Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51

by Humans (v1. 1)

  “Yes, fine.”

  Mortimer followed the waiter away toward the door. Kwan saw that he’d left the cassette player on, and was about to reach out and turn it off when the westerner from the next table stood up, came smoothly and swiftly across, and said in a low voice, “Mortimer betrayed you, that was the price of the interview. There’s no phone call. Get up and follow me.”

  Kwan immediately recognized the truth. Mortimer’s strangeness at the end, his wanting to believe that Kwan could turn capture and trial to his own advantage, his reluctance when the “phone call” came. The end of the tape had been the signal; that was all the interview Mortimer would be allowed. Another realist; Mortimer had believed that Kwan’s betrayal was a fair trade for getting Kwan’s story into a magazine read by millions of people all around the world.

  Kwan rose. The stranger was already walking away, striding away, around the curved glass wall toward the rear of the cafe. Kwan followed him, to a door that said, in three languages: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND. The Stranger pushed open the door. No alarm sounded. He went down four metal steps, Kwan hurrying after, permitting the door to close itself behind him, and then they crossed a corner of the rock garden to a stone path and headed for the pool.

  Looking to his right, Kwan saw through the windows three chunky men in pale gray tight suits and dark neckties standing indecisively at his former table. One of them looked up and saw Kwan, and pointed, becoming excited. Kwan turned his eyes front, watching the broad pale blue back of the tall westerner in front of him. Who was he? The accent had seemed not quite American, but not at all British, nor Australian. Canadian? Was English his second language? How had he known about Mortimer, and about Li Kwan? Where were they going?

  Around the pool, past the sunbathers and a slighdy rancid smell of coconut oil. Then, beyond the attendant’s cabana, full of towels, they came to a pale green wooden fence, eight feet high, containing an unmarked and scarcely noticeable door. The stranger opened this, and they both stepped through to an alleyway. Garbage cans were stacked below a loading dock to the right. The street was to the left. As he closed the door, Kwan looked back and saw the three policemen running this way, around the pool. ‘They’re chasing us,” he said.

  “That door’s locked.”

  It is? Kwan looked at the door, but had no time to think any more about it, because the stranger was moving quickly now toward the street; not quite running, but striding with very long legs. Kwan had to trot to keep up with him, like a child.

  Illegally parked at the curb just to the right of the alley was a white Toyota; like a million others in Hong Kong. The stranger pointed to the passenger door: “Get in .”

  The door was unlocked. Kwan got in, and the interior was stiflingly hot. He rolled down his window as the stranger got behind the wheel. The key was already in the ignition. The stranger started the motor and pulled away into traffic, and then at last Kwan could say, “How did you know?”

  The stranger smiled. He drove patiently but professionally through the jammed streets. “You are not part of a conspiracy,” he said. “Your government says you are, but you are not.”

  “Of course Tm not.”

  “Neither am I,” the stranger said. “But if I tell you who I am, and how I found out what was going to happen to you, and why I decided to help if I could, then we would both be parts of a plan. And that’s a conspiracy.”

  “That’s specious. What con—?”

  The stranger laughed. “Of course it’s specious,” he said. “But you wanted an answer, so that’s the answer I gave you.”

  “The only answer I’m going to get, you mean.”

  “Well, here’s another one, then,” the stranger said. “Next time, you might not be so lucky. You might get caught. And if you get caught, they’ll be sure to say, cWho helped you escape last time?’ It would be better for me if you didn’t have an answer.”

  “Well, all right,” Kwan said. “That isn’t specious. It’s merely convenient.”

  Again the stranger laughed. “What gratitude!”

  Kwan felt himself blush. “I beg your pardon! I was so confused, it was so fast— Of course I’m grateful! You saved my life!”

  “Use it well,” the stranger said.

  They took the ferry over to the island of Lamma, its small houses gleaming in the sun. Along the way, they got out of the Toyota to stand at the rail and breathe the cool sea air and look at the world sparkling all around them.

  “You’ll have to leave Hong Kong,” the stranger said. “Your reasons for staying here are no good any more.”

  “I don’t know where to go,” Kwan said. He seemed to have given over all control, all capacity for planning, to this man who had saved his life. “I don’t know how”

  “By ship, I think.” The stranger gestured out over the water; a big passenger liner like an oval wedding cake, with an American flag for decoration at the stern, was just pulling out of Hong Kong Harbor. “Those ships have many Orientals in their crews. Especially in the kitchens.” He smiled at Kwan. “You’d make a fine dishwasher, with that education of yours.” “I don’t have any papers.”

  “Maybe someone you know,” the stranger suggested, ccwould know someone who works for one of the shipping lines.”

  “The family I’m staying with, they might.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. You could ask.” The stranger nodded again at the departing liner. “A ship like that,” he said, “goes everywhere. In six months, it goes all around the world. Through Suez, through the Med. You could get off in Genoa or Barcelona. Or even all the way to Florida.”

  Kwan looked at the ship. “America,” he said.

  Ananayel

  X really don’t like to do it in such a fashion, so sloppily, leaving these anomalies around, these quasi-miracles, like loose ends in a popular novel. Locked doors that open, alarms that do not sound.

