A Perfect Cover

by Maureen Tan

  Nothing. No cries. Nobody, conscious or otherwise.

  I glanced around the apartment, looking for another way out. No windows. Walls lined with shelves supporting dozens of tiny statues. Sacred Heart. Madonna and Child. St. Francis. St. Therese. St. Martin de Porres. And votive candles, short and tall. All lit. Dozens of single flames captured within crystal cut containers that glittered red and violet and blue.

  Outside, the inferno raged unchecked.

  God help us, I thought, which was as much prayer as I had time for.

  There were four doors into the large room. One shattered. Three closed.

  I crawled to one closed door as the black woman went to a second. Both closets. No one huddled in either of them.

  Fire began licking around the broken doorway

  We both headed for the third door and I pushed it open.

  A bathroom. The apartment’s only window was on the wall just above the bathtub. It offered the only possibility of escape.

  Inside the tub was a cage covered by a cotton towel. From inside, a green parrot called out.

  “Help!” it said, and, “Oh, my!” And then it wailed, “Oh-h-h-h.”

  We’d risked our lives to save a bird.

  I had no intention of dying for our trouble.

  I pushed the bathroom door closed, grabbed a towel from a hook on the wall, soaked it in the cracked sink, and packed it around the base of the door. That offered temporary respite from the smoke and fire.

  In the meantime, the woman pulled the towel from the cage, soaked it, and put it back in place.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said.

  The parrot said, “Gimme five!”

  “Come on,” I said. “Get in the tub.”

  From there, I pushed the window open, grabbed the bird-cage and dangled it outside. The woman was at my side. Together, we hung our heads, shoulders and arms out over the sill. For a minute, we gasped and coughed and dragged fresh air into our lungs.

  The power had gone out in the building, but the moonlight cast long shadows between the two buildings. Immediately opposite us was the blank wooden wall of the tenement next door. And I could hear approaching sirens. Help would arrive within minutes.

  Even if we shouted, it would take a few more minutes for them to locate us. I doubted the fire would wait that long. Despite the closed door, smoke was working its way into the small bathroom, already pouring out around us, threatening to choke us.

  Safety was three stories straight down.

  Between us and the ground was a tree with sturdy branches.

  “We have to climb down,” I said, coughing.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  For the first time that evening, I heard fear in her voice. I turned my head, looked into her face, saw that her eyes were stretched wide.

  The flames behind us weren’t offering any options.

  I still held the caged parrot.

  She’d risked her life for it. Maybe it would give her the incentive she needed. I leaned farther out the window and pulled a corner of the fabric away from the cage door.

  “I’d better let this little guy go.”

  “He’ll die!”

  I doubted she’d see my shrug, so I made sure she could hear it in my voice.

  “If we stay here, he’ll last longer than we will. But if you think it’d be better, I can drop him. Maybe the cage’ll protect him.”

  The parrot helped my cause by squawking out its displeasure.

  “No way!” it cried.

  Stupid bird.

  “We can carry him down,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “We need our hands free.”

  She forgot about how scared she was, focusing instead on saving the pet’s life. She was a brave woman. Or, perhaps, a foolish one. But she wasn’t going to let the little bird die. Within moments she’d found a solution. I hurried to help her so that we, too, would reach safety.

  I dragged the cage back inside the window and she pulled off its fabric cover and smoothed it out. Then she grabbed the bird. It squawked and bit her for her trouble, but she ignored it, hauled it from the cage and wrapped it in the folds of the damp towel. I helped her tuck the bundle deep into the hood of the jacket that she wore. A quick tug on the drawstrings kept the package secure.

  I hung back out of the window and tossed the cage so that it would clear the tree and hit the ground. It’d give us a place to put the parrot once we climbed down. Then I turned back to my companion.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Dolores.”

  “Okay, Dolores. You first,” I said.

