A Trickster in the Ashes Read online

  The American was rooting under the seat, grunting with effort. “Gawd damn—”

  “Can I be of any assistance?” Crispin said.

  The American straightened up. “You ain’t got no liquor under there. Always keep a bottle in the auto, thass my advice, never know when you’re gonna want it.” He brooded for a moment; then sighed and shook himself, squinting at the hills, which bulked so close they filled half the twilit sky. “Looks like we’re almost there anyways.”

  “We are not going to the hills, Mr. Ted.”

  Up ahead, a gap in the hedge! Crispin slowed the Exupresu to a crawl as they passed it, then slammed the gear shift into reverse and threw his weight behind the wheel, spinning the car backward, crashing it through the branches jammed haphazardly across the gap. The Exupresu lurched as the rear tires hit clods hidden under the wheat stubble. Clouds of fumes surrounded them. Macpherson sputtered, “Like hell we ain’t—”

  The engine stalled and died.

  “Now what’ve you fuckin’ done!” The American blew out an aggravated breath. Crispin, trying to coax the engine back to life, glanced over and saw Macpherson’s little eyes glittering with drunken exasperation. Only a fool would succumb to the temptation to see the American as a figure of comedy. Macpherson was more dangerous than he looked, not least because of that concealed six-shooter.

  “Hang on,” Crispin said, and dived for the starting crank, jumped out of the car, and raced around to the front bumper.

  “Get out of the way,” Macpherson called.

  “This will not take more than a couple of minutes!” Crispin went down on one knee and cranked for dear life, hardly able to see what he was doing, driven wild by his inability to sense the diesel engine—all he could do was try this and that, he had no mental operator’s manual. “Keep your hair on!”—a phrase he’d learned from one of his previous Americans, to which Macpherson replied with a string of obscenities.

  The Exupresu hiccuped, shuddered, and said, Raa-aarh. “Thar she blows!” Macpherson shouted joyously, and then with sudden fury, “Dint I tell ya gerroudova way!”

  The engine hung fire, then turned over steadily. Crispin edged around to the driver’s side, clutching the starting crank, eyeing Macpherson. The American hunched over the wheel. Gears crunched together hideously.

  “Dunno ‘bout you, but I’ll go where I want to go,” Macpherson shouted grandly. “Can’t keep no secrets from Josie Macpherson’s boy.”

  “In the name of the Significant, man!” Crispin wrestled with the door. Locked! He reached over the top and felt for the catch. Macpherson smacked his hand with the wooden butt of his gun. Pain slashed up his wrist and two fingers went numb.

  “I’ll not have niggers tellin’ me what to do!” Macpherson bellowed self-righteously.

  Crispin punched the American in the face. His knuckles contacted teeth, saliva flew, and the big, heavy head snapped back. Grunting, Macpherson shook himself. He was too drunk, Crispin realized in horror, to be stopped by a mere blow. “Now willya get out of m’ fuckin’ way or am I gonna hafta-fuck—” And right then, some sixth sensitivity to danger—whether acquired in the QAF or in Okimachi or on the Slow Expresses or at some point during the years of tedious wrongdoing afterward—made Crispin throw himself bodily backward into the thorn hedge just before the bullet from Macpherson’s Colt .44 whined through the air where he had been.

  The fall, awkward as it was unplanned-for, left him momentarily stunned. Half-conscious, he felt the Exupresu grind magnificently into gear, lurch up onto the road, and bump away with a flourish of loose mudguards. Four or five seconds later, bleeding from a hundred jagged tears, thorns sewing his clothing to his skin, he staggered out to the weeded center of the road.

  He stopped and listened. In the utter silence of the countryside, he could hear the chudder of the Renault engine fading.

  To reach the hamlet of Dumadiin the American wouldn’t have to know his way. This road would lead him there by default. He would, in fact, have to turn off along one of several unappetizing little side roads to go anywhere else. In Dumadiin they rented mules, guides, ox carts, and probably their own daughters to anyone willing to pay. They would find the spectacle of the drunken foreigner a tremendous joke, but they would encourage his desire to explore the hills as tenderly and firmly as they would encourage a child to take its first steps. Their livelihoods depended on their asking no one’s motives; the color of a man’s skin mattered not one tenth so much as the color of his money.

