by Don Winslow
“I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”
Graham grabbed him by the elbow. “Are you crazy? You’re not going to do shit. What you’re going to do is what I’m going to do.”
Neal wrenched his arm away. “Which is what?”
Graham started walking again and gestured for Neal to come with him. As they were walking, Graham started to lecture.
“Neal, listen. I don’t know if you’re right or not about this CIA thing. Sounds crazy to me. But whatever is going on here, it is very serious. With this kind of stuff, we don’t fuck around. So what we’re going to do, we’re going to catch the next plane to Providence, we’re going to walk into the Man’s office and say, ‘Mr. Kitteredge, please tell anyone you may or may not know that Joe Graham and Neal Carey don’t know anything and care less.’ Then we’re going to ask him what he wants us to do. He’s going to tell us in polite terms to keep our fucking mouths shut and forget about Dr. Robert Pendleton, and Neal—that’s what we’re going to do.”
“They’re going to kill her!”
“You mean him.”
“I mean both of them.”
Graham looked at him real funny. “You mean her.”
“All right. Her.”
Graham slammed his rubber hand into a lamppost. “Fuck! What is it with this babe, everyone falls in love with her?”
“I’m not in love with her.”
“Yes, you are.”
Yes, you are, Graham thought. I know you, kid, you’re in love with the heartache.
“Look, Neal … say you find them, say you warn them. What then? Are you going to save them? How? You won’t save them, dickhead, you’ll join them. You’ll be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this time the bullet won’t miss. Son, you don’t know these people, what Pendleton did, what the China doll did. Maybe they deserve it.”
“Her name is Li Lan. She has a name.”
“A little while ago you thought she set you up for a bullet in the head, now you want to rescue her. What next, you want to fuck her? Listen, Neal, if you want a little Chinese pussy, I’ll buy you some, it’s all over the place.”
Neal’s fists clenched. For a moment he thought he might punch Graham.
Am I in love with her? he wondered. I must be, because the thought of her hurts, the thought of her dead … and I don’t give a rat’s ass about Pendleton and haven’t since I saw her. And the thought of never seeing her again …
“See you, Dad.”
Neal turned and started walking away. Graham is always telling me that he taught me everything I know, let’s see if he taught me everything he knows, he thought. Graham may be the best street man ever born, but I may be the best ever made.
He was right, but he was right on both counts. Graham hung on his tail like a burr on a dog. Neal couldn’t get the space he needed to break the connection. He took the older man along Grant, then up Clay to Stockton. He passed through crowds and crossed the street, doubled back, went into a store through one door and left through another, took it fast, took it slow, and still Graham stayed with him. It was all right, though. In this game, like baseball, the tie goes to the runner, and Neal knew that time was on his side. Graham couldn’t stop to call in for backup, so he wasn’t able to drive Neal into a tightening net. And once Neal shook him, that would be it.
Mark Chin had kept the net loose all day and was glad it was finally time to jerk it shut. He’d let the kweilo sit around the Hopkins hotel, had let the one-armed guy come in, had waited while the kweilo did his thing in the library, and finally saw his spot as the two kweilos had an argument. About fucking time. It had taken the efforts of seven of his best boys to keep this Neal Carey person in an invisible net. Now the mark was running hard, trying to shake his partner. The opportunity was at hand.
He fell in behind him and let himself be seen as the mark turned to check on his partner.
Neal saw Benchpress come out of a doorway behind him, and this time Benchpress looked like an opportunity. Graham was coming up about fifty feet behind them. Neal turned on his heel and bumped straight into Benchpress.
“A hundred bucks for taking that guy out without hurting him. Another bill for meeting me, giving me some help.”
Benchpress mumbled an address and turned back toward Graham.
Graham saw the guy coming, but it was too late. The fucker was huge, and Graham felt himself wrapped in a bear hug that choked his breath and obliterated his view. In two seconds there were three more Chinese guys around him.
“Don’t hurt him,” Chin told his assistants.
