Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  Lazarus cleared his throat and rolled his shoulders backward. “I was just about to send them off to you. Bloody good thing I didn’t, or they’d’ve been lost weeks in transit.”

  He scooped up the envelopes and delivered them with a defensive sigh. The same old assortment of notices and chits, plus a flurry of invitations to dance performances and drum recitals sponsored by the Australian High Commission wives’ auxiliary. It looked like Lawrence’s unofficial tenure in Delhi had somehow put him on the official hit list. He tossed all but three of the envelopes aside. These were marked in a child’s hand, which he recognized at once as Simon’s, though it slanted erratically, and the pencil had dug grooves into the paper. The envelopes bore no stamps, no addresses, only Lawrence’s name.

  Lazarus had collected his belongings, scattered around the room. Now he stood with his arms full. “Guess I’ll be shoving off, then.”

  “When did Simon give you these?”

  “Different times. I don’t remember.”

  Lawrence tore the bottom envelope first and scanned the ragged lines:

  Something bad has happened. I don t know where you are, but Lazarus says he can get this letter to you. This thing, it’s bad. I can’t tell you what. I can’t tell anybody, but maybe if you come back I’ll tell you then. Maybe you can fix it. So will you come back now?

  Simon.

  “What did he say?” Lawrence demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  “Was he upset?”

  Lazarus shrugged one shoulder. “If he had been, I’d have hurried it off to you, wouldn’t I?”

  “Would you?” Lawrence tore open the other two letters. “Even if it meant upsetting your rice bowl?”

  “I said I would!”

  The other notes were shorter. I guess you’re never coming back, read the second. You’re just like my father, read the third.

  “How long have you been sitting on these?” he asked again.

  Lazarus shifted his load from one arm to the other. “Few weeks.”

  “How many weeks?”

  “I dunno. Maybe four. Five.”

  “You promised the boy, didn’t you? You promised to get these to me.”

  “He’s a bloody kid. What’s it matter?”

  “Get out.”

  “Now, Mr. Malcolm—”

  “I said clear out. Before I break your skull.”

  But Lazarus wouldn’t leave it. He jutted his chin and planted his hands on his hips. “You owe me. I did everything you told me and more.”

  Lawrence stood up. He was shaking. He had never misjudged anyone as badly as he had this stinking rodent.

  Lazarus wisely backed into the vestibule. The darkness swallowed him, but a minute later, his voice rang up the stairwell, “Those are two bloody juvenile delinquents, you ask me.”

  Lawrence slammed the door.

  Something bad has happened. You ’re just like my father.

  Conceivably this was all a ruse to get him back. But the handwriting unnerved Lawrence. Though Simon’s penmanship would never win any prizes, it had always been conscientious, more loping than galloping, more circular than angled, and at least attempting to line up straight. The writing in these notes all but slid off the page.

  He debated whether to approach Joanna first. Whatever had happened, Simon seemed to have decided that Lawrence was the one person he could trust. Thanks to Lazarus, that trust by now was probably gone, but if not… well, he intended to honor it as best he could. His own business with Joanna could wait until he got this squared away.

  He shut off the light and lay down on the bed. His head was pounding, his throat raw. He tried to remember what day it was, but the effort only made his head throb more. He stopped trying.

  It was two in the afternoon when he woke up. Saturday. The hot air roiled with yellow dust, and outside the whole city seemed to be struggling to rouse itself after the midday rest. Lawrence had to wake a trishaw driver in order to buy a ride to Ratendone Road.

  He got down in the shade of a large plane tree opposite the house. Over the compound wall he could see the tats lowered like eyelids. Nothing moved.

  He used his key to open the gate and made his way up the driveway. Joanna’s car was gone. He continued to the garage-turned-servants’ quarters where he heard a radio chattering. Nagu’s sons, Dilip and Bhanu, were doing their schoolwork in the low square room they shared with their father. They looked mildly surprised to find Lawrence in their doorway, but not particularly interested.

