The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  “Sure, what about number one? Have him step forward.”

  Malamud punched the box. “One, step forward.”

  The first Jamaican wriggled two steps closer to the one-way window and rubbed his side as if he’d slept on it wrong.

  “Now have him sing the chorus from ‘I Shot the Sheriff,’ ” Jack Liffey said.

  Malamud suppressed a laugh, but Flor turned and glared.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “Anybody want to explain the chimp to me?” Jack Liffey said.

  “Not particularly, asshole.”

  “Flor.” Liffey stood up and Flor did, too, twenty feet away. They locked eyes and moved a step toward one another.

  They glared for a long time until Malamud rang a buzzer. “Liffey, over here. You’re pretty lively for this time of morning.”

  He turned and waited for whatever it was.

  “Be cool. I told you once this is a big war we got here. We’re watching over it. You know who we are? We’re the moral order. We sit up on Olympus, and when something gets a little out of line, we reach down and straighten it out so the sides fight fair. Now, you may not think so, but this is a big responsibility. It weighs heavy on us.”

  He noticed Dae Kim slipping out the door.

  “Now, anytime we want we can take disability from all the stress of dealing with guys like you, move to Idaho or Nebraska or wherever with Mark Fuhrman. They say it’s nice out there. You got your seasons, you know, a hundred and twenty in the summer and a hundred and twenty below in the winter. But we choose to stay here and keep watch over the world and we like a little respect.”

  “I offered you a fair break the first day,” Jack Liffey said. “I’ve been straight as I can be and all I get out of your partner is attitude. I don’t care if all this being a prick makes him feel powerful, I just don’t give a shit.”

  “Get out of here, Liffey. You don’t have a notion.”

  The chimp chirped and screeched as he went out the door. In the hall Dae Kim caught up with him.

  “They don’t like you very much.”

  “I was beginning to figure that out.”

  “In case it matters to you, I heard them talking. OMB means the Old Movie Bitch.”

  THE anger smoldered out as he stood in front of the glass wall of Parker Center and started to feel lonely and confused again. People like Flor focused him, but it was a false kind of focus that didn’t last, like a bickering household that only pulled together to shout at an outsider.

  He walked the six blocks to the Bradbury Building on Broadway and rode the open-grillwork New Orleans elevator in the atrium up to seven. He always got a kick out of the big eye they’d painted on the frosted-glass door. Their home office in Cincinnati had been famous for strikebreaking since the turn of the century, but the L.A. office had spent the forties protecting the illegal gambling ships off Santa Monica and Long Beach and later ferrying cash back and forth to Vegas. Now they claimed to be legit and the sign inside the door offered services like Debugging, Embezzlement Detection, Executive Protection, Inventory Shortages, and the like.

  “Is Art Castro in?” he asked.

  It was a new receptionist. The old one had taken a serious dislike to him for having cheap shoes and a Timex. It must have been something they taught in receptionist school. This one actually smiled at him and wasn’t looking at his feet or his wrist, so he figured he got to start with a clean slate.

  “Could I tell him who …”

  “Jack Liffey. I’m a friend.”

  “He’s with a client,” she said, “but I’ll put your name up on his screen.” She typed something into her keyboard.

  “I guess technology is just new ways to be rude,” he said.

  She shrugged a little with her eyebrows. “But it’s subtler. It’s sort of Zen rudeness.”

  “I’ll have to meditate on that.”

  He took a seat as far as possible from an immensely fat man who took up at least two places along the plastic bench seats. He was sweating as if he had just jogged there and his hands worked on the seat beside him.

  The nearest magazine was something thick and glossy called Loss. He picked it up idly, opened somewhere, and read, … no longer the person you once were inside, all the feelings and the children you might have had and even the ones you did have. I wake every day facing the inescapable fear that even less will be left than the day before. He saw a photograph of a man sitting cross-legged in a park. It looked vaguely like himself.

