Free Irresistible Impulse by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page B

eliminated, and if they are, we’ll know we’re dealing with a true stranger. If so, I can work up a security plan. The point, by the way, is not to have you live your life under guard. The point is to find this guy and get him to stop.”
    “However will you do that?” Wooten asked with interest.
    Marlene grinned. “We have our methods,” she said in a German accent.
    Edie Wooten returned the grin. She really had, Marlene thought, the most marvelous disposition. “No, really,” Wooten said, “how do you?”
    “Really?” said Marlene. She shrugged. “It depends. Usually I talk to them. I reason with them.”
    “And it works?”
    “Oh, yes,” said Marlene confidently. “I have a very forceful personality.”
    Lucy Karp wandered through the edges of Chinatown, growing colder, hungrier, and more miserable with each passing hour. Twice she started back to school, and twice she stopped, unwilling to contemplate the uproar that would be made over her defection: Mrs. Lawrence would have her piece of skin and then the chief gorgon, Ms. Lee, the principal, and then, worst of all, her mother would be called and come to school and all three of them would stare at her, and of course, she would have missed math and fallen even further behind.
    Illness was her only hope, she concluded, a long, lingering debility that would baffle medical science—and excuse her permanently from long division. A stomach ailment would be best, she thought. Her stomach actually did ache, for it was now past her lunchtime, and her lunch was still in its box in her cubby back at school, and all she had in her parka pocket was a nickel and two pennies. She would have to upchuck, naturally, to make it convincing; then she could run back to school red faced, weeping, with vomit all over her, and say she had wandered away under the influence of a strange disease that had affected her brains and …
    However, if there was one thing she couldn’t bear to do, it was puke, so she would have to really work at it. What was needed was some actual vomit to serve as an exemplar—the sight and smell would work their magic on her gut. Fortunately, finding street messes was rarely a problem in lower Manhattan.
    So Lucy trod the crowded streets, looking in the gutters and in doorways, finding a good array of nauseating venues, including one bloated, stinking rat. She was gagging, well sickened, but still unable to bring up the necessary evidence. By this time she was on Canal Street, a familiar stretch. She caught sight of Tranh’s noodle shop, and at this sight, redolent of those precious afternoons with her mother, Lucy experienced the first sympathetic mental pang. As a result of her mother’s profession, there must have been few children of her age in New York as thoroughly indoctrinated as Lucy was in the dangers of kidnapping and as vividly aware of what losing a child meant. Her eyes stung with tears; she ran in desperate little circles, moaning. At last she sat on the curb and wept.
    All this Tranh observed through the window of his shop. He came out and squatted down next to Lucy and said in rusty Cantonese, “Little Sister, what is the matter? Why are you crying?”
    “Because—because,” answered the child in the same language, amidst the blubbering, “I ran away from school.”
    “ Wah! You ran away? Did they mean to beat you?”
    “No,” answered Lucy. “I was afraid I could not do my lesson. I am a very stupid girl, and I feared to lose face in front of my friends. Now I am disgraced forever.”
    Tranh pulled free the white towel that he habitually kept stuck in his waistband and gave it to Lucy. “It may not be as bad as that,” he said. “Forever is a long time. Wipe your face and come inside. First I will give you some soup with winter melon, noodles, and ham. Then we will think together about your difficulty.”
    “I have no money,” said Lucy, rising, her stomach rumbling at the mention of food.
    “That does not matter,”