Tea with the Black Dragon (v1.4)

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Long didn’t answer. She continued. “And how he used me! I thought Carlo was a wizard in the beginning. My— my mentor! He said he would take care of me, lead me to the top. I wanted to be a wizard too.”

  She snorted. “I was a real innocent.”

  “A wizard,” Long echoed, thoughtfully. “Odd word to use in connection with computers. I’ve always found there to be so much… flimflam about wizards, and I can’t see how one could get away with that in computer engineering. But perhaps that’s my own innocence. At any rate, if the masters of your art are called wizards, then I’m sure you deserve the name.”

  She recoiled, shaking her head.

  “I’ve heard about you from all sides. Miss Macnamara. I’m told you are very good at what you do. And meeting you, I now know two computer wizards.” Long chuckled at his private joke.

  She fought against vanity and curiosity both. “I don’t know what you mean,” she answered, sullen. “I told you I’m not…”

  “I don’t mean anything,” Long murmured. “Go on. You never mentioned to anyone you had done Peccolo’s work for him? Not even when you were so—bitter?”

  “He knew.” The words were a hiss. Liz took two steps toward Long’s chair, placing herself between him and the fading light of the window. Though her figure was a mere silhouette against the dusk, the smugness in her voice was unmistakable. “I knew he knew. And he was never sure whether I had told anyone. I let him sweat it.”

  Mayland Long stirred in his chair. “A subtle vengeance.” Her words were dry and dispassionate. “But you told Rasmussen.”

  “Yes. I had to. When Floyd assigned me the bank job last winter, I told him why I couldn’t do it. He was marvelous about it! He patted me on the back for my integrity, and went away. I thought it was all okay, and he’d get somebody else to write the code, but he came back the next day and said he had no one else who could handle the project and the department couldn’t afford to lose the contract. And he said that the fact I told him I’d done the other half proved more than anything else could that I could be trusted with the responsibility. He said the only real safeguard in life was personal integrity. North Bay trusted FSS and FSS trusted me. We used to joke about it, while I was blocking out the program, about the power I had over the little sidewalk tellers: how I could make them spit twenty-dollar bills all over Oakland at exactly twelve noon some Saturday. Now the federal insurance agency would rise or fall by my design. How a wrong branch would send bureaucrats out of tenth-floor windows. I felt like really hot stuff,” she whispered. “It was a great couple months.”

  Liz took the stuff of the drape in one hand. She leaned against the wall, head drooping.

  “And I designed a really good piece of software. Nobody could have broken it. Except me.”

  One dark hand snaked out; Mayland Long turned on a lamp. In the soft yellow light Liz Macnamara looked lovely. The length of her arms and legs emphasized the slender fragility of her body. Her hair was like a sheet of glass, falling over her eyes. The taut, strained hands which wrung the fabric of the drape, however, were those of her mother, square and ordinary.

  Long broke the silence. “Tell me about your father, Miss Macnamara.”

  She raised her head. Blinked. “Why? I haven’t seen him in almost twenty years. It’s not relevant to this.”

  His hands wove into their characteristic steeple pattern. “I reserve the right to ask irrelevant questions. Even impudent ones. You, of course, don’t have to answer.”

  “My… my father is named Lars. Neil Lars. I refuse to use the name. He was a wind. Still is, probably, if he’s still alive.”

  “Pardon? He’s a what?”

  Liz gestured vaguely. “A wind. He plays winds. Flute, mainly, but also piccolo, some oboe, clarinet. He ran off when I was a little kid. He’s not involved in this.”

  “Are your parents divorced?” pressed Mr. Long stubbornly.

  “Yes. Mother divorced him in absentia. Abandonment. He took all her money when he left. She used to say it was all ‘gone with the wind.’ “

  He nodded. “That seems in character. Tell me more Miss Mac—Elizabeth. Was your father a tall man? Fair? Large boned?”

  She nodded, mystified. “He was a huge, gorgeous Swede. He knew it, too.”

  “Why has your mother never remarried?” Longs eyes caught the light suddenly, gleaming like brass.

  Liz shifted, foot to foot. “I don’t know. Too busy, I guess. I’m glad she didn’t. All the men she knew were losers, and her music is more important… Why do you ask?”

  Long smiled at her confusion. “I want to know everything about your mother. It may help us locate her. But I interrupted a very interesting story. You wrote the second half of the security program and gave it to Rasmussen.”

  She nodded. “Then he asked to see a listing of what I had done for Carlo. Said he wanted to see what kind of criticism the old fool had made.

  “I wasn’t supposed to have one—a printout of the code—but I did. I kept it to spite Carlo. It was a mess; no structure, no comments. That’s not my style, but I was being tricky when I wrote the thing, you see, because I knew I wasn’t going to get credit for it. Carlo couldn’t understand what was in it. No one could but me, I think. But he didn’t have time to write it over, so he had to trust me that it worked.”

  “You are subtle,” Long broke in. “And it was that incomprehensible listing you gave to Rasmussen?”

