The Concrete River (9 page)

Most of the graffiti had been painted out, but time had not been kind to the plaster walls that had been grooved to imitate sandstone blocks. Sections had fallen away raggedly, like flayed skin. He saw one hole up high that went on through, past roof trusses to the blue sky beyond.

Jack Liffey went very still and broke into a cold sweat. Waylaid by the sight. He hadn't even thought about it for years. He'd been playing by himself in the hills above his home, trekking across the garbanzo bean fields to the open chaparral on the higher slopes. Without warning the earth had vanished to leave him falling through space, scraping one shoulder against something rough. Fortunately and unfortunately he had landed in water. Rainwater or crop water had collected in the abandoned glory hole to break his fall. But it was too deep for him to touch bottom and when he came up flailing there was nothing to grab onto. Far above him in the blackness there was a small oblong of blue sky.

Liffey squeezed his eyes shut. The blue had been too vivid, infinitely far. He had tried to scream back then but hadn't been able to. All he could do was tread water and try to force himself calm. He was a powerful swimmer. Eventually he found a toehold that held some of his weight and he dug away a shelf just above water level to grab on. He could rest for a few minutes, holding fiercely, and then tread water again. It was police dogs that found him nine hours later, after dark, just as he was about to lose it.

Jack Liffey pried his hands off the wheel and looked away. He counted backwards from fifty. They said you had to get right back on the horse, and he had. But he still hated swimming more than anything.

*

“You know I signed a consent order.”

Chris Johnson lived in a little square stucco house that was out of place in the West Hollywood neighborhood of craftsman and Spanish bungalows. The original had probably burned down and this had been inserted like a later false tooth in a denture.

“This isn't much of a hack,” Liffey said.

He was tall and handsome and so blond you could almost see through him. Johnson was an anarchist, a cyberpunk techno-hippie who just happened to look exactly like a Hitler youth, and he had a black girlfriend with dreadlocks who called herself Dot Matrix.

He was in sweats, striding and pumping at some kind of ski training machine, like the happy warrior in some cable infomercial. The machine made a herky-jerky grating sound. Amazingly, Johnson had once been drafted by the Forty-Niners as a wide receiver but he had walked out of training camp to get back to his keyboard and his hacking. He'd finally been caught and given eighteen months, suspended, for the ultimate transgression of charging his phone bill to the Republican National Committee. Suspended, as long as he stayed away from computers and never took the case off a telephone.

“You know, it's just an opera society. There's very little effort expended trying to steal so-and-so's score for Verdi.”

The court hadn't really been persuasive. The living room was filled with contraband apparatus, phone monitoring boxes, patch boxes, trunk line test sets, and a panel with looping oscilloscopes that Johnson called his time machine. There was the usual computer stuff, and several portable tool boxes labeled Black Bag 1, 2 and 3. Jack Liffey didn't even want to know what was in the bags. He picked up a gold Cross pen that was engraved
With the personal good wishes of Richard M. Nixon
, and he didn't want to know about that either.

“There shouldn't be much security.”

Chris Johnson slowed his long-legged cross-country pace and then stopped. “They may not have anything on line.” He gnashed his teeth theatrically. “Sorry, I'm in a bad mood today because Dot had her little brother in and he's a mouthy little shit.”

Liffey smiled. “Bet he used some slang you'd never heard before.”

“How'd you know? He called me a grebe-popper or something that sounded like that.”

“Not being state-of-the-art is the only thing that gets your goat. I'd like to know if there's anything going on with plans for a new opera house.”

“You're there, dude.”

Still sweating, Johnson sat at an ordinary-looking computer console and launched an elaborate start-up. He was over thirty, but seeing him always reminded Jack Liffey of something in his own childhood, a feeling of inexhaustible possibilities, a promise that you were going to get to play outside after dusk. It was a feeling he'd once liked a lot, but lost somewhere. He let his eye drift along the books in Johnson's bookcase, almost all of which were tactical military histories. More of the man's sheer perversity. He picked up
Hell in a Very Small Place
.

