Deal to Die For (12 page)
She stopped and turned, accepted the card. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t know, either. I guess there will have to be something.” She gave him a wan smile then and was off, moving unsteadily, as if she’d just suffered a beating, to her car.
Deal watched until she had driven away, then went for his own car. The two detectives were still standing on the porch, still talking, still staring at him as if waiting for him to grow claws and fangs and shriek his guilt. He knew they were watching him, could feel their eyes on his back. But he was goddamned if he would give them the satisfaction of looking back to make sure.
Deal awoke in his bed, still in his clothes, Isabel nestled against his
chest. His arm, where her head lay, had gone numb, and it took him a moment to ease it away without waking her. He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, still groggy with sleep. He’d been dreaming, and it took him a moment to sort things out. It was just growing light outside, which meant that he couldn’t have slept for long.
Just moments ago, he’d been a film director, sitting in a chair that swiveled at the end of a huge crane, looking down at the death scene in Barbara’s house. Only it had been Paige Nobleman kneeling over her sister’s body, her face twisted in anguish.
The tableau was that of the famous shot from the Kent State massacre, the coed looking up from her fallen comrade, and Deal the director had been calling out film imprecations: “Cut. Print. Wrap,” but no one was paying any attention. Janice was there in her tart’s getup, her face a mad sprawl of lipstick, huddled in the corner with the two detectives, who scribbled notes furiously as she shouted, pointing accusations at Deal, who hovered in his silly chair. Driscoll seemed to have been there, a surly grip, maybe, as was his old friend Homer the Dwarf, who had been running about like some lunatic court jester. It was when Deal realized that he was strapped into the chair, and that the thing had begun to whip about on its mount like a car from a carnival ride, that he came awake.
He shook away the memory of the dream, turned and put his hand on Isabel’s shoulder, then bent to press his face against her tousled hair. Her little-girl smell—shampoo, and sleepy flesh, and some indefinable essence of innocence—was a necessary elixir, and he found himself lying that way for several minutes, as if inhaling her very goodness.
If she hadn’t been there, he wondered, would he have been able to find the will: Stand up, Deal, move into the bathroom, face the wreckage that your life has become.
He stood under the shower for what seemed like hours, the hot water pounding on him until it became a hypnotic roar in his ears. He would not read the paper, he thought, he would not turn on the television. He could not stand one more iota of sadness. He could not.
And then there was a tapping at the shower door, and he opened it to find Isabel standing there with her nightgown around her ankles, her shy, sleepy smile turned up to him. “Wanna be with you, Daddy,” she said, holding out her hand. And he smiled, and drew her inside, feeling that maybe, just maybe, he could endure all this after all, and he was grateful for the water that hid his tears.
To Mahler, who had been watching the weekend edition of the morning
news show with an ever-increasing fascination, ever since the words “Miami” and “incredible story” had caught his attention, the entire proceedings seemed surreal, some kind of colossal, ghastly joke.
Just coming awake, he’d been confronted with any number of angles of the remains of the “Miami Freeway Bandits,” as the press had dubbed them. A trio of thugs who’d robbed and killed half a dozen tourists in the last month, they’d been making national headlines ever since they’d shot a Canadian woman, left her dying in the middle of the freeway with her baby strapped in the backseat.
Now, it seemed, it was over. There had been a series of mug shots worthy of any post office wall, interspersed with other, more vivid images: pools of blood on a darkened street, bodies covered with sheets, more bodies being trundled into a series of meat wagons. A local news standup with the mayor, another with an embattled-looking police chief. “We’re saddened, of course. But we’re happy it’s over.”
Mahler found the phone at his bedside, punched in a number.
“Tell me this is all a dream,” he said when the connection was made. “Tell me it’s just a coincidence, it’s some other Chinese tourist.”
“What dream?” the voice on the other end replied.
“Turn on your goddamned television,” Mahler said. “Look what they’re talking about in Miami.”
“Don’t have to turn on television,” the voice said calmly. “Know all about it.”
“Jesus Christ,” Mahler said, groaning. The weekend version of Joan Lunden was staring into a big monitor on her network set. The monitor displayed a live shot of a huge man with vaguely Oriental features.
Big Daddy Lipscomb meets Mr. Moto
, Mahler thought. The man was standing on a brightly lit beach, a pair of coconut palms forming a waving X behind him.
“Mr. Chin,” the female host was saying in a loud voice, “how does it feel to accomplish something that the entire police force of a major American city has been unable to do?”
The big man stared back at the screen as if he hadn’t heard. A hand reached into the picture, fiddled with something at the big man’s ear. Mahler heard fierce whispering, watched the network host squirm.
