“Pretty gutless, Dad.”
With Maeve’s extra weight onboard, the old VW labored down to third gear, about 48 mph, heading over the Sepulveda Pass toward the Valley. It was lugging so badly now he had to drop to second. He’d had the car for almost a year now and he still wasn’t really used to it. The horrible engine noise of the air-cooled beast unnerved him on long trips, like a Greyhound bus running up his tail.
“The price was right,” he yelled over the engine.
Chris Johnson had virtually given it to him—$500, he’d said, whenever he could afford it—after his trusty old AMC Concord had given its life, in effect, to save him from a couple of thugs. The VW hadn’t proved its loyalty like that yet.
“Can we go to the electronics store first?” she pleaded.
He was combining her errand to buy some gizmo with his own trip to Kennedy School to start looking into the missing kids. He had always had this primitive spirit of economy that gave him a deep satisfaction in dual-purpose chores, like someone who’d gone through the Depression and hoarded coupons. His father had seemed to spend half his life catching him coming out of rooms and telling him to turn out the lights.
“And then I drop you at the North Hollywood Library for a few hours.”
“We’ll see,” she said. He could sense another agenda turning over deep in her psyche.
“How is it you’re on vacation in October, hon?”
She grimaced. “I’ve explained that already, Dad. I’m on C-track. It’s not like when you were a kid anymore. We’ve got year-round school. It’s more efficient, and the kids don’t have to help bring in the summer crops anymore.”
“Really?” He stayed deadpan. “Who does bring in the crops?”
“Illegals, of course.”
He glanced at her and she nodded quickly. “Okay, okay, undocumented workers. I didn’t mean anything.”
“I know some of those expressions are a bit absurd,” he conceded. “Differently abled—as if a bunch of folks just decided one day they’d prefer riding around in wheelchairs. But it never hurts to call people what they’d like to be called. It’s just politeness. If redneck assholes want to be known as the cranially challenged, that’s fine with me.”
She smiled. “We had a big discussion of Huck Finn in Mrs. Beecher’s class before we started reading it. You can bet what it was about.”
“The N-word. It gives me the willies, too. I know it really pays off in the book when Huck finally connects with Jim, but I still can’t say it.”
“When we read some out loud in class, we read it as Negro. Negro Jim. It was a weird compromise. Do you think it would have been better to say the bad word?”
“You know, punkin, I think for some questions there just isn’t a right answer. I love Twain, but that word carries freight now that you simply can’t ignore. Someday you can read Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and we can talk about it. He set up a really intractable dispute, between two pig-headed groups, and he thought he’d worked out an answer, but I think it’s the most dangerous possible answer.” It was wonderful to have a daughter you could actually talk to, he thought.
That perked her up. “Caucasian Chalk Circle. I’m there, dude.” She studied him for a moment as he drove. “You know I’ve started dating.”
His heart fell through to the soles of his feet and then bounced, but it didn’t make it all the way back up. He tried not to let the trepidation show. “Would I like him?”
“You’d adore him. He’s into computers and teaching himself Greek. He’s smarter than me.”
“Not a chance.”
“Anyway, we’re just good friends.”
He figured that meant she wasn’t sleeping with him yet, but he decided it was best not to edge into that area at all. In any case, she was spinning her life off into that zone where he would sooner or later have to trust her.
“When you’re ready, I’ll be happy to meet him. I won’t bite. But if he’s never heard of Brecht, I’ll be merciless.”
“You? You’re a pussycat.” She hugged his arm and after enjoying it for a moment, he wriggled free enough to slam the shift back up into third and see if the poor old 1200-cc engine could hold it up the slope.
Fariborz folded his hands and stared at the ketchup bottle on the Formica table in front of him as if it were his lost childhood. America was the only country he had ever known, born and raised here, and the bottle pretty much symbolized it for him, but he felt utterly outside it all now. The folk-rock music and the comfortable home and driving his dad’s Land Rover Discovery and simply going into a 7-Eleven for a Coke and feeling like he had a right to be there. He knew he had done it to himself, but that didn’t make it any easier. Pejman had lived in London for a few years, which gave him some perspective so he may not have felt quite as lost now, but Fariborz felt as if he had cast himself into coldest outer space.
