THE FLENSE: China: (Part 1 of THE FLENSE serial)

by Saul Tanpepper

  He nodded once at them, avoiding eye contact, and hurried down the hall toward the elevator, his thongs slapping the bottoms of his feet as he went.

  “Things happen for a reason, Missus de l’Enfantine,” Cheong quietly said. “I truly believe that. Mister DeBryan would only have distracted you from your work.”

  Distracted?

  She spun on him. “I think you dismiss the dead too easily, Monsieur Cheong! But then again, what is one man’s death when you’ve already written off millions? Or billions? That’s what 6X is doing, isn’t it? Writing them off? Writing us all off! You make me sick.”

  “You would not be so flippant if you knew the things we know.”

  “I don’t care! I’ve already decided not to take your offer. We both had. We were going to return to Huangxia, but that’s clearly off the table now.”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Mister DeBryan texted me last night. He had every intention of working for us. Of course, it was contingent on you agreeing. He indicated that he would work on changing your mind.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “See for yourself,” he said, holding out his phone.

  She slammed her cardkey into the slot, then rammed the door open with her shoulder. “Here’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to collect my things and I’m going to leave this screwed up country of yours. I believe that’s what your acquaintance, Chief Inspector Liu, wanted me to do.”

  Cheong sighed and shook his head. “Very well, but when you change your mind—”

  “I won’t.”

  “When you do, you’ll find my number already programmed into your phone.”

  Chapter Nine

  She almost chickened out and booked a flight to New York instead of Charles de Gaulle, but with her brother on her mind, she decided she needed to spend some time at home. Despite the terrible childhood memories that the family estate held for her, they were tempered by her concern for Jacques. She’d neither seen nor heard from him in over a week, since she’d come across that random tweet about Huangxia, and knew that he could sometimes get himself into trouble if she didn’t remind him every couple days to take his medicine. Her calls from the airport had likewise gone unanswered.

  She boarded the plane feeling agitated. She didn’t like the feeling of retreat, of unfinished business. It troubled her being forced to look away from the Huangxia situation, troubled her equally that it upset her more than did DeBryan’s death. But, she reasoned, she had only known the man for a few days, and they all knew the risks of their work. Reporters died on assignment from time to time. The riskier the job, the more likely it was that an accident would occur.

  She tried to distract herself by doing the crossword puzzle in the airline magazine. A previous passenger had started it, but then gave up after the third clue. Soon after the plane departed, however, she passed out from exhaustion, and so the next ten hours slipped by her in a sort of blissful oblivion, even if her sleep was filled with disturbing visions.

  Arriving by taxi at the family house, she wasn’t surprised to find the place empty. She called Jacques’ name, but all was silent save for the echoes of her voice off the Calacatta marble walls and floors of the expansive entryway.

  Feeling lost and helpless, she wandered into the kitchen. It was designed for preparing meals for large gatherings, and when her father had had it redone, he’d had all of the appliances replaced with stainless steel. The modern look clashed with the old in a way that always set her teeth on edge.

  The milk in the fridge had soured but not yet clumped. She dumped it down the sink and rinsed the glass bottle before setting it aside. The dishes in the basin were crusted in a petrified layer of something unidentifiable, which looked like her brother had prepared it himself. Angel made a mental note to give the service a call and ask them to do another shop and cleaning. They were supposed to come weekly, but sometimes Jacques would send them away.

  There was no note for her, no message on her phone or email to tell her where he’d gone. Or when he’d be back. She muttered under her breath that he was fine, trying to convince herself that he really was, then forced herself to prepare some tea. But she only got so far as to set some water on the stove before she broke down and hurried upstairs to check that he wasn’t in his room lying in a pool of his own vomit.

  She knocked, and by the hollowness of the sound she sensed the room really was empty. When she tried the knob, it yielded, confirming her suspicions. He always kept the door locked whenever he was inside.

  She checked his bathroom next and found the line of medicine bottles on the counter, all in a row. Everything seemed in order.

  Some months before, after he’d finally relented to her pleas that he go see a new doctor, she’d gotten him a pill organizer. There were so many different kinds of medicines now, so many different ways that they needed to be taken, that she had feared he’d make a mistake and regress. They’d worked so hard to get him to this point, to where he was able to begin to function halfway normally again, that it felt like standing at the top of a high narrow ridge with the wind howling about them, constantly shifting, testing their balance. She kept expecting to fall. One moment of lost concentration and they would.

  And Jacques would be right back where he was a year ago.

  He insisted that it wasn’t her job to hold him steady, even deeply resented her for it. She told him that no one else would catch him if he fell. But he just shut her out more the harder she tried.

  She flipped open the lids and saw that the pills from Sunday through Tuesday were gone. It was now Wednesday, which meant either that he was precisely on schedule or he’d missed an entire week’s worth.

  The dishes in the kitchen sink forced her to accept the less favorable possibility that her brother had indeed relapsed. The last time it happened she’d found him lost and wandering around in the city unable to remember who he was or where he belonged. Lyon wasn’t a terribly unsafe place, not unless you were an obvious tourist and unaware of your surroundings, but it still held the usual hazards, even for locals. And if her brother was off his meds, then he could get too wrapped up inside his own head to recognize the risks.

