In the Times that morning, sandwiched between the relentless department-store ads of women with come-hither eyes showing off push-up bras, there was a small report on page 17 about a truck bound from Mexico to L.A. that had been hijacked and driven out into rural Riverside County, somewhere near Lake Elsinore, where it had been looted of its contents. A Mexican national driving the truck had been killed execution-style. The truck and trailer had then been shot up with automatic weapons and torched. The Riverside sheriff’s department suggested that it was an unusually brutal attack for a hijacking and looked more like something the Arellanos or one of the other Baja drug cartels would offer as an object lesson.
What had caught his eye was the fact that the truck was owned by a Los Angeles manufacturer of decorative stone surfacing called LA ROX. Jack Liffey telephoned, but a chastened-sounding Farshad Bayat wouldn’t talk about the hijacking on the phone. He agreed to meet him at home late in the afternoon.
A half hour later, Jack Liffey was only a few blocks from his condo, idling at a light, when he noticed two grizzled old men in antiquated military uniforms with tin hats and puttees leading a string of mules up Jefferson, like sourdoughs planning to dig for gold in the Ross-Dress-for-Less parking lot. The old men looked pretty happy about things, and waved now and then at the traffic. One of them carried a bugle which he brought to his lips now and then and blatted.
Each mule wore a blue saddle blanket fringed with gold, and the last two carried big professionally printed signs on their backs that waggled hypnotically with the stolid mule shamble. The first said, Bring Back Muleskinners. And the second said, The U.S. Army Has Never Lost a War in Which Mules Were Used.
Jack Liffey mused for a moment about the claim, something he had never really considered, of course. It occurred to him that the United States had never really won a war in which jets were used, either. Depending on how you scored Korea. Iraq wasn’t a war, it was a cruel turkey shoot against a hopeless underequipped army. One of the mules dumped on the sidewalk just as the light changed and the mule behind it sidestepped the pile with great delicacy.
He drove on, giving the procession a little wave. Things had been grainy and unpleasant for a long time, the boundaries blurring wherever he looked—but now he saw that it was all distinct; it was all simple; it was all funny. He was headed up to West Hollywood to talk to Dicky Auslander, MFCC, PhD, and that was the funniest part of all.
“Come on in, Jack.”
“Sure, Dicky. Dicky … I’m getting to like the name.”
Jack Liffey wasn’t sure but he thought Auslander frowned a little at that, walking ahead of him. He followed him into the interview room and sat on the sofa as Auslander scribbled something on a yellow pad. The man had finally moved the plant a foot from the sofa, leaving the patient more headroom. Through the wall there was an irregular dull bapping sound, like a fist into a catcher’s mitt, over and over. “What’s going on?”
“My partner does marriage counseling, and sometimes he encourages them to use pugil sticks.”
“Those big rubber Q-tips that people hit each other with?”
“That’s the thing.”
“Seems pretty childish for old married couples.”
“We’re all pretty childish, given a sufficiently charitable perspective, Jack. Wouldn’t you like a few minutes go at your ex? Some people can burrow down into it, get out their hostilities and use the anger to help them do some of the growing up they never managed.”
“If that’s the game, I’ll just go back to making model airplanes.”
“Would you really?” Auslander asked as he sat.
“No, Dicky, I really wouldn’t. I liked the smell of the glue, though.” Never give a psychologist an inch, even in jest, he thought. “What would you say if I reported that some people describe your daughter as a ruthless social climber?”
That stopped the man for a moment, and the bapping next door seemed to redouble as somebody cried out angrily in pain. Auslander pursed his lips and seemed to try to blow through his mouth while the lips were closed. “I thought I suggested you start by looking for the Iranian boys.”
“You shrink the heads, I find the kids. I won’t tell you what’s childish behavior, and you don’t tell me how to do my job.”
He nodded glumly.
“I’ll find your daughter, Dicky, if you really want her found. It’s what I do.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. Nobody seems to have liked her very much, and some say she didn’t like you very much.”
He sighed and real pain flitted across his features. “Her younger sister is the sweetest girl you can imagine. Sometimes they just turn out a certain way and there’s nothing you did, and not a damn thing you can do to change it. Rebecca is a handful, but she’s still my daughter and I love her. Just the way you love Maeve.”
Maybe not just, Jack Liffey demurred in his head. “When she was young, did you go on family vacations?”
“Some.”
“Where?”
