City of Strangers (14 page)

Others had been hurt, and he could never really pay off a debt like that; but he could set his whole life, right now, against some tangible evil. Arriving at this thought seemed to increase the lightheadedness that he felt, but it seemed to ease his burden.

His father's corporation had become enmeshed in the evil of narcotics smuggling. He was certain that Mahmoud was responsible. He could not believe it was his father's doing. Working in the plant the previous summer, Fariborz had seen enough of Mahmoud to distrust him in all things. The man had cut corners at every opportunity. He had bribed Mexican officials. Every payday he had cheated the workers out of at least a few minutes of their wages, in his office he had sex with one of the women workers, and he drank tequila every afternoon with his Mexican watchman. Fariborz had tried to tell his father, but his father had cut him off and refused to listen—far too trusting and loyal to Mahmoud for his own good.

Fariborz lay on the floor, inhaling and exhaling slowly. If he could only disrupt the smuggling—one simple and direct action—it might constitute the beginning of a kind of penance for any vanity that had led him astray. He still had the door code to the factory. He would wait until late, break into the LA ROX
maquiladora
and somehow thwart the terrible evil that dwelled there.

It was even possible, he thought, that Mahmoud was as much demon as man. He did not believe literally in demons—only that there were people who had inexplicable selfishness and evil within them, and Mahmoud was as good a candidate as anyone he knew.

The frowner had come back and was chattering away in Spanish. The fat man was rubbing his own chin, as if trying to remember if he'd shaved. Fear and anxiety had exhausted Jack Liffey so thoroughly that he had actually dozed for a few moments on the cement—he wasn't sure how long. The conversation went back and forth for a while, with the frowner insisting hard on something.

Finally, the fat man turned back to his prisoner.

“The girl is not waiting in her house to meet her father. Are you quite sure that was the plan?”

“Yes. I was on the way to the border to get him.”

“Where do you think she would go?”

“Maybe to the store.”

“Maybe to the store,” he repeated. “I am not an idiot, Jack Liffey. My people have been inside the dolphin house, and there is very little clothing there. Some of what is left is laid out on the bed. As if she packed hastily and did not have room for everything.”

“She must have panicked. Where could she escape? You must have friends watching the border.”

The fat man spoke to the frowner, who left the room again. Then he sighed and seemed to settle in to wait. The grinner began to whistle a tune, and the fat man silenced him with a single word.

“Is your family name Arrellano Felix?” Jack Liffey asked.

He smiled. “Half-smart, like your newspapers. It is true, of course, that my industry is a special instance of monopoly capitalism. Only the commodity is different. We don't deal in cars or canned corn or CD players; we deal in illegal substances. But the way the business works is the same. When we were all reading Marx and Lenin in 1968, the simpleminded students in our cell all thought that the expression ‘monopoly capitalism' meant there was only one big company running things, but the world is never so simplistic. Never. Marx never predicted that. It is enough that there are a handful of big companies, and sometimes they compete and sometimes they cooperate. But all in all, their economy of scale and the way they gobble up competition is sufficient to keep out the little guys. Yes, Arrellano Felix is the best-known monopoly by far. Let's say I am only Avis, and they are Hertz.”

Thanks for the lecture, Jack Liffey thought. It was not very reassuring to know he was being held prisoner by someone who might feel that he had to try harder.

“I think now you should tell me whatever you know about the girl. It will be good for you in the long run. The world's benign indifference is about to end.”

“The girl is running. If she was planning to do that, you know she wouldn't tell me where she's going.”

“Maybe you are in cahoots with her. Maybe you are going to meet her, or arrange a false passport for her. Who knows? Money can buy many things. I need to be sure you don't know.”

“I don't know a thing, believe me.”

“But, you see, I need to be
sure
.” He barked at the grinner, who went out for a minute and then returned, followed by a new man who waited in the doorway as a hulking silhouette with the sounds of machinery leaking around him, the clattering and hissing in the building beyond. The fat man turned to the silhouette.

