Walking Shadow

"He saw the local official, who arranges such things. He sent Liang to Hong Kong, and then to Bangkok. From Bangkok, Liang flew to Nicaragua. He went in a truck to Vera Cruz, Mexico, and went on a boat to the United States."

"Where'd he land?" I said.

"Liang was brought ashore in a small boat at night in Port City.

He stayed there for a week and then came to Boston. The trip took him three months."

We were standing in the dismal kitchen, with the steady drip of the leaky faucet the only sound other than our voices. Several cockroaches scuttled across the one countertop and disappeared behind the stove. I looked at Liang. He smiled politely.

"Three months," I said.

"Some it takes much longer," Mei Ling said.

"They have to stop each place and work. Some have to smuggle narcotics, or go back and smuggle others in to pay for their passage. If there are women, they often have to be prostitutes to pay."

"Does he know the name of the man in Port City in charge of the smuggling?"

She spoke to Liang. Liang shook his head.

"He says he doesn't," Mei Ling said.

"You believe him?"

"I don't know," Mei Ling said.

"But I know he will not tell you."

"Lo

Liang looked blank.

"Of course it is," I said.

"We all know it. But even if Liang would tell me it was, he wouldn't say so in court."

"Yes, sir," Mei Ling said.

"That is true."

I looked around me.

"This was originally a studio apartment," I said.

"Now ten men live here."

"Yes, sir."

I shook my head. I wanted to say something about how this wasn't the way it should be. But I knew too much and had lived too long to start talking now about "should."

"Send me your huddled masses," I said.

"Yearning to breathe free."

CHAPTER 37

Most of the people who came to Brant Island, north of Port City, did so in the daytime, and came to watch birds. They crossed the narrow causeway in the sunshine and went to the rustic gazebo with their binoculars and waited to catch sight of a bird they'd never seen before.

It was deep black when we came. And cold. Vi

"How can he see?" Mei Ling said to Hawk.

"Off a nine-volt alkaline battery in the handle," Hawk said. I glanced at him. Like that explained it. He gri

"What does he expect to learn here?" Mei Ling said.

She didn't address me directly because in her view I was busy, and shouldn't be interrupted. The result was that she talked about me as if I weren't there.

"Won't know," Hawk said, "till we see it."

"But to come out here every night and watch the ocean. They might not come for weeks."

"They might not," Hawk said.

"They might have showed up the first night," I said.

The surface of the water was never still, alternately engorged and prolapsed, smoothing, ruffling, cresting as it came to shore, until the waves fragmented on the rocks, and yet always waves forming and coming on, always changing, always the same… Maybe two hundred yards out on the dark ocean, dark against the dark sky, was the opaque silhouette of a ship. There was no arrival. It simply appeared in the lens and sat motionless. I took the scope down and handed it to Hawk.

"On the horizon," I said, "about one o'clock."

Hawk looked, swept the scope slowly along the horizon and stopped and made a small adjustment and held.

"Yessiree bob," he said in a flat, midwestern twang. Hawk could sound like anyone he wanted to. He handed the scope to Mei Ling.

"On the horizon," he said.

"Around where one o'clock would be if it were a clock face."

Mei Ling looked. It took her a minute, but she found it. She seemed thrilled.

"Doesn't have to be smuggling immigrants," I said.

"No, it doesn't," Hawk said.

We waited in the darkness and the wind and the cold with the waves moving below us. We took turns looking through the glass, and then, finally, we heard the soft thump of an engine. We couldn't find it until it was close and then we picked it up. It was a wide flat launch open to the elements with the engine housing in the middle of the boat. Crowded tight into it were people. The engine thump was the only sound the boat made. The people were silent. The boat bumped in close to the rocks, so close that I could see the buffer bags that the crew tossed over to fend off the rocks. The boat motor kept ru

We stayed motionless in the gazebo, watching the dark figures in the night, only a few yards away. They were barely visible. No one spoke. They moved in a single file along the rocks and up onto the causeway. Someone led them across the causeway. There might have been a hundred of them. When the last of them scrambled up the rocks, the launch backed away and moved slowly parallel to the shore, south around the point opposite Brant Island and out of sight. I looked through the scope at the horizon. The ship was gone. I glanced at the causeway. The people were gone.

The cove below Brant Island was empty and soundless except for the ocean, which was ceaseless.

All of us were quiet as if in the aftermath of a somber ritual we neither sought nor understood. The ghostly procession drifting soundless and phantasmagoric through the near-lightless night seemed more than merely illegal immigrants, though surely they were that. There was something antediluvian in the spectral progress from the sea to the shore and into the darkness that all three of us must have felt though none of us spoke of it.

"The last boat from Xanadu," I said.

CHAPTER 38

When I went through my office mail I always made a pile of mail that I intended to open, a pile of the bills to be paid on the thirtieth of the month, and threw away the junk mail unopened. There was always a lot of junk mail. There was a package wrapped in brown paper, with no return address on it. It had been addressed in green ink, and been mailed in Boston two days prior. I put it in the mail-to-be-opened pile.