Chapter 04 - House Call (Patreon)

My mother set my nose at the kitchen table at a quarter to one in the morning.

She'd sat me in my dad's chair, the one with arms, and put a dish towel over my shirt, and washed her hands at the sink for a full minute the way they do at the hospital, with the water as hot as it would go. Then she stood in front of me and looked at my face from one side and then the other, and put her thumbs against the bridge of my nose.

"Sit. Hold still," she said. "This is going to sting."

It made a sound inside my head like somebody stepping on a plastic cup, and the kitchen went white. When it came back my eyes were running and she was already packing my nostrils with gauze.

"Breathe through your mouth."

I breathed through my mouth. She went through the rest of me in order, from the top down, which she told me once is how they teach it in medical school, so you don't miss something small because you got distracted by the worst thing. The cut under my left eye. The cut across my chest. The long one on my forearm, which she cleaned with something that smelled like a swimming pool and then closed with white strips of tape, one every half inch, though there wasn't much left to close. My knuckles. She held my right hand in both of hers and bent each finger slowly and watched my face while she did it.

Then she knelt on the linoleum and took my left ankle in one hand, put the other on the outside of my knee, and pushed gently inward.

The knee opened like a door on a bad hinge. I grabbed the arms of the chair.

"Medial collateral ligament," my mother said, mostly to herself. "Grade two. Maybe three." She let go and sat back on her heels. "If it's a two, that's six weeks. If it's a three, you're seeing an orthopedist on Monday and I don't want to hear about it."

She went down the hall to the closet in their bedroom where my dad keeps twenty years of braces and wraps and slings, and the neck collar from 1995 that he wears to Halloween parties. She came back with a hinged knee brace, black, with metal bars down both sides, and strapped me into it. Then she took my blood pressure, and my pulse again, and shone a penlight in each of my eyes, and wrote all of it down on a paper towel with the time next to each number.

She didn't ask me anything else. The only things she said were what she was about to do next, and I sat there and let her do it, and watched the clock over the stove go from twelve forty to one fifteen.

When she was done she washed her hands again and dried them with her back to me, looking out the window over the sink. She'd left the lights on in the dojo. I could see them from my chair, a yellow square across the dark yard.

Then she took the cordless phone off the wall and the list of numbers off the fridge, and dialed.

It was a quarter after five on Saturday afternoon in Yokohama. I listened to her ask the front desk of the hotel for Room 1108, in the voice she uses on insurance companies, and then wait.

"Paul," she said. "He's alive. Listen to me."

I couldn't make out his words. I could hear that he was talking, his voice coming out of the earpiece like a radio in another room.

"Listen to me," my mother said again, and he stopped. "A man named Yamazaki came into the dojo tonight after the kids' class and challenged him for the sign. William accepted." She didn't look at me while she said it. "Broken nose, which I've set. Three lacerations, superficial now. Possibly the same ribs again. A sprained MCL on the left, grade two at least. He's lost blood. He's conscious and oriented and he's sitting right here." She paused. "No. A man named Billy Kane stopped it."

The silence on the other end went on much longer that time.

"I don't know," my mother said. "Ask him yourself." She held the phone out to me.

I took it. "Hey, Dad."

"Kiddo." He sounded very far away, and quieter than I'd ever heard him. There was a hiss on the line, and under it a TV playing in Japanese. "Did he get the sign?"

"No."

I heard him breathe out. It went on for a long time.

"You bow first?"

"To the sign and to him."

"Okay." Another breath. "Okay." Then nothing for a while, and when he talked again his voice had gone thick. "I'm coming home. There's a flight out of Narita tonight, I'll get on it, I don't care what it costs—"

"You've got a fight on Wednesday."

"I don't care about the fight."

My mother took the phone out of my hand.

"Yes, you do," she said into it. "You missed one fight in your whole life, Paul, and you still talk about it. You told Kuroe you'd be there. Be there." She listened. "He's fine. He's not fine, but he's going to be. I'm here." She listened again, for longer, and her face started to do something and then stopped. "Thursday. Come home Thursday."

