City of Strangers (3 page)

This was getting odder and odder. “Why do you want that?”

The man shrugged. “Finding Becky may be the key to finding Fariborz and his friends. No matter how long I've lived in this country, I never quite understand how Americans' minds work. Mr. Auslander has promised to let me know the minute she's found, but he may sequester the girl, or choose to keep silent for his own reasons, or he may just forget me. If she is connected to Fariborz, I have a feeling I will need to move quickly to trace from her to him. That's all I ask. Let me know if you find her and let me talk to her right away. I will make it worth your while.”

“I'll consider it.”

“Would a retainer solidify your consideration?”

“Let's leave it there. I have a client already.”

The man leaned back in his chair, as if deciding not to push any harder. “You're welcome to come to my home and talk to his mother and see my son's possessions, if you think it will help.”

They talked some more, but Jack Liffey didn't learn much more useful information about the boy. Fariborz Bayat had been very mannerly from an early age, studious, kind to the old and infirm. He had been interested in literature and poetry, and then music, hanging out with a mixed bag of boys in junior high, Anglos, American Jews, a Palestinian Arab. But once at Kennedy, he had been thrown together with other Persians. The father, too, suspected that the other boys at the elite school had been cool to the Persians. None of the families of the other three missing boys lived in Beverly Hills. They were from Torrance, Sherman Oaks in the Valley, and Santa Monica.

Jack Liffey couldn't work out quite what was so unnerving about Farshad Bayat. His reasons for wanting to have the first words with the missing girl didn't ring true, but there was something else as well, a tremor of mental activity that overtook the man a little too often, as if he was tuned to some distant signal Jack Liffey couldn't hear. And the girl's name had something to do with the signal. Becky Auslander was the ghost at this feast, all right, but he had no idea what feast it was.

He left out the back, through the loading dock, just to get a different perspective on the place. Giant numbered wooden bins of the various species of ROX lined a long concrete warehouse, and a crew of Latinos pushed rolling containers along the bins, counting out a number of ROX from each bin according to the paperwork they carried.

Two young Latinos squatted out in the alley on a smoke break. Only peasant farmers could squat comfortably on their heels like that.

“Buenas días,”
Jack Liffey said.

“Buenas.”

The second man just watched him suspiciously.

“Is Mr. Bayat a good boss?”

He knew they weren't likely to say much, but he might be able to read something in their manner.

“Es Señor Bayat un buen jefe?”
he repeated.

They did their best to pretend they didn't understand him, but he figured it was a straightforward enough sentence, even in his execrable Spanish, much of which had been learned from Auto Club tour guides, discussions with waiters in Ensenada and Chico Cervantes mystery novels.

The workers were practiced at shrugging. All that he learned was that they were Mexican-born, probably illegals.

“Have a good day,” he said, and sauntered on down the alley. The stake truck being off-loaded had
Baja California del Norte
plates, with the
frontera
inscription that basically meant T.J. Another unsurprising fact to store away.

A newspaper rack caught his eye with a giant headline before he reached his car. L.A. wasn't a street-edition town, a headline that big really had to mean something.

Teen Kills 8 at Playschool

The editors managed to work in a little information above the fold, a berserk sixteen-year-old, distraught about breaking up with an older girlfriend who worked at Wonder Playland, had run a bulldozer back and forth through the preschool in Brentwood. Jack Liffey stopped reading. Life was random enough, he thought, and he felt dismal enough already. He didn't need any more insight just then on the sorrowful burdens of the human condition. And, like most crazed tragedies, there was nothing really to be learned from it.

Returning south, he noticed a huge concrete faux Gothic church that he'd seen a hundred times without it ever registering. He parked on the side street and stared up at the flying buttresses. He wondered if the concrete detailing up high was decaying in the rain and smog. The owners who now lived in Frank Lloyd Wright's experimental L.A. homes had learned to their chagrin just how vulnerable poured concrete was, with the maverick architect who had inspired
The Fountainhead
insisting on intricate cast-concrete Mayan designs that eroded to mush in a few decades. Jack Liffey felt his hands tremble a little.

He got out and craned his neck up at the flat gray surface that showed the marks of the wooden forms where it had been poured, unlike the limestone fabric of a European cathedral. Still, the building was impressive. He pushed in at a heavy carved wood door, past a rack of pamphlets about ministering to darker-skinned peoples overseas, past a little font where a brown woman in a shawl was dipping her hand in holy water, and then on into the dim nave. The stained-glass windows were dazzling, a lot of blues and reds that really vibrated in the sunlight.

