This office also had a metal nameplate by the door:
Mr. Broyard Toussaint, M.A. D.Ed.
Dean of Bilingual Students
French
Spanish
Biology
But this time there was no receptionist. A man opened at his knock and peered out quizzically. What the sign didn’t say was that Broyard Toussaint was black, or—as they said in Louisiana—hi-yella, which meant he had Anglo features and was nearly light enough to pass.
“Hello?”
“Hello, did Mr. Hogle call you about me?”
“He did that very thing, about fifteen seconds ago, if you’re Jack Liffey. Come in. Excuse the clutter. I wear a lot of hats at Kennedy, and I seem to need a lot of space to park them all.”
The room was full of piles of books and manila folders, all with limp white bookmarks sticking out of them. The man shifted a pile of books off the only free chair, and Jack Liffey sat.
“Kennedy has a lot of odd euphemisms,” Jack Liffey said. “Does ‘Dean of Bilingual Students’ mean that you counsel the non-Anglos?”
He smiled. “It does indeed. The term sucks, as the kids say, but there’s a logic to it. Those outside the dominant culture tend to share common problems, no matter where they come from.”
“Especially at a place like Kennedy, where ‘dominant’ really means something.”
Toussaint’s smile tightened. “That has been said, but I assure you we’re not one of those vicious Eastern boarding schools, not at all. There’s a little cultural hazing, but more often a sensitive young man from another culture will just read the signals wrong, and think he’s being dissed, as the boys say, when it’s nothing of the sort. Add that to all the usual adolescent struggles with identity. … One likes to think one can empathize with that.”
“Louisiana?” Jack Liffey suggested.
“My folks moved to Chicago when I was fifteen, but I’m from Cajun country, near Lafayette. Where the white Cajuns still swear there is no such thing as a black Cajun.”
“And you’re living proof.”
Toussaint smiled disarmingly and waved at a poster of an old black man, bellowing over an accordion. “And a lot of other people like me, whole schools of music, styles of cooking. I always found that kind of tetchiness in rural white culture supremely silly—almost entertaining, in fact—but some of my friends tended to go the other way entirely and get a little pissed off.”
“I can understand that. So how’s the back of the bus at Kennedy?”
“Apropos of the Iranian boys?” Toussaint asked.
“Yes.”
“They met each other here in the dorm and became close friends. It doesn’t necessarily mean they were driven together by prejudice. Or strictly racist prejudice. School cliques form along a lot more lines than one remembers from our day—goths, football jocks, techies, stoners—it’s endless.”
“So the four Iranian boys just happened to get together because they were the only Edith Wharton fans at Kennedy?”
The man went quiet for a moment, then gave a small shrug. “Listen, for a while now, all things Middle Eastern have remained pretty unpopular in this country. And it’s not getting any better. There was some hazing, one admits. They were called ‘ragheads’ and ‘camel jockeys,’ as if Iranians were Arabs. But the lads only magnified their isolation when they became flamboyantly Moslem. Which was their right, of course, of course,” he added quickly.
“They weren’t from religious families, were they?”
“No. But …” He shrugged. “The boys definitely found their way to Islam, whatever their parents felt. Adolescence is a time of heartfelt and consuming belief, as one probably only remembers dimly, and Islam provides the opportunity for that in spades.”
“ ‘Dimly’ is right. My adolescence was a bad dream I try to forget.”
“For most of us. I think I know why adolescence was so utterly horrible for all of us, and why, at the very same time, it’s possible to look back on it as if it weren’t.”
“Meaning?”
“When one looks back now, we recognize that all those terrible things that we dreaded every day didn’t happen. When we say we want to live it over again, we’d do it only if we could hang onto the knowledge that we didn’t actually slip and fall at the senior prom.”
Toussaint was beginning to sound like Dicky Auslander.
“Well, I don’t envy that time at all, only the stamina I had. I could run a mile in 5:50.”
The man seemed to refocus all at once. “One is interested in Fariborz Bayat, true?”
“True.”