She held the phone out to me again.

"Is your mom right there?" my dad said.

"Yeah."

"Okay. Then just say yes or no." He dropped his voice, as if she couldn't hear him from across the kitchen. She probably could. "Was it the thing? From the mountains?"

"Yes."

He didn't say anything for a while. The TV on his end went to a commercial, a jingle with a lot of bells in it.

"Billy Kane," he said finally. "Billy Kane pulled that crazy son of a bitch off you."

"He's been parked across the street every night since you left. He says Geese told him to." I looked at my mother, who was looking at me. "Geese wants to meet me. Sunday. He's sending a car at noon."

The line hissed.

"Billy saved your life," my dad said slowly, working it out as he went. "So you owe him. A Phoenix pays what he owes." The thickness had gone out of his voice and something harder had come into it. "You owe Billy, kiddo. Not Geese. Whatever that man says to you, you don't owe him a thing."

"Paul," said my mother, who had heard every word, and held out her hand.

I gave her the phone. She took it into the hall and talked to him for another ten minutes with the bedroom door shut, and I sat in my father's chair with my nose full of gauze and my leg out straight in the brace and couldn't make out a word.

She woke me every two hours for the rest of the night.

I'd figured she would. You do it with head injuries, to make sure the person can still be woken. At three she sat on the edge of my bed and turned on the lamp and asked me my name and what day it was, and looked in my eyes with the penlight, and went away. At five she did it again, and this time she peeled back the tape on my forearm and looked under it for a long time. At seven she didn't ask my name. She put her hand flat on my knee through the blanket and held it there. Then she pushed the blanket back and unstrapped the brace and did the thing with my ankle and the side of my knee again.

It hurt. It didn't open anymore.

She put the brace back on and left without saying anything, and I lay there looking at the ceiling and listened to her walk into the kitchen and not do anything in there.

When I got up for real it was after ten. My nose felt like it had a fist in it. The gauze was gone; she'd taken it out at some point without waking me, which I hadn't known you could do. I went down the hall in the brace with one hand on the wall.

My mother was sitting at the kitchen table in the scrubs she'd come home in. She had a cup of coffee in front of her with a skin on top, and next to it, smoothed flat, the paper towel from last night. There were more numbers on it now, in columns, with times beside them, all the way down to the bottom and up the other side.

"Sit down," she said.

I sat down across from her.

She turned the paper towel around so it faced me and put her finger on it.

"Monday night you came home from the docks and told me you'd heard two ribs crack," she said. "When I felt them an hour later, they were bruised. On Thursday you ran a fever of a hundred and two that broke at three in the morning, with no infection and no source, and on Friday you came downstairs looking like you'd slept for a month." She moved her finger down. "At twenty past twelve this morning your resting heart rate was fifty-eight, after a fight that would have killed most people. The laceration on your forearm should have needed twenty stitches, and it was closed when I got to you. At seven this morning your MCL was a grade one. Grade ones take two weeks. I watched it go from a three to a one in six hours, and I was checking it the whole time."

She took her finger off the paper towel.

"I've been a doctor for fifteen years," she said. "Tell me what's wrong with you."

I'd thought about this a lot since January. At one point I'd had a whole speech worked out for it, and now I couldn't remember any of it. I looked at the paper towel and the columns of her handwriting.

"I found something in the mountains," I said.

I told her the same way I'd told my dad, from the beginning. It took longer, because she kept stopping me. My dad had sat and listened with his whole face. My mother took a history. When did it start: the fourth of January. What time: I didn't know, the afternoon. Where on your body did you feel the heat. How long did it last. Did you lose consciousness. Any headaches since, any changes in your vision. Does it happen in your sleep. When I told her about the Dojo, she asked if I could smell anything in there, and I said woodsmoke, and she wrote that down on the back of the paper towel. When I told her about the embers, she made me explain twice what paid how many.

