by John Shannon
They all wore sweaters in the man’s tiny backyard—it was a typical winter afternoon, sunny and in the low sixties. The little koi pond was covered with plywood now, and a gaggle of seagulls circled overhead, squawking away, as if warning her off the whole idea, then heading back toward the harbor.
“Is that kielbasa?” Maeve asked.
“These are boerwors,” he said. “There’s only one place in LA you can get them. They’re from South Africa.”
Uh-oh, she thought. “Just curious: How come you went out of your way for South African sausages?”
“Why?” he considered, nodding. “Here’s why. They’re pretty good, that’s why. The South Africans call a barbecue a breifleis. Over the years I’ve met a number of South Africans. I didn’t like all of them. Originally these sausages were made by the white farmers, the Boers, but I think both blacks and whites eat them now.” He raised the grill off the heat so the sausages could take care of themselves for a while and moved over to where the girls were sitting. He swung a plastic chair around so he could sit facing Ornetta, who seemed a little startled. He was pretty spry for his age, and Maeve kept watching him, looking for similarities to her father. There was something about his short bark of a laugh, and the set of his mouth, that reminded her a lot of her dad. And there also was a kind of sorrow he seemed to carry deep inside that he seemed to have passed on.
“ Ornetta,” the old man said. She regarded him steadily, and it took him a moment to go on. “Maeve says you two are blood sisters.”
“That’s true.” She waited, and when he didn’t add anything, she told him a little about how they had met and how together they had rescued Maeve’s father from the Abdullah Ibrahim Riot two years earlier.
He nodded. What he hadn’t read in the papers Maeve had told him already. “I’m a very old dog, Miss Ornetta, with some very old spots. A lot of my spots run deep on the inside, but they should never ever be allowed to hurt decent individual people. It’s difficult for an old man like me to know how some of his ways and his wherefores appear from outside.”
For some reason, Maeve didn’t quite believe in his sincerity. He still made her uneasy, and she guessed this was all for her benefit. But it was what she’d asked for.
Ornetta continued to stare gravely at Declan Liffey without saying anything, waiting to see where he was going.
“While I cook, would you please tell me another story? Maybe this one can have an ending.”
Both the girls seemed surprised, and Maeve remembered how Ornetta had left him hanging last time, when it came to whether the grouchy old bear was going to humiliate himself to appease the monkeys.
“Most of my stories got endings.” While Ornetta seemed to consider his request, Maeve went to the kitchen to work on the potato salad according to the instructions she’d copied out of her beat-up old Joy of Cooking. She swung the French windows wide open so she could keep one ear on this strange peace conference—if, indeed, that’s what it was.
A ship in the harbor booped deeply as it came along the channel, which seemed to give Ornetta a prod.
“Okay. Here’s the story of the tortoise and the bear. The tortoise was renowned far and wide as one of the wisest of all the animals. Remember, he beat the hare in that big race? That time he showed how wise he was by sticking to his business. Well, now, Mr. Tortoise, he wanted to become even wiser, so he got him a calabash and started gathering up wisdom wherever he went and tucking it in there. He figured if he kept at it long enough he could soon collect all the wisdom in the world.
“When that calabash was nearly full to bursting, he figured he had collected just about all the wisdom that was going, and he came home and decided to climb the tree behind his house and hang the calabash up there for safekeeping. But every time he tried to climb that tree, holding the calabash in his hand, he’d slip on the tree bark and fall down. Tortoises aren’t much good at climbing trees—even with all four hands and feet—but with just three, he couldn’t grab on at all.”
Declan Liffey went back to tending his sausages, lowering the grill, and Maeve called out the window, “Tortoises don’t ever climb trees.”
“Hush, sister. So just then, when Mr. Tortoise was trying to climb his tree, Mr. Bear came along and stood watching him. He was a funny ol’ bear, with a big, pink, shaved-off rump, but Mr. Tortoise didn’t ask about that. Mr. Bear say, ‘Hey, Mr. Tortoise, why don’t you put a leather strap through that calabash and hang it around your neck so you can climb that tree?’
