The Cracked Earth (15 page)

Bruce Parfit smiled gently as he sat behind the big clean desk. “Me and my mates used to think the Great Helmsman was the ridgy-didge.”

“Pardon?”

“That's Australian for the bee's knees. These days I think the world can get on pretty well without him and all he wrought.”

“If we start adding up what the world can get on without,” Jack Liffey observed, “there's no telling where we're going to end up.”

“Mate, ask not what I can do for you. Ask what you can do for me.”

“Monogram's not really your problem. Your problem's in Japan, with Mitsuko. They're a big
zaibatsu
cartel that owns Monogram the way they own pocket change and geishas and a few blocks of downtown Sydney. You don't mean much to them until you become an irritant.”

“I know Mitsuko. They bought up a lot of mining rights back home.”

“I have a friend who knows Mitsuko, too.” This had come from Mike Lewis. “During the war they used Chinese and Korean slave labor. They worked them to death and after the war two of their executives were brought before the war-crimes tribunal in Tokyo. Actually they were given life sentences, but there was an unpleasant deal to let them go. There always is.

“Anyway, they play rough. In Japan, if a zaibatsu feels somebody beat them unfairly, they use yakuza to get even. All the
zaibatsu
have ties to the gangsters. So over here they did the next best thing, they used a strong-arm agency Monogram Pictures has had on retainer for decades.”

He thought of Terror Pennycooke and could almost taste ginger ale.

Jack Liffey paused a moment. He definitely had the man's attention. “I'll take care of the local talent because it's become personal, but I thought you might want a chance to get even with the home office across the seas.”

The Australian's eyes widened slightly. “That's a flaming big fish to grill, mate.”

“Have you got any first-rate hackers? I know one, but he's out of action for the moment.” He smiled, thinking of poor Chris Johnson forced to work on an old 486 computer without a modem, pacing back and forth through the tangle of unusable electronics in his living room and having to go to the pay phone at the corner to call out. No phone line was a condition of parole.

Bruce Parfit looked at the ceiling for a moment, leaning back in his chair, then out the window at the layer on layer of smog, squarish mid-rises like upended Kleenex boxes, and tall teetery palms. “A test match of electronic aggro.”

He sat up straight and punched a single key on his computer. “Michael, is Ad in with you?”

“Sure, Brucie. We're all on wall time.”

“Row on in here.”

“Can it wait?”

“Now.”

In a moment the door came open, held by a very young Asian, while a skinny black kid on polio crutches lurched in and sat hard on a leather bench. He was far too young to have had polio, and he wasn't very good with the crutches, so Jack Liffey guessed he'd only been crippled a few years. The Asian shut the door softly and sat on the front edge of a purple sling chair.

“This is Jack Liffey, a friend of ours. Michael Chen, Admiral Wicks.”

They barely acknowledged him. It took a moment to realize that the last bit was the black kid's name, not an honorific. There were a lot of African-American Generals and Admirals for some reason.

“I hope this is important, Brucie,” Michael Chen said. “We were in a killer run of code.”

“It's important.”

“Well, bazz fazz and rowrbazzle,” Admiral Wicks said.

“You're too young to know Pogo,” Jack Liffey interjected.

“We read reprints.” His remarkable chocolaty-brown eyes came around, fixed and flat enough to hide behind, and he finally gave Jack Liffey a moment of hostile study. “I just want to establish that you're old enough to have read the original, and you feel sufficiently bad about being old.”

“I feel sufficiently bad, thank you.”

He nodded at his crutches. “You know, the thing that challenges you can become an interesting new way of looking at the world. You want to find a challenge for everyone.”

“I've got my own problems, thanks. One thing about this little tech war we're going to talk about, I'd like you to plan it out but put it on ice until I give you the go-ahead. I want to see if there's any chance of a peace treaty first.”

