Cold Snap (22 page)

He had trouble pronouncing
'naturalization'.

"What kind of work?" Ari asked, feeling a
little queasy. "What agency?"

"Confidential," said Rhee, easing back in his
chair like the chief executive of a major corporation. "But they
wouldn't want a couple of insurance investigators snooping around
their business. I sorry about this missing man. Maybe he got into
trouble somewhere else."

"Maybe..." Lawson mused. "Those
prosthetics...how much would they cost me if I didn't take it out
in trade?"

"Plus the arm? Probably $15-16,000 total.
Wrists are expensive. You think your government would pay?"

"My government wouldn't pay for a portable
shit box," Lawson fretted. "You know the price of everything you
import?"

"Good businessman knows his business."

"I can think of some CEO's who could take
lessons from you," said Lawson. "Those clove cigarettes you're
smoking are banned in this country, by the way. You get caught,
they'll deny citizenship."

"It's OK if I roll them myself. Anyway, you
like them? I throw in carton of Kreteks, bonus, straight from
Indonesia."

"Aren't you incorrigible?" Lawson turned to
Ari. "We done here?"

"You've been a most gracious host," said Ari,
standing.

"I get girl for you, too," said Rhee,
spreading a grin of yellow teeth across his face. "Much better than
cat."

"He must be procuring Asian call-girls for
the government," Lawson observed once they were back in the
Scion.

"Would you be surprised?" Ari asked, tuning
up the heat.

"Not as much as you'd expect." Lawson
searched for a convenient niche for his cane. "What does surprise
me is you not telling me about those computers. You say they threw
theirs out?"

"I followed the boy to Caroline County,
Beacon Corner Junk & Salvage. His van was full of computers. He
insisted they be destroyed. Crushed, burned."

"Fuck."

"This concerns you?"

"If they were compromised...and that's what
it sounds like...I know the most likely man behind it."

"Ethan."

"You already guessed?"

"I puzzled out some pieces." Ari pulled out
and headed for the expressway entrance. "I don't think those people
have ever seen Ethan. How could he have entered their
computers?"

"My guess? He went phishing, came up with
some cock-and-bull story to get remote access. Which means he would
have had to find someone at A-Zed dumb enough to let him in."

After a brief pause, they said, in
unison:

"The boy."

"How did you come up with the notion that
he's smuggling illegals into the country?" asked Lawson.

"I ran into a fellow Italian who probably
shouldn't be here," Ari lied casually.

"What, a fucking Mafioso?"

"I wouldn't know, but he was wearing a
trinket similar to what Rhee had on display."

"That's a stretch. Those things are
everywhere."

"He said something about receiving
'assistance'." A Mazda Millennia came perilously close and Ari
edged away. Was the driver Korean? He couldn't tell. He was
suddenly nervous about being on the road. With unprecedented
prudence, he slowed down and began to drive responsibly.

"But why not government assistance?" asked
Lawson. "Maybe your Italian buddy got help from the same agency
that Rhee bragged about."

It was a frightening possibility, but Ari did
not say so.

"What could have been on those computers that
would have gotten your man into trouble?"

"Shit," said Lawson, still unable to find a
proper place for his cane. "There's not enough room to swing a cat
in here."

"Why would you want to swing a cat?"

"If your guess is right, and this Korean
buckaroo is bringing in illegals..."

"Whose names would be on his
computers..."

"And those illegals found out their names had
been compromised..."

"And if they were particularly
dangerous..."

"They'd do anything to make sure that man
didn't hand his list of names over to Immigration."

"Or anyone else," Ari concluded. Seeking to
find a cheery note in all of this, he asked: "How does it feel to
be back at work?"

"You mean back in the field?" Lawson worked
his cane to the side, freeing his leg and prosthetic. "Years ago, I
took my boy to Hollywood Cemetery. Been there yet?"

"Where movie stars are buried?"