  “Do you know where Simon is?” he asked them.

  Bhanu, the younger boy, scowled as his brother said he’d seen Simon heading out into the alley behind the compound. But, he quickly added, they had no idea what he was doing there.

  “Is he alone?” Lawrence asked.

  Dilip shrugged, smoothing the pages of his textbook.

  “He in some kind of trouble?”

  The boys exchanged glances. “I think you had best ask him that question,” Dilip answered. “He has other friends now. And we do not have time for his games.”

  Lawrence left them busily manipulating their sums and let himself out the rear gate. This put him at the midpoint of the narrow dirt alley, which curved in a long semicircle. To his right Lawrence could see to the street, where a cluster of men squatted, smoking and chatting and chewing their paan in the shade of the tall compound walls. They were the neighborhood chowkidar, watchmen whose job it was to keep ruffians away. Thanks to them, only residents of the houses that backed onto the alley had access to it.

  Around the bend to Lawrence’s left, out of the watchmen’s sight and earshot, stood a vacant building that once had housed a dairy. Simon was down on his haunches in front of it. He would have seen Lawrence had he looked up, but he was busy searching for stones, his slingshot looped over his wrist. Several windows of the dairy had been shot out already, as well as most of the streetlights that lined the alley. Simon worked with a jerking motion of his hands, mumbling to himself. When he stood to fire, his jaw tensed. He was only a few feet from his target, one of the remaining intact overhead lights, and his arm cranked back farther than necessary. As the stone hit its mark, glass showered like sparks. The rickety pole quivered. Simon registered no satisfaction, was fishing in his shorts pocket for another rock when Lawrence called to him.

  “You’re making a pretty mess.” He sauntered closer.

  Simon’s mouth opened and shut. He was skinnier, more wiry than he had been at Christmastime. Dust caked his hair, arms, and sandaled feet. The child had gone out of his eyes. “I don’t care,” he said at last.

  “How many more to go?” Lawrence asked, squinting at the line of street lamps.

  Simon didn’t answer.

  “Mind if I try?”

  The boy shrugged. Lawrence had given him this slingshot, made from a whittled neem branch and a strip of bicycle inner tube. When they first came back to Delhi, he’d taken him out into the wilds to practice shooting at the anthills and termite mounds that rose like castles out of the sand.

  Lawrence held out his hand and Simon put the slingshot into it. Lawrence waggled his fingers. Simon handed him a stone from his pocket.

  A fringe of glass still clung to the lamp Simon had just shattered. Lawrence took aim at the fixture’s lip. Like bowling a split, it was more difficult to shake the dregs free than to shoot out the center. He angled himself so the rock ricocheted within the metal housing. The remaining glass fell down.

  “I didn’t get your letters, Simon. Lazarus—” He stopped himself. The boy hardly needed one more betrayal heaped onto his growing pile. “He told me when I got back last night that he’d sent them, but he must have put the wrong address. It doesn’t matter. I’m here now, you can tell me yourself what they said.”

  He stepped closer, opening his arm for a hug. But Simon didn’t move. He stared at the slingshot in Lawrence’s hand.

  “It doesn’t matter.” The boy repeated his words back to him.

  “I didn’t
mean it like tha—”

  “You’re too late,” Simon said bluntly.

  “Now, hold on, son.”

  “I’m not your son.” He lifted his eyes, gazed unwaveringly into Lawrence’s own split pair.

  “No,” Lawrence admitted when he could find his voice. “I’m sorry.”

  Simon’s thin chest rose and fell quickly with his breathing. Then he said, “She’s sneaking out.”

  Lawrence hesitated. “Mem?” he asked gently.

  But Simon’s head snapped up. His eyes burned. “You and Mem think she’s such a good girl, reading all the time, skipping ahead in school. You don’t know anything.”

  “Simon, what are you talking about?”

  “She goes out.” He opened his palm and made a circular motion in front of his face. “She stole Mem’s lipstick and things, her red dress. Every Saturday, sometimes even on school nights. She goes with men. Old men. Older than my father. It’s disgusting!”

