99 Ways to Die

by Ed Lin

  I leaned back and tried to imagine what the pre-prison man looked like. Being completely objective, I’d have to say that Ah-tien was not an attractive guy. He oozed the charisma-less functionality of a light switch. Yes, he had a purpose. No, he wasn’t memorable. There’s a reason we forget if we shut off the lights or not. It’s a pedestrian task we perform with a simple device. Ah-tien’s eyes pulsed with resentment. His lights were switched on now. I cleared my throat and tried to find a way forward.

  “Before your present situation, I understand in the past that you approached Tong-tong for an investment to make a new chip. I assume that the design in question is the one that you had presented.”

  His fingers snuck under the table. “That wasn’t for my company. It was for the new startup I was planning. The current industry just wants to make marginal improvements every year. It’s the safest way to grow profits reliably. My new chip was going to fuck everything up in a major disruption.”

  Ah-tien crossed his arms and cocked his head thoughtfully. This was the man who made chips. “I designed a central-processing unit that required so little power, if it were used in a typical phone with today’s battery and the brightness at fifty percent, it would only have to charge once a week.” Ah-tien held up a single finger to illustrate his point. “If it were scaled up in a laptop, it would only have to charge once a month.” The finger now wagged. “That’s with heavy usage, as well.”

  He shoved his hands into his armpits and fell silent. The faintest smile rippled his lips. That chip sounded great. If it really worked. I took in a breath and coughed to clear my throat.

  “Sir, can you tell me where the design is? I need it quickly to save Tong-tong’s life. You know we’re facing a deadline.”

  His face twisted into a cruel circle of blood-red lips and teeth, like a lamprey’s mouth. “Yeah, I’ll gladly give it to you,” the lamprey chortled. “I need something from you first, though.”

  Did he already know about Nancy and me? Did he want something sick like her used panties or naked pictures? That would help him cope with being in jail, right?

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “I want a new trial!” The answer relieved and confused me.

  “How can I do that, Ah-tien? I’m not a lawyer.”

  His nostrils wheezed as he took in a sharp breath of air. “You don’t know anything about technology or law. What do you do?”

  “I work at a stand in a night market.”

  He didn’t bother to cover up his disgust. “You work in a night market?” He threw his hands up and spoke slowly in case I was too stupid to follow otherwise. “I thought I was talking to an educated person here!”

  “I am educated.” That sure sounded stupid.

  He smiled and spoke with the firm condescension of an elementary-school teacher to a student repeating a grade. “Listen, boy. You tell that super-rich Lee family to prove that my lawyer sold me out. They could get a mistrial declared. I have a friend, Liu Ju-lan, who worked at a rival chip company. Do you know the characters? ‘Liu’ as in ‘Liu’—even you would have to know that one—and ‘Ju-lan,’ like ‘chrysanthemum.’ She has copies of all the emails that prove that I wasn’t the guy who met with the government officials. I sent them to her when I thought I was being set up to take the rap. Ju-lan was supposed to send them out to the press but she didn’t. I don’t know what the hell happened.

  “You got all that, Chen Jing-nan?” He stood up and knocked on the door. “I hope you don’t leave cooking-grease stains on the chair! We’re the ones who have to clean up everything, you know.”

  Now, I would never deny that my ass is greasy at the end of a night. But it does take a while to build up. Sure, I was wearing the same jeans from yesterday, but they still smelled of cheap laundry detergent that hadn’t washed out completely.

  I could hear a corrections officer approaching from down the hall. I couldn’t let this conversation end this way. I decided to say what I was going to say in order to put Ah-tien in his place, even though it might not help Tong-tong.

  “I know about you and Nancy,” I said as I stood up slowly and casually rolled my neck and both my shoulders. “You know, Ah-tien. Your mistress.”

  I’m unfamiliar with the specifics of what a heart-attack victim does when stricken, but Ah-tien’s physical reaction hewed close to what I imagined. He slumped against the door, eyes bugging out, instant sweat streaking his whitened face.

