Julian

by William Bell

  There was a car parked in front of the house, and two guys in suits on the verandah. One of them had his hand on the doorknob. I dashed up the path and onto the porch, startling the strangers. They were the men who had cased the house last night.

  They could have been twins—medium height, beige lightweight suits, slicked-back hair, dark eyes with an irritated, menacing air—but one was smooth-skinned, the other pockmarked high on his cheeks.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked, not very politely.

  The one who rode shotgun in the car the night before replied in a calm, bureaucratic tone, “We are looking for a friend.”

  “What’s his name?”

  The man offered a cold smile. “We don’t want to trouble you.” He said something in Chinese and his partner rapped loudly on the door.

  “There’s a few people living here, including me,” I told him, keeping my voice even. “Who do you want to see?”

  The partner knocked again.

  “Look,” I tried again. “I’m the building superintendent. You’ll have to give me a name.”

  “A friend,” repeated the bureaucrat.

  “Excuse me,” I muttered to the knocker, pushing between him and the door, forcing him to take a step back. He threw a what-do-you-want-me-to-do glance to the bureaucrat, who gave an almost unnoticeable shake of his head.

  “I think you’d better leave,” I said.

  Neither man made a move, the bureaucrat hiding behind a polite mask, the knocker standing with balled fists. I pulled out my cell.

  “You’re trespassing. Go now, or I’ll call 911.”

  They stared at me a moment longer, and when I didn’t back down the bureaucrat snapped off a few words in his native language, turned and walked down the steps, his silent partner behind him. They got back into the car and drove off. I caught their license plate on the cell camera, although Chang wouldn’t need it, I was sure.

  I had no time to think about what had happened. I was due at Fiona’s in two minutes. I knocked on Charr’s door and told him he shouldn’t come out of his room today. He didn’t argue. I dashed up the stairs to find Fiona waiting, in a hurry as always. But she took time to cup my chin in her hand and turn my head from side to side, peering at my eye as if she expected it to fall out.

  “Coming along nicely,” she pronounced. “The lassies’ll be chasing you again in no time. Roger’s sleeping, but he’ll likely wake soon. You know where I keep the diapers. His milk’s in the fridge. Bye, Julian, and thanks.”

  And she was out the door, her feet drumming on the stairs, the screen door slapping in her wake.

  The superheated apartment was in a state of semi-organized confusion. I sat down on the couch, still pumped by my adventure with the two beige suits. Later, Trish arrived at the door—which I had propped open to let some of the stifling air escape—to find me and Roger on the floor in front of the TV, putting an oversized jungle animal jigsaw puzzle together for the sixth time.

  “If you’re free for the rest of your life, I know a few young mothers who’d snap you up in a second,” she purred over the head of the baby she held against her chest.

  I carried Roger downstairs and lowered him into his stroller and Trish set off down the sidewalk, skilfully piloting one stroller with each hand. I watched them go, then called Chang.

  I was late getting to bed that night and sleep wouldn’t come. Not even a breath of air flowed over the windowsill. Things were piling up. Ninon was constantly at the centre of my thoughts. The situation with Charr—the whole Chang thing—was spinning out of control. I felt like I’d been blindfolded and tied to a violent amusement park ride.

  I got up and drew a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and drank it by the back window. Mist haloed the street light and softened the outlines of the cars along the curb.

  I heard voices, urgent but controlled, from the downstairs hall.

  Barefoot, wearing only my boxers, I threw open my door and dashed down the stairs, swung round the newel post and landed in the hall on both feet. The suits I had kicked off the verandah that afternoon were at Charr’s door, talking rapidly in low tones. Charr, in trousers and a greyed tank top, gripping one of my paperbacks in his hand, was shaking his head and yelling, “Bu xing! Zou kai! Zou kai!” at the man who held him fast by the opposite wrist.

  But the pockmarked man held on.

  “Hey!” I hollered. “Let him be!”

  The bureaucrat rattled off a sentence or two and his partner let Charr go. Both suits turned to face me, and at that moment Charr seized his chance, ducking back into his apartment and slamming the door and throwing the bolt, leaving me alone to face the suits.