  It’s the haste that causes it, of course, His desire to get this mess cleaned up once and for all. So I suppose it doesn’t matter in the long run if I make a bit more of a mess along the way. It does offend the perfectionist in me, though, I must admit that.

  And I do have to be careful that none of my principal performers notice these aberrations from the laws of physics. Fortunately, this is a skeptical age; belief in miracles is not widespread. There have been times and places in human history when I would never have gotten away with these slapdash methods, but they are long gone. Today’s humans would much rather believe they are being tricked; alternatively, ccthere must be an explanation,” which they simply have not yet quite worked out.

  Still, I can’t help feeling rueful. Oh, if only I had been called on in an age worthy of my talents. On the other hand, I do increasingly see why He has had enough.

  6

  In Sao Sebastiao they talked with the sort of priest who believed that life on Earth was in any case irrelevant, that pain and suffering could only ensure greater joy and harmony in the next world, and that rich men who treat God’s creatures badly would be punished with horrible fire in the hereafter. He was not, as he told them proudly, an activist priest.

  How, Maria Elena wondered, could such a man be any use at all to her employer, a doctor from WHO, the World Health Organization, a man who believed that life on Earth was all we have, that pain and suffering must be alleviated whenever and wherever possible, and that rich men who treat God’s creatures badly should be wrenched out of society like diseased rootstock from a vineyard? But in Sao Sebastiao there was no one else; the Administration Section doctor visited the village less than once a month and his records were useless, as they already knew. Only Father Tomaz had the statistics, the births and deaths, the illnesses, the deformities, all the spoor of the chemical assassin.

  Maria Elena translated as best she could, as unemotionally as she could. Beside her, Jack—Dr. John Auston, of Stockbridge,

  Massachusetts, U.S.A.—ploddingly asked his questions, filling in the spaces on the forms, writing his c
omments in his tiny illegible hieroglyphics in deep black ink. Maria Elena—Maria Elena Rodriguez, of Alta Campa, Brazil, later of Rio, most recendy of Brasilia—translated Jack’s dry questions into rough- toned Portuguese, translated the priest’s indifferent and querulous answers, and kept her own personality firmly out of the equation.

  Even her voice. A rich contralto, she kept it muted and flat, with none of the full-throated power that used to resound through the great music halls of Sao Paulo and Bio, when the crowds would rise to their feet, weeping and applauding, roaring the choruses with her, she striding back and forth on the stage, loving them, loving herself.

  She never strode any more. Never sang.

  The three sat in the shade of a large tree beside the squat, blunt adobe church, on folding chairs brought out from its dark interior, in which two old women in black, not together, whispered their prayers, their J’S enlacing in the air like the ghosts of snakes. Some distance away, in a brown field, their pilot sat in the shade of his plane reading fumetti, comic books that use staged photos instead of drawings. Behind them, the village baked in the sun, most of the residents away at work in the factory out of sight beyond the brown hills, the children away at their classes in the factory school: one of the benefits the factory had brought, to make up for the death and horror it had also brought.

  Father Tomaz’s bland recital of children born dead, children bom without arms, without eyes, without brains, poured through the transitional vessel of Maria Elena, unsullied by any trace of passion. Maria Elena’s mind was full of her own two dead children, but nothing of them, nothing of herself, touched her words, neither to the priest nor to the doctor.

  What would Father Tomaz say if she were to tell him about her failed children, about Paco’s leaving her, about her agreement with Paco’s conviction that she was now foul—befouled? That Paco had died before their argument was resolved? He would say, “God is testing you, my child. He works in mysterious ways. We cannot understand Him, we can only bow to His will, secure in the knowledge that our suffering is recorded in Heaven, and that our reward is in Heaven as well, with our God, and our Savior, and His angels and saints, in eternal joy. Amen”

  Jack’s forms eventually were all filled in, Father Tomaz’s recital of the plague years was finished, and the three stood from the folding chairs to stretch. They carried the chairs back into the church—the sibilant old women continued, unending, unquenchable—and when they were back outside, in the sun, Father Tomaz said to Maria Elena, “Would you tell him, we don’t need medicine. What we need is faith in God.”

  “No,” Maria Elena said. “I won’t tell him that.” And she allowed at last the hatred to show in her eyes.

  The priest, offended, stepped back a pace, glaring at her. Jack said, “What was that about?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  Today’s pilot was new, a skinny brown man with a bandit moustache. He got to his feet as he saw them coming across the field from the church, and grinned beneath that moustache. He’d probably been bored, even with his comics, which he now tossed up into the plane onto the seat beside his own.

  As they walked, Jack took Maria Elena’s elbow, ostensibly because the dry cracked field was uneven, bumpy, a litde awkward to walk on, but really, she knew, just to touch her. They’d been working together now for four months, and after the first month he’d begun to pursue her with a kind of lighthearted determination, not as though he didn’t really care, but as though his caring had to be kept swathed in protective padding. This caution, or self-protection, or whatever it was, made it easier for Maria Elena to fend him off, without ever having to explain that it wasn’t him but herself she was rejecting. In the last few weeks his pursuit had become more reflexive, absent-minded, ritualistic; they’d setded into a vaguely flirtatious but essentially comfortable relationship that could last for as long as they worked together.

