The White Tigress

by Todd Merer

  Ming ran his hands over the scarred side of his face, as if trying to wipe such thoughts from his mind. All that mattered now was reuniting with his family. To sleep once more with his wife and listen to their little daughter regale him with stories of her victories at sports and martial arts. So amazing that a girl so young could be so skillful. She knew how to slam a bigger opponent to earth. How to launch a shuriken fifty feet into the heart of an adversary.

  And Mi-ang indeed was as beautiful as her mother.

  He ordered the imbecilic driver to go faster.

  His home was in a quarter formerly occupied by diplomats. It was large and elegantly furnished and . . . empty.

  Totally empty.

  Not in the scattered way that indicated a sudden departure, but neatly, as if no one had ever lived there.

  Ming’s first reaction was that Nationalist agents had kidnapped his family. A few calls revealed that this was not so. He spoke to neighbors and learned Li-ang and the girl had peacefully loaded their luggage onto a private vehicle and left. Voluntarily. Without as much as a note.

  Why?

  His wife had never approved of his leaving the Nationalists for the Reds, but she had seemed happy and their lives were good—

  Was it because he was so horribly maimed?

  In his empty house, Ming Chan, soldier and stoic, sobbed. Then he put emotion aside and got to work. A few inquiries produced answers.

  The state car had delivered his wife and child to the main train station. There they had been met by an American national, a nondescript, ethnic Chinese man about thirty years old. Together they boarded a train to Rangoon, where they caught a flight to Delhi. From there, they traveled to the United States. Their precise location was unknown, but the Chinese American man’s identity had been discovered:

  Winston Lau.

  The same man who’d been the proprietor of the PX at the Flying Tiger base at Toungoo, and the scion of a family that had immigrated to the United States in the first great Chinese immigration wave in the 1880s. Worked hard, endured racism, saved money, and prospered. The Lau family was extremely reclusive, rumored to be closely tied with major banks and international criminal Tongs; and they were ardent supporters of the Taiwanese Chinese regime.

  Ming wondered: Had he been cuckolded by a shrimpy businessman with a Western name? He swore that someday, some way, he’d regain his honor and his family.

  “That’s it?” snapped Ming at his terrified aide.

  “Yes . . . no . . . well—”

  “Tell me all, or I will cut your fucking nose off.”

  “Yes, sir. The thing is, there’s this American law . . . actually, it was only enacted in 1946 and ended a few years after, so it didn’t really exist when . . . Anyway, Lau probably lied on the form about the date because he got your wife and child into the United States on what they call the War Brides Act. He lives in New York.”

  Ming was stung. “She . . . married him?”

  “A marriage of convenience, I’m told.”

  “But she’s not in New York? Or is she?”

  The aide shook his head.

  “Answer me, you stupid twat. Where are my wife and daughter?”

  “We don’t know, General.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The present.

  The mountain trail ended at another clearing. Smaller. At first it seemed no more than a grassy outcropping where the jungle gave way to rocky, barren highlands that ended at the snow line, a vast, desolate slope that Andean peoples call el paramo. But at the center of the clearing stood an old stone building with a peaked, slatelike roof from which smoke curled. In the slanted morning light, its facing wall—dark and mossy—was marked by a darker oblong. A shadow?

  No, not a shadow . . . but a door, half-open. My escorts had disappeared.

  What next? Should I enter?

  I did, pushing the door fully open. Viewed from glaring sunlight, the interior was dim. I entered tentatively. The door, perfectly balanced, slammed shut behind me. The sound echoed off stone as if the space were a church, although its interior more resembled a pagan meeting hall. It consisted of one enormous room with a fire pit in its center. The only light was from the pit, where burning embers coiled smoke that drifted up through a Pantheon-like oculus. Someone had been here recently, but they were gone. I was alone.

  Why was I here?

  Then I realized this was the ultimate safe room: the building a harmless stone blip on the outer fringe of satellite camera images, its interior impenetrably thick-walled, its locale far from civilization.

