Ed McBain - Three Blind Mice

“I was so afraid, you see.”

He said nothing.

“It was that I thought… if I drink a little, I won’t be so afraid. Of soldiers,” she said.

Soldiers. No thickness of the tongue this time. No slurring. Soldiers.

“Men,” she said softly, and fell silent.

They were both silent.

“We’ll try again,” he said at last.

“Yes, some other time,” she said.

“When we really know each other better,” he said.

“Will we ever know each other better?” she asked.

“I hope so,” he said, and this time he meant it. “I don’t want this to be…”

“Yes, just white and Asian,” she said, and he wondered if they didn’t already know each other much better than they suspected.

“I’ll call you soon,” he said.

“You must come for your raincoat,” she said.

“Rain check ,” he said, and smiled.

“Yes, rain check,” she said.

“Sleep well,” he said.

“I still dream of helicopters,” she said.

There was a click on the line.

He picked up the martini glass and went out into the kitchen. Warren was still at the kitchen counter. The glass of scotch was now in his right hand.

“Learning your p’s and q’s?” he asked.

“What?” Matthew said.

Warren indicated the slip of paper tacked to the small cork bulletin board near the phone:

a ã â b c d đ e ê g h i k l m n o ô σ p q r s t u ú v x y

“Oh,” Matthew said. “That’s the Vietnamese alphabet.”

“It’s missing a lot of letters, did you notice that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“That’s why I’m a detective and you’re not. There’s no F, J, or W. No Z, either. But there are three A’s, two D’s and E’s, three O’s, two U’s, and a partridge in a pear tree. What do you call these funny little marks?”

“Diacritical.”

“That serious, huh?” Warren said, and raised his glass in a toast. “We struck out, Matthew,” he said, and drank. “Ahhhh,” he said, “delicious. Weaver isn’t the man who made that phone call.”

“Cheers,” Matthew said sourly, and raised his own glass in a toast. He drank, looked into the glass appreciatively, and then said, “Who’s Fiona?”

“Fiona Gill,” Warren said. “Lady who works in the Tax Collector’s office. She’s the one who told me we had a bad make on that license plate.”

“White? Black?”

“Black. Why?”

“Just wondered.”

“You seeing a black lady?” Warren asked.

“No, no.”

“Sounds like it.”

“No.”

But close, Matthew thought.

In American movies, Asian women were permissible substitutes for black women. The white hero was allowed to have a meaningful love affair with an Asian woman, but never with a black woman. This was how courageous American film producers broke the taboo. It was okay for the hero to kiss an Asian woman but if he kissed a black woman, watch it, mister. As for a black man kissing a white woman, that was science fiction. Matthew wondered what it would be like to kiss Mai Chim. Maybe he could get some brave Hollywood movie producer to film their first kiss. Tastefully, of course.

“Want to share the joke?” Warren said, and Matthew realized he was smiling.

“I’m just a little tired,” he said. “What else did Stubbs tell you?”

“Only that the man on the phone sounded famous.”

“Famous?”

“Famous. When he said the word alarmed .”

“How do famous people say alarmed ?” Matthew asked.

“You got me, pal,” Warren said, and sighed heavily. “I’d better be on my way, Fiona’s expecting me.” He hesitated, and then said, “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about anything?”

“No, thanks a lot.”

“If you change your mind, here’s where I’ll be,” Warren said, and wrote a number onto the pad under the phone. He drained the glass, shook hands with Matthew, and went out. Matthew could hear him starting the Buick outside. In a little while, the sound of its engine faded on the night. Now there was only the hum of the air conditioner. He carried his glass to the counter, sat on one of the stools, and looked at the number Warren had written for him:

The 381 prefix told him that Fiona lived on the mainland. He tore the page from the pad and tacked it to the bulletin board, just under the alphabet Mai Chim had Xeroxed for him. When he was in college at Northwestern, a friend of his began dating a Chinese girl whose father ran a restaurant on La Salle. The guy’s name was Nathan Feinstein, the girl’s name was Melissa Chong. Nathan and Melissa shared what Nathan called an Eemie-Wess relationship, which was shorter and easier to say than an East-Meets-West relationship, a tongue-twister on anybody’s lips.

Matthew picked up the pencil alongside the pad and wrote:

He looked at the hyphenated word. It conjured a multimillion-dollar film starring Le Mai Chim and Matthew Hope — not necessarily in that order. The first scene would open with a shot of a green Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme parked under a pepper tree outside Little Asia in lovely downtown Calusa. A couple would be necking on the front seat. They would be our hero and heroine, Leslie Storm and Lotus Blossom Wong, as their names were in the picture. The camera would cut away from a close shot of their torridly joined lips to an antiseptic close shot of an orange-and-white Florida license plate over the rear bumper. The numbers and letters on that plate would read 2AB 39C.

On the pad, Matthew wrote:

He looked at what he’d written. And then he wrote it again:

And again and again and again and again…

And kept writing it over and over again, faster and faster and faster until the last several times he wrote it…

… the numeral 2 resembled…

There’s no F, J, or W. No Z, either.

His eyes darted to the alphabet pinned to the board.

a ã â b c d đ e ê g h i k l m n o ô σ p q r s t u ú v x y

No Z in it. But a 2 in the language, for sure, Oh, yes, our numbers are Arabic . No Z, but a 2! And if you were seeing a Z through a screen door at night, and you didn’t know what the hell a Z looked like in the first place, then you could easily mistake it for a 2! Ike and Mike, they look alike, a Z and a 2! Trinh had seen ZAB 39C, but his eye and his brain had automatically translated it into something familiar, 2AB 39C.

Matthew yanked the receiver from its cradle and dialed the number Warren had left him. It rang once, twice…

“Hello?”

“Miss Gill?”

“Yes?”

“This is Matthew Hope…”

“Yes, Mr. Hope.”

“I’m sorry to be calling at this hour…”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Is Warren there yet?”

“No, he isn’t.”

“I wonder if you’d ask him to call when he… as a matter of fact, maybe you can help me.”

“Happy to.”

“Are there any license plates in Florida that begin with the letter Z?”

“Oh, yes,” Fiona said, “Y and Z both. Those are the letters we set aside for rental cars.”