Ben Soul

window behind him. Dickon turned to look. There was a fly fluttering in the corner of the window where a spider had built its web. The web and the fly were on the outside of the window in the dirt. There were several dead flies and parts of flies in the web. Other than that, Dickon saw nothing.

  “Vanna,” he said to her again, “what’s wrong?”

  “Traps,” she said, after a moment, “traps everywhere, and no way out. It’s no use, no use at all.”

  “What?” Dickon said. When Vanna didn’t answer he said, “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  The waiter brought their plates with the cream noodles surmounted by dark brown beef, bright red tomato and bits of green onion. Dickon thanked him and looked at Vanna. Her face was an impassive mask, and she did not look at him. She looked at the colorful plate in front of her.

  “Yech!” she said. “This doesn’t even look good.”

  “Vanna,” Dickon said sharply, “what’s going on?”

  She glanced up at him, her head averted from her plate.

  She took up her chopsticks and chased a wedge of tomato over the noodles before she got hold of it to lift it to her mouth.

  “Sometimes I think you’d be much better off without me,” she said.

  “No!” Dickon said fervently.

  “You would, you know.” Vanna’s eyes were hard and brittle.

  Dickon felt a cold and chilly uneasiness start somewhere in his ankles and begin to spread up his body.

  “Anyway, you’ll have to try it.”

  “What?” Dickon choked the word out around the cold lump in his throat.

  “I’m leaving you, Dickon. I can’t take any more of you”

  “Why?”

  “I want more out of life, money, power, things like that. You’re a poor fish. You’ll always be poor. I can’t be bothered anymore.” Vanna’s face looked like a block of glacier ice. He saw no mercy in her eyes.

  “I’m dumping you with all the other trash in my life and starting new. Goodbye, Dickon. I’ll call you about divorce details.” Vanna stood, her purse swinging over her scarcely touched plate. Dickon was mute, and crumpled in on himself. He fought to keep the tears from his eyes. Vanna stared at him a moment, and then went to the staircase. Her heels clicked on the grubby floor. The sound faded into the clatter of rising from the kitchen.

  Dickon shuddered and drew a deep breath. He reached over and took the uneaten part of Vanna’s meal. She had left him the check, and a pastor’s income only went so far. Mechanically Dickon consumed all the chow mein, staring unseeing at the web-caught flies through his tears.

  Malcolm Drye Gets a Call

  The phone rang. Malcolm Drye extracted a handkerchief from the pile on his nightstand and wrapped it around the receiver to lift it. The dust was still settling two days after the quake.

  “Hello?” he inquired sleepily.

  The voice on the other end identified itself as a Chief Inspector Pryor of the City’s Police Department.

  “Yes?” Malcolm was still not quite awake. The temblor and its aftermath had wearied him beyond the normal. “What do you want, Chief Inspector?”

  “Do you have a brother, Quigley Drye?”

  “Yes. I don’t often see Quig, though.”

  “Is it normal for him to wear Chinese Mandarin garb? My Chinese sergeant says it’s from the Qing Dynasty.”

  “I’m not sure of the dynasty, but he frequently wears a red silk robe embroidered with dragons.”

  “May we trouble you, sir, to look at a body? It may or may not be your brother’s.”

  Malcolm sat up. He frowned at his clock, and sighed. Quig had always caused inopportune trouble. “Yes, Chief Inspector. I will come. Where is the body?”

  “We have a makeshift morgue on Pine Street, the 500 block. Just identify yourself to the sergeant at the door. He’ll let you in.”

  Malcolm wrote down the directions, and assured the Chief Inspector he would be there as rapidly as he could. His rapidity was relative; it took Malcolm a half hour to shower, and longer yet to dress in his three-piece dove-gray suit, and even more time to find a clean handkerchief. At the end he had to compromise on his gloves; the left had a tiny smudge on the inner thumb. A corsage, of course, was out of the question. The temblor had interrupted flower deliveries to the City for some days now.

  Malcolm found the makeshift morgue without trouble, and the sergeant passed him in. A silent man in a white coat and trousers, smirched with grime and questionable materials, took Malcolm’s name and address, wrote them down in an old-fashioned ledger, and gestured for Malcolm to follow him.

  Mounds lay on makeshift tables right and left. The room was cavernous, its light dim, and its air chilled. Malcolm extracted his handkerchief, lightly scented with oil of cinnamon, and held it to his nose. Despite the refrigeration, the room reeked of death.

