City of Strangers (21 page)

“But it's all been emptied of content,” Maeve's voice rose in the living room. “It's the quintessential art of the Cold War. It turned its back on the world on purpose, so it can't be accused of saying anything at all. And it's proud it did that.”

“I agree in a way,” the boy said. “I think decoration is immoral if it doesn't have a spiritual purpose.”

Where on earth did she learn a word like “quintessential”? Jack Liffey thought. There was a half carton of milk that smelled okay. He set that on the counter. Cereal from the cupboard. He got out the canister of ground French roast and started to make a big pot of coffee.

“You could say abstract expressionism is in flight from meaning.” That was Maeve, in that hectoring too-old voice that he found quite touching, with somebody else's quotation marks in her speech. Maybe even his. Though he rather liked abstract expressionism.

He leaned around the corner into the living room. “Kids, I've never heard such doctrinaire crap,” he interjected. “I grew up with abstract expressionism, and I love it. A painting isn't a novel,
you,
and it isn't a religion,
you.
Before you both shut it completely out of your universe with some ridiculously rigid theory of what it
ought
to be doing, why don't you open yourself up to what it actually does? Let it work on your
perceptions
and feelings instead of your tiny little left brains.”

They both turned on him, eyes big, uniting in instinct against Authority, just as he yanked his head back into the kitchen, grinning.

“Dad, that's not fair at all! You're just arguing ad hominem.”

My, we
are
getting sophisticated, he thought.

“We have every right, sir, to ask art to have a meaning.”

“Don't just hit and run,
Dad.
That's such grown-up arrogance!”

He let them argue at him for a while, but he had planted the seed he wanted to plant. Maybe they'd recall it one day, before some one-track outlook solidified in their psyches to wall out a whole enriching experience of life.

Then, in a lull in all the good feeling, he realized if things kept working out with Rebecca, he was going to have to tell Aneliese de Villiers something. She was so decent and he wanted to like her so much that it made the hair on his neck stand on end. He'd even had fantasies of Maeve and Billy as step-siblings. They'd have liked one another. Why did life have to be famine or flood? And what was it that had defeated his libido with one and not the other?

Soon he called the kids in and set them to preparing what there was of the breakfast, defrosting the muffins in the microwave and laying out the table, and then a glistening Rebecca Plumkill emerged in a fresh sheath dress that she had conjured magically. He introduced them all around.

When Fariborz took his turn in the shower, Maeve did her best to embarrass her father by asking Rebecca how he had been in bed.

“Ssst, Maeve”—he cut her off—“have you got your cell phone?”

“Sure. Mom would kill me if I lost it.”

“I need to borrow it. Right now. And when I say, ‘I have to take the garbage out,' I want you to keep Fariborz occupied for a few minutes, just make sure he doesn't follow me.”

Her eyes went wide. “You're not going to turn him in!”

“No, I'm not, but I am going to have a talk with the folks who made such a mess at Ruby Ridge, and I don't want it to spook him. I'd do it now, but I don't know how long he showers.”

And just then, the water went off. Maeve hurried to her backpack by the armchair and got him the phone. Jack Liffey went into the kitchen to forestall any further talk that the boy might overhear, and to open a can of dog food for Loco, who was finally stirring from his deep sleep.

“You know what's got this dog worried about his food?” Jack Liffey asked them all.

“No, Dad, what's got Loco worried about his food?” Maeve parroted with a pretended singsong annoyance in her voice. “I know a Jack Liffey straight line when I hear it coming.”

“Alpo's over a buck a can now. That's seven dollars in dog money.”

Rebecca Plumkill laughed, and he decided right then that she was a keeper.

After hastily downing coffee and a muffin, Rebecca Plumkill had rushed off to attend to some school business, but not before a whispered promise to return very soon and a long kiss that turned his gizzard inside out. He'd explained away the bandage on his hand to Maeve as a minor burn, and now the kids were deep in conversation. He showered with his hand covered by a plastic bag and then stood in the middle of his mussed bedroom with a curious new ease at inhabiting his own body, a consoling kind of clarity about life.

He recognized it immediately as an illusion, but the kind of illusion worth hanging onto for all you were worth. The opposite of truth—he remembered the words of the great nuclear physicist Niels Bohr—was clarity. But who wanted truth? Not if you could have clarity like this. Or was it just the codeine?

As he dressed, Jack Liffey whistled a tune, or at least took a stab at it. In that happy state, his psyche received faint, worrying messages in the form of a murmur from the front room, and little by little he felt the top layers of his contentment spalling away like old, curling paint. Pay attention, and you'd see that there was always a lot of unpleasant stuff undone.

He dug into his T-shirt drawer and found the tangled mess of leather straps at the bottom. He had bought it at a gun swap meet back in the days when these semilegal bazaars had been held weekends in alleys behind most of the gun shops in L.A., and now he threaded his arms through the two big loops and tugged and wriggled until the breakfront holster hung straight down in his left armpit. He had rarely used the shoulder holster since he had no more right than any other civilian in L.A. to carry a concealed weapon, but this seemed about as good a time to break the law as any.

