by Daniel Nieh
There is a simple iron dead bolt on the wrong side of the door. It isn’t locked. I pad out of the room in my socks, hoping for a glass of water. Across the hallway I find a bathroom that matches my cell: small, sleek, and functional. I’m about to turn toward the central room when a strip of light leaking under a closed door at the end of the hallway catches my eye. As I walk toward the door, I hear the faint thrumming of large quantities of electronics. Pulling it open, I discover another one immediately behind it, this one with no handle facing me. Like doors between adjacent hotel rooms. Pressing my ear against the second door, I discern a whiff of cigarette smoke. I hear nothing but the deep hum and a distant, sedate conversation in some regional dialect I don’t know.
I remember my thirst and head back down the hallway toward the main room, but I pause when I get to the doorway. The door is about a foot open, and I can hear Ai talking in a tense tone.
“—your expectations? That I would condone a plan that would destroy the brotherhood? What you’ve proposed is dangerous for all of us. And we don’t know with certainty that Brother Ouyang or Brother Zhao is responsible.”
He is pacing in and out of my field of vision, gesturing animatedly with a glass of golden liquor. I can also see Sun, who is sitting upright in a chair by the dining table, his eyes down, his hands in his lap.
“Who else could it be?” Wei Songqin protests from somewhere I can’t see. “Do you think he was randomly killed just as he was quarrelling with them about Ice?”
“Of course it’s not random,” Ai snaps. “But it could have been the Big Circle Boys or the L.A. Fuk Ching. Or the lawyer, Peng. I never trusted that slippery prick.”
Ai glares at his fish tank. The register of his Chinese has changed now that he isn’t speaking with me; he talks with a local accent, and crude slang has replaced some of his eloquent flourishes. Wei Songqin’s voice is less sweet, more plain; Sun sounds like the same old Sun, measured, calm, neutral.
“Someone from the Snake Hands Gang has taken over the restaurants,” Sun says, speaking without lifting his gaze from his lap. “A captain named Rou Qiangjun. He arrived in Los Angeles a week before Old Li died. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten that it was Ouyang who got Snake Hands involved in Ice.”
Ai takes a slug of his cognac and rubs his eyelids with the heel of his hand. “Sure, I’m not blind to the facts. But don’t forget: if it was Ouyang who planned Brother Li’s death, then just the fact that his son is in my house would be a declaration of war between us. Don’t you see the risk I am taking by allowing him to stay here?”
“So what, we throw Xiaozhou out? After Old Li sent him here to ask for your help?” Wei lowers her voice. “If they ordered the hit, they already destroyed the brotherhood. How can you defend those two bastards when you know what they’re up to?”
Ai stops his pacing and wheels around in the direction of Wei’s voice.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Fuck!” He hurls the glass to the ground at his feet, where it smashes and scatters in shimmering fragments. “You want to see me dead?”
He stands there a moment, glowering, and nobody speaks. Then he turns to Sun. “You can stay here and use what you need. I will help you get a visa for that Russian slime. But that’s all. And nobody can know. Nobody! Don’t let yourself be seen coming and going. And don’t tell me anything. You have three days.”
I hear a door slam as he storms out of the room. I look to see Sun’s reaction and find that he is looking right back at me.
20
In between sets of push-ups on the floor of my little room in Ai’s underground lair, I sit on the side of the bed and replay the events of the last twenty-four hours—the last-minute arrangements in San Dimas, the flight, the rude awakening to the reality of our situation in Beijing—and think about how I might regain a modicum of control over my life.
I do push-ups on my fingertips. I cross one ankle over the other, then switch. I bring my hands together beneath my chest for a set, then plant them wide for another. I step my feet up onto my bed for a different angle. I plank on my forearms.
Someone taps on my door. I silence the music on my phone and say, “Come in.” Sun pokes his head through the door.
“You’re exercising,” he says.
“Just a little. Helps me think.”
He sets a plastic shopping bag on the ground and sits down on the bed. “How many can you do? In a row?”
“I don’t know. I never max out anymore. But when I was a kid, Dad used to make me do fifty straight before dinner. Every night.”
