City of Strangers (18 page)

He settled down to wait. They would probably be there for a while now, and he didn't want to get caught trying to slip away. It was more important than ever for him to find his friends, probably back in L.A. now, to do his best to foil whatever it was the sheik was up to. He felt a terrible responsibility for his own misplaced devotion. He wondered if he should have stuck with Jack Liffey, rather than dropping him so quickly.

His arm had fallen asleep but he managed to use it, pins-and-needles and all, to drag himself out of the deep pit. Loud music was banging away. He opened his eyes to a stucco wall and wondered where on earth he was. Then slowly he recognized the brown cushions, the derelict backyard. The music came from a house directly behind, some kind of thumping electronic rock. His watch said 5:25, and he marveled that the sleep guardian had managed to wake him just in time.

Jack Liffey sat up woozily, as the tatters of a busy, overwrought dream fled. A man yelling at him, an electrical plug that he had to lug through a huge complex city looking for a mate. He desperately had to empty his bladder. He would have climbed the fence to hunt down whatever was left of the bathroom in the empty house, but he was only three or four blocks from Auslander's establishment.

He strode down the driveway, a building inspector having completed his task, and headed for the psychologist's office. He realized that once he told Auslander about his runaway daughter, the job would be all but done. She was on her own now. Just looking for her again would endanger her. All he had left after Auslander was dealing with LA ROX and Farshad Bayat, and he had no idea how to approach that. He felt some responsibility to the boy, too, wherever he was.

Rush hour was clogging the streets. A giant billboard over La Cienega said
Experience Drive-Through Hi-Colonics. Relief Without Waiting.
There was a picture of a satisfied-looking man in the front seat of an expensive sedan. It didn't even bear thinking about, but he was pretty sure it was a joke.

A furtive-looking woman with dark hair stole quickly away from the little blue clinic as Jack Liffey came across the street. The side entry was locked, but Auslander must have seen him coming. He opened the front and beckoned.

“First things first.” Jack Liffey found the bathroom and relieved himself with great pleasure, wondering why it was that his kidneys always took sleep as a signal to drain every last drop of fluid from every corner of his body into his bladder. The chronic prostate irritation probably didn't help, either, but he had no money for doctors.

Auslander was waiting in his interview room, shuffling papers and making a few desultory notes.

“Hi, Jack. I guess you've got news.”

“You may not be wild about it, but it's basically good news. Given the possibilities.” He made himself comfortable and told Dicky Auslander that he had seen his daughter and she was very much alive and very rich and on the run. He explained that she'd seemingly taken off a drug cartel for over a million dollars and gone on the lam with it. He didn't mention the Bayat connection.

“I suggested giving it back and I'd try to square things with them, but she refused. She's probably right about that, you know—they're not a forgiving sort. She seems to be pretty resourceful, so I think she'll be all right in the end. She underestimated them at first, but she knows better now. I know this isn't what you wanted to hear, but if I brought her back to you, she'd be dead in a week. I think I can guarantee that.”

Jack Liffey peeled back the wet bandage and showed his hand. The psychologist flinched when he got a good look at the ruined skin. “The
drogistas
tried to use me to find her. Luckily I'd already advised her to take off for parts unknown.”

“That's nasty looking.”

“Try it from this side. These are real evildoers, Dicky. The guy's name is Frankie Miramón, I think. They say he's head of the Sonora cartel. I don't even know if
you're
safe. Don't entertain any illusions about the government's riding to your rescue. All the resources of the DEA can't do a thing to these guys, and the Mexican federal police are on his side of the table, some of them anyway, and he has a bottomless supply of money. I didn't like it much, but I thought telling Becky to run was the best thing I could do. She has a million bucks to play with. That'll buy a lot of run.”

“Where can she go?”

“I suggested Europe. It's farther from the cartels, and she ought to be comfortable there.” He shrugged. “If you send someone to try to find her again, please remember that there will almost certainly be people tracking
him.
I won't do it. She said something about roses, that that would let you know where she went, but I wouldn't count on it. Misdirection is her pal now.”

Auslander stared gloomily at the carpet for a while. “Molly and I raised a strange little girl, didn't we?”

“I like her. She has spirit.” He hadn't liked her all that much, but it was the least he could do for the man.

Then Auslander talked of going to look for his daughter himself, and Jack Liffey had to take him through the whole thing all over again. “Look, lots of daughters leave home and don't write. She's alive—I'm not shitting you about that. She's in command of herself, and she's well fixed for money. Give it a year or two at least, then look for her. Maybe the
drogistas
will forget.”

By then the trail would be so cold, he'd never find her, Jack Liffey thought. Finally, Auslander sighed and seemed to give in. Oddly, he took a few notes about something in a notebook. “So, how are you doing through all this?”

