by Jay Brandon
The little Vietnamese was out cold but his blood still flowed. It came in a spurt when the guard drew the shiv across his throat. He worked like a butcher, dragging the bit of metal all the way across. The blood bubbled out freely, as if it had somewhere it was eager to go.
The “guard” dropped the shiv beside the corpse and hurried away. The shift was about to change. He would be lost in it. He brushed at the droplets of blood on his sleeve.
The secret was always to have more plans than anyone else knew about. That was what made everyone else into pawns, Khai thought: that each knew his own function but did not know his place in the grand design. Only Khai held the entire scheme in mind at once.
He had accomplished what he had set out to do: Kill Tang, win the war. But that had necessitated secondary schemes, so that now the conclusion was not neat. The Americans were left over: Greer, Greer’s wife still in this house, her wily father.
It had been hasty of him to try to have the pawnbroker killed. He had done such a thoughtless thing only because of his distraction with his other plans. Hecate had almost suggested it and Khai had embraced the suggestion because it seemed simple. But now he doubted whether it would have worked. There would have still been the wife to deal with. He couldn’t kill her or he would make a powerful enemy of her father. The only alternative would have been to release her to find that her husband had been murdered. Hecate had implied that he could control her after that, but Khai had his doubts.
He still faced the same dilemma. What Khai would have liked to do now was kill the wife and be done with all of them. But he was afraid. He had seen the power her father could wield. But how could he just let her go? She had seen him and so had her husband. He was willing to take a chance on Hecate because he had something on him: The councilman had been a party to murder and knew it. Besides, Khai sensed Raymond Hecate’s ambition, suspected they were two of a kind. They might be able to work together in the future. But over the pawnbroker and his wife he had no hold, if he let her go. It was not in Khai to give up an advantage.
And so, in what should have been his moment of triumph, he remained lost in thought over the problem of the Americans.
Chui was a sort of ghost in the mansion. A ghost waiting to happen. He had the perpetual look of a man checking his mailbox for an eviction notice. The other men avoided him. They knew the walking dead when they saw one. No one wanted to be exposed to his terminal disease.
Poor Nguyen was already a maggot motel by now, somewhere beneath the dirt of a vacant lot. That seemed to Chui not so terrible a state—to have passed on already to the next phase of nature’s plan for one’s flesh. It was the difficult transitional period that worried Chui. Khai was not so kind as nature.
In fact, Khai’s hand had not yet fallen on him. But Chui did not delude himself that Nguyen’s demise had been atonement enough for their mutual failure to kill the American. Chui’s own destruction seemed perpetually imminent. Khai kept him close now, always within the mansion itself. No more outside errands for Chui. Khai was distracted now with his plan for Tang, but surely an occasional stray thought lingered on his own bungling henchman as well. It was a measure of Khai’s cruel genius that he allowed Chui the faintest of hopes that he had been forgotten in the rush of events. Chui admired his technique even while suffering under it.
Chui tried to make plans of his own. He was confined to the mansion. Within that small world his best hope seemed to be the American woman. Her disposition remained uncertain. And it seemed to Chui that John Loftus took a greater interest in her fate than was strictly necessary to his role as go-between. He was American as well, was he not? And he could be observed slipping into her room at odd hours. Chui’s own fate remained quite the most fascinating topic in mind. But because of that damned faint hope that Khai had forced on him, Chui continued to watch for opportunity. Someone else would slip up. The woman was bad luck, and she was rubbing off on others in the house now. John Loftus seemed to Chui the best possible candidate as his stand-in in mortality.
Chui continued to watch and worry and chew his nails and, damn Khai for this, to hope.
When Loftus came into her room with breakfast, Carol said, “Something’s happening.”
“Something’s about to,” he said candidly. “But only Khai knows what it is.”
“He’s thought of what to do about Daniel.”
Loftus could have told her that she and her husband both were only small cogs in Khai’s scheme, but he thought it best to let her think she was the focus of the terror. He said nothing.
Carol was pacing the room, ignoring the tray. He didn’t like her like this. She looked like she’d been up all night thinking, and now her stride was purposeful.
“Tell Khai I want to see him,” she said.
He almost laughed. It was so startling. Khai would be delighted to take a few minutes out of his busy schedule to get her perspective on things.
“There’s something he doesn’t know,” she went on.
“I doubt that.”
“He doesn’t know that my father is a city councilman. If I remain missing much longer—”
Loftus almost corrected her ignorance, but instead he shut up and let her talk. While she was marching back and forth like this the clothes moved on her body. There were glimpses of skin where her warmup jacket rode up above the waistband of the pants. The pants were much too tight, the way he liked them. Loftus just watched her. She spun out some plan but he paid no attention. When she ran down he said, “Here’s what might be a better idea. I’11 get in touch with your father. Maybe if he knows where you are, and I’m already on the inside, we can work something out between us.”
Her eyes glowed and then slid sightlessly around the room as she considered it. It appeared to Loftus that she was only thinking about methods, not questioning the basic suggestion. She trusted him.
“Yes,” she said finally. “Yes. Let me give you his home number. Can you memorize it?”
