Last Days in Shanghai

by Casey Walker

  BACK IN MY hotel, I barred the deadbolt against my thoughts of the Kaifeng captain and sat on the bed. I kept turning over the matters it fell to me to broach with Leo, and my worst suppositions about him couldn’t be whisked away. I pulled the case into my lap and opened it, hoping it would contain something different this time, a magician’s box with rabbits or pigeons. Under the lamp, the money shone with its emerald light. I felt already like “Congressional Staffer #1” in the affidavits.

  One dinner in particular came to mind, from back when I first started working for Leo. I had to know then, I suppose, that I’d cast my lot. I was sitting right off Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the Capitol, and they never handed us a bill. I don’t know what we racked up, a dinner for eight, all rib eyes and Cabernet, but I know the check never came around, and Leo showed no surprise. I knew then that he was a man who’d learned how to take what was being offered, who knew not to hesitate, or make a show, but to offer a quick suture of pandering conversation. The owner, who had a tidy, barely there beard, like a shadow on his face, came over to shake Leo’s hand. Leo rubbed his stomach, boomed out, “Everything was wonderful!” and changed the subject to the Washington Nationals bullpen, how they’d lose 120 games if they kept running out this waiver-wire rotation in front of a Double-A relief corps guaranteed to get torched in the late innings.

  That dinner wasn’t the most important, perhaps just the earliest, of the times I’d kept my mouth shut. I had eaten my share, and drank more than that, and I didn’t want to look ungrateful. On my salary, if you priced out the bottles ordered up from the cellar, I couldn’t afford my own wine. They were idly talking House seats that night—how they’d recruited this millionaire to run for a California seat with favorable demographics but which Republicans hadn’t held in twenty-five years. The Democratic incumbent, a guy everyone liked personally, had just about fondled and groped his way out of office. They talked about what the recruit could spend, how even without fundraising he’d be up on the incumbent three-to-one because he could finance from his own bank account. I remembered thinking: why would someone spend three million dollars of their own money to get elected to a position that pays under $170,000 a year? I should have walked out right then, once I solved that elementary problem of arithmetic. But I doubt anyone has ever quit a job while full of a fifty-eight-dollar steak they didn’t pay for. What you start to do is convince yourself you can handle integrity personally, as a matter of feeling. You accept what’s on offer, but you say you’re different—because you didn’t ask or because you’re skeptical in your heart or because you’re not the worst. As though these leave you still free. You decline to ask who is paying for what. Really, you might prefer not to know. Knowledge becomes culpability.

  I WOKE UP hungry, and the sun was fading and my new phone was ringing. Leo’s voice was always instantly recognizable for its annoyance, and he usually began talking before he even dialed the phone, so when the male voice on the other end said “hello” and waited for a response, I knew, even swimming from sleep, that I wasn’t speaking with my boss.

  “How’s Shanghai?” the voice asked.

  “I hope it’s fine without us,” I said. I managed to choose pronouns with care. “We’re still in Beijing.”

  “Beijing?” The voice cracked, and I placed it. An intern Leo had brought in, Glenn, a recent college graduate who Polk had turned into his personal secretary during his rounds of debilitating treatments. I heard papers shuffling, unless it was a crackling connection.

  “Mr. Polk’s schedule says you’re in Shanghai today,” Glenn said, hesitant.

  “What’s the date on that schedule?”

  “April 19.”

  “There’s a newer one,” I said. I was sure that was true. Bund had emailed a new itinerary twice daily in the final run-up to the trip. It was my job to manage the circus of changes, and I had failed at it.

  “You didn’t let Mr. Polk know?”

  “How come I’m talking to you? Polk can call when he’s in.”

  “Mr. Polk is out sick.”

  “He’s out sick?” I said. “He worked through chemo.”

  Glenn had a suit he’d bought new for the internship, but he didn’t know to cut the jacket vents or the pockets, so he walked in it stiffly, with no place to put things. I never clued him in. He was eager enough, sometimes even helpful, but I could also see he was prone to red power ties and a creeping fascism.

