City of Strangers (17 page)

“You know—I've been thinking about that, too. But in a sense it's not strange at all.” Something was making him talkative, probably just relief at the sense of escape. “There's probably a million Latinos in California who've come this way, or something a lot like it. We never really think about it, sitting in our nice homes, do we? I can imagine terrified mothers holding their children's hands in this very arroyo, or lonely teenagers who know ten words of English. These are damn brave people. And then I think of my suburban neighbors who look right through them every day, mowing their lawns or washing their cars.”

“It's true,” the boy said with a hint of chagrin. “My dad has gardeners, and I don't even know their names.”

“God strike me dead if I don't show more sympathy for them after this night,” Jack Liffey vowed.

“Please don't blaspheme.”

“Sorry. If I don't believe in God, I shouldn't use His name, should I?”

“Really? You
don't?”

Jack Liffey's companion was actually shocked. It was a long way out of his recent experience to run into someone for whom religion held such heartfelt and immediate consequence. He didn't want to upset the boy, but he didn't want to lie, either. “I guess you'd say there's a God-size hole in my world.” Jack Liffey smiled to himself. Maybe it was the codeine, still tickling his fancy. He figured that was a pretty fanciful image for a devout Moslem to wrap his mind around.

“So you're trying to stuff up the hole with good deeds, like finding lost children?”

He chuckled. Smart kid, Jack Liffey thought. “Perhaps you've nailed me.” What he didn't want to tell the devout teenager was that the hole would always be just that, a great emptiness that went on and on, no matter how he tried to fill it. Mostly it didn't bother him, but there was no denying it.

Fariborz gave a helpless shrug. “I worry sometimes that I've moved so far away from Him that He can't hear me anymore. But I
know
He's there.” He glanced at Jack Liffey. “How can you not believe in God and be a good man?”

“I don't think the two have anything to do with each other. Right is right and wrong is wrong. God didn't look out at the world one day and decide, ‘Hey, I think I'm going to declare that human cruelty is wrong!' It's either right or wrong, and even a God can't change that.”

Jack Liffey twisted his ankle slightly on the uneven ground and winced. “Let's talk about it again when we've slept this off.”

They slogged on for a while over the broken ground in silence. There was another big jetliner high above, oblivious of them, and then they heard a dull thudding noise and Jack Liffey took the young man's arm and tugged him against the dirt bank. A helicopter lolled past overhead, spraying a superbright searchlight left and right.

“Screw you,
Migra,
” Jack Liffey said softly and Fariborz chuckled.

“From me, too.”

When the chopper was gone, Jack Liffey scrambled far enough up the bank of the ravine to get a look around. Their progress was disappointing. They'd only gone about three hundred yards north from the border fences and were now about parallel with the little shopping center, still a bright oasis to the west. He slid back down and pointed forward like a weary pioneer. They trudged on uneventfully for a few minutes, a tiny expedition into the promise of North America.

“
Alto, pollos!
” The voice erupted out of the darkness, as shocking as an evil thought. A flashlight dazzled them. The source of the light was up on the crest of the ravine and the man came diagonally down toward them, the light bobbing beside him.

“Manos arriba!”

Jack Liffey decided his best bet was to declare his nationality right away. “
Arriba
your own
manos.
We're Americans, and get that light off us.”

The man stopped where he was and lowered the flashlight beam to their feet. As the dazzle ebbed, Jack Liffey could see the silhouette of their would-be captor, a man no more than five feet tall. Something was wrong with the whole situation. There had been no vehicle sounds at all.

“
Jou
pay me for pass,” the man demanded. Now that he was speaking English, his accent was thick as molasses.

So, he wasn't
Migra
at all, Jack Liffey thought. For some reason, the unprepossessing little rat
patrullista
didn't frighten him at all, even though he carried what might have been a pistol in one hand. Jack Liffey looked around quickly for confederates, but there didn't seem to be any. It was too dark to see his facial expression.

“What sort of pass you selling? Disneyland? Hail Mary?”

“
Jou
no pay, I kill
jou
dead
now.
I find
jou
home over big San Diego, find
jou
muzzer, kill her, too.”

