by James Church
It was easy to sound convincing on this because it was actually true, even truer now that I’d found her like this, dead in an office that looked to carry with it some weird authority, and seemingly a colleague of the nervous man with the pistol. I doubted she had anything to do with the little man’s ragged friend, but you could never be sure in these sorts of operations. For a fraction of a second it occurred to me that he was her killer, but then I realized that for hammer-hands to do anything so delicate as to leave no visible trace was unlikely. If Rosalina, or whatever her name really was, had been mixed up in this dumpling business, seriously mixed up in it, that raised the question of Vincente’s role. And that, in turn, raised questions about what I was doing here. Decoy? Bait? Sitting duck?
None of these sounded appealing, but on second thought, none of them rang true either. Unless this was the most brilliantly conceived double operation I’d ever encountered, it made more sense that I was supposed to do exactly as I’d been instructed, and that Vincente, along with Rosalina, without telling me, had been running something parallel in support. Nice plan, if that’s what it was, but it had come to a bad end. Rosalina, it seemed likely, had convinced the shrill lady that I really was connected with a mysterious buyer and thus not to do anything to make sure I woke up dead. The fatal flaw for Rosalina was that somehow her part in this shadow operation meant to keep me safe had been compromised, and now her misfortune or missteps were about to drag me down with her. Who had compromised her? My first hunch, based on nothing, was that Salvador had said something to the wrong person. Sometimes even a little can be too much.
This was a lot of thinking and supposition to run through my mind in a few seconds, but the room wasn’t that big, and the space between me and hammer-hands would diminish rapidly once he was told to start moving in my direction. I had to think fast.
“As I just told you,” I said, “I have no idea who she is.” Delay seemed the best option. Starting a lengthy conversation wasn’t in the cards, but a few back-and-forths might buy me a little time.
“Was,” said the man with the pistol. “No idea who she was.”
“Was.” I nodded. “You’re right about that.” I glanced at the body. “I don’t know what she thought she could handle, or had to handle, or might have handled. I’m just here to finalize a deal.” I started to reach inside my coat pocket to produce some papers to wave in the air. I knew they didn’t like paper. Maybe it would distract them.
“Don’t move. Do not even twitch.” The voice was nervous, and the fingers on the pistol tightened. This is never a good sign, so I relaxed my posture slowly, easily, and let my hands drop to my side.
“Paper,” I said. “I have the original contract in my pocket, and if someone would sign it we could clear all of this up. Are you authorized to sign?”
The man with the pistol smiled, only it wasn’t really a smile. “Sign? Why would I want to do that?”
“Well,” I started, but he cut me off.
“Why would I want to do that?” The expression on his face was fixed now, cemented in place. He raised his hands, palms up, and shrugged his shoulders, holding the pose. “Why”—his voice crept up onto an annoying plateau—“would I want to do that?”
“If you’d let me finish, I could explain to you why.” I watched the hand holding the pistol as it completed part of an arc and ended up pointed at me again.
The little man seemed a little calmer, even thoughtful. “You might start talking and then this pistol might go off. What then?”
Hammer-hands was edging to the side. That meant, I had to hope, that they didn’t want to shoot me, not really. They’d rather knock me out.
“Look,” I said. “The contract is for the shipment of one dumpling machine.” I grinned. Grinning throws a lot of people off when they’re holding a gun on you. “It’s worth big money if it ends up in the right place, in the right condition. Anyone who facilitates that outcome gets a bonus, that’s in the contract. Anyone who gets in the way … well … you figure it out.”
“You think you can scare me?”
“No, I just thought you had a healthy regard for money, like a lot of people I’ve met around here. The organization knows what works; that’s why it usually gets what it wants.” I was hoping the word “organization” would put a mental foot on the little man’s brakes.