  Oh, Yamauchi was going to love this!

  Birds startled out of sleep settled rustling and twittering back down into the thorn hedges. Crispin rubbed his numb right hand and, for lack of a better plan, started to walk back toward Redeuiina.

  In the end he was lucky. The old Lamaroon man in the yellow Supaido hadn’t been a rich landowner. He was the owner of a garage in Redeuiina, one of the fabled master mechanics, and this very day he’d driven one of his cobbled-together-from-parts fleet of motorcars out to see his daughter, who had married into a dairy-farming diin in the lee of the foothills. It was rumored to be their proximity to the jungle that gave the milk from their goats and cows a unique flavor craved far and wide. Crispin learned this, and much more, after the old mechanic picked him up about two miles down the road from the place where Macpherson had made off with the car. The mechanic was so nearsighted he never turned the car into the bends until it was almost too late; but myopic or hyperopic, he would have known if another car had passed him in the last half hour. Macpherson had vanished without trace. By the time they reached Redeuiina, Crispin had learned all he ever wanted to know about dairy farming, with details of the family relationships of the old mechanic’s son-in-law’s clan thrown in, and a few anecdotes (far more interesting to Crispin) of the garage trade; in return Crispin volunteered amusing stories of his job as dogsbody for a physician in the Yard.

  You wouldn’t believe the complaints some people imagined they had! He didn’t have to make anything up: Yleini’s women friends made a hobby of being ill, and back when she and Crispin had actually talked instead of using each other for target practice, she used to relate their tales of woe to him with a straight face. She found their delicately half-described maladies fascinating. In fact, he thought she was rather in awe of her friends’ expert management and exploitation of their own vulnerability. That at least would be one explanation for why she overcompensated by making herself so emotionally vulnerable.

  The old mechanic dropped him off in the middle of the Yard. As the sunshine-colored car bumped away into the night, Crispin ducked inside the building where he’d said he lived; slumped against the wall of the dark stairwell, breathing the smell of babies and wet washing and refried beans and feces; then exited and started to walk “up the city” (as Yard folk said), going willingly toward the lion’s den, going to stick his head in the lizard’s mouth.

  The autumn night was chilly and the wind smelled of dead things, but that was just the smell of the sea. Crispin had come to detest the sea, not in and of itself (he freely admitted it was useful, he’d even give you necessary) but because of all the things it had come to represent.

  Yleini appearing behind Neiila, shoving the maid out of the way; Yleini on the threshold, still dressed despite the late hour in a beige teagown, her hands over her mouth, gaslight flooding from behind her down the front steps.

  “I thought you were dead,” she shrieked. “He thinks you’re dead.” Crispin heard the ears of all the maids and footmen below all the area railings all up and down the hill pricking up. He pushed her inside. She melted against him, gasping out a relief too profound for tears. He signaled Neiila over her shoulder and mimed drinking. Neiila knew what he wanted. She tiptoed backward, teeth showing, excited. She was fifteen, and her parents manufactured opium deep in the interior; when she came to the Kateralbins she’d spoken a scarcely comprehensible patois, but had picked up Redeuiina dialect even faster than she picked up Yleini’s gowns when madame scattered
them across her boudoir. With her lithe build and ready smile, she attracted the eyes of all the men who called on business, from liaison ruffians to elderly civil servants with moral codes for backbones, who would clearly have felt far more comfortable getting to know her than her employer. The cycle seemed set to continue.

  Crispin held Yleini off by the shoulders. “ Who thinks I’m dead? Mr. Macpherson? Is he here?”

  “No, he’s not! Oh, Significant—oh, heavens—Gawd dang it to hell,” she swore in English, and he wondered in a momentary flash of jealousy whom she’d been talking to. “Devi, who else! When you didn’t come back—”

  “But—” Why had Yamauchi jumped to the conclusion that something had happened? He couldn’t possibly have known Macpherson was going to get drunk and steal the car. If it hadn’t been for Crispin’s mismanagement of the situation, nothing would have happened at all; and Yamauchi could have had no way of foreseeing the engine’s stalling, Crispin’s losing his temper, the American’s shooting at him. Yamauchi had known something was going to happen, though. Had allowed Crispin to take the American “touring the countryside” knowing something was going to happen.