Jack Liffey held up the bandaged hand. “How do you
think
I'm doing? I
liked
this hand a lot—I had a use for it.”

“I mean psychologically. Aren't you pissed off that the author of your story wrote in such an ordeal?”

“Aw, Jesus, Dicky. Not
this
again.”

“You might as well. You look like shit. What did this thing do to you psychologically?”

Jack Liffey glared for a while and then shrugged. “It shook me up. Okay? A lot. My car's gone—there's no way I'm going over there to get it. My confidence is just about gone. I'm getting older, and some parts of my body aren't working very well anymore.” He wasn't going to get specific about
that.
“I've had a wife and a near-wife leave me. I had to bawl out my daughter. And some sort of secure space I used to live in has been violated.”

“Tell me about that part.”

“You know, the outlines of your own body are kind of sacrosanct. It's a kind of minimum of space you need in the world. Some sonofabitch comes and breaks through that boundary, and it really gets to you. I think the violation hurts more than the fucking burn.” Oh-oh, he thought. He felt himself losing some kind of control, his voice shuddering a bit. “I don't like it, Dicky, I don't. It's too goddamn upsetting.”

He went silent for a while, struggling back toward some kind of quiescence. Any kind.

Finally Auslander told him, “That's a fairly common reaction after a rape, the sense of violation of your personal space. Aren't you mad?”

He wondered if he could get across the room in two strides to punch Auslander, or if it would take three. “Christ, yes, I'm mad. If you're the fucking author, why did you do it? Go on, if you're gonna play this goddamn game about my personal pain, you tell me why I've got to have all this happen and end up feeling like the world's biggest leftover part.”

“Long ago, when you first started to separate from your mother—”

“
Stop it,
Dicky, right here. Jesus, I don't want any more of your
Psychology Today
eyewash. I know exactly what's hurting me, and I know it's burning its way through me like acid. This is your game, man, you invented it. You play it right. I want to know
why
this shit had to happen. Why does shit like this have to happen to
anybody?”

“I guess I really don't know.”

“Please don't worry about it. You've had a traumatic experience.”

He stared at the oil painting of surf over the foot of her bed. There was just enough ambient light through the blinds to make out the scene, and he wondered if it was her work. Though amateurish, the painting had captured something of the power and anger of the ocean, a white wave crashing down across craggy rocks. There was a way in which your intent sometimes still counted for something in the world, he reflected, even if you didn't have what it took just then to bring it off. At least that was what he wanted to think.

“When I was scared and alone on the floor of the
maquiladora,
I didn't want to think about what was going to happen to me, so I tried to think about your body. Tried to think of running my hand over it like this.”

“Mmmm. More.”

“It's even more beautiful than I remember.”

“It?”

“You. I'm not trying to objectify. Something is all too obviously going wrong in me, I'm sorry. Maybe I want this too much; maybe I need it too much.”

He felt his face burning with humiliation.

“I would be supremely happy just to snuggle up, Jack. Honest.”

She rolled onto her side and he spooned against her. Unfortunately, the position made him acutely aware of that small flaccid mass of tissue pressed against her buttocks. “It's odd. I seem to feel cut off from everything right now, even my own body. Like I'm somewhere outside, watching, and everything is moving very slowly.”

Actually, he was even losing touch with having spoken aloud just then. Maybe he'd just imagined that he'd spoken to her. He wanted to ask her if he'd just said something, but he was afraid to.

She rolled over so they were nose to nose and placed a palm gently against his cheek in the near-darkness. “Lighten up. You're trying to hold up the sky.”

He felt a rush of tenderness toward her. He wished she could meet Maeve.

“I felt your cheek puff a little,” she said. “Did you smile?”

“That was something Mao said, as I remember. ‘Women hold up half the sky.' ”

“You're trying to hold it
all
up. What is this passion men have for duty? And strength? If only John Ford had never made those horrible movies, boys would be a lot better off.”

“
High Noon
was Fred Zinnemann,” he said. “That was the one where Coop said, ‘A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.' ”

“See?
You've got to get everything exactly right. A grain of sand falls in the wrong spot, and you need to tidy it, adjust it. You're responsible for it.”

“You're right. It's funny, I thought I knew how to live with a certain level of untidiness. Thanks, Aneliese. You've been wonderful.”

“I don't like that past tense, Jack.”

“It doesn't mean anything. You
are
wonderful. You will be wonderful. You could be wonderful. You ought to be wonderful. You wouldst be wonderful. I've run out of tenses.”

“Then you're nowhere near perfect. There's the subjunctives, all the continuous tenses, conditionals.”

He put a hand over her mouth gently and then kissed her forehead. Sex or no sex, he didn't want to talk about grammar.