“Bayat was the smartest of the boys, but I don’t believe he was the ringleader—that’s a terrible word to use. I apologize. The boy who gravitated to Islam first and needed it the most was probably Iman Behrooz. He’s from a broken home, and he really resented his father’s leaving the family. Behrooz developed a very stiff and unforgiving moralism out of that betrayal, and the other boys picked some of it up from him. They started reading the Koran together and whatever else they could find to reconnect themselves with Persian culture. They refused to wear the school tie any longer—I believe in Iran neckties have come to represent Western decadence. As proof of how tolerant one tries to be at Kennedy-Westridge, the administration gave them permission to doff the tie as long as they buttoned their shirts up to the neck. We also helped them set up a do-it-yourself class in classical Arabic.”
“Did they have an Islamic mentor? Here or outside school?”
The man thought about it for a moment.
“Yes. As Persians, one would have expected them to find a Shia mentor, but the man they found wasn’t. The Shias are the division of the faith that relies heavily on clergy—imams and ayatollahs.”
“Refresh my memory on Islam.” He knew roughly, but he was interested in what the received wisdom had been at the school.
“I’m not a scholar of Islam, but as their advisor one had to bone up a little. Most of the Moslem world is Sunni, something like eight-five percent. The Shiites split off to follow a caliph named Ali soon after Mohammed died, and they’re mostly in Iran and Southern Iraq today. They erected their form of Islam on top of an old Persian belief in the divine right of kings so the Shias tended to grant their leaders papal infallibility. Anyway, Southern California is a little short of Persian ayatollahs, but the lads did locate a Sunni sheik who was fierce enough for Iman Behrooz.”
He shrugged apologetically. “One finds that many Christian sects also have their militia leaders and fanatics.”
“Let’s hold the editorials. Does he have a name?”
“Sheik Arad. I have no idea what his title means, but he’s got a little group around him. The boys didn’t stay with him long.”
“Do you know why not?”
“One gathers from Fariborz Bayat that Sheik Arad was a pretty hair-raising character. Bayat was fairly open with me, at least at first. The sheik’s like some ancient prophet. One either drops everything to follow him out into the desert, or else one can go to hell.”
The peculiar electronic tone now sounded again out in the hall, and even at one remove from the clanging bell that he remembered, the summons gave him a chill. Broyard Toussaint perked up. “I’m going to have to go. I’m invigilating a biology exam.”
“Invigilating?”
He smiled. “Fancy old prep-school word for proctoring.” He gathered up a handful of papers.
“Quickly, then, do you think the boys might have followed this sheik out into the desert?”
“Mar Vista, actually. His school. It was the first place the police checked, as one might guess, plus the second and third. It appears not.”
Jack Liffey followed Toussaint out of his office, just as a flood of students washed past. There were a few girls, after all, wearing beige skirts and navy blazers. “Do you have a guess?”
“Hold up, friendasaurus!” a boy bellowed about an inch from Jack Liffey’s ear.
“That’s cold, dude!”
“I’d suggest you talk to Billy de Villiers. He was Fariborz Bayat’s good friend. Call me right after school and I’ll arrange it. I wish you good luck on finding the boys. One liked Bayat quite a lot.”
“Well, laissez les bons temps rouler!”
Toussaint smiled tartly. “One’s accent sucks, my friend.”
“Sit.” The tall, thin Arab named Hassan indicated a spot on the floor with the flat of his hand, as if pointing with a single finger would be rude. A dull red patterned carpet, about three feet by six, had been laid over the beige wall-to-wall of the tract house. Nearby, the sheik sat cross-legged in front of several plates of food on another small carpet, boiled lamb and pots of stewed vegetables that he was plucking out with a piece of limp flatbread and stuffing into his mouth.
“Thanks, sure.” Fariborz was fighting a tendency to talk to them in a kind of stilted baby-talk, trying to make sure these strange men understood him. What he was also trying to do was keep some contact with the commonplace amidst so much that was unfamiliar, even alarming. Two men in turbans who looked like identical twin wrestlers waited behind the sheik with their arms crossed. They looked different from the others, less bronzed, with longer faces, and the boys had learned they were Afghanis, rumored to be former Taliban.
He and Pejman sat uncomfortably, crossing their legs. Yahya was still cowering in the room that they’d been assigned and would not come out with them.