He had brought the
Oxford Companion
back into the bedroom with him, and now he flipped open the cover and lifted the Ballester Molina out of its hollow—the Argentine copy of the army .45 he'd bought at the same swap meet—and tucked it into the holster. He tugged it out a few times just to make sure he could. It was a little like carrying a toaster under your arm, but a loose jacket would shroud it enough so that polite—or easily alarmed—people would pretend not to see it.

When he came out, the kids had moved on to a discussion about pop music, names and styles that meant little to him, though he tried hard to keep up.

“Maeve, you'll need to look after yourself for a while. Fariborz and I have some work to do.”

“Uh, Dad. I haven't told you my good news yet.”

Somehow he didn't like the sound of that.

“I got my license this week, and I've got Mom's old Toyota now.”

“Congratulations,” he said dubiously. It had been coming for some time, and he realized now that he should have asked how she'd got herself there bright and early Saturday morning. “And the downside?”

“If you don't let me come along and help, I'll just follow you around. I'm a big girl now.”

“You just turned sixteen last week. When you're eighteen, you can move out of both of our houses and do what you want.
That's
a big girl in the law.”

“Since when have you been a stickler for the law? Fari and I decided that I could be a real help.”

Jack Liffey looked at the young man and he could tell this was the first the boy had heard about it, too, but Fariborz didn't seem to want to contradict Maeve. If he left her at the condo, she probably
would
try to follow him, and it would be next to impossible to give her the slip in the gutless Chevette. Short of putting a couple of rounds through the tires of her Toyota, he figured the best thing to do was to tell her she could come along and then put her out of the car with cabfare home at the nearest Denny's.

“Where are we going?” he asked Fariborz.

“I'd rather direct you. I want to be there, too, and I have a sense you'd leave me behind if you knew.”

“Everybody
wants leverage!” Jack Liffey complained. “All right, I give up. It's a school outing. I've got to take out the garbage first.”

He caught Maeve's eye and she had understood. He actually did pick up the dampish kitchen bag and head out the door into a gust of Santa Ana wind that was warm and dry and gritty on his face. After tossing the bag into the big green Dumpster off the parking lot, he took out Maeve's cell phone and dialed the number that said “direct line” on Robert Johnson's business card.

“This is me,” came the answer.

“Who me?”

“Who is this?”

“We could do this all day.
I
called.
You
identify.”

“Johnson. Is that Jack Liffey?”

“Uh-huh. Listen, the kid came to me. Fariborz Bayat. But he's going to spook and run if I try to bring him in. He says he's going to lead me to the other kids, which probably means to the sheik's cell. I'll make a deal with you. I'll stay in touch and tell you where we go, if you tell me what's going on with these Arabs, as far as you know. I don't want to walk into a big cloud of plutonium.”

“You really ought to bring the boy in.”

“Don't even go there. I've been having leverage battles all morning, and I'm just barely on top here.”

He heard a sigh and a kind of electronic buzz. They were probably trying to trace him, but he'd be gone in five minutes. “We picked up most of Sheik Arad's group yesterday. All the boom boxes are accounted for, except two, and one of those seems to be a mangled mess on a hill not far from their country retreat down near the border. It was probably a test. It sure put the fear of God into the agent who found it until the 100-meter circle of powder tested as wheat flour. One guy called Hassan Osmani is still on the loose and he's got one boom box. We don't know if it's armed and loaded, but we have to act as if it is. Where are you?”

“Don't know yet.” Jack Liffey clicked off. He was about to head back to the apartment when he had a second thought. Through directory assistance, he got the number of the FBI in the Federal Building and he even let Maeve's mom pay the extra charge for the dial-through.

“Federal Bureau of Investigation, Westwood. How may I direct your call?”

“You may direct it to Special Agent Robert Johnson, thank you.”

There was a long pause. “May I ask where you got that name, sir?”

“No, you may not. Just give me his direct line.”

“I'm sorry, sir. There is no Robert Johnson in this office.”

“How about some other office?”

“I'm on the Bureau computer, sir. We have no special agent in this area by that name. May I direct your call to another agent?”

He hung up with the granddaddy of chills scurrying up and down his spine like a yo-yo. He stared at the card in his hand. The ID the man had shown at the door had looked pretty good, but Jack Liffey realized now that he should have wondered about an agent showing up alone. In his experience, Shoes always went about in pairs.

Who the hell was Robert Johnson, and how did he seem to know so much? He thought immediately of the Mexican
judiciales,
but their interest was in the drugs, not the Arabs, and Robert Johnson hadn't been interested in drugs at all. Could some other agency be involved here, an agency that didn't want to leave footprints? The CIA was forbidden to do domestic surveillance, as were the military intelligence groups, if you took anybody's word. It couldn't have been some L.A. agency because the Campo house was in San Diego County, or maybe even Imperial. And no local police would have the resources to deal with plutonium, anyway. But Johnson sounded like he knew the score, and what other choice did he have?

He came back up the steps from the Dumpsters, and two little girls skipped past, carrying a doll between them by the arms. “All fall down,” one of them said to him. Or that was what it sounded like. Then a crow cawed softly up on the eaves. Enough with the omens, thank you, he thought.

