by Temple Drake
He collected his Mercedes from the short-stay car park and drove back into the city. A truck had crashed on the Yan’an elevated highway, and dozens of glossy pale green cabbages were scattered across the road, some of them crushed flat, others so unmarked that people were getting out of their cars to pick them up. It took Zhang an hour and a half to reach the complex of galleries and studios on Moganshan Road. He parked outside and sat with his hands on the steering wheel. It was still early, not even ten o’clock, and the street was empty except for a security guard on duty by the main entrance. The air was tense and gray. Why had he come? What did he hope to achieve? He had told Naemi that she was responsible for Mad Dog’s death, something he could neither justify nor prove, and he wished he had never opened his mouth. At the same time, he had been unable to forget what had happened during the moments that followed his accusation. Had he perceived some truth about her, or had his mind been bent out of shape by Mad Dog’s unrelenting talk of ghosts and demons? Had he, too, begun to see things that weren’t there? That would amount to a kind of derangement. But if sanity meant he had to believe what he had seen, perhaps he would rather not be sane. As a child, he had always run towards his fear. It was something his father had taught him. If you’re afraid of heights, his father said, look for a high building or a precipice. If the darkness scares you, turn off all the lights. Nothing had ever frightened Zhang more than the face he had glimpsed in the split second before the service lift dropped out of sight. But it was that face that he had come to see.
He entered the complex and climbed the red stairs to the gallery where the opening had taken place the previous Wednesday. At the far end of the space was a two-story glass cube where several gallery employees sat at desks, their faces lit by computer screens. A woman emerged as he approached. She was in her forties or fifties, and her face had the pallor and consistency of wax. She wore glasses with oblong lenses and severe black frames. Her jacket and trousers were also black.
“I’m looking for Naemi Kuusela,” he said.
“She left.”
“When will she be back?”
The woman shook her head. “You don’t understand. She no longer works here. Friday was her last day.”
He stared at her. “Has she got a new job?”
“I suppose so.”
“Where?”
“She didn’t tell me.”
He was still staring. “Are you in charge here?”
“I’m the director.”
“And she didn’t tell you where she was going?”
“Why should she? It’s none of my business.” The woman examined him through her designer glasses. Her default expression was that of somebody conducting an experiment. Measured, impassive. Scientific. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“Wait.”
The other people in the gallery looked up from their computers. He had raised his voice.
“She told me she was leaving China,” the woman said. “She had been here for long enough. There comes a time, she said, when you just know. But she didn’t say where she was going, or what she might be doing in the future.”
Leaving China? Zhang looked down at the polished concrete floor. He was thinking of Nina again. Gulsvig’s Nina. He remembered Gulsvig talking of her abrupt and unforeseen departure for New York. He imagined she would have left New York too, eventually, and with similar abruptness. And whenever she disappeared, she would leave a death in her wake. In London, it had been her boyfriend, Peter. In New York, he thought, there would also have been an unexpected death. She cast off people as a snake casts off its skin. Places too. Things that had been important to her, crucial even, suddenly became superfluous, disposable. Gulsvig’s actual words came back to him, Gulsvig recalling something Nina had said about her English boyfriend. He can’t seem to get close enough. Naemi had said very nearly the same thing to him, early on Thursday morning, when she returned the jade ring he had given her. Was that a coincidence? If so, what kind of coincidence? Once again, the two young women, born forty years apart, appeared to merge, to overlap, but the link between them remained as obscure and mysterious as ever.
“I was sorry to lose her,” the director said. “Her knowledge was remarkable—especially for someone so young.”
Zhang nodded to himself. “And you really have no idea where she might have gone?”
“She was always very discreet. Very private.” The director looked past him, towards the entrance to the gallery. “I had the impression that it wasn’t just China that she was leaving. She was leaving the art world too. There were other avenues she wanted to explore. She is one of those people who can turn their hand to almost anything. Perhaps I was lucky she stayed as long as she did.” She shook her head in admiration, and also, Zhang thought, in disbelief.
He thanked the woman, and was just moving away when she asked him for his name. He looked at her over his shoulder.
“So I can tell her that you asked for her,” the woman said, “when she gets in touch.”
“She won’t,” he said. “You’ll never hear from her again.”
The woman blinked.
On his way back down the stairs, Zhang checked his phone. Just work e-mails. He would deal with them later. When he reached the road, he stopped and looked around. The sky was darker, greener. There was going to be a storm. The rain would fall with such force that it would bounce off the pavement. The temperature would drop.
“You want to buy a gift?”
He turned. The street vendor had arrived with his wooden cart and his trinkets.
“What about a nice piece of jade,” the vendor said, “for luck?”
Zhang took out his car keys and pressed Unlock. “You look like you could use it more than me.”
“There isn’t a person in the world who doesn’t need a bit of luck from time to time.” Shaking his head, the vendor adjusted the position of an old cracked teakettle. “This weather. Everybody’s out of sorts.”
Zhang selected a couple of notes from his wallet and laid them on the handcart.
