The Orange Curtain Read online

  She shrugged.

  “What did Phuong do for you?”

  “I teach her about business, but she not really interest in things I know, all how deal really works. She want to know about market research and demographic, whatever that is. She say she like big business stuff, not little.” Tien Joubert said it all with distaste, as if holding a rodent out by the fingertips.

  “All real business is little stuff, she don’t learn that yet. So I get her what she want, I take her to Orange County Industrial League, and she get to do research on real big stuff. She love it, like cat in clover.”

  He didn’t think cat was quite the right animal but he let it go. Curiously he found himself liking her artlessness and candor. It was like being in one of those experimental plays of the ’30s with the actors speaking their Freudian subtexts aloud.

  “She still good kid, I like her. Big heart. Like American.”

  “Do you have any idea why she might have taken off for a while? Or where she’d go?”

  “No, but she big girl. Maybe you talk to her boyfriend Tommy Xuan.”

  It was pronounced Swan, or thereabouts, and it was the first he’d heard of a boyfriend.

  “Or you talk to Frankie Fen. I get her job with him, too, on his big cuckoo bridge idea.”

  “I saw the designs out in front.”

  She poured herself some more coffee and he held out his cup. It was the first time he’d asked for seconds in a long time. He’d have to find out her brand of beans and tell the ad people.

  “The newspaper said people found the design too Chinese,” he suggested.

  She snorted. “I tell him right in beginning it not going to go flying. Not ’cause the design too Chinese, ’cause Frankie Fen too Chinese. He build all two of these malls here and he call himself the Godfather of Little Saigon. He got one big head.”

  “Isn’t he from Viet Nam?”

  “I got bulldog from England, too, but it not Englishman. Frankie Fen could draw that bridge like ding-a-ling French castle at Disneyland and it still too Chinese because Frankie Fen draw it. Vietnamese don’t like Chinese deep down, that just the way it is.”

  “You think he’s in today?”

  “No, he working on apartment building in Fullerton. I get you address. You go see Tommy Xuan and then you go see Frankie Fen and then you come back and we talk about me some more. I’m pretty interesting.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “I’m pretty interesting,” she said, absolutely without irony. It would be fun to introduce her to a Marx Brothers film, he thought, and see what happened.

  He found his car in the mall lot, between a new Honda and a new Toyota. His beat-up Concord was probably the oldest and ugliest car in the whole lot. It had one other distinction over the others, it had a note tucked under the windshield wiper, facing in to the driver’s seat.

  GO WAY BIG CUNT, OR ELS, it said.

  “Must be for someone else,” he said aloud, but he folded it and put it in his pocket.

  It was just about the ugliest animal he had ever seen and it was growling at him and kicking stiff-legged in the dirt like an angry bull. The dog was the size of goat but the skin was the size of a pony, and there was nowhere for the extra flesh to go except to bunch up.

  “Must have got a whiff of my dog,” Jack Liffey said. “He’s half coyote.”

  “Attila doesn’t have to have a reason. The shar-pei is notoriously protective. He started out with my wife and he wouldn’t even let me get close for months. Heel!”

  The leash went slack and the dog finally decided to lead up the trail into the yellow hillside.

  He smelled sagebrush and something else, sweet and clean, on the breezy air. There was a shrill scream from below and a Marine F/A-18 swooped up off the runway and into a little show-off turn and then climbed away. He braced for the sound of the second one. They always traveled in pairs. It came, and the dog didn’t like it much either.

  “The dog’s got short-man’s syndrome,” Marty Spence said when they could talk again. “Challenges anything that moves. I think it’s overbreeding. They only brought seven of them over from China and that’s a pretty small gene pool.”

  Marty Spence certainly didn’t have short-man syndrome. He was graying a bit, but he was tall and lithe, like somebody who played tennis three times a day. Jack Liffey had called him from a pay phone, using Mike Lewis’s name. They’d agreed to meet on a dirt pad off a country road behind the Marine Air Station, the unofficial trailhead where he walked his dog on his afternoon off from teaching.

