Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  Then, during our first two years of high school, he stretched out to six feet ten and moved from shooting guard to center. And as he stretched, he mellowed. He became that slow-moving man-child in sweatpants and huge headphones. He still did his schoolwork if he was enjoying it, but he didn’t read textbooks that bored him when he could be lifting weights, watching tape, or balancing on one foot with his eyes closed, visualizing made free throws. Or napping—he was always napping, about to nap, just finished with a nap.

  If anything, Andre’s growth spurt allowed us to grow closer, to complement each other better both on and off the court. We helped each other improve, watching hours of YouTube videos, dissecting Chris Paul’s spin dribble and Chris Bosh’s mid-post step-back. I know some people think I only got a basketball scholarship to San Dimas State University because of Andre, but I don’t let that bother me. He wouldn’t have set the district scoring record and been written up in Sports Illustrated our senior year of high school if I hadn’t been tossing him all those pretty lobs.

  Now, in our final season of college ball, Andre’s leading the Cal-10 conference in points, rebounds, and blocks. He’s got a separate phone just for the agents and pro scouts who shouldn’t be calling him yet. As for me, I ride the pine behind Howie Miller, our bigger, faster, stronger starting point guard, even though he’s a year behind us. At least I did until last week.

  “So where did you say we’re going?” Andre says as I climb into his Detroit-made truck, an aging juggernaut, hula girl on the dashboard. He’s finishing one protein bar and unwrapping another. Andre hasn’t treated me any differently in the past week, and someday I’ll figure out how to thank him for that.

  “A massage place in Temple City. Look at this. The lawyer gave it to me.” I show him the contents of the envelope.

  “What’s with the monkey?”

  “I dunno. Dad and I were both born in the Year of the Monkey.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “Monkeys are supposed to be clever and stubborn. If you believe in that sort of thing.”

  “Clever and stubborn, huh? Sounds like you on the court.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything to me. Half the people I know were born in the same year. Including you, and all you do is dunk on people.”

  Andre splays his hand on his chest in mock indignation. “I’d like to think I dunk on people in an intelligent way.”

  Andre starts the truck, and Regime Change, his latest conscious hip-hop obsession, pounds out of his stereo system.

  Hypocrite give a shit about material things

  Fur collar, faux baller, illegitimate bling

  When the shit hit the fan boy that ice don’t swing

  ’Cause you can’t see me and your bird can’t sing

  “So would you believe me if I told you that my dad didn’t actually own any of his restaurants?”

  “For real? I mean, your dad is those restaurants.”

  “That’s what the lawyer just told us. Jules is worked up about it. But I can’t muster two shits about anything. I can’t think about anything but—” I grasp at something in the air with both hands. “I guess I’m still in shock.”

  “Well.” Andre checks his mirrors, hops the curb to pull a sweeping U-turn. “I’m still in shock.”

  “He always said he had sold a restaurant back in China. We came here and he started setting up Happy Year right away. I never thought twice about it. We had an English tutor, and Jules went to private school. Turns out it wasn’t his money. I mean, who shows up fresh off the boat from China with a fat wad of U.S. dollars?”

  Andre contemplates this new fact. “I guess I always assumed it was your mother’s inheritance or something.”

  I shake my head. “Her parents aren’t dead, at least as far as I know. They run a megachurch in Missouri. They basically disowned her when she decided to marry Dad.”

  “Cuz he’s Chinese?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Andre lets out a low whistle.

  “I thought I’d told you that before.”

  “Maybe you did and I forgot,” Andre replies, nonchalant, as he coasts into the middle of two parking spots.

  “Can you wait here?” I slide out of the car. “I’ll be quick.”

  Chateau Happiness is another squat stucco establishment that shares its chunk of suburban sprawl with a Taiwanese shaved ice shop, a martial arts academy, and a travel agency. Cheaply printed posters advertising the spa’s various services—massage, facial, reflexology—cover the windows completely. The Southern Californian sky above the short buildings is stupid azure blue, huge, breezy.

