by Casey Walker
He tried to focus, but he was somewhere out in the heavens.
“Can you promise me something?” I said.
Lightborn looked at me, pulling a serious face.
“Hey,” I said. “Ground control to Major Tom.”
He choked out a laugh.
“Ah, fuck yourself,” I said. I got up and walked back along the Riva. Lightborn followed, singing. “‘Sitting in a tin can . . . Far above the world . . .”
Every congressmen I could think of had one of two things guaranteed in the broom closet: a scumbag businessman or a crazy preacher. They were corrupted of flesh or corrupted of spirit, and often they were both. I don’t know what further clarification I was searching for.
Lightborn caught up to me. “You seem pretty miserable. This about you and that girl?”
“Leave her alone,” I said.
“Don’t hold on too tight,” he said. “Those ones leave if you hold them too tight.”
“She’s leaving anyway,” I said. I cupped my hand and trained the lighter on the tip of the paper. “This is the last of it.”
“Save some of that,” he said.
“No more for you,” I said.
He snatched the joint out of my hand.
“Listen to me,” I said. “If you fuck Leo over, you’re fucking me over, too.” I put two fingers in his chest. He grabbed them like they were the barrel of a gun. Maybe Leo wasn’t any better than Lightborn as a person—quite possibly he was worse. But Leo was still the weaker party.
“The world is a rock,” Lightborn said. “Leo wants to lift it. So what? We all want something. If she’s all done with you, I want your pretty girlfriend.”
I threw a wild punch at him, more desire than direction. I thought about that impulse for years afterward. I only clipped him, and his swing in return was one of those flailing haymakers with a low success rate, but it caught me broadly under the chin. His momentum carried him down with me. I got up first, and he sprawled out laughing like it wasn’t clear to him how he’d fallen.
A group of Frenchmen, dragging their wives behind them, helped get Lightborn up. Back on his feet, he took an old-time boxing stance, fists swaying in large, rough circles. I ignored him, and he grabbed one of the French women and twirled her like they were dancing. To the men’s credit, no one else swung at him. I hadn’t walked far when Lightborn ran up and wrestled my neck under his arm.
Whenever I remembered the swing I took at him, foremost in my mind was that I could not hurt him. Worse, he considered it a joke that I’d tried.
“You’re not much of a puncher,” he said, holding me in a headlock. “But you’re a hell of a guy. Did I hurt you? Did you chip a tooth?”
I SLEPT AS close to Alex as I could get. She kept wrestling away, telling me I was making her hot.
She had us in line early at St. Mark’s. We hadn’t yet been inside. I still felt smoke in my lungs and eyes, which lent the saintly faces in the mosaics a hallucinatory reality. The undulating flagstones beneath my feet felt less like a floor than like my own uneven way of walking. Alex spoke more words to the guards than she did to me. I had already begun to think of her as an absence. Leaving the church, four bronze horses—looted in the siege of Constantinople—soared brightly over the piazza. I had the feeling that after she moved, I would go visit and we would try to make it work. We would probably sleep together, and it would be a little bit sad and beside the point, but we would do it anyway.
DAY 5
SHANGHAI
I.
I HAD MY head on a swivel, skittering down a long corridor through Pudong Airport watching for faces I thought took me in too long. I drifted behind three generations of a family pushing an overburdened luggage cart. The placid grandfather looked like he’d lived eighty hard years, but he shuffled through the check-in crowd like he was meditating in a garden—hands clasped behind his back, face screwed up in concentration. The midforties father, with a face like a turtle and the short arms and neck to match, gave me a squinty look. I felt his gaze bend my spine. I ran into a restroom.
I called Li-Li from a toilet stall, where my worn leather shoes put the first scuffs in a new-laid floor. She knew from my voice I had trouble.
“Perhaps you should go to interview,” she said, when I’d explained. “Public security can then correct the mistake.”
Her tone wasn’t confident, and I took “interview” as a fantastic underselling.
