12
Los Angeles, California, 1989
The old walnut had recognized Ruben’s name, but she wouldn’t say another word on the matter. Instead, she left the jewelry store and marched across the street to one of the churches. “She goes and prays sometimes,” Valantin explained. There was no promising that her aunt would open up when she returned in an hour or two, but I was welcome to stick around and see. “Or you must be hungry for more than sweets,” Valantin said. “Why don’t you go get a bite to eat? My friend owns a restaurant a short drive from here, on Everett and Elk. Leave the cat here, go tell him I sent you, and when you come back, my aunt will tell us everything. I’m curious, too, now.”
Because my stomach was bleating and because I didn’t want to leave without hearing what the old walnut had to say, I agreed to the plan. I stayed in the office for a minute after Valantin left to help a customer, and then I went to Fuji, who’d made himself comfortable on the back of the couch. “I’ll be back in a little bit,” I whispered into his fur.
Outside, with their language still ringing in my ears, I realized just how thoroughly the Armenians had made a home of Glendale, California. Storefronts bore the letters of their alphabet, and as I drove to the restaurant, I saw that even some of the street signs at the intersections had an Armenian addendum. Wilson did, and Broadway did, too, but Harvard didn’t, and neither did Orange Grove Avenue.
As soon as I passed it, I remembered the address Mina had left on the answering machine, as if I were supposed to respond by mail: 700 Orange Grove Avenue.
The Brow Beater never talked much about home, but a year into our travels together, he did mention a woman. This was the night we were leaving Minnesota, after the debacle in Duluth.
Along with a dozen or so other wrestlers, we’d gotten ourselves stuck in the northern territory during the worst of the weather. Every night for over two weeks, the good guys left the wrestling ring for one bar, and the bad guys left for another. By the end of the two-week residency, we practically owned the places. We’d fought with every local bigmouth, we’d taken shots from every bottle on the shelves, and all of us had slept with our fair share of the women of Duluth. All of us, that is, except The Brow Beater.
He’d laugh with us, he’d fight with us, and God knows he’d drink with us, but as soon as a girl introduced herself to him, The Brow Beater would call it a night. After a while, of course, the boys started ribbing him about it. It wasn’t like it is now, with the wrestling audience made up entirely of sentient pimples with boys attached to them. No, back then there were girls, real women, in the crowd. They flocked from town to city, from bingo hall to arena, from tavern to hotel bar.
They came for the bodybuilders and the studs, the blondies and the heartbreakers, but they’d settle, out of curiosity or lonesomeness, for a masked man or a savage or a giant like The Brow Beater. They even showed a little hospitality to old managers every now and again. Regardless of their motives, we were appreciative. Except The Brow Beater, and the rest of the boys never understood that about him. It’s a hard life out there on the road, in the ring, and the touch of a strange woman was more than the touch of a strange woman. We grappled with men, we trained with men, we ate with men, we shared excruciatingly small cars and motel rooms and locker rooms with men, we cut those men open, gimmicked or hard-way, we choked those men with our hands and arms and thighs, we allowed those men to brutalize us the same, we drew money from marks in the stands who happened to be, even then, mostly men, we aimed to entertain those men, to earn the respect or admonishment of those men, and so by the time the men in stripes counted their last pinfalls of the night, of the week, of the month, of the year, by the time the marks had gone and the showers had rained down on us like leaves from a shaking, it came as a kind of godly intercession to find a woman, lonesome or curious but real, to cleave to.
I knew wrestlers who married those strange women, who mistook those nights of flesh and mercy for love. But not The Brow Beater. The Brow Beater seemed to know the difference.
Well, the boys let him have it. They pissed in his boots, they pinned him down and tried to shave his signature eyebrow in two (we fought them off), they potatoed him in the ring, breaking his nose. Finally, the weather cleared, and we drove off to a new, warmer territory. It was during that car ride that The Brow Beater, eyes still ringed in yellow and green, said he was planning to marry a girl back home.
