The Chinese Beverly Hills Read online

  Go away, fire, Routt begged. I’m not the kingfish. I’ll make a bargain with you, Whoever. Don’t tell on me and you can scorch me just a little.

  “Pisky, how you doing! Pisky! Talk to me!” Routt bellowed.

  The world was a freight train passing right over him. A tornado of wind whipped and punched at his shelter. Pinpoints of light glowed through the foil, a few burning hairlines along the folds. The heat was becoming unbearable, and he fought the urge to burst out of the shelter and run.

  “Piss-s-s-sky! Talk! I ain’t so good!”

  No reply. Shit shit, Routt thought. This wasn’t supposed to happen. “Pisky!”

  Training said to keep talking. Fight the sense of being alone.

  *

  It was ostensibly a hunting lodge in northwest Indiana, at the center of thousands of wild prairie acres, but the Reik brothers used it mainly as a remote Camp David for conferences with opinion-makers, now and future. Later in the week it would be a private meeting with several Californians and one of their think tanks, ACP, the American Council for Prosperity.

  For now, the brothers were alone with their mint juleps on the open verandah that overlooked the small lake and rangeland that the elder brother, Gustav, called the Kill Zone. The inner room behind them was lined with weaponry to play with.

  “Andor,” Gustav mused. “What was the happiest moment of your life? Your adult life, I mean. Forgetting the days of Dad.”

  Their father, Maximillian Reik, had been an abusive tyrant of the first water and had beaten their mother mercilessly as a kind of punctuation mark whenever he’d bested someone in a business deal. A first-generation immigrant from Central Europe, he had made the Reik fortune by marketing oilrig drill bits in West Texas in the 1930s. The sons had expanded the fortune a thousandfold in the 1980s, first with refineries and pipelines and then by latching the Reik empire to the new technology of hydraulic fracturing—fracking—shooting superheated toxic chemicals at high pressure into the earth to break up layers of shale and quadruple the output of an oil or gas field. Halliburton and Schlumberger were bigger names than Reik Industries, but not by much.

  “Oh, yes, let’s forget Daddy. The happiest moment of my life, huh? Maybe I haven’t had it yet. Nobody’s assassinated that nigger president.”

  Gustav sighed. The middle-aged brothers agreed substantially on all things political, but Andor just couldn’t stay civil about it. Gustav was on opera and ballet boards in Manhattan and knew how to moderate his speech. “Has the Californian arrived?”

  “You mean the giant garden gnome or the Jewboy?”

  “He’s not a Jewboy, Ad. Seth is a good Protestant name. He’s keeping his little teakettle brewing for us.”

  “Fuck California,” Andor said. “It’s just homos and Volvos.”

  *

  Jack Liffey flipped through the channels, but the only stations not on some version of the Sheepshead Fire were Judge Somebody and an infomercial. He flipped past a poker game featuring several solemn-looking teens in hoodies. Did people actually watch poker on TV? What was next? Watching haircuts?

  He flipped back to the fire—at least disasters were one of the few events ever broadcast live, like barricaded suspects and football games. The big San Gabriel Mountains fire seemed to be turning back on all the newsmen and firefighters and setting off a general panic of panel trucks and fire engines reversing down fire roads and men in yellow coats dashing madly down canyons.

  Jack Liffey could certainly empathize, after his own experiences: a brushfire he’d been caught in, a monster mudslide, being thrown down an L.A. storm drain in a flash flood. Panic was just panic. Nobody was immune.

  He turned the TV off just as the phone rang.

  *

  Maeve Liffey sat at the desk with her laptop, rarely used now because ordinary coursework had fallen away in the face of her tropical fever for painting.

  She had a simple choice: phone her dad about Tien Joubert, or not. Back when he and Tien had first become acquainted, her father’d had a problem keeping his pants zipped, with some pretty bad consequences. But since then she’d had her own unruly sex life—a consuming passion for a Latino gangbanger that had left her pregnant, then a much-pondered abortion, and then an overwhelming infatuation with a rich and intellectual girlfriend. Now she felt she was pulling inward to let her psyche recover. She was powerfully drawn to Bunny, but could put that off.