  He was a decent man, John Auston, thirty-seven years old, tall and awkwardly husky, as though his skeleton had never been properly hooked together but still jangled and skidded within its padding of flesh. He was methodical, quiet, devoted to his work for WHO, and if Maria Elena were in the market for a man, here was one, an excellent one. But she was not in the market, never would be in the market, and in any event Jack was not really unencumbered.

  The fact was, Jack was married and divorced. He had an ex-wife far away up in the United States, and though he would never admit it, Maria Elena could tell that he still loved her. Or still needed her, which came to the same thing.

  Jack always avoided talking about that ex-wife of his who, when their daughter was three, had packed up one day and taken the child and crossed the entire United States from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to Oregon, simply to get away from him. Maria Elena had no sense of the woman, whether she was a good or a bad person, strong or weak or anything about her, and yet sometimes she felt she understood why that wife had left. There had come a point, there must have come a point, when she had simply grown tired of steering him. He was so easily steered, as she herself had steered his flirtatiousness into this unthreatening shoal where it now safely stagnated, and yet how could you feel anything but tarnished if you devoted your life to treating another human being as though he were nothing but a docile ox?

  Since the second front seat, next to the pilot, was so much more desirable than any of the four seats behind it, Jack and Maria Elena had worked it out that one of them would ride up front on the way out each day and the other on the way back. Today, Jack had chosen the first half of the trip, so now he was the one who climbed up the two toeholds and crawled over the pilot’s forward-folded seat into the back. Then the pilot unfolded his seat into normal position and helped Maria Elena climb up. She slid across to the passenger side, stowing the pilot’s fumetti in the pocket beneath the window beside her.

  The pilot took his position at the wheel and, after a brisk series of preparations, started the single engine, turned the small plane around in a bumpy circle, walked it halfway back up the field, and swept it around again to face the light wind. Over by the church, under the tree, Father Tomaz watched; probably hoping they were on their way to God instead of Brasilia. The pilot started them forward and they jounced and hopped down the field, the wings waggling as though they’d fall off, the small wheel in the pilot’s hands shaking like a ribbon tied to a high-speed fan, until all at once the wheels lifted clear of the hard ground and the plane became graceful, coherent, almost alive.

  There was no door on Maria Elena’s side, which was why she and Jack had had to climb over the pilot’s seat, but the window had a flap in the lower half, like a deux-chevaux that she could open with her elbow to look down direcdy at the receding ground, becoming aware for the first time just how large the graveyard was on the other side of the church. And how small so many of the graves. It was human instinct, when something was trying to exterminate the species, to reproduce faster and faster. Particularly when the killer was mostly killing children.

  The noise inside the plane was at a level where conversation was possible but not easy, so usually they didn’t talk much, particularly on the flight back, after the long dry interview in two languages. Today, though, after about five minutes, the new pilot frowned at her and said, “Why do I know you from someplace?”

  This still happened sometimes. People still remembered Maria Elena, the pop star, the rising talent who had shone so brightly and so briefly and then disappeared. She had used only her first names, Maria Elena, and the people had cried them out at the concerts—“Maria Elena! Maria Elena!”—as though she were a soccer star.

  Ah, but that was then. When someone remembered now, or thought they did, she denied it. What was the point in rehashing that painful history? They would want to know why, with her fame still growing, with her record albums topping the charts, with her career on the brink of the international—she had even recorded one album in Spanish—she had so abruptly disappeared.

  And how could she talk about such
things? That her body was foul, her children dead, her husband recoiling from her in disgust. That she could no longer sing, that the music was no longer in her. And that when she had tried to use her celebrity for something that really mattered, to protest the destruction of the land and the people on it, the media had closed against her, shutting her out, more interested in jobs than health, caring more about their wallets than their children.

  So when this new pilot asked why he knew her, she offered him a small and distancing smile, as though he were merely flirting, and said, “I can’t think of any reason,” and turned away to look out her window at the ground bumping by far below.

  That stopped the conversation, but only for a few minutes. Then, when she incautiously looked again in his direction he grinned at her under his bandit moustache and said, “Not such a good priest down there, huh?”

  Maria Elena looked at him in surprise. “You could tell that from way over by the plane?”

  “I could tell that from the sky,” he said, and laughed.

  “He thinks God wants all this misery,” she said. “Why should God want it?”

  “Who benefits?” said the pilot, raising one brown stubby finger in a parody of the pedantic teacher. “That is always the question to ask, when you want to know what is really going on. Who benefits from the docility of the people? Does God?”

  “The owners of the factory,” Maria Elena said.

  “Not God?” It was as though he was teasing her.

  Jack, in the isolation of the seat behind them and not understanding Portuguese, couldn’t take part in the conversation. It was up to Maria Elena by herself. Earnesdy, she said, “God made us. He loves us. He doesn’t want us to be tortured. It doesn’t benefit Him if the people don’t fight back when the factory kills their children. It benefits the owners.”

  ‘The owners.” He seemed doubtful. “Who do you mean, exacdy?”