Los Angeles Noir

throbbed and something splashed off his brow. He stuck out his tongue and tasted warm salty liquid. Red tears, he thought. I am crying red tears. He raised a hand to probe the wound, but someone grabbed his arm and pinned it to his side. Other hands tugged at his tie and he felt a ripple as it slid loose. Now his hands were shoved together and the tie, still warm from the heat of his body, was looped around his wrists and tightened.

His wife had given him that tie. It was silk. Some Italian designer whose name he couldn’t pronounce. Now it bound their love together, he thought. What he would do to save his family.

“The combination,” the boss repeated.

Again Chen shook his head, bracing for further blows. He hoped he’d pass out if they hit him again. He knew his life hung by a filament not much thicker than the fiber optics that wrapped his beloved and lucrative circuits.

“Open your eyes,” a voice ordered.

Chen did and beheld a photo of himself, his wife, and the two girls, at a park near their home in San Marino. Chic and perfectly coiffed even on the weekend, Leila wore a quilted pink warm-up suit and clapped her hands as the children rocked on a seesaw. Chen stood off to the side in blue jeans, a white polo shirt, and tasseled loafers, talking into a cell phone. He remembered that day. An unseasonably warm Sunday in February. They’d eaten dim sum at a new place on Valley Boulevard and then, bellies full and relaxed, had given in to the girls’ pleas and taken them to the park.

“We have people inside your house,” the boss said, his voice the sibilant hiss of a snake that Chen had been told lurked in the arroyo, with diamonds on its back and rattles that sang as it struck.

At these words, Chen’s vision constricted to a pinhole, seeing only his children, their fragile limbs, their trusting eyes. He thought of the evil that lay camouflaged, coiled in wait in this hot dry land so unlike the humidity of home. He and Leila had made a safe place for their family in this New World, though Leila had never stopped pining for the southern province of her youth. They had sheltered their children in ways their own lives had not been, growing up under the lamentable excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Chen himself had been guilty of an excess of zeal, but that was all in the past. The American gold rush was on, and so he had emigrated and found a little door when the big one was closed and built up his business and used his skills. It meant long trips to Asia to search out the best price for raw materials, and he missed his family terribly, but such was the sacrifice one made. And after all, hadn’t he met Yashi there, and banished his loneliness in her arms, and brought her back and set her up in Arcadia as his mistress? He’d even bought her a townhouse on Huntington Drive. He hadn’t expected her to be so hot-tempered, his Yashi, with her flashing eyes and ebony hair rippling like a curtain. Yashi with her greedy red mouth fastening upon him, fingertips fluttering like tiny moths against his skin.

The boss gave a buzz-saw laugh. He punched some numbers into a cell phone and gave an order. Then he put the phone on speaker.

“Russell.” His wife’s quavering voice filled the car. “They promise that if you do what they say, they won’t…” her voice choked. “The children…” she said hoarsely. “They’ve got the children.”

There was a scuffling as the phone changed hands.

“Say something to your father,” a male voice demanded.

Then a wet whimper. “Daddy?” said six-year-old Pearl.

And when he heard that voice, usually so bossy, now reduced to a high whine of fear, something broke inside of Chen, and he slumped in his seat.

How could he give these people what they wanted? How could he not? Even if his family was saved, all would be lost. He knew his wife-she expected a certain standard of living. A big house. Country club membership. Fancy cars. Ivy League schools for the children. The education they had missed out on, because of the situation at home. Then he heard his daughter’s gasp again, and he knew there was only one solution.

He told them.

The boss turned in his seat and his lips parted in a ghastly smile. Then he made a new call and repeated the sequence of numbers into the phone. In the chip factory, with its modest gray carpet, black lacquer furniture, and framed invoices for ever larger orders, Chen knew that someone was giddily twirling the dial.

He closed his eyes again. Soon they’d have what they wanted and they’d let him go and his family would be safe. He could always start over. What did it matter, balanced against their well-being? These were white-collar criminals. They didn’t like leaving behind bodies, messes.

With a sudden jerk, the car wheeled off the freeway and sped north along Rosemead Boulevard. Up they went, past Bahooka’s, the faux-Polynesian restaurant with the shellacked swordfish on the walls and the sticky red-syrup sauces. He had taken Yashi there, a place few Chinese immigrants were likely to go. Unlike San Marino, which was more than half Chinese now and a village when it came to gossip. They hit the 210 freeway and drove west.

Chen felt a spike of fear. “But you promised,” he said.

“Shut up,” the boss grunted.

“Where are you taking me?” he gasped some time later, as the car swung off the freeway and wound up Angeles Crest Highway into the San Gabriel Mountains. This was where criminals dumped bodies. He read the Los Angeles Times enough to know that. It had always given him a broody comfort to know he lived in a hushed and leafy suburb with the lowest crime rate and highest school test scores in all California. He led an orderly, honest life. He took precautions, paid for armed guards, assiduously wooed the big companies like Intel and Pentium. And each time he opened the Wall Street Journal and read another headline that said, Chip Demand Continues to Outpace Supply, his heart swelled with pride and satisfaction at how he provided for his family. At Yashi, now the mother of his son. A prickle of unease filled him then, something he’d have struggled to put into words in a calm setting, much less now. He recalled Yashi throwing plates, demanding that he divorce his wife. Young passionate Yashi. She’d been acting strange lately, and he’d put it down to the new baby. Cooped up by herself all day in the townhouse. Really, he would have to mollify her with a gift. He thought of his favorite jeweler in the San Gabriel Village Square on Valley and Del Mar, the heart of suburban Chinese immigration. The tiny proprietor, Overseas Chinese from Burma, with his wizened face and appraising eyes. A bracelet of imperial jade, perhaps to mark the birth of a son.

It was dusk when they pushed him out of the car on the mountain road, hands still lassoed together by his designer tie. They pulled his shoes off and hurled them down a ravine, startling some unseen animal that crashed through the undergrowth and was gone.

“We’re sorry, uncle, we need time to get away,” one of the underlings said. Chen sensed a curious undertow to the honorific and wondered if they regretted their mistreatment of him, now that he had given them what they wanted.

Yes, he thought, almost approvingly. They couldn’t have him sounding the alarm too soon. They were smart, meticulous people. They thought of everything.

From the side of the road, he watched the car pull forward, then turn and head back down. It slowed as it drew near him, mute and penitent in the gloaming, his wrists tied before him, hands curved into a begging bowl.

“In the name of God, at least untie me!” he shouted. “I’m no threat to you anymore!”

The car stopped. “He wants us to untie his hands,” came a lazy voice from inside the car.

A pause then, as though the matter was under consideration.

“Stop toying with him and do as he asks,” said the boss, sounding weary. “She was very insistent.”

The first bullet shot through his knotted tie, shredding it into charred fibers that soared upward, then drifted down to the pine-needled ground long after Mr. Chen himself had slumped to rest. Two more slugs tore into his chest. A fourth caught him on the temple. He was long gone by then, dreaming of Mieux Mieux from the brothel, sad forlorn bird from his home province of Fujian, and the tricks he had taught her.

“One down, two to go,” the boss said. He opened his Thomas Brothers Guide and flipped the colorful grid pages until he came to one marked Arcadia. His finger drifted across the map and found Huntington Drive. The car sped down the mountainside and disappeared into the night.

Three hours later, Leila Chen and her two girls walked out of a large Tudor house in San Marino and climbed into their Mercedes.

“Los Angeles International Airport,” she said, and directions began to scroll across the screen embedded into the dashboard.