“Me, too.” We share a smile at this shared history, then sit a moment in silence as the weirdness of the thing settles in.
“Actually,” Sun says, “he made me do one hundred.”
I wonder if Dad was more worried about Sun getting killed in some alleyway than me getting overpowered on defense. “You said my dad hired you off the streets. How did that happen?” I ask.
Sun hunches forward, rests his elbows on his knees. “Old Li saw me begging near a lamb skewer place where he liked to eat lunch, kowtowing on the sidewalk with a tin can in front of me. He came up to me and said, ‘Are you busy or can you take a break?’ He was smiling, of course. It was a few years after he had returned to Beijing from Hong Kong, and he was in his early thirties, the prime of his life. I said, ‘What do you want?’ He said, ‘I’m going to eat over there. I’ll treat you.’ So we ate lamb skewers together and some hand-cut noodles as well. He didn’t say anything to me the whole time. Then he paid and said to me, ‘If you’re here at the same time tomorrow, I’ll treat you again.’ I was eight years old.”
I want to ask how he ended up begging on the street, but it seems like an impolite question. So I say, “What happened after that?”
“We continued like that for a while. Each day he would ask me one question after we ordered, while we waited for the skewers and noodles to be prepared. Sometimes it was a question like ‘Where is your hometown?’ or ‘Where do you sleep?’ and sometimes it was a question like ‘Tell me about that man; what’s he thinking?’ Then we would eat in silence. After having lunch like that every day for a few weeks, he asked me if I wanted to work for him. At that time, I had nothing. I didn’t think about it too hard. I just said, ‘Okay.’ Actually, it was the best day of my life. Right after lunch he took me to the Happy Year office in Chaoyang. Back then, all four of them worked from the same place. There was already a cot set up against the wall. That was my home for eight years.
“Every morning I woke up there and made congee for myself. Then I had two hours of martial arts lessons and two hours with a tutor, learning how to read and write. In the afternoon I would do errands for him: delivering messages, picking up lunch, that sort of thing. When there was nothing to do I would hang around the office, do homework, and practice handwriting. He trained me to copy his handwriting perfectly, and then he trained me to copy other people’s handwriting as well. He brought me simple clothing when I needed it, and I could eat at a few different restaurants in the neighborhood on his credit. He sparred with me and taught me sleight-of-hand tricks. He taught me to pick pockets, but he made me promise not to do any stealing that wasn’t part of the job. Trust and loyalty were very important to him. He liked to repeat that proverb, ‘Zhōngchéng lǎoshí chuán jiā yuǎn—The families of the loyal and honest will thrive’”—
I finish it for him: “—‘lángxīn gŏufèi bù jiǔ cháng—and the betrayers with hearts of wolves and lungs of dogs will perish.’”
Sun shakes his head ruefully. “You know, he was always singing around the office. I didn’t know any kids my age, but everyone in the office was nice to me, and I could stay up late watching TV if I wanted to. I didn’t ask any questions. My whole world was Happy Year.
“On my sixteenth birthday, your father told me I would start getting paid. I would have enough to rent a room for myself and buy my own clothes. It wasn’t much, he said, but it would go up ten percent every year. I
would have more responsibilities, too. I was very excited to hear this news. But then he told me I would still be his assistant, but Ai would supervise my work. He was moving to the United States. He would be back a few times every year.”
Sun pauses for a moment, studying his hands, smilingly slightly.
“He didn’t see or didn’t want to see that I was sad. I didn’t know what it meant to have a family, but he was my best friend. I just said thank you, but then that night I followed him home. That was the first time I saw his wife and children. I sat in a tree and watched through a window as he cooked the same dishes he had taught me to cook for myself. I watched all through dinner and after, when he read you and Lianying stories before you went to sleep. Finally, when all the lights were turned off, I climbed down from the tree and went back to the office.”
Sun falls silent after this. He looks a little flushed with emotion, matching the heat of exercise on my body. I’m not good at these moments, so I think about Andre, who is, and then I reach out tentatively and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He looks up into my face with a curious light in his eyes, and in that moment I see all the boons and burdens that Dad gave him, the traits we have in common, the fire and the cool, the rock and now the pain, too. There are those things and the differences, too, the edge that is already sharp inside of him, the harsh lessons I am only beginning to learn.