What did he tell me about her? She loved music, and cats, and something about skiing? She used to carry something reflective in her hands that would cast light out in every direction as she walked. His hope was that she’d be joining him in the States. There was a rise in his voice when he spoke about her, a kind of climbing that his heart seemed to do up his vocal cords. It was the same quality, I realized far too late, that I’d heard on the answering machine last Christmas. The girl—The Brow Beater’s girl back home—was Mina.
I skipped lunch. The clouds came on as I turned the truck around, and I was glad for the light to change. I never trusted a person who prays for cloudlessness, who prefers his days sun-stroked and harsh. Much better are those thumb-licked days when the dim light is a shroud, when no sight in the sky gets lost in a glare, when even an idea can seem matte and precise. When I found the right address, I steered into the narrow drive of an apartment complex, three stories high and square, plastered brown and flaxen as an ice cream bar.
At the gate, I could hear music. I pushed through and followed it—battling clarinets, keyboards, and vocals I remembered overhearing in Mina’s phone call on Christmas—up the fire escape. On the roof, there were about two dozen people, some of them children, dancing. It occurred to me that I was crashing a lunchtime party. A grill was going at one end of the roof, and smoke drifted as thickly as the music from the speakers. Several men huddled around the grill, turning the meat every now and again with a pair of pincers. Elsewhere, a row of elderly folks watched the party stoically from wicker chairs, and the children rushed between their dancing and the staircase beside me, going up and down to the apartments below, returning every time with new bowls and platters of food. A blue tablecloth was anchored to a table by a rock the size of a skull, and some of the smallest children were setting out the silverware. I couldn’t spot a woman between the ages of twelve and seventy. Finally, one of the men left the grill to approach me, pincers in his hands. The others watched him, and he put on a big smile. “I’ll offer you a drink,” he said to me, “if you tell me who you are.”
“I’m here to see Mina,” I said, and the guy turned to his compatriots at the grill, translating.
They let out a big roar of laughter. One of the men, gray-haired and dressed in an open-collared leisure suit, wasn’t laughing. He started marching over to me. The other guy, the one who spoke English to me, introduced the gray-haired man. “Here comes Galust, coming to get you. He’s Mina’s husband.”
Galust seemed too small and old to be married to Mina—half her height and twice her age—but who was I to disrespect him? I said to the English speaker, “Tell him I’m here for business. His wife bought a cat from me last year. I told her I’d come by about this time to administer the final vaccination.”
Galust listened to the translation. He nodded and then planted his hand on my shoulder and guided me to the grill. “Vodka?” he asked, and I said, “No, no, thank you.” He signaled for one of the other men to start pouring, and soon I was raising a glass to new friends for the second time since arriving in Los Angeles.
The English speaker drank with us, too. His name was Shen, from Apartment Six. “The whole building here is Armenian,” he said with pride. “We have lunch and dinner up here almost every day and night, the families.”
When I asked if I should go find the cat in one of the apartments below, he told me to wait on the roof until the women were done cooking.
“But aren’t you guys cooking?” I asked, motioning to the grill.
“We’re grilling,” Shen said.
&n
bsp; From Shen, I learned that Mina and her husband had brought their children here just before the earthquake. “Like she knew it was coming,” Shen said. “People say she’s always been lucky like that. Not everyone in this building has had the same luck.” He poured another round. “I’m being a big drag, forget it. Let’s toast to something upbeat.”
Galust interrupted and drew a huge laugh, and I asked what he’d said.
“It’s not as funny in translation,” Shen said, “but he’s basically saying, Did you come here to give the cat medicine, or did you come here to get medicine yourself?”
