Tick Tock

FOUR

As they drove, Tommy told Del about the doll on his doorstep, everything up to the moment when it had shorted out the lights in his office. She never gave the slightest indication that she found his story dubious or even, in fact, particularly astonishing. From time to time she said ‘uh-huh’ and ‘hmmmm’ and ‘okay,’ and - two or three times - ‘yeah, that makes sense,’ as if he were telling her about nothing more incredible than what she might have heard on the nightly TV news.

Then he paused in his tale when Del stopped at a twenty-four-hour-a-day supermarket. She insisted on getting a few things to clean the van and close off the shattered window, and at her request, Tommy went shopping with her. He pushed the cart.

So few customers prowled the enormous market that it was almost possible for Tommy to believe that he and Del were in one of those 1950’s science-fiction movies, in which all but a handful of people had vanished from the face of the earth as the result of a mysterious apocalypse that had left buildings and all other works of humanity undisturbed. Flooded with glary light from the overhead fluorescent panels, the long wide aisles were uncannily empty and silent but for the ominous low-pitched hum of the compressors for the refrigerated display cases.

Striding purposefully through these eerie spaces in her white shoes, white uniform, and unzipped black leather jacket, with her wet blond hair slicked straight back and tucked behind her ears, Del Payne looked like a nurse who might also be a Hell’s Angel, equally capable of ministering to a sick man or kicking the ass of a healthy one.

She selected a box of large plastic garbage bags, a wide roll of plumbing tape, a package containing four rolls of paper towels, a packet of razor blades, a tape measure, a bottle of one-gram tablets of vitamin C, a bottle of vitamin-E capsules, and two twelve-ounce bottles of orange juice. From an early-bird display of Christmas decorations, she snatched up a conical, red flannel Santa hat with a fake white fur trim and white pompon.

As they were passing the dairy-and-deli section, she stopped and pointed at a stack of containers in one of the coolers and said, ‘Do you eat tofu?’

Her question seemed so esoteric that Tommy could only repeat it in bafflement, ‘Do I eat tofu?’

‘I asked first.’

‘No. I don’t like tofu.’

‘You should.’

‘Why,’ he asked impatiently, ‘because I’m Asian? I don’t eat with chopsticks, either.’

‘Are you always so sensitive?’

‘I’m not sensitive,’ he said defensively.

‘I didn’t even think about you being Asian until you brought it up,’ she said.

Curiously, he believed her. Though he didn’t know her well, he already knew that she was different from other people, and he was willing to believe that she had just now noticed the slant of his eyes and the burnt-brass shade of his skin.

Chagrined, he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I was only asking if you ate tofu because if you eat it five times a week or more, then you’ll never have to worry about prostate cancer. It’s a homeopathic preventative.’

He had never met anyone whose conversation was as unpredictable as Del Payne’s. ‘I’m not worried about prostate cancer.’

‘Well, you should be. It’s the third largest cause of death among men. Or maybe fourth. Anyway, for men, it’s right up there with heart disease and crushing beer cans against the forehead.’

‘I’m only thirty. Men don’t get prostate cancer until they’re in their fifties or sixties.’

‘So one day, when you’re forty-nine, you’ll wake up in the morning, and your prostate will be the size of a basketball, and you’ll realize you’re a statistical anomaly, but by then it’ll be too late.’

She plucked a carton of tofu from the cooler and dropped it into the shopping cart.

‘I don’t want it,’ Tommy said.

‘Don’t be silly. You’re never too young to start taking care of yourself.’

She grabbed the front of the cart and pulled it along the aisle, forcing him to keep pace with her, so he didn’t have an opportunity to return the tofu to the cooler.

Hurrying after her, he said, ‘What do you care whether I wake up twenty years from now with a prostate the size of Cleveland?’

‘We’re both human beings, aren’t we? What kind of person would I be if I didn’t care what happens to you?’

‘You don’t really know me,’ he said.

‘Sure I do. You’re Tuong Tommy.’

‘Tommy Phan.’

‘That’s right.’

At the checkout station, Tommy insisted on paying. After all, you wouldn’t have a broken window or all the mess in the van if not for me.’

‘Okay,’ she said, as he took out his wallet, ‘but just because you’re paying for some plumbing tape and paper towels doesn’t mean I have to sleep with you.’

Chip Nguyen would have replied instantly and with a playful witticism that would have charmed her, because in addition to being a damn fine private detective, he was a master of romantic repartee. Tommy, however, blinked stupidly at Del, racked his brain, but could think of nothing to say.

If he could just sit down at his computer for a couple of hours and polish up a few gems of dialogue, he would develop some repartee that would have Ms. Deliverance Payne begging for mercy.

‘You’re blushing,’ she said, amused.

‘I am not.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘No, I’m not.’

Del turned to the cashier, a middle-aged Hispanic woman wearing a tiny gold crucifix on a gold chain at her throat, and said, ‘Is he blushing or isn’t he?’

The cashier giggled. ‘He’s blushing.’

‘Of course he is,’ said Del.

‘He’s cute when he blushes,’ said the cashier.

‘I’ll bet he knows that,’ Del said, mischievously delighted by the woman’s comment. ‘He probably uses it as a tool for seduction, can blush any time he wants to, the way some really good actors can cry on cue.’

The cashier giggled again.

Tommy let out a long-suffering sigh and surveyed the nearly deserted market, relieved that there were no other customers close enough to hear. He was blushing so intensely that his ears felt as though they were on fire.

When the cashier ran the carton of tofu across the bar-code scanner, Del said, ‘He worries about prostate cancer.’

Mortified, Tommy said, ‘I do not.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘But he won’t listen to me, won’t believe that tofu can prevent it,’ Del told the cashier.

After hitting the key to total their order, the cashier frowned at Tommy, and in a matronly voice with no trace of the former musical giggle, almost as if speaking to a child, she said, ‘Listen here, you better believe it, ‘cause it’s true. The Japanese eat it every day and they have almost no prostate cancer.’

‘You see,’ Del said smugly.

Tommy shook his head. ‘What do you do when you aren’t waiting tables - run a medical clinic?’

‘It’s just widely known, that’s all.’

