Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  “I’ll explain as soon as we get out of here, I promise. A car is waiting for us outside,” he calls over his shoulder as he walks into the dark mess of machines outside the ring of tables. He comes back in a moment, shoving something into the backpack.

  “What was that?”

  “This?” He pulls his hand back out of the bag, revealing a small black cube with two buttons on one side and a little grill on the other. “It’s a Bluetooth speaker. You see.”

  He pulls out his phone and punches around on the touchscreen, and then his voice comes out of the cube: “You’re making a mistake.”

  He presses another button.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” the black cube says.

  I shake my head. “So simple.”

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  I follow him out into the hallway and watch vaguely as he tries a few doors. My body’s not much up to the task of resisting gravity, and first I’m leaning against the wall, then sliding down to the cold floor. I sit on my ass and sip water out of the bottle Sun gave me. My neck is sore from whatever Overalls injected me with, and my whole head feels like a bruise, thanks to Ouyang’s big mitts.

  Ouyang. Half an hour ago I expected him to kill me. Instead, he’s the one lying dead on the cold factory floor, warm blood still leaking out of his face, and I am alive in a blurry new universe, my mind slowing to the trickle of the moment, my thoughts failing to discern familiar patterns or comforting landmarks. I close my eyes, squeezing teardrops out onto my cheeks, and in my mind I see the knife hit Ouyang again and again. I see his face go from vexed to blank as the blade reaches his brain, and it feels like it’s me who’s been hit by the knife, and I take some quick shallow breaths and cry some more.

  I’d never met a fucker who I thought deserved it more. I just never expected to watch it happen. I shouldn’t be here. I should never have come here. The words keep repeating in my head.

  “Xiaozhou! Over here.”

  I look up to see Sun wave at me from a doorway down the hall, then slip out of sight. I rally myself upright, careen over to the doorway, and find Sun taking photos in a room that used to be some kind of office. There’s a dead guy lying naked on top of a big desk that has been pushed to the middle of the floor.

  I stare at him, blinking, until Sun snaps his fingers at me and gestures impatiently at the camera in my hand.

  I flick on the camera and start a video. Sitting on a stool next to the desk, there’s a tray of scalpels and forceps and such. And a little baggie of white powder next to a beaker and a syringe. I dip a finger into the powder and stir it around. More ketamine.

  “He was prisoner—probably labor reform,” says Sun, pointing to a ring-shaped mark, presumably from a manacle, on the man’s ankle. I start there and drag the camera’s eye up his body: wiry leg hair, hairy crotch, waxy belly with a long incision down the side, farmer’s tan on the arms, blank eyes, shaved head. The smell is bad but not so bad—maybe he hasn’t been dead for long.

  Waxy belly with a long incision down the side. It’s also used in hospitals for anesthesia. I lower the camera and close my eyes. Aron Ancona, hepatologist at Cedar Sinai. Importing a volatile commodity.

  “No, no, no fucking way.” The haze lifts from my mind. The fatigue vanishes from my body. Ice.

  I run out of the room and back down the hallway to the kitchen where I woke up half an hour ago. It might as well have been a lifetime ago. I throw open the door to the industrial freezer and there they are—half a dozen grapefruit-size hunks of pink meat suspended in steel-lidded jars of bluish fluid. Little wisps of crimson emanating from them like solar flares.

  Sun is beside me, scratching his chin. He raises his camera. “Take a video of this, too.”

  27

  It’s a new technology. Before, you could only freeze an organ for a few hours. Then some researchers built a machine that can revive a frozen liver before it’s implanted in the patient. It’s not approved yet, but Dr. Ancona has a prototype.”

  We’re sitting in the back of Biceps’s sedan, heading back toward Beijing. Ouyang’s goons had driven me a couple of hours outside the city, to an industrial area in Hebei Province, which surrounds the capital.

  “What was wrong with the normal way of getting a liver transplant?”

  “To be eligible for a transplant, you can’t drink. But a lot of people who need a new liver are alcoholics. And some of them are very rich alcoholics. So there is a black market.”

  “So, what—Ouyang was gonna send one of his tattooed teenagers to the U.S. with a suitcase full of livers and dry ice?”

