Kiss of the Blue Dragon (16 page)

Her little body went stiff and her eyes seemed distant. “Peking,” she said through tight lips.

“Peking doesn’t exist anymore,” I said gently. “Do you mean Beijing?”

She shook her head. Mike and I shared another look. “Ask her to describe her home,” I suggested.

Mike translated her reply, which described a vast palace, jade statues, gold-tiled ceilings and giant pillars.

“Wow,” I said, “that’s quite a place to grow up in. Her parents must be rich.”

“No,” Mike said, “they must be royal. She described the Gugong in Beijing.”

“Translation, please.”

“The Imperial Palace, where Chinese emperors live for five hundred years, starting in the Ming dynasty and ending with the last emperor, Puyi, who lived there until 1924.”

“So how could Lin have been raised there? Isn’t it now a tourist attraction?”

“Yes. Where once there live three thousand eunuchs and hundreds of concubines, there is now over eight thousand empty rooms for tourists to see. No, she is confused.”

“Or she’s trying to confuse us,” I mused. She looked at me sharply and I remembered she could understand most of what we’d said.

He spoke quickly in Chinese and she responded in kind, then broke into tears. She tried so hard to hold the tears back that her sobs came out in spurts. I wanted to pull her into my arms and soothe her, but I didn’t know how. I turned questioningly to Mike.

“She says she was stolen from her sister by very bad men who murdered her,” he said.

“Oh, no. That’s terrible. What of the other girls? What happened to their families?”

Mike pressed on with questions and she sputteringly told him there were eleven other girls who grew up with her in the palace. Lin began crying again and I went into the bathroom, retrieved a couple of tissues and handed them to her. As she dabbed her eyes, I lost all desire to question her further. I didn’t want to cause her any more pain. But I also needed more information to give to the police. I couldn’t very well tell them the girls had been stolen
from a royal palace that hadn’t been used in more than a century.

“There’s only one way to find out what I need, Mike, without causing her more pain.”

He looked at me questioningly.

“Let’s go to your shed. I’ll bring my crystal ball.”

He gave me one of his rare smiles and his black eyes gleamed approvingly. “Now you are talking, Baker.”

I smiled at him, then at Lin. “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s see if we can’t get you back to Kansas without a trip to Emerald City.”

No Place Like Home

T
alk about performance anxiety. Here I was in Mike’s portable meditation hall, with paper amulets pinned on planked wallboards to ward off evil spirits, a Chinese Book of Days open on his bamboo writing table,
I Ching
coins scattered on his futon and charts showing the twelve palaces of purple astrology, and
I
was supposed to be the one to have a vision?

Mike lit several candles and placed the ball and tripod stand in the middle of the floor on a one-foot-high mah-jongg gaming table. I sat on a meditation pillow on the grass mat in front of it and adjusted the position of the ball.

“Ask Lin to sit across from me.”

Mike began to translate, but she stopped him, saying, “I speak English.”

We gaped in silence. She continued with only the slightest accent. “My sister taught me. She said someday I would need it.”

Mike and I looked at each other and stifled grins.

“Well, then let’s continue. In English,” I add wryly.

I tried to remember what Dr. Hunter had done at IPAC. I needed to start using my psychic powers in a more proactive way. “Lin, I need you to concentrate on your own experiences. As painful as this may be, I want you to try to remember what’s happened since you left China. You don’t have to talk about the events, just think about them, okay?”

She nodded, but her smooth, flat features went still and assumed a faraway look that I recognized well. She’d tightened the spigot on the pipeline to her feelings. It was, understandably, a defense mechanism that children used when they were afraid of getting hurt again or reliving past pain. Sometimes it was just too painful to keep the pipeline open. Lin eyed me warily, perhaps as she contemplated giving one more adult a chance to disprove her theory that none of them could be trusted.

“Okay, sweetie,” I said, smiling reassuringly, “now I want you to shut your eyes and picture where you were before you went to the Drummond’s apartment. Who was there with you? What did you smell? What did you hear and see? Think about how things felt to touch. Understand?”