  I stood blocking the hallway, aware of how ridiculous I must look in my red plaid boxers.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  The bureaucrat did the talking. “This is not your business,” he said, as if quietly addressing an employee, his arrogance rising from him like a sharp odour. “I advise you to—”

  “You stand here in my house,” I hissed, “and tell me this is none of my business? You come here and give me advice? I asked you who you are.”

  “We will go now,” the bureaucrat insisted. But he didn’t move.

  The partner’s body language was subtle, but he was preparing to do something. I kept my eyes on his and stood my ground.

  Stalemate.

  “We will go now,” the bureaucrat repeated. “Please move aside.”

  Whether his forced smoothness was meant to calm me or his partner I couldn’t tell. Deciding I could gain nothing by obstructing them, I opened the front door wide, faking politeness, Mr. Good Host seeing off his honoured guests. The bureaucrat glided past me. His flunky kept up the staring contest, wary, expecting a move from me. I almost laughed when he pirouetted and backed out of the house, eyes locked on mine, like a gunslinger in an old Western withdrawing from a hostile saloon crowd.

  And then they were gone.

  I rested my hand on the staircase railing, felt the rivulets of sweat trickle over my ribs, the tremor in my hands. I didn’t feel like discussing the incident with Charr—not tonight, anyway—so I padded up the stairs. I drank a glass of water, then picked up the Chang cell. After I made my report he said he’d be along as soon as he could.

  I wished everything was as simple as Roger’s jigsaw puzzle, with its happy lion cavorting in the grassland with a giraffe and a rhino. Tonight I had been up against pros. The main door to the house was locked every night. The suits had gotten in anyway without making a sound. Were they the ones who had planted the bugs? Or had they had it done? I couldn’t picture Mr. Bureaucrat doing anything that might wrinkle his suit or get his hands dusty. Who were they, he and his pockmarked partner?

  My rival-gang theory, connecting the abduction attempt on Wesley with Mr. Bai’s wealth and resources and apparently illegal activities, was weakened by tonight’s events. When I blocked Wesley’s kidnappers, one of the men had come at me with a knife. Tonight was different. Although the bureaucrat’s partner oozed aggression, suggesting he could break loose and have you on your back before you knew what hit you, he and his boss were restrained. They were all business. They operated within limits. It would have been easy to pop Charr on the head, drag him to the car and make off with him. Instead, they’d tried hard to persuade him to co-operate. When the bureaucrat had noticed his sidekick had Charr by the arm, he had ordered him to lay off.

  I also found it hard to believe the suits were part of the amateur-hour watchers group. Still, nothing fit. There was only one person who could connect the dots for me.

  His car pulled into the driveway thirty minutes later.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  AS IT TURNED OUT, two cars rolled up to the garage—identical models, each driven by a chauffeur in a peaked cap.

  When Chang came into the apartment he found his ward at my kitchen table holding a mug of tea in a trembling hand. Chang shook hands with him, firing off a few questions in Chinese as he pu
lled up a chair for himself. He sounded respectful, not as smooth as he had been with Mr. Bai on my visit to Bai’s office above the restaurant, but close. Charr, his chin quivering, replied at length, nodding in my direction a few times.

  Chang turned to me. “It is imperative that we move our guest immediately. I arranged the cars as quickly as I could. He will be in one of them, out of sight. The other is a decoy.”

  “Which gives the bad guys a fifty-fifty chance of picking the right one and following it,” I countered. “That’s if they have only one vehicle. If they have two, your plan collapses.”

  Chang nodded. “I have thought of that but I was only able to—”

  “There’s another way.”

  I must admit I enjoyed seeing his eyebrows rise, silently asking me what I had in mind.

  So I told him.

  Then I turned off the light.

  It took only a few minutes to go downstairs and help Charr gather his possessions—a few articles of clothing, which he jammed into a small suitcase together with his remaining cigarettes and two of the novels he had borrowed but hadn’t read yet. As we left his room I switched his light off.