  “How’s the boss?” he asked.

  “I can’t really tell,” I said.

  “Moody?”

  “Go home,” I said. “Go back to bed.” I’d fallen asleep in my suit. I sat up and fumbled at the knot of my tie, yanking it hard and only tightening the knot. I steadied my fingers and went back like a surgeon and got the tie undone and popped the top buttons of my shirt.

  “While I’ve got you,” Glenn rattled out, sensing I was about to hang up on him, “I’m trying to square up some of Congressman Fillmore’s committee coverage. They dropped reams of stuff on us at like five o’clock yesterday.”

  “So read it,” I said. “Summarize. Use big fonts.” Sightings of Leo actually reading a briefing book were apocryphal, like encounters with Bigfoot—no matter, he still demanded them.

  “I promise I’m not being difficult,” Glenn said. “Just one more thing.”

  I checked my impulse to throw the phone across the room. I turned on the television to newscasters on BBC World, all of whom had the same indeterminate international look—khaki-brown skin, but never too dark, English with a global lilt. The woman who reported the time in Singapore, London, and Dubai could be from Lahore, Athens, or Buenos Aires. I pulled off my sweat-through socks, barely listening to Glenn in my ear. I undid my belt and scratched at the yowling red welts left by my waistband. They looked like stretch marks. I needed a haircut and to see a dentist, both of which I had been traveling too often to commit to. My slouch in the mirror reminded me of Leo’s.

  “What’s that schedule say about Shanghai?” I interrupted.

  “Shanghai?”

  “Yes, Glenn” I said. I was standing on a narrow ledge, which was my patience. I was going to jump.

  He paused. “Most of today and tomorrow says ‘Cultural Excursion’ or ‘TBD.’ The only firm commitment I see is tomorrow night. Dinner with Armand Lightborn and . . . I can’t read this first name. Mr. Hu? Is that pretty much what you have?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “Theresa’s been calling,” Glenn said like it was all one word.

  I hung up on him and tossed out my messenger bag. In my nest of envelopes were two plane tickets, booked weeks ago, for a China Eastern Airlines flight that left Beijing for Shanghai tomorrow morning. Beyond that, I had two tickets home: Sunday morning, Shanghai to New York City.

  Calls to Leo’s room buzzed without answer. I was routed back to the front desk.

  “Has Mr. Fillmore checked out of the hotel?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” the clerk said. “This is a reservation marked confidential.”

  I sagged into the bed in my undershirt. I stared at the ceiling, then at the briefcase, feeling the change all at once. I had come all this way, but where had I gone? Alex, I remembered, had left DC saying she’d reached her limit of complicity: lying for your boss, saving face for your boss, covering for your boss. The force of her example sat on me. And yet, the longer I’d worked for Leo, the harder it became to walk away from the down payment of my sufferings—months I remembered as nothing more than dirt-caked windows and saccharine energy drinks and prescription sleeping pills pilfered from Leo’s stash. I felt Leo owed me consideration for my sacrifices, which was just the same sunk-cost fallacy that kept most everyone at the job they had, when we had equal cause to riot in the streets.

  I packed my things for the morning flight, an optimistic gesture that I half-believed might have the power to make Leo appear by boarding time. I unsnapped the briefcase again, thinking I might tally the amount
just to have a number. I didn’t get far before I started to think there might be barriers between tonight and tomorrow, unthought-of eventualities—stiff airport guards who might need bending, or minor security officials who could make trouble while Leo was gone and this briefcase was in transit. I slid a band of hundred-dollar bills out from among the firm stacks and split it up between my wallet and my jacket pockets, stuffing myself like a scarecrow.

  THE NIGHT CLERK shambled after me to the congressman’s room, where we knocked without reply. A hundred-dollar bill talked him into letting me peek inside, with the caveat of his continued presence.

