Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51

by Humans (v1. 1)

  I only display all this erudition, of course, because of embarrassment over that slip of the tongue. I see that contact with humans is making me more like them.

  Well, the slip was a small one, quickly forgotten by Susan, and the main point of the conversation was accomplished. That is, to bring her confused tangle of feelings about Grigor Basmyonov out into the light, where she can begin to study them, accept their poindessness, and eventually distance herself first from the feelings themselves and then from Grigor. For how is Grigor to be brought to the necessary despair, if he is loved by Susan?

  That is the point.

  We drove on to the city, I guiding the conversation into shallower and safer waters, knowing she would return to the deeps herself, later, alone. We had dinner in the Italian restaurant I’d recommended, we walked the city streets in a rarely beautiful early autumn evening, and I escorted her at last to her apartment building, where I made no attempt to kiss her good-night but did ask her to come out to the movies with me the next night. She hesitated, but I gave her more assurances that friendship was all I was offering (or asking), and she at last agreed.

  Because, in fact, it isn’t enough merely to force her to see how hopeless her love for Grigor Basmyonov is. She craves an emotional involvement, while fearing a physical one (which makes the Grigor relationship ideal at this moment in her life, of course, a truth we’ve already successfully skipped past), so until she’s given an alternate target for her emotions she won’t abandon Grigor no matter how painful the situation becomes. Andy Harbinger is personable, intriguing, companionable, and absolutely non-threatening. Until she’s weaned from Grigor, Andy will have to be an ongoing presence in her life.

  Which is not at all the way it was supposed to be. Susan Carrigan is not one of my principals, but merely the proximate method to bring Grigor Basmyonov to the United States. She should be cut loose by now, she should be off living what’s left of her life, no longer my concern. But I’m not as familiar with humans as perhaps I should be; their use of free will is so frenetic it’s hard to make plans involving them at all. That Susan would so fiercely lock herself to the destiny of a doomed foreigner took me, I admit, by surprise. Alienation, foreignness, hopelessness, a growing estrangement from life, all of these were supposed to be working in Grigor now, moving him in the desired direction. Susan’s presence, her love, holds his despair at bay; it must be deflected.

  And then there are my other principals. Pami Njoroge is discontentedly performing sex acts on the hard surfaces of the paved-over lots near the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan, in the shadow of the Jacob Javits Convention Center, completely unaware who her pimp really is. (Ha ha, no, it’s not me, the joke is much better than that!) Maria Elena Rodriguez Auston is looking at the telephone number Grigor gave her before she left the hospital, wondering if she should call. (Yes!) Frank Hillfen is living alone in a furnished room in East St. Louis, Illinois, committing small burglaries, too afraid of capture to do more than provide himself a basic subsistence—he hasn’t ever even stolen enough money all at once to pay for transportation to New York City, his goal, where in any event

  I’m not ready for him—and feeding his growing sense of unjust persecution. (Everybody’s on the take; why does Frank get hassled all the time?) Dr. Marlon Philpott, in his new windowless laboratory at Green Meadow III, oblivious of the protestors outside the gate, pursues the elusive possibility of strange matter.

  And Li Kwan is arriving in New York; in chains.

  19

  Kwan did not see the arrival of the Star Voyager into the famous New York Harbor because the room they had locked him into was an interior space on a lower deck, where the vibrations of the engines could be felt on every surface but there was otherwise no sense of movement or progress; only a small metal cube, painted a cream color, furnished with a cot and a toilet and a sink, its recessed fluorescent ceiling light protected by wire mesh. This was the Star Voyager's brig, or as close as this frivolous vessel could come to having a brig. On most voyages, Father Mackenzie had told him, the brig remained empty except for the occasional overly drunk crewman, but when it became necessary to hold someone to be turned over to the authorities at the next port of call, this was the room.

  The authorities. The next port of call. New York City, United States of America. “I’ve heard,” Father Mackenzie had told him yesterday, long-faced, “that Hong Kong has already started extradition proceedings, even before you arrive.”