I raised my glass to Galust at the grill. He’d been a census worker back home, apparently, and now was doing accounting work at a restaurant owned by Shen’s uncle. Mina’s new American role seemed to be no different than what I imagined her old Armenian role to be, staying at home with the kids, making lunch with the other wives and mothers while the men drank liquor on the roof. But that wasn’t entirely true. Based on what these men seemed to recall about Mina’s purchase of the cat—they assumed I lived someplace nearby—I realized Mina hadn’t been totally forthcoming about our transaction. A fuller picture of her visit to me appeared in my mind: on limited money, on a passport whose stamps hadn’t yet dried, she had flown round-trip, alone and in secret, to a stranger’s house a thousand miles away, equipped only with a new language and an old professional wrestling poster, hoping the stranger would be helpful. I drank another shot with the men, and—in my mind, anyway—dedicated the toast to luck, yes, but to bravery, too.
Two children arrived like angels to offer me food, a plate of barbecued lamb with a side of rice pilaf and a hunk of flatbread piled high with tabouli. The girl, maybe eight or nine, had her hair up in a ponytail not unlike mine, and she held the little boy by the hand. There was no mistaking them for anything but sister and brother. The girl said, “I’m Araksya, and this is Shaunt. We wanted to tell you thank you for Smokey. He is such a good cat.”
I looked across the roof to see who’d sent them. I lifted my plate. Mina lifted hers. Our hellos.
13
Transatlantic, 1978–1979
On the second morning of June 1978, on a quiet street in Madrid, a small band of gunmen opened fire on the car of the Turkish ambassador to Spain, Zeki Kuneralp. The ambassador escaped with his life, but the three others riding with him—his predecessor, his wife, and his chauffeur—either died instantaneously or else bled to death over the newly upholstered interior of the car. White leather, smothered red. Not unlike the Turkish flag, or like parfait with fruit, or—well, enough already. Death wasn’t a simile. It actually happened.
Not even seven hours later, gunshots still humming in his skull, Ruben was unfolding a napkin over his lap at an outdoor café in Lisbon. He was with Hagop Hagopian, as he had been for four years already. The heavyset, light-footed woman serving their table came by again, placing a tray of thick little cups of espresso beside a dozen glazed and flaking pastries, none of which had been touched yet. Hagopian, smoking his fourth cigarette of the evening, slipped another folded bill into the pocket of her apron, as he’d done each time she’d brought something new. Hagopian had been described in newspapers of various languages as a monomaniacal, brutish man, but here, Ruben thought, was another side of him. If Ruben were ever asked to contribute to Hagopian’s biography, he’d recall this moment, this tip money folded and tucked as precisely as a note of love. This generosity.
Just then came the news, brought over by a long-fingered man wearing several rings, a man from Moscow whom Ruben had met once before, at the backgammon tournament in Paris. The man crouched beside Hagopian and said, in Armenian, “There’s been a problem in Los Angeles.”
Los Angeles, and Ruben had known immediately that the news concerned his brother. His cousin’s cousin. He expected to have to wait to find out what exactly had happened, expected Hagopian to call for the check, to speak with the man from Moscow in private, in the hotel upstairs or someplace altogether else. But Hagopian didn’t even ash his cigarette. He only said, “Sit down, eat one of these pastéis de nata. My mother always said you should have a good taste in your mouth if you have to tell bad news.”
The man from Moscow thanked him and dragged a chair from another table across the cobblestones. He plucked one of the pastries onto his dish and took a bite. Then he began to explain what had gone wrong on the other side of the world. “The police were waiting for them at the professor’s home,” he said. Hagopian asked if it was possible to know who had tipped off the police.
The man from Moscow ate more of his little cake and washed it down with an espresso. “Well, of the seven men we’d stationed in the Sperry Street warehouse, six were arrested.”
“And the other?”
Ruben lit a cigarette of his own, and the sound of the match bursting into flame came exactly at the moment the man spoke his brother’s name. “Avo Gregoryan,” he said. “The big one, with the eyebrow. He’s disappeared.”
Hagopian’s dimples were so sharp they carved through his beard. He called the waitress back to the table and ordered another round of sweets. “Surprise me,” he told her, and then turned again to the man from Moscow. “This means two things. First, this means we’ll have to put our other operations on hold temporarily. Maybe a full year, or more, to be safe.”