‘We sell a lot of tofu to Japanese customers, Koreans,’ said the cashier as she finished bagging their purchases and accepted payment from Tommy. ‘You must not be Japanese.’

‘American,’ Tommy said.

‘Vietnamese-American?’

‘American,’ he repeated stubbornly.

‘A lot of Vietnamese-Americans eat tofu too,’ said the cashier as she counted out his change, ‘though not as much as our Japanese customers.’

With a grin that now seemed demented, Del said, ‘He’s going to wind up with a prostate the size of a basketball.’

‘You listen to this girl and take care of yourself,’ the cashier instructed.

Tommy stuffed the change into a pocket of his jeans and grabbed the two small plastic sacks that contained the purchases, desperate to get out of the market.

The cashier repeated her admonition: ‘You listen to the girl.’

Outside, the rain chilled him again, sluicing away the warmth of the blush. He thought of the mini-kin, which was still out there in the night - and not as mini as it had once been.

For a few minutes, in the market, he had actually for-gotten the damn thing. Of all the people he had ever met, only Del Payne could have made him forget, even briefly, that he had been under attack by something monstrous and supernatural less than half an hour earlier.

‘Are you nuts?’ he asked as they neared the van.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said brightly.

‘Don’t you realize that thing is out there somewhere?’

‘You mean the doll snake rat-quick little monster thing?’

‘What other thing would I mean?’

‘Well, the world is full of strange stuff.’

‘Huh?’

‘Don’t you watch The X-Files?’

‘It’s out there and it’s looking for me-’

‘Probably looking for me too,’ she said. ‘I must’ve pissed it off.’

‘I’d say that’s a safe bet. So how can you be going on about my prostate, the benefits of tofu - when we’ve got some demon from Hell trying to track us down?’

She went to the driver’s door, and Tommy hurried around to the other side of the jukebox van. She didn’t answer his question until they were both inside.

‘Regardless of what other problems we have just now,’ she said, ‘they don’t change the fact that tofu is good for you.’

‘You are nuts.’

Starting the engine, she said, ‘You’re so sober, seri-ous, so straight-arrow. How can I resist tweaking you a little?’

‘Tweaking me?’

‘You’re a hoot,’ she said, putting the van in gear and driving away from the supermarket.

He looked down glumly at the pair of plastic sacks on the floor between his legs. ‘I can’t believe I paid for the damn tofu.’

‘You’ll like it.’

A few blocks from the market, in a district of warehouses and industrial buildings, Del parked the van under a free-way overpass, where it was sheltered from the rain.

‘Bring the stuff we bought,’ she said.

‘It looks awful lonely here.’

‘Most of the world is lonely corners.’

‘I’m not sure it’s safe.’

‘Nowhere is safe unless you want it to be,’ she said, having entered her cryptic mode once more.

‘What does that mean exactly?’

‘What doesn’t it mean?’

‘You’re putting me on again.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

She was not grinning now. The merriness that had brightened her when she had conducted the tofu torture was gone.

Leaving the engine running, she got out from behind the wheel and went around to the back of the Ford -which wasn’t a recreational vehicle, but a delivery van of the kind commonly used by florists and other small businesses - and she opened the rear door. She took the supermarket bags from Tommy and emptied the contents on the floor of the cargo hold.

Tommy stood watching her, shivering. He was wet through and through, and the temperature, as midnight approached, must be in the low fifties.

She said, ‘I’ll put together a cover for the broken window. While I’m doing that, you use the paper towels to soak up as much water as you can from the front seat and the floor, get rid of the glass.’

With no residential or commercial structures in the area to draw traffic, the street seemed to be another set from that same science-fiction movie about a depopu-lated, post-apocalyptic world that Tommy had remem-bered in the supermarket. A rumble overhead was the sound of trucks on the freeway above, but because those vehicles could not be seen from here, it was easy to imagine that the source of the noise was colossal machinery of an alien nature engaged in the fulfilment of a meticulously planned holocaust.

Considering his overactive imagination, he probably should have tried writing a type of fiction more colourful than detective stories.

In the cargo hold was a cardboard carton full of smaller boxes of dog biscuits. ‘I went shopping this afternoon for Scootie,’ she explained as she removed the packages of biscuits from the larger container.

‘Your dog, huh?’

‘Not just my dog. The dog. The essence of all dogginess. The coolest canine on the planet. No doubt in his last incarnation before Nirvana. That’s my Scootie.’

With the new tape measure, she got the accurate dimensions of the broken-out window, and then she used one of the razor blades to cut a rectangle of that precise size from the cardboard carton. She slid the panel of cardboard into one of the plastic garbage bags, folded the bag tightly around that insert, and sealed it with lengths of the waterproof plumbing tape. More tape secured the rectangle, inside and out, to the glassless window frame in the passenger’s door.

While Del made the rain shield, Tommy worked around her to purge the front seat of water and sparkling fragments of tempered glass. As he worked, he told her what had happened from the moment when the mini-kin had shorted-out the office lights until it had erupted from the burning Corvette.

‘Bigger?’ she asked. ‘How much bigger?’

‘Almost double its original size. And different. The thing you saw clinging to the van window... that’s a hell of a lot weirder than it was when it first began to emerge from the doll.’

Not one vehicle drove through the underpass as they worked, and Tommy was increasingly concerned about their isolation. Repeatedly he glanced toward the open ends of the concrete shelter, where heavy rain continued to crash down by the ton weight, bracketing the dry space in which they had taken refuge. He expected to see the radiant-eyed demon - swollen to greater and stranger dimensions - approaching menacingly through the storm.

‘So what do you think it is?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where does it come from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What does it want?’

‘To kill me.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There’s a lot you don’t know.’

‘I know.’

‘What do you do for a living, Tuong Tommy?’

He ignored the purposeful misstatement of his name and said, ‘I write detective stories.’

She laughed. ‘So how come, in this investigation, you can’t even find your own butt?’

‘This is real life.’

‘No, it’s not,’ she said.

‘What?’

With apparent seriousness, she said, ‘There’s no such thing.’

‘No such thing as real life?’

‘Reality is perception. Perceptions change. Reality is fluid. So if by “reality” you mean reliably tangible objects and immutable events, then there’s no such thing.’

