Last Days in Shanghai

by Casey Walker

  The yacht filled slowly with guests and then pulled into the river. Faster boats cut past us, churning up wakes of phosphorescent water. Shanghai teemed on either side of me, its lights green and blue and yellow. In less urgent circumstances, I might have enjoyed this without reservation, watching the city like it was being staged for just the fifty of us.

  I scanned the top deck for Lightborn. A group of Chinese men stood at the prow, clustered together like speakers on a dais, and a handful of Americans ringed them in a respectful halo. I took my search inside, where boisterous guests crowded together in a walnut-paneled barroom. I saw no faces I recognized among the Americans, but I also did my best to keep my gaze level with their loosened ties. I held my breath and ground my teeth, trying to find the still calm of a temple Buddha. Within a quarter hour, I’d been marked with an indelible dye that said I must be some assistant, and the men present stopped paying me much notice. I had no problem, myself, spotting the other assistants onboard. Most of them stayed closely tethered to their bosses, as though they shared an oxygen tank. I breathed in my small measure of safety: the yacht, at least, was no place I’d be harried by public security. Two men shambled up a set of stairs from belowdecks, but neither was Armand Lightborn.

  I wandered to the aft deck and sat on a bench next to a storage bin for life vests that hid me from sight of the partygoers. On shore, tiny heads bobbed in front of the old banks and colonial-era hotels on the Bund. When so much else had been destroyed, it was hard to imagine those buildings had been left to stand—monuments to markets backed by gunboats, towers of Western money on Chinese land.

  The hour grew later, and the city lights cast prisms across every break in the water. I paced to a window and watched the party inside. The men in suits became looser and sadder in pantomime. I pitied their assistants, stranded on the late-night cruise, knowing the alarm doesn’t come any later in the morning just because the boss kept you out into the small hours the night before.

  What I would say to Lightborn, if I encountered him, was still something of a mystery to me. He might extract me from China, he might know already what had become of Leo, but I wanted him to look at me, too. For what I had done—for Venice, for Kaifeng, for all my silent years preceding them—I had been made, and would be made, to suffer. And I felt he simply needed to be made aware—that it should be brought to bear on Lightborn’s consciousness that out here on the margins there were men like me, however distant in the etiolations of his schemes, who were taken in, who might be at fault, but who suffered for those faults while no harm had come to him.

  A group of Americans trudged out to my end of the ship. They took no notice of me. Three dark-suited men joined them, Chinese and exuding an official demeanor. I’d had my education. These were the sort of men who let praise for the masses fall from their lips, while the papers for personally enriching private ventures were packed into their briefcases. Most saw no contradiction in this behavior and would quote you what Chairman Mao liked to say: “Fish don’t survive in pure water.” Each official was soon joined by an early-twenties female with the irregular proportions of an underwear model. The girls were flower-stalk tall and equally slim, with an unmistakable sexual air whose most lasting impression was nevertheless fragile and unhealthy. I thought of cut orchids. I thought of wax museums. Rose had claimed not to know much about this party, except what she could guess from the other girls who’d been requested. Most were Russian, milky blonde, a species preferred, she said, by the Communist Party elite.

  I was so fixated on this tableau that I didn’t notice someone had sidled up next to me. I felt a hand on my shoulder. He could have snagged my wallet if he’d wanted to start easy in a career of petty theft.

  “You recognize that guy over there?” the man said.

  “Which?” I said.

  “White guy. Leather face.” He pointed to a lonely man who’d come out to lean on the railing and was now gazing at Shanghai in utter confusion. The man’s body wasn’t built for a suit, with a gut and big shoulders and legs as massive around, each one, as my chest. I didn’t find him familiar, though I could be convinced I had seen him before.

  “Sorry, I’m Robbie,” the guy next to me said. “Assistant to Mr. Lightborn.”

  I’d never spoken with Robbie. But rage is what I felt—an easy transference, my burdens all his fault, just for him saying Lightborn’s name. I told him he must be brand-new.

  “Last guy only lasted three hours,” Robbie said.

  “Quit in three hours?”

  “Fired in three hours.”

  “You must be the one not returning any of Lightborn’s calls,” I said.

