The Chinese Beverly Hills (3 page)

“No,” he said.

“You don’t know what it’s all about yet?”

“You’ll have to ask her, hon. I know it was pretty bad.”

“This is hard on you, too, isn’t it?”

“She’s in a bad way. When you know people are
really
in need, it’s a lot easier to help them.”

“Not everybody feels that way, Mr. Buddha. My generation doesn’t use the word ‘duty’ very much.”

Out in front of the house, a motorcycle ratcheted noisily past and someone shouted.

“Listen, Dad, I actually called you about something.”

A chill went down his spine. Another pregnancy? She’d stopped a random bullet? She was dropping out of college? “Go on.”

“Do you remember that Vietnamese woman named Tien Joubert?”

Is a bear Catholic, he thought, does the pope shit in the woods? The woman had turned his life upside down a decade back. “Yeah, hon, I do. I’m not into dementia yet. What’s this about?” He could feel the reserve enter his voice, as if Maeve were about to suggest a special offer on term life insurance.

She told him about Tien’s call and gave him the number. “Please tell Gloria I love her very much.”

Funny the subject should boomerang right back to Gloria, but there it was. He knew exactly what Maeve meant: keep your pants zipped this time.

He counted to seven slowly between inhales to stave off hyperventilation. The keening outside was unbearable. Fire glinted through pinholes, wind slapped the silica and foil shelter. He was a religious man, Missouri Synod Lutheran, and he prayed for his partner and himself. He had to see his wife and children again.

“Our Father who art in Heaven…”

He forced his mind to use the four-fold garland, recite line by line and meditate on the words. Learn, thank, confess, accept.

“Why have You forsaken me?”

Something was starting to go wrong. Heat seared his back and buttocks. His consciousness had entered another place entirely by the time the bellowing outside began to relent.

He lay motionless in a new kind of space—probably between Earth and Heaven—in great pain for a long time. Every stir caused more pain. He heard a helicopter, maybe, and footsteps, voices.

“Over here, Bud.” A man was suddenly very close. “You okay in there?”

He grunted.

“He’s alive. Drop the litter.”

He imagined he looked pretty bad if the guy wasn’t even sure he was alive. The shelter was tugged, maybe cut, but he kept his eyes clamped shut in the new light. Not fire—daylight.

“Don’t move, man. You’re gonna make it. Guarantee.” There was a pause, a light plucking at the back of his coat. “You’ve got first and second on your back. No third I can see.”

Firefighters didn’t lie to one another about that. He felt two fingers pressed to his neck for a pulse as a sweet voice began to sing to him in the distance. Angels?

“Pulse one-forty. You know I can’t give you water yet. You hurting? Scale.”

The state of shock was a step away, they both knew it, and shock could kill all by itself. “Ten. No morphine,” he managed.

“I know.”

It would mask signs the EMTs needed to see. The angelic song was swelling, approaching, and he could almost make out a hymn. “The other jumper?” Piscatelli managed.

“He didn’t make it.”

Blunt and direct was the code. “Quick?”

“Real quick.”

“Why?” He wasn’t sure what he was asking.

“Looks like he had something inside with him, can’t tell now. It fired up. What’s his name?”

“Jerry Routt.”

Routt had known better than to carry anything flammable inside a fire shelter. He moved his lips, the words inward and inaudible, meant only for his dead comrade: “No more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away…”

*

“Here’s Chop-Chop ‘Bama.”

Marly Tom grinned as he showed them his new poster on a sheet of foamcore, his characteristic wavery rendering of Obama’s face, but with a wispy, dangly moustache and buckteeth, and the iconic coolie tunic with its filigreed buttonholes. The tip of an AK-47 could be seen poking up in his hand. Elsewhere in the country, posters might link Obama to socialism or Hitler or some local civil rights guy, but in Monterey Park, all right-thinking people knew that the Chinese were the real enemy.

At the bottom of the poster was the line:
Berieve. Or I keer you!

His pals broke out in laughter and slapped his back. Once upon a time, the abandoned barber shop on a side street just off Garvey had been a busy headquarters for their parents’ group, SAMP—Save American Monterey Park—but that war had been lost twenty years ago in the flood of Chinese immigration.

“Great work as usual!” Zook said.

