“That’s true.”
“And it wasn’t so long after that decree that Mr. Liu put you onto an embezzler.”
“So?”
“Well, there wasn’t any embezzler. I suspect Liu tinkered with the books to try and stay afloat and called you with that embezzler story as a smokescreen. Unfortunately, you apprehended a suspect. Young must’ve found out all about it somehow. He was blackmailing Liu. Maybe the mermaid symbols marked dates for payments. In which case they were due to meet on the day Liu was murdered. I’ll bet the Dollar Shop off the alley where Liu died was a store he owned.”
Ariunbat pushed his bulk away from the balustrade. “But why would Young kill a man he was milking like that?”
“Maybe he was afraid he’d be found out. Maybe he wanted everything at once. He got impatient for the inheritance he planned to get his hands on by marrying Liu’s daughter.”
“And where did he hear about this inheritance if it wasn’t from those boys?”
“Song told me Mr. Liu was dying. She and her father discussed funeral arrangements. I imagine Young came calling at the ger and overheard — and misunderstood — considering he knows only a little Mandarin.”
“Misunderstood? But what about the ‘black pearl,’ the paper money, the inheritance?”
“A black pearl is part of Chinese funeral rites. The paper money that was supposedly an inheritance is the paper money they burn for the dead.”
The streetlight buzzed and flickered. Dorj thought he could see surprise in Ariunbat’s blue eyes. Eyes that suddenly reminded him of something he’d forgotten, a connection he’d failed to make.
The crunch of footsteps on the icy roadway made Dorj turn. It was Myron Young.
“Never was much good at foreign languages,” said Young. “Hell of a thing. Still, the old man must’ve left something.”
Dorj said, “Are you proposing to shoot me with the gun you used to kill Liu?”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said Young. “But, no. We had something different in mind.”
“As you recall, our embezzler, Mr. Chi, jumped into the Tuul,” said Ariunbat, and Dorj felt a meaty arm close around his throat.
The inspector’s feet left the ground as Ariunbat swung him toward the balustrade. Dorj glimpsed a patch of swirling black water surrounded by snow-covered ice. Then a gunshot cracked the silence and Ariunbat crumpled.
Dorj, always prepared, even while vacationing, scrambled free of the dying man’s grasp and aimed his police revolver at Young who raised his hands obligingly.
“I’m an American,” said Young. “I’ve got a right to a lawyer. What time is it in Houston?”
“Yes, they were both blackmailing your father,” Dorj told Song. “Ariunbat had met Young in Olgii, during one of Young’s previous trips to the silver mine there. Ariunbat’s a Kazakh — he has the look, the blue eyes. After he was transferred to Ulaan Baatar, he and Young must have gotten together. The conversation probably turned, naturally enough, to your father’s embezzler. Ariunbat had the doctored records and his police investigations, Young had some business smarts. Between the two of them they figured out what was going on and decided to take advantage.
“When Young misinterpreted the conversation about funeral arrangements, their plan changed. They wanted it all at once. They also wanted to pin the murder on Chi’s sons, but it seemed to me Ariunbat was a little too quick to pretend to connect them with the crime.”
“My father was horrified when Chi died,” said Song. “He never expected that. I’m sure he intended to tell Ariunbat not to press charges.”
“That is probably true,” said Dorj, who knew from experience there was no predicting what people might do when it came to money.
He stood with Song and members of Liu’s family on the junction of two temporarily unnamed streets. Song, dressed in funeral white, blended in with the freshly fallen snow that gave even Ulaan Baatar a sparkling sheen of promise.
Song’s eyes were watery. But she was remarkably calm. No doubt she had been steeling herself for her father’s imminent death for weeks. It had come only a bit sooner, and much differently than she’d expected. And, Dorj thought ruefully, the gunshot had been kinder in the end than cancer would have been. But he kept that to himself.
Mr. Liu’s funeral procession came down the street, the white-draped coffin followed by mourners, all in white, bearing white banners inscribed with the character for “life.” Some of the onlookers threw paper money into the cold air.
When the procession had passed, Dorj said, “I won’t be able to come to the cemetery. My plane will be leaving and — well — you have to catch flights when they have the fuel to make them.”
“Thank you,” said Song.
“Maybe next time I’m in Ulaan Baatar, you might like to see a play,” said Dorj, realizing the inappropriateness of the remark even as he spoke. But the girl nodded.
He reached back into his memory again. “Zai-jan,” he said. “Goodbye.”
The Lazrus Gate
by George C. Chesbro
© 1996 by George C. Chesbro
George Chesbro’s best-known creation is the dwarf private eye Mongo, a character whose adventures are larger than life and evoke, as William L. DeAndrea said in Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, the era of the pulps. Similarly larger than life, with an almost supernatural ability to intuit things, is ex C.I.A. op Veil, a character Mr. Chesbro gives the starring role in the following story.
Veil dreams.
Vivid dreaming is his gift and affliction, the lash of memory and a guide to justice, a mystery and sometimes the key to mystery, prod to violence and maker of peace, an invitation to madness and the fountainhead of his power as an artist.
The Lazarus Person standing under the streetlight on the sidewalk outside the former warehouse Veil Kendry owned was an attractive woman in her late thirties or early forties. From the vast loft on the fourth floor where he painted and lived, Veil watched her through the one-way glass of his window. Although her face was impassive and her expression distant, he sensed her discomfort. Despite the fact that this was New York City’s East Village, the woman was not in danger, for Veil had taken steps when he had first bought the building fifteen years before to make sure that the few blocks surrounding his building were crime-free; drug dealers and others who committed violent crimes in his immediate neighborhood invariably chose not to return a second time, and some disappeared altogether. There was no bus stop in the middle of the block, no apparent reason for her to be standing there for almost forty-five minutes, and the fact that she was a Lazarus Person made him doubly suspicious. If she somehow knew about him and wanted to talk, she had only to press the buzzer at the entrance on the ground floor.
When an hour had passed and the woman still had not moved, Veil went to the telephone and called Dr. Sharon Solow at home. She was not there, and her answering machine did not come on. When there was no answer at her office in the Sleep Research Laboratories at St. Vincent Hospital, he went down to his arsenal of weapons and equipment on the third floor. He took a pair of night-vision binoculars off a shelf, turned off the lights, and went to a window at the front. First he scanned the rooftops of the buildings across the street, but saw no one there. In the darkened doorway of a storefront directly across the way, however, he spotted a man standing by himself, and he was wearing headphones. Veil peered into the night on the other three sides of the building, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Satisfied that the watcher and listener in the doorway was alone, Veil left the building through a freight-delivery entrance at the rear, went to the end of the block, around the building, and crossed the street, then came up on the man as silently as a shadow within the shadows and hit him in the solar plexus. As the man doubled over and gasped for air, Veil grabbed the back of his coat collar and marched him across the street. The woman now looked sad, and she remained motionless, watching him as he approached.