The Chinese Beverly Hills (2 page)

*

It had been a difficult hour for Maeve Liffey. Bunny had finally agreed to undress and pose for her on the broken-down sofa, and between quick sketch lines and brush strokes, Maeve had been sorely tempted to fly across the room and cover her ample body with kisses. But somehow she’d kept to professional conduct so as not to upset the complex relationship among the four UCLA coeds who lived in the rambling rented house in Topanga canyon not far above Malibu.

“Thanks so much, Bunny.”

“You need a better space heater. Jesus, Maeve. Are you sure you can survive out here?”

“I’m okay. I’ll look into a better heater if you’ll pose some more.”

Bunny didn’t commit. She wrapped her bathrobe tight around herself and trotted the fifty feet back to the main house. A few weeks earlier Maeve had moved out to the old garage, cleared out a generation of trash and turned it into her studio and bedroom, freeing her room in the main house for a fourth student to cut down their rent. There was no kitchen or bathroom out here, but she didn’t mind sharing the ones in the house and she could use the extra space for painting, an obsession that had overtaken her not long after starting her first classes at UCLA. She’d had no idea she had any artistic talent at all, but even with her tendency to self-doubt, she could see how good her work was rapidly getting. On the canvas, the dynamics of Bunny’s body were right there to see. The possibility of a sudden nudge or shift, an eruption of movement—even a good cuddle.

Her ringtone cried out the hook from Melissa Etheridge’s “I Want to Come Over.” She had only the cell, like everyone else in her generation. The day of the landline was just about over.

“Hi, kid.”

“Hello,” Maeve said to the strange greeting. It was a woman, but an odd voice, brash and accented, Asian maybe.

“This Maeve Liffey? Daughter of Jack?”

“That’s me.” Already she was suspicious. Who would be calling her dad on her number?

“Hey, Tien Joubert here. You remember me from many years, girl? My English still crap, but it don’t mean I’m stupid, I been to Sorbonne. Speak five language. I run whopping big import business now. Your dad miss a good thing.”

Maeve knew who she was now. The woman had hired her father ten years earlier to find a missing girl in Orange County, but she’d also relentlessly seduced him at a vulnerable time in his life and helped destroy his relationship with a previous live-in. Maeve’s protective instincts toward Gloria rose automatically.

“I remember you. You grabbed onto my dad at a bad time.”

“I worth hundred million bucks, girl. I don’t need no broke-down roundeye man. I got plenty men knocking day and night. I need help to find girl, and Jack’s phone number no good. Somebody at the number say go chase my tail.”

Maeve guessed she meant the phone number from his old condo in Culver City, which he hadn’t used in at least eight years. She debated saying
go chase your tail
, but she knew her father was desperate for business, as always. Finding missing children had been his specialty since the aerospace business collapsed and no one needed technical writers anymore. He always said it paid better than delivering pizzas, just. “Give me your number and I’ll have him call you.” It was as far as she was willing to go, and she might let that promise lapse, too, after careful consideration of the particular
broke-down roundeye man
in question.

The woman gave her a number with the 714 Orange County area code.

“This missing girl isn’t you, is it?” Maeve asked.

The woman laughed with a self-assured abandon that gave Maeve just a hint of what had attracted her father.

*

Routt struggled to control his animal terror—his inner lizard brain still had an instinctual fear of fire. Orange flame billowed over the ridge to the right. The roar was almost deafening, but the head of the fire was temporarily halted along the ridgeline while it sent its scouts spilling south to outflank them. It was hard sometimes not to read a cunning and malevolent will into a blaze.

At that moment Routt stumbled, astonishing himself. He never stumbled—never. He still held the California high school record in the 180 low hurdles.

He glanced down and froze in horror. What had tripped him was a girl’s body, lying prone just inside the wash. There was an obvious gunshot wound in her forehead. Recent. She was small and young and Asian.

“Tony! Over here! Before it’s too late.”

“Jer, go-go!”

“No kidding! Gotta see this!”

Reluctantly, Piscatelli took a few steps back. He reacted to the body, but he was too disciplined to take the time to talk it over. “Okay, she’s gone. Let’s get out of here.”

“This is a murder.”

“We know where she is. Let’s get to a safe zone.”

