Tea with the Black Dragon (v1.4) Read online

  “At any rate, she is sure I shouldn’t be wasting my time playing fiddle in an Irish band, touring about and sleeping in the living rooms of friends. Not at my age.”

  “And what age is that?” he asked blandly. A challenge hid somewhere within the question, and his brown eyes hid within their creases.

  Easily she answered, “I’m fifty. How old are you?”

  Mayland Long threw back his head and laughed. His teeth were large and very white against his skin. “Older than you are, Mrs. Macnamara. And more vain. I won’t answer that question just now.”

  Then he leaned forward again. His elongated fingers stretched across the menu he had not opened. He touched her pink hand for just a moment: “But I think it would be wonderful to fiddle with the Linnet’s Wings and sleep wherever one finds oneself. At any age.”

  She found herself saying, “Then why not do it, Mr. Long. I know you’re not a musician. I don’t mean that. I mean… Why do you live here, in this beautiful, boring hotel? And why do you eat… here? In the Crystal Room. Every night. When you are…” she finished with quiet intensity “… who you are.”

  He drew back, his two hands flat on the tablecloth. I have offended him, thought Martha. She watched.

  “And who is that?” he asked softly, but he gave her no time to answer. “There is time,” he continued, in the same tone of voice: softly, very softly. “There is time for the James Herald, too, in a long life. Sometimes one must wait for things.”

  Wait for what? she thought, but did not continue her attack. “Forgive me if I was out of line. I spoke on impulse.”

  The light was failing outside. The chandeliers cast haloes against the beamed ceiling. Mr. Long nodded. “Impulse or instinct. I am not offended, Mrs. Macnamara.”

  She did not quite understand. She opened her menu and stared, seeing nothing.

  “There is something marvelous in formality,” she murmured. “Greetings. Bows. And surnames.” She gave up searching among the cuts of beef and lamb. She looked at him again. “But I’m a poor peasant, really. I can’t be Mrs. Macnamara for more than a half hour at a time before I get giddy.”

  She found herself saying the words she had swallowed earlier in front of the Maitre d’. “Please call me Martha.” Then she quailed before his silence, realizing she could no more call this man by his first name than she could fly.

  “I don’t ask the privilege in return,” she qualified. “Especially since you admit to being older than me.”

  It was his turn to concern himself with a water glass.

  He held it up to the last light of day “Why? Am I so stuffy, Martha?”

  “No. Not stuffy,” Her forehead creased. She searched for the word. “Intimidating.”

  “But not too intimidating to have my ear twisted for living in a comfortable ‘hotel. For dining at the same place nightly.” He lowered the crystal to the table. The corners of his mouth turned upwards.

  “There are very few people who call me by my given name. I don’t know why that should be, but it’s true.”

  “Isn’t that the way you want it?”

  He shook his head. The smile widened. “I… don’t have an opinion on the matter. And you…” He adopted the imperturbability of a stage Chinaman, “Must decide for me what I am to be called from this moment toward. And where I—,”

  The waiter interrupted, letting Mrs. Macnamara blush in comparative privacy. She chose the lobster. Given the choice, she almost always picked the lobster. Mr. Long asked for rock cod. Rock cod was not on the menu, but the waiter merely nodded and inquired about the wine.

  It was dark out now. The window was shiny black, and whatever crisis had been approaching had passed away with the waiter. Mr. long was eager to talk about Buddhism. Martha tried to listen, but her mind drifted back to Liz. She vacillated between being annoyed with her daughter for this cavalier treatment and being very anxious for her. Being annoyed was by far the most comfortable feeling.

  “I used to have quite a collection of the commentaries of Nagarjuna,” he began. “Are you interested in the Indians?”

  She shook her head and hurried to swallow a bite of romaine. “I have no head for philosophy. I get confused.”

  He lay down his knife and fork neatly. Martha withstood five seconds of silent scrutiny. “I see,” he said finally. “Zen.”

  “Whatever word you like. I sit still, or I try. Truth is what is important, and writings just… catch me by the heels. I think Bodhidharma has the right attitude, to sit for nine years facing a wall. Truth!” she sighed, gesturing helplessly. Her fork clinked and rolled into her salad bowl.

  “He fascinated me,” admitted Mr. Long. He stared over his shoulder into the black glass. “I used to watch him from where he couldn’t see me. Or so I thought.”

  “What was this?” Martha groped, her mind skipping tracks as she listened.

  “Bodhidharma. Sitting by the rock wall of a cave, in Honan. Sometimes he sat in fall lotus, but more often he tucked under his right foot. Sometimes he wrapped a blanket around him, and the snow would make a mound over his head.

  “But it would burn off. The snow—or rain, as the season dictated—would melt and turn to steam and the blanket would smell of scalded wool. That is probably what called the man to my attention first. Burning off the snow “ Mayland Long opened his eyes very wide as his gaze slid from the window to the intent face of Martha Macnamara. “I was not always—subtle—you know. That comes with age, if we are fortunate. But two things I have ever respected are warmth and the ability to sit still.”

