R. MacAvoy - Tea with the Black Dragon

He sighed, as though he were being compelled to speak on a subject he found in poor taste. “Only the top six feet are shingle. The foundation is brick.” He shrugged off the doubt in her eyes, obviously irritated. “Believe what you will. I’m here. And I’m here for a reason. As of yesterday, my goal was merely to locate you. Miss Macnamara. I promised your mother I would help her. Now you must help me find her.”

Mayland Long raised himself from the couch, frowning; in the soft depths of foam his thinking was hindered.

He strode across the room and sat down in a white wicker chair. His back was straight. His fingers thrust among the twisted reeds. “It is time for you to tell me what you know,” he announced.

Elizabeth Macnamara sat in the shadowed room, looking at the wall. “I’ve been robbing a bank.”

“I guessed as much.” His voice reflected a dry triumph.

Her head spun toward him. Her hair made a dim halo around her face. “You guessed? How… how did you? What kind of detective are you? From the police?”

The complexity of her mistake amused Long, but the woman did not see his smile. “No, miss. I’m not from the police. Your mother didn’t want to call the police.”

Liz settled again, but wary as a bird. “How did you find out, then? Do you know how I did it?” It was difficult to see Long in the dark. He sat very still.

“I believe I do. You wrote half of a bank securities package for North Bay Savings, while you were at FSS. What the bank did not know was that you had assisted Dr. Peccolo of Stanford to design the other half.”

Liz shook her head violently. “Assisted, nothing. I wrote the whole thing. He said it would be valuable experience for me.”

“Was it?” asked Mayland Long. His teeth glimmered briefly.

Elizabeth let out a shuddering groan. As she turned from Long to the window she seemed to gather the stray light around her. Outside the gulls keened.

“Shit! Lies lead from one to the other. That was Carlo’s lie—that he had done the system. It was the first bit of rottenness in this whole mess. I’d been dating him almost all of my second year in grad school—on the sly, of course. He’s married. But I broke with him while I was doing the security package. I realized he was using me, and it just stuck in my craw, you know?”

Long didn’t answer. She continued. “And how he used me! I thought Carlo was a wizard in the beginning. My— my mentor! He said he would take care of me, lead me to the top. I wanted to be a wizard too.”

She snorted. “I was a real innocent.”

“A wizard,” Long echoed, thoughtfully. “Odd word to use in connection with computers. I’ve always found there to be so much… flimflam about wizards, and I can’t see how one could get away with that in computer engineering. But perhaps that’s my own innocence. At any rate, if the masters of your art are called wizards, then I’m sure you deserve the name.”

She recoiled, shaking her head.

“I’ve heard about you from all sides. Miss Macnamara. I’m told you are very good at what you do. And meeting you, I now know two computer wizards.” Long chuckled at his private joke.

She fought against vanity and curiosity both. “I don’t know what you mean,” she answered, sullen. “I told you I’m not…”

“I don’t mean anything,” Long murmured. “Go on. You never mentioned to anyone you had done Peccolo’s work for him? Not even when you were so—bitter?”

“He knew.” The words were a hiss. Liz took two steps toward Long’s chair, placing herself between him and the fading light of the window. Though her figure was a mere silhouette against the dusk, the smugness in her voice was unmistakable. “I knew he knew. And he was never sure whether I had told anyone. I let him sweat it.”

Mayland Long stirred in his chair. “A subtle vengeance.” Her words were dry and dispassionate. “But you told Rasmussen.”

“Yes. I had to. When Floyd assigned me the bank job last winter, I told him why I couldn’t do it. He was marvelous about it! He patted me on the back for my integrity, and went away. I thought it was all okay, and he’d get somebody else to write the code, but he came back the next day and said he had no one else who could handle the project and the department couldn’t afford to lose the contract. And he said that the fact I told him I’d done the other half proved more than anything else could that I could be trusted with the responsibility. He said the only real safeguard in life was personal integrity. North Bay trusted FSS and FSS trusted me. We used to joke about it, while I was blocking out the program, about the power I had over the little sidewalk tellers: how I could make them spit twenty-dollar bills all over Oakland at exactly twelve noon some Saturday. Now the federal insurance agency would rise or fall by my design. How a wrong branch would send bureaucrats out of tenth-floor windows. I felt like really hot stuff,” she whispered. “It was a great couple months.”

Liz took the stuff of the drape in one hand. She leaned against the wall, head drooping.

“And I designed a really good piece of software. Nobody could have broken it. Except me.”

One dark hand snaked out; Mayland Long turned on a lamp. In the soft yellow light Liz Macnamara looked lovely. The length of her arms and legs emphasized the slender fragility of her body. Her hair was like a sheet of glass, falling over her eyes. The taut, strained hands which wrung the fabric of the drape, however, were those of her mother, square and ordinary.

Long broke the silence. “Tell me about your father, Miss Macnamara.”

She raised her head. Blinked. “Why? I haven’t seen him in almost twenty years. It’s not relevant to this.”

His hands wove into their characteristic steeple pattern. “I reserve the right to ask irrelevant questions. Even impudent ones. You, of course, don’t have to answer.”

“My… my father is named Lars. Neil Lars. I refuse to use the name. He was a wind. Still is, probably, if he’s still alive.”

“Pardon? He’s a what?”

Liz gestured vaguely. “A wind. He plays winds. Flute, mainly, but also piccolo, some oboe, clarinet. He ran off when I was a little kid. He’s not involved in this.”

“Are your parents divorced?” pressed Mr. Long stubbornly.

“Yes. Mother divorced him in absentia. Abandonment. He took all her money when he left. She used to say it was all ‘gone with the wind.’ ”

He nodded. “That seems in character. Tell me more Miss Mac—Elizabeth. Was your father a tall man? Fair? Large boned?”

She nodded, mystified. “He was a huge, gorgeous Swede. He knew it, too.”

“Why has your mother never remarried?” Longs eyes caught the light suddenly, gleaming like brass.

Liz shifted, foot to foot. “I don’t know. Too busy, I guess. I’m glad she didn’t. All the men she knew were losers, and her music is more important… Why do you ask?”

Long smiled at her confusion. “I want to know everything about your mother. It may help us locate her. But I interrupted a very interesting story. You wrote the second half of the security program and gave it to Rasmussen.”

She nodded. “Then he asked to see a listing of what I had done for Carlo. Said he wanted to see what kind of criticism the old fool had made.

“I wasn’t supposed to have one—a printout of the code—but I did. I kept it to spite Carlo. It was a mess; no structure, no comments. That’s not my style, but I was being tricky when I wrote the thing, you see, because I knew I wasn’t going to get credit for it. Carlo couldn’t understand what was in it. No one could but me, I think. But he didn’t have time to write it over, so he had to trust me that it worked.”