The vendor looked at the money. “What’s that for?”
Zhang shrugged.
Once in the car, he put in a call to Johnny Yu.
“Naemi’s disappeared,” he said.
“After the parting I know not if she is far or near / What meets the eye is bleak and doleful.” There was a quick rasping sound as Johnny lit a cigarette. “That’s Ou-Yang Hsiu. A Confucian master.”
“I think she left the country,” Zhang said.
“You want me to find out what’s going on?”
“I’m not sure…”
He remembered how relief had mingled with regret when he said goodbye to Naemi outside the private members’ club on the night of their first meeting. At the time, he had found his relief bewildering. It had seemed out of character, and out of place. He hadn’t understood why he should be feeling such a thing. Now, though, it occurred to him that he might have had some sort of premonition. Perhaps, after all, relief was appropriate, and valid. Perhaps he should simply let her go. And yet…
As he stared through the windscreen at the street vendor, the air began to look busy, almost pixelated. The rain was coming down, just as he had predicted. In a matter of seconds, it became torrential. The vendor was no longer visible.
“Johnny?” he said.
“Yes?”
“There is one thing you could do.”
* * *
—
Mist rose off the road, and he drove through it, the rain loud on the roof of the car, a constant, brutal roar. He felt slightly sick, as though he had eaten something that was past its sell-by date. On reaching the Embankment Building, he parked directly opposite and sat behind the wheel, staring straight ahead. Gradually, the rain began to slacken off. He switched on the radio and listened to the news.
He had been wait
ing for about twenty minutes when he saw a bulky, middle-aged woman in gray overalls trudging up the street, head lowered. She had a toolbox in one hand and a company logo stitched above her breast pocket. He got out of the car and hurried over the road.
“Did Mr. Yu send you?” he asked.
She looked at him. “You locked yourself out, apparently.” Her hair was plastered flat against her head, and water dripped from her eyebrows and the tip of her blunt nose.
He led her through the lobby, noting the letters EB set into the floor in charcoal gray. To the left was a makeshift wood-and-glass structure that housed the concierge. There was a CCTV camera on the top, but it seemed unlikely that it worked—and even if it did work he would have been prepared to bet that nobody ever so much as glanced at the footage. It was a huge building, with hundreds of tenants. People came and went unchecked all the time.
They took a lift to the seventh floor. When the door opened, he was faced with a corridor that stretched away in both directions. The walls were painted a dull institutional green, and the air smelled of stale food and dust. Fat silver heating pipes clung to the ceiling. Which way should he go? When he was lying on his back in bed a few weeks before and imagined coming to the building, he had been unable to locate Naemi’s apartment, and there was part of him that wondered if it even existed, but he chose to walk to the right, and there, after a few paces, was number 710. Stopping in front of the solid matte-black door, he noticed that it was fitted with two expensive-looking locks. Something about the feeling of anonymity and the enhanced nature of the security measures confirmed the fact that this was Naemi’s apartment. The locksmith put down her toolbox and examined the locks from close-up.
“State-of-the-art, these are,” she said.
Since the door was set deep in the wall, she was able to work without being seen, but Zhang stood guard, just in case. If someone came along, he would use the story he had told Johnny to use: he was looking after the apartment while his friend was away, and he had mislaid his keys. There was no reason why anyone would think to question that. The locksmith hadn’t. If someone who actually knew Naemi happened to pass by, he had no idea what he would say.
But nobody appeared.
It took another half an hour to dismantle and replace the locks, but at last the door was open. The locksmith gave him a new set of keys, then put her tools back in the box. He counted out some notes and handed them to her. She counted them again, the tip of her tongue showing in the corner of her mouth, then she nodded to herself. Turning away, she started back towards the lift.
When she had gone, he entered the apartment, pulling the door shut behind him. From the small, square hallway, with its row of coat hooks, he walked into a room that had the dimensions of a loft. The walls were the same matte-black as the front door. So were the pillars that supported the ceiling. The floorboards had been painted with a deep red Chinese lacquer, and the traditional wood furniture was upholstered in stiff slub silks and dark brocades. Probably it had come with the apartment. The effect of the somber palette used throughout—even the cushions on the sofa were plum- or damson-colored—was to create a kind of hush. He moved on into the center of the room. There were windows all along one side, the view of the city simplified by the mist, its trees and buildings reduced to soft gray shapes.
