Farshad Bayat’s shop was called LA ROX, and because it was all in capitals, Jack Liffey couldn’t work out whether it was meant to be La Rox or L.A. Rox. All in all, he wasn’t very fond of cute ad-spellings, departures like Sell-a-bration and Rite-weigh, because they just seemed to crank up the level of anxiety, a world that didn’t believe in its own rules. Extra anxiety he could do without.
The northern reaches of Robertson Boulevard here, spreading up the flank of Beverly Hills, were all interior designers and antiques and retro shops where they sold Roy Rogers bedspreads and Buck Rogers aluminum furniture at wildly inflated prices. Stripped pine tables out of Iowa farmhouses cost more here than fine hardwood furniture from France—at least, for as long as the music executives coveted that particular look.
The front window of Bayat’s was surrounded by smooth river-bottom stone, and so was everything inside. A showroom showed off rocky stub walls and rock chimneys, stone fences, kitchens done up like caves. He wasn’t quite sure where the subliminal signals came from, but something told him the rocks were fake. A bored, chunky Middle Eastern woman dismissed him with disdain when he said he wasn’t buying and had him wait in a fancy anteroom. There was a wonderful big stone fireplace, and through an open door, he could see a whole crew of Latinos out back unloading cartons from a truck. A skinny foreman in a red vest and one of the Latino workers were holding up butane lighters against each other and flicking them for some reason, as if seeing whose flame was taller. Then the foreman started yelling at the worker, noticed the door was open, and kicked it shut.
Jack Liffey tried not to doze off in the armchair. He’d had a bad night, waking in sweat in some unsettled state between dread and rage, unable to get back to sleep. He was sure the proximate cause was a blind date last weekend that a friend had set up for him, a real knockout of a redhead who had seemed okay until she started proselytizing him with a goofy therapeutic test that involved holding tiny bags of foodstuffs against his cheek and yanking on his arm like a slot machine, looking for the food that would make his arm muscles weaker. Subclinical allergies, she had explained, or energy mis-orbits, as if he were a proton missing one of its electrons.
He had put up with it for a while and then he’d got a bit wiseass as she yanked his arm once again, something about his eyes spinning around like a slot machine to show three turnips, and she’d got mad and kicked him out of her apartment overlooking the marina. He didn’t really want to be like that, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. He wondered if he ought to start drinking again, just a nip or two to help him be a little more sociable to the next gorgeous fruitcake who came along and wanted him to do away with his extra vein poisons by barking like a dog or something.
All in all, he knew he was not really going to revert to the demon rum. It had cost him his first marriage, and he’d been sober ever since. He’d stayed off drugs, too; part of a pact he had made with his ego to prove his strength of character. But for all the propitiating fires he’d lit to these particular abstemious gods, nothing much seemed to be working out for him except an extra helping of anxiety and this new little flutter in his chest.
His second big relationship, with Marlena, had crashed and burned, and now he’d missed several child-support payments so he couldn’t even see his daughter. The detective business wasn’t really paying off—another bad choice—and his miserable condo was still worth less than he’d paid for it. At a certain point in life, you had to find a way to face the discovery that you weren’t a charmed soul after all, and things might just not work out for the best for you.
It was no wonder his friends like Lon and Virginia were ratting him out to the psychiatric community. If only he could get over the bad nights, the sweats and sleepless stretches, he was sure he could take care of the rest by himself.
The bored dark woman came back and beckoned. Following her out the door, he couldn’t help hearing the faint scritch-scritch in the quiet office as her nylons rubbed together at the thigh. He felt a chill, like hearing a fingernail on a blackboard. She pointed to a door down a hallway and left him to his own devices. Receptionists never liked him much, but he was inured to that. The Timex and the cheap shoes always gave him away as a low roller.
