The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 (17 page)

M
ARDIROS HAD ALWAYS BEEN
a student of maps, but what he found when he came to America was something else. “Rita,” he shouted from a backroom. “These Thomas brothers. What geniuses!” They had taken a city that made no sense to itself and given it a structure, a syntax, that even foreigners like him could fathom. Here was a whole bound guide of maps that divided up the sprawl of Southern California into perfect little squares with numbers that corresponded to pages inside. Turn to any page, and you had the landscape of L.A. in bird’s-eye: parks in green, malls in yellow, cemeteries in olive, and freeways, the lifeblood, in red. He pored over the maps at night, reviewed them again in the morning, and then took off to find his new city. By car and foot, he logged hundreds of miles that first week, close to a thousand the next. He was looking for the right business in the right location and wasn’t in any particular hurry. They had come with plenty of cash.

One thing was certain. His parents, looking for something easier, wanted no part of the food business. There would be no Zankous in America. They settled instead on a dry cleaning shop, only to find out that the chemicals made Mardiros sick. Father and son traveled to Hong Kong to explore the trade of men’s suits, then decided the business wasn’t practical. The deeper Mardiros journeyed into Los Angeles, the more he bumped up against growing pockets of immigrants fresh from the Middle East. No restaurant, though, seemed to be dedicated to their cuisine, at least none that served it fast and delicious and at a price that would bring customers back. So in 1983, he went to his parents and pitched the idea. His father resisted. His mother cried. They threatened to return to Beirut. In the end, sensing their son’s resolve, they consented.

He picked a tiny place next to a Laundromat on the corner of Sunset and Normandie—could there have been an uglier minimall in all of Hollywood?—and erected a sign with block letters in blue and red.
ZANKOU CHICKEN.
Before long, the Arabs and Persian Jews and Armenians found it. So did Mexican gang-bangers and nurses from Kaiser Permanente and the flock from L. Ron Hubbard’s church, who methodically polished off their plates of chicken
shawarma,
hummus, and pickled turnips and returned to their e-meters with a clearness that only Margrit’s paste could bring.

This wasn’t Beirut. Mardiros put in long hours. He tweaked the menu; his mother tinkered with the spices. It took a full year to find a groove. The first crowd of regulars brought in a second crowd, and a buzz began to grow among the network of foodies. How did they make the chicken so tender and juicy? The answer was a simple rub of salt and not trusting the rotisserie to do all the work but raising and lowering the heat and shifting each bird as it cooked. What made the garlic paste so fluffy and white and piercing? This was a secret the family intended to keep. Some customers swore it was potatoes, others mayonnaise. At least one fanatic stuck his container in the freezer and examined each part as it congealed. He pronounced the secret ingredient a special kind of olive oil. None guessed right. The ingredients were simple and fresh, Mardiros pledged, no shortcuts. The magic was in his mother’s right hand.

Word of a new kind of fare, fast and tasty and light, spread to the critics. The
L.A. Times
would call it “the best roast chicken in town at any price.” Zagat would anoint Zankou one of “America’s best meal deals.” No one, though, was more breathless in his praise than the guerrilla warrior of city chowhounds. Jonathan Gold called the chicken “superb,” and nothing in heaven or on earth compared with the garlic paste.

The hole-in-the-wall was raking in $2 million a year, half of it pure profit. In Mardiros’s mind, the family was growing and
the business needed to grow with it. This is America, he told his parents. We’ve got something good. Let’s duplicate our success. His parents fought expansion, but he kept pushing, and in 1991 the family agreed to a split. Mardiros would take the Zankou concept and build a chain across the region. Any new restaurants he opened, success or failure, would belong to him. In return, he would sign over his stake in Hollywood to his parents and two sisters. The split was hardly a parting. The garlic paste still would be prepared by his mother and used by all the Zankous. As a favor to his sister Dzovig, he would pay her to manage some of his new stores. Nothing, he assured them, would change at home.

