by Tom Clancy
Today Lenny had found Yan in his usual spot at the end of a cluttered aisle of herbal remedies around the corner from the music and video department. A bald, bespectacled guy in his seventies, Yan always wore a long white frock unbuttoned over his slight paunch. Lenny had been paying him occasional visits for maybe five, six years, but wasn’t absolutely sure if Yan was his first or last name. Lenny was likewise unsure whether the white coat signified he was a doctor or pharmacist, although he didn’t find the blurred distinction between those professions in traditional Asian health care to be problematic. It hadn’t been so different in America once upon a time, when drugstore owners had maintained a close caregiving relationship with their patrons. They had recommended treatments, prescribed medications and tonics, and compounded dosages by hand with mortar and pestle. This had eventually pricked the competitive sensibilities of profiteering pharmaceutical companies, raised jealous territorial growls from the American Medical Association, and been raw meat for the slavering jaws of personal-injury litigators. Lenny, for his part, thought the pressures these interests brought to bear upon the Western druggist had reduced him to little more than a human pill dispenser. Nowadays he didn’t know one customer from another. He poured brand-name medications from big bottles into smaller bottles, put the smaller bottles into a bag, stapled it shut, and rang up the sale on the register. Ka-ching, next customer.
When it came to getting relief for minor ails and emotional distress, Lenny preferred taking his chances here at Snow Mountain. So what if his favorite practitioner was a Mr. Yan, Doctor Yan, Citizen Yan, or just plain Yan, as he asked to be called? Lenny hadn’t the foggiest notion whether he was even licensed. He couldn’t for a million bucks have positively identified the ingredients that went into the concoctions Yan formulated behind his counter. But they seemed to work okay. Far as he knew, they hadn’t been contaminated with the SARS virus. And at least Yan didn’t forget his face between return visits.
“So,” Yan said now. He’d gotten up off his stool the moment he saw Lenny arrive and started whipping together his usual preparation, hand-measuring something dried and wrinkled—bark shavings? slivers of aged roots?—into a paper plate from an apothecary jar. “How you feel?”
Lenny considered. Yan demanded honest answers from his patients.
“Doing my best.” He nodded at the paper plate. “I’m thinking I need a stronger blend this time around.”
Yan glanced at him over the frame of his eyeglasses.
“No,” he said.
“Come on, Yan. I’ve got serious stuff on my mind. Been extra nervous—”
A vehement head shake.
“You always tell me same thing,” Yan said. “This strong enough. Put half teaspoon in cup hot water. Three minutes. When water turn color of urine, you sip.”
“How about I let it sit a little longer—?”
“Three minutes. Urine color. Sip.”
Lenny gnawed the inside of his cheek. Wasn’t anybody willing to budge an inch for him today?
“There’s light urine and dark urine,” he said with a kind of childish defiance.
“Hmmm?” Yan scooped from a second deep glass jar, mixed.
“I’m just saying you never really told me how strong the brew should be.” Lenny already felt asinine. “What shade of urine to shoot for—”
“Healthy color urine.” Yan didn’t look a bit annoyed or distracted. He pulled another apothecary jar from the shelf, reached in for some brown powder, tossed it into the paper plate, added a tacky substance from a drawer below the counter top, stirred the entire preparation with his bare fingers, and then poured it into a Ziploc. “This only let you relax. Not forget.”
Lenny’s brow wrinkled as Yan passed the plastic bag over the counter.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
“You have problem, better solve it,” Yan said.
Her phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Jesus Christ, it’s about time you picked up.”
“I wasn’t here. It makes me crazy, staying home. Staring at the four walls. Waiting. I had to do something.”
“Did you check your machine? I must’ve left half a dozen messages on it this morning.”
“I just walked in the door, Tony. I’ve still got my coat on—”
“You said you did something. Like what? What is it you finally went out and did?”
“Look, I wish you’d give me some breathing room. Maybe try to understand a little of what I’m going through.”
“Okay, okay. I didn’t meant to jump at you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“No, I mean it. Honestly. But you have to understand, Pat’s like my own brother—”
“That’s why you should understand my feelings. You of all people, Tony. None of this is my fault. I love him. I’ve got a daughter who’s asking where he’s gone. Try putting yourself in my shoes.”
