by Casey Walker
HIGH UP IN my hotel room, six faint inches of dawn shone through a gap in the curtains. The ventilation system filled the room with a dry chemical air that left a prickly sensation in my throat. My steps landed off balance, and I couldn’t find the switch for anything but the entryway light. The bed was an unmade lump in the dark.
Albert walked to the window and peeked out in private meditation at the first indigo of the rising sun. A cut leaked beneath my eye. I’d only ever been hit that hard by a steering wheel when I’d spun out once on a country road. I knelt in the dimness and searched the mayor’s briefcase out of the closet.
Behind me, I heard Albert mumbling a low, soothing Mandarin, something he might address to a child or offer as a prayer. I didn’t pay it much attention until I turned to see a figure huddled up in the bed. Albert had moved to its edge. I had to cross the room before I could see that he was speaking with a woman. She turned to me: blank face, sharp bangs, a body so light she barely dented the mattress, though she’d wildly mussed the sheets. I started to say Li-Li’s name, in wonder. The first syllable fell out before I held up—I didn’t want to identify her to Albert. I tried to disguise my voice as a groan. Albert tensed, ready to jump to his feet. He relaxed when I placed the briefcase gently onto his knees. I touched the heel of my hand to the open skin on my cheek and met Li-Li’s half-opened eyes, trying to convey the hello I didn’t voice.
Albert switched on the bedside lamp and bent up the shade. Unaccustomed to the new light, Li-Li looked away and smoothed a lick out of the back of her hair. He took an evidentiary approach to the money, fanning the packets near the bulb. I could see it now—provincial Zhang pleading his case to these big-city men and Albert concerned only with discovering if this money was a fable, contriving how he might gather it for himself.
He closed the briefcase and stood. Something almost joking entered his manner. It was nothing that I would have noticed in another person, only visible against the backdrop of his nightlong detachment.
“Many men spoke to say an American congressman is the honored guest at this banquet in Kaifeng,” Albert said. “They have no doubt he attended. And yet, when I visit this congressman in his hotel, even when we drink tea for a long time, he will still claim he has never in his life visited Kaifeng. For two days this problem has occupied me.”
As a kid, I’d once jumped off a small bridge into an irrigation canal—and what I remembered was there was a point where I thought I would hit the water, but instead I kept falling, and I didn’t know when the water would come and I wished I hadn’t jumped. Something like this feeling came over me as Albert spoke.
“Your boss insists on his innocence in that forceful manner in which liars always insist,” he said. “I was sure that his presence in Kaifeng was a truth waiting to be confessed. But now I am humbled to find he did not tell me a lie, at least about this matter. You were in Kaifeng. You played the honored guest. I am very satisfied to discover the source of this error.”
I put my hands on my face and pulled all my skin forward and felt the oil left behind on my palms.
“I find this an excellent lesson to reflect on,” Albert said. “When you become too certain, you invite limitation in your thinking.”
Li-Li went into the bathroom, and I heard the sink run. She came out with a wet washcloth and held it out for my face. I’m sure this was intended to be consoling. At the moment, it felt grotesque.
“Where’s my boss now?” I asked. I didn’t feel lucid. “Is he free to go?”
“Your travel must be immediate,” he said. “But that is ‘in other hands.’”
He asked that I pass on his greeting to two men from Bund International, but he didn’t use Lightborn’s name, and I didn’t recognize the ones he did say. I wondered if he was referring to the stateroom men I’d seen bullying Armand. Albert left us, and the door puffed quietly shut.
I checked my cuts in the bathroom mirror. The bleeding would not be staunched, and my reflection showed me deep black panda eyes from no sleep. I faucet-washed blood from my twisted hair. My suit had relaxed its cheap fibers and hung off me like I was a skeleton.
“Is it okay?” Li-Li said. She spoke to me in the mirror, my back to her, but also face-to-face.
“Maybe,” I said. Nothing in my situation felt like more than hope or supposition. I massaged the muscle between my neck and shoulder.
“Your boss has been with police?” she said.
“Misunderstanding,” I said. “It seems to be my fault.”
“Your fault?” she said. I explained that public security had kept my boss confined in his Shanghai hotel while they investigated the mayor’s death in Kaifeng—a city Leo had never set foot in.
“Did I make you miss your train?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I arrived in enough time.”
She told me a man had fallen onto the tracks before they could depart.
“People tried to pull him back,” she said. “I do not think he wanted the help. I waited and I wondered why I am going at all.”
“Was he okay?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I left.”
“The captain from Kaifeng is convinced someone poisoned the mayor,” I said. “Do you think Mr. Hu could do something like that?”
She frowned. She said softly: “I do not know what anyone will do.”
She left the bathroom, and I heard the bedsprings squeak. Her words echoed in my ears, and I thought Li-Li had discovered as good a principle to live by as any. I threw the bloody washcloth into the trash, soaked a new one with cold water, and raised it gingerly to my cheek. When I joined her, Li-Li was sitting on the bed, both nightstand lamps on, staring into the closet.
“You gave that man everything?” she said. “And you trust that is the end?”
“Not everything,” I said.
I pointed at the safe. Her mouth fell open, and she covered it.
