City of Strangers (5 page)

He could feel the tension in Pejman. Sheik Arad brought his good eye around to them. The room was tense with command and submission to command.

“No propositions,” the sheik asserted. “There will be no designs outside the grand design. You learners will go to our southern
madrasa
with Hassan.”

“But, sir—”

His good eye slitted and became even fiercer, and the Afghani bodyguards seemed to lean closer. “I don't never take no refusals.”

This time the woman who sat in Auslander's waiting room appeared more or less normal. She was thin and pretty and blond, with her eyes buried in a magazine called
Beginnings.
She didn't even look up as he crossed the room to press Auslander's button. Almost immediately, the man's head appeared and nodded him in.

“I wasn't sure you'd come.”

“I wasn't sure, either. I've been to the boys' school but there's not much to report yet.”

“I didn't expect much yet.”

Jack Liffey sat exactly where he had sat before and stared at the seascape print, obviously meant to be soothing. Fierce surf pounded down on some jagged rocks. Maybe it would actually be soothing once the sea's rasp had smoothed the earth down to a billiard ball, he thought.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“No.”

They were both silent for a while.

“So, losing Marlena surprised you with its power. It knocked you for a loop.”

Jack Liffey said nothing.

“That's what I hear, anyway. I imagine it shook up your sense of yourself and your own strengths. It made it hard to get out of bed in the morning. Made you rethink a lot of your life and wonder where you're heading.”

Jack Liffey wondered if the door across the office led to the outside world. The window shade was pretty bright, and his sense of the geography of the complicated hallway suggested he was probably at the rear, with the backyard just beyond. He could just walk out.

“Sooner or later that happens to all of us, if we suffer enough of a loss, or a truly unexpected loss. The emotional power of it isn't really a mystery, or it shouldn't be. Loss is more or less the primal experience. The first separation from the mother, the first realization that we're not the center of the universe, the best friend–playmate who moves away. A large enough loss delivers us straight back to childhood. I mean, emotionally.”

Jack Liffey wondered if Dicky Auslander, in his years of dispensing facile advice to desperate people, had ever had one of them come across the room and punch him out. He figured it might even be good for the man, might improve his sense of perspective.

“A place of consolation is gone with the loss, and you're helpless about it. But as an adult, you no longer have the defenses of childhood, so it's really worse. You can't invent some kind of magic meaning for your loss. You know better now. Loss is just loss.”

He noticed that Auslander had buttoned his open-necked shirt wrong, an extra buttonhole flying high under his chin. He thought about striding across the office, pushing him down in the chair, and then wrenching the shirt open to rebutton it for him. It would be very satisfying.

“The anguish of loss is like being trapped in a moment of time that can never change, never get better,” Auslander pontificated. “Like right now. If we go on glaring at each other for fifty-five minutes, it's going to get pretty boring.”

“I thought there was a rule in psychology that the party in question has to ask for help to do any good.”

“It's not hard and fast. There's such a thing as
intervention
when things get bad. As Lon and Virginia tried to do for you, by talking to me. It's a sign they care for you.”

Once more there was a faint but terrible shriek from one of the other rooms. It was weak, yet quite distinct. And as it came again, over and over like a ritual of pain giving, then tailed off, they both looked at the wall as if they could see through it to that horrible distress. It reminded him that there were other, haunted, worlds all around, overlapping his, and many were much worse. “Count your blessings,” Auslander suggested.

“I thought you said something about a way to make this entertaining.”

Auslander readjusted his lanky body and grimaced. “Are you comfortable?”

“Yes, Aaron.”

“Let's try this. You're a detective, right? The single most popular genre of popular fiction—I think I'm right in this—is detective novels, broadly construed to include what they call police procedurals and crime novels and similar things. Let's agree to look at your life as if it's fiction. I'll interrogate you on why you feel a need to go around detecting things, and just so it's fair, you can pretend I'm the author of your life. I'm the big, bad guy who's devising your adventures and leaving you so forlorn, taking away Marlena, et cetera, et cetera. You can interrogate me on why I should want to write about a detective in the first place, let alone punish him so much.”

