The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

gave it the old college try anyway, and felt idiotically pleased with my results. Heck, there was enough here for a complete sentence! I tried it out: “Q!x vlaad bakhsh#.”

  A cloud must have passed over the sun just then; for a moment there seemed to be less light than before, and I felt as though gravity was swooping around wildly and pulling my bones in different directions. But despite that moment of disorientation, my stab at pronouncing the mystery language didn’t sound so bad – and apart from a sudden shooting pain above my right eyebrow, I didn’t feel so bad either. In fact, I felt quite gloriously contented with my lot on this earth, right down to my place on this shady deck overlooking the lake. I looked up into a deep blue cloudless sky, feeling as though I could float right up into it – if the sound of an arriving car hadn’t distracted me. Here, just to make my cup overflow, were the Stevensons at last. I dry-crunched some aspirin and headed down the curving stone steps from the deck to meet them at their car.

  I began to feel somewhat less contented as I walked them through the house. Part of the problem was that small but persistent headache, which made it hard to concentrate on exactly where we were. I’m pretty sure we cycled through one suite of rooms and halls and outer decks two and a half times before I caught on and concentrated on going up the spiral staircase to the next level.

  A larger problem, though, was that my loyal ex-student was looking less and less happy. Angie squealed (piercingly) with delight at each wacky architectural feature, and exclaimed at intervals that nobody they knew had anything like this house (doubtless true: I don’t think anybody else had given the architect-developer any money to play with after they saw this place). She even, engagingly, found parallels with Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture in the strangest bits of the house.

  Trouble was, Bruce was the one with the family money. And the ambition. He’d achieved tenure in record time, and now he wanted a house that would position him as the obvious successor to the current chairman of the mining engineering department. As we made our way from porthole windows to spiral stairs to cantilevered decks I could practically see him thinking that a listed historical building in West Austin would fit his desired image better than this display of modern architecture running amok.

  Which it probably would, but I didn’t have a listed historical mansion to show him. What I had was this house, and a growing hunger for the commission on this sale and its effect on my bank account.

  I can’t think why I even tried it. I blame the headache, which aspirin had barely blunted, and the extreme effort of concentration required to keep in mind where we were in the sprawling house. I just didn’t have any mental energy left to tamp down my wild fantasies about how to make Bruce happy with the Harris house.

  When he pulled Angie out onto a deck with a murmured apology, I didn’t have to eavesdrop to guess at the substance of the conversation. This was the place where Sensible Hubby reads the riot act to Exhilarated Wife, and I could almost hear that nice, fat commission taking wings and fluttering off to land in somebody else’s wallet. I would probably never again have clients who could afford a place like this.

  That was when I pulled the notebook out of my tote bag, flipped it open and skimmed down the page I’d been reading.

  Bummer – there were no words meaning “disgustingly rich clients” that I could shoehorn into that little sentence.

  Oh, well, what difference did it make? I was trying to use magic, and since there’s no such thing as magic, I could make up my own rules. There was a word for “and”.

  “Bruce dva Angie vlaad bakhsh#.”

  The room darkened as though the lights were failing. I had the momentary illusion of being on a roller coaster or inside a gyroscope, with gravity pulling at me from crazy angles. The little needle of pain over my right eyebrow turned into a huge lance aimed right at the back of my eyeball. I groaned involuntarily and bent over for a moment, cupping a hand over my eye.

  “Sienna, are you all right?” They were back inside already.

  Eins, zwei, drei…“Never better,” I lied, forcing a smile. The headache had obviously settled in to torture me for the rest of the day, and now I was going to have to act happy with their decision to do something sensible instead of buying Whitney Harris’s white elephant. The girl was definitely no longer contented.

  They were smiling too. Both of them.

  “Bruce had his doubts, but I’ve convinced him that this is too good an opportunity to miss,” Angie announced buoyantly.