He had ratcheted up his bravado day by day, watching himself do it, feeling his resolve hardening and growing more adamant, letting it build and mutually reinforce with a small circle of like-minded friends until they forced one another to take themselves at their word. Suddenly they had to act out their challenges, and—wham!—he found himself on the far side of a hole torn in his reality, stuck fast in a completely different place. And then, by default somehow, they all found themselves closeted with a truly fanatical cabal of grown men from a desert culture that meant nothing at all to them. He ached physically, in a place right under his stomach, ached to be home. But there was no going back; he could see that.
“Almost midday. Almost time to pray,” Pejman said, checking his watch.
“We should wait for the sheik.”
Sheik Arad was the leader of the religious compound in Mar Vista, which was not far from the sparkling new mosque in Culver City that the Saudis had built for L.A.’s Moslems, but the sheik wouldn’t go near it because he was from Sudan and he hated the Saudi regime with a deadly ferocity. The boys hadn’t wanted to come to the sheik—his intensity had terrified them—but they couldn’t think of anybody else who would be able, discreetly, to get Iman the medical treatment for his mangled hand.
“Pej, I insist we’re still just going to attack symbols of impurity.” In fact, he was pretty sure Sheik Arad had other ideas altogether. “We can stink-bomb cinemas where they show pornographic movies, and paint-bomb the headquarters of Hustler magazine and the shops where they put scandalous lingerie in their windows. And we have to do this when the buildings are unoccupied. Maybe it will awaken the sleepy conscience of many Christians, too.”
He had said this many times before, in one form or another, but he felt his stilted diction shifting weirdly. It was almost as if he were being taken over by a djinn who had to translate everything from medieval Arabic. He had sensed it first at the beginning of their Retreat, trying to think of it as an attempt to purify his speech and become more precise and careful, but now he felt estranged even from the part of his brain that generated language.
“All these scandalous things interfere with our own freedom of religion,” Pejman agreed. “There is no way to worship in purity when you’re forced to wade through filth every day.”
They were like two boys whistling past a cemetery. They guessed neither of them had the strength of character to hold out against the ferocity of the Sudani band—not face-to-face—and if they weren’t on the alert they’d find themselves so beholden that they’d end up reluctantly but inevitably sitting in a big truck heading toward some federal building. Or they would be packed off, will-less, to a desert training camp in Libya or even Pakistan.
“Man, I want a Big Mac,” Pejman said. “With fries.” He seemed to work out his distress by thinking about food, while Fariborz tended to fret and repeat himself. Yahya just lay on the sofa across the room, whimpering.
“He may not be back in time. Let’s pray now.”
They took up their little prayer rugs, bought from Ikea, and carried them into the living room. The house had not been built conveniently on a quibla axis, so none of its walls truly faced Mecca, but the sheikh had set up a portable mihrab niche on the east wall, canted a little to indicate true east. In an uncharacteristic moment of levity months earlier, in a similar apartment room on their retreat, Pejman had spoken of praying to Palm Springs, which was pretty much due east of L.A.
They stirred Yahya and took turns in the bathroom tub washing their faces, hands and feet. Then they unrolled their prayer rugs and prostrated themselves, touching their foreheads down.
“In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful. …”
“Two points,” she suggested. Maeve and her father played a running game of finding oddities around town and keeping score. To date the highest was four points, awarded for the giant acupuncture needles that she had found stuck into the earth around L.A. by art students, ostensibly to prevent earthquakes. The average point-award was only two, for oddities like the absurdly undersized horse under John Wayne on the statue at Wilshire and La Cienega.
This ought to be equal to the horse: a giant flying saucer was permanently crashed into the entrance of the electronics store. Customers had to enter under the saucer and past a jeep that had been death-rayed in half. Dummies of 1950s soldiers were firing old M-ls at Martians who were firing ray guns back at them.
“It’s all a little too self-consciously cute,” Jack Liffey demurred. “Corporate eccentricity makes for a different fish entirely.”
“I know what you mean, but it still hits the spirit of oddity.”
“I’ll be a good sport. Two points. What are you buying?”
“I used up Mom’s blank card-stock making business cards. They have this really cool paper that’s preprinted with color designs, and you can run it through your computer to put your name on it, and then snap off expensive-looking business cards.”
