The Orange Curtain

by John Shannon

  “It’s my calling.”

  The man checked his wristwatch and Jack Liffey noticed there were no numbers, it was something Swiss and expensive. “It’s three now. If you come to my house at five-thirty, I will give you a photograph of Phuong, and a list of her friends and jobs.” He handed Jack Liffey a card with his address.

  “Do you have any problems with me talking to the police?”

  “Suit yourself. You can ask for Frank Vo.” There was some unreadable emotion that pertained to this name too.

  The women nearby stirred and a gust of laughter swept around their table. One nodded in a way that might have been indicating him, but that was just too paranoid. They brought their soup bowls up to their faces to eat, and one seemed to be chewing betel. He noticed on the table a big fruit tied up in its own string bag, spiky and half again the size of a cantaloupe. “Is that a durian?”

  “It is indeed.”

  They were a fruit from Malaysia or somewhere like it. The flesh was very sweet but when you cut into it the smell was so putrid and so enduring that none of the hotels in Bangkok had let GIs bring one even into the lobby.

  “I never thought I’d see one again.”

  “It took a long time to import them. Nostalgia is becoming an epidemic in Little Saigon.”

  Late the previous evening, a dog being walked near Irvine Lake had nosed up two decomposing bodies. They were in various states of decay, and the county sheriff’s Crime Scene Supervisor gave a preliminary guess, behind the orange tapes and under the chugging porta-lights, that one was two weeks dead and the second was only about forty-eight hours. The badly decayed body was a male, and coyotes had eaten some of the soft parts of the other one, an elderly female who lay tucked under a lush green sumac bush the size of a small tree.

  The TV reporters spent a good half hour trying to goad the police into saying that there was a serial killer on the loose and then arguing over a newsworthy name for the killer. Something to do with Dahlia would have been great, or a Stalker or some other tabloid-worthy noun. Hillside Strangler had been used, and anyway these had apparently been shot, not strangled.

  TWO

  Incoming

  It was the haircuts that caught his eye. He parked up the road across from the high school where he had a good view of the four boys who sat on the window flower bed of a boarded-up storefront. Only Carp Carp Only, a sign said. He wondered if part of the sign was missing.

  The board-ups over the door and window had been plastered with posters that said Stop the Airport Ripoff! One public bankruptcy is enough! over and over. But it was the boys who interested him. They all wore floppy black shirts buttoned up to the neck and they all had the same checks cut into the sides of their severe flattops. The boy on the end seemed to be the one who had pushed past his chair at the noodle shop. Jack Liffey wasn’t certain but they seemed to be tearing the cello wraps off packets of ramen noodles, discarding the spice packs into the litter at their feet, and crunching into the noodles like Asian Fritos. One of the boys was flipping a coin and then walking it along his knuckles like George Raft.

  In the past he had found that by treating black and Latino gang kids with elaborate and bona fide respect, he usually got their grudged tolerance, but, in his experience, Asian toughs always seemed to have a little something extra to prove. He strolled up the road and sat on the wall beside the kid from the noodle shop.

  “Hello, gentlemen. I hope you don’t object to my sitting here with you for a minute or two.”

  Only the boy who was farthest away glanced at him but immediately looked away. If they had been speaking English before, they were into Vietnamese now, sing-songing gently and nonchalantly. There was a big carton of ramen in the flower bed, like something stolen off a truck, and the boy one over from him reached in for a packet which he tore into. The packet had very pink shrimp on it.

  “You look like the people who know what’s actually going down around here.”

  The boy shook the spice packet onto the ground and broke the big block of dried ramen in half with a crackle like stomping a plastic toy. He began chewing off bits of one of the halves. Jack Liffey looked away, watching an old Asian woman in canvas slippers walk up the other side of the street carrying a frayed paper bag in her arms. She reached a bus bench, but instead of sitting she squatted down at the end of the bench to wait.

