In another part of the city, Gerardine Quantrill was doing just that, although she employed a method less archaic than gazing into a crystal ball. She should have heard from the hit man by now. He was supposed to send her evidence of Sno's fatal accident. Nothing so messy as her heart, which could not, after all, be identified, at least not by Gerardine. Her head would be ideal, if only there was somewhere to keep it. That way they'd never find any dental records. But then, they knew she was missing, presumably kidnapped by a bad drug connection, which was true except that it was Gerardine's connection, not Sno's.
Gerardine had also had the bright idea of having him dismember the corpse, then mail her Sno's right hand, which had a little heart tattooed on the wrist. She'd suggested that to Svenny when she'd called to make the connection with the killer. She appreciated Svenny's expert opinion, but he had not been especially brilliant on this occasion.
"What ya want that for?" he asked.
"Identification," she said. "So I'll know he did it."
"You think he'd dare cheat me? Me?" Svenny had asked.
"He could mail it as if it were a demand for ransom." she said.
"Gerry, honey, you're too kinky for crime. You'd make a better psycho. You'll get your token but you leave that up to me, okay?"
But she hadn't got her token, and when she called Svenny had told her (a) he hadn't heard anything from the independent contractor he had referred to her to help with her little problem and (b) never to call him again. Not a good sign.
So she had to assume the hit had failed and the brat was alive. She should have known by now that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself and you certainly didn't leave it up to a man. But it was easier to lie to Raydir about her concern for the dear girl if she hadn't actually seen her die. Ah, well, she'd always wanted to be an actress as well as a model. No time like the present. Now all she had to do was find the little twit.
She showered, stripped and entered the big meditation room she had designed on the top floor of Raydir's home, a room that overlooked the Sound and the mountains. Growing up a beauty in a series of foster homes had had its disadvantages, including male guardians and "brothers" who were all too interested when she was all too young. Some of them just used her, but many of them had hurt her, either accidentally in the process or deliberately and joyfully, something she had grown to appreciate in time. But at first, before she attained her sophistication and knowledge of how to use the foibles of those around her to her own benefit, she had learned to leave when one of them crawled on top of her. She could go still inside herself and travel wherever she wanted. See whomever she wanted.
But not all psychics are good psychics, and astral travel has been used by great sinners as well as great saints. Gerardine sought Sno like an eagle seeks a rabbit, from on high, with unerring instinct, and she found her, living in the woods with seven men, mere men, easy to manipulate and easy to blame.
* * *
"What makes you think I haven't found Sno in my crystal ball?" Felicity asked, facing Rose. Meanwhile, Puss jumped out of Dico's coat and began trotting down the street toward Crazy Eddy. Dico hurried after her, still well within sight, if not earshot, of Rose and Felicity, who had stopped to face each other.
"Well, if you had, why take so much interest in the investigation?"
"Just because I can find her doesn't mean I can help her alone. It is necessary for several reasons that the investigation take place."
"That's pretty enigmatic. Are you sure Sno is—okay?"
"For the time being, yes, I believe so. But she needs finding very soon."
"Well, where is she?"
"In the woods, probably not far from where this one"—she jiggled her pocket, and the toad croaked—"left her. I can't tell much except that she seems to be well. If she's following her archetype, she has protection and shelter."
"Excuse me? If she's following her archetype?"
"Yes, if her story continues to parallel the one of 'Snow White.'"
"Excuse me?" I should have expected it, Rose thought with a certain sense of fatalism. "Would you care to elaborate? Do you mean to tell me that Snohomish Quantrill, a budding delinquent and potential prostitute with a substance abuse problem, is Snow White, and is now safe in the woods with seven little men?"
"No, not really."
"That's good."
"But I wouldn't be at all surprised, although the men may not be exactly seven or all that little or, for that matter, may not be men. This is the age of equality, after all. And Sno Quantrill isn't Snow White, not in the way Bobby the hit man is Robert the huntsman. Bits and pieces change around depending on the time and the other people involved and their stories. If you read enough of the so-called folk and fairy tales, you'll see that it happened in them too—partially because the original reports of these events became confused with time and telling and possibly because similar things keep happening—differently, depending on circumstances. I think a lot of the trouble you may have recognizing the archetypes comes from having stories committed to paper, instead of being transmitted orally, as they were originally. When things are told from person to person they're much more fluid. Set down on paper, it appears that if one version is right, that no others can be. Life isn't like that."
"You're very Jungian, aren't you?" Rose said after a while. "Jungian analysis is all full of archetypes, and I know there've been some books written from a Jungian viewpoint about fairy tales."
"The tales," Felicity said, "were first. Jung didn't invent them—he simply made use of them. He didn't invent the archetypes; they've been there all along. Ask any observant person who has lived beyond eighty years without getting senile. They will tell you human beings tend to do certain types of things and act out certain events in certain ways over and over and over again. Take that old lady detective of Agatha Christie's for instance, Miss Marple."