  “Yes. I told him why I did it that way. He loved the joke. I thought. It was his idea to stick a wrench into the program to see if anyone would notice.”

  “What sort of wrench?”

  Liz wandered over to the couch. She plucked up a tasseled pillow and hugged it to her. “I created a phony account number which bled the bank of a thousand dollars a month. Rasmussen said we would just sit back and watch it get bigger and bigger until someone finally noticed. There was no theft involved, at this point. We didn’t take the money. We just let it sit.”

  “And it was never noticed?”

  Elizabeth raised her eyes from the pillow. “Doug Threve noticed. He worked for data processing at North Bay. He found the dummy account, but he’s no engineer, couldn’t get to the code to find out what was going on. He came to see Rasmussen, and I guess Floyd let the cat out of the bag.”

  “Did Threve… see the humor of the situation?”

  Without warning the pillow went flying across the living room. It knocked an Escher print to the floor. “Did he? Hell! Goddamn, we were all such good friends! Threve, Rasmussen and Macnamara. Jolly bank robbers!”

  She stood with her hands clenched uselessly in the air.

  Her hair covered her face like a veil. Mayland Long cleared his throat.

  “Herkneth, felowes, we thre been al ones, Lat ech of us holde up his hand til oother, And ech of us bicomen otheres brother.”

  These words recalled her from the tempest of her thoughts. “What did you say?”

  “I quoted Chaucer. A bad habit, quotes.”

  “It sounded like Dutch.” Elizabeth shuffled across the room to the fallen picture. There followed the plink of broken glass.

  He measured her mood carefully before continuing.

  “But I interrupted again. Another bad habit of mine. Am I to assume that it was Mr. Threve’s idea that you three share the profits from this small bloodletting of North Bay Savings? He supplied credentials for the false account? Under whose name?”

  “The name was Ima Heller.” She spoke with distaste. “Rasmussen picked it—that’s his kind of humor.”

  “That’s the name on your mailbox,” commented Long.

  “Right. That’s the name under which I bought this condo. Out of my account at North Bay. I’ve been Ms. Heller a lot, lately. Since the account is in a woman’s name, we needed a woman to make all the personal appearances. And to take all the risks, of course, but I didn’t realize that until later.

  “Can you believe I went along with that?” Her words gritted. “A name
like Ima Heller?” She stood cupping broken glass in her two hands.

  Long regarded her from behind his hands. “How can I doubt you, when you speak with such sincerity?” He met her angry gaze and held it, smiling.

  “Well, that was only the beginning. We emptied the account and went out on the town. Had a lot of fun. It wasn’t serious then.

  “I showed Threve what changes to make in the code to rake off more. We created phony corporation accounts.”

  She approached the chair where he sat, swimming in shadow. The jagged glass in her hands sparkled as though she were holding diamonds. “In the past year we have pulled out of that bank two million dollars. I never decided to do it. I was still thinking whether it was right or it was wrong and I had done it. I can’t even tell you why!”

  “Elizabeth,” said Mayland Long. “You’ve cut your hand on the glass.”

  Chapter 7

  Liz Macnamara thrust one hand beneath the running faucet. The water flowing down the drain was tinted pink. “The letter?” she echoed. “I did that when things began to go wrong, about a month ago.”

  “How did things begin to go wrong?” Mayland Long stood behind her in the kitchen. Absently he hefted the bottle he had left on the table. Golden liquid swirled about the sides. Elizabeth noticed.

  “Oh! I’m sorry; I’ve forgotten all my manners. Can I get you a drink?”

  “That’s because I came in through the window. The formalities don’t apply to visitors who come in through the window.” A smile crept across his lean features: not a Chinese smile, but a very English smile, shy and diffident. “I believe I would like some of your excellent Scotch.” The whiskey lapped and spattered within its confines of glass. “Isn’t it lovely?” mused Long, “like bottled sunshine. And I do usually take it in a glass these days.”

  “Oh God, don’t remind me. I might have killed you.”

  Long shook his head. “Not so easily as that.”

  She took the bottle from his hand, fetched another glass from the cupboard, and filled it for her guest. This homely task brought others to mind.

  “What about food? It’s dinner time. I’ve got some cold barbequed chicken in the fridge…” She opened the refrigerator door. “And French bread. And cake.”

  “You are very kind,” sighed Mr. Long. He eased himself into a spindle-back kitchen chair and rubbed his face with both hands. His fingertips were hidden in his black hair. Then he sighed again and held the Scotch up to the light in contemplation.

  “This matter of the letter at the bank,” he reminded her. “When things began to go wrong…”

  The plate she lay in front of him he recognized as Arabia china, from Finland. It was white as a northern winter, and at its edge ran a bold blue band. Long murmured to himself, “White plates and cups, clean gleaming, ringed with blue.” The rest of the poem flashed unbidden through his mind, until he came upon the lines “the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss of blankets … Sleep…” His eyes closed against the sight of red-stained chicken and the tawny length of bread crust.

