Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (21 page)

           
“Of course not,” he said. “But you
can’t take on yourself the responsibility for things going wrong in other
people’s lives. We’d all like life to be milk and mell, but it just isn’t, not
all the time, there’s bound to be some—”

           
She frowned at him, distracted.
“What? Milk and what?”

           
He was confused for just a second,
obviously trying to remember what he’d just said. “Milk and honey,” he finally
decided. “I said we’d all like life to be nothing but milk and honey, but
there’s bound to be acid, too, along the way.”

           
“Is that what you—?” She frowned,
trying to recall his earlier words. “It sounded different.”

           
“Well, I don’t know what I said,” he
told her, beginning to get impatient. ‘The point was, it’s natural for you to
want this trouble you’re going through to be over with, and it doesn’t mean
you’re unfaithful or cold to Grigor when you feel that way. You
know
that, in your head, but your
emotions won’t listen.”

           
She had to smile at that
phraseology, and nod, looking at him at last. The tears were starting now,
after the attack, but not out of control. She blinked them out of her eyes,
saying, “Emotions never listen, that’s the way they are.”

           
“So we just do our best, okay?” He
smiled at her, warm and concerned. “And we try to think about things other than
Grigor.”

           
“Yes, Doctor.”

           
“And we don’t feel guilty when we
succeed.”

           
“That,” she said, “is the hard
part.”

           
“I know.” He shifted in the seat,
clearly ready to move on to other things. He said, “Do you have any idea how
good Italian food is when you’re an emotional wreck?”

           
Now she had to laugh. “As a matter
of fact, I do,” she said. “It’s a miracle I don’t weigh eight hundred pounds.”

           
“I know a great place in the
Village,” he said. “Let me take you there.”

           
Doubtful, afraid, she withdrew from
him, saying, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t think so. I haven’t been..

           
“Dating?” He grinned at her. “This
isn’t a date, this is dinner. Believe me, Susan, I’m not gonna try to compete
with a tragic hero.”

           
Foolish. Foolish.
Mell!
It isn’t
mell
now, it hasn’t been mell for hundreds of years. It’s
honey
now, I know that as well as
anybody.

           
I was distracted by having to deal
with my litde Judas ewe, that’s all, and for just a second I forgot the
situation, the
time,
and made that
slip. The problem is, I am not living in time in the same way the humans are,
so I don’t have the same temporal relationship with their languages. I have in
my mind and at my command
all
of
English, from its earliest guttural beginnings in the fifth century, when
speakers of Anglo-Frisian first crossed the then-unnamed stormy water from the
European continent to the British islands, and took up residence there, so that
their dialect began to alter away from its Dutch, Frisian, and Low German
cousins in the Plattdeutsch family, down through its endless changes to this
ultimate moment. (I know it into the now-canceled future as well, all the way
to its final commingling with pan-Mandarin.)

           
Mell
entered English early on, from the Greek, MeaA, and at one time the language
was lush with
mell
-derived words, of
which now only a few remain.
Mellifluous,
originally meaning something sweetened with honey, soon was adapted to mean
sweet speech, as in honey-tongued Shakespeare’s line in
Twelfth Night,
“A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight.”
Melianthus
is the honeyflower, a
mellivorous
bird feeds on honey, and
molasses
is a later corruption of the
original
melasus.
In medicine,
meliceris
denotes a tumor containing
honey-like matter, and in some technical specialties
mellaginous
still means anything that is like honey

           
But it’s in the now-forgotten words
that
mell
was at its most
mouth-watering. A sweet medieval Breughelesque pastorality seems to cling to
these words, as of a better world, lost and forgotten, replaced by this
intolerable world.
Mellation
was the
special time for collecting honey,
meliturgy
was the process of making honey, and anything as sweet as honey was said to be
melled.
Such things include
meliorate,
a drink of honey and water,
and
melitism,
a mixture of honey and
wine. And
melrose
was a nostrum of honey, alcohol, and
powdered rose leaves used by doctors in the eighteenth century.

           
I only display all this erudition,
of course, because of embarrassment over that slip of the tongue. I see that
contact with humans is making me more like them.

           
Well, the slip was a small one,
quickly forgotten by Susan, and the main point of the conversation was
accomplished. That is, to bring her confused tangle of feelings about Grigor
Basmyonov out into the light, where she can begin to study them, accept their
poindessness, and eventually distance herself first from the feelings
themselves and then from Grigor. For how is Grigor to be brought to the
necessary despair, if he is loved by Susan?

