26

I sensed that if I was going to help Li, I had to do it fast. Prove Claude innocent or guilty once and for all, and fast.

I looked for witnesses. All that evening and night. For anyone who might have seen someone else at the pawn shop on the night Eugene Marais died. For anyone who had seen someone else at the condemned house of Charlie Burgos this morning. I knocked on doors, buttonholed shopkeepers, and all I found was a woman who had seen a man at the condemned building around noon today. A shabby man with one arm. Me.

I couldn’t see Claude Marais until morning. I went home. My five rooms were hot and lonely. The extra loneliness of knowing that someone who had been there often would not be there again.

I sat with a beer and thought about what to do next. I could knock on more doors, ask more questions, go around it all again to see if I could have missed something.

I drank beer, and watched television, and went to bed.

Captain Olsen, Gazzo’s fill-in, was with Lieutenant Marx in his office the next morning. I could talk to Claude Marais at noon, not that it would do me any good.

“Even that lawyer Kandinsky isn’t saying much this time,” Captain Olsen said. “Marais’ll talk soon. They always talk in the end.”

“No confession yet?” I said. “That’s funny, if he wants to be locked up so badly. Leaving that knife and all.”

“You’re saying it’s a frame-up,” Marx said. A statement, not a question. “Marais isn’t saying it’s a frame-up. You’d think he’d be shouting it if he thought it was.”

“Unless,” Captain Olsen said, “you think he’s protecting someone. Maybe you think that, Fortune? Who could it be?”

I leaned on the wall of the office, but I was alert. Were they playing with me? Or did they know something?

“Who would he protect?” I said.

“Yeh, who?” Marx said. “We’ve booked Manet for not reporting. We’ll drop the robbery, make it obstructing in a murder. He’s going to know what it’s really like being a prisoner after all. The report came from Paris, it fits. They don’t much like it over there. The French won’t defend Manet this time.”

“We like our people all to be heroes,” I said.

Captain Olsen said, “The wife, maybe? Or the sister-in-law, Viviane Marais? Or the girl, Danielle? Claude might try to protect them. The trouble is, we can’t think of any motives for them to have killed Eugene Marais at all.”

“That knife,” I said, “it bothers you. So stupid.”

“We’ve got to believe it, though,” Captain Olsen said.

“A half-crazy killer,” Marx said. “War experiences.”

“You’ll convince a jury,” I said. “If it’s a frame-up, it’s a very good one.”

“We don’t want to convince a jury,” Marx said.

Captain Olsen was going to add something, maybe about who they did want to convince, but I never knew what it was. The telephone rang. Marx listened. First idly, then with a frown, then alert. He said, “Yes,” and hung up. He stood up.

“The wife,” Marx said. “That was some priest. Noyoda, or something like that. He says the wife, Li Marais, is down on the steps of his temple. She’s going to burn herself on his temple steps!”

I saw her, Li, from three blocks away. Lieutenant Marx cursed at his driver to go faster through the narrow Chinatown street that was clotted with traffic. The driver swore back, inched along the street blocked by the cars, pushcarts, and people of Chinatown.

I watched only Li Marais in the distance. Alone on the three steps of the Buddhist temple.

I could see her clear. The block of the temple as empty as the next block was crowded. A deserted street in front of the temple in the distance, the people gathered a hundred feet away on either side—from fear or respect I never would know.

She was a tiny, distant figure all in yellow. Saffron yellow. A kneeling doll in a saffron robe, her head down in prayer or meditation or both. What did it matter?

We were still two blocks away, blocked in the traffic and crowd, when I saw her tiny yellow figure move.

“Li!” I shouted. A shout into the wind.

The flames exploded around her. In the distance on those temple steps she was engulfed in flames in a second.

“Gasoline,” the driver said. “Christ.”

“God damn!” Marx said.

We got out and ran. The last two blocks. We ran, knocking people away, but even the last small flames were fading by the time we reached her.

Lieutenant Marx went to her. She was dead. Only the black, charred shape of what had been one small woman. A human being.

Marx went to her, I couldn’t. For her last words to me? What was Dan Fortune to her? There were no words anyway. There wouldn’t have been even if a spark of life had still been in her. Li Marais had said all that she had to say.

