by John Shannon
“So we are clear with you?” Horn-rims asked.
“For Phuong, yes. However, there is the matter of the Nhat residence that was invaded last month and the family tied up. A 32-inch Mitsubishi television is missing, and a rack-mounted Nakamichi stereo, 100 luong of gold, some jade jewelry and some cash from a floor safe.”
“You’ve already questioned us about that and you know we were at a party on Minnie Street in Santa Ana.”
“Don’t make me laugh. You don’t party with poor Hmong.”
“They are our friends.”
Now the debate seemed to spin out of control for a while, with Tien Joubert, Thang Le and his translator, and the priest all pointing and gesturing and putting in their two cents, overlapping and even speaking at the same time. Even though the discussion was all in Vietnamese, Jack Liffey could sense that he had shrunk to a minor issue and there were a lot of old ghosts rearing up. Perhaps that was good news, and he could be the derisory item that was settled easily while the tough ones were put off for later.
“We must all choose a path,” the priest said suddenly in English, “so that there will be harmony.”
Thang Le spoke sharply, only a few words, and so did the policeman. They seemed almost the same words.
“Can a tiger find harmony with a goat?” Horn-rims said. “It was our way once, but in this country, no one honors harmony. Wishing for harmony is a sign of weakness here, and we have learned that some things are much stronger.”
“What things?”
“Americans only respect what they fear. They never respected the black man until he started carrying guns and burning.”
“I respect you all and I fear you,” Jack Liffey said evenly. It was about as far as he was willing to go. He could feel himself getting annoyed at being the odd man out. “I have nothing against you. I just want peace with you.”
Thang Le grinned sarcastically and spoke.
“He says the respect only lasts as long as the fear. That is the way with round-eye cowards.”
“The shape of my eyes doesn’t matter. You haven’t begun to see my rage and what it can do, fuckhead,” Jack Liffey said. “Translate that for the little freak.” He’d been okay until about the middle of the sentence and then his temper had just blown out all at once, like a very old tire hitting a pothole. This had happened to him before, a sudden, almost self-destructive need to challenge whatever was threatening him.
“Your rage does not interest us in the least.”
Jack Liffey found himself breathing heavily and Tien’s hand was on his shoulder. “All stop it now! Priest right, we got to find path of harmony here.”
Thang Le said something else angry that Horn-rims didn’t even bother translating. Jack Liffey found his hands working compulsively as if he wanted to strangle someone, and he knew he was really riding the sharp edge.
Thang Le carried on some more without any sign of relenting, and then the door came open and Phuong Minh’s father strode in. Thang Le caught sight of him and wound down. The man’s eyes were red and he wore an out-of-date disheveled dark suit and black tie that made him look like a small reissue of Dracula.
“Isn’t my daughter dishonored enough?”
He said something in Vietnamese, maybe a repeat of the same thing, and Jack Liffey felt his anger draining away. Their ridiculous sideshow had pulled the poor man away from his mourning, and for Jack Liffey the sense of utter absurdity flowed back in like a fluid finding its level.
Thang Le spoke for a moment, but there had been a sea-change in his tone of voice. He was quiet and respectful to Phuong’s father. Trac Minh turned to Jack Liffey.
“Your work is over in Little Saigon, Mr. Liffey. Nothing can bring my daughter back and I want you to stop using her name and stop whatever is happening here. I want her spirit to be able to go from among us and rest.”
Jack Liffey nodded contritely. “All right.”
Trac Minh strode up to the table and looked at the papers lying there and scowled. “A peace treaty,” he said scornfully. “Okay then. You all sign this paper and go home.”
Thang Le seemed to be agreeable. Trac Minh handed the paper to Jack Liffey and he signed immediately. When the paper was passed across the peculiar peace table, Thang Le handed it sight unseen to Horn-rims, who signed it with a fountain pen flourished out of his breast pocket. That seemed to be as far as they were willing to go.
