Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  I kick the knife down into the living room. Then I step back, out of grabbing or kicking range, and take aim at his head.

  “You lied, Sun,” I say, my face hot, the tears already starting to gather. “He didn’t kill my father.”

  Stringing together a series of Chinese obscenities that mostly go over my head, Sun rolls up his pant leg and shoots me a bewildered look. “What are you talking about? What is the meaning of this?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You believe that man?” he cries incredulously, pulling a kitchen towel off the oven handle and pressing it against the twin holes in his calf.

  “I saw him lie before, and he wasn’t that good at it. Not like you. You killed Dad exactly the same way you killed Rou—‘two precise stabs in the chest and a clean slash across the throat.’ You wrote that letter and broke into the restaurant beforehand to put it in the safe. You planted the gun and passport at the massage parlor, and then you must have forged instructions from Dad to get the lawyer to do his part. You planned this whole bullshit adventure. It’s true, isn’t it? I don’t want to hear any more lies. I swear it, Sun, if you lie again, I’ll shoot you in the head.”

  Sun looks up at me with some wonder in his eyes, then goes back to managing his twin bullet holes, working methodically, talking to his bloody leg.

  “You want to know something? I often wished I had never let Old Li buy me lunch all those years ago. I thought, Maybe it’s better to live on the streets than to kill for someone else’s money. I had begun to consider walking away from Happy Year. Then Ice came up, and Old Li refused to go along with it. ‘This is it, Young Sun,’ he promised me. ‘We will be finished with Ouyang and Zhao once and for all, and make amends for our past. And then you can do whatever you want.’”

  He stares at his leg as he repeats Dad’s words, then glares up at me. “It was his idea, Xiaozhou. He decided to go after Feder in order to expose them. For one last time, he would be the face and I would be the fist. I was never so happy. He wrote the letter to you in case something happened to him. It’s the truth. When I gave it to you later, I only changed the last page.”

  I train the gun on his face, blinking tears out of my eyes, shaking my head—no, no, no—but I don’t even know what I’m denying. I know it’s all true.

  “You see, Zhao and Ouyang, they didn’t really want to kill Old Li. They just wanted to bend him to their will. So they sent Rou here to work around him. In this way, they gave him a way out, and they also raised the stakes: they told Old Li that Rou would hurt you and your sister if he interfered with Ice. And what do you think Old Li did?”

  Heat rises in Sun’s voice, and he reaches up to the countertop and pulls himself up to standing on his good leg.

  “Do you think he kept his word? Do you think he stood up for what he thought was right? I came here to persuade him to stick to our plan, but he became defensive. ‘We cannot beat these men at their own game, for they are more willing to be vicious than we are,’ he said. ‘We have to bide our time,’ he said. ‘Wait for a better opportunity.’ Once again, I would have to prioritize his clueless children and their perfect lives. He told me how protecting you from his past was his one great triumph, something he couldn’t put at risk. Your obliviousness was a source of pride for him, but to me, it was a constant insult, a glass house outside of which I had to waste my life, standing guard in the shadows, looking in, pulling weeds. When I protested, when I called him a dealer and a coward, it was the first time I had ever questioned his authority. He was very surprised. He dared to speak to me about loyalty. I was loyal enough to become a killer for him! What about his loyalty to me?”

  Standing in front of me now, his face six inches from the barrel of the gun, Sun spits out the words with a hatred I didn’t know he had inside him, but then it vanishes just as quickly as it appeared. He looks down at his hands.

  “We quarreled. I had many years of anger inside of me. I lost control of myself. I had not gone there to kill him. So I—” His voice quavers. “Afterward, I struggled with myself. To some part of me, Old Li was still my father. It was impossible for me to turn my back on my actions and go seek my own happiness. I thought about killing myself. Instead, I decided that Ouyang and Zhao had killed your father, not me. I would avenge his death by keeping to his plan. But I couldn’t do it alone, especially since they would be hunting me in Beijing. I needed you to play his role, to be the face. I didn’t know anything about you except that I despised you.”

