Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  “It’s Alice James, isn’t it?”

  “Your guess is good as mine.” Weller shouldered past him.

  “Like I said, it’s Alice James.”

  “The question is, who’s responsible?”

  “Who buried her?” Lawrence said to his back. “Or who killed her?”

  But Weller spat into the darkness and kept going. “I need to get somewhere I can breathe.”

  Lawrence watched the American consul stop at the base of the incline, yank his Yale cap from his head and whack it against his thigh as he took in several long drafts of air. Then Weller turned and made his way back up to the Kazakh, who remained through all of this on his white mount like some kind of mascot. Lawrence had the distinct sense that the consul was less concerned about Alice’s death than he was about their finding her body.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Weller yelled down to his men. “We’ve reached the end of the line.”

  “What about Aidan?” Joanna’s voice rang out. She aimed her light up at Weller’s face, so he looked like a child’s jack-o’-lantern. Lawrence hadn’t realized she was standing so close.

  “It’s dark, Mrs. Shaw. It’s late. We’ve all had a shock. We’re exhausted.” He reminded Lawrence of a kindergarten teacher trying to put his charge down for a nap. “We’ll go back with Nurga, get some rest, and return in the morning.”

  “You go,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

  “Get that light out of my face,” Weller said. “We’ve been over every inch of this ground. There’s nothing else here.”

  “How do you know that?” Joanna’s voice shook. “You would have said the same thing an hour ago.”

  Weller didn’t answer, but Lawrence could tell he was reaching his limit. Joanna had called his bluff, and the consul was not a good loser.

  The soldiers had finished tidying the grave and were trudging up to the road, coughing and spitting as they went. Joanna moved up the embankment, hugging Kamla to her side.

  “How much farther is it to the rebel camp?” she demanded.

  “Larry,” Weller said as Lawrence came up behind them. “Talk some sense into her, would you?”

  “Sorry, Consul. There’s nothing about this situation that makes any sense to me. The lady’s come a long way to find her husband.”

  “Jesus.” Weller took off his cap again and clawed his fingers straight back through his hair.

  Lawrence checked his watch. “Look,” he said. “It’s nearly midnight. What do you say we make camp by the jeeps?” He pointed at the sky for Joanna’s benefit. “The moon’s about gone. It’s going to be darker than pitch in another half-hour. We can walk back come sunup. Consul?”

  A phlegmatic sigh was all Weller would give them, but it was enough to satisfy Lawrence. “Come on, Jo. There’s blankets and food in the jeeps. We can’t sleep here.”

  “Can’t sleep, period,” Joanna said. But she laid her hand on Kamla’s head, and the two of them began walking.

  That night, in spite of the circumstances, Lawrence was glad that Kamla had come along. Her presence soothed Joanna as he could not, for as hard as the evening’s discoveries had been, Kamla seemed merely tired, and this uncomplicated fatigue was in itself calming. When they got to the jeep they both managed to get down a handful of saltines and a few swigs of tinned juice from the packs they’d brought from Tihwa. Joanna refused to sleep in the vehicle, as Weller was doing, for fear he’d drive off in the night. So she and Kamla rolled up together on a bed of pine needles. Protestations aside, within minutes Joanna was snoring softly right along with the girl.

  The Kazakh went back alone to Heaven’s Pool.

  In the morning the three of them were back at the blast site before the others woke up. Dawn stripped the scene of its macabre glitter. The carcass of the jeep with its skirt of metal and glass debris appeared hardly more sinister than trash in a junkyard. Lawrence thought of a New Guinea village he’d passed during the war, where two hundred civilians had been slaughtered. Days after the killings their bones were still visible in some charred doorways, but already grass grew up through the ashes. Butterflies lighted on the corpses of animals, and the stink of death was absorbed by the sponge of warm moist earth. Nature’s oblivion could be callous. It was also a real impediment to any search for the missing. Here several layers of cedar and pine needles, slicks of mud and matted leaves had already obliterated the tracks that might have provided clues to Aidan’s fate. Joanna’s hope was that these same layers had concealed other vital evidence as well—notebooks, a camera, film, or letters.

