Authors: John Shannon
“Who would have suspected that this innocent-looking thing playing Stan Getz could decease quite a lot of people?”
Jack Liffey was pretty sure âdecease' wasn't a transitive verb, but he didn't bother pointing it out. Maybe in FBI-speak it was. “I can't believe the boy is involved in that.”
“He may not know what he's involved in. We need to speak to Fariborz Bayat as soon as possible. I think you can appreciate that.”
“Oh, yes. Believe me. I have nothing at all against synagogues, or my own lungs. I get chills just looking at that thing.”
“So do we.” He shut the radio off and closed the top and looked like he was getting ready to go.
“Can you do anything about the cartels and the boy's father? That might help me bring him in.”
“We knew something, but not much. You can see why it's of secondary importance right now. We can't do very much for him if he doesn't come forward.” He smiled a little. “On the other hand, if he
does
come to us, we still probably can't do very much for him, and then he's up shit creek with the narcos. I recognize that. I'll talk to some friends of mine and let you know. In the meantime, think of plutonium. And see if you can remember something about the boy. You've got my card.” He paused. “We'd like everybody in this country to be able to live out their dreams in peace.”
Jack Liffey grimaced. “Most of my dreams are about being in French class and discovering I forgot to put any clothes on.”
The Greyhound rumbled north with a kind of ponderous swaying that had been set up when it changed lanes too quickly and the driver overcorrected a little. Back in San Diego, he'd got the last free seat, over a wheel well, and his legs kept cramping up now. There were only so many ways you could scoot your legs at angles. He'd wondered at the time why the elderly Latina had ceded him the window seat right away, but now he saw that she could straighten her legs out into the aisle.
Through the windows on the inland side of the bus, across from him, he saw a long palisade of empty yellow hills that showed that the bus was passing through Camp Pendleton. On the ocean side, he caught glimpses of blue green water and surf. Then there was a high wall on the sea side and through a gap he glimpsed a covey of Marine hovercraft, parked like taxis. A colorful sign on one end of the big wall said,
No Beach Out of Reach,
and at the other end,
The Swift Intruders.
Mean-spirited stuff, Fariborz thought, imperialist stuff. Though he didn't usually think in terms like that.
As an exercise in empathy, he tried to imagine himself a U.S. Marine, spit-shining his shoes to a glow, getting tattooed and shorn, stalking through town arm-in-arm with his pals and glaring at longhair peaceniks, the whole dollar standard of macho posturing, but he couldn't quite do it. Still, he told himself it was no uglier than
Death to the Great Satan,
the slogan that his father's countrymen were always out chanting in the streets at the drop of a hat. There was so much hatred, so much ugliness and cruelty.
He hoped he was done with hard-heartedness now, as surely as if he'd had a religious conversion, a bolt of revelation on the way to Damascus. He didn't know why he hadn't seen through all his ferocious self-righteousness sooner. Even if you were certain that some pious doctrine was right, utterly right beyond any doubting, it was obvious that you couldn't bomb your way to converting the doubters. Even the silly and harmless stink bombs and paint bombs that he and Iman had planned. That kind of action damaged only your own heart.
The final moment of his conversion had come, curiously enough, in the shabby INS interview room that had only been 100 yards north of the Mexican border. He had sat at a table made out of some kind of nicked and dented hard black rubber, across from a kindly gray-haired interviewer who had seemed more bored than anything, and Fariborz had gone on and on refusing to give a name or address. He had broken no law, he insisted, and, following Jack Liffey's whispered suggestion while they were being herded toward the green-and-white Ford Explorer out in no-man's-land, he kept denying that he'd come across the border at all. They'd just been wandering lost near the border for half the night.
“You look like a lucky kid,” the agent had said to him. “I don't know, something about the way you sit up straight. I wish my own kid had your stuff when he was growing up.”
“I'm not a kid. I'm an adult.”
“Joey's a construction flagman over in Phoenix. Said he couldn't stomach community college to try for something better. You in college?”
It was such a clumsy attempt to gain a little more information that Fariborz just smiled. The pen lifted, checked something, and wrote a few words.
“I've got to ask,” the avuncular man said, almost apologetically.
At dawn the exhausted man had spoken at the door to an equally weary-looking woman and given her some money, and soon a white paper bag appeared with two coffees in McDonald's cups and two Sausage-Egg McMuffins. He couldn't touch his sandwich, of course. It contained pork. But he did accept the coffee.
His McMuffin sat there the rest of the morning on a sheet of notepaper, leaking grease that congealed into a graying pool. As loathsome as the food was, it touched Fariborz deeply that the man had bought it for him with his own money. The old man was polite and gentle. He had never once tried physical intimidation, never threatened him in any way.
