Dragon Tears

was too merciful. Things have gotten out of hand. It’s my duty to Become, and having Become, to rule more sternly.”

In the candlelight, the raindrops remaining in the ratman’s hair and eyebrows and beard glimmered as if a woefully misguided artisan had decorated him with jewels in the manner of a Faberge egg.

“When I deal out these more urgent judgments, and when I’ve had a chance to rest, I’ll be back to see you,” the ratman promised. “I just didn’t want you to think you’d been forgotten. Wouldn’t want you to feel neglected, unappreciated. Poor, poor Sammy. I won’t forget you. That’s not just a promise — it’s the sacred word of the new god.”

Then the ratman worked a malevolent miracle to insure that he was not forgotten even in the thousand-fathom oblivion of a deep wine sea. He blinked, and when his lids popped up again, his eyes were no longer ebony and yellow, were not eyes at all any longer, but were balls of greasy white worms writhing in his sockets. When he opened his mouth, his teeth had become razor-sharp fangs. Venom dripped, a glossy black tongue fluttered like that of a questing serpent, and a violent exhalation erupted from him, reeking of putrefied flesh. His head and body swelled, burst, but didn’t deconstruct into a horde of rats this time. Instead, ratman and clothes were transformed into tens of thousands of black flies that swarmed through the packing crate, buzzing fiercely, batting against Sammy’s face. The thrumming of their wings was so loud that it drowned out even the drone of the pouring rain, and then—

They were gone.

Vanished.

The rug hung heavy and wet over the open section of the crate.

Candleglow flickered and pulsed across the wooden walls.

The air smelled of blueberry-scented wax.

Sammy chugged a couple of long swallows of wine directly from the mouth of the jug, instead of pouring it first into the dirty jelly jar that he had been using. A little of it spilled over his whisker-stubbled chin, but he didn’t care.

He was eager to remain numb, detached. If he had been in touch with his fear during the past few minutes, he would no doubt have peed his pants.

He felt it was also important to remain detached in order to think less emotionally about what the ratman had said. Previously, the creature had spoken little and had never revealed anything of its own motivations or intentions. Now it was spouting all this babble about thinning the herd, judgment, godhood.

It was valuable to know the ratman’s mind was filled with the same crazy stuff that had cluttered up the head of old Mike, stabber of moviegoers. Regardless of his ability to appear out of nowhere and disappear into thin air, in spite of his inhuman eyes and ability to change shapes, all of that god blather made him seem hardly more special than any of the countless heirs of Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez who roamed the world, heeding inner voices, killing for pleasure, and keeping refrigerators filled with the severed heads of their victims. If in some fundamental way he was like the other psychos out there, then even with his special talents he was as vulnerable as they were.

Though functioning in a wine fog, Sammy could see that this new insight might be a useful survival tool. The problem was, he had never been good at survival.

Thinking about the ratman made his head hurt. Hell, the mere prospect of surviving gave him a migraine. Who wanted to survive? And why? Death would only come later if not sooner. Each survival was merely a short-term triumph. In the end, oblivion for everyone. And in the meantime, nothing but pain. To Sammy, it seemed that the only terrible thing about the ratman was not that he killed people but that he apparently liked to make them suffer first, cranked up the terror, poured on the pain, did not remove his victims from this world with kindly despatch.

Sammy tipped the jug and poured wine into the jelly jar that was on the floor, braced between his splayed legs. He raised the glass to his lips. In the glimmering ruby liquid, he sought a glimmerless, peaceful, perfect darkness.

9

Mickey Chan was sitting alone in a back booth, concentrating on his soup.

Connie saw him as soon as she pushed through the front door of the small Chinese restaurant in Newport Beach, and she made her way toward him between black-lacquered chairs and tables with silver-gray tablecloths. A red and gold painted dragon coiled across the ceiling, serpentined around the light fixtures.

If Mickey saw her coming, he pretended to be unaware. He sucked soup from the spoon, then spooned up more, never taking his gaze off the contents of his bowl.

He was small but sinewy, in his late forties, and wore his hair closely cropped. His skin was the shade of antique parchment.

Although he allowed his Caucasian clients to think that he was Chinese, he was actually a Vietnamese refugee who had fled to the States after the fall of Saigon. Rumor had it, he’d been a Saigon homicide detective or an officer in the South Vietnamese Internal Security Agency, which was probably true.

Some said that he’d had a reputation as a real terror in the interrogation room, a man who would resort to any tool or technique to break the will of a suspected criminal or Communist, but Connie doubted those stories. She liked Mickey. He was tough, but he had about him the air of a man who had known great loss and was capable of profound compassion.

As she reached his table, he spoke to her without shifting his attention from the soup: “Good evening, Connie.”

She slid into the other side of the booth. “You’re fixated on that bowl as if the meaning of life is in it.”

“It is,” he said, still spooning.

“It is? Looks like soup to me.”

“The meaning of life can be found in a bowl of soup. Soup always begins with a broth of some kind, which is like the liquid flow of days that makes up our lives.”

“Broth?”

“Sometimes in the broth are noodles, sometimes vegetables, bits of egg white, slivers of chicken or shrimp, mushrooms, perhaps rice.”

Because Mickey would not look at her, Connie found herself staring across the table at his soup almost as intensely as he was.

He said, “Sometimes it is hot, sometimes cool. Sometimes it is meant to be cool, and then it is good even if there’s no slightest warmth in it. But if it’s not meant to be cool, then it will taste bitter, or curdle in the stomach, or both.”

His strong but gentle voice had a hypnotic effect. Enthralled, Connie stared at the placid surface of the soup, oblivious now to everyone else in the restaurant.

“Consider. Before the soup is eaten,” Mickey said, “it has value and purpose. After it is eaten, it is valueless to everyone except to whoever has consumed it. And in fulfilling its purpose, it ceases to exist. Left behind will be only the empty bowl. Which can symbolize either want and need — or the pleasant expectation of other soups to come.”

She waited for him to continue, and only shifted her gaze from his soup when she realized that he was now staring at her. She met his eyes and said, “That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“The meaning of life?”

“All of it.”

She frowned. “I don’t get it.”

He shrugged. “Me neither. I make up this crap as I go along.”

She blinked at him. “You what?”

Grinning, Mickey said, “Well, it’s sort of expected of a Chinese private detective, you see. Pithy sayings, impenetrable philosophical observations, inscrutable proverbs.”