by James Church
5
I had a few leads, but leads are overrated. Most of them turn out to be dead ends. If there was a way to discard one or two before doing a lot of digging to nowhere, it saved time. A good place to start was Dooran Street, where the prostitutes hung out. They were a funny mix. The Russian girls kept to themselves a few blocks away. They were controlled by the Russian mafia, and it was a lot of trouble to talk to them, so we mostly left them alone. Dooran Street was where the Chinese and Koreans worked. Once in a while there were some Mongolians, but they were always restless and moved on after a few months. I hadn’t thought too much about them before, but now that I knew Tuya was here, I’d have to keep a closer eye on them.
During their breaks, the girls of Dooran Street sat around the tea shop, the Koreans in the back, the Chinese in the front so they could be seen from the street. A few of them fixed their makeup. The older ones sat back in the chairs with their eyes closed, a cigarette dangling from their lips. Between that and the steam from the teakettles, there was always a pall of smoke hanging over the tables.
The Korean girls stayed together. They drank tea and barely looked at each other. Most of them were from the North, but there were always two or three from the South. The northern girls suspected the southerners of working for the Americans. I didn’t think so, but it was complicated and led to arguments. I thought they were a sad lot. My uncle did, too. Sometimes he took a couple of them to dinner, and gave them a little money on the side.
The Chinese girls were different. They laughed a lot. They heard plenty from their customers, and they didn’t mind passing on what they heard if it meant I wouldn’t interfere with their business. I knew they had to be careful, because the mayor controlled where they could walk, how much they could charge, and how much they could keep. Once in a while he selected some of them for “conferences” in a big house up in the mountains where he entertained rich businessmen and party members. There were rumors that a couple of the girls had disappeared around the same time the previous chief of police was murdered, but no one was talking; when Po Dawei, the current chief, took over, he seemed uninterested in pursuing the matter. Mostly the girls just went along with the mayor because they figured they had no choice, but two of them openly resented his heavy hand. They were always careful how they spoke, so I never pressed them. They might be flashy dressers, but they knew how to be discreet when they had to be.
Those two girls were usually free around one in the afternoon. They weren’t sources in the formal sense of the word. And I wouldn’t call them informants. They never got paid, and I made sure their names never got into the files. As far as anyone watching knew, we just talked and drank tea. If they casually dropped a piece of useful information once in a while, so much the better. Today, neither of them had showed by the time I got there, so I ordered a pot of tea and waited. When a half hour later they still hadn’t appeared, I wandered over to the elderly man who was the owner.
“Mei-lin sick today?” I asked. Mei-lin had come up to me one afternoon six or seven months ago and asked if I wanted company. I was alone and nothing else was going on, so I told her to sit down if she liked. If she had been sent by someone to strike up a relationship with me, that would be clear soon enough. It turned out her father had been a military attaché in Buenos Aires. When the family came home and settled in Shenyang, she was bored. She was also smart, very smart, and observant. She didn’t want a factory job, and for reasons she wouldn’t discuss, she drifted into nightclubs. One thing led to another, and now she was in Yanji drinking tea with me. Over the months we met in the tea shop, she never asked me for a thing. It was all one way—she provided useful information, and all she got in return was a pot of tea. Sometimes, there were sweet bean cookies.
“I said, is Mei-lin sick today?”
The old man looked into the distance. “No.”
“If she comes in, tell her I owe her a cup of your special red tea.”
“I won’t have to. She won’t be in again.”
The girls at the other tables froze. One by one they put out their cigarettes and walked back into the street. First the Chinese girls, then the Koreans. When the place was empty, the old man began to clear the tables. “Maybe you should leave, too, Major.”
“Something the matter?”
“Yeah, Mei-lin is dead.”
All of a sudden I knew what had happened. “Who was the other girl?” I asked. “Someone local?”
“No.” He paused and looked around. “She was from out of town. Rumor is she came from Harbin. But I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“Too bad,” I said. “About Mei-lin, I mean. She was smart.”
“Maybe too smart.” The old man sat back down on his chair near the cash register. “You want something else? Your other friend, the willowy one that wears silk pants, she left town yesterday without saying good-bye to anyone. So I guess there’s no need for you to hang around here anymore. Probably better if you don’t.”
“We’ll see about that, won’t we?” I could tell the old man was rattled to his bones. He usually liked to have me wander into his place at odd hours. It kept the extortion gangs away. The regular drunks hanging around would usually crawl out when I walked in. But if it made the old man feel better, there was no harm in my staying away for a day or two. I got up to leave. “By the way, you know anything about the new fish restaurant on Fuzhou Alley? I hear the fish is good.”
“I don’t eat fish.” He looked at me impassively. “See you around, Major.”
