The Worm in Every Heart

Because if there’s one single thing you taught me, Ellis—one lesson I’ve retained throughout every twist and turn of this snaky thing I call my life—it’s that hunger has no moral structure.

* * *

Huang came back late this morning, limping and cursing, after a brief detour to the office of an understanding doctor who his father keeps on international retainer. I am obscurely pleased to discover that Ellis can still defend herself; even after Huang’s first roundhouse put her on the pavement, she still somehow managed to slip her razor open without him noticing, then slide it shallowly across the back of his Achilles tendon. More painful than debilitating, but rather well done nevertheless, for a woman who can no longer wear shoes which require her to tie her own laces.

I am almost as pleased, however, to hear that nothing Ellis may have done actually succeeded in preventing Huang from completing his mission—and beating her, with methodical skill, to within an inch of her corrupt and dreadful old life.

I have already told my publicist that I witnessed the whole awful scene, and asked her to find out which hospital poor Mrs. Munro has been taken to. I myself, meanwhile, will drive the boy to the kitchen of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant, where I am sure the master chef and his staff will do their best to keep him entertained until later tonight. Huang has lent him his pocket Gameboy, which should help.

Ah. That must be the phone now, ringing.

* * *

The woman in bed 37 of the Morleigh Memorial Hospital’s charity wing, one of the few left operating in St. Louis—in America, possibly—opens her swollen left eye a crack, just far enough to reveal a slit of red-tinged white and a wandering, dilated pupil, barely rimmed in grey.

“Hello, Ellis,” I say.

I sit by her bedside, as I have done for the last six hours. The screens enshrouding us from the rest of the ward, with its rustlings and moans, reduce all movement outside this tiny area to a play of flickering shadows—much like the visions one might glimpse in passing through a double haze of fever and mosquito net, after suffering a violent shock to one’s fragile sense of physical and moral integrity.

. . . and oh, how the ghost of you clings . . .

She clears her throat, wetly. Tells me, without even a flicker of hesitation:

“Nuh . . . Ellis. Muh num iss . . . Munro.”

But: She peers up at me, straining to lift her bruise-stung lids. I wait, patiently.

“Tuh—”

“That’s a good start.”

I see her bare broken teeth at my patronizing tone, perhaps reflexively. Pause. And then, after a long moment:

“Tim.”

“Good show, Ellis. Got it in one.”

Movement at the bottom of the bed: Huang, stepping through the gap between the screens. Ellis sees him, and stiffens. I nod in his direction, without turning.

“I believe you and Huang have already met,” I say. “Mr. Wao Huang, that is; you’ll remember his father, the former warlord Wao Ruyen. He certainly remembers you—and with some gratitude, or so he told me.”

Huang takes his customary place at my elbow. Ellis’ eyes move with him, helplessly—and I recall how my own eyes used to follow her about in a similarly fascinated manner, breathless and attentive on her briefest word, her smallest motion.

“I see you can still take quite a beating, Ellis,” I observe, lightly. “Unfortunately for you, however, it’s not going to be quite so easy to recover from this particular melee as it once was, is it? Old age, and all that.” To Hunag: “Have the doctors reached any conclusion yet? Regarding Mrs. Munro’s long-term prognosis?”

“Wouldn’t say as ‘ow there was one, tai pan.”

“Well, yes. Quite.”

I glance back, only to find that Ellis’ eyes have turned to me at last. And I can read them so clearly, now—like clean, black text through grey rice-paper, lit from behind by a cold and colorless flame. No distance. No mystery at all.

When her mouth opens again, I know exactly what word she’s struggling to shape.

“Duh . . . deal?”

Oh, yes.

I rise, slowly, as Huang pulls the chair back for me. Some statements, I find, need room in which to be delivered properly—or perhaps I’m simply being facetious. My writer’s over-developed sense of the dramatic, working double-time.