by Matt Richtel
I look up at the neon dessert sign and it looks like it’s bending. I exhale through pursed lips.
The man with the umbrella crosses the street. After he passes, I pull over to the side, essentially parking in the crosswalk. I feel Faith’s gaze on me as I turn around to look at the Mercedes.
“Start talking. You said Alan asked you to come to the subway. You did him a favor.”
She sighs. “He asked me to make sure that you got his message. That’s it.”
“Message?”
The buzzard in the Mercedes opens his door and extends out a long leg but doesn’t get out. He’s getting air, or can’t decide his next move.
“He told me you were a journalist,” Faith continues. “He said he wanted to get your attention.”
“Why didn’t he send me an email?”
But as I’m asking, I’m struck by a theory. Maybe he tried to send an email. Maybe he had originally tried to contact me using a fake account under the name Sandy Vello. On my computer, I’d found several emails from the address [email protected]. But the emails went to spam, or I ignored them. So did Alan then jack up his efforts?
Then another theory. On the piece of paper I found on Alan’s desk, I’d seen the date 2/15. That’s two weeks from now. But it’s a month after I received an anonymous email from an account bearing Sandy Vello’s name. And that email had read, “We have one month to stop the launch.”
“Faith, what’s happening in two weeks?”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s happening February fifteenth?”
“I don’t know. And to answer your other question-about why Alan tracked you down in the subway: I got the sense he wanted to reach you anonymously but also that he thought you were more likely to respond to dramatic overture.”
“Like getting pushed under a subway?”
“I didn’t expect that. I thought he was going to hand you something or whisper something to you and then run off. I was supposed to. . intercept you. . to get your attention so you didn’t follow him.”
I’m looking at the shops and buildings around the Mercedes. Why did the man come here? Is he merely looking for authentic take-out dumplings or something else? What’s interesting around here?
“It’s an awfully big favor you did. You must have known him well.”
Directly next to the Mercedes, on the same side of the street, a trinket vendor closes up for the day, using a pole with a hook on the end to remove inflatable dragons from an awning dripping with drizzle. To the shop’s right is a thin three-story office building or apartment complex, or maybe a combination. Its windows are dark, except for one on the second story with blinds. To the shop’s left is a storefront with a banner written in Chinese with some English: Safe Happy Travel Agency.
“I didn’t know him well. Just a little from the cafe.” Faith turns in her seat so now she’s facing me and the Mercedes. I glance at her silhouetted profile.
She explains that over the last year or so, she often saw Alan hunched over his laptop, intent, sometimes even muttering to himself, not with insanity but intensity. One day, a few months ago, when they were at adjoining tables, he struck up a conversation by offering to bet her a doughnut that he could guess what she wanted to do with her life.
“It was funny, not sleazy like you sometimes get.” Left unsaid: she often gets hit on. “His guess was that I wanted to be a meteorologist.”
“Not a bad line.”
“I bought him a doughnut. My first mistake.”
I turn to look at her and find her looking right back. Shade darkens the left third of her, as if lit by a bad movie director wanting to suggest her inner darkness.
“You want to predict the weather?”
Her face softens. She blinks and smiles with her cheeks and eyes, her lips barely moving. Even in dim light, they look full and pink.
“I filled in on Channel 4 for a few weeks when the meteorologist was sick. Alan also guessed that I wanted to be a singer, which was close too. I wanted to be an actress. It kind of took it out of me when I did a few commercials for bug spray. I was supposed to be a dispirited housewife with a cockroach infestation.”
“Faith. .”
“He called me Valerie.” She explains she reminded him of a younger Valerie Bertinelli, the actress from One Day at a Time. She says Alan liked the reference because it reminded him of his efforts to stay sober-one day at a time.
“So you are an actor.”
“A hobbyist. I make my living as a transition specialist.”
“Explain.”
“I help people make transitions-one job to the next, one life situation to the next. It’s a bit of a New Age gig but it paid well when things were booming here. People wanted to assess their options and make sure that they made the right choice to fit their goals. When the economy tanked, I helped people come to terms with lowered expectations.”
