Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  Back at the bus stop on the corner of 34th and Q Streets, Lawrence pulled down his hat and turned up his coat collar and studied the sign above the bench. Buses on this line ran every half-hour. He sat down to wait. The house was still dark at nine o’clock when the bus pulled up. Lawrence got on. At the next stop he told the driver he’d left something behind, and hurried off again. He walked around the back of the block to the alley. The waning moon glowed just bright enough for him to inspect the padlock on the garage door. Another combination. Twice Lawrence heard footsteps and voices in the street, and flattened himself against the spine of hedge that grew up along the garage. Finally the lock sprang open. He raised the door and slipped inside, closing it softly behind him.

  A large Buick sedan, several years old, just about filled the windowless garage. Lawrence switched on his flashlight. The car was a deep blue with whitewall tires, in good condition, though it wore a heavy layer of dust. Something about it seemed familiar. He tried the door and found it unlocked. The odometer told him only that the car had seen respectable use. The glove compartment was empty, as were the side pockets. No sign of registration. He checked the trunk and under the front seats, but it had been cleaned out. He was about to move on when he thought to pull the rear seat up and check for anything that might have fallen through the cracks. Whatever he expected to find, it wasn’t animal crackers. But there they were. Tigers and elephants and monkeys and bears, most intact. They must have been pushed through the crack with some care, though now they were hard as stone.

  And then he remembered. Joanna had told him their car in Washington was a blue Buick sedan. They’d been driving it that day in Rock Creek Park when Aidan warned her—“no ordinary life.” They’d sold the car before coming to India, she said, but hadn’t mentioned to whom. To Ben, then. Or maybe Aidan hadn’t sold it at all but merely left it here for safekeeping.

  He put a hand out and leaned hard against the door frame, feeling the cold metal through his coat. He could see Simon as a toddler sitting in the backseat while his parents, deep in conversation up front, failed to pay attention to him. He could see the boy holding his open carton of biscuits and secretly sliding one after the other between the cushions, like a dog burying his bones.

  He closed his eyes. The face of the boy in his mind was not Simon, but Davey, playing in the backseat of the same car that would one day roll over him. What matters most, he thought.

  “You bastard,” he said under his breath.

  He returned the seat to its position, leaving Simon’s zoo intact. He turned off the flashlight and left the garage. In the moonlight the small square lawn looked hard as pavement. The house was still dark. Lawrence tried the back door, then each window in turn. A walkway led along the side past an old coal chute. The circular metal hatch moved on a hinge. Lawrence’s scalp was soaked with sweat under his hat brim. This was not his line. If he tried this, at best he’d be blackened with soot. He shone the flashlight down. The chute turned so that it was impossible to see the end. At worst he’d get stuck halfway. He bent closer trying to gauge whether the passage narrowed. Something glinted. He put out his hand and ran his fingers around the chute’s lip. A chink had been cut through the sheet metal. In it nestled a brass door key.

  The key opened the kitchen door. The drawn shades and drapes made the place almost black as that coal chute. Rather than risk a light, he opened the window coverings to let in the moon. It was enough. Bare walls. Empty counters. No flowers, no clutter, no homey touches. In the parlor that newspaper he’d seen earlier lay as before. It was dated February 20, 1951. Day before yesterday. Two others piled by the fireplace were dated respectively three days and two weeks earlier. One was a Washington Post, the other two Washington Heralds. No daily service here.

  Upstairs consisted of a bath and two bedrooms, in one of which stood a small desk with a telephone and writing pad. Lawrence ran his fingertip lightly over the surface of the pad, then pocketed it. In the same fashion, he tested the blank sheets of stationery in the drawer, but left them as they were. The only book in the entire house was a telephone book. Not hollowed out to contain something else or dog-eared on strategic pages—just a phone book.

  Time to leave, he told himself. But something held him. Their thoroughness had faltered in the car. And he had found the key. Ben had not told Joanna to change his “home” address. That meant he—or someone he trusted—must still make regular visits here.