Before either of us knew what was happening, the door behind the little man opened and three people poured through—Vincente, followed close on his heels by Salvador and a compact fellow I didn’t recognize. Vincente, in a pretty good imitation of an aging tiger, leaped on the back of the little man, grabbed his pistol, and used it to slug him twice on the back of the head, to good effect. Salvador and the other fellow tackled hammer-hands, who would have put up more of a fight if they hadn’t rammed a hypodermic needle in his neck. He gurgled and relaxed, gurgled again, and then stopped moving entirely.
“Where is she?” Vincente stood up and straightened his tie. “Where is she? And don’t say you don’t know.”
I pointed at the chair. “She was already there when I came in.”
Vincente walked over to the desk, moving as if there was nothing urgent about seeing a figure that sat motionless, its back to us, ignoring everything that had just gone on. He stepped around the chair, put his hand gently on Rosalina’s throat, then her neck, and then looked into her eyes. “She’s dead. Couple of hours, maybe more. I don’t think she died here.” He turned to me. “You know who she was?”
Had I or hadn’t I sat in the car as she drove the two of us—Vincente and me—to the airport? Had I not climbed over her to get to the window seat? Had she not squeezed my hand when the plane landed? Were we back to the existence-nonexistence wind that kept blowing over this operation? “I don’t know. Do I know her? Is that a trick question?”
“No tricks. No jokes. Nobody left on base.”
“Am I supposed to get what that means?”
“It’s baseball, and you’re about to lose the game if we don’t move you out of here in a hurry.”
Salvador knelt down and put another needle into hammer-hands’s neck. “OK, Viktor, he’s gone.”
“Viktor?” I moved back around the desk so I was closer to the door. “Viktor? I thought your name was Vincente.”
“Depends,” said the man I didn’t know and who had been watching everything closely.
“Depends on what?” The turtle had said the routing for the machine was called Route Victor. My head started buzzing, like it does when there are too many things going on at the same time. “Like depending on what?”
“On location. Where you saw him before, maybe he was V1. Here he is V2.”
“No V3?”
“You don’t have to know. Get back on the other side of the desk.”
“Shut up, both of you.” Vincente closed Rosalina’s eyes and looked at her one last time. He frowned. “Somebody take care of the one by the door. Then we move.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket. “This sketch says we can go out the garden, through the second gate on that side by the tree, and then work our way along the perimeter wall until we get to a fire ladder that takes us up and out of here. It better be right.”
We watched while Salvador put a needle into the man who’d held the pistol. The little hands clenched once or twice, then went limp.
“Done,” said the taxi driver.
“Stay close,” said Vincente, and the four of us went out in single file.
6
All of the trees in the garden were oaks, except for one noted on the sketch. When we got to that tree, we stopped. The gate that was supposed to lead us out was locked. It was a big lock, and it was rusted shut. Vincente looked at me. “Do something.”
“Me? What do I know about rusty Spanish locks?”
“It’s not Spanish. It’s Chinese. Who do you think owns this place? Fix it, and do it now. We have four or five minutes at the most. There were no alarms—Rosalina turned them off—but it won’t be long b
efore someone will check the monitors for what is going on in the white room. Then they’ll come looking.”
“I’m not Chinese.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you are. Fix the lock.”
The tree next to the gate was a linden. My grandfather thought lindens were very smart trees, smart and honest. “They don’t put on airs,” he would say to me as we stood outside his workshop in the morning, watching the sun rise. “Honest as can be, reliable, and friendly. They grow as they will. You can’t prune a linden,” he’d say. “They grow according to their own sense of the world. Don’t forget that. And they can help. If you’re sick, you want a linden nearby. Listen to me, boy. You get sick, you just need to find a linden. Don’t bother with those doctors they send around these days. They were all trained by the Japs.”
In those days, there weren’t many lindens in the countryside. There weren’t many trees at all. Most of those that had survived the Japanese occupation had been chopped down for firewood during the awful winters during the war, either that or bombed to splinters by American planes whose only purpose seemed to be to pulverize the land. Miraculously, there was a linden that had somehow survived near my grandfather’s house, and after the war he fiercely protected it. Everyone in our village knew to leave it alone, but people passing by only saw it as wood that would burn and give them heat in the winter nights that seemed to be getting worse every year. Some nights I’d wake to the sound of my grandfather chasing people away, whirling a big axe over his head.
