Noble Man

by William Miller

  “Don’t let Yan Yan stay up too late,” Eric said. “She’s got school in the morning.”

  “Why don’t you come home and put her in bed yourself,” Shelia Tsang said.

  Eric turned and walked away from the car, putting his back to his employees. “I’m working,” he said. “So I can pay for all your fancy clothes and lavish vacations.”

  Sheila laughed. “Yes, you love me so much.” She took another drag from her cigarette. He could hear the soft crackle of burning paper. “That’s why you haven’t touched me in months.”

  “I’d touch you more often if you stopped smoking those cigarettes,” he said. “Maybe get on a treadmill. That wouldn’t hurt either.”

  “Go to hell, Eric.”

  “Don’t you hang up on me-”

  The connection died. Eric cursed and jerked the Bluetooth out of his ear. He was tired of Shelia and all her drama. In the beginning, it had been a lot of fun. They could spend hours just talking, and the sex was phenomenal. Back then, Shelia had been bright, funny, and ambitious. Now all she did was spend Eric’s money, smoke cigarettes, and snort blow in between back-to-back episodes of reality television. He would divorce her, but there was Yan Yan to think about.

  Another problem for another day, Eric told himself.

  He slipped the Bluetooth in his pocket and fixed a smile on his face. “Gentlemen,” he said walking up to the crushing facility. “Let’s see the merchandise.”

  Paeng held up a hand with a blood-soaked bandage on it. “The slut bit my finger off,” he said.

  Eric’s smile never faltered. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I think it deserves a little extra,” Paeng said.

  “Ten thousand was the agreed-upon price.”

  “That was before I had my finger bit off,” Paeng said.

  Fau flashed his partner a warning look.

  Tiger crossed his arms over his chest and blew a bubble with his chewing gum. “How’d you like to have your head cut off?”

  Fau clutched at the pistol in his waistband. Eric’s security detail responded in kind, training their automatic weapons on the kidnappers.

  “Everybody relax.” Eric held up his hands. “You lost a finger. In this business, that is considered a job hazard. Maybe after this you should change careers?”

  “You could be a guitar player…” Tiger said in a deadpan voice. “Oh wait.”

  The security team grinned.

  Eric chuckled. Every once in a while his little brother came up with something witty to say.

  Paeng fumed.

  Eric dropped the smile. “Ten thousand was the agreed-upon price. You can take it, or this gets ugly.” He motioned to his security team with their automatic weapons.

  Fau and Paeng stepped aside.

  Eric moved past them into the crushing facility. Bati Ramos sat with her back against sacks of crushed gravel. Her hands were zip-tied behind her back. She had no pants and no shoes, just a pair of dirty pink panties. She drew her knees tight to her chest in an attempt to hide her nakedness.

  Eric knelt down, pushed a lock of hair out of her face, and smiled. “Hello. Have they been treating you well?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He brushed his fingertips along the outside of one naked thigh. “You are a very beautiful woman,” he remarked.

  Bati shrank from his touch.

  “Don’t worry,” Eric told her. “No one is going to hurt you. And once your daddy gives me what I want, you get to go home. Won’t that be nice?”

  She tried to speak. No sound came out. She licked cracked lips and tried again. “I hope you die.”

  “How rude,” Eric said. “Perhaps I should teach you some manners?”

  Fear filled her eyes. Her bottom lip trembled.

  “No?” Eric asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Then watch your mouth,” Eric told her.

  A sob escaped her chest.

  Eric stood up and went to the door. “I’m going to leave my security team here,” he told Fau. “If everything goes according to plan, this will be over in forty-eight hours.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Paeng said.

  Eric looked at him.

  “The money,” Fau interpreted.

  “You’ll get paid when I get paid,” Eric told them.

  Fau and Paeng exchanged glances but kept their mouths shut.

  The head of Eric’s security team, a stoic Australian by the name of Henries with red hair and freckles, directed his team into strategic positions around the quarry.