“Maybe he is a black Chink,” Captain Beef said. “Wasn’t he born in India or something?”

The row of shops was owned by their patron, Seth Brinkerhoff, who gave them use of the blacked-out barbershop as their art studio, clubhouse, game room, and mancave. It was just about the last storefront in Monterey Park that had not become a Hong Kong restaurant or a Taiwanese bank.

The old working-class town they’d grown up in forty miles east of downtown Los Angeles was long gone, and Zook had felt betrayed and helpless for years. Almost everyone else from their high school had left, including the members of what had once been their motorcycle club, Satan’s Commandos.

It was all due to the liberals and fags on the Westside, of course. The BMW-driving, wine-drinking, Chinese-buttkissers. They didn’t have to live here, surrounded by gibberish mahjongg signs and rude shopkeepers who yelled you away if you didn’t look Chink-a-dink.

Tony “Beef” Buffano turned suddenly on Zook, all three hundred pounds of him. “We can’t let that nigger win, Z.”

“Of course not. Calm down, Beef.”

Marly Tom and Ed “Zook” Zukovich were the resident brains, and they didn’t worry much about Beef’s goofier outbursts. He had a good heart when you calmed him down, and you always loved the guys you went through football with.

“How about a midnight run to put up some of the posters?” Zook suggested.

“Goody!” Beef said.

Marly Tom smiled. “I’ll print some up.”

They whistled and belched and underarm-farted.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Zook looked around at the pathos of their prized Commando clubhouse, two of the old barber chairs ripped out at the roots and replaced by a rickety footie table and a few mismatched chairs. All they had to do for Seth in return for this largesse was run a few business errands and keep the Chinks and liberals nervous.

Zook’s daydream was bigger. He wanted, some way, to reanimate the club and maybe even drive out the Chinese for good. As a member of the newly awakened intellectual avant-garde, he knew he appreciated the dangers of worldwide conspiracies like George Soros and the Trilateral Commission long before they were obvious to the unaroused public. The quality needed in every thinking man these days was the will to look at things unflinchingly.

*

“You’re not really named Hardy Boys?” Gustav asked with a frown.

The enormous man had smacked open the French doors to the verandah like a force of nature. He was wearing a khaki bush shirt, khaki shorts, and knee socks, like some outsized South African leprechaun. He bellowed with laughter. “Hardi Boaz. Hardi is short for Gerhardus. With all respect, one white man to another.” The man-mountain held out a frypan-sized hand and, uncharacteristically, Gustav took it. Andor followed him out into the Indiana night humidity, where Gustav had been reading.

Gustav was annoyed. He had retreated here to reread Ayn Rand, and was intent on finding out why it was crucial to decouple the rise in economic growth from median income. But that would have to wait now.

“The big South African is honored, sir. On behalf of the Border Guardians of California, thank you for your support.”

Gustav knew that the man had been a mercenary of sorts in South Africa, and that after Mandela, he had moved on to America, unable to abide black rule. He ran a vigilante group east of San Diego who did what the Border Patrol couldn’t—loosely, shoot first if you had any excuse. Nobody wanted innocent people hurt, of course, but if they turned out to be simple laborers crossing to
el Norte
, you could plant drugs on them or just bury them.

“Pleased t’meetchew, man. And the good man behind me. I think I am in the deep shit for charging in here like a gutshot rhino, eh. Sorry, a million pardons, hey. Yes, I will, thank you.” He snatched a drink off the table where Andor had chosen to sit.

Gustav noticed the man had an odd way of not looking anyone in the eye. He was amused to see Andor’s brows darken as his drink poured down this big clown’s gullet. Gustav lifted his own julep.

“Can we do this gentleman the favor of the big gun?” Andor suggested.

“Why not?”

Andor went back into the house and Hardi Boaz sat down unbidden in the man’s chair and stared out into the forest across the narrow lake. “You got Gooks out there?”

“You use that word?”

“Ja, sure. I work with guys from ’Nam and Iraq.”

The usage had actually started in the Korean War, Gustav thought. He had a querulous urge to contradict this man, but the urge to enjoy his dynamism was stronger.