  Martha listened to him speak. She had a peculiar skill at listening which was in no way to be confused with an aversion to talking herself. Her listening had an intensity which reached out into the speaker and eased the meaning from him, which knitted word to word beyond the first mere intent which called him to speak. She listened—as she moved—with grace.

  And she noticed, in passing, that Mr. Long had scarcely touched his wine.

  “I don’t know where the story began that the man called Bodhidharma was a frog-faced ogre. He was a small man—an Indian, of course. But he was quite courteous.

  “Courteous to me, at least,” he added. Then there was silence between them till the gentle pull of Martha’s listening was felt again.

  “I waited for him to speak.” He chuckled and touched the bright blade of the butter knife. “I did not cut off my arm to impress him. I don’t know who it was who did that, if indeed that story is not pure fabrication. I merely waited to be noticed. All the winter and most of spring.

  “I waited…” Mayland Long’s head rose up and his eyes met that peaceful, blue, inescapable listening. “I have been waiting so very long, Martha,” he said.

  She only nodded.

  Once again they were saved—or lost—by the arrival of the waiter bearing the entree. The placing of the dishes entailed a certain amount of bustle.

  Plates were lifted and lowered. Silver winked in the light and the knives made a sweet tinkle against one another. Behind all this Mayland Long sat patiently still, having uttered a confession, and having that confession erased by events. His face was touched with loss.

  On the other side of the mild turmoil sat Martha. Her smile grew as the waiter receded. It was a smile which committed Mayland Long to nothing, welcoming all.

  He glanced down at his plate. The fish filet was wound around itself, skewered and dusted with paprika. The potatoes came out of a pastry gun. “When must you leave?” he asked.

  Martha stared with true interest at her lobster. It was enormous and red. She realized the depths other folly then, and wished for a bib.

  “I will leave when I find her,” she spoke with a grim determination which owed something to her feelings concerning the dead crustacean before her.

  “Then I may arrange to have her kidnapped.” Mr. Long spoke quietly, almost to himself. Martha, attacking a bulbous scarlet claw, seemed not to hear. “Where does she live?”

  “Umph! Thi
s is impossible,” Martha muttered, as a steak knife slipped in her now-greasy hand. “I’m not fit for this sort of establishment. Don’t they believe in using nutcrackers, Mayland?”

  “Allow me.” He pulled her plate to the center of the table, where with his fingertips he curled the shell back from the meat as though it were paper. “There is no delicate way to eat a lobster.” In this manner, the new intimacy of his given name passed without comment.

  “Where does she live, your daughter?”

  Martha sighed, picking at her food. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “She used to work for FSS, in San Mateo, or so she told me. I called them. The switchboard said there was no one by the name Macnamara.”

  Mayland Long’s eyebrows lifted, and his eyes glittered with a harder sort of light. “Ah!” he said. “We have a puzzle. Tell me, Martha, what does Elizabeth do for a living?”

  Martha swallowed a bite of lobster. It was very good, but it was a Maine lobster and not native to this seacoast at all. It arrived by plane, as did Martha. Perhaps the same plane.

  “She’s a systems analyst. FSS stands for Financial Systems Software. She went to Stanford in math.” She was reminded that her dinner companion was Chinese by the fact that his face, open so recently, had gone completely unreadable to Martha. She watched and waited.

  “A systems analyst? Umm. Systems analysts rarely call their parents from across the country with mysterious problems. Still more rarely do they disappear. It is not part of the technical mentality to disappear. How will you go about finding her?”

  Martha Macnamara’s unobtrusive chin attempted to assert itself. “I will start by renting a car and buying an area map. I will drive down to Financial Systems Software. If they cannot or will not help me I proceed to Stanford University and seek out Auld Acquaintance. Hers, not mine. If I fail there, I try an old address I have. She moved about six months ago and was staying with a friend from college while she tried to buy a condo;

  I have that girl’s number, but no one ever answers there.”

  She shook her head admiringly. “Just think of it! She’s not twenty-five yet, and buying a condo. Without help, of course—I don’t have a nickel.

  “If that doesn’t work, and she hasn’t called in a few days, then I go to the police.”

  He paused before speaking. “Is it so serious?”

  “She told me she was in trouble. She said I was not to know where she lived because she was… nervous… about somebody. What am I to think? A pesky boyfriend? Bills?

  “I don’t know what to think,” she concluded.

  Mayland Long folded his hands together. “No use to draw conclusions amid such a lack of data.” He regarded nothing, intently.

  “Martha—what do you know about your daughter’s line of work. About computers?”

  “Me? Why, nothing. They send bills. They eat my little bank card and give me money—when they’re working.”

  “Then, may I be permitted to assist you?”

  She started in surprise. “Help me find Elizabeth? That would be too much to…” Her face lit in wonder. “Do you mean that you know about computers, too, as well as Ireland and China?”

  He shrugged. His shoulders were thin beneath his excellently fitted suit jacket. “A language is a language.”

