City of Strangers (11 page)

“The missing boys are not at that compound,” he said drily.

“Cross your heart?”

He smiled finally. “We're not usually in the business of disseminating information, Mr. Liffey, but I will tell you, if you were to go to this compound and break in, you would find it entirely empty. It's been empty for several days, and for a variety of reasons we expect it to stay that way now.”

“Thank you. Do you know where the boys are, or Becky Auslander?”

“No, we do not know. And, if you find anything out about that, we would appreciate a telephone call.
First
—before calling your employer.” He dug a business card cleanly out of his breast pocket.

Everybody wanted to know
first,
Jack Liffey thought. It was like some kind of treasure hunt, and he was the only one in the game who didn't know what the hell was hidden three paces east of the big oak tree. The card reiterated that his guest in the apartment was Special Agent Robert Johnson, and gave an address and phone number in the Federal Building in Westwood.

“You must stay away from the sheik, and keep your daughter away. I can't emphasize that enough. For your own safety.”

Robert Johnson, he thought. One hell of a bluesman. “So you're the guy that legend says traded his soul to the devil at the crossroads for the ability to play the blues.”

“So I've heard.”

“I always thought you were black.”

He smiled. “My current state of whiteness is just temporary.” He was the first FBI man Jack Liffey had ever met who had anything approaching a sense of humor. On his way out, with the condo's kids dancing around him and asking if he was going to arrest anybody or shoot anybody, Special Agent Robert Johnson sang a little:

Maeve was weeping copiously, clutching her little suitcase in the front seat of his VW as he drove. He felt terrible, forcing himself to stay angry at her, but this time he knew he simply had to.

“What am I going to tell Mom about coming back suddenly?” she sniffled when she had calmed down enough to talk.

“You could tell her you broke your solemn word and made me upset.”

“I'm soooo sorry, Daddy. I really am.”

“I know you are, hon.” He'd almost broken down and offered forgiveness, and he stopped talking and drove in silence for a block or two. Causing his daughter pain tore at something really deep in him. He had so little in life, anyway, he thought, that hurting her really pressed on the bruise. But it was always the things you needed so very desperately that you had to beware of. “I need to be able to know I can trust your word. Let us both think about that for a few days, and then we'll talk about what we can do about it.”

She nodded vigorously. “Okay. Honest, Daddy, really, I was just looking things over. I didn't think I'd get involved. I didn't think anything would happen.”

He turned and stared at her and she fell silent.

The noisy VW engine was their only company for several more minutes until they were a few blocks from her mom's place.

“Dad … I have to tell you. I
did
find out something. I know I shouldn't have gone there and all, but I saw a map through the window and I copied it. Maybe the boys are hiding where the map shows.” She held out the business card she'd drawn her copy of the map on.

His window was down in the heat. He took the card from her and, without looking at it, crumpled it in his fist and tossed it straight out the side window. She gasped and turned to follow it with her eyes.

“Maybe that will convince you about giving your word. That map is what lawyers call ‘the fruit of the poisoned tree.' We'll find a way to start fresh without it. Okay?”

She nodded glumly. “I'm sorry.”

“Okay, that's enough self-righteous scolding from me. We've both made mistakes in our lives, and we both know what's right and what's wrong. We'll get past this, hon.”

She leaned in, across the shift, and gave him a hug. He stopped in the uphill driveway, yanked on the parking brake, and found that it needed adjustment and wouldn't come fully on.

“Call me in a few days,” he said.

“I will. I love you, Daddy.”

It looked like she was about to skip away from the car, but then decided that it might be more appropriate to maintain a show of distress, so she trudged slowly up to the house.

It took him only two minutes to get back to the palm tree with the big scar on its trunk, just past the Chinese elm. He was glad he'd made a mental note of the trees because the parked gold Mazda that had been there had driven off. The crumpled business card she'd given him lay in the gutter on a windblown pile of little Chinese elm seeds, like disks of cellophane with tiny almonds embedded in them.

