Lone Wolves

by Chesbro, George C. ;

  “She is our sister,” the Chinese in the middle, a husky youth with a tiny spider tattooed on his forehead, said in unaccented English, his tone low and menacing as he glanced in turn at the paramedics, the policeman, and Veil. “We became separated. We will take her now.”

  The Hispanic said hesitantly, “Your sister’s just had a baby here on the platform, mister. It’s October, and it’s cold. They both need to be taken to a hospital, cleaned up, and looked after.”

  “She doesn’t need a hospital,” the albino said, stepping around the gurney and reaching down to take the trembling woman’s baby. “We’ll take care of her.”

  “I think not,” Veil said in a flat tone, blocking the youth’s movement by reaching out and planting his left palm firmly on the husky man’s chest. He gently but firmly twisted his right wrist free of the woman’s grip, and then straightened up, keeping his left palm on the Chinese youth’s chest. The Chinese was pressing forward with all his weight as he glared at Veil, baring his clenched teeth and making low, guttural sounds in his throat. The albino and the third youth, a man in his late teens or early twenties with a pockmarked face, were moving to flank and press him toward the edge of the subway platform.

  The policeman moved closer to Veil, said quietly, “These guys are Shadow Dragons, buddy, and we’re right on the border of their turf. As a rule of thumb it generally works out best for everybody if the Chinese are left to take care of their own affairs. They say this woman is their sister, maybe we should let them take her and the baby.”

  “I think not,” Veil repeated in the same even tone, meeting the hate-filled gaze of the Chinese pressing against his hand at the same time as he tracked the movements of the other two with his peripheral vision. “They’re not her brothers. Look at her; she’s terrified. We’ll get her and her baby to a hospital, then find an interpreter to tell us what she wants.”

  Suddenly the youth in front of Veil reached into the right pocket of his satin jacket and withdrew a box cutter, which he used to slash at Veil’s exposed wrist. But Veil’s left arm was no longer in the space between them, and the razor sliced nothing but air. The sudden and violent movement caused the youth to lose his balance and lurch sideways. Veil stepped behind him, grabbed the back of the youth’s jacket and his belt, whirled him around once, and then released his grip, sending the Chinese hurtling through the air like some unwieldy human discus. The youth landed on his face and chest, skidded a few feet, then lay still.

  The policeman reached for his gun as nunchaku sticks and a knife suddenly appeared in the hands of the other two youths.

  “You won’t need that,” Veil said to the policeman as he quickly stepped away from the woman and out into the center of the platform to give himself more room. “This is just a friendly discussion about proper health care.”

  The youth with the nunchakus attacked first, the two hardwood sticks connected by a chain a blur as he whirled them in intricate patterns in front of his body and over his shoulders. Veil spun away from the first strike, at the same time slipping out of his leather jacket, shifting his weight, and delivering a sidekick to the solar plexus of the knife-wielding albino, who had rushed in on his left flank. The breath exploded out of the albino in a great whoosh before he doubled over, grabbed at his stomach, sank to his knees, and began to retch.

  Obviously startled by Veil’s quickness and skill, the pockmark-faced youth hesitated just long enough to lose his rhythm. Veil darted forward, swinging his leather jacket over his head and snagging the connecting chain between the nunchaku sticks. He yanked, pulling the sticks from the youth’s hands and catching them in the air. He tossed aside his jacket, and then began to twirl the sticks as he slowly advanced on the Chinese, whose face had gone ashen. Veil stopped next to a support pillar, beat out an intricate tattoo on the steel, and then casually tossed the sticks to the Chinese, who made no move to catch them. The deadly weapon fell at the youth’s feet, and then clattered away on the concrete. Then the youth bolted, darting in a wide circle around Veil and going to the albino, who was still on his knees and clutching at his stomach. The pockmark-faced youth pulled the albino to his feet, and together they went up the platform to help the Chinese with the spider tattoo, who was just regaining consciousness. The three of them disappeared up a stairway at the opposite end of the platform.

