City of Strangers (4 page)

“How long before she catches on when you come home in your new shoulder holster and fedora?”

“Dad!”

“We can't lie to your mom, hon, and anyway I don't want you trailing around after me, playing detective. It might be dangerous for me, you know? How about I promise to keep you up-to-date on everything I'm doing, if you'll promise to butt out?” He'd already told her about the Kennedy Four and the missing girl.

She pouted.

“Deal?”

She swallowed some words that might have been an assent, but he knew he'd better not let it rest there.

“Are we agreed?” he insisted. “I need an unmistakable affirmative here, Maeve Mary. No crossed fingers behind your back.”

She nodded and showed both hands. “Okay.”

And he believed her because she'd never lied to him about anything important before.

A weird electronic chime sounded in the school hallway, nothing like the raucous bell of his own high-school days. That was fine with him, because he knew just how visceral his reaction would be to that school-bell sound, and he did not want to be carried back to all the social dread and sexual confusion and all that unhappiness.

Suddenly every classroom door swung open and boys in blue blazers burst out like thoroughbreds clearing the gates. The sound level rose instantly as they hurried every which way.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious!” one voice wailed.

“Well, bust a can of whoop-ass.”

“So then Mary is all, ‘Duh,' and I'm like, ‘Come
on!'
”

Jack Liffey was having a displaced moment. He was sure it was all English, but it wasn't coming into focus.

He stopped the nearest boy, who had a weird haircut, short on top and long at the fringes. “Can you tell me where the office is?”

“No time to flirt, man. That way.” The boy waved a hand dismissively and hurried on.

As Jack Liffey passed among the tidy students, generally ignored, he realized suddenly that they were all white. One tall boy far down the hall might have been a light-skinned African-American, but he was too far away to tell for sure. And there were no girls. He was surprised because he'd read that Kennedy, the ritziest boys' school in Southern California had merged with Westridge, one of the ritziest girls' schools, but there was no evidence of it.

Eventually he reached an office. A printed metal label in a Plexiglas holder beside the door said:

Mr. Christopher Hogle, B.A., M.A.

Dean of Community Affairs

Basketball Coach

Gymnastics

There was also a cutout photograph of a basketball taped haphazardly to the door, with the words in felt pen:
Hogle Rips and Rules.

The door was open, so he rapped as he went in. A woman at the front looked up, but behind her an extremely tall man beckoned and Jack Liffey went right past her, through a swing gate into the office proper. That pleased him no end because he didn't get on with receptionists. He hated coming on strong with people so far down the food chain, particularly as they were generally just doing their job keeping out riffraff like him. The problem was that gatekeepers rubbed a raw nerve in him.

“Mr. Liffey, I presume?”

“Mr. Hogle. Now I understand the basketball on the door.”

Hogle had to be seven feet tall, and thin as a stringbean. He reached far down to shake hands. Jack Liffey wouldn't have referred to his height, but the jokey familiarity of the man's “I presume” invited it.

“I was once third-string center under Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He was Lew Alcindor then, at UCLA. A pro team in Europe wanted to give me a tryout, but I knew better. Just because you're tall. …” He shrugged.

“Fair enough.”

“Have a seat. ‘Kareem' means ‘generous' in both Arabic and Farsi, and he was, if he let you get close to him. I'm just happy to have touched the hem.” There was a stiff chair by the desk, the kind of thing bureaucrats used the world over to keep a petitioner uncomfortable. There was no choice so he sat.

“The hem of celebrity?”

“Let's say expertise. You want to talk about the missing young men, don't you?”

An out-of-whack sprinkler on the lawn outside slapped the window glass hard with spray. He was surprised a place so moneyed allowed that much disorder.

“And about the girl, too. By the way, what's Community Affairs?”

He shrugged. “Public relations. Making sure the neighbors aren't offended. Talking to private detectives.” An edge had entered his voice.

“I just find missing kids.”

“The girl wasn't a student here. Her dad switched her to Taunton over the hill when we started merging the boys and girls.”

“Her Iranian boyfriend was here.”

“And you're going to ask me about the rumors about the hazing of minorities.”

So that's what the edge was about, Jack Liffey thought. He let it sit, so the man's own nerves would do the hard work.

“Every student in Kennedy-Westridge is mandated to take a ten-week cultural-sensitivity course. In my experience, we're far better than your average L.A. high school, with its warring cliques and race rumbles.”

“How many blacks and Latinos do you have?”

He glared. “Some. We give scholarships.”

