NVK

by Temple Drake

  “Find somewhere closer to the office,” his father said. “All the hotels round here have pools.”

  He didn’t compliment Zhang on having taken exercise. Praise fed complacency. Or perhaps he thought Zhang was lying.

  “I’m sure you didn’t come here to discuss my fitness,” Zhang said.

  His father leaned forwards, his hands folded on the desk, his thumbs sticking up like chicken wings. “It’s your sister.”

  “What’s she done now?”

  “She’s seeing somebody who isn’t suitable.”

  “That’s hardly a first.”

  “I want you to intervene. She listens to you.”

  “Not always. Have you spoken to her?”

  A smile that was faint and bitter came and went on his father’s face. “If I were to speak to her, she’d probably marry him.”

  Zhang remembered the man Qi Jing had been drinking with in the Glamour Bar, and wondered if he was the “someone” his father was referring to.

  “He’s younger, I suppose,” he said.

  His father took out a photo and pushed it across the desk. Zhang nodded. Yes, it was the same man.

  “His name is Chu En Li,” his father said.

  As Zhang studied the man’s face, with its insolent expression, he remembered thinking that he seemed familiar, as if he had seen him somewhere before. In that moment, it came back to him. When he arrived at the noodle place in Yangpu district to have breakfast with Jun Wei, he had noticed a man slouching behind the wheel of the black Vito Tourer that was parked outside. Chu En Li was one of Jun Wei’s drivers. He wondered if his father knew.

  “Is something wrong?” his father asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Zhang said. “I’ll see what I can do.” He slipped the photo into his jacket pocket. “It won’t be easy, though. She’s as stubborn as they come.”

  “Like her mother.” The old man rose to his feet and made for the door. Halfway across the room, he stopped and looked at Zhang. “How’s your wife? Have you seen her recently?”

  “She’s fine,” Zhang said.

  His father grunted, then left.

  * * *

  —

  Zhang worked late into the evening, and it was ten thirty by the time he got home. He sat on his terrace with a whiskey, the living room in darkness behind him. As always, when his mind was empty, he began to think about Naemi. Something had occurred to him that afternoon, not long after his father walked out of the office. According to Johnny Yu, Naemi had been born on September 19th. On the night of the 18th, Zhang had invited her to Yu Yin Tang, and at midnight, when her birthday started, they had been on their way to the Glamour Bar. They had one drink, then Chun Tao drove them to Pudong. Back in his apartment, they danced to a Gloria Estefan record. Later, they slept together, and she told him she was being followed. In the morning, she left early, before he was up. In other words, he had been with her for the first few hours of her birthday, and she hadn’t so much as mentioned it. He didn’t think it was because she was worried about her age, even though she was older than she had led him to believe. It was more as if her birthday didn’t mean anything to her. As if it hadn’t registered. As if she wasn’t even aware of it. But what kind of person isn’t aware of their own birthday?

  He took out his wallet and found the card the Finnish academic had given him. Professor Torben Gulsvig. Department of Mechanical, Electronic, and Chemical Engineering. University of Helsinki. If it was eleven o’clock in southern China, it would be five in the afternoon in Finland. It was as good a time to try him as any. He called the university, and a woman answered. He asked to speak to Professor Gulsvig. The woman put him on hold, with a string quartet to listen to. While he waited, he went indoors and poured himself another whiskey, then he walked back out onto the terrace and leaned on the railing.

  “Mr. Zhang,” Gulsvig said at last.

  The sound of his voice brought back his pale doughy face, his dusty gray-brown hair.

  “We met at the Park Hyatt,” Zhang said, “in Shanghai—”

  “Yes, I remember. How are you?”

  “I’m well, thank you.” Zhang hesitated. “I have a question.”

  But where should he begin?

  “Mr. Zhang?” Gulsvig said. “Are you still there?”

  “When you saw the young woman I was having breakfast with,” Zhang said, “you said you felt like you’d seen a ghost.”

