The Language of the Dragon Page 7

  Laura would have reassured me, but she wasn’t available. I pulled out Koshan’s mystery notebook again; thinking about languages always refreshed my spirit.

  Because of the plethora of special symbols, reading the notebook was slow going. It was even slower because I normally take in languages through speech and hearing, rather than just reading written or printed words. And after yesterday’s showing of the Harris place, I was making a conscious effort not to subvocalize as I puzzled my way through the tortured script.

  Not that it could really make any difference, of course. I was not insane. I didn’t believe that spoken words could give me a headache, much less persuade a reluctant client to make an offer on a property. It just seemed prudent not to take any chances, that was all.

  I worked my way through another page and a half of seriously vowel-deprived words and phrases, acquiring more vocabulary than I ever expected to need for describing the condition of wool or the dryness of yak-dung patties but still coming up blank on clues to this language’s place in the great family of human speech.

  Linguists don’t like languages that turn up without relatives. We like to slot even the most remote examples into some kind of family tree. Joseph Greenberg shoved the !Kung language of Botswana into a shakily defined “family” of other African languages on the flimsy basis that they all used click consonants; earlier linguists had invented the category of Finno-Ugric languages just to keep Finnish and Hungarian from getting lonely.

  And my mind was running over these examples because, like the language documented in Koshan’s notebook, they generally had an excess of consonants and a shortage of vowels and sounded as if someone were spraying the room with a machine gun full of k’s and d’s and worse. Just look at this word that was annotated, “secret energy,” in German. “Ysh!mqvad.” I couldn’t stop myself from trying to say it—

  Nothing happened.

  Absolutely nothing.

  Except that a few crumbs of peach muffin fell into the notebook, and it didn’t take magic to account for that. I closed the notebook and slipped it into my tote bag, and flipped open my brown leather folder to doodle on the legal pad while I waited. It would be very bad form to hand over a notebook marred with grease spots and tea stains to Dr. Osborne.

  I doodled a little rectangle on the page of my “notes” from the Gospel Seminar.

  I was going to give it to him, wasn’t I?

  I added lines below and to the right of the rectangle, making it look like the top of a stack of pages.

  Dr. Osborne didn’t exactly have the warmest personality among the linguistics faculty, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that he was a real scholar, someone who would be able to place this language, someone who could use the information contained in the notebook to add another tiny scrap to the vast edifice of human knowledge. A far more suitable recipient of Koshan Idrisov’s work than Koshan’s scatty landlady who didn’t even have a real job, who was delusional enough to think that some of the words in the notebook had actually given her a headache and… I suppressed the memory of Bruce and Angie Stevenson’s surprise offer on the Harris house. That had nothing to do with language.

  Nothing at all.

  As Laura had reminded me, there was no such thing as magic.

  I scrawled, “Ysh!mqvad” below the doodle of a stack of pages. In German script, as spiky looking as the word sounded. Said it again under my breath. See? Nothing happened.

  Of course, it had been just one word, not a sentence.

  At last I saw Dr. Osborne’s square glasses and pointy little goatee at the bakery counter. Finally, someone who could take this notebook and the uncomfortable mysteries surrounding it off my hands! I waved but he didn’t seem to see me.

  I would be happy to put this material in the hands of somebody who knew what to do with it. Wouldn’t I?

  “Dr. Osborne! Over here!”

  He was still staring into the bakery case. I grabbed my tote bag – no way was I going to leave my wallet and keys unattended in a busy coffee shop – and opened out my leather folder on the table top to signify that this place was taken. I stepped between a pair of giant rucksacks belonging to some guys with very big feet and tapped my ex-professor on the shoulder. “I’ve got a table in the corner.”

  He gave me a blank stare. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

  “You asked me to meet you here. Koshan Idrisov rented a room from me,” I explained, suppressing all mention of historical linguistics survey classes. If he’d continued nominally giving that class every year, that would be close to a thousand more undergraduates he’d ignored since I took the course. It had been ridiculous to think he’d remember me. “I’m Sienna Brown.”

