Last Days in Shanghai

by Casey Walker

  “Maybe the Suzhou men will speak to you,” she said. “But how can I know the future of this?”

  She set the packets on the bed. She split up the rest of the money, placing as many bundles as would fit into the room’s safe, and then tucking the briefcase, with what money remained, into the closet. She handed me three packets. She kept nothing for herself.

  “I cannot tell you what other men you will meet along the way,” she said. “But money always is a help. Only never let anyone know all you have.”

  I CALLED DRIVER Wei, and he returned. We pushed across the river to the Puxi side of Shanghai, where young kids fought to cross streets in high traffic and pretty, pale girls held umbrellas in dry weather to shade them from the sun.

  Li-Li looked past me to the far gray Shanghai sky, with its hazy filtered sun, the small shine not occluded by pollution. Or she was looking at nothing, and her eyes were unfocused. I fiddled with the button for the windows. I felt a need to explain myself to her in some more profound way, and I did something even I was startled by—I reached out, took her under the chin, turned her eyes toward me. I did it lightly, but it unnerved her. I dropped my hand, and there was a long silence.

  “Perhaps for you there is sensitivity,” Li-Li said eventually. “Public security will know that if there is a chance of international attention, they must act more carefully. It is for others that there is no sensitivity.”

  She delivered the last line into the floor mats. I worried about us being overheard but soon was certain we could have screamed and it wouldn’t have attracted the absent mind of speeding Wei. It must be difficult to drive with one good arm. I’d never tried it.

  Leaving the city, the buildings were lower to the ground, tracts of sprawling retail wilderness. Bamboo scaffolding enshrouded a five-story building, and workmen dangled on precarious ropes. Driver Wei stopped at a light, pulled the handbrake, and leaned his head out the window as far as he could manage, looking for where the traffic ended. He put his eyes back on the road with a grunt and spat to show he was dissatisfied with the answer.

  “This will be a long drive to Suzhou,” Li-Li said. She pumped her leg so hard it rattled the window. “The whole city is getting empty for Golden Week holiday. Everyone goes home.”

  “You’re not going?”

  She rubbed her hand across her neck, hard enough to leave a red swath on her skin.

  “My father always would say to me that because I am ugly I had to work harder,” Li-Li said.

  “That’s an awful thing to say.”

  “But I am not pretty,” she said. “He is right.”

  She drew a line along her jaw all the way up to her ear. The scar was only prominent when she smiled, which maybe explained why she so rarely did. She looked up at Wei, who took a sharp corner one-handed.

  “My father was driving,” she said.

  “It isn’t very noticeable,” I said. Now that I had seen the scar, I couldn’t see anything else.

  “I don’t care to be pretty or not,” she said.

  Her lips disappeared into a line.

  “You know that Mr. Hu always wanted to drive me home at night,” she said. “He said it was because he kept me working so long. In the beginning, I was happy for him to take me in his car. He has bought a Mercedes for which he is very proud. Many nights were so late—to drive me over to Pudong New Area where I live, it took much less time.” She paused. “But soon he would get out of the Mercedes. He walks to the door. He asks to stay. He wants to have a whiskey.”

  “Do you drink whiskey?” I said.

  “He gave it to me for a present,” Li-Li said. “I thought it was a strange gift. And then I understood. Mr. Hu is one of the world’s loneliest people, in my opinion. I have thought so ever since we went to the desert. He cannot survive his loneliness.”

  “He was always like that?”

  “The desert was the worst,” she said. “But he always had trouble. He was always hurt.”

  She sailed quietly across her thoughts.

  “Mr. Hu is Shanghainese,” she said. “You know what that means?”

  “No,” I said.

  “There’s a dialect. They speak it to one another when they want to say something more private. I only know a little part. He says he wants to teach it to me because it would help in our business. He would come inside for whiskey and stay very late to practice conversations. It got me so tired, and he would still be so angry if I was late to work,” she said. “He was worse and worse.”

