by Sheena Kamal
There’s movement that draws my eye down by the beach, near the path leading to Lam’s little suite. A head of lustrous hair catching the sunlight.
Four men round the bend and head straight for the beach house, a smaller target than the larger hotel.
Then I’m moving, rushing out of the room, down the stairs, and onto the path leading to the beach house. A hotel porter tries to grab my arm, but I shake him off. As I get close to the house, I hear men whispering to one another, see them move forward. They all seem to be armed. One of them is most definitely the protester Dao had slammed into the wall. The protester leads the pack—they’re about to try the door, when there are a series of shots.
Coming from inside.
Then all hell breaks loose.
41
Sprinting to the back gate, I see Dao emerge from the house. He’s backing up, holding Lam by the scruff of the neck in one large hand, and in the other is a pistol. Ivan emerges from the house after them, bleeding from a wound in his arm—but he’s still holding a gun.
“Don’t move,” Dao says to Ivan.
That voice is a dagger to my spine. Immobilizes me. Weakens my knees. It is the voice that haunts my dreams.
Once, a long time ago, when Ray Zhang’s son, Kai, attacked me and they thought I was near death, Dao had told Kai to get rid of my body, not knowing or caring that I was still alive. Though I didn’t hear it the second time, I can imagine him on the phone when he sent those hit men after me in Detroit. Telling them that yes, he’ll pay the price for my murder. Maybe he even haggled a little.
Ivan’s gaze flickers to me. Just a small movement, but it’s enough to cause Dao to shift slightly, still keeping Lam in front of him and Ivan in his sights.
Dao looks at me. So does Lam. They are the same size, both very tall men, but Lam doesn’t stand a chance.
“I told you,” Lam says, his mouth bloody. “I told you she was here!”
“So what do I need you for?” Dao says.
He sounds different. Now that the first shock of his voice is past, I notice something I should have seen as soon as he started to speak. He’s so hoarse he’s almost wheezing, and his posture is bent. As though there’s some kind of injury he’s being mindful of. An image of Ivan disappearing into the plane’s restroom crosses my mind as I see the same thing in Dao. His heightened energy. His aggression.
I see the moment Lam becomes expendable to him.
The shift of Dao’s finger on the trigger.
“David, stop,” says Lam, perhaps sensing the change in Dao that I now witness.
Dao replies in a language I don’t understand. Whatever he says, it’s not hopeful. I see shock cross Lam’s face.
Dao pulls the trigger.
Lam falls.
Dao points at Ivan and shoots, but he has overestimated Ivan’s loyalty to Lam. I guess money can’t buy everything after all, because Ivan’s already turning away to run back inside. He falls, too, but just in the door.
As Dao is turning to me, there’s a commotion inside and the men led by the protester come charging out. They must have entered through the front.
They see Ivan slumped over. Lam on the ground and Dao standing over him. They begin to shout in confusion and move toward Dao.
I feel a tug on the back of my shirt.
“Run!” Brazuca hisses into my ear. He reaches for my hand as a hail of gunfire pelts after us.
42
I don’t try to turn back, but as I run away from the person I came here to find, I feel a keening sense of relief and loss at war with each other. The battle is internal, but Brazuca must sense it because he tugs harder at my hand even though I’m faster than him and should be pulling him along. But he’s doing pretty well, even with his bum leg.
Then we are in the hotel and I’m surrounded by staff, who shove me and Brazuca into the ballroom where a handful of other hotel patrons gather. Apparently, the word of a security threat has spread throughout the hotel. I hear some muttering about a gang.
Brazuca is still holding my hand. Neither of us seems to be able to let go. A woman in a wedding dress is sobbing in the corner, in the arms of her groom. Various people in semiformal wear are scattered about the room casting concerned looks at the bride and groom. Two men are slightly damp and wearing swim trunks. They look too tired to speak.