           
That is the point.

           
We drove on to the city, I guiding
the conversation into shallower and safer waters, knowing she would return to
the deeps herself, later, alone. We had dinner in the Italian restaurant I’d
recommended, we walked the city streets in a rarely beautiful early autumn
evening, and I escorted her at last to her apartment building, where I made no
attempt to kiss her good-night but did ask her to come out to the movies with
me the next night. She hesitated, but I gave her more assurances that
friendship was all I was offering (or asking), and she at last agreed.

           
Because, in fact, it isn’t enough
merely to force her to see how hopeless her love for Grigor Basmyonov is. She
craves an emotional involvement, while fearing a physical one (which makes the
Grigor relationship ideal at this moment in her life, of course, a truth we’ve
already successfully skipped past), so until she’s given an alternate target
for her emotions she won’t abandon Grigor no matter how painful the situation
becomes. Andy Harbinger is personable, intriguing, companionable, and
absolutely non-threatening. Until she’s weaned from Grigor, Andy will have to
be an ongoing presence in her life.

           
Which is not at all the way it was
supposed to be. Susan Carrigan is not one of my principals, but merely the
proximate method to bring Grigor Basmyonov to the
United States
. She should be cut loose by now, she should
be off living what’s left of her life, no longer my concern. But I’m not as
familiar with humans as perhaps I should be; their use of free will is so
frenetic it’s hard to make
plans
involving them at all. That Susan would so fiercely lock herself to the destiny
of a doomed foreigner took me, I admit, by surprise. Alienation, foreignness,
hopelessness, a growing estrangement from life, all of these were supposed to
be working in Grigor now, moving him in the desired direction. Susan’s
presence, her love, holds his despair at bay; it must be deflected.

           
And then there are my other
principals. Pami Njoroge is discontentedly performing sex acts on the hard
surfaces of the paved-over lots near the Lincoln Tunnel in
Manhattan
, in the shadow of the
Jacob
Javits
Convention Center
, completely unaware who her pimp really is.
(Ha ha, no, it’s not me, the joke is
much
better than that!) Maria Elena Rodriguez Auston is looking at the telephone
number Grigor gave her before she left the hospital, wondering if she should
call. (Yes!) Frank Hillfen is living alone in a furnished room in East St.
Louis, Illinois, committing small burglaries, too afraid of capture to do more
than provide himself a basic subsistence—he hasn’t ever even stolen enough
money all at once to pay for transportation to New York City, his goal, where
in any event

           
I’m not ready for him—and feeding his
growing sense of unjust persecution.
(Everybody’s
on the take; why does
Frank
get
hassled all the time?) Dr. Marlon Philpott, in his new windowless laboratory at
Green Meadow III, oblivious of the protestors outside the gate, pursues the
elusive possibility of strange matter.

           
And Li Kwan is arriving in
New York
; in chains.

           
Kwan did not see the arrival of the
Star Voyager
into the famous New York
Harbor because the room they had locked him into was an interior space on a
lower deck, where the vibrations of the engines could be felt on every surface
but there was otherwise no sense of movement or progress; only a small metal
cube, painted a cream color, furnished with a cot and a toilet and a sink, its
recessed fluorescent ceiling light protected by wire mesh. This was the
Star Voyager's
brig, or as close as this
frivolous vessel could come to having a brig. On most voyages, Father Mackenzie
had told him, the brig remained empty except for the occasional overly drunk
crewman, but when it became necessary to hold someone to be turned over to the
authorities at the next port of call, this was the room.

           
The authorities. The next port of
call.
New
York City
,
United States of America
. “I’ve heard,” Father Mackenzie had told
him yesterday, long-faced, “that
Hong Kong
has already started extradition proceedings, even before you arrive.”

           
“They want me in and out before the
media can make a fuss,” Kwan had answered.

           
“Of course. No one need know Li Kwan
was ever in
America
at all.”

           
“And you won’t help me, Father? You
won’t call the
New Tork Times
?”

           
But the priest had smiled his sad
smile and shaken his head. “I can’t. It is not my right to endanger my order’s
relationship with the company. I’m here as Norse American’s guest. I wouldn’t
want to do anything to make them feel justified in removing the spiritual
advisers from all of their passenger ships.”