Sheik Arad chewed with his mouth open, smacking and snicking. He made some wordlike noise, perhaps acknowledging them, but they could not make it out. The religious leader was not at all what Fariborz had expected, but they had seen him several times now and they had grown less disturbed by his peculiarities. One eye had a cataract, giving him a permanent wild squint, and his legs were withered—at least what little Fariborz had ever seen of them peeking from under his robe. The boys themselves had given up eating meat sometime back, manufacturing a kind of ascetic Islam for themselves, so they had all been put off by the sheik’s carnivorous diet and his table manners. Letting meat juices run out of one’s mouth did not fit their idea of a holy man’s eating habits, but they had only Hollywood films and their own conjectures to match against this reality. And Arad was definitely real.
“You want eat?” the sheik said. This time they could just make out the words in his guttural croak. The good eye came up to pierce their souls while the other one seemed to be contemplating infinity.
“A little, thank you.”
“Give them eat.” He waved a hand flamboyantly, his robe flapping like a bird’s limp wing. Hassan brought the boys plates. Actually, they wanted to ask him if they could leave Iman to recover at this small Mar Vista religious center while they went back to their own place, a furnished apartment rented under a false name in Burbank. Unfortunately, Fariborz was having trouble working up his courage to ask anything.
The sheik said something else that failed to compute. Pejman reached out for a piece of the flatbread.
“Other hand!” the sheik roared. “What wrong with you? Don’ your mothers teach you nothing here? That is the hand you use to clean up your ass!”
Pejman snatched back his left hand, seeming suddenly to shrink into himself.
Our mothers teach us to wash our hands, Fariborz thought—but it was not something he was going to say aloud.
“This country is a despair. I lack the strength to confront it every time.” Then the sheik seemed to come to some more clement decision in himself. “I conclude you will become good students soon enough. As good as born Arabs.”
Fariborz said nothing. Better than born Arabs, he thought. They knew that Persia had a rich civilization that went back thousands of years before Islam and had been the wellspring of a great deal of Islamic scholarship and culture for much of the last thousand. Islamic mysticism and Sufism had developed there, astronomy, Ibn Sina, the prince of physicians, and generations of great poets like Omar Khayyam and the greatest of all, Rumi. The men in the sheik’s entourage by and large represented the outposts and backwaters of Islam. But he tried not to hold it against them. He reminded himself that a fool could come from a big city, and a saint might be born in a village.
As if reading their thoughts, the sheik used the flat of his hand, palm up, to indicate his guards. “They are from Afghanistan, the home of Tamerlane.” He poked the same hand at himself. “I am from Sudan, birthplace of the Mahdi.” Then he indicated Hassan. “He is from Morocco, the great west of Islam. Yet we are all one. The Umma reveals that the group bond does not depend upon blood, but upon faith in Him.”
“May the blessing and peace of God be upon Him,” the boys said in unison.
Fariborz tried the overcooked and smoky food, but did not like it very much. A voice kept speaking inside him. Time to reconsider, it said. But reconsider what? At every stage they had been driven by logic and devotion. They were young and inexperienced, dropped from somewhere far above into company they could not quite assimilate, and could not seem to assimilate them. He had been living with this heightened disquiet for quite some time now.
For years Fariborz had felt out of place and alone. He was an impostor, constantly having to adjust his disguise amongst Americans so he wouldn’t be found out. But his disguise would no longer work here. He had built himself up as a devout Moslem among Christians and Jews, as a Persian among Americans, and these ploys had served as a cloak of protection for very personal fears he sensed within himself. But here they were all Moslems, and he no longer had a cloak against the deeper loneliness.
The sheik chewed noisily, then extracted a chunk of gristle from his mouth and set it on a nearby plate. Fariborz took a deep breath. “We seek permission, sir, to leave our wounded friend with you and return to our own base.”
He could feel the tension in Pejman. Sheik Arad brought his good eye around to them. The room was tense with command and submission to command.
“No propositions,” the sheik asserted. “There will be no designs outside the grand design. You learners will go to our southern madrasa with Hassan.”
“But, sir—”
His good eye slitted and became even fiercer, and the Afghani bodyguards seemed to lean closer. “I don’t never take no refusals.”
