It hadn’t been a short trip; he knew that much. The vehicle had joggled over its share of potholes, banging his hip hard against the steel floor, and they hadn’t climbed any hills of note, as far as he could tell. Occasionally he had gone into breathing panics, since his hands were immobilized and there was absolutely nothing he could do about the tape across his mouth, but he had forced himself to inhale long and slow. Each time, eventually, he had calmed himself again. His abductors had spoken to one another in Spanish, which hadn’t helped him very much. The word buscar or busquen a few times. Finally they had braked to a stop with a jolt and he’d been manhandled out of the vehicle and marched forward blindly across dirt then up some steps onto a smooth hard floor. The echoes of their footsteps seemed to suggest a cavernous building; next he heard the unmistakable rattle of a roll-up door descending and banging shut.
Somebody kicked the backs of his knees to send him down again to where he could smell dusty cement. His ankles were taped to immobilize him completely, and then the footsteps faded. A door shut, apparently to leave him alone with his thoughts. They weren’t very happy thoughts. His abduction was seeming less and less like police business, even if the abductors had been judiciales, and he doubted if he was in anything remotely like a police station. He could smell some plasticky chemical in the air. If he listened hard, he could hear machinery somewhere not far away. One sound was intermittent, a pounding like a stamp mill, and the other steady, like a big air-conditioning unit, but the room he was in was not cool. It was hot and stuffy and seemed to be getting hotter.
Eventually he heard a door come open, boosting the machinery noise, and then he heard the approach of several men. Without warning, the tape was stripped off his eyes in one hard yank. His cry of pain was muffled by the tape still across his mouth, but that went next. His first sight from where he lay was the grinning cop, balling up the silver tape between his palms into a compact mass. He lobbed it in front of himself and soccer-kicked the crude ball sideways. The frowner was there, too, but Jack Liffey’s eye went quickly to a third man, who was new.
He was immensely overweight, straining a very large polo shirt in every dimension under an equally large expensive-looking linen jacket. The fat man wore mirrored sunglasses in the dimly lit room, like a caricature of a Tropical Bad Guy. He kept the left hand of his treelike arm buried in his jacket pocket for some reason, and beckoned with his free hand. The frowner got him a folding chair immediately. Sweat prickled the fat man’s forehead, as if just standing up in the big room were a terrible exertion, and he sat hard to spill off both sides of the chair. The frowner quickly brought him a second chair and, without embarrassment, the fat man shifted his large rump to rest on both of them, side by side.
The grinner squatted to tug out Jack Liffey’s wallet and handed it to the fat man, who riffled through it.
“Liffey. Jack. Culver City. Fascinating. Do you know that was the home of the great Laurel and Hardy?” His English was not just good, like Jaime Torres’s, but perfect, although it had the faintest accent. He had obviously lived much of his life north of the border.
“Not where they lived,” the fat man corrected himself. “But the Hal Roach Studios, where the movies were made.”
In fact, Jack Liffey had once been shown a location on a side street of tiny bungalows fairly near his condo, where quite a few of their short films had been shot. Stan Laurel had died in an ordinary apartment not far away in Santa Monica, but he said nothing.
“I have a sixteen-millimeter print of Tit for Tat. That is the one where the greatest of all comedy teams are selling Christmas trees door-to-door in July.” The fat man chuckled, increasing the strain on his taut polo shirt. “The famous James Finlayson with his big mustache is their foil, and he reacts in scorn and slams his front door on their tree, which of course cuts off the top of the tree. So Hardy knocks again and, after pointing out the damage to the tree and giving his wonderful slow burn, he retaliates by tearing off Finlayson’s porch light. Then he nods with that finality he has. In due course, the exchange of destruction continues until Finlayson has destroyed their car and they have broken up the house and even thrown a piano out the window. They display the true Mexican spirit, in fact. Always get even. Segundo,” he called.
He handed the wallet back to the grinner, who took out the cash before putting it back in Jack Liffey’s pocket. He didn’t get much.