  “Oh! I was expecting somebody older.” He looked almost embarrassed. Almost human.

  “I know,” I said, turning up my smile to what Laura called my ‘extra-charming mode.’ “It’s that word ‘landlady,’ isn’t it? The connotations are so misleading.”

  “Indeed,” said Dr. Osborne drily.

  I led the way back to the corner table I’d claimed, slung my tote bag into the corner and took the chair beside it.

  “Idrisov claimed to have knowledge of a hitherto unknown language spoken in a valley of the High Pamirs,” Osborne said while pulling his chair out, “but he disappeared from the conference before I could look over the papers he wanted to give me. Did he leave them with you?”

  For some reason, the last word I’d scribbled on the legal pad seemed to be blinking at me, the letters swelling and then shrinking again. “Ysh!mqvad – ysh!mqvad – ysh!mqvad.”

  Secret – secret – secret.

  Energy - energy – energy.

  Üks, kaks, kolm, I recited mentally. (Estonian is a very strange language.)

  Why was Dr. Osborne demanding the papers with his very first words?

  “I don’t know what happened to Koshan,” I said, answering the question I thought any decent human being should have asked first. “He just – disappeared. It was very strange.”

  “But he left his effects with you.”

  Dr. Osborne was hunched over the table now, staring at me through those square-framed glasses. His grad students used to have a running joke about those glasses: you weren’t really in trouble, they said, until he took them off.

  “There was some junk in the room he’d rented. Nothing valuable. Clothes, a couple of magazines, toiletries. I’ve packed everything up in case he comes back or sends somebody for his stuff.”

  “You can give the boxes to me. If anybody inquires, just refer them to me. You don’t have to trouble yourself any more.”

  Just what I’d wanted – wasn’t it? To hand over the last trailing bits of Koshan’s chaos to somebody else?

  Secret energy.

  I needed a moment to think. Wahid, ithnan, thalatha. Arabic number names aren’t nearly as easy to learn as Arabic numerals. “I’d need authorization to do that,” I heard myself saying. “From Koshan or a member of his family.”

  “Don’t be stupid! Nobody is going to come looking for secondhand clothes belonging to a Taklanistani visa-jumper!”

  He had taken his glasses off, and the blaze of fury in his eyes terrified me. I know scholarly research is more of a cut-throat business than anybody outside the academic world would believe. Even so, this seemed excessive.

  It was excessive if Koshan’s notes were really nothing more than vocabulary and phrases for yet another little-known Central Asian dialect.

  But if they were more than that? If there really was some, oh, all right, some ‘secret energy,’ bound up in those words?

  The man glaring across the table at me was not somebody I wanted to see wielding that energy.

  Suddenly all I wanted was to get out of there.

  “You can come to the house some time and look through Koshan’s belongings,” I said, without even waiting to count and think. I stood up and tugged the tote bag strap over my shoulder. “Call me, set up a time.”

/>   “Ms. Brown!” Dr. Osborne called after me before I’d even navigated the rucksacks-and-boots hazard.

  I looked back.

  He was holding my brown leather real estate folder.

  “You forgot this.”

  8. Dead man’s shoes

  I spent the next morning dealing with the second folder Aunt Georgia had pressed on me. These clients weren’t nearly so rewarding as the Stevensons; they were first-time home buyers who wanted to look at everything that was within their price range as well as a lot of homes that were hopelessly beyond their means. Austin itself was definitely out of their range; I drove them to view condos in San Marcos, new homes in Hutto, fixer-uppers in Elgin, scribbling notes in my folder as I went along. The page I’d filled with complaints about that Continuing Ed course seemed to have fallen off the pad, so at least I didn’t have to tear it out and crumple it up; but that was about the only luck I encountered.