  Tiger blew a bubble and popped it. He was watching the girl with hungry eyes. “This is a big deal,” he said. “I should stay here and look after things.”

  If he left his little brother alone with the girl, Tiger would have her bent over a conveyor belt before the Bentley reached the end of the drive. “Henries can handle this,” Eric said. “I need you elsewhere. I’ve got a shipment coming in tomorrow evening. You and your crew will have a chance to do some real work for once.”

  Tiger glowered.

  “Get in the car.”

  Tiger held his ground, smacking his gum and looking petulant. Eric met his gaze and held it, daring him to disobey. Finally, Tiger shook his head and loafed to the Bentley. Eric watched him go and considered putting a bullet between his shoulder blades.

  One less problem to deal with.

  He waited until his brother got in the car and slammed the door, then he turned to Henries. “Do you need anything from me?” he asked.

  The big Australian shook his head. “Nah. We go this under control.”

  Eric joined his brother in the back seat of the Bentley. The driver started the car, swung around, and started up the long gravel drive. Eric waited until they were ten minutes south, headed into Kowloon, to start making phone calls.

  26

  A familiar minivan idled at the curb with the side door open. Oscar reached under Noble’s jacket, relieved him of his weapon, and then waved him into the vehicle. Noble slid in behind the driver. Samantha climbed in beside him, and Oscar crowded onto the end of the seat with his pistol aimed at Samantha’s belly. The heavyset driver turned to glare at Noble. The bridge of his nose was swollen and black where Noble had hit him with the binoculars. Bits of wadded-up toilet paper, stained pink with dried blood, stuck out of each nostril. The bloody tissue spoiled his attempt at intimidation. He turned back to the wheel without a word, started the van, and pulled out into traffic.

  Samantha sat with her hands clasped together in her lap and her head bowed. Tears streaked her cheeks. Her hair hung in a black curtain over her face. “I’m so sorry, Jake.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “They knew we were coming.”

  “Diego?” she guessed.

  Noble nodded. “He must have figured he could get back in Lady Shiva’s good graces by selling us out.”

  Oscar pressed the gun into Samantha’s side. “Shut up.”

  The driver turned on the radio. Filipino pop music filled the van with synthesized drums and maddeningly repetitive lyrics. Noble kept his attention on the road. Jeepneys jammed up the boulevard, and pedestrians thronged the sidewalks. He knew the area. They were headed toward Makati, a Mecca of depravity and squalor at the heart of a wicked city.

  He scolded himself for not dispatching Diego when he had the chance. It was sloppy. He had gotten soft, and he would pay the price for it. Worse, he had let Samantha get tangled up in this and now she would pay for his mistake as well. A knuckle of fear squeezed his guts. He’d been in tighter spots before but not by much.

  Noble didn’t fear death so much as what came after it. If his mother was right then eternity was heaven or hell, and Noble was headed for the wrong side of that equation. If the public education system was correct then death was nothingness, a long black non-existence. The first idea scared him, and the second bored him. Noble couldn’t decide which was worse, hell or nothingness.

  Before he solved the
eternity question, the driver turned off Makati Avenue in the bustling red-light district down a narrow side street. Noble caught a quick look at the front of the building as they rounded the corner. The sign said LUSH in lurid red neon. Underneath it advertised ‘Health and Relaxation Massage.’

  The van squealed to a stop in back of the club. Oscar climbed out and yanked on Samantha’s arm. She stumbled from the vehicle and went down on one knee. He hauled her back to her feet, pointed the gun at Noble, and took a step back, keeping the distance. Noble scooted across the leather seat and stepped out onto cracked asphalt.

  Fear etched itself on Samantha’s pretty features. She stared into Noble’s eyes, looking for comfort, some sort of nonverbal signal that he had the situation in hand. He tried to convey confidence with a tight nod. It seemed to give her some strength. Unfortunately, that was all he had to offer. She had no idea what they were in for. Noble did. The knuckle of fear had become a fist, twisting his guts, like someone wringing out a soapy dishrag.

