The Cracked Earth (3 page)

“Who is this?”

The cop studied the microphone.

“I said, who is this? This operation is not a figure of fun.”

Still the driver didn't reply.

“Forty-four Alice, I order you to identify yourself immediately!”

The driver clicked the microphone ostentatiously a couple of times. “You got to say ‘over' at your end … sir. Over.”

“Who is this?
Over
.”

“This is forty-four Alice. It's against procedures to use our names, sir. I got the intruder standing at the window right here and I think maybe you ought to shut the fuck up now. Over and out.”

Jack Liffey heard a small sucking sound of air drawn through the man's teeth as he hung up the microphone and turned an impassive face to the window.

“Intruder?” Jack Liffey said.

The man shrugged lightly. “They sent an FNG down from the top because this is a very big show. He's got an oar in the water some of the time.”

“Fucking New Guy,” Jack Liffey said.

“You been in the Big 'Nam, too.”

“My name is Jack Liffey. I was hired by Mrs. Bright to find her daughter.”

“We know that. I'm Lieutenant Malamud, and this is Sergeant Flor. This here
operation
is something of a high-profile portion of a long-running story, and we're here to see nobody hurts theirself.”

“First missing kid I've seen get this treatment.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is there something I should know?”

“You tell us.”

“Mrs. Bright doesn't seem very worried. Like it may all be a mistake.”

“Really?”

“C'mon, that's all I know. I'm on my way to the girl's boarding school, Taunton in Hancock Park. Can't you tell me anything?”

Lieutenant Malamud moved his lower jaw back and forth thoughtfully, like a guy who never really got excited about anything. “I spent a lot of years in Hollywood Division, and while I was driving around, you know, I took pictures of the real places that Raymond Chandler was always writing about, like his office, which a lot of people think is the Security Pacific Building on Cahuenga but I like the Guaranty building on Ivar better. Anyway, that was all fiction and it doesn't mean I like a real private eye much.”

“I worked at Rockwell down in El Segundo, pretty nice office with a window,” Jack Liffey said. “I was a technical writer back when they were still making planes with guns in them. Then I was the peace dividend. I got child support to pay, so I do what I can. I look for missing kids.”

The lieutenant turned to his partner. “What do you think, Flor?”

The younger man shrugged.

“Cut me some slack,” Jack Liffey said. “I'll let you know anything I find out.”

“Uh-huh. Look, there's a war going on here, on a scale of, like, maybe not on the order of the ones they used to give numbers, but right up there for meanness, and you don't want to get your dick caught in it, believe me.”

“You couldn't tell me who's fighting whom?”

“I can tell you Jamaica is a pretty island, but it's got the highest murder rate in the western hemisphere.”

“That's supposed to help?”

“There it is.”

“Thanks a lot, guys. I hear Puerto Rico's pretty, too.”

He felt a tremor in the asphalt as he walked away and wondered if it was another aftershock. About 3.0. It might just as easily have been somebody working on the subway tunnel, trying to dig it out again. Nothing worked quite right in L.A. except the stuff made for the rich.

A
few blocks north of Taunton School he had to come to a stop for a party spilling onto the street from a broad lawn in front of a faux-southern mansion, all black tuxes and ball gowns like models trying to simulate a slick magazine ad. But the guy in front had a tux cut to ribbons and hanging off him like party streamers and he fled ahead of the others, who were laughing and chasing him with pointy pairs of scissors. Jack Liffey knew there was no way on earth he would ever figure out what was going on there.

Taunton itself took up most of an old-money block, high walls hiding a couple of modern wings that were plugged into a huge Tudor estate at the corner. One discreet sign at ground level announced the name and nothing else. He wedged his old Concord between a Lexus and a lime-green Facel Vega and found the entrance up a broad staircase between sleeping lions.

A smell of some flower rose as he mounted the steps and a kind of brief annoyance at privilege rose as well. It subsided quickly when he saw a little girl standing in the hall, looking lost and sad, and he thought of Maeve with a pang. He wondered how she would look in the blazer and tweedy skirt, but there was little chance of that.

