“That’s nice to know,” said Wooten, her smile showing faintly again. “What would a high-risk individual be like?”
“They would be like the ladies and gentlemen who render oral sex to guys around the bridge plazas downtown. Prostitutes in general. Barmaids. Cocktail waitresses. Drug users and pushers. Promiscuous people. Party people. We expect these folks to get hit on by wackos. My assumption going in is that you don’t indulge in that sort of behavior.”
Marlene paused, raising an eyebrow, open to a confession, not that she expected one at this stage. Yet something had passed across Edie Wooten’s face as she recounted this list. A vagrant fear? Sadness? Marlene was about to ask a sharper question when the door to the music room opened. It was the Dutch violinist.
“Felix and I are off, Edie,” he announced in a mild, faintly accented voice. Wooten rose and offered a formal European embrace, linked arms with him and carried him into the other room, where she presumably said farewell to the other member of the trio, whom Marlene had not yet seen. In a few minutes she was back. She seemed to be having difficulty switching between her world, the realm of delight, art, and comfort, and the dreadful city Marlene had begun to sketch for her. Marlene had seen this reaction before. In fact, she could predict what the woman was about to say next.
“I suppose I’m having a hard time dealing with all this, Marlene. I mean, why me?”
“Yes, everyone says that,” said Marlene. “Why cancer, why car crashes? It happened, it’s happening. To you. The only question is, do you want to do something about it?”
Wooten sat on the sofa and rubbed her face. “What would you suggest?” she asked.
“Well, the first thing is, as I mentioned, you have to keep anything he gives you and give it to me. I’ll need a list of people who have access to your personal space-building workers, stagehands, record people, musicians, friends and relatives.”
“Will you have to bother my family?”
“Not at all. I just need a sense of who’s around you, who can get to you. They’ll need to be eliminated, and if they are, we’ll know we’re dealing with a true stranger. If so, I can work up a security plan. The point, by the way, is not to have you live your life under guard. The point is to find this guy and get him to stop.”
“However will you do that?” Wooten asked with interest.
Marlene grinned. “We have our methods,” she said in a German accent.
Edie Wooten returned the grin. She really had, Marlene thought, the most marvelous disposition. “No, really,” Wooten said, “how do you?”
“Really?” said Marlene. She shrugged. “It depends. Usually I talk to them. I reason with them.”
“And it works?”
“Oh, yes,” said Marlene confidently. “I have a very forceful personality.”
Lucy Karp wandered through the edges of Chinatown, growing colder, hungrier, and more miserable with each passing hour. Twice she started back to school, and twice she stopped, unwilling to contemplate the uproar that would be made over her defection: Mrs. Lawrence would have her piece of skin and then the chief gorgon, Ms. Lee, the principal, and then, worst of all, her mother would be called and come to school and all three of them would stare at her, and of course, she would have missed math and fallen even further behind.
Illness was her only hope, she concluded, a long, lingering debility that would baffle medical science-and excuse her permanently from long division. A stomach ailment would be best, she thought. Her stomach actually did ache, for it was now past her lunchtime, and her lunch was still in its box in her cubby back at school, and all she had in her parka pocket was a nickel and two pennies. She would have to upchuck, naturally, to make it convincing; then she could run back to school red faced, weeping, with vomit all over her, and say she had wandered away under the influence of a strange disease that had affected her brains and …
However, if there was one thing she couldn’t bear to do, it was puke, so she would have to really work at it. What was needed was some actual vomit to serve as an exemplar-the sight and smell would work their magic on her gut. Fortunately, finding street messes was rarely a problem in lower Manhattan.
So Lucy trod the crowded streets, looking in the gutters and in doorways, finding a good array of nauseating venues, including one bloated, stinking rat. She was gagging, well sickened, but still unable to bring up the necessary evidence. By this time she was on Canal Street, a familiar stretch. She caught sight of Tranh’s noodle shop, and at this sight, redolent of those precious afternoons with her mother, Lucy experienced the first sympathetic mental pang. As a result of her mother’s profession, there must have been few children of her age in New York as thoroughly indoctrinated as Lucy was in the dangers of kidnapping and as vividly aware of what losing a child meant. Her eyes stung with tears; she ran in desperate little circles, moaning. At last she sat on the curb and wept.
All this Tranh observed through the window of his shop. He came out and squatted down next to Lucy and said in rusty Cantonese, “Little Sister, what is the matter? Why are you crying?”
“Because-because,” answered the child in the same language, amidst the blubbering, “I ran away from school.”
“Wah! You ran away? Did they mean to beat you?”
“No,” answered Lucy. “I was afraid I could not do my lesson. I am a very stupid girl, and I feared to lose face in front of my friends. Now I am disgraced forever.”
Tranh pulled free the white towel that he habitually kept stuck in his waistband and gave it to Lucy. “It may not be as bad as that,” he said. “Forever is a long time. Wipe your face and come inside. First I will give you some soup with winter melon, noodles, and ham. Then we will think together about your difficulty.”
“I have no money,” said Lucy, rising, her stomach rumbling at the mention of food.
“That does not matter,” said Tranh. “You are a good customer.”
The school called Marlene’s office shortly before noon, and the answering service forwarded the call to her beeper. Edie Wooten showed her to a phone and went into the music room to play some Mozart to improve her mood. She had entered only a minute or so into that sunlit, ordered world when she heard Marlene shrieking from the other room. She put down her bow and went to see what the commotion was about. She found Marlene in the act of slamming down the phone. Her face was dead white, including the lips, which had formed a rigid line beneath flaring nostrils. Bolts shot from her eyes. She looked like a Medusa on a Renaissance medallion.
“Is something wrong?” Edie asked.
Marlene seemed to look through her. Then she took a long breath and said, “No. Actually, yes. A domestic thing. In any case, I have to go. I’ll be in touch. Work on that list of contacts. And don’t worry!”
Then she was gone.
Outside the building, Marlene did not wait for the doorman to whistle down a cab, but ran out into Park and waylaid one in full motion. It screamed off, with Marlene flapping twenties in the driver’s face.
From his vantage across the broad avenue, the Music Lover watched Marlene leave. He knew who she was and what she was doing in Edith Wooten’s building. He was much vexed. Whistling the opening theme from Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in B-flat, he got into his car and drove off to the south.
Lucy finished her soup and brought the empty bowl to the counter. She sat on a stool while several customers came and picked up cartoned take-out orders of noodles. When the place was empty again, Tranh lit a cigarette and regarded his guest solemnly. He said, “Now we must decide what to do. The school must by now have found you are missing. They will call your mother. Can you imagine what she will think?”