“The protester from the photograph, the one Dao beat up . . . he was there,” I say quietly to Brazuca. “I think he must have followed Dao to the hotel.”
“Someone he knew may have seen Dao go in and called him. Those security guys from the bar said Dao had been laying low.”
“Maybe the protester’s not just some innocent activist after all. Not with a group of armed friends like that.” The AC is cranked, and a shiver passes through me. “They don’t stand a chance against Dao.”
“You don’t know that. He was heavily outnumbered. Maybe . . .”
I know what he’s thinking. That maybe my problem has been taken care of. Maybe Dao is dead. I want so desperately to believe it. Something of that desperation must be showing.
“Nora,” Brazuca says. “You can’t . . . you couldn’t save Lam.”
“Lam?”
“Yes, Lam. We both saw him take a bullet.” He pulls a chair out for me and sits beside me. “Do you need medical attention? What’s going on?”
Brazuca takes my hand. I can’t bear the thought of pulling away right now. His touch anchors me, and I need it because there’s a shift taking place inside me. A growing awareness.
“Dao,” I say. “He was bent over, like he was injured.”
“Maybe he got shot. I wasn’t inside. Lam asked me to leave at the last moment.”
“No,” I say, frowning. “It looked like an old injury.”
“What are you talking about, Nora?”
“Why was he there? I thought you were supposed to make contact this morning.” I see the guilt on his face. But I can’t fault him for it. I have kept things from him, too.
“Made contact yesterday. Lam didn’t know about it.”
“You didn’t want me at the meeting.”
“Can you blame me? I didn’t want you in danger. The second he saw you everyone else faded away.” He pauses, not sure how to proceed. Two policemen come in and speak to the concierge, who’s consoling the mother of the bride.
Brazuca ignores them all. His attention is completely on me.
“I was a cop for a long time, and I saw some things . . . even when I worked for WIN Security, there were rough spots. You see the worst of humanity in these fields. The very worst. But, Nora, I’ve never seen so much hate in someone as I saw in Dao today. When he looked at you . . . every little bit of rage inside him is for you. It doesn’t make sense to me, but it’s the truth.”
That I’m the complete focus of Dao’s hatred doesn’t surprise me. I’m not sure anything can anymore. “What happened at the meeting?”
“I wasn’t there. I have no idea what went on in that house.”
“Dao was shot,” I say slowly.
He shakes his head. “Didn’t look that way to me. I’d just come in the back gate behind you when I saw him shoot Lam.”
There’s a tear in his blue T-shirt, at the shoulder, exposing a swath of skin that’s less burned than the skin on his face and arms. There’s nothing I want more than to press my fingertips to it, touch it with the tip of my tongue, taste the salt of man and sweat. Last night I hadn’t touched him there, not specifically in that place I’m staring at now. Other places, yes, but this river of skin flowing over muscle and bone is still uncharted territory for me. There’s still so much I don’t know about him.
The first time I fell in love was when I was fourteen years old. It was with a boy named Zack. Of course. All the bad boys were named Zack back then. The second was a man who worked at a gas station during the day and took night classes. He wanted to be an accountant. I marveled at the idea that someone with such broad forearms would want to spend his days at a desk,
calculator in hand. He belonged outdoors but didn’t want it, and I also enjoyed the way he didn’t seem to know himself.
There were a couple more after that. Then I stopped falling. It hurt too much. There was no point. The falling in was almost immediate, but the climbing out was a slow, arduous process of discovering just what I was thinking in the first place.
Oh, right. I wasn’t thinking.
I release a breath that I’ve been holding. In this room, I’m at once cold and wide open. Wondering if this is what falling in love has become. Not a rush of feeling. Soft words late into the night. The intensity of sexual desire. Maybe I’m too old for all that. Maybe it is one man, revealed to me a single inch of skin at a time. I think about the slap in the bar, done for effect more than anything else. Now the thought of that violence sickens me. Which makes no sense, given what I’ve just witnessed.