"Losing to Terry Bogard for ten seconds paid a hundred," I said. "Last night paid two hundred."

"And when you won? The boxer at the docks?"

"Less."

She looked at me. "So it pays you more when you lose."

"It pays more when they're stronger than me. And more when it's—" I stopped.

"When it's what."

"For real. Life or death."

My mother put her pen down and lined it up with the edge of the paper towel. She did it very carefully.

"Show me something," she said.

I held up my left hand, the way I had for my dad, and the shield came up in front of it with a faint ringing in the quiet kitchen, like a wet finger run around the rim of a glass. My mother looked at it for a long time. Then she reached across the table and put her palm flat against it, the way she'd put her hand on my knee that morning, and pressed.

"It's warm," she said.

"I didn't know that."

"Will it stop a bullet?"

"I don't know. It stopped a knife last night until it broke."

She took her hand away and I let the shield go. She sat back and looked out the window at the dojo, and I sat there and waited for whatever was coming.

"Your father knows," she said.

"Since Monday night."

She nodded slowly. "That's why he kept looking at you all week like you'd won the lottery. I thought it was the boxer." She picked up her coffee, looked at the skin on it, and put it down. "And the two of you decided not to tell me."

"I decided. He wanted to tell you. I asked him not to."

"I know he wanted to." She almost smiled. "Your father has never kept anything from me for longer than a week. He only made it to Friday because he got on a plane."

She was quiet for a while. Next door, Mr. Okafor started his lawnmower, and I listened to it go up and down his yard.

"It's paying you to get hurt," my mother said.

"It's paying me to fight people who are better than me. So I get better."

"I heard you. And the closer it comes to killing you, the more it pays." She turned and looked at me, and her eyes were tired and completely clear. "William, I don't know what that thing is, or who made it, or why it's in my son. But whoever built it wants you hurt."

"It wants me strong."

"It can want both," said my mother.

I didn't have an answer. She didn't seem to expect one. She got up and poured her coffee down the sink and rinsed the cup, and then stood there with her hands on the edge of the counter and her back to me.

"I called Marshall at seven," she said, without turning around. "He's coming at noon with Forest to fix the dojo. Go and shower. You smell like a fight." After a moment she added, "Keep the brace on in the shower. I don't care if it gets wet."

I got up. At the door to the hall I stopped.

"Mom. Are you going to tell me not to fight anymore?"

She thought about it, still facing the window.

"If I thought you'd listen," she said, "I'd have told you when you were twelve."

Marshall Law arrived at ten to twelve with four bags of groceries, a toolbox, a carton of fluorescent tubes from the hardware store on Dalton, and his son.

He came in the kitchen door without knocking, the way he has my whole life, put the bags on the counter, and looked at my face and then at the brace. He made a sound in his throat that wasn't a word.

"Ryuji Yamazaki," he said. "Ryuji Yamazaki. In Paul's place."

"Marshall," said my mother.

"I'm just saying!" He started unpacking: eggs, two kinds of rice, a whole chicken, ginger, green onions, a bag of oranges, bottles with Chinese labels I couldn't read. "Paul's not gone one day and that guy is through the door. You know what he did to a cop at Pao Pao? Broke both his arms. For looking at him. And nothing happened, because nothing ever happens to Yamazaki, because Geese—" He looked at my mother and stopped. "Sorry, Riley. Sorry. I'll cook."

He cooked. That's what Marshall does when he doesn't know what to do with his hands. My mother went to lie down for the first time since yesterday afternoon, and Forest and I went out to the dojo and spent the next hour sweeping up glass.

The place looked worse in daylight. The cubbies on the far wall were kindling at one end, and the kids' spare sandals and flip-flops were still scattered across the floor where they'd come down on Yamazaki. There was blood on the mat, dried brown now in long smears and in one wide patch near the middle where I'd sat. The blue vinyl had split open in two places. The burst tubes had left their empty fittings hanging from the ceiling, and the glass had gotten into everything, the seams of the mats and the cracks along the baseboards and two of the kids' shoes.