  “Be careful if you pet it. Their skin isn’t like other dogs and a lot of people are allergic. It’s oily and the hair is brittle, like horsehair.”

  “Why do people have them?”

  “Why did we wear platform shoes in the ’70s? You’ll have to ask my wife.”

  “I didn’t,” Jack Liffey said. “But I did have a chartreuse Nehru shirt.”

  “My point exactly. So you’re interested in the Industrial League?”

  “Uh-huh. Sounds like some socialist party back at the turn-of-the-century.”

  “Odd name, isn’t it? Heel!” The dog had scampered hard off the path toward a big sumac that was crackling, and then the animal started making a peeved sound from the back of its throat. “Probably a rabbit. You’re going to need a little background first.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Before the war this county was a feudal kingdom, with a few villages like Anaheim and San Juan Capistrano scattered between the big ranches of the landed gentry. The Irvines, the O’Neals, the Segerstroms, a few others. The ranchos all started as Spanish land grants but Anglos moved in, married the older daughters and the rest is history. With the post-war boom, the bean fields and orange groves turned into tract homes, and power slowly shifted to real estate and chambers of commerce. Nobody ever gives up power without a fight and in the 1950s we had the last hurrah of the landed gentry. The fights were over land-use, of course, and slow-growth measures. But growth won, as it generally will.”

  One of the jets shrieked past and all his hair stood on end. He’d never seen enough of the war so it constituted a sense memory out of the past, but he still didn’t like it. Sweat broke out on his forehead though the temperature couldn’t have been much over sixty.

  “Man, I hate that.” He was frozen in his tracks, and when he looked up Marty Spence was watching him. The second jet followed, just as loud with full afterburner flaring. He could understand wanting to shoot them down. In fact, he wouldn’t have trusted himself with a shoulder-launch SAM right then.

  “Viet Nam, huh?”

  “Just a little. I only got caught in a few days of combat at Tet, but it was plenty.”

  “Sometimes I regret missing the seminal experience of our generation. I was finishing grad school, and then I was too old.”

  “Yeah, well. The principal human experience of everybody’s generation is dying, but it’ll keep.”

  He turned and watched the sleek jets circle far out over the sea of tract homes. El Toro Air Base spread immediately below with a big X of runways and a deep green golf course, the two essentials of a military air base.

  “We were up to the ’50s.”

  “Sure. That was when the big boys started moving into the county with a vengeance. National corporations, a lot of electronics companies fleeing their unions. Medical technology, information companies, warehousing, Fortune 500 subsidiaries. Some of them even had headquarters here, like the international construction giant Fluor. They don’t have quite the same interests as the local businessmen. For example, there was a bitter fight over growing the county’s commercial airport, John Wayne Airport down between Newport and Irvine. The big boys want the infrastructure to fly in their Japanese customers, the little boys live down there under the 100-decibel runways. That was probably the last gasp of the small capitalists. Big generally beats small, as we all know. What they did to win was set up extra-governmental planning bodies like
the County Transport Commission to escape the fiddling of local governments and control the things they really cared about.”

  “The Industrial League?”

  “That was where the game was played. It was set up in 1970 by executives of the big corporations, ostensibly to boost business. In fact, it was to fight the chambers of commerce, who were controlled by local business.” He looked back and grinned. “I love my job. It’s like watching medieval tournaments, big armies meeting out on the plain with their visors down, and trying to figure out who’s wearing the black insignia on their chest armor and who’s in the red.”

  They reached a rock outcrop near the crest of the first range of the rolling hills below Saddleback, and they sat side by side just off the trail. His heart thumped a bit. He wasn’t in the greatest shape. The county spread away under them, going bluer and fainter in the haze beyond the air base. Fancy high rises were visible along the 405 and in a few scattered islands.