"Oh, yes, I used to love that series on television and I read most of them when I was in my early teens," Rose said. "I had no idea you were interested in murder mysteries."
"One has to do something while waiting up for girls to return from dances and such."
"You know much more about modern things than, well, than I'd have thought, I mean, if I'd believed in you from the beginning."
"Dear, I haven't been dead or asleep all these years. I've been doing exactly what I'm doing here, wherever I seem to be needed. We have agents all over the world, of course. That's why that young man, Ding, knew me already, and I was able to get his attention."
"Yes, and I want to know more about that sometime, but you were saying about Miss Marple."
"Oh, well, obviously, just that she always solved her mysteries by remembering, no matter where she was or what sort of strange murder case she was involved in, something very similar that had happened to someone she remembered as being like someone else from her hometown of St. Mary Mead. Agatha Christie may have invented a wholly mythical London, but she knew a good deal about human nature."
"So, can you only help with people who are like Snow White or some other fairy-tale character?"
"Oh, no. But there are a lot of fairy tales and a lot of similarities, and the kinds of problems the characters in the fairy tales have are the kinds godmothers are best equipped to deal with, thwarted love, the warped parent-child relationships or sibling relationships that require dramatic intervention to salvage the lives and futures of important personalities who can someday exert positive influence on those around them."
"Sounds like what I do, though we're not usually quite so optimistic about the end result."
"Yes, dear, but you must deal with great masses of people while we—ahem—usually only try to assist one person at a time. You have little time for truly individual attention and quite limited means without access to some of the methods we may employ. You try to cope with problems even we cannot solve with the help of magic."
"Well, that's pretty depressing," Rose said.
"Being depressed about it is the last thing you should do," Felicity told her. "Hope, my dear, is an essential ingredient of wishes. Where all hope has vanished, there is no possibility of wishing. We, of course, represent the last frontier of hope. You're rather more accessible to most people, providing they can stand the red tape and the competition from those not truly in need."
Farther down on Yesler, Dico had stopped to talk to Eddy. At this time of night, the park benches and doorways of Pioneer Square contained sleeping bodies, young men, old men, one or two women, drunk and sober, sick and well, crazy and sane, black, Native American, and white, all huddled up, all homeless with their sleeping bags, coats, shopping bags and carts.
"What can you do for them?" Rose asked.
"What could I ever do for a mass of refugees? For the victims of the Black Plague?" Felicity said. "As a group, not a great deal except help develop leaders who will understand and assist with the problems in a human fashion. As individuals, sometimes a little, sometimes quite a lot, depending entirely on the person. Even the smallest thing can be enough to encourage someone who has decided to give up hope."
They were passing along the triangle with the totem pole in the center, opposite the underground tours, and passed a bench containing a lumpish-looking blonde woman with dirty hair and an old Indian man. Felicity reached into the depths of her layers, pulled out two little plastic sacks and set one beside the woman, one beside the man, then knelt down and whispered something in the woman's ear. The woman barely stirred.
Felicity then whispered something in the Indian man's ear. He snorted and swatted, then chuckled.
"What?" Rose asked.
"I told her where to find an unlocked public restroom where she could clean up in the morning with the things I gave her. We'll unlock it before we return to my place.""And the man?"
"Oh, I told him a joke."
"I'm not even going to try to figure that one out."
"Come back here tomorrow and you'll see," Felicity said.
They started walking more quickly to catch up with Dico, Puss and Eddy, who were about a block ahead of them, approaching the shelter.
All of a sudden, a car full of people pulled up to the curb next to Dico and Eddy and they all piled out, catcalling and yelling names as they surrounded the two men.
Puss darted out from the flurry of feet yowling, "Oh, shit, not again!"
Rose took off at a run toward the melee, Felicity behind her yelling, "Rose, be careful! You're not Wonder Woman either!"
But Rose wasn't paying any attention to anything, including her own safety. Maybe the fact that the young men surrounding Dico and Eddy were white, well dressed and clean-cut looking led her to think they'd listen to reason, though she should have known better, but she started shouting, "You leave them alone!"
"Hey, man, these scum may not have any money but she does," one said, and they began converging on her.
Felicity stopped just short of where Rose was being surrounded and concentrated very hard.
Ding hadn't thought about disgrace in a long time, but he thought about nothing else as he and the homeboys made their way back to the International District.
He wasn't disgraced in the eyes of the homeboys. They'd all seen Kwan Yin too, although the more ignorant and Western among them had to have her significance explained to them. They were all unusually quiet on the way home.
They drove in the old Ford station wagon of Le's elder brother and were almost to the exit when Ding felt a sharp, sudden impulse.
"Get off here," he told Le. "Now."
