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Tea with the Black Dragon

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“They will not fit,” he predicted, as he vanished again into the bedroom.

“They do fit,” she crowed in triumph.

“I admit it,” replied Long. He was a very different seeming man, in faded jeans and a sweatshirt.

He did not look so old, since age generally follows on tailoring. He did not look so terribly well bred, since class follows the same rules. Most obviously, he did not look half as self-satisfied as he had before.

His left hand pulled at his right sleeve, which was too short for his arms.

“I think you look fine!” she stated, surveying all she had done to Mr. Long. “And now there’s nothing white about you.

“Oh! I’m sorry.”

He laughed. His teeth denied her words. “What would you have done had I had the coloring of Mr. Rasmussen? Or your own fairness,” he added, his gaze halted on the young woman’s face.

“Shoe polish,” she replied, smiling for the first time since he had met her.

He transferred his wallet to his jeans pocket. “Ah! While I remember, Elizabeth.”

“Liz.”

“Liz. Yes. You are supposed to surrender that letter tomorrow. Don’t. Create a copy and give Rasmussen that.”

“That can’t work. I thought of it already Rasmussen knows I wrote the letter on an 8080 text processor at RasTech. I can’t get back to copy it without being seen.”

He was stopped by this, and stood motionless for half a minute. “Then I have to return by dawn tomorrow. If I haven’t found your mother yet, I’ll have a copy of that letter for you to surrender.”

“How will you do that?”

“I’ll print one,” he replied confidently.

“You… know how to use the system?”

His gesture was reassuring. “That’s no problem. But if dawn comes and I fail to show…”

“No!” she cried out. Then she spoke more reasonably. “What do I do if you fail to show?”

“Go to the police.”

“But they’ll kill her! Threve said if the police showed up anywhere around…” She put her hand to her mouth and bit down, so that she would not start shaking again.

Mayland Long stepped closer. One hand against her yellow hair pulled her head gently to his shoulder. He could feel her body tremble. Slowly and clearly he whispered in her ear. “Elizabeth, these men intend to kill your mother. Only if there is no one left alive who knows, can they escape suspicion.”

The trembling died away. She mumbled something that was lost into the fabric of Long’s shirt.

“I didn’t hear that,” he whispered, suddenly conscious of her hair against his face and her warm, moist breath on his neck.

Liz Macnamara took one step back and stood alone. “I said I know. They intend to kill mother as soon as they can kill me. And they’ll do that as soon as they have the letter. I’m not even sure she’s alive now. I asked to hear her voice and Floyd said later.”

“She’s alive,” said Long. “I’m sure of it.”

She didn’t ask him to explain his certainty. “But what shall I do till you come back? To help, I mean.”

He smiled. “Sleep, if you can. If not, then drink Scotch. Or pray. Survive in your own way; I can’t know what’s best for you, Elizabeth.

“ ’Til morning,” he concluded, bowing slightly. He flicked off the light and pulled wide the courtyard window. Cold mist from the fountain blew in with the breeze. There was no sound from the gulls asleep in the grass.

Chapter 8

Martha Macnamara awoke with a miserable aching nose. It felt as though it had been stuffed for two weeks straight. Her hands were cramped; she must have been lying on them. There was something else bothering her as well; it took her a few confused minutes to figure out what that was.

“Oh!” she cried out. “I have to go to the bathroom.” She opened her eyes, and the results were so unpleasant she closed them again. The ceiling had looked so ugly, and it swept by with unsettling speed. The spinning ceiling was mere dizziness, of course, like the time she had had her wisdom teeth pulled. And the ugliness must be a result of nausea; dizziness and nausea always went together.

But why was she nauseated? Why dizzy? And why couldn’t she place that ceiling she had glimpsed, with its acoustic tile and round fluorescent lights?

Where was she? Where should she be?

Not at home; her own ceiling was plastered, with a crack through it like a lightning bolt, and the fixtures wore white paper lanterns. Besides, Martha knew she was not at home; she was staying at the James Herald Hotel. Which did not look anything like this. Those ceilings were arched, and the picture moldings were impressively Corinthian.