"No, here...in Richmond. The name refers to
the holly bush. Or tree. Hell if I know which from which. The
cemetery's got graves that go way back. Well, not as far back as
Italy's, not by a long shot. Not as old as some graves you'll find
in a Louisiana parish. But you'll find people who were born and
died in the 1700's, which is pretty old for us. It's where
Jefferson Davis is buried."

"A notable man?"

"One of my personal heroes."

"A soldier?"

"And statesman. President of the Confederacy
during the Civil War. The American Civil War."

"What is it about him that you admire?"

"I was joking. He was a first-rate scumbag.
He led the war to defend slavery and came a lot closer to winning
than folks like to admit, especially these days. But you know all
that, right? You have some awareness of basic American
history?"

"I know about the witch hunts."

"In Salem, Massachusetts," Lawson nodded.

"No, Washington, DC. Mr. McCarthy and the
Communists."

"That's not very far back. You don't know
anything from earlier? Tell me you at least know something about
slavery."

"The ancient Italians had Greek slaves."

"I mean here, in Americalala Land."

"Yes, I've seen your slaves. From Mexico and
South America, right?"

"Crap, those aren't...well, maybe you have a
point. But I mean real slaves, chains, whips, permanent servitude.
Look at me. What race am I?"

"You were Negroid before your injury."

"And now my black skin's been blown off and
I'm nothing, is that it? You're really painful to know, you know
that?"

"It has been alleged." Ari glanced in his
rearview mirror. "Is that car following us?"

"Oh shit..." Lawson studied the passenger
rearview. "Maybe. Who the fuck knows? Who cares? There must be
twenty cars back there. Let's get back on topic."

"I know you are black and that your
forefathers were slaves," Ari admitted.

"Now why would you game me on something like
that? Are you trying to pluck my nerves?"

"What was our original topic?"

"Oh...you mean, how does it feel to be back
in the field? You're pissed because I drifted off-topic. Well
excuse me, massa."

"You were beginning to tell me a story about
a cemetery."

"Right...right. Well, my boy, Dave, was about
four at the time. I took him walking up and down the hills at
Hollywood and we came on a Confederate grave from 1863. I can't
remember the cracker's name, but the inscription ended 'fell at
Chancellorsville'. Dave was already reading pretty well by then,
and he said, 'Dad, they don't say if he got back up.'"

"Very amusing," said Ari.

"Yeah, I laughed. But years later I thought
about that."

"Even the dead need to pick themselves up off
the ground and move on," Ari said agreeably, dismissing the car
behind him.

"Well, the near-dead have to."

"So you found today's events uplifting?"

"I found today very...enabling."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"I can't come inside, much as that would
please me," said Ari to Rebecca as he stood on her doorstep. "I
only wanted to bring you up to date as much as I could..."

"About Ethan?" The cold added to Rebecca's
tension. She hugged her arms, shivering.

"That number you called on Ethan's phone
bill—"

"To that Chinese girl."

"She was Korean, and not a she. That was a
very girlish young man."

"A man!"

"There was no romantic integument," Ari said
hurriedly, suddenly remembering that this was the land where
homosexual marriage was verging on legality. "Your husband was
taking advantage of his technological befuddlement. By doing this
he might have alienated some bad people. He is...staying under the
blankets?"

"But he's all right?"

"I believe so," Ari affirmed. If he runs fast
enough. If he isn't dead already.

"If you find him, can you ask him to at least
give us a call?"

"Most assuredly." There was a loud clash of
gears as a large box truck turned onto Beach Court Lane. "Please
forgive me, but I must depart."

"Thank you. Thank you so much..."

But Ari was already halfway down the
sidewalk. He fell in beside the slow moving van and pointed at the
end of the lane. The driver rolled down the window. It was Karen
Sylvester.

"I think I know where I'm going."

"Deputy Marshal! I am so glad to witness your
brutish capabilities!"

"Shut up, Ari," she said, and rolled the
window back up.

