by John Shannon
When he came in, just to complete his moral rout, Dicky Auslander was sitting on the sofa with Rebecca. He was clinging to a slim glass of white wine, apparently waiting in ambush. Jack Liffey had been planning to say something to Rebecca about how in winter there was never quite enough light to sustain human life, but he suddenly dropped that line of chat entirely.
“Hello, Jack.”
“Jesus, I’m not being cuckolded by my own psychiatrist?” He didn’t think so for a minute, but he wanted to see if he could leverage any sort of edge here.
“We’re worried about you,” Auslander said. “Rebecca’s worried about you.”
“Hell, I’m worried about me. I can’t seem to win the lottery, no matter how many tickets I buy.” He went straight to the kitchen and got himself a ginger ale. It was the best he could do unless he wanted to go back on the solemn oath to himself about staying off the sauce.
He returned and sat down with a cheerful smile. He was determined that they weren’t going to get his goat, though Rebecca was beginning to look very sheepish.
“So. What fun. Lover and therapist gang up on unsuspecting schlemiel.”
“How have you been feeling?” Auslander asked.
“Feeling? Look, you’re obviously worried that I’m doing some work again. I rest when I get tired. I spent most of today either sitting in a marsh or reading papers in an archive. This case is just talking to people and reading things. I shouldn’t have to get into any gunfights.”
Loco wandered in and seemed to take his side, flopping down on his feet. He felt grateful to an embarrassing degree.
“You’re not ready,” Auslander said. “You may not feel it right away, but it’s going to catch up with you. You came very close to what we used to call a nervous breakdown, you know.”
“I thought we used to call it going flooey up in the second story. Or bailing out the bilge.”
Rebecca couldn’t help smiling for an instant.
“Or posttraumatic stress. Have you had any crying spells?”
“No,” he lied.
“That’s good. If you had, I’d want to put you on medication. Stress is your enemy, Jack. I really don’t think you can predict where a detective case will take you, and it could blow up in your face.”
“I suppose it could.” The whole evening was beginning to thin out and grow stale on him, and he could feel himself getting angry. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here?”
“Oh, Jack,” Rebecca said.
They took him down the hall toward the bedroom. He felt in his pockets immediately, but it was not there, of course, and his heart plummeted to his toes. His own red Swiss Army knife, opened to the big blade, was stabbed through a Happy Kitty playing card and then through his favorite photograph of a smiling Maeve and into the wall above the night table. The card was the seven of one of the Happy Kitty suits, with the now characteristic ink stamp. There was the “no no” in kanji and a small inscription: Stand down. The knife should have been in his pocket, of course, and the photo should have been on his desk at his own condo, and his heart should have been in the center of his chest, not down under his diaphragm being throttled by a pair of strong hands. This guy was good, almost too good to believe.
He didn’t look closely at where the blade penetrated the photo. The threat to Maeve was just too horrible to contemplate, to give any literal play to his imagination.
“In for a dime, in for a dollar,” he said grimly. But it did not do much for all the panic he felt.
Low clouds and a chill in the air spoiled the perfection of the morning over the fishing slip. Squid boats with their big outrigger lights were still coming in very slowly, one after another, leaving placid wakes on the slip, having already had their holds suctioned out over on Terminal Island. Grizzled Peruvian and Mexican deckhands jumped to the docks and made fast. Everybody he saw looked exhausted, including the crew working on Petricich’s sunk Sanja P. There were two big eighteen-wheelers dockside and a strange piece of apparatus between them, like a pump of some sort that issued a fat white hose passing between a small group of men in rubber waders who appeared to be standing on the Sanja P.’s deck, maybe two feet under the surface of the gray water. Some proportion of a fathom down, a measure that Jack Liffey could never remember how to calculate.
He found Steelyard at last, in front of one of the trucks, standing and watching beside Ante Petricich as the machinery chugged away. Steelyard used his eyebrows in a minimalist greeting when he saw Jack Liffey.
“The station said you’d be here.”
