R. MacAvoy - Tea with the Black Dragon

Mayland Long regarded him abstractly. “The young woman is not complaining,” he reminded the professor. “She is missing. So she came to you for advice, before leaving FSS?”

Dr. Peccolo nodded once. “It was the last time I heard from her. Over a year ago. She had this idea of going into consultant work. I told her you don’t consult until people are banging on your door. Until you have a reputation.”

“You consult, I imagine, professor.”

“I have a reputation.”

Mr. Long folded his hands amicably. “Her talents were nothing special, then?”

Dr. Peccolo stood up, nearly tipping his chair backwards. “I’m sure we are all rather special,” he stated. “To our mothers.”

Martha stood also, thrusting herself out of her chair with her arms. Slowly she raised her hands to her hips and faced him in this manner. She smiled at the professor who loomed over her. She began to laugh.

“I know how irritating Liz can be,” she said at last. “But you shouldn’t have let her get to you this way. Envy makes big men look so silly.”

Mr. Long was still seated, part of his face hidden by the church steeple of his fingertips touching together in front of his mouth. He watched with interest, perhaps with amusement, as Dr. Peccolo took two steps away from Martha Macnamara’s mirth and flailed behind to catch the falling chair.

As Martha sailed out the office door, Mayland Long rose sinuously to his feet, not touching the arms of the chair. His eyes were caught briefly by the angry glare of Peccolo’s, but slid off toward the diploma case. “Denver, 1959,” he mused. “Chess?”

The answer was grudging. “Softball.”

Mr. Long nodded, thanked the professor for his time, and closed the door quietly behind him.

“Isn’t this interesting?” Martha peered owlishly around her at the table of tinned biscuits, the hand painted linen clan map of Scotland, and the black maw of the fireplace, which emitted a pleasant cold draft into the room. “The London Tea House. Actually it reminds me more of Kent. What do you think?”

Mayland Long’s scrutiny was more circumspect. “I have no objections. Kent will do. Or Sussex. It might even pass for Cornwall. Any shire, borough, or city except London might have germinated such a flower as this.”

Outside the row of glass doors the California sun was shining on tiered pots of geraniums. A young woman passed, wearing a light cotton pinafore and sandals. An immaculate blond toddler clung to her hand. Light from the windows of the passing cars flashed and glinted on the walls in the tea shop. Observing the street outside, Martha thought not of England, but of the Italian Riviera, which she knew only through pictures. Her gaze slid to her companion.

His improbable hands were cupped in the air before him. They steamed. Martha Macnamara was not surprised, for she had seen the blue-patterned Royal Doulton teacup disappear into his clutch.

She was tired and a little depressed, and so felt it incumbent upon her to cheer up Mr. Long. She grasped her own bottle of stout around the neck and held it up. “See that?” She pointed at the tiny, intricate harp on the label. “The original is about 750 years old. It lives at Trinity College in Dublin.”

“I see.” Mr. Long spoke mildly, but his forehead pulled into faint wrinkles and his eyes hooded over. He sighed before he spoke.

“My dear lady,” he began. “I’m sorry our soundings this morning have not been… productive.”

Her eyes widened in opposition to his. “Speak the truth with me, please. They have been very productive. Merely not reassuring.”

“We haven’t found your daughter. In fact, we have run out of leads.”

“We have some history, Mayland! We know she intended to consult—go freelance. We have found two people who have been involved with Liz—one still involved enough to be touchy. In fact…” Here Martha raised her head to heaven. She was a vision in blue with rosy cheeks. “… if we only had Carlo Peccolo tied in that pig skin chair of his, and one hot poker apiece…”

Long grinned, showing his teeth. “Then how would we dispose of him? We couldn’t very well let him go, and I, for one, have lost my taste for long pig. Still, I agree that Dr. Peccolo is a well of information not wholly emptied.” He regarded his cup a while, as though it were the well in question.

“No matter. There are other ways to go about things.” He raised his hands to his mouth and drained the cup.

In this action, his eyes were lowered, his face half hidden. Martha watched and she saw the West melt away from him in the simple intentness of tea. She reminded herself that this man had no business to be here with her this day, engaged in tedious toil, fencing words with unamiable people, measuring miles of hot pavement in search of a young woman he probably had no interest to meet.

She remembered further, distantly, as though out of a story read in childhood, that Mayland Long was a rich man.

She shook her head in dismissal. He told wonderful stories in a wonderful voice. That was far more important. He tended to drowse in the light of the sun—she had seen that twice today: once by the window of his apartment, and once in the car. She recalled his words— “I have always respected warmth and the ability to keep still.” Perhaps he was drowsing now, behind the empty cup, as his elbows rested on the table and the quiet of mid-afternoon filled the shop. He was a man. He got tired. He could be hurt. She thought about that last one: he could be hurt.

Suddenly the specter of parting sprang up her mind, forbidding as the shadow of an axe. She started, and the brown eyes caught her motion. He had not been asleep.

Martha spoke. “I will be concerned when I can do something about this. When my concern will be useful. And I will reach that point. I’m going to find Liz.”

He nodded, accepting her certainty. “Perhaps it’s time for the police to help.”

“No. Not yet. I don’t feel that.” She pursed her mouth, seeking the words for explanation. She raised her glass and took a long swallow of the black beer. “You see, Liz has never feared God or the devil. When she says she might be in trouble, well, I don’t know with whom. God or the devil.”

“Are the police one of the above?” he inquired, bringing one arm up to rest along the chair back. “Would she have called you into the mess if she were in trouble with the law?”

“I doubt it, Mayland. But I’ve got another reason for hesitating.” Martha frowned, trying to explain. “When Liz was nine she was picked up on Riverside Drive by a policeman who thought she looked lost. She wasn’t, of course; we lived in a building right around the corner on West 106th. But Liz didn’t tell him that. She thought it was none of his business. She spent three hours in the station and never told them who she was or where she lived. Complete stonewall, and just because she was angry. And she didn’t call me, either, though the officers would have been glad to let her use the phone—I only found out about it when she didn’t come home for dinner and I called the police. That’s the kind of person she is.

“Liz’s held a grudge against blue uniforms ever since. She wouldn’t thank me if I reported her missing.”

Long shrugged. His suit jacket rustled, dry as paper. “Then our next step must be to question Floyd Rasmussen of FSS. He may know something about this consultant work she planned.”

“I’m going to do that in the morning,” Martha said, rummaging in her purse. “Perhaps I can .arrange to meet him for lunch.”

“It might be easier if I call, arranging the meeting on some technical pretext.” He broached the subject warily.

The large floral purse shut with a snap. “No, Mayland. I think you’d better not go any deeper into this.”