  The tires hummed beneath us, and Driver Wei elbowed the horn like it was necessary to our propulsion—the yellow line separating us from oncoming traffic was only a suggestion to him, and the cars in front of us an insult.

  “Mr. Hu slapped me once when I fell asleep at my desk,” Li-Li said. “I forgot to remind him about a meeting. Very important. He was not there, and he lost face. I cried so much I didn’t think he would ever do it again. And he came to my apartment even that night.”

  “You live alone?” I said. I wanted her to keep talking. Mr. Hu felt like the key to something.

  “I live with another girl. She’s more shy than me. We are both indoor girls,” she said. “I would ask her to get up in the night if she hears Mr. Hu. She would come into the kitchen to make tea. Sometimes that could help him to leave.”

  “I have a guess,” I said. “Mr. Hu is married?”

  She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they’d grown wet.

  “He has a very nice wife,” Li-Li said. “I know he did not think I was pretty. I thought it was safe not to be pretty. Sometimes I was only sleeping for three hours on a night. His wife would call his phone. He would say he was still in the office. He is a very sad man.”

  “Did you say ‘bad’ or ‘sad’?” I said.

  It was clear, even as I asked, that she was telling me this not to condemn Mr. Hu, but to convey her attachment, her sympathy. I hated how well I understood that restraint, stopping short where we would have been justified in ruining the people above us. I sometimes thought we endured their cruelty because we wanted to advance above it, even to change it. It occurred to me now that in tolerating their cruelty we were also learning how to become cruel ourselves.

  “I know what he did with other girls,” she said. “He would tell me.”

  “Why would he tell you that?”

  “To compare me,” she said. “To the karaoke girls. To the barber-shop girls.”

  She was deep red, digging her nails into her palms.

  “He would always say how I was better,” Li-Li said. “Because they treat clients like dogs, but that I cared for him like a man.”

  She looked small and very thin, boyish, but grave beyond what children can imagine. If she was angry at the whole world, then I thought she had every right to be: a small girl with a jawline scar; most visible emotion a blush; not ever pretty and treated even worse for that. I didn’t get the sense she had ever spoken of her entanglement with Mr. Hu at such length. Perhaps she believed instinctively in that story of Lot’s wife, the danger in looking back over your shoulder. It’s only a modern idea that it can heal your traumas to turn around and face them. The much older notion is that the look will dry you out, take all your life away, until you’re no person anymore but a column of salt.

  We drove down a wide street with a median, through business parks surrounded by ten-foot hedges. I thought Polk might call at any moment, and yet I had the feeling that Li-Li was saying the most important things I might hear. Her boss was broken and selfish and whoring, but you don’t dwell on those failings in a eulogy, and she seemed to believe he was gone.

  She turned to me. “I wanted to explain to you that the girl was Mr. Hu’s idea. It is how the men do business.”

  “What girl?” I said.

  “He thinks everyone is like him,” Li-Li said.

  I was distracted by her tear-swollen face. I didn’t understand what girl she was referring to.

  “He worried he offended you, but you nev
er said anything about it,” she said. “You should see Mr. Hu when the girl called him. She was so angry. She said she would scream it to all of Beijing if we did not pay her three times the agreement.”

  I went searching for it. Finally there, in my mind, was the girl standing in my hotel room in Beijing in a too-short skirt.

  “That girl looked so young,” I said.

  “Mr. Hu was very confused,” Li-Li said. “He would not believe it. She said you chased her under the bed. I listened on the phone, and I did not want to laugh. I was not confused like he was. I knew what it meant. It showed me you were good.”

  We stilled at an intersection, and I watched part of a neon sign burn out on a building across the street. I should have explained that I’d been sure that girl was searching my room on the police captain’s behalf. The whole story depressed me—not just that a girl I’d mistaken for a ransacking snoop was some “gift” from one of my hosts, but that Li-Li seemed to trust me, even admire or like me, based on an act that was no indication at all of my character.

  DRIVER WEI BROKE up our conversation by shouting back at Li-Li. We circled a set of fences, once, then twice.

