Half the Day Is Night Page 5

  He nodded. His left hand was still faintly red from the dye.

  Maybe she should have said they should wait, but the woman at the checkpoint hadn’t said anything about sensors at the shuttle ports, just banks. He could have insisted they wait.

  Outside the station they stepped on the ped mover. He didn’t say anything the entire trip to the port. He glanced up at her once, with his red furious eyes. They looked ghastly. Her eyes ached, too. But his eyes hurt to look at.

  At the sub port he had to open the plastic bag and find the tickets in the wreckage of his suit. Her eyes started watering. The tickets were red and stank. “I’ll take them,” she said.

  He waited while she explained to the ticket clerk what had happened, and the clerk ended up punching her another set and throwing out the ones she had.

  She came back and sat down beside David. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He nodded. Then he sighed. “It was a mistake,” he said.

  She asked him what he meant, but he just shook his head and wouldn’t explain any further.

  3

  Probation

  On Saturday David drove Mayla to see her grandfather.

  “I am thinking,” he said in the car, “I am not the person to do this job for you.”

  “I think you’re doing fine,” she said. “I expected it all to take some time to settle in.”

  He thought of the telltale going off. The burn, the shock. For a moment he had felt the dye and thought it was the moment before one knows one is injured, when there is only the shock and the feeling of something wet. “No,” he said. “I think it is not a good idea.”

  She did not say anything and he stole a glance at her. She was looking out at the road. “I’m sorry about the business in Marincite,” she said. “That was my fault.”

  Yes, he thought, it was. “That is not it,” he said anyway, “I think I am just not the right person.”

  “Is it Tim?” she asked. “He’ll be leaving.”

  He shook his head.

  “You haven’t even been here thirty days,” she said. He put the car on automatic and they accelerated smoothly onto the beltway. “Try it another sixty days,” she said. “It’ll get better.”

  “I do not think so,” he said.

  “I can understand your feelings,” she said. “Tim is being a prick. And what happened in Marincite, that would shake up anybody.”

  He shrugged. It would not get better, but sixty days wouldn’t really make a difference. “All right,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She directed him off the beltway and they dropped down to the second level of the city, then onto residential streets.

  The street was a great deal like the street Mayla lived on. Just featureless garage doors, no sense of the residences behind the concrete. She had him stop, and she got out and palmed the sensor next to the garage door. For a moment he thought it wasn’t going to open, and then the door lifted.

  He expected a garage like Mayla’s with space for a couple of cars but this space would have easily held twenty. A public garage, like at the bank. He had not thought much about where her grandfather would live in the city. He guessed he had imagined a place like Mayla’s, not this huge residence for many people.

  There were only two cars: a long car like Mayla’s boss rode to work and a sedan. “Park next to the Benare,” she said and pointed to the sedan. Her voice echoed off the concrete. Why were there only two cars in the parking? It wasn’t a workday.

  At the back of the garage were wrought-iron doors on a lift. The iron was worked into figures, tall birds like cranes and palm trees and flowers. Like an ornate bird cage.

  They went below the floor of the garage into a lobby. Concrete walls painted white, black and white tiles on the floor. Dusty Greek busts on pedestals like garden statuary. The space felt cold and disused, even colder than the usual lobby. This whole country seemed built of concrete.

  She folded the lift door back and the iron crashed. He followed her across the black and white tiles into a carpeted hallway. The doors were big heavy wood, and set into each one like a porthole was a Chinese blue and white plate, blue willow plates depicting a girl and her lover fleeing her father the angry mandarin. Some of the doors were open. An office that looked unused—so this was not just residential flats. Then a storeroom full of old furniture. Then a bedroom. Just one room, with a bed. Like a hotel room almost except there was bric-a-brac all over the table: glass harlequins on a lace doily, feather masks on the wall and a handful of medicine bottles on a glass dish. An old woman’s room.

  Bedsitters? Rich daughter letting old grandfather live in poverty—although the place didn’t feel impoverished, just empty and ugly and full of old people’s used things.

  He followed her down five steps and across a large room with dining tables and chairs draped in white cloths. The walls were mirrored, reflecting back white-shrouded furniture. Community dining?

  “Jude?” she called.

  The place made him uncomfortable, with its empty concrete rooms. Maybe it was being closed down or something? She had not said anything about having to move her grandfather, but then she hadn’t said anything at all about him.

  “Jude?” she said again, and he followed her through a door into a kitchen. Just a kitchen, good sized, with a wooden table and chairs and a shiny yellow tile floor. The black man mopping the floor said, “Don’t you step on my floor, miss.”

  “Jude,” Mayla said.

  The man leaned the mop up against the counter and tiptoed across the clean floor and gave Mayla a hug. “Where you been?” he asked.

  “I’ve been busy,” Mayla said.

  “He’s an old man.” “Old mon,” Jude actually said, in helium falsetto.

  “I know, I know. How’s his cold?”

  Jude shrugged. “The man, he’s eighty-two.”

  “Is he in bed?”

  “No, he’s out on the spring court.”

  “Is Domingo with him?” she asked.

