She leaned back in her chair, arms crossed, her lips pursed in thought.
This question of Sullivan’s whereabouts intrigued Noriko, if only because it coincided with certain other peculiarities about the Kiran Group and its recent exports that Sword’s routine monitoring of the company had brought to her attention… including shipments of the cultured sapphire she’d pretended to be vague about. But the mind was always quick to put the odd information it gathered in neat, orderly compartments, sorting things away like someone with a neatness fetish driven to fits by a misplaced article of clothing. Reality was far too disorganized for her to fall victim to that tendency.
No, she’d taught herself to be guided by the facts, and would need to turn up many more of them in her probe of Kiran before she drew so much as a single inference or conclusion.
Tied into knots of frustration that made his back and shoulders ache, Lenny decided he’d stretch his lunch hour and walk a few blocks over to Chinatown to purchase his nerve medicine from Yan.
The Snow Mountain Mart on Canal Street was a multistoried Far Eastern emporium that had been a neighborhood fixture seemingly forever, its shelves, counters, and clothes racks displaying imported goods in astonishing quantities — a wild and colorful diversity of curios, kimonos, furniture, bedding, beaded curtains, bird cages, parasols, Chinese lanterns, enormous ceremonial masks and paper dragons, miniature jade Buddhas and crystal lotus vases, incense and incense burners, chopsticks and chopstick holders, bamboo steamers, electric rice cookers, green tea sold loose by the ounce, soap bars wrapped together in packages of several dozen, folk instruments, electric guitars, harmonicas, noisemakers, nail clippers, nose-hair trimmers, magnifying glasses, portable CD players, personal pagers, radar detectors, cameras, film, generic batteries… lots of batteries… name the item, there was a decent chance you’d find it somewhere in stock.
Today Lenny had found Yan in his usual spot at the end of a cluttered aisle of herbal remedies around the corner from the music and video department. A bald, bespectacled guy in his seventies, Yan always wore a long white frock unbuttoned over his slight paunch. Lenny had been paying him occasional visits for maybe five, six years, but wasn’t absolutely sure if Yan was his first or last name. Lenny was likewise unsure whether the white coat signified he was a doctor or pharmacist, although he didn’t find the blurred distinction between those professions in traditional Asian health care to be problematic. It hadn’t been so different in America once upon a time, when drugstore owners had maintained a close caregiving relationship with their patrons. They had recommended treatments, prescribed medications and tonics, and compounded dosages by hand with mortar and pestle. This had eventually pricked the competitive sensibilities of profiteering pharmaceutical companies, raised jealous territorial growls from the American Medical Association, and been raw meat for the slavering jaws of personal-injury litigators. Lenny, for his part, thought the pressures these interests brought to bear upon the Western druggist had reduced him to little more than a human pill dispenser. Nowadays he didn’t know one customer from another. He poured brand-name medications from big bottles into smaller bottles, put the smaller bottles into a bag, stapled it shut, and rang up the sale on the register. Ka-ching, next customer.
When it came to getting relief for minor ails and emotional distress, Lenny preferred taking his chances here at Snow Mountain. So what if his favorite practitioner was a Mr. Yan, Doctor Yan, Citizen Yan, or just plain Yan, as he asked to be called? Lenny hadn’t the foggiest notion whether he was even licensed. He couldn’t for a million bucks have positively identified the ingredients that went into the concoctions Yan formulated behind his counter. But they seemed to work okay. Far as he knew, they hadn’t been contaminated with the SARS virus. And at least Yan didn’t forget his face between return visits.
“So,” Yan said now. He’d gotten up off his stool the moment he saw Lenny arrive and started whipping together his usual preparation, hand-measuring something dried and wrinkled — bark shavings? slivers of aged roots? — into a paper plate from an apothecary jar. “How you feel?”
Lenny considered. Yan demanded honest answers from his patients.
“Doing my best.” He nodded at the paper plate. “I’m thinking I need a stronger blend this time around.”
Yan glanced at him over the frame of his eyeglasses.
“No,” he said.
“Come on, Yan. I’ve got serious stuff on my mind. Been extra nervous—”
A vehement head shake.
“You always tell me same thing,” Yan said. “This strong enough. Put half teaspoon in cup hot water. Three minutes. When water turn color of urine, you sip.”
“How about I let it sit a little longer—?”
“Three minutes. Urine color. Sip.”
Lenny gnawed the inside of his cheek. Wasn’t anybody willing to budge an inch for him today?
“There’s light urine and dark urine,” he said with a kind of childish defiance.
“Hmmm?” Yan scooped from a second deep glass jar, mixed.
“I’m just saying you never really told me how strong the brew should be.” Lenny already felt asinine. “What shade of urine to shoot for—”
“Healthy color urine.” Yan didn’t look a bit annoyed or distracted. He pulled another apothecary jar from the shelf, reached in for some brown powder, tossed it into the paper plate, added a tacky substance from a drawer below the counter top, stirred the entire preparation with his bare fingers, and then poured it into a Ziploc. “This only let you relax. Not forget.”
Lenny’s brow wrinkled as Yan passed the plastic bag over the counter.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
“You have problem, better solve it,” Yan said.
Her phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Jesus Christ, it’s about time you picked up.”
“I wasn’t here. It makes me crazy, staying home. Staring at the four walls. Waiting. I had to do something.”
“Did you check your machine? I must’ve left half a dozen messages on it this morning.”
“I just walked in the door, Tony. I’ve still got my coat on—”
“You said you did something. Like what? What is it you finally went out and did?”
“Look, I wish you’d give me some breathing room. Maybe try to understand a little of what I’m going through.”
“Okay, okay. I didn’t meant to jump at you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“No, I mean it. Honestly. But you have to understand, Pat’s like my own brother—”
“That’s why you should understand my feelings. You of all people, Tony. None of this is my fault. I love him. I’ve got a daughter who’s asking where he’s gone. Try putting yourself in my shoes.”
“I’m trying.”
“Sure.”
“I am, believe me. But when you say you went out to do something, and then don’t bother explaining… ”
“God damn it, Tony. God damn it. Everything’s a vicious circle with you. It’s like, ‘I’m sorry, fuck you, I’m not sorry.’ All in one breath, it comes out of your mouth. You’ll say anything to me until you get what you want.”
“I’m only trying to find out if you went to the police.”
“No. I didn’t. Is that enough for you? So I can maybe take my coat off—”
“You need to talk to them.”
“Shit. Here we go again.”
“Just listen…”
“I have. A hundred times. And for the hundredth time, I’m telling you I can’t.”
“Then what’s your plan? To keep checking out that information about towed vehicles on the Internet? You’re even too afraid to dial that number where you get a real person on the line. I mean, it’s like a compulsion at this stage. The Internet. It doesn’t accomplish anything. Nobody’s claimed the fucking car after a week, a whole goddamn week, and you have to talk to somebody—”