This time the woman who sat in Auslander’s waiting room appeared more or less normal. She was thin and pretty and blond, with her eyes buried in a magazine called Beginnings. She didn’t even look up as he crossed the room to press Auslander’s button. Almost immediately, the man’s head appeared and nodded him in.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“I wasn’t sure, either. I’ve been to the boys’ school but there’s not much to report yet.”
“I didn’t expect much yet.”
Jack Liffey sat exactly where he had sat before and stared at the seascape print, obviously meant to be soothing. Fierce surf pounded down on some jagged rocks. Maybe it would actually be soothing once the sea’s rasp had smoothed the earth down to a billiard ball, he thought.
“Would you like some coffee?”
“No.”
They were both silent for a while.
“So, losing Marlena surprised you with its power. It knocked you for a loop.”
Jack Liffey said nothing.
“That’s what I hear, anyway. I imagine it shook up your sense of yourself and your own strengths. It made it hard to get out of bed in the morning. Made you rethink a lot of your life and wonder where you’re heading.”
Jack Liffey wondered if the door across the office led to the outside world. The window shade was pretty bright, and his sense of the geography of the complicated hallway suggested he was probably at the rear, with the backyard just beyond. He could just walk out.
“Sooner or later that happens to all of us, if we suffer enough of a loss, or a truly unexpected loss. The emotional power of it isn’t really a mystery, or it shouldn’t be. Loss is more or less the primal experience. The first separation from the mother, the first realization that we’re not the center of the universe, the best friend–playmate who moves away. A large enough loss delivers us straight back to childhood. I mean, emotionally.”
Jack Liffey wondered if Dicky Auslander, in his years of dispensing facile advice to desperate people, had ever had one of them come across the room and punch him out. He figured it might even be good for the man, might improve his sense of perspective.
“A place of consolation is gone with the loss, and you’re helpless about it. But as an adult, you no longer have the defenses of childhood, so it’s really worse. You can’t invent some kind of magic meaning for your loss. You know better now. Loss is just loss.”
He noticed that Auslander had buttoned his open-necked shirt wrong, an extra buttonhole flying high under his chin. He thought about striding across the office, pushing him down in the chair, and then wrenching the shirt open to rebutton it for him. It would be very satisfying.
“The anguish of loss is like being trapped in a moment of time that can never change, never get better,” Auslander pontificated. “Like right now. If we go on glaring at each other for fifty-five minutes, it’s going to get pretty boring.”
“I thought there was a rule in psychology that the party in question has to ask for help to do any good.”
“It’s not hard and fast. There’s such a thing as intervention when things get bad. As Lon and Virginia tried to do for you, by talking to me. It’s a sign they care for you.”
Once more there was a faint but terrible shriek from one of the other rooms. It was weak, yet quite distinct. And as it came again, over and over like a ritual of pain giving, then tailed off, they both looked at the wall as if they could see through it to that horrible distress. It reminded him that there were other, haunted, worlds all around, overlapping his, and many were much worse. “Count your blessings,” Auslander suggested.
“I thought you said something about a way to make this entertaining.”
Auslander readjusted his lanky body and grimaced. “Are you comfortable?”
“Yes, Aaron.”
“Let’s try this. You’re a detective, right? The single most popular genre of popular fiction—I think I’m right in this—is detective novels, broadly construed to include what they call police procedurals and crime novels and similar things. Let’s agree to look at your life as if it’s fiction. I’ll interrogate you on why you feel a need to go around detecting things, and just so it’s fair, you can pretend I’m the author of your life. I’m the big, bad guy who’s devising your adventures and leaving you so forlorn, taking away Marlena, et cetera, et cetera. You can interrogate me on why I should want to write about a detective in the first place, let alone punish him so much.”
“Aaron—”
“Come on, Jack. Give us a break. What are you so afraid of?”
