“Lowly?” he replied, trying to pronounce it correctly.
She laughed a third time, but with an undercurrent of sadness, as if she’d had to deal with many a mispronouncing English-speaker over the years.
“Call me Lulu,” she suggested.
Dan wanted to work on saying her actual name right, but knew he really didn’t have time. “Thanks,” he told her, “my name is …”
“Bond, James Bond,” she quickly interrupted, laughing once more, but with more self-awareness than sorrow. “Oh, I know your name, Mr. Morgan. Remember, I used it at the beach.”
Dan mentally kicked himself. “Of course,” he acknowledged. “But that was right after you hooked and gutted a big one. I think you could forgive me if I was a bit distracted.”
She gave a relieved smile. “And I hope you will forgive me for my brusque bluntness.”
“No apology necessary,” he maintained. “Your English is very good. Maybe better than mine.”
Her smile widened, but he didn’t see its sardonicism. If he had, it might have reminded him of Peter Conley’s resting face.
“Thank you,” she said instead. “Because I bet your Taiwanese sucks.”
This time Linc laughed aloud inside Dan’s ear, but the comment didn’t faze Morgan.
“What Taiwanese?” he answered, and they both laughed.
That cemented their relationship, so he learned more as she kept driving. Although she looked eighteen, she was actually ten years older.
“How did you get involved in this game?” he asked her as they passed through Checheng Township.
Out the corner of his eye, Dan saw more hot springs, grasslands, forests, a prominently advertised peeled mung bean dessert palace, and yet another riotously colored temple. Apparently, since Taiwan was so drably colored itself, all the temples and many of the restaurants and hotels looked like a rainbow had thrown up on them.
“Can’t you guess?” Lulu answered with more mischievousness than maliciousness.
Dan was going to plead ignorance, but it all made sense to him: what he was doing here, what she was doing here, and why they had met so fortuitously.
“Smith,” he said.
She repeated, “Smith.”
The car stopped. It took Dan by slight surprise, and he chastised himself for letting his guard down as he sat up and popped the hat off his eyes.
“We’re here,” she said.
It seemed to him that they were in the middle of nowhere—not quite the coconut palm forest, but nowhere near Checheng either. Still, Lulu was already heading for a break in the trees. As Dan got out of the car, he looked closer to see a wooden and bamboo gateway, nicely blended into the trees so it almost looked like a part of them.
“Where’s here?” he wondered, following her down a steep stone pathway.
“My family’s legacy,” she told him as they neared a heavy, thick, wooden doorway with a single vertical pole for a latch, and a narrow, opaque glass panel parallel to it. Like the gateway, the door seemed to blend in to the hillside all around it. Lulu took out a key and plunged it into a small round lock between the pole and the glass.
“Welcome to Gaoxing Didian,” she said, but with more sadness than pride.
He followed her into a small, humid foyer lit only by sunlight, facing a simple rectangular counter. On either side were triangular windows looking out into forests of fir, ficus, bamboo, and, of course, palm.
Lulu pointed upwards. “Mudan Township.” She pointed right. “Manzhou Township.” She pointed left. “Shizi Township.” She passed the desk to another door that was a smaller twin of the one they’d entered by. “And, in the middle of it all, our little ‘Happiness Place.’”
Pushing open the door behind the counter, she walked down a tile path between mostly open-air compartments. The humidity was much stronger in this larger space, because each compartment had a square pool of steaming hot spring water. There were six in all, three on each side.
“My parents were smarter than I ever knew,” he heard her say as she headed to another heavy, thick, wooden door at the other end of the compartments. “Because there are three major words for happiness. ‘Xingfu,’ which means long-lasting happy family life, is best. ‘Kuaile,’ which means someone who is truly forever happy, is next.”
She reached the furthest door and held up another key. “And then there’s ‘Gaoxing,’” she said. “The least long-lasting happiness.” She pushed the key into the lock. “A temporary moment of happiness, really, often due to the influence of material possessions.” She turned her head to face Dan. “My family seems to have the curse of second sight.”
