Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  Fill the electric kettle with water and slide three pieces of bread into the toaster oven.

  Spoon coffee grounds into the wide glass beaker until the grounds are three fingers deep and then pour hot water from the electric kettle over the grounds (make sure none escape the deluge and float dry to the top).

  Pour two short glasses of orange juice and sip from one. Thumb through the sports section.

  Put your palms on the counter and clench your eyes shut for a minute as a tsunami of sadness washes over you. Picture the life gushing out of your father’s body. Did he think of you, did he say your name? If you were there, what would he have told you? Stir the coffee in the beaker.

  Take the pot with the eggs off the stove. Set the table with two bowls, two forks, one knife, two mugs, the full glass of orange juice, one paper towel torn in half in the role of two napkins, and a jar of jam.

  Use the lid to drain the water out of the pot of eggs and then refill it with cold water and put it on the woven trivet on the table. Press the coffee and put that on the table, too. Send a text message up the stairs: “Eggs Victor now.”

  Tear one slice of toast into pieces in a bowl, peel two of the soft-boiled eggs, mash them into the toast with your fork.

  Sprinkle salt and pepper. Hear footsteps on the stairs.

  Jules pads in: sweats, slippers, and froofy hair. “Yay, Eggs Victor,” she says, tearing up her piece of toast. “And the worm for earliest bird goes to . . .”

  I pour the coffee. “Are you going to wear that to the restaurant?”

  “I’ll bring stuff and shower at your dorm before we go. Is that okay with you, Herr Victor?”

  “Look, I just—I’m sorry.” Take a deep breath. Spread jam on the last piece of toast. “I don’t do this every day.”

  “I know,” she says.

  Since it’s game day I do a shootaround with Andre instead of my usual morning workout. We move methodically, serious, working our sweet spots and weak spots. At the end, by the time we’re winded but not beat, we take turns shooting foul shots and yelling at each other.

  “A whole troupe of Vegas showgirls,” Andre waves his arms spastically. “Shagging on a spaceship!”

  I swish the shot anyway. “Xiān bié qù xiǎng guòqù de nàxiē hé wèilái yào zuò de shì, bǎ zhùyìlì jízhōng zài dāngxià—Busy your mind not with what you have done or what you will do but with what you are doing right now,” Dad used to say.

  “Final event,” says Andre, stepping behind the basket. He squints up at the rim, squeezes his eyes shut, and then lofts the ball neatly over the backboard. It falls through the net.

  “Oh, booyah. What’s up now, huh?” Andre dances a few beats of the Ghostbusta.

  I retrieve the ball, play along, make a bored face. As I’m lining up the shot, the far doors bang open and the sounds of Women’s Volleyball spill into the arena: fresh sneakers, nets and uprights on rolling carts, brassy chatter and laughter. I close my eyes and release; the ball takes two bounces around the rim and falls in.

  “Ooooh, Victor Li! Are you showing off for us?”

  Holly Michaels, All Cal-10 libero, sashays up to us with a thousand-watt smile on her face, tanly, symmetrically, gorgeously terrifying. I’m mumbling some explanation when she cuts me off, turning to Andre with her hands on her hips.

  “Do you have any idea how much this guy is in here?”

  Andre grins. “The hardest-working man on the team. You coming to the game tonight?”

  “I shouldn’t, because none of y’all ever come to any of our games.”

  “I’ll be at the next one,” Andre says.

  “Uh-huh.” Holly drops her chin, looking ravishingly unconvinced.

  “Hi, Andre!” A towering blonde waves her whole arm at us from across the court.

  “Oh hey Jamie, what up girl!”

  “That’s Jeanie,” hisses Holly.

  “Oh.” Andre smacks himself in the forehead. “Look, Holly, why don’t you and Jeanie come to the game tonight and then come to our after-party at Irving? Four-oh-two.”

  Blueberry eyes narrow. “I’ll consider it. Good luck tonight, Victor.” She chucks me on the shoulder and runs off to help her teammates set up the nets.

  “She likes you,” Andre says.

  “After what happened at that party? No way, man.”

  “That was two years ago, bruh! When are you gonna let it go?”

  Jules finishes tromping down the bleachers. “Who was that fresh little package?”