“Go alone?” I said.
“It is worse to wait,” she said.
“I want a hotel,” I said. “But this needs to be private.”
A catch in her voice told me she was trying to conceal her rising panic.
“A hotel will want your passport,” she said eventually.
“Maybe you could check in with your name?” I whispered.
I hung on her answer.
“You still cannot contact your boss?” she asked.
I SHIELDED MY face with my hand and kept pace with the streaming crowd, sorting the word “EXIT” out of all the indecipherable ideograms above my head. Two drivers approached me, neither of whom stood near a licensed taxi. I gave the less aggressive man my fare to the hotel Li-Li had named. He held one arm crooked, and it looked painful, possibly broken. He finished his cigarette and had trouble lighting another. This wincing man with the tight buzz cut and bent arm called himself Driver Wei. I hunched below the rim of the window and dialed my phone as he swept me through the city. His car was like a broom dusting pedestrians from its path.
The hospital staff put me through to Polk’s room.
“I never heard from you,” I said.
His voice was hoarse. His vitals sounded weak. I cupped my hand over my mouth to keep the driver from overhearing.
“I’m sorry, Polk,” I said. “Maybe I haven’t said that before. I’m sorry about what’s happened to you. And you’ve kept going. I don’t know how.”
“Okay,” he said, barely audible. “Okay, okay.”
In traffic in front of the car, a man had strapped an office desk to his motorbike. As he sped, the desk swayed like the pole carried by a tightrope walker.
“I’ve got calls out,” Polk said. “Lightborn’s . . . I don’t know. I haven’t got him yet.”
“What about anyone else?” I said.
I heard metallic clanging, like falling pans.
“It’s not a missing-child alert I can just post on the freeway.” He was banging something in his room. “The idea is not to make an international fucking incident out of this.”
“I’m just going to say this,” I said. “I took some money.”
“I can’t hear you. Talk louder.”
“I was offered money for Leo,” I said, “and I took it.”
“Are you crying?” he said.
I cleared my throat.
“There were police waiting for us at the airport,” I said.
Polk was silent a long time. The car wound off the freeway into Shanghai proper. A few old men, walking at the pace of another era, shuffled at midday through the streets in their silk pajamas.
“You took money?” Polk said. “Why did you take money? Who in the fuck told you to take money?”
“They offered it,” I said.
“This conversation isn’t real, is it? I’m already dead. I’m dead, and you’re a demon.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“Fuck yourself with ‘I didn’t know.’ You just took it? How stupid are you?”
“What do I do?”
He started to yell, and I wondered what strength the yelling sucked out of him. “Give it back. To whoever gave it to you.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Can’t what? Give the goddamn money back. We don’t want it.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
“Who’s dead?”
“The guy who gave it to me,” I said.
“Are you recording this?” Polk said. “Are you wearing a wire? Jesus Christ, Luke. You know what? Don’
t say anything else. Not another goddamn word. I’m innocent, and I’m going to stay that way.”
“Yeah, you’re as innocent as I am,” I said.
“What are you trying to do to me?” Polk said. “Do you think dying isn’t hard enough?”
With his haze, and my circumstances, our conversation oscillated between unforgiving and dissociated. I heard my voice come out so plaintive, so lost. The same sound as when I’d heard my father was gone, and no one could explain it the way I wanted to hear it, in terms of restoration or reversibility.
“I’d feel safer if we brought the embassy in on this,” I said.
“Understand this,” Polk said, “if you blow Leo up, if you attract any attention at all to whatever you’ve fucked up, then I will bury you so deep in shit the Feds will be blaming you for the Kennedy assassination.”
“Can you imagine what I’m facing here?” I said. “Chinese police?” I couldn’t imagine it myself. The King of Mesh told me I was a ghost, and Polk must have sensed an absence in me, too. His severity felt designed to shock me back to life.
“You will not earn my sympathy,” Polk said. “I wouldn’t care if you were in jail in China forever, except that it would fuck Leo up to have to explain you.”
