The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  She had stood up to greet Elizabeth when she came in, and had remained standing. Now she dropped back into the chair.

  “He was there for us.” She realized she was going to cry, and put her face into her hand to hide the tears.

  So much longing. So many losses.

  “Angela,” Elizabeth said with tenderness, “I’ve been where you are—young, and certain of what you want. I know that need, how vital it seems, how imperative. But I wish you’d believe me when I say that some truths are better left untold, because the more you learn, the more you’ll be haunted by what you don’t know.”

  __________________

  Dr. Raiis became the canary in the mine.

  In 2008 he received a notice of foreclosure from a bank he had never had dealings with. He assumed there was a mistake, called the bank, and told them so. He thought this was the end of it.

  * * *

  Throughout the easy-mortgage years of the early 2000s, Raphael’s Son had taken second and third loans on just about every property he owned. What he did with the money was for him and some bank officers in the Cayman Islands to know, but as he approached the date of the bankruptcy, he began to let the banks take what they wished from among his overly leveraged holdings. Dr. Raiis, of course, had not been informed that the loan on his shop now belonged to a new bank. As far as he knew, Raphael’s Son had parted with the down payment in 2005 but registered the title to the shop in Dr. Raiis’s name. He sent the mortgage checks to Eddy Arax who forwarded them to the bank.

  * * *

  Eddy was unusually twitchy the day Dr. Raiis rushed over with the foreclosure notice getting soaked with perspiration in his hand. He cursed under his breath the minute he saw Dr. Raiis enter, then said with that Armenian accent that grew heavier the more exasperated he became, “Wait in the hallway with everyone else.”

  That’s when Dr. Raiis glanced behind him and noticed what he had been too overwhelmed to see when he came in: a line of restless, anxious-looking men and women that stretched down the corridor, into the office lobby, and outside by the elevators. Every one of them, he soon learned, had come bearing a letter or a notice they thought was sent to them by mistake.

  __________________

  News of Raphael’s Son’s so-called bankruptcy arrived in Los Angeles the way most other headlines broke on the West Coast: through the well-oiled gossip network of Iranian Jews in Long Island. Perhaps because they were only the second largest community of Iranian Jews in the United States, the East Coasters had a curious and long-lasting fascination with the Los-Aan-jealous-syiah that stretched back to before the great migration. At the time, only a few dozen Iranian Jews had left Tehran to seek their fortunes in the United States. Most had settled in New York and gone into the real estate business; many had been enormously successful. But these were the salad days of Iran’s economic expansion—of money growing on trees and entitlement being a birthright; of weekend shopping trips from Tehran to London and three-month summer junkets to the French Riviera; of parties that started near midnight and lasted till daybreak on weekdays, and privately owned villages and thoroughbred stables and jewels that made a laughingstock of the entirety of the crown jewels of the United Kingdom. Triumphant as the renegade Iranians had been in New York, they could not begin to impress the families in Tehran or justify having abandoned their ancient homeland—“because we’re Iranian, you know, flesh and blood, and always will be”—for the soot-covered buildings and confined living spaces and yellow traffic hazards of Manhattan.

  The revolution brought some of those flesh-and-blood Iranians to their senses and sent them packing to Long Island to suffer through snowstorms and hurricane weather, but the majority skipped the excitement and headed for the West Coast. From deep beneath sable coats and mink earmuffs, on the train to Manhattan where they hoped to consult the best plastic surgeons, the New Yorkers consoled themselves that LA’s climate had made the Los-Aan-jealous-syiah spiritually shallow and physically vain. Held captive by the Ashkenazi bridezillas their sons had brought home, and the robber baron party planners the future daughters-in-law had hired on their dime (because among Iranians, the groom’s family pays for the wedding), they consoled each other that the celluloid culture had made the Los-Aan-jealous-syiah too flashy and permissive. Over the years, those who saw the futility of denial packed up and moved quietly to LA. The rest remained on the lookout for reason number ten thousand why living in Long Island was a better idea. As it happened, a single reason would have sufficed and that, ladies and gentlemen of the East Coast, was provided courtesy of R.S. Soleyman.