She spun the combination, pulled the remaining money out, and we surveyed it between us. Her tired eyes, like mine, widened at how much was left.
“What would you do with it?” I asked her.
“If it were mine?”
“It could be ours,” I said.
“It does not belong to me,” she said.
“It didn’t belong to Albert,” I said. “It didn’t even belong to the mayor.”
She considered this for a very long time.
“What if you just imagined it?” I said. “Where would you want to go?”
She looked reluctant to think this over, as though she might commit graft or fraud even in the hypothetical.
“It’s pretty in Guilin,” she said finally. “Do you know it?”
“I’ve heard the name.”
“Or the Li River,” she said. “If you want to see mountains and river.”
“That sounds very beautiful.”
“Or the south of China,” she said. “I have never seen it.”
“And farther,” I said. “Tibet. Or Cambodia. Angkor Wat.”
“I want to see pyramids,” she said. A fan kicked on and began to cycle. She didn’t raise her voice to speak above it. “And cities. Beautiful cities.”
“Which?” I said.
We began to recline.
“Venice and Paris for me,” she said. “Or New York City. I have never been.”
“I love Venice,” I said.
She wore a white, almost-sheer V-neck undershirt. Above the rim of her pants poked a band of red cotton underwear.
“I could show you California,” I said. “The rest of it, and better this time. We could drive down to Mexico. All the way to La Paz.”
We pulled up the pillows and adjusted them behind our necks. She was so careful when she spoke that she barely opened her mouth. She’d washed off her makeup, tied back her hair. She talked with her hands up near her face. Her pale moles grew visible in the light.
I remembered a game Alex and I used to play. The oval mole on her forearm was Venice, I would say, and that
raised one on her neck was New York, and I ran my finger from one to the other, a route. All the marks on her skin became the dots of cities on a map. The brown circle on Alex’s heel was Istanbul or Buenos Aires, depending on where she fantasized that night of going. She would kick her foot out, laughing. She played the game on me, too, though I had so many more spots to choose from, between any two cities, a thousand forgotten, freckled towns. We dreamed together. I thought it might last forever—as though close would always stay close, intimacy outlast its contingent circumstances.
Li-Li and I talked, near but never touching, about all the places there were to see, until she’d fallen asleep, and I was drifting, and there rose an aberrant daylight of Shanghai’s full sun.
DAY 6
SHANGHAI
ON THE TARMAC, fifty yards off, I caught a figure at the top of the rollaway stairs—hard hair, sagging slacks, short-sleeved dress shirt. Leo, slumped. By the time I was aboard Lightborn’s plane, Leo had vanished into one of the guest cabins. A towheaded attendant seated me. Her skin was pale as the fjords, and her face looked rested six months of the year in total northern darkness. I asked her for an orange juice with lots of ice. She brought the ice in a terrycloth towel and held it toward my swollen eye.
I’d left Li-Li curled next to the money, my good-bye no more than a shameful note. She’d been hardly asleep when I was summoned back to the narrow strait of my circumstances by Robbie’s call and a car downstairs. For my quiet disappearance, I could offer Li-Li only this explanation: I did not want to know if she would, or would not, take what wasn’t hers. I couldn’t bear to see her refuse the money, as she no doubt should, and I didn’t want to see her succumb—as I also hoped she might—to start a life closer to the one she’d dreamed of. It seemed to me anymore that there was no action that did not leave in its wake an abiding sense of regret.
After we leveled off, I pushed open the door to Leo’s cabin and found him asleep. An alcohol fume filled the airless compartment. The space was small but held a twin bed and a fold-down desk with a leather chair. On the nightstand was a can of club soda, half of it poured into a high-ball glass. I stood at the foot of his bed until the sense of a foreign presence took hold of him. He woke and looked at me blankly, trying to discover where he was. I knew that confusion.
His face was busted-veined and red-gray like a bruised apple. His feet searched for the floor, and even when he planted them, he looked unsure it wasn’t water beneath him. Every action of his body looked painful, as though he’d been stricken with a muscular disorder, but he was able to make a show of composure, a veteran of many pretended sobrieties. He reached out and patted my arm hard twice, under the shoulder. He’d come to China thinking he’d outsmart Lightborn, arrange his own meetings, and try to hunt up a little more money for himself to feed the presidential ambitions no one else believed in. And now he was leaving with nothing, and even Lightborn would cut him loose. I almost pitied the wreck of him, even as my tongue wanted to sling fire.
“Here we are,” I said.
“Here we are,” he said, tapping the floor. He massaged his legs like they were asleep. He didn’t ask about my face.
“Sit,” he said.
His voice was low, muffled further by the air-breathing turbine engines. His eyes searched the cabin like he was sweeping it for bugs. I settled into the chair, and we sat two feet apart. I had a hard time peeling his puffy face away to find any recognizable expression.
“Theresa’s up at the lake house. I suppose we’ll lay low a few days,” Leo said. “Hope nothing catches in the wind.”
He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.
“You owe me an explanation,” I said.
“Owe you?” Leo said.
“Yes,” I said. “Me.”