Back out on the street, I tried to make some sense of what I’d just learned. Mei-lin was as careful as a cat where she stepped. She kept away from anyone who looked like trouble. And I knew she didn’t like dim sum, she’d told me so herself. So what was she doing in that alley with a new girl from Harbin? Wrong place, wrong time—maybe. Still, it was worth pulling the Harbin thread some more. I needed to look at the file on that dim sum place. Probably nothing there, but a thread sometimes turns into spun gold, depending on when you see it.
On the way back to the office, I passed the alley where Mei-lin’s body had been found. I didn’t want to go into the dim sum place yet, but looking around the outside was important. It gave me a feel for the neighborhood. I don’t believe in ghosts, but places talk to you sometimes. A couple of police were standing nearby, probably part of the murder investigation. I didn’t have much hope they would get very far before the mayor called them off. He had a habit of pushing investigations to look like he was doing something, then pulling them back before they made any progress. Almost everything bad that happened in Yanji led either directly back to him or to someone he was taking money from. He’d threatened me directly over the phone when the restaurant deaths were first discovered, but he’d probably heard things in the next day or two that convinced him another tack was needed. Spotting his car peel away right after the explosion in my office hadn’t been a mistake. He meant for me to see him, I was pretty sure of that. I wasn’t so sure he was behind the explosion on our second floor, but I wasn’t ruling anything out.
After looking it over, as far as I could tell, there was nothing special about the alley behind the dim sum shop. It was an alley, like a lot of others. If there was a difference, it was that the police had been through the scene already and trampled on any evidence there might have been. There were some chalk marks on one of the nearby buildings, and in a trash can behind the dim sum place I spotted a pair of rubber gloves of the sort the coroner used. There were five buildings on either side of the alley, pretty much leaning against each other for comfort in their old age. All of them were firetraps, but I wasn’t the fire inspector. A couple of them had windows in the back on the highest floors, which might mean there were rooms rented. Someone might have seen or heard something, but no one was liable to volunteer, and the police were too lazy to go up the stairs to inquire.
All the buildings had back doors at ground level. A few of them also had landings on the second
floor, with stairs going down to the alley. The dim sum place was one of those. The ground-level door had an iron grate that looked like it was never used. The door to the neighboring building was wide open. A man stepped out and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
“You have a light?” I walked over to him. I don’t smoke much, but sometimes a match is a good way to begin a conversation. I took a cigarette from a silver case I carry around. It was about the only thing of value my wife left behind when she and her boyfriend slipped out of town. She would have taken the house, but it wouldn’t fit in her suitcase.
The man lit his own cigarette, then blew out the match and dropped it on the ground. “Sorry,” he said. “Too much wind back here. Maybe you ought to buy yourself a silver lighter.” He was slightly shorter than I was, and looked like he could move quickly if he wanted to.
“Maybe you could learn to be polite when someone asks a civilized question. You’re not from around here, or you’d know better. Let me guess. You’re from Xinjiang and you’re thinking of moving drugs across the river. Looking at your shoes and your haircut, I’d say you’re from Kashgar. But you’re out of your element up here. It’s not as easy as you thought, so you’re wondering what to do next. The people across the river didn’t come through with the advance, and you’re short on cash.”
The man’s jaw dropped open. “All that from my shoes?”
“No, I got your photo when you pulled into town, and your file followed the next day. You’re sloppy, you’re stupid, and you should have given me a light. I might have let you go home. Now I’m going to take you back to the office and have someone beat the crap out of you.”
“What if I have some information?”
“What do I care? Your type always has information, all worthless.”
“This is valuable.”
“I’ll decide that.”
“I’m a Uighur.”
“I already figured that.”
“Yeah, but I know a Uighur up here who owns a restaurant. He walks with a limp. He’s part of my network. Actually, he’s a distant relative. I was supposed to meet up with him, but he’s disappeared.”
“That so?”
“Yeah, he used to run a noodle restaurant, but he didn’t know anything about noodles. It was just a front.”
“For what?”
“Stuff.”
“So, why am I interested?”
“Maybe I could get ahold of him for you.”
“Why do I want to get hold of him? I don’t eat noodles.”
“Not noodles, dumplings. He knows about something special due to come through here. I don’t know exactly what it is.”
“You said dumplings.”
“A machine or something. He wanted me up here to help him arrange things. He said it was complicated and there was a big payoff if I did it right. He wouldn’t go into detail over the phone.”
“I guess he wouldn’t. So you jumped on a plane and got up here, figuring you’d help out your relative. That is, you jumped on the plane after you set up a deal for drugs across the river. Who’s your contact on this side?”
He shrugged. “I never met her.”
“Her?”
“Maybe him, I don’t know.”
“Listen.” I moved in closer so there wasn’t much space between us. “I think there is a difference between hers and hims. I’ll bet you know what I mean. And I don’t want a run-around. Who’s your contact?” I pushed him against the wall with one hand and grabbed him around the throat with the other. “Don’t think I can’t break your neck if that’s what I decide to do. One Uighur more or less wouldn’t even register in this town.”