  Mayland Long entered his suite of rooms and closed the door behind him. The sitting room was neat and sparsely furnished, with a pair of wing-back Queen Anne chairs set beside the bay window, a sofa of similar design before the swept and evidently useable fireplace, and a single table of black lacquer work standing between the two chairs. On this table lay an oilcloth pad, and upon that rested a hot plate, a red kettle and a jade-green teapot. The striking feature of this room was its walls, which were covered floor to ceiling with books. Wherever space and the angles of the room permitted stood high, heavy book cupboards, some with glass doors. Elsewhere single shelves were drilled into the plaster, and atop all, near the high ceiling, piles of books ascended, stacked flat.

  The books in Mr. Long’s room were a motley crew, being old or new, soiled or stiff and clean, composed in equal numbers of leather binding and bright paperback.

  There was one other object of note in this idiosyncratic chamber, and that was a bronze statue, one meter high, which sat on a shelf at eye-level: a lacuna in the wall of’ books. It was the figure of a Chinese dragon. The creature sat up on its hind legs, in a manner reminiscent of the caterpillar in Alice. It held in its left hand a tiny and exquisite teacup, and in its right a saucer. Its tail curled around in front, like a third hand, and held open a book. The entire statue was brassy black except for the eyes, which were polished and lacquered and shone like gold.

  Mayland Long paced to the low shelves beneath the window. Searching through the row of books, his hand reached out and began to harvest. First he found the three volumes of Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, Principles of Compiler Design, and the Conference Proceedings of the Third West Coast Computer Faire. Then, rising with this armload, he made his way to a large, slotted magazine rack, whence he plucked out Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia.

  He lowered this accretion of technical expertise to the seat of one of the chairs and, picking it up by the carved wooden arms, so as not to damage the Turkish rug, he placed it next to the other chair, on which he sat.

  A tall lamp stood beside him; he snapped it on. He grunted briefly as he opened Knuth, vol. I, Fundamental Algorithms: a happy little sound, full of contentment.

  Chapter 3

  With reddening fingers Martha pried apart the loops other key ring and forced the keys of the rental car upon it. She had reached the landing between the third and fourth floors and stopped to breathe for a moment before continuing her ascent. She wondered what sprite had tempted her to hoof it from the lobby to the seventh floor, where Mayland Long resided. Surely it was not the spirit of physical fitness. Health trailed along in Martha Macnamara’s wake; she had never turned to pursue it.

  She snorted as she recognized her motive. She was visiting a man’s rooms alone, and so had unconsciously avoided observation. What an absurd right hemisphere you have, she railed at herself. Nasty half-brain. Sneaky and absurd… Serve it right to climb the rest of the way.

  She stood at the top. “There,” she mumbled to herself. “See what you made me do?”

  The plain iron sign read seventh floor. She leaned against a newell post cast in the shape of an acorn, feeling the heat in her face. She stepped through the fire door into the hall.

  Here, somewhere along the maroon turkish-patterned runner, was where the body was found. The junkie. With his neck broken. She ought to ask him about that story— get it over with and out of her mind.

  Lifting her hand to knock on the door marked 714 cost a great effort of will. She stared at the shiny brass numbers. Heavy. Solid. 7-1-4. Her face was still hot; he would think she were blushing. Perhaps she was. Definitely she would not ask about the body.

  She listened for movement within and heard nothing. Then the door softly opened, revealing Mr. Long. He balanced a cup on a saucer in his left hand. In the morning light he looked thinner and less exotic. Standing in shirtsleeves between Martha and the window, he seemed very slight indeed.

  “Looking for bloodstains?” he asked gently, smiling. He laughed at her reaction. “Forgive me, Martha. That unfortunate accident is our one piece of notoriety at the James Herald. Everyone who speaks to Jerry Trough finds out about it.”

  “Did you see the body, Mayland? It must have lain just outside your door.”

  He shook his head. “No. I slept through the entire incident. I had been out late the night before, you see, and only woke when the police started knocking on doors. Couldn’t help them.”

  She stood in the doorway, blinking all around at the book-lined room. Mayland Long lifted his suit jacket from the closer of the two wing-back chairs and gestured her to sit.

  She noted the teacup, and the fact that his shirt cuff
s were not buttoned. “Sorry. I guess I’m on time.” She snorted in self-deprecation as she lowered herself into the delicate chair. “Unforgivable, really. You become so used to people being twenty minutes late that you tack that time onto the real time you want them to be there and then someone like me comes along and ruins everyone’s schedule. It’s because I’m so literal minded.”

  “Never apologize,” said Long. “Especially not for punctuality. I was not underway as early as you this morning, but that ought to give you cause for resentment, not me.” He placed the saucer and cup neatly on the floor, atop the second volume of Knuth. “I have only just gotten out of the shower.

  “Please pour yourself a cup of tea while I finish straightening up. It is not black but Chinese,” he added, and knelt beneath the window, paging books carefully into their shelves.