NVK

by Temple Drake

  “I told him the drugs would kill him,” she said, “but he didn’t listen to me.”

  “He didn’t listen to anyone.” Torben paused. “Sometimes, when we were talking, I’d think of that line in The Tale of the Heike: ‘The arrogant do not long endure.’ ” He looked at her. “I feel bad about that now.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  She did, though. It was the end of her time in London. She wasn’t a suspect in Peter’s death, but she couldn’t afford to allow herself to be questioned by his family, or by the police. Her life wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. There were too many inconsistencies, too many blanks. She had already visited a travel agency and booked a flight to New York. She would be leaving the following day, in the evening. She knew disappearing would make her look guilty, as if she had something to hide, but she also knew she didn’t have a choice.

  They sat on the floor, cross-legged, in the dim yellow glow of a single lamp, and Torben put on Blue by Joni Mitchell. He had played it for her before, hoping she would appreciate its significance and beauty. She never had. That night, though, for the first time, the songs made sense to her. They rushed forwards, as driven and breathless as her life, the lines constantly merging, one into another. The voice was thin, almost nervous, but it had a strange strength too, like wire. Each time the needle reached the end of the side, they turned the record over. They must have listened to it half a dozen times.

  At five thirty in the morning, she stretched her arms into the air above her head and told him she should go.

  “Already?” Torben grinned.

  She stood up and looked around. His posters of Hendrix and Che Guevara, his stereo with its wooden speakers. The dead branch he had brought back from a long walk over Hampstead Heath. Some words from one of the Joni Mitchell songs had lodged in her head: Let’s not talk about fare-thee-wells now / The night is a starry dome…He didn’t realize their friendship was over, and she couldn’t tell him either. It seemed so cruel. But there was no other way.

  This moment, when it came—and it always came…

  * * *

  —

  She glanced at the TV. Breaking news. A headline had appeared at the bottom of the screen. MAN SHOT IN SHANGHAI HOTEL. There was some jerky footage of journalists and photographers crowding round a stretcher, pushing and shoving, as it was wheeled across a patch of tarmac and loaded into a waiting ambulance. Then the camera pulled back to reveal the front of the hotel. It was the Holiday Inn, in Kangqiao. Her mind jammed. The breath stalled in her throat. She grabbed the remote and turned up the sound. The incident had taken place in the hotel pool, the reporter was saying. The victim’s identity had yet to be confirmed, and the motive for the shooting was unclear.

  Zhang.

  Was he alive? The reporter didn’t say.

  She pictured herself on the pavement looking up at the hotel, the pool protruding from the side of the building, its four glass windows clearly visible. Zhang’s body was floating in the deep end, the cloud of blood standing out, red against the white clouds in the sky. His clothes would be laid out in his room. His Prada suit, his sunglasses. His phone—

  The smell of his skin came back to her. You only had to look at him to know he would smell good. Something sharp and clean, like freshly cut timber. Once again, she thought of the night they had spent together, after the opening. She had known this was the last she would ever see of him. Perhaps that explained the dull ache in her belly, the desperate grasping at sensation…She lay with her face close to his, breathing in as he was breathing out. She inhaled the air that came from his mouth so that it flowed straight from the inside of his body to the inside of hers. She watched him sleep. She listened to him dream. How strange that people felt they could afford all these hours of unconsciousness. How strange to let time slip through your fingers when you had so very little of it. This was the complacency—the sense of ease—that she had lost.

  That night, she took pictures of him without him knowing. She didn’t use the flash, but she could see the outline of his face, blue-silver light tracing the straight line of his nose, the subtle M-shape of his upper lip, the smooth curve of his jaw. You’re very beautiful. So are you. He murmured something and turned away from her, his right arm reaching out beyond the edge of the bed, his fingers curled in towards his palm. He slept on. She stayed awake, as always. She had been with him longer than he had been with her. She had loved him as much as she knew how. Her surroundings blurred. She was crying again, even harder than before…

  A photo had flashed up on to the TV screen. A twenty-six-year-old man had been arrested, the reporter was saying. He was a suspect in the shooting.