“I’ll beat whatever he paid you,” Graham said.
“This isn’t an auction.”
And Neal was going, going, gone.
Neal checked the address on the doorway under a yellow neon sign with XXX on it in black letters. A tired-looking black man behind the raised counter nodded to him. There were three or four customers in the shop, but none of them looked up from the porno magazines.
“You can shop, you can buy, you can get tokens from me. You can’t read. This isn’t a library,” the counterman said to Neal.
“I’m meeting a guy.”
“Gay stuff back and to the left.”
Benchpress came in just then and handed a five-dollar bill to the clerk, who handed back a plastic sleeve full of tokens. He jerked his head to Neal and pointed to a swinging door at the rear of the shop.
“Step into my office.”
Chin selected a booth, gestured Neal in, and shut the door behind him. There was a pull-down bench just large enough for one person to sit on. A box of Kleenex completed the furnishings. Chin dropped two tokens into a coin slot, then glanced at the channel selector.
“Any preferences?”
Neal shook his head.
Chin pushed a button and the porn video started.
“Sit down. Make yourself at home.”
“Thanks.”
Neal handed him another fifty.
“I get the idea,” Chin said over the sound track of groans of phony passion, “that you got more than a fifty-dollar problem.”
Neal could hear similar groans from the next booth.
“Turn up the volume,” he said.
Mark Chin cranked it up to full. The tinny rock music vibrated on the cheap walls.
“So?” Chin asked.
“I need a place to hide.”
“No big deal.”
“In Hong Kong.”
Cries of “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!” seemed to be coming out of Mark Chin’s chest, as if he were the dummy in an obscene ventriloquist’s act.
“No big deal,” he said.
“Great.”
The video rose to an ear-shattering crescendo of passion as Chin asked, “It’s about the woman, isn’t it?”
“What woman?”
“Room ten-sixteen, the incredibly gorgeous Chinese woman.”
The video shut off in mid-climax. Chin stuck another token in the slot and changed channels. Two women in a steam room were making tentative advances. Their quiet conversation was a welcome relief.
“That Pendleton is a lucky guy,” Chin continued. “Me, I would not mind a piece of that luck.”
Neal felt himself flush with anger. What is this, he thought, jealousy?
“So what is he?” Chin asked. “The chemist?”
Now how the hell would you know that? Neal wondered. He didn’t answer, but let the soft sighs coming from the video fill the silence.
Chin said, “Pendleton tests the heroin? Tells the boss, ‘This is good, this is not so good’? He makes a nice salary, plus benefits? She’s one of the bennies? You don’t want to mess with that, that’s tong business. Big time.”
“I have to find her.”
Yeah, I do. Find her to warn her. Find her to ask her some questions. Find out what the hell is going on. Find out how to come out of this alive.
“What, you’re in love?”
Why is this so obvious to everybody but me?
Chin shook his head disgustedly. The two women on the video began a fresh erotic encounter.
“It’s your funeral,” Chin said. “When are you leaving?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Before your friend finds you?”
“How hard is it to disappear in Hong Kong?” Neal asked.
“It can’t be too hard. People disappear in Hong Kong every day.”
Neal opened his bag and came out with a package of cash. He counted ten hundred dollar bills out and handed them to Chin.
“Disappear me.”
Chin folded the money into his pants pocket. The old saying was right, he thought—it’s amazing how lucky you get when you work hard. But he wasn’t that interested in old sayings. His metaphor of preference was western chess, and he knew that to capture the opponent’s queen, you had to move a pawn forward. He pointed both open palms toward Neal, closed his fingers, and snapped them open again.
“Presto!”
As he and Neal left, the warm ripple of a woman’s laughter followed them.
5
Xao Xiyang took the lid off the mug and sipped at the green tea. His neck ached, his eyes hurt, and even the fine quality of this particular tea did nothing to change the stacks of figures on his desk.