Marx cursed his driver, sent him for the ambulance. It couldn’t help, but Marx had to do something. She had done her work too well. Perhaps she had cheated just a little. She had been away from the Orient and Buddha a long time. A small poison pill to make it quicker? I hoped she had.

The priest, Noyoda, stood over her with us. Some of the people were down on their knees now. Marx swore at Noyoda. The Lieutenant was white. To our Western minds, it’s a horrible form of suicide.

“You let her!” Marx shouted at Noyoda. “That’s a crime, you hear, mister? Why didn’t you stop her?”

“I could not stop her,” Noyoda said.

He meant, I knew, that by his beliefs he could not stop a believer who wanted to immolate herself, perform her special devotion, improve her life and her eternity. But Noyoda was an American, too. He knew the law.

“She poured the gasoline on herself before I discovered her on the steps,” Noyoda said. “She had a cigarette lighter in her hand. She said she would light the flame as soon as anyone came near her. I did all I could, and I called you.”

He was right, of course. The empty gasoline can lay some yards to the right. The cigarette lighter lay blackened near Li Marais. Marx could do nothing to Noyoda.

“So it was her after all,” Marx said as the ambulance began to wail up in the distance. “She killed them after all.”

“No,” I said. “She was with me when Charlie was killed.”

“Killed?” Noyoda said.

I explained the murders to the priest.

“Buddhists do not commit suicide to escape their own guilt or problems,” Noyoda said. “Almost never.”

Marx nodded. “She couldn’t have killed Charlie Burgos, I guess that’s sure. Distraught, Dan? She knew Claude Marais killed them both, and couldn’t go on alone?”

“I don’t think so, Marx,” I said. “For a Buddhist, suicide, especially this way, is a positive act.”

“Positive? How in hell is it positive?” Marx swore.

Noyoda said, “You have arrested her husband for these murders? Is there any doubt that he is guilty?”

“None,” Marx snapped. “If she figured to fool us—”

“She thought there was doubt,” I said. “So do I.”

Noyoda looked down at Li Marais’s charred body. The ambulance had arrived, the doctor just looking at the body too. Noyoda reached into his pocket.

“Then I think I can say why she did this,” the priest said.

He handed Marx a piece of letter stationery. It was Hotel Stratford stationery. I read the note on it with Marx: My flame will light the truth.

“I think,” Noyoda said, sadly now, “she has done this to make you seek the truth, Lieutenant. Her death was to make you know her husband is innocent, make you find the truth.”

“Crazy,” Marx said, watched the ambulance men put the dead Li into their basket. “What a lousy, useless thing to do. For nothing.”

“Useless?” Noyoda stared at Marx. “You are a fool, Lieutenant. You are impertinent and insulting!”

The priest walked into his temple. I could hear the chanting going on inside the temple already. They would chant for a long time. Marx stared after the angry priest.

“What the hell is that all about?”

“Religion,” I said. “To Buddhists, a man is composed of two elements, Lieutenant. The manas, the organ of understanding; and the karma, the entirety of the acts accomplished in the course of his life. When a man dies, the manas, the understanding organ, pass into another body—higher or lower in quality according to the quality of the karma, what he has done on earth. If the karma has been exceptional, then there is no reincarnation, the man has attained nirvana. So for a devout Buddhist, suicide for some noble purpose—like freeing an innocent man—is a way to improve his karma, make himself much better, and maybe even achieve nirvana.”

“You think Li Marais believed all that?”

I watched the ambulance drive away. “I’m not sure. To any good Buddhist, though, it would be self-evident. It would be understood right away.”

“Damn it,” Marx said, “I’m an American cop, not a Buddhist. You think she really thought she could influence the police this way? Make us see we had to be wrong? It’s crazy, Dan.”

“A Buddhist believes that by suicide he creates problems for the person responsible for forcing him to do it, one way or another,” I said slowly. “It’s an infallible way of making someone know they are wrong. To a Buddhist, no one could be indifferent to that. The truth must come out.”

“You think it was all for us? The police?”

“Maybe,” I said, “but she’d been in the western world a long time. She knew about American police, she knew it would mean nothing to you. She was distraught, maybe, but she wasn’t a fool.”

“Then what the hell was she doing?” Marx said. “Do you know, Dan?”

“I think so,” I said.