The turn indicator stalk snapped off in his hand and he stabbed at its hole in a brief flurry of panic, trying to reroot it, and then he just rolled the window down and stuck his hand out the window, still holding the stalk, to signal his turn into the veterinarian’s.
Rolling Wrecks had rented him the old Chevette at a ridiculously low rate. The odometer had died long ago, along with most of the gauges, and a lot of the plastic interior trim was hanging loose or missing. The plastic seat had given up one layer of its color in patches. Just sitting in the car, you could feel the dejection and contempt of everyone involved in its manufacture. The executives had wanted to make something with more profit, the engineers with more pizzazz, and the line workers had all wanted to be home in bed with their hangovers.
“He’s accomplished a complete recovery, Mr. Liffey.” The cheerful assistant vet bobbed up from the counter and plucked a key off a rack. She led him outside to where dozens of dogs in separate runs started to go mad to get his attention. “But he hasn’t been happy here. He’s not an enclosure sort of dog, is he?”
“Loco’s not any sort of dog. He’s basically a coyote.”
When she pulled the gate open and dragged out the semirigid animal, Loco growled and snapped at her for a moment and then its yellow eyes found Jack Liffey and it went catatonic with wrath. The beast had reverted to those flat wild eyes that he’d known so well when they’d first been hobbled to one another.
“Sorry, boy. But you went and ate the poisoned steak. Let that be a lesson to you. Be more discriminating.”
“It was probably Thorazine. It’s one of the easiest heavy tranks to get your hands on.”
Jack Liffey shook his head sadly. “He took it from a complete stranger, as far as I know. In most moods, he won’t even take ground sirloin from me.” He stooped to hug the reluctant dog and felt a tremble in its flanks. “Loco, I’m sorry. I recognize the terrible irony for you. You were just beginning to get over the call of the wild and become a pet. I had hopes you might learn to fetch my slippers.”
On the way home, the dog lay in the rear seat with its shivering back turned away. Jack Liffey talked to the dog gently and sadly the whole way, recounting his adventures in Mexico, though leaving out any mention of the poor Chihuahua and cat. The front door of his condo released a musty breath of neglected garbage, and the dog broke away from him and scurried straight to its old hidey-hole in the rearmost closet.
There were two calls on his machine:
“Daddy, I’m sooo sorry. Really I am. We need to discuss how I can worm my way back into your good graces. Please call me, please, please. I’ll never ever be a pest again. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
That wouldn’t be too hard to deal with, he thought, his spirit lifting a little. The machine announced a wildly inaccurate time and date, and then squawked forward to the next caller.
“Jack, this is Arturo. Our friend down south tells me you’re lucky to have got home alive and with most of your organs still functioning. J. is okay for now, but Miramón’s homies are on the warpath and tearing a wide swath through Ensenada, trying to pick up any trace of the girl. Apparently she got away clean. He says he can’t touch your car right now, but maybe soon, if nobody drives it off and strips it. Something big is going to go down in the cartels—he can sense it, he says, like elephants rumbling off in the jungle. Don’t call me, I’ll call you, hey. Tomorrow I think I move back upstairs.”
Jack Liffey went and got his hollowed-out Oxford Companion to American Literature. It felt curiously animate as he lifted it and the heavy .45 shifted inside. He set it on the end table for comfort, like Farshad Bayat with his Browning. He settled back into his favorite chair, losing a little more of its stuffing every time it flexed, and he tried to will himself to stillness. The building creaked a little; a toilet flushed somewhere. Alcohol would be good about now, but he had enough will left to resist that, and besides there was none in the house.
He chanced a peek under the bandage on the back of his hand and winced. The burn ached in a dull, persistent way now, and the flesh was veined and multicolored, disgusting looking, like some kind of deep-sea sponge. It would probably need to be debrided, the strange word that the burn wards used for sadistically ripping off your old flesh, and it would probably stay a real mess of scarring unless he had skin grafts, to join his growing collection of detective-business wounds like the metal plate in his head and the star-shaped bullet wound in his left shoulder. Sooner or later, he could join a sideshow as Mr. Scar, Eighth Wonder of the Medical World.
