by John Shannon
“Mr. Emmett Rebkovsky of Venice wants us all to know that digital TV is going to be the savior of capitalism,” she said, summing up one letter.
He smiled. “A friend of mine says that capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, while socialism is just the opposite.”
The word caught her attention. “Heavens, are you a socialist, Jack?”
“I probably was once. Right after the war, when I was in Vietnam Vets against the War. Socialism hasn’t had a very good track record, has it?”
“When I was researching my heritage I met some AIM guys at LA State. You know, the American Indian Movement. They said they were socialists, but they couldn’t tell me what they meant.”
He shrugged. “I suppose they just want the world to be a bit fairer, you know? But I’d like to get there with a lot less of the disruption. Probably skip the killing altogether. Are you still working on your heritage?”
She set the paper down. “For a time I thought all I needed was pigtails and a lot of turquoise jewelry, but I came to see that there were holes in me where I didn’t even know I had places.”
“You may not be able to get it all back,” he suggested, “especially if you never really had it to begin with. I’m supposed to be Irish, but I’ll be damned if I’ll play at it. A green derby and hanging out in bars, bragging and singing. The hell with that. We’re all really mongrels, you know. It’s our glory.”
She laid her hand on his on the table. “Yeah, alley dogs. Sniffing each other up and down.”
“Anytime.”
Ornetta hadn’t been too sure about Maeve’s proposed high-intensity project, described so breathlessly, but had come along in the end. After a string of insistent phone calls, they had picked up Maeve’s grandfather and driven him to the Watts Towers in the morning, those strange and wonderful two-hundred-foot-tall artifacts of an era of outsider art, broken crockery stuck into concrete loops and buttresses like some mad daydream of a cathedral. In fact, they had been built between the twenties and the fifties by an Italian immigrant who had hardly spoken English, but they were deeply embedded in black LA now and had an African American art center alongside them, where the three of them had just walked through a show of two series of historical prints by the black artist Jacob Lawrence.
The first series—the human figures all colorful and bold, like construction paper cutouts—traced the migration of blacks out of the South, from dead-end sharecropping after slavery to industrial jobs in Chicago and Detroit. The other illustrated the life of the abolitionist John Brown.
Declan hadn’t said much as they strolled along the prints, reading tags, but he’d been game to go along wherever Maeve insisted he go. Ornetta could see that the old man’s watery eyes were often fixed on Maeve, this new granddaughter he hadn’t even known he had. Ornetta did her best not to identify the old man in her imagination with all the vicious, screeching, hate-spitting racists she’d ever heard about, if only for Maeve’s sake, and Uncle Jack’s. But her blood sister was going to owe her big time for this.
Now they were sitting in the outside patio of Stevie’s on the Strip at the top of Crenshaw, picking at their fried fish lunches. According to Bancroft, it was one of the best soul food places in LA, and it was clean and open, less likely that way to freak out an old white guy unused to crossing the barriers.
A big flat-nosed dog, stretched to the end of his chain, was squatting and glaring at their table, as if well aware that they didn’t belong there. Ornetta imagined a lot of the things that Maeve’s grandfather wasn’t saying out loud padding up on them, too, to stand glowering at them just like the dog. But this reminded her too much of that angry dog pack she and Maeve had once faced to save Maeve’s dad, and she couldn’t take the tension anymore. She’d eaten about all of the fish she wanted, anyway.
“I’d like to check out a Caribbean music place up the street,” Ornetta announced. “I want to see if they’ve got Soca and Sai Sai. I’ll be back.”
“Don’t get lost,” Maeve said.
“I won’t. This my town.” But it wasn’t, and Ornetta knew it perfectly well. She didn’t even know if there was a record store up the street. She just had to get away for a while from the brooding tension of Maeve’s reclamation project.
Maeve noticed that her grandfather mostly picked the thick batter off the fish. The fish itself was white and light and cooked just about perfect. “You don’t like the batter?”
