Beijing Payback
Page 27
I held the tube a couple of inches from his face, which was watery and red. His nostrils were pointed right at me, and behind them, his eyes darted back and forth.
“Listen up. Are you listening? Those are some slick cars in your driveway, Ancona. You’ve got it pretty good here. Stick to your day job, okay? I came here to tell you that everyone involved in your little side hustle is dead. Did you hear about that? Vincent Li died because you and your buddies wanted to make a buck. And now your buddies are dead, too. Are you getting all this or do I need to make it clearer?”
I pulled his face tighter against the door and pointed the lipstick at his eyeballs. He managed to mumble something almost unhappy enough to satisfy me.
“Stick to your day job,” I said. “Or you won’t even see me coming.” Then I gave him another quick blast in the face with the pepper spray, right up the nose. I shoved him backward, and he collapsed onto the floor, wailing, with his hands over his face.
I ran back to my bag, took out Sun’s Lakers cap, and pulled it low over my eyes—probably an unnecessary precaution, since I knew too much for Ancona to send the cops after me. I wandered aimlessly through the canals and alleyways of Venice, coming down off the confrontation and trying to get my head right. It felt good to threaten Ancona, but I was bluffing. If I had it in me to do any more killing, then Sun’d be lying on that kitchen floor next to Rou with a bullet in his brain. But I’m not like him. It had all clicked together when I watched him cut Rou’s throat. Dad had trained him to use violence, and he’d trained him too well.
“Jiāngshān yì gǎi, běnxìng nán yí,” Dad would say. “It is easier to move mountains and rivers than to change who you are.”
Once Sun had made his mind up to carry out Dad’s plan, he didn’t care if Ai also had to die, or if Wei lost her job, or that he or I might have died, too. He was raised on the notion that lives come and go cheaply, starting with his own, which he had swapped for a few square meals. Now all four leaders of the syndicate he had served had died within a couple of weeks: Ouyang and Dad by his hand, Ai by Zhao’s, and Zhao by mine. But when he had the chance to kill the only person who knew what he had done, he let me live. I didn’t know what was going through his peculiar mind when I put my life in his hands. But I would’ve liked to believe that pulling that trigger was as impossible for him as it had been for me. It would’ve been if he loved me half as much as I loved him.
His trail of carnage had shattered my world, and I missed him already. He had shown me how to think about what I did not know, to respect what I could not see. The infinite threads of cause and effect were bound together in knots I couldn’t untie by myself. But I wasn’t ready to give up on figuring shit out, and part of me wished that Sun would be there to help me with the next part of the puzzle.
A competing operation in Seattle. I wasn’t going to kill anybody. I just wanted to not be anyone’s tool anymore—not Feder’s, Sun’s, Flat Head Chen’s, or anyone else’s. I wanted to be my own Victor, like Jules had said, and think a little more critically about the ramifications of my actions. And I also wanted to know if we had shut down the organ trade by exposing Ice, or merely given Chen a monopoly on the market.
Anyway, I had to make myself scarce, and Seattle seemed like as good a place as any other to lie low until I could figure out how much trouble I was in. If it was bad, maybe I could slip across the border to Vancouver. In an econ class I’d learned about the influx of Chinese there, cash-laden officials and executives from the mainland who wanted a safe place to invest their piece of the new China pie, usually in the form of steadily appreciating North American real estate where a mistress could be maintained quietly. Perhaps a better place than Tijuana for me to find something to do.
Then I had to laugh a little when I caught myself imagining the sort of work I could find on the sketchy side of another foreign city. Maybe Sun was right when he suggested that I preferred excitement to leisure. But I was ready to put Beijing behind me. I didn’t want to go to prison, and I’d witnessed enough bloodshed for two lifetimes. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking forward to. But I knew it wasn’t college sports. The obsessions of my old life now seemed as trivial as a television drama, and anyway, I’d been miscast for my part. I knew now that I’d be more comfortable on the outside looking in, moving watchfully, undetected, on the borderlands of a society that made no sense to me, though it contained all I’d ever loved.
That’s about as far I’d gotten in my ruminations when I happened upon a twenty-four-hour coffee shop in Santa Monica. After peering in the windows to check for cops, I went in, ordered a hot chocolate, and pulled out my laptop. The first thing I did was check some local news sites for coverage of the house in Alhambra. Nothing yet—good. Nor was there anything in the Chinese media about Zhao or Ouyang, although VOA had a report about the Falun Gong protest at the SinoFuel Towers. Through a glass, darkly, indeed.
I figured it’d be okay to check my email one last time, and I was glad I did. Gregoire had written to let me know that he’d made it back to Paris. The magazine had agreed to run his Ice piece as a cover story, but he still hadn’t written it. With the great video footage we’d given him, he might turn it into a something bigger: a TV news feature, maybe even a minidoc. Could we Skype to discuss some of the details? Sighing to myself, I copied his email address onto a napkin.