“My mother died of cancer, asshole. Look, I'd like to oblige you, but the
judiciales
took all my money already. You can have my credit card if you want. It's a very nice platinum MasterCard but it's over the limit.”

Jack Liffey got a better look at the man as he sidled closer down the slope and his face turned to the moonlight. The small man's cheeks were covered with pustules, and a smell of putrefaction emanated from him. His mouth hung open and his teeth looked rotten, too. He wore a strange white thick-soled shoe on one foot, as if that leg were shorter than the other. It was like being mugged by the organ grinder's monkey.

“Take off
jou
clothe-es.
Jou pollos
always got hide stuff.”

“Fuck you. Here.” Jack Liffey unstrapped his wristwatch and held it out. “Take my watch. It's a Rolex, worth a thousand bucks.”

The man tucked the flashlight under his arm and reached out for the watch. Without warning, Jack Liffey grabbed the man's wrist and yanked hard, putting all his weight into it. The small man was so lightweight that he came flying past, shrieking, and the flashlight fell with a clunk and died. Jack Liffey kept his hold on the wrist and went with him into the ravine bottom. He hated even to touch the man, but he wrenched the arm around and knelt with a knee in the small of his back.

“No hurt! Please, señor! No hurt!”

Jack Liffey grabbed for the other hand to make sure the gun was gone, and it was, if there ever had been a gun. He wiped his hand on his shirt after touching the man's clammy hand.

“Should I break his arm?”

“No,
don't,
” Fariborz said quickly.

“How much money have you got on you, Mr. Rat?”

“I got no money! Poor, poorest. Many brother, many sister, much sick mother. All poor. All hard on.”

Jack Liffey chuckled to himself. “Your whole family is poor, I know. The cook is poor, the gardener is poor, the chauffeur is poor.”

“What you say?”

“Beat it. If you run fast, I won't call the cops.
Vamos.
”

The small man scrambled to his feet and scurried away. He let out a strange insane sound as he got beyond their reach that Jack Liffey finally decided was some kind of sniggering laugh. “
Jou
soft in head!
Pinche gringo pendejo!
Ha ha ha.” He scampered away, running hard.

Fariborz found the man's flashlight and managed to get it to work and searched the bottom of the ravine with it. Jack Liffey wasn't sure he wanted a good look at the damp lumpy rubbish they'd been hiking through. In a moment the boy found the pistol and handed it to Jack Liffey. It was old and rusted, and the ornate tracery spelled out
Hoppy Special
on the crude barrel. He pulled on the hammer, and a metal compartment dropped open where you could stick in a roll of caps. He hadn't seen anything like it since his youth.

The flashlight beam went back to the ground. “I'm looking for your Rolex,” Fariborz explained.

“It's a Timex. Nineteen-ninety-five at Kmart, and the date window died last year.”

“Waste not, want not.” The boy retrieved the wristwatch and rubbed it off before handing it over.

“Better turn off the light,” Jack Liffey suggested. But he could already hear a gasoline engine approaching. It seemed to be a ways off, but it was coming fast. There wasn't much point running because it sputtered like one of those fat-tire ATVs that could go just about anywhere, fast enough to catch anyone on foot.

A glow became visible on the lip of the arroyo above them, and then a QuadRunner heaved into sight, decked out with a lot of lights. It growled once as it slammed on its brakes to send a shower of dirt down over them.

“Alto. Manos arriba!”

“We've already had the
arriba
business,” Jack Liffey said cheerfully. He was really enjoying this codeine aura, if that's what it was. “Don't wear it out. And your Spanish is
really
awful.” This one was certainly
Migra.

“You two Americans?”

“Oh, yes indeed we are.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“We're FBI agents. We're decoys sent here to catch people victimizing border crossers.”

That gave the man pause. “I haven't heard anything about a sting. If you're FBI, let's see some ID.”

How often did life hand you a straight line like that? Jack Liffey thought. “Badges?” he said in an absolutely appalling Mexican accent. “We don't got to show you no stinking
badges.
”

The INS agent burst out laughing.