The manifest decency of the old man, just doing his job without causing a ruckus, made Fariborz want to weep all of a sudden. He looked from the horrible egg-and-sausage McMuffin to the kindly grizzled face and decided, all at once, that much of mankind was basically good. In that instant, he realized he wanted only to love his enemy. He knew it was a weirdly Christian sentiment, phrased that way, for he was still a Moslem beyond all doubt, but he sensed a spirit of amity washing through him, and then out toward the whole human race.
For the next hour in the interview room, he had felt curiously at peace with himself, as if a fever had broken. He was sure that Mohammed (may the blessings and peace of God be upon him) must have felt exactly the same way at some time in his life and encouraged his followers in that direction, but he couldn't recall any quotes touching on it from the Koran. That just showed his lack of study, he thought. The feeling of generalized love waned a little when a new man took over in the morning and pushed him a little harder, but he didn't let the new man spoil his new feelings. Imagine, he kept reminding himself with a strange wry self-consciousness, a religious epiphany set off by an egg-and-sausage McMuffin. It
must
be something powerful.
And he felt the glow still as he rocked hypnotically in the Greyhound, surrounded entirely by poor people and people of darker skin. His own inner feelings told him clearly that Islam demanded he find the path of gentle truth and peace. Now he had to find his best friend Pejman, little Yahya, and poor maimed Iman, and convince them of the same truth before the sheik and Hassan got them into real trouble. He didn't know what they were up to, but the man and his people obviously had much in common with those who had attacked the embassies in Africa and blown up the World Trade Center in New York (may peace be upon all the fallen), and Fariborz guessed their plans had to be bad ones.
And then all of a sudden a memory made his face burn with shame. He had sat with Becky on the turnout up on Mulholland Drive, the spot they had visited many times because it looked south over the whole of L.A. and then by turning your head 180 degrees you could see north into the Valley, too. He had often played his acoustic guitar on a big rock there, as if he were serenading the entire L.A. basin, picking out Becky's favorites, “Guantanamera” and “Here Comes the Sun” on the gut strings, deceptively simple-sounding tunes but actually quite complex and lovely.
He closed his eyes in mortification at the vividness of the recollection. “I could never marry a nonbeliever,” he heard his own voice telling her, avoiding the charged word
infidel,
but still unbearably sanctimonious as he tried for a tone of utter emotional neutrality. “I couldn't be sure of the purity of such a woman's heart.”
How had he been such a priggish idiot? And worseâhe was sure now that it had been this rejection up in the Hollywood Hills that had driven Becky into her own transgressions. That was as good an example as he would ever need of the insidious damage you caused by following a rigid code.
He thought of how easily and painlessly Jack Liffey had offered his one simple insight: that even God couldn't make right wrong. It had never occurred to him before, but it seemed so obvious now. Becky or anyone else could follow
safa
for the same reasons he did, whether she believed there was a God wagging a giant finger at her or not. The thought warmed him inside, as he formed a new all-encompassing notion: that all people were brothers and sisters, all capable of the same struggle to behave with decency.
Ahead, he saw the two big domes of the nuclear power plant, the northern edge of the U.S. Marine base, and he realized he was about halfway to L.A., halfway to Jack Liffey. He had been wrong to ditch him. The man's presence drew him powerfully now. It was as if he needed to be with the man to talk it all over again, test the sea changes that had gone on in his psyche, maybe even to complete something in himself. And, of course, he needed the man's help to find his friends. After all, Jack Liffey was a detective.
Jack Liffey was startled at first when he opened the door, expecting the FBI man back for some further horrifying revelation, or a gaggle of kids from the complex trying to sell him the world's very best chocolate bar to earn a trip to camp. It was twilight and the bulb in his alcove was out, as usual, so it took him a moment even to recognize her.
“Hello, Jack Liffey.” There was a little trepidation in her voice, but a hardworking brazenness overrode it. “You never called me.”
She came straight in wearing a beige belted trench coat that went perfectly with his earlier flight of fancy at Taunton School about her posing in a Nazi cap for the cover of a man's magazine. Finally the name came to him: Rebecca Plumkill, headmistress.
“Mrs. Plumkill.”
She extracted a bottle of wine from her overcoat. “Ms. But it's Rebecca,
please.
May I call you Jack?”
“Sure, of course. Have a seat.”
“I require two wineglasses.”