He began to look around. Naemi’s departure may have been sudden, but it had obviously been planned. He sensed the calmness and efficiency of somebody for whom the severing of all connections was familiar. Would that be overstating it? He thought not. He moved on, looking for clues as to where she might have gone, but everything he found belonged to a present that was already past—a Flying Pigeon bicycle with a yellow frame, a shelf of Art Island catalogues, a large-scale street map of Shanghai. Gradually, though, he realized that he was learning something after all. The kitchen, which was built into the back wall, and separated from the main living area by a granite-topped counter or breakfast bar, looked brand-new, as if it had been fitted only days ago. He ran a finger along the inside of the oven door. There wasn’t even a suggestion of grease. He opened the fridge. Not just empty, but pristine. It wasn’t that the appliances were clean. They had never been used. He had heard of people who didn’t like their apartments to smell of cooking. Perhaps she was particular in that way, preferring to eat out—though, come to think of it, he couldn’t remember seeing her eat anything at all. It was in the bedroom, however, that he made the discovery that puzzled him the most. Like the rest of the apartment, it had been painted black. There was no bed, though. If the apartment had been rented furnished, surely there ought to have been a bed. As he crossed the room with his head lowered, deep in thought, he became aware of something gritty underneath his shoes. Squatting down, he touched the varnished floorboards. Tiny particles of earth stuck to his fingertips. It looked as if somebody had tried to sweep it up, but he still found traces in every part of the room, as if, at some point, the entire floor had been covered with it. It didn’t look like the kind of earth that might collect on your shoes if you went for a walk in the country, the kind of earth you might accidentally track into your home. It was more like soil. The soil you found in potted plants. But why was it scattered all over the floor? A chill went through him, and he stood up quickly, rubbing one hand against the other.
He returned to the living room. As he stood in the middle of the vast space, his phone began to ring. He looked at the screen. Unknown. If this had happened a week earlier, he would have assumed it was Naemi. Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. He had the sudden conviction that if he answered, he would be allowing something harmful into his life, just as the opening of an attachment can admit a virus. He pressed Decline. It was only midday, but the light had faded, and as he looked towards the bank of windows the whole apartment seemed to shudder and leap sideways, shadows appearing, then disappearing, the floorboards bright as glass. There was a thick silence, as if the walls were padded, then thunder exploded overhead. On the street below, a car alarm went off. He remained quite still, skin prickling. He had sensed something behind him. He turned slowly. There she was, in the bedroom doorway. She was wearing a black shift dress. Her arms and legs were bare. There was blood around her mouth, and blood had spilled down her front, shiny and wet, dark stains on the darkness. More thunder rolled across the roof.
“Naemi?”
His voice was dry and brittle as a dead rose. One touch, and it would crumble.
“I thought you’d left,” he murmured.
She smiled. There was blood on her teeth.
“When I was with you,” she said, “I tried to inhabit the part of me that would excite you. The part that you would love. The rest, I hid away. I’m used to that. But you were more open than I expected you to be. More curious.” She looked past him, towards the window. “I thought it would just be sex. I thought you were that kind of man.”
“I am that kind of man,” he said.
Lightning darted through the apartment. In the silvery glare, the walls seemed dusty, but her eyes were blacker than ever. The thunder was like rocks tipped off a truck.
“So is it true?” he said. “Are you a ghost?”
Stepping close to him, she put her lips to his. They were cold and sticky.
“I can’t tell you that,” she murmured.
“The blood,” he said.
“Yes…”
“What happens?”
“I don’t hurt anyone.” She looked at him. “The blood is mine.”
She turned away, passing through the doorway that led into the bedroom. When he reached the doorway, she was already disappearing behind the freestanding wall at the far end of the room. He followed her and found himself in the bathroom. On the marble surface, next to the sink, was a flat wooden box with metal catches. It was the kind of box that might once have held dusted pink cubes of Turkish delight, or Cuban cigars in tightly packed rows—or even, perhaps, a gun. He lifte
d the lid and saw the cannula and the syringes she had ordered from the medical supplies place. There was also a slim bottle of white spirit, a roll of surgical tape, some cotton wool, and two neatly coiled lengths of tubing. He looked at himself in the mirror. There was blood on his lower lip. Turning on the cold tap, he bent over the sink and washed it off. He didn’t ask himself any questions. He knew the answers were beyond him.
Later, as he was on the point of leaving the apartment, he stopped and took one last look round. In years to come, if he was ever asked about Naemi, it would be tempting to say that he had been ill. He had been suffering from hallucinations. He had descended into a kind of temporary madness. He felt how Gulsvig must have felt when he walked into the breakfast room at the Park Hyatt, or when he researched the young woman he had known and loved and found precisely nothing. It was as if she had never been. Others had seen her, of course—Wang Jun Wei, Chun Tao, Laser—but if a forensics team were to be called to the apartment he doubted they would find any trace of a Naemi Vieno Kuusela. Like a master criminal, she would have thoroughly erased herself. He didn’t understand who she was—not really. There was the young woman with blonde hair, black eyes, and the body of a dancer, and then there was the ancient hag, the nightmare apparition. If Mad Dog was to be believed, though, there was another woman hidden underneath them both, inside them both—a succubus craving a host, an unquiet soul, a murderer…
Out on the street, there was the sound of water everywhere, rushing through drains and gutters, dripping off the trees. The creek looked swollen. All the colors were muted—shades of brown and gray, of mud and metal, nothing primary or garish. He thought of the red blood trickling from her mouth. He thought of that last kiss. But he had imagined that. He had imagined her. She would already be far away, in another country. Another world.