The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  “Miss Brown, you had a comment?”

  I blinked and mentally replayed the last few seconds. By the time I started wondering if Dr. Osborne saw me as an easy victim, the speaker had already moved on to warning us about the dangers of hosting open houses alone.

  “No – no, I was just, uh, just trying to get my pen to flow.” I tapped it vigorously on the yellow pad to demonstrate and was rewarded by a dime-sized blotch of oily black ink. Damn! If that overflowed onto my lap or rubbed off on my hands, this beige linen suit was a goner. I tore off the page and started folding it up, very carefully.

  “I did,” said Carly, and I blinked in surprise. It wasn’t exactly standard procedure for her to come to my rescue in situations like this.

  “Miss Gordon?”

  “Oh, call me Carly.” She dimpled at the speaker and he blinked. That smile of hers was dazzling – at least until you noticed the slightly too-long incisors and began looking for the telltale trickle of blood.

  What? I never said I’m not catty. At least give me this much credit, I’m the same person on the surface as I am inside; I never pretended to be a compendium of all the virtues.

  “I just wanted to say,” Carly began, breathily, “how very wise you are to insist that a woman not try to show an open house on her own…”

  I’d thought that advice applied to all agents. But to be fair, women probably were more at risk than men in that situation.

  “It can be…” Her voice died down as though she found it impossibly painful to speak. “Trouble… I’ve learned that for myself.” Now she sounded as though she might start to cry.

  “Were there any aspects of that experience you’d like to share with the class?”

  “No – no, I just wanted to say that it’s not much fun being cornered.” She sighed deeply. “I hope no one here – no one else – has to learn that the hard way.”

  Christ, I hoped so too. Carly was still not my favorite person, but I’d never guessed that a trauma like that might underly her sometimes abrasive personality.

  I said as much to Davis when we were milling around during a very short lunch break – they’d advertised lunch as covered within the seminar cost, and then they brought in pre-packaged sandwiches and little airline-type bags of pretzels – and he laughed quietly. “Don’t waste too much sympathy. I was around when Carly had that ‘traumatic experience’ – we were both working for a local branch of 21 Realty then – and in her first version, she was royally pissed off because some guy who didn’t meet her standards had the nerve to ask her out. It didn’t become a frightening encounter with a pushy would-be date until a year later, and she’s been polishing it up and adding Gothic shadows and date-rape penumbras ever since then.”

  I stopped empathizing with Carly and switched over to describing interesting executions for her during the second half of the seminar. (What? No, of course I wasn’t writing those notes in English for anybody to read over my shoulder. I was writing French text in German script. I like my privacy.)

  Between Michael last night and Carly today, I felt as if a layer of my skin had been sandpapered off. Instead of joining the panelists and the rest of the class for a drink after the session ended early, I headed straight home. Aunt Georgia could lecture me about building a social life to build a client list some other day. Better yet, she could lecture Carly, who did everything by the book and still, to her puzzlement, didn’t bring in a lot more clients than I did. One of those things that convinced Carly there was a long-term misalignment in the Force, some dark powers denying her the success she deserved.

  ***

  Michael had nothing in particular against his landlady’s other tenant, Laura Jacobson, but he did feel that having to work around two unpredictable females with different and very fluid schedules – if you could even use that term for the way the women ambled through their days – created one of the more challenging environments he’d encountered in two years of finding unusual curios that Hank Henderson wanted tracked down. By contrast, infiltrating the cartels that had cornered a collection of pre-Columbian antiquities while trying to take over Phoenix had been positively restful. So had his undercover investigation of a corrupt police force in a California bedroom suburb, where some very ugly and very rare Chinese statuettes had fallen foul of their theories on civil forfeiture. In both those cases he hadn’t had to worry about hurt feelings or misunderstandings or any of that touchy-feely stuff. Try not to get caught, be prepared to shoot your way out of trouble, and remember that if you screw up you won’t live long enough to worry about it; that was the kind of assignment he felt comfortable with.