She pulled her hair back behind one ear, sniffled and nodded.

“Good. Mike, turn the lights off. I only want candlelight.”

Mike did as I asked and settled like a shadow in the corner of the room. I put my hands on the ball. Images popped into my head, but they were familiar and ordinary scenes from my daily life. Even after only a few attempts at reading the crystal, I knew the difference between active imagination and a real vision. I simply had to wait.

It was like waiting for slumber. Your mind whirls, replaying events from the day, and it seems you’ll never fall asleep. Then you realize the scenarios have become bizarre, even impossible, and you think, “I’m starting to dream. Awesome.”

I focused on the reflected candlelight on the smooth orb under my hands. In my mind, I saw Janet Drummond frozen in her own blood, Mel and Marvin Goldman’s argyle socks, Soji doing her live shot, Marco on the beach. Then I saw a Chinese girl, but it wasn’t Lin. And it wasn’t in my mind. Her image appeared in the glass. A vision. Awesome.

I moved my fingers aside so I wouldn’t block the view, but kept my fingertips on the glass. The girl suddenly seemed so real I thought I could reach through the glass and pull her out. She had short, black hair and was smiling. She looked to be no more than four. I saw others playing, including Lin. So this was the past.

“I see Lin with other Asian girls. One has short black hair and…huge dimples.”

“Pei,” Lin said in a small voice.

I didn’t look up, afraid to lose the vision. Where
was Pei? I tried to expand my focus, like a camera lens, and it worked. I saw a flash of color behind Pei. “She’s in a big red room. So big I can’t see the ceiling. She…you and the other girls are filing out into a garden. I see…rocks piled up to look like little mountains, and gnarled pines, a bronze incense burner…and a winding footpath with colored pebbles.”

“The Imperial Garden,” Lin said.

Innocent laughter filled the ancient courtyard and a distant gong reverberated. I was actually hearing things. The girls played and laughed while older girls dressed in colorful red-satin Chinese dresses watched.

Suddenly there was a scream. Several men ran into the garden and started herding the girls into another big room with high, painted ceilings and incredible jade murals. The girls began to cry. “Sister, where is Sister?” several of them whimpered.

Again, as in a dream, the scene changed abruptly. I felt queasy and my skin chilled. I was no longer looking down at the scenes reflected in glass. My eyes glazed over and it was as if I were there, as if I were Lin.

I’m hurtling down a hallway, a dark labyrinth, being jostled by the other panicked girls
.

“Hurry, hurry,” shouts a guard from behind. He’s dressed in the old Ming-style warrior’s robe. I run faster, but Pei trips in front of me. I try to catch her, but we both go down. I scrape my knee, but am too scared to cry. A guard runs up behind us and scoops us up like sacks of feathers until our sandals once
again hit the stone floor. We run forever, it seems, until we reach the Palace of Heavenly Purity
.

I hear the gasps and muted cries of horror from those who enter the tall templelike living quarters. I expect to see what I always see here: a half dozen private bed nooks made of dark cherrywood and partitioned by expensive embroidered yellow-and-turquoise silk curtains and elaborate murals made of precious polished stones and jade. I expect to see our sisters grooming themselves or playing cards as they always do when we go out to play. But what I see instead is almost impossible to absorb
.

I see Pei’s sister first. She is an angular eighteen-year-old with wide, pretty lips. For some reason she is asleep on the blue-tile floor next to the bed she and Pei share in the corner. Light streams in through long, narrow windows and in its beam I see blood on her sheets. Pei runs to her, then shrieks like a wounded animal, her body in spasms as if she’s been electrified
.

I run to the east side of the temple structure, pull back the curtains and there is my sister, brown-black hair splayed on a bloody pillow, eyes open a slit, her simple white blouse darkened with blood. She is dead. They’re all dead
.

“No!” I cry out. “Sister!
”

A guard wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me away. She is all I have and I cannot even hug her one last time. Likewise, the other girls who live here with us are drawn away from their slain sisters. We howl in a dissonant chorus
.

