FaceOff (13 page)

“Could I trouble you for a glass of water?” he suggested now. “I’m afraid the walk up the stairs has left me parched.”

“Of course.” Freed of her coat, Judy headed smartly toward the modest galley kitchen. Alone in the room, Malachai started in on
the buttons of his own immense black wool greatcoat, while taking a quick inventory of the room.

Was it his imagination, or did he just see a shadow flash behind the window? No matter. He could already feel his blood quicken, a familiar thrumming in his veins.

All these years later, the Buddha, with his enigmatic smile and numerous teachings on karma and reincarnation, held the key.

“When did you first start collecting Buddhas?” he asked, as Judy reentered the room. She handed him a tumbler of water, and he could detect a faint tremor in her fingers as the glass passed from her to him.

“I’m not really sure. All my life, I suppose.”

“Did Mr. Wen know?”

“Of course.” She flushed, her hand resting self-consciously on her chest. “He even gifted me with a jade Buddha medallion. A talisman of sorts.”

“Did Mr. Wen ever speak of his sessions with me?”

“I know he was seeing you about his own . . . collecting issues. His terrible need at times to acquire items whether they made sound business sense or not. He said you believed he was a reincarnated soul, still looking for something he had lost many lives ago.”

“And you?”

The young woman stilled, then twisted her head slightly to take in the full surroundings of her apartment. Her hair moved with her, a black silk curtain that obscured her face from him. “I do not know why I do what I do,” she whispered finally. “A born-again soul, still searching to right a wrong? It makes as much sense to me as anything.”

“Might I suggest a short hypnosis session?” Malachai offered quietly. “It won’t take more than thirty, forty minutes of your
time, and might very well provide you with some of the answers you seek. In fact, I could do it right here, in the comfort of your home.”

She didn’t answer him, so much as she moved closer to the couch, then, after another moment of hesitation, took a seat.

Malachai didn’t wait for a second invitation. He slipped off his coat, eased into a dainty bamboo-framed chair across from her, and incredibly aware of the Buddhas’ watching eyes, he began, by using a simple backward-counting technique, to slowly lead his patient through the curling ribbons of time.

“Where are you?” he asked five minutes later.

Judy described a mansion, partially hidden behind linden trees.

What?
Malachai leaned forward, not sure he could yet make the assumption he was yearning to make.

“Tell me, what do you see? What do you hear?”

“A carriage driving by. Horses’ hooves. It’s twilight and people are arriving home from their day’s work. I hear strains of Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata.
”

“Do you know the street where this mansion is?”

“Of course. Eighty-third Street off of Central Park West.”

She was describing his ancestral home, Malachai realized, his excitement growing as he sought to maintain an even composure, a soothing, rhythmic voice. Judy Chan had returned to what was now the Phoenix Foundation, in New York City, sometime in the late nineteenth century.

This was truly fascinating because the first time he’d put John Wen under, the antiques dealer had returned to the exact same place and time. To anyone else it would have been a coincidence but not to Malachai. There were no coincidences when you were dealing with reincarnation. Every act had repercussions, every encounter a purpose. We return to be with the same people in similar
circumstances to complete the karmic circle, to right our wrongs, to be given another chance. Souls whose fates were forever intertwined, finding each other, again and again and again. Following a repeating pattern of doom.

Every time Malachai witnessed a patient travel he felt privileged to be part of the journey. But this time he also felt ebullient. His own family history—complicated and mysterious—might finally be resolved.

John Wen had been shot and killed by an intruder in his study, just as Malachai’s ancestor Trevor Talmage had been shot and killed over one hundred years ago. Murdered in his own study by an intruder, according to family lore.

Or had he been?

Upon Trevor’s death, his brother Davenport had inherited the house and everything in it, including Malachai’s longed-for treasure, the list of lost Memory Tools.

And now, as Malachai listened to Judy Chan describe every detail of a study she couldn’t know in a time period she shouldn’t be able to recall, Malachai felt another piece of the puzzle slide into place.

“What are you doing there?” Malachai asked.

“My brother is wrong,” Judy Chan said, answering a different question, her voice stronger than it had been a moment ago. She was sitting up straighter, too, Malachai noticed, her demeanor becoming more agitated.

“What is your name?” Malachai asked.

She didn’t answer his question. Instead, she continued arguing with a ghost Malachai couldn’t see or hear.

“The decision to publish is not your choice.”

“Publish what?” Malachai asked. “Who are you talking to?”

“My brother,” Judy Chan hissed. “He is wrong.”

And then Malachai knew. Trevor had not been shot by a stranger. His brother, Davenport, had done the deed.

“Do you know Mr. Tiffany?” Malachai asked, breaking one of the rules of hypnosis and interrupting the moment to interject a question that might bring the patient out of the episode.

But his hunch was correct.

“Yes,” Judy said. “He designed the lamps in the house. The tile work. Jewels for the family.”

Malachai pictured the note he had found, written in Davenport’s hand about the visit to Tiffany’s studio so soon after Trevor’s death. Had Davenport killed his own brother in order to seize the ancient text describing each lost Memory Tool? He must have. Then, he’d sought to hide the evidence of his crime in a treasure chest created by Tiffany. To keep secret that which he never meant to share. Not in that life, or beyond.

And now Judy, in the present, had shot her boss, John Wen, in order to steal the papers back once again.