  “We really want our own place. These condos are – it would feel just like living in an apartment.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “I hear some of these new subdivisions are pretty shoddy work, the homes start falling apart after just a few years,” they said in Hutto.

  I’d heard the same thing.

  “Is your husband handy with tools?” I asked after I put a foot through the front porch of the disaster in Elgin.

  “No,” he said before his wife could open her mouth. “I do analytics for retail clients who want to optimize their social media presence.”

  On the drive back to Sweet Georgia Realty he explained exactly what that meant, but I didn’t take it in. I was too busy blessing Dr. Edward Osborne, who’d been so pushy when he called that I’d agreed to meet him at the house in early afternoon rather than devoting the entire day to Mr. and Mrs. Newlywed. By now that seemed like a brilliant decision. I could use a break from them, and they could use some time to think over what their bank had told them about possible loans. At present there was an extremely large gap between what they wanted to buy and what they could conceivably get a mortgage for. Part of my job as their real estate representative was to reduce the size of that gap by gently reminding them of reality as we toured possible listings. I’d done my best in that direction, but they were still several learning experiences away from an actual loan.

  When I pulled up in front of my own house, I felt like getting out and kissing the threshold. My clients would have thought they’d died and gone to heaven if they’d been able to buy a place like the one I inherited through no virtue of my own. A real house, not a condo with tissue-thin walls or a piece of suburban blight! And in central Austin! Once again I was humbled to recollect how lucky I was. And once again I vowed that I would do whatever it took, including working seriously at the real estate business, to keep paying those astronomical property taxes. I would not lose this house. Ever.

  Parked just in front of my car was a reminder of what I had to put up with to keep the house: a little red sports car that I had already learned to associate with Michael Ryan. Didn’t the man have a job to go to?

  The large sedan across the street disgorged Dr. Osborne. Ten minutes early! I suppressed an eye-roll. Good thing I’d prepared to receive him before going off on the real estate tour from hell this morning. I greeted him politely and invited him into my living room. At least it was cool indoors.

  “When I decided to rent the room again, I packed up Koshan Idrisov’s clothes and shoes in these boxes,” I told him, indicating the two medium-sized cardboard boxes I’d asked Michael to put on the coffee table that morning so that Osborne and I wouldn’t have to disturb him. “I can’t let you just take them away, but you’re welcome to look through them to see if you can find your papers.”

  This was all such a stupid charade. I knew that nothing in those boxes rightfully belonged to Edward Osborne, and he knew it too. But I was willing to pretend I’d fallen for his claim that Koshan had meant to give some papers to him. It was worth it to get him off my back. I figured he’d go through the contents of the boxes with a fine-toothed comb, see that there was nothing in there relating to mysterious Central Asian languages, and go away.

  The first part went as I’d anticipated, with the minor exception that Michael Ryan came out of his bedroom and settled on one of the blue and gray striped chairs to watch the macabre exploration of Koshan’s effects – these boxes that I was unwillingly beginning to think of as a dead man’s possessions. Perhaps, as the Austin police believed, Koshan had disappeared as part of a plan to overstay his visa indefinitely. But he hadn’t been rich, or he wouldn’t have asked Thalia to find him an inexpensive place to stay for a month, would he? You’d think he would have come back for his clothes.

  If he’d been able to.

  “You don’t have to stick around,” I murmured to Michael as Osborne ripped off the tape closing the top box. “I asked you to move the stuff out here so we wouldn’t disturb you.”

  “Somebody needs to look out for your interests,” Michael said, equally quietly.

  My interests? I didn’t care what happened to the stuff in these boxes. I just wasn’t – quite – ready to throw it out yet. Felt too much like declaring Koshan Idrisov dead.

  My cool, peaceful gray and blue living room seemed to be humming with tension as the two men faced off over the pitiful little remnants of Koshan’s trip to America. Oh, nobody said anything, but there were whole speeches’ worth of body language being exchanged.