  “Seems like we’re done here,” I say.

  “The monk,” Jules says. Andre gives me a look, pulls off his sneakers, slips into his slides.

  Back at the Quad, Andre sits on the counter and massages the arches of his feet with a lacrosse ball as I scoop supplements out of little plastic jars into a blender filled halfway with soy milk and bananas. Creatine, whey protein isolate, branched chain amino acids.

  Just as Jules comes out of the shower wearing my towel, there’s a knock on the door, and she detours to open it.

  “Hey, you must be Sun. I’m Juliana,” I hear her say, and then he’s following her into the room. It looks like he’s wearing the same clothes he arrived in last night.

  “I am very sorry to meet you,” Sun says haltingly, looking embarrassed. “I am saying, in such a rotten time. Your father has tell me many nice things about you.”

  “Thank you, Sun,” Jules says. “What a gent. Okay, boys, I’ll go put on some clothes so Andre can regain control of his eyeballs.”

  “Ignoring a half-naked woman is impolite in some cultures,” Andre calls after her. “Hey, my man Sun. Where have you been all morning?”

  “RoboTaco. I wake up three o’clock, big jetlag. I don’t sleep again. So I walk there, twenty-four-hour operating.”

  Andre narrows his eyes. “You’ve been at RoboTaco since three in the morning?”

  “I am walking around all San Dimas. So cool and quiet. So clean air. So much space, so much trees. Old Li have always say to me that America is the most beautiful place.” Sun sighs with admiration.

  “So you’ve definitely never been to the States before?” Andre asks. “Because your English is pretty damn good.”

  Sun combines a wry smile with a shrug. “Old Li always love to watch American films,” he says. “That how he teach me English. We watch everything in Happy Year office. I think his favorites are Robert Redford and Vin Diesel.”

  Except when he says it, it sounds more like “Win Dieser.” Sun closes his eyes in concentration, then reopens them and deadpans with true Dom Toretto gravitas: “‘I live my life a quarter mile at a time.’”

  Andre and I look at each other and share a surprised laugh.

  “Dad did have a Vin Diesel thing,” I point out.

  Jules emerges from my bedroom in black slacks, black tank top, and wet black ponytail. We leave Andre to his foot massage, gather around the table, and go over the plan in Mandarin. As he reiterates his instructions, Sun’s manner is grave and steady again. Jules and I will go to the original Happy Year restaurant for lunch and visit the main office at the back of the restaurant. We’ll keep an eye out for any conspicuous changes, and we’ll try to find out if the safe in Dad’s office has been tampered with or moved. And, of course, we won’t be saying anything about the gun, the passport, or the taco-loving man from Beijing camped out in my dorm room.

  It’s in a grim mood that we head down the stairs and out to visitor parking, and for once Jules has nothing to say. The midday winter sun is warm and mild, and the noontime breeze seems to carry a hint of salt, even though we’re fifty miles from Santa Monica. I think back to the last time I saw the Pacific Ocean—it was about six months ago, in August, when Dad drove us out there to celebrate what would have been Mom’s fifty-fifth birthday. The ocean always mesmerized Dad, made him go all soft and sentimental. He could stare at it for hours on end without saying a word. That evening in August, we ordered omakase at a hole-in-the-wall Japanese place, toro sashimi and
blue crab hand rolls. I remember walking along the beach afterward, Dad and I ambling along in quiet content, our faces bathed in the setting sun, as Jules pattered ahead to trace sine curves in the wet sand with her bare feet. It was a different ocean then, a different family who saw it.

  10

  Ground Zero: the San Dimas Happy Year Chinese Restaurant. There are three other Happy Year restaurants spread around the San Gabriel Valley, each of them newer and larger than this one, but the San Dimas location is the granddaddy, home base. On Saturday at lunchtime, the parking lot is a bit of a shit show.

  “I hope we can get a table,” Jules murmurs. We’re lurking in her hatchback as we wait for three generations of a Chinese family to pile into a minivan. A honk sounds from the growing line of vehicles behind us, and Jules thrusts a middle finger out her window. That numb mood has come over me again, the one in which I keep reconstructing the last night of Dad’s life, replaying various scenarios in my head, now with additional detail: two precise stabs in the chest and a clean slash across— Lang didn’t finish his sentence, but I have a good guess.

