Summer of the Dragon, page 3
By that time I was mad at Hank again. He had said someone would meet me, but there was nobody at the gate, nobody at the baggage pickup, though I waited till the last suitcase rolled through, and everybody else had left.
Normally I can get everything essential to my happi-ness (well, almost everything) into a backpack, but this time Mother had insisted on helping me pack. I’d slipped half the items she gave me under the bed when she wasn’t looking. Even so, I had ended up with a good-sized suitcase in addition to my pack.
Summer of the Dragon / 27
I dragged this load back to the information desk.
There was no message for D.J. Abbott.
The terminal building in Phoenix is really pretty.
There’s a big exotic mural of the fictitious bird which the city is named after, and a stand loaded with flowers, and the usual little shops. I investigated them all. The merchandise was tourist stuff, but it was fun; with Hank Hunnicutt’s advance burning a hole in my pocket I was feeling affluent, so I blew thirty bucks on a silver ring labeled “genuine Indian made.” The bezel was in the shape of an owl made out of pieces of shell, with one little bit of turquoise for a tail.
I had a cup of coffee and then I went back to the information counter. Still no message. Then I got mad.
I grabbed my bags and marched toward the exit and reeled, literally, as the heat hit me like a fist in the face.
I reeled forward, into the fender of a car that was parked in front of the door, in flagrant violation of the signs.
It was a Rolls Royce. I didn’t recognize it, of course; I don’t have much to do with cars like that. I found out what it was later. All I noticed then was that it was black, with a silver hood ornament and door handles and the like. I don’t mean silver-colored, I mean silver.
I didn’t know that at first either.
I didn’t pay much attention to the car. Leaning against the back fender—I had staggered into the front fender, several miles away—was the hand 28 / Elizabeth Peters
somest male I had seen since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
This person was dark: black hair and eyes, skin so bronzed he might have been part Indian. The coppery shade was not restricted to his hands and face. His shirt was open all the way to his belt, displaying beautiful ripply muscles. His arms were folded. His ankles were crossed. He looked completely relaxed, except for his face, which was set in an expression of freezing disapproval. He had a handsome drooping black mustache that made him look like a Spanish pirate. He was gorgeous.
I will always be a peasant at heart. It never occurred to me that the car and the beautiful man might be mine, if only temporarily. I collected my bags and my wits and started to walk away.
“Hold it,” said the apparition of male loveliness.
I held it.
“Your name Abbott?”
I nodded.
Without uncrossing his ankles the man extended one arm and opened the back door of the car.
“Toss your stuff in here.”
I am ashamed to say that I started to do it. Forgive me, Betty Friedan. I’m just a pushover for a handsome face.
“Hold it,” I repeated, as much to myself as to him.
“Your name?”
Summer of the Dragon / 29
“Tom De Karsky.”
“Ah,” I dropped my suitcase, folded my arms, and smiled. “Mr. Hunnicutt’s chauffeur, I presume? May I ask why the Hades you didn’t meet me inside—or at least leave a message?”
“I did leave a message. I presume the fools lost it, they usually do. What are you standing there for? If you’re waiting for me to take your bags, I don’t carry things for liberated females.”
“I wouldn’t dream of asking you to tire yourself,” I said. I heaved my things into the car, letting them fall where gravity demanded and nothing, in passing, that the upholstery was a pale-gray velvet. De Karsky watched me expressionlessly. I slammed the door.
“I’ll sit up front,” I said.
“Suit yourself.”
He pried himself off the fender and sauntered toward the driver’s side, leaving me to open my own door.
The reason why I decided to sit in front was partly because I had a lot of questions and partly because I wanted to annoy Mr. De Karsky, who obviously wanted to stay as far away from me as possible. I was distracted from this latter aim by purely material considerations. That was an amazing car. The dashboard looked like the control panel of a flying saucer. It was basically rosewood or mahogany or something of that ilk, but the wood was almost hidden by dozens of but 30 / Elizabeth Peters
tons and accoutrements, such as a miniature TV screen.
