Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  “Jules, he could be the killer.” I find myself looking at my hands, making fists again. “Or that other guy with the long hair. Did you see his tattoo? And now they’re sitting there in Dad’s office like they own the place, sending us takeout. Fuck!”

  My fist bounces off the rubber dashboard. Painful. Useless.

  “Victor, chill the fuck out! They do own the place, you need to get used to that. And I don’t know anything about killers, but a lot of people have tattoos. We can’t jump to conclusions here just because a straightforward explanation would make us feel better.”

  “I know that,” I say. “I’m just saying, he wouldn’t have acted so defensive with us if he didn’t have something to hide.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Jules says. “Or? He knows he’s taken over for our dad, and he’s insecure about his position here. And you were simply behaving like a couple of alpha dogs, trying to look tough while you sniff each other’s buttholes.”

  I close my eyes for a second, force myself to take a few deep breaths. Sometimes it’s hard to understand how Jules and I came from the same parents. I follow simple rules of my own devising, sliding along the deep grooves of my productive habits; she considers every situation from every angle, floundering in the deluge of her hyperactive intellect. I’d like to think we complement each other, one helping the other cover the blind spots, but sometimes it seems like we’re just driving each other nuts.

  Jules has a tattoo of her own, a Katharine Hepburn quotation in tiny script on her shoulder blade: “The time to make up your mind about people is never.”

  “So what do you make of Sun?” I say. “Do you think we can trust him?”

  “I dunno.” Jules frowns into the distance. “Like you said, he’s a bit like Dad, all goofy and intense at the same time. But I bet there’s something he’s concealing beneath that pleasant exterior. I don’t think he’s telling the whole truth.”

  I let this stew for a minute along with the fact that Dad never told us about Sun, that he deceived us about his work, his past, and the very foundations of our family. Maybe for our own benefit. Maybe he didn’t have much of a choice. But finding out still stings like a slap.

  Back at the Quad, we tell Sun everything we saw and heard, pausing now and then to look up Chinese words on Google Translate.

  “I know this person, a man named Rou with snake tattoos,” Sun says in Mandarin after we finish. “The tattoos are the sign of the Snake Hands Gang. They come from one village in Guangdong where chemical drugs are a cottage industry. They sell the drugs in the streets of Beijing, send home most of the profits, and spend the rest on liquor and prostitutes. Since two years ago, Ouyang has been helping them expand into other businesses. Rou Qiangjun is one of their captains.”

  “So you think he killed Dad?” I ask.

  “This is a possibility, but not the only one. Maybe this new ‘head of security’ was the killer, or they worked together. We can say definitely Rou was sent by Happy Year from Beijing for some purpose other than helping with the restaurants. But perhaps Ouyang and Zhao are also working with other people in Los Angeles. Zhao also communicates with the attorney, Peng.”

  Jules and I share a startled look. “Perry Peng? How much does he know?”

  Sun knits his brow, scratches his head. “More than we do. We’re going to have to break into the restaurant and retrieve your father’s documents before we do anything else.”

  “Wait, what? Break into the restaurant? What the fuck are you talking about?” Jules says, folding her arms across her chest.

  Before Sun can respond, Andre comes out of his room in full pregame regalia: fresh sweats, loosely tied AF1s, Jordan duffel, enormous shiny headphones.

  “Game time, baby boy,” he says to me. “Roll out.”

  11

  You lick my hand?” Sun looks at Eli, incredulous.

  “No, dude. You lick your own hand. Like this, and then the salt. There you go. Ready?” He waves his tequila shot and lime wedge in front of Sun’s face, as if to say, Look, it’s not so hard.

  We’re hovering around the kitchenette counter, the common room too filled with party randos for us to properly teach Sun anything.

  “Okay,” Sun says hesitantly, like he’s not so sure it’s okay, and he licks his hand.

  We eked out a win against Lafayette, but the victory came at the cost of an injury to a key player, and now there’s an unspoken impulse to refill the drinks quickly. I’d subbed in for Howie for a meager four minutes in the first half, four minutes during which Jason Maxwell overpowered me for a handful of buckets at the rim. So Coach Vaughn promptly sent me back to my familiar spot on the bench, opting for bigger, Victor-free lineups, and we maintained a healthy lead right up until Howie drove to the basket with about five minutes left on the clock, landed awkwardly on someone else’s foot, and let out a scream that sucked the air out of the arena.