  Gulsvig laughed. “I was terribly jet-lagged that morning. I’d only just arrived. I wasn’t seeing straight.”

  “What if you were seeing straight?”

  There was a silence on the line before Gulsvig spoke again. “I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

  Zhang wasn’t sure either.

  “I’m a scientist,” Gulsvig went on. “I have a scientific mind.” He paused. “Clearly, the woman you were having breakfast with that morning couldn’t have been the woman I used to know. I’m in my sixties, and your colleague looked like she was in her twenties.”

  “Yes, of course. You’re right.” Zhang decided to approach the subject from a different angle. “Tell me a little about the woman you used to know. Tell me about Nina.”

  “You want to hear about Nina?” Gulsvig sounded surprised.

  “The way you spoke about her made a big impression on me,” Zhang said.

  “Well, if you insist…”

  They had met in the Students’ Union, he began, in the summer of 1974, though he had seen her on campus before that. Who could fail to notice a girl who looked like her? He let out a sigh. They were the only Finnish students in their year, which gave him an excuse to talk to her, though it was months before he summoned up the courage.

  “Eight months, to be precise,” he said, “and several pints of beer.” He laughed. “I worshipped her, right from the beginning, but she didn’t see me the same way. To her, I was just a friend.”

  “Did you ever sleep with her?”

  Gulsvig laughed again. “You’re very direct.”

  Zhang waited for an answer.

  “It was my one great wish to know her intimately,” Gulsvig said. “I would have given anything for that. But she was always able to keep me at a distance.” He paused. “There was a kind of mystery about her. Everybody thought so.”

  “What was her last name?” Zhang asked.

  “Kalman.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  Gulsvig spelled it for him, and he wrote it down. Nina Kalman. A different name—but the same initials…

  “Did she have a middle name?”

  “Vilhelmina.” Gulsvig chuckled. “I used to tease her about it.”

  Inside his chest, Zhang felt a sudden, fierce glow. Somehow he had known that Nina’s middle name would begin with “V.” What did it prove, though? He wasn’t sure.

  He asked Gulsvig when he last saw her.

  “Ah, that was strange,” Gulsvig said.

  It was the summer of ’76, he went on—the long, slow days after finals. A heat wave, and a sense of drift. No one knowing what the future held. In the middle of all that stillness, Nina’s boyfriend, Peter, was found dead in a basement squat in Notting Hill. Rumor had it that he had overdosed, but the whole thing was hushed up. Peter’s father was a peer of the realm.

  “The next thing I knew, she was gone,” Gulsvig said. “She didn’t tell me she was going. She didn’t even say goodbye. She just left.”

  “She was in shock, perhaps,” Zhang said.

  “Perhaps. In any case, I never heard from her again.”

  “Did you ever look for her?”

  “No. It was too painful.” Gulsvig paused, as if, for a split second, he had felt that exquisite pain again. “Someone told me she had flown to New York. I don’t know if that’s true.” He paused once more. “The years passed, and in the end I managed to
forget about her, I suppose—until, you know, the other day…”

  Zhang nodded to himself, then asked Gulsvig if he would be prepared to try to find out what had happened to Nina.

  “You really are interested in my story, aren’t you, Mr. Zhang?”

  “It seems that way,” Zhang said.

  “I’ll do my best. Right now, though, I’m afraid I have to go. I have a class.”

  “Of course. Goodbye, Professor.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Zhang leaned on the balcony, his phone in his hand. Thirty-nine floors below, taillights slid along the curving length of Puming Road, their red glow softened by the fog. Going back over the conversations he’d had with Gulsvig, Zhang was struck by something odd. Whenever he listened to Gulsvig talking about Nina, he had imagined Naemi. In every scene—the meeting in the Students’ Union, the drink in a pub near the British museum, the flight to New York—it was always Naemi who he had seen…

  Just then, Zhang’s doorbell rang. He went back inside.