He sat back in his chair and lit a cigarette. The acrid taste of the cheap tobacco burned his mouth. His lesser colleagues teased him—as regional party secretary he could easily have used the “back door” to procure as many Marlboros as they could bring from Hong Kong—but the habit of caution was still with him. He had known men to be imprisoned during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution for far lesser “crimes” than smoking American cigarettes.
He took off his glasses and wiped them on the short sleeve of his cheap cotton shirt. He could smell his own stale perspiration in his armpits. He glanced at his watch and realized that he had been poring over the agricultural statistics for seven hours. And still they didn’t change.
Ninety-seven million people in this province, Xao thought. More than in the entire Han Dynasty at its height, more than the Ming, more than Rome. I am responsible for ninety-seven million people. And I don’t know how to feed them. Here, in the so-called Rice Bowl of China, we can no longer feed ourselves. A cultural revolution indeed.
His assistant, Peng, currying favor, had repeated to him the flattering play on words that was being repeated in the teahouses: “If you want to eat, go see Xao Xiyang.” And it was true that he had made some reforms, throwing out some of the ideologues who were so badly mismanaging some of the production teams. But “some” was not good enough. The reforms had to be systemic.
And the system was so idiotic, Xao thought as he took another long drag on his cigarette. Insane, really. And I blame you, old friend, he thought, looking at the Chairman’s portrait that hung on the office wall, as it did on all office walls.
They had begun as tongmen-jr—comrades—although the Party cliché was a curse on his tongue now. He had looked up to the Chairman then, almost as an older brother. He had joined the Party, fought the Kuomintang, lost, and joined the Chairman on the Long March. How clear things seemed in those days, how clear and pure in the crystalline air of the mountains, when he and the Chairman and all the rest were fighting to build a new China in a new world.
And the fighting. Fighting the Kuomintang, and then the Japanese, and then the Kuomingtang again. Fighting with the Chairman’s guidance, under his precepts of guerrilla war. Like fish swimming in the sea of the people. And as they fought, they liberated, came to control vast areas of the country. And they threw out the landlords and gave the land to the peasants, then recruited the peasants for the army. And he remembered that when they retreated from a village, the Kuomingtang would come back in and shoot all the peasants who had been left behind.
What fighting he had seen! Bodies stacked like rice hulls along the side of the road. Entire villages beheaded by the Japanese. He remembered the Japanese patrol they had pinned down in the mountain pass—they had picked them off one by one over the course of three days. When finally they went to loot the bodies, they saw that some of the Japanese had not been shot at all, but had frozen to death, their bodies stuck to the rocks by ice, their fingers frozen to their rifle triggers.
And in those same mountains he had met her. She was a courier, a message runner … a spy. She risked torture at the hands of the Japanese, but she never flinched, and he had heard of her before he met her. He chuckled at the memory. They hadn’t called it “love,” that would have been too romantic and decadent. No, they had called it a “oneness of spirit in revolutionary fervor”—but it was love. Such beauty … such soul …
They married in a high mountain meadow and honeymooned in a tent under tall cedars. Then they went back to their separate duties. He was terrified for her, terrified for himself that she might never return from her dangerous missions. For five years they made infrequent, brief rendezvous—passionate couplings in peasant huts or tents, even caves. And when the Japanese had been beaten, and the Kuomintang destroyed, they met in the joyous celebration in Tiananmen Square and never separated again. Started a life and raised a family and never separated again until …
Xao Xiyang lit another cigarette. I must be getting old, he thought. I seem given to the old man’s habit of living in the past, in the realm of memory. But you, old friend, he thought as he looked again at the portrait, you are now in the realm of the shadows. Thank you. The last, best thing you could do for us was to die. It is only a shame you didn’t do it sooner. You should have died on the day of victory, when we all stood on Tiananmen Gate and proclaimed the republic. The New China.
Before you decided to become an emperor.