  Lawrence grasped him by the shoulders and faced him squarely. Simon was shivering so violently his teeth sounded like a woodpecker. “I followed her.”

  Lawrence stayed silent then, listening. When the boy had talked himself out Lawrence held him for a long time, resting his chin against the sandy hair, staring into the vacant building.

  “I’ll take care of Kamla,” he said at last. “I’ll talk to Mem… Everything will be all right. Simon, I promise you.”

  “How?” Simon wrenched himself free. “Mem’s not even here. And Kamla won’t admit anything.”

  “We’ll see about that. Where is Mem?”

  “Out.”

  “Did she say when she was coming back?”

  He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have gone away.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” He extended the slingshot, handle first, but Simon refused to take it.

  “You promised,” he said. Then he turned abruptly and left the alley, slamming the gate behind him.

  2

  Broad daylight. No subterfuge. She nosed the Austin right up to the gate. The guard had changed. This one was beefy, with a block head and square mouth, his cap’s red star pushed high on his brow. She started to tell him she had an appointment with Mr. Chou, but the gate opened before she’d finished the sentence. Another guard waved her on, around to the back of the mansion, out of view from the street. And a third appeared as she parked and stepped out. This one she recognized as the pinch-faced boy who had manned the gate last time. She tried to smile, as much to test herself as him, but they both failed. He looked past her, through her, would not meet her eyes, and while she managed to rearrange her mouth, the warmth of a smile was beyond her.

  She followed him across an enclosed dirt yard and up two steps, through a rear door that was peeling mustard-tinted paint and into a dingy corridor. No carpets covered the dark stone floor. Not even posters of the proletariat on the walls. She glimpsed a couple of large communal offices through open doorways—men and women alike dressed in the same dull blue uniforms as the guards. It was stifling inside and smelled of cigarette smoke and rancid oil. Finally they reached the square green room where Chou had received her before. A ten-foot-high portrait of Mao Tse-tung now hung above the empty fireplace. And at least half the chairs against the wall were occupied.

  Her eyes flew from one drably dressed figure to another. Briefly she registered Chou’s face lifting in her direction, an older man with long pouches beneath his eyes, a middle-aged woman with her hair pulled severely into a knot, and a younger man and woman holding tablets of paper and pencils. She looked to the doorway in the opposite wall. Would he come through there, then? Fleetingly, she wondered if this was some kind of trick, but she forced back the surge of panic as Chou moved toward her.

  “Mrs. Shaw,” he said. “You received my instructions.”

  “Where is my husband?”

  He patted the air with both hands. “One moment, please. I wish first to introduce you to our comrades who have helped to make this meeting possible.” The older man and woman set aside their mugs of tea as Chou steered her toward them. “Comrade Gao.” The elderly man grinned unexpectedly and thrust out his hand. She took it, felt his bones grip her, and shook. Comrade Yu, the woman, merely nodded.

  “Comrade Gao was with Chairman Mao on the Long March,” Chou explained, glancing significantly at the enormous face with half-closed eyes peering down at them from the portrait. Chou’s tone suggested this information should hearten her.

  Somehow Joanna managed to sit down, to accept the tea a young serving girl thrust into her hands.

  “Comrade Yu is deputy consul.” The woman had a squint in one eye that made her look as if she were winking at Joanna. Under almost any other circumstances, it would have seemed funny. But she realized now that if and when this reunion occurred, it would be worse than none at all. These were to be their witnesses.

  Her attention phased in and out as Chou went on singing the praises of these two heroes of the Revolution. Periodically she bent her head and murmured how grateful she was. There were a couple of volleys of Mandarin among the three of them, which Chou did not bother to translate, then at last he raised his hand. The guard disappeared, and moments later the opposite door opened.

  Joanna’s breath caught in her throat.