He assured her he could. When he left a few minutes later she was looking at him intently. Her reliance on him was absolute. He smiled at her confidently and she smiled hesitantly back.
Plans, Loftus thought as he walked down the hall. Everybody around here’s got plans.
His own plans concerned only her.
Alone in the room again, Carol thought only, Daniel. If only Daniel could stay safe long enough for her to save them both. Finally she had some hope that it would all come out all right. She waited for him to call. She wouldn’t be able to say anything on the phone, but she thought her tone alone could convey to him her new hope.
Daylight grew stronger until it filled her room. She caught glimpses of the sun as it climbed higher behind clouds. She listened intently but couldn’t hear a ringing telephone. No one came to fetch her.
Khai was almost as isolated as his prisoners. He spent hours at a time alone in his study, sitting behind the desk in trancelike concentration. Daytime turned to night while he pondered, the night of Tang’s arrest. It was always dim in the room. Khai plotted murder.
He conjured intricate plans that always ended in the simplest acts of violence. Both of them must be killed. And yet that desire always foundered on the fact that the woman could not be murdered with impunity. What had made her worth taking now kept her safe.
Near sunrise of the morning Tang awakened in jail, light dawned in Khai’s study as well. Khai blinked. He had been on the verge of falling asleep and his grip on the problem had loosened. The situation blossomed in his mind, his horizon broadened, and he realized that he had been too tightly focused on Daniel himself. When he allowed himself to look beyond the Americans in his path, a solution presented itself.
The problem seemed simple now, and it still ended, satisfyingly, in murder. Khai fell peacefully to sleep, smiling on his desktop.
Daniel’s hand was on the phone and, like a fool, his back to the door, when the little bell tinkled its warning. He whirled, dropping toward the floor and his hand
going to the shelf under the counter, but he realized how exposed he was and in that instant knew the dead certainty that this mistake was the fatal one. He thought in that moment of his wife, left unprotected.
The door closed again with a small thunk. Daniel’s head came up above the counter.
“Dropped my pen,” he said, and rose to his full height holding one.
Rybek looked no less menacing than the men Daniel had expected to see. He was wearing a heavy overcoat, but even inside its deep pockets his hands looked bulky, as if they were holding something or his fists were clenched. He stood planted just inside the door, looking as if it would disgust him to come any farther.
“Twenty-one shopping days till Christmas,” he said. “You having a busy season?”
“You can see,” Daniel said.
“Must not be advertising enough. People want to avoid the Galleria this time of year, they like shopping these little out-of-the-way places, if they hear about them.”
“I guess I’m a little too far out of the way.” Daniel sat back down on his stool, laying his hands flat on the countertop. Outside his window the street scene had subtly altered, but he hadn’t been watching it closely enough before to put his finger on what was different now. He and Rybek seemed to be wallflowers at the dance, swaying to a rhythm the orchestra wasn’t playing.
“Luckily you’re a two-income family,” Rybek said. “But I’ve just been to your wife’s office and they haven’t seen her for a few days. I know she’s back okay because you told me she is, but I was wondering exactly where she is.”
“She’s at home.”
“No. Try again.”
Rybek came forward finally and pulled his hands from his pockets. They were empty. He laid them on the counter a few inches from Daniel’s. Daniel realized that the detective was slightly shorter than he but this close he looked half again as broad. From the street no one would be able to see anything of Daniel but the top of his head.
“If she’s not at home she must be out shopping. I don’t keep her tied up.” Daniel hesitated. “That was one of the things we argued about. She needs more ‘space.’ ”
Rybek didn’t roll his eyes in sympathy as Daniel had hoped. The cop seemed to be listening for something other than what he was hearing.
“Where’s your little gook sweeper-upper?” he asked abruptly.
“I don’t keep him tied up either. Isn’t today a school day?”
“He doesn’t seem much concerned about that any more. His English teacher misses his contributions to the class.”
Daniel shrugged. It was news to him that Thien had been missing school, but not a surprise. He had seen the boy around once or twice during the days. “Maybe his parents need him around the shop. They must be doing more business than I am.”
“Everybody must,” Rybek said.
The silences between their sentences were growing stupidly melodramatic. Daniel fidgeted, glancing at the clock and the phone. “Anything else I can do for you?”
“Anything else?” Rybek raised his voice for the first time. Daniel saw that he was furious.
“I’ll tell you what,” the cop said. “Somebody’s used me to do a dirty job for him. Maybe you could tell me who that was.”
Daniel hesitated. He almost spoke a name. Instead he said, “You’d have to tell me what you’re talking about first.”
Rybek’s hands clenched on the countertop. He drew one of them back. After a long moment he dropped it to his side.
“That’s what I thought you’d say. Maybe you’ll get lucky, find out something before I do. If you do, you’d best give me a call. And I still want to talk to your wife too, when you hear from her.”
Rybek turned, self-consciously slowly, Daniel thought. He waited, knowing the detective would pause with his hand on the doorknob and look back with one last penetrating gaze and heavy-handed exit line. But the cop surprised him by going straight out the door. Must have already used up all his A material.
