The Emperor of Any Place

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “What’d he say?”

  “I told him you didn’t know my dad was dead. And when I asked you what you wanted, you told me it was none of my business.”

  There is a pause at the other end. “Do you think he bought it?”

  “What’s there to buy? I don’t really know anything.”

  “But do you think he knows you’ve got the book?”

  “Why should he?”

  Leo sighs. “Oh, hell. I am sorry. There was no way I wanted you to get caught in the crossfire.” Now he’s doing the whole warfare thing. It must be infectious. “Listen, Evan. All I can say is what I said last night. The less you know the better.”

  Evan wants to shout at him that if he knew any less he’d be put away in some institution for morons. He sighs. It’s not true. He knows just enough to be totally frustrated. And it’s not Leo’s fault. He knows that, too. “I finished the book,” he says.

  “Ah.”

  “So, I get why Griff is being . . .” He can’t think of a polite word.

  “Cautious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hope you’ve hidden it well.”

  “Yeah, I think so. Anyway, I figure even if he found out I’d read the book, it doesn’t rub off on you, because it was just there on my father’s desk, right? I’d have found it all by myself. So I read it. Big deal. No harm, no foul.”

  “Right,” says Leo, but he doesn’t sound convinced.

  “What am I supposed to do: unread it?”

  Leo laughs. It has the too bright, clear sound of someone who has to laugh a lot professionally.

  “Can I ask you something?” says Evan. “Something else?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “The story is so surreal — so . . . I don’t know — crazy — and yet your dad, he wasn’t crazy, was he?”

  “Not at all. He was a brilliant man. Revered — a scholar.”

  “Yeah, I got that. But then . . .” Evan stops. He’s not even sure why he started.

  “Then, what, Evan? What are we supposed to make of it all?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I mean monsters and ghosts . . .”

  There is a pause. “I’m not sure what to make of the monster, but I can tell you something about the ghosts. My mother had a favorite story about the first time she met my dad. She was a graduate student. She knocked on the door to his office, and he said come in, and when she did, he dropped what he was carrying.”

  “What do you mean?”

  There’s laughter in Leo’s voice now — the genuine kind. “He was carrying this big honking piece of hardware, I guess, which he just dropped when he saw her.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He’d never seen her before in person, but he recognized her.”

  “You mean . . . but wait . . . The ghosts? On the island? But that isn’t —”

  “I should tell you this, first off,” says Leo. “My mother was Iranian — she’d say Persian. In any case, she had this extraordinary face. Beautiful. Big features — huge eyes. It wasn’t her that Dad recognized that first time . . .” He left it at that.

  Evan finished the sentence, remembering the picture of Leo he’d seen on his website. “It was you.”

  “Right. Exactly. He had seen me on the island — the ghost me — and when he met her, he knew right away, she had to be my mother.” Evan doesn’t say wow, but he feels it in his solar plexus, feels the wow punch him hard and then seep into his bloodstream. “Evan, I’ve got an appointment. Thanks for keeping me abreast of what’s going on up there.”

  “That’s okay,” says Evan. And actually it is okay, because suddenly, out of nowhere, another idea has occurred to him. “Have a good day.”

  “You too, Evan.”

  Evan hangs up. Composes himself, then opens Google on his phone.

  “Evan?”

  He looks up. A middle-aged woman with long hair is smiling at him over a cart full of groceries. It takes him a minute to recognize her. He’s never seen her in anything but gardening clothes with her hair all pulled tight in a ponytail.

  “Mrs. Cope,” he says.

  “How are you?” she asks affectionately, leaving her cart and coming to perch beside him on the mauve bench. “I’ve just come from your house,” she says before he can answer, “and I met your charming grandfather.” If anything her smile is wider now, and Evan has no idea what to say. Mercifully, Mrs. Cope does. “Such a gentleman,” she says. “A real southern gentleman.”

  “Oh. Uh, yeah.”