Having used two rolls of paper towels to clean the passenger’s seat and the leg space in front of it, heaping the last of them on the sodden little pile that he had created against the wall of the underpass, he said, Are you a New Age type or something - channel spirits, heal yourself with crystals?’

‘No. I merely said reality is perception.’

‘Sounds New Age,’ he said, returning to watch her finish her own task.

‘Well it’s not. I’ll explain someday when we have more time.’

‘Meanwhile,’ he said, ‘I’ll wander aimlessly in the wilderness of my ignorance.’

‘Sarcasm doesn’t become you.’

Are you about finished here? I’m freezing.’

Del stepped back from the open passenger-side door, the roll of plumbing tape in one hand and the razor blade in the other, surveying her work. ‘It’ll keep the rain out well enough, I guess, but it’s not exactly the latest thing in aesthetically pleasing motor-vehicle accessories.’

In the poor light, Tommy couldn’t clearly see the elaborate Art Deco, jukebox-inspired mural on the van, but he could discern that a substantial portion of it had been scraped off the passenger side. ‘I’m really sorry about the paint job. It was spectacular. Must have cost a bundle.’

‘Just a little paint and a lot of time. Don’t worry about it. I was thinking of redoing it anyway.’

She had surprised him again. ‘You painted it your-self?’

‘I’m an artist,’ she said.

‘I thought you were a waitress.’

‘Being a waitress is what I do. An artist is what I am.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you?’ she said, turning away from the door.

‘You said it yourself earlier - I’m a sensitive guy.’

On the freeway overhead, the airbrakes of a big truck screeched like the fierce cry of a scaly behemoth raging through a Jurassic swamp.

Tommy was reminded of the demon. He glanced nervously at one end of the short concrete tunnel, then at the other end, but he saw no monster, large or small, approaching through the rain.

At the back of the van, Del handed one of the two twelve-ounce bottles of orange juice to Tommy and opened the other for herself.

His teeth were chattering. Rather than a swig of cold orange juice, he needed a mug of steaming coffee.

‘We don’t have coffee,’ she said, startling him, as though she had read his mind.

‘Well, I don’t want juice,’ he said.

‘Yes, you do.’ From the two vitamin bottles, she counted out ten one-gram tablets of C and four gelatine capsules of B, took half for herself, and handed the rest to him. ‘After all that fear and stress, our bodies are totally flooded with dangerous free-radicals. Incomplete oxygen molecules, tens of thousands of them, ricocheting through our bodies, damaging every cell they encounter. You need antioxidants, Vitamins C and B as a minimum, to bind with the free radicals and disarm them.’

Though Tommy wasn’t much concerned about main-taining a healthy diet or vitamin therapy, he remem-bered having read about free-radical molecules and antioxidants, and there seemed to be medical validity to the theory, so he washed down the pills with the orange juice.

Besides, he was cold and weary, and he could save a lot of energy by cooperating with Del. She was indefatigable, after all, while he was merely fatigued.

‘You want the tofu now?’

‘Not now.’

‘Maybe later with some chopped pineapple, mara-schino cherries, a few walnuts,’ she suggested.

‘That sounds nice.’

‘Or just a slight sprinkle of shredded coconut.’

‘Whatever.’

Del picked up the red-flannel Santa hat with the white trim and white pompon, which she had found in the display of Christmas items at the supermarket.

‘What’s that for?’ Tommy asked.

‘It’s a hat.’

‘But what are you going to use it for?’ he asked, since she’d had such specific uses for everything else they had picked up at the market.

‘Use it for? To cover my head,’ she said, as if he were daft. ‘What do you use hats for?’

She put it on. The weight of the pompon made the peak of the cap droop to one side.

‘You look ridiculous.’

‘I think it’s cute. Makes me feel good. Puts me in a holiday mood.’ She closed the back door of the van.

‘Do you see a therapist regularly?’ he asked.

‘I dated a dentist once, but never a therapist.’ Behind the wheel of the van again, she started the engine and switched on the heater.

Tommy held his trembling hands in front of the dashboard vents, relishing the gush of hot air. With the broken window covered, he might be able to dry out and get warm.

‘Well, Detective Phan, do you want to start this inves-tigation by trying to find it?’

‘Find what?’

‘Your butt.’

‘Just before I totalled the Corvette, I’d decided to go see my brother Gi. Could you drop me off there?’

‘Drop you off?’ she said disbelieving.

‘It’s the last thing I’ll ask you for.’

‘Drop you off - and then what? Just go home and sit and wait for the doll snake rat-quick little mon-ster thing to come tear out my liver and eat it for dessert?’

Tommy said, ‘I’ve been thinking-’

‘Well, it doesn’t show.’

‘-and I don’t think you’re in any danger from it-’

‘You don’t think I am.’

‘-because, according to the message that the thing apparently typed on my computer, the deadline is dawn.’

‘How exactly am I to take comfort from this?’ she asked.

‘It’s got until dawn to get me - and I’ve got until dawn to stay alive. At that point the game ends.’

‘Game?’

‘Game, threat, whatever.’ He squinted through the windshield at the silvery skeins of rain falling beyond the underpass. ‘Could we get moving? Makes me nervous to sit here so long.’

Del released the handbrake and put the van in gear. But she kept her foot on the brake pedal and didn’t drive out from under the freeway. ‘Tell me what you mean - game.’

‘Whoever made the doll is willing to play by rules. Or maybe they have to, maybe that’s what the magic requires.’

‘Magic?’

He locked his door. ‘Magic sorcery, voodoo, whatever. Anyway, if I make it to dawn, maybe I’m safe.’ He reached across Del and locked her door too. ‘This creature it isn’t going to come after you if it’s been sent to get me and if it has only a limited amount of time to make the kill. The clock is ticking for me, sure, but it’s also ticking for the assassin.’

Del nodded thoughtfully. ‘That makes perfect sense,’

she said, and she sounded sincere, as though they were discussing the laws of thermodynamics.

‘No, it’s insane,’ he corrected. ‘Like the whole situation. But there’s a certain nutty logic to it.’

She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. ‘One thing you’ve overlooked.’

