Chasing the Monkey King

by D. C. Alexander

  “No, old White Dog finally gave up the ghost. Timing belt broke. Trashed the engine.”

  “So what are you driving now? Wait—I’ll take a stab. Former DJ, former drug dealer, clubber, living in his parents’ basement. Poser. Clothes horse. Exotic ancestry. Let’s see. If you made a little more money, you’d be driving a BMW 3-series. But you’re doing bit contract work. So I’m going to go with a Honda Accord with some sort of ridiculous aftermarket spoiler and probably a corny blue LED light decoration in the rear window or on the license plate. Trying to make your car look like KITT.”

  “KITT?”

  “Come on, Wallace. The car with artificial intelligence from Knight Rider? Eighties TV show starring David Hasselhoff?”

  “Yes, Lars. I remember Knight Rider, thank you.”

  “So did I nail it?”

  Zhang looked mildly irritated. “They teach you how to do that in racial profiling class back at redneck police academy?”

  “Ha! I nailed it, didn’t I?”

  “Ass.”

  “So you’ll do it, right? You can use that $5,000 to tint your car’s windows.”

  “They’re already tinted.”

  “Of course they are. So?”

  “It’s a hackneyed plot.”

  “It’s a what?”

  “This whole thing. It’s unoriginal. Former lawman, his life a mess, looking for redemption or whatever? I can get 20 different movie versions of that on my TV right now, on-demand, without so much as getting off my couch.”

  “Redemption? I just want the money, Dr. Freud.”

  “Only cartoon characters have singularity of motive.”

  “And maybe a little change of scenery,” Severin added.

  “That’s it? Private investigators are supposed to be driven by a unique sense of justice or whatever.”

  “Where are you getting that?”

  “I took a creative writing class that covered the attributes of the major mystery subgenres. Hard boiled. Police procedural. Cozy. That sort of thing.”

  “You gonna be a mystery writer?” Severin asked before tipping his glass back and finishing the last third off his beer.

  “Nah. There’s no money in it.”

  Severin half slammed his empty glass down on the table. “Alright. Quit playing hard to get. Are you in or not? It’s not like you have anything else worthwhile going on, right?”

  Zhang gave him a long stare. “Sure. Why not?”

  “Why not, indeed. With me leading the way, what could possibly go wrong?” Severin said with a grin. “Good. I’ll book you a ticket to D.C. With any luck, we’ll stumble across what we’re looking for there. Then we won’t even have to go to China. Speaking of which, do you have a valid passport?”

  “Of course.”

  “Bring it by my place, and I’ll mail it with mine to an express service that can get our Chinese visas on an expedited basis, just in case we do end up having to go.”

  “I’ll get it to you today.”

  “So there aren’t any issues with you going to China?”

  “Because my folks were émigrés? No. Word in the expat communities is that the Chinese government doesn’t really give a crap anymore. And I was born here anyway. They shouldn’t have anything against me.”

  They left the brewpub, walking down the sidewalk until they came to Zhang’s car—a lowered, white Honda Accord with an aftermarket spoiler and an LED light array clearly visible through the rear window.

  “Good lord, Wallace. Next Christmas, I’m going to get you a custom license plate that says douchebag.”

  “There’s a limit of seven characters for vanity plates.”

  *****

  Going back over the State Department report at his apartment that evening, Severin noted that the Commerce Department investigator who disappeared along with Kristin Powell was a young man named Bill Keen. Using nothing more than Google and a couple of internet social media networking pages, Severin was able to track down a phone number for Keen’s widowed mother in Minneapolis. He asked the usual battery of questions. Was her son in any sort of trouble that she was aware of? Did she know of anyone with any antipathy toward him? Did he owe anyone money? Could she think of anything unusual about her son’s behavior or activities leading up to his departure to China? But the call was unproductive. “You know boys,” she’d said. “They never tell their mothers anything. I was clueless about his personal life.” Indeed, she didn’t know the names or phone numbers of any of his Washington, D.C. friends. All she had was a handful of names of his old high school and college friends, none of whom had been more than minimally involved in his life for many years. At best, he might have met a couple of them for a quick evening beer in one of those odd years when he’d even bothered to come home for Christmas.