  With a vague sense of resentment and a creeping sense of dread, she placed a call to the local Préfecture de Police, as well as to several of the hospitals in the area. They were familiar with her brother’s case, but none reported seeing him in recent days.

  “Oh, Jacques,” she said, cursing him in French. “As if I don’t already have enough to worry about.”

  * * *

  The accident had happened more than three years ago, a few months before she and David returned to Manhattan. It was like the place was cursed, as much for Jacques as it was for her. Whether or not she wanted to leave, Lyon kept drawing them both back, sucking the life out of them both.

  Had it not been for David, would she have ever returned at all? She wanted to believe that her flight to the States, her medical schooling and licensing there would have been enough of an anchor to keep her there. But maybe not. Maybe it was inevitable that she came back. Maybe she blamed David too much.

  Shortly after marrying, he’d begged her to give it a go. He loved the idea of life in “the old country,” as he put it, not realizing how much that description grated at her. David was an incurable romantic, attacking everything he did and believed in with religious zeal, whether it was a scientific pursuit or some entirely impractical one.

  So that was how they’d taken up residence in the family house that July four-and-a-half years before, his countering her resistance with the promise that it would only be for the summer. But a few weeks turned into a couple months, and before long he was suggesting that they make it permanent. “Places die if they are left empty,” he’d told her with macabre solemnity. “Walls collapse without people to fill them and the sounds of their existence to hold them up. Laughter to buttress against the eroding effect of silence.” She had once thought of him as much poet as scientist, had falle
n in love with the dichotomy he presented. But from that point forward, it had become something about him to resent.

  How could she argue? The house had stood empty for some time. Her parents were buried over a year by then, and Jacques had officially left two years before with no desire to ever return, just like her. For all practical purposes, her brother’s claim to the estate had ended long before, once he became old enough to attend lycée at Saint-Étienne, about sixty kilometers away. Their mother had begged him to live at home, to which he always replied, “How can one write on the plight of the bourgeoisie if blinded behind the gilded walls of a citadel?”

  He immersed himself completely in the concerns of the common man, choosing to take up residence in a crowded boarding house with several other students in his literature program. He could have taken a private room anywhere, lived in the type of luxury he had grown up used to. But he had soured of it. They both had.

  The house should have made the perfect setting for a writer’s pursuits — quiet, expansive, filled with history — but Angel knew that it was history which chased Jacques away, just as it had her. After receiving his baccalauréat, he moved even further away, settling into a small apartment in the Reuilly arrondissement of Paris.

  He would never have returned either if she hadn’t married David.

  David, her David.

  Of course, her ex had no such history with the place. He could not know the indelicate position he was putting Angel in. She tried to tell him, but he was intractable on the matter, deaf. “It’d be a shame for Chèvrefeuille to turn to dust and the gardens overgrown with brambles.”

  Chèvrefeuille.

  It gave her the creeps hearing the name her parents had christened the place slipping so fluently through his lips. And now, the echoes of his voice seeming to sound more like her father’s.

  She should never have relented! If she’d just refused from the beginning, Jacques would not have fallen.

  They had been arguing, she and David. She couldn’t even recall exactly how it started, nor could she even be sure if her growing unhappiness was the cause. But she did remember clearly telling David that she couldn’t live another week in the place. The memories were just too painful.

  They were in the master bedroom at the top of the grand staircase, the room Jacques now called his own. David was begging with her, pleading, convinced that she was blowing it all out of proportion, and she had run blindly out of the room, not expecting anyone to be standing there. Jacques had come to pay them a surprise visit. It was the second anniversary of their parents’ passing.

  Had that been what triggered the argument, put her into a black mood? The moments leading up to the accident eluded her.

  He’d had his hand raised to knock when she hit him with the full force of her body, sending him reeling across the landing.

  Never would she forget the surprised look on his face as he tumbled over the railing. Or the sick, wet smack of his body hitting the floor four meters below. She screamed then and ran for the stairs. But by the time she came around the corner enough to see below, convinced that he was dead, Jacques was already struggling to stand up.

  Somehow, he’d hit with his feet first. The impact caused his knees to buckle — luckily in the anatomically correct way — and then he landed on his side. His head hit too, but by then the majority of the energy had been lost. The cut on his temple was small, the bump nothing to worry about. Miraculous. Or so they’d all believed.

  “I’m okay,” he’d insisted, and refused her attentions. She remembered chastising him, telling him to stop being such a child. And of course he’d responded by telling her he wasn’t her little brother anymore, that he’d grown up and was an adult now.

  After that scary episode, the fight had gone out of the both of them. The subject of their leaving was dropped.

  But the fall had been more serious than they’d realized. Jacques’ spleen had been ruptured, and he’d proceeded to lose blood over the course of the next several hours. If they hadn’t all gone out to dinner and been in the middle of the city next to a hospital when he collapsed, he would not have survived.