  He was standing in one of the empty closets, flashlight playing over the ceiling, when he heard the front door downstairs click open. He turned out the light and froze.

  The footsteps moved lightly. Only by placing his ear against the wall could Lawrence feel the vibration traveling across the parlor. It stopped directly below the closet where he was hiding. He stared at the phosphorescent hand on his watch. One second. Two. He had no weapon. He hadn’t carried a gun since Sinkiang. The last time he’d squeezed a trigger was the day he shot Simon. Given that, he was probably better off relying on his wits and hands alone.

  His arm went to sleep, and he reached out, touching his fingertips to the opposite wall. The plaster seemed colder, denser than the other two walls. He realized he was touching the chimney. Another thirty seconds, and the floor downstairs creaked again.

  His foot cramped. The pain shot up his instep. He shifted his weight as gradually as he could, but the floor moaned beneath him. Then his heartbeat drowned out any other sound.

  For five minutes he remained, unmoving, like a child playing hide-and-seek. Come out, come out, wherever you are! The memories of Davey’s and Simon’s voices collided in his head just as their faces had earlier.

  But no one did call out. No one came upstairs.

  He opened the closet door. Stopping and starting, he inched his way back down to the parlor. The visitor must have left while Lawrence’s own fear deafened him. Which meant that whoever it was had come in, crossed to the fireplace, stopped for a lengthy pause, and gone out again. He had not gone into the kitchen or out through the garage, and he had his own key, so had noticed nothing out of place.

  Lawrence stood in front of the fireplace. The newspapers were as he’d left them. He ran his hand over the hearth, but the bricks held fast. Then he reached up inside the flue and felt for the handle to the damper. It was a long shot. Usually these things screamed when you opened them, and surely he would have heard that. But this one glided back as if greased.

  And a small square envelope fluttered down, landing at Lawrence ’s feet.

  All set for end of March. Innocents still abroad. Need to work out the pickup plan. Assume you prefer to handle this, but we need the details ASAP. I’m up to New York this weekend, but will leave place and time in box next week for us to meet.

  B.C.

  Lawrence smoothed the paper out on his hotel bed. It was thick, expensive vellum, the message typed. B.C. On the fourth pass through all the names he and Joanna had tripped over during their search for Aidan, he thought of Bob Cross. The supposed consular attaché in Delhi. The one who pretended ignorance while pressing Jo to admit she knew Aidan was alive. The one neither Bertie Solomon nor his own Foreign Office had ever heard of.

  He felt a hard knot in his belly. Innocents still abroad. If this all centered on Aidan, then those words could have only one meaning. They were using Joanna, too.

  He placed the writing pad on the bedside table, angling the reading lamp. With a sideways pencil he made a rubbing. The imprint was so faint that he could make out only a few of the letters: W-a…e G…1…s…9-4-4…d.

  A radio in the room next door blurted out band music. A woman laughed.

  Lawrence rewrote the letters and numbers on a separate sheet, marking the empty spaces with blanks. Wa_e G_l_s__944__d.

  Not a telephone number. Not an address. A name, perhaps, but then what were the numbers, and that final “d.”?

  He stared at the puzzle until his eyes crossed. The knot in his stomach remained, only tightening as a man’s voice jo
ined the woman in the next room and the dance music gave way to moans of sex.

  The next morning a spear of sunshine woke him at eight. He’d left the curtains open. He sat up, swearing, and his eyes fell on the fill-in-the-blanks.

  “Wade-Giles 1944 edition,” he said out loud, with absolute certainty.

  He splashed some water on his face, pushed his papers into his valise, and twenty minutes later was sitting in front of the Library of Congress sipping coffee from a paper cup as he waited for the doors to open.

  He found the Asian Reading Room on the first floor, tucked off in a wing apart from the library’s famous rotunda. At 9:00 A.M., he was the only customer, and the young Filipina librarian was quick to offer assistance. He asked her to point him toward the available Wade-Giles dictionaries. There was a full shelf and she left him to them. The only 1944 edition had been published by Oxford University Press. On its face, it appeared no different from the others on the shelf. Chinese characters were listed in alphabetical order according to their romanized Wade-Giles versions, each entry followed by definitions in English. But something had to be different about this particular volume. Something in the wording of the definitions, perhaps. Or possibly in the Chinese characters?