“ ‘Damn, you’re pretty smart,’ say the tortoise. So he goes and does what Mr. Bear says. He puts on the strap and hangs the calabash over his back, and he climbs right up the tree to a nice, strong limb where he can safely hang his calabash, heavy with the world’s wisdom.
“But just as he’s about to hang it up there, Mr. Tortoise realizes something. He realizes he doesn’t have all the wisdom in the world in that calabash after all. He must have missed some, because it was that old bare-fanny bear who told him how to put on the strap and climb the tree. So the tortoise came back down, full of sorrow, and he broke open that calabash on a rock and let all the wisdom back out into the world.
“ ‘Man,’ he say, ‘ain’t no point getting just some of the wisdom. Best to let all God’s creatures use it, too.’ ”
Declan Liffey was turning the sausages as she finished the tale. Maeve had noticed him earlier, smiling privately at the bear’s ‘shaved-off rump.’ Now he was wearing a thoughtful expression, and Maeve hurried out with her bowl of potato salad.
As she arrived, Declan Liffey looked up at her with an unreadable expression. “Thank you, Ornetta. Time to eat, girls,” he said.
“Okay, Jack, you can stand up.”
He’d been lying facedown in the backyard in front of Ozaki’s converted garage with his arms spread out, just as the bullhorn had ordered. There was so much artificial light pouring down on him he was afraid it would leave him with a sunburn.
“Thanks a bunch, Ken.” He’d recognized the voice. SWAT seemed to be giving up on Ozaki for now and was apparently turning tactical control back to Steelyard. The high-intensity lights went off, one by one, and the helicopters’ hammering sounds dwindled away as the beasts quit their last wide circles and flew off. Jack Liffey boosted himself onto the concrete porch of the bungalow.
“Nice speech,” Ken Steelyard offered.
“What?”
Steelyard showed him a small Nagra tape recorder, about the size of a sandwich, like something he’d seen on documentary film shoots. He punched the playback. “.… 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.…” He shut it off.
“Where was the mike?”
“Just an ordinary phone tap. We could turn the line on any time we wanted to pick up the room ambience. It wasn’t just you who figured he came back to this place now and again. We may not be quite as lame as you think.”
Gloria Ramirez was there, too, behind Steelyard. She looked a bit shamefaced. She made what might have been a kind of private apology to him, with a nod and a brief grimace, and he let it ride.
“Wish you’d’ve let us know you’d been meeting him,” Steelyard said. He didn’t look friendly. “In some people’s eyes that could make you an accomplice after the fact. Abetting a fugitive.”
Jack Liffey set his hands beside him on the stoop but seemed to have lost all strength. Ken Steelyard gave him a hand to help him to his feet. “He hasn’t hurt anybody yet,” Jack Liffey said. “I was hoping I could head him off before he does, but you’ve spooked him now.”
“I’m not too keen on your definition of ‘hurt,’ Jack. He’s done a lot of lasting, very destructive damage. Not the least of which was to my train layout! Do you know where he’s actually living?”
Jack
Liffey shook his head. He looked around and was shocked when he saw in the crowd gathering on the street beyond the end of the Ozaki driveway, his own father, plus Maeve and Ornetta. “Excuse me a moment.”
He walked up the driveway to them, ducking under the yellow crime-scene tape. “What the hell are you all doing here?”
“We were having a barbecue two blocks away, and we heard the commotion,” Maeve said. “What are you doing here?”
It took him a moment to digest that, and he glanced at his father.
“It’s okay, son,” Declan Liffey said. “We’re all fine. The girls are safe.”
“This is too much to take at one sitting,” Jack Liffey said. “Are we all pals now?”
“Something like that,” Maeve said. “At least, we’re doing our best.”
Everybody was keeping secrets, he thought, and all with the best of intentions. “Take care of them, Dad. I hold you responsible.”
“Haven’t you always?”
Their eyes met, but that was as far as reconciliation was going to go that night.
Gloria Ramirez walked up to them now and hugged the girls herself. Then she put her hand on Jack Liffey’s shoulder. “Ken wants you.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll make sure a car takes them home,” she said.
