by John Shannon
“A couple weeks later I followed him again. The same big stainless-steel truck. This time he went up on an old stretch of the Ridge Route that’s still there beside 1-5 past Castaic. He did the same thing, just motored slowly along with the pipes gushing. I could see the spray in the moonlight. I don’t know how long they’ve been doing this, but I sure wouldn’t get out and walk around on any old back roads in Southern California, I’ll tell you that.”
“Do you remember where you were when you were gassed?”
“Sure. I was walking between A-six and A-seven, they’re two low corrugated metal buildings just outside the toxic area. You could stretch out both arms and touch the walls and it was a dead air trap under the eaves, but I don’t know any storage tanks there. It was a shortcut I used most nights.”
“And when did you get interested in Bhopal?”
“Well, I remember the smell that knocked me on my ass. It was like chili powder thrown in the air and then being walloped with an old gym sock. I’ve never smelled anything like it. The first day in here, I watched them draw my blood and it was the color of cherry Kool-Aid. It jogged my memory. I remembered descriptions like that from Time magazine or somewhere.”
“Were you right?”
“I don’t know. I’m an engineer, not a chemist. The gas at Bhopal was methyl isocyanate, but they think it reacted with water and gave off lots of products and the real damage to people might have been done by cyanide. What I experienced could have been cyanide. You going to help me find out?”
“Are you planning to go back to work there?”
“Next week, if they let me out.”
“I think your gassing was deliberate. Somebody probably found out you followed the truck and laid a trap for you.”
“The possibility crossed my mind. All the more reason to nail it down. Hey, Mr. Spade, my life hasn’t been worth very much up to now. This gives me something to do.”
“Woooo.” The old man gasped and expelled a long breath as if deflating. Milo Mardesich frowned and turned to look at him and Jack Liffey realized Milo had been aware of the long intimate sonata, too. “What the hell’s wrong with this place?”
“It’s full of sick people,” Jack Liffey said.
12
STAYING ABSOLUTELY EVEN
THIS WASN’T AT ALL WHAT THE BOY HAD EXPECTED. SCORES of unfriendly eyes along the curbs and against the walls followed their progress. Jack Liffey motored slowly down Fifth past Wall Street and then San Pedro Street, well into the heart of the Nickel, L.A.’s Skid Row, and Jimmy Mardesich said nothing. Wind cut around the homeless missions and abandoned warehouses and plucked eddies of paper trash up off the streets into little white whirlwinds. They passed what had come to be called Indian Alley, where homeless Native Americans were encamped in hogans of cardboard and blue plastic tarps, and then they reemerged into the larger tribes of the African-Americans and Latinos. Curiously, the few Anglos they could see were all women. One brown-skinned man with half his face blasted away by some disease reached out ominously for the car.
“Not quite here, I think,” Jack Liffey said.
Jimmy Mardesich was too stunned to reply. For some reason even the physical environment was eroded away down here, the fire hydrants losing their last paint and the curbs rounded and chipped away, as if a great burden of something corrosive had hung over the streets and rasped regularly back and forth on tides driven by the last faint currents of the sea breezes that made it fifteen miles inland. The sharp-edged skyscrapers of the bankers’ downtown were only six or seven blocks west but they fussed away in their own universe, barricaded into safety by security guards and every wile of street-level grille and blank marble facade the architects could devise. Discreet urban fortressing had become an L.A. specialty, tens of millions of dollars invested in keeping these few thousand lost souls at bay.
The car drifted past a half-dozen black men who sloped along the sidewalk with walkers and wheelchairs like a shoal of the wounded.
“These are real people,” Jack Liffey said. “They are not mere circumstances of your spiritual education.”
“I understand that. I hope I do.”
They passed people squatting to eat beside cardboard encampments, tearing hunks of bread off a hard loaf. A young man hurried along wearing one red tennis shoe and one black loafer, pushing an empty hospital gurney. A dwarf stared back angrily at the car and gave them the finger. A woman clung to a man from behind and reached over his shoulder, shouting and trying to grab something from him, but no one was inclined to come to her aid. He drove on.
“Maybe here,” the boy said.
