Tea with the Black Dragon

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The freeway was quiet, at 9:45 on this Thursday evening, but it was treacherous with the first rain of the season. He kept the speedometer hovering around seventy-five. The neon signs of bars and cheap motels sparkled by, diffracted in each clinging drop.

He believed that Martha was not dead. He believed this strongly, but it gave him no feeling of security, because it was a belief not under his control. If suddenly that belief went out, like a candle—a candle in the rain…

He hit a pothole, skidded across the lane and recovered automatically. His conviction that Martha was alive was not a feeling like his anger, which he could test and find durable. It was rather a gift from outside, and Long had never trusted gifts.

Pink billows of oleander filled the median strip. Long’s thoughts drifted to Liz Macnamara. He relived his interview with her: her courage and her terror, her sudden shifts of mood, the remarkable concessions he had found himself making to her.

She was like her mother, yes, but much stormier. And at the same time, more fragile. He remembered her head on his shoulder, her hair against his face. He was disturbed, not by the incident, but by his reaction to it.

But mankind had always been like that, turned off its course by a step, by the turn of a mouth, by a covert glance, or scented hair. Should he be any different? His teeth ground together as he considered; was he any different? He was alone with the hiss of Wet tires on wet concrete.

He turned off both engine and lights on Dover Park Avenue, and he coasted to a stop by the curb.

The world was gray and insular, filled with rain. His excellent hearing listened for more. He heard televisions. The thin voice of public entertainment floated from house after house as he walked. The same two speakers, repeated endlessly. No conversation. No music.

Rain beaded on his heavy black hair and in his eyelashes. It was not so bad to be wet, while the weather was warm.

Rasmussen’s neighborhood was new; it lacked streetlights. Mr. Long passed down the street invisibly, the sound of his footsteps swallowed by the rain.

The house took shape from the grayness. It sprawled on a low hill, set on a corner a little apart from its neighbors. A board set on a spike by the street announced the address.

The sloping yard had been sodded quite recently. The scars between the strips had not healed; they bled red clay. No garden, outcrop nor tree interfered with the sweep of lawn to the house. The doorway was flat against the wall of the house, and that wall itself was white stucco. The windows were dim, but somewhere within the shell of the house at least one light was lit. Gazing along the prospect of the sidewalk, his sigh melted into that of the rain.

The back of the house was much like the front, except that from there the light was brighter.

Mayland Long squatted down, resting his palms on the glistening sidewalk. For thirty seconds he tested the silence. Then he stepped onto the grass.

The thick plush of root and blade was reassuring, almost intoxicating to his hands as he half-crawled up the slope toward the house. Fearing his silhouette against the bright wall he lowered himself flat upon the grass and began a slow circuit of the house.

The wall he had approached was broken by five windows. The middle one was frosted glass: obviously the bathroom. Three of the others were tall framed and clear. Bedrooms? The one at the rear of the house emitted a faint yellow glow. It was wider than the rest. He guessed it to be the kitchen.

This wall faced a side street, and beyond, a low growth of scrub which had stolen back land the builders had ravaged and left. He stood, peering through the rain runneled glass of the rightmost window.

It was a bedroom, but unused by the look of it. The mattress on its Harvard frame lay gleaming in the night. A small bureau stood against the far wall. No mirror. Once it had been a boy’s room, perhaps.

The window frame was new, and bore a bolt lock. He looked beyond the window and through the room, to where a door stood open, revealing a hall with staircase. Across the hall from the bedroom door was the living room. He caught his breath with a small, satisfied sound. On the far side of the parlor, against the opposite wall of the house, stood a pair of french doors.

He dropped once more to the ground and began to crawl toward these.

Beneath the kitchen window he paused to listen. There was no television to be heard. No movement at all. A cat murred once, perhaps next door.

When he came to the patio which opened out from the french doors he took off his shoes, and wiped the mud from his hands onto the grass. Neither the knees of his jeans nor the front of his sweatshirt had gotten muddy.