Sun breaks eye contact, manages one of his ducky little nods. “I owed him a lot. He owed me a lot. It’s something that gives me complicated emotions.”
“Yeah.” I cut my eyes away to the floor and we both stare at our feet for a minute or two.
“So, Wei Songqin is Ai’s assistant like you were Dad’s?” I ask, breaking the silence.
Sun nods.
“And she has ninja training, too?” I ask, trying to be light.
“In fact, she can fight a little. Ai asked me to train her in self-defense.” Sun says. “But she has other capabilities.”
“Other capabilities?”
“You didn’t notice anything about her that stands out? Something that she could use to her advantage?”
“Oh,” I say, frowning. “Jeez. I bet she’s good at it.”
“She is an expert at using other people’s emotions and disguising her own,” he says. “But—she is our friend.”
“And what about Ai? Is he our friend?”
Sun thinks, then nods. “We have put him in a dangerous position by coming here. He can’t refuse you, because you are Old Li’s son. But he doesn’t want to go to war with Ouyang and Zhao, and he fears that if we expose them, he will be exposed as well.”
“What’s up with that coin he was fidgeting with?”
“It’s a silver tael from the Qing Dynasty. Ai had the blackest background: his family were aristocrats in the Qing. So he suffered the most during the Cultural Revolution. Both his parents were sent to labor camps.”
“I can’t figure out if he’s supposed to be one of the good guys or the bad guys.”
“I’m not sure there’s such a thing as good guys and bad guys,” Sun says. “But we should be grateful for the help he’s giving us.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So, are you ready?”
I look up at him, a little startled. Clearly, sentimental Sun is done and all-business Sun is back.
“Ready for what? It’s almost midnight.”
“Yes, the timing is perfect. Here, I have some clothes for you.”
He holds out the plastic shopping bag. Inside it I find a rayon black button-down, some slim-fit black jeans, and a black-on-white pair of box-fresh Chuck Taylors.
“What’s with the clothes?” I ask.
“Nice enough for the dress code, but also good for running. You have the gun?”
“I haven’t even checked.” I look in the bottom of my bag. Back in San Dimas, Sun had written some kind of code on an envelope, stuffed it full of cash, and taped it to the PPQ. Now the gun is here and the envelope is gone.
“I can’t believe that works.”
“Only works for one at a time,” Sun says absentmindedly. He has produced a box of bullets from his pocket and popped out the empty magazine, and now he’s loading it with mechanical efficiency. Fifteen rounds. “Very hard to get these into China. For larger quantities, you have to go overland from Myanmar. How about the rest of the cash? We will have to promise most of it to Feder.”
“It’s all there,” I say, nodding to the orange shoebox I had slid partway under the bed. “Did you say something about a dress code? Where are we going?”
“Velvet,” he says. “It’s a nightclub.”
21
Velvet is in the basement of Alien Street Market, a shopping center in the Russian neighborhood of Beijing, close to Sun Temple Park. In our taxi on the way there, a screen embedded in the passenger headrest plays an advertisement for “Korean movie star eyelid surgery” on a loop. Though it’s the middle of the night, we pass trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, ambulances, three-wheeled gleaner carts loaded with uncountable bags of plastic bottles. The city streets remain alight with signage: Sichuan cuisine, Hunan cuisine, Guizhou cuisine, Peking Duck, or, as it’s known locally, Duck. Party World Karaoke—the size of a large hotel. In the side street behind it, stalls selling skewers and noodle soups, stacks of flimsy plastic stools, pool tables under awnings made of tarps.
