“Temple Barr, Maylords local PR rep, wishes to speak with you. I know it’s early and-”
“The efficiently compact redhead,” came the clipped voice from beyond the door. “Fascinating hair color, if it’s natural. Red
is the color of power. Our affairs could use an injection of power. Send her in.”
Pritchard lifted her eyebrows to indicate the high level of honor bestowed on Temple, then turned one doorknob and pushed Temple through the crack in the doors, rather like tossing a virgin sacrifice into the yawning crater of a volcano.
“Pray you’re not a Miss Clairol redhead,” Pritchard advised in farewell. “Ms. Wong loathes fakes.”
Temple, genuine to her roots and often decrying it, swept past the statuesque dark guardian goddess called Pritchard into Amelia Wong’s lair.
The first thing to hit her was sound: falling water and clashing crystals and temple bells.
The next was the dim light. Shadow.
The third was smell. A delicate scent of … orange blossoms. Odd. Temple saw nothing to give off that scent. She smelled something else, a discreet incense of warmed underarm deodorant. And something intangible.
Amelia Wong, she realized, was afraid. Deathly afraid.
Oddly, that bucked Temple right up. If someone as rich and powerful as feng shui’s Wizard of Ahs was cowering behind a metaphysically protective curtain, maybe she, Temple, had the right shui and the right stuff to put things, well, right.
She’d done it before.
Ms. Wong, wearing a pale jade satin pantsuit, sat on a crimson couch that reminded Temple of Matt’s vintage model of
similar hue.
She looked youthfully delicate in the shadowed light, yet as stiff as a Chinese tapestry. Scared was the Western word that came to mind. Scared stiff.
She looked up as Temple entered.
“In the holy mountains of Tibet,” she said, “in the mystical mountains of Tibet, lies the inspiration for the Western fairy tale called Shangri-La. You know of what I speak?.”
Temple nodded. She’d seen the Ronald Colman movie once, ages ago. And it had been ages old when she’d seen it. And the mystical name had since been appropriated for stage use by one of what were amounting to Temple’s many mortal enemies.
“Sit.”
The only seat anywhere near Amelia Wong was a pile of three silk pillows, one purple, one orange, and one yellow.
Temple kicked off her heels and sat. She sank into down feathers like she sank into a Gangsters limo’s leather upholstery.
One was Eastern luxe, one Western, and they were more kissing cousins than they knew.
Amelia Wong continued to speak, her voice high and strained, and yet meditative.
“It’s shameful that the current Chinese government persecutes the Tibetans. Governments, Western or Eastern, always persecute the philosophical, the visionary.”
Temple remained silent.
“In Tibet, where once the Dalai Lamas thrived before being driven out, there was a breed of temple guard dog: small, longhaired, tenacious. It was forbidden that their divine breed be allowed to proliferate anywhere else. Then, in the 1930s, a Westerner smuggled two out. A breeding pair.”
Temple felt herself tense. Once again the Ugly American had ripped off an alien culture.
“The culprit,” Amelia Wong went on, “was British.”
Humph! A Brit at the bottom of it. So there, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair and Bonnie Prince Charles!
“The new breed became known throughout the West as the Tibetan terrier.”
At these words, two long, low dogs trailing golden hair came romping into the room.
“Lhasa apsos.” Amelia Wong laughed as their exuberance lapped at her hot, hose-clad ankles. (Temple had sworn off pantyhose since moving to Las Vegas two years ago.)
“They are friendly, loyal, stubborn, and surprisingly lethal when defending their turf, or their substitute Dalai Lamas. Their jaws are short, but their spirits are as tall as the mountains. I would hate to fall down amid them if I had harmed their master. Or mistress. I call them Tibetan staple guns, but I suspect in another culture they might be considered canine piranha.”
Three more of the dogs had come thronging around Temple, no doubt scenting Midnight Louie. Their eyes were hidden by Veronica Lake falls of long, blond hair, but their black button noses were patent-leather slick. Their small, smiling mouths showed teeth as small and sharp as miniature mountain ranges.
Seeing Amelia Wong with her dogs instantly humanized her.
“Your point?” an emboldened Temple asked.
“You have the heart of a Tibetan terrier.”
Temple took that for a compliment. “I’m just an American mutt,” she began.
“You were the only woman to take action when that gangster began shooting up Maylords. Almost the only one at all.” “Shucks,” Temple began. “The other was the dance man.”
Temple nodded.
“He is gay.”
Temple nodded.
“Yin and yang together. The fish who swims east and the fish who swims west.” Amelia Wong lifted a circle of black and white jade on a golden chain.
Temple had always liked the symbolic black-white curved shapes nestled in a circle, but she’d always thought of them as sperm with eyes rather than fish. She also knew the black was the yin or female, passive principle and the white was the male, active principle. It was here that Temple parted ways with Asian mysticism. Way too stereotyped, although she understood that it was more complex than simply he Tarzan, she Jane.
Amelia Wong fingered the image as she continued to consider the dramatis personae of the Night the Lights Went Out in Maylords.
“Another who moved was the blond man who worried about you. The one who looked so like the Maylord’s interior designer. I thought it was the Maylord’s man at first, but then realized this man was a guest.”
Temple nodded, more guardedly this time.
“He broadcasts most interesting chi, that man who came to your aid. Mystical, but austere. I would love to redecorate his rooms. (So would Temple thought.) What is he?”
“A radio counselor.”
When Temple hesitated, Amelia Wong’s black eyes snapped at her. “His past is deeper than that.”
“A former priest,” Temple admitted.
Wong nodded, satisfied somehow.
“The third man, who actually found the light board and gave us all the gift of darkness, he bears a dark aura himself. Yet you know him and he knows you. Who is he?”
“A … former policeman.”
“You know many in transition. Perhaps it’s because you are too. This last man is utter yang. But you have strong yang as well as yin. So. It was no accident that the four of you acted in concert.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Danny Dove is used to ordering lights on and off. Rafi Nadir once lived for civic duty. And I have an incurable meddling streak-”
“And the blond ex-priest has an incurable need to bestow salvation,” Amelia Wong finished. “I am a multinational corporation,” she continued. “I am a brand name. It doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in the philosophy I market, that markets me.
Down, Taj!”
As one dog obeyed, the other milling Lhasa apsos all settled on their stomachs, waves of blond hair pooling around them.
“Four people in action that night,” Amelia Wong summed up. “The fifth was the shooter. And then,” she said, focusing the full power of her incredibly dark eyes on Temple, “the sixth one I sensed but could not see. The Stealthy One. Your personal yang protector in midnight black. I felt him in the dark.”
Temple felt her forearms bubble with goose bumps. Was it possible Max had been there?
Or Midnight Louie?
“You know to whom I refer.”
Temple nodded. She wasn’t sure which one … Could Max have been there unseen that night? Of course. He wasn’t a magician for nothing. And Midnight Louie? She remembered the spidery flick of hair over her cheek. Matt’s hair, as he leaned over her? Or Louie’s whiskers? Or Max moving past, unseen, but touching her. Max often managed that, somehow.