“Over to you. Give me eighteen,” Maeve exulted.
It was a real fatherly dilemma he faced, having seen the word the instant she had played B-L-O-W across on his C-R-U-M-B down on the Scrabble board. He had another B, and he had a J and an O, too, and there were three empty spaces after blow that would put him right onto the triple word at the edge and give him—let’s see—sixty-three points with the triple word. Too bad there was no blowjeb. He had an E, and he’d go for that. Even Loco would have approved of that, and he was pretty protective.
The dog lay across Maeve’s feet, as if afraid Maeve would go away again if he didn’t stay in affectionate contact. Maeve had won the feral beast’s heart with gobs of love, as opposed to the carefully metered affection Jack Liffey himself had offered, on his theory of consistency: You offered today only what you were willing to offer every day. There was still a coyote wanderlust that flattened out Loco’s yellow canine eyes from time to time, leaving them depthless and a bit panicky. But, for some reason, the dog hadn’t put up much of a fuss at giving up the big yard at Marlena’s to retrench to Jack Liffey’s enclosed condo and patio, at least as long as Maeve appeared from time to time.
“Would you accept ‘btfsplk’?” he said. “It’s Urdu for the little dark cloud that hangs over your head to make you gloomy.”
“That’s not Urdu,” she said scornfully. “It’s Dogpatch.”
“You do know more than Dickens and the Brontës.”
“I bet you’ve never heard of Puff Daddy,” she challenged.
“That some kind of snake? I think Bugs Bunny is the high-water mark of American popular culture, and I can skip everything that came after. Bugs minds his own business in that fine cocky Brooklyn way, gnawing on his carrot, but if you cross him he’ll get back to you, first with wit and then with a terrible vengeance.”
“Yes, Dad, I’ve heard of Bugs Bunny.”
He laid down two tiles. “I’ll have to settle for Jot. Ten points.”
She rotated the board gingerly on the dining table. “What’s your next move going to be in the Becky case?”
Case, he thought. “The standard move, from page 209 of Detecting for Dummies.”
“Dad. You promised. I lay off if you keep me informed.”
“A promise is a promise.” Between their next few moves, he told her what he had learned that day about the boy. His next step, he thought, would be to get his friend Art Castro to find out what he could about Sheik Arad—Castro was a real detective in a big agency downtown with decades of files and lots of contacts and resources, even little microphones in martini olives—and Art owed him a favor.
Later that evening, he planned to go talk to Billy de Villiers, Fariborz’s friend from school, he told her. He wasn’t a boarder like the others, and it was just a jaunt over to Venice to his home.
“Looks like you got it covered.”
“You can read or watch your favorite TV show while I go talk to Billy.”
“My favorite show was on last night—Bowling for Blowjobs.”
His back stiffened. Kathy had warned him that Maeve was getting mouthy. “Maeve Mary!”
She smirked. “I could tell the letters you had. Right onto a triple word and a million points, but Victorian prudery held you back.”
“It’s not something a man discusses with his fifteen-year-old daughter.”
“Almost sixteen.”
“Almost counts only in horseshoes.”
“What’s horseshoes?”
“Doesn’t anybody play it anymore?” he asked. “I’m sure I’ve seen the metal posts in the park.”
“Oh, that thing. How does ‘almost’ count?”
“A ringer counts three points—that’s when the horseshoe clangs onto the post and stays on. I think ‘almost’ means it’s lying less than one horseshoe-width from the post. That’s one point.”
“If somebody puts it on the Internet, it’ll be big.”
His old CD player came to an end and started to recycle some Chicago blues, J. B. Hutto and Junior Wells. More old-guy stuff to her, he figured, but she ought to pick up a bit of it. The kids who knew only the current popular culture were going to end up terribly deprived, all that in-your-face testosterone, no shadings of emotion.
“I’d hate to see a simple old American game turned into some digital racket with machine guns and splattered goop. Simplicity is its beauty.”