  Not so different from his time in the army, that way. Hmm. When he was discharged he’d vowed never to do that again. But had he unconsciously gravitated back towards what was familiar, the long periods of waiting interspersed with the quick violence?

  And was that what had appealed to the eccentric Henderson about him – the potential for violence? And if so, what the hell was he doing on a job that involved going through a girl’s lingerie drawers – or that would do so, if both the idiot females would just leave the house at the same time?

  It was the kind of question that hadn’t troubled him before, the sort of thing a man wouldn’t think about unless he’d been trapped for far too long in some female-dominated world where people sat around eating crazy mixes of ice cream flavors and analyzing their feelings and other people’s words in way too much detail. Had he really only been working this case for two weeks? This morning, while he cracked his knuckles and waited for Laura Jacobson to go somewhere so he could take advantage of Sienna’s being stuck in a day-long seminar… this one morning already felt like it had lasted a month.

  The blasted woman had slept so late, at ten o’clock he’d decided she was going to sleep all day and he might as well get on with searching Sienna’s room.

  At ten-oh-five, naturally, Laura started fluttering around, spilling coffee on her fluffy robe and raising a screech that had him pounding into the kitchen, ready to repel marauders. Then she’d had him holding the stained sleeve while she poured water on it, then she’d insisted on fixing him a cup of coffee to thank him for his help, then she’d perched on the kitchen table and explained how she never ever ate breakfast… while going through an amazing quantity of cold leftover pizza.

  For two more hours she’d driven him crazy by popping up here and there without warning. In Sienna’s room to borrow a crimson silk scarf, in the living room for an interminable rambling cell phone call ‘because the signal’s better here,’ then squeaking and disappearing into her own rooms when some long-haired musician clomped in.

  She’d gone back and forth between dressing to go out and arguing something about a band with the musician. The whole discussion was so loaded with phrases like “dancy vibes,” and “backbeat” and “interesting harmonics” that Michael didn’t even try to follow it; he just slumped against the headboard of his bed, playing a game on his phone and waiting for them to get on with it and go out to lunch.

  Preferably before dinner.

  Finally – after another interminable multi-party phone call in which apparently the whole band had to debate the virtues of three different Tex-Mex restaurants – Laura and her musician friend drifted out of the house, reminding Michael to be sure and lock up if he went anywhere because somebody might try to get in again.

  He promised faithfully to lock up against unauthorized entrants, and didn’t even feel slightly hypocritical in doing so. After all, he didn’t want Edward Osborne getting hold of that notebook Sienna was obviously hiding somewhere. Not first, anyway.

  Stealing from Sienna: that made him more uncomfortable the better he got to know her. Or maybe the real problem was, the better he wanted to get to know her. Here he was on one hand trying to get her to relax, let go of her skittish ways and trust him – and on the other, he was being about as low and untrustworthy as anybody could be. He’d thought of a compromise and prepared to implement it, but wasn�
�t sure that would salve his conscience adequately.

  Even that compromise, though, did require him to get his mitts on that notebook full of information in German script. Analysis of the scan fragment Henderson held suggested it wasn’t a standard-size American notebook, but something tall and skinny. Maybe a standard German size? And it was perfect-bound; one side of the scan showed the lines of stitching that held the narrow pages in place. So, an unusual little notebook, probably in an unusual place.

  He didn’t even have to pick the lock on Sienna’s bedroom door; she must have rushed off that morning without locking it. Maybe she never did lock it. He didn’t know much about her, did he? He pushed the door open, stepped inside softly – and his foot came down on a squashy thing that howled like a banshee, raked his ankle with a set of razor-sharp spikes, bounced off the far wall and landed on top of a tall bookcase from which it treated him to a series of menacing hisses.

  “What the fuck are you, cat, the demon guardian of the lady’s privacy?” Michael demanded sotto voce.

