He appeared so sophisticated and held the sign with such dogged earnestness, he managed to slow down the already-excruciating traffic on the corner.
Below the fine print, a larger-type font declared that George P. Carter III was not homeless or hungry, didn’t want motorists’ money or their expressions of pity. He wanted “justice” for himself, compensation for his eye, and an apology from the police chief, the mayor, and the president of the police commission.
He got a lot of curious stares, a few people honking their horns and giving him a thumbs-up, but no reaction from the police. So he returned the next day.
Monday through Friday for the next five or six years, the Altoid Man arrived at his post on the seven a.m. bus and stayed exactly twelve hours. Every ten minutes or so he would put the sign down, reach into his pocket, and retrieve a box of “original” Altoids, pop one in his mouth, and resume his stance. He took a half-hour lunch break at noon, and sat out the weekends when the traffic on his corner was light. Over the years his appearance showed signs of attrition. He grew increasingly thin and disheveled, his clothes became ragged and dirty, and his sign turned weather-beaten and nearly illegible—but he never gave up his Altoid habit or his steadfast demand for reparations from the LAPD.
In time, he and his sign faded like celluloid figures off a black-and-white reel; he became just another angry soul riding the buses and wandering the streets of LA, but he never stopped fighting the good fight. Just in case he was attacked by the police again, he carried a disposable camera in his pants pocket and pulled it out every time a cruiser slowed down or stopped near him.
* * *
He told Montoya that he had seen “everything” with his one eye, and could give a precise description. “But I’m not talking to you goons,” he said. “Go get your boss and bring him over here to lick my ass.”
By “boss” he meant the police chief, Charlie Beck, but since he wasn’t available or on the premises, the Altoid Man had agreed to meet with Leon instead.
He told Leon he had been riding the 4 bus from downtown to the beach, which was what he always did, going back and forth all night to avoid sleeping on the street, where he’d be vulnerable to “more police brutality,” or in a shelter, where the company was intolerable “since I don’t drink, do drugs, or speak Spanish or Ebonics.” He’d had to get off the bus at two a.m. to fulfill a pressing urge, “and I don’t mean just pissing.” He liked Mapleton for that purpose, he explained, because it was a nice street where “a man with his butt bare” wouldn’t be attacked by “a bunch of faggots” or robbed by “bean-eating Mexicans,” and because there was a large construction site not too far away from Sunset.
“Some fucking maharaja’s been building here for ten years. Must have spent a hundred million on it and all it’s good for is a half-decent shit.”
From the construction site, the Altoid Man had noticed the gray car drive up to the gates of Raphael’s Son’s house, had seen “everything, I can give you minute-by-minute details, but fuck you if you think I’m gonna tell you a fucking thing without first getting my dues from the fucking LAPD.”
__________________
Back in the house, Leon found Neda in the “functional” kitchen, smoking a cigarette at a large, round, marble table next to the window. An espresso, prepared by Esperanza on her favorite new Nespresso machine purchased at Williams-Sonoma, sat untouched before Neda.
At the counter, Esperanza had laid out a formal place setting—a tall glass of passion fruit iced tea, a small salad in a china bowl, a grilled vegetable sandwich with a side of quinoa and garbanzo beans in a lemon tahini sauce from Joan’s on Third on a matching plate, and a black cloth napkin—and had just sat down to eat her lunch. Dessert was a cup of mixed berries from Whole Foods, sprinkled with sweet agave nectar from Trader Joe’s.
Esperanza might have been unusually pampered, but all the housekeepers Neda hired had a way of connecting with their inner princess the minute they came to work for her. It was like they went to bed the first night at the job, felt the single pea beneath the mountain of mattresses laid out for them by Neda, and woke up queen-in-waiting. After that, it was just a question of how much Neda could put up with. As a rule, firing the help was never a good idea: one disgruntled domestic could do a great deal of damage to a former or current employer’s aabehroo merely by disclosing certain personal information, true or not, about the family she had worked for.