“No,” I say. “Before. Two years ago, Dao got shot on a boat. The night he and Jia Zhang took me out on the water, they were going to get rid of me. But it didn’t work.”
“You survived.”
“Yes,” I say, thinking of the way Dao stood today on that back patio. As if there was an old injury to consider, his posture off. His bearing not straight and tall as I’d remembered. “But he got shot that night.”
“This is the first I’m hearing of it.”
It plays for me like a reel of an old noir film that has some gaps, a victim of age and the general wear and tear of having been preserved in a memory such as mine. Me, the heroine of the story. The record keeper.
Insanity.
The night Kai and Jia Zhang died, I was on a boat. There was a scuffle. And there was a gun. I remember getting my hands on it and what happened next.
“Brazuca, it was me,” I say, with a sudden urgency. “I did it. They had me trapped, and I was fighting for my life. I shot Dao in the gut.”
I remember now.
Part 4
43
Dao goes back to the villa for his passports. They’re in the room safe where he left them. There are three. One with his own name, one with the name of the man he’d become since getting to Lombok, and the third is a clean identity he hasn’t used yet. He stuffs them all into a pack, along with some clothes, his pills, and money. There’s blood on his shirt, so he pulls it over his shoulders and puts it in a plastic bag. He’ll get rid of it later. When his hands stop shaking, maybe. He hasn’t been this out of it since the night Jia died and he could do nothing to protect her. He’d wanted to, but the shock of the bullet tearing through his flesh took his breath away, and when he caught it again, it was too late. Jia was gone.
There’s a sound behind him.
He goes into the hall and sees the maid Riya, who he doesn’t really think of as little anymore. She’s rounding the corner, hurrying in the opposite direction. Shit. She still comes every day to clean, to get paid, but he has no idea where she’s been staying. Did she see the blood on his shirt? When the authorities come looking for who killed that lying, blackmailing son of a bitch Bernard Lam, will she conveniently remember seeing him here? What about when Sammy Saleh, his uncle, and his gang show up?
He shouldn’t have hit her after the quake. Shouldn’t have ever let it get personal. There’s only one thing left to do now.
He draws his gun and clicks the safety off. Makes his way silently down the stairs on bare feet. At the foot of the stairs now. A pause, then her voice coming at him softly from the entrance. He finds her there with a laundry basket at her feet, likely the reason she’d come into his room in the first place. She’s got her hand on the door, and she’s saying something to the child from the landslide, who’s now balanced on her hip.
Her hand lingers on the door, as though she can sense him behind her. But she doesn’t dare turn. Maybe she knows he’s got a gun.
“I didn’t see anything,” she says.
The child wipes her sleepy eyes and blinks awake.
His hand is on the trigger. But she didn’t see anything, she said.
He hesitates a moment too long.
She slips out, closing the door behind her. The sound of it shutting sets him in motion. He strides across to it and flings it open. There she is, hurrying away. She punches in a code at the gate and leaves before he can step outside.
His phone vibrates in his pocket as he stands there, on the brink of going after her. There’s only one person who’d be calling him now. “Is it arranged?” he says, when he answers.
Nguyen hesitates. “Yes. I’ll send you the details.”
“Use the new number. I’m ditching this phone.” And the gun, too, when he gets a chance.
“Your employer—”
“I’ll deal with that.” There’s a pause. Nguyen is thinking, which is never a good sign. “What now?”
“Getting you out of Canada the last time was tricky. You sure you want to come back?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll see you when I get there.”
He ends the call and stares at the gate, closed again. Shit. There’s not enough time to deal with the maid now. He puts the gun away and goes back upstairs to grab his stuff. He hates this place. Always knew this gig was going to end. The only thing now is to keep moving. Look forward. Never mind that the reason for his escape is solidly in his past. That kind of thinking could get you confessing your feelings to a shrink or something.
He passes the full-length mirror in the bedroom that is no longer his.
Would you look at that? His hands are no longer shaking.