  As Andre helped the team trainer carry Howie to the locker room, Vaughn beckoned to me. He told me that Jason Maxwell was only a sixty percent free-throw shooter, and I had four fouls to give.

  He told me to play smart, to be realistic. To know when I was beat.

  “What do we say again?” asks Andre.

  “Gānbēi,” says Sun.

  “Right. Gānbēi,” says Eli, and down they go.

  “Unnhhhh,” says Juliana. “Why would anyone do that?”

  Sun holds out his shot glass and turns it upside down, splashing a few drops of Cuervo onto the counter.

  “That is the end of gānbēi. Dry cup. No more báijǐu.”

  Just like Jules and me, Sun is lobster red with Asian Glow, and he’s getting a little sloppy with the distinction between Chinese and English. He seems to have understood nothing of the basketball game and enjoyed everything. Screaming in the stands next to Eli and shotgunning PBRs in the bathroom with Andre has put him in a pink mood of all-American euphoria.

  “During game, why you yelling this word to Andre: mus-ter?” he asks me.

  “Mustard. It’s a code,” I explain. “When I’m out of his line of sight and I want the ball, I don’t yell ‘pass,’ because the other team could yell the same thing. So I yell ‘mustard,’ and he knows it’s me.”

  Sun nods approvingly. “This is good idea.”

  Andre has wandered toward the entryway, and just when I catch a glimpse of Jeanie from the volleyball team looming in his direction, Holly Michaels appears at my elbow.

  “Hey, Victor! High five.” She throws up a palm, bends at the elbow, makes good contact. Volleyball players: good at high fives. “Y’all played a great game tonight.”

  “You were there?”

  “Yeah. What a thrill ride. And way to hang in there on defense.”

  “He walked all over me.”

  Holly shrugs. “I thought you did great.”

  In my tequila-sharpened vision, her teeth are perfect white wolf teeth, her lips a sunset shade of red that matches the acrylic on her fingernails. She’s wearing an SDSU-branded white tank top, a short red skirt, and flip-flops on her tan, calloused feet, where my gaze lingers.

  “Hey,” she whispers, tiptoeing up into my neck. “D’ya wanna go smoke a joint? Andre said we can go on the roof.”

  I glance over and see Jules holding Eli and Sun in her thrall: “. . . because anyway the universe has a natural tendency toward complementary binaries: man-woman, yin-yang, Coke-Pepsi, Visa-Mastercard . . .”

  “Sure, why not?” I say, and Holly rewards me with a smile.

  I know you don’t want to lighten up and have fun, Jules said to me half an hour ago. But it might do you some good.

  Holly takes my hand and leads me out of the triple, and then I show her up the back staircase to the emergency exit door, which is propped open with a plastic pasta sauce jar that Andre cut a wedge out of and brought up here last semester. We walk out into the low, warm sky. The roof is long and flat with no railing. We’re only five floors up, but the sandstone buildings of the university around us are wide and
dark, and after the hot, loud apartment, I feel high up in the fresh night.

  At the far edge stands a towering black silhouette on blue: Andre, bigger than ever when he’s standing alone.

  “Hey kids,” he says, half-turning, half-smiling, as we walk up. He’s working his way through one of his long, perfectly rolled Js.

  “Whatcha doing there, big fella?” Holly asks.

  “Just taking it in.” He passes to Holly.

  “Wowee, thanks.” She takes a dragon-size hit, exhales through her nose, passes to me. We smoke and chat, talk about easy classes, the respective merits of basketball and volleyball as spectator sports, whether Andre should marry Jeanie because she’s six-three and makes bomb mac and cheese, and whatever else, until we’ve killed the joint and my face hurts from laughing.

  “Hey, do you hear that?” Holly asks when the laughter lulls and the thumping music from Eli’s speakers wafts up from below. “I’m suddenly paranoid that people are dancing on tables or something, and both of you guys are up here with me.”

