Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  V-Man. First of all, really glad to hear from you and see your fucked-up face. We’ve been missing you a lot.

  Jules and I accessed the information. Not much history had been retained but we did find some communications between Rou and Ouyang. On January 23 Rou wrote to Ouyang (Jules’s translation):

  I have arrived at the Beacon Street house and made contact with Old Li and Dr. Ancona. Old Li is still being stubborn.

  If you recall, the pregnant-lady house was on Beacon Street. Ouyang replied a couple of hours later:

  Give him a few more days and then proceed as I instructed. Make sure he knows the consequences of being difficult. He will give in when he realizes that we are serious. Otherwise, you know what to do.

  Later, on January 29, Rou writes to Ouyang:

  I guess you already heard about Old Li. There also was a break-in at the restaurant. We are upping security and I am bringing in another guy from Beijing. Please call as soon as possible. Waka waka waka, I yearn to be skull-fucked in prison.

  No reply to that email. Nothing on Zhao or Dong. I saved the Chinese originals for you to look at later if you want. Cuz I wouldn’t vouch for the fidelity of these translations. Your sister is a hottie, but right now she’s a few feathers short of a whole duck. I know you’re both going through something crazy. I hope this helps. We’re all looking forward to having you back here soon to steady the ship.

  I find Sun at the kitchen table, eating chilled cucumber slices with garlic and noodles in peanut sauce out of Styrofoam containers.

  “I bought some for you, too,” he says, gesturing to more noodles.

  “Thanks. I heard from Eli and Jules. Rou was staying at the house with the pregnant ladies. And Ouyang gave him instructions to threaten Dad. I think he had to be the killer. Rou didn’t bring in the guy with the ponytail, the ‘new head of security,’ until after the first break-in at Happy Year.”

  Sun sets his chopsticks down and looks at me intently. “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Okay, we need to—” Sun stops talking and springs to his feet at the sound of someone rushing down the stairs.

  Ai comes through the door pale and frantic, a whirl of cashmere suit and silk scarf.

  “What happened? What—it was you!” he bellows, clocking the bruises on my face.

  Sun assumes a deferential stance, angling his head down and his torso to the side. “Old Ai, I’m glad you’re here. As Xiaozhou was trying to find information about Old Li’s death, he was abducted by Ouyang’s men. I found him and brought him back here. I hit Ouyang with a knife.”

  “He’s dead! Do you know what this means? Please don’t tell me they know you are here.” The Qing silver coin appears out of a suit pocket, and Ai worries it with both hands as he paces back and forth.

  “His people may know who we are, but they do not know where we are. I’m certain there’s no connection to you.”

  “Brother Zhao called me just now. All he knows at this point is that Ouyang is dead. He’s got people asking questions all over the city. You can’t stay here!” He steps toward me and lowers his gaze. “Young Li, I have let you down. I wish I could help you, but now both of us are in great danger. You must return to America immediately. For your own safety.”

  “I am very sorry that I brought you trouble,” I reply. “I already have a ticket to leave tonight.”

  Ai gives me another one of his hard, awkward hugs, not a long one this time. Then he turns to Sun with the kind of expectant look that I’ve gotten from Coach Vaughn in time-outs after botched plays.

  “I’m leaving, too,” Sun says. “You won’t see me again.”

  Ai gives a tight nod. “I have to go see Brother Zhao immediately. Please don’t delay. Go to the airport and get through security. You’ll be safest there.” Halfway to the door, he turns back toward us. “Goodbye, young men. Don’t live like Brother Li and me.”

  He holds my eye for a moment, and then, with another slam of the steel door, he’s gone.

  Sun grasps the back of a chair with two hands, picks it up, flexes his wrists, puts it back down. His forearms and neck are knotted with veins and small, hard muscles.

  “We have to go,” he says.

  “Okay. I just have to pack.”

  I head back to my room and start shoving things into my gym bag. When I snatch the orange shoebox out from under my bed, I immediately notice that it’s lighter than before. And there’s something bouncing around in there.

