The Orange Curtain Read online

  The buzzing swelled again and Mike Lewis glanced back as the tiny racecar bore down on them. “This is folly, son,” he said darkly, keeping his eye square on the car.

  “Dig it,” the kid called, and the car swung away and leapt off the curb to spin around in the street a couple of times.

  “It couldn’t have done us much harm,” Jack Liffey said.

  “Unless it was full of C-4,” he said. “I don’t trust children. Where was I? Oh, yeah, the post-suburbs. They’re nowhere near as bedroomy and whitebread and family-heavy as first-generation suburbs, and they’ve got centers. It’s just, they’ve got more than one. The traditional city tries to stuff all its cultural and financial wonders in one place, but these things have several cores spread around, like the lumps in plum pudding. In fact, I’m thinking of calling them plum-pudding cities.

  “Take the big Orange. It’s got the old government center in Santa Ana, a new cultural center with a theater bang on the border between Santa Ana and Costa Mesa, education centers in Irvine and Fullerton, a sports center in Anaheim with the Angels park and the Pond, all the amusement parks up in Buena Park and North Anaheim, a financial center in Newport along the freeway and, believe it or not, one of the world’s biggest light industrial complexes squashed in between Irvine, Santa Ana and Newport. And this is just off the top of my head. I’m no expert.”

  “False modesty becomes you.”

  A faint cheer rose on the air, ghostly and ill-defined, apparently from TVs in several houses on the street. Somebody at the football game must have scored.

  “Look, all of this has been debated for years. Where you been?”

  “While you were writing The Underground History of L.A. I was busy pedaling the corporate hamster wheel, writing things like The Deposition of Rare Earths on Silicon Substrates.”

  “Sounds super. Did you actually know that stuff?”

  “I was always a bit over my head. The trick was leaving your prose just exactly murky enough. If you made it too lucid, the engineers assumed you couldn’t possibly know what you were talking about.”

  “Look at this.” Mike Lewis pointed to a small stucco house. In perfect silhouette within, there was a man sitting in a lounger trying to watch TV and a woman standing between him and the TV waving a frying pan. “It’s a wildlife short. The American Working Class.”

  Jack Liffey laughed. “Too emblematic for belief.”

  “Yeah. Like an Irish drunk or a German bully, it puts the fork right in the oyster for you.”

  “Can you tell me anything else?”

  They resumed their measured stroll. “I can tell you that the other characteristics of the plum-pudding city revolve around a lot of high-tech jobs, mostly in information and medical technology, a really galloping consumer culture with malls every few miles and a me-me-me display of goods like exotic old cars or boats. There’s also a rejection of any public life at all—you can see that in the way the design of the houses has shifted, with the big porches contracting into little stub slabs and the living rooms all facing the back yard now. Oh, and strangely enough there’s a bit of cosmopolitanism diffusing through it all. They’ve got a lot of immigrants scattered around and all the new restaurants, Indian, Thai, Greek, Afghan. But that’s all abstract stuff, typical of my long-range view and my limited info on the ground. What you really want to know, I can’t tell you. You want to know whose ox is getting gored and who’s really running the show.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Talk to my pal Marty Spence who teaches at Irvine. He knows Orange County like I know L.A. And there’s one other guy you ought to meet. You know, the most amazing people turn up in L.A. Did you know Wyatt Earp lived for years just off Slauson?”

  “No, Mike, I didn’t know that. You’re not going to tell me to go see Wyatt Earp, are you?”

  “He died in ’29. No, but it’s almost as amazing. Up one of the canyons in Orange County is the most famous detective L.A.’s ever had. He’s 93 and long retired but he always keeps a finger on the pulse. Philip Marlowe.”

  “Thanks, Mike. That’s exactly what I need, a mythical old fart.”

  Back at the apartment, Maeve was lying flat on her stomach holding two thin stringers of balsa wood against a model as Anna applied the glue. The TV game whickered and hissed in the background, then it roared suddenly, a strange roar that didn’t sound anything like the reactions of a sports crowd.