  Then Keen’s mother, sounding lonely and grateful for the conversation, went on and on about her five cats, the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers hockey team, and the weather in Minneapolis, before at last offering a little bit more about her son. Prior to taking the job at Commerce, he spent nearly two years working as an engineer at a shipyard in Groton, Connecticut. Before that, he did a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy, in something called MASINT—measurement and signature intelligence—whatever that was. He also graduated with honors from the University of Minnesota with a commission via NROTC and a double major in Arabic and electrical engineering—an interesting combination. With a double major like that, how did he end up at the Commerce Department working on international trade investigations, Severin wondered?

  Severin gathered that the Keens had never been a terribly close-knit family. But with her husband long dead, and her son disappeared, the widow’s sense of loss, of profound loneliness, weighed down her every word. Severin knew the feeling. Her mention of Christmas took him back to that first Christmas after his parents were gone. None of his acquaintances had thought to invite him over. He had an aunt, an uncle, and two cousins back in Vermont, but he was the last known member of his family west of the Mississippi. And though he’d tried to mentally prepare himself for it, Christmas Day was an emotional black hole. He’d loaded it with non-stop activity. He went skiing up at Stevens Pass. He watched two movies at the local, tastelessly designed megaplex. And, when he finally had to bite the bullet and go home to his tiny apartment, he mixed himself a bunch of classic cocktails he’d never tried before—like the mint julep, Sazerac, and old fashioned—hoping the alcohol would soften the emotional pain he felt, or better yet render him incognizant, until the next day. Later, still unable to sleep, and at an entirely indecent hour, he went so far as to try to call two ex-girlfriends on the slim chance that they were sitting in their apartments and not off at happy family gatherings of their own. But neither picked up. Their phones rang and rang. Their voicemail messages played. And after each beep, Severin sat listening to the silence for a moment before hanging up. Nothing he did that Christmas came anywhere near to filling the void in his heart.

  EIGHT

  Three days later, Severin and Zhang flew from Seattle to Washington, D.C., their airliner banking this way and that as it descended through the winding, hair-raising upriver approach to Reagan National Airport, dodging invisible zones of restricted airspace along the way. Having never been to D.C., Zhang was glued to the left-side window as they passed Georgetown, the White House, and the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials while the pilots more or less followed the path of the Potomac River.

  By the time they checked into their concrete monolith of a hotel in Arlington, it was too late to get anything accomplished, so they settled down in the sterile, dark hotel bar for a few Manhattans and an unimpressive plate of hot wings before calling it a night.

  *****

  The next afternoon in the hotel lobby, Zhang, who was wearing thick glasses because he couldn’t find his contacts, was surprised to see Severin emerge from the elevator wearing a relatively stylish suit.

  “Wow,” Zhang said. “You clean up well.”

  �
��I’m glad I could surprise you.”

  “Go ahead. Let’s get it out of the way.”

  “Get what out of the way?” Severin asked.

  “You’re looking at my glasses. Go ahead and make some smart comment about all Asians being myopic or whatever.”

  “All I was going to say was that I appreciate your dedication.”

  “My dedication?”

  “To our job. It must be traumatizing for someone who’s as vain as you are to appear in public with those ridiculous Bill Gates glasses.”

  “I can’t find my contacts.”

  “So I assumed.”