They walked back up the driveway side by side. “And how are you?” Jack Liffey asked her.
“Confused. Emotionally.”
“I hope so. I miss you.”
Then Ken Steelyard descended on them. “Jack, we think the guy’s on the island. We talked to an FBI profiler. He thinks the guy has a sentimental bent, of a peculiarly male sort, anyway. What that means is it’s likely he’d build himself a nest somewhere near the old Jap village.”
“Japanese,” Gloria corrected. Steelyard was oblivious.
“That’s going to be hard to do,” Jack Liffey said. “We were over there. Where the town was is just a bunch of decrepit canneries, all locked up now, and big, empty lots full of junk.
Steelyard shrugged. “I think he’s over there.”
Jack Liffey thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“That’s in our favor, because it means the only ways on or off are the Vincent Thomas Bridge from San Pedro, the Henry Ford from Wilmington, and the Gerald Desmond from Long Beach. You’ve got to drive, or you stand out a mile. There just aren’t any pedestrians on those bridges.”
“Ken, there are other ways.”
“Okay,” Steelyard allowed. “He can swim the channel, like one of the harbor seals, but that’s pretty conspicuous. And anybody in that water better have a good skin doctor.”
“There’re little boats, which he could stash anywhere,” Jack Liffey said. “And there’re other ways still.”
“Like what?”
“Think Recon Marine, Ken. No, think Green Beret. He has a way to get there and back unseen, believe me. He probably has two ways. He’s good, so let’s not underrate him. He got past your alarms.”
“Get in the car. We’re going to have a look.”
The SWAT cops were lovingly repacking all their state-of-the-art equipment into the niches of their black van. They were the American metaphor, Jack Liffey thought: overequipped and under-brained. But, all in all, he figured America didn’t really need a metaphor. Jack Liffey got in the backseat of the big beige Crown Vic with Steelyard driving and Gloria Ramirez in the seat he and his school friends had called shotgun.
“We could probably be even more conspicuous in that SWAT truck, if you wanted,” Jack Liffey said.
“This is what we get,” Steelyard said. “When they issue beat-up Toyotas for camouflage, I’ll ask for one.”
They headed up Harbor and then over the Vincent Thomas Bridge toward Terminal Island. “I take it you want to use me as some kind of bait.”
“That’s the general idea,” Steelyard admitted. “You seem to have developed a rapport with the guy.”
“I tried, but I don’t know if it got very far. I don’t know if the modern samurai allows himself rapport.”
“What’s being a samurai mean practically?”
Jack Liffey shrugged. “Honor is paramount. Following a lot of prescribed rules that dictate what warriors do and don’t do. But really … I only have a few clues what it all means to him.”
He stared back at the big green suspension bridge as they came down into the industrial wastes of the island. He couldn’t help himself: “In the movie Heat, Robert De Niro calls it the St. Vincent Thomas Bridge.”
Steelyard chuckled. “Old Vince, the long-serving congressman, would like that, wherever he’s buried.”
Ahead of them were the onion domes of the sewage treatment plant. Beyond them lay a vast network of conduits running overhead, containing conveyor belts for moving petroleum coke. This system carried the powdery stuff, even finer than coal dust, from the black mountains down by the railhead out to the farthest shipping docks of Pier 200, which had just been built far out into the harbor on new landfill. The town had been promised that the coke deposits would all be covered over, but they never had been, except for the conveyor belts themselves. When the wind was right, a fine grit blew off the black mountains at the railhead to lay a film over every flat surface in San Pedro, from the channel to the Palos Verdes Hills.
They took a hard right off the bridge and then drove into a warren of streets through old industrial buildings, brick and corrugated iron and Art Deco stucco. Fenced lots held rusting railcar wheels and abandoned boxcar-size containers, snowlike piles of the big Styrofoam coolers they packed fish in, and locomotive-size hulks of abandoned machinery that could have been anything. He was reminded of Steinbeck’s description of Cannery Row in the early 1940s.