Daniel had forgotten reporting Carol missing. That was coming back to haunt him. He was the natural suspect. The next time Rybek returned to the shop it might be with an arrest warrant. He couldn’t be here when that happened. They couldn’t both be prisoners.
They were leaving him no official options. He had to go the same place Carol had gone: into the shadows.
The phone rang. Daniel wasn’t even surprised by the sound. He picked it up and Khai said, “You have been talking to the police.”
“No. The police has been talking to me. He’s still curious about what’s happened to my wife. If she doesn’t come back soon, or if I disappear suddenly—”
“I know that,” Khai said irritably. “We don’t have to growl at each other any more.
“I have a plan.”
Chapter 12
KHAI'S GENIUS
Later, when Daniel really thought about it, he said to himself, Why not? He’d been ready to kill someone anyway. Why the hell not?
But when he first heard Khai’s proposal, as he listened to the quiet, self-assured voice make the horrible suggestion, his reaction was conventional outraged refusal. “You must be insane!”
“I am not,” Khai said quietly, “and you know it. Don’t act bourgeois. This is not a common situation and it can’t be resolved in a commonplace way.”
Khai’s genius had never served him better nor pleased him so well. In the predawn dimness of his study his idea had seemed brilliant. Later in the light of morning, after refinement, its allure had not faded. Now as he described the plan to Daniel Greer, it still had the sweet simplicity of perfection.
“I can’t release your wife because there will then be nothing to prevent your going to the police. You on the other hand could hardly—”
“We had an agreement.”
“You on the other hand could hardly fail to go to the police, out of fear that if you didn’t have me imprisoned I would strike back at you.”
“There’d be no—”
“We will never trust each other unless we have to,” Khai went unheedingly on. “Only if we are partners will we have to. You must do what you wanted me to do in the first place. Kill your rival.”
Khai let Daniel run out his protestations without listening. He was continuing to admire the plan. Khai could actually afford to let the woman go if Greer first killed Linh. Daniel Greer would never go to the police then. Even if he told them that he’d been blackmailed into murdering Linh, the police wouldn’t believe him, because the American did have a motive for killing the Vietnamese. His original motive: Linh was putting him out of business.
The plan also had the beauty of achieving Khai’s original objectives: killing Linh as an example to the other merchants, and putting Daniel Greer under his thumb forever.
He cut off Daniel’s protests. “I have found you not to be so lily-livered as you pretend. You came here with a gun, prepared to use it, I think. Use it now. When I hear that your rival is dead you can come and take your wife away.”
“You’re crazy,” Daniel said feebly.
“It’s entirely in your own hands.”
Both men waited. Daniel said, “Let me talk to her.”
“No. No more. After.”
“You’ve murdered her already.”
“No. Remember there is still the threat of her father. But you don’t have an eternity to ponder any more, pal. I dislike suspense. If I don’t hear soon that you’ve accepted my partnership, I’d rather bring matters to a head another way and take my chances with the police. Understand?”
Everything having been said, they hung up without goodbyes. Daniel laid the phone gently in its cradle, as if too much force would explode it, and looked out the window of his shop. It was midafternoon of a bright, bitter December day. The sky was clear but the sun was far and pale. When you stepped out into that street the wind went through you like a shower of needles. The Vietnamese, who never seemed adequately dressed for the cold, had abandoned the street. It almost looked like a part o
f Houston again, but for the alien characters of their shop signs.
Daniel’s mind had been stopped dead by Khai’s outrageous suggestion. Gradually it began working again. What could he do? He had a deadline now, though he didn’t know exactly when it was. He should talk to Rybek. He could tell him the truth now. Could they get enough police to storm the old mansion to rescue Carol before Khai’s men could kill her? If Khai was going to kill her anyway, the risk was now worthwhile.
But he still recoiled from involving police. That would be a clumsy, unsecret operation requiring too many people. And they’d need a warrant or something first. Would his word that he knew his wife was being held inside be enough to get one? Would Rybek even try, as suspicious of Daniel as the cop now seemed? Even if he did, how long would it take? Long enough for Khai to find out what was going on and get Carol away? Daniel had no idea about the legalities except what he’d seen on TV.
It would be better for him to slip in alone again, maybe informing Rybek just before he left, as a backup. But even as he began planning his attack, he knew it was hopeless. It had worked so brilliantly last time, hadn’t it? And this time Khai would be expecting him. It would play right into Khai’s hands. He would have them both then.
He went blank for a while. When he came to himself again he was sitting near his window staring across the street at the Vietnamese pawnshop. He wondered idly if Linh was inside. There was no traffic of customers. He tried to picture Linh inside, behind his counter, and realized he couldn’t remember what the man looked like. He had a vague impression of the man’s size, but he couldn’t put a face to the haze. The one time they’d talked Linh had hardly paid him the courtesy of looking at him. Mostly Daniel remembered his back.
Don’t be such a virgin, he thought suddenly. Who was Linh to him anyway? An obstacle. A rude competitor. Weighed in the balance against Carol’s life, Linh’s hadn’t the moral weight of a sigh. It was only the physical act that was repugnant. If he could wish Linh off the earth in an instant, wouldn’t he do it?