Xao took another sip of the green tea and pronounced another curse on the head of his old friend. He pronounced it in the name of twenty million of the dead. Twenty million peasants, twenty million of “the people,” who had starved in the Chairman’s Great Leap Forward. “Great Leap,” indeed—the great leap from this world to the next. The next world, he thought. Good Marxist that I am, I don’t believe in the next world. But I will see you in hell, old friend.
The Chairman’s Great Leap Forward started in 1957, after an unusually fine harvest. But the Chairman wasn’t satisfied with the mere production of food; society had to be recorded along less “individualistic” and “selfish” lines. Collectivization of all the land was accelerated. The entire rural population was organized into production teams. No peasant dared own so much individual property as a chicken. Worse still, by year’s end, over 300,000 “stinking intellectuals,” including the best economists and scientists, had been labeled “rightists” and shipped off to prison camps.
So when the crisis hit, all the experts who might have controlled it were gone, and no one else dared speak. The Chairman set quotas for grain production, and the new commune managers met them all—on paper. The Chairman looked at the figures and boasted that the new order—the new China—was working just as he said it would, and commanded in the name of “the people” that collectivization be speeded up. Then he set higher quotas, and the people met them—on paper.
Figures may not lie, but the people who write them do, and the Party cadres who reported the figures did just that. They were afraid to be labeled “defeatists,” so they reported victory. They ordered fields to lie fallow to avoid a glut of grain. They took peasants from the fields and set them to building warehouses to hold all the grain that would be harvested. On paper.
But in the fields and the paddies it was a different story, for less than half the grain the figures claimed was actually harvested, and even less was processed. Crops rotted in the fields while the peasants built useless warehouses, fields were not tended while the peasants were sent to work in “backyard steel mills” to help with industrialization. Collectivization was chaos. Urban cadres who knew nothing about agriculture gave idiotic and contradictory orders to the peasants. The already fr
agile transportation system broke down completely, and precious farm tools and invaluable fertilizers sat in stalled railroad cars or were “lost” entirely. Grain production dropped over sixty percent, and while the cadres dutifully checked nonexistent grain into nonexistent warehouses, the Chairman shipped the real grain to the Soviets to repay the debts of industrialization.
The experts who might have helped—the Western-trained agronomists, economists, statisticians, and biochemists—were in prison for the very crime of being Western-trained experts. The few who had escaped that fate were silenced the moment they spoke the truth that the Great Leap Forward was a sham, a tragic fiasco launched by a madman. The emperor had no clothes and the people had no food.
The people starved. Twenty million people starved to death in three years. Many more died of malnutrition-related diseases in the years following. And more than half of the dead were children.
That was our “New China,” Xao thought, a land where we starved our children.
He could never shut his eyes without the sights coming back to him. His nightmares were not of the war with all its various horrors, but of those years, of the emaciated mothers—too weak to walk—who lay beside the road, trying to feed rice husks to babies who were already dead. Or of the children begging him for food, staggering toward his staff car on spindly legs, their rheumy eyes asking him questions for which he had no answers. If you want to eat, go see Xao Xiyang.
I will see you in hell, old friend. You and I will both be there, because I, too, posed for the cameras in the “model villages,” those sham communes that received the money, the fertilizers, and the pesticides. I, too, posed beside the huge piles of grain, the fattened hogs, and the smiling peasants with fat and rosy-cheeked children. I, too, congratulated their leaders and held them up as an example to the rest, even though I also knew that their figures were lies. Even with all their resources, they had to lie. And the rest of the country had to live up to the lie, and send out more grain, and starve all the more. Oh, I will join you in hell, old friend.
Finally the slaughter became too much for some of the higher Party members, who braved the Chairman’s wrath and forced him to put a check on the insanity. Collectivization was modified and slowed down. Some land was freed up to private agriculture. A few of the experts who had survived the purge were returned to their posts. A slow, painful recovery began as the professionals took over from the politicians and pragmatism took precedence over ideology. By 1965, food production reached its normal levels. There was still hunger, but starvation disappeared. And the Chairman sulked and bided his time.