He frowned. ‘What’s that?’

She checked her wristwatch. ‘It’s now seven minutes past midnight.’

‘I hoped it was later. Still a lot of time to get to the finish line.’ He looked over his shoulder, across the cargo hold, at the back door of the van, which wasn’t locked.

And dawn is in… probably five and half or at most six hours,’ Del said.

‘So?’

‘Tommy, at the rate you’re going, the creepy-crawler will catch you by one o’clock, tear your head off - and still have four or five hours of spare time on its hands. If it has hands. Then it’ll come for me.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I think so.’

‘It doesn’t know who you are,’ he said patiently. ‘How would it find you?’

‘It wouldn’t need to hire your silly detective,’ she said.

Tommy winced because she sounded like his mother, and he never wanted this woman, of all women, ever to remind him of his mother. ‘Don’t call him silly.’

‘The damn thing will track me the same way it’s tracking you right this very minute.’

‘Which is how?’

She tilted her head in thought. The fluffy white pom-pon dangled. ‘Well… by the pattern of your psychic emanations, telepathy. Or if each of us has a soul that emits a sound... or maybe a radiance that’s visible in some spectrum beyond those that ordinary humans are able to sense, a radiance as unique as a fingerprint, then this thing could home on it.’

‘Okay, all right, maybe it could do something like that if it was a supernatural entity-’

‘If it was a supernatural entity? If? What else do you think it is, Tommy? A shape-changing robot they send out from MasterCard to teach you a lesson when your monthly payment is overdue?’

Tommy sighed. ‘Is it possible that I’m insane, tenderly cared for in some pleasant institution, and all this is happening only in my head?’

At last Del pulled back into the street and drove out from under the freeway, switching on the wind-shield wipers as heavy volleys of rain exploded across the van.

‘I’ll take you to see your brother,’ she said, ‘but I’m not just dropping you off, tofu boy. We’re in this together, all the way… at least until dawn.’

In Garden Grove, the New World Saigon Bakery operated in a large tilt-up concrete industrial building surrounded by a blacktop parking lot. It was painted white, with the name of the company in simple peach-coloured block letters, a severe-looking structure softened only by a pair of ficus trees and two clusters of azaleas that flanked the entrance to the company offices at the front. Without the guidance of the sign, a passer-by might have thought the company was engaged in plastic injection moulding, retail electronics assembly, or other light manufacturing.

On Tommy’s instructions, Del drove around to the back of the building. At this late hour, the front doors were locked, and one had to enter through the kitchen.

The rear parking area was crowded with employees’ cars and more than forty sizable delivery trucks.

‘I was picturing a mom-and-pop bakery,’ Del said. ‘Yeah, that’s what it was twenty years ago. They still have two retail outlets, but from here they supply breads and pastries to lots of markets and restaurants, and not just Vietnamese restaurants, in Orange County and up in L. A. too.’

‘It’s a little empire,’ she said as she parked the van, doused the headlights, and switched off the engine.

‘Even though it’s gotten this big, they keep up the qual-ity - which is why they’ve grown in the first place.’

‘You sound proud of them.’

‘I am.’

‘Then why aren’t you in the family business too?’

‘I couldn’t breathe.’

‘The heat of the ovens, you mean?’

‘No.’

An allergy to wheat flour?’

He sighed. ‘I wish. That would have made it easy to opt out. But the problem was… too much tradition.’

‘You wanted to try radical new approaches to baking?’ He laughed softly. ‘I like you, Del.’

‘Likewise, tofu boy.’

‘Even if you are a little crazy.’

‘I’m the sanest person you know.’

‘It was family. Vietnamese families are sometimes so tightly bound, so structured, the parents so strict, traditions so... so like chains.’

‘But you miss it too.’

‘Not really.’

‘Yes, you do,’ she insisted. ‘There’s a deep sadness in you. A part of you is lost.’

‘Not lost.’

‘Definitely.’

‘Well, maybe that’s what growing up is all about -losing parts of yourself so you can become something bigger, different, better.’

She said, ‘The thing from inside the doll is becoming bigger and different too.’

‘Your point?’

‘Different isn’t always better.’

Tommy met her gaze. In the dim light, her blue eyes were so dark that they might as well have been black, and they were even less readable than usual.

He said, ‘If I hadn’t found a different way, one that worked for me, I would have died inside - more than I have by losing some degree of connection with the family.’

‘Then you did the right thing.’

‘Whether it was or not, I did it, and it’s done.’

‘The distance between you and them is a gap not a gulf. You can bridge it.’

‘Never quite,’ he disagreed.

‘In fact, it’s no distance at all compared to the light-years we’ve all come from the Big Bang, all the bil-lions of miles we’ve crossed since we were just primal matter.’

‘Don’t go strange on me again, Del.’

‘What strange?’

‘I’m the Asian here. If anyone’s supposed to be inscru-table, it’s me.’

‘Sometimes,’ Deliverance Payne said, ‘you listen but you just don’t hear.’

‘That’s what keeps me sane.’

‘That’s what gets you in trouble.’

‘Come on, let’s go see my brother.’

As they hurried through the rain, between two rows of delivery trucks, Del said, ‘How do you expect Gi to be able to help you?’

‘He’s had to deal with the gangs, so he knows about them.’

‘Gangs?’

‘Cheap Boys. Pomona Boys. Their kind.’

The New World Saigon Bakery operated in three eight-hour shifts. From eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, Tommy’s father served as the shift manager while also conducting corporate business from his front office. From four o’clock until midnight, the oldest of the Phan brothers, Ton That, was the chief baker and the shift manager, and from midnight until eight in the morning, Gi Minh filled those same pos-itions.

Organized gangs, intent on extortion, were active around the clock. But when they used sabotage to get their way, they preferred the cover of deep darkness, which meant that Gi, by virtue of running the graveyard shift, had been on duty during some of the nastier confrontations.