Most of the fenced lots had fiercely bright antitheft lights on high stanchions, to suffuse the area with that eerie perpetual day—or perpetual evening—that you found in Las Vegas. The car eventually came to a big square basin of gray oil-slicked water where out-of-town fishing boats were docked, some of them Japanese long-liners and others from all over the west coast. Steelyard stopped at the edge of the basin, which was maybe a quarter mile across, and they could see more of the same all around the bay—more dead warehouses and abandoned canneries. Seagulls squawked as they circled, and a big pelican or two perched on the pilings, as if posing for tourists. But there were no tourists.
“It would take an army to search this mess,” Gloria said.
“We have some advantages,” Jack Liffey said. “He’s alone out here at night, and the place is lit up like a football field.”
“There’s plenty of dark spaces between the goalposts,” Ken Steelyard said.
“We have another advantage,” Gloria pointed out. “There’s only one minimart and cafe on the island, right back there.”
“You going to stake me out like a goat in front of the cafe and wait for him to come for me?” Jack Liffey asked.
“That’s an idea,” Ken Steelyard said.
It turned out that they did pretty much that: they sent him into the Harbor Lights with an old photo of Joe Ozaki. It had been blown up from a news shot and he was in a business suit, but it was a pretty good likeness. Coincidentally, the counterman at the cafe was a tall Japanese American, too. The place had a small deli section full of junk foods and a few staples, and an eating area of battered tables.
“Hi; I’m looking for one of your customers.” Jack Liffey showed the counterman the photo. “Joe and I bought a lottery ticket together, and I owe him half the winnings.”
The man glanced suspiciously at the photo and shook his head. “Don’t know him.”
This seemed highly unlikely, as it was the only place to obtain food on the entire island.
“If he comes in, tell him Jack has his money.”
He showed the photo to a few workmen eating at the tables, but they just shook their heads no. One shrugged and said something negative in Spanish. Then Jack Liffey bought two packets of fiery hot peanuts
and went back out to distribute them to the cops.
“Next time send me in with a neon vest. That would make sure they remember me.”
“They’ll remember you. You don’t look much like a fisherman or anyone else with an excuse to be over here this evening. Oh, my God, my mouth’s on fire.” Steelyard spit his jalapeño peanuts out the window and hurled the cellophane tube after, but Gloria Ramirez chewed up hers happily.
“I think I know one of the ways he’s coming across to the island,” Jack Liffey offered mildly.
“How?”
“I kept my eyes open. Drive back that way.”
Steelyard did as asked, making several turns in the tangled industrial wasteland and one false attempt down a dead end, where he had to back out. He parked under one of the first big abutments of the suspension bridge. Jack Liffey pointed up. A ladder ran up the concrete abutment, with a safety hoop around it, the ladder leading to an open catwalk. It would be a serious maneuver to shinny around the shoulder of the concrete pier where there was no walkway, but then it would be child’s play to step-slide along the giant I-girders under the roadway to the next abutment. The lowest rung of the access ladder was thirty feet off the ground, but that wouldn’t prove much of a hindrance for their ninja. He’d have a ladder somewhere, or a grappling rope.
“Damn,” Steelyard said. “How long do you think it would take him to cross the whole bridge underneath?”
“An hour? Forty minutes? He’d be virtually invisible up in the superstructure.”
Steelyard sniffed. “So much for the guys blocking the bridges and the three guys with the image-stabilized binoculars I’ve got watching the channel for suspicious-looking harbor seals.”
“You’re mobilizing an awful lot of resources for this poor guy. Maybe we should just let him burn himself out. What do you think?” He glanced at Gloria. He was trying not to think of how sexy she looked undressed.
“They can’t back down now. It’s the cop code,” she explained. “Why do you think there’s a real car chase on TV three times a week in LA?”
“He sent me another card, Jack,” Steelyard said. “Didn’t I tell you? The queen of that goddamn suit, and his note said I’d already had my game and lost. He told me to be a good sport and quit now or he’d have to neutralize me. Remember that word? This card was stuck to my headboard with an unfired five-fifty-six-millimeter cartridge he’d hammered into it somehow. That means he’s got an M-16 or something like it.”