Terminal Island (12 page)

“The Yellow Peril”—the phrase came to him all of a sudden. Jack London and those fellows had been right to worry about the destructive impulses brewing in the East that might sweep over Western civilization and attempt to wipe it out.

The man took a steak knife from the kitchen and drove it through one of those strange playing cards, and then through the side of the plastic trash barrel. At this point the invader addressed himself to the one truly and utterly inexplicable act of the afternoon, something not even the logic of envy and destruction could account for. He emptied the old family china cabinet on the far wall that Declan almost never used, leaving the cloth napkins and old plates and 78-rpm records set out neatly on the carpet. He was obviously very strong, and he braced the cabinet against his hip and lifted the entire thing at an angle by himself, then carried it slowly across the room and out the back door.

The only coherent word Declan Liffey's mind could form for several minutes was
gook.
Just fuck all you gooks, he thought.

Steelyard drove him down to Fish Slip in the plainwrap Crown Victoria, and they parked next to a giant mound of seine net under tarps, where Dan Petricich was talking to his father. The fishing boat had risen from the seabed and was tethered to a big crane on the dock and a large, seagoing tug on its far side, while workmen scrambled over its deck. It looked a bit denuded of equipment and pretty damp, but otherwise fairly sound.

“The crime scene folks will look it over now, but I don't expect much. He didn't leave any clues on dry land. I don't see why he would on a boat.”

Steelyard and Jack Liffey sat in the car a while, becalmed by some impulse neither of them could name. In grade school, when both of them had been troubled for various reasons, they had tentatively supported one another, and it seemed to count for something, even though it was more than forty years behind them.

“You getting anywhere with that list?”

“We've been promised the names today.”

“I think that old man knows something,” Jack Liffey said.

“Every time I touch on a subject he doesn't want to talk about, he starts cursing.”

“Do you think you could find your own father?” Jack Liffey asked. “It's just a hunch, but this seems to be about them, not us.”

“God.” Steelyard gave an inadvertent shudder. “Would I want to find the old man? I don't know. How about your dad?”

“He won't talk to me about anything that matters. I'll make you a deal: you talk to my dad, and if you can find him, I'll talk to yours. There's something about that generation that clams up with their own kids.”

“I don't even know if my dad is alive. But it's a deal. I'll talk to Declan.”

“Get specific. Push him hard on some very concrete plane. Don't let him slip into rattling off abstractions and types. He's a greased eel in that world. Why don't you have another try with Ante there?”

“Let me do my job my way, okay?”

“Sorry. I'm trying not to presume on all that history we had.”

Steelyard smiled ruefully. “Thanks, Jack. You were a good friend in a really bad time.”

Finally they got out into the salty, fishy air and walked toward the salvage operation.

Dan Petricich hailed them as they approached.

“Any news on this fucking boatsinker?”

“No. How's the boat?”

“I think we're going to save her. I may need a new GPS unit. It didn't take well to complete immersion. But there's something else.”

“Uh-huh.”

Jack Liffey could sense Steelyard's professional curiosity gather steam.

“I went aboard this morning when it was first stabilized and looked around.”

“I'd rather you waited for the crime scene people.” Steelyard glowered.

“Sorry, but listen. Everything was normal except the galley. Some of the
plates
were missing. The metal ones were still there and some old scratched Melmac, but there were a few old plates that had Chinese designs, real china from home, and they're just gone. I almost didn't notice. They were from a set we had for years, and we'd broken so many of them that there was no point trying to use them anymore, so I just demoted them to the boat.”

“Where did they come from?”

“I have no idea. They was just always there, even in my childhood. Dad?”

“Ja?”

“Where'd that old china come from—you know, the one with the blue designs all over?”

He snapped something in their own language.

“He says we'd have to ask my mother. She's passed on.”

Steelyard scowled at the old man for a moment but finally let it go. “Is the boat stable enough so you could get your work crew off for an hour or so? I know we probably won't find anything, but I'd like to have our lab people look around before you paint everything and stomp all over it.”

“Sure … okay … sorry.”