Auslander seemed to think it over, like a burglar holding back his alibi. “The Russian River when she was very young, before it became a hundred percent gay. Then Roatan in Honduras—that’s a fancy resort island off the east coast. Ensenada a couple of times when she was a teen. She seemed to like Ensenada—I think because she met a boy at the University of Baja there. I sent a guy to look for her down there, but he got nowhere.”
“Does she speak Spanish?”
“She took it in school. Probably not very well.” He looked a bit sheepish. “There’s a reason I wasn’t very serious about looking in Mexico, Jack. Rebecca has a nasty racist streak. I don’t know where it came from. Neither my wife nor I ever disparaged minorities in front of her. I suppose it’s classism as much as racism. She seems to scorn any group that has a high percentage of poor people—blacks, Central Americans, Mexicans. You only had to see the disdain on her face when she looked at somebody a bit ragged. And she kept using words like ‘beaner’ and ‘greaseball.’ Since it was mostly the well-off who’d fled Iran, she didn’t mind them so much as a minority.”
“And they’re Aryans who seem to own a lot of Rolexes.”
“There’s that.”
Bap-bap-whap. There was a sudden explosion of cursing behind the wall, and Jack Liffey smiled to himself. Nothing like growing up fast.
“Have you found out anything?”
“Just things to think about. There’s no point in me getting your hopes up.”
“How about your own life? You look a little less tense than the last time I saw you.”
That was disconcerting. If somebody like Dicky Auslander could read him that easily, he really did need help. And there had been nothing more than a vague expression of interest from a woman—two women—to brighten up his horizon. “I guess it’s just getting my teeth into a job. It always perks me up.”
“Not a new woman?”
“Nope.”
“Let’s return to our little metaphor of life, all right?”
“You know what I’d like not to do, Dicky? I’d like not to do that again.”
“Come on, indulge my metaphor. I’m the author of the detective story of your life. And you’ve got this burning sensation in your soul, something that you’ve just got to complain about.”
“If you want to be accurate, that detective-story thing isn’t a metaphor, Dicky. It’s a paradigm.”
“You’re the one who took English lit. Are you still pissed off at me for writing a story that leaves you so unhappy? I mean, because I took away so many things that you thought you could rely on?”
Jack Liffey glared a moment and then decided the only way out of this nightmare was to humor the man. “I wouldn’t be opposed to having all the normal stuff in life fall into my lap instead of out of it, yeah, sure. Home, wife, job, money. And I don’t like feeling I’m stuck outside the amusement park without a ticket, looking in over the hedge while everybody else is having fun on the Matter-horn ride. But I reckon that’s just the human condition.”
“Not necessarily. I think you have a tendency to romanticize being an outsider.”
It was lucky there was nothing within reach to throw, Jack Liffey thought. It was no wonder this guy’s daughter’s soul had gotten all twisted up.
“It’s an ordinary human tendency to romanticize what we seem to be stuck with, even the bad stuff, so we can value it and live with it. Let’s put it in terms you can buy into. Dostoyevsky romanticized his pain. Twain romanticized his cynicism. Hemingway romanticized his penis. Romanticizing only gets in the way if you need to be really grounded in reality.”
“I guess I missed that lit class that covered Hemingway’s penis.”
“You know there’s still a lot of gender socialization that goes on. It might stem from something vaguely like Jung’s collective unconscious. Maybe some deep survivals of what we had to learn to reproduce the species. Whatever. You can think of it as sex-linked hormones working their magic on the chemical processes in the brain. But girls and boys really do develop in different ways.”
“No shit. Let me write that down.”
“Something impels girls to be nurturers. They practice it all the time by engaging with their dolls, with their pets, with one another—overengaging, really. You can see them cooing and petting all the time. If that practice never matures, if it freezes at some immature level, it leads to a kind of gross sentimentality. They grow up clinging to things furiously. They gasp and weep at news of faraway car wrecks that hurt people they never knew. They become immobilized by emotion. They can’t make transitions. The trait is frozen way beyond a useful sympathy, it becomes a need.”
Dicky Auslander uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the opposite way. His hands fiddled with a pen in a way that suggested he had once been a heavy smoker. Jack Liffey figured he was thinking out loud, just working out some article he was working on for Psychology for Idiots.