Forest held the dustpan while I swept. For most of the hour he barely said anything, which isn't like him. He kept looking at the splits in the mat.

"You did that," he said finally. "With your feet."

"The stamp. When I threw the last one."

"That vinyl's half an inch thick. My dad bought these mats with yours. I helped carry them in." He crouched and put a finger into one of the splits. "And Billy Kane walked in here and pulled him off you."

"He hit him in the head with the staff."

"Billy Kane works for Geese." Forest sat back on his heels. He's three months older than me, and when he sits like that he looks about twelve. "Why would Geese want to help you?"

"I'll ask him tomorrow."

Forest stared at me. I went over to the corner behind the heavy bag, where the knife had been lying since last night, and picked it up with a paper towel so I wouldn't touch it, and folded it shut and dropped it into a Ziploc bag I'd brought out from the kitchen. Forest watched me do it.

"Your mom's letting you go?"

"I haven't asked her yet."

Marshall came out a little after one to put in the new tubes. He stood on the stepladder with the old fittings in his hands and looked down at the room, at the cubbies and the split mat and the brown patch where I'd bled, and didn't make any noise at all. Then he looked at the sign, and kept looking at it from the top of the ladder.

"Your dad made that the week you were born," he said. "He ever tell you I held the board for him? He cut himself four times. The second time, he got me too." He held up his left hand and showed me a thin white line along the side of his thumb that I'd never noticed. "He wouldn't let anybody sand it. Your mom tried."

"She told me."

Marshall nodded. He fitted the new tube into the fitting and twisted it, and it flickered and caught.

"You did good, kid," he said, without looking down. "Don't do it again."

We ate on the back steps at two: rice, and chicken poached with ginger and green onion, and a fish soup that Marshall said was his grandmother's, which he says about all of them. My mother came out in clean clothes with her hair wet and sat on the top step and ate a whole bowl without talking. Marshall watched her eat it the way he watches everybody eat his food, and when she was done he took the bowl and filled it again without asking.

He waited until Forest had gone back out to finish the mats. Then he sat down on the step below hers with his back against the railing and said quietly, "Paul called me too. Two in the morning."

"I thought he might."

"He says Geese wants to see the kid tomorrow." Marshall turned his bowl around in his hands. "Riley, I'll take him. Me and Forest. Geese doesn't want trouble with—"

"No," said my mother.

"Riley—"

"You've got a restaurant opening in Tokyo in four months, Marshall, and a lease, and a son, and a backer you've never met." She put her hand on his shoulder for a second. "You're not walking into Geese Tower for us. Thank you. No."

Marshall didn't argue. He looked across the yard at the dojo, where Forest was on his hands and knees picking glass out of a seam with a pair of tweezers, and nodded.

"In Tokyo, though," he said after a while. "The apartment's got three bedrooms. I'm just saying. If somebody wanted to be someplace else for a while."

My mother didn't answer him. She didn't tell him no, either, and I was sitting right there and heard her not say it.

I went to the Dojo that night.

My knee ached in the brace, and the rest of me ached wherever there wasn't tape, and when I closed my eyes and did the breathing I could feel for the first time where the breath went. It went down, past my lungs, which made no sense, into the warm place a couple of inches under my navel that had opened up last night when everything else was gone. It pooled there. When I breathed out, the place stayed full. It had been empty when Yamazaki was crouched over me, and now that I knew what empty felt like, I knew what this was.

Then the floor of the Dojo was under me.

The brazier held two hundred and fifty-two embers and a little more. I sat down beside it with my knees pulled up, which I could do in here, because in here my knee was fine.

Two hundred would buy a minor book: three scrolls from anywhere on the walls, priced up to three hundred, out of more than three thousand. I could put my hands in right now and think two hundred and see what came.

I wanted to. I'd wanted to the whole time Marshall was up on the ladder. But every time I looked into the brazier I saw my mother at the kitchen table with her finger on the paper towel, and Yamazaki's face upside down over me with the moth in the light behind his head. Two hundred of the embers in there had come from that, so I left them where they were.

