The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 Page 18

  “Everybody thinks we are making millions,” she said. “Would you believe it if I told you that the one Zankou in Beirut was making more money back then than all of the Zankous put together today?”

  At age 24, Zankou was a survivor. Fending off challengers, some shameless in their imitation, was nothing new. The Internet droned with foodies debating the chain’s “overrated” chicken or lamenting how the garlic paste had somehow lost its zest. “Zankou Chicken, I don’t get the hype,” one wrote. Another declared, “Arax is the best falafel stand in Hollywood. The only reason I go to Zankou now is when Arax is closed.” Zankou defenders shouted back: “What do you mean overrated? It’s better than ever.”

  Rita tamped down talk by sons Dikran and Steve about bringing in outside investors to triple the chain, or about selling Zankou nationwide as a franchise. Look around, she told them. Koo Koo Roo, Boston Market, Kenny Rogers—the street was littered with small chains that grew into bigger chains and imploded because they forgot what good food tasted like.

  Dikran, the marketer who handled everything from menus to charity, seemed to understand. Steve took it personally. He was 28 now and knew more about the food operations than any of them. He had Mardiros’s instinct for the business, Rita agreed, and his taste buds, too. He could take one bite of food and know immediately which spice was too much or too little. But he also had the curse of his father’s temper. Rita worried that he might get into trouble again. And when it came to managing people, she did not trust his judgment.

  Five months earlier, Steve had insisted on hiring a supervisor for Pasadena, a woman who had a long career managing fast-food franchises such as McDonald’s. After much discussion, Rita gave in. The new manager wasted no time making small changes (name tags) and big ones (hour-by-hour tracking of sales). Steve saw an operation evolving from unprofessional to professional. Rita saw it going from friendly to sterile. It was a classic battle, pitting the virtues of smallness against the efficiencies of bigness. It turned ugly. The manager was fired.

  Steve became furious with his aunt, Rita’s sister, who worked at the Pasadena Zankou and had complained bitterly about the manager. He confronted her. She was ten years older than his mother and blind in one eye. His mother wouldn’t speak of the details, but it was clear that Steve had gotten physical with his aunt. Rita felt she had no choice but to fire him and kick him out of the house.

  “What Steve did to his aunt, I am too ashamed to talk about,” she said. “He is a good boy, and he’s got a big heart. But he has given me no choice. He has to learn how to control his temper. His anger, we will not accept.”

  STEVE KNEW THE BACK STREETS of Los Angeles every bit as well as his father. Tooling from Glendale to Hollywood, cranking the wheel from freeway to road, he could tell his Global Positioning System a thing or two about the best way to get there. He had been blaring Bob Marley for two days, ever since his mother had given him the boot. Now it was time to continue his education of The 48 Laws of Power. He slipped the CD into his player, and a voice, eerily disembodied, began to intone:

  “Power is more God-like than anything in the natural world…. Power’s crucial foundation is the ability to master your emotions…. If you are trying to destroy an enemy who has hurt you, far better to keep him off guard by feigning friendliness than showing anger…. Make your face as malleable as an actor’s. Practice luring people into traps. Mastering arts of deception are among the aesthetic pleasures of lying. They are also key components in the acquisition of power.”

  Law 1 seemed easy enough: “Never Outshine the Master.” He was having more difficulty with Law 15: “Crush Your Enemy Totally.” It didn’t occur to him that the tape, like his favorite movie, Scarface, was so over-the-top that another listener might find it comical. He wanted to believe in the message. Whether that message came from Sun Tzu or Donald Trump or Tony Montana, he was willing to hand over his whole being to it. He saw himself as putty going in, a rich and beloved American tycoon coming out.

  “My goal in life,” he said, “is to have as many people at my funeral, to have affected as many lives in a good way, as I can. I want to live a great life. I want to be a great person. I really enjoy hanging out with different people, intellectual people, important people. I know I really can’t do that unless I have power.”

