City of Strangers (6 page)

“Jack.
Mr. Liffey was my dad.”

“He's not usually like this
at all.
I've been thinking for some time that I should pull him out of Kennedy. It seemed like such an opportunity for him when it came up, but I always had mixed feelings.”

“Is his father paying?” He wondered if that was an impertinence, but she didn't seem to mind.

“It's a scholarship I heard about at work, but the kids there are so snobbish. I think he's been trying to please me by staying. He's a very giving boy. I wish he'd learn to please himself more.”

“It looks like he's starting to learn,” he offered.

She nodded. “Or cracking under the strain. Are you sure I can't get you something, Jack?”

“I'm sure, but have something yourself.”

“I believe I will.” He helped her open a bottle of Chilean cabernet in the cramped kitchen, and she told him that she drove her son over the hill to the school every morning before going on to work as a secretary in the fund-raising department of the Braille Institute near L.A. City College. He sniffed the wine on the air as she held a big goblet and he was sorely tempted. The wine wasn't the only temptation going, of course. She touched his arm briefly as they went back to the living room and his skin burned where her fingers had been.

“When Billy calms down, I'd like to talk to him again. Do you think that would be all right?”

“I'd like that,” she said. And it seemed more of a response to what he'd really been asking.

* * *

Hassan drove the beat-up old panel truck like a rodeo cowboy on a bull. Away from Sheik Arad, he wore a permanent grin, as if a bawdy joke had just occurred to him. But Fariborz did not think the tall, thin man had ever heard a bawdy joke, or would know what to do with one. Fariborz had to cling to the door handle and a big strap bolted to the floor where a passenger seat had once been. The only seat was the driver's seat.

“Western-inspired socialism has failed,” the man called over the roar of the old engine. “Nationalism has failed. Islam has shown that it is the only force in the world that can fill the great vacuum. Praise Allah.”

“Praise Allah. How did you end up in America?” Fariborz asked.

“Had to get out. I was just starting at Hassan the First University in Settat. My namesake. That's near Casablanca. We formed an Islamic association the first month.” He grinned. “Some of us issued a declaration for an end to kings and other backwardness. And we declared for
shari'a
law and an Islamic republic. They shut the whole university down the next day.”

“I thought Morocco was an Islamic country.”

“Of course. This is a Christian country. What would happen if somebody declared mandatory poverty and turning the other cheek, eh?”

He
did
seem to have a sense of humor. “I see what you mean. But why come to America?”

“My father was a poor artisan. He hammered brass in a shop in the souk in Marrakech and sold it to tourists. Tray tables and other junk. He saved his money for years to make a better life for me. He saw it all going up in smoke, and he was furious at me. I had a cousin in Detroit, so I was sent to stay with him and study at a community college for a while. Detroit is the Arab capital of America. That's were I met the sheik. He saved me from a life of drifting along with the secular tides.”

Hassan sat back in the torn and patched bucket seat and clung to the wheel with both hands. The rest of the truck was a litter of oily tools and cable. For the first time, Fariborz noticed that Hassan wore a Captain Midnight decoder ring on his little finger, the kind of thing you got in a plastic bubble in a gum machine. On the dash there was an utterly anomalous bumper sticker that said:
If we're not supposed to eat animals, bow come they're made out of meat?
He wondered if it was left over from a previous owner.

“He is quite an inspiration if you give him a chance.”

A backhanded compliment, Fariborz thought. At least the man acknowledged that there were things about the sheik that could seem disconcerting. Fariborz readjusted himself where he squatted, trying not to jounce too much as the stiff suspension hammered over the freeway joints. The stump of Iman's wrist was wrapped tight and he was knocked out on painkillers, his condition stabilized by a sympathetic doctor Sheik Arad had brought in. They were headed now to some redoubt the sheik maintained near the Mexican border. He called it a
madrasa
—a religious school—but Fariborz guessed the location had been chosen more for quick getaways.

“Islam alone can inspire the young and give them a positive vision, a sense of allegiance. We are the forward finger of Islam pressed on the raw nerve of decadence.”

The finger is a long, long way from home, Fariborz thought, with or without a decoder ring. “How did the sheik end up in America? Sudan is really an Islamic country.”

The driver was silent a moment. “It was the will of Allah.”

“Of course. But Allah usually works through human motivations,” Fariborz said. “There must be a reason.”

“Do you mean reason as objective, or reason as cause, or reason as logic, or reason as justification?”

This Moroccan's a lot smarter than he seems, Fariborz thought. “I mean, did he have some purpose coming to America?”

“Can you see into the mind of God?”

“Sheik Arad is not God.”

“He is favored of God. I myself have watched him look into a man's heart and pluck out his secrets. I have seen him predict the winds. At night he sits on his carpet and soars out the window high over the city and observes everything that happens.”

“You're not serious?”