“Supplies are over there.” Halfway there, he noticed that the computer monitors and printers were arrayed on a long counter that was held up by the arm of a giant squid that had ripped up through the flooring. Now he didn’t feel quite so bad about awarding those points. To enhance the shock, they had even reproduced a fainting victim in the aisle with paramedics clustered around her, her blouse ripped open and her skin gone ashen. The store decor was so bizarre that it took him several seconds to notice that the paramedics were moving. One of them slapped cardio paddles on the woman’s chest, and yelled “Clear!”
He got between the scene and Maeve and herded her toward the tall shelves of computer paper. It was a natural reaction, this urge to shield Maeve from harsh reality, but he realized it was a bit patronizing for a fifteen-year-old. “Do I get to take a point back if I tell you there was a genuine fainting victim on the floor beside the giant squid?”
“Huh?” She turned back immediately. He waited while she rubbernecked with a group of others in a little semicircle and after a while she came sheepishly back to where he was toying with a little laptop. He wished he could afford it, but he hadn’t had a computer to call his own since aerospace, and that had been before Bill Gates—ancient history.
“It’s not fainting.” Maeve looked a little green. “The woman is dead.”
“I’m sorry I said anything.” He put his arm around her shoulder, wanting to feel her substance, suddenly struck by the fragility of the world.
“That’s the first dead person I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It’s funny. Something’s really gone when you’re dead. She looked like a dummy of a real person.”
He’d seen a small portion of death in Vietnam and a few times since, but he let it go. There didn’t seem anything really to say. Dead was dead, and if you thought about it too much, you’d start getting a whiff of your own mortality and then the bad sweats would kick in. “How’d you use up your mom’s card stock?” he asked idly.
“I made some business cards for me. See how neat?”
She handed him a card.
“Whoa!” He came to a dead stop. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”
Liffey & Liffey Investigations
Runaway and missing children found
She had listed her own cell-phone number. It was more dignified and better looking than his own business card that Marlena had made up for him two years earlier at her Mailboxes ‘R’ Us shop, with his name in some weird cowboy script and a big eyeball on it. But this idea was not even negotiable.
“Hon, we can’t have this. No, no, no.”
“It’s just a kind of joke.”
“How come I don’t believe you? Remember all the trouble you got in last year?” Trying to help him out, she’d gotten in well over her head with a gang of bikers.
“I saved your life, didn’t I?”
“Thank you very much, but I don’t want you trying it again.”
“Dad, think of all the things I could find out from young people that you never could.”
“It’s very touching that you want to help me, hon, but I fell into this job myself only when I was desperate. It’s not a career path for a bright young woman. It’s just not.”
“I could just ask questions for you.”
“Maeve, no. Have I ever denied you anything before?”
“A Porsche. A strapless evening gown. A thong bikini.”
“But seriously, no. If nothing else, your mom would roast both of us very slowly over an open fire.” He had an inspiration. “The first thing she would do is cut off our visits for good until your eighteenth birthday—you know that.”
That seemed to strike a chord with her and her face clouded over. “Awww. We don’t have to tell her.”
“How long before she catches on when you come home in your new shoulder holster and fedora?”
“Dad!”
“We can’t lie to your mom, hon, and anyway I don’t want you trailing around after me, playing detective. It might be dangerous for me, you know? How about I promise to keep you up-to-date on everything I’m doing, if you’ll promise to butt out?” He’d already told her about the Kennedy Four and the missing girl.
She pouted.
“Deal?”
She swallowed some words that might have been an assent, but he knew he’d better not let it rest there.
“Are we agreed?” he insisted. “I need an unmistakable affirmative here, Maeve Mary. No crossed fingers behind your back.”
She nodded and showed both hands. “Okay.”
And he believed her because she’d never lied to him about anything important before.
A weird electronic chime sounded in the school hallway, nothing like the raucous bell of his own high-school days. That was fine with him, because he knew just how visceral his reaction would be to that school-bell sound, and he did not want to be carried back to all the social dread and sexual confusion and all that unhappiness.
Suddenly every classroom door swung open and boys in blue blazers burst out like thoroughbreds clearing the gates. The sound level rose instantly as they hurried every which way.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious!” one voice wailed.
“Well, bust a can of whoop-ass.”
“So then Mary is all, ‘Duh,’ and I’m like, ‘Come on!’ ”
Jack Liffey was having a displaced moment. He was sure it was all English, but it wasn’t coming into focus.
He stopped the nearest boy, who had a weird haircut, short on top and long at the fringes. “Can you tell me where the office is?”
“No time to flirt, man. That way.” The boy waved a hand dismissively and hurried on.