“Aaron
—”

“Come on, Jack. Give us a break. What are you so afraid of?”

“I'm not really a detective, Dicky.” Somehow, using the nickname gave him enough of an edge to keep from losing his cool. “I was a tech writer in aerospace before the whole industry eighty-sixed in Southern California and promoted me to a small part of the peace dividend. I was at a loss and I fell into this job. It's a long story, but eight or nine years ago—maybe more—a guy from South Africa contacted me. I'd known him years and years ago, and his teenage daughter was hitching around the U.S. and she had stopped writing all of a sudden, her last letter home postmarked Hollywood. He sent me her photo and, as a courtesy, I made a bunch of copies and posted it around and asked some questions up on the Strip. Sure enough, I found out she'd been sucked into this cult up in Canyon Country—you know, that goofy minister who lured all the lost kids up to his sweatshop and put them to work making multicolored leather jackets.

“He had a business sense I guess, if you count a knack for enslaving lost kids a business sense, but otherwise he was a complete paranoid loon. He did everything but wear a tinfoil hat to keep the beams from space from controlling him, and he had guys with guns posted all around his leather-jacket ranch up in Acton. I hired an ex-cop to go up there with me and get the girl out, but the cop turned out to be such a rum-dum, I had to do most of the snatch myself. Which I did pretty damn well, if I do say so myself, and I got her home, and when the aerospace job vanished, it occurred to me that locating missing kids was something I could do.”

“It's more than that,” Auslander suggested after a few pregnant moments. “That first time may have been an accident for you, but then you kept on doing it.”

Jack Liffey shrugged. “Finding lost kids isn't such a bad calling, all in all. I can't stand the thought of a child being abused—I never could.”

There was a crash next door and then a tense silence. It only interrupted them for a few moments.

“Do some role playing, Jack,” Auslander insisted. “Think of me as your author and complain about your lot. What are you afraid of?”

He wondered if he was ever going to be able to get out of there without obliging this loon.

“Not a fucking chance.”

Auslander smiled and rocked a little in his big executive chair. “I think I write about you because I need a hero, somebody brave and tireless and honest who can go out and turn up rocks and see what's underneath. And, of course, take all the punishment that entails.”

If only this guy really were in charge, Jack Liffey thought. If only he could walk over there and give Auslander a big punch in the face for all his troubles.

“If you feel compelled to be a mystery writer, Dicky, write about somebody else. Leave me alone.”

“Do you really think you've turned children's lives around?”

It sounded like a sincere question, and it gave him pause. Jack Liffey thought back over the last few years. Not counting the runaways that he'd found within a few days, hanging out at the Golden Cup on Hollywood Boulevard and nursing their sexual ambivalence, or the lost kids where he'd done no more than post a few notices and call in the cops, there had been five memorable cases that he could recall.

“Okay, Dicky. Here's the ones I remember.”

The first had involved a young Chicano who had lost his mother and was now in Hermosillo, Mexico with his grandmother, a schoolteacher, and probably a lot better off than hanging out with his tagger crew in East L.A. The second, he'd tracked down a precocious and rather insufferable teenage girl who had fancied herself a filmmaker and now wrote him regularly to keep him up-to-date on her progress toward an anthropology degree at Columbia. Lately she had begun writing about the hollowness and cultural imperialism of anthropology, and had begun talking of going into the Peace Corps. After that, he'd located a boy who had been pretty far gone down the road to seeing himself as a religious savior and he'd brought him back to his parents. That boy, too, still wrote Jack Liffey from time to time, and after a year of community college, he'd ended up running a conservation camp, what the State had once called a reform school, far out in the Owens Valley on the eastern flank of the Sierras. The semiholy road.

A young Vietnamese student he'd been hired to find turned out to have been dead before he even took the case, so there wasn't much he could have done for her, but an older Vietnamese woman he'd met in that case had gone on to marry a conservative state senator from Orange County and got him to cosponsor a number of gay-rights bills that no other Republican would touch. That had to be a plus of some kind. And just a year earlier, he'd linked up with a little African-American girl who had remained friends with his own daughter, and was assiduously banging out folktales about magic on a secondhand computer he'd bought her with some of the reward money from her grandparents.