  Just beneath us was a substantial branch that slanted gently down toward a thick trunk that was no more than six feet away. In between, there were lots of smaller branches to use as handholds. From the trunk, it was an easy climb down to the ground. An easy climb if you didn’t mind heights. I could feel the woman trembling as I held her arm, supporting her as she edged out the window.

  In my pocket, the phone vibrated. Not now, I thought. Not now.

  Dolores, the parrot, and I made it to the ground, one step at a time, one branch at a time, one fear-filled moment at a time. Easy for the parrot who, once confined within the folds of fabric, was silent except for an occasional crackling “chirrup.” Difficult for Dolores who, once in the tree, had not miraculously discovered that she had a knack for climbing.

  I coached her every move as we inched our way from branch to branch. And she did what she had to do.

  She made it down, leaned weakly against the building for a moment, then picked her way through the litter that had accumulated between the tenements. Overhead, smoke and flames poured out through the third-floor window. But she seemed not to notice as she searched the shadows for the cage.

  I saw it first, hurried to pick it up for her. It was badly bent but still intact, and I held the door open. Dolores freed the bundle from her hood, pushed it inside the cage, then unwrapped the parrot. It flapped and squawked and managed to bite her.

  After Dolores yanked her hand away, I carefully latched the door, then grinned at her.

  “After all this, it’d be bad if the little guy escaped,” I said.

  Dolores stuck her pinched and bleeding knuckle up to her mouth.

  “Yeah,” she muttered. “Little fucker might kill someone.”

  By now, more emergency vehicles were arriving by the moment. The sounds of sirens and diesel engines and loud male voices filled the air as trucks pulled into position and squad cars began blocking off the street to traffic. In front of the building, firefighters were swarming from their trucks, dragging hoses and opening fire hydrants, pouring into the apartment building.

  Dolores gave me a quick hug before we parted. Then, holding the cage tightly in her arms, she threaded her way between fire trucks to the opposite side of the street.

  I paused on the sidewalk in front of the tenement and scanned the crowd for Tommy and his telltale mop of Technicolor hair. I didn’t see him and had just started to cross the street when the wind whipped thick, acrid smoke through the passageway between the buildings. Suddenly, I was enveloped in it.

  I had taken a breath at exactly the wrong moment. Smoke filled my throat, stung my eyes. My body was racked by another bout of coughing and I couldn’t seem to drag enough air into my lungs. Suddenly a firefighter had his arms around me and I half walked, was half carried, to a nearby ambulance. Its stretchers were already occupied by other escapees from the building, so I sat on the back bumper as a busy paramedic slapped an oxygen mask over my face.

  “Just breathe,” were the terse instructions he gave me, but he followed them up with a smile.

  The traffic was blocked in both directions by emergency vehicles. I had a clear view of the burning building, so in between coughing fits I watched the proceedings. And watched for Tommy.

  One firefighter was in charge of the scene, orchestrating equipment and personnel with the grace and control of a
symphony conductor. The barriers between the buildings had been pulled aside and hoses writhed like snakes through the narrow space. Streams of water from pumper trucks hit the roof and the side walls of the tenement and the adjacent buildings. Helmeted firefighters rushed in and out of the front door and around the sides of the building carrying axes and smaller hoses. Some ended up beside me, faces stained by the smoke, coughing and gasping for oxygen.

  Flames licked out the windows and shot through the roof of the building.

  Ambulances screamed away from the scene.

  Rapidly erected barriers and dozens of uniformed cops kept the curious back from the scene. The tenement’s uninjured residents—hundreds of them—were gathered on the near side of the barrier. Ages and races intermingled—young, old, black, white, yellow, brown—reflecting the diversity of poverty. Sitting or standing, in various states of shock and undress, they watched and some wept as their homes and possessions burned. Tonight they were all victims of a color-blind inferno.