           
Everyone has his reasons. Kwan was
understanding that now, with increasing bitterness. Probably even Dat had his
reasons.

           
Dat had not joined the crew until
Rotterdam
, three stops ago on the
Star Voyager's
endless goalless
circumnavigation of the globe;
Rotterdam
, then
Southampton
, then
Hamilton
on
Bermuda
, and now
New York
. And it wasn’t until after
Bermuda
that Dat began to insinuate himself into
Kwan’s life.

           
From the beginning, lives ago in
Hong Kong
, Kwan had understood that he was not the
only member of the below-decks crew whose papers and alleged history could not
bear much scrutiny. There were a number of other crewmen who also chose not to
go ashore at the many ports of call, who preferred the calm of their quarters
to the gauntlet of beady- eyed immigration officials.

           
Dat, when he arrived, immediately
became one of these, and Kwan noticed him, during the layover in
Southampton
, reading comic books and drinking tea in
the kitchen staff’s galley, but they didn’t talk then, Kwan being content with
his own company and Dat apparently the same. A short slope-shouldered man of
perhaps forty, with a narrow head and a hill-lipped mouth and heavy bags under
his eyes, Dafs ancestors were apparently from somewhere in the Indochinese
peninsula, Kwan couldn’t be sure where. He spoke Chinese with some kind of
muddy accent, appeared to have a smattering of Japanese, seemed to speak no
European tongue at all, and at times conversed with other Indochinese crewmen
in a language Kwan didn’t know but the music of which was undeniably Asian.

           
It was in
Bermuda
, two days ago, that this man made his
approach. Kwan was standing at the rail on the kitchen staff’s small oval deck
at the stern of the ship, watching the containerized supplies being loaded from
dockside, when Dat appeared beside him, gesturing at the outsize shiny aluminum
boxes being winched through the bulwark opening below. “That’s the way to get
off,” he said, in his poor accent.

           
Kwan frowned at him. “Get off?”

           
“The ship,” Dat explained. “I’m
getting off this ship in
New York
.”

           
“You are?”

           
“My own way,” Dat said, and nodded
at the containers again.

           
Kwan also hoped to leave the ship in
New York
, but hadn’t yet found that mythic American
girl who would smuggle him ashore. In fact, American girls were the hardest for
him to pick up on his Tuesday night excursions above; they seemed to have more
tribal consciousness than other people, to be the most determined to stay with
their own kind.

           
Intrigued, wondering if Dat had any useful
ideas (but already a little distrustful, if not quite distrustful enough), Kwan
said, “Use the containers, you mean? How?”

           
“Inside one. They come on full,” Dat
explained. “Food and drink and all those shop things, T-shirts and all that,
and the drugstore things, all inside those containers. And when they’re empty,
they go off again.
Many
of them will
go off in
New
York
.”

           
Kwan looked down at those containers
with new interest. But then he said, “Why tell
me
?”

           
“Why not?” Dat shrugged, and took a
single crumpled cigarette from his T-shirt pocket, didn’t light it, and watched
his fingers turn and smooth and straighten the cigarette as he said, “You don’t
have any reason to betray me. And a man has to talk sometimes, has to hear his
own thoughts, has to know he isn’t crazy.”

           
Kwan felt immediately sympathetic.
It was true, isolation in the middle of hundreds of people was perhaps the
worst solitude of all, as he had learned before being rescued by those metal
ladder rungs on the wall behind him. Other people cluster into purposeful
groups, supporting and explaining and justifying one another, moving through
life in these long- or short-term alliances, their own ideas and conclusions
constantly being tested in discourse. The loner has only himself to talk to,
only himself to listen, only himself to judge if he’s behaving sensibly or not.
If Dat were planning a dangerous move, a desperate move, the need to tell his
plans to another human being, to get a
response
of some kind, could be overwhelming.

           
So Kwan gave him a response, and it
was an honest one. “You’re not crazy. It’s a fine idea.”

           
Dat gave him a quick gratified
smile, the expression battling unsuccessfully with his doleful features, those
heavy lips and pronounced bags beneath the eyes. “I watched at
Southampton
, and I been watching here,” he said, “and
nobody looks inside the empty ones. Because that whole storage section down
there is locked up. Not many people can get in there.”

           
“That’s right,” Kwan agreed.

           
“You
can,” Dat said, and looked at him sidewise.