  I snatch the lid off and there it is: Wei’s lipstick tube of pepper spray. A smile spreads across my face, then vanishes just as quickly.

  31

  Sun dresses us up in foreign-student garb to match the café denizens: graphic Ts, puffy jackets, and knit caps. In the taxi, he hands me a pair of knock-off Ray-Ban aviators and slips on a pair of his own. I pull the cowl of my faux-fur hood across my battered face.

  “Stop here,” he tells the cab driver. As we walk up the block, everyone we see looks like a Zhao operative to me: the guy with the buzz cut reading the paper; the street kid polishing someone’s shoes; the old lady with the mobile coal oven, selling roasted yams wrapped in foil. Okay. Maybe not her.

  Sun waits with his suitcase and my gym bag at one of the tables in front of the café while I go in and order a couple of Americanos.

  “Pretty cold out here,” I say, handing him one. He nods, still looking up and down the street. My phone vibrates. Another call from the 8998 number. I silence the ringer and shove it back into my pocket. Nothing happens for a little while.

  “Don’t feel so bad,” Sun says.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  He shrugs and sips his Americano. “Good coffee,” he says.

  “I just feel like I should have seen it coming. You even warned me: ‘vocationally good at getting what she wants,’ that’s what you said.” The day is sunny, chilly, and clear, the gusty wind laden with gritty sand from the Gobi, which gathers curbside in little yellow drifts. I kick the pavement to get some warmth into my legs. “How did she even know about that money, anyway?”

  “I would guess Ai told her to search our things as soon as we arrived.”

  “God, I was so stupid. I mean, I really thought she cared about me. I thought we really had a connection. But she was just trying to get me out of my bedroom so she could get in there and take the cash.”

  “Maybe it’s more complicated than that,” Sun says. “I’ve known her many years, and I think she does care about you. If she didn’t, why would she leave half the money?”

  “Yeah, I thought about that. And maybe you’re right, maybe she left half because she only needed some and didn’t want to totally fuck me over. But maybe she left half just to make me think that. So the door’s still open next time she needs an easy mark for twenty grand.”

  Sun sighs. “I can see how you feel, but I think it’s not so black-and-white.”

  “Well, if she wasn’t just using me, then why wouldn’t she come to the States with us? I want to understand, but I really don’t. I want to think she believed me when I said I didn’t expect anything.”

  “It’s not about whether she trusts you or not. Young Wei, she does not get to say no very often.”

  “Huh.”

  “You should also remember, she’s already been saved once.”

  I spend a while trying to wrap my head around that one, but my brain is too cold and too blue for that level of emotional nuance. When I interrogate my feelings, I know I’m still more upset that I won’t see her again than I am about the money. But maybe that’s because she played me so damn well. I go in circles like this for a while until I perceive a dire need to think about something else before I lose my mind.

  “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you. What’s the trick to throwing knives like that?” I ask, breaking the silence.

  “Practice a lot. Find the sweet spot between loose and tight. Empty the mind, visualize, exhale first, follow through. Do it the same way every time.
No different from when you shoot a three-pointer, right?”

  “Yeah, but I only make forty percent of those.”

  “What about when you can take your time, no defender?”

  “Maybe three out of four.”

  “It’s about eighty percent when I throw the knives.”

  “So what if you had missed Ouyang?”

  One corner of Sun’s mouth hitches up about a millimeter. “I was prepared for—”

  “—for every contingency. I know.”

  Sun checks the time on his phone. “He should be here.”

  “Should we call?”

  Sun redials and holds the phone up to his ear, then puts it back in his pocket. “No answer.”

  “I think I remember the way to his place.”

  “Me, too. Let’s go.”

  Before we’ve made it to the end of the block, a rapid series of loud bangs has me dropping low and whipping my head from side to side.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  Sun laughs, silent and bright. “Firecrackers. Happy Year of the Goat,” he says. “May Your Intentions be Fulfilled in Ten Thousand Matters.”