  He turned quickly to the back to a photograph of a man missing both legs, his trunk propped up on a little roller platform like a skateboard. The man held up a drawing he seemed to have done of himself, grinning maniacally.

  When he looked up, the fat man was staring fiercely at him and he glanced down again at the page to see a photograph of a wrecked station wagon with a caption about a wife at the wheel and all the children asleep in the back. He wondered who on earth would want to read this thing, if it was a way people soothed themselves if they only experienced small losses.

  “Jack.”

  Castro was in the hallway, immaculate in his tidy flat mustache and linen suit.

  “Come on back.”

  For an instant they tussled at a sixties handshake, ending in a fumble and an exchange of wry smiles. They’d met first in a brief passage through Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the early 1970s.

  Halfway down the hall, Jack Liffey said, “That one liked me a lot better than your old receptionist.”

  “Don’t get settled. She won’t be here long.”

  “I won’t ask why.”

  “Nothing sinister. She’s just a temp.”

  “We’re all temps, Art, with a sufficiently broad perspective on life.”

  The man smiled coolly and nodded Jack Liffey into the office. It was a two-window office with a pretty good view out to the south. Things looked okay from up here, but really it was a waste of decaying mid-rises that housed swap meets and Spanish movie houses. One insurance company that had banked on the Anglo city spreading south from the Civic Center had lost big when the palefaces built their New York–scale high-rises out to the west instead, and now this lone skyscraper was marooned down on Twelfth Street in a vast sea of Latin America. It only took a few blocks in L.A. to take you irretrievably across a border.

  “How did that thing turn out?” Art Castro asked. “With the envelope.”

  Art Castro was holding some evidence for him as insurance, but it was the kind of insurance that you wanted to have around for a long long time.

  “Okay so far. Don’t go peeking.”

  He laughed. “Sooner or later an envelope like that’s gonna want some rent.”

  “I throw you business, Art.”

  “Just kidding. But the day Rosewood Agency actually needs your referrals things are getting really fucked up, I can tell you. I helped you out of love.”

  Jack Liffey shrugged. “Then it’s the thought that counts. I’ve got a question about one of your competitors, G. Dan Hunt.”

  For a few moments Art Castro rearranged things on his desk, swapped an ashtray for a stapler, and squared off the blotter. Finally he nodded. “Sure. You mixed up with him?”

  “Just curious.”

  “He’s not really a competitor of ours. ’Course, no one is. His dad was an L.A. fixer, you know—it’s the 1950s and Louis Mayer hears some reporter out on the margins is going to do a piece saying Rock Hudson is a fairy so G. Dan is sent to talk to the reporter. The city used to work that way when the press was mostly a gentleman, but now it’s mostly not. I hear he tried to cover up that strange business with Begelman kiting Cliff Robertson’s checks. You can see it doesn’t work anymore. The tidy world those Jewish glove merchants ran is gone. …” He tailed off.

  “So,” Jack Liffey said. “Like, if I asked if there was anything more serious he’s involved in these days, would you go around rearranging your desk again?”

  He smiled. “He was rumored to be i
nvolved in the Hundred Committee. That was those Cuban thugs down in Florida that Nixon used to run.”

  “Are you telling me he bumped off Bobby Kennedy?”

  “No. Absolutely not. But that kind of thing, maybe.”

  “So he deals in funny moral areas,” Jack Liffey said.

  “I guess that depends on your sense of humor. I liked Bobby Kennedy.”

  “Cubans, huh? I think what I really want to know is if he ever employs Jamaicans.”

  Art Castro thought about it, as if he might be deciding whether to hold something back. “The eighties was the era of the Jamaican posses. They ran dope and stuff in some parts of town, but now they’re all going to junior college and starting small businesses. You know, it’s a funny thing, your basic American black doesn’t like your Jamaican much, thinks he’s uppity and too close to whitey. Me, I love the sound of the accent.”

  “This wasn’t, like, an abstract question, Arturo.”

  “Okay, sure. I think he’s got a Trenchtown lad he uses.”

  “Green four-wheeler?”

