Reamde

“I could have cash waiting for me,” Marlon corrected him, “but I will be glad to share it with you and Yuxia.”

Csongor flushed slightly but kept on talking through his embarrassment: “What is the procedure?”

“Try to find some more of the da G shou and get them logged on,” Marlon said. “One of them can go looking for a foreign money transfer agent and the rest of us can create a raiding party and collect gold.”

“You have never dealt with non-Chinese money transfer agents before?”

“Why would we?” Marlon asked.

“Let me make some contacts,” Csongor proposed, looking over at the computer he had secured earlier. Yuxia had finished typing and now appeared to be web surfing. “I can probably find one in Hungary. If not there, then Austria.”

“Are those near—I don’t know the name—dot C H?”

It took Csongor a moment to put this together. Then he understood it as a reference to Internet domain names ending in “.ch.”

“Switzerland,” Csongor said. Confoederatio Helvetica.

“The place with the banks,” Marlon said.

“Yes, Switzerland is close to Austria and Hungary.”

“Try Switzerland,” Marlon suggested gently, then turned his attention back to the game; for at almost the same moment, two more creatures’ faces had flashed from gray to color and leaped to the top of the roster. Csongor had an image of teenaged boys all over south China—terrified refugees who had spent the last two weeks staying one step ahead of the cops, hiding out in flophouses or cadging spare beds from shirttail relatives in the country—receiving bulletins on their phones, sprinting to the nearest wangbas, slamming their arses into chairs, cracking their knuckles, and going into action.

Csongor moved toward Yuxia and looked over her shoulder. She had opened up a web browser and was looking at a Wikipedia page. The title of the article was “Abdallah Jones.” It sported a photograph of a man Csongor had once tried to shoot in the head on a pier in Xiamen.

“Motherfucker!” Csongor exclaimed.

Yuxia turned around slowly and looked at him. “Fate has given us a totally awesome foe,” she observed.

“Then we should do something totally awesome to him,” Csongor suggested. “In a bad way.”

“Not so easy, from the pervert capital of the world.”

She said it loudly. Faces bobbed up and popped around the edges of various computer monitors around the café, but Yuxia took no note of them. She had turned back to face the computer. Taking in some of Jones’s exploits, his death statistics, she shook her head convulsively. “This guy really sucks ass.”

“But you knew that,” Csongor said.

“No foolin’.”

RICHARD MADE NO friends during his drive through Elphinstone; but the dirty little secret of Canadians was that they drove like maniacs, so his speeding and light-running were not so far out of the norm as they might have been south of the border. The road that ran up the valley toward the Schloss had, in recent years, become a vector for sprawl and was now lined by the sorts of businesses that were excluded from the middle of town by its famously prim historic-preservation fatwa. But at the end of the day, Elphinstone wasn’t that big and could only support so many car dealerships and Tim Hortons, and so this kind of development petered out in the dead zone around the abandoned lumber mill. Beyond that the road funneled to two lanes and angled upward, then, a few miles later, began to wind like a snake and buck like a mule.