  On opening the door, he found Johnny Yu standing there. Blood ran down the side of his face and neck, some of it already dry and black.

  “Johnny!” Zhang said. “What happened?”

  Johnny grinned. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  Zhang led him to the bathroom.

  The cut was above the hairline, about three inches long. He asked Johnny if he had lost consciousness at any point. Johnny didn’t think he had. Zhang cleaned the wound with iodine, which made Johnny suck his breath in through his teeth. When the bleeding had stopped, he gave Johnny a clean T-shirt, half a tumbler of whiskey, and a couple of painkillers, and showed him to the spare room. Johnny lay down on the bed. He was flooded with adrenaline, though, and wouldn’t stop talking. His girlfriend had attacked him with a meat cleaver, he said. He had bought the cleaver the week before, in the market on Fangbang Road. It had been her birthday present. She wanted to become a chef one day.

  “I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.” Zhang was leaning against the wall, arms folded.

  Johnny nodded. “We’ve been together for about two years.”

  “It doesn’t seem to stop you chasing other women.”

  “That’s why she was so angry. We’d had sex, and she said there was less sperm than usual. She thinks I’ve been seeing someone else.”

  “Wait a moment. She checks your sperm?”

  “Only afterwards, when it comes out of her.” Johnny stared up at the ceiling. “I always thought it was kind of romantic.”

  Zhang shook his head in disbelief.

  “She could have killed me.” Johnny was still gazing at the ceiling, as if his soul had already departed from his body and was floating in the air above him.

  “You should go to the hospital,” Zhang said. “You could do with some stitches.”

  Johnny drank a mouthful of whiskey. “I can’t believe what she did to the apartment,” he said. “She really trashed the place. It’s going to cost me a fortune.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want me to take you to the hospital?”

  “I’ll just lie here for a while, if that’s all right.” Johnny closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Unendurable is the night’s length and a man’s wakefulness, / As a few sounds in the moonlight pierce the screened casements.” He rolled his head sideways on the pillow and looked at Zhang. “Li Yu. My namesake.”

  Zhang said good night and left the room, and when he looked in on Johnny half an hour later Johnny was asleep and breathing through his mouth.

  Not so unendurable after all.

  AS SOON AS NAEMI SAW Zhang’s Jaguar pull up outside MoCA in People’s Park, she knew she had made a mistake. She should never have agreed to go out with him that evening. She should have gone straight home. There were times when she felt her true age was catching up with her, the process sickeningly graphic and speeded-up, like the fast-motion footage of a flower dying. It was a remorseless feeling, something like flu, and it seemed to present all over her body, in every bone and muscle, every cell. Her skin would feel damper, and less elastic, and her hair would seem to lose its luster. It wasn’t painful exactly. It was more as if foreboding or dread had taken on a physical form. And whatever appeared to be welling up inside her was all the more powerful for having been suppressed for so very long.

  They headed east, towards the Peace Hotel. There was a gala dinner to celebrate the annual Business Awards, and she was Zhang’s guest. As they stopped at the lights on Fuzhou Road, he turned to her and asked if she was ill.

  “No,” she said. “Just tired.”

  “Would you rather forget about the dinner?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to spoil your evening.”

  Zhang’s phone rang, and he took the call. As things tilted and she began to fall away, she heard his end of the conversation. Ten minutes…Yes, of course…I also have something to discuss…

  When she came round, the car was parked at the side of the road, and Zhang and his driver were staring at her.

  “I should take you home,” Zhang said.

  “No, no,” she said. “I’m fine. Really.” She hauled herself upright and tucked a loose, limp strand of hair behind her ear. “This happens all the time.”

  Zhang was still looking at her.

  “It’s all right. I’m not going to die.” She let out a little laugh, which sounded strange, even to her. “Do you ever think that death—one’s own, I mean—might actually come as a relief?”

  She should not be saying such things—she was dropping hints, giving herself away—and yet the truth was so unlikely that she doubted he would ever guess.