* * *
Felicity quickly ran through a list of magicks she still had left. She could turn the gang of whitebread ruffians into stone, but since the spell would last seven years, that was likely to attract undue attention and divert the imaginations of the medical community from the real problems that should claim their skill. Ditto if she put the lot of them to sleep. Her toad-changing magic, of course, was used up on Bobby. In the end it seemed best to cast a mental net and try to pull in all who could help or who owed her favors, meanwhile blowing loudly on the police whistle she always carried in her pocket and bracing herself to defend herself and her friends with all of the martial arts skills at Kwan Yin's disposal. Unfortunately, the persona lent itself more to the silken-robe-and-lotus sort of thing than to practical skills, so she attempted to look like David Carradine and hoped that would suffice until real help could come.
It was also problematical to blow on a police whistle while emitting fierce karate yells, but she did her best as she leapt into the fray—just in time to see a tire iron heading for her skull.
* * *
Le turned at Ding's insistence and when Ding saw the gang of toughs surrounding something or more likely somebody, when he saw Kwan Yin and her handmaiden standing by, when he saw the talking cat streak away from the men loudly calling, "Help! Help! My master has been set upon by ruffians!" when he saw the handmaiden swinging her purse like an Argentinian gaucho's bola as she ran toward the white gang, and when he saw Kwan Yin, with a mighty leap worthy of a Ninja Turtle, enter the fray, he opened the door of the speeding car, dove out, rolled, jumped to his feet and passed the vehicle on his way to join in.
"After me, Guerillas! JUMP!" he yelled and Le's car slammed into the other gang's car, as the driver bailed out slightly before he remembered to put the brake on.This required no great feat of leadership on Ding's part. Seeing Kwan Yin had accomplished a couple of things for the gang. First, it made them realize that their leader had even better connections than they had imagined, and second they realized that, all previous appearances to the contrary, there was someone very powerful of their own culture on their side as long as they watched their asses and cleaned up their acts. It was Ding's role as leader to show them how to go about this, and his instructions could not have been more emphatic. Then there was always third, which was that they just really liked jumping people.
Ding kicked aside three of the men and saw that the others had cornered one cowering guy in a trenchcoat along with the cat's master, the black guy, who was trying to shield the handmaiden, who was bopping the hell out of one of the white guys with her purse, while another guy was about to clobber Kwan Yin with a tire iron. Before Ding could intercept the iron, it turned back on the guy wielding it and began to thump hell out of him.
He saw the black guy dive past him and the flash of a knife and saw the black guy pile on top of the guy who had the knife and that he, Ding, was the knife's intended target before the black guy intercepted the attack.
About that time the white guys decided this was no easy way to have fun and began hauling each other back into their car, the Guerillas still beating on them as they fled, using knives and bats. It was way too crowded to shoot any of the bastards without downing an ally with friendly fire, and the homeboys, a little. more savvy than the military, realized this and used their firearms as clubs instead. Ding stepped on the wrist of the guy with the knife, causing him to drop the knife. Ding picked it up, then pulled the little black guy off. The white guy ran with his buddies back to the car, and the lot of them sped away, taking the front fender of Le's brother's car with them, rattling in their wake.
The black guy was shaking. Ding clapped him on the back. "Thanks, man. You saved my life. I'm glad we didn't kill you a while ago."
Dico stopped panting long enough to say, "Me too."
Ding saw Kwan Yin watching him as she helped Rose pick up the items that had been flung from her purse in the fury of her attack. "Look, I'm real sorry about jumping you, man, and scaring your cat," he told the kid. "Sometimes you just get pissed off at the world and take it out on the nearest person, you know?"
Dico nodded. Fifteen minutes ago he wouldn't have known but, now that it was over, he had to admit half-choking that guy had felt pretty good. "Yeah, I think so."
Kwan Yin continued to watch Ding, her head nodding very slowly in encouragement and conditional approval.
"My name is Nguyen Ding Hoa," Ding said, making a slight bow to Dico.
"Dico Miller," Dico replied.
"Dico, my folks work night shifts and I was going to fix them breakfast. Would you like to come home with me and meet them?"
"I'm kinda a mess right now to go meetin' people, besides, I offered to help . . ."
Dico looked back to Kwan Yin, but she was smiling and nodding.
"Well, okay, but I need to clean up and change and . . ."
"No sweat, man," Ding said, though he could smell the acrid scent of urine on Dico. It was nothing new to him. "We got plumbing, at least, and you and me are about the same size. Now, this is Le Hai but you can call him Hai, Minh, Chi . . ."
"What about Puss?" Dico asked, suddenly remembering the cat and looking around for her. "Puss? Puss? Now, I know that damn cat didn't let nothin' happen to her. Come on, Puss, we got invited out to eat."
A small whiskered face peeked out of the alley. "Ssst. You go on by yourself, Dico. I got my own rats to kill. Your new buddy may be okay, but I remember his previously expressed dietary preferences, if you get my drift. Meet me here tomorrow."
Dico nodded and turned back to Ding. Ding started to look to Kwan Yin for approval, but by that time she and the handmaiden were no longer there.