The Chinese Beverly Hills (11 page)

Andor roared with laughter, a rare moment. “That big asshole is definitely the cutting edge. Maybe he’ll sprain their pathological daintiness. All Californians are secret liberals, I swear. Must be the climate.”

“Or bad schools.”

“Want the first shot?” Andor offered him the STAS-12.

“Sure.” Gustav had seen the Buñuel movie, too. “Andor, you know the real joy of being so goddamn rich?”

“Buying an election?”

“I meant personally. We can own all the newest marvels, lock, stock, and barrel. We can have our fun whenever we want.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Drink up. Geronimo.”

Gustav aimed the SPAS-12 at a big tree across the pond, a well-spread chestnut.

A tail of fire issued from the shotgun, along with a startling
whoomp
, and then the gnarled tree trunk erupted in flame about halfway up, crackling like mad. Before long, the gigantic crown of the tree began to tilt.

Despite Gustav’s expectations, there was something a bit unsatisfying about the blast—perhaps that the weapon wouldn’t destroy a city, a whole world.

*

“Bang, bang, bang—you’re all dead!” Hardi Boaz shouted to the bikers at the bar, making pistols of both hands. Heads turned, of course. The stool squatters were generally as big and buff as Boaz himself, with sleeveless jean jackets, shovel beards, ponytails, and wallets on looping chains.

“Agh, boys, take it easy. I been promised they isn’t no wetbacks or nigger-lovers in this place. So I’ll let you all live!”

Ed Zukovich wanted to go hide in the men’s room. He hadn’t actually said anything about wetbacks or nigger-lovers. Boaz had asked to be taken to a place where things were “real white” so he could relax, and Zook figured the man didn’t mean a cocktail bar in Beverly Hills.

This place was a famous biker hangout in El Monte on the way up to Chantry Flats Road in the mountains, where lots of Harley folks loved to ride on weekends. It was a stone-built old building called Rock House No. 2, with two dozen Harleys parked in front.

“Cool your jets, mister.” A confident growl from somewhere at the bar.

“I’m cool as Dr. Death.” Boaz gave a midair pump with one arm, then the other. “I been through a dozen nigger lands like a dose of salts, ma’an. The fainthearts can kiss my arse. Agh, sis, even a lot of them places ain’t places no more.”

One of the bikers stood up slowly. He was paunchy and had two teardrop tattoos descending from the corner of his right eye. “You got a problem, foreigner?”

“Hell, everybody gets a beer!” Boaz yelled and threw a hundred-dollar bill on the bar. The skinny bartender stared at the bill as if it was infected with leprosy.

“That buys about twelve beers, mister, with no tip. This ain’t Cow City in the movies.”

Boaz tossed down two more hundreds. “Beers all around, gents. And no offense. I’ll make up any short, barman.”

“Thank you, foreigner,” Teardrops said evenly. “Let’s take it easy tonight, amigo. Some of us been at work all day and got to smooth out.”

As the bartender folded up the money, Zook tried to steer his charge to a table far in the corner.

“Join us,” Teardrops said. Somehow the crowd at the bar opened up to make some standing room. “A big man like you buys me a drink straight off, I’m obliged to hold off thinking he’s a sack of dogshit.”

Boaz brayed his laugh and dragged Zook up to the bar beside him. “This my buddy, Zook. I’m Hardi.”

“I’m Shank. Where the fuck you from with the clown suit and clown voice?”

They shook hands as if trying to crush each other’s fingers, and Hardi Boaz took a while explaining he was from South Africa, but many years back. Boaz was still not meeting any eyes, but they didn’t seem to be bothered.

“These days all my Boer brothers, the fat-arsed sissy guys that owns the Jag agencies, they all of a sudden start talking like Martin Fuckin’ Luther King, about how they going to love the darkies. They say we got to like our bright tomorrow. Man, through history, any dumb sonofabitch talks like that, he gets his dick chopped off. I had to leave for greener pastures.”

The opened beer bottles began sliding from the center of the bar outward.

“I hear you,” Shank said. “But let’s keep things up close and personal. Some of my friends got Mex ol’ ladies. We’re pretty damn white here, but I’m not so sure about you.”

“My people were so white they were Dutch!” Boaz crowed. “I been an American for ten years. What a great country we all got. We just got to keep it that way.”

