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A HEROIC DIMENSION

THE SOURCE OF THE STOP–AND–GO SEEMED TO BE A BIG dead Guernsey bull that lay against the center divider with a flash red Mercedes accordioned up against it like a matador who’d gone a little crazy. Neither looked like they were going to make it to any more bullfights, and he wondered what on earth the animal had been doing on the northbound 405 just short of Mulholland Drive.

He was anxious to get past the jam-up because the woman on the phone that morning had mentioned a missing boy and offered actual, spendable money, which he needed pretty bad. His child support was still touch and go, and Kathy was threatening to cut off his visits for good. It ate at something elemental in you when you failed a daughter.

His old car coughed a couple of times as it fought its way past the bull and then over the crest of the Sepulveda Pass. Down below he could see a thin blue smoke settled around the taller buildings like the fumes off battery acid. Go Directly to the Valley, he thought—the Big Penalty in a faddish board game of the 1970s called Beverly Hills that had been loosely based on Monopoly. This summer morning, however, he could still make out the hills across the San Fernando Valley at Sylmar, and that made it a very good day in the Valley.

Then he saw the real root of the problem: an immense cattle truck was stove in and sideways across three lanes, delaying the Big Penalty for all the northbound traffic. As he inched up to the truck, there was a terrible bellowing and a sudden ripple of the latticed metal siding.

Sometimes you just had to look away. Instead of thinking about the suffering animal inside, he entertained a fantasy of himself as Philip Marlowe in a sweat-stained homburg, driving his ’38 Dodge over this very spot on the old Sepulveda Highway to answer a summons from some rich old man who spent his afternoons in a greenhouse behind a broad smooth lawn. He’d be asked to hunt down a wayward daughter, or take care of her gambling debts, and the butler would give him a check for a retainer. Jack Liffey had only had a client like that once. Usually his clients lived in stucco boxes, welshed on his fees, and the lawns ran to crabgrass.

Before long the traffic picked up and he barreled down to Victory and off into Van Nuys. The house was easy to find on a small cross street improbably named Sultanate Avenue. It was the damnedest-looking tract house he’d seen in a long time. The scalloped eaves of a gable extended across the stucco face of the house and then dipped some more, so it blocked half the entry alcove, just at waist level. It forced you to sashay to one side coming up the walk and a fridge would have had to go in the back door. There was simply no limit to the ludicrous things they had built in the early sixties.

A washing machine was running somewhere inside. Since it was ten in the morning he didn’t expect a man, but a man answered. He was mid-fortyish, wore a black polo neck, and had tidy swept-back graying hair. A pipe was clenched in his teeth like an icon of fifties conventionality, and he carried a large paperback book.

“Mardesich?” Jack Liffey inquired.

The man frowned and rescued the pipe from his teeth but didn’t seem inclined to answer.

“I’m Jack Liffey.”

“Faye,” the man hollered over his shoulder. “This whole situation is absolutely too reductive for me.” He reverted to a kind of musing drawl, as if speaking to the pipe in his fist. “The boy … I just can’t bear irreversible actions. Oh, come in, come in. I’m sure that’s closer to the form of discourse you expected.”

“On most of the inhabited planets,” Jack Liffey said softly as the man walked away.

It took him a moment to figure out what he was looking at in the room, and then he still wasn’t sure. He’d grown used to swimming against a certain current of the unusual in his life, but just now he was having a little trouble touching bottom. There were big white Xs marked out on the carpet with tape of some kind, and scattered randomly through the rest of the room there were two coat trees, a metal Christmas tree stand, an upended milk crate, two wastebaskets, an upright vacuum, and a chest-high stack of books. It reminded him of a classroom he’d been in once where a naval historian had tried to mark out the Battle of Jutland. The man with the pipe had sidestepped away through the markers on a languid broken field run. There was also a heavy exhalation of Lysol in the air, as if someone had just made a stab at covering over something worse.

In a moment a heavyset woman hove into sight from a different direction.

“Mrs. Mardesich?”

She nodded gravely and waved the notebook she was carrying. “You Jack Liffey?”

“Uh-huh.”

She glanced back thoughtfully the way the man had gone and then seemed to make a decision. “Let’s go to Emily’s. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. Can you drive?”

He felt like saying he’d been driving since he was sixteen, but he let it lie.

“C’mon. The world all makes sense, I promise.” She put a confident hand on his shoulder and squeezed in a mannish way, like a football coach reassuring the new placekicker. “Call me Faye. This place must seem bughouse looking down from the outside.”

“I try not to look down on people,” he said.

“Well said, Jack. Can I call you Jack?”

“Oh, hell yes.” He decided to go with the flow.

She laughed and gave him a one-arm hug. Out front, she squinted a bit at his beat-up ’79 Concord as the passenger door fought against her tugs. “I see we’re flush with success,” she said.