  “Yes, well, I certainly understand…” I actually started the little speech I’d been working on, in which I pretended to be a good sport who didn’t want them to buy anything they might be unhappy with, before it dawned on me that Angie wasn’t saying what I’d been braced for. “I’m sorry, what?” Maybe the pain of this sudden migraine attack was making me hallucinate.

  “We’d like you to convey our offer to the seller,” Bruce said.

  He and Angie looked completely, gloriously contented with their decision.

  I wasn’t.

  The girl was scared stiff.

  6. Taking the relationship to a different level

  Edward Osborne stared at the IT report in disgust. After he’d been unable to find any Alt-Shaimaki materials on Idrisov’s laptop except for three scans of notebook pages – one of them slightly blurred but still barely legible – he had handed the thing over to a computer science expert for detailed examination. A risky step, but he had some protection; Jackson’s wife was one of his dissertation candidates. Nobody who’d written eighty percent of a reasonably good dissertation would risk upsetting their major professor this close to the finish line, and he made it clear to Carrie Jackson’s husband that any careless gossiping about this little job would seriously upset him.

  And surely it was a risk worth taking. The data had to be there, somewhere, concealed in one of those sneaky ways that only computer people knew about.

  Except, according to Carrie’s husband, it wasn’t.

  He reported that the laptop was quite new, a Chinese knockoff of a Dell model, and that the previous owner had not been a particularly sophisticated user. He’d found a handful of emails to and from just one other person, a browser history heavy on gambling sites and soft porn, and three scanned images. That was it.

  “Could data have been loaded onto a flash drive and then erased from the computer?”

  Jackson shrugged. “Could be… but I didn’t find any evidence of erased files. And I don’t believe in a user sophisticated enough to move data without leaving tracks, but too stupid to clear the cookies left by porn sites. Dr. Osborne, this computer is the equivalent of the used car owned by a little old lady who only used it to drive to church on Sundays. Except,” he added thoughtfully, “considering the browsing history, the owner was no lady. Where did you say you got this again?”

  “Just doing a favor for a friend,” Osborne said vaguely. He got rid of Jackson and snarled quietly at the worthless laptop. Idrisov must have had a lot of Alt-Shaimaki data to sell, if he was willing to float scans of whole pages of vocabulary and phrases to attract a buyer. The rest of that data had to be somewhere: if not here, then among Idrisov’s belongings – wherever they were.

  The emails gave him a clue to that, at least. Exchanges between Idrisov and some woman vaguely connected with the math department, they accounted for Idrisov’s invitation to speak at the conference and strengthened Osborne’s conviction that there was valuable data concealed just beyond his reach. Idrisov had originally contacted this woman in search of buyers for this information. That in itself didn’t say where he’d hidden it, but the last emails in the exchange pointed him to a place to look. This Thalia Lensky had done one last favor for her Taklanistani buddy, finding a place for him to stay in some house near campus whose owner had a room for rent.

  Osborne couldn’t think of a student whose arm he could twist for the next job, so he actually hired a P.I. to gain access to Koshan Idrisov’s room and go through his belongings. />
  The man was a bungler.

  First the P.I. had let the landlady see him, pretending to be interested in renting that particular room. She told him it was already rented, and of course he couldn’t very well tell her that her tenant was probably dead; for that matter, Osborne had been too cautious to give the P.I. that piece of information. When he reported failure, Osborne told him to break into the room and ransack it.

  “You’re not paying me enough to take that kind of chance.”

  “If you don’t produce what I need,” Osborne said, “I’m not paying you anything at all.”

  After the bumbling idiot reported a second failure – evidently he had spooked the old lady, who ran him off at gunpoint – Osborne did, in fact, wind up paying the man just to ensure his silence.

  And he still hadn’t set eyes on Idrisov’s store of Alt-Shaimaki vocabulary and phrases!

