The Cracked Earth (10 page)

For no particular reason, he made a Japanese grunt and moved into a karate posture. The samurai just kept going, that's how. That was the existential code. It was walking away that made you old. He laughed aloud and swept the flat of his hand into the belly of an imaginary enemy as he came around and found himself locking eyes with a young woman blowing past in a red Mustang convertible. She grimaced and turned away.

He laughed again and swung downward with a cry to shatter bricks. Stay on the job, he thought. It was what you had left when what you had was gone.

• • •

T
HE
rent-a-cop told him they were shooting right where the Temple of Kali had stood in
Gunga Din,
but he'd seen the movie too long ago to recognize anything. The Alabama Hills back of Lone Pine were all rounded, weathered rock, like the rubble of a small city kicked into heaps by an angry giant. He'd been flagged down by the rent-a-cop a half mile back and told to park, and he had walked up the box canyon toward the pall of dust that hovered over a semicircular pocket in the hills.

“Have you ever acted in a wildlife short?” a man at the table of box lunches was asking a beautiful young girl with a long braid.

“Not so's I'd notice.”

“I was a zebra, I swear to God. They had to pad the film out.”

Only a half-dozen people seemed to be released to eat, and they were peering into the cardboard boxes, as if searching for
just
the right turkey sandwich. A row of hovels had been built against the cliff ahead and a lot of the actors wore loincloths and looked curiously white of skin, like Finns in the middle of winter. Many of the too-white people were waiting curiously by a Land Rover with some contraption on the roof that reminded him of his mom's Electrolux vacuum. Perhaps they were making
The Far Planet of the Dustballs,
he speculated.

He found a young woman with a clipboard and told her Lionel Borowsky had asked him to come out.

She pointed. “They'll break in a minute.”

A cluster of men sat on beach chairs under a canopy. He couldn't see a camera, but there were a lot of lampstands and platforms and big black suitcases scattered around. A pile of bloodied severed limbs waited to one side.

“What's the movie?”

“
The Makers.
It's a lost story by Philip K. Dick—
you
know, the
Blade Runner
guy.”

“How can it be lost?”

“Well,
you
know. It was
found,
for cripes sake. It's about a bunch of androids who run off to live in Tibet and forget they're androids. Over time they build up a bunch of myths about the Makers who made them and then one day these two down-and-out Brooklyn guys stumble into their valley. Sort of
The Man Who Would Be King
meets
The Terminator.
”

A couple of actors he vaguely recognized emerged from the Electrolux Land Rover and walked among the too-white people and then he noticed the cameraman with the Steadicam following them, like a man strapped into a big drill press. When you lived in L.A., you knew about all the latest film gimmicks.

“I said no fucking giggling!” The wail curled up unnaturally from the canopy, electronically amplified, and bounced off the cliff. “If it happens once more, I'm calling the union and you're all off the picture! Take lunch, you sick grifters, and calm down.”

“That's Jerry Tuck, the first AD.”

“Uh-huh. Can I go over, now?”

The shoal of too-white folks drifted toward the box lunches, and the cameraman started unstrapping himself.

There was no question which man under the canopy was Lionel Borowsky. Everything in the valley was turned just perceptibly toward him, as if waiting on his whims. He was heavyset and balding and he had almost managed to straighten his body into a line by stretching his legs forward in the aluminum chair and letting his head dangle back with his eyes closed. A much older man with dead flat eyes sat beside him, glaring out at the AD, who was chasing after the too-white folks, waving a little battery megaphone. Two men in polo shirts stood behind the awning, rocking now and then like backing vocalists.

“Mr. Borowsky, I'm Jack Liffey, the man who's looking for your daughter.”

The eyes came open and found him with sleepy menace. He watched Jack Liffey for a while.

“Mr. B,” someone said, “we still got the stand-ins waiting off there.”

He waved it away. Jack Liffey noticed that the old man was rolling a quarter across his knuckles without looking, like George Raft.

“Are you an ex-cop?”

Jack Liffey shook his head.

“What makes you think you can find her?”

“It's what I do.”

“And take women's money, a lot of which is my money.”

Jack Liffey's vision went pink. “You didn't ask me all the way up here just so we could wave our dicks at each other, did you?”