Hassan bellowed a laugh, but it was hard to tell what it meant.

“Don't mistake yourself. Sheik Arad can do many damn strange things.”

People were never simple, Fariborz thought. You just convinced yourself that someone like Hassan was shrewd and intelligent, and then he rubbed this eccentric Aladdin's lamp hidden away in his mind and out flew djinns and magic carpets that made you wonder.

“Beware how you judge, Fariborz, lad. Sheik Arad is not a sophisticated man, it is true, but he knows what is right and wrong and how to make things right. All the meanings will be revealed to you in time.”

Fariborz subsided. His anxiety had only increased with the talk of the sheik, and the enigma of Hassan's character. He rolled onto his left side so he could speak quietly to Pejman, in the back with Yahya. Pejman looked tense and lost and forsaken, though Fariborz might have been projecting his own feelings a bit. He didn't much mind being the angry finger of Islam, if it pointed out evil and corruption in a forceful way, but he didn't want to hurt anyone in the process, and he was worried that the sheik's circle did not share those sentiments at all. He was pretty sure that none of his friends would go along with real violence, except maybe Iman. But Iman probably hadn't thought about much but pain and the loss of his hand for several days now.

“Pejman, you remember that night of the suitcase? …” Of course he knew his friend did, they all did—it was the moment when everything had started to go wrong, when they had hurried back to their apartment in confusion—but talking about it had been taboo for weeks now.

“Shoot, Fari, how could I forget?” That night Pejman had gone on to declare, almost sacrilegiously, that the event taking place was
their
flight from Mecca. He meant that that night marked a point in their own lives that would remain as much a milestone to them as Mohammed's night flight to Yathrib to escape his murderers, the night when Allah intervened to save the Prophet's life, the date that now marks year zero of the Islamic calendar.

“I know.”

“Do not despair, Allah is with us,” Pejman said, echoing what the Prophet had said the night of the flight to Yathrib, but there was no confidence in his own voice. To save Mohammed, God had placed a spiderweb across the cave mouth to divert the murderers, but Fariborz could find no parallel assistance in their own affairs, none at all.

He had to ask it for the hundredth time, because he had been in another room when it all went down. “Are you
sure
it was Becky?”

Pejman's eyes firmed up with hostility, but he didn't reply.

“What do you think has become of her?”

“She was
your
girlfriend, Fari. You never let yourself see what she was. We could have done so much with that money.”

In his heart of hearts, Fariborz was not so sure he wanted a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills. The world was simpler and purer this way, even though it seemed to be turning out a lot more dangerous.

“Alina, this is Maeve. Can I talk to Eremy?”

“Sho 'nuff,” Alina drawled.

Eremy's family came from what Alina was now calling the “Deep South” of Armenia—Iran, in fact—and for some reason, probably reading
Gone with the Wind
last year, Eremy's older sister had got it into her head to play at being “Southern.” There had been a large Armenian community in Iran since the eighteenth century, but as far as Maeve knew there had never been a single one of them named Scarlett.

“I'll get her for y'all.”

Maeve waited out on the tiny patio of her dad's condo with her cell phone tucked secretly against her ear in case her dad came back suddenly. He didn't know yet that her mom had given her the cell phone, and she didn't want to flaunt it when he could barely afford an old sit-on-the-table black model with no modern features at all. Eremy was speed-dial 3, her third-best friend.

“Maeve!”

“Femme 2 of the Fabulous Femmes.”

“It's great to hear from you at last. We've been missing out on days and days of sun. When are you going to come back to beachland?”

“Not right away. I'm staying with my dad up in Culver City.” She looked around over the patio wall, nobody in earshot, and changed to a conspiratorial tone. “But we could get together for some detective work.”

“That's cold!”

“My dad is looking for some runaway Iranian boys, and they have something to do with a guy called Sheik Arad.”

Maeve heard a groan. “You
do
know we're Christians, Maevie, don't you? My family doesn't have much truck with Moslems,” Eremy complained. “My big brother calls them ‘sand niggers.' ”

“That's not very nice. I just need to try to find out where this sheik hangs out.”

There was a long silence. A group of very young black kids sauntered past the patio, talking breathlessly about a girl who had apparently been flashing her breasts at the condo pool. Maeve instinctively tuned into their excitement and almost missed Eremy's reply.

“You know, if he calls himself a sheik, he isn't any kind of Iranian guy at all. He's some sort of Ay-rab.”

“You always said you wanted to get in on being a detective. I didn't say it would fall in our lap. And you've got a car.”

“Okay, okay. I can try my uncle Armen. He's got a Middle Eastern grocery in Venice. They get Lebanese and Syrians and Pakis and all kinds. I'll bet he knows something about this sheik.”

“Don't call my cell. I'll call you.”

“Great, solid. Let's do this.”