  He shakes the emotion from his face and draws himself tall in front of the gun, fixes his eyes on mine.

  “I guess apologies do not mean much at this point,” he says.

  I stare into the soul of this strange man who feels like a brother, and a long silence passes between us as versions of the past and the future flit through my head like so many destinations on a split-flap display.

  “Sun, why did we come in here? Why not let Rou get away?”

  He frowns. “Like I said, because he would have come after you if he got away.”

  “Not because you wanted to tie up loose ends? Silence the last person who could shake up your version of the story?”

  He shakes his head. “Running from the cops, he was basically framing himself.”

  “But that’s what I am now, right, another loose end? And Jules would be, too. She’d have to know what happened, because that’s not something I could hide from her. But then she’d—and you’d have to—” Salty water and snot choke my throat.

  “Goddamn it, Sun, can you even—I don’t fucking want to shoot you, okay? I don’t—I can’t hate you for what you did, not after the way he used you. But Jules and I would be the only two people to know, and if I don’t shoot you right now, maybe you’d kill us both if you didn’t trust us not to say anything. I want to believe you, I really do, but if I’m wrong, it’s her life, too, don’t you see—”

  I take aim at him, my shoulders shuddering, and I bite down on my lip hard, try to get some air into my lungs.

  “I understand,” he says. “You don’t trust me not to come after you and your sister. I don’t blame you, either. I understand.”

  He looks to the side, away from the gun. He exhales deeply. He closes his eyes. He is ready to die.

  I lower the gun, wipe my eyes, seek a semblance of control over my breathing.

  “I don’t want to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life. I don’t want to risk Jules’s life because I trusted you. But I can’t shoot you. So let’s make this really simple.”

  Sun’s eyes blink open. I flick the safety on and toss the gun to him. He catches it against his chest with both hands and looks at me blankly.

  “I’d rather you kill me, if that’s how you’d play it, if that’s how wrong and dumb I am,” I say, my breathing slowing now that I’ve made up my mind, my heart still going like a hummingbird’s. “I’d rather bet my life that you won’t do it than kill you just in case you would. So if you really are gonna kill me eventually, do it now, and then Jules won’t find out that you—that you killed our father. You can pin my death on Rou. She’ll blame you, she’ll hate you, but she won’t know your secret, and you can let her live.”

  Sun grips the gun in his right hand and looks at it, shaking his head. He bends forward with his other hand on his knee and takes a few deep breaths. Then he flicks off the safety.

  “That was scary,” he says. He raises the gun and fires two shots into the doorway behind me. He fires three more shots into the wall in the living room.

  He wipes the gun down with a dishrag and then wraps it into Rou’s right hand. Then he stands up in front of me, nodding to himself, and he closes his eyes for a moment. He tilts himself forward in the slightest of bows, then straightens up, and I glimpse a sad smile flicker across his face.

  I breathe, slower and slower, closer and closer to normal.

  “You won’t have to look over your shoulder,” he says.

  Then he hobbles down the steps and into the livi
ng room. He adjusts to the injury with each step, moving more fluidly, limping a little less, until he reaches the broken window at a jog, vaults through it with one hand on the frame, and melts into the night.

  35

  The savory seagull-poop smell of the ocean tells me I’m in the right place, but most of all it’s the perpetual crashing and washing of the surf that calms me, settles me, and provides the appropriate soundtrack for my thoughts, which are everywhere. I came west to drop in on Dr. Ancona and decided to stick around until the sun rises in a few hours, when I’ll have to make my way to the Greyhound station downtown. I figured it’d be safer to sleep on the beach instead of hanging around the cops and addicts on Skid Row. It didn’t work—I can’t fall asleep—but I’m pleased to be here, anyway. The Pacific Ocean seemed to be waiting for me, waiting to remind me of its patient enormity, and I feel fairly safe. Somewhere inside I knew I had to come see all this blue-green water before leaving Los Angeles.