When I stood up I looked down the hall toward the far end, where the four walls I can't read go back into the dark. Then I turned around, because I could feel it standing behind me again.

It was there at the edge of the light from the brazier. It wasn't any clearer than it had been the night before. I stood and looked at it longer this time, and I was almost sure it was taller than me now, and that it was standing the way my father stands at the front of a class, with its weight even on both feet and its hands, if it had hands, at its sides.

"Hey," I said.

It didn't move. I hadn't expected it to.

The car came at noon exactly.

I was watching for it through the front window in the nicest clothes I own, which meant black jeans and a white button-down my mother had ironed that morning without being asked, with the brace under the jeans. My hair was tied back. My nose had gone from purple to a greenish yellow overnight, and the cut under my eye was a thin pink line.

It was a black Lincoln Town Car with tinted windows, very clean. It pulled up at the curb in front of the dojo and sat there idling, and Billy Kane got out from behind the wheel.

He wasn't wearing the bandana. He had on a dark suit that didn't sit right across his shoulders, and his hair was combed, and he looked like a man who'd been made to dress up for a funeral. He stood beside the car with his hands folded in front of him and looked at the house.

I'd asked my mother at breakfast. She'd said, "We'll see," and gone out to the dojo and stayed there for an hour, and I hadn't asked again.

I opened the front door. Before I'd made it down the steps, my mother came out behind me.

She had on the grey suit she wears to hospital board meetings and depositions, which she calls her armor, and low heels, and her hair pinned up. She had her purse over her shoulder. She walked past me down the steps and across the lawn to where Billy was standing, and stopped in front of him.

Billy straightened. "Mrs. Phoenix."

"Doctor," said my mother.

"Doctor." He looked past her at me, then back at her. "Mr. Howard only asked for the boy, ma'am."

"Then when we get there, Mr. Howard can ask me to wait in the car." She looked at him for a moment. "Thank you for Friday night, Mr. Kane. My son would be dead if you hadn't come in."

For a second Billy looked about nineteen years old.

"Wasn't nothing," he said.

"It was something," said my mother. She opened the back door of the Lincoln herself, got in, and slid over to make room for me.

Billy looked at me over the roof of the car. I shrugged. He shook his head slowly and got back behind the wheel.

You can see Geese Tower from anywhere in South Town, so I'd seen it every day of my life. I'd never been inside it. Nobody I knew had.

The lobby was black stone and very quiet. Two men sat behind the security desk and didn't look up when Billy walked us past them to an elevator with brass doors at the back. Billy put a key into a slot in the panel, and we went up for a long time. My ears popped. My mother stood beside me holding her purse in front of her with both hands and watched the numbers over the door.

The doors opened onto a hallway that ended in a pair of tall wooden doors. Billy knocked once on one of them and opened it.

The office was bigger than our house. One wall was glass from the floor to the ceiling, and through it was all of South Town: the port, the freeway, the bridges, and the grey line of the ocean. Somewhere down there, too small to see, were Barnes Street and the dojo. The floor was dark wood. There was a long low desk in front of the window with almost nothing on it, a few chairs, and along one wall a shelf of narrow lacquered cases, the kind you'd keep a scroll in. No sound came up from the city at all. It was the quietest room I'd ever been in.

Geese Howard was standing at the window with his back to us.

Everybody in South Town knows the story. Twelve years ago Terry Bogard fought him at the top of this tower and threw him out through the glass, and he fell, and somehow he lived. I looked at the window. The glass in it was a little bluer than the glass in the hallway behind us, and newer.

Geese turned around.

He was taller than I'd expected, with white hair combed straight back and not many lines in his face for a man of fifty. He wore a charcoal suit with no tie. He looked at me first, briefly, and then at my mother, and his face changed by about the width of a hair.

"Doctor Phoenix," he said. "I did not expect you. I should have."

"I'm not here to stop him talking to you," said my mother. "I'm here to hear what you say."

