Cobalt by Chris Bauer

Author:Chris Bauer [Bauer, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

Sophie Ming Hughes and her daughter finished cleaning up the speckled green cobalt dust on the glass counter with a soft gemologist’s brush, sliding the stray powder into a plastic bag. The blue-green smear left by the flecked cobalt pieces on the streak plate was still visible. She packaged the porcelain plate in a larger plastic bag, added the smaller bag with the powder, and ziplocked the two together.

“Put it in the safe,” she said to her daughter in Chinese.

Sophie Ming Hughes thumbed through the photos on her phone to find the video she’d taken of the woman with the cobalt brick that she recorded after the woman’s hasty exit. Her walk to her parking space, her son’s hand in hers, the truck leaving the parking lot. A slim woman, taller than the tiny Ms. Hughes, her hair long and straight and black with streaks of gray. Her age maybe late thirties, the gray the giveaway. Her son’s hair was also black, a deep, beautiful onyx, long for a boy, almost to his shoulders. Ten years old she guessed, maybe younger. They both looked Caucasian, but their beautiful black, straight hair was a troublesome fit for that ethnicity. Easily identifiable, especially if they were together. The end of the video gave up the truck’s Pennsylvania license plate, all seven digits.

Not lost on Ms. Hughes was the significance of what had just happened. The customer was savvy, not short-sighted, had initially been looking to make some money quickly, but she pivoted when her son mentioned a touristy miner’s village up north, something he’d seen on the TV. The customer soon excused her way out the door of the shop, no personal information exchanged.

Her name. What was her first name?

Her daughter remembered, said Mirna, spelling it out in the English alphabet amid their discussion in Chinese, although she couldn’t really be sure of the spelling, only the phonetics of it. Ms. Hughes wrote the letters down, saying them aloud while doing it.

She stiffened her posture to face one of the TVs, the screen showing facts and figures for global stock indices broadcast by the Financial Times. She held her phone to her ear, waiting for it to connect. Her eyeglasses reflected the financial data traveling across the lenses, all of it in Chinese.

Her call went through, then played the automated response in Chinese, then English.

“Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in New York. If you know your party’s extension, please enter it or say it now.”

Sophie Ming knew the extension. She spoke it into the phone.

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