  Liz Macnamara stood attentive beside him, her own plate in her hand. “What did you say? After you asked me about the letter—was that Chaucer again?”

  Long snapped awake. “Forgive me. No, it was Rupert Brooke, and I wasn’t aware I was speaking aloud. I want to hear about the letter.” He rubbed his fingers into his eye sockets, as though to punish his eyes for their treachery, and blinked a few times, focusing vaguely on the chocolate cake that sat on a doily in the middle of the table. Next to the cake lay an elegant, formidable knife with a rosewood handle and a blade five inches long.

  Mayland Long was very much aware of the knife. He wondered that the young woman would trust him so much as to leave a weapon in his reach, when not a half hour ago she had been convinced he was an enemy. Did she leave it there as a test, having a gun concealed on her person? Did she assume fatalistically that if he were going to attack her he would have brought weapons of his own?

  Long peered out of the corner of his eye at her as she sat down: tall, hard faced, ramrod straight. Was she the kind of cool gambler to whom the placement of a cake and a cake knife might be a move in a game of strategy?

  When she had been duped by Peccolo, she had revenged herself quite creditably; the professor was still stinging from that. Long knew from personal experience. Yet within a year of that episode, she had allowed herself to be manipulated and badly used by Rasmussen. A smile twitched across Long’s features. He saw Liz Macnamara as an eaglet, its first pinfeathers protruding through the coat of down. She was half pathetic, half dangerous, awkward and breakable at this stage in her life but promising power to come. That was, of course, if she survived.

  And her survival had become Long’s responsibility, somehow. He watched her and wondered what it would be like to be the father of a child.

  She began to speak. “There’s going to be an audit. Next week. Threve got scared. I don’t know why; he’d been telling me all along that he could keep us bulletproof. Anyway, instead of laying low, they started tapping the bank really heavily. No more individual withdrawals. It was all dipping into the corporation accounts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. And daily. I complained. I said they were making sure we couldn’t survive the audit. And Rasmussen said then I ought to keep my mouth shut, because my part was done. Ima Heller wasn’t necessary any more. And he said it wasn’t any fun having a nagging broad around.” She finished the sentence in steely composure. The chicken wing in her hand snapped in two. “Floyds always been a walking pork roast!”

  Immediately she shot a guilty look at Long. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “Why would I be offended?” he replied. “I too have noticed the porcine element in Mr. Rasmussen’s physiognomy. And character. On top of that he has an unpleasant laugh. Pray continue.”

  “Well, I wrote this letter and left it in my safe deposit box. Explaining all I’ve told you. I gave the key to Ellie Haig, of Surber and Haig. She’s my lawyer. I call her every Monday, to check in. If I should miss a call she opens the box, where I left the letter in an envelope addressed to the police.”

  “I see. And you told Rasmussen about it.”

  “It was my trump card. I thought he couldn’t touch me as long as I had that letter.”

  Long nodded. He tore a sheet from the roll of towels and fingered it absently. “It seems a sound idea. Why did you feel it necessary to call your mother?”

  “I was frightened!” She shuddered. “As soon as I mentioned the letter, Threve got… ugly.”

  Neat black eyebrows shot up. “You could have simply left town.”

  “And wound up in prison, as soon as they audit the bank. I’m the obvious suspect. I mean, as soon as the police squeezed Carlo, he would squeak. Then it would all be over for me. Not Doug or Floyd, just me.

  “Oh, I should have gone to the police myself, I know. Confessed the whole thing,” she said in a rush. “But I kept hoping I would find a way to make it right, first. I haven’t spent that much of the money, you see—not like Floyd, who bought a yacht, or Doug with his Cessna and constant partying—and by working a few years I could make it up. I’m afraid of going to prison.”

  “You don’t sound like a person who is afraid,” remarked Long.

  Stern blue eyes met his. “I know. I don’t know how to show I’m afraid. Never have. I can be scared green about something—like now—and I come across as pissed off.”

  Liz scowled, tearing skin from the bone of the wing. “Sorry if my language bothers you. I can’t think straight.”

  “No sort of language bothers me,” he answered, “unless it’s dull. But you looked quite frightened. Miss Macnamara, the first time I saw you.”

  “In the kitchen? Well you spooked the sh—you really startled me, there.”

  “No. I first saw you outside Rasmussen’s office, about an hour ago. I followed you home.”

  She stared
a moment. “What were you doing at RasTech?”

  His answer came slowly, as finger by finger, he toweled the grease from his hands. “I was standing in the shrubbery, waiting for events. I expected the evening would produce Floyd Rasmussen. Instead, it has produced you. That was a change for the better, Elizabeth.”

  “Liz. And if I looked bad, the reason was that Floyd had just told me Threve had picked up my mother, and if I didn’t go with him to the bank tomorrow morning”

  Liz paused and took a deep breath. Her hands clenched together, blotched salmon and white. “They’d kill her.”