  “Who’s winning?” Mike Lewis asked.

  “Frank Lloyd Wright,” Anna said.

  No matter what he did she wouldn’t tell him anything more about his father. The clamor in the corner had stopped and when he finally looked up, the picture on the television was gone, to leave only an even blue and a band of type scrolling across the bottom.

  PICTURE INTERRUPTED AT POLICE REQUEST. USC QUARTERBACK BUDDY HARRIS HAS APPARENTLY BEEN SHOT FROM THE STANDS. PLEASE STAND BY.

  “How come you had this on anyway?”

  “Don’t you know? USC has more Romany kids enrolled than any other college in the country. It’s our school.”

  FIVE

  The Welcome Bridge

  He held back the big rectangular metal block called the receiver and poked out the locking lever to release the whole assembly. One twist and the 9mm barrel was out. He explained it all as he did it, so his Martian friend would understand. He sniffed at the barrel and then set it on a newspaper on his red desk, wrinkling up his nose. You could sure tell it had been used. It was only a crummy Spanish-made Star auto that he had bought years ago at the unofficial swap meet in the alley behind the Santa Ana gun store, after working up his courage on a dozen dry runs. It had been very cheap because the alley was mostly a Latino marketplace and Latinos really only wanted revolvers, maybe from seeing all the posters of Pancho Villa.

  Billy Gudger screwed the handle onto the jointed cleaning rod and then threaded a little square of cotton into the hole at the top end. He told the Martian that it would take five or six of the patches doused with Hoppe’s Powder Solvent before one came out clean. If you didn’t clean up after you had to use a pistol, the barrel would start to corrode from the residue of the gunpowder gases. His friend always appreciated lucid explanations.

  For years Billy Gudger had been offering his Martian friend explanations of everything, from how the muscles of the body worked as you walked along to the store, to the characteristics of the post-modern in architecture, to how an internal combustion engine sucked in a fuel-air mixture when the intake valve opened. His friend was attentive, polite and unfailingly grateful for the explanations. Of course, Billy Gudger knew perfectly well there wasn’t actually a Martian visitor floating alongside him to keep him company—he wasn’t crazy—but it was a comfort nonetheless.

  I wish people would stop making me use the pistol, he told his friend. It makes things complicated.

  Or were you enamour’d on his copper rings,

  His saffron jewell, with the toad-stone in’t.

  —Ben Johnson, Volpone (1605)

  He had left his mother snoring away on the sofa and covered her with the threadbare quilt that she said her mother had made for her. He figured it was probably just another of her bogus memories. It was hard to tell when she was spinning out one of her fibs. Denny at work had said, “Women, man—when the lips are moving, that’s how you can tell they’re lying,” and he had pretended to like the joke more than he did. Lies were never a good thing, he knew that, even when they were necessary. They just never went away once you sent them out into the world. Lies were like wild animals running in all directions. You couldn’t tell who they’d stir up.

  One day soon he’d go check on the tiger-man at Phillipe’s and see about that.

  On his way east on Bolsa, an Asian woman driving a brand new Toyota did a left turn right across his path from the far right lane at about ten miles an hour, and he had to cram on the brakes. Jack Liffey tried very hard not to think in stereotypes for the next minute or two. He tried, instead, to imagine the fears t
hat beset a woman who had grown up in a rural Asian village and had never directed a big chunk of steel machinery along an urban street, learning one day to her horror that it was the only way to get to the store to buy what she needed for dinner. The rest of the cars seemed to be driving at normal speeds and making the accustomed maneuvers.

  That morning he’d got Maeve home in one piece, only a few minutes late, and he had even had a few pleasant words with Kathy at the door. It reminded him a little of what it had been like caring for her at one time, and then the question of money came up and he was reminded of the rest, the whole grand opera.

  The little stucco building fronting Bolsa had two tenants, at least judging by the parts of the sign he could read. Frank Fen, General Contracting and Engineering, Fast Track Work a Specialty was one, and the other was Sleepy Lotus Import-Export, Tien J. Nguyen, prop. Both parts of the sign were duplicated, or maybe amplified, by Vietnamese phrases that didn’t do him any good at all.