  “If they killed him or kidnapped him,” Joanna wondered aloud, “would they take his clothes and pencils? He probably went off looking for help—” A dogged light flashed in her eyes, and Lawrence was torn between admiration and a hard desire to shake her to her senses. But she didn’t say anything more about confronting the rebels, so he left her and Kamla to comb the earth on their hands and knees while he investigated the surrounding forest.

  Though blue sky twinkled between the trees and sunshine gilded the ground, the likelihood of buried explosives took some of the fun out of this walk in the woods, and he was not inclined to search far. His reasoning, in any case, ran counter to Jo’s: If Aidan had gone off in search of help he’d have left more obvious evidence than that one cryptic picture. After half an hour he returned empty-handed.

  Joanna confronted him. “Why are we the enemy?” She had swollen circles under her eyes, and her hair fell in an unruly mass from the clip at the nape of her neck. She looked almost savage in her intensity.

  He glanced away and caught Kamla watching them. She was squatting on her haunches a few feet behind Joanna, elbows on her knees.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Weller didn’t want us to find that body. He doesn’t want us to find Aidan.”

  “I’m not sure what his hand is in all this,” Lawrence admitted. “Maybe he just doesn’t want to be bothered—now he’ll have to notify her relatives and the State Department. But it’s also possible his rebel friends are involved. He could be protecting this Osman character.”

  “You don’t think Weller ordered…”

  He saw her bite back on the thought. “No,” he said. “I don’t think he’ll lose much sleep over her, but Alice James can’t be important enough to warrant an execution. More likely she and Aidan came here uninvited, and this was the rebel strongman’s way of turning them back at the gate.”

  “Then where’s Aidan?”

  “I don’t know, but this place has been so sanitized I can’t believe that picture of Simon was simply overlooked.”

  “What are you saying?” She put a hand to her forehead to block the rising sun.

  “I think he survived the explosion.”

  “And buried Alice?”

  “Possibly.”

  He could hear her swallow. “Then what?”

  “Logically, he’d make his way back to Tihwa. But Alice has been dead for over a week. It wouldn’t take that long to get back to the capital, even if he walked all the way.” Lawrence glanced up the road. Weller and his men were arriving like the cavalry, in a cloud of sun-spangled dust.

  “Look,” he said. “I know you want to keep searching, but if we go any farther without Weller’s sanction we ’re more likely to blow ourselves up than find Aidan.”

  Before she could answer, the consul was on them.

  Sleep had restored him: His cap was on straight, his face wiped, shirt tucked, and suede jacket open at a jaunty angle. He waved a yellow cable envelope. “Messenger just brought this from the city. Plane’s coming in tomorrow for the evacuation. We’ve got to get back to the consulate.”

  So. Weller had his trump.

  Lawrence expected Joanna to say she wouldn’t leave without her husband. He expected her shoulders to straighten, her chin to lift. He expected her to browbeat the American consul with cries of duty and obligation. Instead her arms came up, crossing over her breasts, fingers gripping her
shoulders. She opened her mouth. For the first time Lawrence read futility in her eyes.

  She said softly, “Alice deserves a proper burial.”

  Weller’s left eyebrow lifted as if he thought she might be joking.

  “There must be a church in Tihwa where she could decently be put to rest.” Those were her exact words: decently be put to rest.

  “Now, hold on,” Weller said. “You saw that body. You smelled it. Once the worms have finished their work we could move it. Not now.”

  “Here then.”

  “You want a service, is that it?”

  “I want us to recognize”—she groped for the word, looking tortured as her eyes found the tree where a scrap of white fabric had wrung itself around a branch—“her humanity.”

  Weller glanced at Lawrence as if expecting him to back him up, but Lawrence held up his hands.

  Joanna tore her gaze from the tree. “I’ll stay here alone if I have to.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Weller chewed on the corner of his mouth. Lawrence could almost hear him thinking: Just humor the bitch. But not without his quid pro quo. “If we help you do this, you’ll come along?” Like a good girl, Lawrence mentally finished for him.