Ruben thought it unfortunate, after the momentum they’d built—starting with the ambassador in Paris and having just come from the successful operations in Madrid and Athens—to stop now.
When the sweets arrived—an assortment of marbled cookies and jellied doughnuts—Hagopian tipped the woman again, and the man from Moscow asked about the second meaning of the news.
“The second meaning is obvious,” Hagopian said, dipping his finger into the jelly. “We have to find our missing man.” He sucked the jelly from his finger and then wiped his finger dry on the end of Ruben’s necktie. “He’s your brother, correct?”
“Actually,” Ruben said, “he’s a cousin of a cousin.”
One hair in Hagopian’s beard, beside the right nostril, sprang free. “But when you convinced me to let him join us,” he said, “you called him your brother.”
“Yes, I did, but I didn’t think he would, well, and a real brother wouldn’t—”
“I sometimes forget how young you are, Ruben-jan.”
Ruben forgot, too. He was only twenty-two.
“You don’t have a family. No wife, no children.”
“No,” Ruben said. “Just this family, here.”
“Plus your parents, who are still living in Armenia.”
“Yes.”
“So that makes you young. Parents but no children. And no siblings, no real family to speak of.”
“Other than you.”
“Other than me,” Hagopian said, smoothing out Ruben’s necktie, sharing a little wink with the man from Moscow. “Be my friend, then. Find him, your brother. Your cousin’s cousin—excuse me. Find him. That’s your new job, as we wait out the new attention we’ll be getting.”
“I promise, Hagop. I didn’t know. I never would’ve—”
“Find him, and I’ll believe you. The sooner you do, the sooner you can get back to the work I know you care so much about. I can see you as a leader one day. You’re too bright and passionate to be running errands, so I expect you’ll find him quickly.” Hagopian had removed his own tie and given it to Ruben. Then he made a show of offering the plate of sweets. “Don’t let these go to waste,” he said. “Our grandmothers, who survived hell, would kill us.”
Since Avo had been given only the one forged passport, he must have remained in the United States. Before his flight, Ruben packed a suitcase with enough clothing and shaving cream for three weeks, which seemed excessive. How hard could it be to find a tall Armenian in a single country?
For all his travels, this was the first time Ruben would be stepping foot in America. Getting off the plane in Los Angeles, he marveled at the plastic weather, but he didn’t smell freed
om in the taxi line, and he didn’t see liberty in the makeshift village of homeless people he eyed on the overpass. His driver spoke worse English than he did.
He took a hotel room in a place called Burbank, where islets of grass separated slabs of concrete sidewalks like compromises, and where the steps leading to some of the homes were painted a candy red. From time to time, he looked down from his third-floor hotel window on to the parking lot below, and to the hills behind it. It was only then that he saw the resemblance. If the hills were greener, if the steps hadn’t been painted, if his passport didn’t read a false name, and if he weren’t there to hunt down his brother, he might have forgotten he’d ever left home.
Ruben’s first stop on his search for Avo was the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail on Bauchet Street, where the six ASALA members—American citizens, all—were awaiting trial for conspiracy to kidnap. One by one, they met with Ruben across a grated screen and a telephone wire. One by one, they mistakenly thought he’d come to bail them out.
“Hagop can help with that,” Ruben said to each one, “if you can help me.”
What they knew—that the big bald unibrowed Soviet was a traitor to his people, a secret rotten Turk, a fucker and a bitch and a faggot coward shit—was less than helpful. What they didn’t know—namely, where Avo had gone, or with whom he’d been in touch outside the warehouse—was frustrating in its scope. On his way out, Ruben promised each of them that they’d hear from Hagopian in the days to come, though he’d heard no such promise himself.
From the jail, Ruben took a cab to the city of Glendale, where he visited the apartment he’d arranged for Avo to live in. He stepped out on Lomita Avenue in front of a tall apartment complex pockmarked by stucco. Cheap brickwork housed a small garden in the front, and a child had drawn flowers on the driveway in chalk.
The Gimmicks Page 16
