Streets on Fire (11 page)

He took to peering closely at the shot of Malcolm, probably taken toward the end of his life. The man had been caught looking exhausted to the core, as he leaned out over a lectern. A Young Turk stood beside him, his eyes wide as if spotting the assassin in the crowd.

Jack Liffey heard voices and a young man in sweats hurried out of a side room, leaving the door open to what looked like a classroom. A blackboard was covered with what was probably Swahili, and three young men pored over an ancient computer on a scarred desk. One of them wore the same tricolor cap as the receptionist.

“
Numba yanga haina malango
,” one read off the screen.

“Something about a house.”

“My house has no door. It a Swahili riddle, fool.”

“Huh?”

“It means an egg.”

Outside, a whole parade of fire trucks went wailing down the boulevard, one after another, not just the two you usually heard. Something pretty big was burning.

*

Maeve Liffey hefted a big plastic trash can that was nearly empty and set it under the high window where she could see the curtain was parted. Her heart thundered away so loud that she was afraid they could hear it from inside the house. She knew Mary Beth was watching from the trees, so she stifled an almost irresistible urge to flee as fast as possible.

The plastic can had a lot of disconcerting flex under her feet as she climbed onto it. She pressed her palms against the rough sun-warmed stucco to stabilize herself and inched upward until her head just cleared the sill.

A TV was glowing blue across the room. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the interior murk, and then she found she was looking across a dining table piled with dishes and cooking pots and ravaged pizza boxes that had probably been there for weeks. Beyond was a front room where half a dozen big men lounged on a sofa and pillows on the floor to watch the TV. One seemed passed out flat on his back on a reed mat, his mouth wide open to collect flies. There were more tattoos per square foot than anywhere she’d ever seen. Most of the guys wore armless T-shirts and jeans that didn’t look any too clean, but one of the bikers was bare-chested, and the man passed out was only wearing jockey shorts and had the hairiest shoulders she’d ever seen, like somebody had glued toupees all over him. The bikers all had beer cans, and they were watching one of those talk shows where people sit side by side to humiliate one another. She could hear the TV voices buzzing lightly against the glass.

A car passed on the street, and one guy on the sofa looked over at the front window and said something. He held up a hand and the man beside him high-fived him, so Maeve guessed whatever he’d said had been judged witty.

She was just wondering what
exactly
this was going to tell her about the disappearance of Amilcar Davis, beyond the fact that he was not chained up in the corner of their living room, when the trash can started to flex on one side. It was like a slow-motion nightmare. She willed the plastic to stop its inexorable sag and clawed at the stucco to take her weight off that side, but she went right on sinking slowly at an angle until all at once the can sproinged and she fell straight down onto it. She cried out in alarm, unable to stop herself, and found herself on her stomach, draped over the side of the toppled trash can, catching her weight on a smarting knee on the dirt.

Oh, please,
please
, she thought.

She heard the back door come open and then there was this inconceivable person looming over her, with a grin and a pointy beard and arms like trees that were covered with eagles and daggers and other things. A gigantic hand closed on her thin upper arm.

“Little girl, if you’re so all-fired het up about what’s inside here, maybe you best come on in.”

“Mary Beth, run!” Maeve shouted.

*

The Mwalimu himself came out to usher him into the inner sanctum. He was tall and imposing, maybe sixty, bearded and dressed in full African regalia. He didn’t offer to shake hands, either in standard fashion or Movement style.

“Welcome to Unity House, Mr. Liffey. We’re not as hostile to your people as you may have been led to expect.”

“I’m never sure who my people are,” Jack Liffey said, as he followed along a shabby corridor, with the Mwalimu’s gold-red-green robe billowing ahead like some huge flightless bird. He wondered if it was cooler under there. The place had no air-conditioning, and the deeper he got into the complex the stuffier it got.

“You have that luxury. The oppressed do not.”

“Yes, okay.”

The office was fairly shabby, too, except for an imposing African mask of a woman’s head, with what looked like long seed pods balanced on top, and a large cloth covered with repetitious black-and-white designs that hung flat against the wall. There was a small desk, but the man chose to sit in an old easy chair and motioned Jack Liffey to a threadbare sofa opposite.