He took Fairfax up to the 10, and instead of the usual orange-seller beside the on-ramp, there was an old man in the tattered coat of a marching band with a lot of braid. He had a forlorn-looking monkey on a chain and held out a hand-lettered cardboard sign at the passing cars:
Please Help. Flatulent Monkey. Need $$ for Vet.

Jack Liffey laughed out loud. He was feeling pretty good for some reason, and he thought of tossing the inventive organ-grinder some change, but the traffic flow was too fast and carried him up and onto the Santa Monica going east. He found his head a bit buzzy. He wasn't sleeping well, but once he came fully awake that morning he found his weeks-long gloom was on the wane, and he wondered if it was something as simple as meeting Aneliese that had done it to him. It sure seemed to have improved his general disposition. Something had, anyway. He was still too many years past fifty, Marlena was still gone, and his life still seemed stalled out near zero; but inexplicably, he felt a lot better about things for the moment.

Downtown, he pulled into the
L.A. Times
parking structure on Spring, picked the name of a city-desk reporter at random, and told the guard he was having lunch with him. Then he exited out the side of the place and walked the opposite way over to the Bradbury Building. Inside the Bradbury, the ornate grillwork and terra-cotta tiles never failed to delight him, like dropping through a thin crust of L.A. reality into turn-of-the-century New Orleans. The central light-well also had open-cage elevators that clattered upward in a leisurely way. Rosewood Agency was up on the sixth floor, behind pebbled glass doors set into dark wood.

He usually had trouble with the receptionist, so he tried to blow past her. “Art Castro is expecting me. I know where his office is.”

“Uh, sir.” She stood up with a look of panic, a weird tall haircut swaying a bit with its own momentum. “I don't think you do.”

Down the hall, he noticed that the door to Art's big corner office didn't have a name on it anymore. Jack Liffey wondered how you could do much better than the view that room had afforded Castro out over the city, two big windows pointing north and east. From way up here, even the area called the Nickel didn't look so bad, though up close it was wall-to-wall homeless.

“He's in 401A,” she said. “Down two floors.”

“Rosewood's expanding.”

“Kind of,” she said dubiously.

He went back out and found a marble stairwell that took him down to four. The door marked 401A had a smaller version of the Rosewood logo, the famous never-squinting eye that Pinkerton created. There did not appear to be a 401B. He rapped once and went in, startling Art up out of his newspaper. The room could probably have held enough brooms and mops to tidy up a floor of the building, but not much more. Where a window should have been, there was a big sheet-metal air-conditioning duct that split in two and headed left and right. The desk and a filing cabinet took up most of the rest of the space.

“Uh-oh,” Jack Liffey said right away.

“You said it.”

“I'd say it looks like Art Castro screwed the pooch.”

His friend made a face. “Art Castro failed to exercise due diligence at a critical juncture in an investigation.” He stood and shook hands and gestured Jack Liffey into a stiff wood chair with an embroidered pillow on it. He moved the chair a bit and then found he had to move it right back in order to shut the door in the cramped space.

“What does
that
mean?” He and Art went way back as friends, to the tail end of the antiwar movement, when they'd stood side by side to toss their medals back at the Federal Building on Wilshire, though Art had had some real medals, including a Bronze Star, and in his case the medals didn't get past the Vietnam theater ribbon and a good conduct.

“I was toking a bit and nodded off in Wilmington just as some bad-doers pilfered one of those forty-foot shipping containers full of Teva sandals. Did you know the drivers they get to haul those shipping containers from the docks to the rail yard up in East L.A. aren't even union? Those cheap bastards in the Harbor Department have been resisting the union for years. Anyway, serves them right. A couple illegals with fake names drove the sandals straight into Mexico, where they vanished into a million bodegas, and I got demoted from associate to employee. Kind of like being busted down to PFC. And my old lady sort of threw me out, too, having been jawing at me overtime for months about the evils of weed. I think she'll let me back after a bit. What I shoulda done, I shoulda ingested a little crank to stay up on top, but I like the mellow way too much. All around, it hasn't been a tip-top month. I just don't feel the deal, at all, Jack.”

“I'm really sorry, man. Anything else? Boils? Gambling losses?”

“Don't even start about my prostate.” The phone rang and he glared at it, then picked it up. “Castro.”

He nodded for a while, but there was an edge to it. “The will is legit. Nobody could find another one, no matter what she says. Let her litigate, if she feels that way. She oughta be the one in trouble, you know, she hopped him up with so much Viagra they needed a chain saw to cut it down at the morgue. She fucked him to death. She admitted to me she didn't really mean to overdo the blue pills, she just got tired of waiting for wood on the old guy.”

He hung up and glared again. “I didn't work on stuff like that before the Fall, I tell you that for free. What do you need from me, Jack?”

“I don't know if you're in a position to do this, but I might actually be able to feed you something back that would put you in good stead. Maybe that would help you with the people in charge here. Sheik Arad. Heard of him?”