  “I’m a stranger in these parts,” Jack Liffey offered. He hadn’t expected the humor to work and it didn’t. “But I guess you already figured that out.” The boys spoke a few lilting words to one another, then fell silent again. The silent treatment was probably supposed to worry him and make him nervous, but it didn’t. Sooner or later though he’d have to cut his losses.

  “You see, I’m looking for a missing Vietnamese girl and I thought you might be able to help me.”

  That stilled any fidgeting. Another boy tore into a ramen packet. Actually he found all the testosterone nonchalance rather touching, just boys really, trying to face down a world that probably seemed a lot more hostile to them than he’d ever know. On Tu Do Street he’d been the vulnerable outsider, guarding what he carried against a snatch, but here they were the prey to a big busy Anglo world that by and large probably didn’t give a damn what happened to their self-respect.

  The boy next to him finally turned and met his eyes. “Diddy mao, big cunt.”

  He knew the Vietnamese words, though he did not know their literal meaning. Anyone who’d been in Saigon for long had heard the GIs telling the peskiest of the pimps and touts to fuck off in no uncertain terms. He imagined if Gandhi had stayed long enough in that corrupting environment, even he might have broken down and used the expression. Right now, coming from a boy who was seven or eight inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than him, it made him want to laugh, but he didn’t.

  “Minh Trac asked me to find his daughter,” he said equably. “Phuong. Am I pronouncing her name right?”

  The boy looked away again. They seemed to be inhibited by his presence now and didn’t even speak to one another. People were accumulating at the bus stop, including a Latino in an electric wheelchair who kept gunning it a few inches forward and back.

  Far away a police siren whoop-whooped and an armada of seagulls came over low. Finally the bus showed up. He’d never actually watched a kneeling bus do its trick. The front hissed downward as if the whole vehicle were deflating so the wheelchair could roll straight on. Then it pumped itself back up and drove off. The old woman was still squatting at the end of the bench as if waiting for a better bus.

  “My mistake, gentlemen. I thought you might know what’s going on around town.” He got up and started away.

  “Hey, mister.”

  It was the boy from the noodle shop. Jack Liffey waited while some war went on in the boy’s psyche.

  “We like Phuong. Most college girl stuck up, treat us like shit. They walk past with hard feet, bam bam bam, you boys all bums. Not Phuong.”

  His English was not very good for some reason and Jack Liffey guessed he’d come over fairly recently from one of the camps, probably even born in the camps. Maybe that was the only real social distinction between these boys and the computer wizards getting their straight-As at Berkeley.

  “See this watch, real Rolex, not knockoff. I know where to get it at good price. Phuong show me last year. What you want to know?”

  “My name’s Jack Liffey,” he said, and he sat back down. “Phuong has been gone for a week. Do you know where she might be?”

  “She work for Frankie the Man. Big Chinaman from Saigon, Frankie Fen, big bossman, he build malls. You ask him.”

  “What’s your name?” he asked the boy.

  “Loc.”

  “Where would I find these people?”

  Loc offered him a ramen pack, and he took it and turned it over in his hands. It was shrimp flavored all right. He decided to give it a try.

  “He got office on Bolsa, next to Asian Garden. Some people like Frankie, some hate.”<
br />
  “Do you like him?”

  “You can’t never trust Chinese. They learn to cheat when they baby. Sell you old stuff no good. Plenty crap, and tricky, too.”

  Racism everywhere, Jack Liffey thought sadly. But it was no time to be insisting on moral lessons. He tore off the wrap and bit a corner of the hard block of noodles. It was remarkably like eating a plastic toy. He pretended to like it.

  “I like your haircut. It looks great,” Jack Liffey said.

  When he looked up, he saw they were in no mood for compliments; their eyes were elsewhere. A lowered and blacked out Honda Prelude was coming up the street slowly and it was worrying the boys. The windows, the chrome, even the wheels, were blackened, so the car looked like a little rolling nugget of death.

  “Where could I get a haircut like that?”

