by Don Winslow
An old man and a boy squatted on the floor of the main room. They held rice bowls to their lips, and their chopsticks were flashing furiously, scooping the dirty white rice into their mouths. The old man wore a sleeveless T-shirt that may have been white sometime during the Sung Dynasty, and a pair of khaki shorts that came down to his calves. His white hair had been shaved close to the scalp, and he had a wispy white beard. His eyes were dull and yellow and showed the resentment he felt at being interrupted in his meal.
The kid, on the other hand, was delighted. He stared unabashedly at Neal, and dropped two or three grains of rice onto the black sports shirt he wore over denim cutoff and rubber sandals. His grin showed bad, crooked teeth, and his eyes looked milky and runny. Infected. Neal figured the kid to be maybe twelve, the old man about a hundred and twelve.
The kid reached under his shirt and came out with a comic book, which he held up to Neal’s face.
“Hulk!” he screamed, then screwed his face up and hunched over, growling and showing teeth. “Hulk! Hulk!”
“That’s pretty good,” Neal said, trying to be friendly.
He reached for the comic book to express admiration, but the kid snatched it back. Then he pulled himself up, threw out his chest, put his hands on his hip, and flashed a confident, macho smile.
“Superman?” Neal asked.
The kid shook his head, then hit him with the smile again.
“Batman,” Neal said.
“Batman! Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da … Batman!”
“You’re good.”
“Marvel Comics. Ding hao! Marvel!”
Honcho pointed to the horizontal telephone booth above them with deliberate nonchalance. “Ma Bell,” he said. “Knock yourself out.”
Pendleton had flopped down in a corner, head in hands. He was done in. Li Lan stood in the center of the room, looking at nothing, expressionless, waiting for the next thing to happen. Neal knew that the next thing was to call Simms and arrange to get the hell out of here. Wherever here was.
“Are you guys ready to do this?” he asked Li and Pendleton.
Tough shit if you’re not, he thought, because we are definitely doing this.
Pendleton kept his head in his hands, but nodded.
Li Lan said, “Yes, we are ready.”
“It’s a local call,” Neal said to Honcho as he climbed the ladder.
“Doesn’t matter,” Honcho answered. “We don’t pay.”
The loft was the size of a baker’s oven and about as hot. There was no room to stand up, and Neal had to bend over, even sitting on the stool. The phone cord came through a small hole that had been drilled in the wall.
It’s a nice scam they have going here, Neal thought. Stealing phone service. Wonder how much they charge the locals to make a call. He dug in his pocket for Simms’s number.
Great. There was no fucking dial tone.
“I think I’m not doing this right,” he said.
Li Lan came up the ladder and leaned into the loft. Even in this sewer she looks gorgeous, Neal thought. Absolutely killer. And she was looking into his eyes so deeply he thought for a moment that he actually might die.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be sorry. Just show me how to use the phone.”
She reached over and gently pulled the cord. It fell out of the hole.
“Is not real,” she said.
A dummy phone for the dummy.
“Why?” he asked.
This time the eyes were angry. As cold and hard as ice.
“You can see all this,” she said, sweeping her arm around to indicate the neighborhood, “and ask why? Why I am a communist? Why I fight for the people? The question you should ask is why you are not, why you do not. You created all this, you made it. Now you can live in it.”
He couldn’t breathe. His chest felt like it was in a vise. Live in it? Live in it?! She can’t mean what I think she means. Jesus God, please, no.
He could barely make himself ask the question, and it came out in a hoarse whisper. “Are you leaving me here?”
“Yes.”
Not even a hint of regret. Cold, hard, and straight.
She started down the ladder. He grabbed the top of it and held on, then twisted himself onto the ladder. He stopped when he felt the blade press against the tendons of his knee. He looked down to see the boy, all of his bad teeth showing in an immense and joyful grin, holding the chopper to his leg. The message was clear: Make a run and you’ll be hobbling for life. And anyway, where would you run? Neal climbed back into the cave. The boy pulled down the ladder, then reached up and took away the stool.