“He signs, too,” Jack Liffey said, indicating the immobile Thang Le.
A lot of eyes focused on Jack Liffey. Tien Joubert leaned close to him and whispered very softly into his ear, “He not read and write, Jack. Don’ make him lose face.”
Jack Liffey stared at the illiterate young hoodlum for a moment, and then nodded to him. “Fine.”
They shook hands coolly and Trac Minh banged out the door and left. The Quan Sats soon followed, in the same protocol order they’d entered.
They all sat in silence a moment, as if a tornado had just passed over, and then Tien Joubert whispered to her receptionist about something.
“Will they keep their word?” Jack Liffey asked Vo.
He nodded. “For some reason, they believe in treaties. It’s the world they know. There is honor in thieves, you know.”
“Until they discover murder,” Jack Liffey said. “Murder is the ultimate argument for people with no conscience. In the nastier corners of the world, sooner or later they discover murder can make you right, whether you are or not, and you never have to worry about things like your own failings.” Death again, he thought. The old bugaboo.
The priest stirred. “I don’t know if you know them well enough to say that.”
“Psychopaths are the same everywhere, but I’m satisfied if you are.”
“We did good,” Tien Joubert said, and she encircled his upper arm with her two hands. “Everybody happy. We go din-din and celebrate.”
The house was growing shadowy with dusk, and he adjusted a box of cereal on the counter to shield the low flame under the saucepan of soup, so the blue light couldn’t be seen from the window in the kitchen door. Just in case. Billy Gudger had been sitting for hours figuring things out and his plans grew more and more elaborate, as his plans always tended to do. Things almost never worked out the way he intended, but usually took themselves off in loopy directions. Still, he felt compelled to lay out his plans. It was all you could do.
While the soup boiled he went to the freezer and checked inside for the zillionth time. What he had put there was still there, an intractable impasse. Even when he poked it hard with a finger, it didn’t move. Now you’ve gone too far, a voice told him. It wasn’t a real voice. He didn’t hear voices, he knew that much. It was just another portion of his mind talking to himself. Everybody did that. He was just like everybody. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Jack Liffey came again, slipping in the door without knocking, sat again with a smile and asked what he’d been doing for the day. His voice was friendly, with that cheerful confidence that Billy loved so much. But this time the picture wouldn’t stay stable, and it took off along its own trajectory, first Jack Liffey was kneeling, whining and begging for mercy and saying he would never never suspect Billy of anything bad, then he was crying out in pain as somebody held his arm behind his back and twisted. Then he was gone, just like that.
But he was sure that Jack Liffey would come back, peering in all the windows again. That much was for absolute sure. And only the most elaborate of plans could save Billy from the man who might once have been his friend.
“I hope you didn’t use up all your favors setting up the Westminster Peace Accords,” he said. He leaned back against the gray granite counter in her kitchen as she fiddled with an egg whisk. She looked like she knew what she was doing with it and he wondered if she’d ever been a cook in France.
“With our people, favors not like that. Not just so much money in bank, write it down in book, you draw that much out some time and it gone. No, no. I do something for Mr. Minh and he do somet
hing for me and maybe I do two thing more. And I need favor for Mr. Nguyen, so Mr. Minh do something for Mr. Nguyen, and then Mr. Nguyen do something for me. It like a big camouflage netting. You know camouflage netting?”
He nodded. They’d had it stretched over the small motor pool at their radar base, the nylon web covered by a random scatter of cloth peanut shapes in greens and browns to hide the jeeps and 6-bys from the air. There had been a lot of jokes about the V.C. flying their bamboo reconnaissance satellites over low.
“Your own family always in middle of net but lots of people at edges, too, and everybody covered.”
“Eloquent,” he said. Like her description of tit for tat, he thought. Straightforward, simple, and shrewd.
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Thank you. I seem to be under the big net now, thanks to you, and I still feel I owe Minh Trac some work, but he asked me to stop.”