He tried again to make himself relax. In a sense, the job was over now, he told himself. When Auslander finally calmed down, he might even pay a bonus for finding out that Rebecca was alive. He’d found the Bayat boy, too—but, really, he’d failed to close out either case. He hadn’t brought either of the kids home. That was part of the simmer that kept everything from settling down into a kind of end-of-job quiescence. That and the fact that the Miramón drug cartel was still very much on the rampage. And something was still afoot with Fariborz and his conscience-driven fervor. Then there were his own problems underlying it all like quicksand, especially that particularly humiliating one with Aneliese.
Far too many loose ends, too many anxieties, like sores on the roof of his mouth that his tongue couldn’t stay away from. Probably just the nature of things, he thought. You could never really close anything out. All you could do was tweak one strand running through the complex skein of billions of strands and pluck it a little and hope at point B down the line, things would be a bit more satisfactory for that strand.
It was probably something like megalomania to think you could do more than that, he decided. Life was just plain untidy. He did his best not to think about his dysfunctional libido—a euphemism, obviously—but it was hard to avoid. He wondered if he’d just finally got so lost in the immensity of things that he was unmanned by his own insignificance. He was sure it had never happened to Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. He touched the spine of the fat gun-laden book for subconscious comfort. That other penis.
Loco wandered out and lay across his feet. In Jack Liffey’s current state, the dog’s affection touched him so deeply, it almost brought tears to his eyes. The dog began to snore, breaths grating in and out. Here was a beast as worried about life as he was, he thought, just as consumed by his otherness, yet so desperately lonely that he would violate his own coyote species-being and cozy up to the Great Betrayer.
The awful-sounding doorbell shrilled abruptly at him. Loco didn’t even stir. Complete moral exhaustion, he thought. He got up and peered out the fish-eye to see the natty FBI man—what was his name? Devil at the crossroads. Robert Johnson. The man was standing well back from the door, probably some procedural training to avoid being dragged unexpectedly into the deep shit, and in his right hand he carried a large black boom box by its flip-up handle, as if he’d just taken it off the kids who hang out in the complex.
Jack Liffey opened the door.
“Mr. Liffey.”
“Mr. Johnson. Here to show me your blues style?”
The FBI man moved forward without invitation, and Jack Liffey backed away ahead of his bow wave to let him in. They sat exactly where they had sat before, and the FBI man placed the boom box gently on the low coffee table. This time there were no kids bobbing up and down at the patio fence.
“Surely my daughter hasn’t been sending ripples through your equilibrium again?” Jack Liffey said, still hearing her voice on the phone with its forlorn promise to be good.
“Perhaps you have. ‘Ripple’ would understate it some.”
“Uh-oh.”
“We share information from time to time with Immigration and Naturalization and with the Border Patrol. They believe but cannot prove that you and a young Persian-American crossed the border illegally from Tijuana two nights ago.”
“We’re both citizens. I shouldn’t think that was illegal.”
The FBI man squinted at him a bit. “It’s illegal, all right, but we don’t need to get into that right now. All things being equal, we’re not really interested in you at all. We’d like to talk to the boy, if he’s who we think he is.”
“He disappeared on me. Maybe I’d better tell you the whole story.” His eye went to the black plastic boom box, and he couldn’t help wondering what it was for. The brand name was Sonovox—one of those tech-sounding names they churned interchangeably out of Chinese factories. Was the man going to play him some incriminating tape recording? Surely the FBI had higher-class pocket recorders for that, mini-Uhers or DATs.
“Maybe you’d better tell me.”