  There was one big room inside the door with a number of rooms off it, but it was not immediately apparent which related to general contracting and which were import-export. Five desks sat out in the middle and a dozen hard chairs along the walls were inhabited by an exactly equivalent number of patient Vietnamese women of various ages. A couple of the women wore loose cotton trousers, but most wore Western skirts. Only one desk had an occupant, a young Vietnamese woman so over made-up she looked like she was headed for a Kabuki play.

  “Hello,” Jack Liffey said. “I’m here to see Mrs. Nguyen. I was sent by Mr. Minh Trac, about his daughter.”

  The young woman finished putting nail polish on a pinkie and looked up but made no indication she had heard him. It was a neutral reaction he remembered well from the service—as if by simply waiting out anything unusual you could make it go away. It was a simple enough method that in his experience had come very near paralyzing an entire alien administration.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d let her know I’m here. About Phuong Minh.” He wondered if he should have left the name in its accustomed Vietnamese order, but she budged at last and pressed a button on a fantastically complicated digital console and spoke into it in Vietnamese. At least, he thought, this receptionist would only see another thong miao—the expression meant gook in Vietnamese—whose existence had no import at all, and she wouldn’t be judging him by the cost of his shoes and his wristwatch, which in his experience was a whole course in most American receptionist schools.

  A little boy squealed and jumped off his mother’s lap, then thought better of it and climbed back on. The women seemed pure emblems of patience, neither reading anything to divert themselves nor talking among themselves. They were trying hard not to stare at him, but he had the feeling that the moment his gaze drifted away, two dozen eyes would be fixed on him in flinty attention.

  “You wait,” was the whole message, translated back selectively from a long run of tonal Vietnamese that had come out of her machine.

  He nodded and for want of anything better to do, he went to the side wall of the room where a number of architectural blueprints were on display under a signboard that said The Harmony Gate. They were apparently alternate designs for an Asian-themed pedestrian bridge between the two big malls that faced one another across Bolsa, somebody’s idea of a welcoming arch for the whole shopping district, and each design said “Welcome to Little Saigon” on it. The biggest drawing was in perspective and showed an arched bridge that ran between a pagoda at one side of the street and a similar looking clocktower on the other. Spaced away from this on the wall were variant designs with much sketchier detail. Contemporary Style looked like an elevated international style factory with some Asian details larded over it, a few Chinese characters and medallions. After this there was Chinese Style, with curlicued pagoda tile roofs at the middle and both ends. His eye drifted on to Thai Style, with a much more elaborate pagoda in the middle and dragon designs on the walkway.

  A door slammed somewhere, but no one seemed to move. One child started to insist on a word, growing more and more emphatic.

  Vietnamese Classical Style had a flattened tiled roof and the pagoda and clocktower at the ends were reduced to embellishments, and finally French Colonial Style, the roof without curlicues at all and the clock tower moved to the middle of the bridge. That was one he recognized right away—on R&R trips to various French colonial outposts he and his friends had dubbed the style Babar the Elephant Colonial. His eye went back and forth, and despite the obvious variations, he had trouble seeing all that much difference—like minor mutations in the shape of a sweet pea. Even the Contemporary had so much Asian detailing that its pedigree was unmistakable. A news article was taped up beside the designs:

  Frank Fen’s Harmony Bridge

  Rejected as Too Chinese

  Rejected by whom, he wondered.

  “You come,” he heard, and when he looked up, a strikingly beautiful Asian woman stood in an open doorway looking straight at him with spooky dark brown eyes. Ages were always tough to guess across cultures. She was probably in fact about his own age, but she was someone who would always be described as looking half her age. She wore a navy blue business suit with a ruffled white shirt billowing out of it, and her offered hand was frank and mannish in his.

  “I’m Jack Liffey,” he said.