“My Rolls is in the shop.”

“Don’t worry; if I’d wanted a big Beverly Hills detective, I’d have called one.”

Jack Liffey wasn’t even sure there were such things as big Beverly Hills detectives. He wasn’t even a detective in any strict sense. He had blundered into his calling as a finder of missing children after his aerospace job had evaporated at the end of the 1980s. Finding missing kids didn’t pay all that well, as callings go, but it was a genuine service to the world and it was better than frying hamburgers.

“Someone recommended you highly.”

“Who’s that?”

“I’d rather not say right yet.”

Emily’s was a busy coffee shop with garish blue-and-red plastic seats and a permanent aroma of chicken fat. He really only liked the darkest French roast he could get, but he let her order him a coffee and declined anything else. For herself, she ordered a Spanish omelette and Emily’s West Virginia muffins with red-eye gravy.

She had addressed the airy diminutive waitress as Tinker Bell, and he couldn’t figure out whether it was an endearment or an insult. Faye Mardesich seemed the kind of woman who would make up pet names for lots of things and make them stick.

“Our household must look pretty dysfunctional to you.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

She stopped playing with the little stand-up plastic ad for strawberry waffles. “Milo lost his job at Lockheed five years ago. He was internally famous as the guy who’d designed the struts on the front landing gear of the L-1011. They were revolutionary and saved Lockheed a lot of money. All he knew in life was mechanical engineering. He went to the headhunters and the agencies and I helped him send out over two hundred resumes. Mostly they didn’t even have the courtesy to reply. He got a couple of temp jobs with the old subcontractors he knew, but nobody’s hiring aerospace full-time, not around here. When it became pretty clear that the job blight wasn’t temporary, he started taking it hard. It affected all of us. He’d been making the high seventies and now he felt like a bum. He drank and didn’t come back some nights. He started yelling at Jimmy and he’d never even raised his voice to the boy before. Mostly he just withdrew. That was up to about a year ago, but, you know …” She considered a moment. “I think I preferred then, with all the melancholy introspection.”

She ran down and he decided to let her go at her own pace. His eyes strayed to a haggard-looking woman who was making her way from table to table. She wore a green bandanna over her hair and carried a bundle in her arms. She seemed to be showing a card at each booth and he guessed it said something like I Am Deaf Please Help.

“I think I get the back story,” Jack Liffey said finally, to save her the trouble. “I was a tiny morsel of the peace dividend myself. But why did you prefer the period with the melancholy introspection?”

She decided to carry on not answering for a while but it didn’t make her uncomfortable. She was one of those people who always seem to be at ease with themselves, even when they fidget. It made him think she’d had a happy childhood in a big family.

Tinker Bell brought the food, curtsying as some kind of private joke, and Faye Mardesich tucked in hard. He sipped at the atrocious coffee that tasted like they’d melted plastic toys in the pot. Once she’d taken the edge off her prodigious hunger, she slowed down and waved a fork in the air as if beating time.

“Okay, I’m over the hump here. Milo’s gone into a manic phase and it’s like living with a Martian. He’s teaching himself French critical theory.” She laughed scornfully and shook her head. “He talks about structural change and reading texts and, oh yeah, ruptures in the historical process. I keep wondering if somebody makes trusses for history.

She chuckled at her own joke. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not rejecting the intellect. It just doesn’t make any sense in his life. It all started after he got a job as a night security guard, which seemed to put him out of kilter with the rest of the world. He’s an engineer at heart, for God’s sake, not a critical theorist. He loved engineering.” She toyed with another shovelful of the omelette but seemed to have lost interest.

“He used to talk with real enthusiasm about how much he liked being challenged to take some practical device and make it work and bringing all his knowledge of science and materials and leverage to bear on the problem and conquering it. And now he’s reading French philosophers in his guard shack and writing essays on the autonomy of the critic and sending them out over the Internet. I’m all in favor of people trying to reinvent themselves, but this is a pathology.”

She torqued herself around to scratch her back the way a man would, and the effort yanked open her blouse for a moment to show a black lace bra just barely containing an ample breast. She laughed at herself and buttoned up in a matter-of-fact way.

“I am a mess. I haven’t even talked about Jimmy yet. Milo is just the context for the problem—” She waggled her eyebrows for an instant. “I’m beginning to sound like Milo. Let’s set the problematic here,” she said with a derisive flex of her lips. “Our son’s run away from home. Jimmy is seventeen and I can’t blame him for getting fed up, but he’s not really seventeen, if you know what I mean. He’s, maybe, twelve. He’s so sweet it’s eerie, he’s unfailingly polite and helpful. He doesn’t have a mean or rebellious bone in his body. Jimmy’s just a big vulnerable kindly kid, trying to hang on to his merit badges, and anybody with an ounce of hurt in him out there can make a meal of the boy.”