Farshad Bayat rose from a desk with a welcoming smile. He was handsome, fortyish and had a receding hairline. They’re Aryans, same stock as Europeans, he remembered reading somewhere, and sure enough, from the planes of his face, this man could have been a German count or a French university professor. Jack Liffey wanted to like him, for no discernible reason.
“Mr. Liffey. Mr. Dicky Auslander called me about you.”
Jack Liffey smiled involuntarily. “I can’t get over ‘Dicky.’ I knew him in college as ‘Aaron.’ ”
They shook hands. “Some men attract nicknames naturally,” Bayat said, “as if they were born with an extra helping of charisma. My roommate at UCLA was called Zorro. He was considered a swordsman—as you might guess.” His voice had only a hint of an accent, a kind of extra precision in the consonants.
Jack Liffey was happy the man could joke about something like womanizing. It suggested the interview wouldn’t have to be conducted in the gloom of intense cultural sensitivity, tiptoeing across the eggshells of contrary beliefs.
Bayat gestured and they both sat. The desk was unusual, a thick rosewood slab laid on a base made of the same stones as everything else around, including one wall of the office.
“I guess you deal in rocks,” Jack Liffey observed.
He smiled. “I guess I do.” The man picked up a stone with two hands and tossed it across the office. Jack Liffey prepared himself for a heavy catch but it was as light as balsa. As he’d guessed, LA ROX were in fact fake. He turned the thing over in his hands, about the shape of a flattened squash, with a hollow back.
“There are other manufactured rocks, of course, but they tend to be very heavy or to look and feel like plastic. I invented a process for cross-linking polymers with a small amount of ground stone. The only thing I can’t manage is the cool feel of stone. There just isn’t enough substance to act as a heat sink.” The man seemed to be worried about something, then his smile reappeared, like cloud shadows scudding away to expose a sunny plain.
Jack Liffey looked at the surface of the stone and it looked grainy, just like granite. “Looks pretty good.”
“The wall in front of the store looked fake, though, didn’t it?” Bayat asked.
“A bit.”
The man wasn’t offended. “It took me a long time to work it out. In the first generation, there were only twenty distinct shapes. I finally decided that our subconscious minds are sensitive to that. We must have a very sophisticated facility for pattern recognition. When I increased the number of molds to thirty-six, it seemed to work much better, but science never stands still. What do you think of this ?”
He tossed another half-stone across the room; this one was heavier and seemed to slosh in Jack Liffey’s hands. The flat back was sealed over.
“It’s filled with water, plus a little air space so it won’t explode if it freezes. You put that on an exterior wall facing the sun and you’ve got a passive solar house, storing heat during the day and releasing it at night. These are very popular in Arizona and Colorado.”
Jack Liffey leaned forward to deposit the stone on a corner of the big desk. “I didn’t really come here to talk about your rocks.”
The man’s smile stayed, but the warmth drained out of it. “No, of course. You want to talk about Fariborz.”
“And Becky.”
At her name, he seemed to grow more thoughtful. But at that moment the woman opened the door and looked in. “Mr. Bayat, the factory called.” Then she talked for a while in what must have been Farsi, and the man’s face went even murkier.
“According to NAFTA regulations, that should not be a problem. I’ll call them back.”
She ducked out, and the man studied his desktop for a moment. Jack Liffey had the distinct impression something was not right here.
“I will do everything I can to help you,” he said at last, so earnestly that he seemed to have just discovered some deep need to convince Jack Liffey of his desire to help. “Fariborz was living away from home, at Kennedy School, when he disappeared with the other three.” His face registered distaste. “The news called them the Kennedy Four, like some sixties gang of radicals.”
“Were you here in the sixties?”