For years, all three men had worked seven days a week, a full fifty-six hours each, because most of the bakery’s customers needed fresh merchandise on a daily basis. When one of them needed to have a weekend off, the other two split his time between them and worked sixty-four-hour weeks without complaint. Vietnamese-Americans with an entrepreneurial bent were among the most industrious people in the country and could never be faulted for failing to carry their own weight. Sometimes, however, Tommy wondered how many of Ton’s and Gi’s generation - former refugees, boat chil-dren highly motivated to succeed by early memories of poverty and terror in Southeast Asia - would live long enough to retire and enjoy the peace that they had struggled so hard to earn.

The family was finally training a cousin - the American-born son of Tommy’s mother’s younger sister - to serve as a shift manager on a rotating basis that would allow everyone at the management level to work approxi-mately forty-hour weeks and, at last, have normal lives. They had resisted bringing in the cousin, because for too long they had stubbornly waited for Tommy to return to the fold and take that job himself.

Tommy suspected that his parents had believed he’d eventually be overwhelmed with guilt as he watched his father and his brothers working themselves half to death to keep all the principal management positions in the immediate family. Indeed, he had lived with such guilt that he’d had dreams in which he’d been behind the wheel of a car with his father and brothers as passengers, and he’d recklessly driven it off a high cliff, killing them all, while he miraculously survived. Dreams in which he had been flying a plane filled with his family, crashed, and walked away as the sole survivor, his clothes red with their blood. Dreams in which a whirlpool sucked down their small boat at night on the South China Sea, drowning everyone but the youngest and most thoughtless of all the Phans, he himself, the son who was sharper than a serpent’s tooth. He had learned to live with the guilt, however, and to resist the urge to give up his dream of being a writer.

Now, as he and Del stepped through the back door of the New World Saigon Bakery, Tommy was con-flicted. Simultaneously he felt at home yet on dangerous ground.

The air was redolent of baking bread, brown sugar, cinnamon, baker’s cheese, bitter chocolate, and other tantalizing aromas less easily identifiable in the fragrant melange. This was the smell of his childhood, and it plunged him into a sensory river of wonderful memories, torrents of images from the past. This was also the smell of the future that he had firmly rejected, however, and underneath the mouth-watering savour, Tommy detected a cloying sweetness that, by virtue of its very inten-sity, would in time sour the appetite, nauseate, and leave the tongue capable of detecting only bitterness in any flavour.

Approximately forty employees in white uniforms and white caps were hard at work in the large main room - pastry chefs, bread bakers, assistant bakers, clean-up boys - amidst the assembly tables, dough-mixing machines, cook tops, and ovens. The whir of mixer blades, the clink-clank of spoons and metal spatulas, the scrape-rattle of pans and cookie sheets being slid across baking racks, the muffled roar of gas flames in the hollow steel shells of the minimally insulated commercial ovens:

this noise was music to Tommy, although like everything else about the place, it had two conflicting qualities - a cheerful and engaging melody, but an ominous underlying rhythm.

The hot air immediately chased away the chill of the night and the rain. But almost at once, Tommy felt that the air was too hot to breathe comfortably.

‘Which one’s your brother?’ Del asked.

‘He’s probably in the shift manager’s office.’ Tommy realized that Del had removed the Santa hat. ‘Thanks for not wearing the stupid hat.’

She withdrew it from a pocket in her leather jacket. ‘I only took it off so the rain wouldn’t ruin it.’

‘Please don’t wear it, don’t embarrass me,’ he said.

‘You have no sense of style.’

‘Please. I want my brother to take me seriously.’

‘Doesn’t your brother believe in Santa?’

‘Please. My family are very serious people.’

‘Please, please,’ she mocked him, but teasingly and without malice. ‘Maybe they should have become mor-ticians instead of bakers.’

Tommy expected her to don the frivolous red-flannel chapeaux with characteristic defiance, but she crammed it back into her jacket pocket.

‘Thank you,’ he said gratefully.

‘Take me to the sombre and humourless Gi Minh Phan, infamous anti-Santa activist.’

Tommy led her along one side of the main room, between the equipment-packed baking floor and the stainless-steel doors to a series of coolers and storerooms. The place was brightly lighted with banks of suspended fluorescent fixtures, and everything was nearly as well scrubbed as a hospital surgery.

He had not visited the bakery in at least four years, during which time its business had grown, so he didn’t recognize many of the employees on the graveyard shift. They all appeared to be Vietnamese, and the great majority were men. Most of them were concentrating so intensely on their work that they didn’t notice they had visitors.

The few who looked up tended to focus on Del Payne and give Tommy only scant attention. Even rain-soaked - again - and bedraggled, she was an attractive woman. In her wet and clinging white uniform and black leather jacket, she possessed an irresistible air of mystery.

He was glad she wasn’t wearing the Santa hat. That would have been too much novelty to ignore even for a roomful of industrious Vietnamese fixated on their work. Everyone would have been staring at her.

The manager’s office was in the right front corner of the room, elevated four steps above the main floor. Two walls were glass, so the shift boss could see the entire bakery without getting up from his desk.

More often than not, Gi would have been on the floor, working elbow to elbow with the bakers and their apprentices. At the moment, however, he was at his computer, with his back to the glass door at the top of the steps.

Judging by the tables of data on the monitor, Tommy figured his brother was putting together a computer model of the chemistry of a new recipe. Evidently some pastry hadn’t been coming out of the ovens as it should,

and they hadn’t been able to identify the problem on the floor, with sheer baker’s instinct.

Gi didn’t turn around when Tommy and Del entered, closing the door behind them. ‘Minute,’ he said, and his fingers flew across the computer keyboard.

Del nudged Tommy with one elbow and showed him the red-flannel cap, half out of her pocket.

He scowled.

She grinned and put the cap away.

When Gi finished typing, he spun around in his chair, expecting to see an employee, and gaped wide-eyed at his brother. ‘Tommy!’

Unlike their brother Ton, Gi Minh was willing to use Tommy’s American name.

‘Surprise,’ Tommy said.

Gi rose from his chair, a smile breaking across his face, but then he registered that the person with Tommy wasn’t an employee, either. As he turned his full atten-tion to Del, his smile froze.

‘Merry Christmas,’ Del said.

Tommy wanted to tape her mouth shut, not because her greeting was completely off the wall - after all, Christmas was only seven weeks away and supermarkets were already selling decorations - but because she almost made him laugh, and laughter was not going to help him convince Gi of the seriousness of their plight.

