The zenith angle (6 page)

Van felt a pang at the depth of his grandfather’s sorrow. He’d been all of seven years old during the Lockheed bribery scandal. Except for family reasons, Van would have known and cared nothing about it. It was just some obscure scandal from the Watergate era.

In his later life, though, the subject had come up once. That was when a Japanese guy from DoCoMo had tried to explain to him why Japan was in so much trouble. Why Japan, with the world’s best engineers and hottest products, had fallen into a hole. In the eighties they were on their way to running the world. In the nineties they were going nowhere.

Somehow Van had always just known that defense contracting was a crooked business. How could anybody have any illusions there to get disillusioned about? Luckily, he himself was from the world of computers and telecommunications. A very different world.

“Well . . .” that old man said. “That’s it, son. That’s all you need to know. Now you can go home and fix yourself a drink.”

Van’s grandfather wandered restlessly back to his worktable, and discovered the red wire of his glue gun, hanging from the drawer. Surprised, he pulled the shiny gun out and set it carefully on the desktop.

“Now don’t you look at this,” he said.

“Grandpa, I’ve seen a hot-glue gun.”

“Not as hot as this one, kiddo. The boys in Burbank made me this when we got the Blackbird shaped and annealed. Titanium was Blackbird skin, it’ll take Mach 3 when the shockwave’s hot enough to melt lead!” He brandished the ray gun. “Here, let me turn this on.”

Van noted with alarm that the cheap wall socket was discolored and half-molten.

“You shouldn’t be melting any lead in here, Grandpa.”

“Oh, I can melt any kind of solder in this gun, no problem.” His grandfather began searching through the dusty junk in a desk drawer.

“Grandpa, let me have that thing.”

“This gun’s too old for you. The boys made this for me back in ’63. Chuck Vandeveer’s Buck Rogers ray-blaster!” He smiled in delight. “That was a dang good joke, too. They were such great, funny guys.”

“Grandpa, I’ll buy you a fresh glue gun at Home Depot.”

“But you can’t have this gun. This one’s mine. You really need this solder gun, boy? Why?”

Van had no good reason to offer.

The old man narrowed his eyes. “You can’t tell me, huh? It’s classified? It’s electronics.”

“Oh, uhm, yeah.”

“Lotta hard soldering work in electronics. Vacuum tubes and such.”

“Sure,” Van said gratefully. “Yeah.”

“You keep it then, Derek, son. You can keep it as long as you need it.”

“Thanks a lot.” Van hastily unplugged the glue gun. Then he ripped some Velcro loose and stuffed the dangerous contraption into his baggiest cargo pocket. At least now the place wouldn’t burn down. He waved his free hand at the walls. “Grandpa, how did you get in this place?”

“I’m hiding out here, that’s how! After I broke out of that damn nuthouse!” Grandpa Chuck tapped the thin skin on his skull. “Old Kelly, he never knew when to leave when the time was right! Hardening of the arteries up here, that was Kelly Johnson’s problem . . . I used to see ol’ Kelly laid up in his hospital bed, all crippled-up and cussing-out Allen Dulles, when Dulles was already dead . . . His mind went! Now my boy Srini, though . . . He’s just this young kid, Srini, but he’s a good engineer, one of my best . . . He fixed up this computer for me, to read things out loud for me . . . A lotta contract work now, he’s a busy boy . . . This was his room.”

“He sure likes planes,” Van observed.

“I pay his mom room and board, you know. His mom, she’s a widow now. Family values, that’s a good deal.” The old man turned back to his desk. He looked with resigned confusion on the clutter of small plastic parts. “Now this here was the P-38 Lightning. Kelly Johnson’s first classic design. America killed Admiral Yamamoto with those P-38s.” He tapped the plastic fuselage with a mechanical pencil. “So much for your Pearl Harbor, huh, Admiral? Welcome to hell!”

One of Van’s phones rang. He pulled it from a hip pocket. “Vandeveer.”

“Where are we?” came a plaintive cry. “Where are you?” It was Helga.

“We’re here now. We’re in Burbank.”

“But there’s no one in the street! I looked everywhere! I’m scared. Why don’t these phones work better? I forget which big numbers to dial first.”

“I’ll come get you,” Van promised.

“Is Disneyland in this town?”

“I’ll just come get you, Helga.”

Van opened the bedroom door to leave. Surprised, his grandfather came after him in a shuffling old man’s hustle.

