by Steph Cha
I knew the feeling of being lied to by a sister, of wanting to know when I wasn’t being told.
“Now, add to that that Lusig and I are both mothers to the same child. I feel that she would forgive me a decent level of intrusion.” She paused, and when I didn’t insert my agreement, continued. “Not that I need to defend myself, of course. I just don’t like to be thought of as unpleasant.”
“Don’t worry, Rubina. I don’t judge my clients.”
This wasn’t strictly true—most of my clients weren’t great people, and I was generally aware of their various flaws. It was part of my job to account for them, after all. But one thing Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade let you forget was that private investigation was a service job. The renegade PI was an interesting figure, but it was no accident that Marlowe never made any money. I was beholden to my clients, not just for services rendered, but for a baseline level of courtesy. I wasn’t obsequious, but I was too old to take pride in being an asshole.
So while I couldn’t avoid forming general impressions on my clients, I maintained a fiction of impartiality, like the kindergarten teacher who loves all her students equally. My judgments were compartmentalized to the point where they couldn’t offend.
“The GPS tracker, have you been using it?”
“Lightly,” she said. “I was thinking it would be a good supplement to your service.”
“Is it a real-time tracker?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to give me access to that?”
“That would be fine.”
“Alternatively, we can use the tracker to cut down on my hours. Not that I wouldn’t love to bill you for time spent reading a novel outside of her apartment, but maybe you don’t want to pay me when I’m not going to see anything.”
She was silent for a few seconds, and I worried she thought I was being lazy.
“I guess that isn’t exactly 24/7,” I said. “But think about it. She’s not trying to sneak around. I don’t think she’ll be beating on your baby when she’s alone in her apartment.”
“Yes, you’re probably right. I suppose I was overzealous.”
“How about this? We can start with some spot surveillance. If she’s going anywhere of interest, I’ll make sure to follow. Where does she live, by the way?”
“Koreatown.”
“Close to the office,” I said. “Ah, is that why you picked us?”
“That is how I found you, yes.”
“Convenient for me.”
She gave me an address and detailed notes about Lusig’s schedule, like an anxious parent instructing a new sitter. I was glad I wouldn’t have to change any diapers.
We hung up with the understanding that I’d check in at regular intervals, and I went back into my idle Internet research, just in case.
Three
I spent the next few days chasing after Lusig. I tried to monitor her tracker, but I was never as fast as Rubina, who texted me every time Lusig’s car woke up. I trailed her to the grocery store, watched her eat frozen yogurt and pick up Chinese takeout. She seemed to stay put most of the time, behaving like a woman encumbered with an eight-month-old fetus. If she had any social interaction, it didn’t involve stepping outside—Rubina was pretty light on the trigger, so I gathered her cousin didn’t leave the house much at all.
I stayed in the office during business hours, keeping my eye on my phone. Chaz called it the baby monitor.
At the end of my second morning spent reading the Internet at the office, Chaz pulled a chair up to my desk. “Are you disappointed?” he asked with a wink.
“What?”
“It’s been three whole days and you’re still not chasing a murderer.”
“No, Boss, I’m not disappointed.”
He pulled his chair up next to me and reached his hands over my keyboard, fingers wiggling and hovering.
“Mind if I take a look at your browser history?”
“What?” I laughed. “Yeah, I mind.”
“Too bad. This is part of your hazing.”
Chaz and Arturo had voted to make me a partner just over a month earlier. I’d been working for them for over a year and had built myself something of a profile, in part due to my involvement in a Hollywood murder scandal—long story. Chaz made the announcement with a lot of fanfare, and he decided that as a “newly made guy” I’d be subject to a certain amount of hazing. He’d gotten the idea from The Sopranos, and he was a regular Paulie Walnuts about it, corny and annoying, though to be fair, toothlessly respectful and harmless. I’d had to buy beers exactly once, and Chaz had made an extra show of looking over my shoulder while I worked. Since I relied on him for advice anyway, there was no real change except in the mock bully face he made when he asked me questions. I knew he’d back off if I asserted my need for privacy, but in this case, I didn’t have much on my browser history to hide. I rolled my eyes and scooted over.
He scrolled through, chuckling and shaking his head. “Let me guess. The missing girl, is her name Nora Mkrtchian?”
I’d read every article on her disappearance I could find, and looking at the browser history, it looked like there were a lot of them. I shrugged—I was letting him make his point, but I didn’t have to help.
“And have you always been so interested in the Armenian genocide?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re getting at. But come on. It’s a news story, and it’s legitimately interesting. And the genocide, Jesus. I’m ashamed I knew so little about it before.”
“Yeah, what did they teach you in school anyway?”
“Very little, apparently. And they about skipped this genocide altogether. I mean how much do you know about it?”
He crossed his arms. “I’ve heard the words ‘Armenian’ and ‘genocide’ together before, but that’s about it. Long time ago?”
“Hundred years this year. So yeah, history, but not ancient history. World War I. Less than thirty years before the Holocaust, and no one’s in danger of forgetting that one.”
“Six million people died in the Holocaust.”
“A million Armenians died in the genocide. The word ‘genocide’ was coined to describe it.”