“There was nothing I could have done, staying there, I mean being white. I'd have had to buy into the whole racist system.” Aneliese de Villiers set out some nicely browned roast potatoes and a pitcher of water on the lace tablecloth.

“Looks great.”

A cheerful African dance tune percolated softly from the living room. He had asked to hear some music from back home that she loved. It reminded him strangely of mariachi music, and he wondered if the dance music of the rural poor was similar the world over.

She had told him her son was staying at the Kennedy School for the night, which was convenient, and he wasn't going to ask just how unusual that arrangement was. He could not help noticing how far ahead of her she had to carry the heavy roast to keep the trencher from riding against her breasts. And then he chastised himself a bit for sinking to the level of Beavis and Butt-head.

“Meat and two veg,” she said. “Very British fare.”

“Looks wonderful.” Part of him meant the food. He noticed again that inner warmth that made her eyes bulge and come alive.

She fetched serving dishes of carrots and rolls, and then poured herself some wine. He waved it off, happy with the water. He did his best to carve the roast, not something he knew a lot about. He'd done his share of turkeys, but Kathy had never been big on red meat, and Marlena had cooked mostly Mexican.

“Zambia got its independence early, but Rhodesia had a lot more whites, and they held out. Toward the end they came up with this desperate referendum scheme. It was a ridiculously complicated plan, meant to appear democratic but really just to delay black rule as long as possible. Some percentage of blacks would get the vote once they owned enough property or made a certain salary. Little by little over the decades, or over the centuries, the blacks would creep toward parity with the whites on the backs of their elite. It was so fantastically devious that they had to send teams of earnest social workers out into the locations with a big flannel-board to explain to the Africans how the plan would benefit them.” She laughed. “They were really astounded when all these unlettered blacks just sat there mute and raised handwritten signs saying
one man
—
one vote.
In the end they crushed the referendum 100-to-1.”

“People are not dumb.”

“Please have some carrots.”

“Not my strong suit, but I will.” He distributed rare roast beef, and then shoveled some boiled carrots onto his plate. The music changed tempo, and two male voices seemed to be singing a lively back-and-forth duet, one voice almost comically deep and boomy.

“I went back to Zambia and Zimbabwe much later for a visit, after what they call black majority rule. A redundancy, of course. It was refreshing to see Africans running things, but most of the whites had gone and there was no place for me. Still, Central Africa is rooted very deep in me. I miss it terribly.”

“I hear that from other exiles.”

She smiled and a kind of light filled her from inside. “There's an amazing unfiltered sunlight that soaks the land there, the flat-topped trees out on the plains, the breathtaking sight of a flame lily. Oh, that smell of rain on a hot tar road. And all those wonderful animals—African animals are always the best, everyone knows that—lions, zebra, elephant, giraffe.” She looked at the wall for a moment, as if waiting for a wildlife film to unfold there. “And the open way Africans laugh, their warmth and small kindnesses. I may go back yet, but Billy won't. He's an American through and through. It's so strange to be a different nationality from your own child. He doesn't know what
boerewors
is—the commonest kind of sausage to me—and he asks me questions about things like the Lone Ranger that I can't answer.”

“I'm a different nationality from my child, too,” Jack Liffey offered, “and we both grew up in the same
town.
I haven't got a clue where the expression ‘da bomb' comes from. Do you?”

She smiled and shook her head and then reached over to press softly on his hand for an instant out of sympathy, or maybe something else. It sent fire all the way to his toes. This night was going to be something, he thought. He could barely eat. He wondered, why on earth do we look forward to this so much? It's terrifying.

They ate as much as they could, which was not much, and they moved to the sofa and held hands and talked about losses they'd experienced, about being single parents, about giving back in life and a lot of things like that.

“My God, I feel like I'm sixteen again,” he said.

“I'll bet it's sincerity that does that.”

“That and feeling just how politically incorrect I am when I can't help thinking you have the largest breasts I have ever seen in my life.”