“A temporary layoff has been ordained,” the fat man said. “Shut the plant down now, for the night.”

“We're just starting swing shift. They haven't been in an hour yet.” Jack Liffey could not get a good look at the man, but the voice was familiar.

“Oh, Lord, don't let him argue. Send them home now.”

“I need to keep a warehouse crew for the shipment to Phoenix.” Now he knew who it was. Mahmoud something, Bayat's man in the
maquiladora.
What word had they used to describe his duties? Fixer? Expediter. Now Jack Liffey knew where he was being held, though it did him no good.

“Everybody goes home. You, the warehousemen, supervisors. You have ten minutes to clear the building.”

There seemed to be a staring duel for a moment, but the other man—if it
was
Mahmoud—finally seemed to decide where the power lay. “I hope you're loving this, my friend,” Mahmoud said.

“It is my profession.”

Jack Liffey had no idea what was going to happen, but it frightened him so much that there was a spasm in his leg. Only the fact that his ankles were taped together kept him from thrashing around on the floor like a jumping bean. The fat man no longer seemed to feel that he needed to hide his mangled hand.

“What a long, strange journey it has been, hasn't it, Jack Liffey?”

“What?”

“Me, I mean. A Marxist-Leninist student who began by demanding democracy in Mexico City, and is then driven out of his country by the
federales,
who studies six years in Michigan, USA, to get his MBA. And now I buy
federales
wholesale.” He chuckled. “You know why
federales
often go in threes in our country? No, of course you don't. The first
federale
can read, the second
federale
can write, and the third is assigned to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.” He laughed and glanced at the frowner, who did not seem to have followed the joke.

The fat man went on like that for a while, but it was becoming hard for Jack Liffey to listen. Something bad was about to happen, and he could think of nothing he could possibly do to fend it off. He tried again to insist that he knew nothing about Rebecca Auslander's whereabouts, but the fat man just waved the objection away, erasing his words out of the air.

Then the grinner came back and nodded. They untaped his ankles and lifted him to his feet.

“I must tell you, my friend, the world is about to get very interested in your predicament. Existentialism is now extinct.” He sighed theatrically. “This is just a kind of insurance policy, you know. So we're all happy that you're truly in the dark.”

The two
judiciales
frog-marched him out the door between themselves, past a lot of silent machinery with large vats and tubes and some kind of pneumatic jacks that looked like they were meant to slam parts of the machines together hard. Probably injection molds for LA ROX, he thought. Then the bulk of his attention did a paradigm shift into the kind of panicky fizzing that came with utter helplessness. They turned a corner at a tidy orange line on the floor and went into a lunchroom that looked exactly like a lunchroom in an American institution, with Formica tables and vending machines, a microwave, a fridge, and a stove. The only difference was that the vending machines seemed to carry nothing but varieties of burritos.

The two
judiciales
—if that's what they were—pushed him hard up against the stove and turned on one of the burners, and his mind went woozy with fear as he saw the little ring of flames. Each blue flame swelled to red, then tapered to yellow at the tip. They untaped his wrists and the
judiciales
held his right arm as the fat man gripped his left with both of his hands. The fat man gave off an overpowering aroma of rosewater.

“Jack Liffey, I lied to you a little. When I said I didn't talk. I mean, when the soldiers burned my hand. I'm afraid I told. I told the soldiers every name I knew who had anything in any way to do with the defense fund. I probably got two dozen other people arrested and tortured. There is no honor in this kind of persuasion, believe me.”

“I believe you. I don't know where she went. I don't.”

“Maybe so. Now we find out.” And his hand was wrenched around and pressed down into the flame with incredible strength.

He kicked and thrashed around and screamed from somewhere very deep inside his body.

Before very long, he told them he was the one who had suggested that Rebecca Auslander run away, and he had suggested, by name, just as examples, Europe and Idaho. Anywhere but Mexico. He even told them she had said something about roses. If there was any honor at all in resisting that kind of persuasion, he did not mention Jaime Torres. He passed out before he could.

