City of Strangers Read online

  “There’s a condition to the job.”

  “There always is,” Jack Liffey said. “Whose toes are too delicate to step on?”

  “You have an impatient streak, don’t you? To my way of thinking, a detective would be better off sitting back and letting things happen at their own pace. After all, impatience is a kind of insecurity.”

  This know-it-all confidence could be pretty maddening, Jack Liffey thought, particularly in a therapist, but then he had a hunch Dicky Auslander was no great shakes at the job. So far his idea of psychology sounded more like a tape of an old Reader’s Digest article.

  “Must be because I never got to fuck my mother and kill my father,” Jack Liffey said.

  The tall man nodded slowly. “Virginia said you’re having a bad time.”

  That stopped Jack Liffey in his tracks.

  “After Marlena left you,” Dicky added.

  “Mind your own business.”

  “I’ll pay your normal detective rate, but one condition of this job is reporting in to me a couple times a week and using any extra time to talk to me about yourself.”

  “That’s just completely out of the question, Dicky.”

  “We used to be friends. Are you afraid of it?”

  Jack Liffey stared back hard. The heater cycled on, then off right away. That was the way gratification tended to work, too, he thought idly, but he had no intention of talking that over with a therapist, or anything else. The stare went on quite a while, before Aaron Auslander cracked and had to speak. As Jack Liffey guessed, he could mad-dog the man at will. That helped restore some of the balance.

  “What is it about therapy that frightens you? Revealing yourself?”

  “Remember that personality test we had to take at State? ‘Are you still afraid of doorknobs?’ There’s no way you can answer that. Just agreeing to talk about your psyche means you’re crazy as a loon.”

  “Doorknobs scare me to death,” Aaron Auslander said evenly.

  Jack Liffey laughed. It was almost the first human thing the man had said to him. “I can carry my own water, thank you.”

  Auslander gave a little shrug with open palms. “So, just come in and report and chat with me twice a week. Is it so terrible? I promise we’ll talk in a way that will please you. Starting Wednesday at ten.”

  “The only way this would please me is if you came down from the rafters on a string and quacked like Groucho Marx’s duck.”

  * * *

  From the brow of the hill, the faraway high-rises of the West Side poked up through a brown haze like the last signs of Atlantis sinking into a muddy sea. For years, Jack Liffey used to walk Loco up here near the retired nuns’ home in the Baldwin Hills, and together he and Loco had discovered the square of lawn at the very lip of the hill where you could look across the intervening plain of habitation to the Santa Monica Mountains. On a clear day, your view stretched all the way from the blue Pacific at Santa Monica on the far west to the tiny urban island of downtown L.A. Loco had liked it here, too, sniffing up a storm at whatever wild scent trails crossed the lawn. Jack Liffey wasn’t sure why he’d eventually got out of the habit of coming here.

  He looked down into the top of a pine tree where a red-tailed hawk had once nested. Each spring it had raised one or two nestlings, and he had watched it circle away, eye him warily, then bring back food or nest materials. He’d never seen the mate. Then one year it had just stopped coming. Died, presumably. Where did dead birds go? You almost never saw them on the ground. He realized he’d been thinking a lot recently about mortality.

  Auslander had been right enough, in his crude way. The fact that Marlena had left him for a religious nut had knocked him right out of his orbit, and he wasn’t sure what the crisis was all about anymore. A real inconsolable fondness for Marlena? Yet another midlife crisis? Could loss actually leave you damaged? He’d already had one genuine soul crisis some years back, when his marriage to Kathy, Maeve’s mom, and his comfy aerospace job had both gone south at about the same time. Back then he had dipped badly into drugs and drink, and he had cranked himself back out of the hole notch-by-notch only as an act of pure will. He’d made himself over into a drug-free, alcohol-free child-finding detective. Maybe his willpower was starting to wear thin. He’d thought he was okay for quite some time, but this new loss had blindsided him.