He told the man pretty much the whole tale of his misbegotten adventures in Mexico. The only place where he got a bit coy was in whether or not Farshad Bayat knew in advance there had been drugs in the ROX. For some reason Jack Liffey started feeling a throb in his neck, as if his heart had climbed up there and begun banging away for escape.
“Where do you think the boy has run to?”
“He’s a good kid,” Jack Liffey insisted. “Really. He got a bit wrong-footed, but he’s the son we’d all like to have. Earnest and trying very hard to do the right thing.”
“Uh-huh. But the question is, where is he trying to do the right thing at the moment?”
Loco stirred awake and glanced up and almost did a double take when he saw the FBI man. There was a little vestigial growl in the back of the dog’s throat, but weariness took over again, and he flopped back onto Jack Liffey’s feet.
“I don’t know. I have a hunch he’s trying to foil some plan that’s started to embarrass him. Probably something to do with his schoolmates. I have another hunch it also has to do with that thing there on the table. Would I be within hailing distance?”
The FBI man made a face. “My colleagues tend to call that a ghetto blaster, unless they get to thinking report-wise and politically correct, and then they use expressions like ‘portable stereophonic cassette tape player.’ Actually, some of the older agents in the office call it a nigger-blaster when I’m not around. But they know I’d squash them like a bug if I heard it. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, but my wife is an African-American, Mr. Liffey. A wonderful woman, and we have two fine children who the world also considers African-Americans. I want you to realize that the Bureau has changed a lot since the benighted days of Mr. Hoover.”
“Got any gay agents?” Jack Liffey asked.
“Not to my knowledge. But to get back to your question. …” He seemed to have a big conversational hump to get himself over, for some reason. “What do you know about plutonium?”
Jack Liffey felt a chill on his spine. “It’s bad news. The Nagasaki bomb. Breeder reactors. Cancer.”
He nodded. “It’s a heavy metal. We don’t use it much in reactors in this country, except mixed with uranium oxide, but it’s nowhere near as dangerous as most people think. Unlike radium and some other radioactive materials, it’s not a gamma-ray emitter. It emits only simple alpha rays—unless you have enough mass for it to go critical, of course, and then it blows up your city. But in smaller amounts, a piece of paper will stop all the radiation it gives off. The only real way it’s dangerous is if you breathe it in a powder form. …” He shrugged.
“Like Karen Silkwood.”
The agent didn’t acknowledge the name, but Jack Liffey knew it was widely suspected that Kerr-McGee had purposely contaminated her several times for being a whistle-blower about lax safety at their plant before eventually having her car run off the road to kill her. The film had starred Meryl Streep, if he remembered right. Not that any of that mattered.
“Inhale about half a gram, and it’ll kill you quick,” he said in a flat voice. “But that’s far less lethal than a lot of other substances. Arsenic, for instance. Twenty milligrams of inhaled plutonium will kill you in a month. Anything less and you’re just upping the statistics for getting cancer one of these days.”
He paused for a moment to let Jack Liffey think it over.
“Take a good look at that boom box.”
Jack Liffey extracted his feet from under the contented dog and got up to look closer at the tape player. He touched the CD lid and instead of the lid coming open, a much bigger section of the top popped up. It was cleverly done along the seams of the plastic case. There was a fat white paper bag about the size of a half brick under the lid.
“That’s not? …” he said.
The FBI man shook his head. “Ordinary Globe A-1 wheat flour. There used to be a little C-4 explosive under it, just enough to scatter the flour into the wind. We’re pretty sure this was a test device, for what the press is calling these days a ‘dirty bomb.’ You use a tiny bit of explosive to spread around something nasty. Plutonium-oxide powder is heavy—twice as heavy as lead—and that compartment would hold maybe two thousand grams.”
“Are there more of these?”
“We think we’ve seized all the prepared tape players save one, and we also seized a map that locates many of the synagogues in the L.A. area. There’s a cell of fundamentalist Islamic fanatics, mostly Sudanis and Algerians, who were apparently going to set these little dirty bombs off indoors on the Sabbath. They were meant to kill as many Jews as possible, and make it necessary to close down the synagogues for quite some time.”