“On the other side, boys are the guardians of the tribe, the warriors. Why? I don’t know. We’re thousands of years past the need for all that, but it’s still there. So instead of engaging, boys stand off a ways, on guard. They develop a critical distance. I’ll bet you used to sit in the front row of the science-fiction movie, making fun of all the bad science and implausibility. The wiseguy is a kind of practice for being a warrior. Look at the African-American boys practicing their dozens game on their street corners, developing their social confidence. And if most of us boys think we’ve got to learn to be warriors for the race, you’ve got it even worse, Mr. Detective. You’re the guy I send out there in the hard rain to find those in trouble—even my own daughter.”
“You’re getting your ‘yous’ mixed up there. You’re either God or you’re Dicky with the missing daughter.” But you couldn’t divert the man once he got up a head of steam.
“And I just might be sending you out ill-equipped on your mission. A boy’s critical distance can fail to mature, too, leaving you stuck in this outsider persona. You end up thinking you’re Camus or somebody. You feel you can never really belong anywhere. You’ve got your nose pushed right up against a big, cold window that’s going to shut you out forever. Other people go inside and let their hair down and laugh in the dance hall. Not you.”
“You go to a lot of dance halls?”
“Unfortunately, the only trustworthy knowledge of the world comes from direct contact. So the more you’re stuck with this picture of yourself as a romantic outsider, the more you’re doomed to work on secondhand information, to be untouchable, insulated from real life.”
“I’ll point that out the next time somebody takes a shot at me.” He’d been shot twice on his last big job, saved from death only by brute good luck. One bullet had left him with two cracked ribs, and another had accomplished what the ER people called a through-and-through at the left shoulder that had left him with an arm he couldn’t lift above the horizontal. He also had a metal plate in his head from another job. All in all, he didn’t feel very untouchable.
“This isn’t literal. It’s about your psyche and what goes on inside there.”
“Fine, Dicky. But you know the profound truth I’ve noticed about men and women? I’ve noticed women absolutely never rob liquor stores. I think they’re probably just more evolved than we are.”
There was one hard bap-bap-bap next door, and then a terrible shriek and a dying moan.
“Fifty-five minutes must be up,” Jack Liffey said.
Auslander looked a little concerned at the sound of the last blow. “Think it over. Maybe we can go back together and rewrite a chapter or two of your career—you’ve got a few years left. Maybe we can write a happy ending—get you feeling like you belong here with the rest of us. Most of the things in life don’t really torment us per se, Jack—it’s just the way we end up thinking about them that torments us.”
“Wait’ll you get yourself a messy divorce or two, Dicky. I find you can really look hard at the way you think about something like that and, what the hell, there’s a reality in there that actually hurts.”
“Same time, three days.”
“You doing sex with Trev?”
Eremy had to shout over the noisy Triumph TR3 engine. Sixteen and a half, and she had her license, plus access to a really righteous car. Maeve was envious.
“Good grief, no!” Maeve called back.
“You haven’t touched his penis yet?”
“No. We just kiss, and a little tongue. A couple times I let him touch my breast, but only over the bra.”
Eremy grinned and shifted down, roaring, then stopped for the red light. Her brother Petros had taught her how to drive the restored sports car, double-clutching and matching revs by rolling her foot from brake to gas, and she loved it all, though it was really still his car. “I let Jarrod do it on my stomach. Not inside. It wasn’t much fun, but then he did me with his finger. Haven’t you let anybody do that?”
“Is it great?”
“Oh, wow. Like, the earth moves, Maevie. I get shooting stars right now thinking about it.” One of her hands went toward her blouse and Maeve could see her nipple had hardened up against the thin blouse.
“You mean like Maria, the Rabbit?” For Whom the Bell Tolls had been the last-but-one book in their reading club.
“Yeah. Just like that. Wouldn’t our parents drop a load if they knew!”
“I have a feeling that happens every generation. You know, everybody ends up doing all these things eventually.”
“Yeah, but it’s worse when your folks come from some old country where women have to pretend they’re a kind of inferior species. Like, they could try to arrange a marriage to some old geezer I don’t even know, with warts all over his face, and then I’d shoot myself.”
“Would they ever do that?”
“I don’t think so, but they sent Petros home to Armenia this summer.”
“No wonder you’ve got his car. He’s not over there looking for a wife?”
“I bet that’s what they had in mind. You know, Mom and Dad’ve never even been in Armenia, not the real thing. It was still Soviet Armenia when they left for Iran and they couldn’t visit.” She made a big helpless gesture with one arm. “But you’d think we were still living there. All they ever talk about is the Armenian genocide, the horrible terrible Armenian genocide. Man, like nobody else ever died.”
“What’s that?”