The backing vocalists went very still, and even the quarter faltered in mid-knuckle. Suddenly Lionel Borowsky sat up and grinned. “Dennis, write that down. I know just the place for it, right after the buzzard scene. Somebody get Jack Liffey a chair.”

He put out his hand to shake and a folding chair materialized.

“Mr. Liffey, welcome to my set. This is my father, the famous blacklisted director.”

“I don't remember any Borowskys on the blacklist.”

“Irwin Cohen.”

“Oh, of course. My privilege.”

He shook the old man's leathery hand.

“Eh.” It was a Jewish sort of shrugging noise.

“I may as well explain the names,” Lionel Borowsky offered. “I went back in the record and found out what was going on at Ellis Island while a third of Eastern Europe was fleeing the pogroms into North America. The schmucks who ran Immigration couldn't deal with all those Polish consonants so they counted down the lines of these bedraggled pilgrims just off the boat”—he counted off those surrounding him—“Levy, Cohen, Stein, Levy, Cohen, Stein. Pure
goyisheh kop.
Long ago I went back and found that granddad was Yusul Borowsky, not Joseph Cohen, but dad is too stubborn to change back.”

“I already monogrammed my shirts.” He rolled his eyes. “This is a sign of going mad, taking yourself so seriously.” Jack Liffey sat.

“Coming from the man who went to prison rather than open his yap.” He waggled a thumb at his father. “He wasn't even a Red. He just did it because Hammett did.”

Jack Liffey admired that kind of bullheadedness, but he let it sit there.

“Mr. B. David is objecting to doing his scenes out of sequence. Says his emotions will all end up with clear black lines around them.” The AD shuffled his feet uncomfortably.

Lionel Borowsky grimaced. “Tell him I don't want emotions. I want him to deliver the lines I wrote. Coach him until he remembers the lines.” He glanced at his father and added softly, “And then we'll change them on him.”

“Getting a Performance out of a Schlemiel 101, four units,” the old man said.

The AD deposited a shopping bag full of box lunches and wandered away with the two backing singers, arguing about the afternoon schedule, leaving only father and son and visitor. The director dealt out the lunches. “Have one, Mr. Liffey. You may as well get something out of this trip.”

“I had an idea that you wanted to see me.”

“Oh, I did, and I've seen you.”

The old man frowned into his box and then tossed it aside.

“What did you see?”

“A guy who's either schtupping my ex-wife or soon will be.”

Jack Liffey decided to let it go some more and see what happened. “Why would that matter to you?” In his box was a turkey on wheat in a clear plastic tub, a big red apple, a brown cello bag that said
HAWAIIAN POTATO CHIPS
—
NOT FOR RESALE,
and a rolled-up napkin with plastic silverware sticking out. He'd heard that Hollywood catering was high end, but it certainly wasn't true on the set of
The Makers.

“See?” Lionel Borowsky said to his father.

“Okay, what can I do? Once again, you're right. A great intellect, my son, a mensch, a guy who's lived the examined life.”

Lionel Borowsky started to eat and then spoke unashamedly with his mouth full. “Don't mistake me, Mr. Liffey. I don't care what you do with Lori. She has a fertile imagination for boy-girl stuff and you're consenting adults. I needed to gauge how your loyalties might have become clouded. Beware of her. She may not be quite what you think. She is entirely capable of … oh, just about anything. She could, just for instance, stage a kidnapping for some nefarious purpose of her own. The only thing keeping me from suspecting that is the paltry ransom. Fifty thousand dollars is not a lot of money in her circles, or in mine.”

Jack Liffey remembered her saying something of the sort. “In my circles, it'll do, but I'll take your word for it. What else would she gain by staging a kidnapping?”

“That's another thought.” He nodded as he appeared to mull it over. “But in eighteen years of directing movies and forcing underfed, overimportant, and oversexed kids from the midwest to reveal their inner feelings, I've learned that I don't know a goddamm thing about their feelings. The only sure touchstone is believing whatever anybody tells you is absolutely not what they're feeling.”

The old man snorted. “Hang on, I got to write that down.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Sure.”

“Do you know a company called PropellorHeads?”

He seemed to think it over for a moment. “They're a little game outfit that licensed a single use of one of Monogram's old movies from the forties for next to nothing, and then they made about five games out of it. I even know the Aussie that runs it. He's a very, very small land shark. Between him and the old boys who run Monogram, I wouldn't bet a lot of money on Australia.”