Inside the first door he found the headmistress. She was named Miss Rebecca Plumkill and she had round wire glasses and was dressed so severely she looked like she ought to be in a Nazi hat on the cover of a man's magazine tying up another woman.

“Mrs. Bright called. You don't look like a detective.”

“What did you expect? Dragon tattoos?”

She burst out laughing and sent him to see the girl's housemother, Myrna Kleis. The headmistress hadn't seemed any more worried than the girl's mother. He wondered if their girls went AWOL all the time.

Myrna Kleis met him in a tiny cluttered office just inside the door of one of the modern wings. She had a froth of pure white hair that looked suspiciously acrylic, and a strong European accent, and she looked sickly and fluttery in the fluorescent light. A pinned-back curtain seemed to lead into a residence room and the whole thing reminded him of a motel sign-in.

His occupation had preceded him there, too.

“Mr. Liffey, I will assist you however I can.” She offered a limp, dry hand. “Our girls are so precious.”

“Do they go missing a lot?”

“No, they do not. Could I make you some tea, please?”

“Sure.” He was getting a lot more tea offers than he wanted, but he guessed the fussing would put her at ease.

“Come into the sitting room, please.”

Two stiff sofas faced each other over a low spindly table, probably for tête-à-têtes with the girls, and on a cart there was a fancy British teamaker with a lot of glass tubes and knobs, like something bolted together by a mad scientist.

As she fiddled with the tea machine his eye was drawn to a small oil painting in a heavy frame. It had pride of place in the room and it looked like a maelstrom of a dozen shades of blue, with streaks of sleet across it.

“It belonged to my father, in Vienna,” she said when she noticed. “It is my most prized possession.”

“Kandinsky?” he guessed.

She smiled. “His colleague and friend and admirer Theo Harten. They were in a group called
der Blaue Reiter,
though Harten never became well known and he died in the ovens at Birkenau. Does the painting speak to you?”

“Not really.”

“It speaks … volumes to me.” She clanged the lid of her teapot shut. “I look at it for some time every day, the way some people will listen to the
Brandenburg Concertos
or read a favorite poem. It's my music.”

“I see.”

“No, I don't think you do, Mr. Liffey. That's an Irish name. Do you like Yeats?”

“Most Irishmen are familiar with Yeats, or Seamus Heaney these days. I like Auden more.”

The machine began to steam and hiss softly, and then brown liquid dribbled into a pot. “The sounds of Yeats are reds and browns, with flecks of gold.

she quoted. “The color is so
intense.”

Myrna Kleis shook her head and then drifted across the room and stared intently at the painting from maybe two feet away.

“It sings, but I have no way of knowing it sings the same song for me it did for Harten or Kandinsky. They were both synesthetes, you know? Though I have a feeling that it is possible Harten only pretended to be, to please his master. Do you know what synesthesia is?”

He figured he was about to learn, so he kept his mouth shut.

“It is a peculiarity of the psyche of some people who have the ability to shut down the yackety-yak of their analytic mind and have their senses cooperate, actually to fuse. Kandinsky could hear colors and see sounds. He was tested by skeptics and he would always make the same associations. His one-act opera was called
The Yellow Sound.”

She tore her eyes away from the painting and looked at him.

“I believe current research suggests that synesthesia has something to do with a deficit of serotonin in the brain, but it would be a shame to explain away Kandinsky like that, wouldn't it?”

“I take it you have this capacity.”

She nodded. “I don't often speak of it. People think you are crazy.”

Nutty as a fruit bat, he thought. He took a guess. “Did Lee have this ability?”

She nodded. “That's why I brought it up. One afternoon a few weeks ago she came to me very upset. She told me she had been listening to Bach and she'd started to lose the color. At first things went pastel and then she was only hearing the music as music and it scared her so much she shut the CD off. She was terrified she might be growing out of any natural talents she had for color.”