“When did he go?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“You reported him missing?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “One runaway kid. They’re not gonna mobilize the SWAT team.”

“Where do you think he’d run?”

But the woman in the bandanna had finally made it to their table. She tipped her bundle forward to display an emaciated baby to Jack Liffey. He stared until he saw a flicker of movement in one tiny clutched hand, little more than a tremor. The woman set a card on the table, and a dried sprig of some herb. The card said, Heather is Good Luck the world over. It is Traditional to warrant the Luck with a small Donation. The Romany have unforeseen Powers. Heather didn’t grow in Southern California, so it was probably just crabgrass. He had a folded dollar bill ready and he opened his fingers to offer it. Surprisingly, her dry hand clutched his wrist and turned his hand over.

She stared into his palm for a moment with spooky deep black eyes that had tiny specks in the pupils. Her voice came out as a croak, a word or two that he could not decipher. Then suddenly the dollar bill was gone and a flimsy slip of paper was in its place, like a fortune from a Chinese cookie. You have a heroic dimension, but you will have to pass through much suffering.

When he looked up she was moving away.

Faye Mardesich took the note in two fingers with curiosity and read it.

“It’s for someone else,” he said. “Where would Jimmy run to?” The dried weed was still on the table, and he picked it up and put it into the empty ashtray.

Faye Mardesich studied both sides of the paper, as if a more careful look might yield up her son’s whereabouts, then she dropped it.

“Naturally I’ve checked his friends and their friends. I think they genuinely don’t know. I didn’t like to go into his room because I value privacy, but I had to. I found a couple of porn magazines.” She shrugged. “That doesn’t bother me. It was rawer than the stuff I saw his age, but the world is moving that way.”

“Straight or gay?”

“Straight, except for some lesbian scenes. You guys all like to watch girl-girl stuff.”

“When we’re not chaining them up.”

She let it go. “And I found this.”

He knew what it was right away. The cover of the dog-eared pamphlet asked:

Is Your Soul Ready for the Next Stage in its Journey?

In each generation a few are within reach of the next Forward Thrust of evolution. Come in now for a simple and totally free appraisal of your spirit’s readiness for The Leap.

It was from the Theodelphian Elect, and gave an address on Melrose. They used almost as many extra capitals as the gypsy woman.

“Do you know them?” Her voice sounded chastened.

“Oh, yes.”

“Are they dangerous?”

He opened the tri-fold and saw the complex diagram he’d seen many times before, a kind of stepladder labeled Soul’s Work that led upward from the core of the earth, through the Breath of the Passions, and then up through dozens of rungs with names like Universal Vitality and Thinking 4,007 Times Faster Than Thought and Assuming the Voluntary Body, steps whose meaning and internal logic had always escaped him. He knew that even the top step with all the yellow rays shooting out of it, a plateau called the Germ of the Form, was only the beginning of another ladder to another plateau. The whole course of metaphysical study led upward more or less as long as your money held out.

“Dangerous like the militias, no. This might not mean anything at all. They leave these everywhere. Do you have any reason to think he’s mixed up with them?”

She rested her chin on her palm and for the first time he sensed a particle of vulnerability in her. “He’s my son, Jack. I’ve had to pull him out of ponds since he was two. He’s as bright as two dim bulbs but he’s far too good-hearted and brave and headstrong for his own good. This stuff is perfectly calculated to suck him in. All you have to do is make Jimmy feel special, or maybe just useful, and he’s yours.”

It was best she didn’t know too much at this stage, he thought. The Theodelphians weren’t the strangest cult in L.A.—that distinction probably went to the Scientologists, who started you out with a kind of bland debased Freudianism and launched you quickly up through the technobabble of interplanetary wars. And the Elect weren’t as old as the Rosicrucians or Madam Blavatsky, but they made up for whatever they might have lacked in ripeness or luster with the naked use of sex to draw adolescents into their orbit. That fact was what he was holding back from the boy’s mother.

“I need to look over Jimmy’s things.”

She nodded. “Milo can’t deal with any of this, but he’s working swing today, from four to midnight. Come by this evening and we’ll go through Jimmy’s room.”

As they stood up, she picked up the crabgrass from the ashtray and put it in a fold of Kleenex in her purse. “You never know.”

In the car she gave him a check for a hundred dollars to get him started. It was more than he usually got. On the way back to her house they passed a barefoot man with a ragged straw hat like Van Gogh’s. He was leading a big goat on a leash. They both watched the man for a while, but there was absolutely nothing sensible you could say about something like that.

She hesitated as she got out of the car in her driveway. “Jack, I’ve got to find my son, but in a larger sense I’m doing this to keep my spirits up. You know what I mean?”