“No, I came in the late seventies for graduate school, not long before the Ayatollah’s triumph. My wife is Jewish so we had little desire to go back. The Revolutionary Guard weren’t very benevolent to Jews—though it’s a shame; Islam has a long tradition of tolerance. Of course, the fanatics were far worse to the Baha’is. Jews and Christians are what’s called People of the Book, and they predated Islam after all. But Baha’i is only one hundred and fifty years old, and the militants don’t recognize any religion founded after Mohammed’s time. Most of the Baha’is who escaped live in Santa Monica and West L.A. now.” He smiled lightly. “You tell me a Persian’s religion, and I’ll tell you where he lives in Southern California. The ethnic Armenians, all Christians, went to Glendale. The Jews to Beverly Hills and West-wood. Moslems are in the South Bay and scattered around, though a lot of the Moslems here are basically secular. I don’t think the militants in Iran were entirely aware of what they were doing, but in retrospect you can see that one consequence of the Iranian revolution was purging the country of its secular middle class.”
“Do you consider yourself a Moslem?”
“I’m not very religious, but in some ways—” he shrugged—“the values and the culture run very deep. There’s a strong sense of family and proper behavior and respect. I drink alcohol only very rarely. This made it harder to argue with my son when he started to become a fanatic.”
“How do you mean?”
“I had no trouble seeing quite clearly what bothered Fariborz about the West. Not just halter tops in the supermarket and sex on TV and drunkenness and cruelty to women. There’s a kind of separation of every individual from every other individual. You and I, Mr. Liffey, if we went to Iran now, I am sure we would both dislike a lot of things we would see; but there are other things I think we would both admire. I’ve been back. There is a deep concern for right behavior and politeness, for being a good host and a good neighbor. It takes a fairly sophisticated worldview to value other things highly enough to put up with the terrible loneliness and apartness in the West. I feel the loss every day, as an exile, but also as an individual. I’m no longer rooted in any place, the way I once was. No one here is rooted.”
Jack Liffey was tempted to share something of his own sense of loss and isolation, but he had to stay alert to other things. The man’s face kept saying something other than his words. Something was going on under the surface here and it was off-center, like a bent axle, joggling a cart and continually thrusting a kind of disquiet up into the ordinary.
“The fierceness of teenagers leaves no room for gray areas,” Bayat added. “Everything has to be perfect right this minute, or it must be obliterated. Fariborz smashed his electric guitar against a tree and burned all his fiction, mostly mystery novels.”
Jack Liffey had read a little about the Kennedy Four that morning in back numbers of the Times at the library. They had supposedly turned themselves into purist religious zealots, then stayed away from classes, then left school altogether. But the news articles had tapered off about three weeks after the boys disappeared. There hadn’t been a word on them in a month. “Do you have any guesses where they are?”
He shook his head slowly. “I hired a detective after they’d been gone a week, but he got nowhere. They might even be in Iran by now, or in some Pakistani madrasa up along the Afghani border, or some Hezbollah camp, or just holed up in Mexico reciting the Koran to each other. I hope very much for the latter.”
“Why do you say Mexico?”
“Fariborz knows it well and speaks Spanish. I’ve owned a small maquiladora in Tijuana for many years. Where these are made.” He indicated the rocks.
“Is there any way Becky’s disappearance could be linked to theirs?”
His expression darkened again. He shook his head slightly, but it wasn’t really a denial, just a gesture of helplessness. “It’s a preposterous coincidence if it isn’t connected, don’t you agree? But she was not a Moslem and not a zealot in any sense, Mr. Liffey. In fact, she’d been growing apart from Fariborz because of his growing religious fervor. She came to me to complain about it.”
“What did she say?”
“Just asked if I could talk to him. He wouldn’t see her any longer without a chaperone present. He insisted she wear long sleeves and dresses that went to the ground. She said she loved him very much. She seemed a fine girl, though I hardly know her. I hope very much that you find her.”
“So does her father.”
“Is he paying you well enough for you to be thorough?”
Jack Liffey wondered if the man was aware of the insult in his words, but he decided not to rise to it. Perhaps he only meant paying well enough to cover expenses. “I wouldn’t have taken the job otherwise.”
Farshad Bayat leaned forward a little, and a tension came over him. It was so hard to read signals across cultures. “I will pay you a large reward if you find her.”
