by Lis Wiehl
“Maybe living in this neighborhood gives them the incentive to work hard so they can climb the ladder and get to someplace better.” Charlie didn’t really believe that, and judging by the look Mia gave him, she didn’t either.
The white van passed, empty now except for the driver. That meant a minimum of fifteen people were living in what looked like a two- or three-bedroom house.
Mia was tapping on her phone. “This is the app I was telling you about.” She held it out in landscape mode. On one side it said English and on the other Chinese. In the middle was the illustration of a button. “You press that before you start talking and then again when you’re done. It listens to you, figures out whether you’re speaking English or Chinese, and then translates it into the other language.”
Charlie was impressed. “How the heck does it work? Are there real people sitting in a room someplace on the other side of the world, translating away?”
“Not for a five-dollar app. I think it just uses some database to make its best guess. And sometimes what it guesses doesn’t make much sense.”
They got out of the car and walked up the now-empty driveway. The lawn was nothing but calf-high weeds. As they went up the chipped concrete of the front steps, Charlie could hear people moving inside, a few quiet conversations. Then he knocked on the door, and all sound ceased.
He knocked again. “Chun?” Mia called out.
On the far side of the house, a door banged open. A figure barreled through the side yard and then down the street. It was a man, shirtless and barefoot. And flat-out panicked.
“We’re not with ICE. Not ICE! Tell them.” Charlie turned to Mia. “Have your phone tell them we’re not ICE.” ICE was US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
She hit the speaker button on her phone. “We’re not with immigration. We just want to speak with Chun. We are friends of Lihong.”
After she pressed the button to translate, a mechanical-sounding voice began to speak, presumably repeating her words in Chinese while Mia held the phone up toward the door.
Finally it creaked open an inch. Two. A frightened eye peeked out.
“What do you want?” A young woman’s voice. Charlie thought it sounded like Chun.
“We don’t care about your status, or anyone’s status,” he said. “We just want to talk to Chun. We want to talk about Lihong.”
Farther back in the house, people were arguing. They sounded panicked, angry. Charlie didn’t have to understand Chinese to guess what they were arguing about. Their voices were overlaid by a steady chirping. It was the sound of a smoke detector with a dying battery.
Finally the girl opened the door. It was Chun. She was biting her lip.
Charlie went in first and almost fell. Mia grabbed his elbow. He had tripped on one of several dozen pairs of shoes parked next to the front door.
The carpeting was a dirty gray, worn to the backing in places. Laundry hung from a rope strung on their right. To their left was what should have been the living room. Instead, it held a set of bunk beds and an air mattress.
The people they had seen working at the restaurant tonight—plus several more who must have been laboring out of sight—were huddled together at the edge of the kitchen, staring at them. One middle-aged woman was weeping silently, tears sliding down her face. A skinny old man was drinking something from a bowl, his face impassive. His yellow T-shirt said Sarah Goldberg’s Big Fat Bat Mitzvah! None of them paid the slightest attention to the beeps of the smoke alarm.
Charlie took Mia’s phone from her and spoke into it. “Don’t worry. I’m not with immigration. I’m with the police.” He pressed the button to translate. After a few seconds, characters showed up on the Chinese side and the phone began to speak.
Their expressions changed, but not in the way he had thought. At the news that he was a cop, they wailed and hid their faces, or cowered with their arms wrapped around their heads. They looked, Charlie realized, like they thought he was going to hurt them. It was one thing to be feared because someone felt guilty when they looked at you because of something they had done. This was something else entirely.
He tried again. “I don’t care about your immigration status. We just want to ask you some questions about Lihong.”
“No!” said a man in English. Charlie recognized him as one of the waiters. He shook his finger at Chun. “They should not be here. You should not have let them in.”
“But, Feng—” she started to say.
He cut her off with a wave of his hand and stomped out of the room.
“So Lihong talk to you?” Chun’s expression trembled between hope and fear. “You help us?”
“Help with what?” Mia asked.
“We work every day. But no money. The boss, he takes our tips.”
“You be quiet,” the older man said. He had burn marks on his wrists and hands that looked like the ones on the body. “The bosses will know you talked.”
The girl lifted her chin. “They come here because of Lihong. They help us.”
Charlie was counting in his head. With the addition of the guy who had run out and the waiter who had stormed out, nineteen people were living in this small house. Split that many ways, the rent on this dump of a place had to be next to nothing.
“Can we talk to you alone for a minute?” Mia asked Chun.
After a moment, she nodded. “We can go up.” She started up the narrow stairs, and they followed.
At the top there was a short hall with four doors, two on either side. Three were padlocked. The fourth belonged to a small bathroom with a peeling linoleum floor. Chun hooked a string from around her neck. At the end was a key, which she put into the nearest door on the right-hand side.
The room was crammed with two sets of bunk beds as well as clothing, food, battered suitcases, and old shopping bags now stuffed with belongings. A white ten-gallon Kikkoman soy sauce bucket had been balanced on one top bunk to catch water that was leaking through the ceiling.