The scene changes suddenly. A moan stops in
my
throat and I realize I’ve been crying. My cheeks are damp with tears. From a greater distance I see the palace as we are leaving with the man called Capone. Behind the palace, I see a big shiny building and American letters: F.R.Y. Barring. My eyes blur and I begin to cry
.

The sense of loss is indescribable. I can take no more
.

I force my eyes open and find Lin still staring at me. Her cheeks, too, are wet. But the distance between us is gone. It didn’t matter that we’d only recently met. She knew that I knew what she’d gone through. I understood the depth of her loss. I respect it. In a way, it has become my own.

“You never saw your sister again?” I said in a torn voice.

She shook her head and a new wave of tears flooded her eyes.

“You don’t know what happened to her? Why she was killed?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered hoarsely.

An overwhelming wave of sympathy propelled me to my feet. I pulled her up and lifted her into my arms, clutching her tight. She was nearly too tall to hold, but I was strong, and strength could be used for more than fighting.

I sat in a chair against the wall and pulled her into my lap, cradling her as best I could a—what, a six-year-old? I didn’t even know. And not knowing intensified my urge to protect and heal her. She had no one.

“Oh, Lin,” I murmured against her bangs as I
rocked her in my arms. “I’m so sorry. That shouldn’t have happened.” I kissed her hair and tasted my own tears. Grief shook from inside me in a silent, hammering sob. I held her and cried uncontrollably for all we had both lost. I mourned because she couldn’t. Not yet. She was limp in my arms, unresisting. While I’d never allowed myself to cry for me, I could cry and rage on her behalf. She needed that. She needed someone to stand up for her. It didn’t take the whole world to make a difference—just one person.

I held Lin until my tears dried and I was filled with a sense of peaceful acceptance. By then she was asleep. I looked in the corner and found Mike patiently watching us. I never had to explain anything to him. He understood without words.

I carried Lin to bed and tucked her in, stroking her hair away from her soft cheeks. I gazed down at her with a bundle of emotions that were new, exciting and a little frightening. Surprisingly, one of them was admiration for Lin. I thought that was a feeling triggered by someone who had accomplished great things in life. But, in fact, a child being courageous in the face of cruelty was a great thing.

By the time I left the room and quietly shut the door, I knew what task lay ahead of me. I finally had tangible evidence that even the most apathetic city officials couldn’t ignore. Lin wasn’t raised in Beijing. She had been kidnapped from a suburb of Chicago. The royal palace she called home was apparently nothing more than a replica built in the shadow of one of the newest landmarks and most
glaring eyesores to hit the Chicago area in the last fifty years.

In my vision, when I viewed the past through Lin’s eyes, the last thing I saw was the Friedman, Reilly & Young building in Barrington. F.R.Y. Barring was all I could see, but there was no mistaking the gleaming corporate icon. Apparently, Capone was no longer stealing girls from China. God forbid, was he breeding them now in the wooded suburbs of northern Illinois? If he sold girls who were literally homegrown, he couldn’t be put in jail for international slave trade.

But he could be put in jail for murder, and that gave me something solid to give to the police. Before I did, though, I wanted to free the girls myself. I didn’t trust the government to do it without screwing up.

That meant it was time to pay a visit to the only man in Chicago who had the guts to steal nearly a dozen girls from Corleone Capone. Vladimir Gorky. Like a Blue Dragon slithering out of the water, I would rise up and face the Russian eagle. The day of reckoning had come.

The Headless Housekeeper

I
n the kitchen, Mike and I gathered to talk about our plans over a cup of tea. No sooner had we settled in than Lola came up the stairs and peeked her head into the kitchen.

“Yoo-hoo,” she said in a singsong voice. “What time is it? Shouldn’t you kids be in bed?” She sat in a chair, dark eyes bright with curiosity.

“Yes, Mrs. Baker,” Mike said obediently, but he didn’t get up to leave, and I smothered a smile.

