Burning Time (13 page)

“Yes, yes, come in. We like you, don’t be afraid,” said Elinor Zing.

Okay. Emma stepped forward. Why on earth would anyone subject herself to this? Her heart thudded as three people graded her walk.

It was then that she noticed there was someone new in the room. Oh, God. He was
so handsome
in real life. This was someone whose work she really liked. Did Katie have a character disorder? Hey, did it matter, if the script said the devastating Michael Lambert, sitting at the conference table waiting to read with her, would fall in love with her and save her from everything, including herself.

She stared at him, trying not to let her mouth fall open. By any chance did he want to be the father of her child? Yes, no, maybe so.

He looked up and smiled. Emma stumbled.

“Great. That was great,” Jack, the director said. “Wonderful choice.”

Glad you liked it, Emma thought. Too bad it wasn’t a choice. The smile of the movie star had almost made her fall on her face.

Sometimes at the end of the day outside thoughts drifted over April Woo like fog, and she would walk around in it for a few minutes, looking for ways to see through the confusion.

Sai Yuan, April’s mother, came from Shanghai. April wanted to go there some day. Shanghai was supposed to be the Paris of China. A foreign port, bustling with activity, and metropolitan. Not like Beijing, which was landlocked on the edge of the Gobi Desert and gray with the grit of constantly blowing desert sand.

“In Old Time all houses in Beijing gray except Forbidden City, so Celestial Sun and Celestial Moon know where to shine brightest,” April’s mother told her.

“Now no more Imperial family, all gray,” she would say, putting down China and building herself up at the same time as she patted herself on the front of her brightly colored cotton blouse (“Look like silk, no iron. Nine dollar.”) that she wore to show Celestial Sun where to shine brightest in New York. Always strongest colors best for good luck was her policy.

“No good food in Beijing,” she added. “Food taste better in Shanghai. But best food in Hong Kong. No good cook in China no more.” She said this with sly look at husband Woo, best cook in America, picking his teeth with menthol-flavored toothpick and reading Chinese newspaper. Pretending he did not hear the compliment.

Sai Yuan was over thirty when she met Ja Fa Woo in Shanghai where he was cook in a big hotel for foreigners.

“Best cook. He knew how to make pizzi before anybody,” Sai said.

The way Sai Woo told the story, they met and got married. She said it in the third person as if she had nothing to do with it.

How Sai Yuan and Ja Fa Woo got married was a question April tried to ask many times and never got a satisfactory answer. Chinese stories had their own meaning. What was left out might be a puzzle, might be a warning, might be to teach a lesson. Might be nothing. You couldn’t know the reason.

For a long time when she was growing up, April was afraid whenever she met someone that she was in danger of getting married. Every year new boys came from China into her class, and she looked around, worrying and wondering which one was the one she would meet and marry. Then she learned you had to agree to marry. You had to want to.

Well, that was not the old way. Old way was matchmaker-arranged marriages according to money and status, and no one wanted to. Married for family honor. Married for face. But Sai’s family was scattered like leaves when she was young.

“All dead,” she said, not showing her face or telling the story of what she did in the years of the wars and turbulence without a family to honor.

The official story was they met and got married and left Shanghai. They had many hardships before they got to golden city. They had many hardships after they got to golden city. Wasn’t so golden. One hardship was no one in New York spoke Mandarin. Sai had to learn Cantonese to get along, never mind English.

Now they lived in a nice house in Queens and had no worries. Except they worried all the time. Sai Woo wanted April to make herself nice so she could meet someone and marry, and come up in the world like she did. She had a house—the whole thing, not just the first floor like Mei Mei. Not so good her daughter, closer to thirty every day, and triple stupid.

April tried to tell her things were different. You don’t just meet and marry. “Ma, you have to fall in love now.”

“Pah, what’s that? A lily blooms only one day. So what. You marry a doctor. You have a nice house like this, best food and good clothes whole life. That’s love.” Sai Woo sucked best dinner out of her teeth, with the help of a menthol-flavored toothpick, behind her hand because she wasn’t rough peasant woman.