  “You’re not the first person to say that tonight,” he said. He shook his phone at me like a rattle. “You wouldn’t believe the last few days.”

  I stared into the river’s green, chemical trash, collecting myself.

  “So that guy used to play pro baseball,” Robbie said, pointing again at the thick man near the railing who was now throwing ice cubes at sea birds. I took a second look and realized I knew who he was, once I had him in the right frame. He’d pitched a perfect game. He’d won two hundred more. He used to hunt African game with a crossbow in the off-season.

  “What’s he doing here?” I asked.

  “Some investment group wants our help building a stadium in China. They brought him over as a rep,” Robbie said. “Baseball’s got huge potential, I think. I mean, what’s the competition, Ping-Pong?”

  Robbie had a gap in his teeth that faintly whistled when he spoke. Underneath our small talk, I rehearsed an entirely different conversation.

  “You ever play baseball?” Robbie asked.

  “Not past Little League,” I said.

  “You know, Mr. Lightborn could have gone pro.”

  “He likes to say that,” I said. “So why the fuck didn’t he?”

  “How about rotator cuff,” Robbie said. “How about tendinitis. How about ligaments. Every piece of conceivable shit.” He flexed his left arm at me, then uncurled it to about a quarter of the normal range of motion. “You know that’s the furthest he can stretch it now without pain?”

  “I guess his talent was cursed,” I said.

  Robbie was distracted by a squawking gull the ballplayer had pinged with ice. As long as I held my tongue, a conjectural evening took shape before me. We were two assistants on a night cruise, talking about bad luck. We could listen to the ballplayer tell stories about road trips and loose women. We could raid the bar and bust open scotch older than I was. At the end of the night, barely under my own power, I could leave in good company, arms draped over my compatriots’ shoulders, Lightborn bouncing into his waiting car to be expensively fondled by every petal of Rose’s flower.

  “You know who Leo Fillmore is?” I asked.

  Robbie cocked his head like it was a name he neither wanted, nor expected, to hear.

  “You know about this?” he said.

  “I know that I work for him,” I said.

  Robbie rocked back on his heels. His aspect turned dark and joyless, and he twisted his head to check our distance from the other guests on board. I followed along with his eyes, watching a young man in sunglasses carry drinks to the triptych of Chinese ministers.

  “Where’ve you guys been?” I said.

  “I’m not going to tell you any shit like that,” Robbie said. He was drinking bourbon over ice. He crunched the ice with his teeth.

  I took the wind in my face, diesel engine smoke from barges and ferryboats. It was a lovely night in spite of my feelings that I might sink under its weight. I started to sway, and soon I couldn’t stop. It was a nauseous fit. I felt like I might collapse. Something had broken, talking to Robbie, in my ability to just stand and bear up. A police boat shot by us with discombobulated officers holding their hats to their heads.

  “Are you drunk?” Robbie said. “Is something wrong with you?”

  “I’ll take it up with your boss when he has a minute,” I said.
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  “He won’t have one for you,” Robbie said. He was trying to sound so mean and yet sounded so uncertain that I almost pitied him. For once, I caught myself looking at the two dim stars in the city’s sky.

  “I bet Polk has called you thirty-five times,” I said.

  “Yeah?” Robbie said. “Well, maybe he can wait his turn. We’re still trying to triage your boss trying to fuck us.”

  He got the tough line out, but then his voice lost its edge. It would take him a few years’ practice to grow expert at his bullying. His knuckles were white where he gripped his glass.

  “The police didn’t pick you up, too?” he said.

  “Leo and I got separated,” I said. “What police?”

  “Am I interrupting?” a deep voice asked. Robbie’s attention was divided by the ballplayer, who pushed in between us.

  “No,” Robbie said at the same moment that I said, “Yes.”

  I turned to Robbie: “Who has him? Who found him?”

  “I don’t even know why Mr. Lightborn owes him the help,” Robbie said.

  “You’re going to have to be clear with me, Robbie,” I said. “Because I don’t have any fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

  He gave me a look of disbelief, like I was trying to con him.

  “If you assholes intended to set your own meetings, there’s no reason for Mr. Lightborn to foot the bill,” he said.