"Then please sit." He gestured at the chairs in front of the desk. "Billy. Stay."

Billy shut the door and stood in front of it with his hands folded.

My mother sat. I sat beside her with my leg out straight. Geese didn't sit. He came around the end of the desk and stood beside it with one hand resting on the edge, looking down at me, and I understood that he'd arranged this room the way my dad decides where he'll stand in a ring.

"On Friday night you were hurt by a man who sometimes works for me," Geese said. "On Friday night he was not working for me. I want that understood before anything else is said."

"Billy told me."

"Billy says a great many things. I am saying this one." He let a moment pass. "Ryuji Yamazaki is a useful man and a sick one. He collects things. Teeth, money, old paper. He believes you found something in the mountains, and he will not stop believing it because you tell him no. He will come back."

"I know," I said.

"After him, others will come." Geese moved his hand an inch along the edge of the desk. "A park ranger tells a story in a bar in Bishop. In a month the story is in South Town. In another month it will be in Hong Kong. There are people in the world, young man, who have spent their whole lives looking for certain things, and they would think nothing of going through you and your mother and your little dojo to look. I have met some of them. I am one of them."

"Is that a threat?" said my mother.

"It is a description." Geese looked at her. "I do not threaten doctors, Doctor Phoenix. A city runs better when its doctors are not afraid."

He opened a drawer in the desk, took out a photograph, and laid it in front of me, turned so I could see it.

It was black and white, and old, a picture of a scroll unrolled on a table. The scroll looked like silk, frayed along the edges and stained, covered in columns of Chinese characters in a heavy brush. There was a red seal stamped in the bottom corner. Somebody had laid a ruler beside it for scale, and it was about two feet long.

"Have you ever seen anything like that?" said Geese.

I looked at it for a long time, because I knew he wanted me to, and because I wanted to be sure. The scroll in the cave had been paper, smooth and warm, in a box with no lock. Its writing wasn't Chinese, or any other language I'd ever seen, and it had moved when I looked at it. It hadn't had a seal.

"No," I said.

Geese never looked at the photograph. He watched my face the whole time I looked at it, and he kept watching it after I'd answered.

"No," he said, as though he were trying the word for size. Then he picked the photograph up and put it back in the drawer and shut it. "That is a pity for me. And very fortunate for you."

I didn't say anything. Beside me, my mother hadn't moved at all.

Geese walked to the window and stood with his hands behind his back.

"Billy will go on parking across the street from your father's dojo every night until your father returns," he said. "Ryuji will hear that he does. That will not stop Ryuji, but it will make him think first. In exchange, I ask nothing."

"Nothing," said my mother.

"Nothing. I would like you to remember that I asked nothing." He looked out over the city. "Your husband refused me once, Doctor. Did he tell you?"

"Yes."

"I offered him a great deal of money. He said he would rather fight in parking lots for fifty dollars than in my arena for fifty thousand." Geese said it without any expression. "I respected that. I still do. It was a stupid man's answer and an honest one, and I have known very few men who could afford to be both." He turned his head slightly. "Where was your husband born, Doctor?"

My mother looked at him for a while before she answered.

"You'd have to ask him that."

"I intend to," said Geese. "I am curious about his family. He resembles someone I once knew."

He didn't say who, and my mother didn't ask. I sat there thinking about Pao Pao, and Terry Bogard hanging over the back of the booth, and Richard Meyer saying if somebody told me you two were brothers, and kept my face as still as I could.

Geese turned from the window.

"Young man," he said. "I have watched Ryuji Yamazaki fight some of the strongest men in this city. He does not stop. He does not get bored. When something stands in front of him, he goes on until it is no longer standing. On Friday night, Billy tells me, you stood in front of him for eleven minutes." He came toward me, unhurried. "And at the end of it you put a mark in his chest that he will carry for a month. Your father cannot do that. Your father has never touched ki in his life, and he is proud of it."

He stopped in front of my chair.

"So I wonder where you learned," said Geese Howard, and moved his right hand.

