Resurrection Man (7 page)

A paper job, she thought, a little lonely with the lateness of the hour. Drawing paper houses. And my family reduced to paper dolls and shriveled into ash.

Her mother had adamantly refused ever to go back to Kansas. Laura had never even met her cousins there; she talked to her grandparents on the phone twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. They were polite. How could they be more, when they had not been allowed to be part of Laura's family? In some ways she was too Chinese to be American, and yet she had lived all her life under the Stars and Stripes; could still quote the preamble to the Constitution and chant the Pledge of Allegiance, that great charm every American child had to learn. What could China mean to her? She had never been there. Never seen her father in his own country. Never even met the great Dai Fei.

Laura shook her shoulders and gave an angry, horsey snort. She despised self-pity.

Lost Child or Treasure Child, she told herself sternly. Depends on how you look at it. Now stop moping and go to bed!

She looked back at the talismans smoldering in the grate. A thin advancing emberline gleamed and softly crackled where black ash overwhelmed the yellow paper. Good night, Uncle Chen.

Good night, Father.

Goodbye.

*   *   *

Perhaps it was the five extra cups of coffee that made her sleep so lightly; that made her snap awake in the middle of the night, and made her left eye tremble. She glanced at her bedside clock: 2:48 A.M.—the hour of Ch'ou. A tic in the left eye foretold... What was it again?
Something will happen to worry you.
Or was it
Someone is thinking of you.
Unable to remember, she groped for the 1992 T'ung Shu dangling from its red silk tassel at the head of her bed. She was flipping through the pages of the almanac, trying to remember where the section on Fortune-telling by Physical Sensations was, when she heard a noise from upstairs.

Immediately she knew what must have awakened her. There were footsteps moving around in the apartment overhead. But it wasn't Dante Ratkay: he was spending Thanksgiving weekend at home with his family. Besides, she knew his sleepy tread as he headed for the refrigerator in the middle of the night, or bumped through the darkness to pee. Often enough there were other footsteps overhead—lighter, feminine ones from Dante's traveling circus of lovers—but never footsteps like these: sure, methodical treads that paused moved a step or two, paused, moved another step...

Searching.

Laura sat up in bed, strung tight as a bow. Probably it was just a thief, she told herself. Just a B&E artist hitting an empty apartment.

On the fourth floor?

It would be an inefficient cat-burglar who couldn't find better pickings closer to the ground. Those footsteps belonged to someone who had chosen Dante's apartment in particular. Probably had even known Dante was away and the coast would be clear.

Or—and this thought scared her—the intruder hadn't known Dante was away; had crept up to his room in the middle of the night, expecting to find him there.

Gently Laura reached for the telephone beside her bed and dialed 911. The clicks as the dial spun back seemed deafening, like machine-gun fire.

Overhead the footsteps suddenly paused.

Laura huddled under her blanket with the phone beneath her. She dragged a pillow over her head to help muffle the sound of her voice.

"Emergency. How can I help you?"

"I think there's an intruder in the apartment above me. The guy who lives there's away—"

"I'm sorry, but I can't hear you. You'll have to speak up."

Laura cringed. "Intruder!" she hissed. "There's an intruder in apartment four-o-six, eighteen eighty-eight Green Street."

"Are you able to get out of the apartment without being seen?"

"I'm not in the apartment, I'm downstairs," Laura grated.,

"Then how do you know there's an intruder?"

With enormous restraint Laura kept herself from hurling the phone across the room. Giving up on the cops, she placed the receiver delicately back on its cradle and crept out of bed.

It's ridiculous for me to sneak, she told herself; whoever is up there can't hear my footsteps. But she found herself walking on her toes anyway, calves tight as if she were sparring in her Wenlido class.

She prowled through her apartment, trying to think, winding around the silk panels that separated each area from the next, ducking automatically under the brass lanterns. Either the cops would send someone out or they wouldn't. Even if they did, whoever was upstairs burgling Dante's apartment would be long gone before a patrol car arrived.

They had shared a lot of cups of tea, Dante and Laura; it made her mad to think of someone tearing up his place. Someone... or Something.

She stopped dead. Maybe the thing searching Dante's apartment wasn't human at all. This building wasn't in the slums, but it was only a few blocks from the dreariest part of downtown. If minotaurs had made it as far as Westwood, they could easily be prowling here. And Dante had a bit of angel in him. He tried to ignore it as much as possible, but she had seen him flinch while walking by a mirror. Once, when he wasn't looking, a butterfly had struggled damply from the tea leaves at the bottom of his cup. Laura had said nothing at the time, knowing he wouldn't want to hear about it.

Could Something have been forming in his room? Or had a Minotaur wandered in, following the scent of magic up the stairs, tracking its ghostly efflorescence to Dante's door?

Laura stood a long moment in the darkness, six lanky feet of frustration in a plain pink nightgown. She had carried on her father's work, but she never had mastered his easy disposition. Her mother was a big raw-boned woman from a Kansas farming community, and along with her size, Laura had inherited her stubborn temperament. ("Tough as nails"—the phrase had enchanted Laura's father; a wonderfully poetic description of his wife, he thought. Her pet name, Sally Tough-As-Nails, he chanted lovingly in the last soft breath before he died.)

Still fuming over her abortive call to 911, Laura had a sudden inspiration for how she might drive out the intruder, be he minotaur or man. Belting on her silk kimono (the one with the lucky dragon on it—good!), she grabbed a box of wooden matches from a shelf above her refrigerator. From the little cedar votive cabinet beneath the eastern window she grabbed a pack of firecrackers, left over from the New Year, packed together like so many bullets in a paper bandoleer.