  “She doesn’t know anything about any of this,” he gasped. “Leave her alone!”

  I kept a stoic face. “Where’s the chip design?” I asked.

  A key rattled in the lock. He swallowed hard. “Get me a new trial. That’s all I care about.”

  The door swung open and a corrections officer stood aside, allowing Ah-tien the dignity of walking to his cell without being cuffed or manhandled.

  “Mr. Chen, please head back the way you came,” said the man as he headed off with Ah-tien.

  I turned the other way and wondered what sort of legal representation Peggy’s family had. Their lawyers had to be awesome because the Lees were able to throw their money around effectively. No one in Peggy’s family would ever come close to getting snagged by the legal system the way Ah-tien had been. Maybe they could get him a new trial easily, but could they do it quickly enough?

  Suddenly a door swung into the hallway, nearly slamming into my face. Wang with the lumpy forehead blocked my path.

  “You have a good talk, Mr. Chen?” he asked. “About power-efficient chip designs, by any chance?” He checked me as I tried to walk around him.

  “We might have. What do you care?”

  “If you found anything out, don’t hold out on me.” He leaned in to my face. “Is it true? Did the cops really send you?” So he had been listening in on me. Well, fuck this guy.

  “How did you end up in this shithole, Wang?” I challenged. “Couldn’t pass the tests to become a cop, huh?”

  Red blotches surfaced all over his face and began to seep into each other. He banged on the door he had come out of.

  Two men, younger and less-verbal versions of Wang, appeared.

  “Go ahead and search him,” Wang spat.

  I was accustomed to wrestling with one big guy at a time, but not two. They easily rolled me up and carried me into what turned out to be an empty interrogation room. Before the hydraulic-pump door had swung completely shut, my gut had already been shoved into a table edge as each man used one hand to search my back pockets and my armpits. In no time at all they had removed my shoes and socks.

  With a practiced move, they flipped me around and groped around in my front pants pockets, making sure to finger behind my scrotum sack.

  Wang entered and the men released me. I stumbled.

  “He’s not carrying anything,” said one of the men.

  “Nothing exceptional in the wallet, either,” said the other, who tossed me my wallet. I missed and had to retrieve it from the floor. I came back up and adjusted my belt.

  “I feel dirty,” I said. “Thanks for that illegal search, Wang. The Generalissimo would have fully approved.”

  He turned his eyes to the ceiling. “I was perfectly within my rights, Chen Jing-nan. After all, I was watching you on camera and I thought I saw you take something from him.” He looked at me and shrugged. “Whoops. Honest mistake. It will definitely hold up in court if you’d like to sue me.”

  “Cavity search?” the first officer hungrily suggested. “We might find a memory card.”

  Wang twisted his mouth. “Now, that is going way too far. I would never allow an unwarranted violation like that in my institution.”

  I crossed my arms. “I’m leaving,” I said.

  “Just a second,” said Wang. “If you hear anything or manage to find that chip design, how about you give me a call, hmm?” He stepped away from the door,
giving me just enough room to get by.

  I brushed past him and stomped out. I don’t remember the moped ride back home. The thick, angry fog in my head didn’t dissipate until a realization came over me.

  Peggy! I had to tell Peggy to get Ah-tien a new trial as soon as she could. Definitely before the deadline was up. Were the kidnappers really going to kill one of the men on a live stream? A death stream?

  I pulled over to the side of the road and called my old classmate. I told her and whichever cop was listening in about the visit and the appropriate adult version of the aftermath.

  “No way can I get him a new trial before the deadline,” Peggy huffed. “Mazu couldn’t even do that. It would take days to even put the paperwork together.” If Taiwan’s top Taoist goddess couldn’t, no one could. “I’ll track down Liu Ju-lan but in the meantime, watch your ass, Jing-nan.”

  “What do you mean, Peggy?” It came out a little meaner than I had planned. I still hadn’t had breakfast. She cracked up a little bit.

