99 Ways to Die

by Ed Lin

  Huang put away his phone, sucked his drink and stared down at his nose. After he swallowed, he asked Kung, “What should we do now?”

  Peggy spoke up. “Once again, the cops have failed to keep wraps on their investigation.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Anybody at that banquet could’ve tipped off the Pineapple.”

  “Impossible,” said Huang. “All those guests, including many dignitaries, were ordered to stay silent.”

  Peggy smoothed down her sleeves, brushing imaginary lint into the faces of Huang and Kung. “Do you at least have a list of suspects that you’re tracking down?”

  Huang’s face hardened and his eyes iced over. “We do. And it’s a long list.”

  “He must have a lot of enemies,” I offered.

  Peggy picked up the second-to-last skewer and pointed it at me. “Everybody loves my father, Jing-nan. It sounds like you might have a problem with him, for some reason.”

  “I don’t, but the people who rent booths in this area do. You know, your dad increased the rent by five percent last week. It doesn’t bother me because we’ve been doing well, and we can absorb the cost, but a lot of people were pretty mad.”

  Kung pried open a leather-clad notebook. A pen appeared in her hand as suddenly, a venomous barb. “Who was mad, Jing-nan?”

  “Uh, eh-everybody was,” I stammered.

  Huang gave me a death glare. “Eh eh?” A cruelly contemptuous smile spread across his face.

  Kung’s eyes opened with concern. She went into nice-cop mode. “Was there anybody who seemed unusually angry, Mr. Chen?” She was even addressing me formally.

  “Not really,” I offered. “Just the usual grumbling.”

  “What do Dwayne and Frankie think?” asked Huang. Dwayne was taken aback the cop knew his name. Frankie had no visible reaction. “Yeah, I got your names from the online reviews of this joint.”

  Frankie took a step forward and kept his hands at his side. “It’s just like Jing-nan says. Nothing really out of the ordinary, officers. Most of the people who operate stalls here wouldn’t have anything to do with a kidnapping. They’re cowardly merchants by nature.” Frankie dipped his head and appraised the floor tiles. They were all cowards except for us here, he meant to say.

  Dwayne jerked his thumb at Frankie and nodded. “I agree two hundred percent with what the Cat said.”

  Huang clicked his tongue, shook his drink and turned back to me. “You’ve said Tong-tong has a lot of enemies, Mr. Chen. Who do you mean?”

  He couldn’t be serious. Maybe Huang was pissed that I was on the line with the kidnapper. One thing I knew for sure was that if I didn’t forcefully reject any suggestion that I knew anything about the kidnapping I could end up in an interrogation room. Again.

  I’ve had bad experiences with cops in the past. I wanted Huang to know I wasn’t soft, even if he didn’t think much of the gun I had had pointed in my face.

  “Hey, you don’t need me to tell you who Tong-tong’s enemies are,” I said as I looked directly into his eyes, seeking the weaker man that surely was cowering somewhere inside. I stuck my right hand into my pants pocket and rolled it into a fist. I didn’t need him to see my resolve. “Tong-tong is on the pro-unification bandwagon. He’s a mainlander who talks a lot and loudly about how Taiwan is a part of China. So that doesn’t exactly endear him to at least half of the people on the island.”

  Peggy dropped her empty stick on the tray with a clatter and picked up the last skewer. It’s common courtesy to check with everybody at the table before taking the last of anything, but there was nothing common or courteous about Peggy. “Tong-tong always has a certain level of hate mail,” she said of her father. “But like I told you cops earlier, there was nothing extraordinary recently and no real threats that the family didn’t handle.”

  Interesting choice of words. Because the Lees were prominent mainlanders, they had strong ties with the military. Off-duty and retired air force and army guys often moonlighted as muscle for hire. Any time the Lees had protests at one of their construction sites, they’d break up relatively quickly.

