Salem's Cipher

by Jess Lourey

  Just past the Ocean Pearl Restaurant (“Best Snails in San Francisco”), Ernest hoisted Mercy on his back so they could travel more quickly. Salem and Bel hung close. Abruptly, he dipped into an alley. A wall of reflective sunglasses had caught Salem’s eye and she would have missed his turn if Bel hadn’t tugged her by the shirt.

  “What’s down here?” Bel asked

  She was answered by a smell—the delicious perfume of cookies fresh out of the oven. Ernest pointed overhead and ducked under a tiny green awning, Golden Lucky Fortune Cookies printed on it in one-inch letters. The factory would be nearly impossible to locate if a person weren’t looking for it.

  The vanilla and sugar aroma was even stronger inside the wee front room. A petite Asian woman, her hair more gray than black, walked under the cloth separating the foyer from the back at the tinkling sound of the front door.

  She stopped and stared at all four of them.

  Her brow furrowed and her lips tightened. Salem glanced from the woman to Ernest. He still held Mercy piggy-back. His eyes were pleading.

  Her accent was thick but her English unmistakable. “You bring president-killers into my business?”

  Lu informed them that the broccoli chicken they’d eaten at Ping’s earlier was trash, sautéed shit and vegetables that Ernest never should have fed them. That’s how she talked.

  “I make you real food.” She’d hugged them, a lot, since they’d arrived, treating Bel and Salem like long-lost daughters. “I meet both your mothers. Yes. Great women.” She winked at Salem. “And your father.”

  They were in her kitchen—not the factory kitchen she used to bake the fortune cookies, but the smaller one in her upstairs apartment. Mercy was napping on an overstuffed couch upholstered with windmills and tulips, Ernest snoring next to her. The entire second floor was a cacophony of cultures and colors, kitsch and castoffs.

  Lu hadn’t stopped talking since they’d arrived three hours earlier. She wasn’t mad that they had come here. It was the opposite. She was angry that Ernest hadn’t brought them to her immediately. She wasn’t the head of the Underground, but Salem got the impression that she was close to it. She seemed to know everything about everyone.

  “You knew my dad? Daniel Wiley?”

  “Yes. Good man. He recruit both your mothers for Underground when they were only in high school.” Lu stopped stirring the luscious-smelling pot of broth, lemongrass, and shrimp. “He make furniture for the Hermitage.”

  Salem and Bel swapped the same dumbfounded glance. “He worked for the Hermitage?”

  Lu clucked her tongue. “He work for us. He tell those men where to hide their secrets. He tell us too.” She cackled. “We go in and get what we need when we can. And bugs! We put plenty bugs in the furniture.”

  Salem cast a doubting look around the kitchen. The most high-tech item was an electric can opener. Lu grabbed a clean spoon from the counter without breaking her stir and swatted Salem with it.

  “You don’t think this is fancy. It’s not. It’s my kitchen. Technology is in back.”

  “Computers?” Salem asked hopefully.

  “And other things.” Lu’s eyes were hooded.

  “Can I look at them?”

  “Later!” Lu said, too loud for the small room. “Now, you eat.” She carried the steaming pot from the stove and poured savory broth and plump shrimp into each of their bowls. Gliding to the fridge, she yanked out a tray of tiny blue quail eggs and cracked two in each of their soups. The hot broth poached the whites immediately, turning them milky. Finally, she drizzled lime juice over the top and stood back.

  Salem wasn’t sure whether to dig in. She didn’t want to get swatted again. Bel seemed unsure, as well.

  “Eat!” Lu yelled. She settled into a chair across from them, smiling like a proud mother as the two women slurped the soup. Her short hair was permed, her eyebrows shaved and penciled in, her lipstick a fire engine red. She wore a Twilight t-shirt and yoga pants. “Good, eh? Real food here.”

  It was better than good. It was heaven. The broth flowed into Salem’s depths, filling her with warmth, the citrus-scented chicken broth as sweet and glowing as the sun. When Salem bit into one of the quail eggs, the rich, creamy yolk added an impossibly lush layer to the already complex flavors. She could tell the way that Bel was chewing, her eyes closed in ecstasy, that she had just tried one of the eggs in her own soup.