  The longer I sat, the more anxious I became. From where I sat, it was difficult to see everyone who had escaped the building or who, like me, was tucked in beside an emergency vehicle. Certainly, I told myself, Tommy would have stayed at the scene looking for Squirt. Unless he was injured…

  I hadn’t coughed for several minutes. I lifted the mask, took a breath of the outside air, didn’t cough or gag, so judged myself cured. Then I stood, spotted Tommy’s car still parked where we had left it, and began searching the crowd for him.

  The distinctive blue-and-pink hair and the assortment of rings and bars that adorned his face should have made him easy to pick out and remember. Even in a crowd, even in the chaos of the fire scene. I walked from one ambulance to the next, talking to anyone who could spare me a moment, looking for him among those who were receiving first aid, wondering if he’d been so badly injured that he had been sent to the hospital.

  No one remembered treating him.

  I walked the perimeter of the fire scene. The barricades blocked the street and sidewalks at the middle of the block, several doors down from the flaming structure. I walked around emergency vehicles, paralleled the barriers and then walked along the sidewalk to the corner.

  People had come from blocks away to view the dramatic fire. As I searched for Tommy, stopping to talk to occasional bystanders and every cop I met along the way, I recognized faces in the crowd. Regulars from the Red Lotus. People from the checkout lanes and aisles at the grocery story. A few prostitutes I’d seen on Old Gentilly Road between Chef Menteur and the railroad tracks. The woman who sold me detergent at the Laundromat on Dwyer Drive. I saw Vincent Ngo in the distance, talking to the driver of a Red Cross van that had just arrived.

  Oddly enough, I didn’t see any of the Young Businessmen. The apartment building, I knew, was within the perimeter of their patrol patterns. But maybe they were here and I’d simply missed them. Or maybe there were too many cops around for their tastes. Interesting, I thought, to find out if the fire had been arson—a common problem for landlords who were reluctant to pay protection.

  I walked around the corner, behind the fire trucks and cop cars parked all over the street, still searching. A fire truck was positioned at the mouth of the narrow alley that ran behind the building. I skirted the truck, peered past the handful of curious on-lookers who certainly hadn’t chosen the best seat in the house. Paralleling the alley was a broad drainage canal and then railroad tracks. Away from the streetlights, in the deep shadows beyond the roadway that passed over the canal, beyond the railroad crossing, I saw people moving. Running.

  I took a roundabout route to the far corner, hunkered down low, crept along a shallow ditch, then crawled through the broken glass and overgrown weeds between a boarded-up tattoo parlor and a discount bakery that was closed for the night. I lay flat, peering through the darkness at the scene unfolding a dozen yards away from me.

  I picked out Tommy’s hair right away.

  He was standing at the edge of a group of more than twenty people that included a handful of men. But judging from the shadowy outlines—from their figures, long hair and dress—most of the group were women. And a few were adolescent girls.

  They moved mostly in silence and what conversations they had were murmured so low that I couldn’t make out any words.

  The men, including Tommy, were helping the women climb into the back of a panel van. Their body language made it clear that the situation was urgent; they needed the women to hurry. The men grabbed the women’s arms, helping them, or perhaps hauling them, up into the van. The smallest of the women, or perhaps those who were not cooperating were picked up and deposited inside.

  Occasionally, I would catch a glimpse of a face. Those being loaded into the van looked distressed. But it was impossible to tell for sure if they were going willingly or being coerced. Undoubtedly, though, they had come from the burning tenement.

  One by one, I picked out the faces of those who aided them, or held them captive. Seven men, including Tommy. I saw only profiles and shadowed faces as they glanced furtively around. Still, it was easy enough to recognize them, their features, their postures. Mostly because I knew them so well. The membership of the Little Vietnam Benevolent Society. All of the men except for Tommy carried a weapon. Handguns, except for the sawed-off shotgun that the butcher carried cradled in an arm.

  Protecting their shipment, I thought, for undoubtedly that was what it was. The hijacked shipment. The fought-over shipment. The one that required documents to move up north. A shipment of women who, from their looks, had probably traveled on board a container ship from the East. They might be Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese or Malay.

