by Daniel Nieh
“He wants us to harass some French journalist for him, and then he says he’ll give us the information we want.”
“Hmm.” She refills my cup, then her own. “And what does he want from the journalist?”
“He didn’t tell us. He said, ‘You don’t need to know. You just need to persuade.’”
“I see.”
“Would you trust him?”
She laughs quietly. “If I were you, I wouldn’t trust anyone here.”
“Not even Sun?”
“I trust Sun more than anyone. More than Ai, more than your dad even.”
“And you? Can I trust you?” I allow a hint of humor, a teaspoon of flirt to enter my tone.
She stands up abruptly from the counter.
“What do you think?” she says, frowning.
“I—I don’t know,” I stammer.
“Well? You asked Sun about me, right?”
“How did you know that?”
“You asked about me, so you know what I do. You know I know all the games. You know you can’t trust me. Right? Look. Right at this moment, you’re feeling a little frightened of me. And also?”
She raises her eyebrows and shifts her weight onto one hip, letting a sassy curve fall into her posture. She tips her head back and parts her lips. “A little excited?”
I swallow dry air. “And you? What are you feeling?”
The posture disappears and she un-becomes a vamp, re-becomes a person. She gives me a somber, full-on look and shakes her head very slightly. “I’m feeling like not working on my day off.”
Whups, I murmur as she clops lightly out of the room on her three-inch heels. Her dissection of my attempt to be cute calls to mind my painful debriefing with Dad after I got my DUI, when I tried to deceive him and he saw right through me. You’re out of your depth, I remind myself. A tuna swimming with the sharks.
Sun walks in, turning his head toward Wei as she passes, then giving me a quizzical look.
“I said the wrong thing,” I say. “It’s one of my hobbies.”
He nods. “She is a sensitive person,” he says in his particular way of making such comments devoid of appraisal—not a compliment or an insult, just a little truth.
“She said she trusts you more than Ai or Dad.”
“Mmm.” Sun looks like he’s doing long division in his head. He arrives at the quotient and leans in to mutter in my ear, “Just remember that she is vocationally good at getting what she wants.”
“What are you saying? Watch out for the ‘no-games’ game? Really?” I throw up my hands.
Sun smiles his tight-lipped smile. “Something like that. Are you ready for our coffee date?”
Café Zehra is a well-lit, pleasant place filled with solo expats and their MacBook Airs. I had thought a French journalist would stand out in any crowd in Beijing, but almost everyone here fits the bizarrely vague description Feder had given us: “Thin. Pale. Expensive glasses. You know, a tight-pants kid.” We are in the Drum Tower neighborhood of north Beijing, but it could be Echo Park. I’m on the verge of loudly asking, “Who’s Gregoire Babineaux?” when a youngish man sitting at the only four-top waves us over. He has a mop of unkempt brown hair and a finely featured face that strikes me as somehow familiar.
“Gregoire?” I ask.
“C’est moi—that’s me.” He smiles and puts out his hand.
“I’m Vaughn.”
“I am Teddy—wait. You!” Sun, mid-handshake, points into Gregoire’s face with a look of shocked delight.
Gregoire cocks his head to the side and puts out his hands, as if to say, Who else?
“You know each other?” I ask.
“You don’t remember? Last night?” Sun elbows me in the ribs. Gregoire bats his eyelashes at me coquettishly, and they both burst into laughter.
“I am so confused,” I say.
“He had the makeup. And blue dress.”
Blue dress, blue dress—my eyes go wide as comprehension dawns. “You’re the brunette Feder was arguing with last night.”
“Yes, yes. A brilliant idea, concocted by a puerile mind. I do it purely out of professional necessity, but I admit I enjoy it much more than I expected.”
“Professional necessity?”
“It’s a clever story, and I’ll tell it to you later, perhaps, but first: Who the fuck is Vaughn and Teddy, and what the fuck are we here to talk about?”
Gregoire says all this with a little smirk on his face. He’s charming, and knows it—expansive, witty, a little unhinged, an adventurer, the kind of guy who could delight and entertain you for a whole weekend of booze and cigarettes, but God, you wouldn’t want him for a roommate. His accent is a fountain of delight all by itself; when he says fuck, it sounds like “facque.”