I leaned my head out the car window for air. A group of besotted men in coats and ties banged out of a restaurant, laughing and shouting after some eternal “Gan bei!” lunch.
“Can you pull yourself together?” Polk said. “Can you stay out of sight? Anything? Give me time to try to unfuck you. Are you okay with that?”
“I’m not okay,” I said. “Nothing is okay.”
Polk hung up. I’d slouched so far down the seatbelt was slicing my neck. We arrived at the hotel, and Driver Wei didn’t let me go without formally presenting a business card. It felt strange to have such courtesies remain, even under summons.
THE HOTEL LOBBY was on the fifty-third floor, and the rooms extended forty floors above that, one of the tallest buildings in the city, with a square hole carved out of its towering peak so that from a distance it looked like a giant bottle opener.
Li-Li met me with no expression outside the downward slope of her finely plucked eyebrows. She wore a black, form-fitting pantsuit, which showed that her form was a straight line, and a pair of wire-frame glasses I hadn’t seen before. We were quiet in one another’s public company. She handed me the mayor’s briefcase and walked in short steps to the check-in counter.
The room we were shown to was nicer than every apartment I’d ever lived in—ironed white linens, hardwood floors with no dust. It had a picture window overlooking the Huangpu River, where beaten ships floated out to sea. The view gave me vertigo, and all at once I felt part of a centuries-long line of misbegotten travelers to China—men who’d moored in unfamiliar ports or rattled overland by caravan into Silk Road cities thousands of miles from home. Li-Li hooked her thumbs into her pants pockets and shifted her feet. She kept her own counsel, her demeanor more like an old man who’d been through a war than someone young with any faith in the future. A double curtain—one sheer and white, and a thicker blackout one behind—hung on two tracks controlled by an electrical switch. It felt like a test—to flip the switch would be to succumb entirely to paranoia. No one could honestly be watching us, at this height, from some perch in a nearby office tower.
“Could you call Mr. Hu?” I asked. “Could he help me with the police?”
She was a thin carving, her arms hanging straight. I laid the briefcase on the bed, and her eyes fell over it for a long moment. She didn’t respond.
“What about the Bund executives I met in Beijing?” I said. “I have their cards. I have a hundred names.”
“You met partners,” Li-Li said.
“Charles, right? My first night here. Wasn’t he a vice president? Somebody with connections . . .” I trailed off.
“Bund does many related ventures,” Li-Li said. She seemed distracted. “Charles’s official title is with another group.”
A hotel porter slipped through the door with my luggage. He was all of sixteen with a floppy haircut and a narrow, severe face. He put my suitcase on a folding rack, and I noticed a red stripe around its zipper that I didn’t think I had seen before—such a disconcerting feeling, to have the material of your own life come into view as though you’ve never laid eyes on it.
“I will sometimes travel for Mr. Hu as a note keeper or translator,” Li-Li said. “Such as when I met you in Beijing. It is really only his business I know, not these other men.”
I wanted her to be quiet while the porter stood near. I hoped he understood nothing more than a few sentences of hotel English.
“So who is Bund?” I said when I’d latched the door. I heard anger dispersed through my voice, none of which I meant to direct at Li-Li.
“There are me and Mr. Hu in a small office in central Shanghai,” she said.
“That’s it?” I said. Beyond her, my eyes fixed, I could see the clock of the Customs House, rendered miniature by distance, but couldn’t read the time figured by its hands.
“No,” Li-Li said. She tightened. “There is in addition the biggest Bund headquarters, outside the city. Nearer to Suzhou than to Shanghai. Mr. Hu would go there one to two days each week. I stay in Shanghai to answer phones.”
The building listed in gusts of wind. Footsteps outside tapped along the corridor. The porter’s face sprung to mind, the suspicious intelligence in it. I toed the floor, trying not to squeak it, and pushed my eye up to the peephole. An attendant came into my fish-eyed sight, lifted a spent tray of tureens and tea up from the baseboards, dropped cutlery into a bin, and went clattering back down the hall.
