Don Winslow - The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

An old man and a boy squatted on the floor of the main room. They held rice bowls to their lips, and their chopsticks were flashing furiously, scooping the dirty white rice into their mouths. The old man wore a sleeveless T-shirt that may have been white sometime during the Sung Dynasty, and a pair of khaki shorts that came down to his calves. His white hair had been shaved close to the scalp, and he had a wispy white beard. His eyes were dull and yellow and showed the resentment he felt at being interrupted in his meal.

The kid, on the other hand, was delighted. He stared unabashedly at Neal, and dropped two or three grains of rice onto the black sports shirt he wore over denim cutoff and rubber sandals. His grin showed bad, crooked teeth, and his eyes looked milky and runny. Infected. Neal figured the kid to be maybe twelve, the old man about a hundred and twelve.

The kid reached under his shirt and came out with a comic book, which he held up to Neal’s face.

“Hulk!” he screamed, then screwed his face up and hunched over, growling and showing teeth. “Hulk! Hulk!”

“That’s pretty good,” Neal said, trying to be friendly.

He reached for the comic book to express admiration, but the kid snatched it back. Then he pulled himself up, threw out his chest, put his hands on his hip, and flashed a confident, macho smile.

“Superman?” Neal asked.

The kid shook his head, then hit him with the smile again.

“Batman,” Neal said.

“Batman! Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da… Batman!”

“You’re good.”

“Marvel Comics. Ding hao! Marvel!”

Honcho pointed to the horizontal telephone booth above them with deliberate nonchalance. “Ma Bell,” he said. “Knock yourself out.”

Pendleton had flopped down in a corner, head in hands. He was done in. Li Lan stood in the center of the room, looking at nothing, expressionless, waiting for the next thing to happen. Neal knew that the next thing was to call Simms and arrange to get the hell out of here. Wherever here was.

“Are you guys ready to do this?” he asked Li and Pendleton.

Tough shit if you’re not, he thought, because we are definitely doing this.

Pendleton kept his head in his hands, but nodded.

Li Lan said, “Yes, we are ready.”

“It’s a local call,” Neal said to Honcho as he climbed the ladder.

“Doesn’t matter,” Honcho answered. “We don’t pay.”

The loft was the size of a baker’s oven and about as hot. There was no room to stand up, and Neal had to bend over, even sitting on the stool. The phone cord came through a small hole that had been drilled in the wall.

It’s a nice scam they have going here, Neal thought. Stealing phone service. Wonder how much they charge the locals to make a call. He dug in his pocket for Simms’s number.

Great. There was no fucking dial tone.

“I think I’m not doing this right,” he said.

Li Lan came up the ladder and leaned into the loft. Even in this sewer she looks gorgeous, Neal thought. Absolutely killer. And she was looking into his eyes so deeply he thought for a moment that he actually might die.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry. Just show me how to use the phone.”

She reached over and gently pulled the cord. It fell out of the hole.

“Is not real,” she said.

A dummy phone for the dummy.

“Why?” he asked.

This time the eyes were angry. As cold and hard as ice.

“You can see all this,” she said, sweeping her arm around to indicate the neighborhood, “and ask why? Why I am a communist? Why I fight for the people? The question you should ask is why you are not, why you do not. You created all this, you made it. Now you can live in it.”

He couldn’t breathe. His chest felt like it was in a vise. Live in it? Live in it?! She can’t mean what I think she means. Jesus God, please, no.

He could barely make himself ask the question, and it came out in a hoarse whisper. “Are you leaving me here?”

“Yes.”

Not even a hint of regret. Cold, hard, and straight.

She started down the ladder. He grabbed the top of it and held on, then twisted himself onto the ladder. He stopped when he felt the blade press against the tendons of his knee. He looked down to see the boy, all of his bad teeth showing in an immense and joyful grin, holding the chopper to his leg. The message was clear: Make a run and you’ll be hobbling for life. And anyway, where would you run? Neal climbed back into the cave. The boy pulled down the ladder, then reached up and took away the stool.

Honcho, Pendleton, and Li were gone.

Joe Graham hated Providence, a sentiment that united him in at least a small sense with the rest of the world. Providence is a town for insiders, for third-generation harp politicians, Quebecois priests with a gift for gab and a glad hand at charity breakfasts, and mafioso smart guys who run sand and gravel companies and therefore know where the bodies are buried.

It was also a town for a bank that knows where the money is buried, and Ethan Kitteredge was sort of the ace archaeologist of bankers. He could make old money look new, new money look old, and lots of money look gone, and he did it in layers. Ethan Kitteredge was so good at taking care of other people’s money that he had even started a side operation to take care of his investors’ very lives. Friends of the Family looked out for the family friends-that is, the people who put enough money in the Kitteredge family bank to allow the Kitteredge family to live in the quiet splendor to which it had become accustomed. And AgriTech had run a whole lot of money through Ethan Kitteredge’s bank.

This fact made Joe Graham hate Providence even more than usual on this particular day, because Joe Graham had been summoned to a rare meeting at Kitteredge’s office to discuss the AgriTech file. The office looked like a captain’s cabin on a whaling ship. Nautical models plied the grain of expensive wooden bookcases filled with navigation texts and sailors’ memoirs. Kitteredge’s enormous mahogany desk was about as old as the ocean, and had on it a model of the Man’s pride and joy, his schooner Haridan. The place reeked of the sea, which further irritated Joe Graham, who thought the ocean was one gigantic waste of space. He had been to the beach once and hated it: too much sand. So he sat in one of those hard New England chairs, staring pointedly at Ed Levine, while Kitteredge and some preppie cracker discussed the finer points of government policy over a pot of tea. Joe Graham couldn’t give a rat’s ass or a hamster’s dick about government policy. He only wanted to know what had happened to Neal Carey.

So while this Simms yokel was mumbling something about the Chinese tradition of quid pro quo, Graham interrupted him to ask, “So where is Neal Carey?”

Levine shot him a dirty look, but Levine could go fuck himself, maybe eat a couple more steaks and drop fucking dead of a heart attack. Levine was his supervisor, but Graham had known Levine when he was nothing more than hired street muscle. He was one tough Jew-big, fast, smart, and mean-and Graham wasn’t scared of him one bit. Right now he was so angry he’d stick his rubber arm up Levine’s ass and twirl him.

The cracker, Simms, sighed at the interruption but condescended to answer, “He’s gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Which word didn’t you understand, Mr. Graham?”

“Listen, you mealy-mouthed fuck-”

“That will be enough, Joe-” Kitteredge said.

Graham saw the Man turn pale with anger. The Man believed in maintaining a tone of immaculate courtesy. Which he can afford to do, Graham thought, because he’s got me to do the nasty shit. Me and Neal.

“No, sir, excuse me, but that’s not enough,” Graham said. He’d thrown the “excuse me” and the “sir” in there in an attempt to save his job and his pension. “Neal Carey gets sent on a job and doesn’t get told what it’s really about. Nobody tells him that Pendleton’s cooped up with a commie spy. Okay, Neal goes off the deep end and boings a major hard-on for this slash-”