When Minh thought about it, which was more often than she liked to admit, the fact that she really wasn’t sure where she stood with yin shi exasperated her. He always seemed happy enough to see her but he never went out of his way to initiate meetings. Minh had been raised in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, a cauldron simmering with refugees of one sort or another, so she knew one when she saw one; the thing that betrayed them was they seemed to be alone even in a crowd. She herself was in the country illegally, a refugee from Taiwan. Minh was not even her real name, a detail she’d never revealed to Martin for fear he might be shocked. Sometimes she had the weird feeling that Martin, too, was some kind of refugee—though from what, she had no clue. Yin shi lived what she thought of as a boring life, ordering up the same dishes three or four nights a week, attending to his hives on the roof, making love to her when she turned up at his door. For excitement, he broke into hotel rooms to photograph husbands committing adultery, though when he described what he did for a living he managed to make even that sound boring. The single time she had raised the subject of boredom he had astonished her by admitting that he relished it; boring himself to death, he’d insisted, was how he planned to spend the rest of his life.
At the time Minh had thought it was one of those things you say to sound clever. Only later did it dawn on her that he’d meant every word; that boring yourself to death was a way of committing suicide in slow motion.
Stepping into the back room, Minh straightened the sheets and blanket on the cot, emptied the water from the plastic basin on the floor, closed the refrigerator door, put away the dishes that Martin had finally gotten around to washing. She retrieved Martin’s faded white jumpsuit and, rolling up the cuffs and the sleeves, slipped into it and zipped up the front. She put on the pith helmet with the mosquito netting hanging from it and took a look at herself in the cracked mirror over the bathroom sink. The outfit was not what you would call feng shui. Taking Martin’s smoke gun from under the sink, she made her way up the stairs to the roof. The sun, high overhead, was burning off the last drops of rain that had fallen the previous night. Vapor rose from shallow puddles as she crossed the roof to the hives. Martin had bought them and the equipment, and even the first queen bees, from a catalogue when he got it into his head to raise bees. In the beginning he had pored over the instruction book that came with the hives. Then he’d dragged a chair up to the roof and had spent hours staring at the colonies, trying to figure out if there was a flight pattern to the swarm’s movements, a method to its apparent madness. Minh had never seen him do anything with such intensity. When he’d begun inspecting and cleaning the frames he’d worn gloves, but he discarded them when Minh happened to mention the Chinese belief that bee stings stimulated your hormones and increased your sex drive. Not that the subsequent stings on his hands had changed anything—it was invariably Minh who made the first move toward the cot in the back of the loft, pulling Martin into the room, onto the cot, peeling off her clothing and then his. He made love to her cautiously, as if (she finally realized) he, not she, were fragile; as if he were afraid to let emotions surface that he might not be able control.
Minh was crouching in front of the first hive, preparing the smoker, ruminating on how making love with Martin had been like sleepwalking through a string of one-night stands that were physically satisfying but emotionally frustrating, when the dumdum bullet plunged into the frames. There was an instant of absolute silence, as if the 20,000 residents of the hive—those that had survived the impact—had been reduced to a state of catatonic bewilderment. Then a raging yellowish-brown football-sized swarm burst out of the hive with such ferocity it knocked Minh over backward. The pith helmet and veil flew off to one side and the bees attacked her nostrils and her eyes, planting their darts with savage vengeance. She clenched her fingers into fists and hammered wildly at the layers of bees encrusting her skin, crushing them by the hundreds until her knuckles were covered with a sticky residue. There was no longer a sun overhead, only a thick carpet of rioting insects ricocheting off one another as they fought for a turn at the intruder who had wrecked their hive.
Her face and lids swelling, Minh slumped back onto the hot tarpaper of the roof, swatting weakly at the bees the way Tsou had whisked at the fly on the bar. As the pain gave way to numbness, she heard a voice that sounded remarkably like her own telling Martin that, hey, you really shouldn’t wear gloves. Sure there’s a reason why. According to the Chinese, bee stings can stimulate your …
1997: OSKAR ALEXANDROVICH KASTNER DISCOVERS THE WEIGHT OF A CIGARETTE
THE TWO MEN IN CON-ED UNIFORMS PARKED THEIR REPAIR TRUCK in the narrow alley between President and Carroll and made their way on foot to the only back garden on the block protected by a chainlink fence. One of the men muttered something into a walkie-talkie, listened for a response and nodded to his colleague when he heard it. The second man produced a key, opened the door in the fence and used the same key to switch off the alarm box inside. The two, walking soundlessly on crepe soled shoes, climbed the stairs to the porch. Using a second key, they let themselves into the kitchen at the rear of the house and punched the code into the alarm there. They stood motionless for several minutes, their eyes fixed on the ceiling. When they heard the muffled scrape of a wheelchair rolling along a hallway over their heads, the two men produced pistols fitted with silencers and started up the back staircase. Reaching the first floor, they could hear a radio playing in the front room. Gripping their pistols with both hands, angling the barrels up, they worked their way along the hall to the closed door and flattened themselves against the wall on either side of it. One of the men tapped the side of his nose to indicate he had gotten a whiff of foul smelling cigarette smoke; their quarry was inside the room. Baring his teeth in a tight smile, his companion grasped the knob and flung open the door and the two of them, hunched over to keep their profiles low, burst into the room.
Oskar Alexandrovich Kastner, sitting in his wheelchair next to the window, was oiling the firing mechanism on a Soviet PPSh 41, a Second World War automatic weapon in mint condition. Smoke coiled up from a cigarette burning in an ashtray. Kastner’s heavy lidded eyes blinked slowly as he took in the intruders. One appeared much older than the other but the younger man, gesturing to the other to shut the door, seemed to be in charge.
“Vy Russky?” Kastner inquired.
“Da. Ya Russky,” replied the younger Con-Ed man. “I gdye vasha doch?”
Kastner eyed the pearl-handled Tula-Tokarev on the table, a 1930s pistol that he always kept charged, but he knew he could never reach it. “Ya ne znayu,” he replied. He was not about to tell them that Stella was on her way to Israel, accompanied by a CIA agent turned detective who lived over a Chinese restaurant. He wondered how the two killers had broken through the chainlink fence and gotten into the kitchen without tripping the alarms. “You took your time getting here,” Kastner growled in English. “Nine years.” He set the PPSh down and, working the joystick, maneuvered the wheelchair so that his back was to the intruders.