He whistled.
“What’s crazy is that there are tons of people who deny that it was a genocide at all.”
“I’m guessing there’s a body count that needs explaining.”
“Oh yeah. I mean some of these accounts, Chaz … there were bodies lining the streets, sometimes stacks of them. There were definitely plenty of bodies.” I shook my head. I’d seen a few corpses, but it was hard to imagine evil and destruction on such a large scale. “The official Turkish position is that it wasn’t ethnic cleansing, it was just a byproduct of World War I. Basically, ‘It was a confusing time for everyone.’ It’s all bullshit though. Armenians were an annoying Christian minority under Muslim rule, and they were systematically targeted.”
Chaz nodded appreciatively. “You’re pretty worked up, huh?”
“It’s just so ludicrous that the status of the genocide is controversial a hundred years later. I mean I know there are Holocaust deniers, but everyone knows they’re more or less crazy people who think the president is hiding Martians in the White House dungeon.” I sighed.
“I have yet to see proof that he isn’t.”
“Har har,” I said. “Anyway, as you can see, this shit is interesting in its own right. It’s not all about Nora Mkrtchian.”
“Not all, sure. Fifty percent?”
I smiled. “Maybe thirty. Doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”
*
Rubina called me on Friday morning to tell me she’d be spending the better part of the day with Lusig, and that I was free to do what I pleased until further notice. Further notice came early Friday afternoon.
“Sorry,” Rubina said quickly when I picked up the phone. “I did mean it when I called you earlier. I was supposed to pick Lusig up for her doctor’s appointment, but she texted me two hours ago to say she didn’t
need a ride, and now I’m in the lobby waiting for her, and she is not picking up her phone.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“I know her location. I don’t know what’s there, and I don’t know what she is doing.”
Dark images flashed through my head—her dark blood, her dead eyes, her studded ear bent against cold concrete. I had a morbid streak dating back to my childhood, well before I had any reason to have one. I knew from experience, now, that imagining the worst wasn’t always a safeguard against its realization.
Still, I kept my paranoia to myself. Rubina didn’t need egging on.
“Where?” I asked.
“Sixth and Grand, downtown.”
“I’ll track her car. I don’t think that’ll be a problem. But my guess is she’ll be really hard to find from there. Unless you have some idea where she could be running around?”
“Try the library. Isn’t that right there?”
“Sure,” I said. “I just want to manage your expectations here. Downtown is big. It’s not the kind of place where you park right in front of wherever you’re going.”
“Understood. Please hurry.”
I drove straight down Sixth and started looking for a lot as I approached Grand. There were two aboveground lots on the block, for $10 and $15, and a driveway to an underground garage. I drove as slowly as I could, looking for Lusig’s car. I pulled into the $10 lot—I didn’t see why any sane person would choose the pricier lot on the same intersection.
Lusig drove a black Prius, not terribly distinctive unless you happened to have her license plate memorized, which I did. I found her car in the northeastern corner of the lot, parked in plain view. It was empty, but I hadn’t expected any different.
She was parked as close as possible to the library, within that lot. I stared up the back stairs climbing up into the skyline, and decided to park and follow Rubina’s hunch.
The Central Library was one of my favorite buildings in Los Angeles. I’d fallen in love with it as a sophomore in high school, when I spent a weekend inside doing research for a history term paper. It was a beautiful, imposing 1920s building, with a central tower topped with a mosaic pyramid that looked out like a watchful eye. At some point it must have been one of the taller buildings downtown, but nowadays it was a short one, standing in the shadow of the US Bank Tower, the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi.
The library was a favorite among the downtown work crowd, as well as bookworms and the numerous homeless who made do within a mile radius of the building. It was a big, gorgeous space, with a wide atrium strung with colorful chandeliers. Escalators ran up and down multiple stories, each one crammed with stacks and stacks of fragrant books. I’d gotten stuck in those stacks, seated on the carpet with cracked spines fanned out around me, losing hours without missing them in the least.
Even if Lusig were in the building, it could take all day to find her. It was possible, too, that she wasn’t there at all. Still, I had to give it my best shot.
Rubina must have had a reason for sending me to the library, and I wondered what she thought might make her cousin want to study.
I looked for her in the news section, where newspapers and magazines hung from bamboo dowels. When she wasn’t there, I remembered she was an adult woman in the twenty-first century with probable access to affordable Internet—she was unlikely to get her news from a public library, especially not one miles from her apartment.
I sat down at a computer and opened up the library catalog. If Lusig was choosing research over a doctor’s appointment, it had to be related to Nora. I ran a few searches and found the call number for the Armenian genocide.
I took the escalators to the history floor and found the corresponding aisle. There was no one there—it had been a long shot. Then again, I wasn’t sure what Rubina expected when she gave me the intersection of a downtown parking lot. I could follow up on hunches, but there wasn’t much more I could do.
I found the call number anyway—956 for Armenia in general, 956.6 for the genocide. It had been a long time since I’d browsed these shelves, and once I had a call number in hand I couldn’t not track it down.