She broke off whisking the eggs for the omelette. “Oh, you not stop now. No. You work for me, and I say work.”
“He said he wanted her spirit to rest.”
“How Phuong spirit going to rest if her murderer out there walking ’round?”
She put down the whisk and came over and pressed herself against him, and he had to close his eyes.
“You not the kind of man who walk away with job half done?”
He heard her giggle.
“I only half done, too. You got to cook me some more.”
“You’re very persuasive, Tien.”
“You bet.” She drew his head down and they kissed and it was a close thing whether they were going to get dinner or not. Tien decided for them by pulling back.
“Tao Quan watching. We save for afters. Here, you tear up salad.” She handed him a big romaine and a wood bowl.
“What’s Tao Quan?” he asked as she began chopping a small oval onion.
“The three kitchen gods. Every kitchen got them. Every year, right before Tet they go up to heaven and make report on what they seen.”
“Heaven wouldn’t approve of us smooching in the kitchen?”
“I don’t know, but Tet not too far away. Why take chance? You like shallot?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had one.”
She waved a hand. “Just like onion, but better.” She set the chopped shallot aside and he was just taking over the cutting board when she hurried over. She caught his hand as he was about to slice the romaine.
“No, no, no,” she said. “Metal must not never touch lettuce. You must tear up with hand. No one tell you that?”
“No one told me that,” he said. Her hand was on his hand, and then her leg was against his leg and they didn’t get dinner after all, not for almost two hours.
FIFTEEN
The Sense of Evil
He watched the beat-up Concord pull to the curb in front, the streetlight glinting off the only chrome left on the passenger side of the car, a single skewed door handle. The car looked like it had rolled, or at least toppled and then slid, the whole right side flattened out and scraped raw. The engine noise stopped and he saw Jack Liffey get out and walk around the front of his car. The man checked the VW, then glanced at the front door of the house, but chose to walk up the driveway, passing out of sight around the side of the house. Billy Gudger stayed well out of the line of sight from the side windows.
He saw himself rushing out the front door and running away down the block, his legs churning as hard as he could make them. Then he saw himself curling up into a fetal position beside the stub wall where he had watched from before, and then he saw himself standing defiantly right in the archway so someone at the back door could make him out. Things felt estranged from him, and a kind of unreality held everything in a glow that vibrated in his peripheral vision in perfect time to a throbbing he felt in his forehead. Everything was prepared, so it just had to unfold this way. He backed to the stub wall, raised the pistol with an almost uncontrollable tremor and lingered as he heard feet clomp unnecessarily loudly up the wooden stoop out back.
The toadstone is found in the head of a certain kind of toads.
—John Churchill, Collection of Voyages and Travels (1704)
The night had a strange look, a kind of orangeness that was fading out of the lumpy brown clouds but remaining on the air, an eerie Southern California winter phenomenon that he’d heard called, for some reason, a radioactive sky. A big sedan inched along the street behind him like a gang car searching for somebody to drive-by, and somewhere to the north there was a dull thump-thump thump-thump like a drop hammer in some ghostly steel plant.
Billy Gudger’s VW hadn’t been disturbed and the house curtains were all in the same places they had been. He could see there were no lights in the separate cottage behind so he went straight to the back door of the main house. There were no lights inside here either, but he had an inkling Billy was in there, the same hunch as before. As he came up the steps, letting his feet hit hard enough so that he wouldn’t startle anyone, he saw with a chill that the door was a half inch from being tight against the jamb. No door had a tongue that loose so it had to be ajar, but he rapped with his knuckle anyway.
“Billy, it’s Jack Liffey. I’d love to talk to you.”
He rapped again, hard enough to test the latch, and the door made a tick and gave a few inches.
“Billy, I know you’re home.”