“Bus is leaving,” he called into the house. They had been holding hands when the door swung open. He'd caught a glance of it, and then they came out sheepishly and trooped toward the parking lot. He felt like a scoutmaster herding his charges to the trailhead. Maeve deferred the front seat of the Chevette to Fariborz with a hand gesture. He hadn't seen her at such a loss for words in a long time.

The trashy car just barely started, the engine turning over reluctantly several times before catching. “Which way?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Right on Jefferson,” Fariborz directed.

He pulled out of the condo, swung in front of a slow motor-home and the boy began looking for addresses as the old bucket gathered speed.

“Oh, gee,” he said.

“Are you going to enlighten me?”

“I didn't realize. We could almost have walked. It's probably right up there.”

He pointed to a self-storage place that had gone up a year earlier, on the lot where the city had once tunneled down to get at L.A.'s main sewer outfall and replace it, a job that had annoyed the neighborhood with stinks and rumbles for years.

“Might I know what it is that's right up there?”

“The group has a storage locker. I saw the address on a shipping label that was taped to the radio cartons. I know the locker number, too. Don't you think it's worth checking?”

Jack Liffey thought about it. They were virtually there. So much for booting Maeve out somewhere safe. “I want you two to stay in the car.”

He parked in front of the office. There was what appeared to be an apartment above the office with tidy blue awnings. Past a big draw-gate, a series of ugly storage buildings stretched up the shallow slope in the lee of the same weedy hills with oil wells that loomed over his condo. As he looked, a tumbleweed whipped hard into the chain-link fence in the distance. Many others had piled up there already.

“What's the number of the locker?”

“I'll show you.”

Still, the leverage.

“Okay, but Maeve Mary stays
here.
Are we agreed?”

He had put his most forceful tone of voice into the admonition, using both her names, and she seemed to take it as a sign to acquiesce. She nodded, and he and Fariborz trooped to the office. Inside, an immensely fat man in a wheelchair sat behind the counter. A nasal cannula wrapped around his cheeks to poke its little tubes up his nostrils, and the hose ran to a big aluminum canister beside him that hissed now and then like an atomic bomb in a cheap movie.

“Hi. I'd like to check out one of your lockers. You got an open one?”

“Any idea the size you're gonna want?”

He hadn't counted on that. “I'll look at what you've got and think about it.”

The fat man set a clipboard on the counter. The top sheet of paper seemed to show a blueprint of different-sized lockers and a lot of fine print about conditions.

“We've got us A's. Those are like a two-car garage, and the B, fifteen-by-ten, and the C, that's ten-by-ten, and D, the five-by-ten, and a few E's, that's five-by-five, upper and lower. Most people think of the lockers as, like, the closet size or the garage size, and go from there. Now what you probably want—”

He didn't have the time or patience for this.

“Just let me look. I've gotta visualize it. Tell me a middle size that's open.”

“You ain't got no idea of what you need stored?”

He was about to pull out his .45 and wave it around. “Do you want to rent a locker or not?”

“You're the boss, sir. C-25 is a five-by-ten, about the size of a deep walk-in closet. Building C is the third one up. The room ain't locked, and I ain't had it swept out yet, either. Guy pulled out this morning with some printing equipment in a U-Haul, so there might be a smell.”

“Great. Fine.”

“You can walk in through that door. Don't got to drive in.”

Jack Liffey led the boy out the side door of the office that put them inside the complex, and they headed up the access roadway that ran beside dozens of swing-up doors.

“I thought he was going to try to explain what a cubic foot was.”

“What was that tube he wore?” Fariborz asked.

“Oxygen. Probably emphysema. Don't ever start smoking. The upside for us, it means he's not going to be following us around. Give me a number now.”

“D-53.”

Each building seemed to specialize in one size of lockup. The first had garage doors, and the second had a series of evenly spaced room doors, like a windowless motel. In the third, the doors were closer together. D was identical to the third building, and locker 53 was around on the back side, so they'd be out of sight of the office if the manager happened to want to watch them.

Coming up he saw the big padlock on the door, so there was little chance of finding Hassan Osmani camped out here, or a cleaned-out locker with a forgotten treasure map on the floor. But he knocked anyway, just to feel he was doing his job.

The boy reacted first. Jack Liffey could see him perk up, so he knocked again and put his ear to the door. Sure enough, there was some kind of muffled noise in there, like a caged animal stirred to fright.

“Iman!” Fariborz shouted without warning, nearly deafening Jack Liffey.

The noise inside became rhythmic, a regular chug that sounded a lot like his rental car trying to start. It was almost certainly human, probably somebody gagged with duct tape.

“Iman, if it's you, be quiet for five seconds, then make noise again!”

He did exactly that.

“Stay and reassure him,” Jack Liffey said.

He trotted back to the office and burst in on the caretaker. A skin magazine quickly went under the counter, and he wondered cruelly if there were specialty magazines for oxygen-tank sex. They stared at each other for an instant and then Jack Liffey took out Robert Johnson's card and showed it.

“I'm working with the FBI. You can call this agent if you want to confirm it. Right now I need to get into a locker. There's a kidnap victim inside.”