The aisle was rich with the smell of aging paper. Most of the volumes were old and dusty, with that soft binding particular to long-standing libraries. Several were newer hardcovers, with clear plastic jackets to keep them in good condition. I scanned the titles and picked three books to check out and read at home.
I did a walk-through of the rest of the library, but Lusig was nowhere in sight. I fought down a strange feeling of disappointment, even of mild surprise. It was unpleasant to remember that decent intuition and random strokes of luck weren’t quite enough to find everything I wanted.
I exited the library on the northern side, where business casual people carried takeout bags and iPhones, walking on straight trajectories with averted eyes. I looked up at the US Bank Tower, at Bunker Hill and the rest of commercial downtown—I couldn’t count the buildings, let alone the offices, the rooms, the people, people, people. Lusig could be anywhere, doing anything at all.
I walked back to my car feeling a little deflated. Lusig’s car was still there, and I’d at least be able to catch her return. I called Rubina.
“No luck,” I said. “You haven’t heard from her?”
“She’s supposedly stuck in traffic, coming from lunch on the Westside.”
I looked at Lusig’s car and winced. A lot of my clients hired me to spy on people with things to hide. Sometimes the marks were squeaky clean, but when they weren’t, there was always a definable oh-shit moment when they were caught in a lie. “Oh,” I muttered. “Shit.”
“She is lying to me,” Rubina said quietly. “I can’t believe it.”
Despite her persistent suspicions and active mistrust of her cousin, there was genuine surprise in her voice.
“What would you like me to do?”
“Wait for her,” she said. “Wait for her to come back, then call me.”
“Are you still at the doctor’s office?”
“Yes, but I will go home shortly. There is no point in waiting when the appointment has been given up.”
She hung up, and I felt the force of her anger and irritation. If I were Lusig, I would have been very scared.
I sat in my car and lit a cigarette, but I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long. If Lusig was supposed to be caught in traffic, she’d have to leave downtown within half an hour unless she was bold enough to invent a crazy fatal accident that shut down the 10, and any idiot with Internet access could prove her a liar with a few clicks. She might not suspect her cousin of sticking a GPS tracker and a private investigator on her car, but if she had any insight at all, she’d have to know Rubina was high-strung enough to ask questions when Lusig had missed an OB/GYN appointment.
I picked up one of the books and opened it up to the title page. It took a few seconds for me to process what I was seeing—tucked snug against the inner spine was a business card with Nora Mkrtchian’s name on it.
The card was bright and a little bit gaudy, with three horizontal stripes in red, blue, and mustard yellow. The Armenian flag, if I had to guess. Who Still Talks was emblazoned over the red stripe in black, and Nora’s name, URL, and e-mail address were printed in the yellow. I picked up the other two books and found identical cards wedged in their first pages. I was fairly confident I’d find similar cards tucked into every volume under the same call number. It would have been clever marketing if enough people would end up seeing it.
My head was buzzing with the enormity of this coincidence but I had a hard time extracting any meaning. I shook my head and started reading instead.
The genocide was consuming my imagination. A million people. A third of a race. My mind skimmed around the edges of these figures, and their reality in flesh, in life, flickered in lurid flashes. It didn’t seem possible, and each link in the chain that led to it came off sounding over the top and absurd. Yet there was the death toll—there
was nothing more ridiculous than that, but that was very real. Even the genocide deniers didn’t contest that many, many Armenians had died, well before their times. And here was Nora Mkrtchian, her name wedged firmly in their histories.
One cigarette and several pages later, Lusig came into my field of vision. I’d been keeping an eye out for her approach, but she’d gotten within signal distance of her car without drawing my attention. She was coming from the direction of the library, walking slowly on a pair of low professional heels. The heels didn’t square with the image I had of Lusig, but they went with what she was wearing. I hadn’t noticed her because she looked like a different person entirely. Instead of the big army jacket, she had on a black blazer, black slacks, and a pastel blouse that gave her pregnant belly a demure definition. Her hair was washed and neatly styled, and the only piercings she wore hung from the centers of her earlobes.
She teetered to the Prius and climbed into the backseat with apparent effort. Her eyes darted all around her, scanning her surroundings with furtive curiosity. I watched her without staring, afraid of making eye contact. I wondered what she could possibly be doing. A few seconds later, she shrugged and lowered herself further into the seat, and she seemed to squirm and struggle against herself.
She was changing. Her movements had the awkward quality of getting in and out of pants without exposing underwear. When she straightened back up she pulled a hooded sweatshirt over her fancy blouse and got back out of the car. I was right—now she was wearing jeans and ratty loafers that slipped off her heels when she walked. She maneuvered herself back in the car, this time in the driver’s seat.
She flipped down the mirror, then mussed up her hair and reattached her piercings.
It was a strange transformation to witness, from order to calculated dishevelment. It was even shady enough to justify Rubina’s vague suspicions.
What was she doing that had to be done in a suit and heels? She’d come from the direction of the library, but I doubted she was spending her afternoon reading in her pregnant professional finest. She must have had business above Fifth, maybe in one of the office towers on Bunker Hill. Whatever it was, she meant to hide it from her cousin.