The Orange Curtain (19 page)

“Billy, I want to ask you about an expression I read. It’s a word I don’t understand.”

Past the small kitchen he could see the suggestion of a dining room. There was an ornate glass centerpiece sitting on lace on the table. A print of a shaggy Highland bull was on the wall beyond the table, just barely visible. He heard another creak that might have come from someone in the house, or might just have been one of those sounds wood-frame houses emitted as the temperature changed and damp soaked through.

“I’ll come back. You just wait for me.”

He walked back to the car. So much for intuition. He would come back just after dark. If the boy was inside, Jack Liffey doubted he could sit there all night in the dark.

In the meantime there was business to take care of:
Go home, fuck you, dead dead dead
was preying on his mind.

He lay with one cheek against the wood floor, his eye only an inch from the periscope where he had watched that man lean up to the window and peer inside. His hand compulsively clutched and released the pistol where it lay beside him on the floor, like some reflex action going on mindlessly after death. Tears from one eye coursed across the bridge of his nose and dropped onto the wood, and from the other fell straight to the dusty unwaxed wood whenever he blinked.

He wondered what it would have been like having a man like that as an uncle, or neighbor or friend. He dared not even think,
father
. Someone to talk to, someone to show him the ropes on all those common things that defeated him so easily, and someone to listen whenever he found a startling new item of information to convey, a recurring number sequence that generated only primes, or the common vowels across the Northern European languages or a startling correlation between business cycles and sunspots.

Impossible now. If only she hadn’t bellowed with laughter so unexpectedly and so cruelly when he’d unveiled the circus wagon, and then lunged forward to smash it flat with her palm.

Tien Joubert wasn’t in her office.

“At warehouse,” the receptionist told him curtly, as if she were paid to keep the word count down. She had a little less makeup on this afternoon and she handed him an outsized business card. The reason for the size was immediately apparent. It had to accommodate the name
Tien Joubert Nguyen and then Sleepy Lotus Import/Export and Business Facilitation
and several lines in Vietnamese, plus a small smiling photograph of her, a logo with an intertwined N and J, followed by three addresses, an internet website, an e-mail address, and five phone numbers. Strangely, for a woman’s business card, even her home number and address were shown. Perhaps she was so proud of the Huntington Harbour address she couldn’t help proclaiming it, or maybe it was traditional in Vietnamese business.

“Thanks loads.”

The warehouse was on one of the side streets back of Bolsa, improbably called Harrowgate Lane, which reminded him that the town of Westminster had originally had a British theme about it. The sad little half-timbered civic center that he’d driven past the day before had harbored in the center of its courtyard what looked like the top third of a lopped-off Big Ben. Probably the only spot on earth where an imitation Viet Nam elbowed up to an imitation London.

The Mercedes was crosswise in three parking slots under an engraved wooden plaque that said
Sleepy Lotus
, and inside a small warehouse Tien was gesticulating to two Latinos in dusty work pants. He climbed the steps at the side of the loading dock and was surprised to hear her issuing instructions in serviceable Spanish. Her face blossomed with delight when she spotted him.

“My glorious lover come back!” she exulted, as if the workers weren’t there. She put her arms around him and tilted her head back to demand a kiss.

Apparently she sensed his embarrassment. “Not time in whole wide world for so much modesty. They my employees
and
my friends. Oscar. Leonardo. This Jack Liffey, my special friend.
Mi amigo especial
.”

They greeted him, trying diplomatically not to make too big a thing of it. “You stay a minute.” She pulled away to talk to the workers. Her Spanish had the weirdest accent he’d ever heard, but the words sounded right, and the workers seemed to be following her.

“
Descargue los cajones grandes primeros
.”

“
Si, Dona Tiena
.”

Along one wall of the warehouse there was a rank of brand-new pink and baby blue chest-tall vending machines that he might have guessed were for cigarettes except for the colors. The Vietnamese and Chinese lettering was no help. When she finished with the workers, he asked what they were. She dug in a carton with a grin and showed him a little pink doll in a plastic bubble the size of a tennis ball. “Every Viet Nam restaurant in country have toy machine,” she said. “Viet Nam people good to kids.”

