Tea with the Black Dragon

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What made transfer of property sometimes morally justifiable and sometimes theft? Mutuality was a good criterion. When one took and gave nothing, that was theft. But the bank might take one’s car away, when one was down on one’s luck and needed the car most. That was lawful behavior on the banks part, but was it morally justifiable? And if transfer of property could be justified, was it the idea of transfer, or of property itself which sat at the root of the problem?

Pragmatism was a sword that cut through such knots; an action was to be judged by its consequences alone. Liz had been introduced to the philosophy as a penniless freshman in college and had lived by it. There was nothing wrong in a deed which hurt no one and did the doer much good.

Liz’s sophisticated robbery was of that kind. No one was hurt but the federal insurance agency, and Liz’s own situation was marvelously improved. Of course, if everyone followed her lead, the bank would break and individuals would be hurt, but everyone was not robbing the bank. Only Liz Macnamara was robbing the bank and now that she was a bit older and no longer penniless, that suited her quite well.

The problem was that Floyd Rasmussen was not a philosopher, but a crook. He was a man of quick changes. He loved his cat and all Disney movies. He also shot things for fun: deer, quail, even wildcats. Floyd turned on and off like a faucet which was levered by his own self-interest. She had liked Floyd in the beginning, though never quite enough to go to bed with him, as he had wanted. Now she wanted to see him dead.

And Threve? Thinking about Threve, Liz clutched her pillow spasmodically, hiding her face in white cotton. Threve was the devil himself. Without Threve, Rasmussen would be no threat to her, but Rasmussen himself was afraid of Threve.

Why? He wasn’t much to look at. He was much shorter than Liz, and he dressed like a gigolo, raising eyebrows in the expensive places where he liked to spend his time. Being in Threve’s company had been purgatory for Liz, but she had not dared avoid him, for fear of his temper. The three of them had been locked together in bonds of mutual guilt, in which camaraderie soured into distrust.

She had spent much of her life in the company of people she didn’t like and wasn’t able to avoid. Her mother’s friends, for example.

She remembered her early years with glass clarity. Her father had disappeared when she was six. For years she carried the notion—picked up God knows where, certainly not from her mother—that he’d been taken bodily into heaven. Mother had let her believe this; it was only when she discovered, overhearing a phone conversation, that he had cleaned out the savings before he left that she realized the truth.

Then came mother’s odd jobs, playing Mendelssohn and Wagner for weddings. Cole Porter at the occasional bar mitzvah. Night and Day, Lohingrin, Miss Otis Regrets… Liz couldn’t listen to any of them without a shudder. In no sort of music could she find pleasure.

Mother had to work nights, too, playing bass at the jazz cafe, and came home in the early morning, her clothes smelling of smoke and beer. Sometimes, when the babysitter didn’t show, she had to go with her mother, and curl up on the table in the pantry off the kitchen, where the Chinese dishwasher would babble interminably in Cantonese, in which every syllable sounded like a threat to the child.

She held none of this against her mother. Mother had had no choice. She had worked like a dog, with help from no one.

The terrible, hurting love Liz felt for her mother welled up in her until she could hardly breath. That was why she couldn’t be near Martha Macnamara: why she’d fled the length of the country to go to college and stayed away ever since. Mother was a noble cause continually being lost. Liz gasped and the bed rippled under her like a warm, maternal bosom.

Their years of life together had been marked by the constant parade of stray people through their apartment: fruitarians, musicologists, women with shaved heads and men with politics. These were all friends Mother picked up along the way, indiscriminately—or chosen according to standards known to no one else in the world but Mother. There was the fat woman who had told Liz to call her Bagheera, who slept on the zabutons in the dining room for a week every summer. There was big, smelly piper named Hamish who insisted on making his instrument imitate a squealing pig, thinking to amuse the little girl. Once, half by accident, she had referred to him as Anus, causing her mother to drop a plate of tomato slices on the kitchen floor. The memory nudged Liz into smiling.