She slammed the brakes hard for a light, and Maeve had to brace herself against the dash. “I forget nobody else knows about it. I think it was in World War I and the Turks were ruling most of Armenia and they were Moslems. The Turks decided to wipe out the Armenians who were Christians. They killed a million people or something like that and drove the rest of them out into the desert and took their property. I suppose it really was a pretty big deal, but I’m tired of hearing about it, you know? Mostly my folks get worked up because Turkey still denies that it ever happened. It’s weird you can kill a whole country and say it didn’t happen.”
“It’s worse than weird,” Maeve said.
“Here’s the street.”
They turned off Lincoln onto a tiny lane called Leeward, heading for the building Eremy’s uncle Armen had told her about. Apparently Sheik Arad was fairly well known in the Venice area. The man had gathered a circle of followers around him and bought an ordinary ranch house that he turned into a compound that functioned as a mosque and school and social center for those who scorned the big official Saudi-financed mosque not far away.
“Anyway, that explains why there’s no love lost between Armenians and Moslems.”
“There’s a lot of different Moslems.” Maeve tried to be broad-minded. “I imagine people in Malaya are pretty different from people ten thousand miles away in Turkey.”
“Not if you ask my dad. He thinks they’re all bloodthirsty Christian-killers.” She laughed. “Even Moslem babies, they’re born with little-bitty scimitars in their hands. Whoa!” She slowed way down, the engine popping and crackling.
A head-high stucco wall completely surrounded the house, right at the sidewalk. There was a solid wood door in the wall, and a speaker contraption to talk to the occupants, plus a mail slot. The only other visible feature, at the corner, was a small sign, blue on white, that was in Arabic characters except for the street address.
“That’s it,” Eremy said as the old car sputtered past.
They went around the block and drifted past again, without seeing anything more. The fence was so tall, they couldn’t see the house. “I don’t know how we’re going to find out what’s inside,” Maeve said.
“I do. Did you see that carport?”
“Huh-uh.”
Eremy drove halfway around the block and parked. An unfenced frame house directly behind the sheik’s compound had a big flat-roofed carport off the side, a few feet taller than the compound’s wall. The house looked dark and abandoned in the middle of the day. Maeve smiled to herself. She finally had a sleuthing partner even bolder than herself. The last time she’d gone off detecting, she’d had to supply all the grit herself.
“Look at this.” Eremy reached under the seat and handed Maeve a strange-looking pair of binoculars. She pressed a button and Maeve almost dropped them when they started to vibrate softly in her hand. “They’re image-stabilized. Weird, isn’t it.”
Maeve tried to move the binoculars and felt them resist the movement, as if they were held in place by invisible rubber bands.
“That’s really cool.”
“We can see right into enemy territory from the business-class seats up on the roof.”
“No, no, no, it was doubles, double four. I get to jump sixteen points.”
“You can’t take them separately.”
Hassan and Pejman were playing backgammon on a card table, but they disagreed mightily about the rules. Iman had doped himself into a comatose sleep with the last Darvocet, Yahya was reading Teach Yourself Arabic, taking notes on the margins of an old Mickey Spillane paperback, and Fariborz sat by himself in a resin bucket chair across the small room, feeling very apart, watching them all draw away from him palpably on some wave of quantum physics that he did not understand.
None of them were actually moving, he was well aware of that, but they seemed to be receding, diminishing, growing more unapproachable, and their voices were muffling into a kind of cottony stupor.
“You can’t stop on the same point I’m on!”
Fariborz wondered if this would go on until he shrank to a point at the geographic center of the room and then, with a little pop, went out of existence altogether. It was impossible to locate himself in his own body. Nothing he did seemed right any longer. It was all just putting one foot in front of the other.
They argued loudly, and he thought, “It’s only gestures. There’s no way to redeem this.” His own motives had come to seem like comforting lies, or vanities. He had just gone on an inner search for ways to make himself feel righteous. But he couldn’t find his way through the thicket of motives to the righteousness itself. What was left was emptiness and inertia.
“You must be Mr. Liffey.” She had gorgeous long hair, shiny black, falling in waves over the shoulders of a gold cashmere sweater. “I’m Ruth Bayat. Come in, please. Farshad is in his Persian room.” She didn’t offer a hand; there was still that much Iran in her, and there was an edge of some sort to the words “Persian room.”
The house was tidy and very white, and what furniture he saw was pretty ornate, with a lot of gold leaf. She brought him to a side door that looked as if it should lead to the garage, but, instead, he went through into another world.
