Dead and Gone (16 page)

“Why were the arrangements so complicated?”

“I thought about that, too. And maybe they weren’t. Not all that much. I don’t live aboveground. I don’t have a home. Or an office. Or a hangout,” I said, dismissing Mama’s from that category—she wasn’t exactly open to the public, and I couldn’t think of a worse place to try and take me out. “If they wanted to hit me, they couldn’t just go out and look for me; they’d have to bring me to them.”

“Do you believe this gangster person was involved?”

“I don’t think so. For two reasons: One, I’d had to meet with him to get the money to deliver. So, if he was going to hit me, why not just do it right then? Two, there
was
a kidnapping. There
was
a missing kid. The Russians
did
run.…”

“How long?”

“I don’t … Oh, you mean, how long have they been running?”

“Yes.”

“About a year, as near as we can tell.”

“And the attempt on your life was … when?”

“Sure. I know. They were in the wind before it all went down. There’s pieces missing. Big pieces.”

“Would it not be better to ask this gangster person more questions?”

“He’s no longer available,” I told her. “I see.”

She went quiet then. So did I. Finally, she looked up at me from under her eyelashes, said, “Do you feel comfortable with me … like this?”

“You mean … talking about this stuff?”

“I mean with me on my knees,” she said softly.

I closed my eyes, reaching for the answer.

“Yes,” I finally told her.

“Because …?”

“It’s … I don’t know …”

“Safer?”

“Yes.”

“I understand,” she said, barely above a whisper.

W
e ate in the restaurant attached to the hotel. A nice place—clean and pretty quiet, considering the bar was right in the center of everything. Gem ate … carefully, I guess would be the word for it. Slowly, chewing every bite a great number of times. But steadily, too, never varying her pace. She finished a whole roasted chicken, right down to cleaning the bones with her small, very white teeth. And a large tossed salad. Four helpings of rolls. Three large glasses of apple juice. A plate of fried onion rings. A side of roasted potatoes.

I did most of the talking, and there wasn’t much of that. A thin rain slanted down against the plate glass of the window next to our table. All around us, activity. Between us, peaceful quiet.

The waiter came and went, raising his eyebrows a couple of times, silently comparing the diminishing pile of food in front of Gem with her slim frame. He opened his mouth to ask her where she put it, but I caught his eye and he closed right down.

Gem ordered a slab of double-fudge cake for dessert. I had the same, mine with twin scoops of vanilla ice cream on top. “Oh!” she said, when she saw my addition. Then she helped herself to one of the scoops.

When she was completely finished, Gem wet her napkin in a glass of water, then patted her mouth and lips. “You didn’t say anything,” she said.

“About what?”

“About me being such a pig.”

“A pig? You eat as neatly as a … I don’t know.”

“Neatly, yes. But a lot.”

“I understand.”

“You … understand?
I
do not understand.”

“I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

“It is I who should apologize. I invite your comment, then I make you feel bad for it. Please tell me … what you meant.”

She returned my gaze. Serene, not confronting. But not backing away.

“There was a time when food was very precious to you,” I said.

“Yes. Do you know when that was?”

“Twenty, twenty-five years ago?”

“Yes. But you … guess, do you not? I mean, you do not know this for a fact; it is a surmise?”

“That’s right. The beast got loose in Cambodia in 1975, I think.”

“I was five years old,” she said, her voice soft and dreamy, but her eyes stayed on mine, unblinking. “My father was a lawyer. You know what happened to anyone with an education? To anyone with any knowledge of the world outside the fields?”

“Pol Pot.”

“He was only one of them. A symbol. A horrible butcher, yes. But he did not kill three million people by himself. The Khmer Rouge were swollen with lust for blood. If the Vietnamese had not come, the killing would have gone on until there was no one left to die.”

“How did you—?”

“My parents knew they were coming. They knew there was no escape. My mother was a peasant born. She had friends in the fields. My parents handed me over. My new people tried to provide for me. It was … impossible.