  In the middle of the afternoon on a Thursday, the whole block seems deserted. Glancing from one empty storefront to another, I wonder how these places earn enough to stay in business. And then I see a guy standing in the window of the shaved ice shop: a slight Asian guy wearing a Lakers cap and a black T-shirt, standing halfway concealed by the window frame. Looking right at me. I glance around to see whether there’s something worth viewing behind me, but it’s all the same, the spectrum of worn taupes, tans, and asphalts of the San Gabriel Valley, without a soul in sight.

  When I look back, the guy is gone.

  I push through the door of Chateau Happiness into a shallow reception room with a desk, a watercooler, and some folding chairs. There are more posters on the walls: Chinese diagrams of the nervous system, the spine, the foot. There’s a waist-high plastic fountain decorated with tiny bodhisattva figurines and colorful LED lights. The permed hair of the bespectacled woman behind the desk is dyed a light-suckingly matte shade of black.

  “Massaji?” she says.

  “Uh, no, thank you. I’m here because I found this.” I pull out the cord and hand it to her. She peers at the card, then the monkey, then pulls off her glasses and examines the card more closely.

  “Where you find this?” she demands.

  “I—” But as I start to talk, a wave of pain crashes over my guts, and I shut my eyes for a second and put my hands on the desk to collect myself. “I’m sorry. It belonged to my father, Vincent Li. I mean, Li Renyan?”

  Her face falls when she hears Dad’s name. She heaves a sigh and cocks her head at a sympathetic angle. Then she rolls her wheely chair over to the beaded curtain beside the desk, sticks her head through, and hollers something in Cantonese.

  “Ailan will help you,” she says to me.

  On cue, a petite woman in slippers, a fitted red V-neck, and silky white pajama pants slips through the beaded curtain. She looks a few years older than me, with clear, quite white skin and straight hair that falls nearly to her waist. The lady says something to her in Cantonese, and Ailan’s curious smile turns into one of those sad faces I can’t seem to avoid.

  “Jiéāi—I’m sorry for your loss,” she says to me in Mandarin. “Your dad was a really kind person.” She has a cute southern Chinese accent to go with her cute southern Chinese everything else.

  “It’s okay,” I reply, just to say something.

  Ailan has me remove my shoes and don slippers of my own, and then she leads me down a dim, narrow hallway with dingy walls. She stops in front of an unmarked door.

  “This is the VIP changing room. Your father’s things are in there.”

  As she turns to go, her words replay in my head—her voice, her tone—and something makes me wonder who it was that she knew as Vincent Li, and how well she knew him.

  “Ailan? Did my dad come here a lot?”

  She turns back to give me a tight-lipped smile and a one-shoulder shrug.

  “Yeah,” she says in English, and then she walks away.

  The VIP changing room is a squarish space with two benches and a wall of wooden lockers with numbered doors. A shower turns off in the next room, and a tall, thin guy walks in. He’s wearing a robe and slippers, and he’s got a card on a cord of his own hanging from his wrist. Ignoring my existence, he passes the card in front of a locker, which pops open with an electronic chirp.

  I
sidle into the adjacent bathroom to pee while the guy gets dressed. I wash my hands and then spend a moment catching up with myself in the mirror, running a hand over my buzzed hair. Dad looked at himself in this same mirror and saw the same dark eyebrows, small mouth, and high, sharp cheekbones. For the first time in a week, mental activity is flickering around between my ears, cutting through the snowstorm of negative emotions and numbness. How often is “yeah”? Did he have a secret massage habit, or was this some other part of the Happy Year business, which I now know that I know nothing about? The tall guy is whistling. He spends a short eternity perfecting his comb-over.

  Locker 14 is in the bottom row. When the dude is finally gone, I sit on the bench and wave my card, and what do you know, the little door pops open. The first thing I see is a tote bag of clean clothes, neatly folded. Dad was always planning ahead. I dig around in the bag and feel something hard at the bottom: a rubber Casio wristwatch. It’s pretty worn—I’m guessing it predates the Swiss wrist candy he was wearing when the cops found him on the floor of his office. With my cell in my pocket, I’ve never felt the need to wear a watch, but I strap on the Casio just to see what it feels like.