‘Gi,’ Tommy said, ‘I would like you to meet a friend of mine. Miss Del Payne.’

Gi inclined his head politely toward her, and she held out her hand, and Gi took it after only a brief hesitation. ‘Miss Payne.’

‘Charmed,’ she said.

‘You’re terribly wet,’ Gi told her.

‘Yes. I like it,’ Del said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Invigorating,’ she said. ‘After the first hour of a storm,

the falling rain has scrubbed all the pollution from the air, and the water is so pure, so healthy, good for the skin.’

‘Yes,’ Gi said, looking dazed.

‘Good for the hair too.’

Tommy thought, Please, God, stop her from warning him about prostate cancer.

At five-feet-seven, Gi was three inches shorter than Tommy and, though as physically trim as his brother, he had a round face utterly unlike Tommy’s. When he smiled, he resembled Buddha, and as a child he had been called ‘little Buddha’ by certain members of the family.

His smile, though stiff, remained on his face until he let go of Del’s hand and looked down at the puddles of rainwater both she and Tommy were leaving on his office floor. When he raised his gaze and met Tommy’s eyes, he wasn’t smiling any more, and he didn’t look anything at all like Buddha.

Tommy wanted to hug his brother. He suspected that Gi would return his embrace, after a moment of stiffness. Yet neither of them was able to display affection first -perhaps because they both feared rejection.

Before Gi could speak, Tommy hurriedly said, ‘Brother, I need your advice.’

‘My advice?’ Gi’s stare was disconcertingly direct. ‘My advice hasn’t meant much to you for years.’

‘I’m in deep trouble.’

Gi glanced at Del.

She said, ‘I’m not the trouble.’

Clearly, Gi doubted that assertion.

‘In fact,’ Tommy said, ‘she saved my life earlier tonight.’

Gi’s face remained clouded.

Beginning to worry that he was not going to be able to make this connection, Tommy found himself babbling:

‘Really, she did, she saved my life, just put herself on the line for me, a total stranger, got her van bashed up because of me, she’s the reason I’m even standing here, so I’d appreciate if you’d invite us to sit down and-’

‘Total stranger?’ Gi asked.

Tommy had been plunging forward so rapidly that he had lost track of what he had said, and he didn’t understand his brother’s reaction. ‘Huh?’

‘Total stranger?’ Gi repeated.

‘Well, yes, up to an hour and a half ago, and still she put her life on the line-’

‘He means,’ Del explained to Tommy, ‘that he thought I was your girlfriend.’

Tommy felt a blush, hot as oven steel, rising in his face. Gi’s sombre expression brightened slightly at the pros-pect that this was not the long-anticipated blonde who would break Mama Phan’s heart and divide the family forever. If Del was not dating Tommy, then there was still a chance that the youngest and most rebellious of the Phan boys would one day do the right thing, after all, and take a lovely Vietnamese girl as his wife.

‘I’m not his girlfriend,’ Del said to Gi.

Gi appeared willing to be convinced.

Del said, ‘We’ve never dated. In fact, considering that he doesn’t like my taste in hats, I don’t see how we ever could date. I couldn’t go out with any man who was critical of my taste in hats. A girl has to draw the line somewhere.’

‘Hats?’ Gi said, confused.

‘Please,’ Tommy said, speaking as much to Del as to Gi, ‘can we just sit down and talk about this?’

‘About what?’ Gi asked.

‘About someone trying to kill me, that’s what!’

Stunned, Gi Minh Phan sat with his back to his computer. With a wave of his hand, he indicated the two chairs on the other side of his desk.

Tommy and Del sat, and Tommy said, ‘I think I’m in trouble with a Vietnamese gang.’

‘Which?’ Gi asked.

‘I don’t know. Can’t figure it out. Neither can Sal Delano, my friend at the newspaper, and he’s an expert on the gangs. I’m hoping you’ll recognize their methods when I tell you what they’ve done.’

Gi was wearing a white shirt. He unbuttoned the left cuff, rolled up the sleeve, and showed Del the underside of his muscular forearm, which bore a long, ugly, red scar.

‘Thirty-eight stitches,’ Gi told her.

‘How awful,’ she said, no longer flippant, genuinely concerned.

‘These worthless scum creep around, saying you have to pay them to stay in business, insurance money, and if you don’t, then you and your employees might get hurt, have an accident, or some machinery could break down, or your place could catch fire some night.’

‘The police-’

‘They do what they can - which often amounts to nothing. And if you pay the gangs what they ask, they’ll want more, and more, and more still, like poli-ticians, until one day you wind up making less out of your business than they do. So one night they came around, ten of them, those who call themselves the Fast Boys, all carrying knives and crowbars, cut our phone lines so we couldn’t call the cops, figuring they could just walk through the place and smash things while we would run and hide. But we surprised them, let me tell you, and some of us got hurt, but the gang boys got hurt worse. A lot of them were born here in the States, and they think they’re tough, but they don’t know suffering. They don’t know what tough means.’

Able to repress her true nature no longer, Del couldn’t resist saying, ‘It never pays to go up against a bunch of angry bakers.’

‘Well, the Fast Boys know that now,’ Gi said with utmost seriousness.

To Del, Tommy said, ‘Gi was fourteen when we escaped Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon, the com-munists believed that young males, teenagers, were potential counter-revolutionaries, the most dangerous citizens to the new regime. Gi and Ton - that’s my oldest brother - were arrested a few times and held a week or two each time for questioning about supposed anti-communist activities. Questioning was a euphemism for torture.’

At fourteen?’ Del said, appalled.

Gi shrugged. ‘I was tortured when I was twelve. Ton That, my brother, was fourteen the first time.’

‘The police let them go each time - but then my father heard from a reliable source that Gi and Ton were scheduled to be arrested and sent upcountry to a re-education camp. Slave labour and indoctrination. We put to sea in a boat with thirty other people the night before they would have been taken away.’

‘Some of our employees are older than me,’ said Gi. ‘They went through much worse... back home.’

Del turned in her chair to look out at the men on the bakery floor, all of whom appeared deceptively ordinary in their white caps and white uniforms. ‘Nothing’s ever what it seems,’ she said softly, thoughtfully.

