There was the sound of feet shuffling, then the Altoid Man’s voice rose from closer to the ground.
“I heard the guy’s car pull up,” he groaned.
“What guy?”
“The dead guy, you moron!”
“You heard him pull up in his car?”
“A minute later, he started honking like a bitch.”
Leon wondered how a bitch would honk, but kept the question to himself.
“How do you know he was the one honking?”
“Because I held my crap and stuck my head out and saw everything.”
“What did you see?”
“The Chevy must have been the getaway car. It wasn’t there when I got off the bus.”
Leon could just imagine a jury trying to make sense of this account. “So when did you see it?”
“When it drove away. You’re a real idiot.”
“What else did you see?”
The Altoid Man took his time pulling his pants up and kicking loose dirt over the feces.
“Where was the driver of the first car when the Chevy pulled away?”
“Still in there,” the Altoid Man motioned toward the gate. He laughed. “Not honking anymore.”
“You think he was dead?”
“I think you should go fuck yourself or give me a twenty.”
Leon chose option number two.
“Did you see the plates on the Chevy?”
“I told you, they were fake.”
“How could you tell?”
“Rental plates have that stupid frame with the name of the company. This one didn’t.”
Leon didn’t even know why he was bothering with the conversation anymore. “So how do you know it was a rental?”
“I told you: it was green. Forest green. The only time you’ll find a more or less new green car is a rental.”
“Is that all?”
“The woman stayed for a while.”
“The woman?” Leon was exasperated.
“Yeah. Like a wet mouse.”
LOS ANGELES
1997
__________________
Elizabeth and Hal registered their company, Z Industries, on the eighteenth anniversary of Noor’s kidnapping in 1977. Within a year, they had funding to create and test a prototype. Two years after that, they started to manufacture the radar. By the year 2000, they had patented or developed a dozen other devices and created an angel investment network from Palo Alto to Tel Aviv to Bangalore.
Their success was so complete, it erased from the collective memory all the years of struggle and hardship, the late-night prayers and early-morning despair, the time away from her daughter that cost Elizabeth her relationship with Angela and the absolute heartbreak that cost Hal his teeth and hair and every other trace of youth and vigor in a man his age. Forty years of studying and experimentation, the combined capacity of two extraordinary minds, the relentless drudgery of a pair of obsessives was reduced, in the mythology of Z, to a mere stroke of good luck, a bubble that grew during the tech boom and that kept growing, people assumed, thanks to the irrational exuberance of the late ’90s. Only this bubble didn’t burst because, depending on who was telling the story, Elizabeth was much too sharp-witted to make a bad investment, or Hal was much too smart not to stay one step ahead of the market. Both explanations were incorrect.
The reason Z Industries continued to thrive regardless of the fluctuations in the stock market was that its principals weren’t chasing money. Neither Elizabeth nor Hal had ever had the slightest idea how to enjoy the good life like normal people. To them, money was something you exchanged for a chance to pursue that other, more distant path—the one that took them away from ordinary life and let them indulge in the quiet, forever-constant pattern of numbers.
Ten years after he had been featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal as one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the twenty-first century, Hussein Zemorrodi still went around in mismatched suits and loose dentures. When he did make an attempt to appear presentable, he’d emerge from Barney’s or Ralph Lauren dressed in various shades of some pastel color—blue or lime-green or, once, yellow; he didn’t care because he was color-blind and didn’t know it, and the salespeople in the stores weren’t willing to offend a person with a black Amex card by pointing to flaws in his choice of ensemble. He never got married or had a girlfriend. He lived out of a single trunk in one hotel room or another, never had more than a few dollars’ cash in his pocket, couldn’t tell a Honda from a Lamborghini to save his life.
Elizabeth was much more astute in financial matters, but, like John Vain, she made up for that by conceiving of ever more innovative ways in which to give her money away. Before she had enough to buy a house or even a condo with, she created a foundation and hired John Vain’s old girlfriend, a pencil-thin, forever-tanned attorney named Stephanie Dalal, to run it. That’s when she stopped being Elizabeth Soleyman, the orphan widow, and became, in the local mythology, Elizabeth the Great.
__________________
Raphael’s Son had decided to remodel the house on Burk Place, so he brought Neda to live in a condominium at the Wilshire Manning on the Corridor. In Angela’s opinion, he did it because the building was inhabited mostly by Iranians, which meant he could show off his newest triumph and make sure the rest of the community learned about it faster than if he had taken out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times. It was also an occasion for him to establish his financial advantage in the real estate market: he had foreclosed on the condo when the previous owners, who owed him money, couldn’t pay their debt.
Almost all their neighbors in the building knew or had heard of the Soleyman family and their enmity with Raphael’s wife and son. Many knew of his Jadid al-Islam years in Iran; a few had even fallen victim to his extortion. In the lobby and the elevators, on the floor and in the garage, they stared at Neda with a mixture of puzzlement and indignation, whispered to each other about her rising belly and too-tight dress and how she was able to sleep at night knowing what she did about him and his mother, their ignominious beginnings, the fact that the condo he had brought her to live in had been snatched away from its real owners. Sometimes, the older women stopped Neda in the hallways just to remind her of her own father’s good name and reputation, how important it was for children to uphold their parents’ aabehroo.
