Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [50]
“Maybe not, brother. But the whales don’t come for the tourists, right? The tourists come for the whales.”
“Sure.”
“You’re not even curious, huh? You ever see a whale?”
“No.”
“If you ever did—up close, I mean—you’d never understand why anyone could kill one.”
“All you mean is you couldn’t kill one. The people who do it, they probably get as close as any whale-watching tourist. Closer, even. And they still pull the trigger.”
“Evil motherfuckers.”
“I don’t think so,” I told him. “If they did it for fun, maybe. Or if they made the things suffer before they killed them. Tortured them, I mean. But it’s just food to some people, right?”
“Food? Those things, I swear to God, they’re practically human.”
“And those kids in Biafra—what were they?”
He was silent for a few miles, concentrating on his driving. Then he said, “And what was I, Burke? A nigger queer. In a jungle a million miles away from civilization, in a place where there’s no laws. No affirmative action. No hate-crimes legislation. A free-fire zone. You remember some of the mercs … not the guys who thought they were fighting Communism or liberating a country. You know the ones I mean—the ones who thought being a mercenary meant having a license to kill niggers, and getting paid for it. You don’t want to say why you saved me over there; you want to say you got no idea, you were just a kid yourself; that’s okay. But you had to have asked yourself why you went in the first place.”
I looked over at Byron. He downshifted just before a series of serpentine curves, his face set, mouth a straight line.
“I haven’t asked myself questions about why people do things since I was a little kid.”
“What happened then?” he asked.
“Nobody answered,” I told him.
The Ly Mang looked like a Hudson River scow with a shack growing out of it. I left Byron in the car, made the approach myself. A short, muscular man with the face of an Inca was doing something to a net on the deck, working at a slow, deliberate pace. He raised his head as I came closer; watching, not moving.
“Is Gem around?” I asked him.
“Who are you?” he responded, his accent more in the rhythm than in the sound.
“She’s expecting me.”
“Today?”
“Yes.”
“Stay there,” he said, flicking the knife he had been using closed with one hand.
I slouched against one of the massive posts holding up the pier, patting my pockets for the pack of smokes that wasn’t there. A mistake. Habits are patterns, and patterns are paths. Trails for trackers. I was somebody else now, and I had to stay there.
A girl in a pink T-shirt and blue-jean shorts came out of the cabin. She said something I couldn’t hear to the Mexican, then vaulted over the railing to the pier, landing as lightly as a ballerina.
Her hair was jet black, framing a delicate Oriental face. A slim, leggy woman with a tiny waist, she could have been sixteen or thirty-five. But when she got close enough for me to see her eyes, there was no chance of mistaking her for a teenager.
“I am Gem,” is all she said. If standing out in the cool weather dressed like that bothered her, it didn’t show on her face.
“I don’t know who you spoke to, but I’m the man who—”
“The man from New York?” she asked, her eyes deliberately glancing down to my right hand, where the fat emerald on my pinky finger sparkled in the sun. Mama’s ID.
“Yes.”
“You need someone who speaks Russian?”
“And writes it. Like a native.”
“Yes. For how long?”
“I don’t … Oh, right—you mean, how long will I need your services?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t say, exactly. I want you to write a letter. Then I want you to meet the people you are writing the letter to. And talk with them.”
“Where would this be?”
“Vancouver. Near—”
“I know where it is. You came from there?”
“Yes.”
“I would go back with you, is that correct?” Her voice was precise, unaccented. Soft.
“You don’t have to. The letter you write, it will say you will meet them in Portland … so there would be at least a week between the letter and the time you go into action.