“Look, I didn’t say I’m in love with the idea of getting mixed up in this whole thing,” he said.
“Good, great.”
“For that matter, I wouldn’t
Her brown Eurasian eyes remaining on the screen, Noriko swished a hand toward the door in an absent gesture of dismissal.
“It’s wonderful we agree—”
“Except in this case it happens there
She finally glanced up at him. Tall, slender, athletic, her shoulder-length black hair gelled and tousled around symmetrically fine features, she wore a body-hugging black sweater, black leather miniskirt, black tights, and high- shaft black leather boots for a total effect Lenny had to admit was a draw to the eyes. Still, the good looks didn’t
“I hope you aren’t going to tell me it’s because we buy components from this Patrick Mulligan—”
“Sullivan,” Lenny said.
“Right, excuse me,” Noriko said. “But if that’s your rationale, you might as well make UpLink responsible for the friendly men and women who sell us light bulbs, keep us in bathroom supplies, and stock our hallway vending machines with bags of potato chips and chocolate kisses.”
Lenny shook his head.
“Pat’s a salesman for the Kiran Group. And we’re probably his biggest account, since we lay out maybe five million bucks a year to Kiran for—”
“Synthetic ruby, I know…”
“Laboratory-cultivated sapphire,” Lenny said. “Sapphires and rubies are the same mineral. Corundum. The difference is their crystallization pattern. And their properties. It’s why we use one and not the other in our laser equipment.”
Noriko looked at him.
“I stand corrected again,” she said. “I also still don’t see any logical reason why that makes Mull… ah,
Lenny guessed he didn’t either. But it was his pledge to Sullivan’s wife that he’d make a go of things, not logic, that had propelled him down here to SoHo on his lunch break.
“I’m busy, Lenny,” Noriko said now. “What’s your point? The
Lenny shrugged his shoulders.
“Just that we’re talking about somebody with ties to our core operations, not the Hershey’s chocolate guy,” he improvised. “It isn’t my job to fill in the blanks.”
“And how does it follow that it’s mine?”
Lenny shrugged a second time, stuck for a persuasive reply. Trying to get past the interference she threw up was like having to dance between raindrops.
Noriko kept looking at him, her expression openly scornful.
“Six months ago the Kiran Group was bought by Armbright Industries, a multinational corporation that happens to be our chief competitor in a dozen areas of tech development,” she said. “Armbright has its own internal security to look after its employees.”
“Their security isn’t Sword by a longshot.”
“Not my problem,” Noriko said. “Let them allocate a heftier slice of their budget to the division. They’ve mimicked us in every other way.”
Lenny felt swamped with futility. He hated talking to her.
“You’re really catching me on a hectic afternoon,” she said. “Is there anything else you want me to consider before we wrap up?”
This time Lenny guessed he might have had an answer, but it stalled short of his lips. What was he supposed to tell her? That he’d related to Mary Sullivan’s background without ever asking a word about it, her sorrowful but determined green eyes stirring memories that hadn’t occurred to him in years?
“No, nothing else,” he said at last. “I’m done.”
“Okay,” Noriko said with flat disinterest. “Be well, Lenny.”
“Yup. I’ll see myself out.”
Noriko Cousins returned her eyes to the computer screen, both hands on the keyboard even before he left her office.
No sooner had the door closed behind Lenny than her clacking stopped.
She leaned back in her chair, arms crossed, her lips pursed in thought.
This question of Sullivan’s whereabouts intrigued Noriko, if only because it coincided with certain other peculiarities about the Kiran Group and its recent exports that Sword’s routine monitoring of the company had brought to her attention… including shipments of the cultured sapphire she’d pretended to be vague about. But the mind was always quick to put the odd information it gathered in neat, orderly compartments, sorting things away like someone with a neatness fetish driven to fits by a misplaced article of clothing. Reality was far too disorganized for her to fall victim to that tendency.
No, she’d taught herself to be guided by the facts, and would need to turn up many more of them in her probe of Kiran before she drew so much as a single inference or conclusion.
Tied into knots of frustration that made his back and shoulders ache, Lenny decided he’d stretch his lunch hour and walk a few blocks over to Chinatown to purchase his nerve medicine from Yan.
The Snow Mountain Mart on Canal Street was a multistoried Far Eastern emporium that had been a neighborhood fixture seemingly forever, its shelves, counters, and clothes racks displaying imported goods in astonishing quantities — a wild and colorful diversity of curios, kimonos, furniture, bedding, beaded curtains, bird cages, parasols, Chinese lanterns, enormous ceremonial masks and paper dragons, miniature jade Buddhas and crystal lotus vases, incense and incense burners, chopsticks and chopstick holders, bamboo steamers, electric rice cookers, green tea sold loose by the ounce, soap bars wrapped together in packages of several dozen, folk instruments, electric guitars, harmonicas, noisemakers, nail clippers, nose-hair trimmers, magnifying glasses, portable CD players, personal pagers, radar detectors, cameras, film, generic batteries…
Today Lenny had found Yan in his usual spot at the end of a cluttered aisle of herbal remedies around the corner from the music and video department. A bald, bespectacled guy in his seventies, Yan always wore a long white frock unbuttoned over his slight paunch. Lenny had been paying him occasional visits for maybe five, six years, but wasn’t absolutely sure if Yan was his first or last name. Lenny was likewise unsure whether the white coat signified he was a doctor or pharmacist, although he didn’t find the blurred distinction between those professions in traditional Asian health care to be problematic. It hadn’t been so different in America once upon a time, when drugstore owners had maintained a close caregiving relationship with their patrons. They had recommended treatments, prescribed medications and tonics, and compounded dosages by hand with mortar and pestle. This had eventually pricked the competitive sensibilities of profiteering pharmaceutical companies, raised jealous territorial growls from the American Medical Association, and been raw meat for the slavering jaws of personal-injury litigators. Lenny, for his part, thought the pressures these interests brought to bear upon the Western druggist had reduced him to little more than a human pill dispenser. Nowadays he didn’t know one customer from another. He poured brand-name medications from big bottles into smaller bottles, put the smaller bottles into a bag, stapled it shut, and rang up the sale on the register.
When it came to getting relief for minor ails and emotional distress, Lenny preferred taking his chances here at Snow Mountain. So what if his favorite practitioner was a Mr. Yan, Doctor Yan, Citizen Yan, or just plain Yan, as he asked to be called? Lenny hadn’t the foggiest notion whether he was even licensed. He couldn’t for a million bucks have positively identified the ingredients that went into the concoctions Yan formulated behind his counter. But they seemed to work okay. Far as he knew, they hadn’t been contaminated with the SARS virus. And at least Yan didn’t forget his face between return visits.