These were the things April worried about at night. How she would find the time to get her degree before her hair turned gray. How she would get to be sergeant if she was stuck on the upper West Side in dry dock. How she was going to find out what happened to that college girl if she couldn’t leave New York. She’d seen many sad things before, and now she was upset by the profound grief of Jennifer Roane. Jennifer Roane had only this one daughter, like her mother Sai Woo had only her. Only this kind of mother was different. She seemed to have an almost unlimited capacity for grief, and no fear of showing it. Caucasians showed their faces.

April was concluding that a comfortable life and a
good-looking man in an expensive suit did not necessarily give you everything, like her mother said. Her mother talked on two sides of her face. She said April had it easy being born where they had plenty to eat and anything was possible. It sounded like hardship made her kind of superior just for suffering. But when April didn’t make it easy for herself and be an accountant for Merrill Lynch or marry a doctor, her mother just thought she was double stupid. Why risk danger? Why look for bad things if you don’t have to?

“You should honor your parents.” Even her father, who didn’t listen to women talking, nodded when Sai Woo said that.

April thought she was honoring her parents. She was just doing it the American way. She wondered if there was anything she could say to Sergeant seventy-eight-degrees-and-real-sunny Grove that would get him to move his feet a little and find out where Ellen Roane stayed, and what she did those three days when she made six charges on her credit card in San Diego.

She was thinking about Sergeant Grove when her phone rang and it was him on the other end of the line.

“Detective Woo,” he said. “This is Sergeant Grove in San Diego. How’s the weather out there?”

April shivered involuntarily. There was only one reason that she would be hearing from Sergeant Grove, and it wasn’t for him to get a weather report. He could get that from the paper or the evening news.

“It’s still in the fifties and raining,” April said.

“Still?”

“That’s how it is here in spring.”

“That’s too bad. It’s still eighty and sunny here.”

“Do you have something for me, Sergeant?”

“A possible match to your Roane girl just came in from a local Sheriff’s Office.”

“Where?” April asked.

“North of here, town in the hills. She was found by some dirt bikers in the desert.”

“How did she die?”

“It appears she was tortured and left out there. Apparently she wandered around, and died of dehydration, exposure to the elements. It gets pretty hot and cold in the desert.”

“Any identifying articles—her wallet, clothes, jewelry?”

“Absolutely nothing. She was found naked.”

“Oh, God. You mean she wandered around naked?”

“Yes.”

“Can you fax me a picture for identification?” April asked, thinking the body he had could be anybody, anybody at all.

“A picture isn’t going to do it, Detective. I’m going to need her prints and dental records, X rays, whatever you can get for me.”

“Is she in that bad condition?” April asked faintly.

“Well, the buzzards got to her face.”

“Oh, God.” April took a deep breath. “Who will be investigating the case?”

“The sheriff in the jurisdiction she was found.”

“I know that,” April said. “Do you have a name and number for him?”

Sergeant Grove gave them to her.

“Newt,” April said. “Isn’t that some kind of lizard?”

“Yes. Do you have some kind of New York accent?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me, Sergeant. That’s where I’m from.”

She hung up and sat there. It was the end of the day. The room was stale now. Sanchez was out on a call. She
felt kind of bad about that. This was the kind of situation when she felt better just having Sanchez there. He was always good making this kind of call. In Chinese she could do it just fine. She steeled herself to do it in English.
Look, it may not be your daughter, but we need the information to make sure
.

She probably wouldn’t get what she needed for a day or two and, and then it would take more time to get it out there. She punched out the numbers. For some reason she made the hardest call, the one to the mother, first.

Troland set up the tray. Five needles, six tiny cups for the colors. A thick dab of A & D ointment. The rubber gloves. Alcohol. He laid the girl out on her back on the bed. She didn’t resist at all. After running up and down the stairs and masturbating and foraging like a rat for the rest of the coke all night, she had finally crashed. He tied her wrists with thin nylon rope long enough to reach the legs of the bed.

“Troland is good, very good, he thinks of everything,” he muttered to himself. Right down to the towel he tucked around her to keep the sheets dry as he shaved her from neck to thigh. He had been right. Coke addicts didn’t feel a thing, not a thing, when they crashed.