“Why do you read this shit?”

“War is the purest form of football. The tactics are right out there, and you've got a much better chance to cheat, and there's no disputing where the ball came down.”

“You were born in the wrong era.”

“Christ, I don't want to
fight
a war. People shoot at you. I just want to read about them. Look at General Giap. He learned from watching kittens. Retreat when the enemy is vigilant, attack when the enemy is looking the other way. What did you learn from your war? You don't talk about it much.”

“I learned to carry a clipboard so it always looks like you've got something to do.”

“That's not war. That's bureaucracy.”

“If you absolutely have to fight, stand near the guys who know what they're doing.”

“Better. Let me tell you what I've learned.”

He'd known this was coming.

Chris Johnson rocked in his swivel-chair and folded his hands in his lap happily. “Toward the end of the first world war, the German Army withdrew for a time from active combat. They pulled groups of NCOs from the front and retrained them in new tactics. They reequipped their units with submachine guns and a whole new approach to the war. After all the years of trench war, the general staff had reinvented the attack in depth.”

He smiled in self-satisfaction, as if he had done the inventing himself.

“It was cavalry tactics on a grand scale. No more broad frontal assaults. They would mass at a single point and try to break through and then sweep on in to continue the attack from the flanks and rear of the enemy. It would demoralize and rout. It did, in fact. The Germans almost took Paris in 1918. It was only the arrival of millions of fresh doughboys from America that lost them the war.

“They'd invented the blitzkrieg, you see, but since they lost the war, they were the only ones who noticed. The French, who won, built the Maginot Line. Twenty years later the German panzer divisions made the French look stupid.”

He stopped and began to hammer at his keyboard. “You know what that teaches me?”

Liffey decided to bite. “What did that teaches me?”

“Always talk to the losers. Winning makes you stupid and losing makes you smart.”

“No wonder you talk to me.”

He chuckled. “Brecht said it, too: ‘First the pain. Then the idea.’ Sit still and amuse yourself for a few minutes. I'll jack into the net.”

He fiddled with his time machine and then keyed a lot of numbers into the terminal, waiting while phones dialed other phones. He got up to patch a few cables behind the apparatus and went to another terminal. Once in a while high spirits made him do a little dance between stations.

Jack Liffey took another book down at random, a history of British commandos fighting with the partisans in Yugoslavia during World War II. There were photos of very thin men in khaki, arm-in-arm in piney mountains. Back then things seemed to matter. Nobody he'd known in Viet Nam had cared a damn about the war. There was a photo of Tito, smiling in the doorway of a tent, and he thought of all the world leaders a half century back—Churchill and Roosevelt and Stalin and DeGaulle and Mao. Nobody had any stature any more. What had gone wrong?

He thumbed to a photo of Yugoslav guerrillas who were leading away a squad of Germans with their hand laced behind their heads. There would never be any more wars like that. They would be impersonal and technological, with men dancing at consoles just like Johnson, men at two or three removes from things tangible. Wars of
information
and
leverage
.

A printer started up across the room.

“No go,” Johnson said. “They have no on-line databases. That's still the perfect form of data security against me, you know. But I can get you a couple of things. One of their PCs has a fax card and I managed to
persuade
the hard disk to cough up the last few weeks of faxes. I won't get them until down time tonight. Coming out now from Ma Bell is the last few months of their long distance calls.”

“Is that it?”

He got a sly look all at once. “It's never it. I always hold a bit back. That's my edge.”

Jack Liffey waited, but nothing else was forthcoming.

“Which general did you learn that from?”

“Napoleon. But then he's also the one who said espionage was useless.” He grinned. “When you're winning, you don't need it and when you're losing you can't use it.”

*

He'd got off at the wrong ramp, City Terrace instead of Eastern, and now he was dead stuck in one of those mystery jams. Nothing had moved for ten minutes and people were getting out of their cars.

“What is it?”

“Dunno.”