  Crispin shuddered as he thought of the drunken, stupid, innocent-as-a-baby American careening along the tiny, dangerous road at the fringes of the jungle. It had been four hours since they parted—at least—and even then, the Exupresu’s diesel tank had only been a quarter full. Where was Macpherson now? Who’d been lying in wait for him, somewhere along the only road anyone “touring the countryside” would conceivably take?

  “Devi set me up.” The fingers of his good hand burrowed into Yleini’s shoulder.

  “No, Cris, he—”

  “The scheming, oily, two-faced, giggling lizard. Fuck him, fuck him, fu—” Crispin saw Neiila hovering in the door of the parlor. “Excuse my language.” He took Yleini by the hand, pulled her into the parlor, allowed Neiila to set the brandy tray down on the sideboard, then dismissed the maid and closed the door himself, making sure it was locked. His nerves twangled. One oil lamp on a low table illuminated too many landscape oils, too many chairs, too much brocade, too many folds in the curtains of the windows, too many romance novels in the bookshelves, too many glittery knickknacks on too many surfaces (why, oh why did she think gilt-painted china figurines were the epitome of taste? he wondered not for the first time), too many shadows. Too many shadows.

  Yleini hunched over her knees on the edge of the love seat, talking at him in fits and starts of retrogressive explanation.

  “So Yamauchi came here about two hours ago,” he attempted to recapitulate. “Looking for me? Specifically looking for me?”

  She seemed to stiffen. Then she recovered, and said sweetly, “Why on earth else would he come here? He brought some of his ugly, hideous Yard thugs.” She shuddered. “They wouldn’t take drinks.”

  “Drinks,” Crispin repeated, and sitting down across from her, poured brandies for them both. “No, have it, I insist, I can tell you’ve had a scare. Now tell me what he said, as exactly as you can remember.”

  “When he saw you weren’t here, he wouldn’t say much.” She brought her head up. Her gown, a pale shade of what she would call ecru, had a stiff low bodice and a valley widened between her breasts as she leaned forward. Why was she dressed so seductively? To receive Yamauchi? “Something about bad news, and he was worried about you, but he said I wasn’t to worry. As if I’d worry!” Her lip twisted, and she said defiantly, “As if I haven’t been hoping and praying, ever since he left, that this was it, that I’d finally be…” She stopped. Crispin winced. He supposed he should at least be grateful that she hadn’t the shamelessness to put what they both knew she meant into hard, solid words.

  He downed his brandy in a gulp, picked hers up, and put it in her hand, closing her fingers around it. Her flesh felt so soft and hot that a low-level resurgence of misery washed through him. “Names? Didn’t he mention any?”

  “Yours. The American’s. Tomichi, I think.”

  “Tomichi who?”

  “Significant, Cris! How many by that name do we know?”

  “Yes,” Crispin said abstractedly, “it’s a small city.” He stood up and put down his glass. “I’ll have to go over to Yamauchi’s to sort this out.”

  “Don’t do anything you’ll regret. Be a man. You’re hardly the first it’s happened to.”

  “I mean the bad news,” Crispin said. Then he blurted: “Can’t you even say you’re sorry?”

  “Sorry?” she trilled. “Sorry?” Her dark, round eyes, like hematites set in the patterned skin, held a depth of self-confidence, a depth of indifference, that knocked all the nervous energy out of him as hard and fast as the love tap from Macpherson’s Colt had knocked all feeling out of his right hand. He was caught in a sparkling whirlwind of intense emotion. She saw that he’d guessed; and, seeing that it was pointless to continue with her exaggerated display of emotion, she sloughed the pretense of love-hate as easily and thoughtlessly as she’d sloughed off her dress and petticoats and stockings (and…and… Crispin thought, torturing himself) and the furbishments of her social persona, and the volcanic naivete and girlish passion he’d married her for, for him. Significant knew how long it had been going on! Probably since she came to Redeuiina as a girl. On and off. Neither of them was the type to cherish a great and secret love. Likely it had started as coercion when she was still his employee, and then when she became disillusioned with her marriage, she’d drifted back of her own free will, out of frustration and the desire for revenge. He would believe that of her any day—had, in fact, accused her of it in the past (but with some unknown man, never with him, never with the one who was obvious).