  “No, this way,” I said when he turned toward the door to the garage. “Back upstairs.”

  He and I sat together in my darkened kitchen, Charr clutching the handle of the suitcase resting on his knees. Below, I heard car doors open and close. I went to the window, keeping out of sight as I peered around the frame. The sedans, one after the other, reversed into the road and sped away in opposite directions. In one of them, Chang would be crouching out of sight behind the front seats. The other car would have no passenger.

  The plan was for Charr and me to wait half an hour. I felt sorry for him, not knowing where he was bound, forced to trust a stranger less than half his age. Then he did something that showed me he was a survivor no matter how scared he was. He opened the suitcase and took out a pack of smokes and a well-worn deck of cards secured with an elastic band. He held the cigarettes up.

  “Ke yi ma? I may?”

  “Just this once.”

  He smiled and lit up. “I teach you Chinese game.”

  “Okay.”

  I hate card games, but anything was better than sitting anxiously in the dark watching a scared fugitive chain-smoke. The game was like blackjack, or twenty-one, but the object was to take turns slapping down cards, counting up the accumulating value in your head and blurting out the total before the other guy did. In the unlit room we read the cards as best we could and whispered the points totals.

  When the time came I picked up my cell, keyed in the number I had looked up earlier, gave some instructions and ended the call.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Charr snapped the elastic around his cards and stowed them, checked the suitcase latches, got up and ran his cigarette under the faucet. I led the way downstairs and through the garage and out the pedestrian door, first checking for movement on the misty street. The humidity muffled city night noises, even a siren wailing in the distance. The plan was to make use of the unlit lane that ran behind the yards on my street. The lane had been put in years before, when the neighbourhood was built, to provide access to the detached garages behind the houses. Charr and I would head south, crossing four or five yards, then cut out into the lane.

  We set out, and soon ran into our first problem—a fence that I knew about but hadn’t realized would be such a challenge for a not very tall, middle-aged fugitive.

  “Wait till I’m across, then give me the suitcase and follow me,” I whispered.

  I vaulted the wooden barrier. Charr handed the case over and attempted to haul himself up and over, got high enough to balance on his chest. He grunted and puffed as his shoes scrabbled on the boards.

  “Wait,” I said, hopping back across.

  I made a footrest by interlacing my fingers. Charr got the idea and made it to the top, teetered awkwardly, then dropped like a sack of bricks to the other side.

  “Oof!” he said.

  “Shhh!”

  I found him crouching on all fours in a flower bed. A dog barked. Then another. We froze. Charr, wide-eyed, looked about.

  “I afraid dogs,” he whispered.

  “Don’t worry, they’re not close,” I assured him. “Let’s go.”

  Four more fences and a sprained ankle later, we sneaked down a driveway between two houses and came out onto the lane, Charr limping and clutching my arm. I toted his suitcase, flashing back to my escape with Wesley. We made it to the intersection of a side street and the lane, where a taxi was waiting, lights out, engine off.

  I pulled open the rear door.

  “You’re late,” the cabbie grumbled. “I was gettin’ ready to pull out.”

  I helped Charr into the cab and laid the little suitcase on his lap. He gripped it as if it was a lifebelt.

  “You have the destination, right?” I asked the driver, handing some bills across the seat to him.

  “Yep.”

  I patted Charr on the shoulder, and he grabbed my hand and squeezed it before letting go.

  I checked with the cabbie. “The directions are clear?”

  “As a bell. What is this guy, a spy or somethin’?”

  Watching the cab start up and pull away I muttered, “I wish I knew.”

  I killed an hour and a half watching a late-night movie, drumming my fingers on my thigh, before I phoned the cut-out. I’d never seen Chang show any kind of mood, emotion or fatigue—but when he replied, he sounded weary.

  “Yes, Julian.”

  “I just wanted to be sure that Charr—that the guest made it safely.”

  “He did.”

  I waited for more, but it didn’t come.

  “You weren’t going to let me know, were you? I had to call you.”

  “Everything has been taken care of.”

  “I was worried about him.”