  Dr. Osborne hunched protectively over the boxes, pulling out one item at a time, shaking, folding, pinching and making sure there was nothing concealed inside the shirt, or the sock, or the underwear that he was holding.

  Michael watched him like a hawk, eyes focused on the professor’s hands as though he expected him to try and shove one of Koshan’s spare shoes into his coat pocket. At the same time he kept an eye on me; every time I stirred, he started to react.

  I watched the two of them watching each other and wondered if there was something going on that I didn’t know about, or was I merely looking at another instance of testosterone poisoning? Certainly there was enough masculine ego present to account for some tension. Michael’s air of barely contained energy, of explosive potential, made him the kind of guy who became the center of any room he walked into without even trying. As for Dr. Osborne, he had been the tenured tyrant of the linguistics department for so long that he’d probably forgotten how to talk to people who weren’t afraid of him.

  Finally Osborne finished with the last items in the second box – a couple of magazines that he’d gone through page by page as though he thought he’d find a vocabulary and grammar interleaved between those kinds of pictures. I was slightly impressed by the fact that he didn’t blush. I felt like washing my hands by the time he finished inspecting the magazines, and I hadn’t even been touching them. Funny, I’d thought people looked at those kind of pictures on the Internet nowadays. I guess some people always prefer hard-copy.

  “There are no papers here,” he announced.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Michael mocked him.

  He ignored that and glared at me. “What did you do with them?”

  A vital part of a realtor’s coping skills, according to Aunt Georgia, is the ability to lie with a straight face. Un, deux, trois. I gave him my best blank look, the one I used on bank officers asking me what part of a client’s work history had given me the illusion they would qualify for a single dollar in loans. “I don’t know what you are talking about. Two weeks ago I packed up everything Koshan left here in those boxes and I haven’t looked at them since.”

  “That won’t fly,” he snarled, moving towards me. “I know you have seen what I’m looking for – I know – “

  Several things happened at once.

  I stepped back. Not running away from Dr. Osborne; instinctively heading for the gun safe in my bedroom.

  Osborne snatched his glasses off and barked, “Ysh!mqvad.”

  And Michael Ryan put him
self between us.

  “You heard the lady,” he said. Very quiet, very cold. “You need to leave now.”

  “Not without what’s mine!”

  Michael took half a step forward. Now it was Osborne who backed away. “I won’t ask nicely again.”

  Osborne glanced at me, jammed the glasses back on his face, spun and stamped out of the house. On the front porch, he turned back for a moment. “This is not over,” he said. But he went on down the three stairs from the porch to the sidewalk, and seconds later I heard his car starting.

  My knees were quivering. I sat down, possibly a little faster than was consistent with being calm and in perfect control. “You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

  Michael’s lips twitched. “Pure self-interest,” he said. “I had a feeling you were about to haul out your cannon again.”

  “What do you have against guns?” I asked.

  “Handled by people who know what they’re doing? Nothing. Pulled out by frightened householders? A danger to society.”

  “I took all the required courses,” I told him. “Put in my range time, qualified on my weapon and I have a concealed carry license.”

  “Mm-hmm. And just how long has it been since you qualified?”

  “Umm… eight years,” I admitted.

  “There you are. People who think they know what they’re doing,” Michael informed me, “are more dangerous than the ones who know their own ignorance. Come out to Red’s with me tomorrow afternoon?”

  I blinked, taken aback by the sudden turnaround. “The indoor range place in Pflugerville? Why?”

  “For my peace of mind. If I have to live in the same house as a woman who solves problems with a .38 Special, I want to be assured that she knows what she’s doing and is up to date on her qualifications. Come on,” he said impatiently, “it won’t hurt, and there’s a great sports bar nearby. We can go for burgers and onion rings afterwards. I’ll even buy you a beer.”

  “How does any woman ever withstand your eloquent invitations? Okay, you’re on – and I’ll show you that I’m not as bad a shot as you think.”