I punched a button experimentally, and jumped back as a tray slid out from under the dash and hit me in the diaphragm. Simultaneously a door on top popped open and ejected a tall glass filled with ice cubes and a pale-amber liquid.
“Hey,” I said appreciatively.
De Karsky started the engine. At least I guess he did, because we started to move. I didn’t hear anything as vulgar as an engine.
“Cut that out,” he snarled, as I reached for another button.
“Why should I?” The television screen flickered and presented me with the grinning face of a game-show host. I don’t care for game shows—I never know the answers—so I turned it off and tried another button.
A plate of cheese and fancy hors d’oeuvres landed on the tray.
“Look,” said De Karsky, in a muted roar, “at least wait till we get out of town, will you? It distracts me, having all that junk jumping back and forth. The traffic here is wild; all these little eighty-year-old grandmas trying to drive.”
It was the first halfway reasonable remark he had made, so I decided to humor him.
“Why grandmas?” I asked, sipping the liquid in the glass. It was Scotch, but a lot smoother than any variety I had ever sampled. The cheese was good too.
Summer of the Dragon / 31
“Arizona is a retirement state, like Florida,” De Karsky explained, sliding through the stop sign at the exit from the airport. “There is no more vicious driver than a little old lady.”
“Male chauvinist,” I said reflexively. De Karsky didn’t answer. He hunched over the wheel, clutching it with both hands and glaring wildly at the other cars as if he really believed his paranoid fantasies.
For a while I was too engrossed by the scenery to hassle him. There were palm trees, growing in people’s yards like elms and maples. Cactus, too. After we left the airport, the first part of the drive was fairly dull, just streets of shops and garish signs, like the approaches to most airports; but the low profiles of the buildings and the wide, dusty street suggested those old Western towns you see in the movies.
After a time we got into a residential neighborhood.
That was where I saw the palm trees and the cactus.
Some people had given up the effort to keep grass green, and had converted their yards into miniature, landscaped deserts. The effect was austere and rather attractive, like Japanese gardens. Some of the cacti were elongated poles, ten or twenty feet high, with branch-ing arms. I learned later that they were saguaro, and that it took them eighty years to grow a single branch.
The little fat cholla, glistening like ice-encrusted bushes, were deadly things; the icicles were 32 / Elizabeth Peters
thorns, and the old-timers claimed that the thorns didn’t just stick you when you brushed them, they jumped out at you.
The neighborhood became fancier as we proceeded and the lawns got more elaborate. I was trying to appear cool and sophisticated in front of De Karsky, but when I saw my first orange trees I let out a juvenile-sounding squeal. They grew in people’s front yards.
They really did. They were pretty, low trees, with vivid emerald leaves and white-painted trunks. The fruit hung like golden-orangy Christmas balls. Many of the houses were hidden behind walls and oleander hedges, but from what I could see of them they favored the Southwest-Spanish style of architecture, with buff adobe walls and red-tiled roofs.
I was beginning to wonder where De Karsky was going. We were supposed to head straight north, to Hunnicutt’s ranch, and most big cities these days have circumferential roads so you don’t have to go through town to get from one side of the city to the other. Then De Karsky made a quick, neat turn into a driveway, and stopped the car.
The house was almost big enough to be called a villa. I couldn’t see much of it, or of the grounds, because of the wall; the drive was blocked by high wrought-iron gates.
“Got to run an errand,” De Karsky explained. “Wait here. I won’t be long.” He gestured at the Summer of the Dragon / 33
instrument panel—I mean the dashboard. “Amuse yourself.”
It was perfectly reasonable that he should stop to do an errand. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it except for one thing. He walked up to the gates, pushed one open enough to slip through, and proceeded along the curving drive.