  “They want me in and out before the media can make a fuss,” Kwan had answered.

  “Of course. No one need know Li Kwan was ever in America at all.”

  “And you won’t help me, Father? You won’t call the New Tork Times?”

  But the priest had smiled his sad smile and shaken his head. “I can’t. It is not my right to endanger my order’s relationship with the company. I’m here as Norse American’s guest. I wouldn’t want to do anything to make them feel justified in removing the spiritual advisers from all of their passenger ships.”

  Everyone has his reasons. Kwan was understanding that now, with increasing bitterness. Probably even Dat had his reasons.

  Dat had not joined the crew until Rotterdam, three stops ago on the Star Voyager's endless goalless circumnavigation of the globe; Rotterdam, then Southampton, then Hamilton on Bermuda, and now New York. And it wasn’t until after Bermuda that Dat began to insinuate himself into Kwan’s life.

  From the beginning, lives ago in Hong Kong, Kwan had understood that he was not the only member of the below-decks crew whose papers and alleged history could not bear much scrutiny. There were a number of other crewmen who also chose not to go ashore at the many ports of call, who preferred the calm of their quarters to the gauntlet of beady- eyed immigration officials.

  Dat, when he arrived, immediately became one of these, and Kwan noticed him, during the layover in Southampton, reading comic books and drinking tea in the kitchen staff’s galley, but they didn’t talk then, Kwan being content with his own company and Dat apparently the same. A short slope-shouldered man of perhaps forty, with a narrow head and a hill-lipped mouth and heavy bags under his eyes, Dafs ancestors were apparently from somewhere in the Indochinese peninsula, Kwan couldn’t be sure where. He spoke Chinese with some kind of muddy accent, appeared to have a smattering of Japanese, seemed to speak no European tongue at all, and at times conversed with other Indochinese crewmen in a language Kwan didn’t know but the music of which was undeniably Asian.

  It was in Bermuda, two days ago, that this man made his approach. Kwan was standing at the rail on the kitchen staff’s small oval deck at the stern of the ship, watching the containerized supplies being loaded from dockside, when Dat appeared beside him, gesturing at the outsize shiny aluminum boxes being winched through the bulwark opening below. “That’s the way to get off,” he said, in his poor accent.

  Kwan frowned at him. “Get off?”

  “The ship,” Dat explained. “I’m getting off this ship in New York.”

  “You are?”

  “My own way,” Dat said, and nodded at the containers again.

  Kwan also hoped to leave the ship in New York, but hadn’t yet found that mythic American girl who would smuggle him ashore. In fact, American girls were the hardest for him to pick up on his Tuesday night excursions above; they seemed to have more tribal consciousness than other people, to be the most determined to stay with their own kind.

  Intrigued, wondering if Dat had any useful ideas (but already a little distrustful, if not quite distrustful enough), Kwan said, “Use the containers, you mean? How?”

  “Inside one. They come on full,” Dat explained. “Food and drink and all those shop things, T-shirts and all that, and the drugstore things, all inside those containers. And when they’re empty, they go off again. Many of them will go off in New York.”

  Kwan looked down at those containers with new interest. But then he said, “Why tell me?”

  “Why not?” Dat shrugged, and took a si
ngle crumpled cigarette from his T-shirt pocket, didn’t light it, and watched his fingers turn and smooth and straighten the cigarette as he said, “You don’t have any reason to betray me. And a man has to talk sometimes, has to hear his own thoughts, has to know he isn’t crazy.”

  Kwan felt immediately sympathetic. It was true, isolation in the middle of hundreds of people was perhaps the worst solitude of all, as he had learned before being rescued by those metal ladder rungs on the wall behind him. Other people cluster into purposeful groups, supporting and explaining and justifying one another, moving through life in these long- or short-term alliances, their own ideas and conclusions constantly being tested in discourse. The loner has only himself to talk to, only himself to listen, only himself to judge if he’s behaving sensibly or not. If Dat were planning a dangerous move, a desperate move, the need to tell his plans to another human being, to get a response of some kind, could be overwhelming.