The old man swung his arms. “I never got to work on the Lightning. That was before my time. But that’s your future, boy! That Pearl Harbor business!” He bared his irregular teeth. “Dang, I’m hungry.”

Once in the hall, Grandpa Chuck briskly turned the wrong way and hastened to an outside door. He clawed at the round brass doorknob, his fingers slipping. The doorknob clicked, but the door was firmly locked at the top with a cheap brass bolt. Grandpa Chuck never looked up at the bolt. He never thought to do it. He just pawed at the round brass knob, muttering in frustration, while Van stared at him in dismay.

The old man gave up at last, and tried to look jaunty. “How’s about some breakfast, son?”

Van followed his barefoot grandfather into the kitchen. Mrs. Srinivasan was there, quiet and polite. She fetched the old man a box of bran flakes, some whole milk, an indestructible metal bowl with a big wooden spoon. The old man sat at the corner of the Formica table, scowling at her. “Television,” he snapped. She obediently clicked the set on.

Van left Mrs. Srinivasan’s duplex and fetched Helga from the street. Helga was overjoyed to see him. She chattered at him nervously. Van put up with this. Helga was tall, shapely, and gushy. Van knew that for some men she had a lot of sex appeal, but he had never understood why. She was not his type at all and he had never felt even a twinge of chemistry. Van was pleased that Helga was good with infants, but basically he felt about Helga the way he might feel about a tame llama. Inside the duplex, Mrs. Srinivasan and Helga stared at each other as if they had come not from Sweden and India, but from Venus and Jupiter. They both seemed like decent women to Van, or at least okay women, but they couldn’t get the remotest grip on one another. They kept addressing each other through Van: “Ask your blond girl if she wants to sit down,” “Ask the nice lady if she has a real bathroom here, you know, with a toilet.” Irritated, the old man turned up his morning cable news show. The TV blared war and terror, headache pills and paper towels, suicide and revenge. Mrs. Srinivasan’s phone rang. It was her neighbor, Mr. Chang. Mr. Chang was surprised at all the morning ruckus. He wanted to make sure that she wasn’t being robbed. Mrs. Srinivasan was an Indian widow with an elderly man in her care. She seemed very reliant on Mr. Chang, who was the retired owner of a Chinese grocery.

There was nothing for it but to have Mr. Chang come right over. He did. He was small and gray-haired and bent, with pants belted high above his waist. Mr. Chang examined the visitors. He sat on Mrs. Srinivasan’s lavishly pillowed wicker couch, and rolled himself a cigarette. Mr. Chang put such luscious handiwork into this that it was clear that smoking was his full-time occupation. Mrs. Srinivasan set out green tea.

Another of Van’s cell phones rang. Dottie had awoken inside the truck. She arrived with the baby. The arrival of little Ted broke Grandpa Chuck’s foul mood. Van helped Grandpa Chuck to the wicker couch and put Ted on his bony knee. The two of them together looked postcard-cute. Even Mr. Chang was forced to smile. Van felt stunned. His grandfather and his son looked eerily alike, same round faces, same blinky, distracted stares.

Dottie plucked Ted free from the old man before Ted’s uneasiness could grow into sobs. Using her baby as a wedge, Dottie swiftly broke the ice between Helga and Mrs. Srinivasan. Soon the three women were clucking over Ted in a happy international hen party. Van’s stomach rumbled and his mood darkened. Van realized that he was starving.

Clearly Mrs. Srinivasan lacked the provisions to feed this sudden crowd of adults.

“Kentucky Fried Chicken?” Van hypothesized.

His insight met with swift approval. Mrs. Srinivasan was vegetarian, but not on special occasions. For Mr. Chang, Kentucky Fried Chicken was the height of luxury from the Red Chinese cultural thaw. Helga loved American fast food. Grandpa and Ted could suck on the crusts.

Van left in the Rover and fetched a big family bucket of extra crispy. Driving the Rover again, even for a few more blocks, was like having sunburned skin rubbed.

When Van returned to the duplex, two more strangers had arrived. One was a middle-aged, olive-skinned woman, in a tailored black pants suit and a hooded khaki jacket. The other was an older, distinguished man, in designer jeans, with a gold earring and graying blond ponytail. The man was his father.

A sudden hush fell. “Is that Kentucky Fried Chicken?” his father said at last.

“Uh, yeah, Dad.”

“For breakfast?”

“Yep.” Van set the cardboard bucket down defiantly.