“You have been searching for Rebecca Auslander.” The fat man enunciated the name carefully.
“Yes. Her father hired me to find her.”
“Why did you look in Ensenada?”
Trussed up on the floor, Jack Liffey did the best he could to shrug. “Her family had gone there a lot. I heard that she liked the town.”
The fat man turned and glared at the frowner. Then he strained forward and reached out to slap the frowner’s head quite hard with his right hand. Still, his left was caught up in his pocket, as if holding onto something it could not let go. “See, Primero. The way a professional does it.” He turned back to Jack Liffey. “Culver City is also the home of the Keystone Kops.”
It wasn’t, but he didn’t say anything.
“Our federal police have been known to make mistakes, but they are not the Keystone Kops, Jack Liffey. Don’t make that mistake. Every taxi driver and vegetable seller—even the barefoot little Indio girl who insists you buy her Chiclets—reports to them and they know everything, absolutely everything, sooner or later. In this case, however, it seems to be later.” He glared at the frowner again, who did his best not to flinch away.
Jack Liffey wasn’t going to be able to do much more than delay them. He knew that.
“Did you find her?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
That perked them all up.
“How did you do that? Does her family have a vacation house that our efficient police also didn’t find out about?”
He wanted to leave Jaime Torres out of it, if he could, though it was probably Jaime’s searching through town that had stirred them up. “I showed her picture around town. At El Gigante, someone knew who she was. After all, she was a new gringa in town, and pretty.”
“Very pretty,” the fat man agreed.
“I know she took some money that belongs to someone else, probably to you. She’s very frightened about it. I think I convinced her to give it back, but she wants me to bring her father down here first so she can talk to him. I was on my way to get him. Why don’t you let me bring him down here? She may have hidden the money away in some offshore account that you’ll never find without her cooperation.”
When he risked a glance, the fat man was smiling. “Very entertaining, your imagination. Where does this girl live?”
“I don’t know the address.” He hoped Becky Auslander had taken him seriously and fled—he wasn’t about to risk a bout of determined persuasion by these thugs. “It’s the house with the dolphins on Chapultepec Hill, but I’ll be happy to take you there and negotiate with her.”
The fat man pointed to the frowner and made a telephone signal, a fist with the thumb and little finger stuck out, brought up to his mouth. The frowner nodded and went out a door, boosting the growl of machinery noise, which died down as the door sealed shut again. The cement floor was getting more and more uncomfortable on Jack Liffey’s hip, but he didn’t want to call attention to his level of comfort in any way. It could only get worse.
“So you were going to get her to give our property back?” The fat man took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow.
“She didn’t know what she was doing. I don’t think anybody wants to make enemies of very powerful people.”
“Very powerful and very vindictive people, you might say.”
“I didn’t.”
“That is discreet of you, but it’s true nevertheless. We’ll just wait a little and see if my friends can speak to the girl.”
They waited for a while, and the grinner spoke in Spanish to the fat man. The fat man seemed a bit exercised and snapped back at him. The grinner went out and came back a minute later with a large floor fan trailing a long cord, which he set up to blow across the fat man.
“Your English is very good,” Jack Liffey said.
“Michigan State University. The Spartans,” he explained proudly. “Not the Wolverines. State was also where the great SDS met in 1970 and began to come apart. I was proud of that once, because … Well, just because.”
Jack Liffey thought it might be important to keep him talking. “Because?”
“Do you know about the Mexico Olympics in 1968?” the fat man asked, with an edge in his voice for the first time.
“Two black Americans raised their fists and had their medals taken away.”
The fat man smiled, but there was no humor in the expression. “I suppose that is what a North American would remember. Like a Mexican remembering that General Santa Anna had a cold the day he visited the Alamo. I was a student at Mexico City in 1968. Just before the Olympics, we were protesting for more democracy in our country. The government didn’t like the embarrassment in front of the world press, so at first the army shut down the university, and then they fired on a demonstration at Tlatelolco Square in the center of the city. Three hundred students were shot down and killed. That’s officially—I think more.”
“I remember some of it.”