“This place is a death trap,” Charlie whispered in Mia’s ear. The sole outlet bristled with cords, and old smoke marks streaked the wallpaper above it. The window looked like it had been painted shut.
Since there wasn’t really any place to sit, they all stayed on their feet.
“So Lihong told you?” Chun asked again. This close, Charlie could see her lips were trembling. “You help us?”
“Kenny told us he fired Lihong,” Mia said. “Why did he do that?”
“Kenny always say Lihong lo sow.” Her face scrunched up as she sought the English word, smoothed out when she found it. “Trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“He talk back to the bosses. He break things.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Maybe . . . ten days? No one hear him go, but we know why. To get help. He always saying we not treated right. That this is America.”
“Not treated right,” Charlie repeated. “Are you paid minimum wage?”
Her eyebrows drew together. “What is this?”
“You should be making something like ten dollars an hour.”
Chun looked at him for a long second and then laughed as if he had told a joke. Charlie realized she hadn’t been asking him for the amount she should be paid. Instead, she was unfamiliar with the idea of minimum wage altogether.
Charlie and Mia exchanged a glance, then she said softly, “Are any of you in this house legal immigrants?”
Chun didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. Her expression was answer enough.
It was clear that Kenny could pay them whatever he wanted. After all, who were they going to complain to?
“What about the bruises on your wrist, Chun?” Mia asked. “Where did those come from?”
She looked from Mia to Charlie. “My skin is tender.”
Did she mean she was an easy bruiser, or was she saying her skin was sore from being bruised? Meanwhile, Chun clearly had other things on her mind.
“So Lihong t
alk to you? You help us?” she asked again. “We need help. Help to be legal. Help to be free.”
Mia sighed. “I talked with Lihong at the restaurant once, but it wasn’t for very long. Then about two weeks ago, I guess he tried to come to my office. But I never saw him.”
Her eyes went wide. “Then where is he?”
“The thing is, Chun, a body has been found,” Mia said softly. “It might be Lihong’s.”
“You mean he is dead?” The girl put her hand to her mouth.
“We don’t know whose body it is for sure,” Charlie said.
“How is he dead?”
“A gunshot wound.”
“A gun?” Her eyes darted around the room as if she were trapped and seeking an exit. Her whole body was shaking now.
“Yes,” Mia said. “If it was Lihong, do you know anyone who would want to kill him?”
She clamped her lips together and stiffened her body, as if trying to force herself to be still. She stared at her hands, which were squeezing each other so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. “We do not know America well. He must have met the wrong people.”
Charlie said, “Does Lihong have any family here?” If he did, maybe they could identify his body.
Chun shook her head.
“Is there a hairbrush or comb of his here? A toothbrush? Clothes, even?” With luck, they could match DNA. But Chun just shook her head again.
“Who is his closest friend?”
“No friends.” Seeing their expressions, she hastened to explain. “In China, we did not know one another. And here we just work. Work and sleep. No time for friends.”
Mia’s expression softened. “Didn’t you come here wanting more than that? Didn’t you come here with a dream?”
“We have no dreams now.” She lifted her head to look at them. Her face was drawn, her eyes empty of hope. “Now we know what we are. We are so low.”
And when he showed her the picture of the dead man’s face, she said she did not recognize it.
The thing was, Charlie was pretty sure she was lying.
CHAPTER 27
SATURDAY
Kenny fisted his fingers in the hair on top of Chun’s head. He yanked up until she was looking into his dark, dead eyes. Then he raised his free hand and drew it back over his shoulder. The movement was slow and deliberate. Almost theatrical. As if he were enjoying himself. And judging by his smile, he was.
Chun twisted her head to one side, ignoring the sharp pain as her hair began to rip free from her scalp. There was no way she could run or hide or even protect her face because she was handcuffed to a pipe. The same pipe Ying had been shackled to before she had finally been taken away.
Chun knew that Ying’s fate would soon be her own.
No matter how much she tried to tuck her head, to turn her face away, she couldn’t avoid Kenny’s slap. She had lost count of how many times he had hit her. This blow was so hard that for a moment she saw sparkling white dots of light floating through the air. Her mouth filled with a sharp, salty taste of blood. Her tongue probed the sharpest source of pain. One of her teeth was loose.
The rest of her housemates were watching in silence, clustered on the stairs or standing farther back in the basement. Kenny had insisted they gather around, serve as the audience for her punishment. She was the lesson they were supposed to learn. This was what happened when you talked to outsiders.
Through the one eye that could still see, Chun looked from one face to the next. Feng pressed his lips together and slowly shook his head as if to say, I told you so. Most of the others adjusted their heads a few millimeters so they would not meet her gaze. A few were biting their lips or twisting their hands, but she knew none of them would interfere.
At this moment, all they wanted was to not be her. They would do whatever was required to avoid her fate. The only one who might have been willing to stand up to Kenny was Lihong. And now he was a cold body in a metal refrigerator drawer in a country far from home.
“You knew the rules,” Kenny said. “But you talked to the police. You talked to that woman.” He used the term that meant old barbarian or foreign Westerner.
