Dead and Gone

“I haven’t asked myself questions about why people do things since I was a little kid.”

“What happened then?” he asked.

“Nobody answered,” I told him.

The Ly Mang looked like a Hudson River scow with a shack growing out of it. I left Byron in the car, made the approach myself. A short, muscular man with the face of an Inca was doing something to a net on the deck, working at a slow, deliberate pace. He raised his head as I came closer; watching, not moving.

“Is Gem around?” I asked him.

“Who are you?” he responded, his accent more in the rhythm than in the sound.

“She’s expecting me.”

“Today?”

“Yes.”

“Stay there,” he said, flicking the knife he had been using closed with one hand.

I slouched against one of the massive posts holding up the pier, patting my pockets for the pack of smokes that wasn’t there. A mistake. Habits are patterns, and patterns are paths. Trails for trackers. I was somebody else now, and I had to stay there.

A girl in a pink T-shirt and blue-jean shorts came out of the cabin. She said something I couldn’t hear to the Mexican, then vaulted over the railing to the pier, landing as lightly as a ballerina.

Her hair was jet black, framing a delicate Oriental face. A slim, leggy woman with a tiny waist, she could have been sixteen or thirty-five. But when she got close enough for me to see her eyes, there was no chance of mistaking her for a teenager.

“I am Gem,” is all she said. If standing out in the cool weather dressed like that bothered her, it didn’t show on her face.

“I don’t know who you spoke to, but I’m the man who—”

“The man from New York?” she asked, her eyes deliberately glancing down to my right hand, where the fat emerald on my pinky finger sparkled in the sun. Mama’s ID.

“Yes.”

“You need someone who speaks Russian?”

“And writes it. Like a native.”

“Yes. For how long?”

“I don’t … Oh, right—you mean, how long will I need your services?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t say, exactly. I want you to write a letter. Then I want you to meet the people you are writing the letter to. And talk with them.”

“Where would this be?”

“Vancouver. Near—”

“I know where it is. You came from there?”

“Yes.”

“I would go back with you, is that correct?” Her voice was precise, unaccented. Soft.

“You don’t have to. The letter you write, it will say you will meet them in Portland … so there would be at least a week between the letter and the time you go into action. You could write the letter here—I brought everything you would need with me—and come up to Portland on whatever date we pick.”

“A week would be all right. I have business in Portland. You will cover my lodging and meals while I’m there, is that fair enough?”

“Sure.”

“You must have a car …?”

“Right over there,” I told her, pointing to the Subaru.

She took a long, slow look at the car, making it clear she saw Byron in the driver’s seat.

“Perhaps you should tell me a little more, first.”

“Like what?”

“Who told you where to find me?”

“Look, the only person I dealt with is Mama. I don’t know who she—”

“Mrs. Wong is your mother?”

“Not my biological mother. It’s a term of respect. Everyone … close to her calls her that.”

“Ah. I do not know her, not personally. But the people I deal with, the people who I get my jobs from, they know her.”

“Since they know her, why don’t you—?”

“Yes. All right. Give me twenty minutes, please.”

“She’s a pro,” Byron said to me as the woman approached the Subaru, pulling one of those airline-size suitcases on wheels behind