Steelyard made a call on his cell and then grabbed Jack Liffey's sleeve and pulled him back toward the car. After they got in, he said, “The old fuck knows something, doesn't he? I'll work on him later. I want to show you something.”

They drove back north on Harbor Boulevard to where they could swing around and get on the Vincent Thomas Bridge to Terminal Island. It was a graceful Rust-Oleum green two-tower suspension bridge, like a smaller version of the Golden Gate, but it hadn't been there in Jack Liffey's youth. There had only been the car ferry, and when that stopped running late in the evening and on weekends, there'd been a smaller passenger ferry to bring shift workers home from the canneries. For a nickel each, he and his friends had pushed through the rotating grid gateways on weekends and ridden across the channel as passengers, scampering all over the boat and then hiding under the benches at the far side and riding back for free, over and over. Only much later did he figure out that the crew had certainly known what the kids had been up to and had winked at it all that time.

The fifty-cent tolls had finally paid the bridge off and, unlike the bay bridges up north, the city had dropped the toll completely so it was free both ways now. Steelyard swung off the bridge, past the immense conic hills of coke dust to be shipped to Asia, and on into the old cannery area. The big canneries such as Star-Kist and Chicken of the Sea were gone now, empty shells or razed, their operations moved to American Samoa and other low-wage zones on the Pacific Rim. Some smaller packing plants still seemed to be functioning, but the main part of the island was now devoted to stacks and stacks of shipping containers and an endless bristling of the tall K-cranes that unloaded them.

Steelyard turned down Tuna Avenue where, miraculously enough, there was one cafe that still survived. Then he turned along a broad basin where only a few out-of-town boats were tied up. The only one Jack Liffey could see stern-on had a registry from Seattle. Being down at ground level disoriented him a bit, but he was pretty sure this was the square basin where the Japanese fishing boats had tied up before the war.

Steelyard turned south on a straight street, heading for a big gray building. “That's the federal prison where Al Capone's syphilis ate up his mind,” he said.

“I think I knew that once. We joked about it as kids.”

He swung to the left around the prison and showed his badge to a Coast Guard officer who lifted the gate to let them enter.

The base was immaculate. There were a few white frame buildings—so clean they looked like a movie set—a dock with a small cutter all set to go in case any Arabs rowed out into the harbor with bombs, and huge expanses of far-too-green lawn. Steelyard drove as far south as he could along the grass to where a stone seawall rising ten feet out of the water formed the southernmost tip of Terminal Island.

“Come on,” Steelyard said.

They got out and stood at the seawall to look back into the basin, which was surrounded by small icehouses and packing plants, most of which looked shuttered and abandoned.

“This is the way the Japanese fishermen saw it coming back from the sea,” Steelyard said.

“From this far away, it just might still all be there.”

“There's a plaque now and a monument, but this view is better.”

“Hell, how much of our past is marked by anything at all?” Jack Liffey said.

“Maybe I'd prefer it
this
way. Blast it all flat. It would match some inner feeling.”

Liffey looked at the man with compassion but said nothing. Wind blustered against their clothing. Steelyard looked back at Jack Liffey with an expression so lost that he could sense some kind of resigned ghost behind the man's eyes. Steelyard gripped Jack Liffey's shoulder hard. “This is private, friend. Respect it. I've come close to eating my gun three times.”

Dec 19 PM

The old man has been paid in full. Paid a little extra, one could say, because the nature of his writing and his life invited it as much as his family's long-past offense.

The span of revenge is endless. A palpable weight all my life, even when you carried it yourself, repeated yourself endlessly, your own merit drowning in the tediousness of your rancor.

You were unfortunate. The
Hagakure
tells us that it is best to pass on through the experience of bitterness when you are young, or your disposition will never settle down. If you become fatigued when you are unhappy, you become useless. You will never be freed from its bondage; the merely appropriate and necessary will dominate what is left of your life. Every one of these men I confront eases the weight a little. I wonder if concluding this task will leave me weightless and substanceless, without a place in the world any longer. Perhaps the space I occupy will cease to be and the world simply close up around where I had been, as if you and I had never existed. What a perfect Bushido death!