  She’d half expected shackles and chains, but Aidan stood on the threshold without any visible sign of restraint. He was dressed like the others, in a dusty blue worker’s jacket and formless pants, his black hair roughly cropped and parted nearly in the middle. His arms hung at his sides. He was clean-shaven, neither thinner nor heavier than when she’d last seen him. Just as he’d appeared in the photographs. His green eyes moved over her face without even a trace of emotion.

  “Please.” Chou sliced the air with an upturned palm.

  Aidan stepped forward, limping slightly. Joanna started up toward him, but his gaze stopped her. It was hard—and narrow as that of a disciplined soldier. That must be it, she thought. They’d brainwashed him!

  The guard pushed an empty chair to face Joanna’s, almost close enough that their knees touched when they sat down. The proximity was too much. She leaned forward recklessly and touched her fingers to Aidan’s cheek.

  As if in some ghastly dream state, he took her wrist and calmly returned it to her lap, then released her. “I’m sorry I didn’t write,” he began without ceremony. “It seemed the kindest way.”

  But the sound of his voice, the touch of his skin only unleashed another wave of despair. “Kind?” She stared at him.

  “To disappear.”

  “We thought you were dead.”

  “I hoped you would,” he said flatly.

  “But Simon…”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you, Joanna.”

  “I’m not talking about me.”

  “Not you or Simon. Anyway, you had Lawrence.”

  She was conscious of the quiet stealthily curling around them. The slide of lead against the recorders’ tablets. The strike of a match as the older man lit a cigarette. Over Aidan’s left shoulder she saw the old woman frown at Chou.

  Joanna took hold of herself. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  His gaze wavered. He shrugged. “He was smitten with you the first time he laid eyes on you.”

  “I never thought twice about Lawrence!”

  “More the fool you.”

  She felt a cold stabbing pain through her middle. “When did you become so cruel?”

  “Not cruel, Jo. Honest.” He smiled to the others. “My comrades understand. There are higher principles than love, even than family.”

  “What principles!”

  “Revolution. Progress. The triumph of the masses. You have no idea what the people of China have suffered—under Chiang, the Japanese, the imperialist powers. There is nothing more compelling than the liberation of an entire nation. A chance opened for me to be part of it, and I seized it.” He swallowed and moistened his lips. A muscle twitched along his jaw.

  S
he dropped her voice, less than a whisper. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why not?” he answered loudly. “I’ve written about nothing else since the war.” And then, “Or didn’t you notice?”

  She blinked back a hot rush of tears. “I know every word you ever wrote, Aidan. I know what you believe!”

  “Evidently, that’s not true. Or we wouldn’t be here now.”

  Joanna looked frantically around the room. The faces staring back gave her nothing, except one. Chou sighed, shaking his head. She returned to Aidan. “Mr. Chou said they would have allowed me and Simon to join you in China.”

  “Did he? I suppose he also explained that I refused.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Are you going to make me spell that out, as well?”

  She wanted to say, You’re protecting us. Instead, she asked, “Is it because of Alice James?”

  “Alice is dead, Joanna. I know you know all about that.”

  There was another long silence as she tried to decipher what he was telling her. Just what did she know about Alice? And how did he know what she knew? “Why must we talk with these people staring at us? Why won’t they leave us alone?”

  “It’s just like the night we met,” he said quietly.

  The suggestion of sentiment in his voice brought her up short. “What are you talking about?”

  “The hall of mirrors. Perhaps you should have paid more attention. We were never really alone.”

  She met his eyes.

  “For years you’ve seen what you wanted to see, Jo. Believed what you wanted to believe. I tried to warn you, but you thought it was just intellectual conversation.”

  They were talking in code, but it ran so close to the truth that the lines overlapped.

  “Why did you marry me?” she asked.

  “Because you wanted it so badly. And your innocence charmed me.” He leaned back in his chair, distancing himself. “What matters most,” he said carefully, “is larger than any one, or two, or three of us. Humans are no different than ants. We live, we work, we breed, we die individually, but together we can move mountains. I’m helping to move that mountain.”