Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  He spun on his heels and hurled the book through the air, past my face, and I turned my head as it crashed through the stained glass window behind me. Saint Dismas, bearing his cross, exploded into ten thousand fragments. They sailed through the air like shrapnel, jagged and sharp, imperfect and unwhole, less than what they had been: a vision, an illusion, a dream.

  * * *

  I wake with a start in a mess of covers in the corner of my bed, and, fucking hell, Holly is gone.

  My phone is dead, but the hue of the glow in the window tells me it’s something like seven in the morning. I step quietly out into the living room. Juliana, in Andre’s comforter, is a snail on the couch; Sun, in my sleeping bag, is a burrito on the floor. Andre’s door is open and I can sense that nobody’s in there.

  In the bathroom I splash some water on my face, look in the mirror, stare at the person there until his face is no longer my face, just some coincidence of shape, light, and color. In the morning light I appear aerodynamic, like some kind of projectile weapon. Cannonball. Jellyfish. I think a few more things over and decide to flick the glass with my finger instead of punching it with my fist.

  “Pathetic,” I say to me, shaking my head. I drink some water from the faucet, go to my room, grab my gym stuff, and head out the door.

  12

  No, you didn’t,” Eli says plaintively. “Please, tell me you didn’t.”

  I stay focused on the blender. Kale. Frozen strawberries. Coconut water. Almond butter. Dates.

  “You college boys,” says Jules, perched on the counter, swinging her ankles back and forth. “You’re always beating your chests and fluffing your feathers, but when it’s time to deliver the goods, it’s always two-pump chump or ol’ mister whiskey-dick.”

  “I was too messed up.” I pour four smoothies. “I had the spins.”

  “Pfffft.” Eli throws his hands up. “It’s the same farkakte story with you every time. As your loyal friend and suitemate of four years, Victor, I am eagerly anticipating the day that you wake up and realize how much you get in your own way.”

  Sun has wandered in from the living room. He’s wearing another black T-shirt.

  I clear my throat. “Sun, you were saying yesterday that we have to break into the restaurant. How are we going to do that? And what are these documents that we need to retrieve from there?”

  Sun casts a guarded glance from Eli to Jules, then sets his jaw and slips into his business mode. “To break in is simple. I know the way how. Regarding documents, Old Li only told me, get documents from restaurant safe and show you.”

  “So you know the code to the safe?” I say.

  “Old Li have said he will give it to you.”

  “No, he didn’t,” I say, my heart sinking. “Unless it’s somewhere at the house.”

  “Anyway, aren’t we ignoring the potential legal consequences of breaking into the restaurant?” Jules says. “It seems pretty risky just in order to get some papers.”

  “Jules,” I say, “the documents could be those yellow legal pads that Detective Lang told me to look for.”

  “No shit, Victor,” Jules says. “But I don’t recall him authorizing you to commit burglaries of your own.”

  “No problem, no problem.” Sun waves his hands vigorously. “We can go tonight, into restaurant and out, ten minutes. It’s actually easy. But code to the safe, that is, uh, guānjiàn.”

  “Crucial,” I say.

  “Then I’m glad we don’t have it,” Jules says.

  The subsequent awkward silence is interrupted by Andre strolling through the front door. “Morning, y’all,” he says, plucking an apple from his neat row of them on top of the refrigerator. Then he turns to me and asks, “So how’d it go with Holly?”

  “Yes, Victor,” Eli says vindictively. “Tell the man. Did you show her your girth certificate?”

  “I got the spins and we talked for a while,” I say. “Then I woke up and she was gone.”

  Jules pulls open a window, lights a cigarette. “You know, Victor, maybe if you didn’t hold so much in when you’re sober, you wouldn’t spill your guts to whatever random female every time you get shitfaced.”

  “Too harsh, Jules! Holly is no random female. And Victor’s just being Victor,” Andre pipes up in my defense, and then turns to me, gesticulating with his half-eaten apple. “So what if you got a little too faded? You’re a nice guy. She’s a nice girl. Don’t be down. Just text her and make a joke about it, piece of cake.”

  “I don’t have her number, and besides—”

  Andre pulls out his phone. “I think I’ve got Jeanie in here somewhere, one sec.”