  So Kwan gave him a response, and it was an honest one. “You’re not crazy. It’s a fine idea.”

  Dat gave him a quick gratified smile, the expression battling unsuccessfully with his doleful features, those heavy lips and pronounced bags beneath the eyes. “I watched at Southampton, and I been watching here,” he said, “and nobody looks inside the empty ones. Because that whole storage section down there is locked up. Not many people can get in there.”

  “That’s right,” Kwan agreed.

  “You can,” Dat said, and looked at him sidewise.

  Ah, so that’s what it was about. (Or what it seemed to be about at that time.) Kwan, having gained a litde seniority, even in the world of kitchen slaveys, had a few weeks ago been “promoted” from the deep sink filled with filthy pots and pans. His work now was in fact somewhat easier, involving nothing more than mopping and scrubbing and carrying, which meant that on the job now he had a key ring hooked to a trouser loop, containing keys to the cleaning-supplies closet, the walk-in freezer, the uniform and linen lockers, and the large echoing storage space in which the supply containers were kept, as they were gradually emptied. At the end of each shift, Kwan had to turn in those keys to his boss, a fussy suspicious Ecuadorian named Julio; no last name ever offered.

  In theory, then, Kwan could, on his last shift before New York was reached, unlock the door to the container area and permit Dat to slip through. But why should he? “That would be very dangerous for me,” he said. “If you were caught—”

  “Then it would be dangerous for me,” Dat interrupted. “Not you.”

  “They’d want to know who let you in there,” Kwan pointed out. ‘They’d promise to go easier on you if you told, because the person who let you in there would be more worrisome to them than someone just trying to jump ship.”

  “I wouldn’t tell,” Dat said.

  “Why not?”

  Dat frowned, his whole face taking on the aspect of his baggy eyes and drooping mouth. His fingers fidgeted with that battered cigarette, turning it and turning it, until all at once the cigarette slipped from his grasp and fell, almost floating, down toward the slow-sliding shiny aluminum containers, but missing them and landing instead on the dirty asphalt. “Ah, my cigarette,” Dat said, with nearly unemotional fatalism, watching it fall, then gazing dolefully downward, like a basset hound, becoming a comic figure.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Kwan said, finding Dat more individual and human now, but no more likable.

  But then Dat gave him another of those sideways looks, and a little smile, and said, “Of course I’d rat on you. You’d do the same for me.”

  “I might,” Kwan agreed, taken by Dafs sudden frankness.

  “But what,” Dat said, “if we went together! That way, we help each other and rely on each other, and if we’re caught we’re both caught. What I mean,” he said, suddenly more animated, turning to face Kwan, one narrow elbow on the rail beside him, “you can let me in during your shift. Then you turn in your keys, and when everybody’s away you knock on the door and I let you in. Or don’t you want to get off this ship?”

  That last was said with such absolute assurance, with such conviction that Dat already knew the answer, that Kwan didn’t even bother denying it. “Of course I want to get off the ship in New York,” he said. “If I can do it and not get caught. But inside one of those boxes? We don’t know what happens to them after they get taken off.”

  “Yes, we do,” Dat said, and pointed far off to the right, where dozens of the containers stood crammed together, glinting in the sunlight. “They get put out of the way,” Dat said, “until they’re gonna get used again. We go out in the box, we feel when it stops moving, then we wait until dark and climb out and we’re in America.”

  “It’s that easy?” Kwan asked.

  “We’ll never know till we try,” Dat said, and smiled in a lopsided way, and put out his bony-fingered hand. “Li, isn’t it? Do we have a deal?”

  Kwan had kept his name; it was common enough to serve as its own alias. “Yes, it’s Li,” he agreed, and after a brief pause he took Dafs hand. “And it’s a deal.”