  “Just like your father,” she adds. She’s got her hands pressed together in front of her mouth, and she looks almost smitten. “I thought I’d better drop over to cut back the petunias,” she says. To Evan it sounds oddly like some kind of spy-type code. “They always get a bit straggly around mid-July. And while I was at it, I decided I might as well dig up the tulip bulbs and put them into storage. The car was gone and I didn’t know anyone was there. But Griff . . . well, he was ever so helpful.” Evan nods like a zombie. What’s the point of arguing? Besides, there is a tear in her eye, and he’s afraid of what might happen if he disturbs her story by telling her the truth. Telling her that this southern gentleman is a one-man wrecking ball. She notices him noticing the tear, and she self-consciously rubs it away with her finger, then busily looks through her purse for a little packet of tissues.

  Was there something between her and Dad? She’s way younger than him. Hmm. The things you don’t know about a person.

  Without looking at Evan, she continues to chatter, rubbing her nose, sniffing. “I’d like to come back and prune the roses,” she says. “Clifford always did around this time.” She chuckles, sniffs, rubs. “His rule of thumb was a quarter inch above the first leaf with five leaflets.” She looks up, her eyes shiny with hopefulness, and Evan wonders if she’s passing on this information to him.

  “A quarter inch,” he says. He can’t remember the rest.

  “Yes, above the first leaf with five leaflets.”

  “Okay. Good. Thanks. Got it.”

  She looks pleased. “I’ll show you sometime.” She closes her handbag and rests her hands on the latch. “I’m so glad I ran into you,” she says, reaching out to tap his knee. Her smile ignites again.

  “It’s nice to see you, too, Mrs. Cope,” he says. And he means it.

  “Rachel,” she says.

  He nods. “I need to get your casserole dish back to you. It was . . . really good. Thanks.”

  She cocks her head to the side and smiles, her hand on her heart. “No hurry,” she says. Then she stands up and straightens her dress. “Don’t be a stranger,” she says.

  “Thanks. I won’t.”

  And she’s off, leaving Evan sitting there, stunned, wondering about all these nice people: goth girls and gardeners. But there was something he was supposed to be doing. He looks down at his iPhone, wakes it up. It’s opened up to Google. Right.

  “Why didn’t I think of this before,” he mutters to himself. He goes to his Internet server, goes to Webmail, punches in his dad’s coordinates. He needs a password for this, but he knows what it is, because he was the one who set it up:

  ax1sb0ldasl0ve

  And up comes his father’s in-box. He scrolls down and down and — Bam! Leo Kraft. “Damn, I’m good!” he says. He opens the e-mail. Scans it quickly. Obviously not the first communication, but a continuation of something they’d been talking about.

  Yamada’s work is amazing as I’m sure you’ll see.

  “Yamada?” says Evan under his breath. He scrolls down. There it is again. “Benny Yamada.”

  “Yo!”

  He looks up. It’s Rollo. “Just a minute,” he says.

  “I don’t have a minute,” says Rollo. “I’ve got half an hour, and in that time I want to ingest an enormous quantity of meat, preferably full of growth hormones.”

  Evan doesn’t put up an argument. He glances at the iPhone, closes it. He can follow this up later. “Who’s Benny Yamada?” he says.
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  Rollo scratches his cheek. “Second baseman for the Mariners?”

  They talk vegetables. “Celeriac,” says Rollo.

  “What is that?”

  “A vegetable. But it would make a good name for a superhero. It sounds kind of fast. Celeriac.” His hand zooms through the air. “You could do a T-shirt with this vegetable guy who’s got a head like celeriac rescuing, you know, a carrot in distress.”

  Evan shakes his head wearily. “This job is getting to you, Rollo. You should probably see someone.”

  “Monica wouldn’t like that.”

  “I mean someone in the head-shrinking business.”

  “Speaking of seeing someone,” says Rollo, and pulls out his cell phone. He starts scrolling through a list, and Evan immediately takes out his own, glad for the excuse, intending to follow up on Benny Yamada. The name almost rings a bell. But as he waits for the WiFi to kick in, Rollo suddenly hands him his Samsung.

  What?

  Evan only says it with his eyes as he takes the phone. Rollo makes the same gesture he does when Evan is supposed to keep on going with a guitar solo. Someone on Rollo’s phone is saying hello.

