Terminal Island (17 page)

“Go on.”

“This guy, Frank Ozaki, straight out of some heavy-duty internment camp for the badasses, he came home and threw a shit fit. Zorotovich wasn't there no more and the guy in charge said he didn't know shit. You know, this Ozaki didn't even go and fight in the war, like most of them. He said he'd rather stay in jail than be a loyal American. Fuck him, you know.”

“You did, Dec.”

The old man shrugged. “He got a permanent bee in his bonnet about getting his stuff back, but how was he going to prove anything? He even peered in our family's window once up the hill where we lived then and saw the chest and shouted at us from out there on the grass. My old man told him we got the thing at Sears and sent him off with an old forty-five he had.”

“You don't happen to have that forty-five anymore?”

“Yeah, I got a bundle of dope, too, and some M-eighties and whatever else the granny state has decided I shouldn't have.”

“Granny frowns on anthrax quite a lot.”

“I don't have that, neither. But I've got a lot of ideas that granny hates, and that's tough titty, too.”

“You and your dad steal anything besides this chest?”

“We got in late and there wasn't much to go around by then. It was like a bunch of sharks in a food frenzy, and we didn't have a truck. We had to tie the chest to the top of Dad's old Dodge. Was a lot of folks to satisfy, you know?”

“Where's the chest now?”

“I guess Mr. Ninja took it away with him. I was a bit preoccupied with other things he was doing to my stuff. Why don't you ask the cop was eating doughnuts out front?”

“You know, Dec, I'm starting to like this Jap. You're lucky he didn't chop off your balls for souvenirs. If you and your pals got any left.”

“Jap-loving crud, you are.”

“If you only knew.”

He had a feeling that being precisely on time would be important for some reason. He waited at the end of the block until exactly three minutes to eight. It had been dark for a long time now because the calendar had hit the dead center of winter, if you measured winter by the shortest days. A few houses on the block had Christmas lights, those dangly white icicle lights that seemed to have appeared all of a sudden a few years ago and instantaneously driven all other Christmas lights out of existence. One roof had a homemade Santa-and-sleigh cutout, but this wasn't the sort of neighborhood that had a lot of money left over for decoration, and it was possible such ornamentation didn't really fit into the Latino conception of Christmas.

He locked the VW, walked up the chilly street to the two-track driveway, and then walked along it to the little house in back that had once been a garage. He could see right away that his knife and message were gone and the front door was ajar, just a few inches, but enough to be unmistakable, intentional.

He stopped at the door, making enough noise on the concrete stoop so he wouldn't startle anyone inside, then checked his watch. Superstitiously, he waited as the second hand staggered drunkenly uphill until it hit the 12, and then he knocked. “Mr. Ozaki. Hello.”

There was no answer, but he had a feeling that he wasn't alone. He pushed the door inward slowly, feeling no resistance. The first thing he noticed was his playing card with his message on it lying on a small table by the door, the cheap knife on top of it. It gave him a momentary chill that the man hadn't hidden it away somewhere or thrown it out, just left it there, as if it were basically of no consequence.

“Mr. Ozaki. I'm coming in. It's Jack Liffey.”

There was some sort of indirect light in the room, enough so he wasn't too spooked to step inside, and then he stopped in the doorway, easily silhouetted against the outside. Shoot me now, he thought, or forget it. He had the same feeling he had had a few times before, a tickle right in the center of his breastbone, as if sighted down by some new sort of laserscope that made you
feel
the red spot pressing gently against its aiming point. There was no red spot, though, and the sensation was complicated by his labored breathing, with the one lung still shut down.

His eyes adjusted, and he almost jumped out of his skin: there the man was. Jack Liffey's spine prickled all the way down. He hadn't seen him at first because he was in such an odd place. For some reason, he stood on the cushions of the sofa, like a woman in a cartoon who had leaped up there to avoid a mouse. His back was to the wall, which was covered with an ugly vinous flowered wallpaper. He did not seem to be armed, though his head was turned slightly and his eyes were fixed on Jack Liffey like a predator. It was hard to tell, the way he was standing on the sofa, but he looked tall for an Asian, maybe five-ten, and he wore unexceptional chinos and a dark crew-neck sweater with shoulder patches, some sort of commando thing from L. L. Bean. The sleeves were pushed up, and his hands were cocked loosely on his hips, the forearms looking strong.