  Zhang told Chun Tao to drive on, then he turned to her again.

  “I worry about you,” he said. “Please don’t.”

  “There’s something wrong—”

  “It’s my blood pressure. It fluctuates. Sometimes I pass out for no reason.”

  “You’ve seen doctors?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good doctors?”

  “The best.”

  They pulled up on Nanjing East Road, outside the entrance to the hotel. Someone opened the car door for her, and she got out. The air was cooler, almost refreshing. A briny drizzle fell.

  Zhang took her arm as they walked up the steps and into the lobby. “How do you feel?”

  “I need the bathroom,” she murmured.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No.” She had spoken more sharply than she meant to. With the last of her strength, she softened her voice. “Give me a few minutes on my own.”

  Watching her carefully, he nodded.

  Once in the ladies’, she entered a cubicle, locking the door behind her. She put down her bag and removed her jacket. Underneath, she was wearing a black silk top. Hanging the jacket on a hook on the back of the door, she lowered herself onto the closed seat of the toilet, reached into her bag, and took out a flat wooden box with brass catches. She laid it across her thighs, then thumbed the catches and lifted the lid. Snugly housed in velvet of a lustrous midnight blue was a cannula, two coiled lengths of tubing—one rubber, the other clear plastic—and several syringes, each inhabiting its own neat groove. She fastened the rubber tubing tightly round her left arm, above the elbow, then held it between her teeth. The cephalic vein rose into view. She removed the cannula from the box. With a series of deft movements, she attached the transparent plastic tubing to the cannula and unsheathed the needle. Avoiding the scar tissue on the inside of her elbow, she slid the needle into the vein, then used a strip of surgical tape to hold it in place. Once it was secure, she let the rubber tubing fall away and put the end of the plastic tubing to her lips. She turned a miniature tap on the cannula. Fresh dark blood slid up the tube and into her mouth.

  When she had swallowed three or four times, she turned off the tap a
nd sank slowly sideways, her head against the cubicle wall, her eyes half closed, the needle still stuck in her arm. The plastic tube fell from between her slightly parted lips. A drop of blood splashed onto her trousers, but since the trousers were black the blood didn’t show. She remained in that position for perhaps a minute, then seemed to jerk awake. Sitting upright, she soaked a ball of cotton wool in white spirit, removed the cannula from her arm, and applied the cotton wool to the small hole left by the needle. She felt stronger suddenly, and more vivid. She felt renewed. It was like this every time.

  Once the bleeding had stopped, she stuck a round Band-Aid over the wound, then packed the cannula and the lengths of tubing into the box. She would sterilize them later, when she got home. Fastening the catches, she slid the box back into her bag, then lifted the toilet seat, dropped the bloody cotton into the bowl, and flushed. She stepped out of the cubicle. There was nobody around. She stood at a row of spotless sinks and rinsed her mouth with mouthwash. She didn’t look into the mirror. There was no point. It would show her nothing but the row of cubicles behind her. An empty room.

  AS ZHANG WAITED IN THE LOBBY, the dinner guests paraded past, the men in black tie, the women in haute couture or traditional qipao. He was trying to imagine what Naemi was doing in the bathroom. Was she using one of her syringes? If so, what did it contain? Heroin? It would explain why she appeared not to eat—though he had never seen a junkie who looked so healthy. He wondered if he should he share his suspicions with Mad Dog. At the very least, it would put a stop to all his talk of ghosts and ghouls. He also wondered if being with Naemi would get him into trouble. It was just as well he had connections in the Shanghai police. The deputy commissioner’s nephew worked for him, and had become a kind of protégé.

  “My brother!”

  Zhang looked up to see Jun Wei’s pockmarked face, his swollen upper body crammed into a white tuxedo, his blue-black hair slicked back. Standing beside him was Xiang Jin, formerly known as Cherry, an ex–bar girl who he had installed in a modern one-bedroom apartment ten minutes’ drive from his office.

  “You were miles away,” Jun Wei said.