  As I contemplated this, something else bothered me. I thought about the kidnapper’s demand. “Isn’t it weird that they didn’t want money?” I asked Peggy. “They kidnap one of Taiwan’s richest men but they only want some plans for a chip.”

  Peggy nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, I didn’t know what the fuck that was about. A low-power chip sounds like something he might feasibly have, somewhere. He has a wide portfolio and not everything’s monetized yet.”

  Huang hunched his shoulders. “It may not seem like it’s about money on the surface, but it is. All crimes are based on money, in the end. These chip plans can be converted into cash if you know the right people to sell to. We’ll see.”

  Kung scribbled something in her notebook and secreted it back into a pocket. “What did the commander say?” she asked Huang, checking if any clues floated to the surface.

  “With the story out, he said we could use our discretion. For tomorrow.”

  “That is,” Kung reasoned, “we’re off the clock now?”

  “Exactly,” said Huang, hoisting his cup to get the last of his drink. “Actually, we’ve been off the clock.”

  Kung exhaled and turned to Peggy. “Well, boss, what do we do now?”

  I also looked to Peggy, unsure what was happening.

  She opened her mouth to mock me. “Don’t be confused, Jing-nan,” said Peggy. “The Lee family is hiring off-duty cops for our private security.” To Kung and Huang, she said, “Let’s all wash up and then you guys escort me home, if you would be so kind.”

  I guess military guys weren’t the only ones who moonlighted.

  Chapter 3

  I met my girlfriend, Nancy, back at my apartment, which is about a five-minute walk from the Shilin Night Market if I cross against the light. It’s not an amazing apartment, but it’s close to work and it has what I need and more. I have a magnificent view of a poorly maintained neighborhood park. My landlord is an investment company, not a jiaotou, a local criminal, like my old landlord, so when something goes bust, a repair guy comes over to work on it, not a low-level hood on a probationary period.

  Nancy was sitting on my couch, and by sitting I mean nearly sliding off, her bare feet against the coffee table’s edge the only things preventing her ass from hitting my patchy living-room rug.

  She had shoulder-length hair with the ends cut straight across, making her head look like a perfect sphere. Her ears stuck out on the sides of her broad and beautiful face. She was two years younger than me but decades ahead in terms of human achievement.

  An overwashed and stretched-out Psychedelic Furs shirt, one of my castoffs, disguised her athletic build while declaring “Love My Way.” I did like the Furs, but by the time that single from their third album was released, they had already started losing what made them cool.

  The television was tuned to the Meilidao cable news channel but was on mute, which was the best way to watch it if it had to be on. “Tong-tong Is Gone Gone!” scrolled across the top of the screen while real-estate listings scrolled across the bottom.

  “I’m so glad you’re back,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve been waiting for the leftovers.” Her feet nudged a bowl half-filled with rice that was waiting for me to top it with a heap of grilled meats and vegetables from Unknown Pleasures. Also splayed across the coffee table were the biology and biotech journals that Nancy read thoroughly and obsessively. I’m sure she knew more than many of her professors at Taida, which is Taiwan’s top university. Nancy’s the best asset in its biochemistry doctorate program, and they know it. Why else would the department make her the liaison for foreign undergraduate students if they didn’t think she reflected well upon the school, Taipei and the country?

  The genius was crankily hungry now, however, and all bets on her behavior wer
e off.

  “You don’t have anything good in your fridge,” she moaned. “How is that possible? Aren’t you supposed to be a food guru or something?”

  I slid in next to Nancy and put my right arm around her shoulders. “It’s true, I don’t have much food right now. You’ve caught me between personal shopping trips. But I have some bad news for you, honey. First of all, you know that that’s Peggy’s dad that’s been kidnapped, right?”

  Nancy stretched and pushed her shoulder into my armpit. “Yes, I know. Peggy’s face keeps popping up every fifteen minutes when they do a slideshow of Tong-tong’s family pictures.”

  “Well, Peggy and her police escorts came by late and they ate so much, I don’t have any leftovers tonight.”