He slipped into a pew in the cool echoey dimness. There was a kneeling rail in front of him that his long-long-ago childhood Protestant church had never had. And Marlena's Bible-thumping, tongue-talking, millennarian church probably wouldn't have had, either. Marlena.
Give me that full gospel,
he thought. Don't give me any of that 90 percent gospel, no, sir. Actually the only part of the gospel they seemed interested in was Revelations, all those Mediterranean fever-dreams about pale horsemen and approaching hellfire.

He settled back and listened to a kind of beating of the air in the vast space. No, it seemed a real sound, small, far-off and agonized, behind a door or a wall. Something in pain. He smelled floor polish and burning wax. An apse near him was blocked off by a rack of flickering candles in red glass. All these sensations seemed to burn his nerves, as if his axons were overcharged. He could even feel his own pulse beating against the inside of this skin. Just hold still for a minute, hold still, he thought.

Jack Liffey wondered what in hell he was doing there. There was an inkling that maybe he was reaching out to hit the pause button on his life for a few moments. Nothing really religious. Just a whim to commune in some way with that ancient craving to do one's best in the world or be part of something bigger and grander.

Then he heard the odd sound again and noticed a number of small people making their way on their knees around the outside aisles, moving from numbered station to station. His spine prickled as if he had blundered in by accident on something extremely private. An old man crabbed sideways on his knees and stopped directly between Jack Liffey and icon No. 9 on the wall. The little man bowed his head and started to weep quietly, his shoulders shuddering. Jack Liffey had an overpowering urge to hug him, comfort him, tell him it would be all right.

Instead he thought about Marlena. He had let her go without a big scene, graciously, blessing her new union with the big Bible-thumper. But why not? What good would anything else have done? Making a scene wouldn't have kept her.

He tried to stand up to go back outside and return to the world but he couldn't. He kept trying ineffectually. It was like a car with a dying battery, grinding and grinding, getting weaker in that futile way that would leave him stranded, far from home.

Hey, anyone there
? he called in his head.
I really think I'm doing my best here.
But, of course, there was no answer.

Something landed on the back of his bare forearm, and he wondered if the church had flies. He looked down and saw a drop of water. A second teardrop hit and he thought, Shit, not again! He knelt to see what kneeling on that hard bar was like, rested his arms on the pew ahead, and then he wept uncontrollably over the back of the pew for a while. A part of him watched, fascinated, and decided he'd never quite done anything like this before. His previous crises had run to alcoholic blur, but otherwise had been pretty much under his conscious control.

Jack Liffey had seen it before, parked along this stretch of Fairfax on his way home. It appeared to be some mid-70s boat-sized GM product, Buick or Oldsmobile, but you couldn't tell because it was completely covered with a blanket of tiny brown teddy bears glued to every surface. There was only an oval left to see out the windshield, and he wondered if that was enough to make it legal. And what would a sudden rainstorm do to it, a billion soggy little bears?

It had been hard enough to tear himself away from the church, and now this. A sign on the roof of the car said,
Disenchantment will never prevail.

A deferred message from above, he supposed, since he'd been offered no revelation in the church.

Maeve looked up from
Wuthering Heights
to see her mother hovering tentatively in the doorway of her bedroom. Tentative wasn't her mother's style, so she knew something was up. “Did I forget to do something?”

“No, no. I was just wondering if you'd seen your father recently.”

Maeve wriggled, set a fancy leather bookmark between pages, adjusted the footrest of the old recliner—generally did all she could to stall. “I'm not sure how you want me to answer. I know he's missed two support payments.” That was the deal. No child support, no visits—though Maeve was almost sixteen years old now.

Her mom grimaced and waggled a hand, erasing that idea right out of the air. “I'm not on the warpath. I saw Alice at the market, and she said she and Warren ran into Jack somewhere and he looked like he was in pretty bad shape. He took losing Marlena hard, didn't he?”

Maeve felt a chill on her spine. The deal was, adults were supposed to take care of themselves, quite privately, so you could have your
own
growing-up crises and they could attend to
you,
but it never seemed to work out that way. Her mom had a running problem, too, with her new husband, Bradley, who labored under what Maeve had come to see as a small-man complex, which meant you could never cross him directly, but had to work around him in some way that his tiny brain would not notice. As far as she was concerned, Brad could shrivel up and die any day he liked, but Maeve loved her real father to distraction, unreservedly, with an ache that went all the way through her.

“He and Mar got along pretty well, but they didn't have very much in common,” Maeve said. “She was going to one of those churches where they think Jesus already has his landing gear down. I think when she left him, it just brought out a lot of his other stuff.”