“Feder wants us to persuade you to do something,” I say. “He said you’d know what.”
“Ah. And if I don’t agree, you will . . . eh?” He makes a slapstick gesture.
Sun nods solemnly, but a giggle dances around the corners of his mouth.
“Terrifique! Wow. Okay. Well, we can’t do that here, can we? My flat is not far; you will come with me there, please. We can talk some more.”
We wait outside the café while Gregoire settles his check.
“I don’t want to actually beat him up,” I say, a little shocked to hear the words coming out of my mouth—how did that even become a topic? I’ve never beaten anyone up in my life. Sun nods glumly. Gregoire comes out the glass doors, pauses for a deep, zesty breath, and then steps past us to a bicycle rack. He fishes around in his satchel for his key then takes the lock off a handsome Taiwanese ten-speed with fenders and disc brakes.
“Sweet bike,” I say.
“Merci. This way, please, gentlemen. Yes, you are new in Beijing, no, Vaughn? I can always tell. So I will educate you. The nice people at the Public Security Bureau, they make sure that the foreign journalist, he is never lonely! Gray bomber jacket, buzz cut, seven o’clock, about thirty yards back and across the street—don’t look now! You already saw him, Teddy; you are a clever one.”
“They keep track of your whereabouts?” I say, scratching an eyebrow in order to surreptitiously glance behind us.
“Oh yes, oh yes. They are very nosy boys. On foot, in a taxi—no, I can’t get away from them. But the bicycle, it drives them batty. Haha. The dress is the same.”
We turn onto a more crowded road, weaving through panhandlers, bootleg DVD stalls, and weird phone booths of sculpted orange plastic in the shape of giant, bulbous mushrooms. The black T-shirt of a Uighur kid selling walnut cakes catches my eye: it’s printed with three English words, SEX DOGGIE STYLE. The driver of a black, tinted-out Mercedes honks relentlessly at a donkey cart driven by an elderly hunchback in a hot pink T-shirt. Gregoire, clearly at home on the streets of Beijing, hardly looks where he is going as he leads his bike with one hand and gesticulates with the other. Sun glides like a ghost.
“How exactly does that work?” I ask.
“You’ll see! Here we are, here we are. Oh, she will be so amused to see you,” Gregoire sniggers. He leads us into a massive complex of eight or ten identical apartment towers ringing a manicured garden.
“What? Who?” We walk into a lobby, wait for an elevator. He ignores my question, but, having come to a stop, suddenly peers into my face with renewed interest.
“You don’t work for Feder,” he says.
I look down, almost embarrassed, until I realize that I’m glad he’s right. “No, I don’t. He has something we want, so he asked us to talk to you. If you help him, he’ll help us.”
Gregoire clasps his hands together and heaves a gratified sigh. “It’s just too perfect.”
We get off the elevator on the eighteenth floor. Gregoire walks us down the hall, fits his key into a dead bolt, and pauses. He looks back at us with a conspiratorial half smile, and then pushes the door open.
“Finally!” A girlish voice with a thick Russian accent. “Did you bring baozi?” Then a scream.
We’re halfway through the doorway; a tall, naked girl just on the skinny side of perfection moves through the room like a dervish, collecting garments and cursing violently in Russian before disappearing into a bathroom with a room-shaking slam of the door.
“Sorry, my darling,” Gregoire calls after her. He winks at us. “Shall we have a drink?”
I glance at Dad’s Casio: it’s not quite noon.
“Ah, Vaughn, don’t be such a good boy. Trust me, you’re going to need one.” He busies himself setting three plastic tumblers, a bottle of baijiu, and a hammer on the table.
The bathroom door flies back open. The girl, now wearing a familiar blue dress, marches up to Gregoire and strikes him across the cheek with a resounding slap. He reaches his fingertips up to his face, where a smarting red mark and a look of surprised glee quickly bloom.
“Ublyudok! What the matter with you? Do not I have enough humiliations every day without you bringing your pervert criminal associate friend to come see free show before breakfast? Fack! Hello!”
She wheels on her heels and turns to us.
