by Casey Walker
I had a hard time making myself nod.
“This country changes with a great pace,” Shoes said. “It is too rapid to be just one person. The problem with my excellent friend was that he became too flexible. He started to be flexible all the time, without judgment. He will soon go on trial. I am less envious of his station now.”
I started to speak, but Shoes held me off. “When Deng Xiaoping led China toward reform and opening, he said, ‘It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.’ Many people, I believe, took this to mean the rules disappear. This is an error. One part of what is necessary is the rule. And the second part is to know when the rule itself is not necessary. I have been doing business in China many years now. The cat must still be a cat and must remember it is after the mouse. My friend needed to be a lion. And the lion is not happy catching mice, you see?”
All I saw was a faint, yellow glow out the windows, behind the terrace tables. When I looked closer, it was the bright reflection of the Oriental Pearl Tower across the river. A table near us held a group of Dutch tourists. A serious woman documented every plate of food put in front of her. Her camera flash caught my eyes.
“The Party will wish to make an example of my friend,” Shoes said. “I am certain that what he will receive for his flexibility is a bullet in the back of the head.”
I chewed the fat middle of my upper lip. He folded his large hands on the table.
“My question has to do with what your boss is looking for,” Shoes said. “And to ask if he has disappeared for any reason you are not accounting.”
He stared at me now with a widow’s eyes. I could see him poised over a roulette wheel. I could see his sticky hand pressed onto Li-Li’s leg. I could see him sick at the side of a desert highway. This one-time technical consultant to the Myanmar junta wasn’t a picture of rectitude, no matter how he wanted to present himself. I assumed he was at least as complicit as I was with the mayor’s “gift.” He stared at me until my composure waned.
“I did not mean to cause you any offense,” he said. “Would you like a cigarette?”
“I need to leave, so smoke all you want.”
Two waiters rushed in as they saw me stand, one to pull out my chair, another to refold my napkin.
“If you do locate my boss,” I said. “I have to know before anyone else.” I flicked out a pen and wrote my phone number on the back of Leo’s business card. I hoped I sounded capable and not like an abandoned child.
Shoes accepted my card with both hands, but his obsessions ran tangential to mine. “You might have observed that the mayor and I did not see eye to eye,” he said. “For some time, his position has been to have me removed from this airport project before it proceeds. My position has been the mayor’s involvement must be avoided. That man would bring only complications. And yet, he feels he has prevailed in our dispute.”
He was insistent that I hear this, and yet all of Mr. Hu’s affect was odd to me, like his statements undermined themselves, or his assertions were self-canceling.
“I am certain that the mayor overestimates his standing,” Shoes said. He voiced it with resignation rather than triumph. His manner turned strangely deferential.
“You understand it is necessary for me to explain this situation to your boss,” he said. “But please permit me to say I sympathize with your personal complications. It is clear to me your boss has behaved in such a way that he has lost your esteem. I have found in my experience that many other things can be rebuilt, but once you have lost faith in a man, there is nothing that will restore that.”
I turned so quickly to leave that I collided with a waiter snatching away my napkin. The waiter fell backward into his trailing partner. The partner bumped hard against one of the restaurant columns. I wondered that the column didn’t fall, too, onto the row of tables, that the tables didn’t flip and shatter the waterfront windows, that the beams that held the outdoor terrace didn’t also dislodge and slide down four stories to the street, dragging us all into the waiting river.
IN FRONT OF an old bank building on the Bund, I called Polk. I confessed: I’d lost Leo. I waited for the words to register. As far as I knew, there was only one congressman in all the history of the US Congress who’d left on a foreign visit and never returned. He’d been murdered in Guyana, at Jonestown. He was also named Leo.
Polk rasped back at me, his voice small even at its peak exertion: “How did you fuck this up?”
On the Huangpu River, ferry boats and yachts cut the water. I was lost somewhere within myself trying to find the words that would guide me out.
“Should I call the embassy?” I said.
Polk sounded physically unwound and went momentarily quiet. “Those assholes?” he said. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“Maybe Leo’s fucking dead,” I said. “Are you considering that?”
“You suck dick at your job. Are you considering that?” Polk said. “You suck toothy shitty dick.”
I looked up at green and gold towers, their spires piercing the clouds. I was one small person among Shanghai’s twenty million, all of us scurrying under construction skeletons on former swampland. Maybe this skyline was progress, the best work to make of our limited human days—building cities, building nations. But I wanted to close my eyes, or slow it down. I wanted to pause for one still moment of consideration. Neon characters flashed ads that were nonsense to me. Mirrored windows hung over the anonymous crowd. Friends met on the sidewalk, took one another by the hand, let go to let others pass, and then linked hands again. I wished I could become any one of these people streaming past and vanishing from my sight.
“You don’t know what position he’s put me in,” I said.
“Don’t start talking like his fucking wife,” Polk said. “Neither one of you are in positions you didn’t choose your goddamn selves. I’ll call Lightborn. I want you to do nothing. You’re a plant until I talk to you again.”