  Or maybe it was a great love, foiled.

  Neither explanation provided an excuse.

  As he stared at her, she rolled her eyes. She yawned, lifted the snifter of brandy to her nose, then put it down with a clink of glass on silver. “Give Devi my regards.”

  Insults bubbled up in Crispin. Scalding pain. The furious embarrassment of the cuckold. Are you sure that’s all you’d like me to give him? Your #$%@!—your—

  But as so many times before, anger quickly gave way to remorse. What will it take to make you love me again? Yleini, my wife—

  He only just stopped himself from going down on his knees. She yawned again, pointedly. “I doubt I’ll wait up. Don’t stay out too late, will you? It causes such disruption among the servants when they have to clean your boots and fetch you the newssheet and press your clothes and make you breakfast when you come in at five only to go back out. And I’m having a luncheon tomorrow—mixed company—with cold meats, so there’s a good deal of cooking to be done in advance. I do expect you to be there, by the way, your schedule permitting.” She glanced at her bookshelves. She’d branched out recently. As well as romances written by Kirekuni ladies, she was reading foreign literature: the Britons—Hardy, Trollope, and Austen—and a Russian novel translated into English, Anna Karenina. Her latest acquisition, a Japanese doorstop newly translated into Kirekuni, The Tale of Genji, lay open on the end table. Beside it he saw an ashtray and her cigarette case. “Pish-pish!” she called, turning. “Pishie! Come out, dearest! T-t-t-t!” With a soft yowl, the Mimese cat emerged from under the sideboard in the corner and jumped up beside her, where cat hair already matted the brocade love seat. Pish-pish was a badtempered feline they’d acquired as set dressing for Crispin’s portrayal of a Mime immigrant. Not inappropriately, it found Yleini the most congenial person in the household. “Who’s an angel-beast?” she said, stroking it.

  With difficulty, Crispin recalled the matter of Macpherson and Minami. Macpherson, Minami, and him. He moved toward his wife. When she looked up, he took her face gently in his left hand, stooped, and kissed her. She smelled of flowers. “I’ll be off then.”

  “Must—” she started automatically, then glanced down. “What have you done to your other hand?”

  “Something to do with the nerves, I think; it’s�
�”

  “No, look at it.”

  “It might be broken, I suppose.” He glanced at her face, saw live interest for the first time. “It’ll heal.” He shrugged and stole another kiss. She had so much power over him. “Don’t stay up reading all night, darling. I’ll be back as soon as possible. If not tonight, then certainly in time for your luncheon. I promise.” At the door he glanced back. She looked fairly stunned. It had, he realized, been months since he’d spoken to her so tenderly.

  Josie Macpherson’s boy was dead. Dawn had broken by the time Yamauchi finally dismissed his five or six associates, some of them Kirekuni officials and some Lamaroon lowlifes, who’d been sitting around the Yamauchis’ parlor with their boots up, smoking daze and doing free cocaine (perks of the business that few had the sense to stay away from) and gossiping interminably about how the American had met his end. Once the last of them took his leave, and the parlor was empty but for a fug of mind-curdling smoke, Crispin got down to brass tacks. “What have you and Minami been plotting behind my back? Devi, I have the right to know why you got whoever-it-was to bump off Macpherson—who was my charge, although you’ve cut off your nose to spite your face really, because as far as the world is concerned, he was yours—and why you tried, and didn’t succeed simply because I thought he had a higher liquor tolerance than he did, to have me bumped off along with him!”

  For a couple of seconds, Yamauchi seemed not to register Crispin’s outburst. Then he yelped aloud and straightened up so fast he almost fell off the couch where he’d been reclining. His feet hit the floor and his pipe flew out of his fingers. “Bump? Off? Crispin, my dear boy!” He sputtered. It was the first time Crispin had ever seen him at a loss for words. “My dear boy!” he gasped.

  Crispin was sitting across from him, so close their knees almost touched. “Can you explain to me, then, if it wasn’t you that planned it, how the boys knew where to find him? They’d already come back with the body by the time I got here. And on top of that, I got a lift back to Redeuiina, and no one passed us on the road. Were they already out looking for him before they even knew I’d lost him? I don’t think so. They were waiting for him. For us. Thank the Significant for Johnnie Walker, that’s all I can say.”