“Jebi se,” the old man said with a sour face and without looking at him.
“I hope that’s a greeting.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
So much for his relations with this Petricich. A technician was hard at work on the boat’s flying bridge, still above sea level, dismounting monitors for sonar and the like to cart them away for safekeeping.
“I assume you heard about the number-seven card,” Jack Liffey said to Steelyard. “I called Hollywood Division last night, but they won’t find any more fingerprints than you did.”
“Uh-huh. Watch this; I’ve never seen anything like it. They’re pumping Ping-Pong balls belowdecks, and this sucker is going to rise like Lazarus.”
“Ja, when we get her up, we seal the bottom and pump the rest of the water out. Jebi se.”
Several wayward white globes had escaped their work assignment and bobbed on the lightly ruffled surface of the slip. A man shouted, and a couple of the work crew grabbed rails and each other for balance. Something belowdecks must have shifted.
“Mr. Petricich. Did you know my granddad Seamus Liffey?”
If anything, the old man’s dark eyes seemed to go even darker, and he still wouldn’t meet Jack Liffey’s eyes.
“He was the secretary of the American Legion post,” Jack Liffey continued.
“Ja, sure. Everybody knew Seamus. He’d drink every one of us under the table.”
“And Steelyard’s dad. He was in the post, too.”
“He was a whippersnapper, but ya. He wasn’t eligible for member. He hung around before the war and cleaned up. Suck-up, brownnose.” He made no effort to spare Steelyard’s feelings, but the policeman didn’t seem to be reacting.
“Can you think of any Japanese from this area that you guys pissed off?” Now he had Steelyard’s attention. “Somebody who lived on Terminal Island and probably got transported to one of the relocation camps.”
“Didn’t know no Japs. They kept to themselves. They was all across the ferry. Good fishermen. They started with abalone out at White Point. Shame they bombed Pearl Harbor. Jebi se.”
“I don’t think those particular Japanese had much to do with it.”
The old man shrugged. “Didn’t know no Japs. They talked funny. Walked funny, too. All bowlegged and the women made tiny steps like lizards.”
“You’re the connection,” Jack Liffey said. “You and Seamus and Justin Steelyard. You’re the one common point in all this.”
“Go fuck yourself.” The old man turned his back and walked away.
Steelyard was watching, too.
“So Dad was a suck-up at the legion. It fits the profile. A loser if there ever was one, a mutt. He always had some scheme for getting rich, we’d all be living in clover. The one time I saw him after he walked out on us, a whole lot later, he showed up at my door asking for money. Skinny as a rat. And he was trying for last prize in the tooth-to-tattoo ratio.”
“My granddad Seamus is only a vague memory,” Jack Liffey said. “Somebody who boosted me onto his shoulders when I was three. He died from a piece of rebar upside the head behind a saloon. Good old Shanghai Red’s. Remember that place?”
“I can tell you got something to tell me. Let’s sit down.” Steelyard nodded to Utro’s, the same cafe where Jack had taken Maeve. The restaurant’s patio was defined by mooring posts and heavy hawsers out front.
They wandered over and ordered coffee, and the
friendly waitress greeted Steelyard flirtatiously before scuttling off at an almost invisible gesture from him. Jack Liffey talked about the Swiss Army knife for a bit, then edged into the important stuff. He explained what he’d found out about the “no no” kanji, and handed Steelyard a printout of the names of all the residents of Terminal Island in 1941. Three thousand names. “Somewhere in some ancient FBI files there’s going to be a list of the troublemakers who voted no and no. Since I don’t have any good friends in the bureau, maybe you could ask one of your good friends to come up with that list and cross-reference.”
“He’d be eighty by now, at least, Jack.”
“It’s worth a try.”
He wondered how far to trust this policeman, but he had begun to like him. Maybe it was only his hangdog sadness.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jack Liffey said. “This ‘no no’ guy seems to be focused on families. It could be that the card at my place today is the second one for our family and my dad is off the hook.”
