The Foreigner

by Francie Lin

  "You should be making the demands," I said dully. "I don’t have the stomach for it."

  "This is for him, you idiot, for his own good. Sooner or later he’s going to be caught if he keeps on."

  "And what if he doesn’t listen to me? What if he calls my bluff?"

  "What bluff? We’re not bluffing. If he doesn’t get out, he’ll be reported too."

  "I’m not reporting my own brother," I said, appalled.

  Angel looked at me.

  "It’s abhorrent, what they’re doing," she said, very quiet, and I knew she would not be swayed. "They’re prisoners. They’re being held like animals. I should have gone to the police with these right away," she said, biting her lip.

  "No. Please. I know it’s wrong, I know. But I can’t turn him in. There’s something not right about all this. He’s just… confused. Or else he’s being pressured somehow. If I can just get him to—"

  She grabbed my arm and gestured. A figure had come out onto the sidewalk; in the flare of a match, Little P’s thin face lit up, then died out. It was too dark for him to identify me, and he seemed disinclined to look around in any case. I raised my hand weakly and said, "Uh… ," the way one signals a waiter, but still he didn’t see me. He moved off down the street.

  "Shh," said Angel. She signaled for me to follow.

  In the rain, people appeared indistinct, vague shapes moving behind a scrim. Little P followed the jagged back street for a few blocks, then turned on Nathan Road and headed toward the harbor. He walked purposefully and fast, through the throngs wrapped in plastic ponchos, then darted across the street, holding a newspaper over his head, disappearing into the crowd farther ahead.

  "There he is," said Angel, pointing. A cab nearly ran her over as she dashed out into the road.

  We followed him all the way to the Promenade, where across the darkened harbor, the Bank of China rose like a prism from the gray sea. The crowd was sparse here; we hung back and watched, in case Little P should turn his head and spot us. A bedraggled seagull huddled beneath a bench, letting out a plaintive scree now and then as the waves splashed the guardrails. If he was aware of being watched, Little P did not show it. He crossed the wide plaza around the clock tower and went into the ferry building.

  "Hurry," said Angel, beginning to run.

  But when we reached the terminal, Little P was not there. A ferry to Central was pulling away from the pier. It seemed impossible that he could have gotten on. All the same, we watched it with despair.

  "Shit," breathed Angel.

  "Do we take the next one?"

  She shook her head. "I don’t think there is a next one. We don’t even know he’s on there, anyway."

  The terminal was wide and open; I looked around wildly. "Where else would he be? Behind the fucking trash can?"

  "Don’t swear at me," she said, angry. "There’s all kinds of levels to this place. You haven’t even looked."

  "Fine." I tore my hair. "Let’s get going."

  We made a cautious sweep of the lower level. The concourse was empty and quiet, rain drumming softly on the high windows, until some passengers from the departed ferry filtered in, coming down the ramp from the upper levels: a woman with a shopping bag, two or three men in dark suits and shirts. One of the men, greased and heavyset, was having problems with a cuff, which flapped about as he fumbled with the button. We passed him as he paused to wipe his nose with the back of his thumb. There was a cut across his knuckles.

  "Wait," I said, halting.

  "What?"

  I watched the men as they put up their umbrellas and went out into the rain. Then I turned around and went up the ramp, walking quickly. Then running.

  "Hey!" Angel protested, but I was too far ahead to listen. An ungrounded fear slowed my heartbeat; it was like stop-time, sounds and colors illuminated with painful clarity. I ran down the concourse. The corridor split off four ways at the end, and I stopped.

  A man came out of the bathroom at the end of the south-facing corridor. I watched him approach, a figure in a shabby black suit, small and neat—too neat, like a false alibi. He glanced at me as he passed by, a look he tried to pass off as bored, incurious. But his eyes locked on mine a moment too long. A single drop of blood stained his white cuff.

  "Hey!" I shouted. He began to trot. "Hey!"

  He ran, sprinting along the north corridor. I started after him, but in a few yards I gave him up and went back in the direction he had come from. Angel was too far behind. This time, I thought. This time I knew what I would find.