  “It looks like we’ll be using my health plan,” Veil said as he walked casually back to where the policeman, paramedics, and woman were all staring at him, wide-eyed.

  “The Shadow Dragons are a particularly nasty gang,” the policeman said to Veil. “They’re likely to come looking for you.”

  Veil shrugged as he helped the paramedics lift the woman and her newborn baby onto the gurney. “I’m easy enough to find.”

  The policeman narrowed his eyes as he studied the rangy but solidly built man with the glacial blue eyes and shoulder-length, gray-streaked yellow hair. “Your name Veil Kendry?”

  Veil glanced at the man, replied evenly, “That’s right.”

  “I’ve heard of you.”

  “I hope it was good.”

  “It depends on who you talk to. You’re a friend of the crazy dwarf, aren’t you?”

  Veil laughed, but abruptly reached out and grabbed the end of the gurney when the paramedics started to wheel it away. The woman was still staring at him, a naked plea for help in her limpid almond eyes. “Where are you taking her?”

  The two men glanced at each other, and the Sikh answered, “You may have a health plan, mister, but it doesn’t look like she does. She doesn’t even have a purse. We’ll take her to the clinic at Bellevue.

  “Take her to St. Vincent’s. It’s closer.”

  “We don’t have a contract with St. Vincent’s. They won’t—”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll pay.”

  The paramedics looked at the policeman, who nodded. “He’s a hotshot artist with big bucks. He’s good for it.”

  The Hispanic asked, “How are you going to pay, mister?”

  “Plastic. What else?”

  “What are we supposed to tell them when—?”

  “I’ll tell them myself. I’m coming with you.”

  The Hispanic nervously cleared his throat, said, “We’re not running a taxi service, mister. It’s against company policy to transport civilians who aren’t relatives of a patient.”

  Veil took his wallet from his pocket, removed the money from it. “I’ve got eight dollars and change. I’ll get you more if you stop at an ATM machine.”

  “Big bucks, huh?” the Hispanic said wryly, glancing at his partner, then down at the woman, who continued to gaze imploringly at Veil. Finally the man shrugged. “Come on, buddy. Keep your money. Mama here obviously wants your company, and I guess you’ve earned the right.”

  Throughout the short ride to the hospital the woman gripped Veil’s wrist with her free hand while Veil spoke to her soothingly in English. At the hospital, where he was known, he arranged to have the woman and her child admitted for postnatal care and observation. He left a credit card at the desk, walked to another part of the building, and then used an electronically coded key card to gain entrance to a private elevator that took him to the top floor. He exited, walked to his right and through a swinging door marked Sleep Research Laboratories. In a small, dimly lighted office on the right a woman with long blond hair and dressed in a white lab coat sat with her back to him as she monitored an array of instruments on a console before her and made notes on a yellow legal pad. Beyond her, behind a glass panel, three men and a woman lay sleeping on cots, wire leads running from their heads, arms, and chests.

  “Good day, Dr. Solow,” Veil said quietly, moving up behind the woman and placing his hands gently on her shoulders.

  “Veil!” Sharon Solow said without looking around. “What are you doing here? I thought you were going to the Whitney to supervise the hanging of your show.”

  “Something came up—or out, actually—and I had to take a detour. Since I was in
the neighborhood, I thought I’d drop in and say hello.”

  “I’m glad. I’ll be right with you. I want to notate this data while it’s fresh. I think I may have resonance here; all four subjects went into REM at virtually the same time.”

  “How’s the kid with the night terrors doing?”

  “Much better, thanks to you. He’s using the techniques you taught him to simply roll away from the dream and go back to Stage Two sleep, or dream himself someplace else. Most of the time he goes someplace else, probably because he knows you do that. He idolizes you.”

  “Where does he go?”

  “Disneyland, mostly.”

  “Sounds like a good choice to me. Free admission, and he doesn’t have to wait in line for the rides.”

  “Veil, what’s that smell?”