  It was Gloria she worried about, her dad’s live-in, who was going through her own ordeal that neither of those hermetically isolated adults would talk about. Maeve had guessed that sex was off the table for Gloria right now, and her dad might just be vulnerable. Tien Joubert insisted she had all the suitors she needed. What to do?

  After a moment, she picked up her iPhone and tapped an icon.

  The icon was a picture of her dad.

  *

  Jack Liffey floundered and dug and then found the ringing handset at last under some tossed newspapers. He pushed the green button. Green is go, red is stop—it was about all he knew of even old-generation wireless phones. The speed dial was beyond him, as was everything to do with computers. “Bueno,” he said. It made sense where he lived, but it often got him in trouble, having to deal with a flood of idiomatic Spanish coming back at him.

  “Give it up, Dad. You can barely handle ‘Grass-ee-ass’.”

  “The creaky old brain still has to try. To what do I owe the honor of a phone call from a young adult who’s already detached herself from the fathership and is making her solo descent to the lunar surface?”

  “Cut it out, Dad. I’ll always be joined to you by a huge cable. I love my befuddled daddy to distraction.”

  He closed his eyes, almost on the edge of weeping at the abrupt affection. Gloria’s maddened state has got to me, he thought. “Thanks, hon. I’ll always be here for you.”

  “I know that. Tell me, who rescued you from the riots in South L.A.? I’ll save you the trouble. I did, age fourteen. Do you need saving right now?”

  “I’m fine. How are you doing at that huge campus? A place like UCLA can be pretty intimidating.”

  “I think I’m finding myself.”

  “You mean painting. That’s great, I mean it. But you’re still putting time into coursework, too, I hope. You have a tendency to focus down like a laser.”

  He heard the pause.

  “I’m fine. Let’s face it, Dad, there’s always a little freshman slump, trying to adjust.”

  “It was sophomore slump in my day. Don’t think I can’t come over there and tan your ass if you’re slacking off.”

  She laughed. “Dad, you never tanned my ass in my life. And these days it would be considered—well, never mind. My ass better remain my own business. Listen, tell me about Gloria. Is she up and around?”

  “She’s ambulatory. With a cane, but stairs are still beyond her.”

  As if overhearing the phone conversation, Gloria started bellowing in frustration, and he heard the cane pound hard across the floor and then thwack into the wall.

  “Is she talking about it yet?” Maeve asked innocently.

  Gloria went on cursing and drumming her feet for a while, but she didn’t call his name. That had become the final, urgent signal.

  “No,” he said.

  “You don’t know what it’s all about yet?”

  “You’ll have to ask her, hon. I know it was pretty bad.”

  “This is hard on you, too, isn’t it?”

  “She’s in a bad way. When you know people are really in need, it’s a lot easier to help them.”

  “Not everybody feels that way, Mr. Buddha. My generation doesn’t use the word ‘duty’ very much.”

  Out in front of the house, a motorcycle ratcheted noisily past and someone shouted.

  “Listen, Dad, I actually called you about something.”

  A chill went down his spine. Another pregnancy? She’d stopped a random bullet? She was dropping out of college? “Go on.”

  “Do you
remember that Vietnamese woman named Tien Joubert?”

  Is a bear Catholic, he thought, does the pope shit in the woods? The woman had turned his life upside down a decade back. “Yeah, hon, I do. I’m not into dementia yet. What’s this about?” He could feel the reserve enter his voice, as if Maeve were about to suggest a special offer on term life insurance.

  She told him about Tien’s call and gave him the number. “Please tell Gloria I love her very much.”

  Funny the subject should boomerang right back to Gloria, but there it was. He knew exactly what Maeve meant: keep your pants zipped this time.

  TWO

  The Eisenhower Daydream

  He counted to seven slowly between inhales to stave off hyperventilation. The keening outside was unbearable. Fire glinted through pinholes, wind slapped the silica and foil shelter. He was a religious man, Missouri Synod Lutheran, and he prayed for his partner and himself. He had to see his wife and children again.

