by Casey Walker
“That’s never been my experience.”
“Government work make you a cynic?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Chicken or the egg?”
I didn’t share with him that not only had I heard of Lightborn’s Venetian palazzo, I’d once been a guest. I’d enjoyed it without reservation, maybe the three best days of my life. It takes long enough, sometimes years, to confess. Even then it might only be to ourselves—we who are the most forgiving of our transgressions.
“You’re one of these serious types,” the King of Mesh said. “I got a brother like you. Spends all day dressed in black, writing sad things about the moon.”
“I’ve just had a long couple days,” I said.
I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket—Polk, I assumed. I pulled it out and held it up for the King of Mesh to see, like the call was a nuisance, though I would have paid the waitress a thousand dollars of the mayor’s money to ring me out of this conversation.
“You’re back on duty,” he said. I told him it had been good talking to him, even shook his hand. He said he’d clear our tab.
“Tell the fucking fraud ‘hello’ from me,” the King of Mesh called out.
“You’re going to have to be more specific,” I said.
IT WASN’T POLK calling, but Li-Li.
“I apologize for Mr. Hu,” she said. Her voice was patchy and somber. “I did not know when I sent you to dinner that he would be so rude.”
“He wasn’t rude,” I said, evenly, though several drinks with the King of Mesh hadn’t chipped away at Mr. Hu’s disquisition about lost faith, flexible men, and the bullet-in-the-head ends of corruption.
“I can explain it to you,” she said. “He has been relieved of his duties by Bund International. He did not reveal to me until now his dismissal.”
“He was fired?” I said. “When? Who?”
She started to explain, but I sensed Li-Li didn’t understand it, either. Light didn’t always filter to the bottom of our pool.
“It is very unjust,” she said eventually. “He had hoped at dinner he could clarify the situation for you.”
“Clarify?” I said.
“It is a poor choice for Bund to ignore Mr. Hu and do work with this mayor,” Li-Li said. “It is not my place to say so, but perhaps you should tell this information to your boss.”
I should have offered her my sympathy, asked what Mr. Hu’s dismissal meant for her own job. But I didn’t. I had every desire to avoid deeper involvement. The turning of tomorrow morning, for me, was the tying of a knot.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “please understand that my concerns right now are very specific. I need to locate Leo. Or I need to speak to Mr. Lightborn. Any help you or Mr. Hu might give . . .”
I wandered to a quiet mezzanine conference room. Its cavernous space was several degrees cooler than the lobby. I felt extra-sensitized to these tiny variations in the thermostat.
“Do you require your briefcase now?” she said.
I’d forgotten, for a moment, that I’d left that money in Li-Li’s hands. But Leo would have to show up personally if he wanted to lay his claim to the mayor’s gift—let him open a Chinese bank account, or show the documents of a provincial Chinese mayor to US Customs. Let him explain it to a congressional ethics committee.
“Keep it until morning,” I said.
What I really meant was, run away with it, Li-Li. Go build yourself a hut on the most beautiful mountainside. Contemplate the stream water and the play of fog and light as morning wanes to afternoon and never for any reason let a person talk you back down to this world.
I WANTED ANONYMITY and air, and I ducked into a taxi and asked the middle-aged driver to take me back to the riverfront.
“You want lady?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“I can show you girls. You have money?”
I told him I had a wife in the United States.
“I have wife, too,” he said. “And now I drive taxi.”
I wasn’t up to humoring him.
“Do you see big acrobat show?” he said. “Very beautiful women. Bend every way. A lucky man marries these girls.”
His English was good, but he ran out of conversation when we hit four snaking lanes of traffic.
I slipped out of the car and into the crowd at the promenade along the Huangpu River, filled with Chinese tourists and a few Germans, from the sound of it. All the Chinese tour groups wore bright flimsy baseball caps that couldn’t hold a shape. A young couple in red hats staggered in front of me with wonder in their faces. They might have been even more confused by the city than I was, bused in from some distant interior province where all the hills still had names. The boy handed me his heavy camera, and I tried to frame him alongside his girlfriend’s shining face, with the looming hypodermic needle of the Oriental Pearl Tower behind them. They looked so happy in the viewfinder. The camera needed a hard push and made a loud click. We exchanged vigorous bowing nods as they backed away.