“I love it, but it’s bad for my heart.” He peered down at what looked like batter-fried acorns on his plate. “I’m not too keen on this stuff, though.”
“I think that’s okra. It’s a lot better this way than boiled, believe me.” Genesee made it a lot, and it wasn’t the flavor that bothered Maeve so much as the texture, carrying a very high slime quotient.
“What do you think of Ornetta?” Maeve insisted.
“She’s a nice girl. Clever with the stories. I’m not really a hater, honey.”
“You use some bad words about people.”
He made a face. Luckily there was enough traffic noise on Jefferson that it was unlikely they’d be overheard, except by the dog still staring at them.
“Those words—they may not carry all the weight you think.”
“They seem pretty heavy to me.”
He looked intently at her, some mask of civility seeming to melt away. “I did everything you wanted, Maeve. I’ve been polite to the little colored girl, I’ve been to all these nigger places without complaint. You can’t ask me to change what I believe inside.”
Maeve sat back in her chair, as if struck. “So all day you’ve been hating being with Ornetta?”
He grimaced. “Look, I know there are individuals that’re different. She’s nice. Bill Cosby is probably a nice guy. Everybody knows that. The coloreds are still what they are. My life’s work has been sticking up for the white man, and a Jap wrecked that now, and I haven’t got time to do it all again.” The fierce look flickered and softened. “I just wanted to have a granddaughter. Is that too much? I want to do what I have to so we can be friends.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible,” Maeve said, trying to be brutally honest.
“Maeve, I am very pleased I met you and found you. But you know we are probably going to disagree, always, about a lot of things. Just like me and your father. Don’t shut me out like he did. Can’t we find a way to spend some time together?”
She thought about it. He was such a sad old man. “You’ve got to watch the words you use. And you’ve got to respect Ornetta.”
He watched her intently, as if waiting for another shoe to drop.
“She’s, like, my sister. We made a pact, we’re blood sisters, and she helped me save Dad. You know, she gets straight A’s at a very good school.”
“She’s a clever girl. Anybody can see that.”
Maeve felt her suspicions gather. “People say trained seals are clever. Is that what you mean?”
“Ornetta is smart. Much smarter than most of her people.”
Maeve nodded and wondered if she was about to push too far. “Do you think you can try to act respectful of other people who aren’t like you, even when it’s not a favor to me?”
He answered with just a hint of sarcasm. “The thought police now. Maeve, you really shouldn’t ask people to change their insides and their private thoughts. I’m going to do my best to be respectful on the outside. And I will think about anything you ask me to think about. That’s where we’re going to leave it for now. Okay?”
She considered for a moment, wondering if he would ever budge farther than that. His presence made her uneasy now. “All right, Granddad.”
He stood up, leaving most of his food. “Now let’s go find Ornetta and make sure she’s safe.”
This time, just to take a new tack, Jack Liffey entered the little bungalow ten minutes early and sat down on an easy chair that creaked under him, trying to make himself as comfortable as he could. He would not play any mind games this trip if h
e could help it, standing at parade rest or mad-dogging the other man’s stare or flapping his arms like a chicken. The house was dark and very cold, and from what he could see, Ozaki wasn’t anywhere in evidence.
Jack Liffey looked around at what little there was to see but got no new clues. The vinous wallpaper seemed to have come from another generation, the furniture from the Salvation Army.
As he was trying to make out a grim standard-issue motel print on the sidewall, maybe a mill on a stream, he heard an almost soundless tunk, like a small stone that had stood on end precariously for aeons and finally had just worn out and fallen over. Joe Ozaki stood in front of him, materializing from nowhere Jack Liffey could make sense of. He was in his full black regalia and at parade rest.
“Have you read the book?”
“You going to give me a pop quiz on the Bushi? I’m not playing your game, Joe. I’m not. Be still and listen to me.”
There was a slight stir, as if the man were about to depart—how?—but in the end he remained in place.