  It was Chu En Li.

  Her hand over her mouth, she left the bed. She leaned against the window, looking out. Her legs felt too brittle to hold her up. She remembered how he sat facing her on the nightclub terrace, his black shirt stretched tight across his chest, a chain of gold links gleaming in the spaces between the buttonholes. Somewhere deep in her bones, she had sensed that he might pose a threat, and she had flown to Manila in order to defuse it, but she had not been sufficiently sensitive or diplomatic. She had allowed him to see how much Zhang meant to her. She had ended up provoking him. Her hand moved to her forehead, which was damp. Everything was jumbled up, the wrong way round. It was Chu En Li, not Mad Dog, who should have died. It was Chu En Li who should have been removed from the equation. Zhang had needed her protection. Instead, she had only succeeded in putting his life in jeopardy.

  Why was this always happening to her?

  Outside, it was growing dark, the orange fading into brown. A chill rose off the glass. She could see planes coming in to land, small clusters of lights stacked up in the sky.

  * * *

  —

  Her phone vibrated on the bedside table. Probably the airline, with an update. She glanced at the screen. The text had come from Zhang, and it was in English. The death of the old without sight of the new. That was all it said. But how could he be writing to her if he had been shot? Some mechanism inside her seemed to slow down and stop. Her hands suddenly felt cold. Then she realized. There must have been a problem with the server, or with the coverage. He would have sent the message hours ago. Even so, it was eerie. She wished she could find out if he was all right, but she knew she couldn’t. She slid the phone into her pocket, then she switched off the TV, put on her shoes and coat, and left the room.

  At reception, she placed her key on the counter.

  “Did you manage to get some rest?” the receptionist asked with a smile.

  “Yes,” Naemi said. “Thank you.”

  The bill was 300 RMB.

  Ten minutes later, she was standing in Departures. She looked at Zhang’s text again. It was almost as if he understood what she was doing. As if he had traveled with her, in spirit form. This was why she had been drawn to him, and why she’d had to bring the whole thing to an end. She sat on an orange plastic seat, took out her phone, and scrolled through her recent photographs. Zhang lying on his back with a hand on his belly and his face turned to one side, the crumpled sheet pushed down to his waist. Zhang at half three in the morning, lost to the world…He slept deeply for a man in his forties. It was the sleep of someone half his age.

  Switching her phone off, she removed the SIM card and snapped it in half, then she hid the phone and the broken card inside a copy of the Shanghai Daily that she was carrying and dropped it in a nearby bin. All the messages from him gone. All the photos. Gone. She reached into her coat pocket and took out her brand-new passport. She had checked it when it first arrived, and also before she left her apartment, but now she opened it and checked it again. Nicola Viktorija Krstulovic. Born in Riga, Latvia, on February 19, 1991.

  “Nicola,” she murmured.

  This was the
name she would answer to the moment she walked out of Frankfurt airport. This was her new identity.

  Though Frankfurt was her immediate destination, she wasn’t planning to spend more than a day or two in the city. She was thinking of returning to her roots. She hadn’t been to the north of Finland for many years, and no one there would know her. After Shanghai, she needed a quiet, uneventful life. She needed a place where she could fit in. Lie low. Long dark winters. The short mad blaze of summer…She glanced at the screen that listed all the departing flights. Her gate number had flashed up. She closed her passport and rose to her feet.

  Some minutes later, she was on a travelator, making for her gate, when she saw a familiar figure coming the other way. It was the man Zhang had talked about when they first met. The man was dressed in the same pale blue suit, and he was pulling the same blue case behind him. As they drew level with each other, he looked at her and winked. There was no time to respond. He had already passed beyond her. All she could do was watch him over her shoulder as he moved towards Arrivals. He hadn’t even broken his stride, and the gap between them was widening with every second. Slowly, she faced front again, and smiled to herself. She had just realized what he was carrying in his luggage. Outside, beyond the plate-glass window, it was night.

  She passed another screen listing departures. A single word had appeared next to her gate number.

  Boarding.

  Temple Drake lives in London.