  The man in dirty white consulted his notepad. Then he looked at a tag on a toe, and shook his head. He went a little farther, checked a toe tag again, and nodded. With a dramatic flair his phlegmatic stoicism had never suggested, he threw back the covering sheet. A man’s body, dressed in a scarlet Mandarin gown with embroidered dragons stared sightlessly up at the ceiling. Malcolm looked long at the face.

  “It’s Quig,” he said. “It’s my brother.” The man in white grunted, the first sound he’d made since asking Malcolm’s name and address.

  “Back to the office,” he said to Malcolm. “You can sign for the effects and the body. Find somebody to give him a decent burial.”

  “Thank you,” Malcolm said. “What happened to him?”

  “Earthquake dumped a freeway on him.”

  “Do you have any details about where he was found?”

  “Talk to Chief Inspector. He’ll want to talk to you, anyway.”

  The man in white scribbled in the ledger. “Chief Inspector should be here in a few minutes. Said you was to wait. Wants to go through the effects with you.”

  Malcolm took a seat on the bench along the wall. He clutched the bag the man in white had given him. It was rather heavy. Malcolm dozed while he waited for the Chief Inspector.

  The Chief Inspector called his name several times to wake him.

  “I am Chief Inspector Pryor,” he said, when Malcolm showed signs of consciousness. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “It’s no great loss, Chief Inspector. Quig and I shared a family name and a distant affection for Mother Vera, the woman who raised us. We were not blood kin. After Mother Vera Drye died we had little reason to keep up the family ties. I didn’t like Quig, and he didn’t like me.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “About three years ago we ran into each other on a street corner. We spoke polite helloes, how-are-yous, that sort of thing. Maybe five minutes conversation, in all.”

  “Can you explain why your brother was dressed in Mandarin robes?”

  “Not for sure. He was always fond of conspiracies and disguises, though. He wasn’t quite in his right mind, you see. Where did he die?”

  “Under an overpass leading to the bridge. A piece of concrete struck his head. Probably died instantly.”

  Malcolm chuckled. “Quig often said it would take a real knockout to take him down. He was referring to the gentle sex, of course. Not so concrete an example.”

  Chief Inspector Pryor grimaced. “Will you open the bag of effects?”

  “Certainly.” Malcolm undid the official sealing tape and extracted a wallet, two sets of keys, a comb still carrying hairs and dandruff, a penknife, a money clip with a few dollars, some coins, a lavender notebook, and a Kuanyin statue. He looked up at the Chief Inspector with an inquiring eyebrow raised.

  “It’s the notebook that we question,” the Chief Inspector said. “It’s apparently written in cipher, one we haven’t had time to decode. Can you tell us anything about it?”

  Malcolm opened it. He glanced down a page. “I ca
n decipher it,” he said. “Quig devised this cipher when we were boys. It’s clever, because it’s based on the phonemes of English, not on the alphabet.”

  “What are phonemes?”

  “The sounds that English speakers recognize as individual sounds. Sometimes a phoneme actually includes several related sounds, but the speaker of a particular language only hears one. Makes problems only when one tries to understand a foreign language that has two or more phonemes attached to sounds one’s own language identifies as a single sound.” Malcolm’s tone was dry and lecturing. Chief Inspector Pryor sighed inwardly, remembering dull college lectures.

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “Two. In English, the sound we associate with the letter ‘t’ is actually a group of up to twelve different sounds. Those sounds have separate identities some languages of the Indian subcontinent. Conversely, the sounds ‘l’ and ‘r’ have distinct meaning in English, but sound the same to speakers of Japanese or Chinese, whence the origin of the comic stage pidgin much abused in past centuries.”

  “Oh. I see, I think. Can you read this notebook?”

  “Yes.” Malcolm scanned the first few pages. “This notebook outlines a conspiracy, Chief Inspector. A conspiracy, I’m sorry to say, between Quig and some agent of the Communist Chinese—a certain Fu I.” Malcolm read further.

  “I’m mistaken, Chief Inspector. Fu I is an alternate identity Quig assumed to conspire with a Chinese terrorist. Quig takes great pride in adopting a name meaning ‘Abundant Increase,’ since he hoped to get very rich off this venture. This Kuanyin is part of the