The Orange Curtain (3 page)

“What’s your name?” he asked the boy.

“Loc.”

“Where would I find these people?”

Loc offered him a ramen pack, and he took it and turned it over in his hands. It was shrimp flavored all right. He decided to give it a try.

“He got office on Bolsa, next to Asian Garden. Some people like Frankie, some hate.”

“Do you like him?”

“You can’t never trust Chinese. They learn to cheat when they baby. Sell you old stuff no good. Plenty crap, and tricky, too.”

Racism everywhere, Jack Liffey thought sadly. But it was no time to be insisting on moral lessons. He tore off the wrap and bit a corner of the hard block of noodles. It was remarkably like eating a plastic toy. He pretended to like it.

“I like your haircut. It looks great,” Jack Liffey said.

When he looked up, he saw they were in no mood for compliments; their eyes were elsewhere. A lowered and blacked out Honda Prelude was coming up the street slowly and it was worrying the boys. The windows, the chrome, even the wheels, were blackened, so the car looked like a little rolling nugget of death.

“Where could I get a haircut like that?”

He felt the movement before he saw anything. Loc was up and fleeing down an alley as fast as he could run. The others were going in three different directions. Then he heard the horrible nearby rat-a-tat of automatic weapons fire. His head snapped around in time to see the Prelude drift past, one window rolled down and a boy in a black balaclava holding a little Ingram spray gun skyward, his grin a disembodied Cheshire cat in the darkness within the car. He pointed the gun at Jack Liffey.

“Bang-bang-bang!” the Cheshire grin shrieked, and then the car accelerated away and Jack Liffey was alone on Golden West Street, a profound chill spreading up his back. He hadn’t even budged. He’d never been close enough to the war, stuck at his radar screens in his air-conditioned trailer off in the forests of Thailand, to get the right instincts.

“Incoming,” he said softly to himself.

Billy Gudger parked his 1962 Beetle right under the big red neon hand. He liked the 1962 because it was the last one with the 1200 engine. It wasn’t that it was any more durable—all air-cooled engines were designed to wear out through heat erosion and be rebuilt often, a kind of grudged tribute to entropy—but the 1200 was still the cheapest to rebuild.
Sonya Gudger
, it said inside the neon hand.
Palmistry, Bibliomancy, Tarot. Genuine Rom wisdom. Se habla Espagnol.

There was an old Buick in front so he went in the back door and sure enough, the heavy curtain was across the foyer and she had a sucker in there. He hesitated by the curtain to listen.

“…Right here on the mount of Venus, see that grid of lines. It means you’ve walled off your heart and caged it up because you aren’t sure you can trust someone in a close relationship.” There was a gasp and a little hiss of emotion. “Here, too, you can see how your little finger ends before the top joint of the next finger. That means you’re not comfortable sharing your emotions.
But
you’re very lucky. See this cross, right under the Jupiter finger. It means you’ll definitely find a happy marriage in this lifetime.”

“When I going to find him? Goddam tired all the wait and all the shmucks.”

“I can’t say exactly, but let’s look at your lifeline again. It’s an indication of the force of your enthusiasm for life.” She dropped into her don’t-trust-quacks speech and Billy withdrew and went on into the kitchen and shut the door softly. If anyone ever tells you the lifeline indicates an exact number of years that you have to live, his mother was about to explain, you mustn’t trust them at all, he’s a quack. You always need three indications, and, in fact, the actual length of your life is a bargain between your life force and the world force, and no one can work that out for you in advance. But what I can tell you…

He got down the big six-quart pot to begin boiling the macaroni. It was her favorite, ordered up to compensate for some transgression he’d committed at lunch that he couldn’t remember, and it was a little too rich even for him. Two pounds of extra sharp cheddar shredded into the macaroni and followed with fried chunks of spicy pork sausage, canned onion rings and bac-o-bits. It gave him heartburn just to think of it but she insisted on having it at least once a week.

The pot was just coming to a rolling boil when he heard the front door slam and Sonja hobbled into the kitchen on her four-footed cane.

“You doing macaroni and sausage?”

“Uh-huh. Good customer?”

She opened the cupboard and got down her bottle of cheap Gallo cream sherry. “Enh,” she said dismissively. “Not much of a tip. A brown person of mixed background. She didn’t really appreciate the real thing. She’d rather have one of those charlatans waving a chicken bone and telling her how very
special
she is.”