  They headed for their rendezvous with the former U.S. Department of Commerce official who signed off on the State Department’s report, boarding a Blue Line subway train at the Rosslyn Metro station after walking down the staggeringly long but non-functional escalator. Every seat in the train car was taken, so Severin and Zhang had to stand, holding a floor-to-ceiling pole for balance as the train started moving. They passed under the Potomac River, crossing from Virginia into D.C. At the next stop, Foggy Bottom, a woman boarded who was clearly at least eight months pregnant. She grabbed the same pole Severin and Zhang were sharing and wobbled as the train jerked forward. Severin looked around, double-checking for a seat for her. All around them, the seats were taken up by perfectly able-bodied 30-something-year-old men, their noses glued to their smart phones and notebook devices as they pretended not to notice there was a pregnant woman standing in their midst.

  Severin scrutinized the closest of the seated men, and when he found the one he thought looked the most uptight, the one with the shiniest shoes and most ridiculously oversized and showy wristwatch—in this case, a Versace—he made his move. “Pardon me, sir. Would you be kind enough to let this pregnant woman take your seat?”

  The man met Severin’s eyes with a look that would freeze water.

  “Oh, of course,” the man said, rising and grabbing a handrail.

  Oh, of course, Severin repeated in his mind, having an inward chuckle over his long-held belief that oversized wristwatches were to D.C. what oversized pickup trucks were to the rest of the country.

  As the woman sat down, thanking the Versace guy, Severin muttered another degradation of Shakespeare: “So shines a good deed in a city of self-centered schmucks.”

  Zhang broke into a wide grin.

  “What was that?” Versace guy said, turning his eyes to Severin.

  “What was what?”

  “Did you say something?”

  “Did I say something?” Severin gave Versace guy a hard stare until Versace guy decided Severin wasn’t somebody he should challenge and looked back down at his smartphone.

  Severin scanned the faces of the other seated men. Having picked up on Severin’s vaguely menacing tone, they glanced at Versace guy, then at one another, and finally back up at Versace guy. And Severin swore that they were each acknowledging the shared telepathy he always suspected the tightest of Washington assholes had the power to send and receive. The presumed message: Sorry you lost your seat, sucker. But better you than me.

  As the train rumbled along its track, Zhang caught Severin eyeballing the other riders with a funny, almost disgusted look on his face. “What is it?” Zhang asked, under his breath.

  “All these people. I mean, look at them. The suits. The intensity. The ambition.”

  “What of it?”

  “Where does it come from? Why are we so different from them?”

  “You mean why are we such losers?”

  “Nice. Really, though. What’s it about?”

  “Power, grasshopper. A lust for power.”

  “I know that. I mean what drives it?”

  Zhang thought for a moment. “They have an above average fear of the dark.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing.”

  “An above average fear of the dark,” Severin echoed, shaking his head. “Whatever that means.”

  *****

  They got off the subway at the McPherson Square station and emerged on the surface in the heart of the capital. There wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy about the block they were on, as it consisted of nothing more than midrise office buildings that would have looked normal in any U.S. city. But as they walked down 15th Street toward the Old Ebbitt Grill, location of their lunch meeting, they crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and were afforded impressive views of tree-lined Lafayette Square and the block-long, Greek Revival-style U.S. Treasury building with its massive granite columns. They also caught peek-a-boo views of the White House, a mere two blocks to their right, as well as the headquarters for the U.S. Department of Commerce, a few blocks straight ahead of them.

  As they walked, Severin sensed the frenetic pace of the city. Cars racing this way and that, their drivers accelerating to close any gap between themselves and the cars in front of them. Cars at traffic lights jerking forward, inch-by-inch, in momentary false starts as their drivers sat in taut anticipation of sustained forward progress, of a light turning green. Car horns honking with unfathomable frequency. As he remembered from his time living there, D.C. seemed to encompass an almost constant state of urgency, of people bursting at the seams to get ahead of each other—in traffic, on Metro station escalators, in the ordering lines of the innumerable chain sandwich shops.

  “Why does everybody honk their horns so much here?” Zhang asked. “It’s insane.”

  “It’s a hostile town.”

  “Hostile to what?”

  “Anything that gets in its way.”

  “Charming.”