He swung the door open and stepped in, trying to make as much natural noise as he could. There was an odd smell on the air of the service porch, the kind of musty old-lady, old-cigarette and strong-cleanser smell you got in cheap motels in the Southwest. In the kitchen, there was a box of cereal on the counter beside the stove, and he couldn’t remember whether it had been there before or not. He wished he was just a bit more observant, a rather important trait for a detective, he thought sardonically.
“I’ve been thinking about the toadstone,” Jack Liffey called evenly. “It’s quite remarkable, a whole chunk of the past of our culture that seems to have dropped out of Western Civilization without a trace. It’s as if we’d all woke up one day and we’d forgotten about maypoles or hopscotch.”
The house thrummed all of a sudden, probably a water heater coming on or—no, it was the freezer chest behind him cranking up its compressor. He could feel it in the floor.
“You seem to have found out a lot about toadstones. I’d like to know where I can look them up.”
He drifted cautiously across the kitchen, not quite sure why he was talking on and on. It was a little like whistling past a graveyard. There was an unholy mess of unwashed dishes in the sink, and a little plaque over the faucets, The Kitchen Elves Will Do the Dishes, reminded him of Tien’s tale of the three kitchen gods. He hoped some gods or elves were watching over him now.
Ahead he could see the big glass centerpiece on the dining room table. He decided he would go as far as the dining room and then retreat if Billy didn’t make himself known. He’d pass on his vague suspicions to Vo and go home, and the poor kid would just have to endure the Sheriff’s SWAT team crashing through the front door.
“Billy, is something wrong?”
He came slowly around the short wall beside the stove that separated the kitchen from the dining area, and nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Stop it! Stop it, you!” Billy Gudger screeched.
Jack Liffey went completely still, though his heart raced and thundered. Billy Gudger crouched beside the wall, aiming a pistol at him with both hands. He clutched the pistol with a fierce and awkward grip, neither the classic Weaver hold that pressed the knuckles of one fist against the palm of the other, nor the sissy-grip that they taught policewomen, with the butt resting on one upturned palm. The young man had one hand wrapped around the grip and the other clasping the receiver of the automatic so that if he actually fired it that way he’d get a damn good abrasion as the receiver flew back. Of course, if he fired the way he was aiming just then, Jack Liffey wouldn’t be around afterward to give him pointers on pistol technique. All
of this Jack Liffey noted in a few microseconds, and then he spoke evenly and without much emotion.
“Who taught you to hold a pistol like that? You’ll hurt yourself. Here, let me show you how to do it.”
He reached out casually with one hand. It was a near thing. The boy’s face took on a deer-in-the-headlights look for an instant, and he might actually have been at the point of handing the pistol over, but he recoiled against the wall instead, as if slapped, knocking over a floor lamp behind him, startling them both with the whump and the breaking bulbs. Jack Liffey didn’t like the way the pistol was trembling.
“Don’t touch me! I’m mean!”
Jack Liffey opened his palms in a friendly way. “No, you’re not. I won’t touch you.”
“I bet you think I’m harmless!”
Absurdly, he thought of Philip Marlowe dividing the world into the anxious and the depressed. People were always dividing humanity along some simplistic axis. “Billy, I’d prefer not to think of people in terms of harmless or harmful. I’d like to think of you as bright and sad and interesting. I want to ask you about the toadstone.”
“Forget that! That’s over.”
“It can’t be over if you’ve got one in your head,” he said, his intuition working overtime.
The young man looked so stricken that he knew he’d struck paydirt. “That’s none of your business. Here, I’ll show you how dangerous I am. Turn around!”
“Clockwise or counter-clockwise?”
The young man’s eyes dilated and he seemed to steam and throb for a moment, like a cartoon character letting off an excess of internal pressure. “Can I give you some advice, Mr. Liffey?”
“I don’t think I’m in a position to decline.”
“Don’t you ever laugh at me.”
Jack Liffey nodded, as sincerely as he could, and he turned around to face away. “Okay.”