A cheap old transistor radio was fizzing softly on a side table, and the man bowed for a moment to put his ear near it and then came upright.

“Kidogo is out right now, but he’ll be back shortly. I assume it is he you wish to meet.”

“It is
he
,” Jack Liffey repeated.

The man smiled. “I have a doctorate—in what we used to call Black Studies, from the University of Michigan,” Mwalimu wa Weusi said.

“Then you probably knew Amilcar’s mother in Ann Arbor.”

“Oh, yes. Even though we were on opposing sides of a very old dispute. We had one common point, in both claiming W.E.B. Dubois. Beyond that, Ms. Thigpen always put the working class and the writings of a dead German Jew ahead of her people.”

“I’m not sure you can call Karl Marx Jewish.”

He shrugged. “Race is always a bit of an artifical construct, isn’t it? Obviously I have European blood, too, but this country sees me as African American completely and forever. As long as they do, I haven’t much choice.”

Which deftly avoided the issue of anti-Semitism, Jack Liffey thought.

“You will admit it’s curious that Amilcar’s family chose to send a white man to investigate his son’s disappearance,” Mwalimu wa Weusi added.

“I caught the case from an African American detective. He punted when it looked like he might have to interview some neo-Nazis out in the Inland Empire.”

“Did you get along well with them?”

Jack Liffey smiled. “I don’t think I’d like them any more than you would, but the trail seemed to lead more in this direction. Reports suggest that Amilcar and his girlfriend had a bad experience right here in LA the weekend before they disappeared.”

“I don’t know anything about that. Perhaps Kidogo can help you.” He raised a finger for silence and then dipped his head again to the radio.

“Not yet,” he said, after a moment, sitting back up with a grave look. “Abdullah Ibrahim is about to give a press conference,” he explained.

“Is he one of yours?”

“He’s NOI, but we honor him. He made his fortune but he didn’t move out to Malibu to swim with movie stars.”

“NOI?”

“Nation of Islam.”

“Ah, of course. Did they ever adopt orthodox Islam? I can’t remember.”

“After Elijah Muhammad died, his son Walid moved them in that direction, but Farrakhan won the internal struggle and took them back to that inventive tale of the evil scientist Yakub who conjured up the white race by accident. I believe Farrakhan reports that this all took place after he visited Elijah on a flying saucer.”

He didn’t crack a smile and Jack Liffey couldn’t work out his attitude. They sat in silence for a moment. Generally silence did not make Jack Liffey uncomfortable—it provided a nice edge when he was questioning people—but this time it did. “Tell me about gangsta rap,” he inquired. “I saw your sign out front.”

“Whatever the sign says, I would defend it in the white media. But just between us I think it’s obscene nihilism. Glorifying a thug life. There’s something quite abhorrent about watching a people dance to their own degradation, all for the profit of white music executives.”

“A lot of young people seem to respond to it.”

“Yes, the white press always argues that the gangsta images are simply holding up a mirror to reality. But a drowning man doesn’t need a mirror. He needs a hand, a way out, a swimming lesson.”

The answer was so studied that Jack Liffey guessed it was part of a canned response he had given often.

“We have to get our own community together before we can meet the world on its own terms. Once we do, we can define our own interests for ourselves and offer our own cultural truths to the world. African Americans have been behind just about every great form of art this country has produced—jazz, blues, rock.”

“Not cinema,” Jack Liffey offered. “The Jews did that.”

Their eyes met and he thought he sensed a spark of amusement. “Yes, they did,” the Mwalimu conceded. “And as a people, the Jews have suffered greatly over a long period of time. Pogroms, the Holocaust—we appreciate all that, but we are no longer in a period when alliances are of much value to us. We are about self-reliance now.”

“More power to you,” Jack Liffey said. “But I’d like to share jazz, if you don’t mind, even if the Irish seem stuck with Riverdance.”

*

Maeve Liffey sat on a folding Samsonite chair in the middle of the living room with a big fat rope tied around her waist. It looked like the kind of rope they used to moor ocean liners, and it had about thirty feet of slack wending across the floor to where the other end was tied around the toilet in the bathroom. It had taken two of the overmuscled bikers to cinch up the knot against her belly so she had no illusions about working it free in some moment of opportunity.