Routt saw that the girl’s right hand was clasped. He reached down and plucked a necklace from her stiff fingers, tucked it quickly into his pocket.

“J.R.,
now
!”

Buds of fire bloomed over the ridge, blinding holes in the world too bright to look at. The whole ridgeline writhed with fire at once.

“Situation!” Piscatelli shouted.

Routt felt the gusts of overpowering wind sweeping toward the fire and knew the beast was declaring itself a firestorm. How hot did they get? He tried to recall. Maybe 1,600 degrees. Hot enough to ignite asphalt roads. He sighted a gravel wash to the left. It was below the trail by thirty feet, good for a possible flameover, though bad for chimney effect from below. But you only had what you had.

“
Left
,” Routt shouted.

“Drop packs!” Piscatelli shouted over the roar.

That was it. Piscatelli was no pussy. Routt took a millisecond to glance at the clawing fists of fire coming straight for them. Their hundred-pound packs contained backfire torches and fuses and would be deadly in a flameover. Drop, indeed. Routt spun and hurled his pack as far as he could. They wouldn’t even be able to get to the safe zone.

“Shake and bake! Now!”

He heard Piscatelli go on his radio, asking for an emergency bucket drop right on top of them.

Routt ran the extra yards to the wash and yanked the shelter packet out of his stomach pouch, tugged the red rings to pop it open. It unfolded, agonizingly slowly, and he flipped the head of the foil shelter away from the fire. The fame was in a personal rage at him, growling. He’d never seen anything like it. He yelled “Gone shelter!” to Piscatelli as he clambered inside the low foil sandwich of a tent, and once on his belly inside he folded out the floor panels underneath him. He’d never been quite this frightened, and it took him down a peg in his own estimation. But training stayed with him like instinct. He slipped his forearms inside the hold-downs and bucked his butt around to thrust the sides of the shelter away from his body to get air space. Head low, breathe low. Don’t panic. It’s
always
better inside.

Go away, fire, Routt begged. I’m not the kingfish. I’ll make a bargain with you, Whoever. Don’t tell on me and you can scorch me just a little.

“Pisky, how you doing! Pisky! Talk to me!” Routt bellowed.

The world was a freight train passing right over him. A tornado of wind whipped and punched at his shelter. Pinpoints of light glowed through the foil, a few burning hairlines along the folds. The heat was becoming unbearable, and he fought the urge to burst out of the shelter and run.

“Piss-s-s-sky! Talk! I ain’t so good!”

No reply. Shit shit, Routt thought. This wasn’t supposed to happen. “Pisky!”

Training said to keep talking. Fight the sense of being alone.

*

It was ostensibly a hunting lodge in northwest Indiana, at the center of thousands of wild prairie acres, but the Reik brothers used it mainly as a remote Camp David for conferences with opinion-makers, now and future. Later in the week it would be a private meeting with several Californians and one of their think tanks, ACP, the American Council for Prosperity.

For now, the brothers were alone with their mint juleps on the open verandah that overlooked the small lake and rangeland that the elder brother, Gustav, called the Kill Zone. The inner room behind them was lined with weaponry to play with.

“Andor,” Gustav mused. “What was the happiest moment of your life? Your adult life, I mean. Forgetting the days of Dad.”

Their father, Maximillian Reik, had been an abusive tyrant of the first water and had beaten their mother mercilessly as a kind of punctuation mark whenever he’d bested someone in a business deal. A first-generation immigrant from Central Europe, he had made the Reik fortune by marketing oilrig drill bits in West Texas in the 1930s. The sons had expanded the fortune a thousandfold in the 1980s, first with refineries and pipelines and then by latching the Reik empire to the new technology of hydraulic fracturing—fracking—shooting superheated toxic chemicals at high pressure into the earth to break up layers of shale and quadruple the output of an oil or gas field. Halliburton and Schlumberger were bigger names than Reik Industries, but not by much.

“Oh, yes, let’s forget Daddy. The happiest moment of my life, huh? Maybe I haven’t had it yet. Nobody’s assassinated that nigger president.”

Gustav sighed. The middle-aged brothers agreed substantially on all things political, but Andor just couldn’t stay civil about it. Gustav was on opera and ballet boards in Manhattan and knew how to moderate his speech. “Has the Californian arrived?”