Keeping pace with the truck, Ari surveyed the
immediate neighborhood. The nearby tree stands, the Nottoway
residence, even the unnamed island in the middle of the James
River...observers could be watching from any direction. And that
included Howie Nottoway, who had been coerced into spying on him
once before. Why not again? Ari had the sickening feeling that the
Americans had unintentionally betrayed his location...to the
Americans. And this second set of Americans was far less tolerant
of Ari's foibles. He had seen American snipers in action in Iraq.
If the time came, he would never know what hit him.

He could raise a fuss. He could tell Karen
that he believed...he knew...that his life was in danger here. And
the prospect of moving to a more congenial location was not
entirely unpleasing. When Ari first moved here he had sensed a cold
reserve in the residence. Very little that had happened since then
had changed his opinion. And the odd plasticity of social life was
certainly off-putting. When an Iraqi smiled, he either liked you or
killed you. When an American smiled, he might like you, or kill
you, or both. It was purposefully ambiguous, a staged
meaninglessness. More habit than heart-felt. It was the smile he
had seen in abundance at the furniture store—the smile of
salesmen.

Yet years of traveling in strange and often
dangerous territories—from the Rue Saint-Denis to the cold, hollow
wilds of Cheekha Dar on the Iranian border, from battlefields to
menacing rendezvous—had planted in Ari a longing for place. It did
not quite matter which place, although Paris had some distinct
advantages over scruffy Richmond. But half a year had passed, and
Ari had begun to sense a kind of settlement in his soul. The
Mackenzies were phony, Howie Nottoway was strangely creepy and the
Wareness's were relative strangers. The same percentage of
personality types could be found in tribes large and small.
Unsuspectingly, he had stretched out invisible tendrils to the
community. And while the community did not particularly want him
(and would want him even less if they found out who he really was),
the emotional vines were maturing. Some of these people knew his
background, and bonds of trust were the strongest, short of
family.

And then there were Fred and Karen. Doing
their job, or trying to. He had grown rather fond of their naivety,
laced with a degree of ineptitude. Karen encountering her first
headless corpse, Fred charging stupidly into a gunfight against
heavily armed opponents...what wasn't there to like and admire,
even after all the criticism? They had been trained in a profession
that dealt with the ugly things in the world. But one had to
actually live in horror to truly comprehend it.

Welcome to Babylon, Ari had told Karen when
they discovered the corpse of Mustafa Zewail.

She was backing around the circle at the end
of the lane.

"You want to get your car out of the
driveway?"

Ari nodded and hopped into the Scion. He
hated the car, not only because it did not suit his rather
grandiose sense of automotive esthetics, but also because he had
been unable to locate the GPS buried somewhere in its frame. He was
starting to wonder if the entire car might not be some oversized
tracking device, on a par with the hormone-driven giants of produce
departments. But now the GPS presented an unanticipated threat.
When Ari visited a prison to translate for an Arab inmate, Karen
had found out immediately. Her database was tied in to the state's
DOC database. Who else had that kind of access?

He parked his car on the side of the road
while Karen gunned the moving van backwards up the driveway. Fred
had hopped out to direct her, hollering at her to stop before the
high truck rammed the top of the garage door. He slid open the
truck panel and three men and a woman jumped out. They voiced some
complaints about Karen's driving.

"We rattled around back there like a broken
bag of marbles."

"What a bunch of wusses," Karen shot back as
she emerged from the cab.

Fred let the loading ramp drop and began to
lower it. Ari jumped aboard.

"Whoa! What do you think you're doing?"

"Are we not going to unload this
furniture?"

"Not 'we'. 'Us'. What if you sprained your
pinkie and couldn't do your job? Let go of that couch! We'll handle
it. Why do you think I brought along all these wusses?"

An agent standing next to Ari took up a
cushion and threw it at Karen, who was unwary and took a full
thwack. Ari, who had looked forward to an upper body workout,
decided he was not really dressed for hard labor. He jumped out of
the cargo bay and stood in the way.

"Wanna move?" said one of the agents he did
not recognize. "Sir?"

"Chiedo scusa," said Ari, bowing a few feet
to the side of the driveway.

"Je suis Américan." The agent thumped his
chest and joined the others inside the van.