D
OWN
C
RENSHAW AT
V
ERNON AND
E
LEVENTH THERE WAS A
twenty-foot doughnut propped up against the sky. Beneath it was an L-shaped streamline eatery with some fading signs for doughnuts at yesterday's prices and a promise that they were the city's best. He parked in the lot that Continental Doughnuts shared with a repair shop, and a dozen eyes in a group of loungers followed him idly as he went inside. This was an African-American area and there probably weren't a dozen Anglos a day who sat down in the red plastic booths.

He didn't sit down either. He nodded to Josette, who worked the counter three days a week, and then inclined his head toward the other angle of the L. “Josette. Ivan in back?”

“He getting ready for his taxes.” She waggled a finger to beckon him in closer and he leaned on one of the red stools on its chrome stalk as she eyed him with a smirk.

“You got that look, that
glow,
like you gettin' laid, Jack.”

“You're observant.”

“Seeing stuff's a survival skill these days. Hope she's worth it.”

“Me, too. She's pretty scary.”

Josette laughed. “Man, don't be disturbing his figurin' for long. I told him, spend it all before you got to pay up, but he don't listen. He gonna get his butt kicked by the state equalization.”

The security door opposite the employee rest room was ajar an inch and he knocked once and pushed it open. Ivan Monk sat at a flimsy table, where he was jabbing at an old PC with two fingers.

“What's up, Jack?”

“Hopes.”

“Same old same old.”

The doughnut shop was only the butter on Ivan Monk's bread. He made the bread tracing bail skips and doing all the other odd dirty jobs people left for detectives. He was good at it and Jack Liffey had passed a number of runaways his way, particularly when the kids ran south of Jefferson or east of La Cienega.

“Hey, you ever work a spreadsheet?” Ivan Monk asked. He pushed away from the keyboard that looked ridiculously tiny and frail under his big hands. He was a nice guy, but he always looked like he was about to break your arm.

“Man, when the Arabs invented the zero, they came up with everything I needed to monitor my finances.”

Ivan met his eyes skeptically. “You need to get yourself a doughnut shop for fallback money.”

“Always wondered where you came up with the capital.”

Ivan Monk took a sip of what was probably good Scotch from a tumbler. He knew better than to offer. “That's none of your business, so I'll tell you. It was my savings from the merchant marine. Where's your savings from making all those fighter planes that they went killing babies with?”

“My own babies ate it up.”

“Man, I happen to know you don't pay your child support.”

“Ouch. You're right, but I think about it a lot.”

Ivan Monk snorted once. “Maybe I'll track you down one day for Kathleen Liffey. What can I do you for?”

“Do you know a Jamaican named Terror Pennycooke?”

“You got business with him?”

“Maybe.”

“I hope you're kidding me. Tyrone P is one crazy fuck. He used to be in one of those Jamaican posses that carried the good dope from L.A. to Kansas City and beyond. Latterly he's become a general-purpose dirty doer. He plays bold for anybody that pays. Likes a big gun, C-4 plastic explosive, and what he calls petrol bombs.”

And ginger beer, Jack Liffey thought.

“Most Rastas are gentle souls, but he's not on that track
at all.
Stay away from him, Jack, if you got any kind of good sense.”

“Thanks, Iv. One more thing. What does ‘irie' mean?”

Ivan's brow wrinkled up. “Spell it.”

He did, and Ivan Monk laughed. “Man, that's pronounced ‘eye-rye.' It's a bit subtle to explain to a man like you, a peckerwood from Babylon, mon, wit no linguistic suss.” He laughed, then lapsed into standard English. “Dread talk does a strange and philosophical thing with its pronouns. Somehow they got the idea that the pronoun ‘me' was subservient and fit only for slaves. Maybe it is, you know? It's an object form, after all, and the doer is always the subject. Anyway, they use I a lot instead of me and my: give it to I, that's I car, I did it I-self. Even the plural, instead of we, it's I-and-I. You okay so far, Babylon?”

“I got lost back at C-4 plastic explosives.”