  He seemed, in a fundamental way, far too sweet a kid to become truly adept in the art of ruthlessness. Among Armenians and beyond, people were awed by his generosity in the same way they had admired his father’s. Zankou didn’t deliver, but there was Steve, bags of spit-roasted goodies loaded in his Lexus, heading to a school or a charity that needed free food for its function. He paid the monthly rent on a building in Ontario that a black preacher, a friend, had converted into his first church. Steve was the one whom friends called when they were nearing bottom and needed a push into rehab. He drove them there, nursed them through the cold turkey, and monitored their recoveries like a hawk.

  As for his own life, it was a mess. He had dark circles under his eyes and was 30 pounds overweight. His younger brother Ara, whose addiction to Vicodin had morphed into an addiction to exercise, thanks in part to Steve, tried to work him back into shape. He kept skipping the gym to gorge on lobster and crab at Mariscos Colima in North Hollywood. After one monumental meal, he caressed his belly. “Bro,” he said, eyes twinkling. “You wouldn’t know it, but underneath these pounds I used to catch a lot of ladies.”

  He was sure he was paying a price for all that softness. People saw him as an easy mark. No wonder his mother discounted his vision. “She thought the manager I hired was pulling the wool over my eyes. But she doesn’t know what it takes to move this business forward. Don’t get me wrong. My mother’s been awesome. She surprised all of us with her work ethic. But she doesn’t understand this business the way I understand it.”

  He had been at his father’s side, watching and learning, since he was a kid. If only he were calling the shots now, the next move would be big. “I believe we can open a Zankou in every major city in America. But she doesn’t want to hear it, bro. I have to sugarcoat everything. I have to walk on eggshells.”

  Walk on eggshells? Had he been walking on eggshells a few days earlier with his aunt?

  “My aunt was totally provoking me the whole way,” he said. “They are making it like I beat her up, but I didn’t. They are insisting that I hurt her. And I didn’t hurt her. I lost—I lost my control, bro. I was mad. You know?”

  So he hit her?

  “I slapped her on the hand. It didn’t hurt, though, bro. I know it didn’t hurt.”

  Now Steve wasn’t sure what to do. Should he stay with friends? Get a place of his own? Leave town? He packed his bags and headed north, past Santa Clarita and Bakersfield, straight up Highway 99. The grape fields all around him were in winter slumber, and he felt his mind begin to race. One image after the other, his life over the past ten years, came back to him. He saw Dikran, the older brother he so admired, walk into the bedroom they shared and whisper at night: “Steve, you’re going to hell if you don’t change your ways.” He saw the 777 Motel and the call girl and her pimp. He saw the courtroom in Van Nuys and the prosecutor making the tiniest of blunders. He saw his father lying on the couch, a hat covering his bald head, and his grandmother home from work, walking past him as if he were already dead. He saw his father burning the photo and telling him he would never forgive her. “God will forgive the devil before I can forgive my mother. Because this is a mother, not the devil.” He saw his father asking him for a slushy lemonade from the Muscle Beach shop at the Glendale Galleria. He saw himself coming back home, the lemonade still icy, his father gone.

  He kept driving through the California farm fields until he reached Fresno. That night, sitting in a friend’s backyard, he heard the story about the Armenian kid who had stolen a crate of raisins in the 1920s. Fifty years later, at the church picnic, the old ladies sitting in their lawn chairs pointed to a boy standing in the shish kebab line. “See that yo
ung man,” one old lady said. “That’s the raisin stealer’s grandson.” No one needed to tell him the moral. He was the son of the Zankou Chicken mogul who had murdered his mother and sister and then had the decency to kill himself. What struck him wasn’t the story’s lesson—that you can never escape the past—but what the storyteller had left out. Did those whispers reach the ears of the raisin stealer’s grandson? Or was he lucky enough to be just outside their reach? Did he manage to live his life never knowing the peculiar bent of his patrimony? Steve wasn’t so lucky. He had heard the whispers, and it made him think about the son he might have one day. Would the whispers follow him? Or would his son know the story because Steve had chosen to tell it from his own mouth?

  For three days, he ate white bean and lamb stew, drank whiskey, and imagined living in a place such as Fresno, the land of Saroyan, far from Zankou, far from family. On the fourth day, he climbed back into his car and headed home.