  “I wouldn’t know, but I can find out.”

  “You do that. Please. And let me worry about Sociology 102 and whether the Mexicans like the Costa Ricans and Peruvians. I love everybody. What would we do for food without immigrants?”

  “Around here, you’re the immigrant, esse.”

  “Sure thing. And you natives are welcome to all the hamburgers you want.”

  HE let the Nissan idle smoothly at the bottom of the hill, unable to decide whether to drive it across town and give it back, or summon the nerve to drive up the hill to see her. Two police helicopters circled and circled out over Hollywood, buzzards waiting for something to die. There was no denying it, she had him in a sweat. It was something he remembered from his teenage years when he was drawn to things he knew were bad for him, but he was going to do them anyway. How could any human being watch movies all his life and not want to be up there with one of those forty-foot-tall presences? To leverage his own ordinary-scale existence up into Magicville.

  He stopped the car and found a phone box.

  “Mike, tell me, why is looking at a movie star so weird?”

  “Weird?”

  “You know, in the flesh. It’s like a spot in a mirror that you can’t get a focus on.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “So, what is it?”

  “This isn’t a joke? I thought you were calling to tell me,” Mike Lewis said evenly.

  “It’s a question. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  “Oh, life and death. I’d better be serious, then. When you think of a normal friend of yours, like me for instance, your referent is all the things that have happened between us, the words we’ve exchanged and the things we’ve done together. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “When you think about a movie star, what you’ve got instead is all those movies you saw with the passive part of your brain, and worse, part of you was up there being somebody else. The referent is daydreams.”

  “So?”

  “That isn’t weird enough for you? Gotta go, Jack. Whatever you’re thinking about, don’t do it. It’s going to be really bad news.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Mike Lewis hung up. He knew Mike was right, but he’d given up so much, he couldn’t find a way to deny himself this, too.

  SHE was sitting on a bench in back with her binoculars, looking out over one of the ravines. She wore a silky silver blouse that was unbuttoned pretty far, so something red peeked out of the depths, and she seemed to break into a genuine smile when she saw him.

  “Jack, it’s good to see you.” That voice like water over rocks. His heart thumped and he felt a little dizzy.

  “You look good enough to eat,” he heard himself say.

  “That could be arranged.”

  She held out one hand, and he didn’t know what she was asking. He took it and she reeled him in gently and kissed him on the cheek. She patted the bench beside her and he sat. The security guard was still there, pacing slowly along the rim of the yard as if deep in thought.

  “Did you see Lionel?”

  “Mm-hmm.” He remembered Lionel Borowsky’s warning: this woman wasn’t what she seemed, this woman was capable of anything. He seemed to be floating an inch or so off the bench.

  “What did he want?”

  He hesitated and then made a decision, he wasn’t sure why. Maybe just because she was his client. “He warned me obliquely that you might be behind the kidnapping.”

  She laughed and passed the back of her hand gently across his lap, as if inadvertently, showing that she noticed he had an erection. “Is that all? Do you think I am?”

  “Frankly, it would make me really pissed off if you were. No matter what you’re paying.”

  “But do you think so?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” She cocked her head to look at him and he felt like a faintly interesting butterfly waiting for the ether jar.

  “Do you always know why you believe people?”

  “Oh, yes. But I’m pleased I have your vote of confidence, even if it’s irrational. Even if it’s sexual.”

  “There’s that. Hows about you let me take you to lunch? You don’t get out much, do you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, grab a bite at the McDonald’s, shop at the Ralph’s?”

  She laughed. “Most of what I need comes to me.”

  “That’s what I mean. Come slumming with me. I’ll take you someplace I promise nobody knows your name. Or would that hurt too much?”

  He was pleased with himself. She was a bit off balance and maybe he could establish some kind of equality after all.

  “I’m not so vain to think I’m recognized that often anymore.”

  “No, but if you keep going to Spago and calling ahead for reservations, you can stretch it out, can’t you?”

  She let that go. “What if the kidnappers call?”