  Then I notice the flat aluminum attaché case leaning against the locker’s back wall. I set it on my lap, flip up the twin latches, and lift the lid. The sides are lined with dense black sponge in an egg-crate pattern. Inside, resting on a row of neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills, is a gun.

  3

  Is it loaded?”

  “No.”

  “May I?”

  “Sure.”

  Eli picks up the pistol, inspects it in both hands. Andre and I requested each other for roommates as freshmen and ended up in a triple with Eli Henochowitz, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn. At least he was raised Orthodox. He has a kippah, but he only wears it for Skype purposes. Eli started exploiting what he calls “Internet arbitrage opportunities” when he was an eighth grader. At this point he’s heavy into cryptocurrencies, freelance SEO, and all sorts of other inscrutable online endeavors—he likes to call himself a webusinessman. Once, blackout drunk on Jaegerbombs, he boasted to a roomful of basketball players and Tri Delt sisters that he was a senior member of a secretive antifascist hacking collective. Nobody was really interested.

  Eli’s nominally enrolled in college as a COMM major to prevent his parents from wigging out. He applied early decision to SDSU, he told us, “for the weather and the hos.” After an occasionally awkward adjustment period, Andre and I came to love Eli for who he really is: a borderline genius with the heart of a saint, the imagination of a twelve-year-old, and the libido of a bonobo.

  “Victor,” he says, “why the fuck would your dad leave you a gun?”

  “That’s not everything, either.”

  “Is there a crossbow, too?”

  “Look at this stuff.” Andre gestures toward the case on the table.

  Eli sets the gun down on the coffee table and flips through the little burgundy passport with my name in it. “Since when are you a Chinese citizen?”

  “I’m not. I have American citizenship, and you can’t have both.”

  He fingers the cash. “How much is this?”

  “Fifty grand. And one hundred thou in renminbi. Chinese yuan. It’s like fifteen grand in dollars.”

  “Fuckin’ A, Victor.”

  “No kidding.”

  “So that’s it? No note or anything?” Eli asks. I shake my head. “And you have no idea why he would leave these things to you?”

  I don’t, I tell him, but I recount my experience at the massage parlor, how Ailan gave me the feeling that Dad had all kinds of secrets. I also tell him about Jules’s and my meeting with the lawyer, and how it seemed like he wasn’t giving us the whole story. “Not like he was lying, but like he was just telling us the parts we needed to hear. The whole thing felt rushed.” I shake my head, stare at my hands. “Or maybe I’m just imagining things.”

  “Do you think he knew what was in the locker?”

  “The lawyer? I dunno. Possibly.”

  “I thought your dad was killed by a burglar.”

  “I thought so, too.”

  We sit there for a moment and stare at the money, the passport, and the handgun on the table. Mostly at the gun. It’s a Walther PPQ, which according to Google is the finest striker-fired 9-millimeter on the market, whatever the fuck that means. The three of us went to a shooting range on a Groupon once. I shot pretty well. Eli was terrible. Andre made it look easy.

  “So what do you guys think this means?”

  Eli puts a gentle hand on my arm. “A lot of time when people keep secrets, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. My parents know nothing about my life here, and trust me, that’s for their own well-being. Like, I eat pork now and then, but it’s not like every Tuesday is a coke bender.”

  Andre clears his throat pointedly.

