“I know, Gianni, I know.”
“You really have people you can trust?”
“If I didn’t, I’d have been dead or in jail twenty years ago.”
He stroked her hair where it caught the light on the pillow. She smiled at him with that look of nakedness that comes after
great joy, or grief, or terrific sex.
“I have a good feeling about this, Gianni. You’ll see. It’ll be fine. Italy’ll be fine. I love that country. It’s so unbelievably
beautiful. I’m so glad Vittorio chose to go there. Even if we never find him, it’ll be a lovely trip.”
“You should tell Mr. Parillo. He’ll be happy to run your testimonial in his tour ads.”
The room was high in the hotel, and outside, the wind was up, whipping the rain. Lying there with Mary Yung, Gianni Garetsky
could hear it too well, and it had the sound of an angry gale at sea.
Gody
he wanted to ask,
why can’t I just lie in a room and make love to a woman with no thought reaching past her and the four sides of a bed?
In the morning, Mary Yung called Jimmy Lee’s private number from an outside phone.
“Your eminence,” she said.
“My day has already reached its zenith,” he told her in the same gently mocking Cantonese. “I’ve heard your voice. What’s
left for me to look forward to?”
“Seeing me for a few moments in person. If I dare presume on your time with so bold a suggestion.”
“I can’t believe my good fortune,” said Jimmy Lee. “At this moment I’m literally trembling with it.”
Mary Yung laughed. “Don’t get carried away, Jimmy. If it’s all right, I’ll be there in about half an hour.”
“I doubt if I’ll be able to wait that long.”
“Please try,” she told him.
Mary hung up and stared out at the rain, still falling heavily after almost ten hours. It was one of those New York downpours
that seem created to either wash the city clean of its sins or sweep it into its surrounding rivers. When she saw a cab heading
for the curb to discharge a passenger, she dashed for it in time to beat out several slower-moving, less-determined men. She
could feel her nerves wriggling at the prospect of what lay ahead for her. A web was being spun and she was at its center.
It was her own web, of course, and she was doing the spinning. But she was hung there just the same, and the threads could
get dangerously sticky.
Jimmy Lee lived and worked high in a soaring tower on the tip of lower Manhattan, where even the summer breezes sounded carnivorous
and the views of the Lady in the Harbor could tear your heart.
Each time Mary was there, she responded with the same curious mixture of wonder, reverence, and fear.
She sensed it again this morning as she stepped out of Lee’s private tower elevator and was greeted by a polite, impeccably
dark-suited young Asian who could have been interchangeable with any one of a dozen others who had greeted her there before.
And the feeling grew as she followed him along a wide, gently curving corridor, past large quiet rooms filled with desks and
glowing computer screens at which other, equally anonymous Asians were at work.
A long way from the rice paddies,
thought Mary Yung.
Then her escort showed her into Lee’s private quarters, bowed formally, and closed the door behind him as he left.
Suddenly she was alone and there was a change of mood as exact as the moment of entering a place of the distant past, some
ancient Confucian temple with Oriental screens, antique wall hangings, and the aroma of burning incense.
There was very little light in the room. It made Mary Yung feel vaguely disconnected from herself and everything around her.
Until she sensed a presence like the ghost of a dead emperor, and saw Jimmy Lee sitting on a kind of carved teak throne in
the shadows, watching her.
“Master,” she said, and stood waiting with bowed head until he rose, came forward, and gently raised her chin.
They stood looking at each other.
Tall for an Asian, Lee appeared even taller in an ankle-length Mandarin robe.
“You keep growing,” Mary told him.
“Only in your mind. In truth, I’m afraid I’ve entered my shrinking season. I must remember my posture.” He smiled with perfectly
capped teeth, a slender, smooth-faced man of indeterminate age who could have been anything from thirty to fifty. “But you
do keep growing more beautiful.”
He bent and kissed her lips… lightly, barely touching her. Then he slowly pulled away.
“Still soft as a bird’s feather,” she said. “I won’t break, you know.”
“So you keep telling me.”
“Then why won’t you take more?”