  I wiped my prints off the doorknobs and the dead bolt before leaving the house in Alhambra. Lang was still lying on the front step. His cuts weren’t bleeding much anymore, but his eyes were half closed and he seemed badly concussed. I fished his phone out of his pants pocket and called an ambulance, all the while trying to keep one hand over his eyes so he couldn’t see my face.

  “What happened?” Jules asked when I picked her up at Union Station. “Where’s Sun?”

  “He’s not coming with us,” I said.

  Once we got on our way, I explained everything, starting with all that had happened in Beijing. I told her that ketamine wasn’t the product, just the painkiller, and Ice was an organ-smuggling operation with Ancona as the buyer. But we had ended it, along with Zhao and Ouyang’s lives, as Sun demonstrated his deadliness again and again. When I had caught her up to the last hour, she pulled her hatchback over to the shoulder of I-10. She piled her hands on top of her head and stared at the windshield for what felt like several minutes. I expected her to be distraught, to be furious with me, but when she finally spoke, her words were calm and measured.

  “So basically what you’re saying is that Sun is our secret adopted brother whom Dad abused pretty badly,” she said. “And he murdered Dad, and we’re the only ones who know, but we’re, like, fine with that.”

  “Jules, I’m not ‘fine with it,’ but it’s not so black-and-white. What’s that line you sent to Dad, something about holding two opposed ideas in your mind at the same time?”

  She shook her head at me. “That memory of yours? Seriously, Victor, you belong in a laboratory.”

  Then I told her that I might be facing some legal problems. That I didn’t know if Lang would recall my presence at the house in Alhambra. I told her how I was caught on camera at the SinoFuel Towers, and how my DNA-filled blood and vomit was all over the factory floor where Sun killed Ouyang, so it would be a good idea for me to disappear for a little while. People would be looking for me, I said—I just didn’t yet know who, or how hard they’d be searching.

  To my surprise, all she said in response was “Just promise me that you’ll find a way to get in touch, okay? Like, soon, and regularly.”

  “You’re not going to try to stop me?”

  Jules shook her head again. Her gaze remained fixed on the boulevard, and her voice was low and steady. “Victor, after you left, I was completely on my own. I was in that house by myself, feeding Dad’s fish and wondering if you were going to come home in a body bag. Or just not come home at all, like a Vietnam MIA, and I’d just be sitting by a window for the rest of my life, knitting mufflers. I was furious at you for leaving, and I was so anxious that I couldn’t eat or sleep. When I found out the life insurance wasn’t going to come through, I had a full-on panic attack. I completely lost my shit.”

  Her voice cracked a little bit, and she blinked a couple of tears out onto her cheeks.

  “I was in that terrible state when you called me from China. Then, after I spoke with you, I realized that I was having this crisis about losing some money that was never mine in the first place. And I was freaking out about you making choices that I had no control over. I started thinking about Mom, how dependent she was on Dad and us to meet all her needs. She started out trying to save him, and she ended up as his enabler, his audience. And you were the same—you were letting Dad decide what happened to you. Or so it seemed at the time, but now I guess we know it was Sun, not Dad. Either way, I’m not going to live like that. I decided right then that I wouldn’t be the next link in that chain. I can choose my own course in life. Whether or not I’m okay is only going to be up to one person: me.”

  She had stopped crying, and her tears were drying on her cheeks in salty tracks of mascara. She turned to look at me.

  “It’s going to take some time for me to process all this shit about our family. But in some way, I always knew it was there, and I never wanted to face it. Meanwhile, you went to China, you confronted these awful men and learned all this stuff that I never could have figured out. And what you did back there, giving the gun to Sun—that was another risky decision. You did that to protect me. I think you’re fucking insane, frankly. You threw away the life Dad gave you, and you let Sun play you like a violin, all because you had to have the answers at any cost. You had to win.”

  It was my turn to tear up now. I was that boy again who got carried away, who trusted the wrong impulse, and no words, no actions could take me back in time or repair the damage I had done.

  “You were right all along, Jules,” I said. “I never should have gone. I fucked up. I fucked up so badly. I don’t understand what happened. None of it seems real now. I thought I was doing what I had to do, that I was being loyal to Dad.”