“Look, I don't care if you kick over Jewish headstones at night, I really don't, and I figure your gracious kids probably don't do things like that, either. I just want to talk to any of them who knew Fariborz Bayat. I could find them indirectly—it wouldn't be that hard—or I can do it through you.”

The tall man thought about it for a moment. “You can do it through Mr. Toussaint. He was their counselor, and he's right down the hall. I'm sorry if I seem overly sensitive on this issue. We've taken a pasting on this, and it's really not a bad place.” He explained what great, sensitive kids they had, offering anecdotes approaching the some-of-my-best-friends-are-colored variety. Jack Liffey just let him run down on his own.

“After all, the rich are pretty much like you and me,” he concluded.

“Except they have a lot more money,” Jack Liffey said. Who was he paraphrasing? He remembered: Hemingway, allegedly responding to Scott Fitzgerald, though Fitzgerald had been maintaining that the rich were
different
from you and me.

“I'm surprised that I didn't see any girls out there,” Jack Liffey said. He seemed to have been dismissed so he stood up.

“We're merging grade by grade. You'll see them in the early grades.”

“Doesn't it narrow the gene pool a lot, putting all the ruling class into the same school?” Jack Liffey said at the door.

The man didn't appear to like the expression “ruling class” very much, but he was Community Relations and wouldn't let himself be baited.

“We try to encourage suitable mates,” he said drily.

This office also had a metal nameplate by the door:

Mr. Broyard Toussaint, M.A. D.Ed.

Dean of Bilingual Students

French

Spanish

Biology

But this time there was no receptionist. A man opened at his knock and peered out quizzically. What the sign didn't say was that Broyard Toussaint was black, or—as they said in Louisiana—
hi-yella,
which meant he had Anglo features and was nearly light enough to pass.

“Hello?”

“Hello, did Mr. Hogle call you about me?”

“He did that very thing, about fifteen seconds ago, if you're Jack Liffey. Come in. Excuse the clutter. I wear a lot of hats at Kennedy, and I seem to need a lot of space to park them all.”

The room was full of piles of books and manila folders, all with limp white bookmarks sticking out of them. The man shifted a pile of books off the only free chair, and Jack Liffey sat.

“Kennedy has a lot of odd euphemisms,” Jack Liffey said. “Does ‘Dean of Bilingual Students' mean that you counsel the non-Anglos?”

He smiled. “It does indeed. The term sucks, as the kids say, but there's a logic to it. Those outside the dominant culture tend to share common problems, no matter where they come from.”

“Especially at a place like Kennedy, where ‘dominant' really means something.”

Toussaint's smile tightened. “That has been said, but I assure you we're not one of those vicious Eastern boarding schools, not at all. There's a little cultural hazing, but more often a sensitive young man from another culture will just read the signals wrong, and think he's being dissed, as the boys say, when it's nothing of the sort. Add that to all the usual adolescent struggles with identity. … One likes to think one can empathize with that.”

“Louisiana?” Jack Liffey suggested.

“My folks moved to Chicago when I was fifteen, but I'm from Cajun country, near Lafayette. Where the white Cajuns still swear there is no such thing as a black Cajun.”

“And you're living proof.”

Toussaint smiled disarmingly and waved at a poster of an old black man, bellowing over an accordion. “And a lot of other people like me, whole schools of music, styles of cooking. I always found that kind of tetchiness in rural white culture supremely silly—almost entertaining, in fact—but some of my friends tended to go the other way entirely and get a little pissed off.”

“I can understand that. So how's the back of the bus at Kennedy?”

“Apropos of the Iranian boys?” Toussaint asked.

“Yes.”

“They met each other here in the dorm and became close friends. It doesn't necessarily mean they were driven together by prejudice. Or strictly racist prejudice. School cliques form along a lot more lines than one remembers from our day—goths, football jocks, techies, stoners—it's endless.”

“So the four Iranian boys just happened to get together because they were the only Edith Wharton fans at Kennedy?”

The man went quiet for a moment, then gave a small shrug. “Listen, for a while now, all things Middle Eastern have remained pretty unpopular in this country. And it's not getting any better. There was some hazing, one admits. They were called ‘ragheads' and ‘camel jockeys,' as if Iranians were Arabs. But the lads only magnified their isolation when they became flamboyantly Moslem. Which was their right, of course, of course,” he added quickly.

“They weren't from religious families, were they?”