  “We live with another guy, too,” I say. “He’s down there.”

  “He is a moron, though.” Andre throws me a meaningful glance and then turns toward the stairs. “Maybe I’ll just check up on things.”

  Without Andre to fuel the conversation, Holly and I stand here quietly, stonedly, looking at the world. She inches up to my side and slips under my arm. I try to think of something to say, but everything I think of sounds stupid in my head. She clears her throat. “Can I—?” She reaches her hands up to my buzzed hair and starts rubbing it. “I love the texture,” she murmurs. “When I’m high, I love textures.” She giggles and closes her eyes.

  This is when you kiss her, I think to myself. Her eyes are closed, her face is inches from mine. I give myself a second to work up the nerve, and then another to savor the anticipation, and then I do it. I totally kiss Holly Michaels. I close my eyes, too, and dwell on the little meetings of our lips, wait for her to end each one, my hand wandering down to the small of her back, her fingertips tickling the base of my skull. It’s tender and sweet, and she smiles when our mouths part, and her eyes remain closed, and then we kiss again, sweetly again, like good listeners, and she makes a soft noise, and nuzzles me for a second afterward.

  “Hi,” she whispers, and I feel fully alive in this moment, open and tickled and trusting, when it starts in my stomach.

  “I feel light-headed,” I say, opening my eyes.

  “Me, too,” Holly purrs.

  “I mean I’m feeling . . . really dizzy.”

  Now her eyes are open, so nice and blue and white, and I dive into them, doing flips.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say, my hands moving from her back to her shoulders, keeping me upright. “Sometimes when I smoke. After I was already drinking. I get the spins really bad.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Maybe I should go lie down.”

  “Oh—okay.”

  She leads me, blinking, toward the door, and somehow we make it back down the stairs to the suite. My stomach is churning, and my sensory experience of life has sharply deteriorated: patchy audio, low frame rate. Amid the throbbing music, everyone seems too absorbed in whatever they’re doing to notice us as we stagger through the party. Andre and Eli are teaching the Ghostbusta to Jeanie and some Korean-looking girl.

  You see me clubbing, you know I VIP

  Blaze it up till we filin’ dankruptcy

  Drop it low, wave ya hands like a rolla coasta

  Bich we do it like this, I’m a ghostbusta

  As we pass the kitchenette, I catch a glimpse of Sun, chin in hand, still intently watching the Jules Show.

  “—and rot away in a tomb of material possessions, you know?” she’s saying to him in Mandarin, gesturing emphatically with her hands. “Everybody else seems to accept it so casually.”

  We don’t walk so much as crash into my tiny room, stumbling over Sun’s backpack and collapsing onto the bed. Holly shrieks, sits up, flicks on the bedside lamp, and takes in the scene.

  “Yikes,” she says.

  “I have a guest,” I explain from between the forearms draped over my face. I stifle a burp and taste tequila. “Ordinarily I’m quite tidy.”

  “Here, drink some water,” she says. “You know what helps me when I get the spins? I keep one foot on the ground, on the side of the bed. Like this.” She moves me around.

  “That does help.” I close my eyes.

  “And keep your eyes open.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “That’s better.” She nestles in beside me.

  “Holly, you know that time?” I try to enunciate. “When I was in your room. I just want to say I’m sorry about that.”

  “Like, when we were sophomores? Ancient history, Victor. Don’t be silly.”

  “I guess I’m sorry about now, too.”

  “You had a big day.”

  “I shouldn’t have smoked.”

  “Maybe so. But hey, you deserve to relax a little.” After a pause, Holly knits her eyebrows and says, “I heard about your dad, and I’m really, really sorry, Victor.”

  I shake my head. “Nothing looks the same to me anymore. People get stabbed to death, and I’m bouncing an inflated leather sphere? I feel like I’ve been living in a fairy tale my whole life. Everything that’s ever happened, I’m replaying it in my mind.”

  I turn and look at her, my vision lagging a bit behind my head. Our faces are a few inches apart. She gets it, I’m telling myself.

  She smiles tentatively, traces my jawline with her fingers. “You can let go now. You can rest if you’re tired,” she says. “I’ll stay with you. Here.”