  In the dingy yellow-tiled bathroom, someone had left the tap running. I stepped inside; a leak in the ceiling had covered the floor with rain. Red had bloomed in the water, into tendrils that dissolved and turned the water a violent pink. Little P was lying facedown in one of the stalls.

  "Little P?" I turned him over. His face had been smashed, and his left hand was bloody and contused.

  "Little P?" I gathered him up and lifted his torso across my lap, cradling him clumsily.

  "Emerson?" Angel splashed through the puddles.

  "He’s all right," I said. It sounded queer and weak in the echoing chamber, like a prayer rather than an assertion. "He’s all right. Go find someone. Find someone."

  She lingered, distraught.

  "Run!" I yelled.

  CHAPTER 21

  HIS ARM WASN’T BROKEN, just fractured. His nose and left eye were swollen and purpled. Though he looked bad, his injuries were minor. I had brought him back to his room at the Mansions at dawn, so doped up on painkillers that he clung to me as I lowered him to his bed.

  "You’re okay. You’ll be fine," I murmured. He didn’t argue. I thought he was asleep until I tried to get up. Then suddenly his grip on my shoulder tightened and he said, harshly, in my ear, "Meet me tonight."

  I thought he was hallucinating, still caught in whatever transaction had gone on before they knocked him out. "It’s over, Little P. It’s me."

  He laughed. "I know," he said. "I know who you are."

  His gaze seemed to go right through me: cowardice, fear, the arrogance of my heart. He did, indeed, know who I was; he was perhaps the only person who had ever known me, darkness and all. I might have prevented all this: given him the will, paid Poison. I touched his injured arm, not exactly meaning to hurt him, and he cried out. The Percocet was starting to wear off.

  "Meet me tonight at the Admiralty," he said through clenched teeth. "Nine o’clock. You want knowledge? You want to know?"

  I gave him a couple of Percocet and a glass of water from the disgusting little basin in the corner of the room. He swallowed the pills dry and slipped back down onto the bed.

  "Are you going to be all right here?" I asked. "No one’s going to… find you?"

  "No," he said. He coughed, retching a little. "Even if they did, what do I care?"

  A roach made its desperate way up the dirty pane of window, through which the autumn sky showed bleakly, white and gray.

  "Nine o’clock," he repeated. He turned his face to the wall.

  IT WAS still early when we arrived at the Admiralty. The entrance was low and wide and muffled with a heavy black curtain, and yellowed placards taped to the window declared "Most Beautiful Girls!" and "Your Fantasy!" Ambient music spilled out into the street, where a number of pale foreigners wandered separately.

  "Well, this is the place," I said, resigned. Without revealing too much detail, I had tried to dissuade Angel from coming along, but she wanted a little titillation, a drink.

  "Only the British would name a strip club The Admiralty," she said, digging in her purse for the cover charge. "How is that erotic to anybody?"

  The stout matron at the door turned out to be the bouncer and cashier both, and as she took our money, she rattled off a little spiel that was meant to be sexy and suggestive ("You look for fun tonigh’, huh? Our girl lot of fun") but lost something in the bored, dry transaction of money for sex, especially when she and Angel scuffled over the amount of change owed. In
side, the bar flanked the sides of a short catwalk illuminated by blue lights, with a pole at either end, and every once in a while a girl in a bikini and plastic high heels would clamber onstage and do an indifferent little dance. Mostly, though, the dancers sat around the inside of the bar munching sandwiches and drinking Cokes. The place was not very crowded, which gave it an intimate air of soiled hopes.

  I scanned the bar but didn’t see Little P yet. Still, I felt anxious as we took seats and ordered drinks. Immediately one of the hostesses came over smilingly and tried to strike up a conversation. She was very small, less than five feet even in high heels, and wore a G-string with bits of tinsel sewn around the waistband and a tiny gilded bra. Her eyes were smudged with black pencil, and her skin had been dusted with glitter. She toed the floor, then came up very close and said, "You wann buy me drink?" focusing her attentions on me.

  "I don’t know," I said.