Ten

A Haunted House

Jack Liffey sat in Ken Steelyard's oversized prowl car for the better part of an hour, trying not to feel oppressed by all the angular gadgetry stuck to the dashboard as he listened to the halting, inarticulate revelations that he knew overprocessed and overtight men like Steelyard tended to confess to anyone handy when their egos started collapsing. Seagulls wheeled overhead, and a single pelican dived and dived off the tip of the island. He wasn't much of a consoler or psychologist, with his own problems crystallizing slowly inside him, but he did his best to hear the cop out. He knew better than to offer a lot of glib consolations, some fatuous “purpose in life,” but he was sorely tempted to offer the man something.

Jack Liffey remembered that as a ten-year-old, he had usually managed to cajole Steelyard into some form of play that got him to forget his wounding home life for the moment. He had been beaten at home, now and then, but that hadn't been the worst. His stepdad just didn't like him very much. Jack Liffey could see that it was exactly what the stepfather had demanded of poor Kennie Steelyard that he seemed to have become in the end, but at what cost?

“I don't know what to tell you, Ken. Doesn't the department have somebody you could talk to?”

In fact what he kept seeing was the two of them, maybe ten years old, avoiding the long recess, hiding out in the bushes. They had invented a game, wrapping golf balls in white hankies and tying off the neck with rubber bands to make big-headed ghosts. He no longer had the faintest reminiscence of what they'd done with their golf ball ghost puppets in those bushes.

Steelyard glared at him. “It gets out you're seeing a fucking shrink, nobody trusts you again.”

“You know, I hate to have to say it, but this is exactly what's making the world such a tough place for you—all these goddamn
rules
that seem to go along with this oaf mentality you cops are always exuding.”

Steelyard quickly turned to stare at him, and Jack Liffey glimpsed something almost pensive behind the sudden anger. “What are you fucking getting at?”

“Most of the time you clam up hard, raise your steel armor, like Clint Eastwood on his worst day. When's the last time you let down and unwrapped a little and let something work on your inner spirit? I'm not being religious, dammit. I just mean some basic humanity inside you.”

Steelyard looked away, but the anger had left his voice. “I'm not sure I get you. You know I try to watch TV at night to relax, and even the cop shows, they just turn into a big pot of rage for me.”

“Kill the TV. Read a book, man. I can give you some books that may make you feel human. Let your mind out of that macho trap. Maybe that's what the toy trains were for, some sort of escape.”

Jack Liffey was not a fan of psychotherapy, and this was about as far as he would go.

The man didn't look over but he squeezed Jack Liffey's shoulder, so hard it hurt. “
Read,
huh? I'll give it some thought.”

Then Steelyard sighed and turned his cell phone back on. It immediately buzzed angrily at him.

“Eee-yuck!” Maeve had swiped a couple of her mom's nose strips, and they had just peeled them off their noses after the requisite wait. Now they were grossing out on what had been sucked out of their nose pores. The morning light through the window made the little worms of extracted blackheads all too evident.

“Boogerocious!”

They peered carefully at the strips, turning them this way and that in the light, and then discarded the evidence and changed tack to try to decide where to go exploring for the day. There was a lot of the city Ornetta had never seen, but it was the Hollywood stuff that seemed to attract her most, Grauman's Chinese and the boulevard itself and the inevitable Hollywood sign, though she seemed to feel a bit sheepish about it, as if she knew in her heart that there were cultural landmarks more deserving. Maeve had her little Echo, full of gas, and the day was before them, so they could go just about anywhere except San Pedro, following her promise to her dad. Then Maeve had a brainstorm.

“How'd you like to meet a real Native American woman?”

Ornetta looked curious in all the right ways, so Maeve explained the plan. “We'll do Hollywood first and then meet my friend for lunch. She's really super.”

“Okay,” Ornetta said. “You go, girl.”

Her grandfather seemed perfectly agreeable to a mini expedition as long as they stayed well away from San Pedro, of course, or any other areas that might be genuinely dangerous for two young ladies alone. Maeve promised to keep in touch by cell phone, and they started preparing for their outing. They loaded a Styrofoam cooler with four diet Pepsis and two Fuji apples. Maeve knew she had her Thomas map book in the car, and a a box of Gummi Bears. Ornetta brought a little throwaway cardboard camera from the Costco. They were getting more and more psyched.