Honcho, Pendleton, and Li were gone.
9
Joe Graham hated Providence, a sentiment that united him in at least a small sense with the rest of the world. Providence is a town for insiders, for third-generation harp politicians, Quebecois priests with a gift for gab and a glad hand at charity breakfasts, and mafioso smart guys who run sand and gravel companies and therefore know where the bodies are buried.
It was also a town for a bank that knows where the money is buried, and Ethan Kitteredge was sort of the ace archaeologist of bankers. He could make old money look new, new money look old, and lots of money look gone, and he did it in layers. Ethan Kitteredge was so good at taking care of other people’s money that he had even started a side operation to take care of his investors’ very lives. Friends of the Family looked out for the family friends—that is, the people who put enough money in the Kitteredge family bank to allow the Kitteredge family to live in the quiet splendor to which it had become accustomed. And AgriTech had run a whole lot of money through Ethan Kitteredge’s bank.
This fact made Joe Graham hate Providence even more than usual on this particular day, because Joe Graham had been summoned to a rare meeting at Kitteredge’s office to discuss the AgriTech file. The office looked like a captain’s cabin on a whaling ship. Nautical models plied the grain of expensive wooden bookcases filled with navigation texts and sailors’ memoirs. Kitteredge’s enormous mahogany desk was about as old as the ocean, and had on it a model of the Man’s pride and joy, his schooner Haridan. The place reeked of the sea, which further irritated Joe Graham, who thought the ocean was one gigantic waste of space. He had been to the beach once and hated it: too much sand. So he sat in one of those hard New England chairs, staring pointedly at Ed Levine, while Kitteredge and some preppie cracker discussed the finer points of government policy over a pot of tea. Joe Graham couldn’t give a rat’s ass or a hamster’s dick about government policy. He only wanted to know what had happened to Neal Carey.
So while this Simms yokel was mumbling something about the Chinese tradition of quid pro quo, Graham interrupted him to ask, “So where is Neal Carey?”
Levine shot him a dirty look, but Levine could go fuck himself, maybe eat a couple more steaks and drop fucking dead of a heart attack. Levine was his supervisor, but Graham had known Levine when he was nothing more than hired street muscle. He was one tough Jew—big, fast, smart, and mean—and Graham wasn’t scared of him one bit. Right now he was so angry he’d stick his rubber arm up Levine’s ass and twirl him.
The cracker, Simms, sighed at the interruption but condescended to answer, “He’s gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Which word didn’t you understand, Mr. Graham?”
“Listen, you mealy-mouthed fuck—”
“That will be enough, Joe—” Kitteredge said.
Graham saw the Man turn pale with anger. The Man believed in maintaining a tone of immaculate courtesy. Which he can afford to do, Graham thought, because he’s got me to do the nasty shit. Me and Neal.
“No, sir, excuse me, but that’s not enough,” Graham said. He’d thrown the “excuse me” and the “sir” in there in an attempt to save his job and his pension. “Neal Carey gets sent on a job and doesn’t get told what it’s really about. Nobody tells him that Pendleton’s cooped up with a commie spy. Okay, Neal goe
s off the deep end and boings a major hard-on for this slash—”
“Pardon me?” Kitteredge asked.
“He develops a romantic obsession for the woman,” Levine explained as he drilled Graham with a shut-the-fuck-up glare that didn’t shut him the fuck up.
“So,” Graham continued, “Blue Suit over here knows free labor when he sees it and stands back while Neal gets deeper and deeper into the shit, and now he shows up here and tells us Neal is gone. So, Mr. Simms, the word I don’t understand is ‘gone.’ Maybe you can explain that?”
Simms looked to Kitteredge as if he expected him to intervene.
Kitteredge did. “Yes, Mr. Simms, perhaps you could explain?”
