East is East

Abercorn digested this information a moment, wondering how it applied to the case at hand, the case that had put him in this car, in this storm, with this root-chewing ex-LURP beside him. The whole thing was a real shame. Ninety-nine percent of the illegals just came in and disappeared—they got a tourist visa and vanished, rode in underneath a bus, breezed in for a semester of college and wound up collecting Social Security. It was a joke. The borders were sieves, colanders, picket fences without the pickets. But when somebody came in and made a lot of noise and started raising hell with the people who bought new cars and registered to vote, red lights started flashing all the way on up the line to Washington, and that’s where the Detlef Abercorns came in. “So, uh, what do you think we ought to do?” he said. “The Nips—the Japanese, I mean—tend to be pretty fanatical too, don’t they? Hara-kiri, kamikazes, the human wave and all of that?”

“Yeah, I’ve been to the movies too. But the fact is, like I told you, they’re just plain square. You know how you catch this clown?”

Abercorn didn’t have a clue. But he figured if the barefoot crackers and their hound dogs couldn’t bring him in, they were in for a real ordeal. He thought of the soldier they’d found in a cave in the Philippines, still fighting World War II thirty years later. “No,” he said softly.

Turco gestured at the pack on the seat beside him. “You know what I got in there? A boom box. Sanyo. Biggest shitkicker you ever saw, puts out enough amps to kill every woodpecker out there stone dead in two minutes flat. I’ve got a couple disco tapes, Michael Jackson, Donna Summer, that kind of shit, you follow me? I’m going to track the fucker, no different than if this was 1966 in the la Drang Valley, cross a trail, any trail. Then I’m going to set this thing on a stump and crank it up.”

Was he kidding? Abercorn couldn’t tell.

Turco turned to him with a grin that showed off all his teeth, black now with the stuff he was eating. “Hey,” he said, reaching back to pat a conspicuous bulge in the pack, “I’m Br’er Fox and this here is my tarbaby.”

Queen Bee

Owen’s wake-up call—three sharp but reverential knocks accompanied by a gently insinuating whisper—startled her from a dreamless sleep. “Es la hora,”

he whispered through the door, and Ruth forced open her eyes. “Despiértese, señorita.” It was one of his Spanish days—that much registered, though she was groggy and hungover and it didn’t much matter whether she was summoned in Spanish, Norwegian or Navajo: all she wanted was to go back to sleep.

At 6:30 each weekday morning Owen Birkshead made the rounds of the still and shadowy halls of Thanatopsis House, performing the delicate task of rousing the slumbering artists without compromising their dreams. Depending on his whim, he would summon them in one of the Romance languages, sweet on the early-morning tongue, or in crisp and businesslike German or even Russian. One morning it would be “Guten Morgen, Fräulein; ihre Arbeit erwartet Sie,” and the next, “Bum giorno, signorina, cbe bell agiornata!”

Once, he’d even tried Japanese—“Ohayō gozaimasu!”—but he was afraid that the harshness of his accent would scuff the glossy patina of the artists’ dreams, and so he gave it up.

“Yes,” Ruth gasped, “I’m up,” too fuddled to throw back her usual “Sί, señor, muchas gracias; yo me despierto.” She’d been up late, too late, and she’d drunk too many bourbons. She listened as the faint shuffle of Owen’s footsteps retreated down the hallway, and she heard his knock and the whisper of his voice at the next door: “Es la hora, es la hora.” She closed her eyes and felt the pain hovering there on the underside of her eyelids. Her throat was parched, her temples felt as if twin spikes had been driven into them, and she had to pee. Urgently. But even as she lay there she knew that the walleyed composer—Clara Kleinschmidt—had beaten her to the communal bathroom round the corner and that the half bath at the far end of the hall would at any moment resound with the thunder of Irving Thalamus’s potent morning micturition.