Nothing could slow Ivan down. “Now it gets really subtle. ‘I' took on a kind of holiness to the Rastas and they started substituting I for initial syllables of a lot of common words. I believe in I-quality. You're my heart's I-sire. I'm gonna I-ceive a letter. And so on. It's half a verbal game, of course, but the other half's an I-claration of independence from the language forms of the slave masters. After you know that, eye-rye is simple. Rye is standard Jamaican English for right. So ‘irie' is a form of all-
right.
Meaning something like right-on.”

“Copacetic there, old buddy. Thanks for the seminar. Someday I'll teach you redneck.”

Monk shook his head. “We already know it. That's the nature of being a minority, Jack, you gots to pay attention.”

O
N
the main drag they sold mufflers, window glass, bowling supplies, and karate lessons. A half-dozen townlets that spread across one end of Canyon Country had voted to merge in the mid-1980s to form the instant city of Santa Clarita, and Saugus was the poorest of the lot, caught in the middle, mainly just soil erosion bisected by a highway. What there was of a downtown had been hit hard by the last two earthquakes and left with a lot of skewed buildings and “For Lease” signs. Over the hill in upscale Valencia there was Cal-Arts, the snobby arts institute, and out to the east there were newer suburbs with postmodern ranches, but here in the core there were mostly Baptist churches and guys tinkering with Harleys.

On the drive up the freeway, he'd found that if he focused hard on the road, he could just about forget what a mess he'd made of his daughter's visit. As usual, there had been a whole lot of little steps that mostly made sense, and then all of a sudden you lay there tied naked to a bed with your daughter screaming in the hall.

Danny Firestack lived a few blocks off the main drag on a street without sidewalks where most of the little boxy houses had aluminum foil in the south-facing windows. A man at the corner had a compressor chugging away in his drive and he was spray-painting the dirt and weeds in his front yard bright green. The sky above the neighborhood was deep blue, as if that, too, had been improved.

He parked across from the address the DMV had given him for 2MDD576. Toward the back of the driveway, by a detached clapboard garage that was about to collapse, he saw a big antique Olds with the chrome rocket on the front fender. The house was easily the crummiest on the block, with plywood boarding up one front window and patchy shingles missing from the roof.

He watched the house for a while and then thought, The hell with it. He walked across the street and up the walk made of eroding pavers and knocked. It was the big guy all right, maybe twenty years old and the size of a linebacker, and he recognized Jack Liffey from the cemetery but tried clumsily not to show it. Maybe it was the black eye.

“Yes?”

“Wise up, Danny, you know I'm not the Avon lady. If I found my way here, all is lost.” He pushed inside.

“Aw, Jeez …”

“I want to talk to Lee.”

“Who?”

Jack Liffey took out Lori's cell phone and dialed at random. “Me or the Santa Clarita cops.”

“Don't!”

Jack Liffey turned the phone off and looked around while the big guy tried to work himself up to it. The place didn't look like a residence at all. All around there were collapsed umbrellas that he recognized as light stands for film work, and cardboard boxes full of videotape cassettes, and a lot of electronic equipment.

“What sort of name is Firestack?”

“My granddad was born Festacci,” he said glumly. “Dad changed it in the war.” He had a hangdog manner, as if maybe his dad had been responsible for the war, too.

“Come on out, Lee.”

And then, all of sudden, she was there. A girl with dark bobbed hair, older and taller than her picture, but terribly skinny and pigeon-toed. She wore a black T-shirt with the circled red
A
for anarchy and what used to be called hot pants.

“How did you know?” she asked plaintively. She wore big black-framed glasses like Buddy Holly's that made her face seem much too small. She didn't seem to be able to stand still and moved about restlessly, giving the impression she was all elbow and knee.

“You're the one who chopped me down at the ankles, aren't you?” he said.