“I’m still waiting for our wedding night.”
“And what if I’m dead before that ever arrives?”
Gravely, Jimmy Lee considered both her and her question.
“Then I’ll mourn you until I die, and take you as I do now. In my nightly fantasies.”
“While you do yourself?”
“What better way?” Jimmy laughed. “You do go right for the heart of things, don’t you?”
“One of us has to.”
Abruptly taking Lee’s hand, Mary Yung led him back to his private throne and sat him down. Then she went back to the door
through which she had entered the room, and turned the key in the lock.
“Don’t do it, Mary.” His voice was soft, but there was a sudden edge to it.
“How do you know what I’m going to do?”
“Because I know
you. ”
“If that’s true, then you also know how I feel about people giving me orders.”
“This is about more than just
your
feelings.”
Mary Yung stood in silence for a moment, wanting something that didn’t have a name. She went to where Lee was sitting, pressed
her lips against his ear, and kissed him.
“Be nice, Jimmy.”
Then she moved a few steps back and began taking off her clothes.
She did it slowly, deliberately, a single piece at a time, letting each one drop at her feet.
A few strands of hair fell across her eyes, and she stared at Lee through them. She felt his eyes on her and heard the sound
of his breathing. It was the only sound in the room. The walls and ceiling might have been breathing with Jimmy Lee.
Finally, Mary Yung stood naked before him.
The air, cool against her skin, raised her nipples, and Jimmy’s eyes went to them as though drawn there.
She stood absolutely still, hands hanging loosely at her sides. She, Jimmy Lee, everything around them felt delicately balanced.
It seemed dangerous to move.
Until her hands moved.
Jimmy’s eyes widened.
He watched her hands as she licked her fingers and touched herself.
He groaned softly. The sound was that of a man in the farthest reaches of pain.
Mary Yung watched and listened, knowing she had him now, very nearly able to feel him in her.
Better yet, she knew what
he
was feeling.
Her body stirred, flowed with sensation, and she carried him up with her. Slowly. Letting it all drift along the edge. Not
wanting him to go off quite yet.
Then their eyes met, so that even apart she had him held fast, circling him. While his eyes went blank with an old darkness.
“Mary!”
Her name was the only word he spoke.
They lay close to one another, but not touching, on Jimmy Lee’s near priceless Oriental rug.
He said softly, “You must want something very badly from me this morning.”
“Why? Because I dared presume to bring you a few moments of joy?”
Lee stared at the ceiling. “Just tell me what you want.”
“When you want to, you can be really hateful, can’t you?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve never taken well to being manipulated.”
“The key was always in the door. All you had to do was walk over, turn it, and leave.”
“That’s what makes it even worse.” He turned his head to look at her. “But that’s my problem, not yours. So please tell me
what I can do for you.”
She needed a moment as a buffer.
“I must have two clean passports, two drivers’ licenses, and a couple of major credit cards.”
“For whom?”
“Myself and someone you don’t know.”
“A man?”
“Yes.”
Lee raised himself to a sitting position. “You’re going to leave the country with him?”
“It’s not what you think. We’re under the gun.”
“How seriously?”
“Very.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“It’s better that I don’t,” she said, and could almost see his mind sniffing and picking at it.
Jimmy Lee nodded. “Of course. I remember now. You wanted the attorney general’s private number.”
Mary Yung was silent. Suddenly chilled, she rose from the rug and began putting on her clothes. Lee studied her, his eyes
flat. Something seemed to circle inside him. Then it surfaced.
“You don’t have to run,” he said. “I can protect you.”
“Not from this. There’s too much breakage.”
“I’ll fix whatever’s broken.”
She sighed. “God, I love your confidence.”
“I’d rather you loved
me. ”
“I do.” She worked into her blouse. “In my own way.”
“Then stop all this craziness and marry me.”
Mary laughed. “
Marry?
I can’t believe some of your compulsions. Your heart’s in a time warp. It’s a hundred years behind your brain.”
He just looked at her.
“Ah, Jimmy. If I did marry you, I’d only end up hating you. And you, me.”