  “You don’t have a cell phone?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Drag me to Sherwood Forest with the peasants, if that’s your game.”

  “My game is getting you down where the air’s thicker. It’s too thin up here in cloud-cuckoo-land for me.”

  He was glad he still had the serviceable Nissan. He cringed to think of opening the door for Lori Bright onto the shredding seats of the Concord, watching her step daintily into the two inches of effluvium on the floor. Even in the pristine Nissan she sat uneasily, as if she’d never been in anything more proletarian than a stretch, and he drove down to the ragged east end of Hollywood Boulevard that was now little Armenia. Pibul’s place was wedged between a liquor store and a shop called Plato’s Household that specialized in extremely ornate china plates and doodads. All the other stores on the block had Armenian script over the doors, like a dozen ways of drawing a rounded chair.

  Phuket Thai didn’t look like much outside, but inside it looked worse. “It’s pronounced fuckit, more or less,” he said as they drove around to the lot in back. “You’ve got to be careful, though. You might make it even worse. Thai’s a tonal language. The single syllable khao can mean ‘they,’ ‘badly,’ ‘rice,’ ‘white,’ ‘old,’ or ‘news,’ depending on your tone.”

  “You speak Thai?”

  “No. Hi, Pibul.”

  “Hello, Mr. Liffey.” The distinguished-looking Thai bowed slightly to Lori Bright, but without recognition. There was an old man at a corner table who looked grizzled and homeless, drinking tea from a glass, and a young couple were eating shrimp as far away from the homeless man as possible. On closer inspection, the grizzled man was playing chess on a little board with pegged pieces. Every once in a while he made a move and expressed some emotion at his invisible opponent, fury or satisfaction or bewildered awe, and then he would rotate the board and express the opposite.

  “Pibul, did you ever see A Week in Palm Springs? Enough Is Never Enough?”

  “Are those movies? No, I do
n’t think so.” His forehead wrinkled up, as if his ignorance might displease them.

  “Great. Two Singhas.”

  He retreated through a bead curtain that clacked and swayed.

  “You were in Thailand, I take it.”

  “A military outpost in the northeast, not far from Laos. I watched radar screens by day and read books at night. It was a whole lot better than getting shot at.”

  The owner brought two large amber beers. “Would you like to order?”

  “Let’s have a nuah yong for starters and we’ll split one of your drunkard’s pastas.” It wasn’t on the menu, but it used to be, a melange of chili and mint and pork and flat pasta that Pibul Phanomyong himself had invented.

  He nodded and withdrew.

  Lori Bright glanced at the photo of the king on a little shelf like a shrine. “I always wanted to do Anna and the King of Siam. To come up against that stuffed shirt and win him over and get him to stop lining up those kids.”

  “I bet you did. Did you make your own kid line up?”

  A chill descended with breathtaking effect. “Are you being philosophical or inquisitory?”

  “I get hints that she’s unhappy.”

  “She’s a teenager. It’s an occupational disease. It’s the time of ghastly loneliness when every boyfriend who moseys away is an irredeemable loss. And all adults are put in the world to deny you things.”

  “So you didn’t get along.”

  “I didn’t beat her with a coat hanger. Why are you obsessing on this?”

  All of a sudden he knew exactly why. The missing girl must have represented his own daughter, the black hole that marked the spot where his life had been sucked away. And just like that, the grief that he thought he’d conquered flooded back in. That very weekend he remembered Kathy was going to relent and let him see Maeve again, even if he couldn’t pay the child support. He held himself very rigid, pretending nothing hurt. “She’s my job, isn’t she? Finding her.”

  “You’re a strange man,” she said, watching him carefully. “You’d never make a movie star because your personality isn’t static enough.”

  “And here I thought it was my looks.”

  The plate of nuah yong arrived and she watched him dip the thin steak into the garlic chili sauce with chopsticks, then followed suit. She was good with the sticks, and she showed off her admiration for the burst of flavor with a big Groucho lift of her eyebrows.