  “Is he lost?” I asked.

  We rolled along a forlorn patch of paved road that ended abruptly at a compound. I couldn’t see any buildings beyond the fences and thin shrubs.

  “He says this is it,” Li-Li said.

  “Where?”

  “He says we are wasting our time,” she said.

  Wei slowed the car, and I jumped out before it stopped. Rain fell. A steady wind rattled the cyclone fencing. Li-Li joined me, and we splashed through mud around the perimeter looking for the entrance. The shadows changed at every angle, cloud cover sifting broken sunlight.

  I pushed open a gate and saw what might have once been a construction site. I didn’t see any evidence that work had been done in months, or longer. Heavy equipment was absent, the Mandarin signage had blown off what might have once been the foreman’s trailer. No windows were in those conjectural buildings, and rain swirled through the open framing and rushed out the other side.

  “What is this?” I said. “Is this right?”

  Li-Li checked the address and placed calls to Bund’s titular heads, never connecting with anything but a switchboard. She was dour but suggested, tentatively, that perhaps Mr. Hu worked elsewhere on his days out of Shanghai. There must exist a real office, she said, where he’d done real work.

  I waved her explanations away and started to trace a different logic out of the shadows. Bund International was a name, nothing more—an act of collusion between Lightborn and all the government officials of his acquaintance who had public money to funnel to questionable construction. Embezzle, skim, divide the spoils. A win-win situation.

  “Bund is a shell,” I said to Li-Li. “A fiction.”

  She looked like she’d seen a ghost, and that was just it: she’d been employed by spirits who’d bid her to push their paper.

  I left Li-Li pecking at her phone, dialing number after number, and I walked through the steel-framed room of what should have been an entryway. Under these naked girders was a more complete view of Lightborn, in all his complexities: He’d shepherded Leo to China under the auspices of a company that didn’t meaningfully exist, in order to tour the congressman through a few show projects that featured Bund’s name, but were more likely an impenetrable agglomeration of fraudulent partnerships that served only to enrich Lightborn and his government patrons. With Leo’s help, Lightborn intended to open an American market to his Chinese partners, land a deal of real size and scale in our district, and continue the process of vacuuming up public money for his private enrichment.

  I’d been party to all manner of congressional business—fundraising, junkets, meals—in which Leo was willing to cheat and shade the truth. But I was sure now that when it came to Bund, Leo only thought he would profit from the deal, when in fact he was Lightborn’s dupe. I wondered if this was what Mr. Hu had been trying to convey to me at dinner—that Bund was a game, a parasite—and his anger at being fired, or his conscience, would have turned him whistle-blower on the whole enterprise if I’d allowed it. Instead, I’d left him in the restaurant and run off in search of my boss.

  I leaned back on Bund International’s fence, because in this whole Suzhou headquarters, I couldn’t touch anything else. It was a ghost town that had never been a town, and so I suppose that meant it had no real ghosts, only trails of money that had floated above the physical ground. A thousand years ago, a holy man, the wild Bodhidharma, who must have felt as overwhelmed by the circumstances of his world as I now did mine, climbed up Mount Song and sat in a cave for nine years meditating. What puzzles me is that he eventually got up and left—that after nine years of contemplation, something became clear enough that he could get to his feet and venture back outside. It seemed to me that staring into shadows only resulted in more shadow-staring.

  The unfinished buildings spit out a sulphurous, rotten-egg smell of low-grade drywall.

  II.

  THE LATE AFTERNOON came brightly clouded, with a lower atmosphere glare of factory smoke. Wei blasted us toward the city at axle-rattling speed. I was not only no closer to finding Leo, but even more poorly situated for defending myself from any inquiry of the Chinese police regarding Kaifeng’s mayor—his money or his death.

  “You look weak,” Li-Li said.

  “Me?” I thought she was the one who looked sick. Driver Wei gritted his teeth over his arm each time the car jarred a pothole. Li-Li insisted he stop the car. We needed air, if nothing else.