“I’m willing to risk it.”
“Well, I’m not. You’d smother me blue in a month. Then we’d lose even the little we have.”
Buttoning her blouse, she considered him where he sat on the floor.
“Talk about craziness,” she said. “You can have me anytime you want and won’t so much as touch me. Yet you walk around with
this marriage bug up your ass like some tight-lipped virgin in need of sanctity.”
Jimmy Lee sat there, insulated in silence.
“Explain
that
one, Buster.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I only know I want more from you than just another perfectly put together piece of flesh. I can pick
those up by the thousand. They grow wild in the streets. It’s the rest of you I want and can’t get and can’t find anywhere
else.”
“What’s so special about the rest of me?”
They stared at each other as though stuck in space.
“You really don’t know, do you?” he said.
Mary shook her head.
“A terminal soreness of the heart,” Jimmy Lee told her. “The only kind that really disdains the pleasures of the flesh but
tries to heal itself by touching others.”
Mary Yung’s eyes were mocking. “Does that mean I use sex for something more than just getting what I want?”
“Loosely, yes.”
“And that appeals to you?”
“I cannot begin to tell you how much.”
“Good. I’m in favor of whatever works.”
Mary put on her skirt and picked her purse off a chair. “So what about the stuff I need? You going to help me with it, or
what?”
“When have I ever refused you?”
“I appreciate it.”
She took an envelope from her purse and gave it to Lee. In it were photographs taken earlier that morning of her and Gianni
Garetsky in full disguise.
“You’ll need these,” she said.
Jimmy Lee looked at Garetsky, complete with gray hairpiece, moustache, and horn-rimmed glasses.
“This is the man you’re running away from me with?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way.”
“What does he really look like?”
“Clean shaven, no glasses or gray hair, and about twenty years younger.”
“Who is he?”
Mary shook her head.
“What did you two do?”
She hesitated, then shrugged. “Between the two of us, we seem to have caused five FBI agents to disappear.”
Jimmy stared at her. “Only five?”
“Please. No more questions.”
He was now studying Mary’s picture. It showed her with the curly Kewpie Doll wig, which she had quickly taken off and stuffed
in her purse the moment she entered his elevator.
“It doesn’t improve you.”
“That wasn’t its purpose.”
Lee got up from the floor, stood tall beside Mary Chan Yung, and straightened his long silk robe.
“I don’t understand this entire thing,” he said.
“You aren’t supposed to.”
“I’ve been running what amounts to about a billion-dollar operation for more than ten years,” Lee said. “Most of it violates
federal laws of one sort or another. Yet not a single government agent has ever ended up any the worse for it.”
“What would you like? A good conduct medal?”
“I’d just like to know why you and your friend should have had to get rid of five feds.” Jimmy Lee snapped his fingers. “Just
like that.”
Mary took a deep breath. “It was simple. To keep
them
from getting rid of
us.
That was the choice we had. And that’s the last I’m going to say about it.”
She picked up the completed paper and plastic from Jimmy Lee early the next afternoon.
Every piece was letter perfect.
His last kiss remained, as always, light as a feather.
“You take care now,” he said in what was very near to a whisper. “You’re the only truly irreplaceable piece of work I’ve ever
known.”
On her way back to the hotel, Mary Yung stopped at a public phone and made her second call to the Washington, D.C., number
of Henry Durning’s private secretary.
“Attorney General Durning’s office,” said the secretary’s voice. “Miss Berkely speaking.”
“Hello, Miss Berkely. We’ve spoken before. Would you please tell the attorney general it’s Vittorio’s friend, and he has to
get on the line in under thirty seconds or I’m out of here.”
This time Henry Durning took the call in exactly seventeen seconds.
“Miss Yung?”
“A brief update, Mr. Durning. We’re getting closer, so I just want to lay out the deal. It’s an even million and it has to
be deposited in a numbered Swiss account when I have the information. Are you still interested? Just yes or no, please.”
“Yes.”
The answer was instant, without hesitation.
“You’ll hear from me soon,” Mary said, and hung up.