Finally the big man seemed to understand. He shrugged, his face impassive. “Am being very good fortune,” he said in atrocious pidgin English. “My good friend discover them all. One, two, three.” He made fierce jabbing motions with his hands.
The host winced, but she was game. “Mr. Liu-Chou was an expert in martial arts, I understand.”
The big man stared blankly for a moment. Then, as if there were some light-years’ delay in the transmission of her words, he nodded soberly. “Is knowing the computer very well, Liu-Chou.”
It took the weekend host a moment, but she managed. “Well, sadly, your companion, Mr. Liu-Chou, was not so fortunate as you have been. What do you have to tell other Chinese citizens who might be planning to come to Miami?”
More fierce whispering. The big man looked puzzled, then seemed to comprehend. He turned back to the camera. “Renting a big car,” he said solemnly. “Big red Lincoln.”
Mahler switched off the television as the scene cut away to a commercial.
“Tell me he’s not yours,” he said into the telephone.
“
Ours
,” the voice said. “Everything fifty-fifty on this deal.”
Mahler sighed. “It’s true, then?”
“Sure, is ours,” the voice said. “Pretty good, huh?”
“Tremendous.”
“I mean, sound like a dummy, got better English than me.”
“Now that’s an accomplishment,” Mahler said.
“English here better than Chinese there,” the voice said, rising ever so slightly.
“Okay,” Mahler said. “You’ve made your point.”
“Anyway, you worry about nothing,” the voice said.
“That’s me,” Mahler said. “See a few bodies strewn over the pavement, I tend to overreact.”
“Is local hero now. What more you want? Perfect cover. Do job, get key to city the same time.”
“What if something goes wrong?”
There was a silence on the other end, a major inhalation of breath, an impatient release. “One thing about Chinese,” the voice said. “Something to understand. No matter what. Beat. Shock. Cut one thousand times. Never say anything to anybody.”
“This guy?” Mahler said. “He’s pretty tough. Is that what you mean?”
“Is of Hung Mun,” the voice said. “Once of Hung Mun, never talk. Die first.”
“Whatever that means,” Mahler said.
“Means go back to sleep,” the voice said. And then the connection broke.
“I am thinking that I know you,” the little man said, peering at Gabriel over the glare of the propane lantern he’d pulled close between them. He’d been working on a snag in his fishing reel, had finally cleared it, guided another shrimp onto his hook, dropped it back down off the pier into the water.
Gabriel shrugged. “I come here sometimes.” He gave his own fishing rod a shake—the rod he had borrowed from a man who would no longer need it, that is—and glanced down into the murky water as if he knew what he was doing. He had in fact fished, more than a few times, with his grandfather, back in Thailand, but that had seemed more ceremonial than anything else.
His grandfather, originally a seafaring man from the Chinese province of Fujian, had refused to eat anything they’d pulled from the foul-smelling canals of Bangkok. “These are not fish,” he would tell Gabriel haughtily, tossing whatever they had pulled up back. “And that is not water,” pointing at the scum-laden surface beneath them. Puzzling words for an eight-year-old boy. But then his grandfather had always been a strange one.
Gabriel glanced about the deserted fishing pier, a former bridge that had been shorn in two, was comforted to see that the broken roadway opposite them was empty. It would make things that much easier.
The sundered halves of road paralleled a much newer causeway that arched high over the bay waters a half mile to the south of them, but it was still early, the sun yet to climb from the ocean to the east, and only one pair of headlights inched silently along the new bridge from the mainland out to the island and its parks and beaches. To the west, the sky reflected a hint of dawn to come, but the tall buildings of the city were still decked in artificial light, their towers winking red warnings that reflected in the waters almost to where he and the little man sat, at the end of a road to nowhere, tending to their lines.
“Not here,” the little man said, shaking his head. “Somewhere else.”
Gabriel shook his head. “I don’t know you,” he said firmly. The fact was, the little man reminded him in an uncomfortable way of his grandfather. The slight build, the shock of white hair, the insistent, intrusive stare that would not let you go. Even though this one was Latino, with a healthy dose of Indian, there was a certain resemblance to his grandfather’s swarthy Oriental features.
“I will think of it,” the little man said. He tapped the side of his head and smiled. “Once it is inside here, it always comes out.” He cackled. “Sooner or later.”
Gabriel shrugged. The international brotherhood of madness, he thought. His crazed grandfather, who would take him to the banks of the Bangkok canals, their only refuge from that hovel of a home, where they would sit, overwhelmed alternately by the stench from the garbage scows that drifted by, then by the sickly sweet perfume of flower barges piled high with cut blossoms on their way to market. They only pretended to fish while the old man chattered endlessly in the unfamiliar Minnan dialect, filling Gabriel’s head with tales he only half-understood, most of them spinning the fabric of a glorious, impossible past, before, as he was always reminded, the Communists had come to drive them from their homeland.