“Lots of people are hurting,” he said.

“The way I keep things from getting me is I keep moving.”

HE went straight back over the hill to Chris Johnson’s place in West Hollywood. That part of town was filled with hundreds of little boxy houses from the forties, most of which now had false fronts with outsized French Provincial details or overtall doors. Russian immigrants recently had begun moving into the area known as Boys-town, and there had been a number of culture clashes with the gays and trendies who’d traditionally populated the place.

Chris Johnson’s little box was still a little box, as unassuming as you could get, which was probably the idea.

“Dude, long time,” he said with a kind of dry smirk.

“It’s been about two weeks.”

“Damn, I’m getting that disease … you know, the one that begins with A.”

“Arteriosclerosis.”

“That’s it.” He stepped aside to reveal the welter of electronics that filled his stucco box. “Come, as Commander Picard says.”

“Who?”

“Don’t shit me. You know Star Trek.” Chris Johnson was tall and athletic looking and so fair you could just about see through him.

Jack Liffey swept a hand to indicate all the electronics. “I thought you were warned off this stuff.”

“The conditions of my parole state that I may not possess a telephone or a modem. They do not say I can’t have a computer.”

“I need some research. A modem would have been essential.” Jack Liffey looked for a place to sit and settled for a wooden stool. For some reason Chris Johnson had glued a lot of aluminum foil to the ceiling and the wrinkles made a mad glare of little multicolored lights.

“You got a cellular?” Chris Johnson asked.

“I think I must have left it in the Ferrari.”

He laughed. “What do you need researched?”

“The Theodelphian Elect.”

Chris Johnson made a big O of his mouth. “Dude, you know, if they even think you’re investigating them, they come after your cojones with little plastic forks.”

“So I’ve heard. My colleague Art Castro had a run- in with them once, trying to get a client’s kid’s money back. They swiped a sheet of his stationery and wrote a letter threatening to assassinate the president in Art’s own handwriting. Really first-rate forgery. It took him a year to get out from under it.”

A computer buzzed, a bit like a washing machine signaling that it was done. Chris Johnson sat down in front of it and typed for a few moments, then set it working again.

“You chicken?” Jack Liffey asked.

Chris Johnson grinned and got an electric screwdriver out of a toolbox, then brandished it with a whir in midair. He took the back off what looked like an old ham radio. “My parole officer checks this place out twice a week, on a random schedule, but he’s so dumb the only way he recognizes a modem is he looks for the RS-12 jack. That’s the little gizmo on the end of your phone cord. So you put a different plug on it and tell him it’s a rapid data transductor.” From inside the radio he took out a black box and a cellular phone.

“Who’s the phone registered to?” Jack Liffey asked.

“You don’t want to know, but the gentleman in question used to work for the Republican National Committee. Actually, I jiggered the code so it’s a number Airtouch reserves for testing.”

He plugged the equipment into the back of the biggest computer in the room and started to fiddle at the keyboard, then picked up a clipboard and scanned it for something. In a moment Jack Liffey heard a tinny voice talking from within the machine, “Nordstrom’s lingerie department. Can I help you?” There was a buzz and then another dialing sound.

“It always helps to loop your calls through somebody’s switchboard. These guys want to get cute and trace who’s interested in them, let’s see what damage they can do to all those red merry widows.”

Jack Liffey knew Chris Johnson would be busy at the keyboard for a while and so he wandered around the room, trying to make sense of the things he saw. One big green screen in the corner was scrolling numbers as if it was working on something all by itself, and another was looping a piece of animation that showed a catlike being biting the head off a guitar over and over. On the wall, a hand-lettered sign said COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY. Beside it there was a framed photo of Chris Johnson looking startled and leaning back in a chair as a slim stripper was advancing on him dangling a sequined bra. It wasn’t very flattering and Jack Liffey wondered why it was on the wall. If nothing else, his girlfriend should have torn it up on sight. Dot Matrix had a legendary temper.

“That picture you’re goggling at was from the last HoHoCon in Phoenix,” Chris Johnson said. Nothing you did anywhere near him ever escaped his notice.

“HoHoCon?”

“It’s the phone hackers’ convention. It’s held at an unannounced site every year. Don’t you go to gumshoe conventions?”

Jack Liffey scoffed.

“I put it up to keep Dot on her toes. Hey, there’s a whole lot of stuff on these guys in here. What do you want?”

“Membership lists?”

He shook his head. “They won’t have that on-line. They won’t even have it on a computer that’s accessible, if they’re smart.”

“How about stuff posted by their enemies. Ex-members’ horror stories. Inside dope.”

“You’re gonna owe me a couple reams of paper. Come back in a while and take me to dinner.” He winked. “Always remember the hacker’s code—knowledge wants to be free.”

“So do I but I always settle for a discount.”