Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,
To the fisherman lost on the land.
He stands alone in the door of his home,
With his long-legged heart in his hand.
-- Dylan Thomas, Ballad Of The Long-Legged Bait
"Always on the look out for your woman," Pagliacci says. He sits on the table and flashes a smile, thirty-two perfectly shaped white tombstones, at Lin. The Italian name is familiar now; the face handsome, features swarthy, hair black and thick and curly; he is the Azzuri answer to Spike, heavier-set, dreamier-eyed, with the same lazy, charming panache in style and movement.
"She is not my wife." The words leave Lin's mouth naturally, rehearsed, as though without pain in them. "I don't care that much."
Pagliacci shrugs. Lin and his girl are strange to him; there is apparently not much love lost between them, yet Lin does not truly look at any other woman even in her absence, while she does not respond even for a weak lapse of a second to the dazzling, exotic charm of Pagliacci and his brothers. There is a mystery here, Pagliacci thinks, but he has no wish to unravel it.
"Papa awaits," he says.
*****
Papa is a huge wreck of a man, wrapped in the smooth black of a Sicilian-cut suit that seems to cover an expanse of flesh greater than a small comet. The bulk of him fills the executive suite where he waits for Lin and Pagliacci to arrive. In this roomful of tanned, white-toothed strangers, Lin's six feet of height is immediately diminished, his pale skin seems to bleach a whiter shade. Papa's hand engulfs his and then lets go; it feels like shaking the paw of a distinguished bear that goes for expensive manicures.
"See this," Papa says in a voice like stones moving over gravel, pointing to a yellow crystal in a small glass box on the smooth onyx table in front of them. "This shit, this miserable material, I have purchased in a miscalculated shipment from a bad place in Russia. Bad, very bad, my boys tell me. Then I speak to Mr. Vicious, and he says you are like that Greek king, your hand, it turns shit into gold. You can do that for me, eh? You turn this shit into gold?"
Lin recognises the yellow substance as a block of strike, a designer drug not easily available on the street. Laid out in readiness on the table beside the crystal are the tools of his trade, from laser 'scope to micro-reader; he kneels in front of the low table on the seat-pads, as though he was about to have a meal in a traditional restaurant, and works without speaking, without urgency. When he takes his eye away from the lens of the 'scope he has to blink twice before the features of the anxious, eager Pagliacci swim into focus behind the monolith of his Papa's shoulders.
"Vicious-sama has had people killed for producing material of this quality," Lin says, truthfully. "But since then we have found that it can be treated to boost it up to street standard."
"Japanese standard or American standard?" Papa grunts.
"Mars standard."
"I like this friend you have," Papa says to Pagliacci, who winks at Lin when Papa is not looking.
*****
"Mars drugs are higher quality," Lin explains to Pagliacci, as they walk towards Red Dragon headquarters. "America has good designer drugs, but the standard of their mainstream productions has fallen since the last century. They found it difficult to compete with the Amsterdam-Toyko coalition."
"But Red Dragon is not complete head and shoulders in the drug business, no?"
"No, that is true."
"Only surprising that you are working here," Pagliacci shrugs.
Pagliacci's tongue is pink from a massive tumbler of strawberry bubble tea; the lurid colour of the drink clashes with his blue-tinged grey suit, yet the effect of the fat tumbler in his hand seems to draw even more mascara'ed and kohl-lined and heavily-shadowed eyes toward him. The last of Lin's ice-blended coffee lies in a slush at the bottom of the plastic. He stirs it with the straw.
"Why is it surprising?"
"I have a friend like you," Pagliacci says, "back home, in Rome. Perhaps he can do half of the things you do. Perhaps less. But he is very well employed, very well paid. He has a car here, a car there, a villa here, a villa there, a country here, a country there..."
"Yes?"
"I do not understand, my friend. I do not know why you stay with the Dragons. You do things that this friend of mine says are impossible."
"There are some people in the Red Dragon who are better than me. I am learning from them..."
Pagliacci throws up his hands with a great shout of laughter. Pink ice rains down three yards away.
"Let me get you a new drink," Lin says.