Leon stopped by the counter and glanced at Esperanza’s sandwich. “Looks good,” he said. “You should make one for your boss.”
* * *
In front of Neda on the table, next to a silver bowl filled with little pink and yellow packets of fake sugar, was a small collection of plastic pill bottles all bearing her name: Ambien, Xanax, Wellbutrin, Lexapro, Neurontin, Soma—anxiety, depression, migraines, smoking addiction, sleeplessness. One bottle contained only a razor blade, the kind purchased at a hardware store for a dollar a pack. It was used, Leon guessed, to cut some of the pills in half.
“How’s your lovely sister?”
His question jarred Neda.
“Nilou and I were in the same grade in Beverly,” he explained, then regretted having revealed anything about himself to the suspect. He pulled a chair out and sat down, unbuttoned his jacket, put his forearms on the edge of the table. “I remember you too,” he added. “You were quiet.”
Neda blushed purple.
“I understand she’s a rocket scientist,” he continued. “At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That’s very impressive.”
Neda was quiet, but Leon realized that Esperanza had taken a break from her health-fest to stare him down with contempt. She could tell he wanted to rattle Neda, and obviously didn’t like it.
“I run into her from time to time.”
That’s how it was on LA’s West Side; you could run into the same people year after year, especially if you had gone to Beverly High, and even more so if you were an Iranian Jew who had gone to Beverly High.
Leon’s eyes wandered back to the razor blade on the table. Suddenly Neda placed her hands, palms up, on the table.
“The other officer already looked,” she said flatly, but he could tell she was still smarting from the comparison to her sister. “And they took pictures.”
The hands were clean, no cuts or nicks or any trace of a razor blade. Then again, Leon thought, who said that the blood in the car had come from a cut? Until a body was found, all Leon and O’Donnell really knew was that Neda had reported her husband missing.
Even this, as Angela S. rushed to point out on Tumblr at two p.m. that day, was probably a lie: “He’s most likely sleeping in his bed as I write this. Really! Has anyone checked? Chances are, he’s right there at the house he paid for with other people’s money, counting the many, many ways in which he’s outsmarted the cops already, laughing at the idiot detective looking for his body all around town.”
__________________
The one thing you could say for Angela, although most people didn’t, was that she had been honest enough about her motives in publicly denouncing Raphael’s Son: it wasn’t for the sake of the victims. Excepting young orphans and old widows, she thought they were all a bunch of cretins—to trust a man with his past with their money, no questions asked. She especially disliked many of the wealthier creditors who thought their losses—in the tens of millions—were more important than those inflicted upon the “small” creditors.
To the extent that it pertained to Raphael’s Son, Angela’s main purpose, she readily admitted, was revenge.
To those who might have pointed out, perhaps correctly, that she and Raphael’s Son had this—the desire to harm another—in common, she would have retorted that whereas His Sleaziness had resorted to telling lies and more lies in order to destroy the Soleyman family and most of the rest of the Iranian community, Angela pursued the all-American ideal of “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
It just so happened that, with Rap
hael’s Son, the most harmful device was the truth.
* * *
And besides, Angela had been writing the blog since 2008. His Sleaziness’s vendetta dated back to before she was born, when the Soleyman family was the toast of Tehran’s high society and Raphael’s Son a bastard child whose mother claimed, impossibly, that he was the one and true heir to the Soleyman legacy.
People who knew him then talked about how he stood at the door of every shop on Ferdowsi Avenue in downtown Tehran, a portly young boy wearing gray wool pants in the dead of summer because that’s all he owned, sweating from heat or shame or perhaps both, and listened to his mother tell strangers that she was the widow of Raphael Soleyman, the eldest of the Soleyman brothers and heir to their father’s fortune; that she had been wrongly evicted from her house after her husband died, and that “this here boy” (she rattled him by the shoulder) had been denied his legacy by Raphael’s unscrupulous brother.