“Could you take me there?” I said, turning back to Li-Li. “To the Suzhou office?”
“I am no help,” Li-Li said. “I have never gone to that place.”
“It’s the only help I can think of,” I said. “Unless Mr. Hu is able to assist us?”
The “us” felt speculative, a weak plea. She put her hands to her face and squeezed. As the blood ran out, I saw the faint white line of a scar I hadn’t noticed before. Even that’s not right: I must have noticed but forgotten.
She exhaled and told me she’d had a migraine last night, flashing lights and holes in her vision. She’d silenced her painful phone. When she finally checked her messages, Mr. Hu had called a dozen times. His ranting took her several listens to decipher.
“Mr. Hu recites old poetry when he is most upset,” Li-Li said. “Does your boss do this?”
“Poetry?”
“Mr. Hu likes Qu Yuan,” she said. “You have heard of him?”
“No.”
“A very old poet,” she said. She’d dismissed the ramble of Mr. Hu, attaching himself like a barnacle to ancient history, as mere drunken grief. But now she believed differently.
“Since then, I cannot reach him,” she said. “He was very distressed. Now I hear of your circumstances, and I must say I have extra worry for him.”
I leaned my forehead on the window until the height made my kness weak. In every new hotel high-rise, these windows didn’t crack open at all, for whose benefit I was never sure. There’s nothing more unnerving than the suggestion that it’s only institutional foresight that’s keeping you from suicide. Finally, I understood the full shape of her hesitation: My hurry was to genuflect to the occupiers of Bund’s corner offices, men she didn’t know except by hard reputation. These were executives whom she had no reason to trust, no standing to beg from. Undoubtedly, they weren’t charitable souls, more likely petty tycoons who leafleted poor neighborhoods with eviction notices and forced underlings into acts of oral sex in the office stairwells. But if they could lift this curse of suspicion from my forehead, if they could help roust or recover Leo, then I would push their failings to the distant edges of my consciousness.
I reached for Li-Li’s hand, which was slick and soft. I hung too long on her delicate fingers. I can’t really say I would show a similar generosi
ty of spirit in her place, that I would let myself linger in the hands of the accused. I indicated the mayor’s briefcase on the bed.
“Did you open this?” I asked.
“No,” she stammered. “I would not do that.”
I grabbed the case by its handle and turned out its contents. The pile of bills, thumping to the floor, brought an upwelling of heartache. Li-Li looked stricken by the lumped cash.
“Mr. Hu and I were there just before the mayor died,” I said. “Maybe you’re right and the police just want to talk. But it’s suicide to go plead without some better guarantee than my stupid name can provide. You understand? I’m guilty enough.”
Li-Li bent down, stacking the money back into the case. I heard the refrain in my voice: me and me and me. She registered that one brick of bills was missing.
“Is that why your boss is here?” she said. She wouldn’t look at me. “For this money? From a man like that?”
“This?” I said. I touched the lock on the briefcase. “It can’t be the whole reason.”
“Why not?” she said.
“Because it isn’t enough, and there are easier ways,” I said.
“How much is it?” she said.
“I didn’t want my hands on it.”
“Except for what you took.” She erupted. “You make me hide stolen money. You want me to take you to Suzhou. And still you will tell me that you do not know anything about anything.”
I was shaking hard, somewhere deep, deep down, but the energy seemed to expend itself before it reached my body’s surface. It left me numb.
“What if you take this?” I said. I lifted two bundles of bills. “For your trouble?”
She took this like a fumbling come-on. She shook her head and crossed her arms. I pushed the bundles onto her, trying to make her hold them. A look bloomed on her face that I believed was her mind bending toward an unthought-of possibility.
“You could start your business,” I said. “Skin cream, right? The expensive stuff. Those pretty little bottles.”
She bounced the bills in her hands like she was guessing their weight.