I poured Lola a cup of tea and while she stirred in five teaspoons of sugar, I questioned her further about her visit to Gorky’s mansion. I needed to know where she’d seen the girls. I had envisioned her
chained in a dark basement. But while she was there, she informed me that not only did she dine on shrimp alfredo, she passed by a room with a bowed glass wall overlooking the lake, à la Frank Lloyd Wright, filled with adorable little Chinese girls eating chocolate cupcakes.

Apparently Lola had a far closer relationship with good old Vlad than she’d let on. And the girls were, at least temporarily, being well cared for.

Based on Lola’s experience, I concluded that there was only one way to free the girls. I had to meet face-to-face with Gorky and strike a bargain.

To that end, I told Lola exactly what I needed from her. She had to call Vladimir Gorky and arrange for him to meet with me. She turned white when I explained my plan.

“Honey,” she said, “don’t go near that man. He’s dangerous.”

“I know,” I said in a monotone, oddly calm inside. “I predict this is the job that will finally do me in. But I have to do it, because if I don’t try to do what’s right for those girls, no one will. I cannot stand by and let children be bought and sold.”

“Don’t make me do this, Angel. I’m scared.”

“You owe me, Lola. If you do this for me, I’ll forget about that whole adoption thing. I’ll never mention it again.”

She blinked with touching hope. “You mean that, honey?” When I nodded, she added, “Why?”

“It’s not often that we get a chance for redemption. I have a lot of regrets. Not so much for what I’ve done, but for what I haven’t done. I just have
this feeling that if we help these girls, we can both start over.”

This was starting to sound like a snake oil salesman’s version of the Buddha’s Noble Eight Fold Path. In reality I didn’t know squat about redemption. But it wasn’t like they offered a course on it at the local community college, so it was time to take some risks.

“I just know I have to do this,” I said in conclusion.

Lola clutched my hand and looked into my eyes deeper than she ever had before. “Angel, baby, are you willing to die for those girls?”

“I’m willing to die trying to get them home. Everybody should be able to go home.”

Lola slowly drew back, nodding with resignation. Then she smiled contentedly. “All right, honey. I’ll call Vlad. You’re doing the right thing, Angel. You always do.”

Yes, irony sucks, but sometimes in a delicious way. Lola arranged a meeting between me and the head of the R.M.O. at Rick’s Café Americain. Lola said Gorky had been to Rick’s before. When I expressed concern about meeting so close to my two-flat, she waved me off impatiently.

“Honey,” she said, “if Vlad wants to find out where you live, nothin’ will stop him. He probably already does know. And if he’d wanted me back after my escape, I’d be gone by now.”

We made a few last arrangements then went to bed. I woke early for a light workout, breakfast and
then I took Lin to Evanston for safekeeping with Sydney. Lola was highly put out that I trusted my foster mother’s care-giving more than hers, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. Even if Lola had been Mary Poppins when it came to child care, I didn’t want Lin caught in Gorky’s net if he decided to scoop up Lola, his errant soothsayer.

By the time I arrived at Rick’s in the early evening, I was feeling downright fatalistic. While Gorky was dangerous, he was also a quasi-public figure and would not risk his reputation by killing me in public. He would let his minions do that at another time and place. It was too hot to wear my millifine steel suit anyway, so instead of dressing in a defensive mode I decided to try to look tough.

I wore short, pale blue shorts, a jeweled aluminum bra top and an easy-stick spiderweb tattoo that covered my cleavage and spread over my bare abdomen down to the low-cut line of my shorts. I heavily lined my eyes, generously colored my lips, slicked my hair back and donned my black stiletto ankle boots.

When I walked into Rick’s at six, the place was already crowded. Dinner was served in the north end of the building. The bar area was filled with tourists and locals, plus the usual dozen or so compubots. Ilsa Laszlo was powdering her nose, as usual, at a table in the corner while Victor, her husband, talked to the refugee about escaping French-occupied Morocco. They sat at the bar, pretending to barter over a ring.

Through the distance, which was hazy with pun
gent, unfiltered cigarette smoke, I saw Rick in a white tux ordering a drink at the bar. He caught my eye and did a double take. I smiled and waved. He nodded and raised his glass in a private toast. I found myself waiting for his come-hither look, but remembered I’d stripped it from his program. He would never look at me like that again. From now on I’d only receive the wistful looks reserved for a fond former lover.