To Tommy, Gi said, ‘Why would the gangs be after you?’

‘Maybe something I wrote when I still worked at the newspaper.’

‘They don’t read.’

‘But that has to be it. There’s no other reason.’

‘The more you write about how bad they are, the more they would like it if they did read it,’ Gi said, still doubtful. ‘They want the bad-boy image. They thrive on it. So what have they done to you?’

Tommy glanced at Del.

She rolled her eyes.

Although Tommy had intended to tell Gi every incred-ible detail of the night’s bizarre events, he was suddenly reluctant to risk his brother’s disbelief and scorn.

Gi was far less of a traditionalist and more understand-ing than Ton or their parents. He might even have envied Tommy’s bold embrace of all things American and, years ago, might have secretly harboured similar dreams for himself. Nevertheless, on another level, faithful son in the fullest Vietnamese sense, he disapproved of the path that Tommy had taken. Even to Gi, choosing self over family was ultimately an unforgivable weakness, and his respect for his younger brother had declined steadily in recent years.

Now Tommy was surprised by how desperately he wanted to avoid sinking further in Gi’s esteem. He had thought that he’d learned to live with his family’s disapproval, that they could not hurt him any more by reminding him how much he had disappointed them, and that what they thought of him was less important than what kind of person he knew himself to be. But he was wrong. He still yearned for their approval and was panicky at the prospect of Gi dismissing the tale of the doll-thing as the ravings of a drug-addled mind.

Family was the source of all blessings - and the home of all sadness. If that wasn’t a Vietnamese saying, it should have been.

He might have risked speaking of the demon anyway, if he had come here alone. But Del Payne’s presence already prejudiced Gi against him.

Therefore, Tommy thought carefully before he spoke, and then he said, ‘Gi, have you ever heard of the Black Hand?’

Gi looked at Tommy’s hands, as if expecting to be told that he had contracted some hideous venereal disease affecting the upper extremities, if not from this blonde-who-was-nearly-a-stranger, then from some other blonde whom he knew far better.

‘La Mano Nera,’ Tommy said. ‘The Black Hand. It was a secret Mafia organization of blackmailers and assassins. When they marked you for murder, they sometimes warned you by sending a white piece of paper with the black-ink imprint of a hand. Just to scare the crap out of you and make you suffer for a while before they finally popped you.’

‘This is ridiculous detective-story stuff,’ Gi said flatly, rolling down the sleeve of his white shirt and buttoning the cuff.

‘No, it’s true.’

‘Fast Boys, Cheap Boys, Natona Boys, the Frogmen, their types - they don’t send a black hand first,’ Gi assured him.

‘No, I realize they don’t. But have you ever heard of any gang that sends... something else as a warning?’

‘What else?’

Tommy hesitated, squirmed in his chair. ‘Well… say like a doll.’

Frowning, Gi said, ‘Doll?’

A rag doll.’

Gi looked at Del for illumination.

‘Ugly little rag doll,’ she said.

‘With a message on a piece of paper pinned to its hand,’ Tommy explained.

‘What was the message?’

‘I don’t know. It was written in Vietnamese.’

‘You once could read Vietnamese,’ Gi reminded him in a tone of voice thick with disapproval.

‘When I was little,’ Tommy agreed. ‘Not now.’

‘Let me see this doll,’ Gi said.

‘It’s… well, I don’t have it now. But I have the note.’

For a moment Tommy couldn’t recall where he had stashed the message, and he reached for his wallet. Remembering, he slipped two fingers into the pocket of his flannel shirt and withdrew the sodden note, dismayed by its condition.

Fortunately, the parchment-like paper had a high oil content, which prevented it from dissolving entirely into mush. When Tommy carefully unfolded it, he saw that the three columns of ideograms were still visible, though badly faded and smeared.

Gi accepted the note and held it in his cupped palm as if he were providing a perch for a weary and delicate butterfly. ‘The ink has run.’

‘You can’t read it?’

‘Not easily. So many ideograms are alike but with one small difference. Not like English letters, words. Each small difference in the stroke of the pen can create a whole new meaning. I’d have to dry this out, use a magnifying glass, study it.’

Leaning forward in his chair, Tommy said, ‘How long to decipher it - if you can?’

A couple of hours - if I can.’ Gi raised his gaze from the note. ‘You haven’t told me what they did to you.’

‘Broke into my house, vandalized it. Later... ran me off the road, and the car rolled twice.’

‘You weren’t hurt?’

‘I’ll be sore as hell in the morning, but I got out of the car without a cut.’

‘How did this woman save your life?’

‘Del,’ said Del.

Gi said, ‘Excuse me?’

‘My name is Del.’

‘Yes,’ said Gi. To Tommy, he said, ‘How did this woman save your life?’

‘I got out of the car just in time, before it caught fire. Then… they were coming after me and-’

‘They? These gangsters?’

‘Yes,’ Tommy lied, certain that every deception was transparent to Gi Minh. ‘They chased me, and I ran, and just when they might have nailed me for good, Del here pulled up in her van and got me out of there.’

‘You haven’t gone to the police?’

‘No. They can’t protect me.’

Gi nodded, not in the least surprised. Like most Vietnamese of his generation, he did not fully trust the police even here in America. In their homeland, before the fall of Saigon, the police had been mostly corrupt, and after the communist takeover, they had been worse - sadistic torturers and murderers licensed by the regime to commit any atrocity. Even more than two decades later, and half a world away from that troubled land, Gi was wary of all uniformed authorities.

‘There’s a deadline,’ Tommy said, ‘so it’s really impor-tant that you figure out what that note says as soon as possible.’

‘Deadline?’

‘Whoever sent the doll also sent a message to me by computer. It said, “The deadline is dawn. Ticktock.”

‘Gangsters using computers?’ Gi said disbelieving. ‘Everyone does these days,’ said Del.

Tommy said, ‘They mean to get me before sunrise.

and from what I’ve seen so far, they’ll stop at nothing to keep to that timetable.’

‘Well,’ Gi said, ‘you can stay here while I work on the message, until we figure this out - what it is they want, or why they’re out to get you. Meanwhile, no one can hurt you here, not with all those men down on the floor to stand with you.’