  “Come in. I am Tien Joubert.” She shut the door, a little harder than necessary.

  “I hope I’m not jumping the queue.”

  She shrugged. “They’re Vietnamese. They like to wait. You need to get better shoe, Jack Liffey. I could get you Italian shoe at half. Good soft leather, like butter, and very thin sole.”

  He suppressed a laugh; he hadn’t come there to bring her up to speed on his theories about receptionist school. He twisted up his wrist to show the Timex. “This is junk too. I leave my Rolex home in the Bruno Maglies. I bet the Vietnamese people out there don’t like to wait anymore than I do.”

  “Well, they got no choice. Their paperwork coming across town by slow boat.” She showed no inclination to smile as she motioned him into a chair and sat herself at an elaborate antique desk. Her movements were very graceful and he thought once again how striking she was, like some idealized mannequin of Asian beauty.

  He explained that Minh’s daughter seemed to be missing and that he’d been hired to try to find her.

  She nodded. “Real good kid, Phuong, smart girl. Phuong can go far in business if she get over fear of mistake. Mistake is the start of all opportunity for people with lots of luck, and Phuong got good luck, better than me even, and I got great luck. I didn’t leave Saigon until May of 1975, and I have to leave all my property, and one husband die in Saigon there in final days and another husband no damn good in Paris, but I doing very fine now, thank you very much.”

  The whole life story in one punch, he thought. “I heard Phuong worked for you part time.”

  She stabbed at a device on her desk and spoke into it, then looked up at him. “You like coffee or tea, Monsieur Liffey?”

  “If I’m Monsieur Liffey, it must be coffee.”

  Still no smile. She completed her order and then went on as if nothing had intervened. “I doing so good I don’t need no husband number three at all, but maybe I take one to make mummy happy. Maybe I take big hairy American like you this time.”

  She didn’t smile, didn’t wink. He had no idea what was going on. He studied his palms and then held them up to show them to her, as he had his third-rate watch. “There’s no hair on my palms.”

  Finally her expression cracked and she smiled just a little. “I like hair. I like everything American. I like your American smell, too, though mummy says it’s like spoil butter. If I start over, I go to a very good doctor and get nose job, I get round eyes, I get big falling tits, the whole American thing. To me look delicate means defeat and weakness. I want to be big and powerful.”

  “You seem to be doing okay as is,” he offered.

  “You married?”

 
“I’m not much of a catch, and I dress badly, too.”

  “That for sure. I can get you good suit, Italian, very good wool blend, nice cut. When we through, I take you to Tri’s Hong Kong Tailor in the Plaza. He a friend of mine and he’ll dress you up good.”

  He smiled. “First, could we talk about Phuong?”

  The coffee came in, a silver salver with a double deck French porcelain drip pot and delicate porcelain cups carried by the Kabuki actress. She set it down and Tien Joubert shooed her away. She poured the coffee and handed him one, hardly more than espresso size. He sipped and it was strong and good.

  “My English bad, I know. It don’t mean I’m stupid, Jack Liffey. I been to the Sorbonne two years and I’m pretty fluent in six languages. I been to French Institute of Commercial Studies, and I run big import house in Rouen for five years. I got property and stuff worth more than five million bucks. I only been in this country since three years and I’m still with one foot in Europe and foot two in Asia.” She slapped herself in the stomach. “I got the body of young girl and I’m from a good family, all got education.”

  He felt like asking to check her teeth, but decided he wasn’t really in a buying position. “How did you end up in France?” he asked to be polite.

  “My father and husband were generals and they fix it. They had a saying in the Army in ’75—sergeants to America, officers to France. But it was more complicate than that. It was not only a matter of rank but of…we say in French noblesse.”

  “Maybe tone,” he suggested.

  “After all, Ky was a general and he came here, the horrible little man, and he ran a damn mini-market and didn’t even pay off his loans and went bust. He manage a shrimp plant in Texas now, not even own it. Shrimp. General Thieu went to Paris.”

  “With a lot of the gold from the treasury, I hear.”