Sun tells me that he started researching Feder Fekhlachev after Dad pinpointed him as a weak link who could potentially provide dirt on Zhao and Ouyang. He found out that Feder had been posted to Beijing by the KGB more than thirty years ago, at the beginning of China’s Reform and Opening-Up era. After the Berlin Wall fell, Feder’s extended family emigrated en masse from Moscow to Brooklyn. But Feder’s background in Russian intelligence meant he couldn’t get into the States. He decided to stay in Beijing and try his hand at capitalism in its latest hotbed. He leveraged his connections in the intelligence world, as well as his fluency in Mandarin, to ingratiate himself with the city’s powerful Russian community. Nowadays, any time a Russian mobster or oligarch shows up in Beijing, Feder is there to show him a good time and arrange meetings with the relevant local scumbags. As a result, Feder has a thumb in almost every pie in town, despite the fact that he never lifts a finger himself—unless it’s wrapped around a vodka shot.
The more Sun tells me, the less I like our plan. “Former KGB? This guy sounds like a badass.”
Sun has amped up his disguise for the nightlife with an asymmetrical pleather jacket and a dyed-look blond wig that sweeps down over his face. It seems a bit much to me, but he certainly looks nothing like his austere normal self. When he shakes his head, his yellowish bangs flop back and forth.
“Feder’s not that tough,” Sun says. “If he were really a good businessman, he’d be retired by now. He drinks too much. Plus, we have something he wants.”
“Why are you so sure that forty grand is enough to make him cross Happy Year?”
“Forty grand and a visa. Remember, Feder can’t get past Immigration, so he has never visited his family in America. Old Ai can fix that.”
“Yeah, but why would he trust us? We’re coming out of nowhere.”
Sun does his microshrug. “Feder is a survivor. He does business with Happy Year but owes them no particular loyalty. You have to convince him that the Happy Year ship is sinking. Then you offer him a life preserver. Just remember, you are representing ‘a major American interest.’ He’ll assume you’re with a powerful conglomerate or crime syndicate. Or better, the government.”
“A major American interest. Right. And what is it that we’re asking for? Didn’t Dad say that Dong can protect Ouyang and Zhao from the authorities?”
“We need photographs, tapes, emails—something that links Ouyang and Zhao to Ice. Maybe Dong, too—although he’s very discreet. It’s true that domestic law enforcement won’t touch any of them. But if we take the story to the foreign press, it becomes a source
of embarrassment, and then the Party has to clean house.”
“Oh.” I restlessly finger Dad’s old Nokia candy-bar phone, which Sun gave me to use. To keep things simple, Sun only saved the numbers for himself, Ai, Wei, Biceps, and Feder, and forbade me to answer calls from anyone else. Someone might think it was him answering, when everyone assumed he was overseas for his own safety. Or worse, someone might figure out it was me.
Me. In Beijing. With Dad’s phone. Going after his killers instead of registering for classes. Trying to implicate a senior Chinese official in the international drug trade. Was I really about to use a bag of cash and a U.S. visa to buy information from a Russian ex-spy? I feel my armpits going damp despite the frigid winter weather. The pistol, tucked into the back of my waistband, is pressing into the vinyl taxi seat and pinching the skin on my tailbone.
“You know I don’t know how to use this thing, right?”
“That you will have to is highly unlikely,” Sun says. “It’s just the last line of protection. In the worst-case scenario, you pull it out and wave it around a bit. Like I said, guns are hard to get here. Chinese thugs mostly carry knives. If they see it in your hand, they’ll go running.”
“Christ almighty,” I mutter, mentally preparing myself for that worst-case scenario—just wave it around. Do not shoot someone. I roll my shoulders out a few times and decide to emulate Sun’s calm confidence in Dad’s plan. It’s like a close game and I’ve got to make the right plays. Maybe I’ll chop someone in the fifth point of the lung meridian.
The cab pulls to a stop in front of Alien Street Market. I glance around at the English signage: APPAREL & SWEATER TECHNICAL SERVICE CENTER, EMAIL FASHION, a shoe store hopelessly named BerFeelny. Inside the shopping center, all the lights are off except for the atrium area, which has a down escalator in the middle of it lined with flashing yellow, green, and magenta LEDs. At the bottom of the escalator is a refrigerator-shaped Russian bouncer, who collects our thirty-yuan cover, and a swarthy little person with a black mohawk, who listlessly hauls open one of the giant, medieval-looking double doors for us.