The Orange Curtain (2 page)

“
Ong Minh
?” Jack Liffey asked.

The man smiled tightly and Jack Liffey got what he deserved for showing off, a flood of Vietnamese washing back over him.

“
Xin loi
. I’m sorry. I only remember a few words.”

“It’s not an inflected language,” the man said didactically. He spoke with an almost mincing precision and a strong trace of a British accent. “You cannot make a question by changing your tone. More likely, it will change the meaning completely. You might set out to say, Do you think it will rain? and end up saying, I want to eat your elbows.” His voice shifted gear. “Yes, I am Mr. Minh. Ong Liffey.”

“Pleased to meet you.” The man shook hands with that unnerving limp grip Asians used.

“Let me close up here and buy you a cup of coffee.”

“Thanks.”

Minh Trac did something beneath the counter, locked up the register and led him along the lane of mini-mall shops into the covered mall proper where Asian pop music was blaring away, a cover of some American tune he vaguely recognized. The white plastic bucket chairs from a
pho
shop spilled out into the atrium, facing a record shop, a dress emporium and a gridded-shut jewelry store. A group of middle-aged women with shopping bags sat and laughed and gossiped, and toward the back a number of sullen male teens in flattops eyed the world resentfully. There were no Anglo faces anywhere.

They sat at a table out in the mall atrium and a woman in fluorescent blue pedal pushers appeared instantly, bobbed a little, and spoke softly with Minh Trac before gliding away.

“So you were in Viet Nam, Mr. Liffey.”

“I was stationed in Thailand, but I went to Saigon several times for R and R.”

He raised an eyebrow. “The traffic was usually in the other direction.”

“I was sent all that way because of a war,” Jack Liffey explained. “I figured I ought to see what it was about.”

“Are you one of those Americans who feel it wasn’t worth the candle?”

Jack Liffey considered for a moment. It wasn’t hard to guess the politics of anyone in Little Saigon but he wasn’t about to sign onto a doomed exile crusade, even for conversational purposes. “Every country is worth it,” he said. “I think what people mean when they say that is more complicated. It was a civil war and America was a big clumsy oaf who did more harm than good, and it probably couldn’t have been any other way.”

The
café au lait
arrived, with a lot more milk than he liked, but he could go that far for politeness’ sake. The waitress gave Jack Liffey a curious look before leaving again. The boys at the back asked her something as she passed and she shook her head.

“I agree with you, Mr. Liffey, but not many people here in Little Saigon would do. Actually, that is an understatement.”

“Yeah, I get it. Most political exiles are a bit sensitive.” He stirred a spoonful of sugar into the fat cup and sipped at it. “
Worth the candle
. Your idiom seems very British.”

“I learned in a language school run by British, and I taught English at a lycée in Saigon. That fact alone made it necessary for me to evacuate as soon as I could. In the days after a victory there isn’t a lot of subtle discrimination among the victors. The children who drove the tanks into Saigon in 1975 seemed to feel if you knew
about
something you must have supported it. In fact, I had opposed the government. I was advisor for a student newspaper that was regularly shut down by the censors, but I was put into a reeducation camp for over a year. We survived on cassava and singing communist songs.”

“Are you bitter?”

“Not really. There was so much injustice and pain—for centuries—that my meagre share was nothing. And we have become quite happy here. My wife and I bore a daughter as soon as we got out of the tents down at Camp Pendleton and I am very proud of her. My daughter was valedictorian at Westminster High School, and she just completed a university degree at Irvine.”

“And she’s disappeared?”

He nodded and fell silent.

“You know, I’d be hopeless asking questions in your community. Completely useless.”

“I know that. She isn’t in our community. I would know.”

It was amazing what parents didn’t know, Jack Liffey thought, but he didn’t offer the opinion. “How do you know she’s gone?”

“She is a good daughter and even though she has her own flat she comes every day to see us. She stopped coming a week ago and she has not been home either. Her landlord checked inside at my insistence. Bread on the counter was turning to mold.”

“Did you tell the police?”

“Yes.”