  The monster cat with the Welsh name didn’t answer him, but it did stop hissing. And in the silence he could hear an ominous dripping. Oh, hell. Apparently the blasted woman couldn’t just keep a glass of water beside the bed; she kept a huge bottle marked with hours of the day, as if drinking water were a homework assignment.

  And right now half of that assignment was puddling on the floor, while the other half soaked into the mattress. Chance that she wouldn’t notice anything: nil. Well, he’d worry about that later. First he had to set up his escape plan. He relocked the door behind him, so that he’d have a few seconds warning if she came back, drew the bolts on both bathroom doors and opened them so he could beat it out that way.

  He figured she was the kind of idiot who’d keep her gun under the pillow. If it got soaked he’d be that much ahead, but… No luck. No gun. He shoved the pillow out of his way, trying to ignore the hint of Sienna-and-perfume that it gave off, and slipped his hands between the mattress and box spring. No gun there either, but he felt something else – something flat, rectangular and rigid. Was this it? He drew out a battered composition book – tall and skinny, matching the dimensions they’d deduced from the scan fragment, with a mostly-green cover stained by unidentifiable substances. Flipped it open and nodded at the sight of a spiky handwriting filling the pages. A perfect match for the sample.

  Not bad! At the cost of a little blood and an adrenaline burst when that cat-monster exploded, he’d found his prize almost at once.

  Michael glanced at the low dresser beside the bed. Apart from the upset water bottle, it was covered with women’s trivia: bottles of scent and lotion, hairpins and creased ribbons, three kinds of combs, why did anybody need three combs with different sized teeth, for heaven’s sake? He told himself he was lucky not to have to search the dresser, Sienna was clearly a slob and he had already learned that the homes of people like that were the hardest to search unnoticeably. In place of a simple rule like “A place for everything and everything in its place,” they substituted a photographic memory for where they’d dropped every little thing, and heaven help you if you disturbed the arrangement!

  The drawers were probably just as much of a disaster as the top of the dresser, and he was lucky that he wasn’t forced to slide them open and fill his hands with silky lingerie and semi-transparent nightgowns like the one she’d been wearing that first night and, and, damn it! He was not having some kind of perverted fantasy about invading the privacy of a woman he barely knew. And who was unbelievably skittish about her privacy.

  Not.

  He took the notebook through the bathroom and into his own room, which got better light at this time of day, and where it was easier to focus. He stacked the cardboard boxes holding the rest of Koshan Idrisov’s possessions to make a convenient stand beside the side window, opened the notebook, weighed the corners of the pages down with his phone and car keys, and got to work with a very small camera adapted to low light conditions and capable of super-mega-pixel resolution. That had been a necessary investment; if he wanted Hank to accept photographs instead of the originals, he wanted to offer him superb images, not just cell phone snapshots.

  There was a daunting amount of material to photograph, and the job couldn’t be rushed. He was sweating lightly by the time he got to the last page, where the foreign writing trailed down across the paper as if the writer were dying. Perhaps he had been, at that; the provenance of this notebook was among the many things Hank had managed not to tell him about this job.

  Four-thirty. Not great, but not terrible. The seminar was supposed to end at five, and she had grumbled something about being expected to go out and be social with everybody afterwards. He probably had a clear hour, hour and a half before he needed to worry about her coming back. As for the Jacobson girl – given the degree of organization she and her friends had displayed earlier, they probably hadn’t even agreed on what to order for lunch yet.

  In actual fact, he had somewhat less than three minutes. But he didn’t learn that until he was bent over Sienna’s bed, shoving the notebook back into its hiding place, and the doorknob rattled.

  She said something under her breath, and he heard the key in the lock while he was still too many steps from the bathroom door.

