But in the beginning, there’d been Judy Jordan.
Or Helen Parrish, if you preferred.
And to get to the end, you went to the beginning. And prayed that somewhere along the way—
The village looked abandoned at first. Not a soul in sight.
Michael knocked on the door to the apartment.
“Cops listen first,” Connie said.
Belatedly, he put his ear to the door and listened.
He did not hear anything.
“Nobody home,” he said.
Charlie musta flew the coop, Sergeant Mendelsohnn said.
Michael knocked on the door again. And waited. No answer. He studied the locks. Four of them. One under the other. To get into this apartment, you would need a battering ram. He wondered if they should try the fire escape again. But how many fire escapes could you climb before someone yelled fire?
Careful, Andrew said.
An old man had appeared in the doorway to one of the thatched huts. Nodding. Smiling. Scared shitless. Six automatic rifles suddenly trained on him.
“We’d better go,” Michael said.
Cover me, Mendelsohnn said.
Rain coming down. A light rain. Everything looking so green. So fresh. Waiting in the rain. The whisper of the rain. Mendelsohnn talking quietly to the old man. Scraps of Vietnamese, snippets of French, bits and pieces of English. Other gooks peering around doorways now. Women mostly. Some other old men. Watching solemnly. Looking scared. Big American liberators standing in the rain with their guns. All but one of them no older than twenty, scaring women and old men to death.
Says Charlie went through about three days ago, Mendelsohnn said.
All of them listening.
Took all their rice, Mendelsohnn said. Got to be miles away by now.
“Maybe you ought to knock again,” Connie said.
“No,” Michael said. “Let’s go.”
Looka the one in the blue over there, the RTO said.
Yeah, Andrew said.
Givin’ us the eye.
Give her some big Indian cock, Long Foot said.
Let’s move it out, Mendelsohnn said.
The rain still falling lightly.
A breeze coming up over the rice paddies.
They were coming down the steps when Michael heard the footsteps below. Coming up. Moving up toward them. Another tenant, he thought. Or maybe—but no, that would be too lucky. But why not? Judy Jordan coming home. By her own admission, she’d been naked the last time he was here, probably dressing to go out, it had been only ten o’clock. So she’d put on a robe and peeked out into the hallway to find nobody there, this city was full of mysteries, and she’d finished dressing, and had gone out on the town. But the night had vanished all at once, and this was now one o’clock in the morning on Boxing Day, and here she was, folks, home sweet home again, coming up the steps to the second floor, reaching the second-floor landing just as Michael and Connie came down from the third floor, hand on the banister, hello there, Judy, long time no—
But it wasn’t Judy Jordan.
Or even Helen Parrish.
Instead, it was—
“You!” Michael shouted.
The man looked at him. His mouth fell open, his eyes opened wide in his head.
“You!” Michael shouted again.
And the man turned and started running downstairs.
Michael took off after him.
The streets were deserted. It would have been impossible to lose him, anyway, because he was wearing a yellow ski parka that served as a beacon, which Michael thought was extremely considerate of him. He was fast for a big man, but Michael was faster; he’d had practice chasing Charlie Wong all the way from the subway kiosk on Franklin to the fortune-cookie factory someplace in Chinatown on Christmas Eve, and it seemed to him he’d been running ever since. He wanted very badly to get his hands on this son of a bitch in the yellow ski parka, and so he ran faster than he’d ever run in his life, arms and legs pumping, eyeglasses steaming up a bit, but not so much so that he couldn’t see the yellow parka ahead, the distance closing between them now, ten feet, eight feet, six feet, three feet, and Michael hurled himself into the air like a circus flier, leaping off into space without a net, arms outstretched, reaching not for a trapeze coming his way from the opposite direction, but instead for the shoulders of Detective Daniel Cahill, who had called him a thief after stealing his money, his driver’s license, his credit cards, and his library card to boot.
His hands clamped down fiercely on either side of Cahill’s neck, the weight and momentum of his body sending the man staggering forward, hands clawing the air for balance. They fell to the sidewalk together, Michael on Cahill’s back, the big man trying to shake Michael off. Michael was tired of being jerked around in this fabulous city, tired of being shaken up and shaken off. He allowed himself to be shaken off now, but only for an instant. Rolling clear, he got to his feet at once, and then immediately reached down for Cahill and heaved him up off the sidewalk. His hands clutched into the zippered front of the yellow parka, he slammed Cahill against the wall of the building, and then pulled him off the wall and slammed him back again, methodically battering him against the bricks over and over again.
“Cut it out,” Cahill said.
“I’ll cut it out, you son of a bitch!”
“Are you crazy or something?”
“Yes!” Michael shouted.
“Ow!” Cahill shouted.
“Detective Daniel Cahill, huh?”
“Damn it, you’re hurting me!”
“Let’s go down the precinct, huh?”
“Ow! Damn it, that’s my head!”
Michael pulled him off the wall.
“Speak,” he said.
“You’re a very violent person,” Cahill said.
“Yes. What’s your name?”
“Felix. And I don’t have your money, if that’s why you’re behaving like a lunatic. Or anything else that belongs to you.”
Felix. Big burly man with hard blue eyes and a Marine sergeant’s haircut. On Christmas Eve, he’d sported a Miami Vice beard stubble, but now—at a little past one A.M. on Boxing Day—he was clean-shaven. On Christmas Eve, he’d been wearing a tweed overcoat and he’d been carrying a detective’s blue-enameled gold shield, and he’d sounded very much like a tough New York cop. Tonight he was wearing a yellow ski parka over a brown turtleneck sweater, and he sounded like a frightened man protesting too loudly that he did not have Michael’s—
But didn’t he know that Michael’s identification had been planted alongside the dead body of Ju Ju Rainey?
“Felix what?” Michael asked.
“Hooper. And I’m telling you the truth. I gave everything to Judy. And she still hasn’t paid me, by the way. I mean, I think it’s demeaning for a person to have to come to another person’s apartment at one in the morning to ask for his money, don’t you?”
“I assume you mean Judy Jordan.”
“Yes, of course, Judy Jordan. Your friend Judy Jordan who owes me a thousand bucks.”
“How do you happen to know her?”
“We’ve worked together in the past.”
“Stealing things from people?”
“Ha-ha,” Felix said.
Michael looked at him.
“I am an actor, sir,” Felix said, proudly and a trifle indignantly. In fact, he tried to pull himself up to his full height, but this was a little difficult because Michael still had his hands twisted into the throat and collar of the parka. “I was asked to play a police detective,” Felix said. “I’d never played one before. I thought the role would be challenging.”