by John Shannon
The kid on the Internet had threatened to kill Asians, one after another, until they were all driven off the campus, if Jack Liffey remembered right. Somebody like that might well have started with an honor student like Phuong, but it wasn’t something he wanted to say in front of her father.
“She’s not on campus much any more,” the boy said. “She’s been doing a business project before starting the coursework for her MBA.”
“What was that?”
The Vietnamese cop that he’d met came out onto the lawn and stared at them with a melancholy frown.
“She was working on something with a group of planners called the Industrial League. I think it had to do with plans to make El Toro a regional airport.”
Frank Vo was the name, he remembered, a polite soft-spoken cop.
“Mr. Liffey,” Frank Vo called.
Jack Liffey apologized to Minh Trac and the boy and then crossed half the lawn to talk to the policeman.
“Hello, Lt. Vo.”
“Good day. Do you have any reason to believe this vandalism was connected with this man’s daughter’s disappearance?”
“No. But I don’t like the concept of coincidence very much.”
“Me either. Do you have anything else to tell me?”
“I just got started.”
His brow furrowed up and another squabble of seagulls came over low, crying and shrieking, but he took no notice.
“My partner feels that you would be better off somewhere else right now.” He didn’t seem to want to say this.
“I don’t want to cause any trouble. I’ll go.”
“Thank you. Good luck to you.”
“You, too,” Jack Liffey said. “I’ll tell you everything I learn.”
He had enough information to get started, so he said goodbye to the father and the boy and walked to the car. When he saw the Anglo cop stroll out to watch him leave, he decided to come back up the lawn for a moment. There was a limit to how accommodating he wanted to be to a prick cop.
“You can kiss my ass,” he said softly toward the cop, not loud enough for him to hear but distinctly enough to read lips.
The cop’s head recoiled a little, as if struck.
Jack Liffey smiled broadly. “Have a nice day,” he said, quite loud.
The cop seemed not to know what was happening, and Jack Liffey walked away. It was good, occasionally, he thought, to take someone like that through a little opening into another universe.
On the way to MediaPros, he stopped on a whim for a late lunch at a tiny Peruvian restaurant, the place graced with artifacts and travel posters of mountain temples and a pyramid of cans of Inca Cola. He smiled to himself about a menu entry that translated lomo saltado as “beef, tomatoes and onions fried with french fries,” and idly he ran up in his head other sentences he’d read that had fractured along cultural fault lines.
I saw a lion riding in my car.
He hadn’t noticed such a pedantic streak in himself in years, and he wondered if its waning had something to do with the gradual loss of his old identity. The secure tech writer job in Martin Aerospace, the marriage and the tidy suburban house with the workshop out in the garage, and the comforting feeling that things in his life were going the way they should. All gone the way of the Hula Hoop.
On a whim, he ordered the lomo saltado and then had a laugh at himself when it arrived and he found it actually was beef, onion, and tomatoes with french fries stir-fried in. That ought to teach him something about cultural sensitivity, but he wasn’t quite sure what.
MediaPros was a featureless white building made of tilt-up concrete slabs, just like thousands of others scattered through Orange County’s little industrial parks. The receptionist sat alone in an entry alcove transferring index cards from a big tray into a row of small metal boxes, screwing up her beautiful young Latina face to make a decision on each one.
“Can I help you?”
He didn’t usually like to use it, but he showed her a leather ID wallet briefly. It had an ID card with a picture of a badge and a statement in fine print that he’d passed a course on investigation and dispute mediation at World Wisdom College of East Orange, New Jersey. Even that wasn’t true.
“About a week ago a young Vietnamese woman named Phuong Minh came here to help make a medical video. I’d like to speak to someone who worked with her.”
“Oh, wow, man.” She screwed up her face again as if trying to decide which file box he should go into. “What’s up?”
“She’s been missing for a week.” The cops were pathological about keeping stuff like that secret, but he usually liked to shovel it all out in the open and see what happened.