“You’re still changing the subject, Dad. I know what a blowjob is. Remember when I walked in on you and Mar in the bathroom?”
“I’d rather not talk about Marlena, either.” He was still changing the subject, of course, but he really didn’t want to talk about Marlena.
She stared hard at him, with real tenderness. “Have you been sad about Mar, Dad?”
He wondered if everyone had joined the Let’s-Help-Jack Club. “Sure, some. I guess it was the shock. It was like a horse kicked me, actually.”
“You know, you two were super different.”
“I know that, hon, but she had a really big heart, and that meant a lot to me.” He felt himself choking up a little, and he stepped hard on it.
Maeve hurriedly came around the table and sat on his lap to hug him. “So do you, Dad. You’ve got a heart the size of a Cadillac.”
He held himself rigid to keep from giving in to the emotion, but he felt his eyes start to burn. This was getting altogether too frequent and too exasperating, he thought.
“A VW-size heart is good enough for me,” he said, as evenly as he could.
The de Villiers house was the tiniest of bungalows on a little walking path called Florita Court, face-to-face with a half dozen other bungalows separated by handkerchief-sized lawns and tiny plots of geraniums and pansies that were all fading now into eerie evening shadow. He wondered how somebody living here could afford Kennedy-Westridge.
The peephole darkened up. “Mr. Liffey?” It was a mellow voice through the door, with a strange accent, like British run through a sieve. He had called ahead and heard the same accent.
“Jack Liffey. Mrs. Aneliese de Villiers?”
He heard a chain come away and then several bolts, like a New York door. He was actually a little stunned when he saw her, a lot of flyaway blond hair and a face that could launch quite a few ships, though maybe not a thousand. Probably late forties, but looking less.
“Please come in.”
She backed away. Or the rest of her backed away, but her breasts pretty much stayed right there, making the cottage seem even smaller than it was.
“Thanks. Is Billy available?”
“He’s closeted in the bedroom, working on his computer. You have no idea how precious privacy can be in a house this small.” She pronounced it PRIV-a-cee.
“I can try hard.”
She smiled and lit him up like a searchlight. Her eyes were the deepest blue, the blue of the sky high up in the mountains above the dustiest layers of the atmosphere. “Please sit down for a few moments. Our agreement is he finishes his algebra before TV or any other interruptions.”
“Bless you,” he said. “And all who sail with you. I don’t know many mothers who could enforce that these days.” He sat on a threadbare sofa of some dark indeterminate pattern.
“Could I get you something to drink?”
“Water would be fine.”
“I have some tolerable cabernet, and various types of mixed drinks.”
“No, thanks.” As she left to fetch him the water from a tiny side kitchen, he looked over the room. Pattern on pattern, wallpaper and rug and curtain, plus a print of a shaggy Highland bull. The room looked prewar British, or what he would have guessed was prewar British, mostly from watching PBS. “Where are you from?” he called.
“Zambia, though it was called Northern Rhodesia when we left. It was long ago, when we were trying to hold on to it. Anyone who could count knew it was time to go. And I didn’t like the ugly way the whites talked about the blacks. My husband and I took what was called the ‘chicken run,’ and never looked back. We lost a small business in Lusaka in the process, like a lot of white refugees.”
“Is Billy Zambian?”
“Oh, no. He was born here.”
“And his father?”
There was a tiny hard glitter in her eyes. “I no longer need to punish myself over him, or deceive or compromise myself. I’m quite fortunate.”
“Whoa, I detect anger.”
“Quite a lot of rage, actually. The less said … Do you have children, Mr. Liffey?”
“Jack, please. A wonderful daughter who knows more about Victorian literature than I do, about Billy’s age. Her mother and I are divorced as well.”