Lulu turned the key, pushed the door open, and stretched out her arm, beckoning Dan to witness what she revealed.
Beyond the door was a small temple that was traversed by a small white path, flanked by eight long tables—four on each side—instead of pews. At the end of the path were two simple ancestral altar shrines, containing traditional ancestral tablets behind incense pots.
The tablet in the left shrine featured a black-draped photo of a man. The other one had a white-draped photo of a woman. It was easy for Dan to guess they were Lulu’s parents.
But the altar shrines were not nearly as distracting as the rest of the space. Covering every table and every wall were at least six computers, countless papers, print-outs, pictures, maps, and graphs—all acupunctured by push pins with different colored tops.
Dan looked back at Lulu with concern, but the only expression he could see on her face was one of dedicated certainty.
“I know I’m going to regret asking,” he said, “but what is this?”
Lulu sighed. “And I know I’m going to regret answering,” she replied. “But I bet you’ve probably already guessed. You’re pretty good at guessing. It’s my investigation into the murderer of my family.”
Dan looked down at her. “Smith?” he asked.
Lulu looked up at him. “Smith,” she answered.
Chapter 24
They had plenty of time to talk on the five-hour drive.
Lulu could have shaved at least an hour off the drive if Taiwan wasn’t Taiwan. But Taiwan was Taiwan, and she explained why as they first drove fifty miles straight south, then twenty-five more miles straight east.
“They could and should have named this country ‘Seismic City.’” She made a waving motion that was meant to incorporate the entire island. “All seismic faults.”
“And that means earthquakes, right?” Dan asked. He was still in his dark gray outfit, but was relieved he didn’t have to make the whole trip slouched down with a tiny hat pasted on his temple.
“Boy, does it,” Lulu concurred. “Like three hundred a year.” She chortled at Dan’s eye-widening reaction. “Take it easy, Cobra,” she advised. “They’re not all ‘Land That Time Forgot’ level. Those only happen once every twenty years or so. The last big one was in 1999 on September twenty-first. Killed almost three thousand people, no matter how prepared we thought we were.” She glanced at him again. “You got your ‘nine-eleven.’ We got our ‘nine-twenty-one.’” She let that settle in before continuing in a lighter tone. “The latest U.S. Geological Society ‘seismic hazard map’ declared that nine-tenths of the island has their highest ‘most hazardous’ rating.” Her expression became meditative. “Due for another biggie any time now.”
Once again, Dan was reminded that, for all intents and purposes, Lulu had been raised with the pop culture and slang of America and Japan.
“So, what are we doing?” he asked her. “Driving around major fault lines?”
She considered the comment with downturned lips. “Basically, yes. If we drove no more than twenty miles north from the west coast where we were, by the time we hit Fangliao Township, we couldn’t get across the island short of stealing a plane.”
Dan wished Cougar would chi
me in about then, but the pilot was still AWOL from the R-comm.
Lulu made a chopping motion from straight up to straight down. “Taiwan is bisected by mountain ranges—like two wrestlers not willing to give an inch. In between them is the Taroko Gorge.”
“It’s like Taiwan’s Grand Canyon,” Dan heard Linc whisper deep in his ear.
“It’s like Taiwan’s Grand Canyon,” Lulu said.
Dan grimaced. Linc chimed in, but Conley didn’t. Life wasn’t fair.
“Any way you look at it,” Lulu continued, unaware of the voices in Dan’s head, “we can’t get from one side of the island to the other by car except by the Shuishalian or the Nanbu Cross-island highways, both of whose entrances are way up north. So better this little southeast detour than slogging over to those things.”
“You’re the driver,” Dan commented, knowing all this chatter was just her way of putting off the inevitable.
