City of Strangers (8 page)

“Is it great?”

“Oh, wow. Like, the earth
moves,
Maevie. I get shooting stars right now thinking about it.” One of her hands went toward her blouse and Maeve could see her nipple had hardened up against the thin blouse.

“You mean like Maria, the Rabbit?”
For Whom the Bell Tolls
had been the last-but-one book in their reading club.

“Yeah. Just like that. Wouldn't our parents drop a load if they knew!”

“I have a feeling that happens every generation. You know,
everybody
ends up doing all these things eventually.”

“Yeah, but it's worse when your folks come from some old country where women have to pretend they're a kind of inferior species. Like, they could try to arrange a marriage to some old geezer I don't even know, with warts all over his face, and then I'd shoot myself.”

“Would they ever do that?”

“I don't think so, but they sent Petros home to Armenia this summer.”

“No wonder you've got his car. He's not over there looking for a wife?”

“I bet that's what they had in mind. You know, Mom and Dad've never even been in Armenia, not the real thing. It was still Soviet Armenia when they left for Iran and they couldn't visit.” She made a big helpless gesture with one arm. “But you'd
think
we were still living there. All they ever talk about is the Armenian genocide, the
horrible terrible
Armenian genocide. Man, like nobody else ever died.”

“What's that?”

She slammed the brakes hard for a light, and Maeve had to brace herself against the dash. “I forget nobody else knows about it. I think it was in World War I and the Turks were ruling most of Armenia and they were Moslems. The Turks decided to wipe out the Armenians who were Christians. They killed a million people or something like that and drove the rest of them out into the desert and took their property. I suppose it really was a pretty big deal, but I'm tired of hearing about it, you know? Mostly my folks get worked up because Turkey still denies that it ever happened. It's weird you can kill a whole country and say it didn't happen.”

“It's worse than weird,” Maeve said.

“Here's the street.”

They turned off Lincoln onto a tiny lane called Leeward, heading for the building Eremy's uncle Armen had told her about. Apparently Sheik Arad was fairly well known in the Venice area. The man had gathered a circle of followers around him and bought an ordinary ranch house that he turned into a compound that functioned as a mosque and school and social center for those who scorned the big official Saudi-financed mosque not far away.

“Anyway, that explains why there's no love lost between Armenians and Moslems.”

“There's a lot of different Moslems.” Maeve tried to be broad-minded. “I imagine people in Malaya are pretty different from people ten thousand miles away in Turkey.”

“Not if you ask my dad. He thinks they're all bloodthirsty Christian-killers.” She laughed. “Even Moslem babies, they're born with little-bitty scimitars in their hands. Whoa!” She slowed way down, the engine popping and crackling.

A head-high stucco wall completely surrounded the house, right at the sidewalk. There was a solid wood door in the wall, and a speaker contraption to talk to the occupants, plus a mail slot. The only other visible feature, at the corner, was a small sign, blue on white, that was in Arabic characters except for the street address.

“That's it,” Eremy said as the old car sputtered past.

They went around the block and drifted past again, without seeing anything more. The fence was so tall, they couldn't see the house. “I don't know how we're going to find out what's inside,” Maeve said.

“I do. Did you see that carport?”

“Huh-uh.”

Eremy drove halfway around the block and parked. An unfenced frame house directly behind the sheik's compound had a big flat-roofed carport off the side, a few feet taller than the compound's wall. The house looked dark and abandoned in the middle of the day. Maeve smiled to herself. She finally had a sleuthing partner even bolder than herself. The last time she'd gone off detecting, she'd had to supply all the grit herself.

“Look at this.” Eremy reached under the seat and handed Maeve a strange-looking pair of binoculars. She pressed a button and Maeve almost dropped them when they started to vibrate softly in her hand. “They're image-stabilized. Weird, isn't it.”

Maeve tried to move the binoculars and felt them resist the movement, as if they were held in place by invisible rubber bands.

“That's really cool.”