  He settled down at a table at the far end of the room from the librarian and picked up a copy of the Taipei Daily that someone had left on the chair beside him. He spread it out on the table. Then he pulled the earliest of the clippings of Aidan from his valise and laid it on top of the paper, folding the page back to cover it. This way he could surreptitiously check the characters from the photograph while appearing to study the news.

  During the war he’d learned to read enough Chinese that he could deconstruct most ideograms into their elemental radicals, and he understood that the omission or inversion of a single stroke could drastically change a word’s meaning—or render it meaningless. His guess was that this particular dictionary contained some of those mistakes, and that Aidan was using these errors as code.

  At the end of the dictionary he found his key—a seven-page index by radicals. Using this, he began translating the slogans on the placards around Aidan. Cast away illusions, prepare for struggle!! Be a true revolutionary! Long live the great unity of the masses! Cherish every hill, every river, every tree and blade of grass in Korea!

  The slogans repeated, ten, twenty times in each picture. And the characters in Aidan’s own hands matched—or very nearly matched—the crowd favorites. The variations looked accidental—the banners were all handmade, after all. But as Lawrence checked what, in effect, were misspellings against the 1944 dictionary, he discovered three elements in every banner: a word for an animal—dragon, bear, dog; a date—September 9, December 20, January 16; and a place name—Baoshan, Ningming, Fugong.

  A current atlas of China showed all the place names as villages along the southern border, near Burma or Indochina. These must be drop points, and the animals the agents’ code names. Hide in plain sight.

  He turned finally to the most recent photograph, which he’d pulled the day before he left Delhi. It broke the pattern. No animal. No place. No date. The errors decoded into only two words: disaster and door. Tsi men.

  “Tsimen,” Lawrence whispered to himself. It was after noon, and the reading room had filled up with bespectacled students working through dissertations and Asian elders come to read the Hong Kong and Tokyo news. “Disaster’s door.”

  He closed his eyes, felt himself spinning, the dry heat from the radiator suffocating. He breathed out rapidly, swept his clippings into his valise, and dropped the Wade-Giles back into its place in the stacks.

  He walked until he found a stationery shop and equipped himself with a box of plain, expensive vellum and matching envelopes. Then he walked into a coffee shop and forced down a sandwich and some tea while he deliberated what to write. Will leave place and time in box. The fact that Cross had told Eldon he’d be gone this weekend told Lawrence that Eldon was in town.

  After lunch he found a store that sold office equipment. Computing machines, cash registers, typewriters. The boy clerk was helping two men in Borsalino hats who talked loudly about “getting a deal” since they had thirty girls to keep busy, and that meant a lot of keyboards. Lawrence mumbled something about being a playwright and told the boy to take his time. Tapping on one typewriter after another, he moved his way down the line of display models to the end, where he pulled a piece of vellum from his supply and inserted it into a large Remington similar to Aidan’s.

  Need to talk. See you at the Jefferson Memorial. Saturday, 10 A.M.

  B.C.

  Brief. Vague. That jaunty “see you.” Lawrence stared at what he’d typed, then removed the sheet and slid it into his coat pocket. He waved to the young overwhelmed clerk, saying he’d be back another time, and continued on his way to the D Street post office.

  The sectioned box area was empty as before. Lawrence spun the dial on Eldon’s compartment and placed his note inside. Then he retreated to a pub across the street and drank for two hours, waiting for Eldon to show himself.

  It was Tuesday. If Cross had any reason to contact Eldon again before the weekend, or if Eldon failed to check his box, this ploy would collapse. But going back to the safe house was too risky. At five the post office closed.

  The next morning Lawrence overslept. This time he’d closed the drapes before going to sleep, and the desk clerk had failed to ring his wake-up call. It was nine-thirty by the time he got to the post office, and Eldon’s box was empty.