The dark walkway reinforced the presence of the buildings on either side of the river. In a long arched row to my right ran the colonial architecture built by the British and French back when Shanghai was either the Paris of the East or the Whore of the Orient. Across the river, Pudong’s instant skyscrapers towered out of wet, sinking sand, a whole new city plugged into a substrate primed for liquefaction the minute the earth rumbled. You could mistake the Huangpu for the river of time itself, I guess—the ever-flowing present that divides past and future.
As the muddy water deformed the lights of the Bund and Pudong towers, I found it almost too easy to come detached from the life I had been living—it wasn’t so solid, or so constant. I felt several years of effort go limp in my hands. Leo’s disappearance lifted a veil. I heard an oceanic rushing through my ears. I felt the shape of my head for its skeletal parts, poked at the jawbone that would outlast me. The rushing would not stop. I thought of the morning my father died, and how brown the park grass had looked, and how I had never stopped seeing the dead patches among the green. I thought of taking Alex to dinner in Venice one night, and how she worried she’d spoiled it just by asking me to talk about my job, what I stayed in it for, what I expected. I’d acted like she was the naive one—the way she’d talked about compromise while holding a champagne glass and a steak knife.
Standing at the railing, I was bumped and pushed by the crowd. One of these bumps was more forceful than the others and squeezed me up against a vertical bar. I stopped ignoring it when it didn’t relent. Someone pulled my wrist hard to my side, and I thought I was being robbed. My wallet, full of the mayor’s money, was in my front pants pocket, but the man behind me—I assumed it was a man—didn’t reach for it. The hands on my wrists weren’t brutish—the fingers felt thin, the palm tapered rather than meaty. I’d only thrown two solid punches in my life, both late-night, low-probability American haymakers, and each time I had a clear idea why I was doing it. I didn’t hit the man grabbing me because nothing was clear. He let go. I turned and gathered his features up into a face at close range. It was the police captain from Kaifeng.
“I like your return to Kaifeng,” he said. He had a hard, hoarse voice, heavy with drink and maybe more besides. “Where is Mr. Hu? It is necessary.”
I assumed he’d tracked me to the hotel. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
“I fly to Hong Kong tonight,” I said as fast as I could settle on a story. “Please tell the mayor that I am very sorry.”
I added the apology in his language, as though it gave me credibility.
“You speak Mandarin,” he said. “You hid what you understand.” He gripped my bicep, not tightly, as though posing me for a picture.
“I didn’t hide it,” I said. “I don’t speak it.”
“You understand,” the captain said, squeezing. He came close to my face. “Where is Mr. Hu? There are matters we arrange.”
I wondered why that word—“arrange”—like we were planning a birthday party. We attracted li
ttle attention along the walkway. One or two travelers in flattened baseball caps glanced as they ambled past, but they never left their herded groups.
“Now. Now. Now. Now,” he said. Each one rose in urgency. He was smaller than I was and not in uniform. His empty right hand, at his side, kept attracting my attention. A gun would have been clarifying, at least.
He pulled me forward, and we walked that way, his hand creeping up to my armpit, and though his body shook, his grip on my arm remained firm. At the road, he settled me into his front passenger seat. I stared ahead into the yellow illumination of the last century’s buildings. As a fog rolled in, they weren’t even buildings anymore, just light and shadow. He looked like he’d been pulled from a freezing river. He leaned forward against the steering wheel, and I thought he might pass out.
“I can’t go with you,” I said. “You must realize that. You can explain to the mayor . . .”
“The mayor,” he said, “is dead.”
