City of Strangers (9 page)

“Bribery isn't really my concern,” Jack Liffey said. “I'm curious about Mexico, though. You suggested once that your son might have gone there.” He decided not to mention that he'd had a second hint about Mexico, because it involved the girl who had interested Bayat so much last time, and he didn't quite trust the man. For all the man's courtesy and charm and sweet talk—whatever that Farsi word was—Jack Liffey still had an overactive instinct that told him something was wrong deep in the bowels of LA ROX. “Can you tell me if Fariborz spent much time there?”

“The family did. For a while, we had Sea-Doos and we went to San Felipe quite a lot to run them around in the Gulf of California, but we all got tired of it. They just make a lot of noise. Last summer, he said he wanted to earn some money and I arranged for him to work in the plant for a couple of months, adding up the accounts, things like that. Mahmoud let him stay in a hospitality apartment we keep in the fancy zone of T.J. up near the country club. He's not there now; it's been checked.”

“I'm sure.”

“You have no word on the girl?” It was his first direct query about the search, and it was curious that it wasn't about his own son.

Jack Liffey shook his head. “Nor the boys. I'm just getting started. Did you ever meet her?”

“Only that once. She came to try to get me to intervene—she was that upset over Fariborz' religious mania.” He shrugged. “What could I do? Other than that, Fariborz came home from school most weekends, but he never brought girls to meet us. He used to be a normal boy, off with his friends, playing his guitar. I don't mean he wasn't polite with his family, but he was very private and he had already pulled himself back a little from us as most adolescents do.”

A small buzzer went off across the room and the treadmill slowed to a stop as it sank to horizontal. Mahmoud got down and toweled off.

“We will keep you informed, Mr. Liffey, if there are any developments in regard to the hijacking.”

The stiff business diction seemed to be a dismissal. “Thanks.” Jack Liffey levered up off the uncomfortable pillow and tugged his trousers straight. “Do you ever think of going home?”

“I don't know if Iran is my home any longer. There's a lot in the country I miss, and I'm not really at home here either, but Islamic law is not my cup of tea. My wife certainly would never go back. She is Jewish, and whatever they claim about toleration, no Jew will ever trust that regime. The revolution had to come, though, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“The old regime was corrupt to the root. I don't just mean Shah's people took money. I mean the way things were run, every business, every ministry, it all bred that way of thinking: Money was all, money was god. Eventually that kind of thinking makes smart money scared. They say over the last two years of Shah, a billion dollars a month left the country. You can't let money surround you as if it were the air you breathe. You can't let it have that much importance in your world. It eats the soul.”

“Then my soul's in a pretty safe place,” Jack Liffey said.

“These are super-duper.” They lay side by side on their stomachs, passing the lightly vibrating binoculars back and forth. The instrument seemed to have a mind of its own and resisted being passed, as if it longed to stay with the previous user.

“Way cool.”

Maeve wished they had brought up a blanket or some kind of padding. The roof of the carport was made of angular pebbles over tar. Some of the pebbles were bigger than others, and sharp edges poked uncomfortably through her light cotton blouse and her cutoff jeans at several points.

“Seen anybody yet?”

“Nope.” They could see over the compound wall straight into the rear of the ranch house that was almost all uncurtained glass. Inside, a slab floor was covered by dozens of reddish carpets. The only furniture was a folding card table pushed up against the wall, and there was a tall stack of identical cardboard cartons like the ones you'd see in a stereo store for the latest boom box. She could read the word “Sonovox” on each one. At the far right they could see the corner of a deep-blue tiled counter, upon which a box of Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies rested, taunting them. Cookies that reminded them they hadn't eaten any lunch.

“I'm drooling,” Eremy said.

“For sure, Miss E.”

“Let's break in and grab them.”

“No,” Maeve objected. “I'm not committing a felony for a Famous Amos.”

Maeve now took her turn at the binoculars and eventually scanned to a stack of papers on the edge of the card table. The papers were fanned out a bit so she could tell they were all photocopies of the same thing, which looked like a hand-drawn map. An annoying reflection on the window blocked a clear view, but the 20-power binoculars brought the map near enough to make out a lot. There was a heavy black line, probably a main road, and a grid of smaller lines with a mix of Arabic and English for legends and labels. The most prominent word looked like
Potrero.
On one of the roads at the edge, someone had drawn a cartoon rendering of a house, like a kindergarten doodle with steep eaves and a centered door. A big arrow pointed to the house from an inscription in Arabic.

She rested her elbows firmly on the roof and tried to make a tripod by stiffening her neck to firm up the image completely. The road by the house read something like Chuckawalla, and the only crossroad looked like Hope Street. She handed the binoculars back to Eremy and sketched what she could of the map on the back of one of her Liffey & Liffey business cards.

“Maybe we best try again later, when somebody's home,” Eremy suggested.