  "Oh, buy her a drink," said Angel, who was very interested in the bar. "Give her something for all that effort." She was referring to the heels.

  The drink was a thick, greenish blue liqueur that came in a cracked four-ounce glass. The matron gave it to me on a wrinkled paper napkin and said, "T’ree hundred."

  "For that?" It was about forty dollars U.S. The girl looked at me patiently, expectant. I dug through my wallet: not enough.

  "Angel—"

  "I’ve got fifty."

  Together, we presented the girl with the glass. The little prostitute looked dubiously from Angel to me and furrowed her brow, plainly distressed about where her responsibility lay. At last she drew up a stool, placing herself firmly between us. You had to admire her sense of fair play.

  "Where are you from?" asked Angel determinedly: the notebook had come out. The girl was not very young at all, it turned out; she was thirty-eight, a fact that she stated simply, without coyness, dangling a loose heel carelessly like a little girl.

  I glanced over at the door. A few men had come in, none of them Little P. Where was he? I swallowed a mouthful of gin without tasting it. Annoyingly, the girl had turned her attention to me again. She stroked my neck with feathery touches like gnats and put her arm around my neck, trying to perch on my knee.

  "No thank you," I said, disengaging her arms with difficulty. Angel tittered.

  "I would expect you at least to be outraged at this—all of it," I told her.

  "Come on, Emerson," she said, giggling. "She’s got three kids at home."

  "Just what I need," I snapped. "A thirty-eight-year-old mother of three sitting on my lap."

  A new bump-and-grind had started up over the sound system. The little hostess was into it, swinging her hips and caressing my chest, straddle-grinding me with professional abandon.

  "No," I said firmly, muffled by her breasts, her taut brown body pressing close at my face. She ran her hands through her long dark hair and draped it deliriously over us like a curtain. "No," I repeated. I tried to claw my way out of the hair. "No."

  Piqued, she unstraddled me and moved off in a huff. The musky dark of her skin was replaced by the sight of Little P across the bar, watching me.

  He was alone. He had not hired anyone to come and sit with him. This made me obscurely happy, for it seemed to speak of integrity, despite any other evidence to the contrary. I went over to him in the corner.

  "How are you feeling?" I asked.

  "Not much," he said. His glass of gin was half-empty. "Not much of anything."

  "No wonder," I said, moving his glass away. "You’re going to kill yourself one of these days, or get yourself killed." His eye and his nose had swelled up greenish yellow, and he was unsteady, limp, speaking sluggishly, though his meanings were clear enough. "Who did this to you?"

  "A man named Wei Li," he said thickly. He looked at me through his slitted eye. He was determined to be candid, I saw, but I was so far outside the sphere of his life that his candor was of no help to me.

  "Is he the one who ships the girls over?" I said. "Or is he someone else?"

  His head jerked up slightly. But if he was shaken, he was too hardened to show it for long.

  "Neither," he said, angry. "How did you know?"

  "I figured it out," I said, thinking of the little girl’s face as Big One heaved above her. "I saw it. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I didn’t know anything about you."

  "I told you to go home," he said.

  "Did you really think I would do that?"

  I had the will in my pocket, worn and tattered by now. I took it out and threw it down on the table.

  "It’s the will," I said as he flicked his eyes at me.

  He frowned. "Why the hell is it… ?"

  "I’ve had it with me. I lied to you about the lawyer. I admit it, all right? And I’m not proud of it. But I wanted something from you."

  As he leaned forward to take the envelope, I grabbed it back and held it beyond his reach.

  "And I still want something from you."

  He watched me, the first flare of greed and surprise quenched by caution, suspicion. "What?"

  "I don’t like you," I said. "I might as well say it. But it’s my obligation to love you. I doubt I could stop even if I tried. So you listen to me." I pulled my chair closer.

  "I’ve got pictures," I said quietly. Angel was watching us; I avoided looking in her direction. "I’ve got pictures of the girls. I’ve got pictures of you smuggling the girls in. I’m holding off on reporting Uncle until we get you out of this. You’ve got a month."