Zook relaxed and sucked down a lot of beer as soon as he realized he wouldn’t get stomped. Hardi Boaz and Shank spun off on a discussion of what it meant to keep America great, and Zook listened closely as Boaz talked about building an armed “troopie” that hired itself out to ranchers along the California border to guard their property, chase off drug mules and wetbacks trying to come over. Boaz loudly invited Shank and all his friends to Zook’s keg the next day to hear him talk about keeping America pure.

Uh-oh, Zook thought. These guys were a lot heavier than he’d bargained on. The teardrops were a prison tat for the number of enemies killed.

Much later, as people were starting to reel out of Rock House No. 2, the ponytail sitting beside Teardrops gave a huge grin for the first time, revealing gold stars set into his front teeth. “I’ll come to your kegger, boys, and let’s us shiver Old Glory right up your flagpole.”

After a bit of sleuthing about Miss Blue-hair at L.A. State, Jack Liffey found his way to an old craftsman bungalow not far from downtown Monterey Park. He waited discreetly down the block in his pickup. He’d usually been able to pal up to teens without putting them off. One thing in his favor was that old guys generally didn’t count at all. And he never tried to hold his own with them or top their comments. His ego had become expendable long ago.

“You know a girl with a blue butch cut?” he’d asked.

“Gotta be Rosa.”

He remembered the name Ellen, but he went with it anyway and waited now at the address he’d finally located. He didn’t really think there were whole glee clubs with bright blue hair.

Eventually a little Yaris showed up, the exact equivalent of his own daughter’s old Echo. But where did Toyota get these names? It was Blue Hair clambering out—definitely the girl from the church. He intercepted her on her way to the door.

“Ellen. Remember me from the church? I’m working for Sabine’s family.” She had a skirt on over the leotard now.

“The name is Rosa,” she said belligerently. “For Rosa Luxemburg, the greatest hero of all time.”

Amazing, he thought, a teen who’d read a book. “I agree, but if you’re a political organizer, isn’t your hair a bit too conspicuous?”

“Not where I work.”

Disaffected kids at college, okay. “Fair enough. I started Long Beach State with a greasy flattop, long sides, and a D.A. You know what that was?”

“Sure. A duck’s ass. ‘Ducktail’ is what L7s say.”

He had no idea what an L7 was, but didn’t think it was the time to update his dope sheet on teen talk. “Could we meet somewhere to talk, Rosa? Sabine’s parents are terribly worried. I’ll treat and I’ll go away the instant you tell me to.”

She glanced around, as if FBI agents might be behind the trees. “Down on Garvey to the left, you’ll see the French Victory Restaurant. It’s not very French or victorious but it’ll be quiet. Be there in half an hour. I’ll make my own way, thank you, and I’ll buy my own Coke. I’ll check the street first for white vans with antennas on the roof.”

“Just me, Rosa,” Jack Liffey said.

*

Jack Liffey parked at a city park between Ellen/Rosa’s house and the cafe she’d specified. A half hour—why the delay? So she could say hello to her parents first? So she could summon her pals to beat him up?

It was early afternoon in the late autumn and the clear-sky sunlight was promising its usual lazy magic. Elderly Chinese men squatted near a nondescript building at the edge of the park, playing something on a checkerboard lying on the grass, the game pieces all white. There was a perfectly serviceable picnic table nearby, but they obviously preferred heel-squatting. Not far away, Chinese teens were playing a pretty good game of two-on-two basketball.

Here was Professor Hollister’s laboratory of immigration, he thought. He tried to imagine being stuck with a group of Americans displaced to some far corner of China. He decided he’d probably feel hopeless about learning enough to fit in. How could anyone expect grown people to give up a lifetime of their culture?

A young Chinese couple in jeans strolled into the park with a lively boy hand in hand between them. The boy was maybe eight, and they all skipped happily to a swing set in a sandbox. Immediately they took up their gender roles—the woman and child sitting in swings to be pushed alternately by the man. Nothing about their manner suggested Asia to Jack Liffey.

The grizzled game board players laughed abruptly, and an old man covered his eyes and ran off. Sore loser. Another old man took his place.

The gangly little boy shouted something as he ran out onto the grass. He glanced back and pointed at his mom. She jumped off her swing and ran after him with the kind of tiny mincing steps Asian women often favored, twisting and turning to pretend to elude her son’s lunges. The boy finally poked his mother’s thigh, and the woman reverted instantly to a full-stretch Western run as she chased after her husband.

Okay, Jack Liffey said to himself. The cultural gap can be very complicated.