He said it to me again—“dead,” in English—and I found it even harder to parse. He didn’t say murdered, but then again, he might be holding “murder” in reserve, for when we’d crossed back into the city of his jurisdiction. He held the horn down with one hand and with the other reached into his pocket for cigarettes. The horn stopped blowing only long enough for him to light up. We stopped at a freeway entrance, behind an accident. Cars moving the opposite direction puttered in rain-slicked congestion. I needed to open the door and step out. If the captain reacted at the pace of the substances in his system, then maybe by the time he unfolded himself from the car, I’d be on the other side of the road. He was pale, staring off toward the river. I felt an impulse that I was in the right—his authority wasn’t divine, he was a drunk in khaki pants whose boss was fighting a long quarrel with a man who wasn’t me. I waited until his cigarette had burned a quarter of the way down its stem and threw open the door and left it open. I was behind the trunk before he noticed. He looked at me astonished, as though I’d been the one who’d dragged him from his quiet devastation and into a roaring car.
I weaved through stopped traffic, ducking low. The captain left his car in the middle of the road, and a dozen horns sounded. A panel van tried to slide around him and nearly crushed him into a taxi. Drivers rolled down their windows to curse me in a language I didn’t speak, and others pantomimed their anger behind their windshields.
I made it to the sidewalk and ran toward a herd of tour buses, end to end like a line of elephants. A few young Chinese men hustled a group of Westerners onto a double-parked bus. The driver screamed at the guides. I stood near the end of the line, and the hurrying guide asked for my ticket. When I said I didn’t have one, he looked exasperated and gave me another from his pocket. I walked to the back of the bus and slouched under the tinted window. When I looked over the rim, I saw the Kaifeng captain running back and forth. He waved his hands in the air, more to himself than like he was signaling. He threw his head back, stared at the sky. I could see, even as we were pulling away, that he was convulsing. He wept as I had never seen a man weep. His face looked twice its size for his wide eyes and open mouth.
THE BUS DROPPED us in a hotel complex, and the guides nipped at us like sheep dogs, hurrying our unwieldy group into a third-floor theater. The lights went down, and I felt safely shrouded. I wiped sweat and dirt from the back of my neck and finally took a normal breath.
It was an acrobatics show. The troupe built a precarious structure of chairs the shape of a house of cards. The littlest girl was catapulted from a seesaw, end over end, where she landed in the top seat. In the last act, a couple fell in love, and we were asked to believe that their love, not the cables linked under their clothing, made them light enough to soar through the air.
When the lights came up, I didn’t want to be the first one out of the theater. Most of the crowd mingled around the lead actress, and I played the part of one more of her admirers, standing in the clump waiting for her autograph. I spent so much time scanning the distance that I paid no attention to what was near. I looked up to find I’d been pushed to the front of the pack, face-to-face with the lovely acrobat. I sifted through a few Mandarin phrases and was about to attempt one when a handler thrust me aside and summoned the person behind me.
The audience leaked out every exit, and I followed them into the street hoping to retain my part in this dying group. Most waddled to a hotel adjoining the theater. I walked to the street and turned in the direction the crowd was thickest. My hands in my pockets felt the ridges of my keys, and I kept my eyes cast down. Men and women became their shoes. I wanted to vanish into them, like I was made of coins, and every person passing could take a handful, stash me jingling into a pocket, toss me away for luck, disperse me into every corner of the city, until I was spent and gone.
I SCROLLED TO Li-Li’s number in my temporary phone. She answered on the first ring.
“Li-Li?”
I heard a gasp and mumble, then a bump like the phone had been dropped to a hard surface.
“Can you talk?” I said. “Things are desperate.”
I heard a tinny voice I didn’t understand, and then a new person came onto the phone, speaking English.
“I am Li-Li’s friend,” she said. “She says she is very happy you call.”
“Please put her on,” I said. “It’s very serious.”
“She wants to know will you still call her from America.”
“Could you ask her where I could meet her?”
“She won’t stop thinking of you.”
“Please put her on the phone.”