  I remembered Tommy’s phone call. Not to 911, I realized. But to one of the men who held the women captive inside the tenement. Or to someone on the outside who could bring help and transportation. He knew exactly where they were being held, I realized. On the second floor.

  I shook my head, continued to stare, still not believing that any of these men—and now Tommy—could have become involved in such a business. I’d misjudged people before, but never so badly. But I watched as Tommy lifted a girl of no more than twelve into the back of the van. And the others—they were men that most would characterize as responsible, hardworking and kind. As family men. Didn’t they know what awaited these women? Didn’t they care? The youngest would likely be sold outright to sexual predators, the others would spend years working off debt-bondage contracts in brothels across the United States.

  I moved my hand toward my pocket, intending to call Beauprix. The area was crawling with cop cars. I’d give him the van’s description, the license plate numbers, and the dispatcher could broadcast it. With sirens screaming, they could stop the van, arrest the bad guys, free the captives.

  Assuming that everything went right.

  But if anything went wrong, if they were chased and escaped, if they decided to fight the police for possession of their valuable shipment…

  Mr. Yang was the link between the money, the documents and the shipment. And tomorrow, all of those things would come together. At the meeting, we would have not only Mr. Yang, but someone with documents. Odds were, the Benevolent Society would be holding the shipment somewhere nearby. We’d follow Mr. Yang to the women. Squeeze the guy with the documents until he gave up his boss. I’d cut the head from Uncle Tinh’s viper. And then I’d use Mr. Yang to go after Uncle Tinh.

  I watched the last of the passengers cram into the back of the van. Within minutes the doors were closed and locked. As the seven men stepped away from the boxy white vehicle, I saw that the back door panels were emblazoned with a winged Mercury and the logo of the florist shop next door to the Red Lotus.

  The men scattered, Mr. Yang and the elderly cousin jumping into the front seat of the florist’s van, the baker and the butcher getting into vehicles that were parked farther up the street. They pulled away, leaving Tommy standing alone on the sidewalk. He turned and began jogging back in the direction of
the fire.

  I followed him, but detoured around the emergency vehicles so that I could approach his car from the direction of an ambulance.

  He was leaning against the fender, and rushed forward when he saw me.

  “My God, Squirt, where have you been? I’ve been wandering all over the place looking for you.”

  He was a good liar.

  So was I, but I stuck to a variation of the truth.

  “I inhaled lots of smoke, so they made me sit with an oxygen mask on.”

  He asked if I was all right now, and I assured him I was.

  “Then I’d best get you home.”

  The fire was under control and barricades no longer blocked his car in. I had no ready excuse to avoid riding with him.

  We rode in silence, except for me occasionally coughing and Tommy drumming his fingers on the steering wheel at every red light. A habit he hadn’t demonstrated before we’d run into a burning building.

  As he rounded the corner onto my street, my cell phone vibrated again, its buzzing audible in the confines of the car. Tommy, too, heard it.

  “Probably my mom,” I said. “She calls every night at about the same time, begging me to come home.”

  Tommy said, “Oh,” as he pulled the car to the curb.

  I said good-night. Stood in my driveway, fairly close to the porch, and talked to Lucky as I watched the taillights disappear in the distance.

  “You’re a good boy, aren’t you, Lucky?” I said, mostly from habit.

  He pushed his angular muzzle up near the railing and his pink tongue lolled out from his open mouth, displaying a wet canine smile lined with big pointy teeth.

  He didn’t bark or growl.

  Progress, I thought, comforted that there might be one relationship in my life that I could be absolutely sure of.

  Lucky snarled at me as I walked away.

  Chapter 21

  I arrived home, let myself into the dark kitchen, and immediately pulled my phone from my purse. My phone had buzzed three times and I had three voice mails from Beauprix. All with the same content, each sounding a little more concerned than the one before.