  “What?” He resumes walking and I fall into step. “I thought the Lunar New Year wasn’t until next week.”

  “The firecrackers start one week before,” he says. I hear another loud series of pops. “And they end one week after.”

  We turn the corner onto the cement-brick walkway into Gregoire’s complex and are about halfway to his building when four guys in black Public Security windbreakers walk into the courtyard from the opposite direction. Sun clears his throat and we each sort of scratch our heads and casually glance first at the third entrance to the courtyard—four more guys there—and then back toward the direction we came—eight guys and two police cars.

  “Fuck, dude. Fuck.” I immediately begin to sweat as blood rushes toward my skin. For lack of better options, we keep walking toward Gregoire’s building, and the sixteen cops keep walking toward us.

  Sun does his microshrug. “Maybe they’re looking for someone else,” he says.

  The door to Gregoire’s building is locked. Of course—it’s an apartment building in a big city. But given the situation behind us, it seems a little silly to scroll through the names on the little intercom and try to ring him up.

  So we turn around and see the cops sauntering toward us, about twenty feet away. The two in the middle—the older, rounder ones—are holding yellow somethings in their right hands.

  Sun looks up, down, around. “You must be that, ah, acrobat,” one of the older cops calls out to him, and then twin wires shoot out of his yellow something and cling to Sun’s ribs. He collapses on the ground, yelping and shaking. A Taser. It beeps for five seconds and then the wires go limp.

  Moving slowly, I put my hands up. The cops look at each other and smile. The one who tased Sun shrugs. Then the world becomes a vibrating blend of hot pain and sky. A repetitive flapping noise and the flavor of tinfoil imprint directly onto my brain, and I feel my head hit the bricks, but the pain doesn’t register because of the totality of the other pain.

  People have the impression that Chinese is an exceptionally complex language, but in fact, it’s anything but. There’re no plurals, no conjugation of verbs, and hardly any tense or gender. And Chinese grammar is quite free-form. You can arrange words and clauses in almost any order and people will understand you.

  The two aspects of the language that warrant its tough reputation are writing and pronunciation. The writing system is simple: no system. Of the fifty thousand or so Chinese characters, only twenty thousand even make it into the dictionary. Learn a mere three thousand and you can read a newspaper. People tend to know about pictographic characters like 目 (mù—“eye”) and 林 (lín—“forest”), but the vast majority of characters are phono-semantic compounds, which means that they include multiple elements that variously represent meaning and sound.

  As for the pronunciation, well, yeah, it’s kind of a bitch. If you ever get used to the four tones, you begin to discover that it’s hardly that simple. There are more than one hundred characters with multiple pronunciations, including basic stuff like 觉 (jué or jiào) and 角 (jué or jiǎo), two common characters that in various contexts can mean “sleep,” “feel,” “role,” “horn,” or “corner.” And then you meet some dude from Taiwan who says “bǐjiǎo” instead of “bǐjiào” and “yānjiù” instead of “yánjiū” and you realize that shit’s all regional anyway, and the Mandarin you learned is really just a dialect of northern China, where the central government happens to be located.

  All that makes it a bit difficult to understand what this dipshit is saying, since his voice is coming through a scrambling device of some sort, and since I can’t see his face. That, and it feels like a flock of ten thousand rusty metal pigeons is swarming around my forehead.

  “Gǎnjué zěnme yàng?—How do you feel? Is it bad?”

  Pinky, ring, middle, index, thumb. I flex my shaky fingers one at a time in front of my face, then make a fist and extend my middle finger toward the one-way mirror in front of us. Sun rolls his eyes.

  “Hahaha. I’m sorry. I try to impart some civility to these police officers under my control, but sometimes they revert to their training, which is inadequate. None of this would have been necessary if you had answered my phone calls. Because I could simply have explained our mutual interest. I have been closely monitoring your actions since you arrived in Beijing, and I have been very impressed. In fact, I am a friend of yours, and you are fortunate that I found you before Zhao Chongyang did.”