“Are the police here inclined to help people in your community?”

He gave a small shrug with his hands. “As little as possible. They have set up a Vietnamese…branch, in response to gang extortions and home invasions, but they are not very effective.”

There was some sort of ruckus at the back of the noodle shop, and one of the boys in black threw something on the table and strode out. He brushed hard against Jack Liffey’s chair, cursing once, and Minh Trac watched the boy depart with a strained composure. The boy had a checkerboard shaved into the short sides of his flattop.

“Gang kids?” Jack Liffey asked.

Minh Trac nodded. “Phuong had absolutely nothing to do with gang boys.”

“That’s her name?”

“Minh Phuong to her mother. Phuong Minh now. Most of her generation have reversed the order of their names and put the family name last, the way Westerners do. A lot of them even choose American names. Tommy and Johnny and Cheryl. They want to be Americans.”

“Doesn’t Phuong mean phoenix?” Jack Liffey asked.

Minh Trac was mildly surprised. “You might say that.”

He remembered it from Graham Greene. It was the name of the embittered journalist’s mistress in
The Quiet American
, and he also remembered for some reason that Greene had added,
But nothing these days is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes
. “Did she have a job?”

Something about the question seemed to disturb the man, but Jack Liffey knew better than to try to read motives across cultures. “She was going to go back to get an advanced degree, but in the meantime she has done several odd jobs.”

“What’s her field?”

“Business. We’ve become a very practical people. Will you agree at least to look for her in the wider community?”

“It’s my calling.”

The man checked his wristwatch and Jack Liffey noticed there were no numbers, it was something Swiss and expensive. “It’s three now. If you come to my house at five-thirty, I will give you a photograph of Phuong, and a list of her friends and jobs.” He handed Jack Liffey a card with his address.

“Do you have any problems with me talking to the police?”

“Suit yourself. You can ask for Frank Vo.” There was some unreadable emotion that pertained to this name too.

The women nearby stirred and a gust of laughter swept around their table. One nodded in a way that might have been indicating him, but that was just too paranoid. They brought their soup bowls up to their faces to eat, and one seemed to be chewing betel. He noticed on the table a big fruit tied up in its own string bag, spiky and half again the size of a cantaloupe. “Is that a durian?”

“It is indeed.”

They were a fruit from Malaysia or somewhere like it. The flesh was very sweet but when you cut into it the smell was so putrid and so enduring that none of the hotels in Bangkok had let GIs bring one even into the lobby.

“I never thought I’d see one again.”

“It took a long time to import them. Nostalgia is becoming an epidemic in Little Saigon.”

Late the previous evening, a dog being walked near Irvine Lake had nosed up two decomposing bodies. They were in various states of decay, and the county sheriff’s Crime Scene Supervisor gave a preliminary guess, behind the orange tapes and under the chugging porta-lights, that one was two weeks dead and the second was only about forty-eight hours. The badly decayed body was a male, and coyotes had eaten some of the soft parts of the other one, an elderly female who lay tucked under a lush green sumac bush the size of a small tree.

The TV reporters spent a good half hour trying to goad the police into saying that there was a serial killer on the loose and then arguing over a newsworthy name for the killer. Something to do with Dahlia would have been great, or a Stalker or some other tabloid-worthy noun.
Hillside Strangler
had been used, and anyway these had apparently been shot, not strangled.

It was the haircuts that caught his eye. He parked up the road across from the high school where he had a good view of the four boys who sat on the window flower bed of a boarded-up storefront.
Only Carp Carp Only
, a sign said. He wondered if part of the sign was missing.

The board-ups over the door and window had been plastered with posters that said
Stop the Airport Ripoff! One public bankruptcy is enough!
over and over. But it was the boys who interested him. They all wore floppy black shirts buttoned up to the neck and they all had the same checks cut into the sides of their severe flattops. The boy on the end seemed to be the one who had pushed past his chair at the noodle shop. Jack Liffey wasn’t certain but they seemed to be tearing the cello wraps off packets of ramen noodles, discarding the spice packs into the litter at their feet, and crunching into the noodles like Asian Fritos. One of the boys was flipping a coin and then walking it along his knuckles like George Raft.

