The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  No sooner had Angela’s Tumblr post gone live than the Herald began to receive calls from livid readers denouncing the publication, Tumblr and all social media, and, especially, Angela Soleyman. She, the callers informed the nineteen-year-old intern who had the misfortune of working the switchboard that day, was a loose cannon with too many college degrees and not an ounce of common sense to help her get along in the world. She was also a monstrous liar who had left out of her so-called reporting (since when does anyone with Internet access become Peter Jennings?) the rather relevant fact that she was an unhappy soul with a very sharp ax to grind against the Iranian community because she was in her early forties and had not managed to find a man stupid enough to marry her. That she had spent years trying to embarrass Iranian Jews and give them a bad name. She should be fired by the Herald, banned by the State of California from ever touching a keyboard again. That’s what the Iranian callers said.

  The Americans who called wished to express: a) the depth of their disinterest in whatever fate had befallen yet another rich Iranian; and b) their abiding resentment of the entire community for being bold enough to live in the most desirable neighborhoods of Los Angeles, send their children to the most competitive schools, and excel in the most difficult and lucrative professions while, at the same time, keeping mostly to themselves and each other, speaking Persian everywhere they went, and insisting that their children marry other Iranians. It was simply too cheeky, too unimmigrant-like, for these Eye-ray-nians to be living next door to and eating in the same establishments as the icons and avatars of American culture. The women get their nails done at the same Vietnamese-owned-and-operated, sixteen-dollars-for-a-manicure and you get to pass right through the paparazzi lines even though you’re not a celebrity—yet—shop on Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills that Kim Kardashian, that goddess of LA culture, frequents. First-generation immigrants must live in undesirable areas and work their fingers raw doing laundry or selling noodles, or slave in factories and eat cabbage, so that their children can go to school and become middle class. That’s what all the Russian and Polish and Western European Jews did when they first arrived on these shores. Only these Eye-ray-nians don’t know how to take a number and stand in line.

  * * *

  The collective response to the news of Raphael’s Son’s missing corpse alarmed the Herald’s editor, an American who had never understood his fellow white people’s visceral resentment of the Iranian population in LA.

  “I would note,” he said politely to the first few callers before he realized it was a losing battle and told the intern to take messages, “that Ms. Soleyman is not affiliated with this publication and does not represent its views.”

  The Americans concluded, once again, that the Herald was too liberal and hung up. The Iranians insisted that, regardless of who paid her bills, the Herald had provided Ms. Soleyman with “fake news”—an act that was especially egregious given that Angela had always had a way of turning any message—good, bad, or indifferent—into a source of anguish and embarrassment for her own people.

  * * *

  Angela S. was a 5'9", 138-pound, Princeton undergrad, Yale law (but she wasted all that education and gave up her $180,000-a-year job at a private law firm to become a writer because she believes in truth, justice, and being poor), Iranian Jewish woman of a certain age—forty-one—who had offended just about every person in the upper-income bracket of the community in LA (and most of Long Island) because she was, in the most aggravating sense of the word, frank. That’s the American and European way to describe her; in Persian, she was tactless, offensive, angry, bitter, and merely out to embarrass her own kin. She was born in Iran but left when she was barely eight years old, and it’s true that she didn’t have an easy time of it (Who did? There’s a reason they call it “exile” instead of “resort vacation.”) but personal hardship is no excuse for unhinging one’s jaw and letting just anything spill. And besides, she had fared better in the US than she ever would have in Iran.

  She finished high school in LA and took off, full scholarship and all, for the East Coast, came back seven years later, and went to work in a private criminal defense law firm, and that should have been the last anyone heard from her except she decided that all defense attorneys were sleazy bastards and joined the DA’s office, decided that all district attorneys were crooked assholes, and, in 2008, quit that job too. This time, she decided that the American people were not well-served by the three hundred thousand–plus new books published in the US every year, and that what the country needed in the midst of two wars, a near depression, and young people killing each other with machine guns on the street every night, was one more book. Entitled Two Continents, One Thief, the magnum opus was intended as a tell-all, unmask-the-scoundrel, shoot-the-guy-in-both-knees-and-watch-him-crawl-to-libel-court exposé of Raphael’s Son and his cast of Shakespearean co-miscreants. Never mind there were more writers in LA than people who read books, or that, outside of the Iranian Jewish community, hardly anyone knew or cared to know Raphael’s Son.