His father took a breath and emitted a quotation. “ ‘Let me prescribe the diet of the country; I do not care who makes its laws.’ ”

Van felt a familiar despair. Why was his father always like this? Why didn’t he just say whatever he meant directly? Why did he have to dig into his big, 1968-hippie head, and come up with some kind of weird, senseless, semipolitical quotation? Van’s dad was a former Rhodes scholar. He was ruinously gifted. Van’s father was literally the only human being in the world who spoke both Afghan Pashtun and African Bantu dialects. He was also the only man Van knew who carried on conversations, in real life, using semicolons that you could actually hear.

Van looked at his father glumly. His father looked bad: piratical, slick, and never to be trusted. But he didn’t look quite so bad as he normally did. He was, for instance, sober. His father offered Van a brisk, cheery “Your dad is here, all is well” smile, a smile as thin, flimsy, and phony as individually wrapped lunch meat baloney. How had his father found out that Van was in California? How had he shown up here at this building? Without a word, a phone call, an e-mail, or a whisper of permission! The guy was impossible.

“It’s more of an early lunch,” Dottie offered kindly. In the rare moments when her erratic father-in-law drifted into her life, Dottie loved to play the peacemaker.

“This smells good!” declared Helga, eagerly helping herself to the chicken bucket. Then everyone went for the chow in a merry outburst of chattering, except for Van, who had lost his appetite. To cover his pain and confusion, he gave an extra-crispy thigh to his grandfather, who seemed lost in the crowd now, tired and bewildered, forgotten.

Van could not understand why his painful personal problems were suddenly the business of Swedes, Indians, and Chinese. They seemed pretty pleased with the fast food he had brought them, but how could such a thing have ever happened?

“Son, this is Rachel Weissman,” his father said, introducing the latest girlfriend.

“Hi,” Van told her reluctantly.

Rachel half curtseyed to grab up her chicken from the cardboard bucket. There was something very wrong with her hip.

“Where are you from, Rachel?” Dottie asked her.

“I’m from Bogota,” Rachel lied. “I work in oil.”

“Rachel and I have a beautiful residencia north of the city,” his father aided and abetted. Dottie blinked at them. “So you’re really at home in Colombia now, Robert? To stay?”

“It’s never like it sounds in the media. ‘Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own.’

” Van’s father gave Rachel a warm, protective look. Rachel was in even worse trouble than Van had imagined.

Rachel was obviously Jewish, but she wasn’t Colombian, Van concluded. His father looked much more Colombian than Rachel did, despite his blondness and his hefty bulk. Van’s father was solid as a bear, but even before he had joined the CIA, there had always been something spacey and strange about him. When they’d finally shunted him into Counter-Narcotics, that dead end of any intelligence career, that was when his pride had broken down.

During the eighties, Afghanistan had cheered him up for a while. He’d shaped up physically, patched up the marriage, and even taken Van camping and fishing in the California mountains. But in Angola, he’d done something indescribable. Generally the CIA never gave its top agents Third World assignments that risked malaria and guaranteed diarrhea, but Van’s father was a charmer. He had a genius for working himself into situations where he was unwelcome, unneeded, unwanted, and way too smart for the job. In Angola, Van’s father had crossed some line, into some mess he just couldn’t mentally manage. Something oily and permanent had stuck to him for good in Angola. He’d returned from Angola with unblinking eyes like two saucers, quoting more poetry than ever before . . . Nightmare episodes in Van’s adolescence, when his mother would scream in betrayed anguish, and his father would storm into his home office, to snort cocaine and translate Walt Whitman into African dialects. Those were the moments when Van would quietly shut his bedroom door, warm up the modem, and vanish deep, deep, deep into his computer. In some sense, Van had never come out.

Dottie was doing all the talking for the group. Her lips were moving rapidly as Van stood there, moored in his silent crisis. For the first time Van realized what Dottie was actually saying. She had had a lot of time to think in the car, and she had bravely made up her mind about something. Dottie was talking about quitting her lab post in Boston and taking up an entirely different job.

“So it’s the perfect time for me to undertake a transition, if Derek is also switching careers,” she confided to everyone.

“Mmm-hmmm.” His father nodded unhelpfully.

“I do have a standing offer. Because Tony Carew . . . have you ever heard of Tony Carew? Tony is the only friend of ours who’s really famous. The Davos Forum, the Renaissance Weekend . . .”

“I’ve certainly heard of those,” said Rachel, looking interested for the first time.