Good. He’ll need them steady for when he gets to Vancouver.
44
Maybe I am one of those voluptuous heroines in a noir film. I’ve seen something, remembered something else, and am starting to question my sanity while I put together pieces of a puzzle.
Am I lying to myself? Are these memories true? I am a woman of means with stunning good looks, but who will believe me?
I raise a pale, trembling hand to brush a strand of hair off my face only to look down at the hand and realize it’s not pale at all. It was never pale to begin with, and now it’s darkened by the hot Indonesian sun, the blunt nails and strong fingers speaking of years of hard work and a poor moisturizing regimen. It doesn’t shake, either. It’s as steady as the Vancouver rain that falls just outside the window, turning to snow as the temperature drops.
Well, there goes that theory. I’m nobody’s heroine. Part indigenous, part Palestinian—two bloodlines where basic human dignity has been historically denied. Who would put me in one of those stories? Who would believe me if I told them my own?
Besides, I’ve only ever seen one film that could be classified as noir. A Hitchcock, I think. All I remember of it is a woman being attacked in a room by a flock of birds and reading that the actress who played her actually had been attacked at the behest of the maniac director who wanted her terror to be real. He’d switched out the planned mechanical birds for the scene for real birds at the last moment.
The actress was powerless to stop it.
Everywhere you look there is a story of a man terrorizing a woman for reasons of his own. This is perhaps my only connection to those fragile kittens in the movies.
The terror, my companion.
“Come here,” Brazuca says, from across the room. We’re back in Vancouver. He’s bare chested, having long thrown out the shirt with the tear. Seems to have given up on wearing shirts altogether when we’re alone.
In bed we push past the secrets, obfuscations, evasions, and outright lies. We are honest, for once.
I’ve always hated the term making love. It has never felt right to me, to suit those words to this action. But I’m reluctant to call whatever this is fucking. Sex too banal. Intercourse too clinical. I hear kids these days call it smashing, but that seems wrong on too many levels to comprehend. It’s none of those things and all of them, except for the last. It’s an exploration to see what fits. I can’t figure it out yet, this thing between us, but I know I won’t ask him abo
ut it. It’s too new. Too much can go wrong. It changed the moment I pressed my mouth to the inch of skin exposed by the rip in his shirt.
Everything tilted.
“You ready to talk about what happened in Detroit?” he asks.
“I was looking for the truth about my father’s death. But the whole thing went sideways,” I say.
It tilted there, too. Maybe it never straightened. I’m living a sideways kind of life, but it seems okay right now, here in this bed with the curtains drawn, cocooning us in. The only view is of a telescope in the living room. It’s strangely comforting, the idea that just past this room if we were to fit an eye to the small circle of glass, we would see the world out there. But we’d have to get up first, cross the threshold, and look through the glass.
Insurmountable obstacles.
This sideways life of mine doesn’t feel right, but it’s okay because Brazuca seems to be living sideways with me. He is also askew.
In the aftermath they found Lam’s body. They blamed it on local gang violence, an attempted robbery gone wrong. Two of the locals who were part of the gang were found beside Ivan at the house entrance to the back patio. By the time the police got in there, Dao was gone.
“He’s got as many lives as you do,” Brazuca said.
We played up the tourist card, of a couple caught in a tragedy. Brazuca was a friend of Lam’s, and I traveled as Brazuca’s girlfriend. The attack on Lam was seen as a crime of opportunity for a group of violent youths looking to snatch a wealthy man whose family would pay to get him back or had at least put kidnap insurance on him. Though several people had seen another man of Chinese descent on the property, nobody knew who he was.
There was death all around us and with it an atmosphere of confusion that we used to quietly make plans to leave. When we heard Lam’s father was on his way to Lombok to collect Lam’s body, Brazuca and I accepted a police escort to the airport. We flew to Singapore, Seoul, and finally back to Vancouver. On these flights I did nothing but sleep.