“I’m trying.”
“Sure.”
“I am, believe me. But when you say you went out to do something, and then don’t bother explaining. . . .”
“God damn it, Tony. God damn it. Everything’s a vicious circle with you. It’s like, ‘I’m sorry, fuck you, I’m not sorry.’ All in one breath, it comes out of your mouth. You’ll say anything to me until you get what you want.”
“I’m only trying to find out if you went to the police.”
“No. I didn’t. Is that enough for you? So I can maybe take my coat off—”
“You need to talk to them.”
“Shit. Here we go again.”
“Just listen . . .”
“I have. A hundred times. And for the hundredth time, I’m telling you I can’t.”
“Then what’s your plan? To keep checking out that information about towed vehicles on the Internet? You’re even too afraid to dial that number where you get a real person on the line. I mean, it’s like a compulsion at this stage. The Internet. It doesn’t accomplish anything. Nobody’s claimed the fucking car after a week, a whole goddamn week, and you have to talk to somebody—”
“I did.”
“What?”
“That’s where I went, okay? To see someone who can help.”
“I . . . why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”
“I would’ve. If you’d given me a chance. If you’d stopped pressing long enough for me to open the closet and hang my coat.”
“If you could manage to answer a simple question, I wouldn’t need to—”
“Go screw yourself, Tony.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I think you should stick it up your own—”
“Look, let’s not argue like a couple of teenagers. We’re in this together. We’d better remember it.”
“Why? So I can listen to more of your insults and accusations ?”
“How about for Pat’s sake? So we can find him. You’re saying you didn’t go to the cops. Okay, fine. Just tell me who . . .”
“No. I won’t jump when you snap your fingers. Think whatever you want of me, I’m not going to stand for that treatment. I’m sick of it. I’ve decided to handle this my way. And right now that means I’m getting off the phone.”
“Hold it, you can’t—”
“Oh? Keep the receiver up to your ear another second and you’ll find out what I can do.”
“Wait—”
“My way, Tony. Good-bye.”
The receiver slammed down on the hook.
Some thirty minutes after he left Snow Mountain, Lenny Reisenberg found himself seated at the counter in the Second Avenue Delicatessen on East 10th Street, waiting for the corned beef sandwich and kasha varnishkes he’d ordered.
No one could have been more surprised by this than Lenny. His original plan had been to buzz over to Sword HQ, fulfill his promise to Mary Sullivan, grab some take-out on the way back to his office, and eat quickly at his desk. A burger and fries, or maybe a tuna salad from the corner luncheonette . . . bland filler
food to carry him until dinner, in other words. Things obviously had not gone as intended. But while his detour to Chinatown may have been unforeseen, Lenny was at least clear about why he’d headed down there. It was simple cause-and-effect. His fast appointment with Noriko Cousins had left him a bundle of tension and he’d resolved to pick up something to help him unwind. Simple. Lenny’s peregrinations since that time were harder to explain, however. Those wandering feet of his had taken him crosstown into the East Village instead of uptown to his office, a long journey in the wrong direction. What was more, they’d brought him to a restaurant he only visited when in the mood to indulge his occasional craving for Jewish soul food with delightful abandon, not have an automatic midday fill up akin to putting gas in the car at some roadside service plaza. It seemed to Lenny he’d truly gone a little out of his head. Despite the stacks of paperwork awaiting him at the office, he’d stayed away from it for almost two hours, veering farther and farther off course on his supposed walk back. And although he hadn’t felt the slightest bit hungry as he’d left Snow Mountain, or as he hiked here along the Bowery in the cold, or even as his waitress had handed him a menu only two or three minutes earlier, he’d all at once become desperately impatient for a towering heap of cured beef, not to mention that side of pan-fried buckwheat groats and bow-tie noodles....
“Excuse me, is there cheese in the potato kneeeesh?”
Lenny momentarily put his thoughts on hold. Or rather, they came to a short stop on their own. The source of that high piping voice—and remarkably screwy pronunciation of “knish”—had been a woman in a window booth to his right, and he couldn’t resist tossing an inconspicuous glance over at her.