He got out, too, and drifted up the center of the street along with the other desultory urban pioneers. A few stood on their hoods, shielding their eyes like Remington bronzes. He saw a bit of smoke around a curve and heard a distant complaint of sirens. Then he started seeing small red objects hurled up in the distance like popcorn.

When he rounded the bend, he saw a big Coke truck jackknifed and tipped over. Kids were looting the spilled cans, shaking them up, popping them open and then hurling them at nothing in particular like fizzing hand grenades. One man was offloading cases into a panel van. A motorcycle cop was on the far side of the truck setting up flares. He had Cokes in all his pockets.

The windshield of the cab-over truck was smashed and the driver's head and one arm poked through. His face was white, with a lot of blood pooled on the pavement below, and it was pretty clear that the ambulance was too late.

Soon the kids noticed the cop and Coke cans started raining down around him. He shouted something and drew his pistol. Jack Liffey decided it was time to get out of there. He heard the first shot as he rounded the bend in a trot.

Cars were starting to back and fill to U-turn across the shallow divider. A woman in a little Geo had a panicky look in her eyes. His Concord had a high center of gravity and got over without trouble, but an old Nissan Z was hung up on its differential and smoking one tire. A big white Land Cruiser caught bumpers with the Z and spun it off the divider. The spinning tire touched down and the Z lurched into a parked car.

Jack Liffey saw the last of the apocalyptic outbreak in his mirror and then he turned off. He wanted to be away before it all went nuclear.

Fifteen minutes later he found L.A. State, a clot of concrete bunkers up a hillside. He parked in front of a shingled bungalow with huge concrete praying hands on the front lawn.

A long flight of piss-smelling concrete steps led up to the campus. He found Social Sciences and then the right room number. A card by the door had three names penciled in and various lists of hours, most of them crossed out. One of the names was Connie Beltran. News articles in Spanish and old Gary Larson cartoons were taped to the wall.

“Xavier Gallegos?”

The man nodded. “Liffey?”

Gallegos sat at the first of the three desks in the deep narrow office, a handsome man in his thirties with flyaway dark hair. An anxious-looking student sat at the back desk trying to make himself so small he would be invisible.

Gallegos closed a book over a sheet of notes. “Let's get a coffee.” He didn't invite the other man.

Outside he stopped with one hand on a high glassed railing that kept suicidal graduate students from hurling themselves over. “I hope you won't find it terribly hostile if I ask for some identification.”

Jack Liffey showed him a driver's licence, and his simplest business card.

“I had a bad experience with a couple of guys this morning.” He described the Cowboy and his pal. “I've run into assholes like them, enforcers for the big ranchers.”

“Where was that?”

“Colorado. You think
Milagro Beanfield War
was just a book, don't you? I come from Chama, a place just like Chamisaville, and everything was just like that damn book. Everybody was named Archuleta and they were all a bit crazy in a nice way and the rich
gabachos
thought they owned the world.”

“What did these guys want?”

“They went through Connie's desk. I knew better than to try to stop them. I might have objected if they'd found anything. I'm not sure. Maybe I would have.”

“They didn't find anything?”

“She never left much there, there were always too many T.A.s and R.A.s using the office to leave anything that mattered. Why don't you buy me a coffee?”

He led across a walkway to an antiseptic snackbar with highly suspect coffee from a Kona machine. They took their tray outside to a plastic table.

“On the phone, you said you were her friend.”

Xavier Gallegos just let that lay between them.

“You seem a little shy about her name.”

“Mr. Liffey, I'm married. Connie and me were colleagues, we talked about Kevin Starr's books and the egregious Father Serra and Southwest social history. We both T.A.'ed in 150, a big non-major course called Missions to Orange Groves. We had lunch together a lot. My wife wouldn't understand this relationship at all so I don't want it on TV, if that's all right with you.”

“She probably talked to you about the Cahuenga Neighborhood Organization and the election campaign.”

“Of course. I helped her write some of the materials. A bunch of naive activists and do-goods, but…”

“But what?”

He waited as a gaggle of young girls in white T-shirts wandered past talking earnestly. They looked like they were in junior high.