  Ah, the well-connected landline ending in 8998. It occurs to me that a friend of mine wouldn’t need to hide behind a voice changer and a one-way mirror, but pointing this out seems futile, so I just sit there and wait to hear what this pompous asswipe has to say. Sun jiggles the leg of the bare table we’re sitting behind—not loose enough. We could stand on the table and yank out the exposed fluorescent tubes in the ceiling, but let’s be real, that’s a pretty shitty idea. The only other feature of the interrogation room is a heavy door with no handle on this side of it, and if we somehow made it to the other side, there’d still be a station full of cops between us and the rest of Beijing.

  “My name is Chen. Vincent Li was cooperating with me before he was killed. Beyond that, you do not need to know too much—it is safer for everyone this way. It is enough that you know that Zhao Chongyang is a dangerous criminal, and he must be eliminated. Like you, I believe that Zhao was responsible for your father’s death. He has long operated in the gray areas of our country’s society. Of course, he is not the only one. But his lack of moral orientation has led him to excess. It’s really too much. This sort of immoderation threatens the fabric of our society.”

  Chen, Chen, Chen, I’m thinking as he blabs on. Where did I hear that name before? Then Ouyang’s last words emerge from the murk of my mind, and I remember.

  “From the memory cards that were in your possession, I surmise that you already know about his reproachable organ transplant operation. Unfortunately, that loathsome endeavor is nothing unusual for Mr. Zhao. In addition to his prostitution and gambling enterprises, he has become one of the principal distributors of illicit drugs in this city. His misdeeds have left the Party leadership with no choice but to give me the authority to terminate Mr. Zhao. And now I will give that authority to you.”

  Sun tilts his head to the side, as if to get his ear closer to the speaker in the ceiling. He shoots me a dubious look. Did we just get a job?

  “Perhaps you also know that Mr. Zhao’s connections are quite good. If I acted in my official capacity to arrest Mr. Zhao, political problems would arise. So.” He clears his throat. “Mr. Zhao has taken your journalist friend to his offices in the SinoFuel Towers at Dongzhimen. I will provide you with access to the emergency stairwell at the rear of the building. In this way you will avoid the security concentrated at the building’s main entrance. I will arrange a diversion on the g
round level when you are ready to penetrate the office. After that, you will terminate Mr. Zhao.”

  The deep, disembodied voice pauses, and I faintly hear the clinking and slurping sounds of tea being sipped from a gaiwan. Wouldn’t want sending people on a suicide mission to interfere with teatime.

  “We will return your memory cards so that you can pass them on to your journalist friend as you originally intended. We will ensure that there are taxis waiting near the emergency exit. You have a flight to catch, is that correct? You will not have problems at the airport.”

  I glance at Sun. He’s staring at the table.

  “What if we say no?” I ask.

  There’s a silence long enough for me to become aware of the pounding pain at the back of my skull.

  Then Flat Head Chen takes another sip of his tea and says, “Don’t say no.”

  Another silence. Pound, pound, pound. Sun looks up.

  “We will need some things,” he says.

  32

  Huge and squat, monolithic, huddled together so they look like one überedifice instead of three, the SinoFuel Towers ought to be called the SinoFuel Concrete Death Cubes. They’re so forbidding that Sauron surely has an office here, and it’s not even the nicest one. Zhao can’t be that high up, right?

  “Nineteenth floor,” Sun says.

  “Could be worse,” I say.

  We’re sitting in the back of a cab in the narrow street behind Tower B, taking inventory. Flat Head Chen’s smirking cops gave us back all our belongings, along with a couple of balaclavas and a fob for the emergency exit doors. They also gave us a number with a code to text when we are ready for their diversion, a bogus Falun Gong protest down in the courtyard. Then there are the weapons Sun asked for: a police baton, a Taser, and a stun grenade. He has them arrayed in his cargo pants along with his last throwing knife. As for me, I finally have my very own stash of zip ties. Legit. I also have Dad’s handgun tucked into my waistband. And to think I could be sleeping through ECON 301: Fiscal Policy and Sovereign Debt right now.