“Do you mind if I fade out a bit? I haven't slept.”

“Of course not. I'm going to stop at a drugstore and buy you a wet bandage for that hand. I know a little about burns.”

Jack Liffey closed his eyes and his head slid along the headrest toward the passenger window, where the shuddery road vibration punished his temple a little. He was still too wired to go off to sleep immediately. A team of INS agents had questioned him and Fariborz separately for an hour or two, and then together, until almost ten in the morning. Then—within five minutes of their release from the federal office building at the border—Fariborz had disappeared, just vanished out of the air like the leaping tarantula. Jack Liffey assumed it was because the young man had some agenda of his own, to do with saving the other boys.

He had ridden the trolley up to San Diego, woozily and alone, but had arrived at Amtrak too late for the last train to L.A. until late afternoon, so he had just given in and phoned Aneliese de Villiers at the Braille Institute. She dropped everything to drive down to get him, and she found him at about 1:00
P.M
. nodding off at the little mission-style Amtrak station on Kettner.

He awoke with a strange feeling that a big clam was sucking on his hand. When he peeked, he saw that it was in fact a wet white bandage of some sort, and that the hand was resting on his own thigh. Aneliese was driving efficiently northward through the endless yellow hills of Camp Pendleton, the only real nature between San Diego and L.A. No one was running the surprise INS checkpoint they had built across I-5 sixty miles north of the border, so they blasted on through without slowing. Generally a myopic agent forced you to slow enough to peer in the windshield and decide if you looked sufficiently Anglo to avoid harassment. More irony, he thought, in his woozy state. He actually
was
a wetback, albeit a light-haired blue-eyed wetback.

He drifted for a moment and then opened his eyes to see the giant concrete breasts of the San Onofre nuclear power plant. His eye was drawn to the danger sirens that he knew hovered over the hillsides and then over the housing tracts for the next ten miles.

“I wonder what those good folks would do if the sirens went off one day,” he said idly. His throat felt scratchy and dry.

“Sirens?”

“See the one up there. They're just like the old fifties air-raid sirens, but it's for the nuclear plant. For the day it goes critical, like Chernobyl.”

“I've never noticed them. Did that atomic-bomb business traumatize you when you were growing up?”

“I think reports of atomic fear are vastly overstated. We had drop drills in school, but I don't think anybody believed it would really happen. We used to joke that we were putting our heads between our knees so we could kiss our ass good-bye. In the fifth grade, I was much more afraid that I'd never get picked for the soft-ball team.”

“You weren't good at sports?”

“I didn't like them, and that's almost the same thing. It's truly the only thing American boys value at that age.”

“It was the same in the white schools in Zambia, believe me, and my brother says it's very much that way in Australia, too. I wonder if it's being out on the periphery of the British Empire that leaves you stuck with values like that.”

“I hate to disillusion you, but we don't think of ourselves as being on the periphery of the British Empire.”

She laughed. “Okay. But it's a similar thing. We're nearer the frontiers of civilization somehow. Closer to some imaginary barbarians who are trying to overrun the margins.”

“I
like
barbarians,” Jack Liffey said. “Loosely speaking. Maybe I
am
one. Anyway, I have a lot more appreciation now for the people who sneak over the margins.”

They talked wistfully of their childhoods for the rest of the way back, and he found himself growing so tender and affectionate toward her that he developed one of those wooden, unstoppable erections and had to readjust his pants surreptitiously. He wondered if it had started opposite those big domes at San Onofre. It was okay for him to joke to himself about that now, he thought, as long as the apparatus seemed to be working again, but in the back of his mind he feared another limp collapse.

Aneliese had to go back to work to finish some project at the institute, so she agreed to drop him near Auslander's office. He went to a big plastic egg-shaped phone booth on La Cienega, and Auslander agreed to meet him at the end of his office day, at 5:30 after his last patient. Jack Liffey didn't want to panic the man about his daughter by expressing any particular urgency. It wouldn't have done either of them any good. Then he called from the booth and had Art Castro call him back right away to put the call on Art's dime.