  Even this—writing a book that, if read by a single LA native, was “bound to embarrass and belittle all Iranians everywhere in the world because, as you know, they are going to think we’re all like Raphael’s Son and the Riffraff”—might have been bearable (at least it would take her and her mouth out of circulation for a couple of years). But then she went and signed up for a private workshop taught by a fat-and-unhappy, never-published-a-book-in-her-life-but-claims-she-can-teach-others-to-write Russian woman named Babette, who lived with her thin but equally clueless fiancé and their grew-old-and-died-years-ago-only-his-owner-is-too-stupid-to-notice dog in a downtown studio. Angela could stand the smell of urine everywhere in Babette’s apartment/classroom, and she could (just barely) stand the obsequious praise the two women heaped on each other, but she quickly caught on that, rather than a real writing course, this was yet another LA-style self-improvement scam (green juice, Pilates, a memoir) by a person who clearly was in dire need of taking one of those classes herself. “In short, she’s no Nabokov.” The only thing Angela took away from the course was that to get a book deal, writers must engage in a form of self-prostitution No Nabokov called “platform building” (slang for “get someone interested in buying the damn book or use your own money to publish it”). Hence the creation of Angela’s blog on Tumblr.

  For some reason she thought she was an expert on the social and cultural anthropology of Iranian Jews anywhere, and that the cure for any of their ills was to expose, “without fear or favor,” their every seminal secret or insignificant minutiae before the world. It’s true she went to great pains to insult Americans as well, but no one cared about that because white people don’t have to worry about their reputation. Minorities, on the other hand, are always judged by their lowest common denominator. No one cared, either, that Angela had as many good things to say about the community as bad. Utter a dozen words of praise and one of criticism, a wise rabbi once said, and they’ll remember the one and hang you for it.

  She had a conviction, fashioned, no doubt, out of resentment of the fact that she was childless and unmarried and without prospects, that Iranian Jews had been silent and insular and fearful of the judgment of others for too long—first, because they were persecuted minorities who survived by remaining invisible, and later, when they were allowed out of the ghettos and into the top echelons of Iranian society, because they had an image to cultivate and maintain—and that they needed her to bring them all out of the shadows so they could shout from every laptop their own and their neighbors’ personal histories, their secrets and flaws and differences, their confessions and complaints and all those other so-called facts they had tried for three thousand years to conceal.

  The question of who died and made Angela truth-teller extraordinaire remained, as yet, unresolved, but it was one thing for her to “speak frankly” to one or two or a dozen other people, and something entirely different—indeed, reckless—to begin to operate an instru
ment of mass destruction.

  In the blog, she was always digging, always trying to expose one cultural flaw or another in every major segment of LA’s population. She picked on Iranians and Koreans, Jews and Muslims and Presbyterians. Not that she was especially wrong about things, but she didn’t understand the art of the unstated—of knowing what to express in words and what to leave implied, what to hint at and to deny in spite of the evidence—all in the interest of keeping unity and harmony within a population.

  She would have been ignored or shunned by most people a long time ago were it not for the fact that her late mother, Elizabeth “The Great” Soleyman, was one of the most adored and respected members of the Jewish community in Los Angeles. “The Great” was a title conferred upon her by popular disposition some ten or so years earlier, when a profile of her appeared, without her cooperation or consent, in Fortune magazine. Until then, people had known that she was a self-made woman who had achieved remarkable success without having so much as a high school diploma. Just how remarkable that success had been became clear when the article divulged her after-tax worth as $2.7 billion, all of which, amazingly, she had come by honestly.

  But while Elizabeth’s wealth and popularity provided some level of tolerance for Angela in the community, they did not serve as a significant restraint on her actions. For one thing, Elizabeth had acted in a manner entirely contrary to any Iranian or Jewish parent when she bequeathed, in a will devised by her in-house attorneys, her entire estate to her charitable foundation. To her daughter and only heir, she left half a million dollars, Warren Buffet–style, and the obligation to serve as second fiddle to the foundation’s executive director.

