poetry, hand-painted on paper as fragile as moths’ wings. The only light comes from the display cases, and they fluoresce only when I come near. My hands are shaking in the dark, and when I hug myself, I realize the rest of me is shaking too. In the blackness I see my mother, slowly drinking herself to death in Oxford, Mississippi. I see Jane’s husband and children in New Orleans, trying their best to live without her and not doing terribly well at it. I see the FBI agents I met thirteen months ago, sober men with good intentions but no idea how to help.
I shot hundreds of crime-scene photos when I was starting my career, but I never quite realized how important a dead body is to a murder investigation. The corpse is ground zero. Without one, investigators face a wall as blank as unexposed film. The painting back in the exhibition room is not Jane’s corpse, but it may be the closest thing anyone will ever find to it. It’s a starting point. With this realization comes another: there are other paintings like Jane’s. According to the audio tour, nineteen. Nineteen naked women posed in images of sleep or death. As far as I know, only eleven women have disappeared from New Orleans. Who are the other eight? Or are there only eleven, with some appearing in more than one painting? And what in God’s name are they doing in Hong Kong, halfway around the world?
The audio tour said the paintings are sold through a U.S. dealer named Christopher something in New York. Windham? Winwood?
Retracing my steps to the exhibition room is easy; I simply follow the babble of conversation echoing through the empty halls. The men are still milling around, talking about me, no doubt, the Sleeping Woman who isn’t sleeping and certainly isn’t dead. I feel no fear as I approach them. Somewhere between the document room and this place labeled “Nude Women in Repose,” I shoved my sister into a dark memory hole and became the woman who has covered wars on four continents – my father’s daughter.
With my sudden reappearance, the Chinese draw together in excited knots. A museum guard is questioning two of them, trying to find out what happened. I walk brazenly past him and shoot two pictures of the woman in the bathtub. The flash of the little Canon sets off a blast of irate Chinese. Moving quickly through the room, I shoot two more paintings before the guard gets a hand on my arm. I turn to him and nod as though I understand, then break away toward the painting of Jane. I get off one shot before he blows his whistle for help and locks onto my arm again, this time with both hands.
Sometimes you can b.s. your way out of situations like this. This is not one of those times. If I’m still standing here when Someone In Authority arrives, I’ll never get out of the museum with my film. I double the guard over with a well-placed knee and run like hell for the second time.
The police whistle sounds again, though this time with a faint bleat. I skid to a stop on the waxed floor, backpedal to a fire door, and crash through to the outside, leaving a wake of alarms behind me. For the first time I’m glad for the teeming crowds of Hong Kong; even a roundeye woman can disappear in less than a minute. Three hundred yards from the museum, I hail a taxi and order him not to the Star Ferry, which someone might remember me boarding, but through the tunnel that crosses beneath the harbor.
Back on the Hong Kong side, we race to my hotel. I’m staying at the Mandarin, which is too expensive for me but has great sentimental value. As a child, I received several letters from my father on its stationery. Inside my room, I throw my clothes into my suitcase, pack my cameras into their aluminum flight cases, and take a different cab to the new airport. I intend to be out of Chinese airspace before some enterprising cop figures out that, while they may not have my name, they have a perfect likeness of my face on their museum wall. They could have flyers at the airport and the hotels in less than an hour. I’m not sure why they would – I’ve committed no crime, other than stealing a Walkman -but I’ve been arrested for less before, and in the paranoid world of the Hong Kong Chinese, my behavior around multimillion-dollar paintings would make me an excellent candidate for “temporary detention.”
Hong Kong International Airport is a babel of Asian languages and rushing travelers. I have a reservation on an Air China flight to Beijing, but that plane doesn’t leave for three hours. The departure screens show a Cathay Pacific flight leaving for New York in thirty-five minutes, with a two-hour layover at Narita in Tokyo. Presenting my worn passport at the Cathay counter, I let the ticket agent gut me for full fare on a first-class ticket. The money would buy a decent used car in the States, but after what happened in the museum, I can’t sit shoulder-to- shoulder with some computer salesman from Raleigh for twenty hours. That potential reality brings another to mind, and I ask the female agent if she can seat me next to a woman. On this day of all days, I cannot deal with being hit on, and twenty hours gives a guy a long time to strategize. Last year, on a flight from Seoul to Los Angeles, some drunk jerk actually asked if I wanted to go to the rest room with him and join the Mile High Club. I told him I was already a member, which was true. I’d joined nine years earlier, with my fiance, in the cargo hold of a DC-3 somewhere over Namibia. Three days later, he was captured with some SWAPO guerrillas and beaten to death, which put me in an even more exclusive club: the Unofficial Widows. Now, at forty, I’m still single and still a member. The Cathay Pacific agent smiles knowingly and obliges my request.
Which puts me where I am now: three scotches down and my short-term memory back in gear. The alcohol is serving several functions, one of them being to damp the embers of grief stirring at the bottom of my soul. But nineteen hours is a long time to hide from yourself. I have a supply of Xanax in my fanny pack, for the nights when the open wound of my sister’s unknown fate throbs too acutely for sleep. It’s throbbing now, and it’s not even full dark yet. Before I can second-guess myself, I pop three pills with a swallow of scotch and take the Airfone out of my armrest.
There’s really only one useful thing I can do from the plane. After a few swipes of my Visa and some haggling with directory assistance, I’m speaking to the operator at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, who transfers me to the offices of the Investigative Support Unit. The ISU has more impressive digs than it once did, but Daniel Baxter, the chief of the unit, likes the bunker atmosphere of the old days, the era before Hollywood overexposure turned his unit into a myth that draws eager young college grads by the thousands. Baxter must be fifty now, but he’s a lean and hungry fifty, with a combat soldier’s eyes. That’s what I thought when I first saw him. A guy from the ranks who found himself an officer by default, the result of a battlefield promotion. But no one will ever question that promotion. His record of success is legendary in a war where victories are few and the defeats almost unbearable. To wit, my sister and her ten sisters in purgatory. Baxter’s unit scored a big zero on that one. But the grim fact is, when a certain kind of shit hits the fan, there’s no one else to call.
“Baxter,” says a sharp baritone voice.
“This is Jordan Glass,” I tell him, trying to hide the slur in my voice and not doing well at all. “Do you remember me?”
“You’re hard to forget, Ms. Glass.”
I take a quick swallow of scotch. “A little over an hour ago, I saw my sister in Hong Kong.”
There’s a brief silence. “Are you drinking, Ms. Glass?”
“Absolutely. But I know what I saw.”
“You saw your sister.”
“In Hong Kong. And now I’m in a 747, bound for New York.”
“You’re saying you saw your sister alive?”
“No.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
I give Baxter as lucid a summary as I can manage of my experiences at the museum, then wait for his response. I expect some expression of astonishment – maybe not a Gomer Pyle “Shazam,” but something – but I