“Please pass many thank-yous to your brother-in-law in Ensenada. He earned his keep, but I've got to send him a big warning, too.” He recounted some of the events of the last two days and described the fat drug lord.

“Man, that sounds a lot like Frankie Miramón,
jefe
of the Sonora cartel. He's said to be tight with the
judiciales.
You're lucky you're alive. Nobody even knows where the guy lives. They say he sleeps in a different bed every night.”

“Just tell Jaime to watch his back. And if there's any way he can rescue my VW in T.J. before it gets melted down to make ashtrays, I'd appreciate it. I'll be happy to meet him in San Diego to pick it up and buy him a huge steak dinner. I'm not crossing that border again in
this
lifetime.”

“Understandable.”

“I don't even feel very safe on
this
side.”

“Jack, I gotta tell you something.”

“Uh-oh.”

“It's not that bad, but you know that little map on the business card you sent me for safekeeping? Or for backup, or something.”

“Or something. The mail got there pretty fast.”

“Well, look, the feds came around to see me again—about this Sheik Arad guy. He's like something they can't get off their shoe. And this map of yours just showed up right as they walked into my office and it's got this clumsy Arabic copied on it, it just screams ‘sheik' all over it, plain as day, and I kind of needed something to help me out in my career, here.”

“You gave it to the FBI.”

“I let them make a copy, just in case there's something special for you about
this
one. I'm sorry if I screwed something up, Jack, but it don't pay to go against the feebs. They got a long reach.”

“You probably did right. I hope it buys you something.”

“At least I won't be sent down to the basement. I don't even know if the Bradbury
has
a basement.”

“I'm sorry about everything, Art.”

“Hey, if you can't ruin your life for a friend, what's it all worth?”

Jack Liffey tried to offer him a laugh and hung up. He hadn't decided yet what to do about LA ROX and their drug connection. He hadn't even thought very hard about it. Maybe he should go to the FBI about them, too, but he rather liked Farshad Bayat, and he had a feeling the man had been forced into something that he didn't want to do. Probably by his expediter, Mahmoud. And the man was also Fariborz's dad, and he found he liked the boy a lot.

A grizzled man in a striped referee shirt came along the sidewalk, his neck cranked up toward the sky. His palms were raised over his head and his biceps were flexed a little, as if he were holding up some huge invisible weight—maybe a blimp that floated just above his head. Both hands bobbed a little as he moved along, and he never took his eyes off the immensity above him until he stubbed his toe on the sidewalk and had to glance down briefly. Apparently something had happened while his eyes were averted. He had to grab for the blimp and tug it back down again.

Jack Liffey watched him out of sight down the block, but there was no change in his deportment. He hoped he got it home safely, whatever it was.

He had his own blimp to carry around and he couldn't worry about a stray one just then. He could tell he was still frazzled by the last few days and the lack of sleep, not to mention the ugly wet clam that clung to his hand under the dressing. And there was something else weighing on him, making his knees tremble a little. He didn't know if it had a name, but he knew what it was, all right: When you had been so completely at someone else's mercy, when you'd been abused helplessly, something inside you tore open a little and it didn't repair easily. The whole world seemed a lot more fragile now.

Suddenly he realized that he had become pretty much an illegal alien in a number of respects: cashless, jobless, and carless in the city of cars. He was also exhausted and anxious, standing right in the heart of the famous city of mellow. Sports coupes and SUVs with solo drivers drifted past him just as an evil orange smog was settling over West Hollywood, trapped by an inversion. The reclaimed Timex told him it was 3:30, so he could nap for two hours before Auslander would see him. But he had no way to get himself the five measly miles home and back, and where else but your own home would they let you sleep in a big modern city? There was a furniture store on the outer rim of the Beverly Center mall across La Cienega and in the front window he eyed a king-size bed enviously. He strolled to a park down La Cienega, but it had just been watered and the turf was soggy.

He glanced around in a daze of bafflement. Temporarily homeless, he thought, and the proposition didn't actually seem so strange. It was as if he'd found his level at last—permanent disequilibrium. His fate would be to stay out here in the elements permanently, his beard growing out slowly, his hair tangling and knotting to dreadlocks, his clothes rotting away to tatters. He could barely keep his eyes open.