“Paid well, past tense.”
“Things aren’t booming. In fact, they’re so dead that people can’t afford to cope with lowered expectations.”
“You liked him. Alan?”
She clears her throat. She pulls her jacket closed. “He seemed to know a lot about me. He was uncanny that way.”
“So you followed me because he was nice and geeky and lonely and needed a favor.”
“No. Because he promised to pay me one thousand dollars and I need the money. And he kind of freaked me out, because he knew so much about me. He presented both opportunity and a subtle kind of threat; I can’t fully explain it, but it’s the truth. I’m obviously not getting paid and I don’t care. I’m sorry this happened, that you got hurt, and I’m very sorry that I just want this to all go away and to not have this man bothering me, or. .” She pauses, and then stops altogether.
“What’s an Earth clown?”
“What?”
“Kathryn Gilkeson? Who is that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Alley.”
I’m looking across the street from the Mercedes. There is a butcher’s shop closing up for the day and a Chinese bookstore already closed. Between them is an alley with a man standing at its entrance, cupping his hands around his mouth, maybe blowing in them to keep warm. Next to the man on the side of the alley is a sign that is too distant for me to read, if it’s even in English.
The man scopes the street and takes two steps backward and disappears into the alley.
We fall into silence. I want her to continue the story but it feels like she’s said her peace or maybe we’re just tired or comfortable. Five minutes pass, then ten, more. I’m wondering why I’m not cold. I should be cold but I know concussion can mess with internal temperature regulation. We watch our buzzard. The already thin sidewalk traffic thins further. The butcher turns off his light.
I’m shaken by a buzzing noise. Faith reaches into a small purse and pulls out a phone. She looks at the bright green-and-white square of the screen, her caller ID. She clenches her jaw. She hits a button, sending the caller to voice mail. “It’s almost eight.” She puts the phone back in her purse. A second later, it buzzes again. She ignores it.
“Do you need me to step outside so you can take a call?” I’m looking at her in the pinkish light from the neon sign on the dessert store.
She cocks her head. “You’re kind.”
She leans forward, pauses, then she kisses me on the cheek. I’m flooded with a sensation that moves from the top of my concussed skull to my Achilles’ heels ragged from basketball and then zips up and settles in my loins. She pulls back, reorients slightly, and she kisses my lips, lightly, like the brush of a fingertip.
“I trust you.” Her words hover just above a whisper.
“Faith. .”
“I just wanted to get that out of the way.”
But I’m thinking about something else. The buzzard is out of the car and walking to the alley.
22
We watch in silence as he disappears into the alley.
; “Faith, may I wax melodramatic?”
“Wax.”
“It’s now or never.”
“That is melodramatic. But what’s it mean?”
I’m surprised to hear myself laugh. It’s both a real emotion and a desire to connect. I shouldn’t. She’s a gigantic question mark with full lips and deep eyes and no obvious medical condition.
From my pocket, I pull the pre-paid mobile phone that I purchased an hour earlier. I tell Faith my plan: I’m going to walk by the Mercedes and put the phone onto the car windshield. When the man returns, he’ll find the phone and we’ll give him a call and try to elicit some information. Who is he? What does he want?
“That’s the plan?” Faith sounds surprised, in an underwhelmed kind of way.
I half nod.
“What’s to keep him from throwing away the phone or ignoring our call or hearing your voice and tossing it?”
I don’t say: 1) I want him to feel like he doesn’t have all the cards; and 2) her questions are all spot-on and I don’t have the answers.
Instead, I say: “Now or never.”
She puts her hand on my arm. “What am I supposed to do?” Implicit in her question: what is she supposed to do if something happens to me?
“Get in the driver’s seat in case.”
“This makes no sense.”