“No. But …” He shrugged. “The boys definitely found their way to Islam, whatever their parents felt. Adolescence is a time of heartfelt and consuming belief, as one probably only remembers dimly, and Islam provides the opportunity for that in spades.”

“ ‘Dimly' is right. My adolescence was a bad dream I try to forget.”

“For most of us. I think I know why adolescence was so utterly horrible for all of us,
and
why, at the very same time, it's possible to look back on it as if it weren't.”

“Meaning?”

“When one looks back now, we recognize that all those terrible things that we dreaded every day
didn't
happen. When we say we want to live it over again, we'd do it only if we could hang onto the knowledge that we didn't actually slip and fall at the senior prom.”

Toussaint was beginning to sound like Dicky Auslander.

“Well, I don't envy that time at all, only the stamina I had. I could run a mile in 5:50.”

The man seemed to refocus all at once. “One is interested in Fariborz Bayat, true?”

“True.”

“Bayat was the smartest of the boys, but I don't believe he was the ringleader—that's a terrible word to use. I apologize. The boy who gravitated to Islam first and needed it the most was probably Iman Behrooz. He's from a broken home, and he really resented his father's leaving the family. Behrooz developed a very stiff and unforgiving moralism out of that betrayal, and the other boys picked some of it up from him. They started reading the Koran together and whatever else they could find to reconnect themselves with Persian culture. They refused to wear the school tie any longer—I believe in Iran neckties have come to represent Western decadence. As proof of how tolerant one tries to be at Kennedy-Westridge, the administration gave them permission to doff the tie as long as they buttoned their shirts up to the neck. We also helped them set up a do-it-yourself class in classical Arabic.”

“Did they have an Islamic mentor? Here or outside school?”

The man thought about it for a moment.

“Yes. As Persians, one would have expected them to find a Shia mentor, but the man they found wasn't. The Shias are the division of the faith that relies heavily on clergy—imams and ayatollahs.”

“Refresh my memory on Islam.” He knew roughly, but he was interested in what the received wisdom had been at the school.

“I'm not a scholar of Islam, but as their advisor one had to bone up a little. Most of the Moslem world is Sunni, something like eight-five percent. The Shiites split off to follow a caliph named Ali soon after Mohammed died, and they're mostly in Iran and Southern Iraq today. They erected their form of Islam on top of an old Persian belief in the divine right of kings so the Shias tended to grant their leaders papal infallibility. Anyway, Southern California is a little short of Persian ayatollahs, but the lads did locate a Sunni sheik who was fierce enough for Iman Behrooz.”

He shrugged apologetically. “One finds that many Christian sects also have their militia leaders and fanatics.”

“Let's hold the editorials. Does he have a name?”

“Sheik Arad. I have no idea what his title means, but he's got a little group around him. The boys didn't stay with him long.”

“Do you know why not?”

“One gathers from Fariborz Bayat that Sheik Arad was a pretty hair-raising character. Bayat was fairly open with me, at least at first. The sheik's like some ancient prophet. One either drops everything to follow him out into the desert, or else one can go to hell.”

The peculiar electronic tone now sounded again out in the hall, and even at one remove from the clanging bell that he remembered, the summons gave him a chill. Broyard Toussaint perked up. “I'm going to have to go. I'm invigilating a biology exam.”

“Invigilating?”

He smiled. “Fancy old prep-school word for proctoring.” He gathered up a handful of papers.

“Quickly, then, do you think the boys might have followed this sheik out into the desert?”

“Mar Vista, actually. His school. It was the first place the police checked, as one might guess, plus the second and third. It appears not.”

Jack Liffey followed Toussaint out of his office, just as a flood of students washed past. There were a few girls, after all, wearing beige skirts and navy blazers. “Do you have a guess?”

“Hold up, friendasaurus!” a boy bellowed about an inch from Jack Liffey's ear.

“That's cold, dude!”

“I'd suggest you talk to Billy de Villiers. He was Fariborz Bayat's good friend. Call me right after school and I'll arrange it. I wish you good luck on finding the boys. One liked Bayat quite a lot.”

“Well,
laissez les bons temps rouler!”

Toussaint smiled tartly. “One's accent sucks, my friend.”

“Sit.” The tall, thin Arab named Hassan indicated a spot on the floor with the flat of his hand, as if pointing with a single finger would be rude. A dull red patterned carpet, about three feet by six, had been laid over the beige wall-to-wall of the tract house. Nearby, the sheik sat cross-legged in front of several plates of food on another small carpet, boiled lamb and pots of stewed vegetables that he was plucking out with a piece of limp flatbread and stuffing into his mouth.