  Nancy retracted her legs and whirled her body around, slamming her knees into my side. In Taipei, being hungry and not having access to any good food was a serious emergency. “You didn’t bring anything, Jing-nan? Nothing at all?”

  I folded up my legs and placed them between us in a defensive move. “It’s all gone. They were hungry because they were waiting so long at Peggy’s office for a ransom demand from the kidnappers.”

  She drew a breath and shifted her jaw. “Ransom, huh?”

  “Oh, shit, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Nancy’s eyes rolled up and to the right as she picked up her bowl and took a mouthful of plain rice. I couldn’t help but twitch. How can people eat rice with nothing? Texture’s no good without taste.

  “Do you want some soy sauce or sea salt on that, Nancy?”

  “Nah, it doesn’t matter, Jing-nan. This is just nervous eating now.” She swallowed and took in a sharp breath. “How much money did they want? A million NTs? Or maybe a million American dollars?”

  In her voice, I heard the fascination and apprehension of the United States. They reminded me of someone else, my old high-school girlfriend. Curiously, though, she had no qualms about going to the US for college like I did.

  “That’s the thing, Nancy,” I said. “They didn’t want money. Can you believe that? They want a chip design that they claimed Tong-tong had stored away. A special low-power chip.”

  Nancy chewed another spoonful of rice. “That could be worth a lot of money,” she suggested. “If you own the patent and license something like that to an international company, it could bring in big money for years.”

  I couldn’t help but rub my hands. “How much are we talking about?”

  “A few million dollars. American dollars. Look at the royalties phone makers or even drug companies pay to license intellectual property. You get a patent on a whole new platform of technology that everybody ends up using, it could even be a billion dollars.”

  As rich as they were, Peggy’s family didn’t have that kind of money. There was something that felt wrong, though.

  “Well, let’s say the kidnappers manage to get the chip design. What company is going to pay to license stolen technology?”

  Nancy rubbed her nose as a faraway look appeared in her eyes. She had entered a deep-think zone and it was a state from which she wasn’t easily aroused—in any sense of that word. I focused on the television to wait it out­—her processing of the information.

  The sound was still muted, but I was able to pick up the timeline of events leading to the kidnapping from the pop-up text along the bottom of the screen. Tong-tong had just enjoyed a surf-and-turf dinner when Wang Lao-shi, his high-school teacher, was introducing him to speak. Wang’s hair was completely white but it wasn’t thin and the guy continued to wear it in a crew cut. The old man raised a hand and shook a finger at a smiling Tong-tong and noted that his old student was always the first to speak when a mistake had gone unnoticed in class. Even if the teacher had made the mistake. The room erupted in laughter at that remark because what sort of student would be dumb enough to correct a teacher in front of an entire class?

  “Aha!” said Nancy as she slapped my shoulder. “I’ve figured it out!”

  “Ow!” I said, rubbing the point of impact. “What have you come up with?”

  “What if it’s not a company that licenses the technology? What if it’s the Chinese government?” She greedily shoved more rice into her mouth and talked through her food. “It’s China, Jing-nan! It has to be!”

  China. Taiwan’s political arch-nemesis even though many of us shared common ancestry. Those ties are ancient history for most people. From the Chinese government’s view, however, Taiwan was a toy that it desperately wanted to grab, and like a toddler, China would rather destroy it than let it get away.

  “I hope you’re wrong, Nancy,” I said.

  “I could be,” she said, although the pull in the pitch of her voice said she was right. She worked her tongue around her teeth to loosen a stubborn grain of rice.

  “Wait,” I said. “One thing I don’t understand. If the chip is already patented, how can anyone else steal it and expect other people to license it from them?”

  “Is the chip patented?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll bet it’s not,” said Nancy. “I’ll bet someone offered Tong-tong some or all of the patent for money upfront.”

  “Well, they don’t know Tong-tong,” I said. “I don’t even know him that well but I know he’s too cheap to lay out cash like that.” It took the guy a million years to repave the pedestrian walk in my area of the night market. Is there such a thing as waiting for a sale on asphalt?