  “You like it!” Lu sat back, satisfied. Then, like a rerouted train, her mood switched. She scrunched her face and pointed at Salem and then Bel. “So, why you two never join Underground? Think you too good?”

  “No!” Bel set her spoon down. “We’d never heard of it. Our moms didn’t tell us that it existed.”

  Lu nodded and stroked her chin. “That’s what I thought. They protect you. Or they think they do.” She tapped her head. “No one safe if one woman not safe. No one. You young kids. You think you don’t have to fight for anything. Think it’s always been this way. But we fight, us old ladies.”

  “It’s not like that,” Salem objected, but Bel talked over her.

  “We’re fighting now.” Her voice was deadly serious. “We’ve been on the run since Monday. We don’t know if our mothers are even alive.”

  Lu stood. Salem thought she might yell again, but instead, the smile returned to her face, as if they’d just passed a test. “Yes. You fight now. But first you eat, little birds. Then you shower. You two smell like hobo and crotch. Then I show you computers and we make you look different so you don’t get arrested, and then you go to correct SF Dolores Bell.”

  “There’s two?” Salem asked, barely able to refrain from sniffing at her armpits.

  “Of course,” she said, as if Salem had just asked if the sky was high. “You went to Mission Park and looked at their silly bell. You should go to Dolores Mission, three blocks from where you were. That Dolores been there for hundreds of years. Before Chinese come here, even.”

  “Does it have bells?”

  “Three. Outside, second level, for all world to see.”

  Lu’s tiny bathroom was decorated with a Nemo shower curtain, an orange bathroom mat, and bleach-stained towels in jewel tones. The inset medicine cabinet had a mirror front. As Salem peeled off her reeking clothes, she thought back to her last shower. Five days ago? The cargo pants and t-shirt she’d been wearing the entire cross-­country drive had taken the shape and smell of her body. She dropped them onto Lu’s bathroom floor and stepped into the most delicious shower of her life.

  When water met body, the steam and heat melted her, washing the crust from her eyes, massaging the tight knots in her shoulders, creating hot rivulets of water that followed the curves of her belly, running between her thighs, washing gently down to her feet. She ran her hand over her stomach, marveling at its flatness. She’d been developing a computer programmer’s pooch, but a near week of adrenaline and sporadic access to food had erased it.

  She lathered her hair first. After they’d finished the soup, Bel had trimmed Salem’s curls into a short bob. Salem was amazed at how little time it took to suds up her shorter hair. Lu’s shampoo was cheap, but the ginger grapefruit seemed like the sweetest nectar Salem had ever smelled. She tipped some into a washcloth and used it to scour away road dirt, dark odors, and accumulated fear. The water washing into the drain went from a dirty brown to a clear, and still she scrubbed until her flesh felt raw and new. Then she shaved her legs. Bel had warned her she might need a machete, but her stubble had grown in soft and came off cleanly.

  She’d been in the shower so long that it was almost out of hot water when Bel, who’d already showered, entered the bathroom. “Better than an orgasm, right?”

  Salem sighed by way of response, reluctantly shutting off the water and reaching around the Nemo curtain for a towel. She dried off her bob, thinking she could get used to the ease of the short hair. She wrapped the towel t
ightly around her upper chest and slid the curtain open with a sharp whisk.

  Bel stood in front of the mirror, wiping off the condensation. “Rachel would have loved this.” The foggy swirls of the mirror were reflecting a short-haired brunette Bel. Before her shower, Salem had dyed her friend’s hair light brown with a box kit Ernest had brought them and then hacked most of it off, leaving one inch. It stuck up in the back around the queen of all cowlicks.

  “Would have?”

  Bel winked. “I think that relationship might have run its course.”

  Salem smiled happily and stepped out of the shower to stand behind Bel. “I didn’t like her.”

  “Really?” Bel made a mock no way face. “I couldn’t tell. Except wait, didn’t you come right out and tell me so the only time you met her?”