“That isn’t necessary.” Though not unwelcome, he thought. Some agenda was whirring away beneath the surface.
“I will pay you even more than Mr. Auslander has promised you, but you must do one thing for me. Report to me first, then tell her father. That’s all I ask.”
This was getting odder and odder. “Why do you want that?”
The man shrugged. “Finding Becky may be the key to finding Fariborz and his friends. No matter how long I’ve lived in this country, I never quite understand how Americans’ minds work. Mr. Auslander has promised to let me know the minute she’s found, but he may sequester the girl, or choose to keep silent for his own reasons, or he may just forget me. If she is connected to Fariborz, I have a feeling I will need to move quickly to trace from her to him. That’s all I ask. Let me know if you find her and let me talk to her right away. I will make it worth your while.”
“I’ll consider it.”
“Would a retainer solidify your consideration?”
“Let’s leave it there. I have a client already.”
The man leaned back in his chair, as if deciding not to push any harder. “You’re welcome to come to my home and talk to his mother and see my son’s possessions, if you think it will help.”
They talked some more, but Jack Liffey didn’t learn much more useful information about the boy. Fariborz Bayat had been very mannerly from an early age, studious, kind to the old and infirm. He had been interested in literature and poetry, and then music, hanging out with a mixed bag of boys in junior high, Anglos, American Jews, a Palestinian Arab. But once at Kennedy, he had been thrown together with other Persians. The father, too, suspected that the other boys at the elite school had been cool to the Persians. None of the families of the other three missing boys lived in Beverly Hills. They were from Torrance, Sherman Oaks in the Valley, and Santa Monica.
Jack Liffey couldn’t work out quite what was so unnerving about Farshad Bayat. His reasons for wanting to have the first words with the missing girl didn’t ring true, but there was something else as well, a tremor of mental activity that overtook the man a little too often, as if he was tuned to some distant signal Jack Liffey couldn’t hear. And the girl’s name had something to do with the signal. Becky Auslander was the ghost at this feast, all right, but he had no idea what feast it was.
He left out the back, through the loading dock, just to get a different perspective on the place. Giant numbered wooden bins of the various species of ROX lined a long concrete warehouse, and a crew of Latinos pushed rolling containers along the bins, counting out a number of ROX from each bin according to the paperwork they carried.
Two young Latinos squatted out in the alley on a smoke break. Only peasant farmers could squat comfortably on their heels like that.
“Buenas días,” Jack Liffey said.
“Buenas.”
The second man just watched him suspiciously.
“Is Mr. Bayat a good boss?”
He knew they weren’t likely to say much, but he might be able to read something in their manner.
“Es Señor Bayat un buen jefe?” he repeated.
They did their best to pretend they didn’t understand him, but he figured it was a straightforward enough sentence, even in his execrable Spanish, much of which had been learned from Auto Club tour guides, discussions with waiters in Ensenada and Chico Cervantes mystery novels.
The workers were practiced at shrugging. All that he learned was that they were Mexican-born, probably illegals.
“Have a good day,” he said, and sauntered on down the alley. The stake truck being off-loaded had Baja California del Norte plates, with the frontera inscription that basically meant T.J. Another unsurprising fact to store away.
A newspaper rack caught his eye with a giant headline before he reached his car. L.A. wasn’t a street-edition town, a headline that big really had to mean something.
Teen Kills 8 at Playschool
The editors managed to work in a little information above the fold, a berserk sixteen-year-old, distraught about breaking up with an older girlfriend who worked at Wonder Playland, had run a bulldozer back and forth through the preschool in Brentwood. Jack Liffey stopped reading. Life was random enough, he thought, and he felt dismal enough already. He didn’t need any more insight just then on the sorrowful burdens of the human condition. And, like most crazed tragedies, there was nothing really to be learned from it.