“I’m going to be on that plane home tomorrow morning,” I said. “With or without him.”
This threat felt difficult to carry through, even as I said it. But I offered it so Polk didn’t think he had me on a leash.
“Get cancer,” Polk said. He hung up.
The other Leo, in Guyana: he’d been shot on the tarmac next to his plane. An assistant was shot alongside him—a woman, about the same age then as I was now. She’d played possum for the better part of a day, bleeding on the runway until help arrived. Decades later, she ran for and won her old boss’s seat. I knew staffers in her office. They kept a wary eye on their idioms: “drinking the Kool-Aid” was off limits; so were “pulling the trigger,” “under the gun,” “left for dead.” She must, from time to time, still think of her old boss, and I always wondered what she thought of him—if she’d made that Leo a hero, or if she’d decided prying into Jonestown hadn’t at all been worth it, that Jim Jones would have continued his paranoid apotheosis among the believers, but done it without killing anyone, had he just been left the hell alone. I felt suddenly unaware of the buried capabilities of the men we were involved with. And my fear was that these men were equally unknown to Leo Fillmore—that his corruption was not even accompanied by understanding.
II.
IN THE HOTEL lobby two teenaged girls took turns at the piano. The morning was a far-off destination. I ordered a drink—more than a few, actually, but just Tsingtaos, sitting as near as I could to the entrance. I preferred the commotion while waiting on Polk’s instructions. Three women in pink pillbox hats greeted travelers circling through the gold revolving doors.
The scattered armchairs filled with other weary guests. I wasn’t the type to strike up conversations, though I often attracted them. Cab drivers, lonely businessmen, married women—they saw me, and they saw someone who never missed a day shaving, who wasn’t physically imposing, who was neither fashionably dressed enough to be intimidating nor shabby enough to be suspect. I was blessed with the wise words of sad, adrift people who’d h
ad too many cocktails after the conference. Women pressed stories of personal dissatisfaction, and men more often had some unfunded dream. I did not interrupt: Leo liked that about me, I think. I seldom knew how to end a conversation, unless I was trying to prolong it. The way I got to know Alex was by working late in the Rayburn Building, planning my exit to coincide with the sound of her heels clicking down the hallway. I could stretch my day out an extra hour to bump into her and then manage to fumble the conversation closed as soon as it began.
A man sat in a chair across from mine without asking if it was occupied. I knew I looked alone, reeked of it. He had two inches on me, so he was an actual six feet, not my liar’s six feet. His suit was slim-fit and his shirt tailored. I looked him over and guessed finance, New York City. He was too put together for DC.
“American, yeah?” he said. He had the faint accent of a stifled Midwesterner who’d gone east for college and stayed.
“Good guess,” I said.
“What business?” he asked.
I considered lying to him.
“Government,” I said.
“The big thief, huh?” he said. “Which part?”
“The Hill,” I said. “Congress.”
He laughed.
“Is that funny?” I asked.
“Isn’t it?” he said. “Sorry. No offense.”
“Some taken,” I said.
“Long day?” he said.
“You know bosses,” I said.
“I don’t miss them,” he said. He wasn’t much older than me—five years, tops. He looked like he worked out, but the muscle was for show, a little bulge of bicep and scrawny legs. I couldn’t guarantee he spent his weekends playing touch football in the park, but he’d definitely be the one you’d think to call if your team was short a guy.
We seemed to both be staring at the lobby fountain, like it was important to take it seriously.
“So you’ve seen some shit, huh?” he said after a minute.
“Nothing special.”
“Come on,” he said. “Congress?”
“You know,” I said, leaning in. “It’s nothing but briefcases of cash. I don’t even know what to do with all the leftover briefcases. They’re starting to clutter my apartment.”
He smiled and settled himself into his chair, draping a leg over the corner of a low table in front of us.
“So it’s as fucked as it looks?” he said.
“Even more fucked than that.”
“You work for anybody I’d know?”
I took a breath, said the name sighing, blowing it away from me to lose it in the night: “Congressman Leonard Fillmore.”
“I’ve heard that name,” he said. “Had that money thing a couple years back, yeah?”
“That was paperwork,” I said. “People made too big a deal of it.”
“Leo the Lyin’, right?” he said. “I remember.”
“Headline writers,” I said.
He was referring to a campaign-finance fuckup from before my time, the kind of thing opposition research scatters into the media winds from time to time. Nothing had come of it.
“Hey, no judgments,” he said. “People want to give him money, he should be able to take it. You’re going to run the world on three-dollar checks from old-folks homes? Come on. Everybody knows how it works.”
“They think they do,” I said.
“So? What’s your angle?” he asked.
“Obtuse.”
“I see,” he said. “You think you’re the clever one.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“You’re the one who’s so smart he can’t even see he’s getting screwed,” he said. “I bet you don’t even clear 60K. Get screamed at all day? Might wind up in jail at the end of it?”
“I get a free Metro pass,” I said.
“You should be getting Super Bowl tickets.”