“You were part of Phoenix, weren’t you? Or assigned to the long-range-reconnaissance patrols? Or PRU or ICEX, I knew those acronyms. We invented a lot of words for killing back then. Euphemisms. Dismantling the infrastructure. Neutralizing cadres. Reconnaissance by fire. Free fire zones. Zap. Smoke. Waste. Buckle. H & I. Frag. KIA. KBA. Bust a cap. Even ‘go double veteran.’ You ever do that?” It meant raping and then killing a Vietnamese woman, but he doubted that fell anywhere within Joe Ozaki’s code of conduct. His digs elicited no reaction.
“ ‘Extreme prejudice,’ that was a nice one. You knew better, though. You knew you were plain killing people, not ‘lighting them up.’ And now you’re doing your best to invent a whole narrative to help make sense of what this country turned you into. I feel for you, Joe, but I’m not going to play these games with you. But even if I’m not going to do it your way, I’m your friend, not your enemy, and I’m going to tell you why. You need to know this, so don’t just flit away on me like the Green Hornet.”
The motionless man seemed to be taking it in. Jack Liffey shivered a little in the cold, and he noticed that he could hear the susurrus of city traffic far better than he should have. He wondered if his senses were somehow being heightened by these encounters. The whole business was far more elemental than he was used to. Certainly his adrenaline was pumping. He was breathing, not well, but just managing, since it was still a near thing relying on a single lung. He imagined a nice sharp K-bar in a sheath on the man’s back.
“How could you even pretend I’m a worthy opponent? You’ve got the discipline and all the skills. All I ever did back in ‘Nam was sit and watch radar screens and argue about Notes from Underground or Wuthering Heights every night with guys just like me. In a blink, you could kill me with a butter knife, you could probably kill me six ways with a marshmallow. I know real samurai aren’t supposed to have friends, but you listen to me. You’ve made the whole city pay attention to you, now pay attention to me.
“You believe in honor, I understand that, even if the brand you admire has gone out of style. But all this stuff that’s driving you, the whole Bushido code—you can’t just choose it, like a style of dress. It’s part of a world that’s gone; it needs to have that world around it to exist. You can stand out in the tide all day long slashing away at the waves with a samurai sword, but it won’t make you a samurai. The world has turned its back on all that. Whether you like it or not, it’s dead as a dodo, and there are whole other sets of values now. Even in Japan.
“I know you don’t believe me. But before you get upset, answer me just one question: How does your code account for something as simple as human affection?”
Air stirred faintly in the room, and Jack Liffey wondered if it was some ancient Japanese spirit arriving to object to his arguments.
“Bushido just got too heavy, man. Its horns grew too long, its skin too thick, its brains got crowded into those tiny little skulls, and it went extinct. I’m offering a simple friendship that the code you’re living by doesn’t even recognize.”
It was amazing to Jack Liffey that the man remained there taking the harangue without a word. His eyes were fixed, and it was impossible to know if anything was getting through.
“This is the world we’ve got, for better or worse. We don’t have clan honor anymore. What we’re left with is personal honor. And the first rule of personal honor is never harm the innocent. The second rule is, when you’re overwhelmingly strong and somebody insults you, you walk away. There’s even a word for this in your code, isn’t there? Ahimsa. In fact, you’ve been following it, at least so far. Whatever my father did long ago, or his father, I’ve never hurt you, and I offer you my hand as a friend.”
Jack Liffey stood up and stuck out his hand ostentatiously, a little too palm-up for a handshake, but it felt better as a welcoming gesture. He watched Joe Ozaki’s eyes go to the hand.
“I’m sorry about what the army made you do, or the guys in suits. I don’t even like what I did, because I enabled those B-52s and their bomb runs. We can find a way to deal with that, I promise you, but not by relying on a system of dead values. You’re not exempt from the modern world, Mr. Ozaki. Here, my hand. Friendship goes a long long way in this world.” His arm was getting heavy, but he dare not seem to give up the offer.
“Please. You can always change your mind and kill me later.” He smiled, but it was precisely the wrong instant to smile.