  “Our Father who art in Heaven…”

  He forced his mind to use the four-fold garland, recite line by line and meditate on the words. Learn, thank, confess, accept.

  “Why have You forsaken me?”

  Something was starting to go wrong. Heat seared his back and buttocks. His consciousness had entered another place entirely by the time the bellowing outside began to relent.

  He lay motionless in a new kind of space—probably between Earth and Heaven—in great pain for a long time. Every stir caused more pain. He heard a helicopter, maybe, and footsteps, voices.

  “Over here, Bud.” A man was suddenly very close. “You okay in there?”

  He grunted.

  “He’s alive. Drop the litter.”

  He imagined he looked pretty bad if the guy wasn’t even sure he was alive. The shelter was tugged, maybe cut, but he kept his eyes clamped shut in the new light. Not fire—daylight.

  “Don’t move, man. You’re gonna make it. Guarantee.” There was a pause, a light plucking at the back of his coat. “You’ve got first and second on your back. No third I can see.”

  Firefighters didn’t lie to one another about that. He felt two fingers pressed to his neck for a pulse as a sweet voice began to sing to him in the distance. Angels?

  “Pulse one-forty. You know I can’t give you water yet. You hurting? Scale.”

  The state of shock was a step away, they both knew it, and shock could kill all by itself. “Ten. No morphine,” he managed.

  “I know.”

  It would mask signs the EMTs needed to see. The angelic song was swelling, approaching, and he could almost make out a hymn. “The other jumper?” Piscatelli managed.

  “He didn’t make it.”

  Blunt and direct was the code. “Quick?”

  “Real quick.”

  “Why?” He wasn’t sure what he was asking.

  “Looks like he had something inside with him, can’t tell now. It fired up. What’s his name?”

  “Jerry Routt.”

  Routt had known better than to carry anything flammable inside a fire shelter. He moved his lips, the words inward and inaudible, meant only for his dead comrade: “No more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away…”

  *

  “Here’s Chop-Chop ‘Bama.”

  Marly Tom grinned as he showed them his new poster on a sheet of foamcore, his characteristic wavery rendering of Obama’s face, but with a wispy, dangly moustache and buckteeth, and the iconic coolie tunic with its filigreed buttonholes. The tip of an AK-47 could be seen poking up in his hand. Elsewhere in the country, posters might link Obama to socialism or Hitler or some local civil rights guy, but in Monterey Park, all right-thinking people knew that the Chinese were the real enemy.

  At the bottom of the poster was the line: Berieve. Or I keer you!

  His pals broke out in laughter and slapped his back. Once upon a time, the abandoned barber shop on a side street just off Garvey had been a busy headquarters for their parents’ group, SAMP—Save American Monterey Park—but that war had been lost twenty years ago in the flood of Chinese immigration.

  “Great work as usual!” Zook said.

  “Maybe he is a black Chink,” Captain Beef said. “Wasn’t he born in India or something?”

  The row of shops was owned by their patron, Seth Brinkerhoff, who gave them use of the blacked-out barbershop as their art studio, clubhouse, game room, and mancave. It was just about the last storefront in Monterey Park that had not become a Hong Kong restaurant or a Taiwanese bank.

  The old working-class town they’d grown up in forty miles east of downtown Los Angeles was long gone, and Zook had felt betrayed and helpless for years. Almost everyone else from their high school had left, including the members of what had once been their motorcycle club, Satan’s Commandos.

  It was all due to the liberals and fags on the Westside, of course. The BMW-driving, wine-drinking, Chinese-buttkissers. They didn’t have to live here, surrounded by gibberish mahjongg signs and rude shopkeepers who yelled you away if you didn’t look Chink-a-dink.

  Tony “Beef” Buffano turned suddenly on Zook, all three hundred pounds of him. “We can’t let that nigger win, Z.”

  “Of course not. Calm down, Beef.”

  Marly Tom and Ed “Zook” Zukovich were the resident brains, and they didn’t worry much about Beef’s goofier outbursts. He had a good heart when you calmed him down, and you always loved the guys you went through football with.

  “How about a midnight run to put up some of the posters?” Zook suggested.

  “Goody!” Beef said.