  “You asked me!” Salem’s indignation would normally have caused her curls to fly into her eyes, but not any longer. They were too short, drying in an alarming fright wig pattern, a few canary-in-the-coalmine curls beginning to break free of the weight of water and test the air atop her head.

  They locked eyes in the mirror. Bel opened her mouth to argue. A laugh escaped instead. “You look like Buckwheat.”

  Salem was going to protest but caught her own reflection. She chuckled. The mirth was contagious, inciting more giggles from Bel, the first in days, and they grew to a full-on belly laugh. Soon, Salem and Bel were doubled over, sweet tears leaking out their eyes, howling so hard they could hardly speak.

  “Or maybe you look more like Screech,” Bel finally managed.

  Salem nodded in complete agreement as she pictured the lead from their favorite high school TV show, a cramp forming in her stomach from the laughter. Still, the giggles rolled on. “You did such a terrible job cutting my hair!” she managed to choke out.

  “I really did!” Bel squealed. “But at least you look old enough to drive a car.”

  That set off a new wave of howls. They’d have laughed all night if Lu hadn’t knocked on the door.

  “You girls too loud! This not a party!”

  “Sorry,” Salem said, trying to hold her breath to halt the laughter. She snorted instead. They had the funeral giggles, which had to run their messy, healing, hilarious course. “It’s getting a little hairy in here.”

  Bel punched her arm, wiping laugh tears from her eyes. “That’s dumb.”

  Salem giggled in agreement.

  “You know,” Bel began.

  “Yes?” Salem said, falling onto the closed toilet seat to ease her side.

  “I love you.”

  “Olive juice too!” Salem said, harking back to a joke they’d passed around in junior high. If you mouthed “olive juice,” it looked just like you were confessing your love. They’d do it to the boys, and laugh and prance away. Salem waited for Bel to return it, or begin laughing again, but she didn’t. “Bel?”

  “I’m serious.” And she was. The happy tears were still on her face, but the laughter was erased. She faced Salem, placing her hands on her bare shoulders, and looked her straight on, the short, dark hair making her appear waifish. “I would do anything for you, Salem. I will. I don’t know which of our mothers—”

  “Stop.” Salem’s mirth disappeared.

  “No, I have to say this. I don’t know which of our mothers is still alive, but my heart tells me it’s yours.”

  Salem’s hand flew to her mouth.

  “And I will survive that, because you will be by my side.”

  Salem tossed her head side to side. “Grace is fine.”

  “I don’t think she is, Salem. You’ve heard everyone talk, Ernest, Lu. Vida’s the leader of the Underground. It makes sense to keep her alive. She’d be more of a bargaining chip.”

  Salem wanted to argue but couldn’t find the words.

  “You and me forever, right?” Bel held out her index and pinkie finger in the bloodsister’s salute they’d invented about the same time as “olive juice.”

  Salem touched her identical fingers to Bel’s and sighed. “They should have told us, you know?”

  Bel’s sweet blue eyes deepened. Salem thought the lines around her mouth were new. She looked older than her twenty-nine years. “Our parents?”

  “Yes.” A hot pool of emotion was swirling inside of Salem. “Our entire childhood was a lie, you know? They knew about this world, and they hid it from us, left us to discover it on our own.”

  “You heard Lu. They were trying to protect us.”

  “That made sense when we were little girls, Bel. Not now that we’re grown women. They manipulated us. They chose what was easier for them, not what was best for us.” Her voice was spiraling upward. “They didn’t have to stay in the Underground. They didn’t have to risk our lives. One of our moms didn’t have to die.”

  “Stop.” Bel’s eyes were blazing, her voice sharp. “They did the best they could. What’s done is done. There is no advantage in looking backward.”

  For the first time in her life, Salem felt like she understood people better than Bel. Or maybe she was behaving like a child. She was too exhausted, too disoriented to know. “All right.”

  “It is all right,” Bel said. “Or at least it will be. Let’s get to work and save Vida.”

