Shadow and Silk by Ann Maxwell

Author:Ann Maxwell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Man-Woman Relationships, Contemporary, General, Romance, Tibet (China), Tibet (China) - Fiction, Suspense, Adventure Stories, Silk Industry - China - Tibet - Fiction, Fiction, Silk, Love Stories
ISBN: 9781420104394
Publisher: Zebra
Published: 1997-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Washington, D.C. November

The music is all wrong for a high-quality bookstore, Cassandra Redpath thought irritably. Bookstores need Baroque or Renaissance concerti, or even medieval chants.

But in DuPont Circle, dissonance and cacophony reigned.

Redpath glared at the loudspeaker behind the service counter. A group that sounded like pigs mating during a rocket launch had been thumping out of the speakers for the past twenty minutes.

As though in response to Redpath’s ire, a new disc slid into place. A rap anthem came over the speakers in machine-gun bursts of urban hatred.

On the whole, Redpath decided, I’ll take ratting swine.

The girl at the cash register was anorexic. Except for a purple bandanna tied around her head like a sweat band, she was clad entirely in black. The metal studs piercing her ears, eyebrows, and nostrils were numerous enough to set off a metal detector.

The clerk didn’t notice Redpath standing on the other side of the cash register. She was too busy scowling down at an open biology textbook on the counter in front of her.

Redpath put the books she had selected on the counter. The thump was enough to lift a few pages of the biology text.

The clerk looked up with a total lack of interest.

“Canihelpya.”

Redpath ran the sounds through the language computer in her brain. Twice. Finally she decided it was English.

‘ ‘Canihelpya,’’ the clerk repeated with emphasis.

“Yes, you may help me,” Redpath enunciated carefully. “I would like to pay for these books.”

“Yah?”

“Yah,” Redpath said.

“You read this stuff?”

“No, I use it for weight-lifting.”

“Cool.”

The clerk looked at the books and then at the cash register as though trying to remember the connection.

“The noise makes it difficult to concentrate,” Redpath suggested.

“I can’t concentrate, like, anywhere?” the girl said. “It’s way bad here? All these books, like, string me out?”

Her voice lifted into a higher note at the final word of every sentence, turning what should have been statements into tentative questions. So far as Redpath was concerned, it was the most annoying linguistic tic to come into vogue since ya know?

“Do you read?” Redpath asked with mild interest.

“Huh?”

“Words. Sentences. Perhaps even entire paragraphs.”

“Oh, sure thing,” the girl said with a shrug. “They said I had to read to get the job.”

“But do you read?”

“You mean, like, books?”

Redpath nodded.

“Uh, no,” the girl said. “I’m more a listening person?”

“Thank God there are books on tape,” Redpath muttered.

The girl blinked. “I meant CDs?”

“Of course,” Redpath said. “Whatever was I thinking of?”

She slid a hundred dollar bill across the counter to pay for the three books.

“Cool,” the clerk said. “Is it real?”

Redpath thought of pointing out that people who read often have access to more real money than those who don’t, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

“It’s real,” Redpath said.

The clerk moved her lips slowly, reading each title as she punched numbers into the machine: Chinese Triads and the Opium Wars, Silk and the Asian Mind, The New Russian Mafias.

“You really gonna read this stuff?” the girl asked.

“Tonight? No. But over time, yes.”

A look of sympathy went over the clerk’s face as she rang up the sales.

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