  Marly Tom smiled. “I’ll print some up.”

  They whistled and belched and underarm-farted.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Zook looked around at the pathos of their prized Commando clubhouse, two of the old barber chairs ripped out at the roots and replaced by a rickety footie table and a few mismatched chairs. All they had to do for Seth in return for this largesse was run a few business errands and keep the Chinks and liberals nervous.

  Zook’s daydream was bigger. He wanted, some way, to reanimate the club and maybe even drive out the Chinese for good. As a member of the newly awakened intellectual avant-garde, he knew he appreciated the dangers of worldwide conspiracies like George Soros and the Trilateral Commission long before they were obvious to the unaroused public. The quality needed in every thinking man these days was the will to look at things unflinchingly.

  *

  “You’re not really named Hardy Boys?” Gustav asked with a frown.

  The enormous man had smacked open the French doors to the verandah like a force of nature. He was wearing a khaki bush shirt, khaki shorts, and knee socks, like some outsized South African leprechaun. He bellowed with laughter. “Hardi Boaz. Hardi is short for Gerhardus. With all respect, one white man to another.” The man-mountain held out a frypan-sized hand and, uncharacteristically, Gustav took it. Andor followed him out into the Indiana night humidity, where Gustav had been reading.

  Gustav was annoyed. He had retreated here to reread Ayn Rand, and was intent on finding out why it was crucial to decouple the rise in economic growth from median income. But that would have to wait now.

  “The big South African is honored, sir. On behalf of the Border Guardians of California, thank you for your support.”

  Gustav knew that the man had been a mercenary of sorts in South Africa, and that after Mandela, he had moved on to America, unable to abide black rule. He ran a vigilante group east of San Diego who did what the Border Patrol couldn’t—loosely, shoot first if you had any excuse. Nobody wanted innocent people hurt, of course, but if they turned out to be simple laborers crossing to el Norte, you could plant drugs on them or just bury them.

  “Pleased t’meetchew, man. And the good man behind me. I think I am in the deep shit for charging in here like a gutshot rhino, eh. Sorry, a million pardons, hey. Yes, I will, thank you.” He snatched a drink off the table where Ando
r had chosen to sit.

  Gustav noticed the man had an odd way of not looking anyone in the eye. He was amused to see Andor’s brows darken as his drink poured down this big clown’s gullet. Gustav lifted his own julep.

  “Can we do this gentleman the favor of the big gun?” Andor suggested.

  “Why not?”

  Andor went back into the house and Hardi Boaz sat down unbidden in the man’s chair and stared out into the forest across the narrow lake. “You got Gooks out there?”

  “You use that word?”

  “Ja, sure. I work with guys from ’Nam and Iraq.”

  The usage had actually started in the Korean War, Gustav thought. He had a querulous urge to contradict this man, but the urge to enjoy his dynamism was stronger.

  “Magtig, me, and my troopies run the border from San Diego to El Centro, I can tell you. Lock up the virgins and kiss my arse. We got the will, we got a nice hot desert on our side, we even got our own drones. You’re not taking notes.”

  Gustav smiled, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “I know what you’ve got. I paid for it. Have you ever had the pleasure of firing a Tyrannosaur?”

  Andor was waiting behind them, holding a chunky-looking bolt-action rifle.

  “No, sir. I knew a big-game chap who owned one.” Boaz took the A-Square Hannibal .577 rifle and inspected it. “Jaysus. The only bore I seen bigger was on a battleship.”

  “Sometimes you have to stop a rhino, not just annoy it. We got some big twenty-point bucks out here, but let’s not wait around. There’s a two-hundred-pound solid salt block just left of the cottonwood. See if you can make a mess of it.”

  The big man opened the rifle bolt and inspected the cartridge the size of a small flashlight, then ran it home again. “May our enemies die soon, I say, and bloody hell.”

  Gustav noticed his brother watching the man with great anticipation, as if expecting him to grow a second nose. They had never seen anyone fire the Hannibal without being knocked flat or thrown back through the French doors. It had the heaviest recoil of any shoulder-fired weapon ever made, a 220-pound punch.