Skillful Death (48 page)

D
OM
WOKE
ON
THE
boat.

His grief was nameless, but burned as a bright hot ball in his stomach. At first, he only remembered that something terrible had happened in the city. He refused food and fought away the tea that Pemba tried to make him drink. Eventually, he drank a few sips and his panic was replaced by a heavy lethargy which pinned him to the cot in the boat’s small cabin. This boat wasn’t as large or luxurious as the one that had brought them to the city, and Dom felt it in the rolling motion.
 

Every few hours, Pemba brought more tea and wouldn’t relent until Dom drank at least a few sips.

Dom’s dreams were haunted by visions of Diki in great danger.

He woke again in the night and he stayed silent on his cot, staring up at the ceiling of the cabin. He listened to Pemba’s even breathing, and waited for his head to clear. By the time the sun came up, Dom remembered the big man who ran away at the sight of Dom’s bloody daughter. He remembered the panic and then horrific glee on the old man’s face before he plunged the knife into Diki’s chest. He remembered how the candlelight had lied and animated Diki’s face even after she had surely grown still.

With all the memories came realization. Dom flexed his arms and legs, but didn’t move from the bed until he was sure that he had control of his body. He turned only his head and saw Pemba’s slumbering body. His friend’s face was fully relaxed and free of the tortured guilt that Dom felt.

Dom stepped across the rolling cabin and sat on Pemba’s chest. Pemba gasped as he woke. Dom pinned Pemba’s arms down.

“What are you doing?” Pemba asked.

“You drugged me.”

“Yes. I had to. You weren’t being reasonable.”

“It wasn’t your choice to make,” Dom said.
 

“I have to look out for your best interests when you refuse to.” Pemba said. He thrashed his legs, but couldn’t shake Dom.

“Tell the captain to take me back to the city.”

“Tell him yourself. It won’t do any good now. Hakki fled. He’s probably half a world away by now. He’ll live the rest of his life with the guilt of what Varol did. Dom, we have Diki aboard. We need to take her back to the village so you can see her off.”

“I can’t go back,” Dom said. “My poor daughter.”

“There’s nothing more to do, my friend,” Pemba said.
 

Dom slumped to the side and Pemba wriggled from beneath him. He sat on the cot and put his arm around Dom.

♣
   
♢
   
♡
   
♠

They held a small ceremony with just three attending—Dom, Pemba, and Tara’s aunt. Diki’s body was positioned on her side, curled up like a baby, and set atop the pyre. Dom felt the anger burning in Tara’s aunt more than the heat from the fire. Pemba looked at the ground rather than watch Diki be consumed by the flames. Dom remembered the stinging words from Tara’s aunt when Tara died. This time, she said nothing.

♣
   
♢
   
♡
   
♠

Dom stood when Pemba entered the office, and he remained standing until Pemba took a seat at his desk.

“Do you know what’s missing from your office?” Dom asked.

“What’s that?” Pemba asked. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a small book. He wrote a few lines while Dom stood. Pemba put the book back in his drawer and looked up to find Dom still waiting for his attention.

“What is missing?” Pemba asked.

“You have no mementos from your family in here. No portraits, no drawings from your children, no flowers from your wife.”

Pemba smiled and leaned back in his chair.
 

“What are you saying, Dom?”

“Your man, at the door, what is he, your guard?”

“Security, I suppose. I think you know his father. You used to work in the mines with…” Pemba said.

Dom cut him off. “Why do you need security?”

“We’ve both seen some terrible things in our lives. They go back to … when? When you had your factory burned? Things were quiet for a long while, but we both know the world lost its innocence quite a while ago.”

“Yes, it did,” Dom said. “He said you ordered that nobody should come in.”

“I did.”

“Including me?”

“Clearly not,” Pemba said. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

“Only because I talked my way in. I reminded him that you and I have a friendship that goes back to childhood, and that I have always been welcome in your house. If he had stuck to the letter of his orders, I wouldn’t have been allowed access to you. Why is that?”

“Forgive me. I gave a blanket order that was misunderstood. I’ll try to be more clear in the future. Trust no one, lest I be murdered in my own house. Oh, except Dom. Always let Dom in. It just takes the simplicity off the rule, don’t you think?”

Dom sat down on a low couch near a window.

“Pemba, my oldest friend, what really happened to Diki?”

“What on earth are you talking about?”
 

“Those men, who I supposedly cheated in another life, how did they find Diki that night?”

“I don’t know,” Pemba said. “How did they find us? They pulled me from a carriage and knocked me unconscious. I still have the scar. I booked that carriage with a huge tip and didn’t give a name. I have no idea how those men found you, me, Diki, or anyone.”

“I believe they had help,” Dom said.

Pemba shook his head.

“They had help from someone who stands to gain from my disappearance,” Dom said.

“Dom. Please.”

“Tashi investigated your bookkeeping. We know of your debt.”

“Do you? Do you understand this business you invented? Do you know how far I have to go into debt each year? Do you also know how much profit I earn on that investment with every conference we host? That’s how it works, Dom. I spend money on clients, advertising, travel, meals, bribes, and everything else. Then, when we have our conferences, we make back all that and more. My margin is higher than anyone’s. You and Tashi should know all this.”

“You’ve never been in debt like you are now. Our other businesses have cash reserves.”

“And our other businesses are not expanding at the rate I am. Do you want to stay small, and have the slightest bump knock us off our feet? I don’t. I want to grow this business large enough to withstand fluctuations. I want it to survive. You asked me about family? This is my family.”