"Bugger the drink, my friend," Pagliacci says. "Answer the question. I am thirsty for answers. Drink is cheap, talk is dear. That should be the saying. Why do you stay with the Red Dragon?"
"Honour."
"Honour! A beautiful word. What does it mean?"
"You remember the paper dragon," Lin says.
Pagliacci nods. Three nights ago they wandered into the local Chinatown, and watched a dragon dance - perhaps fifty men and women holding the poles that supported a long red-and-gold dragon, forming a snake-like body that wove in and out of the streets like a conga dance with no end, a snake chasing its tail beneath a sky full of fireworks and hope.
"The dance is a beautiful thing and there is a pride for each of the people who dance it, because they are part of a great thing," Lin says. "There is not much money in it, no. And when the city sees the dance, it cannot see the people below the dragon; it only sees that the dragon and the dance are beautiful things. So the dancers know they will never be seen, and their individual skill will never be known."
"Such a pity," Pagliacci said. "I am sure some of the girls in that dance were of fine and beautiful form."
"There is only the honour and the pride," Lin says, "the knowledge that, although you cannot see it, you are doing something to be proud of. Something with honour. And if one person decided that he did not want to dance any more, and left, how would the dragon dance, if there was no one else skilled enough to dance in his place?"
Pagliacci nods his head, claps his long, clever hands like a dove beating its wings, and puts his arm around Lin's neck to pull him into a headlock. It is a rough and affectionate gesture, reserved only for good friends and brothers.
"You have a reason for everything," he tells Lin. "If you were commanded by your Red Dragon to kill a schoolbus full of children I think you would give me such a good reason that I would first weep, then follow you with a loaded gun."
"I do not think that will happen," Lin says.
"Something like it, then," Pagliacci says. "Something equally terrible or pointless, something you can see no reason for doing except that you were told to. What would you say to me, then?"
"Think of the dragon dance again. Sometimes one person in the dance must perform an step that seems to him to be of no use, to be ridiculous even, dangerous, wasteful. But if he did not do it, then the dragon would not leap, the dance would no longer be beautiful, the other people would miss a step or be confused and then the entire dragon would collapse."
Pagliacci leaps upon a stone bench (they are passing a park) and applauds, whistling and clapping and stamping his feet. Lin stands below him and gazes up with concern into the healthy brown face as Pagliacci shouts, "Bravo! Bravo, my friend, bravo indeed! Buy me a drink, damn you, I've had enough of your talk for one day, how you defeat me so!"
Lin sees a familiar building nearby. He has never entered it, but the antics of his friend have begun to infect him with their reckless disregard of conventional behaviour. He buys two plump packets of soymilk-grass-jelly, suspended by a raffia string, a straw sticking out of the open end, from a vendor on the street. Now Pagliacci waits in the lobby of the office, sucking with interest on the fat straw of one packet, while Lin bluffs his way straight-faced through a maze of receptionists until he finds himself standing, smiling, the packet in one hand, in front of her desk, watching the surprise spread like a glow across her face, drop light in a kiss on his cheek. Around them the tapping of keyboards, the clack of high heels and the rustle of paperwork diffuse into another kingdom, a blank area on a map labeled Other People's Lives.
*****
"What's that?"
Lin is brushing his teeth. He says, "What?" between the foam, decides this is a bad idea, spits in the sink and rinses his mouth in a mouthful of water. The metal taste of the pipe remains on his tongue after he steps out of the bathroom. It reminds him disquietingly of blood.
"That," Mei says. She lifts the small plastic packet, waves it at him. "I thought I told you about bringing work home."
"That's not work."
"What is it?"
She is from a middle-class background; she has an office job, a degree in management-engineering, a mother staying with an aunt near her own apartment; she has probably never held a packet of strike, or grass, or coke, before this.
"For Pagliacci's father."
"Oh, poor thing," she says, turning the packet over. "It looks like some really nasty medication."
