Aren’t you sick of using your little brother as an excuse for every bad deed, every crime you’ve committed?
And on and on it goes. In fact, Riki would’ve probably stayed out there in front of Vera Wang’s World-Famous (boy, that description is taking quite the liberty) Teahouse for a long while if the rickety door hadn’t swung open with a creak. The bell on top of the door jingles, slicing into his heated debate with himself. For a moment, it annoys Riki, because he was sure he was winning against himself, but then he finds himself staring soundlessly at the face peering out of the shop and all thoughts fall silent.
It’s an old woman, probably around her sixties, with big permed hair that Riki’s familiar with, having grown up in Indonesia; her thin lips were painted bright pink, way too bright for her skin tone, and her eyebrows thickly penciled into a sharp arch.
“Yes?” The woman speaks, and there’s something about her tone of voice that makes Riki feel all of five years old, caught with his hand in the krupuk jar.
He gives himself a little shake. He’s twenty-five, not five, and the top of the old woman’s head doesn’t even reach up to his nipples. Oh god, why is he thinking about nipples right now, at this very moment? What the hell is wrong with him? Of course, as soon as he thinks that, all he can think about are nipples, like some pervert. “Ah . . .”
The old woman steps fully out of her shop and lifts her chin up, up so she can stare at Riki directly in the face. “You been standing there for exactly four minutes. I think this unusual behavior, even for a millennial.”
“Oh, uh . . .” Riki scrambles to find something to respond with and his brain burps out, “I’m not a millennial?”
The woman’s eyes narrow with suspicion and move up and down, making his skin prickle. “Hmm, you don’t look young enough to be Gen Z. You need to take better care of your skin.”
Back in Indonesia, Riki’s mother had always nagged at him and his brother, Adi, to reapply sunscreen every two hours, but nobody ever followed that advice. And now he’s paying for it. He feels oddly guilty about it now, and suddenly self-conscious about his skin, and why in the world is he thinking of that right now?
“I think you better come in,” the woman says, and retreats into the teahouse without bothering to see if Riki has agreed.
With quite a bit more trepidation than he was prepared to experience this fine morning, Riki takes a deep breath and follows the little old woman into the dark teahouse.
It’s like stepping into another world entirely, one that seems stuck in the 1950s. Not that Riki would know what a teahouse in the 1950s looked like. This one, anyway, is small and dark despite the two large bay windows beside the door. Maybe it’s the layer of grime on the windows, or the numerous yellowing posters plastered across them, but it has the effect of transforming the teahouse into a slightly dank cave. Riki finds himself bunching up, his shoulders narrowing so he won’t accidentally touch anything.
The walls are yellowing too, and one side is completely covered by an ancient floor-to-ceiling cupboard that has hundreds of little drawers. Riki almost shudders to think of what might be in those drawers. Spiders, most likely. They look like they haven’t been opened in centuries. The other walls are covered with Chinese posters and cheap Chinese paintings of lotus blossoms and birds and cherry blossoms. They’re all crumbling, bits of paper peeling so the birds look monstrous, the flowers a grayish peach instead of a soft pink. There are four tables with two chairs each, all of them in that cheap, tacky Asian style that Riki finds familiar—elaborately carved backs and legs, probably machine cut in China, outdated and uncomfortable as hell to sit on. The whole place smells of old people and makes Riki incredibly sad. Then he takes another step forward and almost jumps out of his skin, because there, on the linoleum floor before him, is the outline of a man.
The old woman, already behind the counter, catches Riki looking. “Oh, that is dead man. I assume you are here because of dead man?”
Riki can’t quite tear his eyes away from the outline. It looks macabre, with one arm stretched up above the head. Astaga, he thinks. He knew that Marshall died, of course he did, that’s the whole reason he’s here, but to see the actual position Marshall was in . . .
“Good outline, yes?” the old woman says with what sounds suspiciously like pride in her voice. When Riki finally drags his gaze from the outline to her, he finds her smiling triumphantly.
“Uh, yes?”
“I draw it myself, you know.” She practically thumps her chest as she pours some water into a kettle and sets it on the stove.
“What? Wouldn’t the police have done that?”
She snorts. “Hah! The police. What good are they? They come in, they take couple of photos, they take body and go. Did they even take fingerprints?”
The pause stretches on for a couple of seconds before Riki realizes she’s expecting him to answer. “Oh! Uh, did they take any fingerprints?”
“No!” she says loudly, and slams a wrinkly fist on the counter hard enough to make Riki jump.
Riki’s not quite sure what to say, but it seems polite to share in her indignation, so he ventures, “Why not?”
That’s apparently what she wanted him to say, because she raises an accusatory index finger and points at the ceiling. “Exactly! Why not? I say to them, why you not taking fingerprints? Take my fingerprints! Take fingerprints all over the shop! Do your job. And you know what they say?”
Riki’s prepared for this by now. “What?”
Her voice lowers conspiratorially. “They say, ‘Ma’am, we are doing our jobs. Please stand aside. And stop trying to make the team drink tea.’ ” She leans back and huffs before taking out a teapot and sprinkling a pinch of tea leaves into it. “I make them my best oolong, but none of them even took a sip. None!”
She’s so obviously offended by this slight that Riki feels compelled to nod with empathy.
“Well, one nice officer took one sip. She said is nice. I say, ‘This is best oolong, a Gaoshan oolong, very expensive, you know.’ She said is the best tea she ever had. Hah, of course is best tea! I going to brew her a different oolong, because she obviously appreciate tea, but another officer tell me stop making tea for team. Can you imagine? How rude!” She pauses for a breath and gasps a little. “Oh dear, speaking of rude, I been very rude myself, haven’t I? I’m Vera, Vera Wong. Owner of this establishment.” She says this as grandly as though she were the queen of England, showing off Buckingham Palace to him.
“Er, yes, very nice,” Riki says. “I’m Riki. Riki Herwanto.”
“And why you loitering in front of my teahouse, Riki Herwanto?”
“Um—” Why indeed? He looks down at the outline of Marshall’s dead body, flushing with guilt. He could swear his cheeks must be burning. The tips of his ears feel like flames are slowly licking them. He should’ve thought this out, but then again, that was just what he’d been doing out there on the sidewalk before Vera ambushed him. Quick, think of something! He fishes into thin air and plucks something out. “I read about his death in the obituary and thought it sounded strange because of . . . well, him dying in a teahouse and everything.” Then his brain burps out, “I’m a reporter.”