He stood at last, examining the parlor from around the edges of bright print curtains. The furniture was all a set: of pine, heavy and crude. Some pieces of it still wore strips of bark. The head of a deer hung on the left hand wall, its idiot gaze fixed on the stones of the fireplace. Beneath it stood a spindle-sided magazine rack, empty.

The door was locked with a bolt like that on the bedroom window. But the door was made of small panes of glass held in place by wooden mullions. With his fingertips he peeled one of these strips away, and then another. After the third minton was removed, a rectangle of glass slipped into his hand. He reached in and slid back the bolt.

He stood dripping in the silent room. It was warm in the house, and as he ran his hand through his head, releasing a spatter of drops, he realized that his few hours sleep had not sufficed. He was still weary.

And he had so much to do. Since it seemed Rasmussen was not receiving this evening, he had to gain what information he could from the house itself. He needed to find the address of the place where Martha was being held. He needed to find it tonight, before Threve and Rasmussen got their hands on what they thought was Liz’s letter, and both women’s lives became superfluous to their plans.

If he could not find the information here, then he must go to Threve’s apartment and try again. But that would require time and risk. He felt pressured on both counts.

He began with the room he was in, working with quick eyes in the dimness. The barbaric furniture held few drawers or hiding places. The mantel was bare. Rasmussen’s house seemed much neater than his office. Perhaps the man had a housekeeper.

A sharp hiss announced that he was not alone in the room. He swiveled from the waist, very fast, to confront the outrage of a startled white cat, which stood frozen on the stairs, tail stiff and bristling. It snarled at the intruder and lifted one snowy forepaw, displaying its armament.

For an instant cat and man faced one another, the lean rigidity in the posture of the one reflected in that of the other. Then the man relaxed. He sank down on one knee and averted his eyes. A throaty trilling filled the room: a soft, comfortable cat-sound.

The thrashing of the cat’s tail subsided. Pink-rimmed ears unfolded. The white cat stalked closer.

Long centered his small noise deeper in his throat. It became a purr. It ceased. As the cat reached him, he extended his hand—felt it butted by the blunt, white skull.

“I have no argument with you, little warrior,” he whispered, as brown eyes lost themselves in green.

At that moment the room was blasted with light. The white cat leaped straight into the air as Mayland Long spun about and froze, staring straight down the barrel of a twenty-two rifle. It might have been the cat that hissed.

Martha wanted to ask the fellow about Mr. Long, but it was possible the kidnapper hadn’t noticed Long, and any mention of her companion might imperil him. Liz, she assumed, was already neck-deep in this.

The man in the red shirt was peering into the ancient refrigerator that stood against one wall. Martha noticed he had a dust mark on the seat of his white trousers shaped like an upside-down heart. There was a rattle of beer cans.

She realized she was very thirsty. “Can I have a beer?” she asked.

“No,” he said, surly. He didn’t look at her.

This small nastiness roused her. “Why the hell not? You’ve got a whole six pack.”

“They’re mine. I don’t want to waste them.”

Hearing these words, Martha felt a cold certainty that the little man intended to kill her.

She was afraid of dying. She believed anyone who claimed not to be was either a liar or had never been close to death. But her fear was of manageable size; she could endure it.

If Liz were to die, however, at the age of twenty-four, bright and strong, having known so much hardship and so little fun in her short life… Martha knew that she herself was being kept prisoner as bait in some sort of trap for her daughter. She refused to be so used. She would die first. Or kill.

Settling again into the lotus pose, her bound hands resting on her lap, she stared about her at the dirty, depressing room, empty as a dry skull. The little kidnapper returned to his chair, a bottle sweating in his hand. He belched loudly.

It was hard to believe that just yesterday (or was it now the day before?) she had sat across the table from Mayland Long, the two of them pretending that the world was essentially civilized and had been created for the sake of play. Theirs had been expensive play, too. She recalled the dazzling chandeliers of the James Herald Hotel. She recalled Mayland Long’s strange, mutable eyes.

Better to die tonight, having known him, than to have died alone last week in New York, in the August stink and heat.