The Orange Curtain (7 page)

“I’d appreciate it if you’d let her know I’m here. About Phuong Minh.” He wondered if he should have left the name in its accustomed Vietnamese order, but she budged at last and pressed a button on a fantastically complicated digital console and spoke into it in Vietnamese. At least, he thought, this receptionist would only see another
thong miao
—the expression meant gook in Vietnamese—whose existence had no import at all, and she wouldn’t be judging him by the cost of his shoes and his wristwatch, which in his experience was a whole course in most American receptionist schools.

A little boy squealed and jumped off his mother’s lap, then thought better of it and climbed back on. The women seemed pure emblems of patience, neither reading anything to divert themselves nor talking among themselves. They were trying hard not to stare at him, but he had the feeling that the moment his gaze drifted away, two dozen eyes would be fixed on him in flinty attention.

“You wait,” was the whole message, translated back selectively from a long run of tonal Vietnamese that had come out of her machine.

He nodded and for want of anything better to do, he went to the side wall of the room where a number of architectural blueprints were on display under a signboard that said
The Harmony Gate
. They were apparently alternate designs for an Asian-themed pedestrian bridge between the two big malls that faced one another across Bolsa, somebody’s idea of a welcoming arch for the whole shopping district, and each design said “Welcome to Little Saigon” on it. The biggest drawing was in perspective and showed an arched bridge that ran between a pagoda at one side of the street and a similar looking clocktower on the other. Spaced away from this on the wall were variant designs with much sketchier detail.
Contemporary Style
looked like an elevated international style factory with some Asian details larded over it, a few Chinese characters and medallions. After this there was
Chinese Style
, with curlicued pagoda tile roofs at the middle and both ends. His eye drifted on to
Thai Style
, with a much more elaborate pagoda in the middle and dragon designs on the walkway.

A door slammed somewhere, but no one seemed to move. One child started to insist on a word, growing more and more emphatic.

Vietnamese Classical Style
had a flattened tiled roof and the pagoda and clocktower at the ends were reduced to embellishments, and finally
French Colonial Style
, the roof without curlicues at all and the clock tower moved to the middle of the bridge. That was one he recognized right away—on R&R trips to various French colonial outposts he and his friends had dubbed the style Babar the Elephant Colonial. His eye went back and forth, and despite the obvious variations, he had trouble seeing all that much difference—like minor mutations in the shape of a sweet pea. Even the
Contemporary
had so much Asian detailing that its pedigree was unmistakable. A news article was taped up beside the designs:

Frank Fen’s Harmony Bridge

Rejected as Too Chinese

Rejected by whom, he wondered.

“You come,” he heard, and when he looked up, a strikingly beautiful Asian woman stood in an open doorway looking straight at him with spooky dark brown eyes. Ages were always tough to guess across cultures. She was probably in fact about his own age, but she was someone who would always be described as looking half her age. She wore a navy blue business suit with a ruffled white shirt billowing out of it, and her offered hand was frank and mannish in his.

“I’m Jack Liffey,” he said.

“Come in. I am Tien Joubert.” She shut the door, a little harder than necessary.

“I hope I’m not jumping the queue.”

She shrugged. “They’re Vietnamese. They like to wait. You need to get better shoe, Jack Liffey. I could get you Italian shoe at half. Good soft leather, like butter, and very thin sole.”

He suppressed a laugh; he hadn’t come there to bring her up to speed on his theories about receptionist school. He twisted up his wrist to show the Timex. “This is junk too. I leave my Rolex home in the Bruno Maglies. I bet the Vietnamese people out there don’t like to wait anymore than I do.”

“Well, they got no choice. Their paperwork coming across town by slow boat.” She showed no inclination to smile as she motioned him into a chair and sat herself at an elaborate antique desk. Her movements were very graceful and he thought once again how striking she was, like some idealized mannequin of Asian beauty.

He explained that Minh’s daughter seemed to be missing and that he’d been hired to try to find her.