Steelyard frowned at him. “Wishful. Does it really look like his usual second card to you? So far the second is always a doozy. Try this on for a theory. The guy starts with a first warning shot to some predefined target, but if somebody gets nosy, he slaps one on Mr. Nose, too. You and me both stuck our noses in.”
That sent Jack Liffey’s heart sinking another foot. He couldn’t get the picture out of his head—ultimately he had looked at it—Maeve’s open grin with his own blade right through her neck.
“At least I’ve had both of mine now, as far as we can tell,” Steelyard said. “He seems to fuck over the thing you care most about. I think I get that much. Strangely enough, I’m already getting used to the destruction of my layout. Why should I expect different? What have I got? An ex-wife who isn’t speaking to me, a kid who went bad, a partner who thinks I’m a pain in the ass, an ulcer that isn’t responding to the new drugs, and a sparkling personality that even pisses me off from time to time.”
Jack Liffey wasn’t sure if he should say something.
“This daughter of yours …” Steelyard began.
“Maeve.”
“You get along?”
Jack Liffey nodded lightly, as if agreeing too eagerly would be tactless after Steelyard’s list of humiliations.
“That’s great. I thought nobody got along with teenagers.”
“We’ve had our problems, but things are pretty good in general. I think she saves most of the crap for her mother and …”
He broke off. He realized he couldn’t say the word stepdad, it was too painful, and he sure wasn’t going to say the asshole’s name. The man had slapped Maeve once, and that was two times too many for him.
“Christ, I must sound like an ass.” Steelyard wobbled his cup a couple of times aimlessly and stuck a dollar under it.
“You’ve had quite a trauma, I’d say, and I’ll bet you haven’t got anybody to talk to about it.”
Steelyard eyed him almost suspiciously for a moment, as if Jack Liffey were a salesman just getting down to the pitch.
“Fuck it. It’s just life.”
“Give me a call and we’ll have dinner sometime. For old times.”
“I don’t know how you feel about your old times, Jack, but mine may as well be circling the fuckin’ drain.” He stared at Jack Liffey for a moment, as if trying to figure something out. “I’m gonna go spend some quality time with myself.” Steelyard got up and walked away, and Jack Liffey was pleased, just a little, somewhere deep inside to find someone whose gloomy streak made his own take on life seem downright cheerful. Schadenfreude, he thought it was called.
Dec 18
How intoxicating the Hagakure is! Here is a true warrior, forbidden suicide after the death of his master, who because he cannot do what he knows is his duty, demands permission to go into retirement and become a monk. It is in this seclusion that his journal is begun. He brings me close to something very ancient, and not just to the values and philosophy of that matchless era of honorable combat in Japan. This awakening stretches back much farther, to the yellow flicker of campfires, to guarding the cave mouth through the night until the other is seen approaching in a cold dawn. To the ancient dream of hurting.
Nine
Across the Bridge
Jack Liffey slowed the VW and then had to pull over and stop for what appeared to be a Rose Parade float puttering slowly along Slauson toward him and filling more than half the roadway. It was led by two big motorcycles and a truck encroaching on his lane with a sign that said Wide Load. But it wasn’t even Christmas yet, he thought. Almost, though. He felt a little tingle of guilt as he remembered, once again, that he hadn’t gotten anything for Maeve or Rebecca yet. To avoid that thought he watched the float. Could it actually be for the Rose Parade already? He remembered that the powers that be had wrecked the Rose Bowl, anyway. Now it was set up to please the gamblers and math fetishists, turning a traditional matchup of the Big Ten and Pac Ten into some foul computer-selected national playoff that would put teams like Florida and Nebraska in the bowl but bring in millions in Vegas betting. Not that he cared that much, really. Football was about as important to him as a flower show.
He got a better look at the float as it drew abreast, and what he saw gave him a shock. It was made of flowers, all right, but the dystopic tableau depicted several dead young men lying in front of a burned-out storefront while others crouched within—a shoot-out at the LA Gang Corral. Most appeared to be African American. Even their Uzis were rendered lovingly in some dark silver buds.