She sat heavily at the Formica table with its little flying kidney shapes and poured a generous juice glass of sherry. “It’s just more of your curse,” she went on. “Marigold was right, I should have strangled you at birth and saved us all a lot of trouble.”

Marigold had been his grandmother, who had claimed to be the seventeenth in a line of great seers, stretching back to the legendary Rom homeland in the Punjab. It might have been true. All the names were written out on the front page of a tattered old Latin Bible that Sonja Gudger used for counting letters and chapters and finding hidden meanings.

“Good luck for you, because of that damn toadstone in your head, and bad luck for everyone around you.”

He smiled warmly. It made him happy whenever she mentioned the toadstone and praised him like that. “I had a good day at work,” he said. “They let me open up the cassettes for the Betacam and put on the labels and number them. It was a whole box of ten, and if you get them wrong it’s a real mess later when you go to edit.”

“I’ll bet you fucked it up.”

“Then I took down numbers while they were shooting. They’re on the side of the camera, and you look real quick right after the director calls cut and you put the number in a log where it says ‘tail.’ It’s called the time code. You put a star on the best shots when the director tells you so he can find them again. It’s a very clever system.”

“Put in some salt!” she shouted. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know salt drives the evil spirits out of the pasta?”

A
jewell containing a crapone or toade stone set in golde
.

—Nichols, Gifts to Queen Elizabeth (1558)

Jack Liffey waited on a hard bench in the lobby facing a large blue digital clock, as policemen and various people with problems came and went. He’d never liked the way digital clocks measured time. Time was circular and gradual, a slow analog losing bargain with the universe. In fact, in his current mood, he didn’t much like the passing of time at all. The pace of things had begun to worry him a lot—his daughter growing up too fast and filling out a real brassiere, his life whisking by, all the tubes of toothpaste and boxes of Kleenex you were constantly buying, even the way the geraniums on his patio ran wild.

A week earlier, driving to the supermarket, he had heard a smug voice on the radio news say something about how everything would be made right after death, and idly he had replied aloud, “Oh, no it won’t,” and his own words had filled him suddenly with a chill of winter. Oh, no it wouldn’t. Death was real. He would simply cease to exist one day, not some imaginary faraway day either, but Poof, he’d be gone. He had broken out in a sweat and stopped the car at the curb and sat in paralysis for a half hour, unable to find a way to stop imagining extinction.

A little of that shudder stayed with him now. He recalled Tom Mercer turning from the book he was reading on his bunk in Thailand one night and saying, “Man, what’s worse? A contingent universe, where you can’t even choose which nostril to pick, or total free will? You know what makes them both so poignant, absolutely fucking poignant, is the thought of death.”

Young men dragged out of college to go fight a war and then given enough of a reprieve to land five hundred miles away from the fighting to stare at radar screens tended to talk like that.

“The good part of death,” Jack Liffey had replied, “is that I’ll never have to hear you argue about shit like this again.”

“Listen to the Philistine. I happen to know you shook the dust of religion off your heels and you stand square in the middle of the modern world.”

He wondered where Tom Mercer was standing now, if he was holding down some tech job somewhere, or teaching Philosophy 1A in a junior college, or long dead of his flirtation with heroin.

Two policemen dragged a struggling woman across the lobby and distracted him.

“You’ll hear from my lawyers about this!” she squealed.

“Oh, no, not the
lawyers
,” one of the cops mocked.

“Mr. Liffey, Lt. Vo will see you now.”

The earliest edition of the next morning’s Register was out by late afternoon. Orange County was a land of car commuters, and street editions had almost no relevance, but the Register editors liked to think of themselves as neck-and-neck with the L.A. Times, and they maintained all the old journalistic traditions by sending a dozen sad boozers out in old pickups to fill the street kiosks with a vestigial early street edition of the next day’s paper.

TWO BODIES FOUND

AT IRVINE LAKE!

A
few paragraphs down, the reporters quoted an unnamed source in the Sheriff’s office who’d dubbed the perpetrator with the uninspired name,
The Sagebrush Killer
.

