The Chinese Beverly Hills (10 page)

“That’s human remains,” she said. “Or I’m a bad dog.”

“I hope I don’t have to punish you.” Her strange remark deserved that at least. He outlined the oval in the air with his finger as he always did to remember it. His memory clung best to gesture and body soma. “It wasn’t quite firestorm heat, so there’ll probably be more left. Where do you make the head?”

“If I had to guess, there.”

“Call Terry to bring a sifting screen. There’ll be more bone. Maybe other evidence. Wait.”

Walt Roski took a ballpoint pen out of his shirt, stepped off the berm, and dragged the pen through a tiny irregularity in the powdery ash. Out of the ash came a trophy hooked on the plastic pen: a melted, misshapen set of handcuffs. Barely recognizable, but close enough.

“Crimeny!” she said.

“I wonder if a cop was involved.”

“Even street kids can buy handcuffs these days, Walt. S & M fans on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“S & M?” he asked innocently. He wanted her to have to say it.

“Sadomasochism, dear. You may have heard of it.”

*

“Never stop questioning. A faith unquestioned will break like a straw at the first bad wind.”

Jack Liffey lurked in the shadows of the church building to watch a circle of high-school-aged kids, mostly Asian, sitting in a circle on a lawn and listening intently to a short Asian priest, almost a midget, who spoke tranquilly in perfect American English. Father Soong? The St. Thomas Aquinas parish church was utterly undistinguished, a low stucco box of the 1960s that could have been a church of any denomination, or a big shoe store.

“Faith is everywhere—often where you don’t expect it.”

The man reached into a fold of his loose white frock and took out a strange object. It was an embossed brass cylinder on a wood spindle with a single lanyard tied to a small weight. He spun it for a while, with a soft grating sound

“
Om mani padme hum
,” he intoned. “This is a Tibetan prayer wheel. What I quoted is the prayer written on it. It means the jewel in the lotus. Or maybe something more complicated, no one is agreed. But everyone agrees that a prayer flies up to heaven at every spin.”

Nobody said a word.

“Is no one going to challenge me? Don’t you feel that’s nonsense?”

Finally an Asian boy with a shaved head said, “It’s laughable, father. What kind of God would want somebody to sit there twirling a top?”

The priest smiled. “And what kind of God wants you to watch me drink wine and mumble every Sunday? Question and doubt, but cling hard to what lives in your heart.”

The priest noticed Jack Liffey waiting and glanced at his watch. “We’ve run way over. Same time next week. We’ll talk about the jewel in the lotus. I want each of you to bring one doubt that you’ve entertained.”

They stood up raggedly and the priest gathered himself, all four foot eleven or so, and made toward Jack Liffey.

“You must be Mr. Liffey. Professor Hollister called. I’m sorry we ran late.”

“Jack, please. My father gets to be Mr. Liffey, since he’s still alive.”

“You’re lucky, sir. How old is he?”

“Ninety-some. Whether I’m lucky or not… well. He was a world-renowned scholar on the supremacy of the white race. His work was published by a lot of fairly unevolved life forms.”

Father Soong smiled. “We know a little about racists here in Monterey Park. My name is Theo, if that’s the order of the day.”

They shook hands and the priest led him toward a side door of the stucco building, and then into a spacious office.

“I’d love to know what you were up to with those kids.”

“Please don’t think I’m cynical just because I need to disturb some cynical teens. Those were some of the brightest kids in this parish. Most of them are going to lose their faith in a few years at college. I’m hoping a few of them will cling to a scrap of Christian charity.” The priest shook his head sadly. “You’d be surprised how perfunctory faith can become even for priests.”

“Would you tell me about Sabine Roh?”

The little priest seemed to muse on the request for a while, even shuffled papers to delay answering. “Sometimes it’s very difficult, Jack. To misquote Tolstoy, all good girls are alike, but Sabine is gooder than good. She’s kind, considerate to everyone, deeply religious and deeply into what she calls ‘community.’ She really means Liberation Theology, which she’s been reading with her friend Ellen. Gustavo Gutierrez, Paolo Freire, even our own Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker group. Sabine keeps telling me that she wants to become a nun and I try to dissuade her.”

“Why?”