  “Hello?” says Evan.

  It’s the girl.

  The friend of a friend of a friend. He glares at Rollo, who holds out his hands like he can’t help himself, he’s just way too wonderful for words. Then he goes back to his fries, a contented look on his face and gravy on his chin.

  The conversation that follows is generic. The kind you might have in a language lab when you’re learning Portuguese. Evan feels like he’s opened this box full of worn-out and dusty phrases, which he inserts into the conversation in more or less the right order. Like building something, except that there won’t be anything there when he’s finished. Whenever he can catch Rollo’s eye, he glares at him, makes threatening gestures with his plastic fork.

  “No way,” he says pleasantly to the girl.

  But apparently there is a way and the girl — what the hell is her name!— goes on to tell him about it. He’s only half listening, but it’s not her fault; she’s not dumb. And it’s not his fault, either; he’s just numb. Still, he hangs in, recognizing the pauses, the openings where you’re supposed to plug in a reply. The weird thing is she sounds nice. She’s not a chatterbox; she’s saying interesting stuff — what he catches of it. It’s just that the part of his brain that knows how to do this kind of thing is buried under that avalanche of anger and that deep and buried sense of loss. That’s all. It’s like he’s been away a long time on an island in the middle of nowhere and he’s forgotten how you play this game.

  “Really?” he says, sounding as interested as he can.

  And, yes, she does mean really.

  But now Rollo is noisily gathering up their garbage. He points at his wrist as if there had ever been a watch there.

  “Hey, this is cool,” Evan says into the phone, “but Rollo’s got to get back to his vegetables and this is his phone. Yeah, I know. Yeah, he is totally insane. In fact, he’s doing his little insane dance right now. Or maybe he just needs to pee.”

  She laughs. It’s not a bad laugh. Maybe a seven.

  “For sure,” he says. “Yeah, absolutely. Uh-huh. You too.”

  Then click.

  Now he can put all of his energy into a vegetable-destroying glare. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he says.

  Rollo throws up his hands. “You were great, Ev! Haven’t lost any of that famous Griffin panache.”

  Evan hands him back the Samsung.

  “So?”

  “So, what?” says Evan.

  “You’re seeing her when?”

  Evan rolls his eyes. “She leaves for camp at the end of the week. She’s a counselor. Hey, stop the matchmaking, okay?”

  “Okay, okay. I’ve done my work.”

  Evan walks him back to the Pulse. They don’t talk, but it’s fine. Evan recognizes it to be the kind of not talking they do together as opposed to the not talking he’s been doing a lot lately.

  So . . . progress?

  Then Rollo is gone, and, sitting on the same mauve park bench as before, Evan checks up on Benny Yamada and begins to finally understand what is going on.

  He heads home but takes a detour to Laramie Close. He’s been there once, though he can’t remember why: trick or treating when he was a kid, dropping off homework? Whatever. He thinks he can remember the way, which house. There are maybe ten house designs in the whole suburb, but it’s surprising how you learn to find your way around by the smallest of details. It’s like those king penguins coming back to the herd from a fishing trip and somehow finding their own penguin kids among the thousand other penguins all in their dinner jackets.

  He rings the bell and — Yes. Got it.

  “Oh, hey.”

  “Hey.”

  Olivia Schlaepfer is dressed almost normally in jean shorts, a white top, and . . . well, a six-gun strapped to her thigh. “Orphan boy,” she says. If she’s surprised to see him, she gets over it pretty quickly. “If you’re here for supper, you’re way early.”

  Evan shakes his head. “Thanks, though. That was nice.”

  “Anytime. Oh, if it’s about adoption, we could talk to my parents.”

  For one crazy moment he thinks she’s serious, but a sly smile gives her away.

  “No,” he says, “but again, thanks. Actually, it’s about Benny Yamada.”

  “Oh!” Now she’s interested. “What about him?”

  “You know his stuff, right? You’re into the whole graphic novel thing?”