He rubbed the body all over with Mennen Speed Stick, and carefully positioned the transfer, then pressed it down on the sticky surface. Perfect. The paper came away leaving the outline of the drawing on the girl’s chest, neck, and stomach. He put the tattoo machine together, debating how many needles to use. It would go faster with three. He put in three needles and pressed the button. The
whine sounded, but the girl didn’t move. He decided to tape her mouth anyway. She didn’t resist this either, and continued breathing noisily through her runny nose. Troland sat down on the stool he had put by the bed. Then he remembered he needed the jacket. The guy in the movie had his jacket on. Troland had to wear the jacket. He went to get the jacket and put it on. Then he sat on the stool with the jacket open, snapped on the gloves, and checked his watch. Willy was with him the whole time, reminding him of things and whispering encouragement.

All this was new. He could take a minute to relish the triumph of finally finding a way to make a burning last forever. He touched the flames on the wheel, on the eagle’s wing. The picture he had created was electric. Richly patterned snakes, an eagle with huge wings, and two wheels were entwined in a blazing inferno that covered the girl’s torso, neck, arms, and legs. She’d be on fire all the way down to her toes.

Troland picked up the machine again. Never had he felt calmer. He’d only actually tattooed someone once himself, but he’d been watching the process almost all his life. He’d even drawn the last tattoo Willy had done before he went to Nam. Tro’s tattoo was supposed to be his good luck and bring him back.

He pushed the button and the contacts closed. Electricity from the battery made a magnetic field that attracted the iron armature. It moved toward the magnet against the spring and forced the needles to pop out, breaking the contact. For a fiftieth of a second the magnet lost its magnetism. The spring pulled the armature back, and the needles popped in. In and out, fifty times a second. The whine filled the room, covering the sound of the girl’s thick breathing.

At first contact with her white skin, Troland held the
needles too close. The black lines on the soft slippery flesh beaded with blood. A single stripe of red formed where Troland wanted it to be black. He knew it would still come out black when it healed, but it would scab instead of scale if he drew blood. And he didn’t like letting the poison out. He shuddered. For a second, nausea rolled over him. Even with the gloves on, he didn’t feel good with the blood of a coke whore on his hands. He didn’t have to be a genius to know she was more than likely to be HIV positive.

He cursed himself and looked at her face. It occurred to him he could put her away with no trouble. Once she was dead, the blood wouldn’t come out and he’d be safe. Not a twitch disturbed her features. She didn’t feel anything. The fear passed as quickly as it came. No way was he going to die of AIDS. Willy told him not to kill her, so he covered the spot with ointment and went on.

The sun rose in the sky, warming the upstairs room. He didn’t even consider taking his jacket off. Sweat poured down his chest and sides, but he didn’t feel it. He was completely absorbed with the process. He lost all sense of time and place.

The buzz of the machine, the same as that in the movie, was the first noise he ever heard that covered all the voices in his head. If he kept it on, no one talked to him, not even Willy. Only the machine was talking, telling him how good he was, how he had found something new to add to his work.

He was an artist, an artist of the flesh. He actually trembled with pleasure when he thought of branding her at the end. That part couldn’t ever change. But now the beauty of the everlasting flame and the searing punishment of the brand would be merged in a single vision.
She’d be awake by then. She’d feel like she was burning alive.

Red was good. Blue and pink and green were good. Black was the most durable. Black never faded. Most of the other colors faded after time. But he liked the tattoos with many colors best. They weren’t so crude as some of the bikers’ tattoos that were all black, or black and blue, with only a few dabs of red. Not well done. Many were very crude. Troland wasn’t crude.

He loved how the needles sucked up the ink like tiny straws, and then released it in the thousands of tiny holes he made in the skin. Several hours went by. Troland sat over the sleeping girl, deep in his work. The position he was in was far from ideal. He was sitting on a stool, leaning forward to the body on the bed. There was no resistance to the bed. She should be on a hard surface, like a table. An operating table that could be positioned would be best. He had to get one.