Returning south, he noticed a huge concrete faux Gothic church that he’d seen a hundred times without it ever registering. He parked on the side street and stared up at the flying buttresses. He wondered if the concrete detailing up high was decaying in the rain and smog. The owners who now lived in Frank Lloyd Wright’s experimental L.A. homes had learned to their chagrin just how vulnerable poured concrete was, with the maverick architect who had inspired The Fountainhead insisting on intricate cast-concrete Mayan designs that eroded to mush in a few decades. Jack Liffey felt his hands tremble a little.
He got out and craned his neck up at the flat gray surface that showed the marks of the wooden forms where it had been poured, unlike the limestone fabric of a European cathedral. Still, the building was impressive. He pushed in at a heavy carved wood door, past a rack of pamphlets about ministering to darker-skinned peoples overseas, past a little font where a brown woman in a shawl was dipping her hand in holy water, and then on into the dim nave. The stained-glass windows were dazzling, a lot of blues and reds that really vibrated in the sunlight.
He slipped into a pew in the cool echoey dimness. There was a kneeling rail in front of him that his long-long-ago childhood Protestant church had never had. And Marlena’s Bible-thumping, tongue-talking, millennarian church probably wouldn’t have had, either. Marlena. Give me that full gospel, he thought. Don’t give me any of that 90 percent gospel, no, sir. Actually the only part of the gospel they seemed interested in was Revelations, all those Mediterranean fever-dreams about pale horsemen and approaching hellfire.
He settled back and listened to a kind of beating of the air in the vast space. No, it seemed a real sound, small, far-off and agonized, behind a door or a wall. Something in pain. He smelled floor polish and burning wax. An apse near him was blocked off by a rack of flickering candles in red glass. All these sensations seemed to burn his nerves, as if his axons were overcharged. He could even feel his own pulse beating against the inside of this skin. Just hold still for a minute, hold still, he thought.
Jack Liffey wondered what in hell he was doing there. There was an inkling that maybe he was reaching out to hit the pause button on his life for a few moments. Nothing really religious. Just a whim to commune in some way with that ancient craving to do one’s best in the world or be part of something bigger and grander.
Then he heard the odd sound again and noticed a number of small people making their way on their knees around the outside aisles, moving from numbered station to station. His spine prickled as if he had blundered in by accident on something extremely private. An old man crabbed sideways on his knees and stopped directly between Jack Liffey and icon No. 9 on the wall. The little man bowed his head and started to weep quietly, his shoulders shuddering. Jack Liffey had an overpowering urge to hug him, comfort him, tell him it would be all right.
Instead he thought about Marlena. He had let her go without a big scene, graciously, blessing her new union with the big Bible-thumper. But why not? What good would anything else have done? Making a scene wouldn’t have kept her.
He tried to stand up to go back outside and return to the world but he couldn’t. He kept trying ineffectually. It was like a car with a dying battery, grinding and grinding, getting weaker in that futile way that would leave him stranded, far from home.
Hey, anyone there? he called in his head. I really think I’m doing my best here. But, of course, there was no answer.
Something landed on the back of his bare forearm, and he wondered if the church had flies. He looked down and saw a drop of water. A second teardrop hit and he thought, Shit, not again! He knelt to see what kneeling on that hard bar was like, rested his arms on the pew ahead, and then he wept uncontrollably over the back of the pew for a while. A part of him watched, fascinated, and decided he’d never quite done anything like this before. His previous crises had run to alcoholic blur, but otherwise had been pretty much under his conscious control.
Jack Liffey had seen it before, parked along this stretch of Fairfax on his way home. It appeared to be some mid-70s boat-sized GM product, Buick or Oldsmobile, but you couldn’t tell because it was completely covered with a blanket of tiny brown teddy bears glued to every surface. There was only an oval left to see out the windshield, and he wondered if that was enough to make it legal. And what would a sudden rainstorm do to it, a billion soggy little bears?
It had been hard enough to tear himself away from the church, and now this. A sign on the roof of the car said, Disenchantment will never prevail.