  This time, as the highway opened up, his mind fixed on a different image from the past. It was 2005, two years after the murders, and the grieving was finished. The family had decided it was time to honor Mardiros and open a new store in West L.A. Because he was the son most like his father, the job was given to him. You find the location, his mother told him. You find the contractor. One day, the store half done, he found himself unable to get out of bed. For 90 days, he lingered in a state of deep depression. Doctors prescribed pills, but he wouldn’t take them. Nothing could reach him. Not food or drink or sex. His mother didn’t know what to do. She was paying $15,000 a month in rent for a restaurant with no opening in sight. She finally persuaded him to see a psychiatrist, a Greek doctor who heard the story and could see where the problem was buried.

  All his life, he had been told he was Mardiros’s son. And all his life, good and bad, he had done his best to make that true. The girls, the outbursts, the devotion to business, the loyalty to family, it became his way of honoring the father. But what it meant to be Mardiros Iskenderian’s son had changed irrevocably that day. It was one thing to be the second coming of a patriarch beloved by family and community. It was another to know that all this legacy had been washed over by one act. Who was the father? Who was the son? How could Steve ever be expected to build a new Zankou in his father’s name, without ever owning up to what his father had done?

  Usually he did not plan his visits to Forest Lawn. He went only when the impulse seized him, and that was rare. Truth be known, he wasn’t sure if he was strong enough. But that December day in 2007, as he barreled into Los Angeles, he decided he would do something different. Inside the cemetery gates, he visited the grave of his father, and then he headed to the opposite end to locate the graves of his grandmother and aunt. He hadn’t gone to their funerals. He had never said a proper good-bye. “I know it sounds stupid, but it wasn’t until I was standing there, staring into their headstones, that it hit me for the first time. That my father had killed them. I never really looked at it like that before. He took two lives. He was going to die anyway, so I don’t count his life. But he took two lives with him. And those lives belonged to my grandmother and my aunt. There was no turning away from it. This is what my father chose to do as his final deed.”

  He wanted to believe that none of it was truly planned, that his father, racked by rage and cancer, was not of sound mind. He wanted to believe that in the living room of his aunt’s house, his father awoke to his crime and felt immense sadness. He could only hope that his father had asked for forgiveness as he sat down on the couch and raised the gun to his head. What he didn’t know was that the coroner had checked for traces of salt beneath his father’s eyes and found none. Mardiros Iskenderian had shed no tears.

  The son left the cemetery that day with the same questions he had been lugging around for five years. They were questions, he now knew, that had no answers. How could a woman who cooked with such love disown her son on his deathbed? How could a man so intent on passing to his sons the good name of his life’s work hand them this name, this act?

  He drove up the canyon to the mansion that sat on a ledge in the Verdugo Hills. He parked his car and walked up the driveway past the koi pond in the entrance and knocked on the door. His mother and three brothers were waiting for him. There was Ara, who struck an impressive bodybuilder’s pose, and Vartkes, the university student who was still trying to finish a condolence letter he had been writing to Dzovig’s sons for five years. And there was Dikran, the uneasy patriarch, who felt the need to speak for them all.

  “Dad wanted us brothers to love each other and always support each other no matter what. We are different, each of us, but we are one. We love each other, and we will die for each other. As his sons, we can never let money or outsiders tear us apart. To do less would be to dishonor Dad’s memory.”

  Steve sat down on the couch next to his mother, leaned back, and closed his eyes. Rita took a puff of her cigarette and smiled. Her prince. Her pasha. Then she opened the family scrapbook to a page from Beirut, the year 1975, and she began to narrate. “To this day, I never see anybody as beautiful as my husband was. I met him when I was 12. Roof to roof, we passed each other notes. It was forbidden, but we fell in love.”

  MARK ARAX is the author of three books, including In My Father’s Name, about his twenty-year search to find the men who murdered his father, and the upcoming West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State. During his twenty-year career at the Los Angeles Times, Mark won many national awards for both his investigative reporting and feature writing. He now teaches literary nonfiction at Claremont McKenna College.