  The fluid loss had been severe. And coupled with the concussion, he suffered a series of small strokes over the next three days which robbed him of much of his memory and physical control.

  The recovery was long and difficult. It was still not complete, not psychologically anyway, and she feared that it might never be. The old Jacques was in attendance more often than not, as long as he kept to his strict regimen of self-medication. But every once in a while, he’d stop or forget a dose, and he’d become a different man. Then she’d have to intervene.

  She had learned to recognize the early signs of these changes by reading his blog posts. The writing would shift, grow dark. A timely phone call to the service she employed to help watch over him would often be all that was needed. The blog was a convenient window into her brother’s mind, one which she kept secret from him.

  But the posts weren’t an infallible oracle. Every once in a while, his writing would veer without warning onto some disturbing tangent, and she’d know that the madness had taken control of him.

  She hoped that wasn’t what had happened to him now.

  Chapter Ten

  A loud crash startled Angel awake several hours later. It was raining hard, and the wind wrestled in the eaves. She could hear the torrents of water rushing down the roof and collecting in the clay gutters, rattling down the steel downspouts. Another ground shaking boom quickly followed, this one arriving almost immediately on the heels of a flash of lightning which lit up the darkened library where she’d drifted off, casting the old, dusty tomes and artifacts in stark shades of white and gray.

  She had come in to use the computer but had gotten sidetracked looking over some old papers left out on the desk during her last visit. It seemed ages ago that she’d been in here, three or four months now. Jacques rarely, if ever, visited the room, and he certainly didn’t bother with the desk. She doubted he used any of the rooms other than his own, the bathroom, and the kitchen. And the once-a-week housekeeper would have simply left the papers where they lay, not knowing where to file them.

  As for the computer, he had built his own from parts scavenged in second-hand shops in town. She knew that he constantly tinkered with it.

  The papers were just medical reports. She remembered that she’d had them out to check on Jacques’ medications. She’d wanted to make sure he understood which dosages of which pills were to be taken at which time. It was all so very confusing, prompting her to buy him the plastic pill calendar now sitting on his bathroom vanity. He’d refused to use it at first, so she was glad to see that he’d relented.

  The library’s wooden and leather desk chair was very large, very old, and much too luxuriant to have been of much practical use when her father had it made some four decades before. But then again, he had always been a large man. Now the abused cushion wheezed deeply whenever she sat in it, folding over the sides of her legs like it intended to swallow her up.

  She pushed herself up with a grunt, unhappy that she’d fallen asleep, and made her way to the door.

  The library sat at the terminus of a long hallway that branched off the left side of the front entryway, and as she passed along it, light from the lamps lining the walkway outside flung shadows against the wall. The sharp smell of the storm was fuller than she expected, and so she knew that it was in the house with her.

  The entryway floor glistened with wetness, reflecting the glow which came in through the open door from the mock-gaslights outside.

  She wasn’t scared. Not bodily, anyway. She knew, seeing the tracked puddles, that there was no physical threat to her. Of course, it was incongruous given how much this place threatened her. And considering how recently the intrusion at the hotel in Shanghai had been, and the consequence of it to DeBryan, she had every right to feel terrified. After all, a person had entered her house unseen while she slept unaware, had come in ou
t of the dark night, and left the door wide open.

  Unseen, perhaps, but not unknown. Anyone with malicious intent would not have deposited a sloppy trail of rainwater across the vestibule and up the marble stairs.

  Brother Jacques is home.

  Stepping carefully over the puddles, she made her way slowly up the stairs, gripping the railing so tightly that she could feel the bones in her hand compressing the thin flesh which sheathed them.

  “Jacques?”

  Frère Jacques, frère Jacques . . . ?

  She knocked gently on his door. “It’s Angelique,” she told him in French.

  Dormez vous? Dormez vous?

  “I arrived this evening.”

  There was a rustle of sound and something that might have been a cough.

  “Je m’inquiète pour toi.” I’m worried about you.

  She tried the knob but found it locked. She wasn’t surprised.

  “Qu’est que c’est je te peux faire?” Is there anything I can do for you?

  Non. Jacque’s thin voice. Vas t’en.

  Go away.

  “Est-ce que tu vas bien?” Are you all right?

  Vas t’en.

  She squeezed her eyes tight against the tears.

  Go away.

  Go away.

  It was always the same between them.

  She could hear the clack of his computer keyboard and knew that he was writing, probably exorcising another social evil he had newly encountered. Pushing him, especially when he was in such a state, would extract no information and only sharpen his resentment at her; he would talk to her only when he was ready.

  She made a mental note to recheck his blog in the morning.

  Outside, another clap of thunder shattered the steady rasp of the rain, but this one sounded farther away than the others. The storm was moving on.

  “Make sure you dry yourself off,” she told him, and pulled her sweater tighter around her shoulders. This old house felt damp and cold. The sweater, from the closet in her room downstairs was one she rarely wore. It smelled of mothballs. She didn’t remember putting it on, but was glad she had it now. “You’ll catch your death.”