  The man shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with Domingo. You just feeling guilty, knowing Domingo is taking care of him and you don’t get out here often enough.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. They both laughed, as if this was an old thing between them.

  “You both staying for dinner?”

  “Oh, Jude, this is David Dai, he’s working for me. David, this is Jude.”

  “Where’s that other one?” The man’s voice was carefully neutral.

  “Tim is going back to Australia. We can’t stay for dinner this time. Next time, I promise.”

  David suddenly understood, this was all one house. This was all Mayla’s grandfather’s house. The lobby, the parking, all the rooms. The dining room draped in white. All empty.

  “I’m baking potatoes,” Jude said, “not in the flash, neither.”

  “With real sour cream?” Mayla asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “Next time,” she said. “I promise.”

  All one house. Huge and ugly and cold.

  He followed her again, back out across the empty dining room and up another five steps to a room with mirrors like windows and tables covered with lace and picture frames. Another wooden door with a blue and white plate set in it. Mayla pushed the door open and yellow light spilled out.

  The room was full of light and he blinked. The bright air was damp and misty, no, it was misting. Raining. Like rain. Space went up and up; twice, three times the height of the kitchen. There were clusters of plants and in the center of each clump stalks of tall bamboo, four or five meters high. The floor was terra-cotta tile, glazed Indian red with artificial rain. All around the walls, tall mirrors like windows. And in the center was an old man in a wicker chair and a young man holding an old navy blue umbrella.

  “Hello,” Mayla said, her voice too loud and too cheerful, “over your cold?”

  “Nearly,” the old man said. He
was a flat-faced, long-boned ugly old Chinese man with dyed black hair. At least David assumed it was dyed. “How is the bank?” the old man asked.

  “The bank is doing well,” she said. “Can you turn off the sprinklers? We’re getting wet.”

  She took the umbrella from the young man—Domingo?—and held it while he went to turn off the sprinklers. “I just got back from Marincite,” she said. “Did you read in the paper about Tumipamba’s funeral?”

  “Jude said your picture was in the paper,” her grandfather said.

  There had been an im in the paper, of the coffin with Mayla standing at the foot, facing out of the picture. Mayla’s presence in the picture was an accident. Crisp black-and-white im, the cliché of funerals. Tim had said she looked like “a frigging presidential widow.”

  “I went to the funeral.” She sounded defensive.

  “That was stupid,” he said.

  “I was working with Tumipamba,” she said. “I thought I should go to the funeral.”

  “And get your picture in the paper?”

  “I didn’t even know they took the im,” she said.

  “You were working with this man? In Marincite?”

  “We’re negotiating an agreement,” she said. “With Marincite.”

  She offered that as a kind of gift, her voice hopeful. The old man was silent, considering.

  The rain stopped. David found he’d been hunching his shoulders.

  “What kind of agreement?” her grandfather asked. Like his own father, David thought, this was a man who did not trust gifts. Who had to turn them over and over and who always suspected either a bribe or a catch.

  “Marincite Technical Exchange is going independent,” she said. “Marincite is spinning them off. We may do the financing. A lot of money.”

  He didn’t help her, just waited for her to go on. After a bit of silence she said tentatively, “I offered short-term notes with an automatic rollover. It would have been a better deal for them, but they wanted five-year fixed, something about the way they do business.” The terms meant nothing to David but he listened to the sound of her voice. He could hear things better now, through the strangeness of language and the shrillness. He could hear her nervousness, and hear how she got a little less nervous as she talked. She chattered on about buying some buildings and leasing them back to the company, while the old man sat silent, his eyes on the Indian red tile.

  “Short term?” he said suddenly, and coughed, a bark. “Why’d you push short term if they wanted fixed?” He had a hard, flat, American voice, David could hear that, too.

  “The U.S. market is falling,” she said, her voice gone sharp and defensive again, “it’s got to correct, and then interest rates will drop. We thought with Marincite we’d have to give them short term. The bank will take short term,” she said and shoved her hands in her pockets.

  The old man looked up at her. “You didn’t do your homework.” The old tyrant looked pointedly at her hands and she took them out. “A client shouldn’t have to be sold,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything, just took her dressing down. Maybe she knew that nothing would make any difference. Better than himself, every time he saw his father they ended up screaming at each other. When was the last time he had seen his father?

  Mayla’s grandfather looked at him. “You’re new,” he said.

  Mayla promptly introduced her grandfather, “John Ling,” she said. John Ling leaned forward in his wicker chair and held out his hand and for a moment David thought he was supposed to help the old man stand up. Then he realized the old man wanted to shake hands.

  Loose dry skin over fragile bones.

  “What happened to the big blond … Tim?” the old man asked.

  “He’s going back to Australia,” Mayla said.

  “Are you American?” John Ling asked.

  Nobody had ever thought he was American before. “No sir,” David said. “French.”

  “Southeast Asia?”

  “Yes sir,” David said, “Indochina.”

  “Speak any Chinese?” the old man asked.

  “No sir, my grandmother speaks Vietnamese.”

  The old man sat back. Nodded. “I went to Chinese school after regular school for a couple of years, but I never learned a bit.” His attention went back to Mayla. “What are you wearing?”