  * * *

  Before they immigrated to the West, Iranians had revered America as the one country on the planet where the law was mightier than the people who wrote it.

  “In America,” they had told each other with awe, “even the president gets impeached if he breaks the law.”

  The president, maybe, but not Wall Street players and not, alas, Raphael’s Son or the Riffraff. What the great recession of 2008 would prove to many immigrants who hitherto held the American justice system in adulation was that, much like the dictatorship from which they had escaped, it applied mostly to the poor.

  * * *

  After he got no answers from Eddy Arax, Dr. Raiis called Raphael’s Son at the office and at home and on his cell phone several times a day. He left messages and tried to convince himself that he had not done a foolish thing. Better businessmen than he, after all, had trusted Raphael’s Son with much larger investments; they couldn’t all be fools. Rabbis ranging from the ultra-Orthodox to Reform and Reconstructionist praised his financial savvy and his generous devotion to every Jewish cause; they couldn’t all be wrong.

  He appealed for help to Neda and even to his granddaughters, Nicole and Kayla: “Ask your father to call me back, please—this is urgent, extremely urgent.” He went back to the office in Century City and was horrified to find an even larger rush of panicked, outraged clients threatening to break down Eddy’s door if he didn’t open.

  Shaking like a scarecrow in the wind and appearing like he was on the verge of a stroke, Eddy screamed from inside, “I can’t give you any money today! I don’t have it to give.”

  * * *

  Over the next few days, as Raphael’s Son proved elusive and word spread that he was preparing to go into bankruptcy while his hillbilly relatives in their ninety-nine-cent-store getup were buying blocks of real estate downtown and elsewhere in cash, Eddy was increasingly besieged by clients demanding return of their deposits. He went from being unusually bitter and short-tempered to a veritable emotional wreck. People screamed at him and he screamed back, they pled with him and he broke into tears.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” he repeated a hundred times a day, then finally turned off the ringer to his office and cell phones. “It’s not my money to give.”

  He lost his appetite entirely and smoked more. He squeezed two or three hours of sleep out of a full dose of Ambien, felt physically ill, and wondered who might care for his mother if he took off for Belize. He called Raphael’s Son on his private cell phone—so private, only three people, Joshua Simcha, Hadassah Simcha, and Eddy, knew the number—and yelled at him till Raphael’s Son hung up.

  “Come here and answer these people yourself,” he said.

  “If you won’t see them, at least return their calls so they leave me alone,” he said.

  “If you’re going to disappear, tell me what to do with the books and the office,” he said.

  Eddy couldn’t prevail upon his boss to come out of hiding, and couldn’t avoid the creditors even at home in Glendale. He slammed the door on the elderly and the widows because he couldn’t bear to look them in the eye; with the wealthier creditors who had lost millions, he poured salt on the wound by saying, “Don’t blame me if you’re stupid and that bastard is a thief.”

  Then he got a visit from Cagney and Lacey—the Rat in the Hat and That Fucking Snake—and he began to seriously fear for his life.
<
br />   __________________

  Angela was driving with Nilou to Temple Street downtown, hoping to convince the bankruptcy court to stall or stop Raphael’s Son and the Riffraff’s heist, when she spotted John Vain. They had stopped at the light on Main and 7th, and she happened to glance up at the orange and white city bus in the next lane. The man by the window looked nothing like the John Vain of her childhood, and yet she recognized him immediately. She put the car in park and left it at the intersection with the engine still running and Nilou in the passenger seat, sprinted up to the bus, and banged on the door till the driver noticed her. He didn’t open, but he pointed toward the stop a block away. Angela yelled at Nilou to get behind the wheel and follow the bus, then ran, met the bus, and climbed on before passengers had a chance to disembark. She collided with John Vain on the steps.

  * * *

  At the time he was released from prison he had a few hundred dollars in an old account and a host of old friends with means, Hal and Elizabeth among them, who would have jumped at the chance to help him start over. What he didn’t have was the emotional wherewithal to go back and show his face to them, be reminded of who he once was and what he had become, depend—he who had been the king of giving—on handouts.