  “Isn’t it obvious? The guards, the corrections officers, they’re after the chip design, too. I’ll bet it’s worth a lot of money on the black market. I mean, even the cops, the unscrupulous ones, would probably want to get their hands on it. They wouldn’t hand it to the kidnappers to rescue my father. They’d rather straight up sell it to the highest bidder. Right, Huang? Kung?” The moonlighting police officers were on the line and both assented with wordless sounds.

  “If the prison guards want it so badly, why don’t they go in and beat up Ah-tien until he gives it up?”

  “You idiot, they can’t touch him after all the prison reforms. But his visitors, who can bring things in and out, they’re up for grabs.” She cleared her throat. “Or gropes.”

  “Listen, Peggy. Call your family lawyer and start the process.”

  “Yeah, I’ll get the balls rolling,” she said. “Just like how the guards got your balls rolling.”

  Kung couldn’t stifle a laugh. “I’m sorry, Jing-nan. That was funny.”

  “No problem, officer. And Peggy, when you hear any good news, go to Taipei Prison and tell Ah-tien himself what’s going on.”

  “I’m a little too famous right now, Jing-nan. You don’t want to feed a media circus, do you? I’ll need you to go again on my behalf.”

  “There’s no way in hell I’m going back there, Peggy. Send a lawyer. They like getting probed.”

  Chapter 7

  I went back to work. What else could I do? I was just one citizen in a nation of workaholics. A job was a source of pain, comfort and confirmation of one’s identity. Yes, I work at a night-market stall.

  Working sure beats sitting around and feeling helpless. A man was going to be killed at 7 o’clock the next day unless some jerk in jail got his retrial. I told the guys about my visit to Taipei Prison and it worked on one level as an episode of comic relief for us all.

  “You should’ve farted in their hands,” said Dwayne.

  “When I was in prison,” said Frankie, “the guards didn’t stop there.”

  I kept checking my phone. The Daily Pineapple, Taiwan’s morally bankrupt media outlet, suggested that the online broadcast of a live murder could be a generation-defining event, as big as the day news broke that Chiang Kai-shek had died and everyone was forced to mourn.

  “Tong-tong certainly is not in any way as admirable as the Generalissimo,” the column read. “However, it could prove to be a tragic loss of one of our most prominent businessmen in a truly bizarre public execution. It may be prudent to trim stock positions tomorrow, ahead of his murder.”

  Dwayne was on his phone as well. We kept swapping phones to show each other new stories and rumors popping up.

  An anonymous blogger was claiming that Tong-tong hadn’t been kidnapped at all and the whole ruse was cooked up in order to trick the chip designer to hand over the architecture.

  If Tong-tong had in fact planned this, he hadn’t told his daughter. The panic that I had seen in her eyes couldn’t be faked because she had never panicked before.

  Some tasteless jerk autotuned the ransom video and made a song out of it. I regretted being its 23,023rd viewer.

  The jujubes were having another hot night but I was feeling frayed from my jailhouse rock. Luckily, Frankie was cool as usual and helped keep our menu items well-stocked. He also encouraged me to lure in particularly indecisive large groups, which needed attention before they split up and half of them went elsewhere. He warned phone-surfing Dwayne when skewers were beginning to char too much. The Cat was as alert as ever, and yet I could tell that even he himself was weighing things carefully in his mind.

  Like a lot of relationships in Taiwan, the one that I share with Nancy is guided by restraint, even with our phones. We don’t regularly text or call each other while she’s in class or I’m at work. Generally, we meet up at my place and we update each other as needed.

  I hadn’t told her yet about my treatment in prison and was looking forward to doing so after work, but Frankie came up to me as the night was winding down and asked me to go somewhere with him. He literally said “somewhere.”

  “Uh, Frankie, where are we going?”

  “Just come. There’s a car waiting.”