From a compartment between the seats, I snag a black pen and reporter’s notebook and stuff them into my back pocket. I step out of the car into a light drizzle, San Francisco mist. It’s momentarily refreshing, then chilly. I consider opening the trunk to grab a sweatshirt but there’s no time. I walk a few steps, then jog toward the Mercedes, hewing as close as I can to the buildings, imaging somehow I’ll become invisible if I can blend into the grayish stone exteriors of Chinatown in the dark.
As I jog, I’m squinting at the mouth of the alley. But for a second, I see the inside of my brain. I imagine blood pouring into the sensory cortex, supporting my vision, and dopamine cascading into my nucleus accumbens, my pleasure centers, giving me a rush. I see the little white spots on my frontal lobe, the concussion, which might explain the slightly blurred vision. Or maybe that’s just an effect from the drizzle.
I am standing at the Mercedes. I whip out the pre-paid Motorola phone from my front pocket, nearly fumble it, have to bend down to catch it. I stand, look at the mouth of the alley. No buzzard sighting. No one else on the street.
I glance at the intersection where I’ve parked. I can’t see my car. I squint. Blood to sensory cortex: where is my car?! Then I see it, just where I left it. Had it disappeared, ghost-like, then reappeared, or was my brain flickering on and off?
I pull out my iPhone. I scramble through dozens of apps I’ve downloaded; a game where I shoot birds at buildings, a program that turns my phone into a mirror, a calorie counter. I find the flashlight app. I click it open. Lights blasts from the phone. I direct it to the passenger window and look inside the Mercedes. On the leather passenger seat, there sits a to-go container, open, half-eaten onion rings inside. Intrepid investigator. I’ve discovered the reason he has oily skin. In the cup holder in the center console, there sits a pack of menthol cigarettes. The backseat is empty. I peer at the mouth of the alley. It’s empty too.
Frontal lobe to Nat: Do something and then run away?
I place the pre-paid phone on the passenger-side windshield. I look at it, gathering drizzle. I lift the slippery wiper blade and place the phone underneath. On an impulse, I put my hand on the passenger side door handle and pull up. It’s unlocked. I open it, causing the inside light to go on. I snag the damp phone, wipe it on my shirt, toss the phone inside, onto the onion rings. I start to close the door. My eye catches a receipt taped to the outside of the food box. I pull it off. Scrawled on it, “buffalo burger, onion rings.” Circled in pen, the word “Bill.” The buzzard has a name.
“Buzzard Bill,” I mutter.
I peer at the alley mouth. I sense movement. The light is changing, playing with the shadows, something or someone emerging from the shadows. In one motion, I push the car door shut and fall to the ground. Thankfully, the car’s inside light goes off instantly.
I don’t know if the movement was Buzzard Bill, or someone else, or my imagination. Where to escape? I look at the sidewalk behind the car. It’s unlit but wide open. Exposed. I look to the front. Same bad news, and then some worse news. At the intersection ahead, I see taillights ignite. My taillights. The Audi pulls out and disappears to the right. Faith has left. Again. For good reason this time? Did she see Buzzard Bill and freak? Did she get a mystery call?
I look directly behind me at the darkened stairwell with shiny, wet steps that bisect the storefronts.
Crab-like, I hustle to the stairwell. I press up against the wall. At the stairwell, I pause; if I slink up the stairs, I’ll be fully exposed. I listen to my heartbeat, fast and regular, comforting me, weirdly, a reminder that I’m largely intact. I take two slow breaths to slow down my heart and my mind.
I hear the Mercedes door open. It closes hard and heavy. Buzzard Bill is in a hurry. I hold my breath and crab-scamper up the stairs. The engine turns over. Car in gear, tires on wet pavement, he’s out.
I remember the reporter’s notebook in my back pocket. Hadn’t I planned to write down the license plate? I feel self-recrimination that, suddenly, dissolves into laughter. A momentary outburst. Relief. I’m safe. More neurotransmitters flooding my brain. Neurological goodness. What would be great would be to feel this way all the time-the feeling of escape, and completion, but without the near-death antecedent.