“Where the hell did they get plutonium?”
The FBI agent shrugged, but not really as if he didn’t know. He just wasn’t going to talk about it. Jack Liffey stared in horror at the bag of flour. Robert Johnson leaned forward and flicked the little switch that turned the radio on, and a jazz station started playing softly, ominously.
“Who would have suspected that this innocent-looking thing playing Stan Getz could decease quite a lot of people?”
Jack Liffey was pretty sure ‘decease’ wasn’t a transitive verb, but he didn’t bother pointing it out. Maybe in FBI-speak it was. “I can’t believe the boy is involved in that.”
“He may not know what he’s involved in. We need to speak to Fariborz Bayat as soon as possible. I think you can appreciate that.”
“Oh, yes. Believe me. I have nothing at all against synagogues, or my own lungs. I get chills just looking at that thing.”
“So do we.” He shut the radio off and closed the top and looked like he was getting ready to go.
“Can you do anything about the cartels and the boy’s father? That might help me bring him in.”
“We knew something, but not much. You can see why it’s of secondary importance right now. We can’t do very much for him if he doesn’t come forward.” He smiled a little. “On the other hand, if he does come to us, we still probably can’t do very much for him, and then he’s up shit creek with the narcos. I recognize that. I’ll talk to some friends of mine and let you know. In the meantime, think of plutonium. And see if you can remember something about the boy. You’ve got my card.” He paused. “We’d like everybody in this country to be able to live out their dreams in peace.”
Jack Liffey grimaced. “Most of my dreams are about being in French class and discovering I forgot to put any clothes on.”
The Greyhound rumbled north with a kind of ponderous swaying that had been set up when it changed lanes too quickly and the driver overcorrected a little. Back in San Diego, he’d got the last free seat, over a wheel well, and his legs kept cramping up now. There were only so many ways you could scoot your legs at angles. He’d wondered at the time why the elderly Latina had ceded him the window seat right away, but now he saw that she could straighten her legs out into the aisle.
Through the windows on the inland side of the bus, across from him, he saw a long palisade of empty yellow hills that showed that the bus was passing through Camp Pendleton. On the ocean side, he caught glimpses of blue green water and surf. Then there was a high wall on the sea side and through a gap he glimpsed a covey of Marine hovercraft, parked like taxis. A colorful sign on one end of the big wall said, No Beach Out of Reach, and at the other end, The Swift Intruders. Mean-spirited stuff, Fariborz thought, imperialist stuff. Though he didn’t usually think in terms like that.
As an exercise in empathy, he tried to imagine himself a U.S. Marine, spit-shining his shoes to a glow, getting tattooed and shorn, stalking through town arm-in-arm with his pals and glaring at longhair peaceniks, the whole dollar standard of macho posturing, but he couldn’t quite do it. Still, he told himself it was no uglier than Death to the Great Satan, the slogan that his father’s countrymen were always out chanting in the streets at the drop of a hat. There was so much hatred, so much ugliness and cruelty.
He hoped he was done with hard-heartedness now, as surely as if he’d had a religious conversion, a bolt of revelation on the way to Damascus. He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen through all his ferocious self-righteousness sooner. Even if you were certain that some pious doctrine was right, utterly right beyond any doubting, it was obvious that you couldn’t bomb your way to converting the doubters. Even the silly and harmless stink bombs and paint bombs that he and Iman had planned. That kind of action damaged only your own heart.
The final moment of his conversion had come, curiously enough, in the shabby INS interview room that had only been 100 yards north of the Mexican border. He had sat at a table made out of some kind of nicked and dented hard black rubber, across from a kindly gray-haired interviewer who had seemed more bored than anything, and Fariborz had gone on and on refusing to give a name or address. He had broken no law, he insisted, and, following Jack Liffey’s whispered suggestion while they were being herded toward the green-and-white Ford Explorer out in no-man’s-land, he kept denying that he’d come across the border at all. They’d just been wandering lost near the border for half the night.