  I tried to constitute the terms on which Lightborn would feel he was the betrayed party on this China excursion. I knew Leo had ambitions unending, bottomless wants, so perhaps that was my answer: if there was a district project he could steer to a bidder, why would he settle for Bund’s first offer?

  “Can we go somewhere and talk?” I asked Robbie.

  “Do you know how far this is above your head?” Robbie said.

  “Everyone here’s so fucking serious,” the ballplayer said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “We’re just bullshitting,” Robbie said. He pointed at me. “This is one more guy begging for a favor he doesn’t deserve.”

  He gave the ballplayer his full attention. “Can I get you anything? What are you drinking? Shots? You tell me.”

  Robbie boxed me out with his shoulder, stepping in close to this poor, bored ballplayer who’d just come to get drunk for free with pretty girls. Robbie didn’t pay me anymore attention as I slunk off, and why should he? This was Lightborn’s boat, with Lightborn’s guests. I was a deckhand.

  I ENTERED THE paneled barroom, determined to speak with Lightborn. Rose stood next to a swaying Russian girl in a black dress, pulling the girl’s hands away from her drinks. Each time, the girl shrieked. The Russian turned to me, smiled crookedly, and, in passable English, pointed at the skittish bartender and said he was putting cheap liquor in nice bottles and watering down what he poured. The boy shrank behind the bar, and he probably was watering the drinks, and he probably was pouring her the cheap stuff, but only because the girl was a mess. Rose dragged the Russian to the bathroom. They were gone so long that I went to see if I might help. I found Rose holding the girl’s hair back out of her face as the Russian knelt emptying her stomach. I asked if I should bring water, but Rose waved me off.

  I sidled through the galley kitchen. An aquarium of lobsters with banded claws crowded roughly on top of one another. Eels with oily black skins waited to die in their own gloomy tank. I interrupted two men examining a wine rack that covered one wall. I excused myself and left them to their whispered admiration.

  At the far end of a hallway, I found a staircase. That Leo might be running a scheme of his own, that he wasn’t merely a drunk loosed in foreign territory, was easy to integrate into what I knew of him. What I didn’t know—what only Lightborn, as yet, seemed to know—was how exactly Leo’s ambitions had gone awry, in what limbo he’d been left. I thought of Mr. Hu’s stories of the bad ends of corruption—the bullet in the back of the state minister’s head. I suspected if Lightborn were willing to help fix Leo’s mess, it wouldn’t at all be for Leo’s sake—it would be because a missing American congressmen was a dangerous kind of attention. I climbed toward an open door at the top of the spiral stairs, stepping softly toward the sound of low voices.

  On the stateroom bed, I saw Lightborn, seated. He wore an oxford cloth shirt with half the buttons undone. I hadn’t spoken with him since Venice. Standing above him were two Chinese men. I mounted another step to get a better look. Lightborn was slumped down like he was maybe a foot shorter than he actually was. His shoulders were two fallen slopes. His belly was maybe the worst, a bonobo-like protrusion created by the odd angle of his slouch. The Chinese men had their backs to me, and they rattled on at Lightborn, working their grievances up to a violent pitch. They talked over one another, increasingly emphatic, hands choppy and wild, their words mostly in English but still difficult for me to make out. Lightborn started to stand up, as though to defend himself, and one of the men put a hand to Lightborn’s chest and shoved him back onto the bed. I tried to back up and slipped down two stairs, catching myself on the railing. Lightborn lifted his head just enough to glimpse me staring at him.

  One of the Chinese men, following Lightborn’s eyes, turned and looked down at me. I saw pomade and cufflinks and shined shoes. His eyes were watery from the open cognac sitting on the sideboard. He’d taken his suit jacket off, and his belt divided his belly into two loaves. His partner struggled with the plastic wrapper around a pack of cigarettes. It slipped unopened from his hands, and he crushed the pack under his heel. The man with the divided belly shouted at me, and his partner with the crushed cigarettes joined in, but louder. He rushed to slam the door, but before it closed, I had one last look at Armand, the bagginess in his face. I spent a vertiginous second lost in his soupy eyes. I saw ladders of men ascending above Lightborn, men who had the standing to argue with him, to lay their hands on him, and I imagined men incomprehensibly more powerful than even those men, who surveyed the rest of us from the height of some Babel tower that could not be crushed. I heard the door latch, and I stood listening for another moment. There was no more conversational noise, only a shuffle of footsteps. Distantly from the deck, I could hear a cacophony of Russian and English and Chinese, and I thought it could be the roar of six more arguments, but perhaps it was one vast celebration.