I glance around. I’m on the top step of the entrance to an apartment building. An intercom system hangs just below eye level with a list of residents, lit dimly from an internal light. Most of the names are in phonetic Chinese, like Chu, some with native characters.
The rain has picked up. I hope the buzzard has reached for a soggy onion ring and found a mysterious phone. He’s deciding whether to pull over and find something telling about it-the owner, address book-or to toss it out the window, maybe figuring it for some kind of surveillance device that tracks his whereabouts, or, alternatively, gunning it back to Chinatown to find whoever put it there.
I’m also trying to imagine what happened to Faith. Why not ask? I pull my own phone from my pocket. I call her. The phone rings and rings. No answer. I leave a message. I contemplate calling the pre-paid phone but decide it’s too soon. He may come right back here before I can get my bearings and make sense of this place.
The phone’s clock reads 9:10. I sit down. It’s quiet enough that I can hear the drizzle. I’m not sure of my next move, so it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the events of the last twenty-four hours:
A gangly, oily-headed man sits in the audience of my awards presentation, then hands me my phone. Had it really fallen from my pocket, or had he somehow taken it and tinkered with it? The next morning, he shows up at my office, trying to follow me and Faith. We evade him, then discover the corpulent corpus of Alan Parsons, the mountain man who nearly felled me at the subway. On his desk, the phone number for a woman with a dead daughter. And a second reference to February 15. Hours later, after I’ve met with still-living narcissist Sandy Vello, the man appears again, this time ostensibly drawn there following Faith.
Faith is beautiful and cautious, scared and confident, irresistible and unpredictable. Why did she kiss me?
And what does any of it have to do with Chinatown? There were Chinese characters on a piece of paper I found on the dead man’s desk. The words have something to do with computers, and so does Sandy Vello. Does it relate to a dead girl named Kathryn Gilkeson? And do all these roads lead to the alley across the street?
One way to find out.
It’s 9:15. I take deep breaths to let a few more minutes pass and make sure the street is as quiet as it seems, and to see if Faith has returned.
9:20. The street is quiet. My car has not returned. I’ve lost Faith.
9:23. I look a
cross the street, at a restaurant on the corner with a pair of enormous chopsticks hanging in the window. It’s a tourist trap, and an emotional one. I flash again on my fateful dinner with Polly, the night I associate with two fortune cookies changing the course of my life. I picture the waiter, his limp left leg, the first empty fortune cookie cracked like an empty egg, water condensed on the outside of Polly’s glass. She’s not sharing my Tsingtao; she’s pregnant. I picture the red tablecloth, damp around the bottom of the water glass. Polly’s smiling a sad smile. She says she wants to tell me something. But I can’t quite remember what she said, or how she said it. I grit my teeth. I look down at my phone.
9:28. Enough.
I stride onto the sidewalk, then across the narrow, empty street, my steps lit intermittently by storefront neon. I reach the mouth of the alley. On the wall next to it, I see the plaque I’d been unable to read earlier from a distance. On its top, Chinese characters. Beneath, a translation: CHINA-US HIGH-TECH ALLIANCE.
I can’t tell if it refers to the dark-windowed office to my immediate right, or something located in the guts of the alley.
I peer into the dark maw.
I see the red glow of a cigarette tip.
23
“Who are you?” The voice is accented, the “r” swallowed.
A hefty man steps forward. He’s half a head taller than me, square cranium that’s a bit too large for his body, short-cropped hair, flat nose consistent with his Asian DNA but squished to the right. The right edge of his upper lip looks crooked, a jigsaw puzzle. Big head, slightly exaggerated nose and mouth. I almost gasp from mild thrill. I’ve never in person seen a case of acromegaly, a chronic disorder caused by too much growth hormone.
“You walk like someone who has fame or money.” He reaches to his mouth, pinches the cigarette with thick fingers and flips it against the wall. “Are you famous? If so, I’d like to know you.”
“Not famous.” I half step backward.
“Then it’s the other option.”