The Foreigner Read Online Free Page A

personally, I suppose she had named him executor because he was a lawyer, and she had always liked the propriety of doing things through official channels. I had met him at the service. A tall, cadaverous man with a voice that rasped like a twig. The receptionist directed me toward an inner door.
    Mr. Carcinet sat behind a massive ebony desk, smoothing his tie as if it were a pet. He was long and sallow and angular, bald as a skull, with something fastidious about his ashy-looking mouth.
    "Ah, Mr. Chang." He stood up and indicated a chair, moving an enormous pile of papers to one side of his desk in order to look more directly at me. As I sat down, he put his fingertips together and regarded me silently over their tented peaks, once in a while putting the tip of a gray tongue to his top lip, as if perplexed. His huge bony elbows jutted out on the arms of his chair as he rocked back and forth minutely.
    "Well," he said at last. "I’d like to say I’m sorry once again for your loss. I understand that you and your mother were quite close, and this must be very hard for you."
    "I suppose so," I said, resenting the sympathy. His vast, shiny black desk was out of proportion to the tiny airless room. I could see my face distorted and reflected in the glossy finish. I hadn’t shaved since the service—had not been out of my apartment at all, in fact. A sparse, erratic beard stuck out in strands from my chin, and my suit was rumpled; my hair was too long and matted like a thatch.
    "As it involves the motel," Pierre Carcinet was saying. "The"—a shuffling of papers—"the… Remada? Inn? The will must be probated in order for any transfer of property to take place. This can take a while, I warn you, so the sooner we get the process started, the better, yes?"
    He paused for a moment. Then for some reason he lowered his voice.
    "You have a brother, correct, Mr. Chang? But I understand he hasn’t been, shall we say, very
close
in some time?"
    "I haven’t seen my brother in almost ten years."
    I felt suddenly cold at the mention of Little P. It had been so long since I’d discussed him with anybody that, without quite knowing it, I had come to feel proprietary about his existence. It had never occurred to me that my mother would discuss him with anyone else. I saw his dark face fleetingly, almost Russian in its long proportions. The memory gave me an unexpected wrench.
    "…tied up in property," Pierre Carcinet pronounced, looking at me expectantly. When I didn’t say anything, he put his hands on the desk and leaned forward.
    "This
means,
" he said, enunciating, "that you and your brother have quite a responsibility on your shoulders. If you should decide to sell the motel, I hope you will confer with me from time to time in order to make sure there are no complications."
    "I haven’t thought about selling the motel at all," I said, offended. "It’s the family home."
    Mr. Carcinet gave me a long, penetrating look and rubbed his chin reflectively for a while.
    "Well, this brings me to the, shall we say, unpleasantness," he said at last. "I don’t mean to be blunt, Emerson, but I’m afraid the decision about the motel will not be yours to make."
    His thin face behind the desk wavered a little, then stabilized.
    "What do you mean?"
    "I mean," he said steadily, "that in her will, your mother left the Remada Inn to your brother, Peter Chang. You will receive some of her stock holdings and a smaller property she owns in Taiwan, but the motel goes to Peter."
    Mr. Carcinet seemed to be fading into the distance; each time I looked up, he appeared farther and farther away, sad and puzzled across an expanding lake of glossy desktop. He stood up and bent toward me.
    "Are you all right?" came his voice distantly. "Emerson? Water," he said, conferring with someone else, and then a buzz of voices like bees on a screen door.
    Slowly he came back into view, along with a flowered Dixie cup full of tepid water.
    "I’m all right," I said,