Gabriel turned to the little man, gesturing back down the abandoned roadway. To get to this place, you could only drive so far. You came around a barrier at an entrance far out on an island that was likely locked up in foul weather, and drove along a road that marched on pilings over the bay and had started to crumble and crater at the urging of the sun and salt water until you were a mile out from any land and had reached another barrier, this one welded fast. There you were forced to walk another quarter mile or so to the place where the road fell away into darkness and, presumably, the most worthy of the great fish lurked.
“You have a very great car,” Gabriel said. The shape of the man’s limousine nosed against the welded barrier glowed vaguely white in the distance. Beside it loomed the darker shadow of the truck that Gabriel had borrowed from the same man who had provided him with his pole for fishing.
The little man gave his cackling laugh. “It is mine for as long as I use it,” he said. “I am just the driver of that machine.”
Gabriel nodded as if it were news to him, working carefully. “You’re a chauffeur, then.”
“At eight o’clock I am a chauffeur,” the little man said, glancing up at the sky. “Right now I am a fisherman.”
Gabriel raised his chin to recognize the man’s cleverness. More and more like his grandfather, he thought. He wondered briefly what tragedies, if any, might have befallen this one. Like his grandfather, this man had the look of a person starved for understanding, for the barest glimmer of companionship.
In his grandfather’s case, perhaps such cravings had been understandable. If the tales he told were to be believed, his grandfather had been a dashing figure in his prime, no fisherman where the seas were concerned, but a merchant sailor, and finally a gunrunner, a Chinese pirate with a red bandanna to cover his closely shaven head. At times, even a dagger clenched in his teeth.
“We were the only Chinese who did not fear the sea,” his grandfather would proclaim, thumping his bony chest with his aging fingers, no bandanna, no knife, no boat, a pathetic figure on the bank of a stinking sewer, a thousand miles from his home. Still, he told the stories. He did not fear the sea, he insisted, and he had not feared the men who did, especially the cowards hiding behind a red star and the fear of living a life on one’s own behalf. A group of those men had come one night, expecting to find Gabriel’s grandfather, who had taken up the work of supplying arms to the small pockets of long-suffering loyalists in the distant mountains beyond Zuangping.
His grandfather had, by good fortune or bad, depending upon how one interpreted it, stolen away to the docks of Xiamen, to supervise the offloading of several crates of rifles made in Russia, shipped to Japan, and brought by fishing boat from Taipei. When he came home at dawn, he found his family slaughtered: his parents beheaded, his wife hacked to pieces and thrown to the alley dogs, his two sons with their brains dashed out against the door stone, his fourteen-year-old daughter given the torture of one thousand cuts and left for dead. None had talked, that much was clear.
His grandfather had fled Xiamen that morning with his daughter, her wounds bound and packed with what herbs and medicines he could find, had cradled her in his arms inside a crate in the stinking, airless hellhole of a junk’s cargo hold for twelve days and nights, and, miraculously, she—the woman who would become Gabriel’s mother—had survived. With nothing but his words to soothe her pain and fever, he held her fast until they’d rounded the horn of Asia and come to Bangkok, to join the thousands of other Chinese refugees in the place they’d called home ever since.
How many times had Gabriel heard it, each time the account growing more fervent and lurid, until it would have been impossible to take it for truth, unless you were to come home and find your mother undressed for her work, plunging a needle into the flesh of her arm, between her toes, wherever she might find a vein, and you could trace those scars that criss-crossed her body like some drunken mapmaker’s misplaced tracings.
“Put-together Girl” the other Asian girls at Jack’s American Style Bar called her. As if she’d been made up from random scraps of flesh. But her face, save for one long line that traced the furrow of her brow, was unmarked, and lovely, and her breasts were larger than was usual among Asian women, and, perhaps most importantly, she had inherited something of her father’s brazen disdain.
Until the dragon had consumed her, she had been a favorite of the American GIs who came to Thailand—and to Jack’s—for rest and recuperation, in increasing droves as the Vietnam war heightened. Some of them called for the Put-together Girl, and some even called her by her name. But still they called, and often. Maybe there was something in her scarred body that comforted as well as excited them, that gave them hope, those men who were likely to return to their jungle war and fly into scraps themselves, Gabriel thought. But that was just a thought and one he’d come to long after he’d left Bangkok.
“We’re lucky to have this place to ourselves tonight,” the little man on the other side of the lantern said, and Gabriel roused himself to nod his agreement. He was wasting time, he thought, and yet the past seemed to lay some spell upon him.
He glanced around their deserted spot. There was really no point in telling this little man that the gate at the island entrance had been closed and blocked, was there? Nor that there
had
been one other fisherman trying his luck a bit closer in toward shore.