“I did not tell them anything,” Chun said. “They asked about Lihong and I told them he left. That’s all.” When the cop and the woman had shown her the photo and told her Lihong was dead, she had realized that they could offer her no protection. That the hope that had led her to open the door to them had been a false one. But by then it was too late to undo what she had done. “They showed me a photo of his dead face and I said I had no idea who it was.”
“Lihong is dead because he defied me.” Kenny looked at the ring of faces. “But there are things worse than death.” He turned back to Chun. “You are a fool.” His tone was conversational. “You will soon know how good your life was here, but it will be too late to get it back.” With his free hand, he grabbed one of her ears and twisted, squeezing it like a lemon. It felt like it was ripping right off her head.
She screamed then. Blood flew from her open mouth and freckled his face. Letting her head drop, he stepped back, his features drawing together in disgust.
“Look at her! Let this be a lesson to you all. If you try something stupid, you’ll be punished.”
Chun saw that there was no point in trying to placate him. She might as well tell the truth. Maybe one of the others would take her words to heart and find a way to get free. “We are not slaves,” she said with her broken mouth.
“Ha! Don’t tell me what you are and what you are not. I brought you here. I treated you like my own daughter. But no more. No more. You are a fool. You know the saying. ‘Wait to butcher the donkey until after it has finished its job on the mill.’ ” Kenny let out a sound that was somewhere between a grunt and a laugh. “Now you are the donkey. And you haven’t finished your job. You still owe me money, and you’ll still be paying me back. Just in different ways from before.” He voiced another Chinese proverb: “You’ll be like the freshly bought horse. The only way to break it in is by constantly mounting it and continually beating it.”
He took a deep breath. “And I promise you this: you will be broken in.”
He turned to the rest of them. “Let Chun be a lesson to you. You take what I give you and you are grateful for it. And you pay what you owe.”
CHAPTER 28
Bo’s feet ached. How did so many women manage to spend entire days walking around on their tiptoes? The saleswoman had told her that the high-heeled shoes she had bought were specially engineered to be more comfortable. More comfortable than what, was the question. Instruments of torture? Bo lived in sneakers, both on the floor of the tea factory and off it.
Now she shifted from foot to throbbing foot, a cement wall cold against her back. For over an hour she had been stationed across the street from Warren Paczkowski’s apartment building. She was pretending to check her phone, randomly scrolling up and down. Not making eye contact with the men who walked by and took second and sometimes even third glances. Her new glasses with the thick black frames made her look studious, or at least like someone trying to look studious. She had purchased the clear-lensed glasses at the Spy Shop. Their thick side pieces hid a video/audio recorder. But it was her clothes that drew men’s eyes. This morning she had pulled on the tight jeans, the padded bra, and the low-cut sweater. The heels made her stand with her bottom back and her chest forward. Her coat was styled to look like a snug-fitting motorcycle jacket, only it was made of black vinyl, not leather. It was not nearly warm enough, but she hadn’t wanted to bundle up. Her body was the lure.
And Paczkowski was the fly.
She had prayed and prayed for justice, and she had been rewarded with nothing. Maybe eventually there would be justice in heaven, but she could not wait. Dandan deserved justice on this earth. And it wasn’t like Bo was going behind God’s back. He could watch for all she cared.
She was willing to do whatever it took to get this man with the unpronounceable name to admit the truth.
To admit that even in America, justice had gone to the highest bidder. How different were things here, really? In China, the authorities had beaten Bo and killed her baby. In America, the authorities had let the killer of her firstborn walk free.
She closed her eyes for a second, remembering how Charlie Carlson had brought her the terrible news, knocking on her door just before nine on a Tuesday evening.
“Are you Bo Yee?” he had asked when she peeped out.
“Yes?” Even though she was here legally, her heart still sped up.
“I’m with the Seattle Police Department. May I come in?”
As he took a seat on the edge of her gold brocade chair, she realized she had never before had a man visit her apartment. She was still married, even if she had been separated from her husband for sixteen years. China would not let Bo’s family leave, and there was no more money for smugglers. It had all been spent on Bo.
The policeman looked around her apartment, furnished with other people’s castoffs. Even her electronic keyboard, her most prized possession, had once belonged to someone else in her church.
When Bo was lonely (and she was often, so achingly lonely), music soothed her soul. It connected her to something bigger, to something beyond words. She had found the connection by accident, when she had bought a cassette player and a half dozen tapes of classical music at a garage sale.
Eventually she had also found a church here, one where a good number of the congregants were Chinese. Back home she had not been religious, but just like music, the sermons and the fellowship had filled some of the empty spaces inside her. She had made a few friends, people who told her about places to eat, grocery stores that sold food she recognized.
On Sundays she had started slipping into a front pew early just so she could hear the pianist, Abigail Endicott. Watch her fingers dance over the keys, her feet move on the pedals. When Abigail saw her interest, she had offered to teach her, taken her on as a private student for free. Since Bo couldn’t afford to buy a piano, she practiced at home on the electronic keyboard Abigail gave her. After the older woman began to find it too tiring to play for both services, Bo took her seat at the piano for Sunday’s second service. Her life was a quiet round of work and church and work again.