“
Magtig
, me, and my troopies run the border from San Diego to El Centro, I can tell you. Lock up the virgins and kiss my arse. We got the will, we got a nice hot desert on our side, we even got our own drones. You’re not taking notes.”

Gustav smiled, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “I know what you’ve got. I paid for it. Have you ever had the pleasure of firing a Tyrannosaur?”

Andor was waiting behind them, holding a chunky-looking bolt-action rifle.

“No, sir. I knew a big-game chap who owned one.” Boaz took the A-Square Hannibal .577 rifle and inspected it. “Jaysus. The only bore I seen bigger was on a battleship.”

“Sometimes you have to stop a rhino, not just annoy it. We got some big twenty-point bucks out here, but let’s not wait around. There’s a two-hundred-pound solid salt block just left of the cottonwood. See if you can make a mess of it.”

The big man opened the rifle bolt and inspected the cartridge the size of a small flashlight, then ran it home again. “May our enemies die soon, I say, and bloody hell.”

Gustav noticed his brother watching the man with great anticipation, as if expecting him to grow a second nose. They had never seen anyone fire the Hannibal without being knocked flat or thrown back through the French doors. It had the heaviest recoil of any shoulder-fired weapon ever made, a 220-pound punch.

“And Hardi will have his fun along the way,” Hardi Boaz added. He braced a bit, but not much, and sighted out over the breeze-rippled lake. The explosion was far too loud, and the big man rocked a little with the punch. The salt block had vanished in a white puff.

He put the butt of the rifle down at parade rest and sighed. “Ouch,” he said without inflection. “I take it you two gentlemen are having your fun along the way, too. There’s no recoil pad on this weapon. We speak the same language.”

“We have plenty of work for you, Mr. Boaz,” Gustav said tonelessly.

*

She advanced on him and rubbed the material of his fraying sport coat between two fingers. “I get you good coat, Jackie, cashmere, good Italian design. Not this Target shit.” She pronounced it Tar-zhay, as so many did, but in her case, he wasn’t sure it was a joke. French had been Tien Joubert’s first language after Vietnamese; then Mandarin, Cantonese, and only then English. “Good shoe, too. Ugh.” She made a face. “Why you still dress like high school teacher?”

“In my job, it’s good to be invisible.”

He’d always enjoyed her artless candor, and he had enjoyed a lot more about her, too, as the pheromones gusting his way were reminding him. Her face was still striking, with the porcelain beauty of a doll. Amazingly, she still lived in the same big, crass, upper-middle-class house on an artificial basin full of yachts. The town in north Orange County insisted on spelling itself Huntington Harbour, so he insisted on pronouncing it
Har-BOOR
. The house was all blue carpets and glass and stainless-steel furniture, like a sixties daydream of a robot-servant future.

“You still handsome man. Maybe I come after you. No, no worry. I got men banging my door all day. I worth half the gold in Fort Knock. My English still crap, I know.”

People running after money at her speed never had the time to learn much of anything that wasn’t immediately useful, he thought. He rarely joked with her because she had absolutely no reflection or irony. That generally required a slower life process.

“How you been, Jackie? Got woman that good for you? Got money? I try to phone that apartment and the phone no good.”

“I haven’t lived there for a long time, Tien. Can we sit down and relax a little? I’m having a hard time keeping up with you.”

She laughed. “You always like that. I had to drag you into bed with me. But it was good, right? Even now, I got pretty tight body.” She pressed her breasts as if to demonstrate. “You want to see?”

Quickly, he said, “I’ll take your word. How about some tea? You used to love tea.”

“You sit.” She turned on her heel and glided gently to a doorway. “Lupeta,
háganos algún té, por favor
.”

Amazing. She’d learned a bit of her sixth or seventh language. He’d never managed even a second, though he’d tried hard with Spanish. He knew Tien was a bright woman, even if her intelligence shot off in odd directions. She was tough as nails with the shady characters who tended to hang around Asian import-export.

Out the wall of glass across her patio-dock, he could see that she’d replaced her little fringe-topped tootle-bug boat with a yacht the size of Kansas. He couldn’t even see the top deck. Unfortunately, it destroyed the view, unless you got off on masses of white fiberglass.

She came back and settled into the blue easy chair opposite him. Thank heaven, he thought. She was entirely capable of settling abruptly onto his lap.