“What do you make of that?” he asked Maeve.
“Two points, I’d say. But what on earth could it be for?”
“Maybe they’re letting the Crips into the Rose Parade?”
“That’s two weeks away. The cut flowers would all be wilted by then. Who knows?”
A pickup truck followed with another Wide Load sign. “We’ll probably never know. And it’s better that way. The world I recognize is strange enough.”
He was driving Maeve into protective hiding. The knife through her photo had freaked him enough to work on coming up with some way to protect her that she would be willing to buy into. On an earlier case, they had met a famous old civil rights leader and his granddaughter, and Maeve had made a blood sisters pact with the little girl. Ornetta Boyce, two years her junior, had been sent away to school. Working on possible places for Maeve to hide, Jack Liffey had found out that Ornetta was home for Christmas. She was staying with her grandparents, and South-Central LA seemed far enough off the beaten track to be a safe bet. Maeve was keen to see Ornetta again, anyway.
“We write all the time. Remember I saw her last summer?”
Actually, he did. But keeping up with kids was hard, especially when they didn’t live with you full-time.
“I saw Bancroft and Genesee, too. They’re pretty frail now.” Maeve looked sad as she talked of Ornetta’s grandparents.
He nodded. “I saw them once. I’m amazed they manage to take care of one another without full-time nursing.”
He pulled up in front of a bungalow that was set back above a sloped lawn, and he had the same warm feeling he always had thinking of the couple. Visiting them was like visiting the cloister of some Old World saints: their aura would reach out to enclose and protect you.
Maeve got out and folded the seat forward to get at her overnighter. She’d graduated from her little checkered pasteboard number—its innocence had always stirred a little pang in his heart—to a lumpy Gore-Tex contraption on rollers that looked like it came from Mount Everest Outfitters. The front door banged open, and a shriek announced that Ornetta had seen Maeve. They rushed at each other like diminutive linebackers. Ornetta was something like fourteen now but had grown a lot and filled out even more. He was amazed at how mature she looked.
Bancroft Davis came out onto the porch next. He was on a walker now, but it was one of the new-style ones that looked a lot more like sports equipment, with handlebars and hand brakes and a canv
as saddlebag for books and such, as if it came from the same expedition outfitters as Maeve’s bag.
“Jack,” Bancroft Davis said. “It’s a great treat to see you again.”
“The pleasure is all mine. That thing looks like it’d be happy to do a marathon.”
“It’ll have to do it without me.” They shook hands warmly.
“How’s Genesee?”
“She’s inside. Fine, but a little tired.” His wife had been in a wheelchair for some time now.
“Hi, Uncle Jack.” He got a hug from Ornetta, and then the girls were a blur of eagerness heading away down the hallway toward her bedroom.
“How’s she doing in school?” Jack Liffey asked. He followed the old man inside to the living room, with its bleached fifties modern furniture and African artifacts everywhere.
“Straight A’s,” he said proudly. He smiled with satisfaction as he waved off help and shifted himself gradually into a leather chair that someone had mounted on a box to raise it about eighteen inches and make it easier to use.
The school Ornetta attended, Jack Liffey knew, was called Dunbar Latin, and it was in Washington, D.C. It had been founded in 1807 for the half-white illegitimate children of plantation owners and had sent far more than its share of famous African Americans to Harvard and Yale. The first time Bancroft had told him about the place, he had shown him a photocopy of an old ad the school had placed in newspapers across the South in the early 1800s, disingenuously promising not to teach its students to read. But, of course, they had.
Genesee, herself an old Communist, didn’t really approve of such an upscale place. But since it got Ornetta away from South-Central LA and its ever-looming troubles, she acquiesced. Jack Liffey wasn’t all that fond of private schools himself, but as he was living with a headmistress, what could he say?
“We’d best talk a bit about this danger you said your daughter’s in,” Bancroft suggested as Jack Liffey took the chair across from him.