  Not that Iranians were loathe to give to charity; far from it. They just left more to their children than to perfect strangers. Then again, neither Elizabeth nor Angela had ever understood how much fun being rich can be.

  Angela’s blog on Tumblr, The Pearl Cannon, was named after a real piece of artillery built by a Jewish blacksmith in nineteenth-century Iran. Like her, the cannon spewed a great deal of ammunition every time it was fired up. Like her too, it had its own mind and went against the grain: instead of shooting its explosive charge forward through the muzzle, the real Pearl Cannon exploded through the back and lay waste to its own team.

  The only difference was that the Pearl Cannon, having revealed its fatal flaw at the first try, was permanently retired from battle. Angela, on the other hand, kept writing. She picked on every cornerstone of Iranian Jewish culture, and made it look draconian and insidious. Close family ties meant codependence, conservative values were designed to keep women in chains, respect for one’s elders robbed the young of the opportunity to pursue their own dreams. The young, meanwhile, were a bunch of spoiled, entitled mama’s-boys-and-girls who would never grow out of their high school mentality or conceive of an original idea that didn’t have to do with making money. Women were complicit in their own enslavement because they traded their freedom for financial security. And family ties . . . well, about that, Angela could have written a few volumes and still have more left to say.

  A good number of those volumes would doubtless reflect her special enthusiasm for exposing the truth about the Soleymans’ sworn enemy, that reptile-in-Ferragamo-loafers, Raphael’s Son. Angela wasn’t the only person who had loathed the bastard long before his so-called bankruptcy, but she was certainly the loudest and most prolific and, once the Ponzi scheme was unearthed, the greatest proponent of sending him to jail for fifty years before hanging him from a crane. Long before the rest of the community came to see the light, she had concluded that anything he did—financial, social, or personal—was morally corrupt and legally dubious at best. Later, she applied the full force of her bulldog spirit to identifying the Riffraff as the sort of vermin who gave all Homo sapiens a bad name.

  “Let me say it like it is,” she wrote in the closing lines of her column that Monday. “The wolf in a seal’s body is about to pull his biggest rip-off yet, his wife and the Riffraff are going to help him disappear with everyone’s money, and the cops in this town are too incompetent and unmotivated to care.”

  * * *

  That last comment, about the cops, dug deep into the detective who was called to the scene that Monday. Leon Pulitzer was another LA writer who thought he was doing time in an ordinary job until fame and fortune caught up with him. He had been in law enforcement for twenty years, never finished a book, and still fancied himself a “crime writer in training.” At six o’clock on the day of the murder, he was summoned to the site when his boss, Detective III Jay O’Donnell, found out that the victim and his family were Iranians.

  “Get over here and tell me what the wife’s saying,” O’Donnell had ordered Leon, who was still in bed. “These people all speak English but make no sense.”

  Leon was about to protest that he was neither a translator nor a mind reader when O’Donnell mentioned Raphael’s Son’s name.

  He arrived on Mapleton to find it swarmed with police cars and spectators, television news vans and camera crews and paparazzi, and all the usual hangers-on who popped out of the ground every time there was a hint of celebrity-related news anywhere in Los Angeles. In the case of Raphael’s Son, the Holmby Hills address was enough to attract a good amount of media attention, given the neighborhood’s famous living residents and especially its most renowned dead person—Michael Jackson—who had been “put to sleep” in 2009 with the help of his in-house physician, in a rented mansion around the corner from Raphael’s Son’s. More recently, the drama surrounding the divorce of the couple who owned the LA Dodgers had made the area a paparazzi favorite. The Dodgers couple, court papers revealed, owned two houses in Holmby Hills, two in Malibu, and three elsewhere in the country. According to the wife—a smart but starved-looking little critter with a chihuahua’s nervous demeanor who, before the divorce, had paid a hair dresser $10,000 a month to dry and comb her and her husband’s hair—the first house, purchased for $21 million, was intended as their residence; the second house, immediately next door to the first and purchased for $6.5 million, was used for doing “extra laundry.”