“She has shame to speak with you. She is without comfort in her English, and you do not understand her Chinese, she says.”
“Who are you?” I said. “Her English is excellent.”
“You know her bar?” she said. “Tell the driver Sanlitun Lu. She says she goes to meet you now.”
“Tell her I’m very sorry, I have to go.” I hung up. I realized I’d called the wrong Li-Li. The other Li-Li didn’t answer her phone.
I DUMPED MYSELF in a chair in the lobby of a Ritz Carlton. Two Chinese men behind me ordered Johnny Walker Red, and so I did, too. I waited for my thoughts to still. Only when my hands became unsteady did I realize how hard I must have been clenching them. I glared blankly at the lobby lights. I steeled myself to go over Polk’s head, notify the embassy that our trip had fallen to pieces. I wanted to blow the whole thing up. I wouldn’t deal with a wayward Chinese police officer alone.
I had another Johnny Walker, even though I didn’t like the watered-down taste of the first one. I was afraid when I called the embassy I would stammer or not make sense. We’d given them the basic notice that Leo would be in country, but our meetings had been arranged either through Bund or Lightborn, which precluded the usual consular intercessors.
When the whiskey took hold, I finally made the call. I spoke with a woman who was prepared to help me with a lost passport or medical injury. I began to unspool the disastrous story of our trip, and as I pictured her face on the other end of the line, I lost my thread. I imagined myself as her, listening, and then as her superior, listening, and then it was the superior to that superior that I was telling the tale to. I was telling it again and again, until the telling was televised and I was exposed and ashamed—this trip was a mess from its inception out to the far horizon, before the mayor’s money, before Leo had disappeared, and long before a party official was dead. What an ethics committee might say, or the grand jury might hear, was entirely correct: I could not not have known.
I sat with the phone to my ear, the line clicking. I’d shrunk until I was two inches tall. I apologized and hung up the phone.
I tossed out my pockets until I held two numbers from the King of Mesh. I began dialing again. I was consumed by the disoriented belief that my circumstances had become so unreal that I wasn’t accountable to anyone anymore. I wasn’t even accountable to myself. I didn’t call the King of Mesh, because I never wanted to see him a
gain, but I called the number on the other card he’d given me. I didn’t want to be alone. I spoke to a woman. Not for the first time it occurred to me: you will live all your life in thrall to your evasions, hurtling toward desires that can never be satisfied.
SHE COULD HAVE been someone’s translator, a concierge. For tonight, she was my company, my solace. I singled her out from the scan she gave the lobby. She could walk in and out of this hotel a hundred times, and the men whose eyes gnawed into her would have forgotten her by the time the next pretty girl walked by.
I flashed two fingers at her. She came and sat: petite, expectedly; black hair, above the shoulders, cut in a flip popular in America in the last decade but just reaching China now. Pencil skirt, pin-tucked blouse, very little makeup. She wore glasses, but when she took them off the lenses didn’t magnify or shrink the ice cubes in my drink. She asked me which room was mine, and I sat stupidly silent. She asked if I wanted another drink.
“Could we go somewhere else?” I said. Anxiety put me in perpetual motion.
“I will call for the car,” she said.
We went outside to wait. An early mist had turned to rain. A car pulled around, and I wasn’t sure if the man at the wheel was just a driver or a bodyguard, too. He was big enough to knock me senseless if he needed to, but for now he was just handling the car.
“Xintiandi,” she said to the driver.
“You will like it,” she said, looking me over. “All the Americans like it.”
I saw what she meant when the car let us out—Xintiandi was an outdoor shopping mall, distinct from its American cousins only by its patina of history: worn cobblestones, narrow alleyways. We took an outdoor table at a beer garden, under trees strangled in coils of lights.
“How long for your China visit?” she asked. She spun her beer until foam crawled up the glass. I watched beyond her head, behind the fountain. I looked into the next cafe and up at second-story windows.
“I’m supposed to leave in the morning,” I said. “But I don’t know. Maybe I’ll die here.”