She felt so awful that maybe she was in a hospital. Yes. She had passed out on the street. Someone in a black car had spoken her name…

And now she just had to go to the bathroom, dizzy or not. She pulled her eyes open.

How very odd. She was stretched out flat on a table. Brightly colored lengths of wire were wrapped around her wrists, tying them together in front of her.

“Out that door and to the left,” said a voice. She searched for the speaker.

He sat sprawled in a white director’s chair, amidst a clutter of magazines. He was a small man whose dark hair was carefully slicked back and curled about the ears. He wore a wine-red shirt which hung open, revealing a gold medallion. His belt was wide and black, his trousers white. His voice matched his appearance perfectly.

Martha tried to sit up; it was a hopeless effort.

“I can’t do anything without my hands.”

He stared insolently and flung another magazine to the floor. He lounged across the barren room toward her. In his hands were black steel dikes, he snipped through the skinny windings on her wrists.

“Try to run and I’ll break your leg,” he said, as she slipped off the wooden table. “There’s nowhere to go, anyway.”

He was quite correct. The tall, barnlike room had no windows and only two doors. One of the two was green metal. It had a key lock and a hole beneath where the doorknob had once been. The other door stood open, and as Martha passed through it, leaning on the doorsill for support in her vertigo, she saw that it led through a short hall to two other doors. One of them was identical to the door in the large room, except that it had a knob on it. The other door was wood.

She turned the knob on the green door. It was locked. “Other door,” came the voice behind her. It was a nasty voice, the sort of voice which might make a child cry, hearing it say “other door” in that sneering fashion. It was the sort of voice that would want to. Martha turned and passed through the wooden door.

“You are very mistaken in this,” repeated Martha. “No one I know has more than four hundred dollars in the bank.”

“The less I hafta say, the better off you’ll be,” grumbled her captor, as he rummaged around on the floor. He had leafed through all his magazines while his prisoner was unconscious, not reading them, but reading the captions on all the pictures and spoiling the interest of them, and so now had nothing to read.

“You’ve said that twice in the last hour, and you must know by now it doesn’t shut me up.”

He raised his eyes. “Less you say, happier I’ll be,” he added.

Mrs. Macnamara sat only a few feet from his chair. A small pile of discarded magazines kept her from the chill of the floor. Her feet were folded on her thighs in the full lotus posture. She had spent a large part of the day in this position, and now daylight was fading from the crack beneath the green door. Had it been just one day since the trip to the Valley and the lunch in the tea shop with Mayland Long?

She remembered the car, and how a man had leaned out, smiling, and taken her hand. She remembered the open door. The yank on her arm. The hankie with its operating-room stink.

That was how she got her nose burned, she decided. Ether, or chloroform, or whatever.

Had no one seen this? Where was Mayland? He’d been right beside her. He just found that flower, and given it to her. So very romantic, but silly, too, in his dignified, almost pedantic manner. Had they snatched him too? Had they killed him? The thought was unbearable.

And what about Liz? A spasm of fear nearly cut off Mrs. Macnamara’s breathing. Liz was the hub around which all this mystery revolved. Though Martha Macnamara pleaded ignorance of the affair, pretending to assume she was being held for ransom, she knew that her capture was tied in with her daughter’s trouble. Oh Liz, Liz! What had she done to herself?

And what a silly grief it would be to her to find that her mother was kidnapped, just because she had called her for help. Or that her mother was dead.

The floor glinted with brass snippets. Huge soft dust kitties rolled ponderously whenever the man threw a magazine.

Except for the table on which Martha had awakened, a dirty white refrigerator, and the director’s chair—also white, also dirty—the room was empty. No sound leaked in from the outside world.

Martha felt despair well up from her chest to her throat. She let it sit there, paying attention to her breathing instead.

The first drops of rain spattered against the windshield. Long had been expecting them since the wind turned from the north. The wet air summoned a host of visions to his mind—the bare, black cliffs in the rocks above Taipei. Old eyes filmed with blue, and a mouth of bad teeth, rudely laughing. Laughing at him, while the rain came down. He shook his head against these inchoate memories.