Page 15 - Brokenclaw - John Gardner

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the ancient market story-tellers must have possessed as they charmed their

listeners with fables and legends. Lee was still speaking, allowing himself a
broad smile as he said, ‘To be truthful, there are times when I don’t know
whether I should be inscrutable and mysterious or play the noble savage.’ This
James Bond OO7 - printing disabledappreciative laugh in which Lee himself joined before becoming James Bond OO7 - printing disabled
brought an
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solemn again.
‘The totem I have given you today stood before my grandfather’s and my
father’s teepees. I know it like an old friend. I played at its base as an infant; I
looked upon it as a sacred object while I was with the other braves at rituals

and ceremonies. It has power and a long memory within its wooden being. So
guard it and keep it well.’
The applause was genuinely warm, but Lee held up his right hand for
silence. ‘I have heard it said,’ an almost conspiratorial smile crossing his face,
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‘that I am a fraud; that I have invented these stories; that I am nothing more than
the child of some itinerant Chinese tailor and a Blackfoot girl who sold her
body in Fort Benton. None of this is true. Come to me and I have written proof.
Ask, when you go to the Blackfoot reservations, of Brokenclaw, for that is also

my inheritance.’ He drew his left hand from behind his thigh and held both
arms out, hands with palms upwards.
For a second Bond did not see the truth, then he realised that Lee’s left hand,
palm open, had his thumb on the right side. His left hand was his one physical

blemish, as though, at conception, the hand had grown from the wrist the wrong
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way round, so that with palms outstretched the thumb was to the right; when the
palms faced down, the thumb was on the left.
The group applauded again and the gathering started to break up. The last

Bond saw of Brokenclaw Lee was his head and shoulders above a group
heading towards the escalators.
Bond stayed for a while, viewing the ancient totem with its symbols of
snake, bird and, he thought, scales for weighing, not justice, but gold. The

longer he looked, the more he saw – strange, even grotesque, faces peering out
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from carved leaves and branches.
Finally, with a smile, Bond turned and left, walking back through the Indian
Big House, the short hairs on the back of his neck once again stiffening at the

sound of the chanting and rhythm of the tom-tom beat.
This had been a strange, and somehow exciting, diversion – to see someone
as charismatic as Lee and hear his story which could well be a trunk full of

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