“Good evening, Mr. Ozaki. I'm sorry to intrude, but I think you know why I left you a message. We need to have a talk.”

There was still no answer, and Jack Liffey summoned all the self-possession he could muster. He had to keep the tremulousness out of his voice. He had sensed it building up in a tickle at the back of his throat. Silence was a weapon he used himself in interviews from time to time, and he couldn't let himself be unnerved by it. It was a trick he knew well, and it didn't usually get to him. He shut the door behind himself and felt marginally less vulnerable to silhouetting.

He still couldn't work out where the indirect light in the room was coming from, but as his eyes adjusted further, he could see the man clearly, standing there bizarrely in the very center of the sofa, surrounded by all the wallpaper vines, like a large bird of prey perched in some jungle. Everything in the room seemed imperceptibly drawn toward him by his own gravity. It might simply have been that he was positioned in the gloomiest spot in the room, but he seemed to be absorbing light from the air around him, using it up in some way. In fact, Jack Liffey had the feeling the man was slowly drawing energy out of the room, letting everything else go cold and dead with entropy.

“I'm going to sit.” Jack Liffey lowered himself onto a stiff chair facing the sofa. It put him at a worse height disadvantage, but he couldn't help that; he had to keep his legs from trembling. “I'm Jack, if you like. I won't call you Joe unless you invite me to. You've done a pretty thorough job of blasting my dad's life's work, as you know.” He offered a rueful smile. “I don't really mind that. The world can do without another benighted manuscript about the supremacy of the white race. I can't consider it much of a loss. Good riddance, except maybe for entertainment value.”

He knew he was talking too much, but he didn't seem to have any choice. “You did quite a job on Steelyard's trains and the fishing boat and on my woman friend's home, too. You seem to go after what you think people value the most. She did love that place and put a lot of hard work and money into restoring it. Though it really had to be me you were targeting, didn't it? Perhaps you thought the damage would destroy our relationship, she'd blame it on me. Well, I'll be honest with you, maybe it did. Though I had a feeling we weren't going to last forever, in any case. I can move on. You haven't really damaged me at my core, if that was your wish. You did seem to threaten my daughter, too, with that photograph. I hope that was only a metaphor. I really wouldn't take kindly to anyone hurting her. In fact, one of us would have to die if you did. But you haven't actually hurt anybody physically yet, have you? I have a feeling that would violate some code you've set yourself.”

He waited to give the man a chance to speak. His only movement so far had been a microscopic adjustment of his head to follow when Jack Liffey sat. His face was expressionless, not even suggesting thought, and his eyes remained fixed, almost unblinking. There was some intimation of mortal fate in his motionless presence, in the immense inertia, the black hole that was drawing in and extinguishing all human emotion around itself.

“I think I've worked out that you have some kind of grievance against a small circle of elderly men, and the grievance seems to extend to their families. I have a little more trouble with that part of it. I imagine long ago there was a slight to your family, some form of cruelty to your parents, maybe. You're too young for it to have been you—I doubt you were even born before the end of the war. It must have been something done to your father, Frank, or your mother, Mary. I'm sure there was plenty of anti-Japanese feeling to go around those days. Does your morality insist that you carry a grudge into the second or third generation? I really can't understand that kind of thinking.”

Again, he waited to give the man a chance to explain himself, but there was no reply. His sense of his antagonist was shifting subtly. It was becoming increasingly difficult to think of him as a man at all. He was more a malign voodoo god, with something too fierce in his silent waiting to be purely human. His eyes followed every slight shift Jack Liffey made, and his muscles seemed ready for fast movement.