“You look like a lucky kid,” the agent had said to him. “I don’t know, something about the way you sit up straight. I wish my own kid had your stuff when he was growing up.”
“I’m not a kid. I’m an adult.”
“Joey’s a construction flagman over in Phoenix. Said he couldn’t stomach community college to try for something better. You in college?”
It was such a clumsy attempt to gain a little more information that Fariborz just smiled. The pen lifted, checked something, and wrote a few words.
“I’ve got to ask,” the avuncular man said, almost apologetically.
At dawn the exhausted man had spoken at the door to an equally weary-looking woman and given her some money, and soon a white paper bag appeared with two coffees in McDonald’s cups and two Sausage-Egg McMuffins. He couldn’t touch his sandwich, of course. It contained pork. But he did accept the coffee.
His McMuffin sat there the rest of the morning on a sheet of notepaper, leaking grease that congealed into a graying pool. As loathsome as the food was, it touched Fariborz deeply that the man had bought it for him with his own money. The old man was polite and gentle. He had never once tried physical intimidation, never threatened him in any way.
The manifest decency of the old man, just doing his job without causing a ruckus, made Fariborz want to weep all of a sudden. He looked from the horrible egg-and-sausage McMuffin to the kindly grizzled face and decided, all at once, that much of mankind was basically good. In that instant, he realized he wanted only to love his enemy. He knew it was a weirdly Christian sentiment, phrased that way, for he was still a Moslem beyond all doubt, but he sensed a spirit of amity washing through him, and then out toward the whole human race.
For the next hour in the interview room, he had felt curiously at peace with himself, as if a fever had broken. He was sure that Mohammed (may the blessings and peace of God be upon him) must have felt exactly the same way at some time in his life and encouraged his followers in that direction, but he couldn’t recall any quotes touching on it from the Koran. That just showed his lack of study, he thought. The feeling of generalized love waned a little when a new man took over in the morning and pushed him a little harder, but he didn’t let the new man spoil his new feelings. Imagine, he kept reminding himself with a strange wry self-consciousness, a religious epiphany set off by an egg-and-sausage McMuffin. It must be something powerful.
And he felt the glow still as he rocked hypnotically in the Greyhound, surrounded entirely by poor people and people of darker skin. His own inner feelings told him clearly that Islam demanded he find the path of gentle truth and peace. Now he had to find his best friend Pejman, little Yahya, and poor maimed Iman, and convince them of the same truth before the sheik and Hassan got them into real trouble. He didn’t know what they were up to, but the man and his people obviously had much in common with those who had attacked the embassies in Africa and blown up the World Trade Center in New York (may peace be upon all the fallen), and Fariborz guessed their plans had to be bad ones.
And then all of a sudden a memory made his face burn with shame. He had sat with Becky on the turnout up on Mulholland Drive, the spot they had visited many times because it looked south over the whole of L.A. and then by turning your head 180 degrees you could see north into the Valley, too. He had often played his acoustic guitar on a big rock there, as if he were serenading the entire L.A. basin, picking out Becky’s favorites, “Guantanamera” and “Here Comes the Sun” on the gut strings, deceptively simple-sounding tunes but actually quite complex and lovely.
He closed his eyes in mortification at the vividness of the recollection. “I could never marry a nonbeliever,” he heard his own voice telling her, avoiding the charged word infidel, but still unbearably sanctimonious as he tried for a tone of utter emotional neutrality. “I couldn’t be sure of the purity of such a woman’s heart.”
How had he been such a priggish idiot? And worse—he was sure now that it had been this rejection up in the Hollywood Hills that had driven Becky into her own transgressions. That was as good an example as he would ever need of the insidious damage you caused by following a rigid code.