After so many years playing the pampered son, Mardiros now saw himself as the patriarch, a role that became official after his father’s death. Over and over, he preached: Success means nothing if we don’t stay as one. Greed must never rear its head. There is plenty for all of us. He loved Dzovig’s two boys as he loved his own, and he knew she felt the same way about his sons. The boys were more like brothers than cousins. They lived only a few minutes apart in Glendale and attended the same private Armenian school. Dzovig would take them each morning, and Rita would pick them up. A gang of six, they climbed the hills, rode bikes, played video games. They had the coolest toys, the latest gadgets. If they were spoiled, and they were, it came with the turf. As the grandchildren of Margrit, each one was something of a food snob. No one’s cooking could measure up to hers. She made the best lentil soups, the best raw-meat-and-bulgur
chekufta.
She wasn’t big on hugs or kisses; she could be downright stern, but she wanted her grandchildren to know what good food tasted like. When they turned up their noses at her sheep’s brain soup, she bribed them with $20 bills just to get them to take one sip.

Mardiros didn’t need to travel far to find his next spot. Glendale was a city made new by three successive waves of Armenian refugees, first from Iran, then from Beirut, and now from Armenia itself. He picked a less grimy minimall squeezed behind a gas
station for Zankou no. 2. As soon as it began turning a profit, he found a spot in Van Nuys for Zankou no. 3. Then came Zankou no. 4 in Anaheim and Zankou no. 5 in Pasadena. His white house, way up in the Verdugo Hills, was now known as the home of the rotisserie chicken mogul. It sat higher than the mansions of doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers. Only a porn king looked down on him. He and Rita drove a Jaguar and a black Mercedes-Benz. They had live-in servants. Yet it wasn’t the kind of wealth that let them lounge around playing golf or tennis. When Rita wasn’t tending the boys, she was feeding and bathing Mardiros’s 97-year-old grandmother. His mother, Margrit, had her own seamstress, and she dressed in the finest silks and wools. But more often than not, her clothes were covered by the apron she put on each morning at 7:30 sharp. When she finished preparing dishes for the customers, she began cooking delicacies for the employees.

As for Mardiros, he spent his days driving from Zankou to Zankou. He did the payroll, made sure the food tasted right, and timed the customers from the second they walked in to the second they were served. When he wasn’t working, he was catting around with his own gang of rich buddies. He went to Vegas with them, to Cabo with them. Every so often, he’d pile Rita and the kids into the Mercedes and take them to his favorite Chinese restaurant. This was what passed for family time. If he felt bad about neglecting his wife and children, he tried to make up for it by giving to the Armenian community. He gave to schools, dance troupes, and starving artists. He gave to orphans and widows and soup kitchens back in Armenia. He gave so often that a cartoon in one Armenian American newspaper showed two doors leading into Zankou. One was for food, the other for philanthropy. All in all, he had done what he had set out to do. At night, out on the balcony, he sat in his chair and could see all the way to Catalina Island. He’d take his telescope and look up at the stars and then
look back down at the twinkling lights of Los Angeles. He belonged here. This was his place now. He and his Zankous had become part of the map.

H
E COULD FEEL THE PAIN
down below growing worse. Something terrible, he knew, afflicted him. Next week, he told himself. Next week. By the time he got to the doctor, it was too late. The cancer in his bladder had spread to his rectum. Chemotherapy would buy only a little time. He broke the news to Rita and the boys, and then he gathered his mother and sisters in the living room to tell them. He was going to fight it, he said, but if he died, he wanted them to know this: His sons—Dikran, 25, Steve, 23, Ara, 18, and Vartkes, 17—would be taking over his Zankous. The room fell silent. His sisters, Dzovig and Haygan, seemed tongue-tied. His mother sat stone-faced. She didn’t ask what kind of cancer he had or what kind of prognosis the doctors had given him. Instead, as she put down her demitasse of Turkish coffee, she blurted out in Armenian: “Your sons. The shadow they cast is not yours.” Then she rose, walked up the stairs to her bedroom, and shut the door.

Each one of his boys, it was true, was struggling to find his place. Vartkes, the youngest and perhaps the brightest, was using his allowance to buy marijuana. Ara, pent up and quirky, was addicted to painkillers. Dikran, the oldest, had found the Lord and was preaching salvation during the day and telling his brothers at night, in bed, that they were all headed to hell. He had become a born-again after a scandal in 1977 that had cost him his dream of being a lawyer. A top student at Woodbury University, Dikran had been caught in an elaborate scheme to cheat on the law school entrance exam. He paid a fine and served probation, but no credentialed law school would ever accept him.