  “So what’s at issue now?” Jack Liffey asked.

  “You’re looking at it. Airport again. Back in the ’80s, when expanding John Wayne Airport was the agenda, the county begged the Marines to give up the air base there. It was surrounded by miles of open land then and would have been a perfect regional airport. The Marines said Never-Never, Absolutely Never, so the county rebuilt John Wayne, but it only had room for one runway and it’s already pushing its traffic limits.

  “Then the ’90s and irony struck. El Toro became a small part of the peace dividend, scheduled to close soon. Most of the big boys perked up and want this to become a regional airport, but look at all the homes that have crowded up to it in the last decade. It’s the John Wayne airport fight all over again. Though, this time, the smaller businessmen who live near John Wayne would love to see El Toro become the main airport so they could cut back on theirs. There’s the knights in black, galloping down the fields with their lances stuck out in front. But who’s in those suits?” He grinned. “It’s so much fun to watch.”

  “Not as much fun if you’ve got a house down there.”

  “I’ve got a house down there. I’m rooting against the airport, but that doesn’t mean I think of it as a moral issue. People just follow their interests. Even Marx said capitalism had a historical mission to raise the productive capacity of society.”

  “That’s an edifying thought,” Jack Liffey said. “Did he say anything about when the productive capacity would get high enough so they stop trying to eat us for lunch?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Is this airport feud bad enough to get people hurt or kidnapped?”

  Marty Spence made a series of faces as he ran a hand along the grooves in the dog’s neck, like the folds in an outsize spacesuit.

  “You hesitate,” Jack Liffey observed.

  “When billions of dollars are involved, who can say?”

  SIX

  A Squabble of Seagulls

  His old car rumbled along between the forbidding eight-foot concrete block walls that were so characteristic of the county and made the road seem an autoroute into Cold War East Berlin. Perhaps they were to keep foreign spies out of the ranch homes inside there, he thought. He understood the aversion to having your front yard on a six-lane through-road, but the architects should have looked for another solution. Every housing tract for miles was imprisoned in its own game preserve, with only the roofs and a few trees peeking out at him as he passed.

  On the other hand, in some moods, he found driving along these grim and eventless Orange County streets restful compared to the level of oddity he had grown used to in L.A. No one popped out of an alcove to wave a tomahawk or tapdance in a pink tutu. The Orange Curtain had pretty well penned the bizarre and the random back into the big city. He found an opening in the walls beside a sign that said Seahorse Riviera that led him into the greener pastures.

  It was only because the remote on his answering machine had decided to start working again, as it did just often enough to keep him checking, that he’d got Minh Trac’s urgent message to come back to his home. There were no details because the machine had cut the man off after about fifteen seconds as it was prone to do with people with soft voices, and when he’d called Minh Trac’s number, he’d gotten an out-of-service buzz.

  For some reason Minh Trac was sitting on a lawn chair in his driveway. Beside him was a young man on another lawn chair. The younger man had neatly pressed slacks and a bright knit shirt, and Jack Liffey remembered Mike Lewis once describing a busload of Asian tourists as dressing like escapees from a golf magazine.

  Minh Trac nodded recognition as he parked in front and then Jack Liffey noticed the orange crime scene tape strung across the open front door of the house. A white Crown Victoria plainwrap was parked up the driveway with the police bust light clearly visible in the rear window. Seagulls wheeled overhead, crying out now and again to remind him he was only a mile or two from the coast.

  “Thank you for coming back so quickly.”

  “What’s happening?”

  The boy had risen to take his hand.

  “This is Tom Xuan, my daughter’s boyfriend.” It was pronounced Swan, or almost. “Jack Liffey, the man I told you is looking for Phuong. Somebody broke in and wrecked my house. Luckily my wife was at her sister’s.”

  They shook hands and the boy ducked and glanced up involuntarily as a seagull screeched, circling much lower than its pals, then he brought his eyes back.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me she had a boyfriend?” Jack Liffey asked.