She burst out laughing. “They're very sensitive, too,” she said as she undid the top button of her blouse. They started on the sofa and eventually retreated to the bedroom, leaving a trail of rumpled clothing. He discovered that much of her body was just as sensitive as her breasts. She had no trouble at all enjoying herself.

“It's been so long,” she whispered against his chest.

But he had trouble for his part, and it threw a genuine pang of alarm into him, which only made it worse. Whether it was the way he had been imprisoned by sorrow for weeks now, or some new desperation about wanting things to be utterly perfect with Aneliese, or some other deep-rooted fear that he could not even identify, nothing that she did seemed to have any effect on his small boiled shrimp. She tried her best and then he stopped her. He lay back staring grimly at the ceiling.

“It's not you, I'm sure of it,” he said.

“It'll all work out. It's fine, Jack, honest. This was wonderful.”

He rubbed his eyes hard, his upbeat mood falling in like a house of cards. Just cut my wrists now, he thought. Put me out to pasture. This, he thought, was exactly where Hemingway ate his shotgun.

There was no sound of Loco scrabbling at the other side of the door when he got home at 2:00
A.M.,
and Jack Liffey wondered if this was another sign of the animal's newfound domestication, the dog finally taking human comings and goings in stride. But when he opened the door, his heart started pumping, and he knew in an instant that it was something else altogether. His world had been invaded, the condo tossed and ransacked by somebody who didn't care that he knew it. In fact, somebody who
wanted
him to know it.

The first thing he saw was the back of his sofa knifed out, and white cotton stuffing coming off the cheap frame underneath. He looked back quickly at the door but there was no sign of forced entry. The patio door was closed and locked. A couple of videotape cassettes that he happened to have—Maeve's favorite movies, in fact—had been ripped open in pointless vandalism and the brownish tape lay spaghettied on the floor. The drawers of a cabinet had been emptied out and the drawers themselves tossed into the heap.

Then he saw a partially gnawed raw steak at his feet and felt a new chill. He went straight to the closet in the back room that he knew Loco favored for refuge, ignoring further devastation as he went, and there the dog lay. Its flank was still warm as he knelt but the dog was terribly still, and then he saw it inhale slowly with a little raspy sound. He gathered the body up in his arms and carried it down the hall, then set it down on the sofa long enough to toss the steak into a plastic bag which he slung over his arm. He carried the dog to his car and drove like mad to the twenty-four-hour animal hospital on Sepulveda.

“Please, please, please. …”

A bored overweight girl with bad acne took the dog in ahead of a Siamese cat in a box on an old woman's lap, and a few minutes later a skinny old guy with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth came out to tell Jack Liffey that since Loco was still breathing and the dog's heart seemed strong, it was probably only something like Thorazine, but they would keep the animal under observation. They had no facilities to analyze the gnawed meat, but they would freeze it in case it became necessary.

He left his name and address and went out to the small porch in front, watching the dead street and dark storefronts across the way. He stayed like this for a long time, so long that it began disturbing him. He knew he'd wound down to some kind of stasis in front of the animal hospital, and now it was hard to force himself to move again. A big sedan came north very slowly, with its brights on, the driver probably drunk and beating an overcareful retreat home. A sea breeze gusted between the buildings, and he could actually smell the sea, though the Pacific was several miles away.

Poor Loco, he thought, finally turning from coyote into dog and rewarded like this. But that was the way of the world's rewards, wasn't it? He felt the self-pity stalking him and shut his mind to it, to thinking at all. He heard animal sounds from behind the veterinary building breaking up the deep quiet, a faint howl of protest, a moaning, some kind of bird chatter. There was a soft drone overhead. A couple of late, late airplanes droned high above, probably transpacifics, inbound to make the big turn over the L.A. River and then descend westward on their final approach into LAX. Everybody was homeward bound, except him. He didn't want to go back to his apartment and have to deal with all the disruption.

Home—whatever that had come to mean.