  He sat down on the grass and clutched his knees, looking through the haze at street after street of houses. It reminded him of a train trip to New York that he had taken as a child with his parents. He’d had a sleeper, and after lights-out, he had lain there, curtain tucked around his neck, forehead to the chilled glass, peering out into the vastness. The rolling motion of the train, the velvety dark, and here and there a little pocket of fuzzy light drifting past in the distance. He could still taste the wonder he had felt then. Every smudge of light was a town that he would never know, every bright pinprick a home. Thousands upon thousands of lives went on outside his ken. Why had he felt so vividly that those lives out there were real and his was only made up?

  After a few minutes on the grass, with Loco nuzzling his leg and him scratching the dog’s ears, Jack Liffey realized he was crying a little.

  Two

  Disenchantment Will Never Prevail

  Farshad Bayat’s shop was called LA ROX, and because it was all in capitals, Jack Liffey couldn’t work out whether it was meant to be La Rox or L.A. Rox. All in all, he wasn’t very fond of cute ad-spellings, departures like Sell-a-bration and Rite-weigh, because they just seemed to crank up the level of anxiety, a world that didn’t believe in its own rules. Extra anxiety he could do without.

  The northern reaches of Robertson Boulevard here, spreading up the flank of Beverly Hills, were all interior designers and antiques and retro shops where they sold Roy Rogers bedspreads and Buck Rogers aluminum furniture at wildly inflated prices. Stripped pine tables out of Iowa farmhouses cost more here than fine hardwood furniture from France—at least, for as long as the music executives coveted that particular look.

  The front window of Bayat’s was surrounded by smooth river-bottom stone, and so was everything inside. A showroom showed off rocky stub walls and rock chimneys, stone fences, kitchens done up like caves. He wasn’t quite sure where the subliminal signals came from, but something told him the rocks were fake. A bored, chunky Middle Eastern woman dismissed him with disdain when he said he wasn’t buying and had him wait in a fancy anteroom. There was a wonderful big stone fireplace, and through an open door, he could see a whole crew of Latinos out back unloading cartons from a truck. A skinny foreman in a red vest and one of the Latino workers were holding up butane lighters against each other and flicking them for some reason, as if seeing whose flame was taller. Then the foreman started yelling at the worker, noticed the door was open, and kicked it shut.

  Jack Liffey tried not to doze off in the armchair. He’d had a bad night, waking in sweat in some unsettled state between dread and rage, unable to get back to sleep. He was sure the proximate cause was a blind date last weekend that a friend had set up for him, a real knockout of a redhead who had seemed okay until she started proselytizing him with a goofy therapeutic test that involved holding tiny bags of foodstuffs against his cheek and yanking on his arm like a slot machine, looking for the food that would make his arm muscles weaker. Subclinical allergies, she had explained, or energy mis-orbits, as if he were a proton missing one of its electrons.

  He had put up with it for a while and then he’d got a bit wiseass as she yanked his arm once again, something about his eyes spinning around like a slot machine to show three turnips, and she’d got mad and kicked him out of her apartment overlooking the marina. He didn’t really want to be like that, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. He wondered if he ought to start drinking again, just a nip or two to help him be a little more sociable to the next gorgeous fruitcake who came along and wanted him to do away with his extra vein poisons by barking like a dog or something.

  All in all, he kne
w he was not really going to revert to the demon rum. It had cost him his first marriage, and he’d been sober ever since. He’d stayed off drugs, too; part of a pact he had made with his ego to prove his strength of character. But for all the propitiating fires he’d lit to these particular abstemious gods, nothing much seemed to be working out for him except an extra helping of anxiety and this new little flutter in his chest.

  His second big relationship, with Marlena, had crashed and burned, and now he’d missed several child-support payments so he couldn’t even see his daughter. The detective business wasn’t really paying off—another bad choice—and his miserable condo was still worth less than he’d paid for it. At a certain point in life, you had to find a way to face the discovery that you weren’t a charmed soul after all, and things might just not work out for the best for you.

  It was no wonder his friends like Lon and Virginia were ratting him out to the psychiatric community. If only he could get over the bad nights, the sweats and sleepless stretches, he was sure he could take care of the rest by himself.