  Nancy ran a finger along her right eyebrow. “It’s a little odd, the timing of this thing. Peggy’s dad was supposed to come to Taida next week to announce a major donation.”

  “He didn’t even go to Taida,” I scoffed. I didn’t attend the school either, but I loved someone who did. I could’ve probably gotten in, too.

  With the back of her hand, Nancy rolled a stray rice grain from her chin into her mouth. “Anybody can give money to the school. You don’t have to be an alumnus. You don’t even have to be a good person.”

  A few years ago, the CEO of a Taiwanese company that made parts for the Apple iPhone referred to his factory workers as “animals” that were a “headache” to manage. He had been donating hundreds of millions of NTs to Taida—right in biomedical engineering, Nancy’s field. She had considered not taking any of the research money, but in the end she chose to be agnostic about it.

  I support every choice my girlfriend makes in life. Every single one. But I don’t think I personally could’ve taken that guy’s money. Well, my fake night-market alter ego Johnny could. I slip into that guy every night and he doesn’t take offense to anybody bearing money. Actually, there’s one thing I definitely couldn’t do, no matter what persona I slipped on. I couldn’t call my workers animals. Dwayne would probably break me in half. If I ever made a truckload of money, I wouldn’t let it go to my head.

  I imagined what it was like to be rich, as rich as the Lees. Once you had all that wealth, how could you be so insecure that you had to put people down as “animals”? At least Tong-tong was hesitant in speech, as Confucius instructed. Not that I admired Confucian ideals. No one followed them to the letter, but the man’s teachings sure seemed to be profound when taken piecemeal and out of context. The devil could cite Confucius to his purpose, after all.

  My hand came across a rice grain on the couch and I palmed it. Nancy really must be hungry. She wasn’t usually a sloppy eater but now rice was going all over the place.

  I chucked the rice grain in the general direction of the kitchen sink and was rewarded with a ping sound as it struck the metal. “Is Taida going to name a building or an autonomous car after Tong-tong?”

  “He was planning to establish fellowships for eight students to study and do anthropology research in China. I found out about it from my friends in the student council. They have sources in the president’s office. They’re all so gossipy.”

  I cracked
my neck. The fellowship was the kind of thing that was a headache for the national consciousness.

  A large part of the population, particularly the waishengren, the mainlanders, who were predominantly in the northern part of the island, believes that Taiwan is a part of China and should eventually join the motherland, one way or another.

  Others, including many benshengren, people of Chinese descent whose ancestors had moved to Taiwan centuries ago, feel that Taiwan had separated from China in antiquity, and is an island nation in its own right.

  Then there are the Hakka, people of Chinese descent who could be mainlanders, benshengren or a combination. Their identity is a cultural one, not ethnic, and Hakka have their own customs and language whose origins are obscured by the passage of centuries and the many migrations of their history.

  Meanwhile, Taiwan’s indigenous people, of both officially recognized and unrecognized tribes, want the waishengren and benshengren to stop developing on their ancestral lands.

  Lost in the mix are the newer immigrants from Vietnam, Indonesia and Burma, and the Southeast Asian brides introduced to Taiwanese men through marriage brokers. These men have typically had a hard time meeting a potential mate because they aren’t upwardly mobile enough to attract the women who will indulge them in their misogynistic fantasies.

  I’ll bet Tong-tong never had a problem like that.

  Tong-tong’s financing of a Taida fellowship to study in China could be seen as a soft-power move to reinforce ties with The People’s Republic. Tong-tong was the ideal tool of the Chinese Communist Party: A charismatic and filthy rich Taiwanese from a mainlander family who could smooth out public apprehension at closer ties and eventual reunification.

  But those attributes also made Tong-tong the perfect target for Taiwan-independence-minded kidnappers.

  I pumped my left leg in excitement. “Nancy, who knew that Tong-tong was going to donate money to your school?”