  It’s not until we’re walking through the automatic sliding doors that I realize how uncomfortable this situation will be. The two young hostesses rush up to us as soon as we step inside the waiting area. Wearing long faces and pink qipao, they ask us in their chirpy Fujian accents if we’re holding up okay, if we have everything we need. They tell us how things aren’t the same without Dad around. Blood rushes to my face as the twenty-odd people waiting for tables perk up and bend their closest ears toward our conversation.

  Rick Yin shows up to save us. Tall, handsome, and fluent in English, “Slick Rick” Yin has worked at Happy Year almost as long as Dad, I guess because his acting career never took off. Dad valued him enough to pay him nearly twice as much as any of his other employees. Technically he’s the front-of-house manager, but Dad often had him on the phone with the bank, the utilities, the Chamber of Commerce, and so on, and not only because he speaks perfect English. Slick Rick can wheel, deal, and wheedle. On the rare occasion that someone orders a bottle of wine, he makes them feel like they’re at a Michelin-starred restaurant just by how he opens it.

  “Xiǎozhōu, Liányīng, nǐ zŏngsuàn lái le—You’re here at last,” Rick says, as if we were turning up late instead of unexpectedly, and he wraps the two of us into a big hug like he’d been doing since we were in grade school.

  “It’s really nice to see you, Rick,” I say, meaning it.

  “How’s business?” says Jules.

  “Oh, business is great, really, super. You know your Dad, he trained us pretty well! A new guy came over from Beijing to help out, Mr. Rou. He’s back in the office. You’ll want to meet him. Kind of a character,” and Rick laughs like he said something hilarious. He seems a little antsy beneath his Chinese Elvis veneer. I thank him and tell him that we’ll go back and see Mr. Rou now.

  “We can’t eat here,” Jules says hoarsely as we pass along the seafood-tank side of the vast dining room, and I nod my agreement. Through the saloon doors, in the kitchen, everyone is too busy with the lunch rush to notice us. I’m beelining it to the office door at the back when Jules grabs my arm.

  “Hey, slow down. You cool, Cato?” she asks.

  She’s right—I’m not. I take a long breath, try to unwind the key between my shoulder blades a few clicks. The kitchen is intense with the heat of the gas stoves, the sounds of chopping and frying, the competing odors of sesame oil, cilantro, and Sichuan peppercorns. My eyes reflexively drift to the back doorway, where Dad would stand with his arms folded over his chest and supervise his underlings. He started me working here when I was thirteen, five or six hours each weekend at minimum wage, wrestling the mop and bucket around the bathrooms or mixing the duck sauce in an industrial-size garbage can. Three cases of applesauce, three jugs of white vinegar, two boxes of white sugar, half a bottle of molasses, and one big jar of plum sauce, which Dad had shipped in from China by the case. No ducks. If you didn’t stir it fast enough, the sugar would clump, but if you stirred it too fast, you’d end up with sticky brown goo all over your pants.

  My eyes dance over to the extra sink Dad installed by the chopping station for velveting the meat, presently filled to the brim with bloody skirt steaks, corn starch, and diluted Shaoxing wine. Old Jiang, Dad’s indispensable knife man, spears a steak with a barbecue fork and begins shaving uniformly thin slices off of it with concise, rapid motions. He handles his ultrasharp blade with mesmerizing efficiency, standing over his work with an athletic flex in his knees, an unlit cigarette dangling from his expressionless lips, as he flicks bits of gristle and fat into a separate bowl.

  “Jīngtōng gèshì jìnéng, zhǐ shì biǎomiànshàng sìhū bu fèilì—Masterful skill appears on the surface to be effortless,” Dad would say.

  I take Jules’s hand off my arm and give it a squeeze. “I think I’m okay.”

  “Play dumb.”

  “Right.”

  “Don’t flip out.”

  “Right.”