I looked around for Gorky but saw no sign of him, so I took a table on a dais in the back where I could see the whole room in relative privacy. I ordered champagne. I was about to give the most critical performance of my life and a slightly elevated mood might help. Gorky was no two-bit crook I could intimidate with the threat of bodily injury. It would be my vision of the world against his. And whatever happened tonight, I’d have to do a better job bluffing than I had with Tommy Drummond.

I’d had maybe two sips of the pink bubbly when Gorky walked in. He was tall with broad shoulders, more striking than handsome, with swarthy skin stretched tight over hard, Slavic features. Topping it all was a head of thick, distinguished-looking silver hair. He had to be at least seventy years old, but he had the body of a man thirty years younger and he could probably kill a man with a single punch to the heart.

Gorky spoke briefly and authoritatively to the Moroccan host, then strode confidently toward me in ivory slacks and a gray silk shirt. Heads turned his way and people milling between the tables parted
instinctively to make way for him, in part because of his extraordinary presence and in part because many doubtlessly recognized him from news coverage.

“Ah, you must be Ms. Baker,” he said in a gravelly Russian accent when he climbed the single step to the dais and reached my table. He smiled broadly with oodles of charm. His icy-blue eyes twinkled and he held out his arms in a where-have-you-been-all-my-life? gesture, saying, “It is such a pleasure to meet you after all this time. Lola has told me so much about you.”

I stood and held out my hand. “How do you do, Mr. Gorky?”

He took my hand, undressed me with his eyes, and then kissed my knuckles with chivalry that took me aback. It reminded me of one of Lola’s old phrases about men: just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there isn’t a fire burning down below.

One kiss wasn’t enough. He clasped his enormous paws on my arms, kissing each cheek without permission and with no recognition of my stiff resistance. “In my country, we greet people as old friends, Ms. Baker, unless we know them to be enemies. If they’re enemies, then we make love to them.”

“You make love to men?” I inquired, pulling myself out of his grasp.

“No, we just kill the men. But why kill a woman you haven’t yet seduced?”

I pulled myself up, dignity restored, and mo
tioned to the chair opposite mine. “You talk about your country?” I said, trying to steer the conversation away from sex. It was giving me the creeps. “That would be America, wouldn’t it? You are a naturalized citizen, I thought.”

“True. But in these wonderful days a person’s allegiance is not to the land of his birth, but to great ideas.”

Carl, the plump, white-haired, tuxedo-clad waiter, took Gorky’s order with attentiveness I’d never received, I noted with irritation.

“What would you like, Mr. Gorky?”

“Vodka.” The word was a burr in his throat. He pinned his powerful gaze on me. “For two.”

“No, I don’t drink vo—”

“Your very best,” Gorky added.

“Very good, sir.” Carl hurried off.

I realized with some pique that Vladimir Gorky was a man who didn’t listen to women. I doubt he’d heard anything I’d said so far.

“So, you are Lola Baker’s daughter.”

He leaned back in his chair and crossed his thick arms. I’d bet a paycheck he had started out as a street thug and had risen through the R.M.O. ranks by brute force, as well as cunning. His manly charm and large size had probably been part of the equation, as well.

“Yes, I am.”

He nodded approvingly. “You’re very beautiful.”

I took in a deep breath and felt self-conscious about the low cut of my metal bra. I was so supposed to be intimidating, not fetching. Men like Gorky
prided themselves on finding everything a woman does sexy. It was a way to diminish any other platform from which a woman might assert herself. He was all about power and he’d gotten it by disregarding some basic rules of civilization, like don’t kill, lie or maim.

“I’m not here to talk about me, Mr. Gorky.”

“Please,” he said with a cajoling smile, “call me Vladimir.”

“I know that you have eleven Chinese girls in your safekeeping,” I began diplomatically. “I trust they are in good health.”