For Steve, it was a different weakness. He had gone to the 777
Motel in Sherman Oaks on a winter night in 2000 to meet a call girl. He didn’t know she had a listening device broadcasting to a pimp, who stole his money. Steve gave chase down a freeway, and shots were fired at the pimp and the prostitute, hitting their car. Steve was charged with two counts of attempted murder, and bail was set at $1.4 million. If the verdict didn’t go his way, he faced life in prison. As it turned out, the prosecutor made a small blunder during the trial, telling the jury about a prior crime that Steve did not commit. His attorney, Mark Geragos, objected, and the judge declared a mistrial. Steve pleaded guilty to a lesser crime, did a year of work furlough, and was let go.

In the days that followed the news of his cancer, Mardiros couldn’t help but notice that his mother’s behavior toward him had changed. She would come home from work, Rita would greet her as usual at the front door, and she would walk right past him and into the kitchen without a word. No “How do you feel today?” No “Are your treatments working?” She would pour a glass of water from the refrigerator, turn around, and walk upstairs to her room. He wouldn’t see her again until the next day, when she would repeat her silence. His hair fell out, he lost 60 pounds, but not once did she seem to notice. It didn’t occur to Rita that her mother-in-law might be miffed about Mardiros’s desire for his sons to take over the business. After all, Margrit had opposed the expansion from day one, and Mardiros alone owned Zankous nos. 2, 3, 4, and 5.

This went on for more than a year, not a word spoken between mother and son. Mardiros might have taken it upon himself to ask what crime he had committed to deserve such treatment. But all he had left was his pride. Then one day, while his mother was away at work, he walked into her bedroom and reached atop the dresser and grabbed the photo of him and her when he was a child in Lebanon. He could see that she had the faintest smile on her lips as she was leaning over to hug him.
Her prince. Her pasha.
He took the photo out of its frame, tore off the side depicting his mother, lit
a match, and watched it burn. Then he folded up his side of the photo and threw it away. A day or so later, as it happened, the house caught fire. Flames shot up from the maid’s bedroom downstairs. He and Rita were stuck on the balcony, choking on smoke, when firefighters finally rescued them. They packed what they could and went to live at a hotel in Glendale while the house was refurbished. It was the next to last time he would see his mother. She had taken all her possessions and moved in with Dzovig.

Over the following year, as he lay dying, his mother never once called him. Neither did his sisters or his nephews. His treatments had caused a buildup of fluid on his brain, and he was thinking all kinds of crazy thoughts. He told Steve about setting the image of his mother to flames, and how that image had come back to light the fire that had burned the house. In more rational moments, he thought that a mother capable of disowning her son at the hour of his greatest need, a son who had dedicated his life to her, was capable of engineering great mischief when he was gone. Yes, the Zankous he had built belonged to him alone, and he believed the trademark was his, too. But how could he be certain that his mother and sisters wouldn’t challenge the inheritance of his wife and sons?

His head began to throb, the pain so severe that his sons had to take turns rubbing his skull with their knuckles. He told Steve he was certain that his mother and sisters were plotting against him. He could barely stand up, but each week he made Steve drive him to the two Zankous that Dzovig managed and open the safe so he could count the receipts. Steve, tugged by his love for his grandmother, asked his father if he could ever find it in his heart to forgive her. “God will forgive the devil before I can forgive my mother,” he said, “because this is a mother, not the devil.”

H
E ROSE FROM HIS BED
on the morning of January 14, 2003, took a shower, and got dressed. His wife would recall his putting
on the white silk suit that hadn’t fit him in years. Only now, after losing so much weight, could he wear it again. He reached into the closet for his .38-caliber revolver and stuck it into his coat pocket. Then he jammed his 9mm semiautomatic Browning into his waistband, next to his diaper. The gun held 11 rounds, and he scooped up nine extra bullets. As he walked down the stairs and said good-bye to Rita, he had no intention of going to Zankou Chicken to see an old friend. He had called his sister at work and arranged a meeting with her and his mother to discuss family affairs.