  From Lompoc, he took a bus for the 175 miles into Los Angeles, spent two nights as a guest in the rented one-bedroom house his old kitchen hand Manuel shared with four other undocumented immigrants in the West Adams district downtown. He had lost thirty pounds in prison, his skin was sallow and pale, his clothes fraying and outdated. The rows and rows of cowboy boots he had gone to such lengths to purchase, his expensive suits, the silk ties and tiepins and cuff links he had taken such joy in wearing, were all piled in a heap inside a large packing box in a storage locker off Vine Street in Hollywood. They smelled of dust and mothballs and stale air. Even after they had been cleaned, they hung off him like something stolen out of the back of a truck.

  At Lompoc, he had been assigned to the kitchen, so he tried to find work as a short-order cook. His great fear was to run into anyone he had known in his former life, which was unlikely, given the caliber of places where he applied, but it also meant he couldn’t get a recommendation or turn to any of his old contacts for a job. In the end, he bought a fake Social Security card from some Russian teenagers and went to work alongside half a dozen undocumented workers at a Tex-Mex restaurant next to a muscle gym on Olvera Street. That’s where he was when Angela first started to look for him. He was working fourteen-hour days and saving up so he could move out of LA and go as far as it took, the middle of Death Valley if he had to, to find a place cheap enough that he could afford, put up some plumbing and an old stove, hang up a sign that said, Warning: Prison Food Served Here.

  * * *

  They stood on the sidewalk at Main and 8th, Angela in her lawyer suit from Ann Taylor Loft and John Vain in a pair of worn black pants and a faded black T-shirt, and waited for Nilou to park the car and join them. From far away, they resembled old acquaintances who run into each other too often and never quite know where to pick up. Then Nilou arrived and threw herself at John Vain, crying, “Uncle John, I’ve missed you!” without a trace of anger in her voice, and he opened his arms and hugged her.

  He had just started to work as an expo at Artisan House on 6th and Main. The owners were a pair of Iranian kids, and they had hired him despite the fact that he was too old because he was Iranian. He lived on 6th and San Pedro, which could be considered skid row, but he had an apartment with a nice bathroom and kitchen, and he didn’t mind stepping over bodies and between tents to get to it.

  He gave the report in a single installment, as if it had been prepared and rehearsed and memorized for an occasion such as this. His hair had thinned and his body hinted of a permanent ache or two, but it was the emptiness—the emotional void between him and the girls—that was most telling. It was like going back to a city you grew up in, but that has burned down and been rebuilt since you last saw it.

  Too politely, he asked about Elizabeth and the Raiises.

  “They’re fine,” Angela answered for herself and Nilou, “but you don’t wanna know about Neda.”

  If this was an invitation for him to ask, he didn’t take it.

  They quickly ran out of things to say to each other.

  “Shall we go sit somewhere and catch up?” Nilou offered hesitantly.

  John Vain was late for work. He didn’t have a cell phone but he took Angela’s number and promised he’d call.

  __________________

  In the months after Raphael’s Son declared bankruptcy, Dr. Raiis tried, Sisyphus-like, to save his shop from the ghost bankers who had somehow come to own it. When Eddy didn’t answer his calls and Raphael’s Son planted a pair of nightclub bouncers outside his own house to scare away creditors, Dr. Raiis went to the police, the district attorney, Legal Aid; to every one of the members of the Riffraff Brigade, their spouses and friends. Again and again, he appealed to Neda for help, as if she had any say in her husband’s affairs. He wrote an eloquent, heartrending letter in which he asked for her help in return for “everything your mother and I did for you when you still needed us.”

  Next, he sought out other creditors and suggested they all meet and join forces. The ones who didn’t have much to begin with and had now lost it all thought it best to keep quiet and out of the way, rely on Raphael’s Son’s humanity to give them their money back when the dust had settled. They didn’t want to risk alienating him by closing ranks. The wealthier creditors laughed when they heard how “little” the Raiises had at stake.