  Something passed between the two of them that he couldn’t read. After a moment, Minh Trac shrugged, and a little chagrin showed through. “I didn’t know,” he said. “She never told me. He came to see me just now because he had heard she was gone and he wanted to help.”

  Something was still heavy on the air, and finally the boy decided to let it out. “Xuan is a Chinese name, Mr. Liffey.”

  “Mr. Liffey’s my late father’s name. Call me Jack. I know Xuan is a Chinese name. Does that matter?”

  “If he were black and dating your daughter would it matter? I don’t care what you think you feel about tolerance. It would matter, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not much. I’d like it a lot, actually. Without African-Americans and Jews, the only culture this country would have is football.”

  “I believe I feel as you do,” Minh Trac said. “I have nothing against the ethnic Chinese who have lived for many generations amongst the Vietnamese in Viet Nam. They enriched our culture immeasurably. I can’t understand why Phuong doesn’t know I feel this way. Maybe because she has seen so much animosity in the fight over the Welcome Bridge.”

  A cop came out and ducked under the orange tape and looked at the three of them, then ducked back into the house. Hundreds of gulls came over very low, squawking, and all three looked up at them for a moment.

  “The official collective noun is a squabble of seagulls,” Minh Trac said. “I taught absurd things like that in English class.”

  “Let’s talk about what happened to your house,” Jack Liffey said. “Do you have any idea who did this?”

  “No. They smashed in the patio window and broke up all the furniture. It was obviously a message, but I can’t understand it at all.”

  “I think it was Quan sat,” the boy said. “It means Body Count, but that’s just bravado. They’re too young even to remember the war. Somebody wrote coi chung! on the wall with lipstick. It means look out or beware, and I’ve heard it’s their motto.” He laughed derisively. “It was misspelled.”

  Jack Liffey thought of the note in his pocket. The spelling wasn’t all too hot on the note either. “Do you think they could have kidnapped Phuong?”

  “I doubt it,” the boy said. “Everyone knows their specialty is extorting protection money from rich businessmen, and they haven’t asked Mr. Minh for anything. But they are not very bright and they are very paranoid. Many of the Quan sats are camp boys who h
ad to wait for years and years to get in the country and never got much of an education. Some of them can’t even dial a phone.”

  The cop came out again, carrying a couple of silver Halliburton cases that looked like they contained film equipment. He put them in the trunk of the plainwrap and glared at Jack Liffey for some reason.

  “Don’t disturb anything,” he called officiously.

  Jack Liffey ignored him and turned back to the boy. “Where did you meet Phuong?”

  “UCI, in the Vietnamese Student Union. I’ve got another year to complete a physics doctorate. I’m working on a neutrino experiment with a colleague of the Nobel laureate, Dr. Reines.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  He thought for a moment. “A week ago. The student union told us a little film company wanted a Vietnamese couple to appear in an educational film about TB. Phuong thought it would be a lark. When we showed up, they decided we were too old—I think they wanted high school kids—but they used us in one scene, anyway. I had to go to a night lab as soon as we finished the scene, but she said she could get a ride so she stayed after me.”

  “What was the night?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “When was the last time you heard from her?” he asked Minh Trac.

  “Monday, the day before that.” His eyes were looking worried.

  “What’s the name of the film company?”

  “It was video really. They’re called MediaPros, over in Garden Grove.”

  “Do you have any idea who might want to harm her? Enemies? Campus racists?”

  “Racists?”

  “Didn’t you have an incident at UCI with a kid threatening Asians over the Internet?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I forgot, it was so unusual. Really, we don’t have much trouble. Just a kind of silent resentment.” He smiled lightly. “It’s whispered we study too much and we’re overachievers. I suppose we should arrange it so a statistically significant group of Asians flunks out of school every year. Nobody’s really going to hurt anybody over getting good grades.”