by Temple Drake
“I’m sorry to be calling so early,” Gulsvig said. “I couldn’t wait any longer.”
Gulsvig told him that although there was some evidence to suggest that Nina had studied in England—the University of London had a record of her enrollment—he could find no trace of her in Finland. No trace whatsoever. She wasn’t currently registered as a voter. In fact, she never had been. She didn’t have a social security number or a driving license. She had never paid tax. He hadn’t even been able to find a birth certificate for her—or a death certificate, for that matter.
“I’m utterly bewildered,” Gulsvig concluded. “It’s as if she didn’t exist outside my knowledge of her, and that makes me feel like I imagined her. Like I imagined the whole thing.”
The darkness in Zhang’s bedroom pulsed and prickled. Dawn was still half an hour away.
“Last time we spoke,” he said, “you told me Nina’s boyfriend died.”
“What about it?” Gulsvig said.
“I don’t know.” Zhang was still trying to think. “In all the time you knew her, did you ever feel you might be in danger?”
There was a silence on the other end.
“In danger,” Gulsvig said at last, and slowly, as if to taste the words, or test their relevance. “From her, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you ask?”
“A friend of mine warned me against Naemi,” Zhang said, “and now he’s dead.”
Another silence.
“It was an accident,” Zhang said. “He fell.”
“But Mr. Zhang,” Gulsvig said, “Nina and Naemi are two completely different people.”
“I know. But there seem to be certain—similarities…”
“You think they’re connected in some way?”
“I don’t know. I can’t prove anything.” Zhang paused. “But you didn’t answer my question. Did you ever feel you might be in danger?”
“Actually, there was one time,” Gulsvig said.
At the end of their second year at university, he and Nina had flown back to Helsinki for the summer holidays. Not long after they arrived, a friend hosted a party at his parents’ villa, which was on a small island on the outskirts of the city. Like everyone that evening, he drank too much. Towards midnight, he found himself sitting on a wooden jetty, looking out over the Gulf of Finland. Since he was some distance from the house, he assumed he was alone, but then a movement in the half-light had him glancing to his left. A blonde girl in a white top stood at the water’s edge. His heart rose up inside him, and he called out to her.
“Nina?”
Her face turned in his direction. “Torben? Is that you?”
She came along the beach and climbed up onto the jetty and sat down next to him, her legs dangling over the water. The night seemed to sharpen into focus, and he had the sudden, keen sense that he was at the heart of things, the very center of the world. This was all her doing. He wondered what it would be like to have that kind of power.
“Sorry if I interrupted,” he said. “Did you want to be alone?”
“It’s all right.” She looked at him sideways, through her hair. “What are you doing out here?”
“Sometimes things get a bit much for me and I have to get away.”
“I know that feeling.” She was wearing a miniskirt, and her hands gripped the edge of the jetty, on either side of her bare legs. “But I often feel lonely too. I can’t seem to get the balance right.”
“How are things with Peter?” He felt he had to ask. He would not be a proper friend to her if there were parts of her life that he refused to address, or even countenance.
“Peter.” Her voice was amused, but also despairing.
“Do you miss him?”
“Sometimes.” She peered down into the water. “The sex is good—when he’s not too stoned, that is.”
Listening to her talk about her love life was the most hateful part of the role he had devised for himself, but he was her confidant, and her adviser. It was the price he had to pay.
“He wants too much from me,” she said.
“How do you mean?”
“He can’t seem to get close enough. Sometimes it’s as if he wants to climb inside my skin.” She gave a little shudder.
Torben found Peter arrogant and condescending—Peter came from an aristocratic English family—and he was secretly hoping that the relationship might soon be over, though he was aware that there would be other Peters, and aware also that he would never be among them. But perhaps he could find some satisfaction in the thought that he might outlast one of her lovers, and that he might even, in his own modest way, outlast them all.
“I spoke to him earlier, on the phone,” Nina was saying. “He wants to know where I am, and who I’m with. He wants me to be with him all the time.”
“Sounds claustrophobic,” Torben said—though he could imagine wanting exactly the same thing.
“It makes me wish he was out of the way.” She turned to him for the first time since she had sat down. Her eyes were black and silver, and there was a smell of carrion suddenly, as if something was decaying nearby. “Have you ever had the feeling that someone is so close,” she went on, “that you might have to kill that person just so you can breathe?”
Kill that person.
The night stepped back. In that moment, it seemed to him that she wasn’t a human being at all. She was an animal, pretending to be human. He didn’t know where the idea had come from, only that it was there, and it was so vivid, so present, that he felt at risk. Like prey. She must have seen something in his face because she spoke again.
“I’m sorry, Torben. Did I frighten you?”
“A little, yes.” It was probably a gamble to admit it, but somehow he had to tell the truth.
She gazed out across the water. Though it was the middle of the night, the sky above the horizon was a pale blue that had some green in it, like the flames in a gas fire. She looked so sad just then that he wished he could put an arm round her, but he was worried she might misinterpret it.
“Don’t stop being my friend,” she said in a low voice.