  The back door was solid metal. A hooded light bulb flickered and buzzed, attracting moths. They zipped and looped around the weak glow. The driver hammered on the door with an open palm.

  Noble considered making a play for Oscar’s weapon. It was going to be bad inside for him, and it would be worse for Samantha. All they could do to Noble was torture and kill him, but they could keep Samantha alive. Some fates were worse than death. But Oscar kept three long strides between him and Noble, and he kept the pistol pressed against Samantha’s chest. Noble could rush him, but Oscar would pull the trigger and Samantha would be dead before she hit the ground. And there was still a chance—a small chance—if Noble played his cards right, he could get them both out alive.

  A heavy bolt drew back with a clang, and the metal door swiveled open on well-oiled hinges. A bar of light spilled across the alley.

  Noble found himself staring down the twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun. The guy holding it was on the wrong side of sixty, shirtless with droopy man boobs, and blown out flip-flops.

  At a nod from Oscar, the old man stepped aside. Samantha and Noble were herded in. The metal door slammed shut with a hollow boom like distant thunder. The sound raised goose bumps on Noble’s arms. The small hairs at the back of his neck stood on end.

  They were in a dingy kitchen with mold creeping between the tiles. Noodles boiled on an electric hot plate, filling the air with the aroma of cabbage and red peppers. A chipped Formica table held a half-finished mahjong game. A potbellied man in a stained white undershirt straddled a metal folding chair, watching a football game on a black-and-white portable television. A .38-caliber Smith and Wesson lay on the table. The ancient revolver was black and pitted with rust. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned or oiled since World War II. There was no use lunging for it; the thing would probably blow up in Noble’s hand.

  A beaded curtain led to the front rooms where Noble heard the sharp cackle of the working girls and the rich baritone of Louis Armstrong growling his way through, “What a Wonderful World.” Where they’d come by the old recording or why they chose to play it in a whorehouse, who could say? Noble wondered if it would be the last song he ever heard and if there was some sort of poetry in that fact. Did it have what college literature professors called symbolism? Or was it just a crappy coincidence?

  The only other door led to a sagging staircase, which they climbed all the way to the third-floor landing. The air reminded Noble of finger-painting day in kindergarten class. He faced a short hall with two doors on the left and a third straight ahead. Three surprisingly good oil paintings graced the crumbling plaster walls.

  The paintings were so tasteful and so completely out of place that Noble’s steps faltered. All three showed the Philippine countryside, rice paddies, and thatched roof farmhouses under blue skies boiling with white clouds.

  The fat driver gave Noble a push to get him moving again. Oscar opened the first door at the top of the stairs, and his partner manhandled Noble inside.

  27

  Bakonawa Ramos, dressed in his bathrobe, poured a fourth cup of coffee and added a dash of bourbon. He padded through the first floor of his brownstone on Massachusetts Avenue to the front window and parted the curtains with one hand. The sun had come up on the capital city, driving back the late September chill. Pete Shaffer, from three doors down, jogged past on his morning run. Ramos kept expecting to look out and see police cars parked on his manicured lawn, but the rest of the world went on as usual.

  He went to his study and dug through the desk until he found an ancient pack of Djarum Black buried down at the bottom of a drawer. They still had the sweet clove smell even if it was a little muted. More digging turned up a gold-plated Zippo engraved with his initials. He pocketed the cigarettes and the lighter and climbed the steps to Bati’s bedroom.

  He still thought of it as her room even though she hadn’t really lived in it since leaving for Yale. It still looked like the bedroom of a high school girl. The bed had a duvet with big yellow sunflowers. Teddy bears were stacked in the corner. A powder-blue dresser was covered in the kind of jewelry marketed to teenage girls. Pictures of Bati and all her friends were stuck in the mirror frame. Ramos recalled all the sleepovers and the giggle of prepubescent girls.