Letting herself out of her own apartment, she headed down the corridor for the stairs, striding over the dingy carpet like an angry stork. She was working hard not to think, working just to maintain her anger. She knew that if she faltered, fear would set in. At first she climbed the stairs two at a time, but at the landing caution kicked in and she went more slowly, watching Dante's door and ready to run if a minotaur came out of it, or a man with a gun.

She took the corridor very quietly indeed, stopping a couple of feet from Dantes door, and listening. There: the smooth wooden grumble of a drawer being pulled out.

Laura's heart bumped painfully in her chest.

She suddenly realized how much noise striking her wooden match was going to make. But it was too late to worry about that now. Better get it over with before I sneeze, she thought. Or panic.

Closing her eyes, she mouthed a quick prayer to her ancestors—Uncle Chen, if ever you look out for me, look out for me now!

Quickly she struck a match and held it to the firecracker's fuse. When it caught, she dropped the matches, opened Dante's door a crack, and pitched the firecrackers in. There was a grunt of surprise followed by an instant of total silence. Then the firecrackers went off like gunshots in the darkness.

Inside the apartment someone squawked and crashed heavily to the floor. Tripped over Dante's bedside table, Laura thought, hearing the thump and clang as Dante's telephone and old brass alarm clock clattered to the floor. Whoever was inside swore and scrambled up. Didn't sound like a minotaur, Laura thought. Relief surged through her like whiskey.

Now hold on, she told herself. A normal guy with a normal gun could still fill you full of ordinary holes.

Hesitating outside the door, she heard a shattering crash from inside the apartment.

She inched the door open, and a moment later heard the sound of footsteps clanging on the fire escape. Cursing herself for a coward, she ran inside and fumbled for the dimmers; couldn't find them; lost another few precious seconds until she remembered Dante only had old-fashioned switches for his lights. She cursed again and slapped them on.

A cool breeze eddied from the kitchen, thick with the stink of gunpowder. The window that led out to the fire escape must have been latched. The intruder had smashed it and swept out the glass at the bottom with a wooden cutting board that now lay discarded on the floor. Picking her way to the window in bare feet, Laura just caught a glimpse of a dark figure clattering down the fire escape. "Hey! Stop!" she shouted. Then, "Fire!"— that was supposed to work better.

Her neighbors were not convinced. A couple of them looked curiously out their windows, but no one seemed in the least interested in dashing outside and running down the intruder. He had too much of a start for Laura to have any hope of catching him, and frankly she didn't like the idea of cramming her gangling frame through a window still glittering with broken glass along its top and sides. There was nothing she could do but watch and hope the mysterious intruder would choose to amble under a street light so she could get a nice long look at him.

He didn't.

*   *   *

"Well, damn," Laura said.

She became aware of the way her hands were trembling. In fact, now that she came to think of it, her whole body felt pretty shaky. She decided she should sit on Dante's ghastly white couch for a moment and recover her equilibrium.

"Please," said a distant voice from Dante's bedroom. Adrenaline screamed back into Laura's bloodstream.

"Hang up, and try your call again. If you need assistance, dial your operator. Please hang up now. This is a recording."

It was the phone: just the phone.

Laura hissed slowly; tension leaked from her like air from a punctured tire. "Damn," she muttered. She scowled at her big shaking hands. "Must be the coffee," she said.

*   *   *

The cops finally showed up just past four in the morning. Officer Donnelly was young and white and had very pleasant manners, including covering his mouth when he yawned, which he did almost continuously. He had bored a hole through a flattened bullet and strung it on a red ribbon as a walk-away, cinched to a belt-loop at his hip. Officer Pierce was black and middle-aged, too old to believe in walk-aways; he played Grouchy Cop.

The police also brought an angel. "Ugh," she said, walking into Dante's apartment. Laura didn't blame her; she hated Dante's apartment too, calculated as it was to be as flatly impersonal as possible. The angel grimaced, looking around at the white-painted bookshelves, the white-painted table and plain-painted chairs. Everything bought new, of course: Dante avoided antique and design stores as if they were leper colonies.

The angel squinted unhappily. "What's wrong with the light?"

"He buys old-fashioned incandescents and there's no dimmer."

The angel peered disbelievingly at the (plain white) lamp beside Dante's coffee table. "They're not even full spectrum bulbs?"

Laura laughed, remembering that she had said pretty much the same thing in pretty much the same tone of voice three years ago when Dante had first invited her to drop by. Personally, she used Morning bulbs over her breakfast table and had a three-track dimmer to keep her living room light levels harmoniously adjusted. "Awful, isn't it?"

"Yuck," the angel agreed. She was a thin-faced woman in her early thirties who wore three charms on a red cord around her neck: a large irregular pearl overwritten with tiny Chinese characters, a pierced metal cap from a bottle of Coke, and mounted on a gold ring a fragment of what looked to be glass from a shattered windshield—presumably a walk-away from some accident. She had a four-character chop tattooed on her face: "Pearl," "River," and one Laura read as "Traveling," all around a Phoenix. She had a habit of periodically hunching her shoulders and peering out from between them, a mannerism which made her look like a questing ferret. It was particularly pronounced when she was running her fingers over Dante's dresser drawers, and around the frame of the smashed window. Every time she did it, Officer Pierce would shoot a questioning look at her, accompanied by an impatient grunt.

At first the angel volunteered her information quickly enough: one intruder; male; looking for something. Had been alarmed while in the bedroom.

"Extraordinary," Officer Pierce growled, looking down at the blackened package of firecrackers still lying on Dante's (bare, painted) living-room floor. "What would we do without you?"

"A question I often ask myself," the angel shot back. Pierce rolled his eyes.

While the young white cop took Laura's statement, Pierce strolled around the apartment, listening and making notes. As far as Laura could tell, nothing had been stolen.