  The suite was twice the size of my own, with an L-shaped executive desk and a king-sized bed. The bed didn’t look touched since the maids were in this morning. No messy suitcase lay on the floor, and none of Leo’s pill bottles cluttered the bathroom vanity. The unabated pounding from the neighborhood construction was just as loud as it was in my room, but the congressman’s floor had a better view of the wreckage and the city beyond.

  My phone vibrated against my thigh. I grabbed for it.

  “I wanted daily updates,” Theresa shouted. On the cheap phone, bass drained, her voice reached me as a high-register whistle.

  “Schedule is hectic,” I said. “I apologize.”

  I looked across Beijing into a particulate sunset of Gobi dust and pollution.

  “The toilet in the guest bathroom,” she said, “the tank won’t refill.”

  “I’ll call the plumber when I’m back Monday,” I said. I rocked in the executive chair and heard the boom of walls collapsing somewhere below the visible skyline.

  “My mother is coming this weekend,” she said. “You want me to have her walk downstairs in the middle of the night? She’s eighty-five years old!”

  “Call Glenn,” I said.

  “Glenn makes my teeth hurt,” she said.

  Her natural timbre was actually quite sweet, oddly matched to what usually poured from her mouth. I pictured Theresa on the other end of the line, with that glare that could break a bone in your face. She was attractive in a severely wound, pursed-lips way that made her look more Parisian than American, though she had some spare midsection she spent mornings trying to shrink on the elliptical. I always wondered if Leo knew what people whispered about the fidelity of his wife. Perhaps he did, and he was satisfied none of it was true. Or perhaps he and Theresa had some other accommodation that was none of my business.

  “Well,” she said, leaving the plumbing aside. “How is he?”

  She and Leo rarely spoke to each other by phone, leaving me to play go-between. But I would not tell her that the last time I had seen Leo was two days earlier, that he’d been spectacularly drunk, that he’d leveled a phone at my head, and that after I blocked the projectile, I left him unattended in the hotel lobby, half in love with an image of his choking death.

  “Booze?” she asked.

  “He hasn’t had a drop.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “If Armand doesn’t send him home smelling like gin and whores, then I’ll pay your salary for a year.”

  Theresa’s background was in finance, where she’d elbowed into the boys club. I was convinced she’d have made a better member of Congress than her husband, except retail politics didn’t suit her. She had a sharp sense of personal dignity that wouldn’t allow her to dress down and flip pancakes next to a costumed chicken at the county fair.

  Suddenly her end of the line was drowned out by public-address speakers squealing a station stop.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m on the train to New York. Apartment hunting.”

  The night clerk tapped me on the shoulder.

  “I can’t get into this right now, Theresa,” I said.

  “I want every detail when you’re back,” she said.

  “I promise.”

  “Remind me that drink you liked?”

  Talking to Theresa was like standing at the opening of a trench whose bottom I couldn’t see. At ground level, a bulldozer hit its last wall of the day, and a slow centipede of helmeted workers filed from the construction site.

  “Negroni, right?” she said. “I remember. Nothing to soften the blow there.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said. “Leo’s fine.”

  “Leo is Leo,” she said.

  We hung up. I put my hands on the desk to help me to my feet. I’d spent just one night with her, but I obsessed over the memory. I’d gone to the house because Theresa said the upstairs fireplace was blowing smoke into the bedroom. Leo had been away fundraising. Alex and I had finally decided our distance was hurtful, and the best means of preserving whatever good feelings remained was to end our relationship. Theresa and I had four cocktails before we were wrapped together on the living room couch. At first, I felt what I thought I might: a private satisfaction that I had somehow paid Leo back for how he belittled me. But that feeling proved fickle. Theresa took the real spoils. When she visited the office, she gave me conspiratorial winks, and I eventually understood that these were not come-ons as much as signals that she held something over me. The intractable question, that I have never answered to my satisfaction, is whether you regret more those temptations you resist, or suffer more from what you have done.

  I FOLLOWED A bend of rubble piles and cranes and found a noodle shop on a side street, behind the hotel. I’d hoped the night air would be calming. I found nothing consoling in it.