It took perhaps a second for his curiosity to be satisfied. Young, blond, and blue-eyed, she was definitely a Gentile, and just as surely an out-of-towner. In fact, she seemed as if she ought to have been wearing a shiny Wisconsin State Fair Beauty Queen tiara on her head. The guy opposite her in the booth had a similar scrubbed, fair-haired look. Together they sort of reminded Lenny of Barbie and Ken.
Their waitress, a thickset Latin woman, was eyeing Barbie over her pad with apparent shock and horror.
“This is a kosher restaurant,” she said.
Barbie didn’t get it.
“Oh, I see,” she said. Her blank stare indicating the contrary. “But is there cheese in the potato kneeeeesh?”
The waitress tapped her pen against her pad, rolled her eyes. Surely she’d gotten stuck with a simpleton.
“No cheese with meat,” she huffed.
“Oh.” Poor squeaky Barbie’s confusion had deepened. Could the waitress have misunderstood her question? She glanced down at her menu as if seeking enlightenment there, found none, looked back up. “Does that mean the kneeeesh has meat in it? Because I want a potato . . .”
Glad for the distraction from his own problems, Lenny continued to casually eavesdrop above the energetic gabbing and lip smacking of his fellow deli-goers. In this ethnic hodgepodge of a city, you’d have to scour the streets for a month to find a longtime resident unacquainted with the orthodox Jewish dietary prohibition against serving meat and dairy products together in any form, cooking them in the same pots and pans, or eating them with the same utensils. But did Barbie truly deserve to be faulted for her ignorance? Lenny guessed that she typified a form of New York snobbery and felt kind of bad for her. On the other hand, a blind person could have seen the word kosher on the sign above the entrance. How oblivious to other cultural traditions could you be? Maybe it was Barbie who was guilty of being a snob, and the waitress who deserved his sympathy. And so much fuss over an appetizer, how much worse would things get once Barbie got around to selecting her main course? Besides, this couple had “dud” written all over them as far as leaving a decent tip.
It was, Lenny decided, important to look at both sides before jumping to an opinion.
Now he saw the swing doors from the kitchen fly open, watched his own waitress shoulder through, identified his food on the dishes she was carrying, and eagerly waited for her to put them down in front of him—farewell Barbie and company, hello lunch. This suddenly tyrannical appetite of his really was nuts, he thought. But then Lenny wondered if something other than a need to fill his stomach might have awakened it. A different sort of emptiness within him that he’d subconsciously wanted to stifle. He didn’t want to go deep into psychoanalysis here, but wasn’t that what comfort food was about? He’d slipped into a funk, no question, and it occurred to him there were plenty of contributing reasons. Mary Sullivan’s pained features, her struggle to keep from falling apart in his office that morning. Noriko Cousins’s unassailable indifference. And then the capper, Yan’s sternly uttered words of advice at Snow Mountain. You have problem, better solve it. Taken individually or rolled into a ball, these things had been weighing on him to a greater degree than he’d cared to admit.
Lenny lifted the top slice of club roll off his sandwich, reached for the mustard dispenser, spooned, smeared, bit in. Tasty. He forked a couple of kasha varnishkes into his mouth. Delicious. Lenny ate some more, felt the gloom that had been hanging over his head begin to lighten. Barbie and Ken’s waitress stormed past him toward the kitchen, grumbling under her breath: “Kneeeesh, kneeeesh, why don’t she go back to school?” He chewed, swallowed, wondered how the issue of schooling had come into play with her. Well, Barbie did look like she could be a college student. Maybe the waitress felt Kosher Laws 101 ought to be a basic curricular requirement. At any rate, it was clear that communications hadn’t improved over at the window booth.
Lenny decided his reservoir of sympathy was deep enough for everyone there, and silently wished them well. He ate, savoring each scrumptious mouthful of food. Nothing was as bad as it seemed if you gave it a little consideration. Look at his problem, for example. A few bites of sandwich ago it had looked hopeless. Insurmountable. A few bites later, and he had a feeling he’d come upon a solution.
“Gord,” he said to the waitress’s wide, receding back. “I’m calling Gordian.”