Aneliese de Villiers sat down in an overstuffed chair and smoothed her cotton skirt over her knees; but when she was through smoothing, even more knee seemed to show. They were nice knees. “It’s been quite a transformation from our youth, hasn’t it?” she suggested. “I didn’t know a single child in my school whose parents were divorced.”
He thought for a moment. “I knew one in my neighborhood, but just one. It seemed like an immense tragedy for the poor boy, hush-hush, not to be talked about. I think we both grew up in a strange postwar moment in history that will never be repeated. Our fathers came through the Depression and then the big war, desperate to make everything as stable and peaceful and respectable as possible. They pretty much did, but then our generation blew it.” He thought of Marlena again and decided to change the subject. “Do you miss Africa?”
“It gets into your blood. But I’ve made a life here.”
He was about to ask about her life here when the inner door opened and a handsome boy with short hair came through.
“Come in and sit with us, Billy. This is Mr. Liffey, the man who wants to ask you about Fariborz.”
The boy came across and offered a polite friendly hand. Nothing surly or distant at all, and Jack Liffey wondered if he’d somehow woken in a parallel world that was populated with tidy, obedient, attentive children. The boy sat gently on the edge of the sofa. He was wearing a T-shirt with a big photo of Jim Morrison.
“Pleased to meet you, sir. Fari was my best friend until all that Persian Mafia stuff. Or whatever you want to call it.”
Jack Liffey half-wished the mother would leave, to let the boy talk more freely, but the other half found the woman so agreeable to look at that he was glad she was staying. And where was there to go in that tiny cottage, anyway? “How long had you known … you called him ‘Fari’?”
“Uh-huh. Sometimes he was Frankie, too, until he got hyper-Persian. We met the first week we were at K-W three years ago—we were put in the same rush group when we were freshmen. We both loved old rock from the sixties, like Hendrix and The Doors, and we wrote poetry together. Song lyrics, really. He set them to music with his guitar. A few months ago, he smashed the guitar and burned his copies of the songs. It was Iman’s doing. That little Hitler thought he was some kind of ayatollah, purifying his circle.”
“Do you have any idea where they went?”
“No.”
“Would you tell me if you did?”
“I wouldn’t protect those creeps for all the tea in China.”
“Billy.” His mother leaned forward. Apparently, negativity was frowned upon in this household.
“They are creeps, Mom. I’m sorry, but they are. They made Fari drop me so he couldn’t even speak to me anymore. I could see it hurting him, but he went and did it. He was my only real friend there. The rest of them don’t like poor kids very much.”
There was something hysterical welling up inside the boy, some emotion that he had long suppressed leaking upward, seeping into his speech patterns and visibly thickening his features. Jack Liffey could see the pain in the mother’s face.
“It’s not the money, they say.” Sarcasm dripped from his voice. “No, not at all—it’s just that you don’t share our experiences. You’re not part of our world. You wouldn’t understand so many things that are important to us.”
His mother covered her eyes, and Jack Liffey tried to change the subject. “What about Becky Auslander? Did she have the same experience you did with the Persians?”
“Becky,” the boy repeated, and there was an even harder note in his voice. “The one good thing about this whole Persian Mafia was breaking up Fariborz’s relationship with that little bitch.”
Aneliese de Villiers gasped a little, then covered her mouth to prevent more.
“She was a money-grubber. Fari was one of the richest boys in the school, and that’s all Becky was after, believe me.”
Jack Liffey secretly savored this criticism of Auslander’s daughter. “So why did she disappear at the same time the Persian boys did? Do you have any idea?”
He shrugged elaborately. “Maybe her Gucci watch stopped and she committed suicide.”
“Billy! Whatever you think of the young woman, you mustn’t joke about suicide.”
“I’m sorry.” But he wasn’t. “Fari never saw her for what she was. Never. You know, she never split a tab, not once, even for Cokes. It was Iman who made Fari give her up, but for the wrong reasons. Probably because she was an infidel or some such word. I don’t know why I’m so mad at her. She was a climber, but it’s those jerks who snubbed me. Now I don’t have any friends at all at Kennedy! Not one!”
