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Liu Mei noticed that, and noticed something else as well. “Look how wide all the streets are, Mother,” she said. “They hold the automobiles so well, I think they were made to hold them.”
“You are right,” Frankie Wong said. “You are right, and you are clever. A hundred years ago, Los Angeles was only a village. These streets were made with cars in mind.”
Liu Han thought about that as he drove them past the buildings and houses of the city, which also seemed to her to be set very far apart from one another. A large city growing from a village in only a hundred years? All of China’s great cities had been great for many centuries. She laughed a little. Los Angeles struck her the same way Earth as a whole struck the little scaly devils: it had grown too great too fast to seem quite natural.
In front of the hotel, a crowd of people had gathered. Some waved U.S. flags. Some waved red flags. Some waved Kuomintang flags, too, with their twelve-pointed stars. “Don’t worry about that,” Frankie Wong said. “It just means they know you’re from China.”
Warily, Liu Han let herself be reassured. “When will we see officials who can help us?” she asked. “Will they come to this”-she read the letters slowly and carefully-“Biltmore Hotel, or will we have to travel to them?”
Now Wong looked at her with frank respect. “From what I heard, you didn’t have any English before you got ready to come to the USA.”
“A little. A very little, from a long time ago,” Liu Han answered with a glance over toward Liu Mei. “But I could not read it then. Learning this alphabet is easier than learning Chinese characters, I think. It would be easier still if the letters sounded the same way all the time.” Her daughter, who had studied with her, nodded agreement to that.
Frankie Wong laughed. “A lot of people who grow up speaking English would agree with you there. I’m one of them, as a matter of fact. But let’s get you settled in here first before we worry about reforming English. How does that sound?”
“It will have to do,” Liu Han said. Wong laughed again, though she didn’t think she’d been joking.
Sam Yeager knotted his khaki tie, then checked the result in the mirror on the sliding door to the bedroom closet. “You look very handsome, dear,” Barbara said.
“Take more than a uniform to do that for me,” Yeager answered. His wife snorted. He eyed her. “You now, babe, you look good.”
Barbara examined herself. Her azure dress played up her eyes. She tapped a curl back into place. “If you like middle-aged women, I may possibly do,” she said. “Possibly.”
He slid an arm around her waist and brushed her lips with his, not hard enough to disturb her lipstick. “I don’t know about middle-aged women in general, but I can think of one in particular I like.” His hand closed on her hipbone. “And I like what you do, too. I just wish I could do it more often. But I’m middle-aged, too.”
“Middle-aged going on seventeen, by the way you’re pawing me,” Barbara said as she twisted away. But she had a smile on her face and a smile in her voice. “Now-is our son ready?”
“He’d better be,” Sam said. Both as a ballplayer and as a soldier, his life had run by the clock. That was second nature to him. It wasn’t yet second nature to Jonathan, which produced friction every now and then, or sometimes more often than every now and then. Sam raised his voice: “You ready to go, Jonathan?”
“Just about,” Jonathan answered, something less than a smile in his voice. “Do I really have to come to this thing, Dad?”
“Yes, you do.” Yeager held on to his temper with both hands. “We’ve been over this before, you know. This is officially an informal reception, which means family and all. What would you do if we weren’t here-call Karen and see if she could come over?” He made it seem as if being alone in the house with her didn’t sound like fun.
“Well, yeah, I might do that.” Jonathan made it seem as if his father were the one who’d put that thought in his mind, as if he never would have had it without Sam’s help. They were both lying through their teeth, and they both knew it.
“You’ll have to find another time, that’s all,” Sam said. “But cheer up. I hear this emissary has a daughter about your age. Maybe she’ll be cute.”
“Fat chance,” Jonathan said.
Sam shook his head. He hadn’t been so cynical at that age. He was sure he hadn’t. And if anybody had offered him a chance to meet a girl who might be cute, he’d have been off like a shot. He was sure of that, too. After another glance at his watch, he said, “Come on, let’s have a look at you. We’ve got to get going, you know.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” When Jonathan came into the bedroom, he did pass muster. He couldn’t do anything about his shaved head, but that was far from unique among kids his age. His suit wasn’t of flashy cut or color, and, if his tie bore a pattern that looked like body paint, it wasn’t gaudy body paint.