Maeve could see her mother decide consciously to leave the snotty comment about Jesus alone. “Do you think he's drinking?”

It was drink, long ago, and the disorder that went with it, that had ended up sending Maeve to Two-family City. “No, he's pretty firm on that now.”

“Alice said she'd never seen anyone so downcast and unsteady. Would you like to go see him?”

Maeve felt herself light up. “Really?”

“You're on school break. Why don't you go cheer him up.”

Maeve was up out of the chair in an instant, hugging her mother. “Oh, thank you, Mom.”

“I care for Jack, too.”

Jack Liffey adjusted the hard chair to face the wall of his apartment. He took off his wristwatch and set it in front of him. He rested his palms flat on his knees, closed his eyes, and started to inhale deeply the way a meditation-besotted blind date had insisted on showing him, sucking air into every nook and cranny of his lungs that he could visualize. Then he exhaled until his belly tucked in under his ribs and his throat creaked a little. He carried on this way while repeating in his head one of the mantras she had suggested:
I'm strong today, I'm forgiving.
Whatever.

After about fifteen minutes, he'd end up good and buzzed for a while. You could call it meditation if you wanted, but he figured what he was really doing was altering his blood chemistry, hyperventilating. It was probably the way mystics and sufis and dervishes had always cranked themselves up to the point where they heard their gods talking to them. He knew it knocked his blood pressure back and left him woozy, so it was as good a substitute as he knew for a stiff shot of single-malt scotch.

About two-thirds of the way through his allotted time, Loco stirred and started to pace restlessly, with an odd little purring. It disturbed his concentration. He thought he'd preempted this by giving the dog its obligatory five minutes of affection. Loco was half coyote and did not usually make much in the way of demands on the human world.

The purr became a mewl. Something was up and then the rasp-angry doorbell sounded.
Damn,
he thought.
Meditatus interruptus.
Still, he was already getting a bit lightheaded. Loco was leaping at the knob as if trying to work out its mechanics.

And there was Maeve, grinning, carrying her little suitcase, and she launched herself into his arms just as the dog launched itself at her. “I missed you, Daddy.”

“Oh, me, too, sweet stuff.”

She bent down to hug Loco, which gave Jack Liffey a chance to rub his eyes surreptitiously. So much sudden love going around was more than he could handle.

“Pretty gutless, Dad.”

With Maeve's extra weight onboard, the old VW labored down to third gear, about 48 mph, heading over the Sepulveda Pass toward the Valley. It was lugging so badly now he had to drop to second. He'd had the car for almost a year now and he still wasn't really used to it. The horrible engine noise of the air-cooled beast unnerved him on long trips, like a Greyhound bus running up his tail.

“The price was right,” he yelled over the engine.

Chris Johnson had virtually given it to him—$500, he'd said, whenever he could afford it—after his trusty old AMC Concord had given its life, in effect, to save him from a couple of thugs. The VW hadn't proved its loyalty like that yet.

“Can we go to the electronics store first?” she pleaded.

He was combining her errand to buy some gizmo with his own trip to Kennedy School to start looking into the missing kids. He had always had this primitive spirit of economy that gave him a deep satisfaction in dual-purpose chores, like someone who'd gone through the Depression and hoarded coupons. His father had seemed to spend half his life catching him coming out of rooms and telling him to turn out the lights.

“And then I drop you at the North Hollywood Library for a few hours.”

“We'll see,” she said. He could sense another agenda turning over deep in her psyche.

“How is it you're on vacation in October, hon?”

She grimaced. “I've explained that already, Dad. I'm on C-track. It's not like when you were a kid anymore. We've got year-round school. It's more efficient, and the kids don't have to help bring in the summer crops anymore.”

“Really?” He stayed deadpan. “Who
does
bring in the crops?”

“Illegals, of course.”

He glanced at her and she nodded quickly. “Okay, okay,
undocumented
workers. I didn't mean anything.”

“I know some of those expressions are a bit absurd,” he conceded. “
Differently abled
—as if a bunch of folks just decided one day they'd prefer riding around in wheelchairs. But it never hurts to call people what they'd like to be called. It's just politeness. If redneck assholes want to be known as the cranially challenged, that's fine with me.”

She smiled. “We had a big discussion of
Huck Finn
in Mrs. Beecher's class before we started reading it. You can bet what it was about.”

“The N-word. It gives me the willies, too. I know it really pays off in the book when Huck finally connects with Jim, but I still can't say it.”

“When we read some out loud in class, we read it as
Negro.
Negro Jim. It was a weird compromise. Do you think it would have been better to say the bad word?”