  “That’s why they needed Old Li. His restaurants were already flying refrigerated containers of foodstuffs across the Pacific. Now that Old Li is gone, Rou Qiangjun can receive the livers and get them to Dr. Ancona.”

  “And Ancona will do what? Revive the livers and perform transplant surgeries in his garage?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I don’t believe it. It’s just so sick.”

  My left eye is swollen almost shut, and my head feels like someone ran it in a clothes drier for a few hours; the Chinese Advil Sun gave me hasn’t done a damn thing. Figuring I might be hungry after my period of captivity, he also brought me a bag of shrimp-flavored corn snacks, and I’m munching on these as I try again to work my way through the last hour. After we finished up our little photo project, we stuffed Ouyang’s laptop into Sun’s backpack and called the cops from the punk girl’s phone, placing it on the cement next to her face on speakerphone. “Sorry,” I muttered to her in a stupid moment before we climbed through a smashed skylight and rappelled down the side of the building to where Biceps was waiting for us.

  “So you knew about this all along? And you let me think that Ice was about importing ketamine, when they were only using it for anesthesia?”

  Sun nods. “Old Li told me not to tell you unless I had to. He thought you would refuse to come to China if you knew the truth.”

  “And I suppose you knew that Snake Hands would be waiting for us at Velvet, too?”

  “No, no.” He shakes his head. “I hoped Feder would give us the information. But I had to prepare for every contingency.”

  “So you put a tracking device on me and used me as bait,” I say, fingering the ladybug-size sticky black tag that Sun had shown me on the inside of my collar and thinking back to that awkward pat on the neck he gave me on the way to Velvet.

  “Yes. I am sorry.”

  “What if they had killed me?” I say, louder, blood rushing to my face.

  “It’s highly improbable. These people, they are businessmen, not psychopaths. They only kill when they really have to.”

  “Highly improbable? Not psychopaths?” I shake my head. “That’s bullshit, Sun. Those guys were Grade A psychopaths. They just carved out some guy’s liver.”

  I catch Biceps watching me in his rearview mirror.

  “What the fuck are you looking at? Keep your eyes on the road,” I snap at him in English.

  “Xiaozhou, you ought to calm down,” Sun says.

  “Calm down? After that?” I say. “I’m sick of being dragged around with a blindfold on. That’s the second time you used me as bait—no, wait, the third. You know what? You and Dad are just right for each other. A pair of expert bullshit artists keeping me in the dark as long as possible. Well, it’s gone on long enough.”

  I don’t know if I’m expecting Sun to argue back or what, but he just sits there, looking at his lap, as rain pounds down on the roof of the car. We sit like that a long while, plowing down this wet highway in the middle of nowhere. I glare out the window as we pass through an anonymous county-seat town the size of Seattle. There are the iconic Chinese white characters on the red background of a propaganda banner: RESOLUTELY STRIKE DOWN LAND SPECULATION. Then a gargantuan billboard featuring the garbled English slogan of a new residential development: DYNAMIC CRYSTAL’S FACILITIES ARE OF YUPPY STYLE UNIQUE AND IN HARMONY OF EAST-WEST CULTURE
.

  Nothing feels normal in my body, nothing feels familiar. My flesh is the wrong temperature, my blood is like cold gasoline, I taste it in my mouth with each bite of shrimp-flavored corn snack. Blood—I am aware of it everywhere, those nine pints coursing through my veins, how easily it can drain away, end up on a cold concrete floor, and who am I without it? Dad’s blood, on the floor of his office; my own blood, in my mouth, now; the pinkish fluid seeping from the incision on the liverless man in Ouyang’s slaughterhouse; the blood of Ouyang himself, running in a stream down the side of his face, spreading across the floor, spreading across my mind.

  Blood that Sun spilled. He looks up from his lap and talks to the back of Biceps’s headrest. “Old Ai used to be the bait. He and your dad came up with the idea together,” he says. “The fist and the face. Your dad was the fist. Whenever Happy Year had a problem with a partner or a competitor, he was responsible for resolving the problem. By the time I came along, he didn’t want to be the fist anymore. That’s why he invested so much in training me. So he could be the one to wear a nice suit and charm our competitors. He proposed alliances to them. He negotiated poorly, on purpose. They would swell with confidence. Then they would not notice the development of a vulnerable situation. So what happens to them? The fist. Me. The face opens the door and the fist comes through.”