  “Probably blood and placenta.”

  Now Sharon Solow spun around in her chair, and her mouth dropped open when she saw the stains on his shirtfront and jeans. “Veil, what happened?!”

  He grinned. “I delivered a baby on the subway platform a little while ago. Mother and baby doing very well downstairs, thank you. But I need to get cleaned up before I go to the museum. I could have gone home, but I seem to remember I have a change of clothes here.”

  “You always have a change of clothes here, love,” Sharon said, squeezing his hand. “You go wash, and I’ll join you when I finish here.”

  Veil showered in the locker room reserved for the laboratory’s test subjects, then toweled off and started to dress in clean clothes. Sharon appeared in the doorway as he was slipping on a denim shirt. She came over and helped him button it, then kissed him. “Thank you, love,” she said softly.

  “For what?”

  “Just for being you. For being our baseline research subject and authority on vivid dreaming, and for helping all the other vivid dreamers who come here looking for help because they can’t handle it like you do. And, of course, for coming through the Lazarus Gate to save my life.”

  Veil smiled thinly. “It took me a long time to find a way to bring you back; you were in a coma for almost three years. To my knowledge, you and I are the only two people who have actually gone through it and come back. And you can never do it again. I couldn’t help you. You’d stay dead.”

  Sharon whispered, “I’m aware of that, Veil. No more machines and drugs. Ever.”

  “You miss the CIA funding?”

  “Do roosters crow in the morning? Of course I miss the CIA funding. But I don’t miss the CIA. We make do.”

  “And they still don’t know what happened?”

  “Not a clue. And they’ll never know—unless either you or I tell somebody, and I’m no more likely to do that than you are.”

  “Good.”

  “There,” Sharon said, helping Veil put on his sports jacket and plucking off an imaginary piece of lint. “That’s a great artist’s costume. Are we still on for dinner?”

  “For sure.”

  “See you later, love.”

  Veil arrived at the hospital at noon the next day with flowers and a basket of baby clothes only to be told by the nurse at the reception desk that the Chinese woman and her child were gone. As Veil stared at her uncomprehendingly, the nurse quickly added, “An elderly Chinese gentleman with a lawyer came for her this morning; they’d called the ambulance service to see where she’d been taken. The old man was very polite, and the lawyer had papers showing that the woman was his granddaughter.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  The woman behind the desk flushed slightly. “Well, the papers were in Chinese, but everything seemed in order.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Veil breathed, his eyes suddenly flashing blue fire.

  “Sir, I was with them when they talked to her.”

  “In Chinese?”

  “Yes, sir. But the woman offered no resistance. She seemed perfectly willing to go with them.”

  Veil sighed. “That nice old Chinese gentleman and his lawyer probably told her they’d bury her baby alive and kill her family in China if she didn’t go with them willingly.”

  The blood drained from the nurse’s face. “What?”

  “Never mind,” Veil said curtly, placing the clothing and flowers on the desk. “It’s too late to do anything about it. Give these to some other patient.”

  He returned to his loft and worked feverishly, trying to put the mother and baby out of his mind and center himself.

  Thousands of vultures of unspeakable cruelty and injustice circled the city day and night, and the fact that the wings of this particular dark bird had brushed his face did not mean there was anything he could do to track and bring it to ground and rescue its prey. The woman and her baby were lost, almost certainly untraceable, beyond his help.

  The attempt to blot out rage and memory with canvas and paint did not work, and he finally gave up the struggle. There were still debts that he owed, and he felt he did not have the right to refuse to at least try to repay them when the opportunity arose.

  In late afternoon he washed out his brushes and walked over into Chinatown to buy a bird.

  Veil dreams.

  He is Archangel, the CIA’s most efficient and ruthless operative in their secret war in Laos. He gathers intelligence by acting as liaison to the anti-Communist Hmong tribes in the mountains, but mostly what he does is hunt and kill the enemy. This is war, and so he is rewarded for his murderous bent and skills. But he kills not out of love for country, but for himself. Violence is a need. It will be many years before he learns to control the vivid dreaming that is at the root of his battle with insanity and finds both redemption and healing in painting his nightmares. Now it is only extreme violence that holds in check his personal demons and allows him to find rest in the savage dreamworlds of his nights.