  He was beginning to think that he might have to take a hand personally. What had happened to Koshan Idrisov just might also have to happen to the old lady who’d rented him a room, if she persisted in blocking his access to data which he now considered morally his. After all, he probably would have paid Idrisov for the information. If the man had lived. It wasn’t his fault that everything had gone wrong.

  As for the P.I.’s story about being threatened with a gun – he wasn’t too worried about that. Some old broad with palsied hands, waving a gun she was probably too stupid to have loaded properly? Not a problem for a man who had the secret of disappearance on the tip of his tongue.

  I badly wanted to talk over the day’s happenings with Laura, my best friend and also my long-term tenant since the middle of our sophomore year. But when I got home, she wasn’t there.

  Worse: Craig was.

  He was sitting in the living room that Laura and I shared, drinking beer and watching TV, with his feet up on the coffee table. Cath Palug was nowhere to be seen, but that wasn’t surprising; he regularly exercised his secret superpower of invisibility when we entertained people he considered unworthy of his attentions, and Craig had never been a favorite of his.

  Laura and I were modestly proud of the way we’d redecorated the living room. My parents, who never noticed their surroundings as long as there was enough light to read academic journals by, had allowed it to age ungracefully into a dim brown space filled with large brown furniture. When Laura moved in with me, we sold the heavy old-fashioned furniture and painted the room light gray. Our redecorating was limited by my insistence on paying half the cost and by the fact that all I had to spend was what I could get for the old furniture, so it wasn’t as spiffy as Laura’s two rooms-and-bathroom suite, but we were happy with it. An Ikea coffee table paired with a blue-gray striped futon couch and chairs made the place look light and airy. The finishing touch was the replacement of my grandparents’ monster cabinet TV with a wall-mounted flat screen.

  I didn’t feel that Craig’s invasion really improved the look of the room. His blond curls and carefully nurtured three-day blond stubble no longer appealed to me. Had they ever, really?

  “Hey, babe!” he greeted me. “Come over and take a load off. Let your hair down – well, let it escape anyway, ha ha!” A wide-spread arm invited me to sit on his lap. I took a chair on the other side of the coffee table.

  Craig looked hurt. “Why so unfriendly? Here I am to solve all your problems, don’t I even get a little kiss? And babe, somebody’s dumped a bunch of junk in my room. You need to clean it out.”

  I learned that Laura had let him in before going off for a late-afternoon rehearsal with one of the bands she sang for. A communications problem. She didn’t know that my feelings towards Craig had changed; to be fair, I hadn’t been aware of how much they’d changed until I walked into my house to find him making himself so very much at home.

  And, of course, Laura also didn’t know that Michael Ryan had rented the room that Koshan had vacated without warning.

  So when Craig showed up, announcing that he was going to solve all my financial problems by renting the vacant room himself and that I agreed it was high time we took our relationship to the next level, Laura had no particular reason to disbelieve him. She probably thought a little less of me, but that would have made her even less willing to question him.

  I told him the first reason why I wasn’t going to clear the room out for him, the one that had nothing to do with our relationship.

  The shock of my news made him actually drop his feet to the floor and sit up. “What do you mean, somebody else has the room? We agreed I was going to take it over!”

  “No. We did not agree on anything. You told me that was how it was going to be, and I went down to the beach to think it over.”

  “Well, you didn’t tell me no!”

  Aunt Georgia always said, “Count to three before you shoot your mouth off, Sienna.” Um, dois, três… “I’m doing that now.”

  “You can’t change your mind on me like that!”

  This argument had creepy echoes of an older and nastier one. I took a breath and reminded myself that this was Craig, not a drunken stranger. But it didn’t help. Acel, aryo, adek. I’ve never learned Acholi, but it’s interesting, isn’t it, that all the numerals start with ‘a’? Thinking about that made me feel stronger. “I’m not changing my mind, Craig. I never said yes in the first place.”

  “If you didn’t say no, that’s the same thing as agreeing!”