Maeve called Gloria Ramirez, who told her she could move her day around to take the afternoon off. They agreed to meet for a late lunch in a big marketplace called
El Mercado
in East LA, not far from her house in Boyle Heights. Maeve was thrilled because she had rarely set foot in East LA and she'd just finished a semester of Spanish. Now maybe she could put it to use.

Steelyard peered down into the trash barrel with a dispassionate frown. Jack Liffey had already had a good look. The last three koi from the pool in back had been thrown in on top of a gummy mass of shredded paper that reeked of ammonia and other bathroom chemicals.

“You guys got about five seconds to evolve into something that loves breathing Drāno,” Steelyard offered the fish softly.

Actually, the fish were well beyond evolution—as Jack Liffey knew from his peek—motionless, mouths and gills distended, good and dead. The card, held to the side of the trash barrel, said
To defeat the man.
Declan was across the room in his desk chair, rubbing the raw spots where the duct tape had been stripped off and cursing a blue streak, mostly against the Japs, who he was sure were behind the attack, collectively, having waited for it since Hiroshima.
Slopes, dinks,
and
gooks
were words of hate that Jack Liffey had ignored often enough in the service, but obviously, his father moved in circles that had whole lobes of the brain set aside for even more original racial epithets.

“Skibby yellowshitters!”

“Bucktoothed little cocksuckers!”

“Chow Ming Mongoloids!”

“Mustard monkeys!”

“Charlie fuckin' Chans.”

He seemed at last to be running down. “You know how many years I worked on that book?”

Steelyard sat on the sofa and opened a notebook, showing very little evident sympathy. “About as many as I worked on my layout,” he pointed out.

“You can't equate a major breakthrough in historical scholarship with a stupid toy train!”

Diplomatic as always, Jack Liffey thought.

“What was this scholarly masterpiece called?”

“The History of the White Race.
It was more than seven hundred pages long and had more footnotes than the
Britannica.”

“You didn't keep a copy?”

“He got that, too. All the while, your dumbshit colleague sat in his car in front eating doughnuts and never noticed the slant-eyed monkey attacking from the back.”

Jack Liffey refrained from reminding his father that he'd warned him several times about moving his valuables out of the house. Given the title he'd just heard, he could pretty much guess what it contained. No loss there. All those footnotes would merely have cited like-minded screeds written by the nutcases holed up in redoubts in northern San Diego County and Idaho.

“We're not baby-sitters, Mr. Liffey. We had a car here watching over you. If the officer hadn't come over to check on you, you'd still be tied up.”

“An hour too fucking late!”

“Sounds like you should have accepted your son's offer to get away for a while.”

Declan glared at Jack Liffey for the first time. “I don't get paid by the hour to argue.”

Jack Liffey wasn't quite sure what that was supposed to mean, but he left it alone. “You're still welcome to go to my place, Dad. You'd have it all to yourself. I'm staying at a friend's.”

“What's the point? What's he going to do to me now? Steal my skivvies?”

Jack Liffey shrugged. “It's just an offer.”

“Let's go over the perp's actions again,” Steelyard suggested. “I want to make sure I've got it all down.”

Declan Liffey had calmed down enough to give him a step-by-step account of his ordeal. For the first time, the old man allowed himself to veer away from a single-minded focus on the rape of his manuscript, and mentioned the intruder emptying the cabinet that had been against the northern wall and lugging it away with him. Steelyard perked up a bit and pried out of him a detailed description of the piece of furniture: banged-up mahogany veneer, a rounded front that was called waterfall by antiques buffs, metal handles shaped like Chinese letters.

“The letters mean anything?”

“How should I know? Probably Fuck you, round-eyes. It belonged to my dad. My wife never liked it.”

Steelyard fussed around a while longer, but he excused himself when a couple of people from crime scene showed up in their superclean jumpsuits and plastic booties to look for evidence. One of them, unfortunately, was an Asian technician, and Declan glared at her ferociously.