Of course, these lives might have worked out okay without him—it was the kind of thing you would never know—but he liked thinking he might have given each of them a nudge in the right direction.

“Jeez, Jack, I'm glad I created you. You might have saved more kids than me.” He wasn't sure irony wasn't leaking in now. “You're my existential hero, and for hundreds and hundreds of readers.”

“Hundreds?
I want an author with a bigger publisher.”

“Over to you. Give me eighteen,” Maeve exulted.

It was a real fatherly dilemma he faced, having seen the word the instant she had played B-L-O-W across on his C-R-U-M-B down on the Scrabble board. He had another B, and he had a J and an O, too, and there were three empty spaces after blow that would put him right onto the triple word at the edge and give him—let's see—sixty-three points with the triple word. Too bad there was no blow
jeb.
He had an E, and he'd go for that. Even Loco would have approved of that, and he was pretty protective.

The dog lay across Maeve's feet, as if afraid Maeve would go away again if he didn't stay in affectionate contact. Maeve had won the feral beast's heart with gobs of love, as opposed to the carefully metered affection Jack Liffey himself had offered, on his theory of consistency: You offered today only what you were willing to offer every day. There was still a coyote wanderlust that flattened out Loco's yellow canine eyes from time to time, leaving them depthless and a bit panicky. But, for some reason, the dog hadn't put up much of a fuss at giving up the big yard at Marlena's to retrench to Jack Liffey's enclosed condo and patio, at least as long as Maeve appeared from time to time.

“Would you accept ‘btfsplk'?” he said. “It's Urdu for the little dark cloud that hangs over your head to make you gloomy.”

“That's not Urdu,” she said scornfully. “It's Dogpatch.”

“You
do
know more than Dickens and the Brontës.”

“I bet you've never heard of Puff Daddy,” she challenged.

“That some kind of snake? I think Bugs Bunny is the high-water mark of American popular culture, and I can skip everything that came after. Bugs minds his own business in that fine cocky Brooklyn way, gnawing on his carrot, but if you cross him he'll get back to you, first with wit and then with a terrible vengeance.”

“Yes, Dad, I've heard of Bugs Bunny.”

He laid down two tiles. “I'll have to settle for Jot. Ten points.”

She rotated the board gingerly on the dining table. “What's your next move going to be in the Becky case?”

Case,
he thought. “The standard move, from page 209 of
Detecting for Dummies.
”

“
Dad.
You promised. I lay off if you keep me informed.”

“A promise is a promise.” Between their next few moves, he told her what he had learned that day about the boy. His next step, he thought, would be to get his friend Art Castro to find out what he could about Sheik Arad—Castro was a real detective in a big agency downtown with decades of files and lots of contacts and resources, even little microphones in martini olives—and Art owed him a favor.

Later that evening, he planned to go talk to Billy de Villiers, Fariborz's friend from school, he told her. He wasn't a boarder like the others, and it was just a jaunt over to Venice to his home.

“Looks like you got it covered.”

“You can read or watch your favorite TV show while I go talk to Billy.”

“My favorite show was on last night—
Bowling for Blowjobs.
”

His back stiffened. Kathy had warned him that Maeve was getting mouthy. “Maeve Mary!”

She smirked. “I could tell the letters you had. Right onto a triple word and a million points, but Victorian prudery held you back.”

“It's not something a man discusses with his fifteen-year-old daughter.”

“Almost sixteen.”

“Almost counts only in horseshoes.”

“What's horseshoes?”

“Doesn't anybody play it anymore?” he asked. “I'm sure I've seen the metal posts in the park.”

“Oh,
that
thing. How does ‘almost' count?”

“A ringer counts three points—that's when the horseshoe clangs onto the post and stays on. I think ‘almost' means it's lying less than one horseshoe-width from the post. That's one point.”

“If somebody puts it on the Internet, it'll be big.”

His old CD player came to an end and started to recycle some Chicago blues, J. B. Hutto and Junior Wells. More old-guy stuff to her, he figured, but she ought to pick up a bit of it. The kids who knew only the current popular culture were going to end up terribly deprived, all that in-your-face testosterone, no shadings of emotion.