“Neal Carey telephoned me from the YMCA in Kowloon and said he had Pendleton and Li Lan and please come and get him. I of course said I would, and sent the nearest available resources over. When they got there, perhaps forty-five minutes later, Carey, Pendleton, and the woman were gone. When I got there in another hour, they were still gone. That was six weeks ago. We have since managed to track them as far as a temple near the Walled City.”
“What’s that?” Levine asked.
“It is the eighth circle of hell. It is an area only about the size of three football fields, yet perhaps the densest maze in the urban cosmography.”
Kitteredge leaned over his desk. “Mr. Simms, please spare us any further demonstrations of your … erudition. We all acknowledge that you are intelligent. You may take that as a stipulation, and please begin to speak in English.”
Simms flushed. He didn’t particularly care for Yankees, or Irishmen, or for that matter Jews, and he was having to put up with an especially unpleasant combination of all three.
“The Walled City is a no-man’s-land. It had its beginnings as a fort that became a haven for squatters during the early days of British colonization. Neither the Chinese nor the British attempt to administrate it, so it is controlled by an uneasy confederation of tongs. Tongs, or Triads, are gangs—”
“We have them in New York,” Graham said.
“How nice for you. Anyway, the original walls have long since crumbled, but the area is actually an impenetrable maze, a hovel of the worst kind of crime: Drugs, extortion, slavery, and child prostitution flourish there. The police rarely venture inside, and tourists are warned that even to step into the Walled City is a risky proposition. People simply disappear.”
Gone, Graham thought.
“If Carey was lured into the Walled City, I’m afraid he is in desperate trouble.”
“He’s a tough kid,” Levine said, but Graham could hear the fear in his voice. Ed Levine always said that he hated Neal Carey, but Graham knew better. Besides, Neal was Ed’s employee, one of his people, and Ed Levine was fiercely protective of his people.
“That won’t do him much good, I’m afraid,” Simms answered. “If he’s in there, he’s in one of the most vicious slums in the world. A place without law, ethics, or morals. A jungle.”
“What will happen to him?” asked Kitteredge, who had a banker’s way of cutting to the bottom line.
“I doubt they’d murder him outright, unless the Li woman ordered it.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s much more valuable alive.”
“To whom? As what?”
Simms smiled tightly. “A white youth would be an oddity there, to say the least. A commodity. They will probably auction him off to the highest bidder. This really is excellent tea. What is it?”
Simms’s hand reached for the teapot but never made it. A hard rubber artificial arm slammed it to the table and held it there.
“Go in and get him,” Graham said.
“Impossible. Now remove your arm, please.”
“Go in and get him.”
“I don’t want to have to hurt you.”
Graham pressed down hard. “Yeah. Do some of your fancy CIA shit on me. Terrify me.”
“Ease up, Joe,” Levine said. Graham could feel that the big man was getting ready to move, to peel him off Simms.
“I’ll break his fucking wrist, Ed.”
“Have you all considered the possibility that your Carey isn’t in the Walled City at all? That perhaps he is cashing a check in Peking, or on a nice beach in Indonesia somewhere, laughing at all of us?”
Simms was trying to maintain his cool, but the voice betrayed pain.
“Mr. Graham,” said Kitteredge, “please release your … hold … on our guest’s arm.”
Graham pressed down a little harder before letting up. He looked Simms in the eye and repeated, “Go in and get him.”
Simms ignored him and turned to Kitteredge. He was red in the face and rubbing his wrist as he asked, “What do you want me to do, Mr. Kitteredge?”
“Mr. Simms, I want you to go in and get him.”
“Look, Carey has disobeyed every single directive we’ve issued. He’s blown a major operation. And, frankly, I don’t know whether (A) we can find him, and (B), if we do, whether we could get him out.”
Levine came from around the desk, leaving his usual position on the right hand of God. He leaned against the Man’s desk and looked down at Simms. “In that case, I don’t know whether (A) we can continue our current financial relationship with AgriTech, or (B) we may have to call in our paper.”
Simms blew his cool. “You don’t fuck with the government.”
“Watch us.”