  “Yeah. How did you know?” Evan shrugs. But she launches in anyway. She’s talking even as she leads him to her room.

  Benny Yamada, graphic novelist and soon to be moviemaker.

  She opens up the home page of his website on her computer. Evan had already found the site on his phone at the mall — enough to get the idea. But now he looks more closely on her big screen and listens as she fills in the background.

  There’s a picture of Yamada: Asian, bleached blond, cool as hell in a Lakers ball cap and a T-shirt that says WILL FIX IN POST.

  “I’ve got the Tilt to Fade trilogy,” she says. “You could borrow it if you like. Backspatter is the first — that’s the one they’re filming.” She turns to him, her eyes huge. “There are rumors that Henry Austin Shikongo might play Rat Catcher.”

  “No, really?” says Evan. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but he recognizes how important it is.

  “Totally,” she says. “I can’t wait.”

  Then she tells him that she liked Alpenglow the best and that Collateral Spam was pretty weak, but then third sequels always are, “Don’t you think?”

  Evan isn’t sure what he thinks. His mind is reeling.

  “I don’t believe this,” he mutters.

  Olivia looks him square in the eye. “Why are you really here?” she says.

  Whoa! He didn’t think this through. But before he has to start making up some outrageous lie, he notices “New projects” on Yamada’s menu bar. And when he scrolls down, there’s only one project listed: Kokoro-Jima.

  A tiny island in the Marianas not to be found on any map. An island populated by ghosts and the hungry dead. A soldier washes ashore, battered, bruised. A soldier alone and then not alone . . .

  “Amazing,” he says. “Freaking amazing.”

  Her eyes do a little Spanish Inquisition number, but he just turns back to the screen. “I know,” she says. “Look at this.” She pulls up four full-color spreads:

  1. A Japanese soldier, his face wracked with pain, lying on his belly, parting bamboo with his fingers.

  2. A wrecked cargo plane in the jungle, the sky filled with carrion crows.

  3. Another soldier, an American, holding some kind of weird yellow contraption in his hand, his other arm ending in a bandaged ball where a hand should be.

  4. A band of flesh-eaters standing in the long grass like a bunch of bad-ass amigos in a Tarantino movie
. Amigos with torn gray skin and red eyes.

  Evan leans back in his chair, wraps his arms tightly across his chest. His heart is beating out of control. He stares at the illustrations, shaking his head in stunned disbelief. Then he notices that Olivia is watching him.

  “You know something about this?” she says.

  He nods. “Yeah, but I can’t tell you. Not right now.”

  She weighs his answer and he can see she’s dying to press him for more, but then she backs off.

  “It’s really too bad,” says Olivia.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “No, that’s cool. I mean about the project.”

  “What?”

  She shakes her head. “Apparently the whole project is on hold.” She scrolls down to Yamada’s closing remarks. How the book is pretty well complete but hung up in “Production Hell.”

  Back in the car, Evan texts Leo. He doesn’t know much about what a cease-and-desist order from a lawyer might be, but it’s a good guess that Yamada’s site is in violation of it. Not that there’s any mention of Griff. Not that there’s any picture of him.

  He backs out onto Laramie Close and then just sits there, not knowing where to go. Home? If it was hard to play dumb before, it’s going to be impossible now. But where else does he have to go? He looks back toward Olivia’s door. She’s standing there watching him. He waves. Makes gestures like there’s something wrong with the car. Then it moves — jerks — and he makes a joke of it, like he was doing something wrong, like he’s just learning. She frowns and goes in. He owes her an explanation, but it will have to wait.

  He goes home. Mystery solved — well, one mystery, anyway. It’s not the publication of Kokoro-Jima that Griff ’s pissed off about; it’s this graphic novel by a best-selling author. But what is Griff ’s problem? Why does he feel so threatened? They can change the name of the killer; it doesn’t have to be him. Or is it the idea of it? The marines: the whole honor shtick. What’s their motto? Semper fidelis: always faithful. Is that what’s eating him up? Only one way to find out.

  He enters the back door and sees the brown cordovans, sitting on the floor at attention. Your deduction, Sherlock?