  “Anyway,” Eli says, “my point is that, if I died, I’d probably want my folks to know who I really was. So what’s a good reason that your dad would have a gun and some stacks of cash? Like maybe he’s a police informant. Or a spy for the Chinese intelligence services. And he’s hidden that information from you for your own safety, but now he wants you to know because you’ve got all this untapped potential, right? And so now you—”

  “Whoa, okay, Henochowitz! Back up the trolley,” Andre cuts in. “Vincent Li befriended stray dogs. He meditated twice a day. Somehow I doubt he was narcin’ on dealers after his long shifts managing four restaurants. Look, Victor, this stuff is crazy, I mean, money and a gun? But maybe your dad left this stuff to you as some kind of emergency kit. There’re no indications that he wanted you to do something with it. For now, what you’ve gotta do is take it easy and take some time to, you know, process and stuff. Right? Am I right?”

  I sort of nod. Take it easy: the path of least resistance, a classic Andre position. I know what he’s saying is true. But having something to do would really hit the spot right now.

  In Andre’s car we are quiet. After a while Andre asks me what I’m thinking. I tell him how much I hate staying at the house. How I wouldn’t go back at all except that Jules says she can’t fall asleep there if she’s alone. How I hear her getting up in the night to double-check that the doors are locked, and she’s got a hammer sitting on her bedside table.

  How I lie awake at night and watch different versions of Dad’s murder in my head, over and over.

  “I wish I could comfort you,” he says. “But if it were my family and my house, I’d probably feel the same way.”

  For dinner Jules and I pick at takeout that someone from one of Dad’s restaurants sent over. I ask Jules about how design school is going, but she gives me a short answer. Then, as if to be polite, she asks me about college, but I find that I don’t have much to say, either. Given that she’s already having trouble sleeping, I decide to wait until the morning to tell her about the gun.

  After dinner I wash the dishes. Dad always did the dishes, even when it was his turn to cook. He got a big kick out of doing the dishes and singing show tunes at the top of his lungs while Mom sat in the breakfast nook trying to read a magazine or do the crossword. Sometimes she would give up, come into the living room where we were watching TV, snuggle up with Jules and say something like “Six hundred million Chinese men and I marry the only one who has memorized Cats.”

  I’m lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling and fighting down the persistent bubble of misery rising in my stomach, when Jules knocks on my door. I tell her to come in. She sits on the side of my bed and says, “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I say back.

  Her forehead is crinkled up, and her eyes are wet and shiny. She makes little tiger fists in her lap and examines her cuticles. She turns her face away, addressing herself to the wall. “I seriously can’t feed the fish. I can’t go down there and feed all those stupid tropical fish without thinking about how it was like the greatest joy of his life to feed his fish.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say. Fo
r a while there is no sound but her sniffles and her tears pit-patting onto my bedspread.

  She finally breaks the silence: “Play me in Ping-Pong?”

  “Sure.”

  We descend to the basement and play a best-of-five. I play conservatively, returning neatly, trying to work her toward the corners, but she sends it all back with big looping spin shots that put me on my heels. I get one game off her, but only because she’s less focused than I am. A million years ago, a prior version of Jules won state in tennis. Whooping up on me seems to put her in better spirits.

  “I guess you’re still my bitch,” she says as we wipe down and fold up the table.

  “Mmhmm.”

  “How about I teach you some basketball, too,” she suggests brightly.

  “Okay.”

  Upstairs, in the hallway, she leads me to her room.

  “I need to show you something,” she says.

  The walls of Jules’s childhood bedroom are white and bare, but every inch of the floor is covered with clutter. I poke a half-unpacked suitcase with my shoe. “It’s like a tornado hit Madewell.”

  “Shut up. It took me an hour to read this insurance policy. Seriously? China needs an alphabet.” She hands me the stack of papers from Perry Peng. “I need you to tell me I’m understanding this correctly.”

  The cover page has just one line in the middle of it: “Xìng Nián (Běijīng) yŏuxiàn gōngsī, Happy Year Co. Ltd., Beijing.”

  “Holy shit,” I say after a while.

  “Right?” Jules is slouched against a pile of bedding with her nose in some weighty hardcover.

  “This policy is worth twenty-four million renminbi.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, holy shit.”

  “I know.” Jules sets the book down on her bed and flicks her bangs out of her eyes. “I feel like such an idiot for questioning the lawyer guy like that.”