The music came on, and I stopped the world.

It was easy this time. The grey came down over the office all at once, clean, and Geese stood frozen in front of me with his right hand open and coming at my face, palm first and fingers straight, from about two feet away. Even stopped, I could see how fast he was. There was no wasted motion anywhere in him. Everything was going toward me, and the strike was going for the bridge of my broken nose.

I could also see where it would stop: an inch short. His weight hadn't come forward. His back heel was still flat on the floor. It was a hand sent out to look at something and come back, and in every version I pictured, it stopped an inch from my face and stayed there. I'd never been surer of anything in the stopped world.

I spent the rest of the thirty seconds looking at my mother. She was frozen halfway out of her chair beside me, with her purse sliding off her lap and her right hand coming up to catch his wrist, the way my dad had taught her.

Time came back.

Geese's palm stopped an inch from my nose. I didn't move, and I didn't blink. I could feel the air his hand had pushed ahead of it, cool, on my face.

My mother's hand closed around his wrist.

Nobody moved. Geese looked down at her hand on his arm, then at her, then at me. Behind us, Billy took one step away from the door and stopped.

"Let go of me, Doctor," Geese said quietly. "I was not going to strike him."

"I know," said my mother. "So did he." She didn't let go. "That's what you wanted to see."

Geese looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled, very slightly, and it didn't last.

"Yes," he said. "That is what I wanted to see."

My mother let go. Geese took his hand back and straightened his cuff, and walked back to his place by the window.

"Billy will drive you home," he said, without turning around. "Thank you for coming, Doctor. Young man, when you want to fight someone who will pay you properly for it, you know where I am."

My mother didn't say anything in the elevator, or in the car the whole way back to Barnes Street. She sat with her purse in her lap and looked out the window. Billy didn't say anything either. Once, at a red light on Dalton, I saw him look at her in the rearview mirror and then look away.

When we pulled up in front of the dojo she got out first. I got out after her, slowly, because of the brace, and Billy came around the car.

"Your mum," he said to me in a low voice, while she was walking up to the house. "Grabbed Mr. Howard's arm."

"Yeah."

"Six years I've worked for him. I've never seen anybody put a hand on him who wasn't trying to fight him." He watched her unlock the front door. "Your dad teach her that?"

"Yeah."

Billy nodded slowly. "Tell him he did all right," he said, and got back in the car.

My mother was standing in the kitchen when I came in, with her hands flat on the counter and her suit jacket still on. I think she'd been standing that way since she walked in. She didn't turn around.

"He knew you'd see it coming," she said.

"He wanted to find out if I would."

"And now he knows." She was quiet for a moment. "You're not going back to that tower."

Then she took off the jacket and hung it over the back of a chair, and took the phone off the wall, and dialed a number that wasn't on the list on the fridge. She didn't have to look it up.

"Terry," she said, when somebody picked up. "It's Riley Phoenix. I need to talk to you."

Interlude: Geese Tower

Billy came back up at a quarter past three. Geese was sitting at the desk with the photograph out again, face up in front of him.

"Dropped them home," Billy said. "She's on the phone to Bogard."

"Of course she is." Geese didn't look up. "The boy did not lie to me, Billy. He had never seen this scroll in his life. His father's face goes still when he lies, and so does his. His moved the entire time."

"So it's not one of the Qin."

"It is not one of the Qin." Geese turned the photograph face down. "Which means there is another kind, and it does not sit in a box on a shelf. He carried it down the mountain inside himself."

Billy said nothing.

"He did not flinch," Geese went on. "A brave man flinches and then decides not to move. I have struck a great many brave men. That boy had nothing to decide. He knew where my hand would stop before I moved it." He folded his hands on the desk. "Where was Paul Phoenix born?"

"Still working on it, sir. New York's all I've got. A lot of the city's paper went missing in the bad years. And nobody will tell me which orphanage Jeff Bogard went to. He didn't leave much behind."

"Keep working on it."

"Yes, sir."