  He felt the movement before he saw anything. Loc was up and fleeing down an alley as fast as he could run. The others were going in three different directions. Then he heard the horrible nearby rat-a-tat of automatic weapons fire. His head snapped around in time to see the Prelude drift past, one window rolled down and a boy in a black balaclava holding a little Ingram spray gun skyward, his grin a disembodied Cheshire cat in the darkness within the car. He pointed the gun at Jack Liffey.

  “Bang-bang-bang!” the Cheshire grin shrieked, and then the car accelerated away and Jack Liffey was alone on Golden West Street, a profound chill spreading up his back. He hadn’t even budged. He’d never been close enough to the war, stuck at his radar screens in his air-conditioned trailer off in the forests of Thailand, to get the right instincts.

  “Incoming,” he said softly to himself.

  Billy Gudger parked his 1962 Beetle right under the big red neon hand. He liked the 1962 because it was the last one with the 1200 engine. It wasn’t that it was any more durable—all air-cooled engines were designed to wear out through heat erosion and be rebuilt often, a kind of grudged tribute to entropy—but the 1200 was still the cheapest to rebuild. Sonya Gudger, it said inside the neon hand. Palmistry, Bibliomancy, Tarot. Genuine Rom wisdom. Se habla Espagnol.

  There was an old Buick in front so he went in the back door and sure enough, the heavy curtain was across the foyer and she had a sucker in there. He hesitated by the curtain to listen.

  “…Right here on the mount of Venus, see that grid of lines. It means you’ve walled off your heart and caged it up because you aren’t sure you can trust someone in a close relationship.” There was a gasp and a little hiss of emotion. “Here, too, you can see how your little finger ends before the top joint of the next finger. That means you’re not comfortable sharing your emotions. But you’re very lucky. See this cross, right under the Jupiter finger. It means you’ll definitely find a happy marriage in this lifetime.”

  “When I going to find him? Goddam tired all the wait and all the shmucks.”

  “I can’t say exactly, but let’s look at your lifeline again. It’s an indication of the force of your enthusiasm for life.” She dropped into her don’t-trust-quacks speech and Billy withdrew and went on into the kitchen and shut the door softly. If anyone ever tells you the lifeline indicates an exact number of years that you have to live, his mother was about to explain, you mustn’t trust them at all, he’s a quack. You always need three indications, and, in fact, the actual length of your life is a bargain between your life force and the world force, and no one can work that out for you in advance. But what I can tell you…

  He got down the big six-quart pot to begin boiling the macaroni. It was her favorite, ordered up to compensate for some transgression he’d committed at lunch that he couldn’t remember, and it was a little too rich even for him. Two pounds of extra sharp cheddar shredded into the macaroni and followed with fried chunks of spicy pork sausage, canned onion rings and bac-o-bits. It gave him heartburn just to think of it but she insisted on having it at least once a week.

  The pot was just coming to a rolling boil when he heard the front door slam and Sonja hobbled into the kitchen on her four-footed cane.

  “You doing macaroni and sausage?”

  “Uh-huh. Good customer?”

  She opened the cupboard and got down her bottle of cheap Gallo cream sherry. “Enh,” she said dismissively. “Not much of a tip. A brown person of mixed background. She didn’t really appreciate the real thing. She’d rather have one of those charlatans waving a chicken bone and telling her how very special she is.”

  She sat heavily at the Formica table with its little flying kidney shapes and poured a generous juice glass of sherry. “It’s just more of your curse,” she went on. “Marigold was right, I should have strangled you at birth and saved us all a lot of trouble.”

  Marigold had been his grandmother, who had claimed to be the seventeenth in a line of great seers, stretching back to the legendary Rom homeland in the Punjab. It might have been true. All the names were written out on the front page of a tattered old Latin Bible that Sonja Gudger used for counting letters and chapters and finding hidden meanings.

  “Good luck for you, because of that damn toadstone in your head, and bad luck for everyone around you.”

  He smiled warmly. It made him happy whenever she mentioned the toadstone and praised him like that. “I had a good day at work,” he said. “They let me open up the cassettes for the Betacam and put on the labels and number them. It was a whole box of ten, and if you get them wrong it’s a real mess later when you go to edit.”