“Did you know your daughter did some work for them?”

He looked genuinely surprised. “She's just a kid.”

“A kid who's into movies.” He liked the idea that they finally conceded he might know things they didn't know.

Just then a young woman wandered past with very large breasts struggling against a bright blue halter top. Some of her spilled out and some was rosy and firm and she laughed at something in her head with the kind of voice you heard on telephones when you got the wrong area code. It aroused him and made him think of Lori Bright and he was surprised by the urgency of his desire. What a disorderly set of emotions he had developed, he thought.

“Is she in tight with the flakes at PropellorHeads?” Lionel Borowsky asked.

“I don't think so. Do you know any Jamaicans?”

“I met Bob Marley once. Kept thumping a big Bible and I couldn't understand a word he said.”

“Any living ones?”

Something clouded in his eyes, but he wasn't going to share it. “Nope.”

“I'll keep you informed, then. Can you hear colors?” he added as he stood up.

They looked at him as if he was crazy.

“I'll track her down for you, if I'm not too busy fucking your wife.”

The old man roared with laughter.

H
E WAS DUE BACK FOR THE POLICE LINEUP AT TEN, SO HE
had to rouse himself in the motel bed at about five to be safe. He'd never had trouble running on half sleep; in fact he rather liked the buzz of stoic rectitude it gave him.

He showered and got on the road so fast it was still dark. The two-lane highway ahead of him was dead straight, with truck lights hanging out there for a long time and then exploding past with a gust that rocked the Nissan. A bit of moon was dying out and the half-light under the hills filled the desert with hallucination, a lot of ghosts he didn't want to see. Eventually he watched a bloodless sun come up over the barren Argus range to the east. To the west the first light hit the snow-powdered crests atop the long wall of the Sierras, and before long, morning light was hanging above the dark desert floor like a gas.

The desert had a stark kind of virtue. It reminded him of the last time he'd had his body in tip-top shape, and a good morning run would leave him tingling with chaste satisfaction. A kind of rejuvenating cleanliness waited out there, broadcasting a kind of hope out of all the emptiness. It was where visionaries and prophets came from. And samurai, defenders of the weak.

He knew he was straying further and further from the easygoing technical writer he had once been, the family man and homeowner who avoided anything new and unusual. That life was like a dream he'd had, a pleasant-enough dream, but evaporated, long gone. A big hand had descended from somewhere, and had as if casually, indifferent to his hopes, overturned everything.

WIRE PALADIN, SAN FRANCISCO.
He saw the calling card with the silhouette chesspiece from his TV youth. He didn't even have Richard Boone's fancy hotel room to return to, no faithful Chinese servant to set out his clothes. He grinned at himself: as a boy, he had misread the calling card that opened the show. He'd thought Wire was the character's first name.

T
HE
place didn't look much like it always did on the cop shows. It wasn't shabby at all and it wasn't cramped. There were two rows of plush theater seats on his side of the one-way window, like a private screening room for the money-men at Fox. Lieutenant Malamud was there, standing up by the big window, and Flor sat at the end of the aisle. Dai Kim was there, too, sitting glumly in a tidy suit. For some reason, a chimpanzee in a tutu was handcuffed to a seat arm at the back, and once in a while the animal tugged at the cuffs and made a little scree, but it seemed pretty resigned.

“I can't wait to resolve the OMB thing,” Flor said.

“I tell you, I never saw the guy,” Dae Kim complained.

Malamud shrugged. “Maybe you seen him elsewhere. Maybe he's been stalking you.”

He tapped a little squawk box on the wall and spoke into it. “Let's rock-and-roll, folks.”

A door on the other side of the window came open and a reggae band trooped in languorously and lined up under the big black numbers. They all had dreadlocks and bright shirts, and one of them bobbed regularly as if singing to himself, but Jack Liffey could see immediately that his Jamaican was not among them.

“He's not there,” Jack Liffey said.

“Take a good look, Liffey,” Sargent Flor said. “It wasn't easy to dig up a bunch of Jamaicans at this hour.”

“I said he's not there. I can see them.”

“Take a really good look. Stare at them for a minute. I'd like to be sure you got highly motivated.”

He wondered if Flor had been talking to Quinn over in Culver City. He had it in for him for some reason and it was going to end badly.

“I'm motivated. I drove all the way back here from Lone Pine this morning.”