“We can see right into enemy territory from the business-class seats up on the roof.”

“No, no, no, it was doubles, double four. I get to jump sixteen points.”

“You can't take them separately.”

Hassan and Pejman were playing backgammon on a card table, but they disagreed mightily about the rules. Iman had doped himself into a comatose sleep with the last Darvocet, Yahya was reading
Teach Yourself Arabic,
taking notes on the margins of an old Mickey Spillane paperback, and Fariborz sat by himself in a resin bucket chair across the small room, feeling very apart, watching them all draw away from him palpably on some wave of quantum physics that he did not understand.

None of them were actually moving, he was well aware of that, but they seemed to be receding, diminishing, growing more unapproachable, and their voices were muffling into a kind of cottony stupor.

“You can't stop on the same point
I'm
on!”

Fariborz wondered if this would go on until he shrank to a point at the geographic center of the room and then, with a little pop, went out of existence altogether. It was impossible to locate himself in his own body. Nothing he did seemed right any longer. It was all just putting one foot in front of the other.

They argued loudly, and he thought, “It's only gestures. There's no way to redeem this.” His own motives had come to seem like comforting lies, or vanities. He had just gone on an inner search for ways to make himself feel righteous. But he couldn't find his way through the thicket of motives to the righteousness itself. What was left was emptiness and inertia.

“You must be Mr. Liffey.” She had gorgeous long hair, shiny black, falling in waves over the shoulders of a gold cashmere sweater. “I'm Ruth Bayat. Come in, please. Farshad is in his Persian room.” She didn't offer a hand; there was still that much Iran in her, and there was an edge of some sort to the words “Persian room.”

The house was tidy and very white, and what furniture he saw was pretty ornate, with a lot of gold leaf. She brought him to a side door that looked as if it should lead to the garage, but, instead, he went through into another world.

“Wow!” It had once been a garage all right, but now it was a grotto, the walls crafted of what was probably the same substance as LA ROX, but all in one irregular surface. A waterfall dripped and trickled diagonally along one wall, descending from pool to pool, and the red-tiled floor was dotted with big patterned cushions. There were several leafy potted hibiscus, and he had no idea how they kept them alive inside the windowless cavern.

Farshad Bayat and another man sat on cushions wearing comfortable-looking sweats. They were not far from a raised platform on the side that looked as if it was for musicians. There were none there at the moment, only a portable stereo on the edge of the platform that offered a soft plucked music with female vocals. He remembered that Lawrence Durrell described Egyptian music as sounding like a sinus being ground to powder, probably because it wasn't the eight-tone harmonics of the West. This was sweet and clean, lilting, though something about it was clearly Middle Eastern.

“Mr. Liffey.” Both men stood, and he shook hands with Bayat and then the second man, who had a face made of the same rock as the walls. Nothing stirred in his expression.

“Mahmoud Khalili. My factory manager and expediter.”

“I'll leave you gentlemen in the Persia of man's dreams,” Mrs. Bayat said, with the same edge.

Bayat smiled. “My wife thinks this room is a ridiculous indulgence. We have poetry nights in here, we've had the great poet Ahmed Shaloo standing right there, we've had famous Persian singers like Mohammed Reza Shajarian.” He pointed to a skinny stringed instrument on a stand. “That's a Persian
tar.
The guitar was named for it, but it's really more like a lute. I love this place, it's my sanctum. Please sit.”

At the back of the platform he noticed an old color-organ from the '50s—one of those strange contraptions that flashed colored lights through a grille depending on the pitch of the music. It was turned on and offering mostly yellow and green with the pulse of the Persian singing.

They settled on pillows and Bayat offered a big plate of food off a dwarf's table, the soft flatbread called lavash, sliced cucumber, tomato, onion, feta cheese, and leaves that smelled like mint. He declined, but Bayat wouldn't accept his refusal to a glass of tea from a pot that rested on a little samovar, and the second man held out for him a glass mug of sugar cubes.

“Thanks.”