“How do you do?” she intones with exaggerated politesse, bows, and points to her nose. “I am Yulia Three. Agency have five Yulia, right now, only two in Beijing: Yulia Three and Yulia Five. Yulia Two is in Milano. Yulia Four is in Bangkok. Yulia One got too fat. Ha! Maybe you are not criminal, but anybody who know this fffffackhat is pervert by association.”
With that, she storms out of the apartment, slamming the front door even harder than she slammed the bathroom door.
“Fuckhat?” I raise my eyebrows.
Gregoire spreads his palms as if to say, Beats me. “Yulia has learned many new things here in Beijing. When she first showed up, she would hardly look a man in the face. Now she chats a lot of bullshit to me because she can get away with it. In Russia she’s nothing but an anorexic punching bag for her degenerate pimp of a boyfriend.”
Seeing something tense in my face as he tosses off this casual remark about domestic violence, Gregoire makes a patronizing expression and says, “Hey, welcome to the Jing, Mr. Vaughn.”
“Wait—so she’s your alibi,” I say. “Feder sends her here, then you put on her clothes and some makeup and go to meet him, and she waits around here. And your government minders just think your girlfriend stopped in. But why?”
“Very good, Vaughn. Now, please, remove the batteries from your mobiles before you bless us with more of your insights,” says Gregoire without looking up from pouring the baijiu.
We pull our phones out of our pockets and I see that I have two missed calls from a number ending in 8998. I tip the screen toward Sun, who glances at it and shakes his head.
Then I flip the thing over and pull out the battery. Gregoire nods in approval.
“Yes, thank you. Feder is slipping me dirt for investigative reports that I publish in my magazine in France. It’s really good information, stuff that could get him into a lot of trouble. Right now, nobody knows where I’m getting it. People are watching him and watching me, and not just Public Security. Normally we meet at his agency—that’s more discreet. But last night we had the urgent thing to discuss. To meet at Velvet is a risk, even with the disguise. If certain people saw us together? Bad news for everyone.”
He demonstratively grinds his fist into his hand. Then he pulls a silver cookie tin off the top of the refrigerator, pops off the top, and plucks out a jar with a brown marble of goo in it.
“Smoke hash?” he offers.
“Uh, no, thanks. Back to the investigative reports—what’s in it for Feder?”
“He’s doing his job. When I write a report, someone ends up looking bad. And maybe that someone has a rival who benefits from the report, and maybe that rival is a little poorer and Feder is a little richer than he was last week. Win-win-win, until two months ago? My magazine won a major prize for a report I did on the Beijing operations of the yamaguchi-gumi. Eight thousand words!”
As he talks, Gregoire rolls a Zhongnanhai cigarette between his fingers, sprinkling tobacco into a king-size Rizla. He pinches off a bit of the goo, rolls it into a smaller marble, and sticks it onto the end of a chopstick. He toasts the marble with a lighter, crumbles it with his fingers into the Rizla, and skins the whole thing up into a neat, narrow cone.
“Yamaguchi-gumi?” I ask.
“Yakuza,” Sun says quietly.
“Ah. So the prize you got—that was a problem?”
“The attention that came with the prize was the problem. Some putain media watchdog in Paris began criticizing me for relying on anonymous sources. No accountability, ethics abuses, mouthpiece for special interests, la la la. Those imbeciles have no idea how things are done in this place.” Gregoire rolls his eyes and exhales sticky-sweet hash smoke from his nose. Then he leans in, opens his eyes wide, and lowers his voice. “So I am quiet as a mouse until last week, when Feder come to me with the most juicy one yet. Some developer gets a big loan from a state-run bank to build a research megaplex for a major German engineering firm. So? How would you like to see a photograph of three men receiving foot massage, eh?”
Without rising from his chair, Gregoire reaches over his shoulder and snags a folder off the kitchen counter. He pulls out an eight-by-ten print and sends it spinning onto the table in front of me with a flick of his wrist. In it, two Asian-looking men and a white guy, all dressed in robes, sit deep in side-by-side recliners. Three ponytailed someones kneel between the men’s legs, their heads in front of the men’s crotches. Behind each someone, a rattan footbath waits patiently.