He frowned. “You know, when I was in high school,
sheeks
were rubbers and we pronounced it that way. When did this ‘shake' stuff start?”

“I think it always was. We just didn't know any better. Maybe we say ‘Trojans' wrong, too.”

Art Castro put his big brogues up on the desk. “So?”

“Anything you can find out about him and his circle.”

“What's your stake in this?”

“It's complicated.”

“It always is,
hermano.
”

Jack Liffey told him about the Auslander girl and the Kennedy Four who had gone missing at the same time, and the fact that someone had tied the boys vaguely to the sheik. “I think he's Sudanese, like about half the mad bombers in the known world, the guys who hit those embassies in Africa, a couple of the 9-11s, I think. That's about all I know.”

“I'll try our database and I'll try a friend upstairs who's into the spook stuff, but don't count on a lot. When your stock goes down, it's hard to trade up.” He offered a sudden feral grin. “Then again, the rules no longer apply.”

“Your stock will always be A-plus with me, Art.”

He eyed Jack Liffey for a moment, as if wondering about his sincerity, but decided it was okay and acknowledged it with a nod. “We're still getting away with it,
carnal.
All lapses are temporary.”

“It hurts!” Iman complained.

Fariborz was trying to feed him soup that Hassan had warmed up before he left, but he seemed too distracted by the pain in his hand.

“You can take another Darvocet, but you've only got three left.”

“I need it now. Man, I need it.”

They were in the back room of a two-room cottage, and Yahya was peering out the small window into the blanched expanse that Fariborz had already checked out. “Where are we?”

“We went south, then east,” Fariborz said. It was rolling deserty land a lot like the arid hills he knew just east of Tecate, which was probably just across the border from them. They were on the edge of a scabby little habitation, not even a town, and at the nearest shack a half mile away a fat, dark woman had been pounding on a bunch of rugs on the clothesline for a long time. None of them knew whether they were prisoners or accomplices, though they'd been left completely unattended when Hassan drove off. “We're someplace where it wouldn't be hard to find gila monsters and scorpions.”

“Don't leave me, man,” Iman begged.

“I'm not planning to. Don't worry.”

“What's that woman doing?” Yahya asked in an aggrieved tone.

“You mean with the rugs? She's beating them.”

“What's that?”

“Haven't you ever heard of that? It's how people used to clean the dust out of them.”

“My dad spreads them out on the driveway and scrubs them down with soapy water and a pushbroom.” He considered that thought for a moment. “I want to go home.”

“Not just now, Yahya.”

Pejman came in from the bathroom, drying off his hair. “Somebody else. You're up. At least there's hot water.”

“Dibs,” Yahya said. He grabbed up the big plastic bag that was his suitcase and lugged it into the bathroom.

“Fari,” Iman started plaintively.

“Uh-huh.”

“We can't go home now. We've gotta go along with these guys, even if they are Arabs.”

“I guess so, but we've got to find out what they want from us. I'm not going to hurt anybody. It's against Islam.”

“I'm
already
hurt.” He lifted the mangled hand and Fariborz could see it was starting to seep again through the bandages.

Fariborz took the hand and set it gently on a towel in his lap, grimaced and slowly began to unwind the bandages. “Everything went bad really fast. But that's no excuse to do more wrong. I think what we've got to do is do something good to make up for the harm that happened to you.” He was just thinking out loud. “It may not get us back in balance, but it seems like all we can do.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know.”

“Don't go dreamy and sissy, Fari.”

“Allugatu l'arabiyattu salah,”
Pejman read haltingly from a worn old mimeographed book.

“Oh, no it's
not,”
Fariborz insisted.

“What was that?” Iman asked. He had never learned much Arabic.

Pejman looked up from the old book he had picked up. “ ‘Arabic is an easy language,' ” he translated.

“Arabic is hard,” Fariborz insisted with his new ruminative air. “Life is hard. Duty is hard. Belief is hard. If there's something easy, you guys tell me what it is.”

Riding down the rickety cage elevator, it suddenly occurred to Jack Liffey that it was still the girl he was really after, and he'd been altogether too willing to take Auslander's word for the fact that his earlier detectives had exhausted all the possibilities for finding her directly. Taunton was her school, not far west of downtown, in the heart of old-money Hancock Park. He'd been out there before on another job, so he figured he might have a leg up.

The school had been built up around an old Tudor-style mansion at the corner that still served as the entrance, the front steps guarded by drowsy concrete lions. He parked right behind a lime green Facel Vega and nodded to the lions going in, but they didn't seem to remember him. He pushed his way in the heavy doors to a place with a lot more ambiance than Kennedy-Westridge. There were worn hexagonal terra-cotta tiles like the refectory of a monastery, and a chair rail down the wall made of shiny mahogany.