Outside there was the abrupt sound of hard braking, several large vehicles arriving at once, and the unmistakable thud-thud of many heavily shod feet hitting the pavement.
“You brought the cops!”
“No, I swear—”
Joe Ozaki did an effortless backflip and passed out the rear window. For the first time, Jack Liffey realized that the French windows had been open and unscreened all this time. Several thoughts besieged him at once, and he realized that every one of Joe Ozaki’s seemingly preternatural skills had a logical explanation. Like this one—a backflip through an open window. And no wonder it’s so cold in here. And, of course, no wonder I could hear traffic noise distinctly. And how am I going to prove to him I haven’t betrayed him? Plus, how the hell did the cops find us?
Just as the chatter of a helicopter arrived overhead and a bright light flooded the room, an amplified voice filled the night: “Joe Ozaki, this is LA SWAT! Your house is surrounded! Throw down any weapons and come out!”
Another thought added itself to Jack Liffey’s litany: How the hell am I going to get out of here without half a dozen of these nervous Nellies shooting me to pieces?
Dec 23
“Sergeant, you’d better get with the program here. Now, today, 1430 hours.”
“Yes, sir. I still need to speak to Mike Osborn.”
“Mike Osborn is no longer assigned to debrief your PRU. Mike Osborn is history. Mike Osborn is a previous war. He is on the Big Bird home. General Abrams has taken direct military command of the entire ICEX operation from the civilians. You report to Colonel Freitag at district, and to me for Bangh Son Southeast.”
“Can I see this in writing, sir?”
“No, Sergeant. Tell me: How many VC cadre have you taken care of up to now?”
“I would not know, sir.”
“Assuming you were inclined to talk about it, how many would you estimate?”
“I would not know, sir.”
“I estimate more than 600 captured, interrogated, and neutralized by you and your PRU colleagues, and another 80 or so on your solo patrols. You enjoy the one-man operations, don’t you?”
“Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Late at night, with your face painted black, out there on your own at the edge of some gookville with a silenced Ingram or a K-bar or a simple length of strangle wire. Looking for Tommy Gook. What is the spirit of the K-bar, Sergeant?”
“To kill, sir.”
“What is the spirit of the Ingram?”
“To k
ill, sir.”
“Then why are you having trouble with this order?”
“Sergeant McGehee is an American citizen, sir. He is a fine Marine.”
“And I’m telling you he’s a security risk. He’s written secretly to a Democratic congressman and a reporter for the New York Times, and he’s keeping a detailed journal, not just of his own activities but also of yours and Osborn’s, and probably now mine. We’ve read his journal. In it, he speaks of U.S. v. Wilhelm von Leeb. Do you know what that is, Sergeant?”
“No, sir.”
“Wilhelm von Leeb was an ordinary Wehrmacht officer who was prosecuted in 1948 for war crimes, specifically for following his orders to assassinate civilian political commissars in the occupied Soviet Union. He protested those orders vehemently to Field Marshal Keitel, Sergeant Ozaki, but in the end he carried them out and he was prosecuted for it.”
“We should destroy this journal, sir.”
“We can no longer find it, and we cannot trust McGehee. You are to visit Sergeant McGehee this evening in his hooch at the DOOIC and neutralize him. You are to make it look like a VC raid. Is that understood, Sergeant?”
“Understood, sir.”
“Are you on board, Sergeant?”
“I am on board, sir.”
“Do you protest these orders, Sergeant?”
There was a long pause. “I am an American soldier, sir.”
“Very good, Sergeant.”
Eighteen
Crossing the Bridge
Declan Liffey was slathering on barbecue sauce, and wherever it dripped, the coals in the rusty old barbecue flared up. They were the fattest sausages Maeve had ever seen. Ornetta was sitting primly on a lawn chair, still being a good sport. They had gotten special dispensation to attend this cookout after Maeve had convinced Bancroft and Genesee that it was a momentous event in the history of the Liffey family. She had a hunch the old man would go the extra mile or two eventually, and she was going to give him the chance. Now, if only Ornetta stayed with the program.