           
Ah, so that’s what it was about. (Or
what it seemed to be about at that time.) Kwan, having gained a litde
seniority, even in the world of kitchen slaveys, had a few weeks ago been
“promoted” from the deep sink filled with filthy pots and pans. His work now
was in fact somewhat easier, involving nothing more than mopping and scrubbing
and carrying, which meant that on the job now he had a key ring hooked to a
trouser loop, containing keys to the cleaning-supplies closet, the walk-in
freezer, the uniform and linen lockers, and the large echoing storage space in
which the supply containers were kept, as they were gradually emptied. At the
end of each shift, Kwan had to turn in those keys to his boss, a fussy
suspicious Ecuadorian named Julio; no last name ever offered.

           
In theory, then, Kwan could, on his
last shift before
New York
was reached, unlock the door to the container area and permit Dat to slip
through. But why should he? “That would be very dangerous for me,” he said. “If
you were caught—”

           
“Then it would be dangerous for
me,”
Dat interrupted. “Not you.”

           
“They’d want to know who let you in
there,” Kwan pointed out. ‘They’d promise to go easier on you if you told,
because the person who let you in there would be more worrisome to them than
someone just trying to jump ship.”

           
“I wouldn’t tell,” Dat said.

           
“Why not?”

           
Dat frowned, his whole face taking
on the aspect of his baggy eyes and drooping mouth. His fingers fidgeted with
that battered cigarette, turning it and turning it, until all at once the
cigarette slipped from his grasp and fell, almost floating, down toward the
slow-sliding shiny aluminum containers, but missing them and landing instead on
the dirty asphalt. “Ah, my cigarette,” Dat said, with nearly unemotional
fatalism, watching it fall, then gazing dolefully downward, like a basset
hound, becoming a comic figure.

           
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Kwan said,
finding Dat more individual and human now, but no more likable.

           
But then Dat gave him another of
those sideways looks, and a little smile, and said, “Of course I’d rat on you.
You’d do the same for me.”

           
“I might,” Kwan agreed, taken by
Dafs sudden frankness.

           
“But what,” Dat said, “if we went
together!
That way, we help each other
and rely on each other, and if we’re caught we’re
both
caught. What I mean,” he said, suddenly more animated, turning
to face Kwan, one narrow elbow on the rail beside him, “you can let me in
during your shift. Then you turn in your keys, and when everybody’s away you
knock on the door and
I
let
you
in. Or don’t you want to get off
this ship?”

           
That last was said with such
absolute assurance, with such conviction that Dat already knew the answer, that
Kwan didn’t even bother denying it. “Of course I want to get off the ship in
New York
,” he said. “If I can do it and not get
caught. But inside one of those boxes? We don’t know what happens to them after
they get taken off.”

           
“Yes, we do,” Dat said, and pointed
far off to the right, where dozens of the containers stood crammed together,
glinting in the sunlight. “They get put out of the way,” Dat said, “until
they’re gonna get used again. We go out in the box, we feel when it stops
moving, then we wait until dark and climb out and we’re in
America
.”

           
“It’s that easy?” Kwan asked.

           
“We’ll never know till we try,” Dat
said, and smiled in a lopsided way, and put out his bony-fingered hand. “Li,
isn’t it? Do we have a deal?”

           
Kwan had kept his name; it was
common enough to serve as its own alias. “Yes, it’s Li,” he agreed, and after a
brief pause he took Dafs hand. “And it’s a deal.”

*
 
*
 
*

           
The interior of the container was
cold, and smelling faintly of old cardboard, and not entirely airtight or
lightproof; grayish yellow lines of illumination defined the edges of the
frontopening panel Kwan had used to climb inside. He had nothing with him in
this box but a small duffel bag containing one change of clothes and his
notebook and pencils; he sat on that and waited. He was alone, Dat having
explained that the weight of both of them in one container would draw attention
when the containers were winched ashore so he had gone off to hide in another
one. But Kwan didn’t mind that; in fact, it was better. He had no interest in
becoming Dafs partner or friend, once they left the ship, and presuming they
were successfully to get past whatever gates or guards or locks there might be
between the dock and the free world.

           
The Free World.

           
Kwan had been in the container less
than an hour, seated on the small duffel, back against the cold flimsy-seeming
side of the aluminum container, becoming both bored and sleepy but nevertheless
feeling a kind of slow deep contentment, when noises alerted him. The storage
area door had been opened. Feet strode loudly on the metal floor. Then silence.
Then a voice: