Jesus Christ, what am I doing?
I had left a message with Getting that last morning on Guernsey and somewhere between Birmingham and Delhi, he left me a message to call him back, immediately. Mia got her message through to him loud and clear.
I debate telling Mia about it as I listen to it in the airport restroom. I’m not sure if our new relationship means sharing everything I’m doing with the other side. What are the rules? I had done something like this before and screwed myself over with it, so I don’t want to make that same mistake again.
I sit in the stall and try to decide what it is I’m trying to achieve in the end. Do I want to stick with Mia? What if she doesn’t want to stick with me? Maybe she’s going to fly me back home and cut me loose, return me to my shit life. Or, maybe, if I prove myself, she’ll decide to keep me around. Maybe she actually likes me, that it’s not all some sort of psychological mind-fuck that she’s been playing the entire time. When did she find out about me? Did she already know everything that very first time we met at Logan? Surely not. Well…
Helping Getting might get me safely back to the States, maybe even a pardon if I can come down on Mia hard enough, but where would that leave me with Nash and Mr. Secret Service? Can Getting really protect me? Will he even give a shit enough to try? I’m expendable, once he gets what he wants. I’m to be thrown in with the trash, not even recycled.
And then there’s Nash.
“Getting left me a message.”
She’s waiting outside the entrance of the restroom and the passing stream of people is so thick that I would otherwise have to shout to be heard, so I lift up onto my toes so I can speak directly into her ear. She leans back to regard me for a moment, then smiles, though I’m not certain if she’s smiling at the fact that Getting has responded, or that I told her, or both.
“Call him before we board tomorrow.”
We had arrived there in Delhi during the evening and our layover is long enough that we will be spending the night in a suite of the nearby Radisson, in the most extravagant room in the hotel. She’s trying to seduce me, to remind me as to why I want to continue playing for her side.
People are fighting for my very heart and soul.
I’m feeling kind of special.
21
Delhi
Roland Park-White was a billionaire before David Getting started on his first million.
Roland Park-White (I always think of him by the fully spiffed up three-decker name because that’s how everyone talks about him) was the son of an Australian industrialist father, and his mother was the daughter of a former Korean nationalist leader who held a seat in that country’s National Assembly some time before I was born. From the way it sounds, if I were Korean and someone said this nationalist leader guy’s name to me, I would immediately know enough to make some sort of comment — either for or against — and it’s the reason everyone assumes is the reason that the Australian industrialist guy married his daughter.
Roland Park-White was to inherit the family business but that didn’t go as planned, because Father Park-White decided to be a prick about it and stay on until well after his expiration date. And by “family business,” I don’t mean that the Park-White business was some little grocery down in Koreatown selling exotic ingredients, or even a company that built stuff like ships. No, I mean it’s something of a “holding company,” as best I understand it, and it owns other companies that do build the ships, and run the newspapers, and make the movies, and produce the springs that go into those plastic things that you put through the middle of a roll of toilet paper and then squeeze it together to get it into that thing on the wall.
Father Park-White decided that he simply did not want to give up all this great fun, so he stuck around and this pissed off little Roland Park-White enough that he took his measly millions and ran away. He relocated to Singapore, bought Singapore nationality, and got himself a Singapore passport because a Singapore passport is the best one to have if you want to jet around the world and broker shady deals. His millions then became billions.
And then tens of billions.
And then he bought the old family business for the express purpose of kicking the old man to the curb.
(Isn’t that a dream of all of us? Not my Dad, mind you, but I wouldn’t mind a few minutes of kicking the shit out of the Old Man.)
Very Shakespearean stuff. And I say this in the vein of how everyone says that something of a grand family scale is Shakespearean stuff. I don’t know if there’s any actual Shakespeare story that relates to the story of Little Roland Park-White and his father, one with Australians involved, because like many people in the world, I had to read the stuff for school, and, like most people in the world, I didn’t get it.
Now, though, Getting’s worth more than Roland Park-White, even though Roland Park-White’s still a billionaire. You can make a lot of money in “commerce,” which is how Getting described Roland Park-White’s business when I asked him about the guy, but if you really want to make the money, you do what Getting did and get yourself into the American financial industry. He sailed right past Roland Park-White in terms of net worth in less than five years.
When I call Getting, his response to my telling him about the card and the party on the island is Jesus H. Christ!
Not a shout, but an under-the-breath-goddammit-I’m-being-fucked sort of response.
Mom asked me to come down and help her move the furniture in the living room. I was laying on my bed, doing homework, and her asking for help made me apprehensive. We had hardwood floors and Mom never had any problem rearranging the furniture by herself. She did it a lot, actually, on a whim.
It drove Dad nuts, because he would come home some days and find the living room so different from the living room he left that morning that he worried that he had somehow managed to walk into a neighbor’s home. We lived in one of those really old row houses — a tall, narrow box mashed between two other tall, narrow boxes that were all rather plain if you didn’t think such things were charming. And because parking was such a hassle, Dad often had to park somewhere different each day and would worry that he would either walk into someone else’s house, or wander the streets of Boston until he fell over dead. He thought that was funny, saying that, but he was an engineer, so….
I crept down the stairs to find Mom throwing herself furiously at the back of the couch and almost slapshotting it into the fireplace. It was all actually a ruse, though. It was Method Two of the three ways that Mom brought up a matter that she considered serious enough that it had to be dealt with personally.
DEFCON 1 was her appearing suddenly, as you came out of the bathroom or the kitchen, scaring the shit out of you so much that you didn’t have time to think of all the potential excuses for all the potential reasons she had for ambushing you, so you were fucked. It’s time we talk.
DEFCON 5 was to bring up a subject off-handedly, during dinner or breakfast, in front of everyone else so you at least felt secure that it wasn’t going to be anything embarrassing because Mom was never one to embarrass us in front of our own family. Not intentionally, anyway. The family was our nucleus, our tribe. There was decorum. Protocols were in place.
Asked to help with 1) stripping of wallpaper, 2) moving of furniture, or 3) folding of sheets were all in the middle at DEFCON 3. You were alone, but you had time to think. Pushing furniture gave you a moment’s pause before providing her with an answer. At the same time, physical exertion lowered your guard, so it wasn’t unheard of for Mom to ask if you’ve had your period just as you bear down on the secretary, which was a troublesome piece because it was the oldest and most delicate, and weighed a freakin’ ton because some idiot made it out of African Blackwood, shit that’s denser than wood called Leadwood and makes oak out to be a poor cousin of balsa. Tonya had the misfortune (the brain-fart, really) of wearing socks one time when she was hit by that question, and she both leaned in and stood up at the same moment so that her feet sailed out from beneath her and she fe
ll, splitting her head on the side of the thing. Afterwards, she claimed that Mom tried to kill her with a piece of furniture and Mom promised to not ask such personal questions at such a precarious moment again. She apologized, to Tonya and all of us, that evening at the dinner table. We accepted her apology, but when I looked across the table at my sisters, it was obvious that they didn’t believe her either.
So I pulled off my socks, for the added traction, but there was the problem of the sweat pouring out the soles of my feet. After these instances of familial service, Mom always looked us over and thanked us for our extra effort, which we obviously put into the project because we were always dripping wet afterwards. She didn’t understand that we would’ve been equally drenched if we had simply stood there and watched.
Anyway, this one time, when she asked me to come down and help confuse the shit out of our Dad, I was ready for whatever she might throw at me because it had been some time since I last had an incident over DEFCON 4. (Generally along the line of Pick up your sweaty socks and Please warn someone when you leave the bathroom like that.) I’d been secretly listing in my head all the things that might come up at my next furniture-moving confessional and Mom, of course, had to know this, because she decided to trick me and came at me with a complement.
“Lissie.”
When I moved to the States and met the family that would become my family, they changed my name from Elsja to Elise, thinking it would help me fit into the fabric of a society were most of the girls went by the name of Maria-Something. We lived in the Afro-Hispanic section of Boston back then, over near Mattapan. Naddie, when she came of speaking age, had a real issue with me having a vowel at the beginning of my name, so it always came out more like Ah-lissie, like she had tried to hold a sneeze in her tiny little head. So now, I’m Elise to everyone on the outside, but Lissie to my family.
I’ve had many names, it seems, without ever once getting married.
Anyway, Mom took a pause between pirouettes of the love seat to tell me that she was proud to call me her daughter. I was on the other end and I stood up and looked at her, not knowing where this was going. Something was weird, because it appeared to me that Mom was close to tears. I mean, as much as I turn on the waterworks, Mom has a stoic nature that puts….well, Stoics, I guess, puts them to shame. Stoics are crybabies next to her.
“I want to know if there’s anything you want to ask me about your mother.”
“You’re my mother.”
By this point in my life, I truly saw Mom as my mother. Everyone else was a memory of a different time, like remembering kindergarten. It’s not where you tell people you went to school when they ask you as an adult.
Mom tried to smile but the corner of her mouth quivered and it really, really scared the shit out of me. Was she thinking of giving me back?
“I mean your…”
She sighed, as if she was about to admit to a crime, like she stole me or something.
“I mean your biological mother.”
I relaxed and shook my head because what did I care about her? She was gone before I was really alive. She was a stranger to me. I told Mom what Ma had told me about my mother — about her being a servant, and the promise, and the dying stuff.
Mom was confused at first, then a little angry. Then a whole lot of angry. Not at me, but at the Old Man. It’s strange, how he’s always had this effect on her and they never even once met.
Anyway, that was when I learned that Ma was full of shit.
Getting is not happy that it takes me until the next morning to get back to him but I make some comment about being in India, the phone coverage, and that dissuades him from harping on it any further. Actually, the coverage is better than what I had in Boston, though how much of that is due to the better phone Bouchard had given me, I don’t know.
Hey! With Bouchard gone, did I score a really nice phone for free?
Not that they let you keep a phone in prison, mind you.
I call him while we’re getting ready to leave to catch our flight to Singapore. It must’ve been around nine or ten at night on his little island. It strikes me that while I had an incredible dinner in a very nice restaurant, two glasses of a particularly fruity wine, and slept the night away curled up next to his mortal enemy, Getting was back home, spending the day waiting for the phone to ring, probably slapping his feet all over that marble floor. It must’ve driven him nuts because I can clearly hear the agitation grating in his voice.
I’m calling from inside the bathroom, because seeing Mia would be a distraction. I’d be checking my words, watching for her reaction, and it would definitely give me away.
Getting wants me to repeat what I had told him in the message, so I confirm that I now know that we’re going to Singapore, or someplace nearby, to meet with a man named Roland Park-White. That’s when I receive the meaningful response from Getting.
He asks me about the chances of my getting a hold of the memory card and I have to stop myself from lighting into him because this is that same damned card that he had me put back. I tell him that I’ll try, but that Garcia (he’s still referring to Mia as that Garcia woman, which I now find rather rude) keeps it close at all times.
I ask him if he knows anything about the contents of the card, because I’m still in the dark about the thing other than the artwork Iben and Anna had fussed over. He hesitates, then tells me that it isn’t important, my knowing. I’m to get the card and, if possible, bring it back to him. If not, I’m to destroy it.
“Well how reliable’s the source? I mean, I don’t want to compromise myself over a couple of family photos.”
There’s another pause, then “Our mutual friend. He’s my source, and he’s been pretty reliable.”
Welcome back, Bouchard.
I tell him that I have to go, that Garcia’s returning, and before he can respond, I clap the phone shut on him. Yes, it’s a petty thrill, but what else do I have?
“Everything good?” Mia asks as I emerge from the bathroom. She’s checking the room over for anything that she may have missed packing.
“Yeah. Fine.” I figure she’ll be as evasive as Getting when I ask her “What’s on the card?”
“Family photos.” She bites the insides of her cheeks to keep from grinning as she looks sideways at me. “It’s supposed to be information that Roland maintained of every illicit account and transaction he’s made over the past fifteen…sixteen years.”
Shit.
“Shit. That could be useful. Why does Getting want it?”
“Because it provides a direct link between him and Roland Park-White.”
Shitshitshit.
“Problem is, no one has what’s needed to access it.”
“Roland Park-White does.”
Mia carefully shakes out the bedspread to check for that one missing item that snuck off in the night.
“Yes.”
“And what’re you going to do? Just ask him for it?”
She pauses long enough to look at me across the bed and smiles with amusement.
“Of course, bokkie.”
Shit! If this thing is as bad as Getting makes it sound, then I may have just found the one thing that might get me out of this mess.
But how am I going to get my hands on it?
All Mom knew was what the Old Man told her and Dad in the note that I carried from Cape Town to Boston. He stated that Ma had died in an accident, nothing more, because that was what Mom told me when I broke down crying and she came rushing around the love seat to hold me in her arms.
An accident? I was the one who found her that morning, coming back from the market. Skipping because Ma had given me a couple of extra pennies so I could buy myself a few little sweet crisps if I would bring her back a bag of milk for her tea. It’s surprising to think now, how I could be so happy over such a simple little thing, but I was positively overjoyed. It definitely seemed like it was going to be one of the most special days of my life.
The satchel, hangi
ng from a long length of rope, rolled across the back face of the shop where Ma and I lived in the attic. It looked heavy. Heavy enough that it appeared to have shattered the frame of the small window it had dropped out of — the window over the basin where we washed dishes in our makeshift kitchen. There was really no kitchen in the place, only a sheet of plywood held up by boards where we placed the basin and the hotplate Ma used to cook our meals.
It was rather odd. I didn’t understand what was going on. Did Ma know that the satchel had fallen out of the window?
I raced up the narrow, steep stairs in the back because she was waiting for her milk so that she could have her morning tea. Weird satchel stuff aside, I didn’t want to disappoint her.
When I found her, she was almost sitting on the floor, lifted so that her shoulders were jammed up under the plywood counter. She had a bizarre expression on her face, as though she was completely surprised by the satchel falling out the window. I now saw that it didn’t fall all the way to the ground because the other end of the rope was tied firmly about her neck, pulling up tight under her chin so that it looked like it would slice right through. It caused her head to tip forward, so that she was staring, wide-eyed, at the floor between her legs.
What could I do other than go over and poke her, asking if she was all right.
22
Singapore — Busan
Turns out, Roland Park-White’s not even in Singapore, or on an island off of Singapore. He does have a home there…that is, he has an island there, but by the time we stop by and ring the bell, knock the knocker (no, not really), we’re told that he’s headed on up to South Korea to see family. I wonder if he has a specific reason or if it’s just some holiday thing, like Thanksgiving. Anyway, now Allie doesn’t have to feel so bad because while Changi (that’s the airport in Singapore, because I am now so international in nature) is rather nice, it’s still an airport and we don’t stay long.
Zwerfster Chic Page 20