He turned his eyes toward her, and tried to remember what had seemed to be a teenager in a loose white shirt and dark pants. Now she was dressed to blend in with any young professional on her day off: a dark blue, long-sleeve, light-weight U-neck top, dark tan casual slacks, and dark blue slip-ons—all under a light-weight, dark tan, three-season windbreaker. She made it look fashionable. Now her black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore glare-reducing sunglasses through which her deep brown eyes could still be seen.
He let the silence linger a second more, filling his eyes with the green, brown, and gray scenery, then opened his mouth to say something along the lines of oh, look at that elephant in the room, when she beat him to it.
“I was fifteen years old,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road. “You know how fifteen year-old girls can be?”
Dan rolled his own eyes, almost chuckling. “Boy, do I,” he said with empathy, the fifteen year-old Alex coming into his mind in sharp focus. “But silly me, I always wanted to believe that Chinese teenagers were different.”
Lulu sniffed in thankful derision. “Oh, yes, the old gweilo fantasy of the polite, quiet, subservient Asian.”
“Ge-why-low?” Dan interrupted instead of challenging her on her stereotypical preconception, especially since that stereotypical preconception was, in his case, right on the money.
“Foreign devil,” she translated before plunging back in. “Well, Cobra, I’m not Chinese. I’m Taiwanese. Taiwan is still an independent democracy. And like all teenagers in all free countries, boy, did I take advantage of it.” She exhaled, her eyes misting. “My parents’ only crime was trying to keep me safe and happy. But I treated them like aged, ignorant, idiots.”
Dan understood. “Like teenagers everywhere—from Asia to America. And beyond.”
Lulu took little solace in Dan’s well-meant disclaimer. “You have your nine-eleven,” she said with heavy sadness. “We have our nine-twenty-one. But I have my own, personal four-fourteen.” She took a deep breath and plunged into the memory.
“That night, thirteen years ago, I decided I was going out, no matter what my parents said, and no matter how much they needed my help. Our resort was more crowded than usual—a whopping great four guests—but nothing was going to stop me. I got in my lowest cut, highest hemmed outfit and headed for the door. When I went out, passing someone coming in, my parents were alive. When I came home, they were dead.”
She looked at Dan with haunted but still hard eyes. “Five hours, Mr. Morgan. All it took was five hours.”
“What happened?” he asked.
Lulu returned her attention to the road, her entire demeanor changing. She went from a lost, regretful young daughter to a hardcore, fervent avenger in two seconds flat.
“An accident,” she scoffed. “Like I told you before, we’re not a country with many violent crimes. If they had been shot, or stabbed, or strangled, the whole country would’ve stopped dead—if you’ll excuse the expression—until the killer was caught. But they weren’t shot or stabbed or strangled. According to the final police report, my father had slipped, hitting his head on the side of a hot spring pool, then his top half had slipped into the water.” She looked back at Dan. “They weren’t sure what killed him first: blood flooding his brain, drowning, or being scalded to death.” She turned back to the road. “My mother died from a fall…supposedly running to get him help. They found her at the bottom of a ravine.”
Dan was smart enough not to even inquire into the chances of the police report being true. “The man you passed on the way out,” he said instead. “Smith.”
“Smith,” she agreed.
“How did you know it was Smith?”
“I didn’t. Not then. I accepted it was a man who called himself Mr. Smith after six years of research.”
“How do you know he killed them?”
“I don’t,” she said in a tone that was anything but an admission. “But he was the only one with a fake name. He was the only one who couldn’t be found. He was the only one who wasn’t questioned. He was the only gweilo.”
Dan wanted to start barking at Randall and Shepard about how they could have teamed up with this tragic obsessive, but he stopped himself, remembering her admonition to have a little faith in his superiors.
“So,” he said to her instead, “you’ve dedicated your life to finding and proving it was him.”
“Darn tootin’,” she replied in a sardonic drawl. “And everyplace I found evidence of him stank with death.” Lulu sat up straighter behind the wheel, trying to change back into the young professional. “Quite the mover and shaker, your Mr. Smith,” she continued.