“What a shame. We thought you'd help us clear up our OMB business. Just give us five minutes, okay? What about number one?”

“Sure, what about number one? Have him step forward.”

Malamud punched the box. “One, step forward.”

The first Jamaican wriggled two steps closer to the one-way window and rubbed his side as if he'd slept on it wrong.

“Now have him sing the chorus from ‘I Shot the Sheriff,' ” Jack Liffey said.

Malamud suppressed a laugh, but Flor turned and glared.

“You think that's funny?”

“Anybody want to explain the chimp to me?” Jack Liffey said.

“Not particularly, asshole.”

“Flor.”
Liffey stood up and Flor did, too, twenty feet away. They locked eyes and moved a step toward one another.

They glared for a long time until Malamud rang a buzzer. “Liffey, over here. You're pretty lively for this time of morning.”

He turned and waited for whatever it was.

“Be cool. I told you once this is a big war we got here. We're watching over it. You know who we are? We're the moral order. We sit up on Olympus, and when something gets a little out of line, we reach down and straighten it out so the sides fight fair. Now, you may not think so, but this is a big responsibility. It weighs heavy on us.”

He noticed Dae Kim slipping out the door.

“Now, anytime we want we can take disability from all the stress of dealing with guys like you, move to Idaho or Nebraska or wherever with Mark Fuhrman. They say it's nice out there. You got your seasons, you know, a hundred and twenty in the summer and a hundred and twenty below in the winter. But we choose to stay here and keep watch over the world and we like a little respect.”

“I offered you a fair break the first day,” Jack Liffey said. “I've been straight as I can be and all I get out of your partner is attitude. I don't care if all this being a prick makes him feel powerful, I just don't give a shit.”

“Get out of here, Liffey. You don't have a notion.”

The chimp chirped and screeched as he went out the door. In the hall Dae Kim caught up with him.

“They don't like you very much.”

“I was beginning to figure that out.”

“In case it matters to you, I heard them talking. OMB means the Old Movie Bitch.”

T
HE
anger smoldered out as he stood in front of the glass wall of Parker Center and started to feel lonely and confused again. People like Flor focused him, but it was a false kind of focus that didn't last, like a bickering household that only pulled together to shout at an outsider.

He walked the six blocks to the Bradbury Building on Broadway and rode the open-grillwork New Orleans elevator in the atrium up to seven. He always got a kick out of the big eye they'd painted on the frosted-glass door. Their home office in Cincinnati had been famous for strikebreaking since the turn of the century, but the L.A. office had spent the forties protecting the illegal gambling ships off Santa Monica and Long Beach and later ferrying cash back and forth to Vegas. Now they claimed to be legit and the sign inside the door offered services like Debugging, Embezzlement Detection, Executive Protection, Inventory Shortages, and the like.

“Is Art Castro in?” he asked.

It was a new receptionist. The old one had taken a serious dislike to him for having cheap shoes and a Timex. It must have been something they taught in receptionist school. This one actually smiled at him and wasn't looking at his feet or his wrist, so he figured he got to start with a clean slate.

“Could I tell him who …”

“Jack Liffey. I'm a friend.”

“He's with a client,” she said, “but I'll put your name up on his screen.” She typed something into her keyboard.

“I guess technology is just new ways to be rude,” he said.

She shrugged a little with her eyebrows. “But it's subtler. It's sort of Zen rudeness.”

“I'll have to meditate on that.”

He took a seat as far as possible from an immensely fat man who took up at least two places along the plastic bench seats. He was sweating as if he had just jogged there and his hands worked on the seat beside him.

The nearest magazine was something thick and glossy called
Loss.
He picked it up idly, opened somewhere, and read,
… no longer the person you once were inside, all the feelings and the children you might have had and even the ones you did have. I wake every day facing the inescapable fear that even less will be left than the day before.
He saw a photograph of a man sitting cross-legged in a park. It looked vaguely like himself.

He turned quickly to the back to a photograph of a man missing both legs, his trunk propped up on a little roller platform like a skateboard. The man held up a drawing he seemed to have done of himself, grinning maniacally.

When he looked up, the fat man was staring fiercely at him and he glanced down again at the page to see a photograph of a wrecked station wagon with a caption about a wife at the wheel and all the children asleep in the back. He wondered who on earth would want to read this thing, if it was a way people soothed themselves if they only experienced small losses.