“So you looked in the window and you liked what you saw?”

It was the huge one who’d hauled her inside, whose name she’d heard as Lunchmeat. A skinnier and fiercer one nicknamed Greek sat in a beanbag facing her. He had the word
UNEMPLOYABLE
tattooed across his forehead, with a swastika under it.

The initial panic had almost made her faint as she’d tried to dig in her heels outside, but Lunchmeat had lifted her off the ground with one hand and carried her inside like a tote bag. Her panic had now given way to a kind of frantic calculation of possibilities. It was hard to discern what went on in their heads. She felt like a dog in a room full of humans, trying desperately to read their unspoken intentions.

“No, I don’t,” she said.

“You don’t like us?” big Lunchmeat said, with mock wounded vanity.

The TV was blaring away in the background, identical twin women bragging about how they had fooled their husbands and swapped beds at will. The husbands were much less cheerful about it, and the big security guards restraining the husbands looked a lot like the bikers.

“What’s your name?” Lunchmeat asked.

“Nancy.”

“Nancy what?”

“Drew.”

Lunchmeat bulked over her and bent way forward sniffing at her hair. He had the reek of an old ashtray.

“Don’t little girls smell
nice
. Ain’t even no perfume to it. Greek, come smell her.”

The thinner one launched himself toward her and buried his face in her lap. She went rigid as he nuzzled where he shouldn’t, and a chill taking her whole body.

He pushed back up off her knees. “Ain’t like no woman yet, not even a little bitty can of tuna fish. You peeking in our window to work out what fucking a bunch of us is gonna feel like?”

“
No
!” She realized she’d better come up with something plausible fast.

Lunchmeat took a fistful of her hair and sniffed it some more. “Nice. Umm.”

“You know,” Greek said, “you come into our place, we can do what we want with you. It’s the law.”

“It is
not
.”

“Course it is. We talked about it back in social studies in high school. Guy breaks into your place, you can shoot him. I remember one ignoramus asks, ‘What if the guy’s only half in the window?’ and the teacher goes, ‘Just shoot the
inside
half.’” He guffawed.

“That’s not true.”

“So we get to do what we want with you and
then
shoot you. No point wasting it, huh, girl?” When she let herself look at him she could see he was eyeing her breasts. She was mortified that she’d worn the sexy lacy bra that she had sneaked out to buy when her mom was busy.

“I didn’t break in,” she insisted.

“You’re in now.”

“What you after if it ain’t a good time?” Lunchmeat asked.

There was nothing to lose now, she thought. “I thought you might be holding Amilcar Davis for ransom.”

“Milk-car?” Lunchmeat said quizzically.

There was some sort of outburst on TV and a guy across the room hollered, “Look at that! Mother
fuck
!” but no one was paying attention.

She could see understanding dawning on Greek.

“She’s talking about that nigger who was double-dating with the queers.”

“Man, one of those guys must have been personally related to the President,” Lunchmeat said.

“He means the cops been here three fuckin’ times already, pussy, even the Feds.”

“There’s a big reward,” she improvised. She almost went for a million but thought it was probably over the top. “A hundred thousand dollars.”

“Fuckin A,” Lunchmeat said. “For that, I’ll turn my own ass in,”

“Too bad we ain’t got him.”

“If you aren’t holding him, I was mistaken,” she said, in a brave stab at normality. “I’m really sorry. You can just let me go and I’ll forget it and look somewhere else.”

“What’re
you
worth?”

“My dad’s poor,” she said quickly. “He’s laid off.”

Lunchmeat had moved around in front of her but she saw his keen interest collapse, as if he’d just pawed through the stolen wallet and found only a few singles. Wouldn’t a rich girl say the same thing? Maeve thought. This guy was
really
not very bright.

“Then we got to have some fun with you,” Greek said. “Cash or gash, that’s the rule.”

*

He’d imagined Kidogo showing up in his own set of multi-colored robes, but in fact he dribbled his way into the office nonchalantly in a purple Laker suit that was soaked through as if he’d been playing all afternoon. He fit the costume. He was thin and at least six-nine, and the ball kept rapping down on the floor like a finger hammering on the same bruise.