She grinned. “Boy, did you take a tumble.” She circled him like a dollying camera, looking him over. “You're kind of a scruffy-looking guy, even without that shiner. Did I do that? Wow. I don't know, not counting that mouse on your cheek, maybe you're sort of kindly looking. You look like a man who'd stand around with a big net under the trees in the spring just in case the baby birds start falling out of the nests.” She grinned. “A grown-up Holden Caul-field with his hands in his back pockets worrying about the duplicity of the world as he waits to catch the kids that might run off the edge, and in between erasing all the Fuck Yous painted on all the walls. No, I know, you look like the kind of guy who'd still be standing there holding the Alamo when all the rest of them have fled out the back door and left you to Santa Ana.”

“Actually, I'm the kind of guy who lost his job in aerospace and finds missing kids.” He turned to Danny Firestack, standing there with his eyes going watery and frightened. “You're peripheral in this, aren't you?”

“He's just a film student at Cal-Arts. I made him do it.”

“Beat it. I won't hurt her.”

A terrible relief spread over the boy's face and he made a cringing smile and went straight out the door.

“He's not much,” she said, “but he's company, and the camera's heavy. I want you to know I'm doing exactly what I want to do and I'm not going back. I have declared my personal independence from that omnivorous woman who calls herself my mother, and anyway, I'm right in the middle of finishing up a real important documentary about the resurgence of fascism in California, and artists are permitted to do exceptional things if it's necessary to their art.”

“Sounds like you've absorbed the essence of fascism, all right. Hush a moment and stop trying to impress me. I've never yet taken a runaway back to an abusive situation, but you've put me in a tricky position by committing a felony.” He had no idea how he was going to handle it.

“Can I make you a little drinkie-poo, Mr. Detective, I mean, before din-din?” she said. “Isn't that what all your femme fatales say? As a big handsome shamus, you must get a lot of femmes fatale-ing at your feet, right?”

“Coffee would be nice.” Maybe if he set her to a simple task, her mind would stop zigging around.

She wiggled her hips in an exaggerated way as she headed for the kitchen. “Walk this way. Now, you're supposed to say, ‘If I could walk that way, I could make a fortune on Hollywood Boulevard.' ”

He followed her into a kitchen with a week's worth of plastic dishes dumped into the old cast-iron sink. She plopped a tin kettle on the stove, then, frowning with the concentration it took, measured three spoons of instant coffee into a cup.

“You don't drink coffee much, do you?” he said.

“More?”

“Less.”

“Here, you do it, then.” She shoved the cup away in a flash of anger at being criticized—and in that she reminded him a little of her mother. She rocked from one foot to another, and he wondered if it was drugs or just nervous energy. “You know, they gave me an IQ test when I was ten, but the testing lady really fucked it up. First thing, they wouldn't accept my definition of the word ‘tolerate.' The stupid cow had never heard it used in a negative sense, I guess. I said it was like ‘abide' as in, ‘I would never abide that sort of behavior.' Or maybe she didn't know the word ‘abide.' And then she showed me a series of numbers and asked me to complete the sequence. That one wasn't even her fault, it was the test makers. It was three numbers that made an obvious arithmetic series, but if you looked a little deeper it was a Fibonacci series, you know, with each number the sum of its two predecessors. I tried to explain it to her but when I said Fibonacci, she looked like I'd just fallen down from Mars and was going to infect her with some space disease. I try to be tolerant of idiots, but sometimes it's hard, especially when it matters. You know, she probably got my IQ wrong by twenty points.”

He emptied half the coffee powder back into the jar and shook the teapot once just to make sure there was water in it. “The only three-number sequence that could be both arithmetic and Fibonacci is one, one, two, three, if you leave out the first one,” he said. “That must have been pretty stupid of the test makers.” Normally he let kids run, let them tell tall tales and impress him, and let them top his jokes, but he could see Lee Borowsky was going to require special measures. She wouldn't like being patronized, for one thing, but she sure didn't like being called out, either, and she glared at him.

“You needed the money to complete your documentary?” he said.

“Are you about all done?” she said fiercely.

He glanced at her, twitching there in the doorway, unable to find some way to hold her hands still.

“Trying to take me down,” she explained.

“How would you like it? You must be a real special genius for such a cute little girl. Is that what you want?”