* * *

“Jack, are you all right?”

He wondered why her voice was calling out to him, asking him that, and then he wondered why
on earth
he had gone to sleep on the floor of her bathroom with colored-plastic shampoo bottles lying all around him. He sat half up and saw that one of the plastic bottles was even floating in the open toilet. There was simply no logical explanation for this.

“Jack!” Yes, that was Aneliese's voice, full of concern, a room away.

“I'm fine.”

But was he fine? He noticed that his elbow hurt and then he saw quite a bit of blood trickling down his arm. His eyes went immediately to the bandage on his hand, but that was still in place, still pure white. The very first priority here, he thought, was to sort out what the hell was going on. This was not a dream. He was recovering a vague memory of coming into the bathroom to empty an overfull bladder in the middle of the night. He had fumbled the seat up and peed to his great relief—he was quite sure of that—and then he had flushed. He had felt his cheeks burn. Perhaps there had been a wave of nausea, too. He wasn't sure.

He looked around again and the conclusion was unmistakable, though astonishing: He had just plain fainted, pulling down a shelf of her toiletries with him. He looked at his elbow and saw it was badly gashed, probably by the doorstop screwed into the wall. He had no memory of falling down, not even a clear memory of dizziness. He must have gone down like a sack of old tools.

“Oh, Jack.” Aneliese squatted in the doorway in a filmy wrap, watching him.

“I often sleep on the bathroom floor,” he said. “Give me a moment to think up some witty reason.”

She knelt and studied his elbow. “This'll need stitches, but I've got some butterfly bandages for now. What happened?”

“Aneliese, honestly, I would tell you if I knew. I think life just finally caught up with me. Or maybe it's got a bit of a lead.”

He hadn't noticed it before, but Ruth Bayat had a way of fishing about with her eyes when she talked to you, as if something was going on just behind you. He still thought her quite handsome in that wonderful Persian way, with regular dusky features and thick shiny hair cascading over her shoulders. An expensive-looking dress. “He's by himself, listening to music and writing poetry. Saturday morning is his retreat.” He followed her across the too-white house.

“You don't go to synagogue?”

“In terms of manifest devotion, I am about as Jewish as Farshad is Moslem. I don't mean we've rejected our religions. We are both what we are, deeply and culturally, but not the other. I guess you'd say we're heartfelt but secular. Thus our son turns religious to rebel. I wonder if we're doomed to alternate generations forever, with Fariborz's children becoming secular again, and their children finding a renewed God.”

“I've seen similar,” he said.

“I suppose life was a lot easier when we all knew who we were.”

“Are you sure? None of us really remembers a time like that.”

“I do and it
was
easier. I didn't say better.” She made a contemptuous wave of her hand. “I will never again allow men to force me to wear the
chador.
What monstrous patronization! Have you noticed that democracy never survives for long in any place where a significant number of people—women, for example—are denied equality? It happened in your own South, with colored people.”

“Yes. And the South is still paying for it.”

“Farshad.” She knocked softly. Jack Liffey could hear Beethoven through the door. He'd expected something more exotic.

“Bija tu.”

She opened the door and ushered him in as Bayat rose from a pillow, holding a leather-bound notebook, and smiled insincerely. He didn't really want to be interrupted. Jack Liffey took the offered hand.

“Welcome, Mr. Liffey, welcome. You always catch me in my Persian sanctum. I'm afraid you're going to think I wallow in nostalgia.”

“It's a pleasant place.”

“I'll bring tea,” Mrs. Bayat said and sealed them in with the soft music.

He displayed his notebook, unlined paper half-filled with elegant lines of cursive Arabic. “Persian is written in Arabic characters,” he said. “It's a bonus you get with a language with such calligraphy. You're trying to write beautiful words and they
look
beautiful, too. I can't think of another art that's two arts at once.”

He gestured and they settled onto pillows, Jack Liffey uncomfortably because of his wounds and a certain stiffness left from his fall the night before. Nearby he noticed a parrot in a freestanding cage made of ornate wrought iron, like something out of a musical comedy. He was certain it hadn't been there the last time. The big green parrot paced and bobbed restlessly, as if it wasn't quite sure it belonged, either.

“I found Fariborz,” he said abruptly, so there would be no more reflections on the arts or long discourses into polite blather.

Jack Liffey didn't quite get the reaction he expected. It was a kind of vigilant regard, showing neither surprise nor delight. “That's very good.”

“I know we're all supposed to carry on here and be super-polite for a while and kiss hands and things—what was the word?”

“Taarof.”

“But I found out about your drug deal, too, so I think we can dispense with the sweet talk. And maybe the moral posturing, too.”