  “No, goddammit. Fuck!” I smack a cabinet, hard. Everyone looks at me. My palm stings, and hot little jolts of pain run up my arm, into my shoulder.

  “Look, forget about Holly, all right, I already did. And I don’t want you to set things up for me anymore! The joint, the roof—I know your little game, okay?”

  Andre puts his phone back into the pocket of his sweatshirt and folds his arms across his chest. “Okay,” he says. “If that’s how you feel, I won’t set anything up for you anymore.”

  His placid tone seems to say, “Whatever you want, you big baby.” I pace halfway across the room, then turn back to hurl some more silent accusations at him. You love being better at everything than me. You knew Vaughn would tell me to foul Jason Maxwell. You think I need you, but I don’t. I don’t need you.

  The room is silent, and everybody’s looking at me like I’m holding a bomb. I storm into my bedroom and lock the door behind me.

  Then I snatch the case from under the bed and flip it upside down, emptying the contents onto my unmade bed. The bottom, the inside, the edges of the foam lining—I scrutinize all of it and find nothing. So I start flipping through the cash, examining both sides of each bill and then tossing it aside.

  Maybe I’m not getting in my own way. Maybe I’m the only one who remembers what’s important.

  Half an hour later, Jules, Eli, Andre, and Sun are strewn across the common room sofa and floors, streaming a nature documentary off Netflix, when I burst out of my room and tell them that I’ve found it.

  “Twenty-seven, thirteen, seven,” I say, waving a pink hundred-yuan note in front of me. “It’s got to be the safe code. And there’s two addresses on it as well. One in Venice and one in Alhambra.”

  For a moment, as they exchange looks, the only sound is David Attenborough talking about the dietary habits of the Komodo dragon. Then Andre hits MUTE on the remote control. “I guess we better Google that shit,” he says.

  “Give it here.” A tablet has appeared in Eli’s hands. “Looks like they’re private residences.”

  “We’ve got to check them out, right?” I look from Sun to Jules.

  Jules sighs, then smiles weakly, and I can tell she doesn’t want to argue. “Okay, fine. If a drive to Alhambra is required for closure, then so be it. Andre, you take Venice.”

  “We’ve gotta watch the game film with the coaches at three,” Andre says. “But I can drive to the restaurant tonight.”

  Comprehension dawns on Sun’s face. “You don’t drive,” he says to me.

  “He got a DUI. Kāichē bù hējiǔ!—Don’t drink and drive!” Jules wags a finger in my face. Sun looks at me with surprise.

  “That was actually one hundred percent my fault,” Andre interjects.

  Thinking back to that miserable episode, I feel my face getting hot. “Andre, you’ve gotta sit it out,” I say. “The draft is in six months, and you’ve got too much at risk. Jules, can you go check out both addresses now while we go to the film session? And then, if you could drive Sun and me to the restaurant tonight, that’d be great.”

  “So now I have to drive to Venice? Are you shitting me? Do you want me to swing by Tijuana, too?”

  “Jules,” I say, “we have to do this.”

  Jules addresses Sun in Chinese. “Promise me that my brother won’t get hurt,” she says. He returns her serious look
, holds her gaze, and nods his head.

  “Fine, then. I’ll fucking drive to motherfucking Venice,” she says in English, and snatches the hundred-yuan note off the coffee table. “I’m keeping this for gas money.”

  “Hey, what about me?” Eli says.

  “Shouldn’t you be mining Bitcoin?” Jules asks him. “Or whatever it is that you do?”

  “You should go with Jules to those houses,” I say to Eli. “You can protect her if it’s dangerous.”

  “Oh, I am all over that. I’ll go get my camera. Oh, and my sunglasses.” Eli bounces up and darts into his room.

  Andre bursts out in big, rich peals of laughter as Jules stares at me with her head at an angle and her mouth hanging open.

  “You will be sodomized,” Jules whispers. I turn away from her, hide my smile.

  “Let’s talk about the restaurant,” I say to Sun.

  He’s gazing pensively past me, into my room, at the pink Maos and green Franklins strewn together on the floor.