It was the first time I had seen him walk. The process was worth watching. I mean, if men think they are the only once who like to study the movements of a well-constructed body, then they are kidding themselves, poor lambs. De Karsky had lean hips and broad shoulders and he walked with the slow, cocky swagger affected by heroes of old Westerns—you know, when they saunter into the saloon filled with bad guys.
However, animal lust did not distract me to the point where I failed to notice that small anomaly. If the gates were unlocked, why didn’t he drive straight on up to the house? It was some distance away, and the temperature was pushing a hundred degrees.
He wasn’t gone more than five minutes. I occupied myself as he had suggested, locating a stereo tape deck and a miniature movie projector before he came back, carrying a brown paper bag.
It could have been his lunch—a late lunch. It could have been a head of lettuce, or a loaf of bread. Admittedly, I think about food a lot, but most people would have gotten the same mental 34 / Elizabeth Peters
image. Brown paper bags suggest grocery stores. Only he had not been to a grocery store.
Even before he reached the car my brain, working with its usual lightning speed (I jest, of course), had arrived at a brilliant deduction. This errand was his own personal business, not something he was doing for his employer. I simply could not picture Hank Hunnicutt collecting anything that came in brown paper bags. Leather briefcases, yes; dispatch boxes wound around with red tape, no doubt; crumbling antique trunks with rusted padlocks, containing the secrets of the Lemurians, undoubtedly. Brown paper bags, no.
De Karsky didn’t want his boss to know about his errand. That was why he had left me, and the car, outside the gate, so I would be unable to describe the house in case I happened to mention the unscheduled stop. But why the devil should it matter? Was Hunnicutt such an ogre that he would object to an employee’s taking a few minutes off to run a personal errand?
I watched closely as De Karsky opened the car door and stowed the paper bag out of sight under the seat.
I could tell from the way he held it that the contents were heavy. The contents were not—was not—I never can get that point of grammar straight…. It wasn’t lettuce. But the bag had once held something of that nature, something wet. Damp had weakened the paper; and as De Karsky shoved it out of sight, a corner tore.
I
Summer of the Dragon / 35
caught only a glimpse of a dark, dully gleaming surface, but I saw enough to rouse my worst suspicions.
The car purred smoothly off down the street, with De Karsky peering intently out the front window like Luke Skywalker getting ready to bomb the Death Star.
I had the idea that he was trying to avoid conversation—and also that he was worried about something.
I had a few worries of my own. The object in the brown paper bag was a gun, I was almost certain of it. If he hadn’t made such a production of hiding it I wouldn’t have wondered about it. Like most ignorant easterners, I assumed the Arizona deserts were full of dangers—rattlesnakes, pesky redskins, renegade white men, coyotes…. So why hide the gun? Why not toss it into the back seat and say something like, “Them coyotes have been pesky lately”? I was forced to the conclusion that Mr. De Karsky had borrowed a firearm from a friend, thus acquiring a weapon which could not be traced to him.
A nice way to start a vacation, I must say.
When I emerged from my profound reverie concerning guns and such things, we were on a wide highway with nothing around but sky and cactus. The sky was bright blue and the cactus was greenish brown. The air shimmered with heat, though the car was pleasantly cool.
I sighed.
36 / Elizabeth Peters
“Welcome back,” De Karsky said.
“Huh?” I turned my head and stared at him.
“Talk about brown studies. What were you thinking about?”
I decided not to tell him what I had been thinking about.
I started to reach for the dashboard and then had second thoughts. I didn’t want to irritate him, not just then.
“Does anything else to eat come out of here?” I asked.
De Karsky let out a muffled sound that might have been a laugh if it had lived to grow up.
“Third button from the right, second row.”
This time, it was chocolates—the kind they sell only in the most exclusive stores, five creams in a box trimmed with red velvet roses.
“Want one?” I asked, waving a plump dark one with a candied violet on top under De Karsky’s nose. He made a hideous face.
“No, thanks.”
“This is a fabulous car,” I said.