“I’m not really a detective, Dicky.” Somehow, using the nickname gave him enough of an edge to keep from losing his cool. “I was a tech writer in aerospace before the whole industry eighty-sixed in Southern California and promoted me to a small part of the peace dividend. I was at a loss and I fell into this job. It’s a long story, but eight or nine years ago—maybe more—a guy from South Africa contacted me. I’d known him years and years ago, and his teenage daughter was hitching around the U.S. and she had stopped writing all of a sudden, her last letter home postmarked Hollywood. He sent me her photo and, as a courtesy, I made a bunch of copies and posted it around and asked some questions up on the Strip. Sure enough, I found out she’d been sucked into this cult up in Canyon Country—you know, that goofy minister who lured all the lost kids up to his sweatshop and put them to work making multicolored leather jackets.
“He had a business sense I guess, if you count a knack for enslaving lost kids a business sense, but otherwise he was a complete paranoid loon. He did everything but wear a tinfoil hat to keep the beams from space from controlling him, and he had guys with guns posted all around his leather-jacket ranch up in Acton. I hired an ex-cop to go up there with me and get the girl out, but the cop turned out to be such a rum-dum, I had to do most of the snatch myself. Which I did pretty damn well, if I do say so myself, and I got her home, and when the aerospace job vanished, it occurred to me that locating missing kids was something I could do.”
“It’s more than that,” Auslander suggested after a few pregnant moments. “That first time may have been an accident for you, but then you kept on doing it.”
Jack Liffey shrugged. “Finding lost kids isn’t such a bad calling, all in all. I can’t stand the thought of a child being abused—I never could.”
There was a crash next door and then a tense silence. It only interrupted them for a few moments.
“Do some role playing, Jack,” Auslander insisted. “Think of me as your author and complain about your lot. What are you afraid of?”
He wondered if he was ever going to be able to get out of there without obliging this loon.
“Not a fucking chance.”
Auslander smiled and rocked a little in his big executive chair. “I think I write about you because I need a hero, somebody brave and tireless and honest who can go out and turn up rocks and see what’s underneath. And, of course, take all the punishment that entails.”
If only this guy really were in charge, Jack Liffey thought. If only he could walk over there and give Auslander a big punch in the face for all his troubles.
“If you feel compelled to be a mystery writer, Dicky, write about somebody else. Leave me alone.”
“Do you really think you’ve turned children’s lives around?”
It sounded like a sincere question, and it gave him pause. Jack Liffey thought back over the last few years. Not counting the runaways that he’d found within a few days, hanging out at the Golden Cup on Hollywood Boulevard and nursing their sexual ambivalence, or the lost kids where he’d done no more than post a few notices and call in the cops, there had been five memorable cases that he could recall.
“Okay, Dicky. Here’s the ones I remember.”
The first had involved a young Chicano who had lost his mother and was now in Hermosillo, Mexico with his grandmother, a schoolteacher, and probably a lot better off than hanging out with his tagger crew in East L.A. The second, he’d tracked down a precocious and rather insufferable teenage girl who had fancied herself a filmmaker and now wrote him regularly to keep him up-to-date on her progress toward an anthropology degree at Columbia. Lately she had begun writing about the hollowness and cultural imperialism of anthropology, and had begun talking of going into the Peace Corps. After that, he’d located a boy who had been pretty far gone down the road to seeing himself as a religious savior and he’d brought him back to his parents. That boy, too, still wrote Jack Liffey from time to time, and after a year of community college, he’d ended up running a conservation camp, what the State had once called a reform school, far out in the Owens Valley on the eastern flank of the Sierras. The semiholy road.
A young Vietnamese student he’d been hired to find turned out to have been dead before he even took the case, so there wasn’t much he could have done for her, but an older Vietnamese woman he’d met in that case had gone on to marry a conservative state senator from Orange County and got him to cosponsor a number of gay-rights bills that no other Republican would touch. That had to be a plus of some kind. And just a year earlier, he’d linked up with a little African-American girl who had remained friends with his own daughter, and was assiduously banging out folktales about magic on a secondhand computer he’d bought her with some of the reward money from her grandparents.
Of course, these lives might have worked out okay without him—it was the kind of thing you would never know—but he liked thinking he might have given each of them a nudge in the right direction.
“Jeez, Jack, I’m glad I created you. You might have saved more kids than me.” He wasn’t sure irony wasn’t leaking in now. “You’re my existential hero, and for hundreds and hundreds of readers.”
“Hundreds? I want an author with a bigger publisher.”