  When Andre and I return to the Quad after the film session, our triple is quiet and clean. I peek into my room, where Sun has made the bed, stacked the bills back into the briefcase, and planked himself neatly on top of the covers. Andre puts on SportsCenter on mute and sits in front of it with a Spanish lit anthology in his lap. We had been sitting together in Spanish class for every semester since the ninth grade, until twelve days ago, when Dad got knifed and I stopped showing up for anything.

  “‘¿Quién sabe donde la muerte descansa?’” I offer. He smiles grimly. Some silence passes. I sit down next to him. “You think I’m an idiot?” I ask quietly.

  Andre looks up at SportsCenter, squints, thinks. “Your dad passed away. It’s not an easy time.”

  “Yeah.” The pain bubble pulses. I study my palms.

  Andre shakes his head. “I dunno, man. I know you want to do something, but have you thought about how deep this might go? I like Sun, but hey, you just met this guy. And he comes from another world, someplace where they play by different rules.”

  Andre looks away for a second, wrinkles his brow. I can sense his discomfort in the role of the worrier, which is oddly heartening to me—I feel the love. But then he gives his head a waggle, shakes off any mood unbecoming to the big easy, the captain of relaxin’. “Anyway, we’ll hang in there together.” He swings a huge arm over my shoulders, pats me on the head with a huge hand. “And we back off before anybody gets dead or pregnant, okay?”

  With his hand he nods my head. I smile up at my best friend.

  Just then Eli bursts through the door. “What’s going on in here? Y’all making some blasian babies?”

  “Shhhh. Dude is sleeping,” Andre says, tipping his head toward my room.

  Jules slumps in past Eli and collapses onto the couch.

  “He never shuts up,” she hisses at me.

  “So? Did you find anything?” I ask.

  “Yeah.” Eli’s head is in the fridge. He comes around to the couch and cracks open a can of energy drink. “Really weird. The address in Venice? Nice house, nobody home. We snuck a look at his mail to get his name: Aron Ancona. LinkedIn says he’s a hepatologist at Cedar Sinai.”

  “Hippopotamus?” Andre says.

  “Liver doctor.” Jules’s voice comes from under a throw pillow.

  “And that’s all we know, other than that he has a very nice house. But the house in Alhambra, right? Here’s where it gets super strange. Big house, probably four, five bedrooms. Toyota minivan parked out front. For a while we sit outside and we don’t see much, just a few glimpses of a superpregnant Chinese lady through the windows. Then we realize that it’s not the same lady each time. It’s multiple Chinese ladies, at least four, maybe more, all just severely pregnant. We sit there for an hour and nobody comes or goes, except right when we’re about to leave, another van pulls up and out hops a Chinese guy with two big takeout bags. So we decide to tail the van and he drives back to, drum roll, Alhambra Happy Year.”

  “Why the hell would Happy Year have a house full of pregnant ladies?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” Eli shrugs. “We googled ‘Chinese pregnant lady house’ and all the results were this one adult video.”

  “Yikes,” says Andre.

  “Yikes is right.” Jules pops up from under her pillow. “We watched a few minutes, but let me tell you, it was not very informative. Or stimulating.”

  “I wonder if it has something to do with Ice,” I say.

  “Ice could also be a meth thing,” Jules says. “Sun said they’re planning to import a volatile commodity, right?”

  “They make a lot of meth in North Korea,” Eli volunteers.

  We all look at him. “Why do you even know that, man?” Andre asks.

  For a moment we sit there puzzling over the results of our little investigation. Another world. Different rules. What was Dad mixed up in, and why did he want me to have this information?

  Finally, Eli breaks the silence. “So what happens next?” he asks.

  “Let’s get this document out of the restaurant safe tonight. Then we’ll know more,” I say. “Dad left us these clues on purpose. He’ll show us what we need to know.”

  13

  Sun kneels outside the back door to the restaurant, takes off his backpack, unzips it. “This is your spot.” He indicates the ground next to him with his chin. “Eyes up.”

  I obey, squatting against the wall and scanning the section of parking lot that’s visible from the back of the building. The only car is Jules’s hatchback, which she turned around to face the street after dropping us off. From where I am, I can’t see the boulevard, but I hear the intermittent sounds of passing cars. In front of me, across the row of staff parking, there’s a high wall between us and the video store behind the restaurant. To my left there’s a young row of fig trees that Dad planted between us and the adjacent gas station.