“The developer. The managing director of the state-run bank.” He taps the men in the photo one by one with a longish fingernail, smoke rising in snakes off the joint held in his fingers. “And? Voilà! The VP of Asian Operations for the German firm. It’s just too beautiful.”
“How did Feder get this?”
Gregoire tips his head back, blows a smoke ring, and then leans across the table toward me with a smile in his eyes. “A lot of times, Feder’s clients will get the stuff themselves and then pay him to find a channel for exposure. But this time? Feder pulled double duty! You see, for his modeling agency, Absolute Fashion? Feder flies in these Yulias from Russia on his own ruble and collects their passports when they arrive. Usually, one or two of them clean up big-time on the best jobs: catalogs and campaigns. Those are the good bets. Most of the others break even on runway crap, car shows, or my personal favorite: the phony beauty pageants out in the provinces. Have you ever seen such a thing? The noble but uneducated proletariat think they’re buying a ticket to the Miss World competition, but ninety percent of the girls are Russian, heh. Yulia Three? She’s been Miss Argentina three times and Miss Canada twice!”
Gregoire smirks again, evidently pleased with his particular association with a three-time fake Miss Argentina. “Anyway. The bad bets, well. Those are the ones who don’t break even. They have to pay him back for their tickets home, don’t they? So, they do what they have to do.” He taps the ponytails in the photograph.
My head spins as a world I didn’t know about adds itself to the solar system. “Jesus,” I mutter.
Gregoire pats my shoulder. “He’s not listening, mon frère,” he says.
“Who ask Feder to do this?” Sun interjects.
“He says it’s better if I don’t know,” Gregoire shrugs. “And I’m certain he’s right! But now my editor won’t run my story. He say we have to have sources we can name, or no go. And you think Feder wants his name in the French papers? So we have our little argument last night, and here you are! To solve the problem! So, please. Do it fast.”
He abruptly slugs the rest of his baijiu, sets the joint to rest in an ashtray, and pushes the hammer toward me. He spreads out his left hand on the table and squeezes his eyes shut. I look to Sun, but he looks just as perplexed as I am.
“Gregoire? I don’t get it.”
He opens a quizzical eye at me.
“You already want to run the article, but you can’t.
So why would I smash your hand?”
Gregoire opens his other eye and gives Sun a bewildered look that says, Can you believe this guy?
“Merde, it’s true what they say about you Americans, huh? Did you go to Yale with George Bouche or something? Look, if I’m being tortured—if my life is in danger—these media watchdogs can’t criticize me for protecting my sources. When they find out what you did to my hand, my critics back in France will look like callous fools, and I will be a hero. I might win the Londres Prize! So for fuck’s sake, just smash my hand! I get my story, Feder get his pat on the head, and you get your whatever it is that vodka-bucket is keeping from you. Win-win-win once again. You see now?”
Everything he said makes perfect sense, although I don’t know why Gregoire thinks something that twisted would be so obvious to me. I shut my eyes and give my head a shake.
“Okay. I get it. I—how bad should I do it? How many times?”
Gregoire heaves an exasperated sigh. “I don’t know. A bunch of times. It has to look bad and show up nice in photos, okay? But I’d still like to be able to fingerblast your mother someday. No, no, I didn’t mean it. Just, please, have mercy and do it fast, before I lose my nerve. Remember, you have the easy part, right? But you are doing me a favor. So thank you, Vaughn.” He gives me a look of sincerity with these last words, then squeezes his eyes shut again and squares up his shoulders. “Please.”
I take the hammer in my hand, which has a tremor in it. I look at Sun, who looks a little tired.
“You want me to do it?” he asks in Chinese.
I shake my head, put the hammer down, and grab the baijiu instead. Clear sorghum liquor, 114 proof. It’s the local brand: Red Star Double Still, about two bucks a bottle at current exchange rates. I pour a good three fingers into my tumbler.
“Gregoire, just so you know—my name isn’t Vaughn. It’s Victor.”
“Okay.” He nods his head and swallows. “Victor.”
I toss back the baijiu. My eyes and my sinuses burn as I get up out of my chair and stand above Gregoire’s arm with my legs wide and bent. I grip his wrist with my right hand and lean on it. He inhales sharply as I pick up the hammer in my left.