  Coda

  The story ends where it ends. No epilogue, other than Rita and her four sons still trying to come to terms with Mardiros’s final act. If the piece feels as if the writer had something extra invested in the telling, something deep down but never expressed, it may be because I saw so much of my own story in their story. My father was murdered when I was fifteen, and the mystery of that crime bent my entire life, for good and bad. I saw my mother in Rita, a woman who knew nothing about her husband’s business yet had no choice but to take it over. I saw myself in Steve, a son trying to honor his father and yet so confused about the choices his father had made at the end of his life. I wanted to use my Armenian heritage to inform the story, to get close to the family and give the reader the most intimate portrait I could. But I had to be careful not to rely on my heritage so much that I was conning the family or pulling punches with the reader. It was not an easy balancing act and I think now that I may have failed. Rita, for one, will no longer speak to me. Not because of some factual error or even a contextual one but because, her friends tell me, the story was too personal, too intimate.

  Charles Bowden

  MEXICO’S RED DAYS

  FROM GQ magazine

  THERE WAS A TIME when death made sense in Juárez. You died because you had a drug load or because you lost a drug load. You died because you tried to do a deal or because you were a snitch, or because you were a poor woman and it was dark and someone thought it might be fun to rape and kill you. There was a pleasant order to death, a ritual of cartel thugs or corrupt police or the army taking you, then tying your hands and feet with duct tape, torturing you, and finally killing you and tossing your body into a hole with a dose of “milk”—the friendly term for lime. Your death would be called carne asada, a barbecue. Life made sense then, even in death. But those were, of course, the good old days, when murders averaged two or three hundred per year.

  Now the world has changed. Since January, El Paso, the sister city of Juárez, just across the remnants of the Rio Grande, has had just five murders. In the first 160-odd days of 2008, Juárez has had nearly 500—no one knows the exact number, except that it just goes up and up and up. The killings have the cold feeling of butchery in a slaughterhouse, and they are everywhere: done in broad daylight, on streets, in markets, at homes, and even in Wal-Mart parking lots. Women, children, guilty, innocent-no one is sa
fe.

  These are red, endless days.

  SHE CAME TO JUÁREZ FROM SINALOA, the state on the Pacific that is the mother of almost all the major players in the Mexican drug industry, probably to visit her sister who works in the city. She was very beautiful—her hair hung down to her ass and her skin was oh so white. They called her Miss Sinaloa. I know this because when Elvira, who works at an asylum on the outskirts of Juárez, starts talking about her, she includes this Miss part. Yes, Miss Sinaloa, a beauty queen who came to Juárez. “Once,” Elvira says with pride, “we had a very beautiful woman—Miss Sinaloa. The police brought her here; she was 24 years old.”

  The city cops claimed they had found her wandering on the street one morning, but Miss Sinaloa had actually been at a party. No one knows how she left the party—in Juárez there are many versions of every event—but everyone agrees on what happened after: The police took her and then raped her for three days. Eight policemen, in turn, over and over. In the mid-1990s, when girls from Juárez first began vanishing and then reappearing in the desert as corpses, the cops referred to them as morenitas, the little dark ones, because they came from the darker-skinned barrios where the women who slave in American-owned factories live. But Miss Sinaloa hailed from a different world: She was fair-skinned, middle-class, a beauty queen. And a fair-skinned woman is a special treat for street cops. By the time she got to the asylum, Miss Sinaloa’s buttocks bore the handprints of many men. There were bite marks all over her breasts.

  I have been coming to Juárez for thirteen years, and like everyone here, I have an investment in the dead. And the living. Miss Sinaloa is a story, and like all stories, for a moment it tantalizes. Then it vanishes—swept up into one of the many theories that attempt to account for all the violence happening in Juárez. Some blame the massive migration of the poor to the city to work in the factories; another favorite theory has it that the violence is because of the drug world. Those who focus on the murder of the girls sense a serial killer prowling the lonely dark lanes. Others simply see the state waning in border towns like Juárez, the violence a new order replacing the fading state with criminal organizations.