He hadn't had a drink in six years, but he searched out two glasses that he had once loved, elegant black-stem crystal numbers forgotten on the top shelf of the cupboard, between the unused Osterizer and the Joe Namath Butter-up popcorn popper. He hunted through a drawer for a corkscrew, and finally found an old two-prong number to open the cabernet. He hadn't forgot how, but opening the bottle was complicated by the way any pressure on his left hand disturbed the burn and sent a scream of pain up his arm.
“Was I supposed to call you? I'm sorry.”
“I waited for it every night,” she said in a strange throaty voice. He wasn't sure, but he thought he felt her hand drag very lightly across the back of his neck as he tugged at the cork. He poured the two glasses, still not sure whether he would drink his. Something so odd was going down that he couldn't get a grip on things. Was he dreaming this? He thought of Aneliese, but chased the thought away, like stamping his foot at a pest. Things like this only happened in 1940s movies, he thought. But things like
what?
Loco was curious, too, sitting up by the sofa staring at them both. The animal gnarred a little. Without looking straight at her yet, Jack Liffey said, “Do you realize that in the last four thousand years no new animals have been domesticated? And I'm still failing with this one.”
He heard a hearty laugh. The laugh made him feel goodâactually, to his surprise, aroused him sexually. He turned with a wineglass in each hand to see that she had taken off the trench coat and looked marvelous in a short black dress. He recalled a quote he had read in a science-fiction novel as a teen, the first line of print that had ever aroused him:
Looks like that dress will come off easy.
He decided to go ahead and sip the wine.
Wow,
he thought. The first shock was a little harsh, but then a mellowness flooded over him. It was only wine. He'd have only the one glass.
“To what do I owe this honor?” he asked.
She grinned broadly and he realized she was already a little drunk, probably something imbibed earlier for Dutch courage.
“Chemistry,” she said. “Better living through. This was so damn hard for me, Jack Liffey. Every woman,
absolutely
every woman, desires to have a man who is slightly roguish and makes her laugh.”
“Is that me?”
“Why do you think I got myself half drunk to come here uninvited?”
And for the first time since Marlena, he turned out to have no trouble at it at all.
“Jesus Christ,” Jack Liffey murmured, and then corrected himself. “Jesus
H.
Christ.”
Cool air wafted across his body, discernible at several sensitive points because he was completely nude where he lay on his back in a tangle of sheets on his bedroom floor. An opened bottle of Wesson oil lay on its side beside him, making a terrible mess where it had gurgled onto the carpet. A pillow was torn open and had coughed out its shredded foam to add to the disorder. He had no idea how
that
had happened. He didn't see how he could have done it because his left hand was still swathed in bandages and hurt like hell. He would need some more painkillers soon.
“How did we tear the pillow?” he asked, but there was no answer.
Rebecca Plumkill breathed evenly, deeply asleep in her own nudity, diagonally across the bed. Her small breasts, flattened now to near-invisibility as she lay on her back, had been fantastically sensitive, as had various other spots on her. And on him. He had no idea what time it was, or if he'd been dozing for long, but it was still dark. He had no idea where his watch was, either. He'd fantasized about evenings like this, but he hadn't really thought he had any left in him at his age.
An empty wine bottle lay on the floor, too, and two stemmed wineglasses lay on their side with a haze of red liquid pooled in the low spots. He did not think he had had very much of the wine since he did not feel very buzzed. It had been his first drink in six years, and it appeared to have been worth it. The world was amazing, he thought. All the wearying absurdity of things seemed to have evaporated off him. He looked at the woman's slim body again and felt himself smiling like an idiot. It was as if he'd skipped forward in time, far past the predators, and landed in an age when everything that had wanted to eat him was now extinct.
He was just drifting off again when he was startled awake by his raucous doorbell. He wondered if the FBI man was back with another tale, another demand, another caution. It shrilled again, insistent and chilling, and a tremor took his shoulders. He pictured the fat Mexican drug lord standing darkly in his alcove, attended by a choir of
judiciales.
There were still predators after all.
Wrapping the sheet around him, he made his way toward the front door like the sorry leftover of a toga party. Loco stirred a bit, too, one yellow eye opening with a lazy regard to watch the fluttery white apparition pass by. He wondered if Loco had lapped up any of the wine. Normally, the dog was wound so tight that it snapped erect at the slightest cooling pop in the walls.
He peered out through the fisheye to see in the shadows, lower than he expected, Fariborz Bayat. The boy looked exhausted and disheveled, and he was just reaching up to ring again. Jack Liffey moved quickly to forestall that terrible noise, clapping the flat of his hand over the exposed bell to muffle it, and then tugged the door open. A blast of cool air ran up under his makeshift toga. The boy looked startled.
“Don't ring. Come in.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“You look done in. Sit down over there while I put something on.”