  The bored dark woman came back and beckoned. Following her out the door, he couldn’t help hearing the faint scritch-scritch in the quiet office as her nylons rubbed together at the thigh. He felt a chill, like hearing a fingernail on a blackboard. She pointed to a door down a hallway and left him to his own devices. Receptionists never liked him much, but he was inured to that. The Timex and the cheap shoes always gave him away as a low roller.

  Farshad Bayat rose from a desk with a welcoming smile. He was handsome, fortyish and had a receding hairline. They’re Aryans, same stock as Europeans, he remembered reading somewhere, and sure enough, from the planes of his face, this man could have been a German count or a French university professor. Jack Liffey wanted to like him, for no discernible reason.

  “Mr. Liffey. Mr. Dicky Auslander called me about you.”

  Jack Liffey smiled involuntarily. “I can’t get over ‘Dicky.’ I knew him in college as ‘Aaron.’ ”

  They shook hands. “Some men attract nicknames naturally,” Bayat said, “as if they were born with an extra helping of charisma. My roommate at UCLA was called Zorro. He was considered a swordsman—as you might guess.” His voice had only a hint of an accent, a kind of extra precision in the consonants.

  Jack Liffey was happy the man could joke about something like womanizing. It suggested the interview wouldn’t have to be conducted in the gloom of intense cultural sensitivity, tiptoeing across the eggshells of contrary beliefs.

  Bayat gestured and they both sat. The desk was unusual, a thick rosewood slab laid on a base made of the same stones as everything else around, including one wall of the office.

  “I guess you deal in rocks,” Jack Liffey observed.

  He smiled. “I guess I do.” The man picked up a stone with two hands and tossed it across the office. Jack Liffey prepared himself for a heavy catch but it was as light as balsa. As he’d guessed, LA ROX were in fact fake. He turned the thing over in his hands, about the shape of a flattened squash, with a hollow back.

  “There are other manufactured rocks, of course, but they tend to be very heavy or to look and feel like plastic. I invented a process for cross-linking polymers with a small amount of ground stone. The only thing I can’t manage is the cool feel of stone. There just isn’t enough substance to act as a heat sink.” The man seemed to be worried about something, then his smile reappeared, like cloud shadows scudding away to expose a sunny plain.

  Jack Liffey looked at the surface of the stone and it looked grainy, just like granite. “Looks pretty good.”

  “The wall in front of the store looked fake, though, didn’t it?” Bayat asked.

  “A bit.”

  The man wasn’t offended. “It took me a long time to work it out. In the first generation, there were only twenty distinct shapes. I finally decided that our subconscious minds are sensitive to that. We must have a very sophisticated facility for pattern recognition. When I increased the number of molds to thirty-six, it seemed to work much better, but science never stands still. What do you think of this ?”

  He tossed another half-stone across the room; this one was heavier and seemed to slosh in Jack Liffey’s hands. The flat back was sealed over.

  “It’s filled with water, plus a little air space so it won’t explode if it freezes. You put that on an exterior wall facing the sun and you’ve got a passive solar house, storing heat during the day and releasing it at night. These are very popular in Arizona and Colorado.”

  Jack Liffey leaned forward to deposit the stone on a corner of the big desk. “I didn’t really come here to talk about your rocks.”

  The man’s smile stayed, but the warmth drained out of it. “No, of course. You want to talk about Fariborz.”

  “And Becky.”

  At her name, he seemed to grow more thoughtful. But at that moment the woman opened the door and looked in. “Mr. Bayat, the factory called.” Then she talked for a while in what must have been Farsi, and the man’s face went even murkier.

  “According to NAFTA regulations, that should not be a problem. I’ll call them back.”

  She ducked out, and the man studied his desktop for a moment. Jack Liffey had the distinct impression something was not right here.

  “I will do everything I can to help you,” he said at last, so earnestly that he seemed to have just discovered some deep need to convince Jack Liffey of his desire to help. “Fariborz was living away from home, at Kennedy School, when he disappeared with the other three.” His face registered distaste. “The news called them the Kennedy Four, like some sixties gang of radicals.”

