mouth. The frowner nodded and went out a door, boosting the growl of machinery noise, which died down as the door sealed shut again. The cement floor was getting more and more uncomfortable on Jack Liffey's hip, but he didn't want to call attention to his level of comfort in any way. It could only get worse.

“So you were going to get her to give our property back?” The fat man took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow.

“She didn't know what she was doing. I don't think anybody wants to make enemies of very powerful people.”

“Very powerful and very vindictive people, you might say.”

“I didn't.”

“That is discreet of you, but it's true nevertheless. We'll just wait a little and see if my friends can speak to the girl.”

They waited for a while, and the grinner spoke in Spanish to the fat man. The fat man seemed a bit exercised and snapped back at him. The grinner went out and came back a minute later with a large floor fan trailing a long cord, which he set up to blow across the fat man.

“Your English is very good,” Jack Liffey said.

“Michigan State University. The Spartans,” he explained proudly. “Not the Wolverines. State was also where the great SDS met in 1970 and began to come apart. I was proud of that once, because … Well, just because.”

Jack Liffey thought it might be important to keep him talking. “Because?”

“Do you know about the Mexico Olympics in 1968?” the fat man asked, with an edge in his voice for the first time.

“Two black Americans raised their fists and had their medals taken away.”

The fat man smiled, but there was no humor in the expression. “I suppose that is what a North American would remember. Like a Mexican remembering that General Santa Anna had a cold the day he visited the Alamo. I was a student at Mexico City in 1968. Just before the Olympics, we were protesting for more democracy in our country. The government didn't like the embarrassment in front of the world press, so at first the army shut down the university, and then they fired on a demonstration at Tlatelolco Square in the center of the city. Three hundred students were shot down and killed. That's officially—I think more.”

“I remember some of it.”

“There were thousands in jail, and I became the treasurer for a group that collected money for lawyers and bail. The police arrested me and wanted to know who had contributed to the defense fund. I wouldn't tell them.” For the first time, he took out his left hand. He displayed it casually and Jack Liffey winced: The back of his hand was scarred grotesquely, as if it had been larded with gobs and strings of pink clay. “They held my hand over a gas burner for a long time. Still I didn't tell them. When I got out of jail, it was prudent to leave the country and finish my education somewhere else. In fact I couldn't come back to Mexico for a long time. I missed my country a lot in those years, or I thought I did. But, you know, you don't really long for your country when you're in exile. What you miss is something in yourself that you can't have anymore.”

“What did you long for?”

“That is none of your business. Relax now.” He chuckled. “Enjoy what Albert Camus called ‘the benign indifference of the universe?' It may not always be so.”

Fariborz realized he'd not eaten since the morning of the day before, but he stayed on his knees on the small frayed carpet in the center of the bedroom floor. He needed to continue to pray and fast, and fast and pray, until he was given some sign. At the moment, there was only a silence and the stillness of the spirit that disturbed him deeply.

He prayed for guidance and for absolution for his mistakes, prayed to have a sense of rightness again, prayed even for the merest sense that Someone was listening. He bent forward and pressed his forehead to the carpet, repeating the formulaic Arabic prayers, feeling the blood drain into his face and flush it warm. He heard traffic outside and a horn now and then, the voices of children squealing at each other as they passed. That world out there was no longer his. He felt he needed help to reenter it, to feel as if he belonged.

He tried to frame explanations for his actions—but for whom, he wondered? All he had wanted to do, all along, was take a few small actions that would advance him along the
Sunna,
the right way. He asked sincerely if that wish had perhaps been vanity, if he had been following some voice in his own mind rather than the voice of God, and it was the vanity that had poisoned what he had done.

He had tried to separate himself from the mores of a society that he had come to see as utterly godless and irreverent. But he did not want to punish any individuals—even the godless. He had wanted simply to draw a bold line around the lusts and venal indulgences he saw, around injustice and cruelty, the cheapening of love and affection, around intoxication and exploitation, around that terrible obsession with buying commodities and the whole invisible bondage of the cash nexus. His only purpose was to call impassioned attention to what lay inside the line he would draw so everyone might see it. He had not expected everyone to change overnight, or maybe at all, or even to understand what he was doing, but the act of witness would be enough for him. It should have pleased God.

Instead, everything had gone wrong. People had been hurt. Iman had lost a hand. Their group's hopes to finance their plans had vanished in an instant. They had become isolated from the school and their friends and families. And there seemed nothing but more hurt in store for them. He did not know for certain what Hassan and Sheik Arad were planning, but what little he had seen made him profoundly uneasy about their designs. So he had run away. And now Fariborz Bayat felt utterly alone in a cold and silent world.

His prayers went on and on until he felt the tears rolling along his cheeks, and then on still more. Something boomed outside. Once, twice, three times—either a truck backfiring or a gun. The walls of the building shook with it; the windows rattled. He collapsed and rolled onto his back on the floor of the apartment, surprised that he was even alive. God had let him live through his crisis. God, in fact, had sent explosions to stir him out of his immobility and carry him to a calmer place, into the eye of the storm.

The booming sounds had broken into a culpable drift of his attention: he'd been thinking of his short tenure as a bodybuilder in the Kennedy School's weight room. In his mind, the gym coach had been telling him insistently how muscles were built—through failure after failure. There was no such thing as a slow accretion of muscle tissue, the coach had told him. You worked a particular muscle, harder and harder, worked through the pain, until it failed and the tissue broke down. And then, if you ate protein and kept in good health, the muscle tissue grew back bigger and stronger where it had failed. He sat up: It was a revelation. Maybe what he had been doing was exercising his moral and religious muscle. He had taken them past the critical point, he had failed—but, like a muscle, this failure may be exactly what he needed for moral growth.