I must have been staring at nothing, remembering my grandfather’s voice when he was angry, because Vincente snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Stay with us. You on drugs?”
“No, just thinking.”
“Christ, don’t think. Fix the lock.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll give you two minutes.”
“This is a linden tree,” I said, suddenly drained of energy. “Good place as any to die.”
“Nobody dies,” said the man who still hadn’t introduced himself. “We’re supposed to deal with that dumpling machine shipment, and we can’t do that if we’re dead. We also can’t do it if we stay arguing under this tree. I don’t know about you, but I’m not waiting for a Chinese lock to get unstuck. I’m climbing over the fence.”
It seemed like a bad idea. The fence was at least four meters high. It was made out of big stones for the first three meters or so, then changed to thick boards that were fitted tightly together so there was no way to get a foothold. At the very top was a roll of razor wire. At some point, the big oak trees in the garden had been trimmed back so that none of them hung over the fence. The trimming had been brutal, huge limbs hacked away so that the trees were disfigured. It was surprising that all of them had survived. The linden, for some reason, had been left untouched. It had grown with a mind of its own so that its upper branches leaned toward the fence.
“Well, if you’re going to do it, do it,” Vincente said. “Here.” He took off his jacket. “Wrap this around your arm so you can get over that wire. Or better, lay it on top so we can follow you. Up, quick. They’ll be out here any minute.”
The man was up the tree in a few seconds. He found his footing on the first thick limb, lifted himself to a second, smaller one not far above, and then crawled out so that he had bent the branch almost to the point of breaking as it hung over the top of the fence. He dropped the coat on the razor wire, lowered himself onto it, and then, with a wave, jumped down on the other side. The branch sprang back again.
“Your turn.” Vincente pointed up the tree. “Get up and over fast. Don’t look back. The two of you have a job to do. We’re not going home until it’s done.”
I’m not as agile as I used to be, and my hands didn’t give me the grip I needed, but somehow I didn’t fall. When I reached the limb that led over the fence, I looked down. Vincente stood below me, calmly lighting a cigarette. He looked up and nodded. I heard a shout from the white room, Vincente ducked out of sight, and I slipped off the branch onto the coat that covered the wire. A second later I slipped off that and fell four meters onto a large, unyielding azalea bush.
“You hurt?” The man who had gone first was brushing himself off. “You almost ruined that azalea. It’s fifty years old, maybe more. One of the few charms of this place.” He put out his hand to help me off the bush. “Call me Yakob. That’s my name here. You run into me somewhere else, you don’t call me Yakob. You don’t know me. Understood? Come on, we can’t afford to stand around.”
“We aren’t waiting for Vincente?”
“You mean Viktor? No, he has to stay to handle things from inside. Too bad about the woman. You knew her?”
Vincente already knew the answer but had asked me the same question. Why? Salvador already knew where Rosalina fit. That left this fellow, Yakob. He knew, he didn’t know? He was testing me? I decided to go with Vincente’s warning, if that is what it was.
“No. Never met her,” I said.
Yakob was already heading down the gravel path. “No matter, it’s done, finished, the whole fucking operation is busted except for the one thing left for us to do.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “Once we find the machine, we fix it, then we never see each other again. You clear on that?”
“Don’t worry. I’m not looking to make new friends.” I stopped. “Wait a minute. What about Salvador?”
“Who?”
“The one with the hypodermics. He drives a taxi, but that’s not his job, I gather. He seems to have some connection with Trotsky.”
“Never knew that. Never knew his name. Maybe he went back to clean up the white room. Don’t worry. He seems to know this place even better than I do. We’ll probably meet up with him once we’re outside. Let’s move. You know where the machine is, I take it.”
“Last I saw it, I was with your pal Yuri in a tunnel not far from the door to the kitchen.”