  12. The wrath of Cath Palug

  Funny, I didn’t remember locking my bedroom door when I left for the seminar. I supposed I might have done so, though. Given how poorly I’d hidden that blasted notebook, locking the room would have been the smart thing to do. Darn it, I’d meant to put the notebook away in my gun safe, then it had slipped my mind. Maybe I’d been thinking about locking the gun safe and had locked the door instead? Maybe… I jiggled the key in the lock and tried hard to remember having done the same thing early this morning.

  I caught my breath as the door swung open. Now that I definitely did not remember from this morning. What the hell was Michael Ryan doing there? And behind a locked door, no less. Adrenaline shot through me, making my hands shake. This was like an instant replay of our first meeting. Only worse. This time he was in my room, not in a shared bathroom. There could be no good explanation for that. And this time my gun was in the safe where I usually kept it, on the far side of the bed. And on the far side of Michael.

  “What are you—” I started to croak. No sound came out. I moistened my lips and tried again. “What the hell do you think you’re—”

  “And cut it out, you damn cat!” he shouted. Apparently he hadn’t even noticed me coming in; he was standing with his hands on his hips, yelling up at a yellowish-gray fur shape on top of the bookcase.

  “Michael?”

  He started and then turned towards me. “Your cat,” he said, almost snarling, “just peed on my bed. When I tried to throw him out, he ran through the bathroom, jumped on your dresser and slid the length of it. Knocking all your stuff over.”

  He moved to give me a view of the dresser. I have to admit that considered in isolation, the top of the dresser looked a lot better than usual; no clutter.

  The clutter was distributed over a couple of half-open drawers, the rag rug on the floor, and a corner of my mattress that had apparently just chugged all the water I’d planned to drink that day before I woke late and rushed off without my super-bottle.

  I picked my way through the mess, retrieved some expensive cologne, and stoppered the bottle with its remaining quarter-inch of scent.

  “Sorry about your perfume,” Michael said. “I had no idea the damn cat was going to react that way.”

  “It’s okay,” I said absently, “Aunt Georgia gives me a bottle every Christmas. And I’m kind of tired of the scent anyway.”

  “Well… sorry about that, then because I think your room’s going to reek of it for a while. But I really can’t be expected to herd that cat!”

  My knees didn’t seem to have got the message that the emergency was over; they were still shaking. I sat down on the edge of the mattress.

  It squelched
. “How did it absorb all that water so fast?”

  “Damned if I know. Maybe this wasn’t Caps Lock’s first trail of destruction through the room.”

  “Cath Palug. I didn’t mean to lock him in,” I said slowly. “Maybe he’s annoyed about that. But I don’t see how he got into your room. I always keep the bathroom door shut and bolted.” Since Koshan had moved in, anyway. I’d moved Cath Palug’s litter box to the screened back porch where the washer and dryer stood so that I wouldn’t have to leave the bathroom door open for him.

  Michael shrugged. “Maybe you were in a hurry this morning, forgot. Look, no real harm done. Sorry I yelled at your cat and frightened him into a conniption.”

  Forgot to bolt the bathroom door?

  Forgot that I’d locked the bedroom door?

  I shook my head. These memory problems were beginning to worry me. I was forgetting things, losing track of time… I began wondering again about sudden headaches as a symptom of brain damage. Did people under thirty even get brain tumors? Should I make an appointment for an EEG? MRI? Anything? I wasn’t even sure what sort of test would be appropriate.

  The only thing that was clear to me was that Cath Palug had just created a major laundry chore. “If you’ll give me your sheets and quilt, I’ll wash them. And get you fresh ones.”

  He was looking at my face. Too intent; too close. “Is that part of the normal service? You do your tenants’ laundry?”

  I tried to laugh. It came out wobbly. “Only when my cat is responsible for the damage.”

  “Well… don’t worry about it right now. I’ve got some other stuff that needs washing, I’ll throw it all into the machine in a while.” He held out a hand to me. “You don’t look so good. I think you should have a nice cup of coffee with lots of sugar.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Something else sweet? How about ice cream?”