“Wyoming,” Frank Vo said in a bemused way, with his mouth full. He leaned back in his chair away from the round rice cake on a big square of wax paper on his desk. “I don’t know what on earth they were thinking of. Hey, these people come from a tropical country so let’s send them to the high plains where the wind freezes you into a statue and the entire growing season is six weeks long.”

Jack Liffey nodded. “Nobody likes it there. I don’t know why even the Norwegians stay.”

“You know what they say? One day the wind stopped in Wyoming and all the chickens fell over.” He laughed. He was a short man, even for a Vietnamese, in an impeccable dark suit and tie. A map of north Orange County was on the side wall of his office with different color pins stuck into it. “Want some? It’s
banh chung
, usually only for Tet, but I love it. There’s ground pork in the middle.”

“Thanks, I ate.” Jack Liffey hadn’t eaten but the look of the gooey white ball didn’t appeal to him.

“I finished college in Laramie but I got out as soon as I could. I don’t even like the memory of those rough brown stone buildings.” He shrugged it off. “I study sociology. So I end up a cop.”

“You don’t like it?”

He smiled. “I love it; I mean it. I want to stop all the gang nonsense and extortion. We’re not like that. Really. We’re a gentle and decent people. But you take generations of war and then you cream off a lot of the riff-raff and put them in refugee camps for a while and you get a mess anywhere, a few percent. You’d be like that, too.”

“Sure. Mr. Minh said he was sure Phuong had nothing at all to do with the gangs.”

The man shrugged. “In my experience parents don’t know very much about what their children are up to.”

“My experience, too. Except my own daughter, of course,” he added quickly.

Frank Vo smiled again. “And mine, but she’s only four. The boys you saw with the hair, they’re a gang of wannabes called East Wind. Nothing serious, petty theft and stealing lunch money. They may dress hip but they’re schoolkids. I’m more worried about some of the heavier FOBs. That means fresh off the boat. These are the guys who were in the camps for boat people in Thailand or Malaysia until it was too late to learn anything. Some have been here a decade now and I don’t think they’ll ever catch up the schooling they missed. You know, even their Vietnamese is lousy, Camp Vietnamese. Imagine. They may never have even one good language.”

There was a thermos on the filing cabinet, with the big word
LUCKY
on it. Jack Liffey remembered one like it from several billets in Southeast Asia, a genuine artifact of another time and place. It made him feel strange, old. It was as if a chunk of his life had been ripped out and discarded, wasted.

“What about the car?”

“Blacked out Honda Prelude, a rice rocket. They’d be older and more established boys, men really. Could be the Numbah Tens, the Bolsa Boys, Westies, Gardens. Blacked out, whited out…” He shrugged. “They all do that to cars. Ordinary kids do it, too. Too bad you didn’t get a license number. My money would be on the
Quan sat
. It’s short for
Quan sat vien chien truong
, which means body count. You’re familiar with the expression.”

“Not intimately. I was an electronics tech in the war. That war’s been over for a long time.”

“Not for some of our citizens. You can be blown up here for advocating good relations with Hanoi.
Quan sat
have a peculiarity. They pick on the ethnic Chinese, just like Hanoi does.”

An Anglo cop in uniform looked in the door. “Vo, there’s a whole bunch of Viets here gabbling about some kin who’s subletting an apartment. Can you deal with it?”

“Ask them to wait, please.”

The cops stared at one another and something angry passed.

“Sure thing,” the Anglo cop said laconically and shut the door.

“I’m surprised he didn’t say
slopes
,” Frank Vo said, then shook his head as if waking himself. “I didn’t say that. Where were we?”

“Fighting the war.”

“Don’t you want to ask about Phuong?”

Jack Liffey nodded. “Phuong.”

“I haven’t had time to do anything about her,” Frank Vo said. “I know her very well. She’s very bright, a very good kid. I don’t think it’s serious that she’s gone for a week. She’ll show up with a boy somewhere, an honor student, skiing or going to lounge acts in Vegas. We’ve all got a few wild oats.”

“What else was she like?”

“She wasn’t like a lot of our more ambitious young people, who are usually very single-minded and focused. She had a streak of fun, and she was taking time out of school to learn practical things. She attached herself to one person after another to learn. She was closest to an older businesswoman named Tien Joubert Nguyen. Joubert is a married name she kept.”