It was the Grace Mission. A sign on the side wall said SLEEPING ZONE and had arrows pointing every which way. The street seemed less chaotic, and a short line of men waited at the door.
“Do you have some money?”
“Enough for a while I think.”
“Do you really think this is the way to share their experience? I don’t think you’re equipped.”
The boy seemed to summon his equanimity back from some deep reservoir. “They don’t have any choice. I have to try.”
HE caught up with Mike Lewis at the channel end of Fish Harbor in San Pedro, where he was dangling his short legs over the gunwales of a ratty old shrimper named The Great Regret that rode the swells off a container ship that was just beating its heavy way out the channel. Lewis was an L.A. social historian, with a specialty in where the bodies were buried. He’d had a vogue for a time after a book of his had unburied a few choice local bodies, but then had fallen out of the public eye and ended up teaching a few courses here and there at small art colleges where the deans weren’t particularly sensitive.
“Nice car, Jack,” Mike Lewis said.
“I’m running a scientific experiment on the strength of sheet plastic.”
“Nice hair, too.”
“That’s a longer story.”
Mike Lewis did something businesslike with the valve of his scuba gear and set it aside just as a weathered old sailor came on deck from below. His skin looked pocked and unhealthy and he grinned at Mike.
“Jack Liffey. Dusko Marrot.”
“Hey.”
The container ship hooted as it rounded the end of Terminal Island, and the old man sat nimbly on a hatch. He dug out a Popeye corncob pipe and lit it as Jack Liffey stumbled aboard with his landlubbers’ legs.
“How does Mike get you to take him out diving?”
The old man thought about it awhile, scratching his leathery neck. “He save my boy’s bacon,” he said finally.
Another Mike Lewis story, Jack Liffey thought. There were a lot of them, and he didn’t really have room for any more. The last time around someone had told him how Mike had been desperate to find out which bureaucrat the L.A. School Board was grilling in closed session over a leak about one of the many district breakup schemes that percolated up out of the whiter reaches of the Valley. So Mike had phoned in a bomb threat and then videotaped everyone scurrying out of the big gray building above Grand Street.
“So I will do the world for him.” The old sailor subsided, and they all seemed to endorse his reticence, though probably for different reasons. Mike Lewis never talked about what it was he expected to find down in the channel bed between Catalina and the shore, but whatever it was, it was probably there.
A sudden breeze swept across the boat and caught his car where he’d parked behind a mountain of seine netting, and they watched the plastic on his windows flash and ripple in the sun.
“Dusko used to be a Yugoslav,” Mike Lewis said. “Then he was a Serb for a while, until he got fed up with what they were doing.”
The old man puffed a bit, a kind of European huff of contempt, like steam leaking from a pot. “Not just in Bosnia neither,” he said. “Right here in town, too. Throwing pipe bombs and calling names, ’You fascist Eustache Croat bastard.’ ‘You commie Serb baby-killer bastard.’ Guys been friends for forty years, they eat at Ante’s every Tuesday, their kids
play football at San Pedro High together, it’s all so moron. It makes you want to bring Tito back. For a little peace, I would even drive a Yugo.”
“Don’t go overboard.”
Jack Liffey wondered how Milo Mardesich fit into the Balkan feuds. It was a Yugoslav name of some variety, but he seemed so far removed from it all, with his engineering degree and his home up in the mongrel suburban vastness of the Valley. He tried to imagine his own Irish heritage catching him up in the same way, reduced to feuding with some Scots-Irish Presbyterian in his condo complex over what was going on in Northern Ireland, but it was too ridiculous. It would be like fighting over TV shows or the size of the cuffs on your pants.
“I sponsor a petition. We got the Jugoslavian Club in town, you know, with the J, and I know we can’t use that name no more and I say, ‘Let’s make it the Dalmatian Club, we all from the Dalmatian Peninsula,’ but then Disney make the damn movie and we all suddenly damn spotted dogs.”
Mike Lewis laughed. “What are you now? Adriatics?”
“I’m a southern Slav, but I don’t know. It’s all too moron.”
“This guy might not be all that magnanimous,” Mike Lewis explained. “Most of the other ‘southern Slavs’ in town here are Croats, from the fishing coast around Zadar and Pag, and he’s an inland Serb and distinctly in the minority.”