  She had on a red silk blouse belted over tights, something simple and bright, David thought. Although what did he know about how people dressed?

  “You spend a lot of money on clothes,” he said. “Your grandmother never spent so much on clothes.”

  She sighed.

  The old man stared out at the plants. Was his vision bad? The silence hung.

  “So how are you feeling?” she said, trying to fill the space.

  “Old,” he said. “And helpless.”

  She looked up at Domingo and then at David, looking for help or for something to say. Her face was pink.

  David found he could not meet her gaze, so instead he looked at the bamboo.

  * * *

  “I was thinking,” she said in the parking, “maybe we should go someplace for dinner.” Her voice was bright, working hard at it. She dug in her purse. “I think, I looked up restaurants … but I think the best place … wait,” she found a piece of paper. “I thought maybe a French restaurant, you know, I thought you might like some food from home.”

  Food from home. Chicken. Pasta. Something other than fish. “It does not matter,” he said. Homesickness washed over him in waves, all he could think of was bread and butter—not tortillas and not that bland stuff from the U.S., just a decent piece of bread. He wanted to go home. Sixty days, he had promised. At the moment it seemed an immeasurable wait.

  “I went away to school,” she said, “I remember what it was like. Besides, after that business in Marincite, I wanted, you know, I mean I can’t make you forget that but—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said again.

  “It does,” she said. “I don’t know what to say about it. It was horrible. It was horrible for me, and I wasn’t wearing the telltale.”

  Blind. He had thought he was blinded. The memory was bad, he slid away from it and shrugged.

  She looked down at her hands.

  He meant only to pass it off, but she looked as if he had shrugged her off. She looked the way she had when she was standing in front of her grandfather.

  “I would like to go to a restaurant,” he said.

  She smiled at him, grateful. How easy to make her happy. “Well,” she said, serious again, consulting her scrap of paper, “there are a couple of places but everybody says that the best place is Botticelli’s. It’s in Aphrodite, that’s a casino.” She looked down at her piece of paper. “Actually, it’s not French, it’s Continental. But they have some French dishes and some other things, too. Italian, and Spanish.”

  “Okay,” he said, and was rewarded again by her smile, so he smiled, too. “Okay,” he said, to make her smile, to feel his own face mirroring hers.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He nodded, and because he didn’t know what else to say, he said it again. “Okay.” And it sounded so inane, this dialogue of “okays” that they started to laugh, grinning at each other like idiots. A couple of emotional cripples, he thought. Grinning at her in her grandfather’s parking.

  * * *

  Botticelli’s was in the middle of the casino. It was dark and each table sat in a little pool of light. For a centerpiece each table had a stand and a live parrot: blue parrots, green parrots, gray parrots, all with heavy bills and strong ugly feet. He looked and was relieved that at the tables where people had food there were no parrots.

  The prices made him still. The chicken, the beef dishes were 45cr and 55cr. He looked up and the blue parrot flipped down to hang upside down. A little sign said that they nipped.

  “Poor things,” Mayla said, “they don’t do well in the air mixture, the cold gets them. Most of them don’t live long.”
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br />   He supposed they didn’t fly because their wings were clipped, but what kept them from climbing down the stand and onto the table? The parrot turned and twisted its head, snake fashion, then clambered sideways and righted itself, flapping its wings. It opened its beak when a waiter walked by and its tongue was black. It stared at David, flipped upside down again.

  A waiter stopped at their table and the parrot righted itself again. The waiter asked if they were ready to order.

  He had no idea what he wanted, he hadn’t even decided if maybe he should order fish—it was the cheapest thing on the menu.

  The waiter said he’d be back and fed the parrot a peanut. The parrot craned its head and fluffed out its feathers. It raised its wings and made a “ding” exactly like the sound of a flash unit signaling “ready.”

  Mayla looked up from her menu.

  “It was the bird,” David said.

  She laughed and the bird stared at her. “They’re distracting, aren’t they? I think we should get a bottle of wine, but you have to order, I don’t have the nerve to order wine in front of a Frenchman. The chicken dishes are famous.”

  There wasn’t much on the menu he had ever eaten before but he didn’t tell her that. He ordered coq au vin and she ordered some kind of chicken with garbanzo beans so he got a Chardonnay. White with chicken and he liked Chardonnay. Growing up his family hadn’t drank wine often, and when he did buy it he usually just got a vin de table. He really didn’t know much about wine.

  The waiter came and got the parrot, whisking the thing away, stand and all. David was relieved.

  The food was good, and even if it tasted a little different, it was not fish. It tasted so good he wolfed it down so it never really had a chance to get cold. The bread wasn’t bad, warm crusty rolls wrapped in a big napkin, and he sopped his plate clean. He thought the wine was all right and Mayla seemed to think so.

  Coffee after dinner, not-hot-enough Caribbean coffee. Then they walked back through the casino.

  “Blue and whites,” Mayla said suddenly.

  He looked at her, not understanding.

  “There’s been a bomb threat,” Mayla said.

  David looked around. He saw people at the slot machines, heard the muted whir and chime of gambling, nothing out of place, everything seemed normal. Then he saw, at the door, six in police blue and white.