He frowned. “Who told you that? Oh, yes, Lola was there. Where is she, by the way?”

I looked at him and took a sip of champagne.

“Don’t worry. I gave her to Cyclops to teach her a lesson. I think she has learned it. I would never hurt her, Angel
moy
.”

As I recalled from my encounters with the Sgarristas,
moy
was Russian for “my.” My Angel. What a presumptuous jerk.

Carl returned with two shots of vodka and a chilled bottle for refills. Gorky slid a glass toward me, then raised one in a toast.

“To the beautiful Angel Baker.” He tossed back the liquor and exhaled contentedly. “Please, Angel, drink. It is the best vodka my homeland has to offer.”

“What lesson did you want Lola to learn?” I said, ignoring his entreaty.

“That she should not play me for a fool.”

I chuckled softly. “I wouldn’t think anyone could play you for a fool.”

“Only when I let them.”

“Vladimir,” I said in conciliator tone, “I want you to give me those Chinese girls.”

He laughed as if I’d just told a hilarious joke. “Just like that? They’re worth one hundred million dollars.” His inscrutable eyes hardened, then lit with curiosity. “What could you possibly want with them?”

“I want to return them to their rightful parents.”

His frown deepened. “Why do you care?”

I slowly turned the clear glass stem of my champagne flute. “Because I know what it’s like to be torn away from your parents. Because it’s wrong. Whatever you plan to do with them, it’s wrong. Children should not be bought and sold.”

He poured himself another shot, swilled it and put the glass on the table with a quiet thud. “So how long have you been working for Corleone Capone?”

“I do not work for the Mongolians,” I hissed. “That’s ridiculous. I’m a Certified Retribution Specialist.”

“I know what you are,” he shot back impatiently. “You do kung fu. You’re stubborn and independent.”

My jaw parted and I forced it shut. “Who told you that?”

He shrugged. “Why, Lola, of course.”

“How discreet of her,” I said tightly.

He raised a bushy gray eyebrow and looked at me pointedly over his large, arched nose. “There isn’t a discreet bone in that woman’s body.”

I wouldn’t deny that. “If you don’t hand over those girls, I’ll have to report them to the police.
You’ll be put behind bars for slave trade, just like Capone was a few years ago.”

His mouth parted with a coughing chuckle. “That’s good, very good, Angel
moy
. You have an admirable sense of justice. But the police can’t touch me. I haven’t sold the girls, so I’m guilty of nothing. Capone is the one who kidnapped them. Besides, my people have been in Chicago a lot longer than Capone—the Mongolian Capone, that is. I have the police exactly where I want them.”

“You have untold wealth, Vladimir, from untold shady businesses. Why do you need to sell innocent girls? Surely you’re not that hard up for cash.”

That elicited a spark of anger from his steely blue eyes. “Don’t insult me. I have more money than the Illinois treasury. Of course I’m not doing it for the money. Leave that to the Mongolian bottom feeders.”

“Then why?”

He looked around the room, as if noticing his surroundings for the first time. “I like it here. I’m a big Bogart fan. Did you ever see
The Maltese Falcon
?”

“Yes,” I said tersely. So we had one thing in common—we were both fans of Bogie. “But it’s not my favorite.”

“I suppose you like
Casablanca
. Women always do.”

“Yes,” I reluctantly admitted, “I do like it.”

“And
The African Queen?
” he inquired almost disparagingly as he tossed back another shot.

I refused to admit he’d nailed me again.

“I liked Bogart better when he was a character actor, before he wimped out as a romantic lead.”

“I want the girls,” I said through clenched teeth. “Why can’t you let them go? I have my own connections in the police force who won’t turn a blind eye on this.”

He really looked at me for the first time, blinking in surprise. He probably wasn’t used to women trying to direct the course of a conversation.

He poured another shot for himself. “I kidnapped the girls from Capone because he killed my cousin ten years ago. I have been waiting for a chance to pay him back. His organizatsia is not nearly as wealthy as mine. He needs the money. By keeping his girls, I can hurt him financially. But more than that, the Asians want to save face. You hear of this before?”