  “Cool, man. So that’s how you killed people together.”

  If Sun detects the sarcasm, he doesn’t show it. “Killing was rarely necessary. We renegotiated from a more advantageous position. Sometimes I didn’t know why I was beating someone up. Sometimes I knew and I wished I didn’t know.”

  Then he turns toward me, and the look on his face is pure icicles. “For years he promised me that I could be my own person. ‘Soon, soon,’ he would say. ‘When my children are older I will come back to China and settle my affairs. And you can do what you want.’ Then your mother got cancer. He had to take care of her. Then he had to take care of you because she passed away. And I was handling his dirty business in China the whole time. Do you think I liked it any more than you do?”

  Now it’s my turn to stare into my lap. I was furious at Sun for bringing me into this game, but Dad had made him play for years. Dad was the one who had led me straight into Ouyang’s hands. Sun had kept me alive.

  “You could’ve walked away after he died,” I say after a while. “Nobody would have known if you didn’t do this last thing for him.”

  “The idea occurred to me. I was ready to move on from Happy Year. But I thought, Why quit now with only one task left to repay my debt to Old Li? We agreed that stopping Ice was a good idea.”

  I think about Ice, and the circumstances that make it possible and profitable—the same circumstances that bring thousand-dollar handbags from sweatshops in Anhui to malls in Orange County. There’s a lot of money in the States, and there’re a lot of poor people in China, able people with time, with ambitions, with—well, with livers. Still, something about it doesn’t add up.

  “If you’re a senior government official like Dong, or some high-powered gangster like Ouyang or Zhao, why would you get into such a dangerous business when it can’t be scaled up? I mean, how many livers are you realistically going to move across the Pacific? The whole thing couldn’t be worth more than one or two million per year, split among Ouyang, Zhao, Dong, Ancona, and all the goons down the line. With tons of risk at every step along the way. And they were willing to kill Dad just for that? Aren’t these guys already loaded?”

  “You’re right,” Sun says. “Maybe that’s the saddest part. It’s not a good business. The problem was the supply: once you have it, it’s hard to make it go away. Dong had been using Ouyang and the Snake Hands Gang to provide organs from prisons and labor camps to government hospitals for years. But then some American reporter exposed the whole operation and the Party was embarrassed. The regime is so sensitive, they care more about the front page of the New York Times than anything in a Chinese newspaper. So the Party tightened the regulations at the hospitals, and Dong lost a source of revenue. But the real problem for him was the surgeons, the prison guards, all the people who had depended on him for extra income. People who knew secrets. He had this whole organ-stealing infrastructure that ground to a halt. So Zhao came up with the idea of selling the livers on the American market. Just like Ouyang, he resented Old Li for leaving Beijing. They both thought that Old Li felt he was better than them. So Zhao said, ‘What a great way to bring him back to earth.’”

  “Yeah, well. Zhao was right about Dad,” I say. “Bullshit was his number-one hobby. I’m starting to feel like they deserved each other.”

  “You shouldn’t see it that way. Old Zhao, he is a special kind of bad person. He has no interest in being good, and he is not weak and indulgent, like Ouyang. Old Zhao doesn’t spend his money. He likes the power it gives him.”

  “Uh-huh.” I pound another fistful of Chinese Bugles and contemplate all the special kinds of bad person I’m learning about. “So can we get to him?”

  “You haven’t had enough yet? I thought you’d be ready to go home by now. We can’t link Zhao to Ice, not with these photos.” He sighs. “But there is a chance we can find something in here”—he taps the laptop resting on the seat between us. We already tried to access the hard drive, but surprise surprise, it’s protected by security software.

  “If not, well, Old Li did not leave any further instructions,” Sun says. “Ouyang is dead, and we can give the photos of the Ice body to Gregoire to publish. I think then you can go home and I can retire. Tuìxiū.” He says it in the same singsong tone as Ouyang did, with a little tip of his shoulders from side to side.