He woke to a searing pain in his left hand, someone rasping it down to the bone with a cheese grater. In fact, one peek revealed a real person bent over his hand, a young man, rubbing a cold wet goo onto the unbearable wound. He clamped his eyes shut again, engulfed by a visceral desire to return immediately to the world of sleep and blot out the pain, but it had so thoroughly invaded his busy dream-state that even there some terrible wolverine-like animal had been chewing on the hand. No, he was awake now. He discovered that his ankles were still taped and his hip told him he lay on cement. His shoulder was being shaken gently. Jack Liffey opened an eye again to see a delicate hand, slim pianist's fingers.

“Can you swallow, sir?”

The boy was maybe seventeen or eighteen, darkly handsome, and knelt beside him offering a glass of water and two pills.

“It's codeine. I put Xylocaine on your hand, from the first-aid kit, but it's probably not strong enough to help much.”

Jack Liffey took the pills from the boy's palm and swallowed them with a sip of water, and the boy scurried around to strip the tape off his ankles. A pennant of the same tape fluttered from his good wrist, waggling a little as he sloshed the plastic tumbler for no particular reason. Freeing his hands must have been the boy's first act, after first pushing aside that angry beast gnawing on his hand.

The boy settled back on his haunches with an earnest, concerned look, and Jack Liffey studied his face. He had an olive complexion, but he did not look very Mexican, at least not in the round-faced mestizo-Indian way he was familiar with. His voice had sounded American. Of course, he might have been upper-class Mexican, fitted out with a few more European genes, the people who used to call themselves “Spanish” in L.A.

“I heard those men talking about you before they left. You found Becky.”

Jack Liffey's eyes snapped back to the young man's face, studying it for clues. Pain made his thought process stiff and refractory, but he managed the leap of logic. “You're Fariborz.”

The boy nodded. “We have to get you out of here. They'll come back tomorrow to question you again. I heard them say you passed out too soon and they couldn't get you to wake up again. Your body must have a really strong defense mechanism.”

“A really strong defense mechanism would be asbestos skin.” He thrust his fiery hand into the glass of water and closed his eyes. “Oh, Lord!” The relief was immediate, almost total, but within a few seconds he could tell it was not going to last. Pain gathered, the wolf padding forward again to gnaw at the wound, tear off chunks.

“Soon the pills will make you drowsy.”

“Then let's get going now.”

“We can't leave until that light turns red.” He indicated a tiny green glow showing on a metal box by the door.

“Why?”

“The alarm is off because the manager came back. He would see us now. I think he needs to finish some work the Mexicans interrupted. He'll leave soon. He never stays late.”

“Will he come in here?”

“No. He doesn't want any part of them or what they did to you. I think he's scared of the big Mexican.”

“So am I. My name is Jack Liffey,” he offered. “I find missing kids. I was hired by Becky's father to find her, and I talked to your father, too, and to some of the people at your school. Where are the other boys?”

“They're not here. That's all I can say.”

Jack Liffey's hand was throbbing. He had displaced most of the water from the tumbler and there wasn't enough left to wet the whole wound. “What on earth is this all about?” Jack Liffey asked. His question offered Fariborz the latitude to explain just about anything he wished. “Everyone said you were a good boy.”

The boy looked rueful. There was a distracting pop-bang up on the metal roof, and they both glanced up quickly. But it was probably only a heat contraction or a big bird settling on the ribbed aluminum.

“A good boy,” Fariborz repeated, as if testing the words for some secret meaning. “Yes, I was trying to do good. The
Sunna,
the straight path, if you're Moslem, but I don't think you have to be Moslem to appreciate the idea.” He smiled grimly, as if there were some joke at his expense. “It's harder than I thought.”

“Congratulations. That sounds like the beginning of wisdom.” Jack Liffey glanced toward the door, but the tiny glowing lamp was still green.