Instantly, Malachai realized the answer to everything he’d been looking for wasn’t in the past. It was in this room, staring him right in the face.

The Laughing Buddhas.

“Judy,” Malachai said, his voice urgent. “You can hear me now. You need to leave the house in New York. You need to come forward. To the present.”

Judy remained in her seat, returning slowly.

“You are in John Wen’s office,” he informed her, his rich voice deep and compelling. “It is five days ago, you have come to see your boss. Then, you see a Buddha. Tell me about the Buddha.”

“It is an eight-inch, solid-jade Buddha,” she whispered. “Sitting on a square wooden base with gold-seamed corners and inlaid
abalone. Mr. Wen has had it for months now. Months when I have implored him to give it to me.”

“He won’t listen to you.”

“The Buddha must be shared, I begged him. It is wrong to keep it secret, hidden from the world. True power is sharing knowledge in order to help others, not hoarding it for yourself.”

Malachai blinked, puzzled. “So you decided to take back what belonged to you. You shot Mr. Wen. You removed the Buddha from his office. Where is the Buddha now, Miss Chan? Tell me, and I will help you share it with the world.”

The woman’s dark, slitted eyes held a strange, spectral gleam. She was not yet in this existence, Malachai realized. But nor was she in the other.

“Violence,” she murmured. “It always ends in violence. Brother against brother, spouse against spouse, friend betraying friend. I loved him and I have felt his bullet. I loved him and I struck the mortal blow. Is there truly no other way?”

Malachai realized belatedly that Miss Chan was holding a gun, a small antique pistol she’d pulled from the folds of her dress and now had pointed directly at his sternum.

He had made a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake.

“You are not Davenport,” he whispered. No, of course not. John Wen had been Davenport, a man who’d shot his own brother in order to keep the legendary text a secret. “You are Trevor,” Malachai continued to Judy Chan. She was the reincarnation of the brother who’d wanted to share the list of lost Memory Tools with the world, and paid with his life.

One hundred and thirty years ago, Trevor had been the victim. This time around, to judge by the pistol held so steadily in Judy Chan’s hand, that would not be the case.

The secret of the Laughing Buddha had to be shared. And Trevor/Judy was willing to do it, no matter the price.

“I can help you,” Malachai heard himself whisper, his voice hoarse with uncommon desperation. “Show me the Buddha. I think I know its secret. I’ll show you and we can share it with the world.”

But Judy’s finger was already tightening on the trigger.

Lives tumbling over lives. An endless procession of old injustices and fresh pains. Lessons still unlearned, cycles yet unbroken.

The list of lost Memory Tools forever out of his reach.

Malachai lunged forward.

The antique pistol exploded to life once again.

THE MOMENT D.D. SAW JUDY
Chan sit down on her sofa, the detective had known the woman was in trouble. The glazed look that had come over her eyes, the sudden slackness of her features.

Malachai was doing something to her. Drugging her, tampering with a witness, interfering with a murder investigation. It all sounded like probable cause to D.D. She started backpedaling as quietly as one could down a rusty fire escape, then dropped to the ground and picked up her cell.

She requested uniformed officers, division detectives, and her squadmates and she wanted them now.

She buzzed the second-story apartment again, frantically seeking entrance. This time, the elderly woman didn’t come down, but stuck her graying head out the window above.

D.D. didn’t bother with pretenses anymore. “I’m a cop, and the tenant on the fourth floor is in trouble. Open up! Quick!”

The woman appeared to consider the matter. Then slowly, but surely, the front door opened and D.D. sprang ahead.

Four flights of stairs. Minute this case was done, she was booking more time with the StairMaster. But for now, around, around, around.

She burst onto the fourth-floor landing just in time to hear a gunshot. Crap. She threw herself at the door, and it flew open, apparently unlocked.

Her own firearm drawn, she dropped to the floor and scrambled into the unit, gaze already seeking an injured, possibly even murdered, Judy Chan.

Instead, she discovered the woman in question standing quietly before her, smoke still pouring from some ancient-looking derringer.

“He lied. He would’ve kept the Buddha for himself,” Judy said calmly. “The Buddha is meant to be shared.”

Then she handed the strange little pistol to D.D., just as Malachai moaned from behind the sofa, “If you could be of some assistance, Detective. I believe I have just been shot.”

MALACHAI SHIFTED IN HIS CHAIR
with some discomfort. Being shot in the leg that had been hurt in the stampede in Vienna years before had been an unlucky break. This time around, however, at least he’d fared better. It turned out Judy Chan wasn’t a very good shot when partially hypnotized. While she’d murdered her boss with a single bullet to the heart, her woozy state—the very state Malachai had put her in—had saved his life.

Eight months had passed and now she was in prison having been found guilty despite an aggressive effort on her attorney’s part to prove that she was criminally insane, deluded by visions from a so-called past life.

Malachai had sat in the back of the courthouse every day. If
Miss Chan’s attorney proved that believing what you remembered from a past life meant you were insane, Malachai’s own life’s work would have been held in question, his passion turned into a joke used against him. But the prosecutor had won. With over 25 percent of the country believing in reincarnation and several world religions based on its precepts, the defendant’s case didn’t pass muster. The jury hadn’t accepted the murder was Chan’s attempt to right a centuries-long feud. But they did convict her on a charge of second-degree murder stemming from armed robbery.