  It was a place where secrets were stored.

  Here I’d be instructed regarding the heavy lifting that was the real reason I‘d been so handsomely retained. I heard a sound—

  From the other side of the fire pit emerged a small, dark-haired woman in a diaphanous white dress.

  Dolores.

  Wordlessly, she approached, stood on her toes, hugged me. As I felt the length of her against my body, a strange cognitive dissonance rose within me: Dolores was still little Sara in my mind, yet now I was all too aware of her womanliness. We fit as if custom-made for each other, yet she was my old friend and client’s kid. I shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t think of her otherwise.

  She took my face between her hands. Her pale eyes mirrored the glowing embers in the fire pit.

  “I’ve something to show you,” she said.

  I nodded. Felt anxiety creep into my gut.

  “And something else to tell you.”

  I swallowed hard, nodded again.

  She handed me an old, dog-eared photograph: two unshaven men in hiking gear with arms around each other against a backdrop of a steep, densely wooded canyon in whose vee was wedged an enormous concrete dam, a controlled flow of water cascading down its face. The taller man was an American; the shorter, a bespectacled Colombian.

  The photograph in my hand trembled.

  I was one of the men. The other was Dolores’s father, Nacho Barrera, the long-deceased CFO of the old Cali cartel.

  “The dam at Colima,” I said. “Near the finca where you . . . where Sara kept her ponies.”

  Tears coursed her cheeks. “Who am I, Benn? What am I?”

  Good question. I might have said she was a natural actor, but maybe she wasn’t acting just now. My own emotions were in too much turmoil to judge hers.

  I stared at the photograph of me the way I’d been: slimmer and smiling-eyed, footloose and fancy-free. Exactly like the other man in the picture had been . . .

  Nacho Barrera. Drug lord, father, friend . . .

  Most of my clients are not upright people. Still, a very few, like Nacho, despite their business and its methodology, are honorable men. Of course, the same aberrations apply to their law-enforcing counterparts, who range from purely good to nine-to-five mediocre to the ones who break bad. Like Richard—

  Oh, Jesus. Had he been lying? Or were he and Dolores . . .

  Dolores took the photograph from me and gently slid it into a worn wallet she tucked into a woven Indian bag. But both our thoughts remained tethered to Nacho, I knew.

  Knowing Nacho had changed my life.

  I’d lost a beloved wife who couldn’t abide my work while my years of living dangerously made me more money than I could hide. Until, many years later, I’d met Dolores, née Sara, now Sombra, which in turn had brought Richard into my life. He’d taken me down and left me destitute. The sorry circumstances that had led me here.

  Yet these losses were pittances compared to Sara’s. In a single night, she’d lost fifty family members and every other person she’d known.

  Twenty years later, here we were once again.

  “Look at us now,” I said. “Cosmic jokesters.”

  She nodded but didn’t smile. “The night I ran away? It wasn’t to find my father. I knew his enemies would have killed him first. It was to protect you. When they found me, I told them you’d run away. I assumed they were going to kill me, but they didn’t. For a lon
g time, I wished they had, because they used me. Fifteen days shy of my tenth birthday, I lost my virginity fifteen times over. In the morning, they left me for dead, as a reminder for all to see. ‘We’re the bosses now and . . . this . . . this is what happens to . . . to . . . those who defy us.’”

  Her voice had caught. Tears rimmed her eyes.

  “A lot of things changed that night,” I said. Not just the course of my life, but the face I saw in my shaving mirror: a killer who’d taken two lives to save Sara’s. The reason I still swallowed little blue pills before I lay me down to sleep.

  “My father trusted very few people, Benn. You were one of them. You proved him right. I trust you, Benn. Prove I’m right.”

  “About what?”

  “The Logui are my family. They would die for me, and I for them. I’ve armed and trained them to fight off cartels, guerrillas, and paramilitaries. But now a new threat has arisen, one too big for them to fight.” She shook her head helplessly. “I’ve been asking myself what my father would do, and recently I remembered something I heard you tell Papa: ‘Forget trying to break a door down . . . just oil the hinges.’”