  We tried to collect ourselves, standing in front of a drab apartment block fronted by a row of food stalls. The nearest vendor roasted duck heads on a grill that was welded onto the back of his bicycle. Li-Li made me sit on the curb, and she wandered off with Wei.

  When she returned, she sat next to me and handed over a small plate of crusted tofu and said it would give me strength. I picked at it and the chili sauce alongside. She sat near enough to eat from the same plate. People stared at me, and I tried not to notice. Down the lane, Wei examined a sliver of charred meat on a stick up close under his eye. The woman who’d sold Wei the meat wore a dirty white apron, and the man next to her was in a tatty white T-shirt. His eyes were rheumy. Power lines, phone lines, and cable lines crisscrossed in a firm mesh above my head—I could be called to rapture in heaven and I’d still be electrocuted or strangled on the way up. Li-Li and I sat lost in brambles of thought.

  “I’m a burden to you,” I said.

  I took her long silence as agreement.

  “What about the train?” Li-Li said finally. “I could show you.”

  “Where am I going?” I asked.

  “To Guangzhou. Maybe sneak to Hong Kong?” she said. “It could be easier to fly from there.”

  I didn’t really see how it would work. I could press on—run hundreds more miles, try to slip off the bottom of China like I was sneaking out its unlatched back door. But my constriction wasn’t strictly geographical. No Leo, no Hu, no Bund—to approach any of them, like pools of water on the desert highway, was to see them evaporate. If I could have vanished now with them, I would have done so, but instead I seemed condemned to high visibility.

  “Polk says he’s working on it,” I said. I was talking as much to myself as to her. “Polk says. Polk says. But what does he know? He’s drugged up and half dead.”

  “Poke?” she said. She stuck a finger out.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  Three stacks of caged fowl stunk next to me, confined so that none of the birds could turn around. A rabbit sat in its cage, so grossly fat its haunches pushed through the bars. I could almost reach a finger out to him, but I thought he would bite it, placid as he looked.

  “Do you know if Mr. Lightborn ever got to Shanghai?” I asked.

  “I never could discover,” Li-Li said. “No one I could speak to knows.”

  I felt like I was holding my head out in front
of me, squeezing my temples with all my strength. Wei was deep in conversation with the man with the rheumy eyes. Together they tested Wei’s forearm, opining on his pains, and the unkind sidelong glances that came with pauses in their conversation seemed always to be directed at me. Li-Li retreated back into herself.

  I felt swallowed by the noise of the city. Mountains of earth were excavated every minute, and sky-sucking towers altered the whistle of Shanghai’s wind. Grandparents walked and clapped for their exercise. Bashful girls giggled and leaned on their surly boyfriends, who were uninterested in anything but the sheen of their motorcycles. A febrile, high-toned argument between two old men attracted an onlooking crowd, and the crowd grew rife with voices. If you were born in Shanghai, and were over sixty and sentient, then recorded in your mind, perhaps imprinted on your body, was a half century worth of ideological murder, utopian promise, and bad faith. And yet for me to extract even an eyedropper’s worth of truth about this city took laborious work. The nearest passerby was a harrowingly dull, medium-build man in golf attire, his pants belted higher than his belly button. I felt so lost. I wished I understood him.

  “What would you call those girls in English?” Li-Li said. “The kind my boss sent to you?”

  “Girls?” It was my first glimpse of the conversation she’d been having with herself.

  “You know the girls I mean.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “What’s the correct word to use?” she said. “I do not want to use an impolite expression.”

  Once I understood the family of words she was searching for, none seemed particularly polite. I couldn’t immediately bring myself to pronounce any of them to her.

  “I am not a little child,” she said.

  “I know that,” I said. Bent double with her elbows on her knees, her shirt hung down, letting scarce light hit her flat, skeletal chest. She was so skinny you could see the flares of contoured bone along her breastplate.

  “You do not know how many times I have to see those girls,” Li-Li said. “How many times to wait for them. I give them directions from parts of the city they do not know. Talk about their lives and their mental troubles.”