He let out a long breath. “Very few orders are going to allow her to express the social side of her nature.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “It’s so sad, or maybe worse. The Church has abandoned all the really elderly nuns. Go to any retirement center and you’ll find eighty-year-olds on walkers looking after bedridden ninety-year-olds.

“Maybe it was presumptuous of me. I told Sabine that becoming a nun would probably end up infantilizing her. Young nuns have a kind of moral earnestness and a caring for others without any real personal connections to strain the bond. And there’s always somebody around to take their good intentions seriously.”

Jack Liffey wondered when the church, in its wisdom, was going to send this man off to deepest Congo with no way back.

“Please tell me about the Orange Berets,” Jack Liffey requested. “You were their advisor.”

“They’re gone now, but it was a stroke of brilliance—a Mexican-Asian coalition to fight racism. But mixed with street theater.” The priest was silent a moment. “Sorry—I actually choke up if I let myself think of a few dozen immigrant kids standing arm in arm to protect peace meetings from the rowdies. I’m blessed to have seen it.”

“What’s left?”

The priest shook his head sadly. “A snapping turtle that doesn’t know it’s dead. If you can help me reestablish contact with Sabine, God’s blessing on you.”

There was a brisk knuckle-rap at the door.

“Yes!” the priest called.

An Asian girl wearing a tight black leotard and a buzz cut of startling blue hair looked in. “Sir, I need to get an urgent message to Sabine.”

“Do you know where she is?” the priest asked casually.

The girl glanced at Jack Liffey, and he did his best to seem utterly uninterested.

“She’s gone to the mountains,” the girl said.

“Don’t be silly, Ellen. This isn’t Cuba.”

“I don’t think it’s literal. She’s hiding out.”

“What’s your message?”

“To call me.”

“Do you have any idea how I’m supposed to give her this message?”

The girl looked surprised, and then distrust flooded up through her. “Sorry to bother you, sir.” She ducked out at once and shut the door. They could hear light footsteps running away, and the priest sighed.

“I suppose you wouldn’t like to pass me this Ellen’s address or phone number.

“I’m afraid I don’t have it. She was in the Orange Berets, but she was a militant atheist.”

There couldn’t be that many girls with blue crew cuts, he thought. “One last question, sir: why did you show those kids the Tibetan prayer wheel?”

The tiny priest reclaimed the device from the folds of his oversized garment. He twirled it a few times pensively. “Next week we’ll talk about the jewel in the lotus. It can only mean the eternal contained within the fleeting. The lotus flower lasts only a few days, and then it withers to make room for a seedpod for the future.”

*

Ed Zukovich borrowed his uncle’s Cadillac Escalade for his mission to pick up the border dude at LAX and take him to the Washington Plaza Hotel, the only accommodation Monterey Park had that might seem respectable to a celebrity. Of course, if you went outside the city a bit—to the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, for instance—you had a truly swank place, but that was a lot more expensive.

At the American Airlines exit gate near the baggage claim, he held up his cardboard sign saying
Boaz,
like some dorky chauffeur, expecting to greet a stuffed shirt. Seth Brinkerhoff had told him the man was dynamite as a speaker. Dynamite was always good, Zook thought.

People were dragging rolling carry-ons out the doors, but he was a bit early. He elbowed his way to the front of the drivers in their monkey suits, feeling like a mutt in a poodle show. Zukovich had never even flown in a plane. His mother had been terrified of airplanes, boats, even long-distance buses.

All at once there was a bellow of laughter that set a nearby airport cop on alert. An enormous grinning man wearing a khaki bush shirt, khaki shorts, and knee socks had come out and was staring straight at Zook and the sign. His hands were flung into the air exultantly. The man-mountain used both index fingers to point straight at the cardboard sign and brayed again.

Zukovich flipped the sign over to see if he was holding it upside down, but no. “Is it misspelled?” he asked when the man came up to him. Oddly, the man’s glance was fixed a few inches to Zook’s left.

“Don’t mind me, sonny.” The booming voice had a really odd accent to it, with all the vowels twisted out of shape. “God put me here so nobody could get theirself smug about being civilized.”

They both noticed two more cops heading discreetly their way.

“Uh-oh. I think I am in the deepshit already for being too loud. Like a gutshot rhino, hey. Let’s go get my crap before the coppers decide to shoot me and ask later.”