He thought of how easily and painlessly Jack Liffey had offered his one simple insight: that even God couldn’t make right wrong. It had never occurred to him before, but it seemed so obvious now. Becky or anyone else could follow safa for the same reasons he did, whether she believed there was a God wagging a giant finger at her or not. The thought warmed him inside, as he formed a new all-encompassing notion: that all people were brothers and sisters, all capable of the same struggle to behave with decency.
Ahead, he saw the two big domes of the nuclear power plant, the northern edge of the U.S. Marine base, and he realized he was about halfway to L.A., halfway to Jack Liffey. He had been wrong to ditch him. The man’s presence drew him powerfully now. It was as if he needed to be with the man to talk it all over again, test the sea changes that had gone on in his psyche, maybe even to complete something in himself. And, of course, he needed the man’s help to find his friends. After all, Jack Liffey was a detective.
Jack Liffey was startled at first when he opened the door, expecting the FBI man back for some further horrifying revelation, or a gaggle of kids from the complex trying to sell him the world’s very best chocolate bar to earn a trip to camp. It was twilight and the bulb in his alcove was out, as usual, so it took him a moment even to recognize her.
“Hello, Jack Liffey.” There was a little trepidation in her voice, but a hardworking brazenness overrode it. “You never called me.”
She came straight in wearing a beige belted trench coat that went perfectly with his earlier flight of fancy at Taunton School about her posing in a Nazi cap for the cover of a man’s magazine. Finally the name came to him: Rebecca Plumkill, headmistress.
“Mrs. Plumkill.”
She extracted a bottle of wine from her overcoat. “Ms. But it’s Rebecca, please. May I call you Jack?”
“Sure, of course. Have a seat.”
“I require two wineglasses.”
He hadn’t had a drink in six years, but he searched out two glasses that he had once loved, elegant black-stem crystal numbers forgotten on the top shelf of the cupboard, between the unused Osterizer and the Joe Namath Butter-up popcorn popper. He hunted through a drawer for a corkscrew, and finally found an old two-prong number to open the cabernet. He hadn’t forgot how, but opening the bottle was complicated by the way any pressure on his left hand disturbed the burn and sent a scream of pain up his arm.
“Was I supposed to call you? I’m sorry.”
“I waited for it every night,” she said in a strange throaty voice. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he felt her hand drag very lightly across the back of his neck as he tugged at the cork. He poured the two glasses, still not sure whether he would drink his. Something so odd was going down that he couldn’t get a grip on things. Was he dreaming this? He thought of Aneliese, but chased the thought away, like stamping his foot at a pest. Things like this only happened in 1940s movies, he thought. But things like what?
Loco was curious, too, sitting up by the sofa staring at them both. The animal gnarred a little. Without looking straight at her yet, Jack Liffey said, “Do you realize that in the last four thousand years no new animals have been domesticated? And I’m still failing with this one.”
He heard a hearty laugh. The laugh made him feel good—actually, to his surprise, aroused him sexually. He turned with a wineglass in each hand to see that she had taken off the trench coat and looked marvelous in a short black dress. He recalled a quote he had read in a science-fiction novel as a teen, the first line of print that had ever aroused him: Looks like that dress will come off easy.
He decided to go ahead and sip the wine. Wow, he thought. The first shock was a little harsh, but then a mellowness flooded over him. It was only wine. He’d have only the one glass.
“To what do I owe this honor?” he asked.
She grinned broadly and he realized she was already a little drunk, probably something imbibed earlier for Dutch courage.
“Chemistry,” she said. “Better living through. This was so damn hard for me, Jack Liffey. Every woman, absolutely every woman, desires to have a man who is slightly roguish and makes her laugh.”
“Is that me?”
“Why do you think I got myself half drunk to come here uninvited?”
And for the first time since Marlena, he turned out to have no trouble at it at all.