“Let me grab my handbag, and we can go.” Barbara put the strap on her shoulder. “This should be fun.”
Jonathan muttered something, his voce just sotto enough to keep him out of trouble. Sam had his doubts, too, but kept them to himself. He’d been to enough official functions over the years to know that a few were interesting, most weren’t much of anything one way or the other, and a few made him wish he’d stayed far, far away. He even understood how he’d got ordered to attend this one: he was an expert on Lizards, this Liu Han came from a country oppressed by Lizards, and so… To the brass’ minds, no doubt it all seemed perfectly logical.
Barbara found one more inducement for her son as the three of them headed out to the Buick: “The food will probably be good.”
“Yeah?” Jonathan weighed that. He’d been to a few of these affairs himself. After a moment, he nodded. “Okay, that’s pretty hot.” To show how hot it was, he gave an emphatic cough.
“Some Lizards will be there, I expect-some of the ones living here, I mean,” Sam said, unlocking the driver’s-side door. “If you want to talk to them in their language, that’s fine. It’ll be good practice for you.” That proved an even better incentive than food. However much the Lizards fascinated Jonathan and his set, he didn’t find all that many chances to meet them.
Sam got on the Harbor Freeway at Rosecrans. The freeway had pushed that far south only a couple of years earlier; it made getting to downtown L.A. a snap-except when an accident addled things, as one did this evening. Yeager muttered and fumed till they were past it, then stepped on the gas as hard as he could.
“Good thing we left a little early,” Barbara remarked.
“Have to build in some extra time,” he answered, passing a car that wasn’t going fast enough to suit him. He laughed. “The Lizards think we’re out of our minds for driving without seat belts. But they’d never sell, never in a million years. The only thing people care about is going fast.” As if to prove his point, he zoomed past a gasoline-burning machine that couldn’t get out of its own way.
He left the freeway at Sixth and went east a few blocks to Olive, on which the Biltmore stood, across from Pershing Square. He parked in a lot north of the hotel. U.S. flags, the red banners of the People’s Liberation Army, and national flags of China-Kuomintang flags, in other words-all flew outside the twelve-story, E-shaped building. Pointing to those last, Barbara said, “She probably wishes they weren’t there.”
“You’re right. She probably does,” said Sam, who’d spent the couple of days he’d known about the reception boning up on China. He nodded toward the hotel as they came up to the entrance. “Pretty fancy place, eh, Jonathan?” He didn’t say hot; that wasn’t his slang, any more than swell was his son’s.
“It’s all right, I guess,” Jonathan answered, determined to be unimpressed.
Inside, Sam was asked to show identification. He did so without hesitation. He might have been a Lizard stooge, a Kuomintang supporter, or even a Japanese agent, none of whom had any reason to love the People’s Liberation Army. He might even have worked for the NKVD; Molotov wouldn’t
want the Chinese Communists shopping anywhere but at his store. When he’d satisfied the guards that he was none of those things, they checked off his name and those of his wife and son and let them go into the reception hall.
Jonathan made a beeline for the buffet. As soon as he’d filled his plate, he stood around looking to see if any other fogies had brought along people-with luck, good-looking female people-his own age. Sam and Barbara looked at each other with identical amused expressions. At Jonathan’s age, Sam would have behaved the same way. At Jonathan’s age, though, barn dances were about the biggest social events Sam had ever seen. Even the small towns of Class D ball had seemed sophisticated to him. He shook his head. The world was a different place, a faster place, these days.
He looked around, too, not for pretty girls but to see what kind of crowd it was. When he spotted Straha, an eyebrow shot up. The shiplord raised a hand in greeting. Sam nodded back. If the chief Lizard defector was here, that put a seal of approval on the event, all right.
And there was the guest of honor, a Chinese woman who would have had to stand on her toes to make five feet. Her daughter was several inches taller-and if Jonathan hadn’t noticed her, he wasn’t paying attention, because she was a very pretty girl. Yeager got a drink, then drifted toward them to do his ceremonial duty.
Listening to Liu Han and Liu Mei, he realized they had only a little English. A Chinese man in a suit snappier than any civvies Sam owned was translating for them. Having done a good deal of translating himself, Yeager recognized its limits. The only Chinese he understood was chop suey. Still… Where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer, he thought.