“Oh, wow,” she said again. “I hope she’s okay. The director’s in the studio right now shooting, but maybe I can get you one of the writers.” She played with the intercom, and it beeped back at her, startling her.
“Ken, this is Anita. Did you work on the TB video?”
“I wrote it.”
“Could you come up to the desk? There’s somebody who’d like to talk to you.”
“Right up.”
She did something gingerly to the machine and it beeped again. “New equipment,” she explained. She had him sign a guest book on the counter as if he were registering for a room.
In a moment, a gangly young man came into sight and thrust out his arm.
“Kenny Dunne.”
“I’m Jack Liffey. About a week ago, did you meet a young Vietnamese woman named Phuong Minh?”
“I met a Vietnamese couple during the shoot. I don’t remember any names.”
“She’s missing and I’d like to talk to anyone here who worked with her.”
His eyebrows went up. “You a policeman?”
“I was hired by her father.”
“Come on.”
Jack Liffey followed down a long white corridor filled with the burnt carbon smell of a Xerox machine working overtime.
“Yeah, like I actually know what I’m doing,” wafted angrily out of an office they passed.
The young man bobbed his head into another office. “Have you got the call sheets for the TB production? No, of course, you don’t. Billy has them on the set.”
At the end of the corridor, he put up a hand to halt them at a serious-looking door. A sign over the door was flashing Recording. He held his ear to the door for a moment and then tugged it open slowly, inviting Jack Liffey to follow. They went down a hall and into a cavernous room with dark lighting equipment dangling from a grid overhead, a clutter of cables that you had to step over to go anywhere and big theatrical flats leaning against the walls. What light existed was concentrated on a two-wall set out in the middle of the space, done up as a medical examining room, where a black woman had her sleeve rolled up and a nurse was standing by with a syringe in her hand, stifling a yawn. Two men were peering into the innards of an opened-up video camera on a big dolly and several other people sat around on high stools and canvas chairs. There appeared to be several other standing sets off in the darkness, a bathroom, a hospital room and what was probably meant to be a booth in a fast-food restaurant.
“Dan, you at a break?”
A husky guy with a Star Trek T-shirt and a greying pony-tail leaking out of his baseball cap looked up. “Until they find out why we’re getting hits every time we fucking dolly the camera, I got nothing but time.”
A woman nearby said, “And he says, it’s only a sin if you come,” in an Irish brogue and the group around her bellowed with laughter.
“This guy is a detective. He wants to ask you about the Vietnamese girl we used last week.”
“Woman, Kenny, let’s be PC here.”
The director stood to take Jack Liffey’s hand. “What’s the problem?”
“Phuong Minh has been missing from about the time she worked here.”
“No shit? I hardly used her. She looked too old to be a high school girl playing drums in a school band. Hell, she showed up in a power suit, straight from
some business job. She changed into jeans and stuck around for a crowd scene, though. Helped our ethnic balance, and it looked like she was getting a kick out of watching the shoot. Billy?”
A very short young man in his twenties came out from behind the clipboard he was holding and watched Jack Liffey cautiously.
“You got the Burkett time sheets for last week?”
The short man nodded and dug into a manila folder that lay on a big steamer trunk. He stepped over a tangled mass of cables and brought across a two-part form from a modeling agency and Jack Liffey noticed the soft suspicious eyes watching him. He looked like the kid who always had to double-lock his dorm door to stop the pranks.
The sheet had Minh Phuong typed across the top and it listed her arrival as 3 P.M. and her departure as 7:30 P.M. She was to be paid at the rate of $150 for a nonspeaking role.
“Did the agency send her?”
“No. We just pay everybody through the agency to avoid legal problems.”
“Do you remember if she left alone?”
The director looked at his assistant who just shrugged.
“Could I see what you shot with her?”
“Not today you can’t. We need our one functioning Beta playback on the set. If you come by tomorrow morning, I’ll have somebody dig out the tapes. Probably the last two that day. Can you set those aside, Billy?”