Lin keeps his tongue between his teeth to prevent telling her that Pagliacci's father is not a nice old man doddering away in some Milan resort, that the yellow stuff is bound for the streets of New York and Nichigawa, that it does not cure diabetes or arthritis or Alzheimer's, and that he would like her to wash her hands after putting it down even though it is triple-sealed and air-locked. He decides that one action is substitute enough for a thousand words, and gently takes the packet from her, tucking it back into the pocket of his coat.
"It's about time the Red Dragon revised the company dress policy," she says, running her hand along the long coat that Lin only wears on his more sinister outings; the fine gold braid, the wide European collar, the tassel at the shoulders. "But if you don't wear it then you'll look like a Yakuza instead. There's no winning, is there?"
This is part of her campaign, a small, subtle pressure that has been increasing inch by creeping inch, of late. There is hardly any part of it he can complain of; it is only a feeling he gets, in between the innocent sentences fallen from her small pink lips, that perhaps, maybe, hypothetically, he might consider a life different from the one that he is bound to. He remembers Pagliacci's questions, the stone bench in the park; he closes his eyes and sees the paper dragon dancing in the streets of Chinatown.
"Lin?"
*****
He opens his eyes. He is in Vicious-sama's office. He remembers the assignment. There was no real need for the alliance with Pagliacci's Papa, no real need for the old man to come to Mars, nor for their agents to go to Rome. There was never a need for anything from Pagliacci's Papa, except his death, and the death of Pagliacci, and of his brothers, and of their entire clan. We need this, Vicious says (as though Lin has ever needed an explanation to obey his orders), to pitch the Earth mafias further into chaos. They must not know that the Red Dragon is responsible; they only have to know that there is a hole in the hierachy, in the black market commerce, in the command; the rest of the planet will do its own backstabbing and finger-pointing, will tear itself to pieces. There only needs to be chaos on Earth for those on Mars to smile, shake their heads, ascend, a bright phoenix rising from the ashes...
He has realised that from now on there can be no more space for anything else. None for the magnetic charm and white-flashing smile of a buoyant friend; none for idle conversations on the streets of Mars; none for a girl's shoes beside his door, her coat on his hook, her hand on his face. He is aware now that the dragon is there, that it does not care about those people who do not dance beneath its red-and-gold scales; that, one day, if ordered to bring hurt upon them - that strange, confusing step, that wasteful effort whose importance is not for him to question - he will hurt them in a terrible manner, much more terrible than if they were strangers who had nothing better to expect of him in their lives.
Sitting in the office now, he feels the mask come over his face completely, and it is hard to feel that it will ever leave again. He cannot see the future, but he can imagine it. There is a page he will come to where he closes Pagliacci's unseeing eyes, weighs them down with two coins that he brings with him when the bullets have stopped flying and the room is heavy with smoke and silence. There is a page, later or earlier (he cannot decide), where a delivery man stops at the door of her house (that he has never entered) and hands a box to her (in actuality it is her housemate who receives the box on her behalf; and Lin cannot know that her housemate is Julia, but perhaps this is a good thing), and immediately behind that page is one where she knocks on the door of his apartment until the landlord arrives to tell her that he left without a forwarding address.
There is a page where he is buying a new phone, moving into a new flat, hefting a new gun in his hand, distilling a more potent new drug into a canister for crystallization, sitting alone at a bar again (but never the bar where he met her, where the memory-ghosts of Spike and Julia hover forever in an eternal, frozen semi-happiness). Perhaps Shin still plays pool there; perhaps Mei will go there, and fall in love with Shin, and he will slip in behind the door as the service is going on, hope that somehow they will feel that he wishes them well. Perhaps there will be a happy ending for her.
Rising now to his feet to join the rest of the group, running his mind through the weapons that might be available, there is a feeling of strings falling away, of a single hook in his heart pulling at him, a single bond tightening. It is strong and it is made of a thousand ordinary strings; of father, of mother, of sister and brother, lover and friend, wife and child, gods and idols; it is that which always remains when the dust has fallen from the heavy blow of the ultimate decision, burnt into the skin of his back, dancing with fire-lit eyes on a greater plane.
This is love, he thinks; no in between.
All or nothing.
Footnote: If anyone has studied Ballad Of The Long-Legged Bait in Lit class, can you please explain to me what it's about??