But just as Maeve tucked the card into her shirt pocket, there was a rumble, both noise and a vibration in the carport roof. A big lowered 1950s car gunned up the drive and came to a stop in the carport. It revved its engine once with that rough-sounding
blat-blat-pop
of a hot rod and then shut off. This was not going to be Grandmother home from bingo, Maeve thought.

Car doors opened and slammed, and then there was an ominous silence.

“Waaal, Cletis, was you seein' what ah thunk ah saw?”

“Sho' did, Bubba. Coupla young dollies, hunkered down like possums on the roof. Most excellent.”

Eremy and Maeve made frightened faces at one another. The accents didn't sound real, as if the young men were just larding on the hillbilly for fun.

Two black T-shirts came into view, both saying
To Hell and Back.
But it was the hair that Maeve noticed first. Both young men—maybe eighteen or twenty—were shaven bald, except for a line of tall hair-spikes that were dyed, respectively, green and purple, Mohawked down the middle of their heads from front to back. Maeve had seen hairdos like that in movies but almost never in person. One of them had zigzags and barbed-wire tattoos all the way up and down his arms. These guys really and truly wanted to be called freaks.

“Didn't the ol' man say we get to do jes' what we want with any strays that wander into the yard?”

“Uh-huh. Just
whatever.
”

Eremy sat up and dangled her bare legs brazenly. “Southern cracker boys,” she observed with disdain. “The lowest form of animate life except for pond algae.”

“Eremy,”
Maeve tried to hush her.

“Don' you go messin' with us, girlie. You want to come down with us and rip it up some? Got us some beer and Mary-J.” He waggled a very long tongue obscenely up at them. It was a real shock. Outside of that guy in the band KISS, Maeve had never seen a tongue stick out so far.

“Ugh.”

“We certainly don't.”

The boys seemed to notice the binoculars. “Look there, Bubba. They got them a set of bye-noculars. Musta been spying on the camel jockeys over there doin' they thing. This one looks like an Ayrab her-ownself.”

“I am not,” Eremy insisted. “I'm Armenian and one hundred percent Christian.”

“You got you an awful lot of one hundred percent leg, Armenia girl. Looks like it go all the way up.”

Eremy teased them by dangling her legs even farther, hiking her shirt to show some midriff. But Maeve grabbed her shoulder and tugged her back up roughly. Eremy seemed to be determined to get them into trouble.

“What do we do with these cuties, Cletis?” Cletis, if it was his name, was the one with the green hair.

“Let's start by givin' them a eyeful of real men workin' they bodies, see some real washboard abs to get they little pussies aw' wet.” He stripped off his T-shirt, and Maeve had to admit to herself his upper body was pretty buff. “Bet you ain't seen nothing like this.”

Maeve noticed that down in the overgrown grass there were a lot of weights and a couple of workout benches. The purple-spiked one yanked a barbell out of the weeds and started doing speed presses, the big iron weights clanging at the top and bottom of each repetition. His companion now stripped off his shirt, too, and began curling a heavier-looking set of blue weights, up to his chest and back. His arm muscles looked huge, bulging tremendously as they stretched his barbed-wire tattoos.

“What are we going to do?” Maeve whispered.

“We just watch them be morons. This is fun.”

“It
is
not. We've got to get out of here.”

“They aren't gonna hurt us. Don't be a wussie.”

Between sets, the boys struck stylized muscleman poses for the girls, fists front and back, arms and legs crooked at angles. Purple-spikes could grunt and tense himself up all at once in a peculiar way that brought up the definition of every one of his upper body muscles. In that instant he seemed to morph into the carapace of a huge insect. Maeve wondered why anyone thought looking like that was attractive. But finally, tired of showing off, they positioned themselves directly under the roof, their hard-eyed faces craning upward.

“Come on down now. Come to Papa.”

“Party down now.”

“Huh-uh,” Maeve said. “I don't think so.”

Then Green-spikes got the idea to spray them down with a hose. He hooked up a brass nozzle. First a fine spray bloomed overhead, sprinkling down on them and driving them to the trellis where they'd climbed up, and then Eremy squealed as a hard gush hit her straight on as she was climbing down. Maeve hoped the binoculars she was carrying were waterproof, and then she was gasping herself as cold water smashed into her. She heard Eremy coughing, and cleared the water out of her eyes to see Purple-spikes holding Eremy tight and kissing her. Maeve was mortified to see that both of their cotton shirts were soaked through and nearly transparent. Eremy wore a blue bra.

“I'll scream rape if you touch me,” Maeve threatened.

“Act cool, girlie. We just got to punish you for being bad, trespass and all, then you can run home to Mama.”

Eremy ripped herself away from the boy grabbing her. “Do what to punish us?”

“Come on, have we raped you?” Purple-spikes complained.

He pointed at a Ping-Pong table next to the house. “You bend over and take a swat, that's it. That's pretty lenientatious I'd say, for trespassers.”

“Promise only one?”

“Scout's honor.” Maeve noticed that the boy's accent had completely disappeared. She didn't think they were hillbillies at all, and she doubted they were named Cletis and Bubba, either.