Jack Liffey didn't drink tea much, but he put in a sugar cube and nursed it. Rather than talking right away about the hijacking, Bayat talked about Iranian music and poetry and how important they were to the culture, and he asked after Jack Liffey's family and his health, and Jack Liffey did his best to reciprocate the elaborate courtesy. He noticed now that there were an incongruous treadmill and a stair stepper in the far corner of the cave, probably survivals of the room's previous life as a gym or junk room. The second man didn't talk at all, but watched with a predator's eye.

“You're very gracious, you Persians,” Jack Liffey said after they had been talking long-winded pleasantries several minutes longer than anyone with even the vaguest goal in life could have borne. He hoped it might break the stranglehold of the man's civility.

Bayat nodded and smiled. “It drives many Americans crazy, I know. Even Iranians who have lived here for a while. It's called
taarof.
How would you translate that?” he asked the other man.

Mahmoud shrugged, without softening his expression in the least. “Sweet talk, perhaps.”

Bayat laughed softly. “You know, Mr. Liffey, after so many years here, I think in English and talk on the telephone in English, and I do a lot of business in English; but I still make judgments about people in Farsi, deep in my head. Some things are like that.”

“I don't speak Spanish well,” the second man said, the first information he had volunteered. “Even living there half the time.”

“May I ask about the hijacking now?” Jack Liffey requested.

Bayat sobered with a small nod. “You mean, could it have anything to do with my son's disappearance? I don't see how. Whatever my son has become, he and his friends are not running around California with Uzis, hijacking trucks.”

“Do you have any idea at all why someone would go after one of your deliveries, and hit it so viciously?”

Bayat shook his head. Jack Liffey asked them as many questions as he could come up with about the hijacking, but still they professed to know nothing whatever about the crime.

“Do you suppose someone across the border could have hidden drugs in your truck?”

Bayat considered the idea in silence for a moment. He seemed to approach a watershed, then step across it on purpose. “All right, Mr. Liffey, that's why Mahmoud is up here. He will be looking into that very suspicion at both ends. If there was somebody putting contraband on the trucks at
that
end, they had to be tied to someone here to off-load.”

“What is an expediter?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Some of it you don't want to know,” Bayat said, and he seemed to cheer up again. Mahmoud grunted and walked bandy-legged across the grotto to the treadmill. He flicked it on with a whirr and started to walk vigorously. He didn't seem in any rush to get down to his smuggling investigation.

“Doing business in Mexico still involves a variety of unofficial costs,” Bayat went on. “There are many people in politics and various ministries and elsewhere who have to be satisfied. It gets even more complicated as the PRI weakens and Mexico becomes a true multiparty country. There are that many more interests to consider.”

“There's no bribery north of the border?”

“I'm sure there is. But it's more subtle, and it's not a good idea to count on it for easing your path. Mahmoud and I met in the garment business downtown, when I was briefly trying my hand at what's known as the rag trade. There were a lot of … secondary costs involved in getting shipments through customs, getting them into stores, and Mahmoud taught me about them. It was a very cutthroat business. Have you seen the garment district in L.A. recently, Mr. Liffey?”

“A bit.”

“Fifteen years ago it was just old tenements, used as small factories, a few hundred of them, with a handful of sewing machines working away in each one. The streets were dead outside, full of litter. Now the whole district is a bazaar, with storefronts and shops everywhere. There're flags and bright colors and crowds.
We
did that. Persians are a bazaar people. We transformed L.A.'s garment district into the biggest and brightest clothing bazaar in the entire world. With a little help from some Israelis and Koreans, of course, and all those Mexican women who are hard at work at the machines. But mostly it was Iranian capital and Iranian energy. On the way, a little money changed hands in unusual ways.”

The song came to an end, then another started up with more of a wailing trill, the woman's voice continually changing key and swelling up out of itself. It echoed a bit and reinforced the foreignness that pervaded the grotto. Mahmoud Kahlili was breathing heavily now as the expensive treadmill started tilting itself uphill.