“I'd hate to see a simple old American game turned into some digital racket with machine guns and splattered goop. Simplicity is its beauty.”

“You're still changing the subject, Dad. I know what a blowjob is. Remember when I walked in on you and Mar in the bathroom?”

“I'd rather not talk about Marlena, either.” He was still changing the subject, of course, but he really
didn't
want to talk about Marlena.

She stared hard at him, with real tenderness. “Have you been sad about Mar, Dad?”

He wondered if everyone had joined the Let's-Help-Jack Club. “Sure, some. I guess it was the shock. It was like a horse kicked me, actually.”

“You know, you two were
super
different.”

“I know that, hon, but she had a really big heart, and that meant a lot to me.” He felt himself choking up a little, and he stepped hard on it.

Maeve hurriedly came around the table and sat on his lap to hug him. “So do you, Dad. You've got a heart the size of a Cadillac.”

He held himself rigid to keep from giving in to the emotion, but he felt his eyes start to burn. This was getting altogether too frequent and too exasperating, he thought.

“A VW-size heart is good enough for me,” he said, as evenly as he could.

The de Villiers house was the tiniest of bungalows on a little walking path called Florita Court, face-to-face with a half dozen other bungalows separated by handkerchief-sized lawns and tiny plots of geraniums and pansies that were all fading now into eerie evening shadow. He wondered how somebody living here could afford Kennedy-Westridge.

The peephole darkened up. “Mr. Liffey?” It was a mellow voice through the door, with a strange accent, like British run through a sieve. He had called ahead and heard the same accent.

“Jack Liffey. Mrs. Aneliese de Villiers?”

He heard a chain come away and then several bolts, like a New York door. He was actually a little stunned when he saw her, a lot of flyaway blond hair and a face that could launch quite a few ships, though maybe not a thousand. Probably late forties, but looking less.

“Please come in.”

She backed away. Or the rest of her backed away, but her breasts pretty much stayed right there, making the cottage seem even smaller than it was.

“Thanks. Is Billy available?”

“He's closeted in the bedroom, working on his computer. You have no idea how precious privacy can be in a house this small.” She pronounced it
PRIV-a-cee.

“I can try hard.”

She smiled and lit him up like a searchlight. Her eyes were the deepest blue, the blue of the sky high up in the mountains above the dustiest layers of the atmosphere. “Please sit down for a few moments. Our agreement is he finishes his algebra before TV or any other interruptions.”

“Bless you,” he said. “And all who sail with you. I don't know many mothers who could enforce that these days.” He sat on a threadbare sofa of some dark indeterminate pattern.

“Could I get you something to drink?”

“Water would be fine.”

“I have some tolerable cabernet, and various types of mixed drinks.”

“No, thanks.” As she left to fetch him the water from a tiny side kitchen, he looked over the room. Pattern on pattern, wallpaper and rug and curtain, plus a print of a shaggy Highland bull. The room looked prewar British, or what he would have guessed was prewar British, mostly from watching PBS. “Where are you from?” he called.

“Zambia, though it was called Northern Rhodesia when we left. It was long ago, when we were trying to hold on to it. Anyone who could count knew it was time to go. And I didn't like the ugly way the whites talked about the blacks. My husband and I took what was called the ‘chicken run,' and never looked back. We lost a small business in Lusaka in the process, like a lot of white refugees.”

“Is Billy Zambian?”

“Oh, no. He was born here.”

“And his father?”

There was a tiny hard glitter in her eyes. “I no longer need to punish myself over him, or deceive or compromise myself. I'm quite fortunate.”

“Whoa, I detect anger.”

“Quite a lot of rage, actually. The less said … Do you have children, Mr. Liffey?”

“Jack, please. A wonderful daughter who knows more about Victorian literature than I do, about Billy's age. Her mother and I are divorced as well.”

Aneliese de Villiers sat down in an overstuffed chair and smoothed her cotton skirt over her knees; but when she was through smoothing, even more knee seemed to show. They were nice knees. “It's been quite a transformation from our youth, hasn't it?” she suggested. “I didn't know a single child in my school whose parents were divorced.”