“Fortune can’t replace people,” Dom said.

“Neither can poverty. You’ve been paying penance for Tara’s death for fifteen years. Did all those years of living like a pauper replace her? And what exactly are you accusing me of?” Pemba straightened a pile of papers and polished a smudge on the surface of his desk. He didn’t look at Dom as he continued. “People don’t talk like this. People don’t come in and make grand accusations which erupt into big arguments. People harbor their suspicions and then eventually just stop talking to each other.”

Dom walked out of Pemba’s office.

W
ITH
T
ASHI
’
S
HELP
, D
OM
executed an elaborate plan. He set up three new identities—two in China, and one in California. With the first, he found his way into China. There he located an American expatriate, from whom he learned English. During his stay in China, Dom switched identities again. From there, he booked passage to the United States with a work visa. After landing in San Francisco, Dom adopted his final identity. He became the orphan of Russian émigrés who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution and managed to land on U.S. soil before welcoming their first and only child.

On the last of his money, he traveled north to Washington. There he found a community of legitimate Russian descendants with a social convention of staying quiet about their ancestry. Dom became Bud, and Bud blended well.

He took a small room at a boarding house which catered to itinerant fisherman. Men made quick, disposable friends between voyages, and Bud found them loose with their handshakes and eager to buy a stranger a drink. He watched them come and go and never felt probed to reveal too much about his past.

Bud faked up a résumé to get a job with Evergreen Ore, a small silver processor on the Stillaguamish River. He proved solid on the concepts, but loose on the terminology, and landed a low-level job running the sorter. His driver’s license put him at fifty-one, but he could have easily passed for forty.

Bud grew bored quickly. The plant had some interesting jobs, but they required an advanced degree or decades of experience, neither of which Bud could show. He spent his free time learning about electronics. Building circuits gave purpose to his nimble fingers and sparked his curiosity. Books and manuals proved useless learning tools, but if he could get his hands on something, he could determine how it worked.

Bud began picking up broken radios, televisions, calculators, and anything else with a circuit. Most of the time, he fixed the problem and sold the device to a second-hand store. Occasionally, he improved on the design and kept the appliance for himself. As the world adopted more and more electronic devices, Bud’s hobby absorbed all his free time. His friends and neighbors presented a wonderful variety of broken devices with electronic puzzles to solve. And, if he couldn’t find anything to fix, Bud came up with his own inventions.

He moved to a small one-bedroom apartment in a divided up old house. He slept on the couch and turned the room into his workshop. The walls were lined with stacks of equipment, and his desk became his tool chest.

Most of the time, helping someone he knew was enough. Most of the time, his satisfaction came from repairing something and restoring it back to working order. But one day, he experienced an epiphany that he couldn’t keep to himself.

That afternoon, he did something unthinkable: Bud went to a store and purchased a new radio. He had a half-dozen radios in his shop, all in working order. He purchased this brand new radio just so he could take it apart.
 

The idea was so simple, such a natural simplification to the circuit in front of him, that he couldn’t believe it would work. He could remove a dozen components and trim a third of the circuit board inside the radio and repurpose the remaining parts to work even better than they had before. The reduction would ease manufacturing, trim costs, and save space. Bud made the change and put his radio back together. It worked.

He wrote a letter to the manufacturer, a medium-sized California company, and boxed up his prototype. Now that he’d proven the concept, he didn’t care about the radio. His satisfaction came from the successful execution of his idea. He sent the letter and the prototype back to the manufacturer and forgot about it.
 

Bud quit his job at the plant and took a part-time job at a repair shop. The owner preferred to work on lamps and sewing machines, so he farmed out all the electronics work to Bud and allowed him to use the shop space to work on his own projects. Bud supplemented his income by refurbishing and re-selling, and most months he managed to make even more than he had at the plant. He didn’t have an opportunity to employ his new radio design very often. Most of the radios that came into the shop were bulky old tube-based gear. People didn’t bother to bring in smaller mass-produced stuff.

♣
   
♢
   
♡
   
♠

Bud mostly worked in the back room, where he could spread out. The appliances he worked on usually contained dozens of parts and required Bud to keep careful track of each. The tuner in pieces before him was exhibiting multiple symptoms. The volume knob made a scratchy sound when turned, and the light behind the frequency indicator was flickering. These problems were mind-numbingly boring, and getting the thing apart enough to fix them was nearly impossible. Bud was ready for a distraction. He wandered to the counter when he heard the bell ring.

The owner of the shop was organizing clocks on a shelf.

“May I help you?” the owner asked.

Edgar, one of Bud’s regulars, held up a small black appliance.

The owner lifted his half-glasses up to his forehead, saw the small electronic device, and simply pointed towards Bud.

“Hello, Mr. Edgar,” Bud said.

“Hi,” Edgar said. He crossed to the counter and set down his device. It was a portable audio cassette recorder.

“What is that for?” Bud asked. The little plastic device with its earpiece jack and three-inch speaker was something a kid would carry around. Edgar was a serious audiophile. With an amazing turntable and amplifier at his house, why would Edgar want the cheap cassette player?

“I don’t think I’m getting good signal out,” Edgar said. “I can’t read anything from this.”

“Pardon?”

“My computer?”

“Pardon?” Bud asked. He’d only been speaking English for a few years. He worked hard on his accent, but he still ran across new words.