  Chapter 14

  1

  THE SLAP OF THE TATS against our bedroom window was sharp and hot against the cool darkness. I could not see Simon’s face, but I felt his eyes as I silenced the blinds. “Hey!” He sat up, suddenly waking. “What are you doing?

  “Shh. Go back to sleep.” I crossed the room quickly and lay down on my bed, pulled the sheet tight to my chin.

  But he wanted to know, “Where were you?”

  I turned my back to him and did not answer. I wore the smoke and dust of New Delhi night. I stank of sour sweat and men. I was grateful that we had put a stop to his visiting me in bed, but still he continued to whisper his demand, as if I had cheated him out of a treat. I slipped into a pretense of sleep-breathing. Finally he fell silent.

  “I was hot,” I insisted when he questioned me the next day. “I went out to look at the moon.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I was also tired.” I could not meet his eyes.

  For the next week I sensed him lying in wait, measuring the nights by my presence. I grew impatient, then anxious for him to forget. If this went on, where would I get the money to pay Jaggu? Might Shrilal replace me?

  My concern mounted until finally I moved my bed to the far end of the room, protesting to Mem a need for privacy. As usual, she wasn’t really listening, but she said she understood, and I told myself I had outwitted Simon.

  I was wrong.

  2

  The mashing of bedclothes alerted him, the rub of bare feet on the dhurry rug. Through cracked lids he watched Kamla shape her pillow beneath the blue cotton coverlet, then slip behind the tats and out onto the balcony.

  He counted to five, pulled on his shorts, and peeked out after her. An old bony stalk of wisteria formed a ladder from the second-story bedroom down to the garden. She was already below. Through the darkness, he could just barely make her out beside the mali’s box where the two of them used to play hide-and-seek. He was too far away to guess her new game.

  He heard the slip of the lock, the crunch of gravel as she cracked the gate and rolled her bicycle out, then he shinnied down the wisteria, and a minute later they were making their way up Ratendone Road, Kamla’s long dress bunched to her knees, Simon a spy’s length behind.

  The sky this night was sepia, choked with dust and dung smoke. Wild dogs skulked in the shadows. The compound walls rose ghostly and white, while the dark shapes of tents and lean-to slums huddled like trolls in roadsid
e ditches. Simon had never known New Delhi to feel so empty and eerie. He thought Kamla must hear him following behind her, but she never looked back.

  Wasteland alternated with walls until they reached York Road, where the darkness stirred with a mean half-life. Shadows twitched in the center of the roundabout. Women’s voices muttered.

  At first he thought it was an encampment. He hung back, hiding behind a banyan tree as Kamla crossed the road. She gathered her skirt to step onto the high curb, then hauled her bike over the top. Women’s voices greeted her in Hindi. Simon could no longer tell her apart.

  Suddenly an automobile entered the roundabout. Its lights went on, and the hard yellow beams caught the women in poses that made him think of the calendars Brian Wilcox hid beneath his mattress. Brian, just last week, reaching, laughing, and grabbing him between the legs. “You know what that’s for?” Brian said with a squeeze, and answered his blank horror for him. “You put it in her and pull it out, in and out,” as Frankie Mann slid his finger suggestively up and down between the pinup’s legs. “Oh,” Brian said as an afterthought, seeing Simon’s bewilderment, “but she must be naked down there and your little in-and-out worm as well.”

  Now, like the women in the calendar, the darkened figures leaned and stretched, tipping heads and unfurling bared arms and legs. His breathing tightened as the headlights slowly circled the roundabout, catching each woman like an actress on a stage. Then suddenly, as the black Ambassador came around a second time, Simon saw Kamla enter the flood beams.

  Her eyelids and brows were blackened so her skin seemed paler, eyes bluer than he’d ever seen them, and she wore, not her nightgown, but that long sleeveless gown of Mem’s. It hung too long, too loose, but she had piled her black hair on top of her head and the blood-red silk seemed to glitter. She wore the throat open. Her back arched, bare arms lifted to shake on her bangles. She seemed to reach for the moon.