“Wow!” It had once been a garage all right, but now it was a grotto, the walls crafted of what was probably the same substance as LA ROX, but all in one irregular surface. A waterfall dripped and trickled diagonally along one wall, descending from pool to pool, and the red-tiled floor was dotted with big patterned cushions. There were several leafy potted hibiscus, and he had no idea how they kept them alive inside the windowless cavern.
Farshad Bayat and another man sat on cushions wearing comfortable-looking sweats. They were not far from a raised platform on the side that looked as if it was for musicians. There were none there at the moment, only a portable stereo on the edge of the platform that offered a soft plucked music with female vocals. He remembered that Lawrence Durrell described Egyptian music as sounding like a sinus being ground to powder, probably because it wasn’t the eight-tone harmonics of the West. This was sweet and clean, lilting, though something about it was clearly Middle Eastern.
“Mr. Liffey.” Both men stood, and he shook hands with Bayat and then the second man, who had a face made of the same rock as the walls. Nothing stirred in his expression.
“Mahmoud Khalili. My factory manager and expediter.”
“I’ll leave you gentlemen in the Persia of man’s dreams,” Mrs. Bayat said, with the same edge.
Bayat smiled. “My wife thinks this room is a ridiculous indulgence. We have poetry nights in here, we’ve had the great poet Ahmed Shaloo standing right there, we’ve had famous Persian singers like Mohammed Reza Shajarian.” He pointed to a skinny stringed instrument on a stand. “That’s a Persian tar. The guitar was named for it, but it’s really more like a lute. I love this place, it’s my sanctum. Please sit.”
At the back of the platform he noticed an old color-organ from the ’50s—one of those strange contraptions that flashed colored lights through a grille depending on the pitch of the music. It was turned on and offering mostly yellow and green with the pulse of the Persian singing.
They settled on pillows and Bayat offered a big plate of food off a dwarf’s table, the soft flatbread called lavash, sliced cucumber, tomato, onion, feta cheese, and leaves that smelled like mint. He declined, but Bayat wouldn’t accept his refusal to a glass of tea from a pot that rested on a little samovar, and the second man held out for him a glass mug of sugar cubes.
“Thanks.”
Jack Liffey didn’t drink tea much, but he put in a sugar cube and nursed it. Rather than talking right away about the hijacking, Bayat talked about Iranian music and poetry and how important they were to the culture, and he asked after Jack Liffey’s family and his health, and Jack Liffey did his best to reciprocate the elaborate courtesy. He noticed now that there were an incongruous treadmill and a stair stepper in the far corner of the cave, probably survivals of the room’s previous life as a gym or junk room. The second man didn’t talk at all, but watched with a predator’s eye.
“You’re very gracious, you Persians,” Jack Liffey said after they had been talking long-winded pleasantries several minutes longer than anyone with even the vaguest goal in life could have borne. He hoped it might break the stranglehold of the man’s civility.
Bayat nodded and smiled. “It drives many Americans crazy, I know. Even Iranians who have lived here for a while. It’s called taarof. How would you translate that?” he asked the other man.
Mahmoud shrugged, without softening his expression in the least. “Sweet talk, perhaps.”
Bayat laughed softly. “You know, Mr. Liffey, after so many years here, I think in English and talk on the telephone in English, and I do a lot of business in English; but I still make judgments about people in Farsi, deep in my head. Some things are like that.”
“I don’t speak Spanish well,” the second man said, the first information he had volunteered. “Even living there half the time.”
“May I ask about the hijacking now?” Jack Liffey requested.
Bayat sobered with a small nod. “You mean, could it have anything to do with my son’s disappearance? I don’t see how. Whatever my son has become, he and his friends are not running around California with Uzis, hijacking trucks.”
“Do you have any idea at all why someone would go after one of your deliveries, and hit it so viciously?”
Bayat shook his head. Jack Liffey asked them as many questions as he could come up with about the hijacking, but still they professed to know nothing whatever about the crime.
“Do you suppose someone across the border could have hidden drugs in your truck?”
Bayat considered the idea in silence for a moment. He seemed to approach a watershed, then step across it on purpose. “All right, Mr. Liffey, that’s why Mahmoud is up here. He will be looking into that very suspicion at both ends. If there was somebody putting contraband on the trucks at that end, they had to be tied to someone here to off-load.”
“What is an expediter?” Jack Liffey asked.