  Joanna hesitated but nodded.

  Weller summoned the squad. The men grumbled and wrinkled their noses, but this time Chen had had the forethought to bring the shovels he and the other drivers kept in the back of their jeeps.

  Joanna settled for a deeper grave next to the existing one. That way they could simply roll the body into it. She offered to help dig, but Weller wouldn’t hear of it, so she and Kamla went off to fashion a marker from twigs and vines while Lawrence and the soldiers dug the new hole. When the time came to transfer the corpse, however, Joanna insisted. Under Weller’s scrutiny, she placed one shovel under the shoulders while Lawrence applied the other to what was left of the pelvis. All three of them, he knew, wanted one more careful look as the blanket of earth momentarily peeled away. The body lifted and rotated. Lawrence noted again the hole in the cheek, the yellow of the hair. No rings on the fingers or ornaments of any kind. In the dapple of light that fell through the trees they could see the delicate shape of her skull and now the empty orbits of her eyes. He held his breath and gave a heave. They all stepped back at the redoubled stench. Lawrence turned his head and caught Joanna staring at the bits of hair and fabric and clots of indescribable matter that clung to the original grave. He gently pushed her back toward Kamla, who was sitting on a log far enough away that she could neither see nor smell the corpse. Then he handed their shovels to the soldiers, who quickly filled in both holes.

  Weller, the only one among them who had ever exchanged words with Alice, gave a generic and hurried eulogy to “this young life, ended so tragically in the wrong place and the wrong time. May she rest in peace.” Then Joanna approached the grave alone.

  She planted the crude cross she and Kamla had made. For several minutes she continued standing there, fists clenched at her sides. She moved her mouth, but no sound escaped. As she turned from the grave she looked past Lawrence and Kamla, past Weller and the circle of Chinese watching from the embankment. She searched the edge of the forest, downstream, upstream, then glared at the crystal blue sky. She truly seemed to believe that Aidan was going to step from the wilderness, that this act of generosity would bring her husband home.

  Lawrence knew better than to warn her, but he didn’t have to watch. “Come on, Kammy,” he said and, slinging an arm around the child’s shoulders, led her back the way they had come.

  Chapter 7

  1

  A HEAT WAVE HAD GRIPPED the capital in their absence, and as they drove back into town that evening past shuttered shops and families pushing wagons piled with household goods, it became clear that the latest news from the war was making the locals restless. The line of visa applicants, which four days earlier had consisted of a few White Russian landladies and wealthy Chinese merchants, now stretched around the consular compound. And it bristled with Kazakh and Kirghiz warriors who might have been Nurga’s cousins.

  Lillian Weller came barreling out the door as they crossed the inner courtyard. “The Desais left Kashgar two days ago! And everybody from the British consulate flew out last night.” She flailed a hand in the direction of the gate where two armed guards were struggling to hold at bay the local traders and officials who demanded a private audience with the consul. “My God, Dan, I’m so glad you’re back, you cannot imagine!”

  Clearly, where her husband had been or why did not concern her, and she scarcely looked at the rest of them. But as the consul extended a hand to her shoulder and gave her a clumsy pat, she stepped away, nostrils flaring. “You’re filthy!”

  “You’re absolutely right, my dear. I’d say a good cleanup is the first order of business. Then we’ll just take this one step at a time.” Weller threw Lawrence an equivocal smile: Let’s keep what happened up there between us.

  But he didn’t dare look at Joanna.

  “My hands are tied,” he insisted an hour later when they cornered him in the hallway outside his office. “I’ve got the Chinese mayor and a full retinue of local yes-men waiting inside there. If I don’t find a way to get them out of here—”

  “Aidan’s a U.S. citizen,” Joanna interrupted. “Isn’t your first responsibility to him?”

  “He and that girl were traveling without sanction or permission.” Weller shifted the leather binder he was carrying, tucked it officiously under one arm. “Bucolic as those mountains might look, they’re a war zone.”