“Or a step straight into cynicism, Mr. Liffey. I don't want that to happen to me—it's cheap and ugly.”

He felt the boy's sincerity reverberate and he tried to give him his full attention. “Sure. Tell me more.”

“I was looking for a way to behave morally in a world that offers almost no moral paths.”

“I don't think you're completely alone on that expedition. A few people before you have tried to do the right thing, within their lights.”

“None of them seem to be in charge of anything much that matters these days.”

Jack Liffey chuckled, then grimaced as the pain redoubled. The pain seemed to have the quality of intensifying all experience, including his perceptions of Fariborz, who seemed to carry a hazy aura of piety around himself. He'd met one kid before who had embarked on what Kerouac had called “the holy boy road,” but this young man seemed to have a bit of humor about him, which, in the end, might just save him.

“I've read Gandhi,” the young man said. “You can't just be passive, you can't just keep your own hands clean. You have to take positive action for the good. Anyway, that's what I thought.”

The pain charged back into the center of Jack Liffey's consciousness and made it hard to concentrate. Still, it helped for the young man to talk away. At first Fariborz spoke in evasive generalities but finally he broke down and told him about some grandiose plan he had worked out to draw attention to conspicuous nuggets of vice that were afoot in America—such as paint-bombing
Hustler
magazine's headquarters on La Cienega.

The boy had been saving newspaper articles about likely targets: the one industrial block in Studio City where most of the country's porn production was centered, a neo-Nazi storefront, a notorious sweatshop downtown, etc., etc. He had pictured himself as something like Mexico's popular hero Super Barrio, an actual caped character who showed up from time to time to twit the rich and powerful. He figured the press might pick it up and start following his exploits, a new Zorro or something. With the right publicist, it was almost wacky enough to have worked.

Fariborz employed the first person insistently, taking the whole plan on himself, but Jack Liffey figured his friends had all been in on it.

“But somebody got hurt. It was my fault. I prayed and prayed to discover the name of my sin.”

“Could you get me some more water?” Jack Liffey asked.

“I don't think it's a good idea. Mahmoud's just down the hall.” The little light was still green.

It was the first time the boy had used the man's name and Jack Liffey realized the boy knew the setup here pretty well. He nodded dully and waved his hand a little. “My generation was luckier than yours,” Jack Liffey said. “We actually got to stop a war. That's pretty amazing when you think about it.”

He clamped his eyes closed. There was nothing to do but try to talk through the pain. He heard himself saying, “Of course, the Vietnamese had a lot to do with stopping the war, too. But I think it was rebellion spreading through the U.S. Army that finally put the fear of God into the government. I was just a tech over there, monitoring a radar, but we all had peace symbols and strings of beads on our scopes. I heard more than one time about platoons taking their officers prisoner at gunpoint and refusing to go out on patrol, and lieutenants just clamming up about it to prevent an ignominious end to their careers. Who knows.”

They heard a door slam and both looked over, but the light was still unchanged.

“Of course, a lot of kids got a big head about it all. They'd driven out a president and built a rock-'n'-roll culture and they thought they could change everything, overthrow the whole system. That was pretty crazy. America is a big, rich, deeply conservative, almost immovable country. A lot of those kids hurt themselves—psychologically, if not physically—trying to do the impossible. I have to deal with them and their children every day now. It's best to know the limits of the possible.”

“But you have to try, no matter what the limits seem to be,” the young man protested. “How else can you know what's possible?”

“I can't walk through that cement wall, and I don't have to keep throwing my shoulder into it just to make sure.”

Fariborz shook his head, unconvinced. “Maybe one day the atoms will all line up just right and you
will
be able to walk through.”

Jack Liffey tried to laugh, but the pain ambushed it. “I think that's probably excluded.”

“Mr. Liffey, the people who wanted democracy in Czechoslovakia were beaten in 1968. What if they'd given up? They went into the streets twenty years later and won.”

He felt addled and unhinged. Perhaps this was the wrong time for a simple political discussion. “Times were different; I don't know. Maybe every generation
does
have to try. I'm not blaming you.”