“There were thousands in jail, and I became the treasurer for a group that collected money for lawyers and bail. The police arrested me and wanted to know who had contributed to the defense fund. I wouldn’t tell them.” For the first time, he took out his left hand. He displayed it casually and Jack Liffey winced: The back of his hand was scarred grotesquely, as if it had been larded with gobs and strings of pink clay. “They held my hand over a gas burner for a long time. Still I didn’t tell them. When I got out of jail, it was prudent to leave the country and finish my education somewhere else. In fact I couldn’t come back to Mexico for a long time. I missed my country a lot in those years, or I thought I did. But, you know, you don’t really long for your country when you’re in exile. What you miss is something in yourself that you can’t have anymore.”
“What did you long for?”
“That is none of your business. Relax now.” He chuckled. “Enjoy what Albert Camus called ‘the benign indifference of the universe?’ It may not always be so.”
Fariborz realized he’d not eaten since the morning of the day before, but he stayed on his knees on the small frayed carpet in the center of the bedroom floor. He needed to continue to pray and fast, and fast and pray, until he was given some sign. At the moment, there was only a silence and the stillness of the spirit that disturbed him deeply.
He prayed for guidance and for absolution for his mistakes, prayed to have a sense of rightness again, prayed even for the merest sense that Someone was listening. He bent forward and pressed his forehead to the carpet, repeating the formulaic Arabic prayers, feeling the blood drain into his face and flush it warm. He heard traffic outside and a horn now and then, the voices of children squealing at each other as they passed. That world out there was no longer his. He felt he needed help to reenter it, to feel as if he belonged.
He tried to frame explanations for his actions—but for whom, he wondered? All he had wanted to do, all along, was take a few small actions that would advance him along the Sunna, the right way. He asked sincerely if that wish had perhaps been vanity, if he had been following some voice in his own mind rather than the voice of God, and it was the vanity that had poisoned what he had done.
God is greater, God is greater.
I witness that there is no god but God.
I witness that Mohammed is the prophet of God.
He had tried to separate himself from the mores of a society that he had come to see as utterly godless and irreverent. But he did not want to punish any individuals—even the godless. He had wanted simply to draw a bold line around the lusts and venal indulgences he saw, around injustice and cruelty, the cheapening of love and affection, around intoxication and exploitation, around that terrible obsession with buying commodities and the whole invisible bondage of the cash nexus. His only purpose was to call impassioned attention to what lay inside the line he would draw so everyone might see it. He had not expected everyone to change overnight, or maybe at all, or even to understand what he was doing, but the act of witness would be enough for him. It should have pleased God.
Instead, everything had gone wrong. People had been hurt. Iman had lost a hand. Their group’s hopes to finance their plans had vanished in an instant. They had become isolated from the school and their friends and families. And there seemed nothing but more hurt in store for them. He did not know for certain what Hassan and Sheik Arad were planning, but what little he had seen made him profoundly uneasy about their designs. So he had run away. And now Fariborz Bayat felt utterly alone in a cold and silent world.
His prayers went on and on until he felt the tears rolling along his cheeks, and then on still more. Something boomed outside. Once, twice, three times—either a truck backfiring or a gun. The walls of the building shook with it; the windows rattled. He collapsed and rolled onto his back on the floor of the apartment, surprised that he was even alive. God had let him live through his crisis. God, in fact, had sent explosions to stir him out of his immobility and carry him to a calmer place, into the eye of the storm.
The booming sounds had broken into a culpable drift of his attention: he’d been thinking of his short tenure as a bodybuilder in the Kennedy School’s weight room. In his mind, the gym coach had been telling him insistently how muscles were built—through failure after failure. There was no such thing as a slow accretion of muscle tissue, the coach had told him. You worked a particular muscle, harder and harder, worked through the pain, until it failed and the tissue broke down. And then, if you ate protein and kept in good health, the muscle tissue grew back bigger and stronger where it had failed. He sat up: It was a revelation. Maybe what he had been doing was exercising his moral and religious muscle. He had taken them past the critical point, he had failed—but, like a muscle, this failure may be exactly what he needed for moral growth.