Where could you go in a city to be inconspicuous, to cause no bother and avoid encroaching on anybody else's precious space? It was a strange side effect of civilization, he thought, that the simplest natural acts that you could have performed anywhere in a forest, such as peeing or sleeping, say, required a specialized and hired space in a city. He had a strange sensation that all the buildings around were receding from him, locks and latches fastening firmly. He could almost hear the clicks and slams.

Before his bewilderment could lead him to do anything truly weird, he set out briskly into a neighborhood of two-story Spanish homes, as if he had a purpose in mind. Here and there a guard dog barked to shoo him onward. Several of the homes seemed to be in the process of being remodeled, and the dark eyes of dead windows glared at him. One was pretty much gutted and surrounded by a hurricane fence. There were no workmen about, so he headed straight up the driveway, as if he belonged. The grass in the backyard was long dead, and a fishpond was empty, its concrete bed cracked up into hexagons like a mudflat.

He saw just what the doctor ordered: A stained and ruined sofa, abandoned for some reason, lay up against the detached garage. It had once been Danish modern, the kind you saw in cheap furnished apartments with loose cushions resting on plastic straps. Some of the cushions were missing, but by flipping down the extras from the back, he had a complete bed, even one extra to prop up his head, and he lay on his stomach and let out an audible sigh of delight. Just before he fell down a dark well, he realized he had an erection—so springy and uncomfortable under him that he had to roll onto his side. He was thinking warmly of Aneliese.

“Failure to appear,” a voice challenged darkly in his ear. It sounded just like the FBI man Robert Johnson. “Failure of duty. Failure of periphery.”

“Guilty,” he replied, but he was out cold.

* * *

Fariborz hid behind a bushy castor bean on a hill not far away from the Campo house. Nobody seemed to be stirring, and no vehicles were parked there. He worried that the Arabs' plans might already be under way somewhere, whatever they were, and he was too late. He saw a helicopter far up, but the house was only a few miles from the Mexican border, and it was probably just an INS patrol.

He was just about to sneak up closer when he saw a dust cloud boiling off a vehicle that was coming up the dirt road fast from the west. Something made him look east, and there was a second dust-tail approaching. He burrowed himself into the big-leaf castor bean as he heard the helicopter descending.

The vehicle coming from the east resolved itself into a desert-camouflaged APC, a low wedge-shaped military vehicle that had huge knobby tires. The vehicle crushed a wire fence under its big tires and crossed into the square of unkempt yard, where he'd stood only a few days earlier. It slammed to a stop a few feet from the shack. The second APC approached even faster and stopped with a dramatic skid near the first one as the helicopter went into a small noisy orbit very low around the house, raising even more dust.

An amplified voice called for anyone inside to come out, but they didn't give it a lot of time to work before one of the APCs revved its engine and lunged forward to smash open a corner of the shack. The vehicle backed off to leave a listing ruin with a big ragged hole at the corner. He thought of Waco, but nobody here was firing in or out of the house. A ramp door dropped down from the back of the second vehicle, like a UFO opening up to emit its Martian invaders. Fariborz felt his heart pound when he saw that was just about what emerged.

Two men in space suits, each carrying a little white suitcase attached by a hose to a bubble helmet, came down the ramp and walked gingerly across toward the shack. One carried a rifle of some kind, but the other went straight for the opening knocked in the corner of the shack, holding an instrument of some kind out ahead of himself. He thrust the small machine into the shack, studied it for a moment, and then went inside.

Fariborz couldn't help thinking of the water-heater panel and the giant jar of potassium iodide he had found. But what did they mean? The back door was thrown open from the inside, and the second spaceman went into the shack warily with his rifle ready. Soon one of them came out and made a high fist-pumping gesture to the vehicles. A third spaceman came down the ramp of the APC pushing a big red wheeled container ahead of him. There was a big symbol on its side: three separate pie slices with a circle in the middle. Fariborz recognized it immediately from chemistry class at Kennedy—the radiation symbol.