  “I’ll tell you, Wallace, this place is hard on people. Chews them up. Sucks the humanity out of them. A lot of folks can’t stay here long-term without blowing a gasket.”

  *****

  At the Old Ebbitt Grill, a smartly dressed host led them past the long mahogany bar, through a room decorated with old paintings, antique chandeliers, and even the mounted heads of animals allegedly shot by Teddy Roosevelt, back to a booth where Tracy Fiskar, former bigwig with the U.S. Department of Commerce, waited for them. Severin didn’t expect to like her. He thought of D.C. movers and shakers as a largely tiresome breed. Usually too self-absorbed and focused on whatever they were striving for to have any facets to their personalities that might be of interest to people who lived outside the Beltway. Overachievers with more flash than substance.

  “Ms. Fiskar?” She rose to shake hands, revealing her power suit. She had keen eyes, a sly grin, and an aura of boundless energy about her. No doubt the fevered pace of D.C. suited her to a T. “I’m Lars Severin. This is my associate, Wallace Zhang.”

  “Ms. Fiskar is my mother. Call me Tracy, please.”

  “Tracy then. Thanks for agreeing to meet.”

  “Hey, people in my line of work are always looking for a free lunch. Speaking of which,” Fiskar said, picking up a menu as they all sat down. “If you’re an oyster fan, they have local Chesapeake Bay oysters today. Some from Apalachicola too.”

  “No, thanks,” Severin said. “I prefer my oysters to come from water I can see through.”

  “Huh?”

  “Water that’s blue instead of brown.”

  “Ah, so you’re a West Coast oyster snob,” she said, smiling.

  “Unapologetically.”

  “Me too, truth be told. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Washington State.”

  “How refreshing. Us too. Federal Way for Wallace, La Conner for me.”

  “I’m from Tacoma.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  She laughed. “Yes, but that’s just one of many factors contributing to the inferiority complex that drives my type-A personality. Anyway, I see that there are some oysters on today’s list that come from Maine. They have clear water, don’t they? Wallace? You in?” Zhang gave a nod. “Two dozen?”

  “Works for me,” Zhang said.

  “Dirty martinis?” she added

  “Marry me,” Severin said.

  They made a bit of
small talk about the weather and what new exhibits at the Smithsonian they should see while in town before their drinks and large tray of shucked oysters on crushed ice arrived.

  “So, how are you two involved in this again?” Fiskar asked.

  Severin grinned. “It won’t sound any more plausible than it did when I told you over the phone. Not to me, anyway.”

  She gave Severin a good, long look, then shrugged her shoulders. “Alright. I’ll take it on faith. I guess if you have a secret evil agenda, it won’t be the first time someone tells me I told you so.”

  “This is D.C.,” Severin said. “So you never really know.”

  “I don’t know anything that’s classified, anyway,” Fiskar said. “So screw it. Fire away. I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “Well, as I mentioned on the phone, Kristin Powell’s family has asked us to cast a wide net. I suppose the threshold question, assuming she was killed, is whether or not it was random. If it wasn’t—if there was more to it—then the next thing we need is a better idea of the context. Given that you were the Commerce Department official who signed off on the State Department’s report, we figure you’re the one to ask.”

  “I can see how you’d think that,” Fiskar said. “But I’m afraid I’m going to have to probably lower your expectations a bit. For one thing, I didn’t know Kristin Powell or Bill Keen personally. I knew of them. And I’m sure we attended some of the same meetings. But it’s a big administration, and I really only knew the people I worked with every day. Another thing is that my signature on the State Department report was, unfortunately, nothing more than a formality. It might as well have been a rubber stamp that said Commerce acknowledges receipt of report and deems it satisfactory, regardless of content, because it doesn’t want to make waves. I wasn’t involved in the investigation, wasn’t privy to anything special, and nobody was interested in my genuine opinion of the substance of the report. They didn’t so much as give me leeway to correct the State Department agents’ crap grammar and spelling errors.”