He thought for a moment. “I knew one in my neighborhood, but just one. It seemed like an immense tragedy for the poor boy, hush-hush, not to be talked about. I think we both grew up in a strange postwar moment in history that will never be repeated. Our fathers came through the Depression and then the big war, desperate to make everything as stable and peaceful and respectable as possible. They pretty much did, but then our generation blew it.” He thought of Marlena again and decided to change the subject. “Do you miss Africa?”

“It gets into your blood. But I've made a life here.”

He was about to ask about her life here when the inner door opened and a handsome boy with short hair came through.

“Come in and sit with us, Billy. This is Mr. Liffey, the man who wants to ask you about Fariborz.”

The boy came across and offered a polite friendly hand. Nothing surly or distant at all, and Jack Liffey wondered if he'd somehow woken in a parallel world that was populated with tidy, obedient, attentive children. The boy sat gently on the edge of the sofa. He was wearing a T-shirt with a big photo of Jim Morrison.

“Pleased to meet you, sir. Fari was my best friend until all that Persian Mafia stuff. Or whatever you want to call it.”

Jack Liffey half-wished the mother would leave, to let the boy talk more freely, but the other half found the woman so agreeable to look at that he was glad she was staying. And where was there to go in that tiny cottage, anyway? “How long had you known … you called him ‘Fari'?”

“Uh-huh. Sometimes he was Frankie, too, until he got hyper-Persian. We met the first week we were at K-W three years ago—we were put in the same rush group when we were freshmen. We both loved old rock from the sixties, like Hendrix and The Doors, and we wrote poetry together. Song lyrics, really. He set them to music with his guitar. A few months ago, he smashed the guitar and burned his copies of the songs. It was Iman's doing. That little Hitler thought he was some kind of ayatollah, purifying his circle.”

“Do you have any idea where they went?”

“No.”

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“I wouldn't protect those creeps for all the tea in China.”

“Billy.” His mother leaned forward. Apparently, negativity was frowned upon in this household.

“They
are
creeps, Mom. I'm sorry, but they are. They made Fari drop me so he couldn't even speak to me anymore. I could see it hurting him, but he went and did it. He was my only real friend there. The rest of them don't like poor kids very much.”

There was something hysterical welling up inside the boy, some emotion that he had long suppressed leaking upward, seeping into his speech patterns and visibly thickening his features. Jack Liffey could see the pain in the mother's face.

“It's not the
money,
they say.” Sarcasm dripped from his voice. “No, not at
all
—it's just that you don't share our
experiences.
You're not part of our
world.
You wouldn't
understand
so many things that are
important
to us.”

His mother covered her eyes, and Jack Liffey tried to change the subject. “What about Becky Auslander? Did she have the same experience you did with the Persians?”

“Becky,” the boy repeated, and there was an even harder note in his voice. “The one good thing about this whole Persian Mafia was breaking up Fariborz's relationship with that little bitch.”

Aneliese de Villiers gasped a little, then covered her mouth to prevent more.

“She was a money-grubber. Fari was one of the richest boys in the school, and that's all Becky was after, believe me.”

Jack Liffey secretly savored this criticism of Auslander's daughter. “So why did she disappear at the same time the Persian boys did? Do you have any idea?”

He shrugged elaborately. “Maybe her Gucci watch stopped and she committed suicide.”

“Billy!
Whatever you think of the young woman, you mustn't joke about suicide.”

“I'm sorry.” But he wasn't. “Fari never saw her for what she was.
Never.
You know, she never split a tab, not once, even for Cokes. It was Iman who made Fari give her up, but for the wrong reasons. Probably because she was an infidel or some such word. I don't know why I'm so mad at
her.
She was a climber, but it's those
jerks
who snubbed me. Now I don't have any friends at all at Kennedy! Not one!”

There was a choked sob. Jack Liffey had had his eye on the mother's pain at that instant so he missed the heave as the boy jumped to his feet. He bolted out the front door, leaving it open.

“Billy!” She stood up, but her own emotion ran down before she got far. She stood forlornly on the tiny porch for a moment and then came back inside and closed the door softly. “I'm sorry, Mr. Liffey.”