“Jack.”

Castro was in the hallway, immaculate in his tidy flat mustache and linen suit.

“Come on back.”

For an instant they tussled at a sixties handshake, ending in a fumble and an exchange of wry smiles. They'd met first in a brief passage through Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the early 1970s.

Halfway down the hall, Jack Liffey said, “That one liked me a lot better than your old receptionist.”

“Don't get settled. She won't be here long.”

“I won't ask why.”

“Nothing sinister. She's just a temp.”

“We're all temps, Art, with a sufficiently broad perspective on life.”

The man smiled coolly and nodded Jack Liffey into the office. It was a two-window office with a pretty good view out to the south. Things looked okay from up here, but really it was a waste of decaying mid-rises that housed swap meets and Spanish movie houses. One insurance company that had banked on the Anglo city spreading south from the Civic Center had lost big when the palefaces built their New York–scale high-rises out to the west instead, and now this lone skyscraper was marooned down on Twelfth Street in a vast sea of Latin America. It only took a few blocks in L.A. to take you irretrievably across a border.

“How did that thing turn out?” Art Castro asked. “With the envelope.”

Art Castro was holding some evidence for him as insurance, but it was the kind of insurance that you wanted to have around for a long long time.

“Okay so far. Don't go peeking.”

He laughed. “Sooner or later an envelope like that's gonna want some rent.”

“I throw you business, Art.”

“Just kidding. But the day Rosewood Agency actually needs your referrals things are getting really fucked up, I can tell you. I helped you out of love.”

Jack Liffey shrugged. “Then it's the thought that counts. I've got a question about one of your competitors, G. Dan Hunt.”

For a few moments Art Castro rearranged things on his desk, swapped an ashtray for a stapler, and squared off the blotter. Finally he nodded. “Sure. You mixed up with him?”

“Just curious.”

“He's not really a competitor of ours. 'Course, no one is. His dad was an L.A. fixer, you know—it's the 1950s and Louis Mayer hears some reporter out on the margins is going to do a piece saying Rock Hudson is a fairy so G. Dan is sent to talk to the reporter. The city used to work that way when the press was mostly a gentleman, but now it's mostly not. I hear he tried to cover up that strange business with Begelman kiting Cliff Robertson's checks. You can see it doesn't work anymore. The tidy world those Jewish glove merchants ran is gone. …” He tailed off.

“So,” Jack Liffey said. “Like, if I asked if there was anything more serious he's involved in these days, would you go around rearranging your desk again?”

He smiled. “He was rumored to be involved in the Hundred Committee. That was those Cuban thugs down in Florida that Nixon used to run.”

“Are you telling me he bumped off Bobby Kennedy?”

“No. Absolutely not. But that
kind
of thing, maybe.”

“So he deals in funny moral areas,” Jack Liffey said.

“I guess that depends on your sense of humor. I liked Bobby Kennedy.”

“Cubans, huh? I think what I really want to know is if he ever employs Jamaicans.”

Art Castro thought about it, as if he might be deciding whether to hold something back. “The eighties was the era of the Jamaican posses. They ran dope and stuff in some parts of town, but now they're all going to junior college and starting small businesses. You know, it's a funny thing, your basic American black doesn't like your Jamaican much, thinks he's uppity and too close to whitey. Me, I love the sound of the accent.”

“This wasn't, like, an abstract question, Arturo.”

“Okay, sure. I think he's got a Trenchtown lad he uses.”

“Green four-wheeler?”

“I wouldn't know, but I can find out.”

“You do that. Please. And let me worry about Sociology 102 and whether the Mexicans like the Costa Ricans and Peruvians. I love everybody. What would we do for food without immigrants?”

“Around here, you're the immigrant,
esse.
”

“Sure thing. And you natives are welcome to all the hamburgers you want.”

H
E
let the Nissan idle smoothly at the bottom of the hill, unable to decide whether to drive it across town and give it back, or summon the nerve to drive up the hill to see
her.
Two police helicopters circled and circled out over Hollywood, buzzards waiting for something to die. There was no denying it, she had him in a sweat. It was something he remembered from his teenage years when he was drawn to things he knew were bad for him, but he was going to do them anyway. How could any human being watch movies all his life and not want to be up there with one of those forty-foot-tall presences? To leverage his own ordinary-scale existence up into Magicville.