The boy nodded but kept his eyes on Jack Liffey, as if he were a small animal who might soon be eaten.
“Hey Dan, we found it! The glitch was just one of the leads from—”
“I don’t want to know.” He turned back to Jack Liffey, suddenly much more abrupt and businesslike. “How the damn camera functions is an intimacy that does not concern me. Come tomorrow morning. Kenny will take you out now.”
“Thanks.”
He headed out as the hubbub built behind him.
“Margie, get set to stick her.”
The writer led him out the soundproof door and back to the front. ”Come in tomorrow and ask for Billy Gudger. He’ll set you up with a playback. If she actually left at 7:30, everyone else here was long gone except the crew and talent.”
It was a toss-up. He could hit the freeway and head over to Irvine to find the Industrial League in its high rise or jump straight down Beach Boulevard or Magnolia to Little Saigon to see if he could talk to Frank Fen at his contracting office. Little Saigon was closer so he turned down Beach. The broad ugly boulevard was lined with used car lots, taco stands, RV sales centers, and abandoned storefronts. It looked like a poor Latino area but as he drove southward, the gross income seemed to rise like bread dough and the commercial sprawl got more familiarly suburban, Kmarts and theme restaurants and home centers.
Frank Fen was still away at a building site, but Jack Liffey strolled in curiosity out behind the mall on the north side of Bolsa where something big was being constructed. A huge parking lot was hemmed around by massive Vietnamese historical plaques in bas-relief on the side walls. About half had been painted up gaudily, though no one was doing any painting at the moment. In the middle of the lot, a score of towering sculptures of Asians were watching over a row of empty stalls that looked like they had just been built. “Nguyen Trai (1380-1442),” he read on one. “Great statesman, author of Binh Ngo Pai Cao (Proclamation of Victory over the Ngo), the culmination of patriotism in Vietnamese Literature.” He was brightly painted, but most of the others were still white concrete.
No one was at work at the moment, but piles of cement bags, lumber, and building blocks sat around awaiting a new impetus. Then two blacked out Toyotas squealed into the empty parking lot behind him and pulled into a V to block the driveway.
Uh-oh, he thought.
The doors opened and too many young men got out, like some sort of circus trick. They mostly wore black and they weren’t kids like the gang outside the high school, they were in their late twenties and thirties. One was taller than the others and he led the rest in a flanking approach that soon trapped Jack Liffey in a corner of the building site.
Here and there Jack Liffey saw a weapon in a waistband. The tall one stopped a few feet away. He had one pink eye, like some wayward albino trait, and a long whisker on the same side of his face which made him look a bit crazy and would also make him pretty easy to identify, Jack Liffey thought.
The one with the pink eye gave some order in Vietnamese and a wiry young man with a gold chain seemed to speak for him.
“Fuck you, fucker,” Gold Chain said. “You come to our town and make us trouble.”
“I don’t mean you any harm,” Jack Liffey said.
“We know you. You been to our country, fucker, take our girls and blow things up.”
“You have me confused with somebody else.”
“We know you ever since we were little babies.”
The one with the pink eye looked around him as if counting his gang, then ended with a finger pointed straight at Jack Liffey and said something.
Gold Chain seemed to be translating. “Fourteen here. That unlucky. Got to get rid of one.”
“Getting rid of me is even more unlucky, if I can prove you didn’t hurt Phuong.”
“This America. We innocent until guilty.”
“You really believe that? Tell me the cops never hassle you.”
“Bad luck is you, fucker.”
Pink Eye gestured and five of them closed around him and all at once started hitting him with high kicks and straight blows with their hands crooked in weird karate shapes. They weren’t hurting him very much, like being assaulted by toddlers, either because of his adrenaline rush or they were pulling the punches, and he was just starting to think, Thank God I outweigh them by fifty pounds, when things seemed to change gears and one blow in his kidneys hurt a lot.
“Hey there, you stop now!” It was a woman’s voice far away.