  We’re wearing black clothes and disposable plastic gloves. There are stockings on our heads and shower caps on our shoes, which seems a little backward. It’s three in the morning.

  Sun takes a small black drill out of his backpack. Even the bit is black. He begins drilling through the dead bolt on the door. The whine of the drill itself is exceptionally quiet, but the metal-on-metal screech shreds my nerves like a cheese grater. After destroying the dead bolt, he drills through the center of the doorknob and slips inside.

  I look at our escape vehicle and see that Jules has reclined her seat most of the way. She’s lying back with her head turned toward me, watching through the rear window. The night is humid and near.

  Long minutes pass and I begin to calm down. Sun and the noise of his weird drill seem like something that happened a couple of hours ago. I squat against the building, hugging my knees, making myself small. Little thoughts about cops and big thoughts about Dad present themselves at the borders of my mind, but I abandon them in favor of an alert, ready watchfulness. I got a lot of practice at this over the past few years, sitting on the bench and waiting to be called into action at a moment’s notice. A hair over ten minutes per game for four seasons. Twenty-six box scores with Did Not Play—Coach’s Decision next to my name. One barely relevant three-game suspension for violating team alcohol policy. I don’t think about it. I feel glad to have a task to focus on, a plan of action, something other than sorrow. I relax, eyes up.

  A man pushes a shopping cart along the sidewalk on the other side of the gas station. The cart makes a lot of noise and seems to be sprouting a variety of accessories, which the man stops to adjust, cursing volubly. He tosses off some further profanity at another man walking on the street. The other man, dressed all in white, ignores him; he leaves the sidewalk, cuts through the gas station, and heads toward the row of fig trees.

  Now he sees me and breaks into a run in my direction. I see the ponytail. Muscles tense in my forearms, along my spine. I replay Sun’s instructions in my head, slip through the door and into the hallway. It is dark except for the faint green glow of th
e EXIT sign above the door behind me, and adrenaline lights up my body as I will my eyes to adjust, every hair on my arms and neck reaching out into the dark, seeking information like antennae. The door to the office is closed, and through the glass I see Sun crouched by the safe with a small, bright flashlight in his mouth. I imagine that I see Dad in there, too, searching around for his reading glasses or snacking on some stir-fried noodles in black bean sauce and watching Cirque Du Soleil DVDs on his little flat-screen.

  I rap twice on the glass. Then I run down the hall and step halfway through the door to the kitchen.

  I wait for Ponytail to appear at the other end of the hallway, giddy with anticipation, my mind full of the stillness of the restaurant. When he reaches the door, he stands there sidewise for a moment. He’s holding something in his right hand, low. We stand still, half-facing each other at opposite ends of the hallway, my pulse hammering in my ears, adrenaline crashing around in my blood. Then he steps toward me.

  “Bié dòng!—Don’t move!” he shouts, raising his hands in front of him. I slip into the kitchen. The light of streetlamps coming through the dining room windows spills in above and beneath the saloon doors on the other side of the kitchen, and I can see more. I take a few steps in, turn to face the door, crouch into an athletic stance. My frantic heart feels ready to escape my idiot body and find a hiding place. Then Ponytail bursts through the door, a pistol extended in front of him in both hands.

  “Who are you?” he says in Mandarin.

  Stall, I tell myself, and I open my mouth, but exactly zero words come out. He lowers the gun a little, takes two slow steps toward me. Then he hears Sun’s footsteps behind him and turns—too late. Sun’s first kick, a roundhouse right, catches Ponytail’s wrists and sends the gun bouncing off a wall and into a sink. His second kick is a swift, powerful left-footed reverse to the chest that throws Ponytail backward into me.

  We crash to the ground. I scuttle backward on my hands and heels as Ponytail springs to his feet and throws a punch at Sun’s head all in one motion. Sun deflects the blow with his right palm and rolls the next one into his side, but they keep coming: Ponytail is as quick as a welterweight contender, all over Sun in a blur of fists and feet, elbows and knees. Sun steps back, moving like a sheet of silk between Ponytail’s limbs, guiding them around the periphery of his body, hollowing out and changing shape with each blow, so that even when he gets tagged, nothing connects with force.