Others had been hurt, and he could never really pay off a debt like that; but he could set his whole life, right now, against some tangible evil. Arriving at this thought seemed to increase the lightheadedness that he felt, but it seemed to ease his burden.
His father’s corporation had become enmeshed in the evil of narcotics smuggling. He was certain that Mahmoud was responsible. He could not believe it was his father’s doing. Working in the plant the previous summer, Fariborz had seen enough of Mahmoud to distrust him in all things. The man had cut corners at every opportunity. He had bribed Mexican officials. Every payday he had cheated the workers out of at least a few minutes of their wages, in his office he had sex with one of the women workers, and he drank tequila every afternoon with his Mexican watchman. Fariborz had tried to tell his father, but his father had cut him off and refused to listen—far too trusting and loyal to Mahmoud for his own good.
Fariborz lay on the floor, inhaling and exhaling slowly. If he could only disrupt the smuggling—one simple and direct action—it might constitute the beginning of a kind of penance for any vanity that had led him astray. He still had the door code to the factory. He would wait until late, break into the LA ROX maquiladora and somehow thwart the terrible evil that dwelled there.
It was even possible, he thought, that Mahmoud was as much demon as man. He did not believe literally in demons—only that there were people who had inexplicable selfishness and evil within them, and Mahmoud was as good a candidate as anyone he knew.
The frowner had come back and was chattering away in Spanish. The fat man was rubbing his own chin, as if trying to remember if he’d shaved. Fear and anxiety had exhausted Jack Liffey so thoroughly that he had actually dozed for a few moments on the cement—he wasn’t sure how long. The conversation went back and forth for a while, with the frowner insisting hard on something.
Finally, the fat man turned back to his prisoner.
“The girl is not waiting in her house to meet her father. Are you quite sure that was the plan?”
“Yes. I was on the way to the border to get him.”
“Where do you think she would go?”
“Maybe to the store.”
“Maybe to the store,” he repeated. “I am not an idiot, Jack Liffey. My people have been inside the dolphin house, and there is very little clothing there. Some of what is left is laid out on the bed. As if she packed hastily and did not have room for everything.”
“She must have panicked. Where could she escape? You must have friends watching the border.”
The fat man spoke to the frowner, who left the room again. Then he sighed and seemed to settle in to wait. The grinner began to whistle a tune, and the fat man silenced him with a single word.
“Is your family name Arrellano Felix?” Jack Liffey asked.
He smiled. “Half-smart, like your newspapers. It is true, of course, that my industry is a special instance of monopoly capitalism. Only the commodity is different. We don’t deal in cars or canned corn or CD players; we deal in illegal substances. But the way the business works is the same. When we were all reading Marx and Lenin in 1968, the simpleminded students in our cell all thought that the expression ‘monopoly capitalism’ meant there was only one big company running things, but the world is never so simplistic. Never. Marx never predicted that. It is enough that there are a handful of big companies, and sometimes they compete and sometimes they cooperate. But all in all, their economy of scale and the way they gobble up competition is sufficient to keep out the little guys. Yes, Arrellano Felix is the best-known monopoly by far. Let’s say I am only Avis, and they are Hertz.”
Thanks for the lecture, Jack Liffey thought. It was not very reassuring to know he was being held prisoner by someone who might feel that he had to try harder.
“I think now you should tell me whatever you know about the girl. It will be good for you in the long run. The world’s benign indifference is about to end.”
“The girl is running. If she was planning to do that, you know she wouldn’t tell me where she’s going.”
“Maybe you are in cahoots with her. Maybe you are going to meet her, or arrange a false passport for her. Who knows? Money can buy many things. I need to be sure you don’t know.”
“I don’t know a thing, believe me.”
“But, you see, I need to be sure.” He barked at the grinner, who went out for a minute and then returned, followed by a new man who waited in the doorway as a hulking silhouette with the sounds of machinery leaking around him, the clattering and hissing in the building beyond. The fat man turned to the silhouette.