She nodded. “Real good kid, Phuong, smart girl. Phuong can go far in business if she get over fear of mistake. Mistake is the start of all opportunity for people with lots of luck, and Phuong got good luck, better than me even, and I got great luck. I didn’t leave Saigon until May of 1975, and I have to leave all my property, and one husband die in Saigon there in final days and another husband no damn good in Paris, but I doing very fine now, thank you very much.”

The whole life story in one punch, he thought. “I heard Phuong worked for you part time.”

She stabbed at a device on her desk and spoke into it, then looked up at him. “You like coffee or tea, Monsieur Liffey?”

“If I’m
Monsieur
Liffey, it must be coffee.”

Still no smile. She completed her order and then went on as if nothing had intervened. “I doing so good I don’t need no husband number three at all, but maybe I take one to make mummy happy. Maybe I take big hairy American like you this time.”

She didn’t smile, didn’t wink. He had no idea what was going on. He studied his palms and then held them up to show them to her, as he had his third-rate watch. “There’s no hair on my palms.”

Finally her expression cracked and she smiled just a little. “I like hair. I like everything American. I like your American smell, too, though mummy says it’s like spoil butter. If I start over, I go to a very good doctor and get nose job, I get round eyes, I get big falling tits, the whole American thing. To me look delicate means defeat and weakness. I want to be big and powerful.”

“You seem to be doing okay as is,” he offered.

“You married?”

“I’m not much of a catch, and I dress badly, too.”

“That for sure. I can get you good suit, Italian, very good wool blend, nice cut. When we through, I take you to Tri’s Hong Kong Tailor in the Plaza. He a friend of mine and he’ll dress you up good.”

He smiled. “First, could we talk about Phuong?”

The coffee came in, a silver salver with a double deck French porcelain drip pot and delicate porcelain cups carried by the Kabuki actress. She set it down and Tien Joubert shooed her away. She poured the coffee and handed him one, hardly more than espresso size. He sipped and it was strong and good.

“My English bad, I know. It don’t mean I’m stupid, Jack Liffey. I been to the Sorbonne two years and I’m pretty fluent in six languages. I been to French Institute of Commercial Studies, and I run big import house in Rouen for five years. I got property and stuff worth more than five million bucks. I only been in this country since three years and I’m still with one foot in Europe and foot two in Asia.” She slapped herself in the stomach. “I got the body of young girl and I’m from a good family, all got education.”

He felt like asking to check her teeth, but decided he wasn’t really in a buying position. “How did you end up in France?” he asked to be polite.

“My father and husband were generals and they fix it. They had a saying in the Army in ’75—sergeants to America, officers to France. But it was more complicate than that. It was not only a matter of rank but of…we say in French
noblesse
.”

“Maybe
tone
,” he suggested.

“After all, Ky was a general and he came here, the horrible little man, and he ran a damn mini-market and didn’t even pay off his loans and went bust. He manage a shrimp plant in Texas now, not even own it.
Shrimp
. General Thieu went to Paris.”

“With a lot of the gold from the treasury, I hear.”

She shrugged.

“What did Phuong do for you?”

“I teach her about business, but she not really interest in things I know, all how deal really works. She want to know about
market research
and
demographic
, whatever that is. She say she like big business stuff, not little.” Tien Joubert said it all with distaste, as if holding a rodent out by the fingertips.

“All real business is little stuff, she don’t learn that yet. So I get her what she want, I take her to Orange County Industrial League, and she get to do research on real big stuff. She love it, like cat in clover.”

He didn’t think cat was quite the right animal but he let it go. Curiously he found himself liking her artlessness and candor. It was like being in one of those experimental plays of the ’30s with the actors speaking their Freudian subtexts aloud.

“She still good kid, I like her. Big heart. Like American.”

“Do you have any idea why she might have taken off for a while? Or where she’d go?”

“No, but she big girl. Maybe you talk to her boyfriend Tommy Xuan.”

It was pronounced Swan, or thereabouts, and it was the first he’d heard of a boyfriend.

“Or you talk to Frankie Fen. I get her job with him, too, on his big cuckoo bridge idea.”

“I saw the designs out in front.”

She poured herself some more coffee and he held out his cup. It was the first time he’d asked for seconds in a long time. He’d have to find out her brand of beans and tell the ad people.