“You know, punkin, I think for some questions there just isn't a right answer. I love Twain, but that word carries freight now that you simply can't ignore. Someday you can read Brecht's
Caucasian Chalk Circle
and we can talk about it. He set up a really intractable dispute, between two pig-headed groups, and he thought he'd worked out an answer, but I think it's the most dangerous possible answer.” It was wonderful to have a daughter you could actually talk to, he thought.

That perked her up. “
Caucasian Chalk Circle.
I'm there, dude.” She studied him for a moment as he drove. “You know I've started dating.”

His heart fell through to the soles of his feet and then bounced, but it didn't make it all the way back up. He tried not to let the trepidation show. “Would I like him?”

“You'd adore him. He's into computers and teaching himself Greek. He's smarter than me.”

“Not a chance.”

“Anyway, we're just good friends.”

He figured that meant she wasn't sleeping with him yet, but he decided it was best not to edge into that area
at all.
In any case, she was spinning her life off into that zone where he would sooner or later have to trust her.

“When you're ready, I'll be happy to meet him. I won't bite. But if he's never heard of Brecht, I'll be merciless.”

“You? You're a pussycat.” She hugged his arm and after enjoying it for a moment, he wriggled free enough to slam the shift back up into third and see if the poor old 1200-cc engine could hold it up the slope.

Fariborz folded his hands and stared at the ketchup bottle on the Formica table in front of him as if it were his lost childhood. America was the only country he had ever known, born and raised here, and the bottle pretty much symbolized it for him, but he felt utterly outside it all now. The folk-rock music and the comfortable home and driving his dad's Land Rover Discovery and simply going into a 7-Eleven for a Coke and feeling like he had a right to be there. He knew he had done it to himself, but that didn't make it any easier. Pejman had lived in London for a few years, which gave him some perspective so he may not have felt quite as lost now, but Fariborz felt as if he had cast himself into coldest outer space.

He had ratcheted up his bravado day by day, watching himself do it, feeling his resolve hardening and growing more adamant, letting it build and mutually reinforce with a small circle of like-minded friends until they forced one another to take themselves at their word. Suddenly they had to act out their challenges, and—
wham!
—he found himself on the far side of a hole torn in his reality, stuck fast in a completely different place. And then, by default somehow, they all found themselves closeted with a truly fanatical cabal of grown men from a desert culture that meant nothing at all to them. He ached physically, in a place right under his stomach, ached to be home. But there was no going back; he could see that.

“Almost midday. Almost time to pray,” Pejman said, checking his watch.

“We should wait for the sheik.”

Sheik Arad was the leader of the religious compound in Mar Vista, which was not far from the sparkling new mosque in Culver City that the Saudis had built for L.A.'s Moslems, but the sheik wouldn't go near it because he was from Sudan and he hated the Saudi regime with a deadly ferocity. The boys hadn't wanted to come to the sheik—his intensity had terrified them—but they couldn't think of anybody else who would be able, discreetly, to get Iman the medical treatment for his mangled hand.

“Pej, I insist we're still just going to attack symbols of impurity.” In fact, he was pretty sure Sheik Arad had other ideas altogether. “We can stink-bomb cinemas where they show pornographic movies, and paint-bomb the headquarters of
Hustler
magazine and the shops where they put scandalous lingerie in their windows. And we have to do this when the buildings are unoccupied. Maybe it will awaken the sleepy conscience of many Christians, too.”

He had said this many times before, in one form or another, but he felt his stilted diction shifting weirdly. It was almost as if he were being taken over by a djinn who had to translate everything from medieval Arabic. He had sensed it first at the beginning of their Retreat, trying to think of it as an attempt to purify his speech and become more precise and careful, but now he felt estranged even from the part of his brain that generated language.

“All these scandalous things interfere with our own freedom of religion,” Pejman agreed. “There is no way to worship in purity when you're forced to wade through filth every day.”

They were like two boys whistling past a cemetery. They guessed neither of them had the strength of character to hold out against the ferocity of the Sudani band—not face-to-face—and if they weren't on the alert they'd find themselves so beholden that they'd end up reluctantly but inevitably sitting in a big truck heading toward some federal building. Or they would be packed off, will-less, to a desert training camp in Libya or even Pakistan.

“Man, I want a Big Mac,” Pejman said. “With fries.” He seemed to work out his distress by thinking about food, while Fariborz tended to fret and repeat himself. Yahya just lay on the sofa across the room, whimpering.

“He may not be back in time. Let's pray now.”