Another hard blow caught his neck and he wondered if he should warn them he had a metal plate in his head from an earlier accident and they could do him more harm than they intended if they hit him there.
“You fuck, leave our town!” he heard just as a rain of really sharp blows came down on his neck and head and he lost consciousness.
SEVEN
Betrayed by Language
He turned his head a little and stopped, but his brain kept right on moving and then banged to rest against his skull, and he cried out faintly. There was a panting sound very near him and he opened his eyes to see, three inches away, the gnarled, flattened mug of a bulldog drooling foam. The dog made a stab at licking his nose and he recoiled, bestowing on his brain another impact.
“Oooh.”
“You ’wake. Go ’way, John Bull, scatter! Here, take this.”
The soft bed he lay on heaved a little and Tien Joubert was sitting beside him, holding four white pills in her tiny palm.
“What is it?”
“Panadeine from France, can’t get in store here. It got codeine in it, work real good. Make you feel good.”
She gave him a stemmed wine glass of water. He swallowed the pills, and as he settled back he noticed he was under silk sheets in a huge bed in a blue bedroom and he checked a little and found he wasn’t wearing any clothes.
“Where am I?”
“You die and go to heaven. Heaven got me, naturally. You want the other place, you got to dress for more warm.”
“I don’t seem to be dressed at all.”
“Your clothes was a mess. Blood all over like crazy. I get rid of them. I get you good stuff, Country Road trouser and nice Ralph Lauren shirt. Maybe Alfani shoe. No, I know. I take you Di Fabrizio, get you foot model like movie stars and he make you special good shoes.”
He pictured himself showing up at the end of the day at Marlena’s in bright designer clothes and two-tone movie star shoes and saw the look on her face and it all took place in the achy part of his brain and he almost shuddered.
“You rest. I get you some noodles to make you strong.”
He slept, he wasn’t su
re how long, but she was there when he opened his eyes again. It was dark outside and a garish gold lamp on the side table was on.
“Hi, Jack Liffey. Bet you feeling better.”
He was. In fact, he was lightheaded on the codeine.
“What happened? I only remember the gangsters surrounding me.”
“They kick you some when you fall down, but I stop them. Everybody coward when you wave gun at them. Bad boys run for the hills, and I bring you home, nurse you back to health.”
“You waved a gun at them? Half of them had Glocks in their pants.”
“They not dare mess with me.”
“Well, thank you. It was still brave of you, even if you are too important to mess with. I’ve got to call my home.”
“Not yet. We talk some more, it my turn.” She put her hand lightly on his chest and settled into a long tale about her life. He tuned back in as she was sneaking paper money out of Viet Nam in a padded bra and girdle and then being met by a guy in Paris, a recent exile like herself and a friend of her dead husband, who offered to help her get settled. The man got her an apartment with three other Vietnamese women and talked her into investing in a new Peugeot dealership located where the rich Vietnamese lived. He took her money and a lot of other exile money and fled to Texas, where he bought a fishing boat.
“Eight year later, I got plenty money again. I fly to this Texas, Galveston, and I find this guy and tell him, give me my money back and I won’t hurt you. He just laugh and tell me to go chase my tail. So I find some roundeye Texan don’t like some Viet Nam fishing guy very much, anyway, and after a while he sink his big boat at the dock one night. Of course he don’t got insurance. Next day I go see him, and he weeping and pulling his hair, and I say, give me my money back and I won’t hurt you, and he give me my money. It not much, just the principal of the game.”
“Game?”
“Well, life. You got to come out even. Just even is best. I loan money when people need it, don’t ask for interest. When I want something, I get it. Big screen TV, Mercedes, house with boat dock—you got to see my view in front room. We in Huntington Harbour.” She touched his head, smoothing his hair down. Her tiny fingers were very gentle. “When I waiting down in Texas for American guy to sink boat, I go sport fishing one day. On the boat, they talk a lot about ‘keepers’ or not. I think you a keeper. When you stronger, I love you.”