“Mr. Ozaki. I know you were in Vietnam. I think you were in one of the commando forces, I think the Green Berets, but maybe Navy SEALs, Marine Recon. You probably had to kill your share of people, maybe more than your share. I killed someone once, not in the war, and I think I know some of the strange, sleepy hold it exerts on you. There are people who say you never really recover from that, you slowly become obsessed with guilt. But I think that's just the sentimentality of people who never faced killing. We both know plenty of warriors who have shrugged it off. Some are psychopaths, of course. They don't feel a thing. I don't think that's you, because you've gone to great lengths not to hurt anyone recently.

“There are plenty of ordinary soldiers who came home from Vietnam with their terrible burdens of memory. They had bad dreams for a while, but they found a way to put it behind them. They were doing what their country asked, after all, and war really is hell, war asks too much of a human being. They weren't bad people to start with, and most of them have healed. Time heals. Love heals. Work heals. The human mind is resilient, it finds a way. I meant well, I loved my dog as a boy, it was all necessary, I'm not so bad, look at my life now. Is this making any sense to you?”

The man breathed palpably, the room so silent that Jack Liffey could hear the breaths in the moments when he fell silent himself, a faint air hiss, as if the man had a slight cold, an allergy, or maybe a problem with his sinuses. His hands shifted slightly on his hips, settled again. But it didn't humanize him. The impression he gave Jack Liffey now was of a total singularity. He was without any parallel anywhere. If there were others even remotely like him,
they
were the copies.

“Were you part of Phoenix? That might have been worse for your psyche, from what I've heard. It doesn't really matter, though, does it? You've been home a long time now, and, for some reason, you've waited and waited until something told you it was time to start evening old scores. That much is pretty clear. My father and his father. Steelyard's father. Ante Petricich. Maybe Robbie Zukor. Don't you want to talk about what they did? Don't you want it
known?”

Jack Liffey stopped because a police siren had come irritatingly along a nearby block, switched abruptly to its higher-pitched whooping, and now, in the silence, a disembodied amplified voice bellowed, “White Accord, you ran a stop sign! Pull over!”

The announcement must have worked, because all the belligerent noises outside cut off at once. Joe Ozaki did not seem to have noticed the interruption.

“You're taking back things, aren't you? A chest, some china plates. A kitchen chair. Are they in the next room? No, you're too smart for that. You probably don't even live here, at least not all the time. This looks like a motel room, a room with no personality at all. I don't see any signs of use. Are you like those Middle East dictators who sleep in a different bed every night?” He had a brainstorm. “Or have you moved back to Terminal Island, somewhere over there as near as you can get to the site of the old village? No one's supposed to live there, but that was your family's home. I'm sure you could find a niche somewhere, a hidey-hole to make your own.”

He waited longer than usual this time, trying to outwait him, but that was a fool's game. Ozaki was simply not going to talk, not tonight.

“I'd like to hear about your grievance. I like to think I have a moral code, too.” Jack Liffey spoke for a few minutes about losing his job in aerospace, discovering he had this unexpected talent for finding missing children. It was unnerving having nothing coming back—like baring your soul in a confessional and then finding out that the priest had stepped out for a cigarette break. “Maybe we could do something about your grievance together.”

Jack Liffey glanced at his watch and saw he'd been there almost forty-five minutes, talking to himself. How strange, he thought. “I warn you, the cops know your name now, and they'll find you in a few days, if you have any normal routine at all. I'm not going to tell them about this place, but they're not fools. I think you may need me more than I need you, if you have some righteous task to complete. I'll let you think it over. I'll be back here tomorrow night at eight, and then it's your turn to talk to me.”

He didn't wait for the acknowledgment that he knew would not come. Jack Liffey tore his eyes free from Joe Ozaki's and went out the door with no departing words. He didn't let himself relax as he walked up the drive, in case the man was watching, but after he got the car started and drove a few blocks, he stopped along the road and let out a massive gasp. The tension had left his hands trembling against the wheel and his knees shuddering. His one functioning lung struggled to get back to a normal breathing pace. He had been near hyperventilating. Joe Ozaki should have been a queen's guard outside Buckingham Palace, he thought, or perhaps a samurai, legs apart and arms folded, waiting in front of the paper house, standing watch unquestioningly for some inscrutable master.