“So are Latinos,” he said.

She looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh, you mean Mex’cans. Why you say Latino? They don’ speak Latin.”

“Ask Dan Quayle,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. I need your help, since you’re
my
boss, too. I need to speak to Thang Le, the guy who calls himself Uncle Ho. Do you know who I mean?”

She frowned. “Course I know Le. He first class cow
boy
. And only guy I know, when you give him good fried shrimp and yam, noodle and pork, he turn up nose and ask for cheeseburger and fry. His spirit still lost-in-transit over Pacific. He junkie of all bad stuff in world. Why you want?”

“He thinks I’m after him and his gang about Phuong. I want to tell him I’m not, in some way that will get through to him. I don’t want to wake up some morning with a guy in a black jumpsuit holding an assault rifle in my face.”

“Why don’t you just forget him? He nothing.”

“I don’t want to die, Tien. Not prematurely anyway. I’m funny that way.”

“You want me kill him for you?”

“
No!
For heaven’s sake. I just want him to leave me alone.”

“Okay, I know only thing he understand.”

“No violence.”

“Oh, no. I don’ mean that. You come with me now.”

She popped the door on the Mercedes for him and backed away from the wall very fast even before he settled. She accelerated across a speed bump that tossed him up off the seat, leaving him flailing for a handhold, and then squealed to a stop at the back of the industrial complex of little warehouses, where she hit a remote stuck to her visor causing an automatic roll-up door to trundle noisily up its guideway. Then she drove straight in.

This one was not much bigger than a one-car garage and absolutely empty except for a small heap of swept-up shipping labels and plastic strappings in the back corner. The light dimmed and a black shadow descended the walls as the door clattered down until the room was pitch dark. She cracked her door to turn on the interior light but not enough to start the bonging.

“Oh-oh,” he said.

“I know you not stay with me down in county tonight,” she said as she started unbuttoning her gold silk blouse. “We got time.”

“I usually like a little music and sweet talk first.”

“Me, too,” she said. She flicked the radio on to classical KUSC. “Start sweet talk now, you big hunk of my man.”

She torqued around to hang the blouse from a little hook over the shelf that passed for a rear seat. She wore a red and frilly, nearly see-through brassiere.

“You never do it in car? The seat go down some.”

“Not since I was a teenager.”

“I done it in some damn strange place sometime. Back of Church in Rouen with plenty old ladies praying up a storm. My body really want you, Jack.”

“My body’s sending me signals, too.”

“Time to answer signal.” She had the bra off and her body glowed like porcelain in the dome light as she started to wriggle out of the skirt. “Green is go.”

He started on his own shirt uncertainly, with a dozen varieties of guilt padding around the car like wolves. The seats didn’t quite come down far enough and toward the end, his foot hit the key and the horrible bonging started up to punctuate a critical moment so they both burst out laughing. When they drove out later and passed her other warehouse, a little slower, Oscar and Leonardo stood on the loading dock, grinning and applauding. He hadn’t blushed like that in years.

It took her about two hours to set it all up. There was a whirl of telephone calls and return calls, beepers paged, messages left and answered, favors called in, people popping into her office and hurrying away, much of it conducted in a rapid Vietnamese full of what sounded like threats and pleadings. It turned out that what it was that Thang Le understood was the Paris Peace Accords and everything that surrounded them, and that was what Tien Joubert was trying to duplicate.

As befitted the spirit of those tortuous Paris talks, the shape of the table was once again a major issue. She wanted a face-to-face with Jack Liffey and herself on one side and Thang Le and his chief lieutenant on the other, but what she got eventually was a square table with the addition on the east of Father Dang, a priest the
Quan Sats
trusted, and on the west Lt. Frank Vo to vouch for the police department’s disinterest in Thang as a suspect in Phuong’s killing. Apparently it took a lot of favor-calling for Tien Joubert to get Lt. Vo to make an appearance, but he agreed finally, probably out of curiosity as much as anything.