Jack Liffey flexed his hand, grimacing, unable to concentrate. What he wanted to tell the boy was that the kind of heroism he was talking about wasn't something a single person could just will on the spot—that even a Gandhi born a century too early would have been irrelevant. When it worked, it was a relationship between a single will and a special time that made moral action possible. But he didn't want to argue any longer; he didn't even want to hear his own voice. It seemed to him futile—even a little distasteful—to argue against a boy's idealism. And then there was the pain, always the pain.

“You came here to disrupt a tiny corner of the drug trade, didn't you?” Jack Liffey guessed.

The boy nodded warily. Drugs had not been mentioned before then. “How did you know?”

He sighed. “It's a manageable goal. You have my permission to save my life, too. That's also a nice small, manageable goal.”

The young man nodded again slowly, and there was a deadpan aspect in it that Jack Liffey missed at first. “Perhaps you're worth saving. Just barely.”

Jack Liffey laughed softly, despite himself. This was one confident kid. Then Fariborz hissed him quiet. “
There.
”

A tiny red pilot lamp had come on and begun to flash beside the green. In a moment, the green went out and the red turned steady.

“We'll give him a chance to drive away,” the young man said.

“When we get out there, I think we're going to have to avoid just about everybody,” Jack Liffey suggested. “The
judiciales
have informers everywhere.”

“I'm on it,” the boy said. “If I'm going to be charged with saving your life, you're not going to be going the gringo route. I'll be your coyote. That means your unofficial guide across to
el Norte.
”

“I know what a coyote is. Have you ever crossed illegally?”

“No, but I know how it's done.”

“I hope you do.” The codeine was starting to fuzz him up now, without doing all that much for the pain. He caught himself looking up at the ceiling and groaning. “Did you do anything here to disrupt the drug business?” Jack Liffey asked. It might interfere with their escape.

“There's no evidence of it here anymore, nothing.”

“Did you have anything to do with the shipment that was hijacked in Riverside?” He remembered it had been grotesquely violent, with somebody executing the driver.

“No.”

Dark armies, fighting in the dark. Maybe that was just an object lesson, from someone in one camp to someone in another. He'd probably never know. Jack Liffey's impatience swelled with the pain. “Let's go
now.
”

The young man helped him up and turned out the room light before leading him into a hallway where there was only blackness and a pulsating silence. “Follow me. Touch the wall to keep going straight.”

“You're the boss.”

They tapped their way along, and before long they came around a corner to where they could see, far ahead, a faint haze of light from an emergency lamp, and they could walk a little faster. At the outside door there was another code box on the wall. The boy punched in a series of numbers and a green light came on, then punched what seemed the same numbers again and the red began to flash. “Go!”

Then they were outside, blinded by the glare of a security light overhead as they hurried across a parking lot toward the street. In the distance, the whole sky was orange with town light, and the road showed the taillights of a single car, a big low-riding American sedan, diminishing.

“Do you think you can walk for an hour?”

Jack Liffey looked at his watch for the first time and saw it was only 9:45. “I have to. I do what I have to. Does that get us across?”

“No. It gets us to the right
colonia. La Libertad,
where many people wait to cross.”

Jack Liffey wondered if the name was somebody's idea of a joke—for the neighborhood where illegals waited to cross the border to take up their miserable underpaid jobs in
Norteamerica.
Better
La Peonage, La Serfdom.

The industrial street was dusty and curbless, rutted at the edges with weeds, and a footpath snaked alongside it, where people had worn away the weeds, like a well-used game trail. As long as he fought the wooziness and kept moving, he found the pain in his hand almost manageable. A big doubly articulated truck ground slowly out of a driveway behind and crept past them.

“
La Libertad
is a sad place. People used to wait in the river zone next to it, which was even worse. But that whole colonia was bulldozed to build a shopping center and apartments. It was called
cartolandia
—cardboard-carton city.”