  Peter Rabbit and the Pokey Puppy graced the bookshelf along with high school textbooks and several religious works by C.S. Lewis and Lee Strobel. She had been in middle school when all the church stuff got started. One day she came home and asked if she could go with a friend to some kind of concert, and Ramos said yes not knowing it was a Christian concert. Soon Bati was attending Sunday services. Then Wednesday-night Bible studies. He thought it was a phase that would pass. He should have put his foot down. By the time he realized she wasn’t going to outgrow her teenage convictions, it was too late.

  Now he wondered if all this could have been avoided if only he had said no to that damn concert.

  He plucked a picture of a smiling Bati from the mirror and sat down on the bed. This had become his routine, a ritual. He would wander through the house sipping coffee and peeking out the windows, but he always ended up in Bati’s room looking at the pictures and touching the teddy bears. He hadn’t shaved since he got the news. Heavy black stubble covered his face. He had dark bags under his eyes. He rarely slept and when he did, he curled up in a corner of Bati’s bed. He was terrified to move anything in the room. When he left to haunt the rest of the house, he replaced the picture in exactly the same place on the mirror frame. He felt that if he could preserve it all exactly as it had been when Bati still lived here, then he could keep her alive.

  He took the Djarum Blacks from his pocket, debated with himself for several minutes, and finally stuck one in his mouth. It took several tries, but he got a flame from the Zippo, lit the cigarette, and took in a lung full of slightly stale nicotine-laced smoke.

  He coughed, pounded his chest with a fist, and then had another drag. In a few moments, it was like he had never quit. He smoked that one down to the filter and lit another one from the stub. Before long, a lazy blue cloud filled the bedroom. Morning sunlight streaming in through the blinds lit the slowly swirling eddies of smoke.

  His phone rang in his pocket. The sound shattered the quiet. He had turned the ringer all the way up to be sure he didn’t sleep through it, not that he’d slept. Ramos flinched and nearly spilled his coffee. He placed the mug on the bedside table and put a shaking hand in the pocket of his bathrobe. The number said private caller. He took another drag from his cigarette to calm his nerves, pressed the talk button, and put the phone to his ear. “I’m listening.”

  “Good to hear your voice, old friend. How long has it been?”

  Naked fear gripped his heart with icy fingers and refused to let go. Sweat sprang out on his forehead. Ramos cleared his throat. “Twelve years.”

  “That long?” Eric Tsang said. “Time flies.”

  Ramos stabbed his cigarette out on the bedside table. He didn’t shout or make thr
eats. Letting his emotions control him would only complicate the situation and maybe get Bati killed. “How much is it going to cost to get my daughter back?”

  “I don’t want your money,” Eric told him.

  “Then what do you want?”

  “You are going to turn over all of your operations to me and end your crusades against human trafficking.”

  Ramos snorted. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I’m not finished,” Eric said. “You are also going to tell the world who you really are.”

  Ramos had feared something like this for ages. He lay awake nights wondering what would happen if he was ever exposed. Now, all of his worst nightmares were coming true at once. His sins had finally come back to haunt him. The threat of exposure was only trumped by a father’s instinct to protect his daughter. He looked around Bati’s bedroom like he might find help from the stuffed animals. They stared mutely back at him. “This crosses the line, Eric. We’ve always been competitors, but we’ve always been gentlemen about it.”

  “That was before you started using the CIA as your own personal police force,” Eric said. “You stepped over the line first, old friend.”

  Ramos stood up and paced Bati’s bedroom. “Look, Eric, you have my word I won’t put international law enforcement onto any of your operations.”

  “Not good enough,” Eric said. There was a pause on the other end of the phone. “You know I have a daughter now? She’s seven. They grow so fast.”

  “What’s your point?” Ramos asked.

  “I lose sleep at night thinking of all the terrible things that might happen to her,” Eric said.

  “I want to talk to my daughter. Put her on the phone.”

  “I left her in the care of some mercenary friends. I’m paying them top dollar to keep her alive. How much she suffers is up to you. You have forty-eight hours to turn over all your operations to me and then tell the world who you really are. After that I’m going to let my men have their fun with your little girl and I’ll mail what’s left of her back to you in a shoe box.”