  She moved to within inches of me, stood on her toes, held my gaze. I saw my reflection in her eyes. She said, “The mountain we’re on is the center of the Logui world. The land as far as can be seen is theirs. But now a new invader has arrived. The usual reason: plunder. Beneath this land is a vast deposit of extremely valuable minerals known as REE.”

  “God save me from acronyms. REE . . . ?”

  “Rare earth elements that are essential to modern technologies, both military and civilian. Trillions of dollars’ worth. Corrupt elements of the Colombian government have leased the Sierra to foreign companies to mine the REE. If this continues, the Logui will be no more.”

  “Foreign companies,” I said. “Chinese ones.”

  “My Benn, always a few moves ahead.”

  “We pawns are paid to be sacrificed.”

  Her laughter echoed off the stone. “You’re no pawn. You’re my knight in shining armor. Save me, Benn. Save all of us.”

  I felt a flare of anger. “What can I do? Seems like Richard has everything under control.”

  Her face clouded. “Richard’s not what he seems.”

  “I’ve already found that out the hard way.”

  “You don’t get it. Richard’s a traitor.”

  “To you?”

  “To everyone, and every cause.”

  “What’s his angle?”

  “Money. He used me to pump up his cartel body count in Colombia. Now he’s America’s intel honcho in the South China Sea, and he smells big money.”

  “So why are you involved in his Chinese caper?”

  “I can’t save the Logui from the Chinese myself, although Lord knows I’ve tried. I paid a fortune in bribes to Colombian politicians to have the Sierra declared a World Heritage Site.”

  “Rendering it untouchable. So then no problem?”

  “Yes, problem. The Chinese paid them more. They’re going to strip-mine the Logui homeland.”

  “What am I supposed to do? You can’t sue people for outbribing you.”

  “I don’t want you for my lawyer. I want you to negotiate for me.”

  “Negotiate what? With whom?”

  “The situation is . . . fluid. There are a lot of people involved, and they all have different agendas. The only thing I’m certain of is that I’ll want your advice.”

  Her evasive manner troubled me. That, and that she assumed too much. I had myself another boss.

  She said, “I’ll pay you well. Ten million.”

  Ouch. Here was the score I’d been chasing when I was a drug lawyer. But I’d sworn off drug money. And this was something else entirely.

  “I won’t take money from you,” I said.

  “But you will help me?”

  I nodded. I’d help her for old times’ sake. For Nacho, and for Sara. Besides, I was already part of Team Dolores, on Duke’s nickel. I’d committed to watching over Stella, and I would do the same for Dolores.

  Not that I had any illusions that the trust in either pact was a two-way street. Stella was dancing to music beyond my frequency, and Dolores . . . well, she was a woman of many faces. Apparently, Richard was familiar with one of them. Also, her $10 million offer matched his. Double money for double trouble?

  “Even if you won’t take my money, I may be able to do you a favor. I might be in a position to learn about this Lucky person, who’s important to Richard. If I do, I’ll let you know, and it could be worth a lot more than ten million.”

  “We’ll see how it plays out.”

  “But you are with me?”

  “I’m with Sara.”

  She caressed my cheek. “Go back to New York and wait until you’re contacted, then follow your nose. Where you go, I’ll follow.”

  “Contacted? By whom?”

  “I don’t know. Yet.”

  “How do I contact you?”

  “You can’t. I’ll find you.”

  “What about Stella?”

  “She wants to stay here until this is over.”

  “She wants . . . or you want?”

  She smiled. “We both want.”

  CHAPTER 12

  An hour later, the NOTAR whisked me to Bogotá, where I boarded an unmarked DEA Gulfstream, undoubtedly seized from some fallen drug lord.

  As I have often found to be the case with clients, their absence makes my heart grow colder, and distance sharpens my mind. Forget first impressions. Check out second thoughts.

