The Orange Curtain Read Free

reason that Greene had added, But nothing these days is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes . “Did she have a job?”
    Something about the question seemed to disturb the man, but Jack Liffey knew better than to try to read motives across cultures. “She was going to go back to get an advanced degree, but in the meantime she has done several odd jobs.”
    “What’s her field?”
    “Business. We’ve become a very practical people. Will you agree at least to look for her in the wider community?”
    “It’s my calling.”
    The man checked his wristwatch and Jack Liffey noticed there were no numbers, it was something Swiss and expensive. “It’s three now. If you come to my house at five-thirty, I will give you a photograph of Phuong, and a list of her friends and jobs.” He handed Jack Liffey a card with his address.
    “Do you have any problems with me talking to the police?”
    “Suit yourself. You can ask for Frank Vo.” There was some unreadable emotion that pertained to this name too.
    The women nearby stirred and a gust of laughter swept around their table. One nodded in a way that might have been indicating him, but that was just too paranoid. They brought their soup bowls up to their faces to eat, and one seemed to be chewing betel. He noticed on the table a big fruit tied up in its own string bag, spiky and half again the size of a cantaloupe. “Is that a durian?”
    “It is indeed.”
    They were a fruit from Malaysia or somewhere like it. The flesh was very sweet but when you cut into it the smell was so putrid and so enduring that none of the hotels in Bangkok had let GIs bring one even into the lobby.
    “I never thought I’d see one again.”
    “It took a long time to import them. Nostalgia is becoming an epidemic in Little Saigon.”
    Late the previous evening, a dog being walked near Irvine Lake had nosed up two decomposing bodies. They were in various states of decay, and the county sheriff’s Crime Scene Supervisor gave a preliminary guess, behind the orange tapes and under the chugging porta-lights, that one was two weeks dead and the second was only about forty-eight hours. The badly decayed body was a male, and coyotes had eaten some of the soft parts of the other one, an elderly female who lay tucked under a lush green sumac bush the size of a small tree.
    The TV reporters spent a good half hour trying to goad the police into saying that there was a serial killer on the loose and then arguing over a newsworthy name for the killer. Something to do with Dahlia would have been great, or a Stalker or some other tabloid-worthy noun. Hillside Strangler had been used, and anyway these had apparently been shot, not strangled.

TWO
Incoming
    It was the haircuts that caught his eye. He parked up the road across from the high school where he had a good view of the four boys who sat on the window flower bed of a boarded-up storefront. Only Carp Carp Only , a sign said. He wondered if part of the sign was missing.
    The board-ups over the door and window had been plastered with posters that said Stop the Airport Ripoff! One public bankruptcy is enough! over and over. But it was the boys who interested him. They all wore floppy black shirts buttoned up to the neck and they all had the same checks cut into the sides of their severe flattops. The boy on the end seemed to be the one who had pushed past his chair at the noodle shop. Jack Liffey wasn’t certain but they seemed to be tearing the cello wraps off packets of ramen noodles, discarding the spice packs into the litter at their feet, and crunching into the noodles like Asian Fritos. One of the boys was flipping a coin and then walking it along his knuckles like George Raft.
    In the past he had found that by treating black and Latino gang kids with elaborate and bona fide respect, he usually got their grudged tolerance, but, in his experience, Asian toughs always seemed to have a little something extra to prove. He strolled up the road and sat on