It was amazing how fragile everything was, he thought. Only the day before, his general outlook had seemed to be picking up, and he'd had the evening with Aneliese de Villiers before him. Then—when the moment had come—he'd broken down like a fifty-three-year-old jalopy dropping its transmission in the road and refusing to go an inch farther. On top of that, he'd lost the refuge of home.

He tried again to move off the little porch, but discovered that none of his limbs obeyed. His legs were in full revolt, sending back petulant refusals. There was no point to doing anything, they insisted. Pools of street light picked out little windblown slips of paper, sparkles of insects on the air, driven east by the breeze. He felt woozy and disconsolate, completely unhinged. Even the battered VW parked at the curb seemed a pretty dismal mode of transport for a grown man.

He took a deep breath, told himself to buck up and just
knock it off,
and drove home in a daze. He wrapped an artificial numbness around himself like a cloak and held it there to seal out the real numbness.

Thank God Maeve hadn't been in the apartment, he thought. He kicked detritus around on his carpet and examined the destruction. What had they been after? he wondered. He realized this thought heralded the return of a semblance of reason—to look for a reason. About half his books had been swept off the shelves in the bedroom, but luckily no one had touched the big
Oxford Companion to American Literature,
which was in its usual position. He took the large book down and opened it up. His .45 automatic pistol was still nestled in the hollow where he had cut away the pages. At least there wouldn't be a weapon out there with his fingerprints on it, holding up liquor stores. Unless, in the fragility of things, he decided to get into the act himself.

Like so much Tijuana construction, the window latch didn't quite meet its slot, and he was sure he could jimmy it open. Even at the luxury end of things, Baja buildings seemed to start decaying even before they were completed. Fariborz didn't know why that was, but he had a feeling it was something to do with contractors shorting everything by just a little extra profit margin—less sand than needed in the cement, too few rebars, not enough labor time to get things right.

He had wanted to like Mexico the summer he had lived in T.J., in this very apartment, but the sense of ubiquitous shoddiness and decay had soured him a bit. He had read about the Shakers and how they had built their homes and furniture simply and slowly and sturdily, to the glory of their God. Fariborz himself instinctively understood that, felt deeply that every act should be a kind of tribute to God.

But now he had begun to realize he was no expert at all on how to perform an action meant for the glory of God. Everything he had tried to do had gone wrong. Somewhere in his recent reading, there had been a striking passage: When you find yourself a long ways down the wrong path and you're finally sure of it, you have to act as soon as you can. So the evening before, he had gone out the window of the rural compound with his flight bag while Hassan and the other boys had been praying in the next room.

He had walked to a minimart and discovered he was in a hamlet called Campo on Highway 94 halfway from San Diego to El Centro and he had then hitched west to the improbably named Thing Road, where he had walked two miles south to the border crossing at Tecate. He had crossed on foot with no problem at all. On the Mexico side, there was no bus until dawn and he had eaten three wonderful soft tacos—grilled
carne de res,
his first meat in months, like a repudiation of some kind—from the vendor beside the bus station, and then slept fitfully on a pile of smelly cardboard behind a cantina.

In the morning he caught the packed and tipsy westbound bus on Baja's Highway 2 to Tijuana. He had stood the whole way, pressed against the back doors, tossed back and forth along with everyone else by the ragged road. It was an easy walk up from town to Colonia el Paraiso, near the country club, out in the eastern districts of Tijuana which he knew well, just a long jump across the foul T.J. River from Otay Mesa and all the
maquiladoras
that surrounded the airport and stretched out endlessly to the east, American and Japanese factories that assembled almost anything you could name.

The latch finally gave to his penknife, and he slid the aluminum window open and listened. He doubted anyone ever stayed in the company apartment, except an occasional business visitor. Mahmoud disdained living on the Mexican side of the border and had a fancy house up at Imperial Beach south of San Diego. There were no signs of recent habitation, and Fariborz went straight to the stripped bed and flopped down to try to sleep. Being on the run was incredibly exhausting, he decided, physically and morally. But after a few minutes his eyes opened wide; he was too keyed up to sleep.