  * * *

  The interior of the container was cold, and smelling faintly of old cardboard, and not entirely airtight or lightproof; grayish yellow lines of illumination defined the edges of the frontopening panel Kwan had used to climb inside. He had nothing with him in this box but a small duffel bag containing one change of clothes and his notebook and pencils; he sat on that and waited. He was alone, Dat having explained that the weight of both of them in one container would draw attention when the containers were winched ashore so he had gone off to hide in another one. But Kwan didn’t mind that; in fact, it was better. He had no interest in becoming Dafs partner or friend, once they left the ship, and presuming they were successfully to get past whatever gates or guards or locks there might be between the dock and the free world.

  The Free World.

  Kwan had been in the container less than an hour, seated on the small duffel, back against the cold flimsy-seeming side of the aluminum container, becoming both bored and sleepy but nevertheless feeling a kind of slow deep contentment, when noises alerted him. The storage area door had been opened. Feet strode loudly on the metal floor. Then silence. Then a voice:

  “Li Kwan!”

  Kwan froze inside the box, silent, barely breathing. His heart was a fist in his chest, massively clenching.

  “Li Kwan! We know you’re in there! Come on out! Goddamn it, don’t make us search every goddamn container!”

  The voice was irritable, weary, but not actively hostile or angry. It was just a ship’s officer faced with an annoying duty. They know we’re here, Kwan though, not yet realizing the significance of the fact that his was the only name called. But there was no point trying to hide any longer. With a sigh, wondering how much trouble he’d made for himself, Kwan stood, picked up his duffel, and opened the front of the container, letting the panel swing out and down on its hinges. “Here I am,” he said, to the three aggravated uniformed Caucasians, who turned to him with identical frowns of exasperation.

  * * *

  Dat had betrayed him, turned him in, there was no question about that. Dat, more than that, had set him up in the first place, suggested the scheme, inveigled him into it, and then betrayed him. Kwan had plenty of time to think about that in the Star Voyager's small cream-painted brig. What wasn’t clear was why Dat had done it.

  Kwan had discussed that with Father Mackenzie, when the man had come in shortly after the arrest, introduced himself, and asked if there was anything he could do. ‘Talk to me,” Kwan had said, and Father Mackenzie had been happy to do so—he didn’t seem to have much to occupy himself on the ship, except to be on call for providing the last rites to Roman Catholic passengers who succumbed to strokes or heart attacks while at one or another of the nine meals offered every day— and when the conversation had turned to Dafs betrayal Father Mackenzie had made one tentative suggestion that just might be the truth. “He could be an agent of the Chinese government,
” the priest said. “I’m not saying he is, but he could be. Sent to make sure you never get into a position where you can publicly embarrass China.”

  “But I still can, Father, if someone would call the New York Times as soon as we arrive. If you—”

  But no. Father Mackenzie couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Bravery and action were impossible to him. He was just a small decent man, doing what he could.

  Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh, they’re all decent men.

  Shortly after Father MacKenzie left, the vibration of the engines stopped. We’re here, Kwan thought bitterly. The free world.

  But then nothing happened for another hour. Kwan paced the floor in the small room, increasingly nervous. Was this really going to be the end? The priest had said that Hong Kong was already seeking extradition. Hong Kong, not China. It would be harder for China to take him away from American jurisdiction, but Hong Kong could do it easily. Put together some trumped-up criminal charge—nothing political, not at all—and the Americans would see nothing wrong with sending a petty thief or arsonist or blackmailer home to a fellow democracy for a fair trial.

  Sinking deeper into bitterness and gloom, Kwan paced the narrow floor, rubbing his hands together, pushing his fingers through his thick hair, biting his lower lip. Thoughts of his own death crowded in on him, the dog’s death he’d be given, death equally through humiliation and a bullet. After all this.

  He stopped when he heard the grating noises of the door being unlocked. He was facing the door when it opened and three uniformed crewmen entered, these Caucasian faces impersonal, showing nothing at all. “Your escort’s here,” one of them said. ‘Time to go.”