  “I suppose so.” I touch something on my ear that hurts, find more blood on my fingers. “I mean, on the one hand, Dad was right: if you had told me the truth about Ice back in San Dimas, I wouldn’t’ve agreed to come with you. But on the other hand, it’s hard for me to say I’d rather be studying for my next midterm or whatever. Using my time to practice basketball and chase girls, after what I know now—it just seems ridiculous.”

  Sun thinks it over. “I think if you can go back and be carefree like you were before, that’s better. The way you are feeling about visiting Beijing is the same way I felt about visiting San Dimas: like I saw another world. Watching basketball and doing tequila shots. I didn’t know what it means to be carefree until then. I like your life, your friends—they are so relaxed, so funny. I never knew anything like that before.”

  I spend a minute thinking about this, about Sun and Wei and what it’d be like to see them playing beer pong or doodling in a notebook during an econ lecture.

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel carefree again. I mean, I was only able to mess around playing basketball because Dad had conned you into doing his dirty work for him. It’s not right to be carefree if someone else is paying the price.”

  “Right and wrong—it’s rarely so simple. I say, if you can be free, you should. I wanted to stop Ice”—Sun looks away with a scowl—“to make amends for things I have done. But to say these violent acts are a good thing, I think that’s arrogant. You know what I learned from my martial arts training? Wúwéi. The principle of nonaction. Do nothing, and nothing is left undone. Because maybe Ouyang will be replaced by someone even worse. It’s like the old man who lost his horse—who’s to say it’s not a blessing?”

  “The old man who lost his horse?”

  “Old Li never said that to you? It’s an ancient story. The old man lives with his son close to the border and raises horses. One day his finest horse goes missing and his whole household is upset. But the old man says to them, ‘Who’s to say it’s not a blessing?’ And sure enough, a few weeks later the horse comes back leading another fine horse.

  “Everyone congratulates the old man, but he says, ‘Who’s to say it will not bring us misfortune?’ He was right, because soon afterward his son was riding the new fine horse, and he fell off the horse, broke his leg, and became permanently c
rippled. Everybody came to console the old man, but he was not upset at all. He said it again: ‘Who’s to say it’s not a blessing?’ The next year, a neighboring state invaded the old man’s country. All the able men were conscripted to join the war, and most of them died in battle—but not the old man’s son.”

  “Huh.”

  We sit in silence, looking forward, until Sun says, “You still think what we did is something called ‘right’?”

  I crumple up the empty bag of Chinese Bugles and lean my swollen cheek against the cool of the tinted window, gazing out at the sea of skyscrapers as it begins to take shape in the predawn haze.

  “I don’t know. This whole thing is the worst shit that’s ever happened to me, and tonight was the worst part. But it’s not all about me. These things would still be happening if I weren’t here, you know what I mean? Ouyang was a straight-up evil bastard and he had it coming. And if he gets replaced by someone worse, maybe another good person like you will take out that guy, too.”

  “Good person?” Sun weighs this for a moment, then does a tiny shake of his head. “We can talk about good and bad, but perhaps it is simply because you prefer excitement to leisure.”

  I give a surprised snort. “So? You prefer leisure?”

  Sun closes his eyes and leans back into the headrest. “I’d be willing to give it a try.”

  28

  What is this place? A top-secret Internet café?” I whisper to Wei.

  After Biceps dropped us off at Orange Blossom Hutong with an explicit promise to rearrange our faces if Ai got wind that he’d chauffeured us around Hebei, Sun and I woke up Wei and showed her the laptop. She led us to the thrumming door at the end of the hallway by my bedroom. She opened the first door and then rapped a beat on the second—one, two and three, four—and after a minute, a blinking teenager in sweats pulled it open from the other side.

  Now Sun and the kid are huddled together, fooling around with the laptop. The room is long and narrow, with rows of classroom tables lining the two walls and another closed door at the opposite end. At identical workstations along the tables, other geeks tap away, about a dozen of them altogether, oblivious to the presence of two variously lethal retainers and a bruised half-breed from the land of opportunity. Under the tables, aside from a minifridge filled with squat orange cans of Chinese Red Bull and a large round trash can overflowing with junk-food packaging, there’s enough server hardware to drain the power grid of a small country.