  “Were you here in the sixties?”

  “No, I came in the late seventies for graduate school, not long before the Ayatollah’s triumph. My wife is Jewish so we had little desire to go back. The Revolutionary Guard weren’t very benevolent to Jews—though it’s a shame; Islam has a long tradition of tolerance. Of course, the fanatics were far worse to the Baha’is. Jews and Christians are what’s called People of the Book, and they predated Islam after all. But Baha’i is only one hundred and fifty years old, and the militants don’t recognize any religion founded after Mohammed’s time. Most of the Baha’is who escaped live in Santa Monica and West L.A. now.” He smiled lightly. “You tell me a Persian’s religion, and I’ll tell you where he lives in Southern California. The ethnic Armenians, all Christians, went to Glendale. The Jews to Beverly Hills and West-wood. Moslems are in the South Bay and scattered around, though a lot of the Moslems here are basically secular. I don’t think the militants in Iran were entirely aware of what they were doing, but in retrospect you can see that one consequence of the Iranian revolution was purging the country of its secular middle class.”

  “Do you consider yourself a Moslem?”

  “I’m not very religious, but in some ways—” he shrugged—“the values and the culture run very deep. There’s a strong sense of family and proper behavior and respect. I drink alcohol only very rarely. This made it harder to argue with my son when he started to become a fanatic.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I had no trouble seeing quite clearly what bothered Fariborz about the West. Not just halter tops in the supermarket and sex on TV and drunkenness and cruelty to women. There’s a kind of separation of every individual from every other individual. You and I, Mr. Liffey, if we went to Iran now, I am sure we would both dislike a lot of things we would see; but there are other things I think we would both admire. I’ve been back. There is a deep concern for right behavior and politeness, for being a good host and a good neighbor. It takes a fairly sophisticated worldview to value other things highly enough to put up with the terrible loneliness and apartness in the West. I feel the loss every day, as an exile, but also as an individual. I’m no longer rooted in any place, the way I once was. No one here is rooted.”

  Jack Liffey was tempted to share something of his own sense of loss and isolation, but he had to stay alert to other thi
ngs. The man’s face kept saying something other than his words. Something was going on under the surface here and it was off-center, like a bent axle, joggling a cart and continually thrusting a kind of disquiet up into the ordinary.

  “The fierceness of teenagers leaves no room for gray areas,” Bayat added. “Everything has to be perfect right this minute, or it must be obliterated. Fariborz smashed his electric guitar against a tree and burned all his fiction, mostly mystery novels.”

  Jack Liffey had read a little about the Kennedy Four that morning in back numbers of the Times at the library. They had supposedly turned themselves into purist religious zealots, then stayed away from classes, then left school altogether. But the news articles had tapered off about three weeks after the boys disappeared. There hadn’t been a word on them in a month. “Do you have any guesses where they are?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I hired a detective after they’d been gone a week, but he got nowhere. They might even be in Iran by now, or in some Pakistani madrasa up along the Afghani border, or some Hezbollah camp, or just holed up in Mexico reciting the Koran to each other. I hope very much for the latter.”

  “Why do you say Mexico?”

  “Fariborz knows it well and speaks Spanish. I’ve owned a small maquiladora in Tijuana for many years. Where these are made.” He indicated the rocks.

  “Is there any way Becky’s disappearance could be linked to theirs?”

  His expression darkened again. He shook his head slightly, but it wasn’t really a denial, just a gesture of helplessness. “It’s a preposterous coincidence if it isn’t connected, don’t you agree? But she was not a Moslem and not a zealot in any sense, Mr. Liffey. In fact, she’d been growing apart from Fariborz because of his growing religious fervor. She came to me to complain about it.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Just asked if I could talk to him. He wouldn’t see her any longer without a chaperone present. He insisted she wear long sleeves and dresses that went to the ground. She said she loved him very much. She seemed a fine girl, though I hardly know her. I hope very much that you find her.”