A deferred message from above, he supposed, since he’d been offered no revelation in the church.
Maeve looked up from Wuthering Heights to see her mother hovering tentatively in the doorway of her bedroom. Tentative wasn’t her mother’s style, so she knew something was up. “Did I forget to do something?”
“No, no. I was just wondering if you’d seen your father recently.”
Maeve wriggled, set a fancy leather bookmark between pages, adjusted the footrest of the old recliner—generally did all she could to stall. “I’m not sure how you want me to answer. I know he’s missed two support payments.” That was the deal. No child support, no visits—though Maeve was almost sixteen years old now.
Her mom grimaced and waggled a hand, erasing that idea right out of the air. “I’m not on the warpath. I saw Alice at the market, and she said she and Warren ran into Jack somewhere and he looked like he was in pretty bad shape. He took losing Marlena hard, didn’t he?”
Maeve felt a chill on her spine. The deal was, adults were supposed to take care of themselves, quite privately, so you could have your own growing-up crises and they could attend to you, but it never seemed to work out that way. Her mom had a running problem, too, with her new husband, Bradley, who labored under what Maeve had come to see as a small-man complex, which meant you could never cross him directly, but had to work around him in some way that his tiny brain would not notice. As far as she was concerned, Brad could shrivel up and die any day he liked, but Maeve loved her real father to distraction, unreservedly, with an ache that went all the way through her.
“He and Mar got along pretty well, but they didn’t have very much in common,” Maeve said. “She was going to one of those churches where they think Jesus already has his landing gear down. I think when she left him, it just brought out a lot of his other stuff.”
Maeve could see her mother decide consciously to leave the snotty comment about Jesus alone. “Do you think he’s drinking?”
It was drink, long ago, and the disorder that went with it, that had ended up sending Maeve to Two-family City. “No, he’s pretty firm on that now.”
“Alice said she’d never seen anyone so downcast and unsteady. Would you like to go see him?”
Maeve felt herself light up. “Really?”
“You’re on school break. Why don’t you go cheer him up.”
Maeve was up out of the chair in an instant, hugging her mother. “Oh, thank you, Mom.”
“I care for Jack, too.”
Jack Liffey adjusted the hard chair to face the wall of his apartment. He took off his wristwatch and set it in front of him. He rested his palms flat on his knees, closed his eyes, and started to inhale deeply the way a meditation-besotted blind date had insisted on showing him, sucking air into every nook and cranny of his lungs that he could visualize. Then he exhaled until his belly tucked in under his ribs and his throat creaked a little. He carried on this way while repeating in his head one of the mantras she had suggested: I’m strong today, I’m forgiving. Whatever.
After about fifteen minutes, he’d end up good and buzzed for a while. You could call it meditation if you wanted, but he figured what he was really doing was altering his blood chemistry, hyperventilating. It was probably the way mystics and sufis and dervishes had always cranked themselves up to the point where they heard their gods talking to them. He knew it knocked his blood pressure back and left him woozy, so it was as good a substitute as he knew for a stiff shot of single-malt scotch.
About two-thirds of the way through his allotted time, Loco stirred and started to pace restlessly, with an odd little purring. It disturbed his concentration. He thought he’d preempted this by giving the dog its obligatory five minutes of affection. Loco was half coyote and did not usually make much in the way of demands on the human world.
The purr became a mewl. Something was up and then the rasp-angry doorbell sounded. Damn, he thought. Meditatus interruptus. Still, he was already getting a bit lightheaded. Loco was leaping at the knob as if trying to work out its mechanics.
And there was Maeve, grinning, carrying her little suitcase, and she launched herself into his arms just as the dog launched itself at her. “I missed you, Daddy.”
“Oh, me, too, sweet stuff.”
She bent down to hug Loco, which gave Jack Liffey a chance to rub his eyes surreptitiously. So much sudden love going around was more than he could handle.