Free Vulture Peak by John Burdett Page A

to see if I had any questions.
    I did have one. As a semilinguist myself, I was jealous. “Tell me, Lilly, how is it you speak so many languages fluently?”
    Lilly picked up an apple—not a golden delicious but a big green one full of juice—and took a bite. She spoke with her mouth full. “It’s all thanks to Dad and Granddad. The old man was a big industrialist in Shanghai. When he saw Mao was going to win the civil war, he put his entire factory on a ship and moved everything and everyone to Hong Kong. He was an old-style Confucian. Appreciated bound feet on women, especially his wives and his mistresses, and liked to relax with an opium pipe on a Friday night.” Lilly looked at the apple, perhaps at the big chunk she had taken out of it with her perfect teeth. “He brought my father up very strictly, which is to say Dad learned how to obey and that was about it. When the old man died, my father didn’t know what to do about anything, so he imitated the British. He got a British nanny for my sister and me when we were hardly more than zero years old. When you grow up bilingual, you can pick up languages very easily, like picking up shells from the seashore.
    “We didn’t like the British nanny much—she was built like a bulldog and went all red and blotchy when she was angry. She believed in spanking, so when we wanted to get rid of her, we exaggerated and told Dad she was a sadistic lesbian—we were very precocious and loved learning about weird things from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. He was so shocked that lesbianism existed that he sacked her on the spot without making inquiries. Anyway, our English was better than our Putonghua at that stage, so we didn’t need her.
    “In those days the Brits thought the French were the top of the cultural league, so we got a French governess. She was a total pain in the ass with rules for everything and this nasty high-pitched arrogance. She always dressed impeccably, so we found ways of messing up her clothes and hair. Over time the sustained disorientation sent her psychotic—literally. She called it
Chinese torture
. They had to take her away in an ambulance, but we were pretty much perfect in French by then.
    “Next was a German, a hyper-hygienic bitch with an enormous bosom. When we’d learned the language, we told Dad about the Nazis. He only knew about Japanese genocide during the war, so he freaked out and got rid of her. Next was an Italian. She was great. Unbelievably lazy, very soft and indulgent, but she had to have sexwith a new man every month to prove she was irresistible. Unfortunately, Mum found out and sacked her.” She proceeded to munch. “Actually, the real center of our family—the
foyer
, as the French say—was the Fukienese maid. She was mum, dad, sister, grandmother all in one. We adored her and took care of her in her old age. She died a few years ago, and we gave her the big Chinese funeral with tons of hell money and cognac. We cried for a month. Fukienese is our real mother tongue.”
    Lilly gave an exaggerated toothy grin and made rings around her eyes with thumbs and index fingers. I guessed the idea was a caricature of the Chinese face, which might have been crude from anyone else but from her was hilarious. Her new persona—call it Lilly II—was a lot of fun. I shook my head.
    “And the Arabic?”
    She threw me a knowing look. “That came later. We were in our twenties before we realized that the big money wasn’t necessarily in the West anymore. As I said, Daddy was very out of touch. Standard Arabic isn’t difficult, we cracked it in six months, and you get access to the whole of North Africa.”
    “Am I going to meet your sister?”
    Lilly took another bite out of her apple. “How d’you know you haven’t already?”
    I must have been getting slow. It took quite a few beats before I saw the answer to the conundrum. “She’s your twin?”
    “Got it in one, Captain Kirk.”
    I felt a shiver run down my spine, as if