*

Rosa twiddled the straw in her diet Sprite and ate an occasional sweet potato fry from a paper tub. A low wall separated them from the sidewalk—presumably to keep patrons from absconding with the salt shakers. The counter menu inside had offered various combinations of grease and carbohydrates, plus something called the French Victory Special. He felt like asking the clueless-looking Chinese teen, when did the French ever have one?

Two tables away, a tiny older man with a business suit and a bad scar down his cheek sat opposite an astonishingly beautiful Chinese girl with long, dyed blond hair. She wore a chest sash like a beauty queen over a ball gown, but he couldn’t read it. The two touched hands across the table now and again like lovers, but it was the lack of parity between them that made one suspicious—looking for adjustments.

“Go on,” Jack Liffey said.

She wasn’t Catholic, Ellen said, but she knew that Sabine had been close to Father Soong. She and Sabine had been blood sisters from their teens when they’d read the Brontës and Jane Austen together. Later they’d tipped toward reading Marcuse and Habermas and liberation theologists like Paolo Freire. They’d both scorned the Asian boys who pecked away at their computers, doing math. They yearned for a wild-haired Che Guevara.

“Where’s Sabine gone to?” Jack Liffey asked.

“I wish I knew.”

“Tell me about the Commandos.”

Ellen/Rosa made a face and bonked her forehead with the heel of her hand in self-reproach. Jack Liffey liked the emotionality.

“Back in the day, they were dangerous. Satan’s Commandos, a nasty motorcycle club, and then they became a hate-the-Chinese group. They were on the fringe of the Tea Partiers for a while, but the gang is mostly gone. A few scary guys, that’s all.”

She was interrupted by a whinny from the table nearby.

“I guess I should split right now!” the woman bawled. He could hear outrage in her voice.

“No no no. Please. I’m on top of it,” the man insisted.

Jack Liffey took only a brief glance, as the woman seemed to be subsiding.

“Can we talk more about Sabine?”

“Maybe.”

“I take it that’s her given name.”

“She has a parental name, too. I don’t speak enough Chinese to order noodles in a restaurant. I think her original name was Suong—it’s actually Vietnamese.”

“I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a
nom de guerre
like Rosa. So her family are Hoa Chinese from Vietnam.”

“You’re about the right age, aren’t you? You were one of the baby-killers.”

The word was like a cattle prod, but he let it go, then didn’t. “Rosa, I had a peace symbol on my radar scope and my buddy had a poster of Uncle Ho on the wall above his. It was the best we could do.”

“Goody for you.” She looked about to stand and leave.

“Wait, please. I’m just looking for Sabine, and I have no interest in anything that’s uncomfortable for you. I swear I’ll protect any confidences.”

Rosa/Ellen pursed her lips, poised on her own knife edge of trust.

“Sabine and I founded the Berets. I said orange was a lousy color. Combining brown and yellow, of course. I asked Sabby if we were fighting for Halloween.”

He smiled.

She nodded a kind of surrender to him. “Sabby and me have been watching the last few Commandos as a kind of duty. You’ve probably seen the racist posters they put up. Losers like that often resort to terrorism as they burn out.”

There was more bleating from the couple nearby, plus some table-pounding, and Jack Liffey forced himself not to look.

“My own target was the so-called brains—Ed Zukovich,” Rosa said, studying her clasped hands. “He’s only the brains compared to a cactus. We both ignored their poster artist, Marly Tom. His name is Tom McMarlin, and he’s nothing, a nebbish.

“Sabine drew the big dumbhead, Antonio Buffano. He’s known as Captain Beef and he’s reputed to have the largest penis in the Western World. I wouldn’t know. They’re all sad cases, really—like dogs that were kicked a lot when they were puppies.

“That’s all I know, Mr. Liffey, except that they’re holding a keg party tomorrow afternoon. I can find out where it is if you want to check it out. But if I tell you, I want a report. Obviously I’m not welcome.”

He waited, but there was no more forthcoming. “That’s not all you know about your friend, is it? I know she wasn’t clean as Ivory Snow.” He mentioned the baggie and map he’d found in her room, and she stared hard over his shoulder at a ghost from some dire past.

“Please. It may help find her.”

Ellen/Rosa banged her forehead with her palm again as she fought some inner struggle. “Sabby’s family needs money bad, and a lot of people know that. Some of them aren’t nice people—a few angry Latinos on the edge of gangs that we knew from the Berets. I told her to stay away from them, but she said it didn’t matter what happened to her.