There was a choked sob. Jack Liffey had had his eye on the mother’s pain at that instant so he missed the heave as the boy jumped to his feet. He bolted out the front door, leaving it open.
“Billy!” She stood up, but her own emotion ran down before she got far. She stood forlornly on the tiny porch for a moment and then came back inside and closed the door softly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Liffey.”
“Jack. Mr. Liffey was my dad.”
“He’s not usually like this at all. I’ve been thinking for some time that I should pull him out of Kennedy. It seemed like such an opportunity for him when it came up, but I always had mixed feelings.”
“Is his father paying?” He wondered if that was an impertinence, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“It’s a scholarship I heard about at work, but the kids there are so snobbish. I think he’s been trying to please me by staying. He’s a very giving boy. I wish he’d learn to please himself more.”
“It looks like he’s starting to learn,” he offered.
She nodded. “Or cracking under the strain. Are you sure I can’t get you something, Jack?”
“I’m sure, but have something yourself.”
“I believe I will.” He helped her open a bottle of Chilean cabernet in the cramped kitchen, and she told him that she drove her son over the hill to the school every morning before going on to work as a secretary in the fund-raising department of the Braille Institute near L.A. City College. He sniffed the wine on the air as she held a big goblet and he was sorely tempted. The wine wasn’t the only temptation going, of course. She touched his arm briefly as they went back to the living room and his skin burned where her fingers had been.
“When Billy calms down, I’d like to talk to him again. Do you think that would be all right?”
“I’d like that,” she said. And it seemed more of a response to what he’d really been asking.
* * *
Hassan drove the beat-up old panel truck like a rodeo cowboy on a bull. Away from Sheik Arad, he wore a permanent grin, as if a bawdy joke had just occurred to him. But Fariborz did not think the tall, thin man had ever heard a bawdy joke, or would know what to do with one. Fariborz had to cling to the door handle and a big strap bolted to the floor where a passenger seat had once been. The only seat was the driver’s seat.
“Western-inspired socialism has failed,” the man called over the roar of the old engine. “Nationalism has failed. Islam has shown that it is the only force in the world that can fill the great vacuum. Praise Allah.”
“Praise Allah. How did you end up in America?” Fariborz asked.
“Had to get out. I was just starting at Hassan the First University in Settat. My namesake. That’s near Casablanca. We formed an Islamic association the first month.” He grinned. “Some of us issued a declaration for an end to kings and other backwardness. And we declared for shari’a law and an Islamic republic. They shut the whole university down the next day.”
“I thought Morocco was an Islamic country.”
“Of course. This is a Christian country. What would happen if somebody declared mandatory poverty and turning the other cheek, eh?”
He did seem to have a sense of humor. “I see what you mean. But why come to America?”
“My father was a poor artisan. He hammered brass in a shop in the souk in Marrakech and sold it to tourists. Tray tables and other junk. He saved his money for years to make a better life for me. He saw it all going up in smoke, and he was furious at me. I had a cousin in Detroit, so I was sent to stay with him and study at a community college for a while. Detroit is the Arab capital of America. That’s were I met the sheik. He saved me from a life of drifting along with the secular tides.”
Hassan sat back in the torn and patched bucket seat and clung to the wheel with both hands. The rest of the truck was a litter of oily tools and cable. For the first time, Fariborz noticed that Hassan wore a Captain Midnight decoder ring on his little finger, the kind of thing you got in a plastic bubble in a gum machine. On the dash there was an utterly anomalous bumper sticker that said: If we’re not supposed to eat animals, bow come they’re made out of meat? He wondered if it was left over from a previous owner.
“He is quite an inspiration if you give him a chance.”