Tommy shook his head and rose from his chair. ‘I don’t want to draw these… these gangsters here.’ Del got to her feet as well and moved to his side. ‘I don’t want to cause you trouble, Gi.’

‘We can handle them like before.’

Tommy was sure that the pastry and bread artists of New World Saigon Bakery could hold their own against any group of human thugs. But if it chose to reveal itself in order to get at Tommy, the demon-from-the-doll would be as unfazed by bakers as it was by bullets. It would cut through them like a buzz saw through a wedding cake - especially if it had grown and had continued its apparent evolution into ever more fierce predatory forms. He didn’t want anyone to be harmed because of him.

He said, ‘Thank you, Gi. But I think I’d better keep moving, so they can’t find me. I’ll call you in a couple of hours to see if you’ve been able to translate the note.’

Gi rose from his chair but did not step out from behind his desk. ‘You came for advice, you said, not just to have this message translated. Well, my advice is... you’re safer trusting in family.’

‘I do trust in you, Gi.’

‘But you trust a stranger more,’ Gi said pointedly, although he did not look at Del.

‘It saddens me to hear you say that, Gi.’

‘It saddens me to have to say it,’ his brother replied.

Neither of them moved one inch toward the other, though Tommy sensed a yearning that matched his own.

Gi’s face was worse than angry, worse than hard. It was placid, almost serene, as if Tommy could no longer touch his heart for better or worse.

‘I’ll call you,’ Tommy finally said, ‘in a couple hours.’ He and Del left the office and went down the steps into the enormous bakery.

Tommy felt profoundly confused, petty, stubborn, stupid, guilty, and miserable - all emotions that the legendary private detective, Chip Nguyen, had never felt, had never been capable of feeling.

The aromas of chocolate, cinnamon, brown sugar, nutmeg, yeasty baking bread, and hot lemon icing were no longer appealing. Indeed, he was half sickened by the stench. Tonight the smell of the bakery was the smell of loss and loneliness and foolish pride.

As he and Del passed the coolers and storerooms, heading toward the back of the building and the door through which they had entered, she said, ‘Well, thanks for preparing me.’

‘For what?’

‘For the glorious reception I received.’

‘I told you how it was with me and the family.’

‘You made it sound strained between you and them.

It’s more like the Capulet’s and Montague’s and the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s all thrown together and named Phan.’

‘It’s not that dramatic,’ he disagreed.

‘Seemed pretty dramatic to me, quiet but dramatic, like both of you were ticking and liable to explode at any second.’

Halfway across the room from the shift manager’s office, Tommy stopped, turned, and looked back.

Gi was standing at one of the big windows in that managerial roost, watching them.

Tommy hesitated, raised a hand, and waved. When Gi didn’t return the wave, the bakery stench seemed to intensify, and Tommy walked faster toward the rear exit.

Lengthening her stride to keep up with him, Del Payne said, ‘He thinks I’m the whore of Babylon.’

‘He does not.’

‘Yes, he does. He disapproves of me even if I did save your life. Severely disapproves. He thinks I’m a succubus, a wicked white temptress who’s leading you straight into the fiery pit of eternal damnation.’

‘Well, you’re lucky. Just imagine what he’d think if you’d worn the Santa hat.’

‘I’m glad to see you still have a sense of humour about this family stuff.’

‘I don’t,’ he said gruffly.

‘What if I was?’ she asked.

‘Was what?’

A wicked white temptress.’

‘What are you talking about?’

They reached the rear exit, but she put a hand on Tommy’s arm, halting him before he could open the door. ‘Would you be tempted?’

‘You are nuts.’

She pretended to pout as if hurt. ‘That’s not as flattering a response as I’d hoped for.’

‘Have you forgotten the issue here?’

‘What issue is that?’ she asked.

Exasperated, he said, ‘Staying alive.’

‘Sure, sure. The doll snake rat-quick little monster thing. But listen, Tommy, you’re a pretty attractive guy in spite of all your glowering, all your deep angst, all your playing at being Mr. Mysterious East. A girl could fall for you - but if she did, would you be available?’

‘Not if I’m dead.’

She smiled. ‘That’s a definite yes.’

He closed his eyes and counted to ten.

When he was at four, Del said, ‘What’re you doing?’

‘Counting to ten.’

‘Why?’

‘To calm down.’

‘What number are you at?’

‘Six.’

‘What number now?’

‘Seven.’

‘What number now?’

‘Eight.’

When he opened his eyes, she was still smiling. ‘I do excite you, don’t I?’

‘You scare me.’

‘Why scare?’

‘Because how are we going to manage to keep this supernatural thing from killing us if you keep acting this way?’

‘What way?’

He took a deep breath, started to speak, decided there was no adequate reply, exhaled explosively, and said only, ‘Have you ever been in an institution?’

‘Does the post office count?’

Muttering a curse in Vietnamese, the first words he had spoken in that language in at least twenty years, Tommy pushed open the metal door. He stepped into the skirling wind and the rain - and he immediately regretted doing so. In the bakery heat, he had gotten warm for the first time since scrambling out of the wrecked Corvette, and his clothes had begun to dry. Now he was instantly chilled to the marrow once more.

Del followed him into the storm, as ebullient as any child. ‘Hey, did you ever see Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain?’

‘Don’t start dancing,’ he warned.

‘You need to be more spontaneous, Tommy.’

‘I’m very spontaneous,’ he said, tucking his head down to keep the rain out of his eyes. He bent into the wind and headed toward the battered, mural-bright van, which stood under a tall lamppost.

‘You’re about as spontaneous as a rock.’

Splashing through ankle-deep puddles, shivering, poised at the slippery slope of self-pity, he didn’t bother to answer.

‘Tommy, wait,’ she said, and grabbed his arm again. Spinning to face her, cold and wet and impatient, he demanded, ‘Now what?’

‘It’s here.’

‘Huh?’

No longer flirtatious or flippant, as alert as a deer scenting a wolf in the underbrush, she stared past Tommy: ‘It.’

He followed the direction of her gaze. ‘Where?’

‘In the van. Waiting for us in the van.’