He went back to the bedroom where he contemplated again the gloriously nude Rebecca Plumkill, headmistress of Taunton Academy, lips slightly parted as she gave a light snore. She hadn't budged an inch. If he hadn't seen a single hand twitching like a cat chasing its dream mouse, he would have feared he'd killed her. He covered her with the sheet and put on the pants and a shirt he rescued from a wad in the corner.
By all rights, he should take Fariborz Bayat by the nape of the neck and convey him straight to the FBI, but he went to the kitchen and put on hot water instead.
“How did you get here?”
“I took the Greyhound to the station downtown, but then it was tough. They've frozen my ATM account. You're in the phone book, so I hitched out Wilshire to La Cienega, and I had to walk from there.”
“That's four or five miles.”
“I've been walking for two hours.”
“How'd you get past the guard?”
“He was asleep.”
So much for his last line of defense against the
drogistas.
“You could have called me.”
“I'm sure your phone is tapped. Just like they've been watching my ATM. I always used a different one miles from where I was staying just to run them around.”
“You'd be better off coming with me to the FBI.”
“
No.
” The boy stirred as if he was about to leap up and run. “If you even suggest it again, I'm out the door.”
“Hold your horses. I don't turn people in. Do you want some tea? And what's this visit about? I thought you were finished with me at the border.”
“I'd love some tea. I think I need your help.”
It was nice to be needed, Jack Liffey thought. He hadn't actually been doing so well lately as Mr. Fix-it. He went back into the kitchen where the little flip-number clock built into his stove said it was 3:30
A.M.
Which was plus or minus an hour, depending on its mood. From the kitchen door he watched Fariborz and wondered how much he knew about his comrades. He was slumping to one side, obviously exhausted, hardly able to keep his eyes open. He felt an immense affection for this boy with his fierce longing for rectitude. His resourcefulness at the border hadn't been bad, either. Quite a kid.
“Stay awake a bit.”
“Oh. I don't know what the sheik's people are planning to do, but I think I need to get my friends away from them. I got them into trouble in the first place. Even Iman”âhe shook his headâ“he always had a tendency to go overboard. You always think you can't tell Iman anything, but I knew when we argued he'd be listening even when he pretended he wasn't. Maybe later he'd come around. But now he's been hurt very bad and I'm afraid it's probably made him supercommitted. It's like shooting the father and eloping, getting the whole pregnant enchilada. Iman lost his hand.”
Trying hard to explain, but not being quite coherent as he drifted.
“Do you know what they're up to?” Jack Liffey asked.
“They didn't really trust any of us, you know. Something about a radio with a little explosive charge in it. Like you'd use in a stink bomb or a paint bomb. Also, I found a big bottle of potassium iodide pills.”
“I see,” Jack Liffey said.
The young man tried to come alert. “Do you know what it means?”
“Be right with you.” He caught the kettle just as it began expelling a thin soundless mist, an instant before the whistle, and turned it off. He poured scalding water into two mugs with tea bags and brought them into the living room, where Fariborz was listing precariously to the left again. Loco had adopted him and lay across the boy's feet.
The dog was developing pretty good taste, he thought. There was probably a single domesticated gene working its way like a virus through his bloodlines.
“Don't drift off yet,” Jack Liffey said. “Here.” He handed the boy the tea so he would have to concentrate enough to stay upright. The boy sipped the tea and sighed.
“They're dirty bombs, meant to spew out some radioactive powder, maybe plutonium,” Jack Liffey explained. And he told the boy most of what Special Agent Robert Johnson had told him. Fariborz appeared horrified, intent, angry, troubledâemotions scudding across his weary face like cloud shadows on a prairie. Then they were both quiet for a while, contemplating the enormity of it.
“I guess that explains the big
X-Files
episode I saw,” Fariborz offered. “I went out to Campo, where they'd kept us all cooped up for a week. The government had the place surrounded with tanks, and there were men in space suits walking around with radiation containers. I think I remember reading in school that if you take a lot of potassium iodide, it protects you from radiation poisoning. I saw their list of synagogues, too.” He sighed. “Those imbeciles, targeting ordinary Jews. That's
stupid.
It makes us look terrible; it makes Islam look bad. I wasn't into hurting anyone, honest. Damn their bigotry, these guys out of the desert.”
“That's edging up on bigotry itself.”
He gave a rueful shrug. “Most of the other kids at Kennedy thought
I
was an Arab. âLittle raghead,' they called me behind my back. Sand nigger. What's that all about? All those prep-school boys with razor haircuts and more pocket money than a Third World country. How does anybody think it accomplishes anything to call people stupid names?”
“We can't solve that one right now, but we'd better find your friends. Do you have any ideas on that?”