A backhanded compliment, Fariborz thought. At least the man acknowledged that there were things about the sheik that could seem disconcerting. Fariborz readjusted himself where he squatted, trying not to jounce too much as the stiff suspension hammered over the freeway joints. The stump of Iman’s wrist was wrapped tight and he was knocked out on painkillers, his condition stabilized by a sympathetic doctor Sheik Arad had brought in. They were headed now to some redoubt the sheik maintained near the Mexican border. He called it a madrasa—a religious school—but Fariborz guessed the location had been chosen more for quick getaways.
“Islam alone can inspire the young and give them a positive vision, a sense of allegiance. We are the forward finger of Islam pressed on the raw nerve of decadence.”
The finger is a long, long way from home, Fariborz thought, with or without a decoder ring. “How did the sheik end up in America? Sudan is really an Islamic country.”
The driver was silent a moment. “It was the will of Allah.”
“Of course. But Allah usually works through human motivations,” Fariborz said. “There must be a reason.”
“Do you mean reason as objective, or reason as cause, or reason as logic, or reason as justification?”
This Moroccan’s a lot smarter than he seems, Fariborz thought. “I mean, did he have some purpose coming to America?”
“Can you see into the mind of God?”
“Sheik Arad is not God.”
“He is favored of God. I myself have watched him look into a man’s heart and pluck out his secrets. I have seen him predict the winds. At night he sits on his carpet and soars out the window high over the city and observes everything that happens.”
“You’re not serious?”
Hassan bellowed a laugh, but it was hard to tell what it meant.
“Don’t mistake yourself. Sheik Arad can do many damn strange things.”
People were never simple, Fariborz thought. You just convinced yourself that someone like Hassan was shrewd and intelligent, and then he rubbed this eccentric Aladdin’s lamp hidden away in his mind and out flew djinns and magic carpets that made you wonder.
“Beware how you judge, Fariborz, lad. Sheik Arad is not a sophisticated man, it is true, but he knows what is right and wrong and how to make things right. All the meanings will be revealed to you in time.”
Fariborz subsided. His anxiety had only increased with the talk of the sheik, and the enigma of Hassan’s character. He rolled onto his left side so he could speak quietly to Pejman, in the back with Yahya. Pejman looked tense and lost and forsaken, though Fariborz might have been projecting his own feelings a bit. He didn’t much mind being the angry finger of Islam, if it pointed out evil and corruption in a forceful way, but he didn’t want to hurt anyone in the process, and he was worried that the sheik’s circle did not share those sentiments at all. He was pretty sure that none of his friends would go along with real violence, except maybe Iman. But Iman probably hadn’t thought about much but pain and the loss of his hand for several days now.
“Pejman, you remember that night of the suitcase? …” Of course he knew his friend did, they all did—it was the moment when everything had started to go wrong, when they had hurried back to their apartment in confusion—but talking about it had been taboo for weeks now.
“Shoot, Fari, how could I forget?” That night Pejman had gone on to declare, almost sacrilegiously, that the event taking place was their flight from Mecca. He meant that that night marked a point in their own lives that would remain as much a milestone to them as Mohammed’s night flight to Yathrib to escape his murderers, the night when Allah intervened to save the Prophet’s life, the date that now marks year zero of the Islamic calendar.
“I know.”
“Do not despair, Allah is with us,” Pejman said, echoing what the Prophet had said the night of the flight to Yathrib, but there was no confidence in his own voice. To save Mohammed, God had placed a spiderweb across the cave mouth to divert the murderers, but Fariborz could find no parallel assistance in their own affairs, none at all.
He had to ask it for the hundredth time, because he had been in another room when it all went down. “Are you sure it was Becky?”
Pejman’s eyes firmed up with hostility, but he didn’t reply.
“What do you think has become of her?”
“She was your girlfriend, Fari. You never let yourself see what she was. We could have done so much with that money.”
In his heart of hearts, Fariborz was not so sure he wanted a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills. The world was simpler and purer this way, even though it seemed to be turning out a lot more dangerous.