  I slid the envelope back toward him. "I want you to put the sale of the Remada in motion. Sell it, and get out of here. Get rid of any documentation that links you to the Palace. You can deposit any checks in an account under my name if you think they’ll be trying to track you down. I’ll help you any way I can. I just want you to start over, Little P. Take the money and start over."

  He looked at me mazily, concentrating very hard. Suddenly he laughed, an ugly, abrasive sound. "And where am I supposed to go?" he asked.

  "Anywhere! Bali! South America! Wherever you want. Just start over."

  But he was already shaking his head. He didn’t say anything immediately, only motioned for another drink from the bartender. I didn’t stop him. I told myself I didn’t care if he drank himself to death—if his heart slowed, growing colder and then stopping altogether. It was what he wanted, apparently. Sex, exploitation—he preferred these things to the chance my mother was offering him through the inheritance.

  "You remember when I ran away? That day?" he asked suddenly.

  "Sort of," I said, impatient. Some of the old bitterness returned as I recalled the morning he left. My mother had run alongside the cab knocking frantically at the windows as he disappeared.

  "I used to dream about that day," said Little P. "Still dream about it. Her face all bloated with tears. She was knocking and knocking on the window."

  It was an unexpected admission; I had thought he’d forgotten about the way she doted on him.

  "I’ve been trying to explain it to you ever since you got here," he said. "I know what you think. You think I’m a punk-ass loser who fucked you and Mother ten times over. But when I left, I had good intentions. I was stupid, but I was never a complete prick. I just wanted to touch the world. I wanted to know what there was to be afraid of. You and her—the world was always out to get you. Felt like living in permanent lockdown, permanent fear. I still have nightmares I’m being chased through the motel. Round and round, room after room. When I turn around, though—isn’t anyone there. But I’m still afraid. You understand me? That’s the legacy she left behind. Terror. Weakness." He flapped the envelope in my face. "This is the least she owes me."

  He drank off a finger of gin and put the glass down abruptly. His lip jerked with that incessant tic. It occurred to me that I had seen Little P drink before but had never seen him drunk.

  "So I went to China, and that was a head job. The school was a front. I had no income from day one."

  "You sent us letters ab
out your students for a whole year."

  "Fake," he said. "The ’school’ took my filing fee and disappeared. The office I paid at was gone when I went back for work the next day. All the furniture was still there, no people. I latched on to some other foreigners and traveled with them for a while. It was okay. No, that’s a lie; it wasn’t okay. But I wanted to learn, and I learned. You want to know what degradation is?" He laughed. It sounded like he was choking. "The most twisted, deformed, mutilated man with no arms or legs, lying in the middle of a busy street and nobody stopping, nobody blinking an eye. A five-year-old kid with a baby begging on a train platform and having a crippled woman in a chair push her down, slap her for moving in on her turf." He shrugged. "And that’s just the tip of the volcano in a place like that. I got out as soon as I could. Went to Taiwan."

  He rattled the ice in his glass and signaled for another.

  "I thought Uncle could help me without involving you and Mom. I went to see him totally unannounced, and he gave me a job. He sponsored me for a work visa. He let me stay with him until I made enough to move out on my own. He was good to me. He was good to everyone," he said. "That was part of the problem."

  He shook out a cigarette. One of the dancers came up and lit it for him, which he barely acknowledged with a wave.

  "For a long time I didn’t know exactly what the Palace did. I mean, I knew it was a karaoke bar, with girls, but the girls were legitimate. The economy was better back then. Uncle and his family weren’t lucky enough to invest a lot when the index shot up. But everyone was feeling the rush of the boom, and when I got there, the Palace was swinging. So I never had any reason to think about the business at all.

  "Later on, stuff tapered off—not drastically, but enough so that we ended up short one year. Nothing to worry about. If it was just Uncle acting alone, the Palace wouldn’t have changed. But Poison complained. He thought it was the hostesses bleeding us; they got good contracts, fucking Coco Chanel wages. But they were hard to deal with: bitchy, picky. The Palace was high-class then. Uncle wanted to be fair.