Come to think of it, neighbors whispered amongst themselves, she did look extremely pregnant for a newlywed, and really, what can you expect of a girl raised in America? Kids here have no sense of responsibility, they feel no guilt or obligation toward their parents, don’t you see it on all their TV shows? The children are always right, they’re always telling the parents how to live and the parents end every episode of every sitcom by apologizing to the child or at least admitting that he knows best.
* * *
Until Nicole was born and Neda had someone to take care of, she kept her head down and let cement the impression that she was simply too stupid to know just what an embarrassment she was. After that, she focused all her attention on her daughter, used her as an excuse to avoid even family gatherings, to stay out of the way of Elizabeth and Angela and even her own parents. It was as if she had made her bargain with the devil and intended to uphold her end, had given herself to Raphael’s Son in exchange for a chance at having children.
But if Neda hoped that distancing herself from the others would minimize the damage he was able to inflict upon her parents and Elizabeth, she was sadly mistaken. For them, the last years of the century were marked by a gradual coming apart of the bonds of friendship and trust that had sustained the two families in their most difficult times.
Angela stayed in New Haven to work even after she graduated law school; Nilou went off to Pomona to study rocket science. No matter how much the two reached out to her, Neda remained detached. Her parents, who could neither make peace with having Raphael’s Son as a son-in-law nor separate themselves entirely from their daughter, made a few agonizing att
empts at tolerating Raphael’s Son’s company before he declared he had no use for them and told Neda they weren’t welcome in his house. She could see them on her own if she wanted to, even take the baby with her, “just don’t bring them near me or I’ll have to tell them how far up they should shove their third-rate, has-been, taaghooti pride.”
Neda was as alone in her marriage as she had been before it. Only now she could no longer deceive herself that someday, somewhere, she was going to grow a personality, discover some pluck, overcome the uneasiness that made her so shy and awkward with just about everyone. She was a devoted mother, but even with the girls she doubted herself, second-guessed every act, and regretted every decision. Later, when driving them to school and picking them up every day, she never once had the courage to stand around and chat with the other parents. She would go alone to all the meetings with their teachers, all their performances and after-school games, because Raphael’s Son was “too busy making money so you can maintain your fancy lifestyle.” She would venture into luncheons and bar mitzvahs and school fund-raisers, dressed in expensive clothes and loaded up with Xanax to help her overcome her social anxiety, sit in one spot the whole time, and smile mechanically and pretend to enjoy herself before crying in her car all the way home.
Then Raphael’s Son went and stole everyone’s money, and Neda got a taste of what it’s really like to be unpopular.
__________________
The real culprit, to take the long view, was money itself.
There was too much of it in the ’90s and early-to-mid 2000s, and it came too easily to too many people. There was so much of it, the average Angeleno couldn’t go to a Shabbat dinner or a shul, a parents’ meeting at his child’s school or a ladies’ weekly card game, without the conversation descending immediately into a pulsating, inflated, and curiously detailed accounting of how much money “other people” had made the previous week. It wasn’t just the dot-com boom or the rising values of real estate; not just the stock market, or the ninety-nine-cent business, or electronics. These “other people” were raking in millions merely by waking up in the morning, or having a pulse, or, as with Elizabeth the Great, knowing what tiny start-up to buy, and when to sell it.
It was so easy, it seemed, to make money, anyone who failed to become outrageously wealthy was either dense or slow or just unmotivated. Doctors and attorneys, accountants and architects and engineers—especially engineers—anyone who had squandered years pursuing higher education, then paying off student loans by billing an hourly rate for their work, was wasting time. Never mind that their parents had made every sacrifice to send their kids to university, that the kids had studied in high school and college till their eyes bled, spent years on their degrees and their residencies, graduated at the top of their classes—and now what? Now they worked twelve-hour days making a hundred thousand dollars a year while their not-so-bright classmates, the dropouts and the truants, bought a piece of land in Las Vegas today, and sold it in a month’s time for double the price.
As for the Iranians, they were finally making their peace with the fact that in America a name isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. It lives and dies with the individual; it can be changed for a mere few dollars as a legal formality; and unless you’re a Vanderbilt or a Kennedy or some other outlaw-turned-statesman, your name says less about you than your Social Security number or your zip code or your bank account number.
This is what Iranians had found out in Atlanta and New York and Los Angeles and Palo Alto in the years after the revolution: that halo around the heads of the American rich is actually the zero that turns one dollar into ten; the more zeroes there are, the brighter the halo will shine. To most, it seemed that everyone around them was raking in the zeroes by the truckload. And that they alone had missed the memo, were left struggling to pay the rent or the mortgage, the lease payments on the car, the private school tuition, the obligatory bar mitzvah celebration.