“The workers’ kitchen or the bosses’?”
I made a note. He didn’t react to the mention of Yuri. And he said “bosses.” Maybe he was a secret fan of Trotsky’s, too. Maybe this whole thing was part of a Trotskyite coup … I caught myself before jumping off that mental cliff.
“The kitchen was next to a dining room with a big, ugly table,” I said. “I guess it was in the main house, if there is such a thing here. It didn’t look like a place for workers, unless there’s been a revolution.” I threw that in to see if he’d respond. He didn’t, so I moved on to something that was still needling me. “Why didn’t anyone ever give me an overview of the place? How did they expect me to find my way around?”
“Maybe they didn’t expect you to find your way around. How should I know? I don’t set these things up. Planning isn’t my business. I just grunt and tackle. You? One of those Asian-guru idea types?” He gave me the once-over. “Never mind that now. Listen closely. We’re on the far end of the factory compound. The main house, the guest quarters, and the offices sit in a little valley behind that rise. That’s probably where you were. One of the underground passages leads there, but we’re not risking it underground. Can’t see what’s coming at us up top. The special machine shops are about a kilometer away. They’re isolated, but it’s not so difficult to get inside. The housing for the foreign machinists is in another compound. That’s an overview. Satisfied?”
He seemed to know the layout pretty well. What else did he know, I wondered. “Where are the machinists from?”
“Not your concern.”
A few days ago it wasn’t my concern, but suddenly it was. “How many of these dumpling machines are there?”
“That’s not your concern either.”
“You have an annoying way about you, anyone ever tell you that?”
“Let’s get to that dumpling machine you saw before it disappears. After that, if you want, we can compare notes on who is the most annoying.”
7
We worked our way around the small rise and found the adit. No need for a key. The door had been pried open. Whoever did it
must have used something heavy, because the steel frame bolted into the rock had been twisted. The tunnel was empty, stripped bare; even the lights had been pulled down and taken away. A tiny bit of daylight was coming in from somewhere, maybe an airshaft at the far end.
“So much for that.” Yakob pulled down the trapdoor in the ceiling where Yuri had kept his cache of equipment. How would he know where it was if he didn’t know Yuri? Trapdoors aren’t thrown into plans for free, and they aren’t supposed to be obvious to anyone who wanders by.
“What’s that?”
“This? What does it look like? A cache. It’s supposed to have a few things in it.” He felt around. “Fuck me, all gone.”
“Yeah, gone.” I gestured around the tunnel. “Nothing here. So what’s next?”
“They are a step ahead of us, which is exactly where we don’t want them to be. The damned machine is already on its way, and now we have to find it. What’s the routing?”
Why ask me, I almost asked, but something warned me to try a different tack. “Good question. I spent the last couple of days drugged, blind, and drinking bad wine trying to convince someone to tell me the routing. They claim they don’t know, and after what they put me through, I’m prepared to believe them.”
“Then you’re an idiot. Someone knows.”
“The turtle didn’t.”
“Who?”
At least he didn’t know Japanese. “The guy in charge of transport. He didn’t know. If he didn’t, who did?”
“Like I said, someone knows. Someone always knows. Otherwise, it would still be here. Someone who knows the routing put it on a truck. It had to leave here by truck. That much we can figure out by ourselves. That machine is too big for a bicycle, and too heavy for a wheelbarrow. So it left in a truck. And if it left in a truck, there is a manifest, no question about it. Truck drivers are psychotic in their need for manifests. They can drive without gasoline if it comes to that, but they have to have a manifest; otherwise they can’t get past customs, and if they don’t get past customs, they don’t get paid. No one cares if the manifest is accurate or not; whatever it says, customs needs it. At most seaports, you can ship an elephant as vanilla ice cream and no one in the customs office will blink an eye as long as there is a manifest and something in it for them. Airports are tougher, but they won’t ship this machine on a plane. Planes crash sometimes, and if this shipment doesn’t make it all the way through, there will be a lot of unhappy people in high places.”