Hasul stood at his office window and watched the Durango enter the parking lot five stories below. The slide of its headlights over the pavement, pale yellow on black, was a small observational pleasure that did not escape his appreciation, as few such pleasures would.
Only the shielding on his plate glass window allowed it.
At this late hour his regular employees were gone, driven off to the comforts of home and family, leaving the expansive lot unoccupied except for a handful of vehicles used by Hasul and his inner cadre. The 4×4 went straight up to where they were lined perpendicular to the building entrance and slipped into the first vacant stall at the end of the row. Then its headlamps went out, a door swung open, and its driver emerged into the blue-white radiance of mercury vapor lights at the far side of the lot. Arranged in a single bank, they shone down from almost a hundred feet in the air like the lights of an outdoor sports arena. With Hasul’s direct exposure to them restricted, their height and distance mitigated any threat from ultraviolet emissions.
Out in the lot, the driver leaned against the front of his 4×4 and finished a half-smoked cigarette. Hasul noted how its tip flared orange with his deep inhalations, bright specks of not-quite-spent tobacco scattering into the wind as he tapped at the head of ash.
After a minute the driver flicked his stub to the blacktop, crushed it out with his shoe bottom, took a quick look around, and started toward the building entrance. A tall whip of a man, he moved with loose-legged, almost bouncing strides, his shadow stretched long in front of him.
Hasul did not leave the window at once. Instead he reached out to touch the smooth glass, his fingertips meeting their own faint reflections. Darkness had swallowed the countryside mere yards beyond the paved rectangle illuminated by the arc lights. The ice-chandelier treetops of its surrounding woods, the snow-encrusted ground between them, the roadway that wound uphill toward the building . . . he could see none of them under the starless sky a
nd felt something close to the separation, the otherness that normally marked his daylight periods. It was a drastic contrast from the exhilarated feeling Hasul had known hours before, but as one who fancied himself a collector of rare moments, capturing and preserving them as some did exotic butterflies, he realized the lows that gripped him the hardest were often a price he must pay for his memorable highs.
Hasul kept his fingers pressed against the glass now, remembering his walk beneath dusk’s heavy overcast. He had left the office building hooded and gloved, a face guard draping down from bridge of his nose, protective sunglasses with side panels over his eyes. His pulse had raced with expectancy. As he did on the rarest occasions—no more than twice, perhaps three times a year—Hasul had decided in his approximate way to know the world as one who was altogether part of it.
For a while he had paused on a hammock near the edge of the trees and looked west in the direction of the expiring sun. At the distant limit of his vision, the clouds above the mountain humps were stained the color of old bruises. Hasul had seen the vapor of his rapid breaths puff into the winter air through his face guard’s mesh ventilation panel, his excitement increasing as the latest precious moment to be caught in hand raced up on him.
It was no sudden urge, that wish to feel the cold against his skin. Indeed, Hasul’s earliest memories consisted of the excruciating lessons of impulsiveness. The constant forethought and rigorous preparation for which he was lauded in the scientific research community were not, in his eyes, points of pride but absolute necessity.
As he stood out in the gloaming, Hasul had unclipped his portable dosimeter from his coat pocket, held it before him to determine that the UV level was within a comparably tolerable range, and set its timer function for thirty seconds. Caution relaxing its leash on him just so far, he had worn 100 SPF sunblock makeup tinted to match his flesh tone and applied a thick layer of cream to his lips.
His physicians would have crowed in disapproval regardless, not to fault them. Their job was to butler his health. But Hasul had already given them forty-eight years worth of validation, some of it aided by chance, since it was probable he would have died in childhood had his genetic defect not been the variant type . . . and still that wasn’t truly the point. In the end nothing escaped decay, flesh least of all, and he saw human longevity for the illusion it was. The body was perishable; only its spirit was eternal. Five years, fifty, a hundred—the difference between one life span and another did not amount to a murmur in the flowing river of time. Hasul had calculated and been willing to accept that each exposure would have consequences along the way. What mattered was that he remain true to the plan for which he was created, and this he had done, sparing none of his wealth and ability. Following God’s will through personal discipline, Hasul was soon to reach the culmination of his purpose in this world.