  She pulls my shoes off, she tries to settle me down, she puts her hands on me in gentle ways until the spins are gone and the high has moved from my stomach to my head, behind my eyes, the base of my skull, and as she draws circles on my chest with her fingertips, sleep overtakes me like a snowstorm.

  * * *

  We stared at Mom’s coffin, the three of us, the survivors. Linda Eastman Li, Loving Wife and Mother. Someone could go from being a person to being an inanimate object just like that. The organ music had stopped, and the only sound in the church was Jules’s quiet sobbing. I caught sight of Reverend Wetherbee coming up the aisle, a book in his hands, his eyes set on Dad.

  Wetherbee was quite young back then, just four or five years into his first assignment out of divinity school. Tall and plump, he had recently cultivated a goatee, perhaps in order to offset his baby-facedness. It occurred to me that I should intercept him, stop him from triggering an explosion, because at fourteen I was already adept at reading Dad’s moods. Generally, he oscillated between contemplative and cheeseball—he hardly ever lost his temper after Mom got sick. But when he did, he blew big, and beforehand, there was always this tempest in his eyes, this powerful look on his face. A little action around the corners of his mouth. Almost a grin.

  The look was no guarantee of an eruption. Far more often—like when Jules or I complained, or argued with each other, or begged for material things—he seemed to shrink from his own anger as much as we did. He would retreat to his office and pretend to bury himself in work, but when I spied on him through the glass panes of the French doors, I discovered him meditating: erect in his chair, eyes half shut, hands resting on knees.

  If he was really steaming, he would drive to Santa Monica and stare out at the Pacific, at the shape of the planet, perhaps imagining he could see all the way back to the hutong where he grew up. I joined him for that drive once. It was the year before, the day we learned that Mom’s tumors had spread—I was thirteen. We spent two hours sitting in the sand and two more on the Santa Monica Freeway. He barely said a word the whole time, but he smiled at me as I buckled my seat belt for the drive home, and he asked me to play one of my favorite CDs.

  I saw the look again at Mom’s service. He had stood patiently, accepting embraces from a line of parishion
ers who had hardly ever seen him, a little vein on his neck dancing back and forth. I knew he was hot, and maybe I could have said something, diverted Wetherbee, forestalled the storm. Instead, I shut my eyes, allowed myself to sway a bit on my feet, and tried to imagine what it would feel like to disappear into a void of not-feeling, not-thinking, not-being.

  “It belonged to her,” Wetherbee said to Dad, offering up the Bible with both hands.

  Dad took the book, weighed it in his hands. “It didn’t help her much, did it? All that praying.”

  Wetherbee did not reply. Dad wandered away, gently tossing the book up and down in his hands, glancing around the church, but not at us, not at Mom. Mom’s body.

  “We had many plans, Linda and I. Dreams that we worked for. Made sacrifices for, both of us,” he said, his eyes darting from Jesus to Jesus: figurine, painting, window. “And now she is dead, despite her religion.”

  Wetherbee eyed Dad warily. He was in his own house. He drew himself tall to defend it, but spoke in soothing tones. “Her faith did not heal her, but it provided her with peace and perspective. Now, her suffering is over.”

  Dad seemed not to hear him. He looked at the coffin now, then back to the book, then at his surroundings again; he seemed loose, unhinged, like he might keel over. “Many plans,” he repeated to himself. “Many sacrifices.”

  “Dad, don’t,” Juliana said.

  “Bìzuǐ!—Shut your mouth!” he barked at her in Mandarin, in a full rage now, naked to his core. The furnace within him that forged my world.

  Wetherbee inclined his head to the book in Dad’s hands. “Vincent, the Bible tells us that we can only have a limited view of God’s will; that we can only take the measure of our lives as if ‘through a glass, darkly.’ Through scripture, and through prayer, Linda was able to find peace at the end of her time with us. Perhaps the book will offer you consolation as well.”

  “Consolation.” Dad said the word slowly, enunciating each syllable, like it was a foreign word to him. Like he was still learning the language.

  He turned back to Reverend Wetherbee. “There will be no consolation for me,” he said.