As Jack Liffey passed among the tidy students, generally ignored, he realized suddenly that they were all white. One tall boy far down the hall might have been a light-skinned African-American, but he was too far away to tell for sure. And there were no girls. He was surprised because he’d read that Kennedy, the ritziest boys’ school in Southern California had merged with Westridge, one of the ritziest girls’ schools, but there was no evidence of it.
Eventually he reached an office. A printed metal label in a Plexiglas holder beside the door said:
Mr. Christopher Hogle, B.A., M.A.
Dean of Community Affairs
Basketball Coach
Gymnastics
There was also a cutout photograph of a basketball taped haphazardly to the door, with the words in felt pen: Hogle Rips and Rules.
The door was open, so he rapped as he went in. A woman at the front looked up, but behind her an extremely tall man beckoned and Jack Liffey went right past her, through a swing gate into the office proper. That pleased him no end because he didn’t get on with receptionists. He hated coming on strong with people so far down the food chain, particularly as they were generally just doing their job keeping out riffraff like him. The problem was that gatekeepers rubbed a raw nerve in him.
“Mr. Liffey, I presume?”
“Mr. Hogle. Now I understand the basketball on the door.”
Hogle had to be seven feet tall, and thin as a stringbean. He reached far down to shake hands. Jack Liffey wouldn’t have referred to his height, but the jokey familiarity of the man’s “I presume” invited it.
“I was once third-string center under Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He was Lew Alcindor then, at UCLA. A pro team in Europe wanted to give me a tryout, but I knew better. Just because you’re tall. …” He shrugged.
“Fair enough.”
“Have a seat. ‘Kareem’ means ‘generous’ in both Arabic and Farsi, and he was, if he let you get close to him. I’m just happy to have touched the hem.” There was a stiff chair by the desk, the kind of thing bureaucrats used the world over to keep a petitioner uncomfortable. There was no choice so he sat.
“The hem of celebrity?”
“Let’s say expertise. You want to talk about the missing young men, don’t you?”
An out-of-whack sprinkler on the lawn outside slapped the window glass hard with spray. He was surprised a place so moneyed allowed that much disorder.
“And about the girl, too. By the way, what’s Community Affairs?”
He shrugged. “Public relations. Making sure the neighbors aren’t offended. Talking to private detectives.” An edge had entered his voice.
“I just find missing kids.”
“The girl wasn’t a student here. Her dad switched her to Taunton over the hill when we started merging the boys and girls.”
“Her Iranian boyfriend was here.”
“And you’re going to ask me about the rumors about the hazing of minorities.”
So that’s what the edge was about, Jack Liffey thought. He let it sit, so the man’s own nerves would do the hard work.
“Every student in Kennedy-Westridge is mandated to take a ten-week cultural-sensitivity course. In my experience, we’re far better than your average L.A. high school, with its warring cliques and race rumbles.”
“How many blacks and Latinos do you have?”
He glared. “Some. We give scholarships.”
“Look, I don’t care if you kick over Jewish headstones at night, I really don’t, and I figure your gracious kids probably don’t do things like that, either. I just want to talk to any of them who knew Fariborz Bayat. I could find them indirectly—it wouldn’t be that hard—or I can do it through you.”
The tall man thought about it for a moment. “You can do it through Mr. Toussaint. He was their counselor, and he’s right down the hall. I’m sorry if I seem overly sensitive on this issue. We’ve taken a pasting on this, and it’s really not a bad place.” He explained what great, sensitive kids they had, offering anecdotes approaching the some-of-my-best-friends-are-colored variety. Jack Liffey just let him run down on his own.
“After all, the rich are pretty much like you and me,” he concluded.
“Except they have a lot more money,” Jack Liffey said. Who was he paraphrasing? He remembered: Hemingway, allegedly responding to Scott Fitzgerald, though Fitzgerald had been maintaining that the rich were different from you and me.
“I’m surprised that I didn’t see any girls out there,” Jack Liffey said. He seemed to have been dismissed so he stood up.
“We’re merging grade by grade. You’ll see them in the early grades.”
“Doesn’t it narrow the gene pool a lot, putting all the ruling class into the same school?” Jack Liffey said at the door.
The man didn’t appear to like the expression “ruling class” very much, but he was Community Relations and wouldn’t let himself be baited.
“We try to encourage suitable mates,” he said drily.