“You think you can take on the CIA? You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
“We know enough to launder your goddamn money for the past ten years,” Levine said.
Kitteredge raised a hand to object. “I’m not sure I would call it ‘laundering.’”
“Taking their slush fund, running it through the Bank, and then loaning it back to to their pet corporation to pay for research? Come on, Mr. Kitteredge, what would you call it?”
“Patriotism.”
Nobody answered that one.
Kitteredge smoothed back the unruly lock of ash-blond hair that fell across his forehead. “For an … organization … such as ours, it is our duty and our privilege to support our country. Because we are who we are, that support often takes a covert form. So be it. We do what we can do. However, gentlemen, in this particular case we have erred grieviously. We have—albeit unwittingly, and I am very angry about that, Mr. Simms, very angry—sent our colleague, Neal Carey, into dangerous waters without the proper navigational aids. Thus, sailing in the dark on uncharted waters, he has foundered. If he has indeed … drowned … we must mourn him. But if he is marooned, we must rescue him. We will use—and you will use, Mr. Simms—all our resources to do so. Am I understood, gentlemen?
Ed Levine and Joe Graham nodded.
“Mr. Simms?”
Simms nodded.
“The tea is black gunpowder. Many of my ancestors invested in the China trade,” Kitteredge said.
“Tea traders?”
“Uhhmm. And opium, of course.”
Right, thought Graham. Opium in and tea out. Sounds like money in the bank. Make that money in the Bank.
“Take some with you, Mr. Simms. I’ll have my secretary make up a package,” Kitteredge added.
The abruptness of the dismissal startled Simms. Just who the unholy hell did these people think they were? Nobody wanted to find young Neal Carey more than he did. He shook Kitteredge’s hand, nodded to Levine, and ignored Joe Graham as he left the room.
Kitteredge sat back in his chair and touched his fingertips together at his lips. He looked like he was praying, but Graham knew it was a habit he had when he was in deep thought. So Graham just shut up, something he thought he maybe should have done earlier, because maybe the Man was searching for just the right words to fire him.
Finally he spoke. “Ed?”
“I think we have to assume that Carey’s been the subject of hostile action,” Levine said. “Carey’s an arrogant, undisciplined, unreliable fuck-up, but he’s no traitor.”
“For the r
ight woman?” Kitteredge asked.
“In Carey’s case, there is no right woman. He’s psychologically incapable of that depth of feeling.”
Kitteredge turned to Graham. “Do you concur?”
“If Ed means that Neal is generally pissed off at women and doesn’t trust them, sure,” Graham answered. “Is this what they teach you in night school, Ed?”
Levine was on a roll. “It’s more than not trusting them. Neal expects betrayal. His mother was an addict and a prostitute, and worse than that, she left him—”
“We kicked her out of town.”
“Nevertheless, deep down, Neal knows that any woman he loves will eventually leave him, betray him. When she does, she validates his view of life. If she doesn’t, he’ll do something to make her leave. If that doesn’t work, he’ll leave and be pissed off when she doesn’t follow him. So—”
Graham slammed his fist on the table. “If Doctor Fraud here is finished, I’d like to start looking for Neal.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do, Graham. Keep your arm on. What I’m saying, so that even Graham can understand it, is that it’s just not possible that Neal is living happily in China somewhere with this broad.”
“So you believe he’s a prisoner, Ed,” asked Kitteredge.
Ed got quiet for a minute, which made Graham nervous. Ed being quiet was never good news.
“Yes,” Ed answered. “Or he’s dead.”
“He’s not dead,” Graham replied.
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“Terrific.”
“Either way, gentlemen,” Kitteredge said, “we have to find him.”
“How are your connections in Chinatown?” Levine asked Graham.
“Not so good anymore. Things have changed, the old guys are dying out. It’s all kids now, and they’re all crazy. Gun-happy. But I’ll ask around, see if anyone can do some digging in Hong Kong.”
“With your permission,” Ed said to Kitteredge, “I’ll head over there, keep the heat on our friend Simms.”