They took up their little prayer rugs, bought from Ikea, and carried them into the living room. The house had not been built conveniently on a
quibla
axis, so none of its walls truly faced Mecca, but the sheikh had set up a portable
mihrab
niche on the east wall, canted a little to indicate true east. In an uncharacteristic moment of levity months earlier, in a similar apartment room on their retreat, Pejman had spoken of praying to Palm Springs, which was pretty much due east of L.A.

They stirred Yahya and took turns in the bathroom tub washing their faces, hands and feet. Then they unrolled their prayer rugs and prostrated themselves, touching their foreheads down.

“In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful.
…”

“Two points,” she suggested. Maeve and her father played a running game of finding oddities around town and keeping score. To date the highest was four points, awarded for the giant acupuncture needles that she had found stuck into the earth around L.A. by art students, ostensibly to prevent earthquakes. The average point-award was only two, for oddities like the absurdly undersized horse under John Wayne on the statue at Wilshire and La Cienega.

This ought to be equal to the horse: a giant flying saucer was permanently crashed into the entrance of the electronics store. Customers had to enter under the saucer and past a jeep that had been death-rayed in half. Dummies of 1950s soldiers were firing old M-ls at Martians who were firing ray guns back at them.

“It's all a little too self-consciously cute,” Jack Liffey demurred. “Corporate eccentricity makes for a different fish entirely.”

“I know what you mean, but it still hits the spirit of oddity.”

“I'll be a good sport. Two points. What are you buying?”

“I used up Mom's blank card-stock making business cards. They have this really cool paper that's preprinted with color designs, and you can run it through your computer to put your name on it, and then snap off expensive-looking business cards.”

“Supplies are over there.” Halfway there, he noticed that the computer monitors and printers were arrayed on a long counter that was held up by the arm of a giant squid that had ripped up through the flooring. Now he didn't feel quite so bad about awarding those points. To enhance the shock, they had even reproduced a fainting victim in the aisle with paramedics clustered around her, her blouse ripped open and her skin gone ashen. The store decor was so bizarre that it took him several seconds to notice that the paramedics were moving. One of them slapped cardio paddles on the woman's chest, and yelled “Clear!”

He got between the scene and Maeve and herded her toward the tall shelves of computer paper. It was a natural reaction, this urge to shield Maeve from harsh reality, but he realized it was a bit patronizing for a fifteen-year-old. “Do I get to take a point back if I tell you there was a genuine fainting victim on the floor beside the giant squid?”

“Huh?” She turned back immediately. He waited while she rubbernecked with a group of others in a little semicircle and after a while she came sheepishly back to where he was toying with a little laptop. He wished he could afford it, but he hadn't had a computer to call his own since aerospace, and that had been before Bill Gates—ancient history.

“It's not fainting.” Maeve looked a little green. “The woman is dead.”

“I'm sorry I said anything.” He put his arm around her shoulder, wanting to feel her substance, suddenly struck by the fragility of the world.

“That's the first dead person I've ever seen,” she said. “It's funny. Something's really gone when you're dead. She looked like a dummy of a real person.”

He'd seen a small portion of death in Vietnam and a few times since, but he let it go. There didn't seem anything really to say. Dead was dead, and if you thought about it too much, you'd start getting a whiff of your own mortality and then the bad sweats would kick in. “How'd you use up your mom's card stock?” he asked idly.

“I made some business cards for me. See how neat?”

She handed him a card.

“Whoa!” He came to a dead stop. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

She had listed her own cell-phone number. It was more dignified and better looking than his own business card that Marlena had made up for him two years earlier at her Mailboxes ‘R' Us shop, with his name in some weird cowboy script and a big eyeball on it. But this idea was not even negotiable.

“Hon, we can't have this. No, no, no.”

“It's just a kind of joke.”

“How come I don't believe you? Remember all the trouble you got in last year?” Trying to help him out, she'd gotten in well over her head with a gang of bikers.

“I saved your life, didn't I?”

“Thank you very much, but I don't want you trying it again.”

“Dad, think of all the things I could find out from young people that you never could.”

“It's very touching that you want to help me, hon, but I fell into this job myself only when I was desperate. It's not a career path for a bright young woman. It's just not.”

“I could just ask questions for you.”

“Maeve, no. Have I ever denied you anything before?”

“A Porsche. A strapless evening gown. A thong bikini.”

“But seriously,
no.
If nothing else, your mom would roast both of us very slowly over an open fire.” He had an inspiration. “The first thing she would do is cut off our visits for good until your eighteenth birthday—you know that.”

That seemed to strike a chord with her and her face clouded over. “Awww. We don't have to tell her.”