The mother was old and withered and shrill. She had gone so far as to state on the boy’s birth certificate that his first name was indeed “Raphael’s Son.” She talked like a charlatan and cursed like a whore, embarrassing even her son as she lingered eternally outside the Soleyman mansion on the Avenue of Tranquility and screamed to the heavens and to every blind beggar and hungry orphan who passed by that “this here boy, my son, Raphael’s Son, is the real owner of that house.” When they saw her coming down the street, shop owners closed their doors and turned their backs, pretending that they hadn’t seen her or her son, that they couldn’t hear her bang on the glass with her fists. Often, they gave her a few rials just so she would go away—“You’re bad for business, sister, take your son home and put him to bed.”
It would have taken an act of God, at the time, to convince Raphael’s Wife to give up her claim, however questionable, to the Soleyman estate, and it might have taken a second act of God for Raphael’s Son to find his way out of the dusty twilight of old Tehran into the company of the Aaron Spellings and Hugh Hefners of the world, but that is exactly what had happened to him and to so many other Iranians in America; one minute they were selling old bicycles, the next minute they had become Internet tycoons. Only Raphael’s Son had never really left the servants’ yards and narrow back alleys behind the houses where his mother took him begging, never let go of the promises she had made on his behalf—that he would someday rise to obliterate everyone who had stolen his birthright, denied him respect and recognition, laughed at him or turned him away because they thought he had no power and therefore no right—never stopped bleeding from the sharp edges of the neighbors’ dismissal.
TEHRAN
1952
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It began—this much everyone agreed on—with Izikiel the Red, so called because of his fiery red hair and eyebrows, and for the pale white skin that turned amber when he became angry, which was often, and for the whites of his eyes that became crimson when he drank. Born in 1901 in the Tehran ghetto, he had lived in two rooms with his parents and nine siblings, worked in a bottle factory from age six, married in 1921, produced two sons, and became a widower in 1960. He made his fortune trading wool and other fine fabrics imported from Russia, which he sold for far less than any of his competitors. When Reza Shah came to power and ordained that every man and woman in the country must pick a surname, Izikiel chose Soleyman. In 1954, he built Bagh-e Yaas—a stately mansion that became a symbol of hard-earned prosperity and hard-fought triumph over adversity not only for him, but for all the Jews of Tehran.
Bagh-e Yaas had a main residence, two satellite houses, and a seven-acre garden where hundred-year-old maple trees spread their branches over beds of pink and white Muhammadi roses. The yard walls were covered with the most fragrant vines of poet’s jasmine anywhere in Tehran. The brick pathways leading to the Big House wound past glittering pools and cascading fountains, and ended at the edge of tiled verandas with French doors that opened into vast salons and long hallways and a black granite staircase that spiraled up five floors until it ended at a ballroom with crystal chandeliers and bay windows from which the sound of music and laughter flowed into the moonlit streets and shady back alleys of the capital.
Izikiel’s older son, Raphael, was a sleepwalker with an extraordinary appetite and the physical appearance of a famine survivor. He ate as much as three men, and was always hungry. The appetite and the sleepwalking were caused by intestinal worms, which were as common as they were insidious, and they should have been curable—were in fact curable for every other person affected by them in the country—but they refused to be dislodged from Raphael’s insides no matter what remedy was applied. The doctors and faith healers and plant-and-powder physicians who had tried and failed to stamp out Raphael’s worms were of the opinion that the vermin drew their resilience from a second, more mystifying source, this one peculiar to the Soleyman family and which Raphael had inherited—a condition that, for lack of a medical designation, was known to the Soleymans as “incandescence.”
Raphael looked normal enough in daylight, but at night, or in dark places, his heart glowed a pulsating blue-white color that exposed all its veins and arteries, all its muscles and tendons and fluids, as if his chest were made of glass and his skin were transparent.