  “You men, you throw around these big words like loyalty and revenge, and really you’re just acting like a bunch of baboon males, chasing that adrenaline, thinking with your nutsacks. And don’t tell me you weren’t hounding some floozy in Beijing, because I can fucking smell it in your aura. You only get laid once a year, and trust me, big sister can tell. Victor, I’m glad you want to leave town, because I could really use some distance from all this family shit right now. I need to figure out my life on my own. But look, you’re not off the hook with me. You’re still my family. So be careful, and find a way to stay in touch.”

  I promised to contact her within a few days, and I told her I loved her, that I knew I had caused her to suffer, and that one day I would make it up to her. She told me she hoped I’d have the chance, and then she gave me a hug that lasted for a long time. And I felt powerfully in that moment that change for the better could hurt just as much as change for the worse, and only time could show me which was which.

  I found an old receipt and a ballpoint pen in Jules’s glove box, and I copied her number and a few others out of my phone. Then I switched it off and threw it out the window. Then I asked her if she could drop me off in Venice, but I didn’t tell her why.

  First, though, we had to stop at the Quad.

  Andre and Eli were playing Mortal Kombat X when we came in.

  “He’s here! Victor!” said Eli, tossing aside his controller, leaping up, and pulling me into a hug that smelled of deodorant spray and snack mix.

  Andre didn’t say anything. He just lumbered to his feet with a big grin on his face and bent forward to wrap his arms tightly around both of us.

  I explained that the police might be looking for me and I had to go. They followed me around the suite as I repacked my gym bag.

  “It’s all good, really, guys,” I told them. “I just need to lie low for a minute and see how some things play out. Check in on Jules, okay? I’ll be in touch. Don’t worry, seriously. If the police show up, just say you don’t know where I’m going.”

  “We don’t,” Eli pointed out.

  “Yeah, it’s better that way. I’ll explain everything later, promise.” I snatched Sun’s Lakers cap off the coffee table, dodged into the kitchen, tossed some protein bars and trail mix into my bag, and headed for t
he door.

  “Hey man, hey!” Andre grabbed my arm. “Are you sure about this? I mean, you seem really large and in charge right now, but you’re also wearing makeup and saying some crazy shit. Are you sure you don’t wanna just chill for a minute and talk it through?”

  He had an iron grip on my forearm, like he wasn’t ready to let me go. Like somehow he knew what I knew: that even if I could come back, our lives would never go back to the way they were before.

  “This is just goodbye for now, I promise. Hey.” I reached up and hugged my best friend. “I’m still Victor, man. I’ve still got your back.”

  Eli spoke up. “Holly came by asking about you. Twice. I don’t know if that affects your decision to leave, but it would definitely affect mine. I mean she was looking super nice.”

  I hugged Eli, too. “I’ll see you guys a little further down the line,” I said.

  I had Jules drop me a few blocks from Dr. Ancona’s house in Venice. I stashed my bag in his neighbor’s shrubbery. Ancona had a sleek modern house with a concrete pond out front. In the driveway there was a late-model black Navigator and, next to it, a German sports car in canary yellow. I rang the doorbell a couple of times, and after a minute he opened the door a few inches—the most his chain lock would allow. From what I could see, he was a stocky, graying man around my height, with thick eyebrows and a ruddy complexion. He was wearing a bathrobe.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Hey, man,” I affected a sort of stoned surfer tone. “I found this tube of lipstick on the street in front of your house. I thought it might belong to your wife or something. Looks like a nice one.”

  “Hey, kid, it’s almost midnight. I’m—”

  I gave him a quick blast, and his hands flew up to his eyes as he started cursing. He started back, but I was quicker, reaching in and snatching the collar of his bathrobe, yanking him forward so his chin and mouth were pressed up against the edge of the door.

  “Don’t move!” I dropped the surfer voice. “Don’t make a sound, or I swear to God I will break down this door and empty this tube of pepper spray onto your balls.”