  I scratched my right ear. “I have to make a phone call first.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I picked up my phone and pressed my only favorited contact. I felt self-conscious about someone being next to me when I talked to Nancy. I know, it makes me sound shy, but that’s how I am about some things. Plus, after a whole night of fake friendliness as Johnny, the real me wants to crawl back into myself. “Excuse me,” I said to Frankie. I walked out to the nearly empty path in front of Unknown Pleasures.

  Nancy picked up after a few rings. “Jing-nan?”

  “Hey, Nancy, I’m going to be back a little later than I thought tonight. Frankie wants to take me somewhere.”

  She sniffed out my vague comment. “Hmm. Hopefully, he’s not taking you to a whorehouse.”

  “Nancy, this is serious. I think he’s going to take me to meet one of his gangster friends. Someone who might be able to help Tong-tong.”

  That sobered Nancy up. “Okay. I hope it works out.”

  “I also want to tell you that I met up with your former sugar daddy in jail.” I paused. “He seems to be on the selfish side. He won’t give me the chip design until I somehow get him a new trial.”

  “I don’t think it’s right to call it a selfish request. His original trial and sentencing didn’t seem fair for a number of reasons.”

  “That may be true, but why didn’t he just give me the chip design or tell me where it is? He’s in jail but his life isn’t in danger, either.”

  “It’s the only thing he has left. Would you help him otherwise?”

  “I may not even be able to help him now! Well, I sure can’t before the deadline. Oh, wait, do you know someone named Liu Ju-lan? That’s a friend of his who has some emails that could help.”

  “I do remember meeting a Ju-lan before,” Nancy said thoughtfully. “It must be her. I wouldn’t say I knew her well at all, though.”

  “Oh, there’s one more thing, Nancy. They thought that Ah-tien might have given me the chip design so the prison guards searched me on the way out. They even grabbed my balls!”

  “But you never hide anything back there!”

  I told Nancy not to wait up, and in case I disappeared, she was to find Frankie. I joked that if worse came to worst, she could have my record collection including the first printing of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures LP with the incredibly rare matte cover. I got a good price on it but the outsized shipping cost from the UK had been a known displeasure.

  “Don’t say you’re giving me your records,” said Nancy. “It’s bad luck to talk like that. Frankie’s going to make sure you’re safe. You’ll be all right.”
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  “I’m only kidding around,” I assured her. “Nothing bad could possibly happen. I’m actually going to come out of this healthier than when I went in.”

  After I hung up, I began to feel apprehensive. In all the gangster films, it was never the worst enemy the main guy had to worry about. It was the old pal, the best buddy, the most trusted guy in the world who stuck the knife in your neck or cut the rope while you were climbing it.

  But, hell, if Frankie wanted to take my life, there wasn’t any way I could prevent it. Anyway, what workers wanted to kill their bosses? They would lose their jobs and go to jail.

  I went back to Frankie and told him I was ready. We let Dwayne handle the final closing matters, and the two of us walked down a darkened alley where the stalls had already closed. As we drew closer to the street, Frankie let out a quick high whistle. Two headlights flashed at us.

  We came up to a four-door Nissan that was tucked under a tree.

  “Take a seat in the back, Jing-nan,” said Frankie.

  The door locks clicked as we drew closer. I waited for him to climb into the front passenger seat before I popped open the rear door. I eased my way into the car and nodded to the eyes in the rearview mirror. Frankie slammed his door shut and then I did the same.

  The interior lights were off and I wasn’t able to get a good look at the driver. Based on the driver’s wrinkles around the eyes and white eyebrows, I would guess that he was up in Frankie’s territory, in his seventies. I would also guess that he had a taste for being discreet. A baseball cap with a curved brim essentially hid his entire face from any observers on the street.

  The driver hunched up his right shoulder and the car started. He stared at me through the mirror and I shivered involuntarily. The eyes were large and indifferent but they weren’t mean. He was an unblinking squid observing a fish haplessly struggling against the suckers of its arms.