Her knees are pulled up under her chin, hair falling in a thousand ringlets over her shoulders and her arms. She is a silhouette, a child. In Saigon. In Chinatown.
“Rambo?”
“Yeah?”
“Talk to me.”
“Where the hell did she go?”
“Forget about it, will you? She’s just gone, just history.”
He does not know when Votolatto hangs up. But he knows that he listens to a dial tone for a long time before the earpiece starts bleating at him like a siren … and he throws the cell phone at a wall. It bursts with a crack into a hundred pieces. They flutter to the ground, silver feathers in the dark room.
When they tie up the Rosa Lee at the fish buyer’s wharf in Nu Bej, Michael, his father, and Tio Tommy are bleary eyed, but grinning at each other. They have been awake for thirty-six hours fighting their way home from Georges Bank with the twenty-foot seas of a freezing November gale eating at their stern. But now they are here. Safe and sound. With a slammer trip of cod aboard.
The former public defender opens the hatch on the main fish hold. He is wearing a thick, charcoal fisherman’s sweater and his yellow foul weather overalls, streaked with fish guts and blood. Flecks of snow swirl over the boat in the sharp northeast wind. “We going to be rich or what, Kenny?”
The fish buyer looks into the hold. It is nearly packed to the deck beams with ice and fresh cod. “Yeah, you can buy the moon. This must be your lucky day, Mo. DHL guy came this morning. You got a package in my office. You’re not going to believe this. The tracking label says it came from Vietnam.”
His father flashes him a squinty-eyed look.
He shrugs.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
A minute later he is walking down the wharf with a package the size of a shoebox in his hands. He can see his father watching him, but not watching him, as he and Tio Tommy supervise the lumpers unloading gray totes of ice and cod. So he walks away from the Rosa Lee to be alone with his hopes and fears. When he gets to the end of the wharf, he drops down on a pile of nets. Sits and looks at the harbor, the hurricane dike. The snow is coming thicker, starting to stick on the wharf, the boats, the rigging as he tears at the thick cardboard of the box.
Inside the cardboard, beneath the tissue paper that carries away in the wind, is a rectangular box about the size and weight of a brick, covered in light green silk. He pushes open the small ivory clasps. Inside there is something wrapped like a mummy in more tissue paper.
As he peels it away, he sees a face, then a torso, and finally legs. They are folded in the lotus position. It is a statue. Made of some kind of green stone, maybe jade. The Buddha. Its belly is round and full. And so is the chest. The breasts of an earth mother. The eyes almost sparkle in this face that spreads with a broad smile.
He is holding the Buddha in his left hand, trying to remember what it was that Brandy and Delta told Tuki about being old souls, about what old souls know, when his eyes see something that looks like it may be a picture. It is lodged in the bottom of the silk-covered box.
When he pries it out with his fingernails, he recognizes the rich colors of a Polaroid snapshot. There are a man and a woman in the picture. They are dressed in khaki shorts and white polo shirts, standing in front of a large stone pagoda. The man is tall, slender, black. He looks like Lou Gossett Jr. The person beside him is Tuki. Her hair is tied up on top of her head in a gold and black fountain of curls. She is holding the little green statue of Buddha in front of her in both hands like an offering. And she is grinning, huge, just like the man.
He thinks it is an amazing grin, coming out of the blue the way it does. Quite a pretty smile. It starts with her plum lips and straight white teeth, spreads to her proud chin. Two little dimples bloom on her cheeks as her eyes light up, full of discovery.
From somewhere in his chest, a voice sings about catching a midnight train. The snow now a warm rain on his cheeks.
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Published in Electronic Format by
TYRUS BOOKS
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
4700 East Galbraith Road
Cincinnati, Ohio 45236
www.tyrusbooks.com
Copyright © 2006 by Randall Peffer
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction.
Any similarities to people or places, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-3235-4
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3235-1
This work has been previously published in print format by:
Bleak House Books
an imprint of Big Earth Publishing, Inc.
Print ISBN: 978-1-932557-19-9
Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues (Cape Island Mystery) Page 24