  “You needn’t concern yourself, Julian. But thank you for your help,” he said stiffly.

  A hot flush bloomed in my neck and face. Not concern myself? I had no idea what was happening right where I lived. I could be in danger—from cops or spies or crooks, I didn’t know. The so-called guests—especially Charr—could be under threat. And the guy with the answers apparently didn’t think I deserved any kind of explanation.

  Chang’s offhand, phony politeness stuck like a bone in my throat.

  Be the painter, I told myself.

  “Was there something else, Julian?”

  “I want a meeting with Mr. Bai,” I blurted.

  Pause.

  “Mr. Bai is quite busy these days. Perhaps—”

  “No, Mr. Chang,” I cut in. “No ‘perhaps.’ Definitely. You are my contact with Mr. Bai and I’m telling you I want a meeting with him.”

  I heard a great sigh at the other end. Or did Chang’s second-long pause cause me to imagine it?

  “All right, Julian, I’ll do my best.”

  Another brush-off.

  “If I don’t hear back from you in, let’s say, two days, I’ll come over to Mr. Bai’s office myself. And I won’t leave until I see him.”

  This time I cut the connection.

  As soon as I put down my cell I began to second-guess what I’d done. If I pushed Mr. Bai he might get angry. This might not be my home anymore. I might have to leave my job. I’d lose the only security I had.

  On the other hand, I felt relief, a thawing of the tension that had been gathering for a long time. I had allowed myself to slide backward after vowing that I would change my life for good and refuse to stand on the sidelines. Now I was back on track. I would go to Mr. Bai and demand some answers. And if his solemn promise to me had meant anything, I’d get them.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I WORKED LATER THAN USUAL the next day, arriving home mid-afternoon with an empty stomach and a case of the jitters. Thoughts of Ninon and my status with Mr. Bai endlessly bounced off one another. I took a longer run than usual, pushing hard so I’d be tired
and able to sleep. Afterwards I showered and ate an early supper, then found a not-too-stupid movie on TV, forcing myself to stay awake until it was over. Before I turned in I checked the street for watchers but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  I hardly ever remember my dreams, but in a nightmare that night I found myself at the rink, flying down the ice, the rasp of my skate blades in my ears, my stickhandling a blur as I sidestepped bodychecks, hurtling toward the net. All of my teammates, a row of blank faces, watched silently from the bench. I swept to the left wing, the goalie slipping across the crease, tracking me. Then I pivoted, zipped back to centre, and when the goalie reacted I drilled a slapshot aimed high to the corner of the net.

  But my stick broke and the puck dribbled straight to the netminder.

  The dream recycled. I missed again and again, in exactly the same way. I read my failure in the faces in the crowd.

  The dream cut to another scene—a penalty shot. I circled to build up speed, then came straight in on goal and flicked a wrist shot. Dead on target. Goal! A bell rang. But the red light didn’t come on. The puck bounced off the mesh and ricocheted right back out to my stick. Impossible! A bell rang every time I shot and scored, but the net always spat back the puck.

  “Why is there a bell?” I asked myself, circling to renew the attack. “There’s no bell in hockey!”

  My eyes popped open. Heart thudding, I propped myself up on one elbow. In the living room, my Curtis cell was ringing. I scrambled from the bed and ran to the phone, pushed the green button.

  “Is this Julian?”

  A male voice. Familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to it. I shook the last images of the dream from my head. “Who is this?” I demanded.

  “Are you Julian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m calling for Ninon. She needs you. Better hurry.”

  The taxi picked its way along dark empty streets toward the lake. It passed through shadowy pools under wide bridges and tangles of roads and ramps. It crossed desolate stretches of flat land where the bulk of an occasional building loomed above dimly lit streets. The driver drew to a halt in the middle of a block. Ahead, the road dead-ended at a stretch of hurricane fence with dark horizontal space behind it. A canal of some sort, I guessed. On one side of the road cranes reared into the moonless sky beside some sort of half-completed warehouse or factory; on the other was an open space of unlit and unused land with a few trees where a tiny light prickled in the distance.