In the past he had found that by treating black and Latino gang kids with elaborate and bona fide respect, he usually got their grudged tolerance, but, in his experience, Asian toughs always seemed to have a little something extra to prove. He strolled up the road and sat on the wall beside the kid from the noodle shop.

“Hello, gentlemen. I hope you don’t object to my sitting here with you for a minute or two.”

Only the boy who was farthest away glanced at him but immediately looked away. If they had been speaking English before, they were into Vietnamese now, sing-songing gently and nonchalantly. There was a big carton of ramen in the flower bed, like something stolen off a truck, and the boy one over from him reached in for a packet which he tore into. The packet had very pink shrimp on it.

“You look like the people who know what’s actually going down around here.”

The boy shook the spice packet onto the ground and broke the big block of dried ramen in half with a crackle like stomping a plastic toy. He began chewing off bits of one of the halves. Jack Liffey looked away, watching an old Asian woman in canvas slippers walk up the other side of the street carrying a frayed paper bag in her arms. She reached a bus bench, but instead of sitting she squatted down at the end of the bench to wait.

“I’m a stranger in these parts,” Jack Liffey offered. He hadn’t expected the humor to work and it didn’t. “But I guess you already figured that out.” The boys spoke a few lilting words to one another, then fell silent again. The silent treatment was probably supposed to worry him and make him nervous, but it didn’t. Sooner or later though he’d have to cut his losses.

“You see, I’m looking for a missing Vietnamese girl and I thought you might be able to help me.”

That stilled any fidgeting. Another boy tore into a ramen packet. Actually he found all the testosterone nonchalance rather touching, just boys really, trying to face down a world that probably seemed a lot more hostile to them than he’d ever know. On Tu Do Street he’d been the vulnerable outsider, guarding what he carried against a snatch, but here they were the prey to a big busy Anglo world that by and large probably didn’t give a damn what happened to their self-respect.

The boy next to him finally turned and met his eyes. “
Diddy mao
, big cunt.”

He knew the Vietnamese words, though he did not know their literal meaning. Anyone who’d been in Saigon for long had heard the GIs telling the peskiest of the pimps and touts to fuck off in no uncertain terms. He imagined if Gandhi had stayed long enough in that corrupting environment, even he might have broken down and used the expression. Right now, coming from a boy who was seven or eight inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than him, it made him want to laugh, but he didn’t.

“Minh Trac asked me to find his daughter,” he said equably. “Phuong. Am I pronouncing her name right?”

The boy looked away again. They seemed to be inhibited by his presence now and didn’t even speak to one another. People were accumulating at the bus stop, including a Latino in an electric wheelchair who kept gunning it a few inches forward and back.

Far away a police siren whoop-whooped and an armada of seagulls came over low. Finally the bus showed up. He’d never actually watched a kneeling bus do its trick. The front hissed downward as if the whole vehicle were deflating so the wheelchair could roll straight on. Then it pumped itself back up and drove off. The old woman was still squatting at the end of the bench as if waiting for a better bus.

“My mistake, gentlemen. I thought you might know what’s going on around town.” He got up and started away.

“Hey, mister.”

It was the boy from the noodle shop. Jack Liffey waited while some war went on in the boy’s psyche.

“We like Phuong. Most college girl stuck up, treat us like shit. They walk past with hard feet, bam bam bam, you boys all bums. Not Phuong.”

His English was not very good for some reason and Jack Liffey guessed he’d come over fairly recently from one of the camps, probably even born in the camps. Maybe that was the only real social distinction between these boys and the computer wizards getting their straight-As at Berkeley.

“See this watch, real Rolex, not knockoff. I know where to get it at good price. Phuong show me last year. What you want to know?”

“My name’s Jack Liffey,” he said, and he sat back down. “Phuong has been gone for a week. Do you know where she might be?”

“She work for Frankie the Man. Big Chinaman from Saigon, Frankie Fen, big bossman, he build malls. You ask him.”