He nodded. “Do you want to start looking right now, tonight?”
Jack Liffey shook his head. “Neither of us is up to it. I'll make you a bed on the sofa, and we'll head out in a few hours.”
“Plutonium,” the young man said as Jack Liffey stood up. “I had no idea, really. Maybe I should have guessed something terrible.”
“Don't worry,” Jack Liffey said. He ruffled Fariborz's hair fondly as he went by; he couldn't help it. “Just remember what we've learned from all the movies about fighting a heavily armed enemy. You're really in no danger at all unless you tell people you're planning to retire in three days. And then only if you show around a picture of your wife and kids.”
The boy thought about it glumly for a moment, but just when Jack Liffey figured the boy wasn't up to getting the joke, Fariborz almost smiled. “I think you also have to talk fondly about a particular stream to go fishing the day you retire.”
Jack Liffey chuckled softly; he'd understood perfectly. You might call it some sort of doppelganger effect here, he thought.
“Jack, Jack, somebody's there!” The voice was urgent in his ear, a woman's, rich and wonderfully throaty. He woke, opening one eye to see the frizz of her short blond hair, which was colored too evenly to be real, her big greenish eyes. She propped herself up in his bed on an elbow. Rebecca Plumkill, he thought. Will wonders never cease. He remembered that he had straightened her out longways and covered them both with bedclothes rescued from the floor. He felt vaguely scalped, as if pain had been distributed mildly but evenly across the whole surface of his head, so he figured he'd had his share of the wine after all.
She pointed urgently at the closed bedroom door, and he listened to a murmur from the living room. His conscious mind, coming alert, could account for one of the voices, but not the other. Bright light bled in at the curtains, so it was probably already well into this exceedingly complicated morning and time to get up and deal with it. Something about the timbre and rhythm of the second voice made him smile.
“Don't worry about it,” he said. “The voices belong. How are you feeling this morning?”
“Pretty good, if I do say so, Mr. Jack Liffey. Sore here and there, tender.” She patted around her chest and flanks. “A bit sticky.
Whoa!”
She'd caught sight of the riot of shredded foam on the floor.
“Did we do that?”
“You
did that,” he said. “I think. Don't you have to be at school?”
“It's Saturday.” She nuzzled up next to him and he started to get aroused. “Mmm-mmm.” He'd lost track of the days. Saturday explained the other voice in the living room.
“I'm sorry,” he said, disentangling gently. “Duty duty duty. I'll block the view down the hall if you want to make a dash for the bathroom.”
He took a couple of old codeine pills that he had and then dug around in the closet until he found the bathrobe somebody had given him years ago, an expensive kimono that had been slit open and westernized with buttons. He'd never worn it, but now seemed as good a time as any. She came up to him before he could put it on and held his penis hard for a moment, like a jack handle.
“I'd like some more of this. Quite soon.”
“I wouldn't call it the impossible dream.”
When he went out into the hall and stood to block the view, Fariborz was sitting up on the mussed sofa, wrapped primly in a blanket, and Maeve sat in the chair opposite, with her legs tucked under her in that way only women did. The two seemed to be deep in a debate on the merits of abstract expressionism.
“Most of them don't have enough going on in the picture to challenge you to look for very long or even think very hard,” Maeve was saying.
“Good morning, punkin'. I see you two have met.”
Maeve leapt up and ran to hug him. He kept a bit sideways to hold his erection out of contact, and to keep her from noticing the bandage on his hand. “Daddy, hey! I love you to pieces!”
Abruptly they could all hear water start splashing into the bathtub.
“You've got somebody here!” Maeve exclaimed delightedly.
“There's lots of somebodies here,” he evaded. “Have you figured out that the somebody right over there is the one you got in trouble over?”
She turned and looked hard at Fariborz.
“Maeve was spying on your pal, the sheik,” he explained for Fariborz's benefit. “Helping me out, and the FBI nearly popped her for it. We had a bit of a disciplinary discussion about that, and she's not quite out of the woods yet.” He wasn't ready to give up the last shreds of leverage it gave him.
“Fariborz BayatâMaeve Liffey. I'm going to try to get some breakfast together for all of us, and I don't want anybody talking business until I'm done. Understood?”
Maeve nodded and then indicated the bathroom. “Who's in there?”
“You'll meet her.”
Going into the kitchen of his suddenly jam-packed condo, he experienced a comforting paterfamilias mood that he hadn't felt in years. He delved in the freezer and found a cardboard tray of rock-hard English muffins. One jar in the fridge held about an inch of marmalade. Another was full of reddish jam, some indefinable homemade berry kind that probably hadn't been touched in a year.