  As my flight droned toward New York, I reconsidered Dolores. Come to extremes, she lapped the field. I like to think I’m hip to all schools of people, but Dolores was a private university of one. Sexy, smart, small woman. Great to look at but difficult—no, impossible—to touch, at least for me. Brave and kind to her own, but a merciless killer to outsiders. In public, an antidrug crusader; yet her alter ego was a reclusive cartel kingpin. Whimsy wasn’t in her arsenal. She did everything for reasons known only to herself. She was as opaque as a frappe glass of whipped cream.

  What did she want?

  And why from me?

  When beset by puzzlement, I free-associate, tracking random thoughts on paper, then looking for connections. I go through half a dozen yellow legal pads a month. Now I took one from my bag and set it on my lap, then paused for thought, pen in hand.

  Okay . . .

  As always, atop the page, I doodled a theme to jump-start my brain. This one was a smallish stick figure of a woman with blunt-cut, dark hair . . . actually, the stick wasn’t straight but curvaceous.

  Dolores.

  Richard’s comment had gotten under my skin. Hard to believe she’d give herself to the likes of him. Then again, harder to believe she wouldn’t do anything to win. I willed the distasteful images from my mind and doodled another woman.

  Stella.

  According to both Duke and Richard, Stella’s parents had been murdered as part of a vicious family feud. That feud—which apparently involved Albert Woo, Uncle Winston Lau, Missy Soo, Duke (and, via Duke’s letter, possibly Madame Soo, as well)—seemed a small mirror image of the China v. Taiwan conflict itself. Best I could tell, Uncle, Albert, Duke, Stella, Dolores, and Richard were on the side of Nationalist Taiwan—and against mainland Communist China. It made sense: Duke had flown fighter missions for the Chinese Nationalists. Uncle’s Foochow Tong was rooted with the Taiwan Chinese.

  As for Missy Soo and her hidden coterie, their hostile intent surely meant they were aligned with Red China . . . at least for now. But no telling which way any or all really leaned. Was it to the side that paid them best? Or to their true beliefs?

  I doodled on, hoping for inspiration.

  Beneath the figures of Dolores and Stella, I drew a line down the center of the page. On its left side I tallied the known downsides:

  Dolores: Assume her alliance with Richard was not only a joining of devious minds but also a physica
l bonding. Next to her name, I wrote: Liar? Paused, then wrote, Definitely. Then wrote Goal? and beneath it Helping the Logui.

  I paused again, wrote Lucky. Thought some more, added ????

  Richard: His $10 million offer was a dangling carrot never to be chewed. Next to his name I wrote, Thief, followed by Traitor? Then: Goal? and beneath that Money. Glory. Dolores. I thought a moment, wrote: Sees me as disposable. Dangerous.

  Duke: I penned, Dangerous. Untrustworthy. Liar.

  Stella: I wrote, Client. Unbalanced. Liar.

  Missy Soo: Red-flagged liar.

  I was playing liar’s poker.

  Major questions: Despite Richard’s braggadocio, who really was in control? Who worked for whom? And, most vexing, how did Lucky—and his hat—link to the Chinese strip-mining the Logui homeland?

  Which formulated the downside conclusion:

  Liars + danger = get out while you can!

  On a fresh page, I tallied the upsides:

  Stella had paid me; therefore, I was her loyal fiduciary. But more important, I wanted to watch over her, because violence had scarred her in the same way it had Dolores . . . Sara . . . whom I loved.

  There were no more upsides.

  I reread what I’d written . . .

  Decided I was in the thicket.

  My usual hemlock cocktail.

  I crumpled the pages.

  My longtime driver, Val, picked me up at Newark. Now that I was flush again, I’d rehired my former factotum. Val had buzz-cut white-blond hair, a lined smoker’s face, and the pallor of a night person. He was the gentlest man I knew, but although he was in his seventies he had a flip side hard as an anvil. His family were central European Jews who somehow had resettled in postwar Berlin in the ’50s, and young Val, the Jew boy, had both taken and given many lumps. Yet he had managed to remain an essentially kind and good person.