“Thanks, sure.” Fariborz was fighting a tendency to talk to them in a kind of stilted baby-talk, trying to make sure these strange men understood him. What he was also trying to do was keep some contact with the commonplace amidst so much that was unfamiliar, even alarming. Two men in turbans who looked like identical twin wrestlers waited behind the sheik with their arms crossed. They looked different from the others, less bronzed, with longer faces, and the boys had learned they were Afghanis, rumored to be former Taliban.

He and Pejman sat uncomfortably, crossing their legs. Yahya was still cowering in the room that they'd been assigned and would not come out with them.

Sheik Arad chewed with his mouth open, smacking and snicking. He made some wordlike noise, perhaps acknowledging them, but they could not make it out. The religious leader was not at all what Fariborz had expected, but they had seen him several times now and they had grown less disturbed by his peculiarities. One eye had a cataract, giving him a permanent wild squint, and his legs were withered—at least what little Fariborz had ever seen of them peeking from under his robe. The boys themselves had given up eating meat sometime back, manufacturing a kind of ascetic Islam for themselves, so they had all been put off by the sheik's carnivorous diet and his table manners. Letting meat juices run out of one's mouth did not fit their idea of a holy man's eating habits, but they had only Hollywood films and their own conjectures to match against this reality. And Arad was definitely real.

“You want eat?” the sheik said. This time they could just make out the words in his guttural croak. The good eye came up to pierce their souls while the other one seemed to be contemplating infinity.

“A little, thank you.”

“Give them eat.” He waved a hand flamboyantly, his robe flapping like a bird's limp wing. Hassan brought the boys plates. Actually, they wanted to ask him if they could leave Iman to recover at this small Mar Vista religious center while they went back to their own place, a furnished apartment rented under a false name in Burbank. Unfortunately, Fariborz was having trouble working up his courage to ask
anything.

The sheik said something else that failed to compute. Pejman reached out for a piece of the flatbread.

“Other hand!” the sheik roared. “What wrong with you? Don' your mothers teach you
nothing
here? That is the hand you use to clean up your ass!”

Pejman snatched back his left hand, seeming suddenly to shrink into himself.

Our mothers teach us to
wash
our hands, Fariborz thought—but it was not something he was going to say aloud.

“This country is a despair. I lack the strength to confront it every time.” Then the sheik seemed to come to some more clement decision in himself. “I conclude you will become good students soon enough. As good as born Arabs.”

Fariborz said nothing. Better than born Arabs, he thought. They knew that Persia had a rich civilization that went back thousands of years before Islam and had been the wellspring of a great deal of Islamic scholarship and culture for much of the last thousand. Islamic mysticism and Sufism had developed there, astronomy, Ibn Sina, the prince of physicians, and generations of great poets like Omar Khayyam and the greatest of all, Rumi. The men in the sheik's entourage by and large represented the outposts and backwaters of Islam. But he tried not to hold it against them. He reminded himself that a fool could come from a big city, and a saint might be born in a village.

As if reading their thoughts, the sheik used the flat of his hand, palm up, to indicate his guards. “They are from Afghanistan, the home of Tamerlane.” He poked the same hand at himself. “I am from Sudan, birthplace of the Mahdi.” Then he indicated Hassan. “He is from Morocco, the great west of Islam. Yet we are all one. The Umma reveals that the group bond does not depend upon blood, but upon faith in Him.”

“May the blessing and peace of God be upon Him,” the boys said in unison.

Fariborz tried the overcooked and smoky food, but did not like it very much. A voice kept speaking inside him. Time to reconsider, it said. But reconsider what? At every stage they had been driven by logic and devotion. They were young and inexperienced, dropped from somewhere far above into company they could not quite assimilate, and could not seem to assimilate them. He had been living with this heightened disquiet for quite some time now.

For years Fariborz had felt out of place and alone. He was an impostor, constantly having to adjust his disguise amongst Americans so he wouldn't be found out. But his disguise would no longer work here. He had built himself up as a devout Moslem among Christians and Jews, as a Persian among Americans, and these ploys had served as a cloak of protection for very personal fears he sensed within himself. But here they were all Moslems, and he no longer had a cloak against the deeper loneliness.

The sheik chewed noisily, then extracted a chunk of gristle from his mouth and set it on a nearby plate. Fariborz took a deep breath. “We seek permission, sir, to leave our wounded friend with you and return to our own base.”