“That’s a little above my weight class.”
“C’mon, don’t be a sucker,” he said. He thought I was that college roommate still stupid enough to study for an exam whose answer key could be had for a couple dollars. He didn’t realize I’d bought the answers, too.
“I got a World Series ticket once,” I said. I was angry with myself once it was out of my mouth. “Box seats.”
“Whose box?” he asked.
“Armand Lightborn.”
“Lightborn?” he said, and he whistled. “Risky business.”
The revolving door spun like a pinwheel and reflected lights off every polished surface. Was that Liszt on the piano or Chopin? I never knew anything.
“What’d you say you do again?” I asked.
“I didn’t tell you yet,” he said. “I own a company. We’ve got our manufacturers in China.”
“What do you manufacture?”
“Mesh.”
“Huh.”
“That nylon mesh you find on backpacks—the netting stuff. A million uses for it. If you stop to think about it, the whole world runs on mesh. To me it does.”
“How’d you get into that line of work?”
“It’s a convoluted story,” he said. “But it’s paying now.”
“Really.”
“Billion-dollar industry,” he said. “And I’m the king.”
“Any openings in that business?” I said. “I could use some billions.”
“Yeah,” he said, “what would you do with it?”
“Fly to the moon. Buy a DeLorean.” I tried to consider what I might actually want from a windfall of money. “Who the fuck knows?” I said.
“Have you met the girls here?” he said, leaning close, dropping his voice a tone.
“Not really my thing,” I said.
“You a fag? No judgments.”
“You got me,” I said.
He looked at me and was laughing again: “Man, if you’re not into whores and free shit, then what exactly do you do in Congress?”
I tried to pivot. I thought I might learn something from this King of Mesh. “I’ve always heard China was a difficult place for an American to do business,” I said.
“Less than you might think,” he said. “You need Chinese partners. And people are scared of the corruption. But Washington’s corrupt, too.”
“You really think those are the same thing?”
“Am I hurting your feelings?”
“No,” I said. “But you understand why I ask.”
I could smell scallions frying in the hotel restaurant behind us, and it reminded me I had walked away from Shoes before eating dinner.
“Let me tell you the difference between you and them,” the King of Mesh said.
I distrusted all sentences that began, “Let me tell you . . .” It was always men who insisted they had the world all figured out and were about to hold it before you, dangling on a string. He continued: “It’s that the corruption here is manageable, rather than stupid and wasteful and at eternal cross-purposes. The thing is, you could throw money around Washington all you want and your shit still might not get done. You people are corrupt without even being dependable.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Bribery is really a matter of decency.”
“Bribery is a lawyer’s word.”
“Lawyers have excellent vocabularies,” I said. “Collusion, conspiracy. Misappropriation of public funds.”
“Put it this way,” he said. “In China, they might pass a law that says you can’t make people work when it’s over 105 degrees, but then the official temperature will never be over 104.”
“You ever been outside when it’s 105?” I asked.
“I only mean that to be illustrative,” he said.
“So everyone wins, then.”
“I’m just saying at least this way some works gets done,” the King of Mesh said. “That FCPA and Sarbanes-Oxley horseshit ties you up like a fucking roasting chicken. What you people don’t understand is that what the United States calls ‘bribery’ is what half the world calls ‘doing business.’ If you don’t pay, so
meone else will—there’s no addition or subtraction.”
“You know,” I said, “It might not be smart for you to be telling me this.”
“You’re pretty harmless, buddy,” he said, pounding down the rest of his beer and looking to order two more. “Am I wrong?”
He paused, like he was holding me up under a light. A petite Chinese woman walked in on the arm of a sallow-faced man three times her age, and the King of Mesh gave me an exaggerated eyebrow.
“The girls here are phenomenal,” he said. “Particularly in Shanghai.”
He’d decided I had the usual weaknesses. That was fine. I couldn’t disagree. He handed me a card.
“These are the girls you want,” he said. “Not the scummy ones who’ll leave your junk infected and rob you. These ones come to you discreet. They love Americans. Anything’s better than these Chinese millionaires. They’re psychotic.”
I rubbed my finger across the thick card stock. It had the same cotton feel as money.
“That code on the back,” he said, “that’s my account.”
“That’s generous,” I said. I flipped it over. The back was blank.
“I’m fucking with you,” the King of Mesh said. “Pay for your own whores.”
“That’s how my mother taught me,” I said. I put the card in my wallet.
“I say whores, that’s not right,” he said. “They’re lovely ladies.”
“I’m sure they appreciate that.”
“So satisfy my curiosity: Armand Lightborn,” the King of Mesh said. “I hear he shows off this house in Venice that’s like a fucking palace. Like he thinks he’s a count.”
A party emptied out of two cabs and came into the lobby, screeching to the ceiling. I couldn’t hear him well.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “Did you say ‘his account’?”
The King of Mesh slapped me on the thigh. He couldn’t hear me, either. He leaned in, “You’re exactly right: he’s a cunt.”
He paused. “But you reap what you sow, right?”