Dusko Marrot waved the pipe and hissed contemptuously. “This hatred goes across the ocean by magic waves. It’s in the air. It sneaks into brains like virus and these little bitty brains swell up like a blister. Somebody say one word, ‘blubba-blubba,’ and the blister burst open, and the virus fly out and look for enemies.”
“That’s two words, blubba-blubba,” Mike Lewis corrected.
The man shrugged. He seemed to have talked himself out on the disturbing topic for the moment.
“Corruption’s two words, too,” Jack Liffey said. “Cor. Ruption.”
Mike Lewis frowned and turned toward him, and Jack Liffey could see him coming into focus. It was the kind of word that did that to him. Mike Lewis smiled a kind of feral smile. “You look like a man with a question.”
“That’s me,” Jack Liffey said. “Men with questions form a distinct fraternity in this town.”
“And all the others are heavy drinkers.” He knew Jack Liffey was on the wagon. He produced a bottle of single-malt scotch and shared it with the boatman. “I won’t offer.”
“It doesn’t burden me. I need to know about the toxic-waste business, or about GreenWorld Chemical out in Burbank.”
The boatman put down his pipe and took a packet of Twinkies out of his canvas jacket. He stripped off the cellophane and poured scotch fussily onto one of the Twinkies, dribbling it slowly from end to end so the spongy cake had soaked up as much as it could hold. Then he began to eat the Twinkie with satisfaction.
“GreenWorld. Formerly a subsidiary of ACI, the third largest chemical corporation in the world, part owner of the state of New Jersey. But I think I know what you’re really after. Remember when napalm became unpopular, and Dow spun off their subsidiary that made it? When DDT became illegal, Du Pont shipped the production facility to a maquilladora just south of the Mexican border and then cut it loose. Manville waited too long to get out of asbestos and they damn near went under with the lawsuits. Spin off the bad stuff, send it to the third world, let the Thais eat rat poison—it was the corporate game of the eighties.”
“What was GreenWorld’s poison?”
Mike Lewis laughed and took a big swig off the bottle. “Their poison was poison. They began with reclaimed motor oil and picking up old photographic chemicals to dredge out the precious metals and they got into storing really bad industrial waste, taking it off the hands of other corporations. Then ACI pioneered ways to neutralize PCBs and dioxins and nerve gases by burning them at very high temperatures, preferably in big incinerators in the working-class end of your city. With all the Superfund money around, it was a growth industry for a while.”
“I thought they stopped those incinerators.”
“Most places did. I worked on the campaign to stop Lancer in Watts. This is a mighty litigious country, and when the poison game started getting more risky than profitable, ACI cut their industrial waste group loose with a pat on the back. Actually they spun it off to a group of VPs and some venture capitalists who liked the gamble. They had the common touch, some of these new owners. There was a lot of corporate bonding with some shady types, I hear.”
The old sailor started flavoring his second Twinkie. When he had it well soaked, he offered Mike Lewis a bite, but Mike shook his head and took his straight out of the bottle instead.
“Sicilians used to be big in reclaimed motor oil,” Jack Liffey said.
“Or what passed for Sicilians out here in the west. Guys like Mickey Cohen. These guys like any kind of gig where you can cut corners and muscle a lot of little guys.”
“How’s this for cutting corners? Somebody pays you a pretty penny to haul off their toxic waste and neutralize it and you just dump it down the drain.”
Mike Lewis shook his head. “They monitor the drains. EPA, city agencies, the state.”
“It’s a metaphor, Mike. You put it in a truck and dump it at night on a desert road where nobody much ever goes.” That got his attention all right.
“That’s not a metaphor. That’s a felony.”
Inexplicably the old sailor had started to cry. He stared at half a Twinkie in his hand and wept silently, tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Oh, Holy Moses,” Mike Lewis said.
At first Jack Liffey thought he was reacting to the old sailor’s tears and then he noticed Mike was looking down at the water, bending forward, his eyes open wide.
“I thought it was just a tire.”