  Despite the fact that he is constantly teetering on the edge of madness, he does not lack feelings of intense loyalty to, and even love for, the people of these mountain villages he has armed and fought with. Now he is particularly concerned about the safety of one particular tribe, for he has been spotted and recognized by the Pathet Lao on a trail close to the Hmong village. He kills four of the guerrillas and escapes from the others by leaping from a tall cliff into a raging river where he loses consciousness and floats downstream for some distance before finally being washed ashore. It is after nightfall when he regains consciousness. Dazed and cold, he nonetheless immediately begins the arduous climb up out of the gorge, for he knows that he must warn the villagers that they will be suspected of collaborating with Archangel, and all will be made to pay the price.

  He completes only half the climb before he leans back on a pillow of air, falls through space, and rolls away from the dream into deeper sleep. He has no need to complete the journey now, for he knows what he will find at the end. He has returned to the village many times before. He has come this far now only to take. the temperature of his soul and test his resolve, to see how far he will go in real time to atone for the past by trying to save another woman and her baby in the present.

  Veil arose at 5:30 A.M., washed and dressed, then cut up an old sheet to use as a shroud to cover the birdcage. He disguised himself, then picked up the cage, left the building, and walked the few blocks from his home in the East Village to the Delancey Street corner of Sara Delano Roosevelt Park on the western boundary of the traditional area of New York’s Chinatown.

  He hobbled on his cane into the park, then sat down on a bench at the southern end and watched from under the wide, floppy brim on his hat as other men, each carrying a shrouded birdcage, entered the park from all directions. They sat on the benches, some together and others alone, and as the sun began to rise and heat the day they carefully rolled the covers on their cages to one side, reenacting a centuries-old tradition. A lone bird began to sing, and soon it was joined by another, and another. Soon the air in the park was filled, filigreed, with the trilling of birds. There were calls and countercalls, and within the space of a few minutes it seemed as if
all the birds were singing the same song, improvising on a single melody.

  Veil rolled back the cover on his cage, but nothing happened. He bent over and looked inside the cage at his hua mei, a brownish song thrush with splashes of olive and gray that was found near the Yangtze River in China and in parts of Southeast Asia. The bird sat silently on its perch, staring back at Veil. Veil clucked and softly whistled a few times, but the bird steadfastly ignored him. Veil grunted and shook his head, and when he looked up he saw the man he had come to talk to enter the park. Veil waited until the silver-haired banker had chosen a spot to sit, and then he rose, picked up his birdcage, and hobbled over to him.

  “My bird will not sing,” Veil said quietly. “I thought perhaps you might tell me why.”

  The man, dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a blue windbreaker over a white sweatshirt, looked up, fixed Veil with his soulful brown eyes, and then frowned as recognition came. “Veil?”

  “Not my name, Chou. I don’t want anyone to know whom you’re talking to. You’re just having a conversation with an old man. Can you tell me what’s wrong with the bird?”

  The middle-aged banker hesitated, then pulled back the cover from Veil’s birdcage and looked inside. “First of all, it’s from Shanghai,” he said, a note, of distaste in his voice.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Its beak lacks the black traces found in the best birds, which are from Guandang Province. How much did you pay for this bird?”

  “Seven hundred dollars.”

  “You were cheated. A bird that has not yet picked up songs from other hua mei should cost no more than five hundred. What do you know about hua mei?”

  “Nothing, really, except I remembered that you and the others bring your birds to the park each morning to sing. It’s considered a virtuous hobby, and a distraction from vice.”

  “The birds won’t sing if they don’t eat well, and this one looks as if it has not been properly cared for. Without proper food, the feathers get dull, like this one’s, and the bird has low morale.”