“Some of it you don’t want to know,” Bayat said, and he seemed to cheer up again. Mahmoud grunted and walked bandy-legged across the grotto to the treadmill. He flicked it on with a whirr and started to walk vigorously. He didn’t seem in any rush to get down to his smuggling investigation.
“Doing business in Mexico still involves a variety of unofficial costs,” Bayat went on. “There are many people in politics and various ministries and elsewhere who have to be satisfied. It gets even more complicated as the PRI weakens and Mexico becomes a true multiparty country. There are that many more interests to consider.”
“There’s no bribery north of the border?”
“I’m sure there is. But it’s more subtle, and it’s not a good idea to count on it for easing your path. Mahmoud and I met in the garment business downtown, when I was briefly trying my hand at what’s known as the rag trade. There were a lot of … secondary costs involved in getting shipments through customs, getting them into stores, and Mahmoud taught me about them. It was a very cutthroat business. Have you seen the garment district in L.A. recently, Mr. Liffey?”
“A bit.”
“Fifteen years ago it was just old tenements, used as small factories, a few hundred of them, with a handful of sewing machines working away in each one. The streets were dead outside, full of litter. Now the whole district is a bazaar, with storefronts and shops everywhere. There’re flags and bright colors and crowds. We did that. Persians are a bazaar people. We transformed L.A.’s garment district into the biggest and brightest clothing bazaar in the entire world. With a little help from some Israelis and Koreans, of course, and all those Mexican women who are hard at work at the machines. But mostly it was Iranian capital and Iranian energy. On the way, a little money changed hands in unusual ways.”
The song came to an end, then another started up with more of a wailing trill, the woman’s voice continually changing key and swelling up out of itself. It echoed a bit and reinforced the foreignness that pervaded the grotto. Mahmoud Kahlili was breathing heavily now as the expensive treadmill started tilting itself uphill.
“Bribery isn’t really my concern,” Jack Liffey said. “I’m curious about Mexico, though. You suggested once that your son might have gone there.” He decided not to mention that he’d had a second hint about Mexico, because it involved the girl who had interested Bayat so much last time, and he didn’t quite trust the man. For all the man’s courtesy and charm and sweet talk—whatever that Farsi word was—Jack Liffey still had an overactive instinct that told him something was wrong deep in the bowels of LA ROX. “Can you tell me if Fariborz spent much time there?”
“The family did. For a while, we had Sea-Doos and we went to San Felipe quite a lot to run them around in the Gulf of California, but we all got tired of it. They just make a lot of noise. Last summer, he said he wanted to earn some money and I arranged for him to work in the plant for a couple of months, adding up the accounts, things like that. Mahmoud let him stay in a hospitality apartment we keep in the fancy zone of T.J. up near the country club. He’s not there now; it’s been checked.”
“I’m sure.”
“You have no word on the girl?” It was his first direct query about the search, and it was curious that it wasn’t about his own son.
Jack Liffey shook his head. “Nor the boys. I’m just getting started. Did you ever meet her?”
“Only that once. She came to try to get me to intervene—she was that upset over Fariborz’ religious mania.” He shrugged. “What could I do? Other than that, Fariborz came home from school most weekends, but he never brought girls to meet us. He used to be a normal boy, off with his friends, playing his guitar. I don’t mean he wasn’t polite with his family, but he was very private and he had already pulled himself back a little from us as most adolescents do.”
A small buzzer went off across the room and the treadmill slowed to a stop as it sank to horizontal. Mahmoud got down and toweled off.
“We will keep you informed, Mr. Liffey, if there are any developments in regard to the hijacking.”
The stiff business diction seemed to be a dismissal. “Thanks.” Jack Liffey levered up off the uncomfortable pillow and tugged his trousers straight. “Do you ever think of going home?”
“I don’t know if Iran is my home any longer. There’s a lot in the country I miss, and I’m not really at home here either, but Islamic law is not my cup of tea. My wife certainly would never go back. She is Jewish, and whatever they claim about toleration, no Jew will ever trust that regime. The revolution had to come, though, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“The old regime was corrupt to the root. I don’t just mean Shah’s people took money. I mean the way things were run, every business, every ministry, it all bred that way of thinking: Money was all, money was god. Eventually that kind of thinking makes smart money scared. They say over the last two years of Shah, a billion dollars a month left the country. You can’t let money surround you as if it were the air you breathe. You can’t let it have that much importance in your world. It eats the soul.”
“Then my soul’s in a pretty safe place,” Jack Liffey said.