  We slip through the back door into a fluorescent hallway, a bright dream of thin white walls and rough corporate carpet, eerily serene after the hubbub of the restaurant. Dad’s office is the second glass door on the left. We peek through the glass and see a sturdy Chinese guy with a shaved head and cauliflower ears, sitting at Dad’s desk and talking on the phone. He’s wearing a loose black button-down, tucked in, like a corny stage magician. I tap on the glass and the man looks around. When he sees us, some kind of resolved calm spreads across his wide face.

  “Yuck,” Jules whispers.

  The man rises and unlocks the door, which requires more steps than I remember. Only then do I see another man getting up from the sofa behind the door, a muscular young Chinese guy with deep acne scars on his temples, a long black ponytail, and what looks like a life-size tattoo of the human nervous system running up and down his arms and legs.

  Shaved Head ushers Ponytail out the door, and as he steps past us, he scans me with an expressionless look that feels like an icy hand on my chest. Then he strides purposefully toward the exit at the end of the hallway that leads to the back of the parking lot.

  Shaved Head waves us into the office, speaking Mandarin: “You must be Lianying and Xiaozhou. I saw you at the funeral. My surname is Rou. I am called Rou Qiangjun.”

  He stands up to shake our hands; his is coarse, calloused. His shoulders are broad and powerful, his muscular neck almost as wide as his head. I notice a tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, but it’s mostly concealed by his magician shirt, so I can’t tell what it is.

  “Please, sit. I’ve worked for many years for the Happy Year company in Beijing. After the company heard the terrible news about your father, they sent me here to help. Since I arrived, I have learned how much everybody loved your father. Please accept my sincere condolences.”

  His southern accent is not the same as the hostesses’ Fujianese inflections—more like the thicker, heavier Mandarin spoken by people from Hong Kong.

  “So you previously worked at the restaurants in Beijing?” Fishing. I figure he has no idea what we’ve been told about the company.

  “That’s right. It is all very different here in America.” He smiles at me without showing his teeth. “I learn a lot each day.”

  He’s a decent liar—no stuttering, no fidgeting—but I can sense him taking measure of me as I look around the room. Nothing much seems to have changed, except for the new locks on the door and a small lockbox sitting on top of the bulky drop safe in the corner. I scan the untidy desk, the stack of papers on the filing cabinet. No yellow legal pads.

  “Is everything going smoothly?” Jules asks.

  “I assume you heard that someone broke into the restaurant a few nights ago. No? They cleaned out the registers and broke into the office. You see, your father was the only one who knew how to open the safe, so the employees have not been dropping cash into it. So a lot of cash had accumulated in the drawers. Yo
u haven’t heard anything about that, have you?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I say, and Jules shakes her head, but Rou keeps his gaze on me, watching me keenly, and I find myself imagining him stepping through the broken window in the breakfast nook, peering around with his small, alert eyes.

  Then he looks away, shifting a stack of papers on the desk, affecting nonchalance. “Anyway, insurance will cover everything. We have receipts, of course. We replaced the locks, and we’ve taken some additional measures. The young man who was just here is our new head of security.”

  “We’re glad the business is in good hands,” Jules says. The tightness around her mouth tells me that she’s feeling the weird vibe, too. “We came to thank you for sending meals to our house. Let us know if there’s anything we can do to help out.”

  “Everything is very good, thank you. Except there is the safe.” He points to it with his left hand and I see a tattoo on that wrist, too: a snake’s head. “Your father didn’t share the code with you, did he? From what I know, it’s only some cash in there. But it’d be nice to be able to use it.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t know the code,” Jules says.

  I stand up to go and put out my hand. When he takes it with his, I meet his probing gaze again, and he grips my hand much more tightly than he did a few minutes earlier, mashing my knuckles against each other as he stares into my face. But I have strength of my own; I turn his hand upward and pull it toward me, out of his sleeve a bit, feeling his weight and power as I do.

  It’s a snake on this wrist, too, the head peeking out of his cuff, the body winding up his wrist, disappearing into his sleeve.

  “Interesting tattoo,” I say.

  Rou looks down at his wrist, and he smiles, but not with his eyes.

  “I was born in the Year of the Snake,” he says. “That’s just something I did when I was young. Like you.”

  Well, that guy’s a sleazefest,” says Jules as we pull out of the parking lot. “I hope to God you got what you wanted, because I’d rather mate with a sloth than converse with him again.”