Instead Gabriel said, “But where are the fish?” Thinking as he spoke the words, how many times had he asked his grandfather the same thing?
The little man laughed. “They will be along.” Gabriel felt a chill hearing the words, his grandfather’s familiar reply.
His grandfather, who had told him other stories, tales of mystery and magic, at the same time less terrible but far more strange. Of Mazu, the little girl who died to save her fisherman father at sea, and whose spirit lived on, to come to the aid of shipwrecked sailors everywhere. Of the
Tiatong
, the one possessed by the spirits of the departed, and the
Fashi
, who listened to their strange-tongued discourse and translated the messages for the living.
Once his grandfather had taken him deep into the Chinese quarter of Bangkok, where they stood on the curb of a narrow street and watched, amid clouds of incense, the yearly procession of the
bai-bai
, a pagan ceremony much older and far beyond the ken of the Tao, of the Buddha: crowds of men bearing strange godlike figures aloft on divans, bands of flute and cymbal players fore and aft, and most disturbing of all, the two messengers from the King of Hell, a tall thin man on stilts, all in white, and a short fat man in black, so round and full he seemed ready to burst.
The pair surrounded Gabriel and buffeted him back and forth, waving their arms, squawking in their strange language like cranes, until he screamed for help and his grandfather waved his arms and the two finally went on their way. Though no words passed between him and his grandfather, Gabriel knew why he’d been chosen by the pair.
His mother, fair-skinned, and lovely, until the drug had taken her beauty, even her very self, away. His father the huge black man the GIs called Sergeant Snow. His bar. His women. His drugs, which came across the border from Burma in the form of opium to be transformed into the drifts of white powder that sustained so many American troops and gave the man his name. The big man had never acknowledged Gabriel as his son, had never so much as given him a kindly glance, but his mother told him the truth.
“So you cut the trees,” the little man was saying.
Gabriel roused himself again, saw that the light was growing now in the east, that the looming shape of the truck he had borrowed had grown into an orange immenseness there by the limousine, that the big letters that explained its function were clear, even at this distance.
The little man was waiting for some response, staring at Gabriel as he turned down the feed on the gas lantern between them. As the artificial light fell away, a shadow seemed to cross the little man’s face, transforming his features momentarily, and Gabriel felt another chill.
“Right now I am a fisherman,” Gabriel said.
The man cackled and his face rearranged itself, and Gabriel felt reassured. Nothing had changed. Not really.
“It is the way you must think about it,” the little man said. “When you work for them, you might be theirs, but when you do what you want, you are yours.”
Gabriel nodded. It was growing light, and he had wasted enough time. He turned to the little man. “Your work is not so difficult, though?”
The man shook his head, agreeing.
Gabriel kept his voice casual. “And you meet many interesting people.”
The man shrugged. “Some rich people. Some famous people.” He smiled. “Some good people.” He tapped something in his pocket. “The lady I have now, she is one of the good people.”
Gabriel glanced at the limousine again. He had the car now, and he needed just one more thing. If he were lucky, it would come to him easily. If not, he would have to take measures, and he hoped that he would not have to. “Is she famous?” Gabriel asked.
“She is an American actress,” the man said. “I suppose that she is famous.”
“And she stays at a fabulous hotel?” Gabriel asked.
The man shrugged. “She did. Then she wished to move. She was not happy there.”
Gabriel nodded. That much he knew already. “The rich are very difficult to please,” he said.
“It wasn’t that,” the little man said. “She wanted someplace to be that was more comfortable, more like…” He broke off to think of the proper word.
“A home?” Gabriel ventured.
The little man smiled. “Exactly. A home. She was feeling of great distress, you know. And she was wanting a home.”
“Your home?” Gabriel asked, feigning surprise.
The little man cackled. “No, no. Of course not. She is a famous actress, after all. I was taking her to a little hotel. One place I know about not even so far away. My friend from Santo Domingo has. She is much happier there.” He reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a Polaroid photograph, extended it to Gabriel.
Gabriel held it close to the dim lantern. A small hotel, its fanciful bands of stonework and bright colors shadowed by some glass and steel monster in the background. The actress standing on a patio, one hand trailing on a balustrade, a pool tiled in a black and white checkered pattern just behind her. She had managed a smile, but her eyes were saying something else. Beside her, half a head shorter, stood the little man, chauffeur’s cap cocked back, delighted that this good and lovely person had placed her other hand on his shoulder. One neon letter, an “R,” part of a neon sign from another era, in the upper right-hand corner of the shot, the rest cut off at the margin. One dark blurred hump at the picture’s bottom—most likely a Santo Domingan thumb.