Then Raphael’s Son came along, with his nearsighted squint and penguin’s gait and all those suitcases full of cash that he claimed was “family money,” and when he popped open the cases and announced there was more where this came from, just come along and invest with me and you’ll get it back in spades, all those Iranians who had been waiting for an opportunity to catch up in America’s race to the riches, and all those who wished to multiply the millions they had already made in America, put aside common sense and simple reason, and turned over their life savings without, in most cases, so much as a receipt from Raphael’s Son.
They did so—trust a man with tainted origins, a made-up pedigree, and, at best, questionable resources—because they liked what he promised, saw it happen all around them to twenty-year-old college students whose biggest achievement was tapping on their computer keyboard long enough to hit upon a decent idea and suddenly become billionaires.
Never mind that the “family money” he had carried out of Iran belonged to families other than his own; that he had extorted the cash and the precious stones, the antique rugs and thousand-year-old artifacts from the wives and daughters of wealthy men who had been jailed in the aftermath of the revolution, condemned to death, and released only after hefty “donations” had been made to a host of mosques and mullahs and “facilitators” such as Raphael’s Son. Never mind, even, that his own bookkeeper, a sickly Armenian man with an unbridled death wish he did his best to fulfill by smoking four packs of Marlboro Reds a day, was always warning the older and less wealthy “investors” against giving their money to Raphael’s Son. The guy had started with nothing and made a fortune, people said. He must know what he’s doing.
They were right. Raphael’s Son did know what he was doing.
__________________
Raphael’s Son’s explanation for how he was able to offer such high interest rates on any size of deposit was that he invested the funds in a way that few others were able. In the era of billion-dollar profits on Wall Street and rags-to-riches stories from Silicon Valley and elsewhere, this was not such an unlikely possibility. Nor was he the only person engaged in that line of work. His investors were no more or less guilty of recklessness than anyone else who ever bought into a racket.
What was different with Raphael’s Son was that he sought not only his own prosperity, but also the ruin of his victims. He didn’t discriminate against friends or foes, family or strangers. In the end, he didn’t even discriminate against his own father-in-law.
For years, he had told Neda that her parents’ poverty, however genteel, was an embarrassment not only to him but to Nicole and Kayla.
“It’s not right, when people see you’re living like a queen while your father’s hauling boxes of cucumbers and bags of rice like a work mule. It reflects badly on us.”
In 2005 he offered to help the Raiises “become somebody.”
If they agreed to pay the mortgage, he said, he would cover the down payment so they could buy a business.
* * *
In another day and age, before he lost his pride and buried his ambitions along with his medals and memories, Dr. Raiis would have walked with his head high in front of a firing squad rather than take a dime from Raphael’s Son. Even now, with his back permanently damaged from lifting heavy loads and his hands cracked like a farmworker’s, his first reaction to the offer was pure indignation.
“Tell your husband we thank him,” he said when Neda carried Raphael’s Son’s message to him and Zeeba, “but that we’re not beggars and wouldn’t be in his debt to save our lives.”
They were living in a rented walk-up on the corner of Van Nuys and Moorpark, and Zeeba had been out of work for five months. What income they had was the seven dollars an hour from Benny Produce. Nilou, who was working for NASA on the Mars Rover project, sent them money all the time, and so did Zeeba’s brothers from Iran. Neda would have liked to help, but she never had enough to spare: Raphael’s Son gave her access to credit cards, but he made sure she was always short of cash.
He had do
ne this from the beginning of their marriage. At one point, Neda tried to get around it by asking for cash back when she charged groceries or items at the drugstore, but Raphael’s Son found out when he checked the credit card statements at the end of the month. He canceled her cards and didn’t give her new ones for twelve weeks. He paid the maid directly, so that no cash went through Neda’s hands, and he was more than generous with the girls’ allowances. But he wanted Neda to remember who was feeding her and how badly she needed him.
Maybe because she felt guilty for not being able to help them, or maybe out of fear that Raphael’s Son would take offense at the rejection, Neda insisted that her parents take the offer. She saw them once a week on Dr. Raiis’s day off, when she drove to the Valley and spent the afternoon in their apartment that was in perpetual semidarkness because it didn’t get direct sunlight. She pressed the point at every visit and on the phone with Zeeba because they both knew that once she—Zeeba—was on board, Dr. Raiis would have to fall in line. He had learned this quickly in America—that the person who calls the shots in a family is not necessarily the father but the one who makes the most money; that he, who had ignored his wife’s urgings in Iran and by so doing endangered all their lives and reduced them to this, could no longer decide anything on his own.
You don’t get to dictate too many decisions when you’re dependent on tips from the adult children of people who once held you in the highest regard. And, ultimately, you don’t get to refuse an opportunity such as the one Raphael’s Son was handing out when you’re past retirement age and still waiting for your big break.
* * *
Benny Produce was the smallest and least profitable of all the Iranian grocery shops in Pico-Robertson. The owner was all too happy to sell the place and leave it to Dr. and Mrs. Raiis to revive.
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The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. Page 30