“A temporary layoff has been ordained,” the fat man said. “Shut the plant down now, for the night.”
“We’re just starting swing shift. They haven’t been in an hour yet.” Jack Liffey could not get a good look at the man, but the voice was familiar.
“Oh, Lord, don’t let him argue. Send them home now.”
“I need to keep a warehouse crew for the shipment to Phoenix.” Now he knew who it was. Mahmoud something, Bayat’s man in the maquiladora. What word had they used to describe his duties? Fixer? Expediter. Now Jack Liffey knew where he was being held, though it did him no good.
“Everybody goes home. You, the warehousemen, supervisors. You have ten minutes to clear the building.”
There seemed to be a staring duel for a moment, but the other man—if it was Mahmoud—finally seemed to decide where the power lay. “I hope you’re loving this, my friend,” Mahmoud said.
“It is my profession.”
Jack Liffey had no idea what was going to happen, but it frightened him so much that there was a spasm in his leg. Only the fact that his ankles were taped together kept him from thrashing around on the floor like a jumping bean. The fat man no longer seemed to feel that he needed to hide his mangled hand.
“What a long, strange journey it has been, hasn’t it, Jack Liffey?”
“What?”
“Me, I mean. A Marxist-Leninist student who began by demanding democracy in Mexico City, and is then driven out of his country by the federales, who studies six years in Michigan, USA, to get his MBA. And now I buy federales wholesale.” He chuckled. “You know why federales often go in threes in our country? No, of course you don’t. The first federale can read, the second federale can write, and the third is assigned to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.” He laughed and glanced at the frowner, who did not seem to have followed the joke.
The fat man went on like that for a while, but it was becoming hard for Jack Liffey to listen. Something bad was about to happen, and he could think of nothing he could possibly do to fend it off. He tried again to insist that he knew nothing about Rebecca Auslander’s whereabouts, but the fat man just waved the objection away, erasing his words out of the air.
Then the grinner came back and nodded. They untaped his ankles and lifted him to his feet.
“I must tell you, my friend, the world is about to get very interested in your predicament. Existentialism is now extinct.” He sighed theatrically. “This is just a kind of insurance policy, you know. So we’re all happy that you’re truly in the dark.”
The two judiciales frog-marched him out the door between themselves, past a lot of silent machinery with large vats and tubes and some kind of pneumatic jacks that looked like they were meant to slam parts of the machines together hard. Probably injection molds for LA ROX, he thought. Then the bulk of his attention did a paradigm shift into the kind of panicky fizzing that came with utter helplessness. They turned a corner at a tidy orange line on the floor and went into a lunchroom that looked exactly like a lunchroom in an American institution, with Formica tables and vending machines, a microwave, a fridge, and a stove. The only difference was that the vending machines seemed to carry nothing but varieties of burritos.
The two judiciales—if that’s what they were—pushed him hard up against the stove and turned on one of the burners, and his mind went woozy with fear as he saw the little ring of flames. Each blue flame swelled to red, then tapered to yellow at the tip. They untaped his wrists and the judiciales held his right arm as the fat man gripped his left with both of his hands. The fat man gave off an overpowering aroma of rosewater.
“Jack Liffey, I lied to you a little. When I said I didn’t talk. I mean, when the soldiers burned my hand. I’m afraid I told. I told the soldiers every name I knew who had anything in any way to do with the defense fund. I probably got two dozen other people arrested and tortured. There is no honor in this kind of persuasion, believe me.”
“I believe you. I don’t know where she went. I don’t.”
“Maybe so. Now we find out.” And his hand was wrenched around and pressed down into the flame with incredible strength.
He kicked and thrashed around and screamed from somewhere very deep inside his body.
Before very long, he told them he was the one who had suggested that Rebecca Auslander run away, and he had suggested, by name, just as examples, Europe and Idaho. Anywhere but Mexico. He even told them she had said something about roses. If there was any honor at all in resisting that kind of persuasion, he did not mention Jaime Torres. He passed out before he could.