He gave way as I pushed him, and that made my nervous system scream at me that something bad was about to happen. I moved right in the same instant his right hand came up holding a knife with a killer blade. He would have gutted me like a sheep if he’d moved a faction of a second faster. Instead, he sliced the sleeve of my shirt. I slammed him against the wall so hard he dropped the knife and slumped to the ground. That’s when I stepped on his hand.
“Hey!”
That’s the first reaction they all have when I step on their hand.
“Hey, yourself.” I stepped down harder. “This is one of my favorite shirts.”
“Wait, wait!” Fear was in his eyes, so was pain, but most of all, recognition.
“You’re the guy who ruined someone’s hand in Mongolia; we heard about you.”
“Was I? Oh, yeah. I meant to break his arm in four places, but I crushed his hand instead. You want the same?”
“No!”
I let up for a moment, then stepped down hard again. “Which will it be? You lose your knife hand forever, or you tell me something useful.”
“It’s a her. We never dealt directly. She’s not from around here. Really, I don’t know anything else.”
“You have a phone number?”
“Phone?”
I put my heel on his wrist. “Not only do you lose your fingers, but your worthless hand is going to hang from the end of your arm until the day you die because your wrist will be pulverized. Don’t repeat the question. The fucking number or your wrist, you choose.”
“It’s on my phone. I can’t remember numbers so good.”
I took my foot off his wrist and kicked his knife across the alley. “Get up. Get your phone out of your pocket, slowly, with the hand that still works. If you pull another knife on me, I’ll kill you.”
He stood up slowly, nursing his hand. “I think you broke it.”
“I sincerely hope so. Give me the phone.”
He retrieved it with difficulty from his pocket. “Can I go see a doctor?”
“Are you kidding me? You’re coming back to the office to answer more questions.”
6
When I got back to the office, the duty officer looked harried. “Glad you’re here, Major.”
“Now what?”
“Phone call from your uncle. I just hung up. He makes me nervous, I hope you don’t mind my saying. Something about the way his mind hops around.”
My uncle had told the duty officer it was imperative to speak to me. On hearing I was not available, he left a message that I should come home as soon as possible. It was urgent.
Normally I would have given myself time to look through the files for what I needed, and only then would have called home. What my uncle considered urgent never fit my definition. But there had been enough odd events over the past few days that I was jumpy. Besides, ever since he had returned from one of his frequent trips to Harbin last week, he had been moody, even more than normal.
“On my way,” I said to the duty officer. “If my uncle calls back, tell him I’ll be home soon.”
“What shall I do with this guy?” He pointed to the prisoner, who was leaning against the wall and moaning softly. “What happened to his hand?”
“He caught it in a door. Put him in a holding room. Better yet, call Jiao in and tell him to work this guy over.” Jiao was our best interrogator. Every special office in the country wanted to grab him, but I wasn’t giving him up. “Tell him we need to find out where that noodle shop owner is, the Uighur with the limp. If this guy complains, tell Jiao to hit his other hand with a hammer so he won’t favor one of them. I’ll be back. And do something with this phone.” I tossed it to the duty officer. “Have someone see what it tells us about this guy.”
7
Uncle O was waiting in the small room we use as an office for the occasional client that might come around in need of his once-in-a-while detective agency. He sat behind the desk, a bulky thing with six drawers and a place for pens along the side.
“Uncle.” I looked at him carefully. “Is something wrong?”
He turned away. “No, nothing. I shouldn’t have called. You’re busy.”
Normally I would have been suspicious at this expression of deference to my work schedule. But his voice was not right, the set of his shoulders was wrong, and the spiri
t, that annoying spirit, was nowhere in evidence. This made me even more uneasy than I already was. For all the fights we had, for all he was irritating, he was at least a reliable force of energy in the universe. Now it looked drained away. He seemed broken. Something strange hung in the air.
I wasn’t sure how to deal with this. “Maybe a cup of tea?” I offered. “I’ll go make some.”
He was silent, seeming to shrink away by degrees even as he sat in front of me.
“Uncle,” I said, “this is awkward. I mean, we don’t say much to each other most of the time. But this … this is not right.”
“Oh.” He turned back to me finally. “Yes, it’s right.”
I was startled to see his eyes were red.
“Nephew, look at me.” His eyes searched my face. “What am I?”
“You’re…”
He waved his hand. “No, don’t bother. You have no idea. You don’t know me. Even I don’t know me. At least, I didn’t. But something has happened.”
There was nothing for me to say; he wanted me only to listen. For once, I let him go on.
“This will sound very strange. If you want to laugh, go ahead.” He gave me a defiant look that almost reassured me, but it faded quickly, and he seemed even smaller than before. “I’m sorry,” he said with a finality that made me shudder.
“About what?” I said it softly, for fear anything louder would shatter him before my eyes. I’d never felt so unsure what he was up to. Sometimes he made me angry, most of the time he made me frustrated, but this was something completely different.