No one knew what caused incandescence, but it had run in the Soleyman bloodline for generations. Every decade or so, a child—usually a boy in the family—was born with a glowing heart. The parents, fearing social repercussions, did their best to hide the condition, though by most accounts the affected person suffered from no other symptoms and developed no particular ailments. Raphael too might have been spared a life of agony had he not been invaded in early childhood with the worms that, the doctors hypothesized without any rational basis, seemed to draw special strength and resilience from the light in his heart. As it was, his sleepwalking was so acute, he ended up lost on the streets at least once a week. For a time, his parents locked the door of the bedroom where he slept with his younger brother, but Raphael climbed through the window and went out. They sealed the window, so he broke the glass and crawled through it, bleeding, into the yard.
In the end, Izikiel decided to let him be, and so Raphael took to the streets every few nights, barefoot and dressed in white cotton pajamas, the light from his heart attracting every moth and firefly and nocturnal bird in the city, plus an entire horde of restless, insomniac ghosts who had been turned away from their homes by their living relatives, and half a dozen street urchins who were always on the lookout for an adventure. They followed Raphael wherever he went, and then trailed him back home and into the room where he slept with his brother, Aaron, so that in the morning, when the boys woke up, the air was teeming with flying creatures and the floor was littered with dead leaves and fresh dirt and whatever else the barefoot ghosts had dragged in from the streets. Then Aaron would open a window and let out the moths that had grown into butterflies, and the ghosts dissolved into the light.
By age sixteen, Raphael was written off as a lost cause by every physician and witch doctor in the country. By twenty, he was relegated to the ranks of madcap uncles and embarrassing siblings that most families tended to keep hidden from the world, until they grew old and died in some quiet corner of the house. He was not married and had no prospects, and he was not expected to do a full day’s work for as long as he lived. As for his rights of inheritance, there was no question he had none, given the state of his health. It is true that upon a father’s death, his eldest son conventionally inherited the entire estate. If the eldest son was no longer living, the next oldest son was second in line, followed by other male siblings.
But the state of Raphael’s health ruled out the possibility of him managing anything at all, or of producing children. Instead, it was clear that the mantle would pass to Aaron. That’s what Izikiel had determined and what everyone deemed just and reasonable, and everything would have been just fine, the family would have continued to live in peace and prosperity, had it not been blighted wi
th the arrival of the Black Bitch of Bushehr, later known as Raphael’s Wife.
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She emerged out of the heat wave of 1950, during the endless summer that began in the south and spread northward, laying the country to waste with its relentless, desiccating breath. In the port city of Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, the heat boiled the fish in the sea and sent them to float on the surface—the sheen of their scales blinding against the sunlight on the horizon, hiding the green of the water in daytime, glowing silver in the moonlight. Around the harbor, the beach was littered with red and yellow and striped fish, young boys with brown skin and scraggy limbs lay in the shade of foreign ships—English and Norwegian, Russian and German and Italian. They were nearly naked, their feet wrapped in cloth or newspaper against the blistering sand. Before the heat, their fathers had worked as fishermen or smugglers, sailors or dockworkers. The boys had dived for pearls or sunken treasure, begged the foreigners who arrived on the ships for chewing gum and cigarettes. Now the water held nothing but jellyfish and seaweed, and the sailors barely left their ships for fear of heatstroke.
Raphael’s Wife came from a family of palm readers and sorcerers and harem maids—Jews with Arab skin and Cimmerian eyes who inhabited the veiled and narrow edges of a diverse and idiosyncratic society. She was thirty years old, pitifully unappealing to the eye and woefully unaware of it, when she escaped her hoodlum father and eleven bandit brothers and left Bushehr in search of cooler climates and a kinder destiny. She headed north, for the capital. By her own account, the journey had taken eighteen months and eleven days; she rode on trains and on the backs of camels and mules, traversed the Great Central Desert without a guide—alone but for the lizards and scorpions and the occasional caravan. She had stolen a bedouin’s headdress to guard against the sun, lifted a pair of severely used oxfords from a young Dutch tourist who had fallen asleep next to her on a bus, and she crossed the gates of the city of Tehran one morning in the winter of 1952 just as the song of the muezzin soared above the brick minarets and blue-tiled domes of every mosque in the city.
The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. Page 4