  “I’ll bet you fucked it up.”

  “Then I took down numbers while they were shooting. They’re on the side of the camera, and you look real quick right after the director calls cut and you put the number in a log where it says ‘tail.’ It’s called the time code. You put a star on the best shots when the director tells you so he can find them again. It’s a very clever system.”

  “Put in some salt!” she shouted. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know salt drives the evil spirits out of the pasta?”

  A jewell containing a crapone or toade stone set in golde.

  —Nichols, Gifts to Queen Elizabeth (1558)

  Jack Liffey waited on a hard bench in the lobby facing a large blue digital clock, as policemen and various people with problems came and went. He’d never liked the way digital clocks measured time. Time was circular and gradual, a slow analog losing bargain with the universe. In fact, in his current mood, he didn’t much like the passing of time at all. The pace of things had begun to worry him a lot—his daughter growing up too fast and filling out a real brassiere, his life whisking by, all the tubes of toothpaste and boxes of Kleenex you were constantly buying, even the way the geraniums on his patio ran wild.

  A week earlier, driving to the supermarket, he had heard a smug voice on the radio news say something about how everything would be made right after death, and idly he had replied aloud, “Oh, no it won’t,” and his own words had filled him suddenly with a chill of winter. Oh, no it wouldn’t. Death was real. He would simply cease to exist one day, not some imaginary faraway day either, but Poof, he’d be gone. He had broken out in a sweat and stopped the car at the curb and sat in paralysis for a half hour, unable to find a way to stop imagining extinction.

  A little of that shudder stayed with him now. He recalled Tom Mercer turning from the book he was reading on his bunk in Thailand one night and saying, “Man, what’s worse? A contingent universe, where you can’t even choose which nostril to pick, or total free will? You know what makes them both so poignant, absolutely fucking poignant, is the thought of death.”

  Young men dragged out of college to go fight a war and then given enough of a reprieve to land five hundred miles away from the fighting to stare at radar screens tended to talk like that.

  “The good part of death,” Jack Liffey had replied, “is that I’ll never have to hear you argue about shit like this again.”

  “Listen to the Philistine. I happen to know you shook the dust of religion off your heels and you stand square in the middle of the mod
ern world.”

  He wondered where Tom Mercer was standing now, if he was holding down some tech job somewhere, or teaching Philosophy 1A in a junior college, or long dead of his flirtation with heroin.

  Two policemen dragged a struggling woman across the lobby and distracted him.

  “You’ll hear from my lawyers about this!” she squealed.

  “Oh, no, not the lawyers,” one of the cops mocked.

  “Mr. Liffey, Lt. Vo will see you now.”

  The earliest edition of the next morning’s Register was out by late afternoon. Orange County was a land of car commuters, and street editions had almost no relevance, but the Register editors liked to think of themselves as neck-and-neck with the L.A. Times, and they maintained all the old journalistic traditions by sending a dozen sad boozers out in old pickups to fill the street kiosks with a vestigial early street edition of the next day’s paper.

  TWO BODIES FOUND

  AT IRVINE LAKE!

  A few paragraphs down, the reporters quoted an unnamed source in the Sheriff’s office who’d dubbed the perpetrator with the uninspired name, The Sagebrush Killer.

  “Wyoming,” Frank Vo said in a bemused way, with his mouth full. He leaned back in his chair away from the round rice cake on a big square of wax paper on his desk. “I don’t know what on earth they were thinking of. Hey, these people come from a tropical country so let’s send them to the high plains where the wind freezes you into a statue and the entire growing season is six weeks long.”

  Jack Liffey nodded. “Nobody likes it there. I don’t know why even the Norwegians stay.”

  “You know what they say? One day the wind stopped in Wyoming and all the chickens fell over.” He laughed. He was a short man, even for a Vietnamese, in an impeccable dark suit and tie. A map of north Orange County was on the side wall of his office with different color pins stuck into it. “Want some? It’s banh chung, usually only for Tet, but I love it. There’s ground pork in the middle.”