“I … eventually lived with a guerrilla group near the Thai border. They purchased me from the people who had me. They were not freedom fighters; they were drug lords. When the leader discovered I could do sums very quickly, he got me books. About money. He was very interested in money.

“The books were mostly in English. Some were in Russian. There were Russian soldiers in the jungle. Independent outfits. It was as if they all knew governments would fall, but heroin would always have value. Like gold or diamonds. So they traded together. Made alliances. I became the translator for the leader. He could trust me, because I was a child, so I had no power. Even if I could have escaped, the jungle would have devoured me.

“I was very patient. One night I was able to leave. In Thailand, money is god. I had to be very careful. Anyone would hurt you. Anyone would take your money. But I did speak English. I found some students. American students. In the Peace Corps. One of them helped me buy papers. I came here. First to California. I had names of people. I found some of them. And then I found myself.”

“Why would you tell me this?” I asked her.

“To be fair. I know about you.”

“What could you know?”

“My … people, in New York, they say you are a man for hire.”

“Even if that were so—”

“But here, you are hunting for yourself. This is personal, not professional.”

“Why do you say?”

“Because of what you do
not
say. About money.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You hired me. I am a woman for hire, and you hired me. But you never discussed the price of my services. As if it did not matter to you. So either you are concerned only with your target, or you plan to cheat me. Or dispose of me.”

“You’re pretty relaxed for someone who’d even consider that last … thing.”

“All my life, I have had only minutes—minutes at the most—to make decisions about people. One day I will be wrong. That day I will die.”

“Is that … I don’t know, Buddhism or something?”

“It is the Zen of violence. It has no logic, only essence. There are no computations, no calculations. No facts. Therefore, no theories.”

“It sounds dangerous.”

“No. It is a total thing. Do you know the fear of not knowing? Do you understand the terror of being utterly without power, in the hands of those who might use you, might hurt you, might kill you … might do … anything?”

I looked at her, saw trace lightning the color of iodine flash in her black eyes. “Yeah, I do know,” is all I said.

“Yes,” she said, accepting my answer as truth. “So you do not wait for decisions to be made by others. You
act
. If you succeed, you hold the power of your decision. If you fail, you die. It is the only way.”

“The Tao?”

“If you like. The Way is not
one
way. We are born into this world differently, one from the other. There is no fate. No destiny. There is only random chance. When you act, you alter that randomness. It may be for your good; it may be for your death. But it is better to make the decisions for yourself. No matter the outcome, the fear is gone.”

“F
ear is the key,” I told Gem later that night as she sat lotus-positioned on the carpet, a plain white tablet on her thighs. “Controlled fear. We have to spook them enough to get them out in the open, but not so much that they take off.”

“What they do
not
know, then?”

“Yeah, that’s the way I figure it, too. If we address it right to the drop box, they’ll know we have at least that much.”

“Do you know what you want to say?”

I
t was another hour before it was done. Gem worked silently, setting up her gear with the practiced, careful movements of a bomb-maker. First she sprayed some cleanser on the surface of the desk and wiped it vigorously with a silk scarf. “Formica,” she said, in a satisfied tone. “No fiber transfer.” She coated her hands with a trace of talcum powder and slipped on a pair of surgeon’s gloves. Next she took out a factory-sealed box of typing paper, opened it along one seam with a single-edged razor blade, and took out a sheet. She wrote quickly and precisely, using a cheap roller-ball pen, the kind they sell a few million of every year. “Purchased in Corpus Christi, Texas, about two years ago,” she said when she saw me looking at the English version she had copied from.

Gem’s handwriting was more like printing, only the slight serif on some letters and the right-hand slant hinting at individualism.

Sergei & Sophia–

Dmitri is dead. You are connected to this through the boy. There is danger for you. Dmitri kept records. For your own safety, we must meet. I will be in O’Bryant Square at the corner of Park and Washington on Monday afternoon, at 2:00 p.m. I will be wearing a bright-red jacket
.

It was signed “Your Friend.”