Zukovich followed him toward the luggage rack that was already receiving suitcases from above. He noticed from the burned and crosshatched skin on the back of the man’s neck that he was probably older than he’d looked at first. Zook didn’t do well with ages, but he guessed late fifties. The big man was bowlegged but nimble. What a strange being.

“Gerhardus Boaz.” He thrust out a big strong hand as they walked. “Call me Hardi.”

“I’m Zook. Where do you come from?”

“San Diego. Though I rule Imperial County, too.” He did his best to mimic an American accent, but it didn’t work. “Of course, you mean before. I left South Africa in 1995, son. You can’t expect a real man to go on living under
kaffir
rule. You don’t know what
kaffir
means, do you? It was our word for nigger. Course, over there, there were niggers everywhere like ants.”

Zukovich winced. A well-dressed colored couple nearby halted and turned to glare at them, but Boaz seemed totally unselfconscious about creating a scene.

“I know what you think, ma’an, but I’m not prejudiced even a little bit. Back home we said the Dutch and the
kaffirs
came to South Africa at exactly the same time.
We
arrived at the Cape in ships just as the blacks were climbing down out of the trees!”

He burst into laughter, and Zukovich wondered how to get his charge out of the terminal alive.

*

“Woosah! I got to chill.”

Diana Yao had ridden up breathless on her goofy pop-popping Solex bike with its 49cc gas engine. She lived about a mile away

“The engine cut out at Hitchcock and I had to pedal for a while before it came back.”

Diana had left the Orange Berets some time ago to go back to serious math studies at L.A. State, but she was still loyal to Ellen and Sabine, so she’d responded to Ellen’s distress call. She’d insisted on meeting in neutral Cascades Park not too far from her home. The grass slope, with its descending pool-to-pool rapids, had been built in the late 1920s as the grand entry to a housing development that had gone bust in the Depression and never been built. Emblematic of something, Ellen had once thought.

“Let’s be cool,” Diana said. “I’m still out of it, but I’ll always be there for Sabby.”

“Word up,” Ellen said. “I need to find her.”

“What do you know?”

“I know Father Soong doesn’t have a clue. She was tailing that fat guy in the Commandos, the dumb one they say has the big thingy.”

“Everybody knows about Captain Beef.”

“He figured to be the safest doofus to watch, he was so stupid. I drew the intellectual.” Ellen laughed. “The Zook guy who’s read all the biggest clownsuits of the Cold War, like W. Cleon Skousen. He’s their big thinker. Compared to an oak tree.”

“El, I’m here because…?”

“I’m scared and alone in this, Di. Sabby told me she had a way to get close to watch that big guy. I don’t know what her game was. She’s changed a lot. Ever since her trip to Mexico, she’s been a lot harder and angrier. Not that sweet nun.”

“I never heard about her trip.”

“Nobody really knows. It was a craziness to help her parents, but I don’t think it went down well. Help me any way you can. You know her math friends. Just ask around.”

Diana reached over and rested her hand on Ellen’s knee. “You don’t look too good, girl.”

“The revolution let me down. Maybe I just want a normal life.”

“True that,” Diana said.

*

Gustav watched his younger brother Andor unfold the metal stock of his newest plaything, the SPAS-12 shotgun. It wasn’t the assault shotgun itself that interested Andor so much as the specially fabricated B-2 Bomber shells.

Long ago, Andor had gone to a movie made by some pretentious Spaniard named Buñuel called
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
. The only thing he remembered was one scene in which a bunch of rich and drunk party guests, wearing tuxedos and gowns, utterly blasé, went out on a verandah and fired an ordinary-looking pistol that blew the crap out of whatever they aimed at. He remembered like yesterday watching an elm tree burst into flames. I want
that
, he’d thought.

“You do like your powerful firearms,” Gustav said.

“They make my dick hard.”

“Sometimes a gun is just a gun.”

“Huh?”

“You never read Freud?”

“Why would I read a Jewboy, Gus? Here, have a Bloody Mary. I think I’m learning to make them right.”

“What’s the secret, little bro?”

“Extra garlic and Tabasco. It keeps away vampires, too.”

Gustav smiled dutifully.

“Who’d you send to speak to that California Tea Party group?” Andor asked.

“The South African with the short pants. The only guy who’s ever successfully fired your T-rex.”