Eremy made a disgusted noise, but she gave an elaborate shrug and bent forward over the edge of the table. “Get it over with, dorko.”

“Bare bottom. It's gotta be, tweak.”

Eremy snorted again, but quickly tugged the back of her jeans down several inches. Blue panties clung to the denim and bared her buttocks. Purple-spikes hauled back with a Ping-Pong paddle and took a wide swipe at her, but stopped a few inches short. “Just a warm-up. Nice little butt buds there, girlie. Gets the ol' juices flowing.”

“Get it over with or forget it.”

This time he swiped around with a full swing and let the paddle hit. There was a resounding slap, and Eremy flinched but refused to cry out. She tugged her jeans back up and pulled away from the table, with a flush spreading across her face.

All eyes went to Maeve. “No way, just no
way
at all.”

“You gotta, girl. It's the deal. Then you're out of here. Else we turn you over to the Ay-rabs.”

That was an alternative she hadn't thought of. The sheik would probably tell her dad, and he'd go through the roof and send her home. She glared for a moment, wondering how she'd gotten into this predicament in the first place. After all, she told herself, it would only be a single sharp pain, and then it would be over. She'd been paddled once in a hazing ritual for a school club and it hadn't been that bad. Maeve took two steps and flung her chest down on the Ping-Pong table.
“Primitives.”

“Pants.”

“You can do it right through the cloth.”

“Huh-uh. This is the real deal here, girl, bare cheeks.”

Maeve gritted her teeth and felt the breeze as she tugged her jeans down, just past the curve of her buttocks. There were so many emotions roaring through her that she felt like fainting. There was fear and shame and, to her horror, even a little of what seemed like sexual excitement.

“Panties, too.”

She hoped they were clean. She worked the elastic down just below her bottom and waited. Maeve closed her eyes tight, hearing the footsteps of one of the boys slide toward her on the concrete patio. There was the testing swish of the paddle in the air, and a crow nearby added its derisive caw. Thanks, crow, she thought, and then she yelped as a hand jammed down hard between her shoulder blades to hold her down on the table and the other hand snaked up between her thighs and fondled her, a single insistent finger trying hard to poke inside.

“Stop it!
Stop!”

“You just a bitty wet, ain't it so?” The accent was back.

She wriggled away and wrenched her panties up. Maeve could feel her vision narrow to a small cone and go bright red. “You bastard, you liar!”

Green-spikes, the one covered with tattoos, stood there grinning at her, his eyebrows raised, and then he brought his finger up ostentatiously and licked it. She tried to slap him but he caught the blow, and then she ran toward the Triumph, tears streaming down her face. Eremy was ahead of her, and the car coughed to life. Her face burned. All she could feel was humiliation and hatred. If she'd had a weapon, she would have killed both boys, she knew it.

“Don't you
dare
tell Trevor, or anyone,” Maeve said between gasps and coughs.

“Let's go take a bath for about a week.”

Hassan had shown them what do with the boom box, repeatedly and annoyingly, as if they were utter dummies. The brand name on the black plastic was Sonovox, basically a no-name cheapo. The top of the case had been neatly removed and the works of the radio, only a small circuit card, had been moved to the side, behind one of the stereo speakers. The CD and tape sections had been gutted to leave the whole center of the unit empty. Then a rectangular packet about the size and shape of a pound of butter went into the bottom, a little wired spindle was inserted gently through the waxed paper into the pliable substance in the package, and then a five-pound bag of Globe flour went on top before the case was sealed up again.

They knelt out on the scrubby desert, far out some unknown two-track road, and Pejman took his turn and went through the steps while Fariborz observed, and they made doubly sure it was done the way they'd been told. Hassan waited at the crest of a hillock fifty yards away. Fariborz felt a chill. The whole scene was far too much like the afternoon they had left their pipe bomb in the Santa Clarita hills, the second of those fateful moments that, taken together, had changed their lives forever.

“Praise belongs to God.”

“The lord of all being, the all-merciful.”

They surveyed the work and then sealed the top of the plastic case with superglue as they'd been shown. Their eyes met for a moment. The only reason Fariborz wasn't more worried was because the device was so small. This couldn't have been meant to do much damage, though he had no idea what the bag of flour was for. Maybe a stand-in for paint, like their own paint bombs.

“You take off and I'll hit the switch,” Fariborz said.

“No, you.”

Fariborz gave him a push and the smaller boy started to run back toward the hill. When he was safely away, Fariborz reached out gingerly and flicked up the ON switch. The radio started to play some top-forty number, a guitar, drum and horn, yet another derivative eight-bar blues-based wail. Some lyric about regret and spurned love. He longed to do it better, put a little backbeat into it, words with more edge. He could almost feel the strings bowing tight against the frets under the fingers of his right hand. He was left-handed, and he had taught himself to play the guitar upside down, just like Hendrix, following Jimi's invented fingerings that he watched over and over on video. Then he felt the regret washing over him again: that music was his distant past.