Colin Harrison - The Finder

Jin Li had her suspicions but no answers. The closest she had come to learning had been a few weeks earlier, right before she'd broken it off. They had been walking along Fifth Avenue after eating when a fire truck had raced by. Like most New Yorkers, Jin Li had become inured to the sound of fire truck's sirens, seeing them as a noisy irritation as they passed. "Goddamned things," she'd muttered, then turned to Ray.

He'd looked at her, saying nothing, eyes cold.

"What?"

But he didn't answer. Stood there rigid, as if bracing for an attack. His teeth were set against each other, his eyes unblinking, feet spread apart. An instinctual response. She'd said something he found ignorant, and she sensed that whatever had happened to him-the scar, the unwillingness to say why he'd drifted around the third world for years-related to this very moment. She felt him capable of violence.

"Ray? What is it?"

He stared at her, traveling great distances in his mind.

"Don't look at me like that. Please!"

Then his face eased, blue eyes warm again. Ray had nodded to himself, the emotions put back in the safe place in his head where they'd been, and took a step along the sidewalk with her, as if the moment had never happened. But it had. She had seen into him. Finally, she knew that Ray A noise! This time for certain! A door opening downstairs.

She slipped over to the window again, looked out. Two Chinese men were standing on the street below, waiting.

Now she heard noises in the stairwell. Two sets of feet stomping upward. They passed her floor and continued higher. Searching from the top, she thought.

Jin Li gathered her small number of things into a pile, pushed a dozen boxes around, and created a tiny hiding hole within the expanse of crumbling cardboard. Here she squatted down into a cannonball position and waited, the smell of dry-rotted paper in her nose.

She did not have to wait long. The two men pushed through the door, the old floorboards creaking under their weight. The Russian custodian, from his voice. And another man, whom she watched through a crack between boxes. Another Chinese man. With a big bandage taped on the end of his nose.

"It is very big room," said the Russian. "Many boxes."

The Chinese man did not answer. She could no longer see him but she could hear him walking heavily along the floor. She smelled a cigarette and assumed the Russian was waiting while the other man finished his inspection. But then she noticed that the Russian had moved to the window behind her. She held her breath and twisted her head around. The Russian was casually sliding the window shut, his tattooed fingers gripping the frame. She'd forgotten to close it! She watched his face. A grimness there. The window was the old kind with iron sash weights that rattled in their tracks, but the man was deliberate and slow, easing the window down with minimal noise, his mouth pressed tight as if trying to hold its sound within him. When he was done, he let his hands drop to his sides. But they opened and closed and opened again expectantly, each hairy finger marked with a bluish spider of ink. Then he stepped forward quickly, making it appear that he had been standing elsewhere.

He knows, Jin Li realized, he knows I'm here.

Pain, pain, go away, come back and kill me another day. Bill Martz rose as he always rose now, with pain in his back and knees and feet, not to mention pain between his ass and his balls, which meant his prostate gland was acting up again. He winced as he stood, found his slippers, then inspected his naked self in the bathroom mirror. You look like a hairless orangutan, he thought. He pissed with great relief into the bathtub, which he did whenever he could. No aiming, just fire, let the maid clean up after him. Pissing with freedom was an increasingly important activity to him, even imbued with existential significance, and he cared little what anyone thought. At cocktail parties and dinners at private homes, he often pissed into the bathtub instead of the toilet. Or even in the sink. What were they going to do to him? Nothing! He was Bill Martz!

Connie was making breakfast. His fourth wife. He often wondered why they were together. Once a month or so he forgot her name. She was twenty-eight years younger than he was and the difference showed every day. One of those women who had collected and instituted into their regimens so many beauty secrets that they appeared to be aging at one-tenth the rate that normal people did. Glowing! Bubbly! Peppy! He resented her youthfulness even as he absolutely required it as a condition of their marriage. Soft, bouncy, firm. And he wasn't just talking about her breasts or face or ass. Nope. It was a grim and insufficiently recognized truth that as women drifted into and out of menopause, their sexual selves suffered mightily. No matter what the women's magazines chirped. Looseness. Dryness. Discomfort. Pain. Connie was old enough that menopause was out there, lurking on the horizon in a few years, but he was confident that her ob-gyn had all sorts of endocrino-logical tricks up his sleeve. He'd better. Bill Martz had seen (wife number two) what happened otherwise and it was not a happy thing. He was too rich to be afflicted by a dry vagina!

Why had he married Connie? Why, really? She was beautiful, but so were lots of women. She made him feel good. Well, sure. But why had he actually married her? They weren't going to have any children and he had gotten the snip back in his fifties between marriages two and three, when he was running around so much that he couldn't keep the women straight in his head. He had married Connie because he was lonely and she was there. Simple as that. He didn't love her, not really. He was fond of her, yes. Terrible word, "fond." He had loved his first wife passionately, but she had died of breast cancer at forty-two, and thereafter he had been able only to approximate a decreasing percentage of that original feeling with subsequent women. So, no, he didn't really love Connie. And he doubted she loved him, not if he knew anything about women, though he appreciated her willingness not to make it an issue. Why should she love him, anyway? He wasn't particularly lovable. He wasn't particularly anything, except rich. And nasty. Vanity Fair had once devoted a whole article to how nasty and rapacious he was, and not one word was libelous. He was a nasty, rapacious orangutan who pissed into his bathtub instead of the four-thousand-dollar toilet. I used to be charming, he reflected, back when I cared what people thought of me. Why'd Connie marry him? The moan-ay, of course. The security. But Connie was still just young enough to have children. And why shouldn't she? She had every right to have them. He understood that marrying him might have been a disastrous decision for her. At this he felt a distinct sadness for her, what she'd missed. He had four grown children and they were his only consolation. The rest of it all could go to hell.

Really, his wife was wasting her life by being with him. If he had any courage he would tell her this. She was still pretty enough to go out on the remarriage circuit and grab a reasonably decent guy-someone with, say, eighty or a hundred mil. He and Connie had sex about twice a month, thanks to the beautiful pills science provided to guys like him, but he had to admit it wasn't great. Connie wasn't the problem. She was fine, or would be fine. He didn't have it, the juice, the mojo, the mustard. The act itself was ghostly, a tissue of sensation atop thousands of earlier iterations. He couldn't feel the pleasure in its originality, his cock no longer the time-travel device it used to be. His rational mind was never overwhelmed. In fact, he smelled death on himself-a sour, exhausted whiff. Whether this was mere aging or his problem in particular didn't matter. There was no pill for it, no woman for it, no end of it, no antidote for it — except big action! Making decisions, risking, winning, taking the hit when it came, feeling the force of money. Money as wind, fire, stone! Money as beauty, ugliness, and pain! Money as fear and hatred and love! Only with money were his instincts perfect, his reflexes untouched by age, his passion endless. He couldn't explain this and it certainly wasn't admirable, but it was true.