Bayat looked quite pained, as if he'd just been hit by an abdominal spasm. “That's not quite fair.”

The parrot emitted a low squawk and then it left a single word hanging on the air that sounded like
lot-fan.

“As I remember, you put on a big performance about being one of those guys whose feet never touches the crooked path. I distinctly remember a lot of talk about that, and then I go and find out there's a bunch of dilute cocaine hidden in those LA ROXes of yours. Look here.” He peeled back the bandage to show the back of his hand. “One of your confederates questioned me. On
broil.
Maybe you should take a wild guess why I haven't already called the DEA.”

“Probably because you don't have any evidence.
No,
I'm sorry, please let that go. That's not the attitude I wish to take.”

The parrot repeated its word, sharply and impatiently, then seemed to lose interest and turned its back like a disgusted preacher in a frock coat.

There was a knock, and Bayat clammed up while his wife brought in the tea. The parrot perked up though and watched her closely as if she might hold something for him, too.

“I'm going to Bahameen's,” she said, and Bayat nodded. “I'll see if she and Kamran want to go to the Greek for the music thing next week.”

He watched her out the door, then watched the teapot for a moment without decanting any of it. Vapor sashayed gently over the spout.
“Lot-fan, lot-fan,”
the parrot croaked.

“That's ‘please' in Farsi,” Bayat explained. “I'm holding the bird for a friend and I have no idea what it wants, or if it even knows that the word has a meaning.”

Bayat poured the tea and set a cup in front of Jack Liffey. “It was known we were in trouble. Somebody brought the deal to Mahmoud and he brought it to me, half-cooked already. I should never have entertained it, of course. But Mahmoud had already said ‘maybe' to these men, and it is very difficult to back away from men like that.” He huffed a little bit, then sipped at his tea. “The Miramón cartel employ some very frightening gunslingers.”

Jack Liffey didn't think he'd ever heard anyone use that word in a serious conversation. The bird screamed all at once like an impatient child, and both men reacted a little. Bayat got up and tugged a thick tailored cloth cover over the cage, then stood staring at the rock wall of the room as if some answer lay there.

“Will you go to the police and put an end to it?” Jack Liffey suggested.

Bayat turned and his eyes showed real fear. “Mr. Liffey, I can't, I really can't. Mahmoud is scared. I'm scared. I'm worried about my family. You know what they did to you, just trying to get a simple answer. From me, they want money that I don't have.”

He sat again, and the bird very distinctly shrieked
“Fuck you!”
through the cover. Bayat did not try to pass it off as Farsi.

“I think I finally convinced Miramón that the girl ran off with the money, but they still hold me responsible for the full amount, and I don't have it. Just as a reminder, they hijacked a load of our rocks, burned it all, and killed the driver. I believe there is a Western proverb about supping with the devil and needing to use a very long spoon. I have learned that nowhere is there a spoon long enough to sup with the Miramóns of the world. What would you do in my place? Let them kill my wife? Please walk a short distance in my shoes, Mr. Liffey.”

Jack Liffey remembered his own resolution never to cross the Mexican border again, never to get near the Miramón crew. “I'd probably lock my doors and go armed.”

Farshad Bayat lifted the pillow at his right hand, also hoisting his expressive Groucho eyebrows. There was a 9mm Browning pistol under the pillow. “I hate weapons, I left Iran in part because there were far too many children with guns, but I will defend my home and my wife to the death. This is a true nightmare. What else would you do? Stay in my shoes a moment, please. Whatever you try to think of, I believe you will see I am doing it already or have done it.”

“A bodyguard company.”

He shrugged. “You saw the little signs out on the lawn. Dickless Tracies, I believe they're called. A minimum-wage teenager with a pistol drives up in a Dodge Neon ten minutes after someone has blown up your house.”

“Pay Miramón. It's only a million and a half, right? That shouldn't be so much for you.”

“I made this mistake in the first place because I was in a cashflow crisis. I'm mortgaged beyond any rational limit. Anyway, he's doubled what I owe him. For his ‘inconvenience,' he says. As if there was no inconvenience to me in all this. The only people I know who will lend me what I need under the circumstances demand twenty percent interest. Per week.”

“The only thing left is the feds.”

“If it was just the American police agencies, I would do it, but they have no jurisdiction in Mexico. You can't seriously expect me to go to the Mexican federal police. That's like going to Frankie Miramón's uncles and cousins. I might cooperate in setting up a sting over here, but I don't think he's stupid enough to cross the border for it. Mr. Liffey, for over a month now, I have lived every day side-by-side with mortal fear.” It almost looked like there was a tear in his eye. “Solutions in a nightmare are not solutions, but only another part of the nightmare. Can you tell me how to save myself and my family?”