She had done most of the calling and pre-negotiating from her inner office, emerging periodically to talk to people who passed through or just to pace restlessly from door to window, while Jack Liffey, feeling distinctly ridiculous and a bit guilty, had helped the receptionist rearrange the furniture in the big front room of the office. It was as if he’d gone to the family doctor to ask to have a boil lanced and abruptly found himself in the whirl of lead-up to open-heart surgery.

The receptionist’s name turned out to be Loan Pham and she was a lot nicer once she discerned Tien’s attitude to Jack Liffey.

“Can we move table closer here, Mr. Jack, please?”

“Sure. Just Jack. Which is your family name, Loan or Pham?”

“Pham. I turned it around in school; it’s easier for everybody.”

The desks and work tables were now arranged in a big rectangle, wider on two legs, and Loan had scattered tea cups and paper pads tidily around. Tien’s lawyer, a natty little man with a display handkerchief in the pocket of his shiny suit, had dropped off a draft agreement of the peace treaty and left, shaking his head. Loan made photocopies and distributed them around the tables. They had everything but little flags and name plates. Finally, Loan charged up a big teamaker like a Russian samovar and armed herself with a flash camera to play both hostess and press.

By the time the priest showed up, Jack Liffey had got used to feeling like a droll pain in the ass, and he figured they all had their own agendas running, anyway, or it would never have come off.

“Johnny Dang,” the priest said, and offered his hand. Jack Liffey had to assume it was his name.

“I guess we’ve got the same name,” Jack Liffey said after he’d introduced himself. “Jack is a diminutive of John, too.”

The priest bowed and smiled. “Mine was Gianni—G-I-A-N-N-I—when I trained in Rome. They had even more trouble than you people with ____.” He said a word that Jack Liffey didn’t catch in a high-pitched three-tone whine.

“I won’t even ask you to spell that. So the
Quan Sats
trust you.”

“I minister to all the gang boys without prejudice, following the spiritual example of Father Greg Boyle in East Los Angeles.”

“Father G-Dog,” Jack Liffey acknowledged. He was famous as the priest who believed in unconditional love, even for gang-bangers, and who never wrote anyone off. The cops hated him because he wouldn’t rat out kids who came to him, and the Church had transferred him far away for a few years, as if embarrassed to find a real Christian in their ranks, but finally let him return to East Los. If the Church ever actually recognized saints, he would probably get his halo, but of course, Jack Liffey thought, like the secular society, they really only honored conformity, and only when it came in elephant doses.

Father Dang made a telephone call, apparently to confirm to Thang Le that there were no tiger cages waiting for him at the office.

“This is quite an event,” the priest observed in a kindly way, after the call.

“I’m surprised myself. I just wanted to get the lads off my back.”

Loan Pham brought them some Chinese tea and Jack Liffey sipped at the tepid, insipid drink that he didn’t much like.

A few minutes later Lt. Frank Vo came suspiciously into the room and looked over the tables. “This is preposterous,” he said.

“Most of life is,” Jack Liffey said, “with a narrow enough point of view.”

The policeman stopped very near Jack Liffey, and spoke softly, “Are you still looking into Phuong’s death?”

“I have one more person to talk to. I haven’t been able to get to him yet, but I will tonight.”

Frank Vo watched him, as if having second thoughts about cutting him some slack. “Margin and the Serial Killer Team are not happy with either of us.”

“What have you done to deserve their hostility?”

He put his fingers into the corners of his eyes and tugged outward to emphasize his Asian features. “They keep saying there is no yellow or white or black, only blue, but I don’t think they believe I am quite blue enough.”

“Are you?”

“If it means ignoring who I am, no. They don’t ignore it. You would be surprised the number of times the word dink or something like it is scrawled on my locker.”

Jack Liffey winced. “This can be a funny country,” he said. “Some people are pretty good about that and some aren’t. I can’t apologize for the kind of guys who choose to be cops.”

Frank Vo shrugged. “As a people, the Vietnamese are sometimes very warm and sometimes very indirect and cool.”

Jack Liffey thought of Tien Joubert, and he could picture it. She was both.