“I’ll never stop,” he said. “I couldn’t.”
She faced him again, and whatever had seemed inhuman or primeval was gone. “I have this secret. I can’t tell you what it is. I can’t tell anyone.” She glanced over her shoulder, towards the house, as if to make sure nobody was listening. “Some people sense it. They become curious. ‘Tell me your secret,’ they say. ‘I’ll keep it to myself. I promise.’ And I’m tempted, I’m so tempted—it would be such a weight off me—but I can’t. The consequences would be—well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. There would be no going back, in any case. And so I’m forced to do things I don’t want to do. To protect myself.” She sighed, then looked down into her lap. “There’s no peace.”
She wouldn’t say any more. In fact, he suspected that she felt she might already have said too much. It was in the calculating glance she gave him. What she had told him was so vague, though, that he couldn’t make any sense of it, and he put it down to the anarchic, off-kilter atmosphere of those long, white summer nights in Finland. People would do and say the most extraordinary things.
“I’ll always be there for you,” he told her. “You can tell me as much or as little as you like. It’s up to you.”
“You’re a good friend,” she said. “I don’t deserve you.” She reached out and ruffled his hair, then she jumped to her feet. “We should go back to the party, don’t you think?”
Zhang moved his phone from one ear to the other. Outside, it was beginning to get light. Gulsvig had talked for fifteen minutes without a break.
“To return to your question,” Gulsvig went on, “I wasn’t in danger exactly, but I did sense a kind of threat. There were borders and limits, and I knew I couldn’t step over them.
Maybe other people had, though—in the past.”
“You think that’s what happened to Peter?”
“Who can say? Whatever the truth of it, her wish was granted. It wasn’t long before he was out of the way.” Gulsvig paused once more, and when he spoke again he sounded different. Shaken, or even haunted. “When she told me, a year later, that Peter had died, it felt like something she had prepared me for. Warned me about.”
“How do you mean?”
“People died around her. Perhaps that was what she’d been trying to tell me.”
Zhang stood up and walked to the window. A chill October rain was falling on the city. “You’re sure there’s no record of her in Finland?”
“Not that I can find.”
“Well, if you learn anything new—”
“Of course,” Gulsvig said. “Mr. Zhang, I’m sorry, but it’s after midnight here. I should go to bed.”
“Sleep well, Professor,” Zhang said. “And thank you for calling.”
Aware that Naemi would soon be returning to Shanghai—she had already been gone for seven days—he kept replaying his phone call with Gulsvig. He would like to have dismissed the story as an instance of midsummer madness, as Gulsvig had, but almost everything the professor had told him had found some correlation in his own recent experience. The young woman Gulsvig had described was a young woman Zhang recognized. She was Nina, but she was also, somehow, Naemi. How could two women from completely different eras have so much in common? Why did they share the same preoccupations, the same anxieties? And why did they express themselves in such a similar way? Those words—protect myself—were eerily familiar. Could they be mother and daughter after all? Naemi had told him her mother was dead, but Gulsvig had said there was no death certificate for Nina. What had happened to her, then? How was it possible for somebody to leave so little trace of herself? Could Naemi have had a hand in her disappearance? Perhaps there had been some terrible accident or tragedy. Perhaps there had even been a crime. People died around her. Was this the secret she carried with her, the secret she could not reveal?
THE PHILIPPINE AIRLINES FLIGHT TO MANILA was only half full, and Naemi had three seats to herself. She put her headphones on and sat back with her eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. Go to hell. They were the last words she had heard Mad Dog say. Once again, she saw him slumped against a brick wall in Hongkou district. As soon as she walked away, she had known what it would mean. She would have to leave the city. The country too, probably. When she returned to her apartment, she fast-tracked an order for new documents. She needed to prepare for another life. But there was something she wanted to look into first. It had to do with Zhang’s sister’s lover, Chu En Li.
On the night of the Business Awards dinner, Zhang’s friend Wang Jun Wei had started talking to her. His face was flushed, and his movements were slow and fumbling, like a lobster in a tank. He had been drinking heavily. He began to boast about a special favor he had done for Zhang. Something to do with Zhang’s sister. He leaned in close, his breathing arduous, as though he had been running. She had been sleeping with his driver, Chu En Li, he said. It had become a problem for Zhang’s family, especially his father, but he, Jun Wei, had found a solution.
“What kind of solution?” she asked.
He leaned closer still, and spoke into her ear. “I sent him to Manila.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought it might be something more—I don’t know—extreme.”
Straightening up, he looked at her steadily. “Like what?”
“Life is much more fragile than we think.”
His gaze lasted a moment longer, then he tipped his head back, his mouth wide open, his eyes squeezed shut. She realized that he was laughing.