Great, he thought. He could start looking for her at Standard Brands paint store.

Myrna Kleis poured tea into two delicate Chinese cups. “Milk? Lemon?”

“Nothing. Do a lot of painters experience this thing?” he asked.

She shook her head and brought him a cup. She remained standing with her cup. “More musicians, actually. Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Olivier Messiaen. He went to Bryce Canyon in Utah on a commission and he said later that
Des Canyons des Étoiles
wrote itself out of the scenery. It's a weird piece, but everybody likes it. He's dead now. David Hockney is the only living synesthete painter that I am aware of.”

“Do you think this has anything to do with her running off?”

“If I didn't, I wouldn't be opening myself to the possibility of ridicule. She was very upset at starting to lose her colors.” Her eyes begged him not to scoff.

“So where has she gone?”

She shook her head sadly. “Ask Bronwen King. I was Lee's adviser and friend, but she was her confidante. I'll get her for you.”

The housemother sipped at her teacup, then left him alone in the room. He looked at the painting again. He was beginning to like the edgy swirl of it, but he didn't hear anything. Then, he didn't really expect to. He felt no urgency to have remarkable powers. Though being able to pick horses would have been nice.

A bell rang in the hallway outside and it gave him a chill of sensory recall.
That
was the way senses got to him—the involuntary memory of the oppressive orderings of high school. Six minutes to get to a book locker that wouldn't open half the time and swap books. Neither college nor the army nor fifteen years in aerospace could erase the dream of standing there naked and suddenly realizing he had only six minutes before French finals and he had forgotten to go to French class all year.

He was actually sweating a little when Myrna Kleis led in the girl, tall with short shiny black hair.

“Mr. Liffey, this is Lee's friend Bronwen.”

“Hello, Bronwen.”

The girl stared at him neutrally, hugging a Peechee to the chest of her blue blazer.

“Could I speak to her alone?” Jack Liffey said.

“Of course.” The housemother was offended, but she nodded curtly and went out.

“I'll disturb your day as little as possible,” he offered. “I'm sorry to pull you out of class, though when I was in high school I think I would have welcomed any interruption.”

“Cut to the chase,” she said.

He chuckled. “Okay. I think you know Lee is missing. I need to speak to her, just to make sure she's okay, and Ms. Kleis thought you might have an idea where she is.”

She started humming something softly, and he waited a few moments.

“I get it,” he said. “If I recognized the tune, the lyric would probably be an insult.”

“ ‘You know something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?' ”

“If your humming was better I'd know ‘Ballad of a Thin Man.' ‘And he says, How does it feel to be such a freak, and you say, Impossible, as he hands you a bone.' ”

Despite herself, she gave a small smile.

“Go on, sit down. If Lee doesn't want to go see her mom, I won't make her. I've been finding missing kids for a long time and I never make them do anything they don't want to do.”

She didn't sit. She mastered her urge to be polite and looked away from him as she spoke slowly, judiciously, “If bullshit falls in the forest and nobody's there, does it make a sound?”

“Look at me,”
he said sharply.

She did, suddenly an obedient fifteen-year-old.

“You're endangering your friend's life. I don't have time to waste convincing some spoiled rich kid that I know the score. There's a ransom note and Lee might be in trouble. If you know anything at all, tell me
now.
”

“I'm not spoiled,” she said defiantly.

He thought about it, then nodded once, giving her that one.

“She's been working all her free time with a filmmaker named Dae Kim. She's been his PA.”

He immediately thought of “public address,” but that couldn't be right.

The question must have showed. “Production assistant. Kim is a well-known underground filmmaker, but she said he was going mainstream in an interesting way. Some company hired him to do an interactive movie for CD-ROM.”

“Where would I find him?”

“The company is called PropellorHeads. It's on Little Santa Monica near Sepulveda.”

“Thanks.”

There might have been tears in her eyes. “Do you think Lee's okay?”