Gem picked up a small can of compressed air. She sprayed the single sheet of paper thoroughly, using the gentle sweeping motion of a graffiti tagger, then folded it precisely in thirds. Next she opened a new packet of manila-colored Monarch-size envelopes—I could see they were the self-sealing type—and addressed one carefully. Then she inserted the letter, peeled off the strip to expose the adhesive, and rubbed her gloved thumb along the seam to make sure the seal was tight. The stamp came from a roll; a stick-on.

Gem slid the stamped, addressed envelope into a Ziploc bag and sealed it.

“If we mail it today—Tuesday—they will get it on Friday at the latest. That still gives us Saturday as a fail-safe.”

“If they check their box every day,” I reminded her.

She shrugged. I knew what that meant: they would or they wouldn’t—it was out of her hands. And there was always another Monday.

L
ater that day, I stood very close to Gem, holding the mailbox slot open and shielding her as she made the Ziploc spit out its contents.

“Do you know this town?” I asked her.

“Why? What is it that you need?”

“Unless you brought a red coat with you, it’s what
you
need.”

A smile played across her face. “I love shopping,” she said.

W
e found her a brilliant red coat—a hunter’s jacket, the guy in the store told her. She also found a pair of lace-up boots she fancied. And some other stuff.

We had a late lunch with Byron at a little restaurant he knew about. He held his lips in a whistling position as he watched Gem eat, but no sound came out.

“So you figure on me coming back no later than Sunday morning, okay?” he said.

“Perfect. Thanks.”

“Sure. Tell you what—drive me out to where I’ve got the limo stashed. I’ll take it back to Seattle; you keep the hot rod until I get back. The suite’s covered, no worries there.”

“You want me to meet you at the airport Sunday?”

“No need. There’s always plenty of cabs around at PDX. And that way, there won’t be any phone calls.”

“Speaking of …”

“How many you want?”

I
spent the next couple of days prowling Portland. Knowing I didn’t have enough time to really learn the streets, but wanting to get a sense of the terrain. I’d checked the plaza where we’d set the meet—it was only a few blocks from the hotel—and I knew it couldn’t be boxed without a damn regiment standing by. The hotel was my trump—a place to duck into where I could just disappear.

Anyone interested might check the lobby, but no way the hotel was going to stand for a room-to-room unless it was the police asking. Whoever they might be considering for backup, I was sure the Russians weren’t bringing the law.

Gem always passed on coming along with me. Said she had some things to do. Sometimes she was there when I got back, sometimes she wasn’t. She must have found a greengrocer nearby—the living room smelled like a fruit stand from all the produce she had stacked in various spots. Refrigeration wasn’t a problem; Gem ate everything she scored the same day she brought it back. She asked me once if I wanted some pomegranates. I played along and told her no thanks. She ate them all, neatly and completely.

My first day of prowling turned up a bakery a few blocks away. A good one, from the smells. Picked out a half-dozen pastries. Plump ones, oozing with custard and cream. Gem gave me a sly smile and a wink, as if I’d just bribed her. And a tiny trace of a wiggle as she pranced over to the desk to arrange the pastries in a neat, precise row.

She washed them all down with hits from a huge bottle of water, talking between bites.

“You are in danger?” she asked.

“Yeah. I just don’t know from who.”

“But the people I am to meet—they will know?”

“They’ll know something. Maybe the solution to the puzzle, maybe just another piece of it.”

“If there was no danger to you, you would not be seeking them?”

“No.”

She regarded me soberly, despite a mouth surrounded by powdered sugar. I felt like I was cocaine on her scale: telling her I weighed a kilo while her readout said two pounds.

“It cannot be as you say. Not
only
as you say.”

“Why?”

“You are in a rage. A cold, black rage. When we talked … before … you told me you understood the fear. I believe that is true. But you are being hunted, yes? You were almost killed, and by people you do not know. Where is your fear now, Mr. Burke?”

“It’s there, I promise you.”

“Is it? Whoever your enemies are, you could hide from them. But what you want is their blood.”