  Outside the house, Neda stood in her bloodied white terry cloth bathrobe purchased for $275 at the spa of the ugly and expensive Montage hotel on Cañon Drive in Beverly Hills, and her bloodied white terry cloth slippers with the single pink rose, purchased for $5.99 at the Rite Aid (where all the pharmacists are Iranian, the cashiers are Filipino, and the store clerks are Latino; white people, it seems, do not work at Rite Aid) across the street from the hotel.

  Glassy-eyed and terrified, she had already given her statement to the uniform, Jose Montoya, who had arrived on the scene in his black-and-white, and was now repeating it for O’Donnell.

  Leon stood next to him and listened: the last time she saw her husband alive, Neda explained, was Friday evening. At the time, they hadn’t been on speaking terms for about ten days, which wasn’t unusual for them, though she couldn’t recall the reason for the latest estrangement. Her husband had been unusually busy at work, and his bedroom, separate from hers, was situated at the opposite end of the house, so that he could have come and gone half a dozen times in one night without her taking notice.

  On Sunday night she had eaten dinner alone, in the “functional” ground-floor kitchen (not to be confused with the other, more expensive “just for show” kitchen also on the ground floor). After dinner she had watched an old episode of The Borgias on Showtime in the family room, then retired upstairs to her bedroom by ten p.m.

  She had not seen the girls before she went to bed Sunday night either. She thought the older one had been studying at the library, and that the younger one—well, to be honest, she had no idea what the younger one had been up to. As had become her routine in the last three and a half years—since Raphael’s Son had made himself and his family social pariahs—Neda had downed two Xanax, plus half an Ambien, plus two melatonin gelcaps, to fall asleep. Hours later, a loud noise had awakened her. She bel
ieved the time was “three thirty–something,” but she could be wrong. The Xanax had worn off and the melatonin was useless, but she was still groggy from the Ambien, so she had drifted in and out of sleep for the next hour before she finally got up, driven, she said, by the “feeling that something had happened,” and ventured out of her room to investigate the source of the disturbance.

  Without first checking the house, she went straight into the yard, hiked down to the gate, heard the sound of the Aston Martin’s engine still running, and saw the front of the car pressed against the metal bars.

  Here, Neda stopped, drew a hollow, stunted breath, turned more ashen, and told O’Donnell, “I’m sure he was dead.”

  At this, O’Donnell smiled broadly and turned away from Neda toward the ever-growing circle of onlookers at the edge of the police tape. Like any normal Angeleno, O’Donnell hated the paparazzi, thought they were less than pond scum, that they should have their cameras confiscated and their asses kicked to the curb as long as they were chasing other people. But if it was he they chased . . . well, in that case . . . O’Donnell’s heart quivered at the thought that he might be quoted, even featured, on TMZ or E! or—who knows, stranger things have happened—invited to appear on his own reality show, The Real Cops of Holmby Hills. So he sucked his stomach in and stood with his feet wide apart, wiped his face every few minutes, and did his best to look professional and photogenic.

  “Ma’am,” he said, one eye on Leon and the other on the television cameras, “this is Detective Pulitzer. I believe he speaks Farsi. In case you’re more comfortable.”

  * * *

  The security cameras outside the house were dummies intended to scare off inexperienced thieves. Raphael’s Son had disabled them when he bought the house because he didn’t want any record kept of his own comings and goings. The lights that should have illuminated the driveway and the gate had been dark since the Department of Water and Power launched its Compact Fluorescent Energy-Efficient Lightbulbs campaign in 2009; the lightbulbs conserved energy by going dark after a week or two, or breaking as they were being installed. They were significantly more expensive than regular lightbulbs, and they had to be changed so much more often that, in the end, the consumer spent more than he saved on the power bill. In Neda’s house, Gerardo, the gardener who usually changed the bulbs as a favor, finally drew the line and insisted that he should be paid for his time and the use of his ladder. Raphael’s Son responded that Gerardo was getting way too much money for walking around with a leaf blower. They had a hearty argument, Gerardo quit for the twelfth time that year, and the lightbulbs remained dark thereafter.