Later that same night, in an attempt to follow up on what she had learned, she searched Zhang’s apartment while he was asleep. In the pocket of his suit jacket, she found a picture of the man she had seen with Qi Jing in the Glamour Bar. Assuming this was Chu En Li, she took a photo of the picture with her phone. The following evening, back in her own apartment, she spent several hours on WeChat, hacking into a number of different accounts, including that of Zhang’s sister. Qi Jing had posted photos of herself and Chu En Li together. She had also referred to their recent, cruel separation. She had used emojis: a face with a down-turned mouth, a heart broken into jagged pieces, a spray of tears…
Once in Manila, it only took Naemi a day to track Chu En Li down to a modest hotel in the city center, not far from Luneta Park. He was renting a room on the third floor, facing the street. Half hidden by the trees on the other side of the road, she had watched his plate-glass window slide open. Naked to the waist, he stood on the narrow balcony next to an air-conditioning unit, smoking a cigarette.
On her second evening in the city, she followed him to a nightclub on the waterfront. He was accompanied by two Filipino women. He had zigzag lightning strikes carved into his close-cropped hair, and wore a pale gray suit that had a sheen to it. She left the three of them at the edge of the dance floor and walked out onto the terrace, where the music was less insistent. There were sets of sofas facing each other, with low glass tables in between. There was the usual view of high-rise buildings. Off to the right, she could see cargo boats at anchor in the enormous blackness of Manila Bay. She took a seat in the middle of the terrace. Sometimes she would long for a place that was far from everything—a place where it was quiet, and nothing happened. A few years ago, she had flown over Guatemala at night. She remembered how the dark was almost uninterrupted, just the occasional tight sprinkle of dim lights to signify a town. Well, perhaps she had all that to look forward to, in the not-too-distant future…
She had been sitting outside for about half an hour when Chu En Li appeared, as she had suspected he might. The women walked on either side of him, leaning into him, their tight-fitting dresses patterned with big tropical flowers, his arms around their shoulders. He was moving past her, towards the end of the terrace, when his head turned. His eyes stopped on her face.
“I know you,” he said.
She looked up at him, but didn’t speak.
“I saw you in Shanghai,” he went on, “in that fancy bar on the Bund. You were with my girlfriend’s brother.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t remember you.” She paused. “I meet a lot of people.”
Since he had recognized her, she could pretend she didn’t know who he was. That way, he wouldn’t suspect that she had engineered the encounter. It was important that he saw it as a coincidence.
He signaled to the two women with a jerk of his head. They smiled and turned away and went inside.
“You were with Zhang Guo Xing.” He sat down opposite her, his arms spread along the back of the sofa, his legs wide apart.
She watched him watching her. Up close, he looked cheaper and more venal than she had expected. There was a spider tattoo on the web of skin between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.
“You don’t have a drink,” he said.
He stopped a passing waitress and ordered two cocktails. She noticed that he didn’t bother to ask her what she wanted. Not that she cared. She wasn’t going to drink it anyway.
“So what are you doing in this shithole?” he asked when the waitress had gone.
“You don’t like Manila?”
He shrugged. “It’s not Shanghai, is it.”
“Why are you here, then?”
Still leaning back, he kept his eyes on her. “You know why.”
She met his gaze, but didn’t say anything.
“Your boyfriend sent me here,” he went on. “Apparently, he didn’t like me seeing his sister.” There was no hurt in his face, and no embarrassment, only a veneer of disgust.
The drinks arrived—pink cocktails in tall glasses, the rims cluttered with fruit. She watched as he picked off the bright wedges and tossed them on the table.
“Zhang has nothing against you,” she said at last. “It was his father who disapproved.”
Chu En Li was watching her again. Something stubborn in his face told her he was unconvinced. She would have to try harder.
“He was acting on behalf of his family,” she went on. “Doing their bidding.” She paused. “You can hardly blame him for that.”
Picking up his drink, Chu En Li sucked down half of it, then he put it back on the table and leaned forwards, his elbows on his thighs, his hands dangling between his knees.
“I’m beginning to get the picture,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“I know why you came.”
“I work for a gallery. I’m here on business.”
He smiled, as if he knew better. “You want to fuck me.”
“I’m already with someone,” she said. “You know that.”
“Do you like rough sex?”
“What?”
He touched a finger to the corner of his left eye, indicating the place where Mad Dog’s punch had landed. “You have a bruise.”
“I got out of a taxi too fast. I hit my head.”
Smirking, he finished his drink and then sat back, his arms spread out on either side of him again, his black shirt pulled tight across his chest. “So you’re not going to fuck me?”
“I already told you. I’m with someone.” She glanced sideways, towards the club’s strobe-lit interior. “In any case, it seems you have that side of things taken care of.”
“Those girls?” He smoothed a hand over his hair. “They’re nothing.”
“They’re very pretty—”
“They’re not you.”
Shaking her head, she looked off into the dark.
“You don’t think I’m good enough for you,” she heard him say after a while. “I can see it in your face.”
She lit a cigarette.
“But Zhang Guo Xing,” he went on in the same sour voice, “he’s good enough…”
The mere mention of Zhang’s name, even in the mouth of this third-rate gangster, aroused a longing in her, and though she knew it was ill-advised, given everything that had happened, she determined in that moment that she would spend another night with him. Just one more night.