  Salem watched Bel exit the bathroom. She stayed behind to clean up. She needed to collect herself. She tossed her road clothes into the trash, tugging on the clean underwear, sports bra, khakis, and surprisingly low-key peasant blouse that Lu had provided. They actually fit reasonably well, the pants loose around her slimmed-down waist. She ran through the plan as she dressed. Now that she and Bel had disguised themselves, Ernest would drive them to Dolores Mission, where an evening wedding guaranteed a large crowd and relative anonymity.

  Mercy would stay behind.

  Once they’d recovered Beale’s keytext from the bell, they would return to Lu’s, where she promised them she would show them the “best computer bank in world.” Salem would use it, hopefully, to crack Beale’s cipher, and she, Ernest, and Bel would fly to Virginia where the treasure was rumored to be. They would use the cracked cipher to pinpoint the treasure’s location, retrieve it, and bring it back to Chinatown. Lu would know what to do with it, how to use it to save whichever of their mothers was alive. Mercy would continue to stay behind for her own safety. The girl deserved at least one day without running.

  Salem thought for a moment about stealing a look inside the medicine cabinet. Lu probably had rows of exotic herbs and tinctures. What the hell. Small satisfactions, you know?

  Salem opened it and peeked inside. Noxema, a toothbrush, whitening toothpaste, and a tube of rash cream.

  Hunh.

  She was closing it quietly when the door was yanked open and Bel stuck her head in, eyes wide. “You have to come see this. Now.”

  74

  Chinatown, San Francisco

  Agent Lucan Stone stood just inside the Powell Street grocery store on the northwest end of Chinatown. When he’d spotted a short-haired brunette Isabel Odegaard through the second-story window, there was only one reasonable reaction.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Clancy Johnson was downtown San Francisco with Senator Hayes’s people, going over the plans for the Alcatraz speech in two days. No one liked it. The photo ops would be brilliant—talking about prison reform on one of the starkest piles of rock in the country—but dropping Hayes on an island was a logistical nightmare. Stone didn’t envy the Secret Service in charge of that security detail. Realistically, there was nothing Clancy or Stone could do to help, but the government liked to stack everything one too high.

  Stone knew his speedy rise through the FBI ranks had pissed off a lot of agents that he’d stepped over. He’d made peace with that. He wasn’t in the field to placate colleagues.

  He was here to make his mother proud.

  She’d
died before he graduated Quantico, even before he’d gone to college, the victim of a stray bullet through her kitchen wall.

  “Life gives you defeats,” she’d say, “but don’t ever let yourself be defeated.”

  That had gotten him through the first year after her death. Her second favorite saying, “Life doesn’t work unless you do,” earned him a full ride to college, and his 4.0 GPA opened the door to Quantico. Turns out growing up in the streets of Detroit had prepared him well for FBI training. After that, there was no secret to his success. He worked hard, he listened to his gut like his mother had taught him, he always made good on his word, and, when possible, he kept his mouth shut and eyes and ears open. That’s how he’d acquired the tip that had sent him here, across the street from the Golden Lucky Fortune Cookie Company.

  According to Stone’s contact in the NSA, a female agent he traded intel with (and sometimes more), the NSA had been collecting SIGINT from the Golden Lucky Fortune Cookie Company ever since a protocol search had intercepted unusual emails being sent from their server, messages containing words guaranteed to draw the government’s attention: state of emergency, executions, terrorism, Iraq, North Korea, fundamentalism. The communications, once decoded, were vague enough that the NSA assumed they were still a code within a code, things like the fundamentalists are funding North Korea, the executions have begun. The messages were not yet grounds for a search warrant, but they were suspicious, coming from a fortune cookie factory.

  But then came words that spoke directly to Stone’s current mission: Gina Hayes assassination, Vida Wiley, Isabel Odegaard, and one that threw him for a loop even though he’d read the decoded message four different times: the Hermitage. The NSA cross-referenced their files, found Stone and Clancy assigned to the Wiley and Odegaard case, and Stone’s contact passed on the intel. Stone had skipped out on Clancy’s San Francisco snipe work with Hayes to follow up on the lead, and here he was, discovering a whole lot more at the Golden Lucky than he’d bargained for.