“Not my Mr. Smith,” Dan said, also choosing to stare out the windshield.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re just following orders, huh?”
Dan winced. “I deserved that. But keep in mind, I’m looking for him too. And not to give him a pat on the head.”
“So why are you looking for him?” she asked.
Dan answered honestly. “To find out why our headquarters and all our homes were destroyed. To find out why I’ve been chased halfway around the world. To find out what is going on.”
Lulu surprised him by turning off Route Nine at the juncture of Nanxing Road. And by saying, “Well, why didn’t say so before? I can tell you all that.”
Chapter 25
Dan remained surprised as she drove into Fuli Township in Hualien County, a sleepy little parish on the east coast, a quarter way up the island. All it looked good for was to link one major trucking thoroughfare with another that was several hundred yards ahead.
But the surprises kept coming for Dan when Lulu turned left and pulled in beside a multi-colored, neon-lit glass booth containing a young woman in a flaming red, lace-up, midriff and cleavage-baring top and hot pants sitting on a padded stool.
“Betel nut beauty,” Lulu explained as she unbuckled her seat belt and opened the driver’s side door. “Don’t dawdle,” she suggested as she got out. “Or stare.”
Dan emerged onto a small main street of eight buildings with either thatched, corrugated steel, concrete, or shingled roofs. Then, as he speechlessly followed Lulu around the side of a small shop behind the neon-lit glass booth, he heard Linc speaking quickly in his ear, as if reading a disclaimer for a prescription medicine commercial.
“Also known as Shuangdong or binglang girls, they sell betel nuts to truckers, who chew them like American truckers chew tobacco. Started in the 1960s as a marketing ploy at one betel nut stand, then caught on. Now these kiosks are everywhere along roads in rural, suburban and urban areas…”
“Shut up, Linc,” Dan hissed between his teeth.
“You say something?” Lulu asked without slowing or turning around.
Rather than answer, Dan caught up with the young woman as she pressed yet another key into another lock on another door while grabbing yet another handle alongside. With a twist and a push, she ushered Dan insid
e.
It was the dimly, fluorescent-lit back room of the Taiwanese mini-convenience truck stop store out front. Big oil-drum-sized cans filled with tea leaves, cigarette packs, and betel nuts—which looked like chestnuts with glandular conditions—all but filled the space, save for a few narrow curving paths.
Another woman, wearing bright pink short-shorts, low-cut tube top, and skyscraper-high heels sat on a closed can, smoking a cigarette. Since she looked thirty years old, Dan guessed she was in her forties, or beyond.
She said something in her native tongue, which the R-comm told Dan was “Hey, Lulu.”
Lulu began twisting some cans around to make more room. “Hey Zen Shoo,” Dan heard in his head. “Your shift soon?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Mind relieving Quac now?”
The betel juice beauty frowned, pinched a piece of tobacco leaf off her tongue, stood, dropped the cigarette, then ground it under her stiletto heel. To Dan’s eyes, it was quite a performance.
Without another word, the person the R-comm called Zen left the room, passing a balding man who had poked his head in.
“Oh, Lulu,” he said. “It’s you. I was expecting you closer to dark.”
“We made good time, Foo,” she told him. “Everything ready?”
He looked apologetic, even obsequious. “Almost,” he admitted, his hands up in the universal position of helplessness. “Like I said, thought you were coming later.”
Lulu stopped long enough to pinion him with a baleful stare. “Okay then, Foo. Will it be ready?”
He nodded like a bobble head on a mechanical bull. “Yes, Lulu, of course, Lulu.”
And before she could melt his head with her stare, he was gone, back into the main rest stop store.
As Lulu returned to her redecorating, she took a second to see how Dan was doing.
“Friends of the family,” she told him as she returned to her can shifting.
Beginning to get a re-glimmer of why the remaining Zeta had reached out to this extraordinary young woman, Dan stood up. “Can I help?”
War of Shadows Page 17