  Long ropes of noodles were pulled and cut into a steaming pot. They had the look of threads in a loom. I ordered by pointing, more to have a seat than anything. I held the bowl up to my mouth, twirled the chopsticks between the weave of noodles, and slurped small bites. I sipped the broth, salty enough to sting the lips. I wished I had any appetite at all—dangling, I felt, between Leo’s recklessness and my own. As well as I knew him, it was hard to imagine where he’d gone. The restaurant filled with a late rush of shouted orders, the noodles loomed and un-looming, and Beijingers crowded around my seat. Their mutterings eventually drove me away. I left my bowl of noodles nearly full, and two workers stared in my direction, disbelieving—the laowai, the foreigner. One of them, caked in plaster, picked my bowl up and finished the leftovers himself.

  I walked toward the back face of the hotel, rising sheer like an obelisk. To all appearances, every guest was out. I could see where I had left the light on in my room—the one lone light. The curtains were drawn. I was pulling my room card out of my wallet when it occurred to me that you needed to have the key to turn on the room’s lights. I took two steps back and recounted the floors: ten stories up, corner room. It was too late for housekeeping. I was almost sure I’d left the curtains open. Then the light went out.

  I ran in the side entrance of the hotel and took the service stairs two at a time, ten flights. I spent a long moment kneeling on the top landing, winded. The face in my imagination was a composite of the Kaifeng police captain as I remembered him last night and in the blurred uncertainty of this morning. I looped my head around the stairwell door. The corridor was empty. I wanted someone else to discover who was in my room, and from a phone near the elevator, I called the front desk and asked for housekeeping to leave me fresh towels.

  I snatched a China Daily off another guest’s floor mat and held it open at the far end of the hall and waited until the elevator pinged. An attendant emerged, balancing a stack of linens up to her eyes. When she began knocking at my door, I followed. She keyed in, the lights blinked on. A pneumatic spring kept the door from slamming. I had more tension in my arms than I realized, and I shoved the door open and smashed into someone coming the other way. I fell into the switch, and the light snapped out. Behind me the door hit the deadbolt. It was dark save for a vertical band of light from the hallway. Fabric brushed on fabric. An interior door closed in the dark—the bathroom, or the single closet.

  When I’d put the lights back on, I took the room in. I couldn’t see who I’d struck. The girl with the linens had vanished. I raised my fists and walked with t
repidation to the far side of the bed, finding nothing but the armchair I’d passed my first night in. The briefcase lay on its side near the desk, and I couldn’t recall if that’s how I had left it. I cracked it open, and the only thing missing were the bills I’d taken myself. I heard a murmur, and I spun around nervously and announced to the empty room that hotel security was on its way up. I lifted the bedskirt carefully with my foot, and I met two black eyes glaring back at me. I was face-to-face not with the suspicious police captain of my worst imaginings, but with the housekeeping girl, so badly shaken she’d scurried out of sight.

  Embarrassed, but relieved, I said everything I could to get her to come out. I tried to explain I’d had a teeth-rattling few days and had managed to convince myself someone had broken into my room, when in all likelihood I’d miscounted the floors. I kept talking to the poor girl until she crawled into view. She looked about fourteen in her black button-up shirt and a black skirt. They were street clothes, not housekeeping ones, as though she’d been halfway to freedom before being sent on a last, undesired errand. I continued to offer apologies, unsure if she understood me.

  It occurred to me that she could complain—call her manager, call the police, say I’d assaulted her. I unfolded a hundred-dollar bill from my jacket pocket. I creased it into a tent and set it on the bed and pointed so her eyes would follow.

  She fingered an eyebrow as I pled with her. The bed was a buffer between us. She took a step around the foot, toward me, and then lost her composure, twisting her wrist in front of her eyes and mine, shaking her hands at me like she wanted me to acknowledge and bless her pain. She spit out angry words I didn’t understand. I sat down in the armchair thinking this looked unthreatening. She grabbed the bill and ran out.