  BACK IN THE barroom, Rose had straightened her bright yellow dress, and she smelled like a fashion magazine filled with competing perfume cards. The Russian girl smelled like stomach acid and slept on the bar. Rose shook her awake, and together we dragged her to a love seat. The girl’s body unfurled like a carpet. The bartender kept apologizing, like this was his fault, or we were the people to whom he owed explanations. Rose fidgeted like she was afraid to appear too familiar with me.

  After awhile, Robbie came inside. He glanced at Rose and the unconscious Russian.

  “I’m supposed to say it’s safest for you to stay out of sight and we’ll contact you in the morning,” Robbie said in a monotone. He asked for the name of my hotel.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “Fluid situation,” he said.

  “Is Leo okay?” I said. “Tell me that much.”

  “He isn’t dead,” Robbie said.

  He waited for me to press him for more.

  “Enjoy this now,” I said. “You’ll be me someday.”

  Robbie had been instructed to tell me exactly what I did not believe—that if I could just pass one more night alone, then tomorrow would dawn with infinite promise. I was being sent off with the hope that Lightborn wasn’t so bullied or distracted by that universe of his connections, so incomprehensible to me, that Leo would be attended to while I’d be forgotten. I hoped that one day Robbie’s children would have to carpool out to an upstate prison on Sundays to visit him.

  “Do you ever read Chinese poetry?” Rose said suddenly. She stared at the men on deck with a faraway look, but she was talking to Robbie.

  “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” he said.
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  He shook his head at us both and took a bottle of cognac from behind the bar. He spread his fingers and stuck them like tentacles into four short glasses. On deck were the ballplayer and ebullient officials of whatever sort and the painted ladies in their company. I watched Lightborn join them. From a distance, I could detect no turmoil in his manner. He was somehow smiling. I didn’t see either of the men he’d been speaking with. He threw his pitching arm around the ballplayer. Rose looked contemplatively from the shallow-breathing Russian girl to the clustered men. She told me she’d remembered some lines of Li Bai she once memorized in school:

  Empty a wine-cup to end grief, and grief remains grief. You never get what you want in this life, so why not shake your hair loose on a boat at play in dawn light?

  She left me and joined the party. I watched Lightborn kiss her neck.

  We came banging into a pier somewhere near Suzhou Creek and the teepee form of the Monument to the People’s Heroes. I don’t know where the rest of the night took Lightborn and the ministers, or the ministers above those ministers, but as I walked off the boat, I’d never felt more envious, or more small, or so overfilled by hatred.

  IV.

  RETURNING TO MY hotel late that night, two clerks halted me in the dim lobby. One took the lead, wringing his hands. He asked if I was Mr. Slade. A pair of public security officers appeared from the darkness behind him, looking brutish but bored. The older officer stepped forward and spoke almost into my ear: “Please you will come with us. For tea.”

  “Should we sit?” I said. I pointed at an arrangement of lobby chairs, empty of guests at this late hour.

  “Sensitive matter,” the officer said.

  He brought his arm out mechanically and rested it on my shoulder. He seemed to move several seconds behind his thoughts. He led me forward, and in a clipped voice I asked everything I could think to—what this was about, and where I was being taken. The clerks fled, in search of any other task they might perform.

  An Indian businessman wheeled his suitcase out of the elevator and glanced at the officers leading me. The officers openly stared the man down, like they wanted to empty his suitcase and turn out his pockets. The businessman ignored their attention and offered me a pinched smile. I guessed from his impassive expression that he assumed my guilt, as you do when the police have a drunk corralled outside a bar. What was terrifying to me must have looked respectable and without violence to any passersby.