  “I wish that’s all I had lost,” they said.

  Still, Dr. Raiis would not accept that an injustice such as the one Raphael’s Son had committed would be allowed in the twenty-first century, in the United States of America, in the we’re-so-liberal-we-raise-the-bar-for-everyone-else state of California.

  His latest idea was to write an appeal to the president of the bank, reminding him of his responsibilities as a human being, and asking for a face-to-face meeting in which to “arrive at an amicable and mutually agreeable solution.”

  * * *

  According to the victims as well as the contingent of bloodsucking, cadaver-eating, let’s-steal-the-penny-off-the-dead-man’s-eyes lawyers and forensic accountants the trustee had called into action as a result of the “bankruptcy,” the genius of what Raphael’s Son had done was the intentional failure to keep documents. Ten years into the twenty-first century, all the books at Soleyman Enterprises were kept in old-fashioned accounting ledgers, written in pencil, with no copies made. There was no computer in the office, only an electric calculator, and even that was hardly ever used because both Raphael’s Son and Eddy were products of the Iranian educational system and therefore able to retain an enormous amount of information in their memory and perform complex mathematical calculations in their heads.

  This absence of documentation had of course been noted by most of Raphael’s Son’s clients, and while it did scare away a few potential investors, it was overlooked by others as the price of doing business with an establishment that provided such steady, high interest on their money. And besides, they told each other over a few shots of tequila every Friday night at Shabbat dinner or Saturday night at a gathering of seven hundred of their closest friends, “that Eddy is a walking Excel sheet.”

  As long as the going was good, the investors were happy to rely on Eddy’s instant recall, down to the last cent, of every dollar he received or paid on Raphael’s Son’s behalf. Most of them believed Raphael’s Son when he said that he didn’t keep a paper trail so he could avoid paying taxes, the IRS be damned, he’d pay taxes on his earnings when Hank Paulson paid his. In case they hadn’t heard him tell this story before, Raphael’s Son always followed this statement with an account of how Paulson made $700 million at Goldman Sachs while digging the hole into which the rest of the world would sink; in 2006, when he left the firm to become George W. Bush’s treasury secretary, Congress
passed a law that “happened” to spare Paulson $50 million he owed in taxes.

  “For that, and because he was too stupid to see the meltdown coming, Paulson got to keep the top job at Treasury even under Obama.”

  Once the money disappeared, however, Eddy was left holding the bag. To the creditors, Raphael’s Son said he had no way of knowing just how much he owed each investor; to the lawyers, he said they should talk to Eddy, who had, after all, kept the books. To the district attorney, in the single suit brought against him, he suggested the DA would have a better case if they charged Eddy for his shoddy accounting. To Eddy, he explained that there was nothing for him to fear: “You don’t have any assets to lose, and if it turns out that one of us has to do time, I can see to it that your mother is well taken care of.”

  It was true that doing a year or two of quiet time in Pleasant Valley State Prison, better known as the Country Club for its green lawns and lax regulation, might have been an improvement over Eddy’s life on the outside. It was also true that, though he had never directly benefited from the fraud, Eddy knew what his boss was up to all those years. And that story about him keeping every number in his head—that was of course pure drivel. Eddy did keep ledgers, only they were handwritten, in pencil, and easily erased or adjusted according to Raphael’s Son’s instructions.

  __________________

  John Vain’s boss at Artisan House had been trying to get ahold of him for over a week when he gave up on reaching him by phone and showed up at his door late one Friday evening. There was no answer when he knocked, and no manager on site, but the door was so flimsy and the hinges so old, they gave way with one good push.

  Barely eight hundred square feet and shaped like a T, the apartment consisted of a narrow living room where an ancient yellow and white sofa, backed against one wall, faced an even-more-ancient television set. A small bedroom and smaller kitchen sat to the right and the left of the sitting area. Between them in the back wall, a square window with a cheap aluminum frame overlooked the busy intersection below. The window had to be closed at all times to keep out the dust and noise of traffic, but even then the sound of cars and the smell of gasoline permeated the apartment.