“The newspaper said people found the design too Chinese,” he suggested.

She snorted. “I tell him right in beginning it not going to go flying. Not ’cause the design too Chinese, ’cause Frankie Fen too Chinese. He build all two of these malls here and he call himself the Godfather of Little Saigon. He got one big head.”

“Isn’t he from Viet Nam?”

“I got bulldog from England, too, but it not Englishman. Frankie Fen could draw that bridge like ding-a-ling French castle at Disneyland and it still too Chinese because Frankie Fen draw it. Vietnamese don’t like Chinese deep down, that just the way it is.”

“You think he’s in today?”

“No, he working on apartment building in Fullerton. I get you address. You go see Tommy Xuan and then you go see Frankie Fen and then you come back and we talk about me some more. I’m pretty interesting.”

“You can say that again.”

“I’m pretty interesting,” she said, absolutely without irony. It would be fun to introduce her to a Marx Brothers film, he thought, and see what happened.

He found his car in the mall lot, between a new Honda and a new Toyota. His beat-up Concord was probably the oldest and ugliest car in the whole lot. It had one other distinction over the others, it had a note tucked under the windshield wiper, facing in to the driver’s seat.

GO
WAY
BIG
CUNT
,
OR
ELS
, it said.

“Must be for someone else,” he said aloud, but he folded it and put it in his pocket.

It was just about the ugliest animal he had ever seen and it was growling at him and kicking stiff-legged in the dirt like an angry bull. The dog was the size of goat but the skin was the size of a pony, and there was nowhere for the extra flesh to go except to bunch up.

“Must have got a whiff of my dog,” Jack Liffey said. “He’s half coyote.”

“Attila doesn’t have to have a reason. The shar-pei is notoriously protective. He started out with my wife and he wouldn’t even let me get close for months. Heel!”

The leash went slack and the dog finally decided to lead up the trail into the yellow hillside.

He smelled sagebrush and something else, sweet and clean, on the breezy air. There was a shrill scream from below and a Marine F/A-18 swooped up off the runway and into a little show-off turn and then climbed away. He braced for the sound of the second one. They always traveled in pairs. It came, and the dog didn’t like it much either.

“The dog’s got short-man’s syndrome,” Marty Spence said when they could talk again. “Challenges anything that moves. I think it’s overbreeding. They only brought seven of them over from China and that’s a pretty small gene pool.”

Marty Spence certainly didn’t have short-man syndrome. He was graying a bit, but he was tall and lithe, like somebody who played tennis three times a day. Jack Liffey had called him from a pay phone, using Mike Lewis’s name. They’d agreed to meet on a dirt pad off a country road behind the Marine Air Station, the unofficial trailhead where he walked his dog on his afternoon off from teaching.

“Be careful if you pet it. Their skin isn’t like other dogs and a lot of people are allergic. It’s oily and the hair is brittle, like horsehair.”

“Why do people have them?”

“Why did we wear platform shoes in the ’70s? You’ll have to ask my wife.”

“I didn’t,” Jack Liffey said. “But I did have a chartreuse Nehru shirt.”

“My point exactly. So you’re interested in the Industrial League?”

“Uh-huh. Sounds like some socialist party back at the turn-of-the-century.”

“Odd name, isn’t it? Heel!” The dog had scampered hard off the path toward a big sumac that was crackling, and then the animal started making a peeved sound from the back of its throat. “Probably a rabbit. You’re going to need a little background first.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Before the war this county was a feudal kingdom, with a few villages like Anaheim and San Juan Capistrano scattered between the big ranches of the landed gentry. The Irvines, the O’Neals, the Segerstroms, a few others. The ranchos all started as Spanish land grants but Anglos moved in, married the older daughters and the rest is history. With the post-war boom, the bean fields and orange groves turned into tract homes, and power slowly shifted to real estate and chambers of commerce. Nobody ever gives up power without a fight and in the 1950s we had the last hurrah of the landed gentry. The fights were over land-use, of course, and slow-growth measures. But growth won, as it generally will.”