  Lawrence thought of the blast crater, the charred shell of the jeep. Alice James’s decaying face. Bucolic.

  “They broke the rules and therefore deserved what they got, is that it?” Joanna asked bitterly.

  “I don’t know all the rules they broke,” Weller retorted. Then ominously, “Or why.”

  The flicker of the electric torches that lined the corridor exaggerated Weller’s jowls and the pouches under his eyes. He reminded Lawrence of a vexed bulldog. “Wouldn’t you like to?” Lawrence asked.

  “I’m sure I would. But Aidan Shaw’s not the only missing person in Sinkiang, and I’d say the odds of any of us finding him under current conditions are slim and none. Now, I’m going to get the two of you out of here. That’s a favor, Larry. As you well know, whatever my responsibility may be toward missing Americans, I have no official obligation to Australians.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No.” Weller repeated, “It’s a favor. And if I were you I’d accept graciously, because if you don’t, I’ve got an officeful of guys who’d be pleased as punch to take your seat on that plane.”

  “What about you?” Lawrence asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Are you getting out?”

  Weller’s mouth twisted into a smile. “Sure,” he said. “When I’m told to.”

  “What about Kamla?” Joanna asked.

  He blinked.

  “You said you’re getting me and Lawrence out. I’m not leaving without Kamla.”

  The momentary wrinkle of confusion receded. “Look, Joanna, I know we talked about this, but there’s just not time. She’s got no papers. The Brits won’t claim her, and the Chinese have their hands full saving their own skins. I don’t have jurisdiction here.”

  “Consider it a trade,” she interrupted. “You get my husband. I save a child.”

  Weller glanced at Lawrence. “A trade.”

  She nodded, wincing as if he’d just flashed a light into her eyes. A mutter of voices rose behind the thick wood of his office door. “All right,” he said impatiently. “I’ll try.”

  Lawrence caught a glimpse of swirling cigarette smoke and a trio of pinched Chinese faces as the door opened and shut. Then one of the houseboys hurried past, arms full of overstuffed suitcases.

  Lawrence took Joanna by the elbow and steered her back toward the staircase. “It’s a dangerous game,” he said. “Trading one life for an
other.”

  “It was just a ploy.”

  “I understand. And it looks like it worked. But it’s a hell of a burden to put on Kamla if you even start to believe it.”

  The horn of a lorry sounded through an open window at the end of the hall. Joanna put her hand on the banister and turned away from him. “Don’t worry,” she said.

  Fifteen hours later, as Tot stood out in the withering sun loading their bags into the consular Chevrolet that would take them to the aerodrome, Weller handed Joanna a brown paper packet tied with twine and sealed with scarlet wax. The documents inside were marked with the Chinese governor’s official chops and Consul Weller’s signature.

  “That’s that, then,” Weller said, sweeping his arm from Jo to Kamla with an air of forced showmanship.

  Joanna looked down at Kamla. The girl’s gaze questioned her.

  “Mother and daughter,” she said.

  The aquamarine of those eyes surrounded her, pure and grave and uncompromising. She knelt down quickly and embraced the child. “You will come with me and I will take care of you. We really are family now.”

  But even as she spoke the words, she knew just how false they must sound. Lawrence had it exactly right. This was an impossible game.

  2

  An hour after Mr. Weller gave Mem the papers authorizing my adoption we boarded a Chinese transport plane. A large C-47 was painted on the nose, and Lawrence told us the Nationalist government owned the aircraft, though the pilot was a big American with brown hair and freckles who looked as I imagined Simon would someday. I squeezed in beside Mem, and Mrs. Weller and Lawrence took the seats behind us.

  The plane was stifling and the noise of the engines roared in my ears, but I was too busy thinking to care. We really are family now. What did Mem mean with these words? Was Simon to be my brother? Was I to accept Mem’s missing husband as replacement for my missing father? And what of Lawrence? Would he leave us, now that the trek was over? I did not dare to ask these questions, but one thing needed no asking. After all the time we had spent together, all the distance we had traveled, it had come to this: Without Mem and Lawrence, I had nothing.