“You mean the giant garden gnome or the Jewboy?”

“He’s not a Jewboy, Ad. Seth is a good Protestant name. He’s keeping his little teakettle brewing for us.”

“Fuck California,” Andor said. “It’s just homos and Volvos.”

*

Jack Liffey flipped through the channels, but the only stations not on some version of the Sheepshead Fire were Judge Somebody and an infomercial. He flipped past a poker game featuring several solemn-looking teens in hoodies. Did people actually watch poker on TV? What was next? Watching haircuts?

He flipped back to the fire—at least disasters were one of the few events ever broadcast live, like barricaded suspects and football games. The big San Gabriel Mountains fire seemed to be turning back on all the newsmen and firefighters and setting off a general panic of panel trucks and fire engines reversing down fire roads and men in yellow coats dashing madly down canyons.

Jack Liffey could certainly empathize, after his own experiences: a brushfire he’d been caught in, a monster mudslide, being thrown down an L.A. storm drain in a flash flood. Panic was just panic. Nobody was immune.

He turned the TV off just as the phone rang.

*

Maeve Liffey sat at the desk with her laptop, rarely used now because ordinary coursework had fallen away in the face of her tropical fever for painting.

She had a simple choice: phone her dad about Tien Joubert, or not. Back when he and Tien had first become acquainted, her father’d had a problem keeping his pants zipped, with some pretty bad consequences. But since then she’d had her own unruly sex life—a consuming passion for a Latino gangbanger that had left her pregnant, then a much-pondered abortion, and then an overwhelming infatuation with a rich and intellectual girlfriend. Now she felt she was pulling inward to let her psyche recover. She was powerfully drawn to Bunny, but could put that off.

It was Gloria she worried about, her dad’s live-in, who was going through her own ordeal that neither of those hermetically isolated adults would talk about. Maeve had guessed that sex was off the table for Gloria right now, and her dad might just be vulnerable. Tien Joubert insisted she had all the suitors she needed. What to do?

After a moment, she picked up her iPhone and tapped an icon.

The icon was a picture of her dad.

*

Jack Liffey floundered and dug and then found the ringing handset at last under some tossed newspapers. He pushed the green button. Green is go, red is stop—it was about all he knew of even old-generation wireless phones. The speed dial was beyond him, as was everything to do with computers. “
Bueno
,” he said. It made sense where he lived, but it often got him in trouble, having to deal with a flood of idiomatic Spanish coming back at him.

“Give it up, Dad. You can barely handle ‘Grass-ee-ass’.”

“The creaky old brain still has to try. To what do I owe the honor of a phone call from a young adult who’s already detached herself from the fathership and is making her solo descent to the lunar surface?”

“Cut it out, Dad. I’ll always be joined to you by a
huge
cable. I love my befuddled daddy to distraction.”

He closed his eyes, almost on the edge of weeping at the abrupt affection. Gloria’s maddened state has got to me, he thought. “Thanks, hon. I’ll always be here for you.”

“I know that. Tell me, who rescued
you
from the riots in South L.A.? I’ll save you the trouble.
I
did, age fourteen. Do you need saving right now?”

“I’m fine. How are you doing at that huge campus? A place like UCLA can be pretty intimidating.”

“I think I’m finding myself.”

“You mean painting. That’s great, I mean it. But you’re still putting time into coursework, too, I hope. You have a tendency to focus down like a laser.”

He heard the pause.

“I’m fine. Let’s face it, Dad, there’s always a little freshman slump, trying to adjust.”

“It was sophomore slump in my day. Don’t think I can’t come over there and tan your ass if you’re slacking off.”

She laughed. “Dad, you never tanned my ass in my life. And these days it would be considered—well, never mind. My ass better remain my own business. Listen, tell me about Gloria. Is she up and around?”

“She’s ambulatory. With a cane, but stairs are still beyond her.”

As if overhearing the phone conversation, Gloria started bellowing in frustration, and he heard the cane pound hard across the floor and then thwack into the wall.

“Is she talking about it yet?” Maeve asked innocently.

Gloria went on cursing and drumming her feet for a while, but she didn’t call his name. That had become the final, urgent signal.