“It belonged to some oil sheikh,” De Karsky said.
“You mean this is a used car? How degrading. I’d have thought Mr. Hunnicutt could afford a brand-new one.”
“You’d better call him Hank, everybody else does.
He is a funny mixture of extravagance and thrift. He’ll spend any sum on other people, or on Summer of the Dragon / 37
his wild theories, but like most millionaires he is natively pleased when he can acquire a bargain.”
“Have you been acquainted with many millionaires?”
I inquired.
“Not yet. But I’ve made a study of their habits.”
“Ethnologically speaking?”
“Precisely.”
“What are you, a sociologist?” I asked, half kidding—but only half. He was no illiterate handyman.
“I have a degree in archaeology,” De Karsky said, with a thin unpleasant smile. “We are colleagues, Ms.
Abbott.”
“Call me D.J.”
“I consider the use of initials affected.”
“Then you can stick to Ms. Abbott. That’s Ms., M.
S.”
There was a brief hostile silence. I didn’t seem to be doing too well in my attempts to ingratiate myself. I wondered why he was so antagonistic. A possible explanation presented itself. I approached it with my usual tact.
“Look, if you are Mr.—I mean Hank’s—anthropologist in residence, I’ve no intention of trying to take your job. I’ll be going back to school in the fall; I just came out here because—”
“I don’t care why you came, and I don’t feel at all threatened, thank you.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, dear me, I have offended the poor little 38 / Elizabeth Peters
feminist. I’m not questioning your brains, Abbott, for the simple reason that I don’t know whether you have any. You may be the brightest thing to come down the pike since Margaret Mead, but you can’t challenge me.
I’ve made a profound study of what Hank wants and I can supply it better than anybody else.”
“What does he want?”
De Karsky made another of those unmirthful laughing noises.
“There, that’s what I mean. You’re about as subtle as a bulldozer, aren’t you? I have no objection to giving away my technique, because you’d never be able to emulate it. You’re traditionally trained, and you’ve got a big mouth. You’ll never be able to listen to Hank’s ideas in silence, much less agree with them.”
“Is that what he wants—somebody to support his wild theories?”
“That should have been obvious.”
“But he must have plenty of other sycophants,” I said rudely. “Hangers-on, spongers, hypocrites who will say anything to keep a soft berth.”
“Yes, he does. The ranch is crawling with weirdos.
But I, my dear, am no weirdo. I have a good degree from a reputable institution of learning. Summa cum laude, in fact. Hank is naive, but he’s no fool. When Professor Screwball and Madame Charlatan tell him he is right, he knows
Summer of the Dragon / 39
they are speaking from ignorance. When I tell him he is right….”
“I see. And of course you tell him he is right?”
“Most of the time. An occasional outburst of skepticism is necessary in order to maintain my scholarly image. The outbursts have to be well timed, however.
That takes practice.”
“Now wait a minute,” I said, mostly to myself.
“Maybe I’m being encouraged to misjudge you. Maybe the theories aren’t as crazy as everybody thinks. Which one are you supporting at present?”
“The last one was reincarnation,” De Karsky answered readily. “Madame Charlatan’s real name is Karenina—”
“Oh, come on.”
“It’s possible. There must be other Kareninas besides Anna. However, I am inclined to agree with you that the lady’s name is as fictitious as her title. She’s a graduate of the Edgar Cayce Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc. Cayce started out as a psychic diagnostician; people would write him letters describing their aches and pains, and then he’d go into a trance and write back telling them what was wrong with them. It was usually spinal lesions. He had worked for an osteopath as a young man—”
“I know about Cayce,” I interrupted.
“You do?” He shot me a quick, suspicious glance. I responded with a sweet smile. That wor 40 / Elizabeth Peters
ried him. “Well,” he went on, slowly, “then you know Cayce eventually turned to the occult and claimed he could give people details of their past lives. That’s what Madame is doing for Hank.”
