Manuel likes a good motor vehicle and the CZS where he works has a fleet of impressive ones. They are all black, but the large garage on the CZS campus looks like a car lot with everything from vans and trucks, to high performance sports cars. The garage doubles as a parking lot for employees who are not provided chauffeur service, but there are only a small number of cars in the garage that do not belong to the CZS.
Manuel had his pick of any of them; he volunteered to drive Worthington to Knoxville, Tennessee, and the car he chose had to be large enough for himself, his partner Adam, and Dr. Worthington.
As he walked through the rows of cars, he realized that the models got older as he approached the wall further from the entrance. It was like walking back in time as the variety of the moden selection turned to boxy sedans from the 1980s, then sleek compact and muscle cars from the 50s and 60s, to the carriage styles of the early century. He was tempted to dust off an old Model T that had a modern paint job, but it would make the trip three times as long as it needed to be. He wandered back toward the front through the rows of vehicles until he saw a section of Buick models from the 70s and he found himself looking for something. Then he saw it, the Skylark that was painted black and looked as though it was just manufactured and positioned there among similar designs as relics of the decade of their manufacture. He walked toward it and he put a hand on the hood. He knew that car, not that specific one, but the make of it with it’s duck-bill hood and windows set into the sleek frame like a futuristic helmet. Manuel stared into the front windshield like he was staring into the face of a man and it seemed to glare back at him, daring him to recall the memories he struggled to recall in the moment.
He knew that car, it was the first car he’d ever owned, his father had sold it to him and he made his mother crazy with it, he knew that car. But his memories have been hijacked by the parasite latched to the knape of his neck like a rattail; it is like a leech but when it attached to its host, it had been genetically modified to interface with the neurocircuitry of the brain, specifically the hippocampus, and it made the host incapable of accessing explicit memories, but still able to function normally in everyday life. So Manuel couldn’t recall his specific history with the Skylark, but he felt memories that wouldn’t unravel like tightly rolled scrolls.
The four-door is big enough, he thought to himself, and he sat inside. He found a key in the visor and he started it, feeling it come to life around him. He closed his eyes and he wanted to remember, to see in his mind the last time he felt that sensation, but Worthington is an expert with parasites by now and the modified leech has the view of his past locked down.
He maneuvered the car into the aisle between the next row of cars and he drove up to the guards at the entrance.
“That’s a choice,” one of the guards said. Manuel didn’t know him and he ignored the man as he logged the car in the CZS system. Manuel was feeling the car in his hands and the rumble of its engine through his body, hoping it could jog the memories that he could not dislodge on his own.
Chau Pham is so much more than a housekeeper to Yuri James. He calls her his housekeeper because it is easy to explain that to others, and it usually makes others ignore her presence. Chau is his business partner and she has a long history with organized crime that dates back to the 1980s, shortly after she arrived in the US when she was just becoming a teenager. The limited opportunities available to her family as refugees in New York without a firm grasp on the English language, forced her father into menial jobs and it wasn’t long before he was intinced into petty crimes for a Vietnamese gang that paid him enough to support his family. Chau loved her father and learned at a young age that as long as she was quiet, her father would take her anywhere he went, even to meetings with dangerous men as long as the intention of the meeting wasn’t explicitly dangerous. When her family relocated to a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina in the 1990s, her father opened a restaurant as a front for a hub of an international drug trafficking ring that was the source of a majority of the illicit drugs sold in the US. Chau grew up next to her father and she would serve him meals, and screen his meetings with others when he was home with his family.
Chau’s father is an old man now, but he is a seasoned criminal who has avoided law enforcement for all of his life. He takes no interest in the street level operations of drug sales and he does his job receiving and holding shipments that were divided up by three men that he never met, only the proxies who picked up their share.
This paradigm shifted when Yuri showed up at his restaurant that was in a stripmall along a country road. Chau’s family operated every business in the stripmall that included the restaurant that served Chinese food, a tobacco store, laundromat, and nail salon. Yuri showed up there, stopping first to have a manicure, and then he had lunch at the restaurant. When the bill came, Yuri said,
“I was waiting for Binh Pham.”
The waiter looked down at him curiously. No one ever asked for Binh Pham, even though he was usually in his office in the back watching a black and white television.
The waiter asked him to pay and leave, and Yuri put a gun to his head and led him to the kitchen as everyone else inside the dining room scattered. When he entered the kitchen, he was met by armed men who surrounded him.
“Take me to Pham or…” as he said it, using the waiter as a human shield, the men fired and killed the waiter who crumbled in front of Yuri.
“Oh, so this is gonna to get messy, then.”
As the men fire at him, Yuri imagined a bulletproof armor that covered him. It appeared out of thin air and took the shooters by surprise. They paused long enough for Yuri to shoot two of them, and he imagined chains that wrapped a third. He killed two more and then pistol whipped the man who was restrained.
“Leave him alone,” Binh said as he entered the kitchen and he shook his head at the death. He was a short old man and his middle-aged daughter helped him walk.
“I came to take the load off you,” Yuri said. He left the man chained and stood in front of Binh. His daughter stared at Yuri fearlessly. “I want the whole shipment. I want you to sell it all to me.”
“You had to kill these men?” Chau asked and her father smiled at her.
“How else would I get your attention?”
“You got it,” she said, “but you have to have respect and trust to make demands. We don’t know you.”
Yuri smiled at her. He wanted to hurt her, to kill her for her disrespect and to demonstrate to the old man that he should be feared, but he knew that killing her was a bad idea; he would bring Binh’s wrath down on him and he could shut down the entire hub of the international ring if Yuri wasn’t careful. And Yuri did like her, she had the dignity of a mother or grandmother and Yuri didn’t want to disrespect her.
“Then come with me,” he says to her, “I’ll show you what I’m about.”
Chau was surprised by his response, but she left her father in the care of a cousin and she has been with Yuri ever since. She treats him like an unruly son, but she is amazed at his power, his ability to make things out of thin air. And she imparted her knowledge that she had gained from watching the man her father had become.
Yuri is Chau’s bodyguard and she directs his rage to dominate the players who threaten the power that her father has consolidated.
When Dr. Roy Worthington travels to Knoxville, Tennessee to meet Yuri, he seeks out Chau Pham who he finds at a nail salon in the heart of the city.
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