The other two joined him at the gunwale and they all stared overboard at an oil sheen ruffled by the wind, and then faintly, beneath the surface, a darker shape turning slowly in the current that tugged past the mouth of Fish Harbor.
“Waterlogged,” the old sailor said.
When the shape of the long neck became unmistakable, they could see that it was a Thoroughbred horse, drifting just beneath the surface, though all the legs had been chopped off at the knee. Or eaten off, Jack Liffey thought.
“Not good,” the old sailor decided, and wept some more.
AT the end of the dock there were three pay telephones in their little phone-company plastic bubbles. One phone was missing its handset, the second took only credit cards, and the third had its coin slot jammed with bubble gum that had hardened to concrete. He trudged back to the boat.
“Mike, let me borrow your cellular.”
“What makes you think I’ve got a cellular?”
“Same thing makes me think you don’t take ginseng supplements.”
“Okay.” He dug in his gym bag and something clumsy in the motion made him look younger, more vulnerable, but it might just have been the sickly sea light on his pale skin.
On an intuition, Jack Liffey asked, “How’s Siobhan?”
Mike Lewis gave a little shrug as he tossed the phone casually over to him. “She went back to Ireland.”
“See her family?”
“For good.”
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, Mike.” Siobhan and his own wife had been best friends. Mike Lewis didn’t look very happy about it.
“I hope it works out for you.”
“I’m learning to like losing. It has fewer responsibilities.” He saluted with a hoist of the scotch bottle. “A dark disenchantment prevails for now.”
Jack Liffey wanted to step back aboard and give his shoulder a squeeze or punch him lightly, but it would have been too awkward. “I hate it,” Jack Liffey said. “Life won’t leave you alone.”
“Nothing scares me anymore,” Mike Lewis said. “I’ve got that.”
Jack Liffey walked a ways up the dock before calling Art Castro’s office. He recognized the secretary’s voice. She was the one with the big eyebrows who was a
lways eyeing your shoes and wristwatch, something they taught in receptionist school to sort out the losers and make them wait. Art Castro worked for a high-class detective agency and they didn’t do a lot of work for losers.
“This is his old buddy Jack Liffey, so you can tell me where he is.”
He heard a dull electric hiss for a bit.
“You remember me, Timex and Sears loafers.”
“Oh, I remember you.” Still more phone hiss.
“Art told me if I ever really needed to get through to him to tell you, ‘Murieron tres toreros el año pasado.’ ”
She corrected his pronunciation fussily but he could almost hear the disappointment in her voice. “I bet you don’t know what it means.”
“Three bullfighters turned in their lunch bucket last year.” They’d set up the password because Art was holding something important for him, some evidence he would probably never need, but if he did, he’d need it in a hurry.
“He’s up in Hanson Dam on a stakeout. He’ll be in the wild land up in the far north. That’s all I can tell you.”
“If I don’t make it out in a week, send the sled dogs.”
HE thought a moment and then dialed a second number.
He asked at the switchboard and finally got through.
“Quinn.”
“You don’t know me, but I have some information for you.”
“The hell I don’t know you. You’re that fuckhead Liffey.”
Jack Liffey waited a moment, but it didn’t change anything. “I’m that fuckhead Liffey who’s warning you that IA is after your ass. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
He hung up. He’d thought long and hard about this call and he could not quite come to grips with why he felt compelled to make it when he disliked Quinn so and would be perfectly happy to see someone pull him down. Bending over backward to give a hand to your worst enemy was a moral imperative of some sort—in his finicky conscience it seemed to have something to do with staying absolutely even in an ambiguous world.
13
BLOOD WILL TELL
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA MANAGED TO NORMALIZE ITS DISasters by making up scientific scales for them. The equivalent of the Richter scale for wet-season floods was based on anticipated frequency, and in the world of rushing water the Big One was a hundred-year flood. The massive earthen Hanson Dam was almost two miles long, meant to keep a hundred-year flood sweeping down out of the Tujunga Canyons from obliterating the whole northeast Valley. On the safe side of the dam there was a manicured golf course for the rich, but on the inner, danger side they’d left a couple thousand acres of wild chaparral, boulders, dirt parking lot, and the kind of rough parkland that the city offers up to its working poor.