As they walked back to the car, Steelyard seemed lost in thought.

“Any way to speed up the FBI on those lists of the ‘no no' boys?” Jack Liffey suggested. “It sure looks like a disgruntled Asian.”

“Disgruntled,” Steelyard repeated, rolling the word around in his mouth, as if testing several of the flavors it gave off.

“
Very
disgruntled then,” Jack Liffey amplified. “Peeved,
I
-rate. Who knows? There's sure as hell a grudge here, and I'm the only one still on this guy's radar, as far as we know.”

“The feebs really love it when you call them up and say they're dragging their feet on something you asked them to do. You ever had a lot of luck jamming up the feds?”

“As a matter of fact, I've met good feds, just like I've met good local cops. There're exceptions to every rule.”

Steelyard laughed a little, as if he'd softened up some overnight. Maybe it was just getting back on the job after all the soul-searching out on Terminal Island. “I'll call the junior G-men. And
you,
take a lesson and get what you value out of reach.”

“There's only one thing I value that much and she's at an undisclosed location.”

“I hope you're right, Jack. I worry about this guy. This is not the usual dirtbag from the shallow end of the gene pool. He plans, he comes in under surveillance, he knows what to do to hurt his targets, and then, once in a while, he leaves really skeery things behind like that Special Forces kill knife. He may not have hurt anybody's person yet, but he's had a free run. I have a feeling he might go nuclear the first time he's thwarted.”

“Look!” Ornetta had placed her tennis shoe into Humphrey Bogart's shoe impression in the concrete square in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese, which Maeve noticed was apparently now called Mann's Chinese. As Maeve knew perfectly well, everything in LA ate up its own past every few years, as if what it had once been didn't matter a bit. Ornetta's shoe fit perfectly.

“Wow, he had small feet,” Maeve said.

“I guess he was a little guy.” She looked around dubiously. They had parked behind Musso & Frank's and walked several blocks to get here.

Hollywood Boulevard was just about the tackiest possible place in LA, but Maeve hadn't wanted to warn Ornetta in advance. Mostly the shops along the boulevard sold T-shirts with pictures of movie stars or little plastic reproductions of things such as movie cameras and skulls and little toilets for use as ashtrays, and also S & M paraphernalia such as spiky collars and whips and black bras with the nipples cut out. In fact, a lot of the local people striding up and down the boulevard seemed to be wearing the stuff.

Except for the gawky camera-laden families from Kansas, who were mostly down by the Chinese Theater at the west end, the boulevard was full of hard-core druggies and bikers and runaways with utterly lost looks in their eyes—a hundred wannabe punk musicians looking for one another. One guy, who was shirtless in the chill of December, bustled past with an angry frown and big half-dollar-size rings in both his nipples. A young woman in leathers lounged sleepy-eyed against a wall, so emaciated Maeve wondered if she would survive the day.

“There's something really wrong going on,” Ornetta said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

“These kids didn't grow up here. If all you're fed, day after day, is sick dreams about becoming famous, and your parents hate you, what chance do you have?”

“This isn't about
movies,
” Ornetta complained. “Almost nothing here is about movies.”

“No—but it's full of people whose minds were messed over by the movies.”

“Can we go to that other place?”

“El Mercado; sure.”

“I know about bad places,” Ornetta said, “but I think there's a lot more evil deep in the soul here.”

“My dad told me somebody once said if you strip all the false tinsel off Hollywood, underneath you'll find the real tinsel.”

A stocky man with a fringed deerskin shirt and a tattoo on his forehead that said
Metal or Death
was striding toward them with the impotent malevolence of a large predator trapped in a zoo. Ornetta wasn't in any mood to laugh at the joke. “Let's book.”

As it happened, there was a faxed list of names from the FBI waiting on Ken Steelyard's desk. The list was several pages of names of the Japanese Americans who had declined to make patriotic affirmations in 1942. A clerk-trainee had already painstakingly compared the list to Jack Liffey's roster of the Terminal Island residents and winnowed it down to thirty-one names.