The one characteristic shared by all Mothers friends was that they were irresistably attracted to Mother. They came for her sudden blue flashes of insight, when she would lift her head and point, speaking a few words to prove she did understand what the speaker had been saying in an hours confused, monotonous monologue— bursting the confusion with an arrow of pure good sense.

They came for the curve of her mother’s neck and her grace of movement. They came for lessons, arrangements, transpositions, hamburgers… They came with broken dreams, with fiddles unstrung, without carfare home…

Without exception they took more than they gave, and Mother, who was a real musician—a professional, and a real spiritual expert—a human being, allowed them to play their games around her as if she were blind to them.

Liz’s fists balled up in anger at people.

And Stanford she had found to be filled with the same sort of self-involved zanies. They dressed badly, their rooms reeked of dope, and they babbled interminably. She had found that her fellow students were friendliest when they were about to borrow money from her. In that freshman year she had learned to protect herself from leeches: deadbeats, grabby dates, “friends” who only wanted to crib her papers. She became very good at it and soon had few friends of any sort.

She’d envied the students in business administration. They got up in the morning at reasonable hours, dressed as well as their purses permitted, and studied with moderate diligence, knowing it would pay them in the end. Of course, these were a different breed, and in a way a lesser breed, for Liz was an engineer. But she followed the regimen as closely as her thirsty mind permitted.

When she had money, she would be able to call bullshit bullshit. When she had money, her mother would have time to be a real musician again—in concert halls instead of bars.

The contrast between the dream and reality drove a single cry from her throat. She flung herself to her feet.

There, in front of her eyes, lay Mayland Long’s clothes, folded neatly. These were the only reassurances she had that the strange man had really been there—was actually out somewhere in the night trying to find her mother.

She touched the white shirt. By the dry, smooth feel of it, it was silk. The suit, too: raw silk, undyed. She called an image to mind and saw him again, standing composed and still in the doorway of the kitchen, holding the bottle aloft, like a lantern.

His manner, too, had been dry and smooth. She had fallen apart in front of him—a thing she had not done before any human being since cowing to Stanford. She had offered to give him everything she had, and had meant it. She still meant it—money, reputation, flesh, future—all of it would be a good trade for the life other mother. And he had turned the conversation gently aside.

She had the feeling that Mr. Long had refused her merely because he had all he could want or need already. It was all just the way he wanted it. Clothes, manner, confidence.

Yet this was the man Martha Macnamara had hired for a few thousand dollars. To risk his life. Of course he liked Mother. That was clear from the way he spoke about her. But everyone talked that way about Mother. Liz accepted that as her mother’s due.

In the corner of her eye she saw movement—herself in the standing mirror. She did not like her body. It was awkward, and the bones were too big. She turned back to the folded shirt.

It was silk. It gave her hope.

Chapter 11

The small cities of the Peninsula followed one another along the freeway. Mayland Long drove, his headlights cutting through a fog of pain. His single useable hand clutched the bottom of the wheel. The left arm lay limp, the hand resting on his thigh. At a dip in the road it shifted. This hurt so his grip on the wheel slid, and the Citroen veered across two lanes. Fortunately, his was the only car on the road.

The Rengstorff exit loomed ahead. He took the curve slowly, but was forced nonetheless against the door of the car. Wheels scraped gravel. The left side of the car dipped as it left the pavement, but he threw himself against the wheel and found the road again.

The Southern Pacific Railroad track rattled beneath his wheels. Only the forgiving suspension of the Citroen made the jolting bearable. He turned right on University Street and glided the car to a dark stop.

The building in which Threve lived sat amid grubby wooden houses like a stork in a pond full of ducks. The high-rise sparkled in the dim moonlight; its concrete facing had been mixed with glass. It was a white, impregnable virgin of a building, having no windows on the ground floor.

Long skirted the ghostly walls, treading the grass of its tiny lawn. Wearily, he leaned against the bole of a small olive tree, his shape hidden by moonlight among silvery leaves. He no longer felt the cold.

There were two doors set into the rear face of the building. One of these was glass, and possessed a splendid brass lock. The other was steel, with a lock to match. Mr. Long walked up to the glass door.