He wouldn’t speak above a whisper. I don’t know who he thought might be listening—the sparse population of the East China Sea was thirty thousand feet below. Perhaps he felt possessed of a seismographic sensitivity, already registering the distant rumble of federal prosecutors who might want to discover what his Chinese entanglements with Armand Lightborn amounted to.
“You look tired,” Leo said.
“Try to imagine,” I said, “why I wouldn’t have slept in five days.”
“We’re going to do this civilly,” Leo said.
He paused for this to register, like counting the seconds between lightning and thunder.
“Do what?”
“You’re young, and you were basically family,” he said. “After your behavior, this is special treatment.”
“My behavior?” I said. My anger felt better than a warm bath. “My behavior?”
Leo looked out the window, our blue planet below for his eyes to traverse in a glance.
“All I did was exactly what I thought you would have wanted,” I said. The low oxygen of the pressurized cabin made me feel short of breath.
“What I wanted?” Leo said. “You’re worse than this fucking migraine.” And then for one long complaint, he didn’t care who overheard. Leo started to accuse me, at full volume in great detail, of lying, taking money, running around with whores. He shouted at me that I’d compromised him in ways beyond remedy. I had extensive practice at being berated by Leo, and I endured his yelling in foot-staring silence. Leo could froth himself up over minor annoyances like cold meals or lost keys, but as he dressed me down over my “behavior” in China, it occurred to me he’d finally encountered a situation that filled his anger to capacity.
“Trust me,” he said, as he finished his rant. “I heard it all.”
Leo pushed past me into the aisle. It seemed Lightborn or Chinese police had enumerated my sins for Leo, but I wasn’t the only guilty party—I had accusations of my own. I followed him to a curtained-off section at the rear of the plane. He twisted around the liquor bottles until he found a label he liked.
“I won’t even get into this with you,” Leo said. “You’re fired, if you didn’t already guess that. But I’m just too worn out. I will say I’m disappointed. I never thought you were so weak.”
My ears popped, a sting I felt down into my neck.
“Yeah, you were exemplary, Leo.”
“You see? That’s what’s disconcerting,” he said. “That you still blame me for your faults. I’m a sinner, Luke. But at least I know it. Your problem is you don’t have the courage to be honest with yourself.”
“You’re unbelievable,” I said.
Leo wanted the world to see him as a calm port, a reckless man grown wise. I saw him at sea, hoping these outbursts of faith and penitence would save him from sinking in the chop of his envies and failures.
“You left me stranded,” I said.
“We’re all fucking stranded.” His voice rose. “But I would have met you in Shanghai if you hadn’t gotten me picked up by the police instead.”
Here I cut him off and began my own tirade. I felt like I was addressing a jury. I confessed to him that, yes, I’d participated in the banquet charade. But in my defense I was only in Kaifeng because of Leo, and he’d lied to me about our reasons for being in China at all. I told him how reckless he’d been, sending me to Kaifeng alone, and how stupid, chasing money to Shanghai and thinking he could run his scheme in secret. Even Polk had been unaware.
“What are we talking about, Luke?” he said. “Lightborn tell you all this?”
“You’re delusional,” I said, “If you think anyone was telling me anything. Polk’s nearly dead, by the way—nearly dead and still concerned about protecting your reputation.”
He ignored Polk’s name. “You’ve got no right to hold yourself above me, Luke. Don’t kid yourself.”
“I’m on Lighborn’s fucking jet,” I said. “How much kidding myself do you think I have left?”
Bitterness stooped Leo’s shoulders—it was a physical malady for him.
“Lightborn was going to fuck you,” I said. “There is no Bund. It’s a shell company.”
“You think I don’t know Lightborn’s an asshole?” he said. “How stupid do you think I am? I wouldn’t trust that guy to save me a seat while I went to the bathroom.”
He repeated Lightborn’s name under his breath, hateful. I wondered if that was the only possible outcome, when you’d admired someone for so long, shadowed and studied them so astutely. Maybe you couldn’t help but grow to despise everything you’d imitated, your mimicry confronting you every day with evidence of your limitations. I watched Leo sulk in his skin. It was like watching a snake try to skid backward into the discarded husk of itself.
“I just want to say it now.” I ached for some kind of dignity. “If people show up demanding that I talk about this, I’m going to talk.”
Leo didn’t flinch. “What would you have to discuss, Mr. Slade?”
“I’m not making a threat, Leo. But if you think that because you were a friend of my father, or any of that, that I’m just going to shut up if the FBI starts asking questions . . .”
“Oh, Luke,” he said. His “oh” gave me chills, like our situation was all sewn up in his mind. “Give your father more credit. He understood this stuff better than you ever will.”
I tried to ignore his insinuation. I didn’t want to hear anything that would contradict the image of my father as I remembered him. Every morning since my father had died had been a day less new and just more compromised than the last. I needed to hold his memory apart and upright.
“You can do whatever it is you think you have to do,” Leo continued. “But be sensible, Luke. What do you think all your escorts and dirty money make you look like on a witness stand? Or in the media? If you want to try to tell a convoluted money story about me and a bunch of foreign executives with unpronounceable names . . . well, I’m just asking: which story do you think people will be more interested to hear—mine or yours?”