  I shook my head and he switched arguments, perhaps sensing that this one was a loser. “So where did you meet this Mike Ryan? Down at the beach? He must be real hot stuff, huh, if you’re dumping me for him.”

  “Craig, I’m not dumping you for him.”

  “Sure feels like it.”

  “No.” I thought over exactly what I wanted to say and counted to five this time. In Japanese. Ichi, ni, san, yon, go. “I’m dumping you for me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Think of it,” I advised him, “as moving our relationship to a different level.”

  That week away from Craig’s expectations and assumptions had been extremely clarifying. Even Floss and Blossom had been helpful. “When you talk about this guy,” Floss had said, “you don’t sound as if you have fun with him.”

  “That’s not the only thing in life.”

  “No, but it’s important,” Blossom said. “What do you actually get out of hanging out with this guy?”

  I shrugged. “He’s good-looking enough, and he seemed to be really into me for some reason. I thought maybe, if we got to know each other, it would get better. With time. I’m no good at judging character, Bloss. So I’ve been trying not to judge.”

  Both girls rolled their eyes.

  “Well, I can hardly just dump him when he hasn’t done anything wrong!”

  “Sure you can,” said Floss.

  “It’d be a kindness,” Blossom said.

  “Why let him waste any more time with you, when you really don’t even like him much?”

  It had sounded more reasonable in Port Aransas than it did in my living room.

  Craig spent some time telling me how unreasonable I was being, how unfair, how I didn’t appreciate all he’d done for me. Apparently he valued his company very highly, if a dozen evenings listening to Laura singing with various bands constituted a gift for which I owed him lifelong gratitude. When he got to the point of whining about how I’d taken him for granted and he’d wasted all this time and money on a girl who didn’t even put out, I reminded him that my housemate had given us free passes to all those shows.

  That made him so incandescently angry that I wondered if I should head for the bedroom, but he ran out of things to say and stormed out before I was quite ready to introduce him to my father’s old Smith and Wesson.

  And now I had two concerns to talk over with Laura when she drifted into the house after rehearsal.

  Laura’s side of the house mirrored mine, structurally: two bedrooms with a bathroom between that opened into both rooms. The floor plan had allowed the a
rchitect to save on hall space in the interests of putting a generous living room and kitchen between the two pairs of bedrooms, but it made it awkward if you were trying to rent out rooms. Laura had both bedrooms and the bathroom on her side, and paid well for the privilege, but it meant that when I was cash-strapped the only remaining space to rent out was the bedroom that shared a bathroom with my room. For several years I’d rented that to an elderly retired Italian teacher who did little but sit in her room reading, but earlier this year Mrs. Costellano’s daughter had finally produced the grandson she’d all but given up hoping for. Suddenly the woman just had to move to Denver to live with her daughter and grandson, and a chunk of my monthly income went with her.

  All of which was why I’d never gotten around to decorating my side of the house as Laura had done with hers, and why her spare room was a much pleasanter place to sit and grouch about life than my bedroom was. Laura was an Anglophile with a serious addiction to Liberty floral cotton prints. Sometimes I thought she overdid it, but what the heck – unlike me, she had plenty of money to spend doing up the place, and on a hot summer afternoon like this it was very pleasant to sit in a room that looked like an English flower garden run amok. With a river at the bottom of the garden – that was represented by the watery blue-green curtains behind the floral-print throw pillows.

  Being an Austin slacker is a lot easier if you have a trust fund behind you, rather than only an aging house that eats its head off in running repairs. Not that I should complain; I haven’t had to get a real job yet.

  But I did, quietly, envy Laura her financial resources. And maybe a few other things, like her talent – she didn’t get gigs singing for three bands just because of her pretty black eyes and crisply curling black hair – and, oh, her self-assurance, her social skills, her empathy…

  All of which were now focused on me and my confused kvetching about the day.

  “I had no idea you felt that way about Craig,” she said for the fourth or fifth time, “or I’d never have let him in. I’m so sorry—”