In the bathroom I splashed cold water on my face. My left eye was puffy and purple, and the tear in my earlobe had scabbed over. My sparse beard had grown in wiry and uneven. I could close my eyes and still clearly see Ouyang’s bloody head, still feel Wei’s fingertips on the side of my face. But I’d been someone else yesterday; today I knew so much more, and that knowledge gave me more sight, more strength, more patience. I knew I’d become someone else again tomorrow, though I didn’t know who. Hopefully someone cleaner.
When I returned to my laptop, I saw that I’d just received a message from someone called WSQ1212 at a popular Chinese domain name.
Xiaozhou, nǐ háihǎo ma?
That’s all it said: “Xiaozhou, are you okay?” WSQ—it had to be Wei Songqin. But what if it wasn’t? I knew right away that I would risk finding out. Wei had told me that she couldn’t become a new person just by crossing an ocean. I still believed she was wrong. Dad had come so close.
But I have no idea how to tell her that. I’ve spent the last couple of hours sitting here on the beach, thinking about that and a billion other things, worrying Ai’s silver coin with my fingers, getting nowhere and getting no sleep. Now it’s 4:00 A.M. and I’m still not particularly tired. It occurs to me that this young day is already almost over in Beijing, and the night is about to begin. Somewhere over there, a perfect woman is putting on a mask, a Mongolian dwarf is dragging open a door, and a prisoner is about to lose his liver. As for me, lagging way back here in Pacific Standard Time, I have a lot more catchup to play, so I’m looking forward to the twenty-hour bus ride north.
I like long bus trips because they restrict your freedom. All your choices of potential actions vanish away, and all that’s left is time—time to work through the backlog of thoughts and anxieties crowding your mind until nothing’s left and you just tilt your head back and gaze in blissful boredom out at the world racing past.
I can see the world moving out here on the beach, too, this night uncommonly clear, the stars setting in the west as deliberately as the hour hand on a watch, the ocean yanked into billows by the pull of the moon, an unseeable force that gives the tides their motion, their power to shape and reshape the shoreline, their power to seduce, their power to destroy, their power to transform.
Acknowledgments
The completion and publication of this novel owe most to my guide and coach in authordom, Nicole Mones. Nicole, it’d be impossible for me overstate my gratitude for your support and encouragement. That gratitude also extends to our mutual agent, the indefatigable Bonnie Nadell, and her team, especially Austen Rachlis and Sam Freilich. Your early investment and gr
eat patience made everything else possible, and you also found me my dream editor, Zack Wagman at Ecco. I frickin’ love you, Zack!
Many other early readers contributed their taste and wisdom to Victor’s story. Thank you so much, Sam Simkoff, David Gluck, Brad Basham, Christian Ervin, Kate Smaby, Sam Rothberg, Charlie Frogner, Eddie Byun, Steven Patenaude, Michael Patenaude, Rigas Hadzilacos, Yorgos Garefalakis, Clint Darling, Ismail Negm, Elizabeth LaBan, Jordan Rooklyn, Shannon Yentzer, and Marissa Fernandez. I’m especially grateful to Emilie Sandoz, Dado Derviskadic, and Rachel Barrett for helping me navigate a new industry. And to Claire Chang and my lovely cousin Diana Kuai for their help with Chinese language and history. Huge hugs are also due to Owen, Nels, and Eileen for the Point House and Librarians vs. Barbarians and so much more.
This journey began before I was born, when my loving and dedicated parents, Sidney and Carol, met while folk dancing at the International House in Berkeley. I have grown up with and been shaped by my own special tribe of brothers and sisters—Camellia, Ari, Susie, and Geordie—as well as my soul siblings—Vincent and Breanna Chia. And more hugs and kisses are due to Isaure Maïza-Hadzilacos, Vivien Ong Patenaude, and Lee-kai Wang—it wouldn’t feel right to make this list without you.
Above all, this book is what it is, and I am who I am, because of you, Tess.
About the Author
DANIEL NIEH is a Chinese-English translator and interpreter whose clients include corporations, governments, and arts organizations. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and earned an M.A. in Chinese literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Daniel has also worked as a model in China, Singapore, and the United States.
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Copyright
BEIJING PAYBACK. Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Nieh. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
COVER DESIGN BY HENRY SENE YEE
COVER ARTWORK: YUAN © YUANLAIJSN/SHUTTERSTOCK; BEIJING © DONG WENJIE/GETTY IMAGES; SNAKE (ENGRAVING) © OXFORD UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, UK/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nieh, Daniel, author.
Title: Beijing payback : a novel / Daniel Nieh.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Ecco, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018033459 (print) | LCCN 2018033746 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062886668 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062886644 | ISBN 9780062886651
Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3614.I35626 (ebook) | LCC PS3614.I35626 B45 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033459
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Digital Edition JULY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-288666-8
Version 06122019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-288664-4
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