The Finder: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

"Mr. Ray! Listen to me. Listen now!"

  Something touched his face. He kept his eyes closed. Don't break, he told himself, don't you break.

  "You see, you look!"

  His eyes stayed closed. He breathed through his nose to slow his heartbeat. It worked. He knew from experience that he could last five minutes upside down if necessary.

  "You look!" they screamed. "You see this!"

  The thing brushed his face again. He opened his eyes.

  "Do you see what that is?" he heard Chen yelling from above.

  At first he did not. A box with tubes, hard to focus on while hanging upside down, swinging back and forth in front of his eyes, the tip of one of the tubes attached to a bloody needle.

  Then he understood.

  His father's morphine pump.

  They'd taken it, yanked it right out of the vein in his father's right arm. He needed a forty-milligram bolus of Dilaudid every hour, or the pain was—

  "Yes, yes!" Ray screamed. "I'll do it! Yes, get me up!"

  When the limousine returned Ray to his father's semidetached house in Brooklyn, two of the three men got out slowly, watching him, but as soon as he was free he bolted toward the front door, carrying the Dilaudid pump. His red truck was back in the driveway, he noticed. He flew in through the cluttered entrance, past all of his father's gardening equipment and landlord supplies, and into the living room, surprising the guard, who jumped to his feet and drew a .45 pistol.

  Ray froze, raising his hands. The other men arrived in the room and the guard lowered his gun. The nurse, Gloria, sat next to the hospital bed holding his father's head in both her old hands, bent close to him, lips on his forehead, whispering lovingly to him as he arced his back in pain, digging fitfully at the bed with his shrunken legs. His upper lip was drawn back, showing his old worn teeth, and the lids of his closed eyes fluttered in torment, the brows above raised in disbelief and wonder at the canyon of pain through which he traveled. Ray had seen his father suffer, but this was different; this was an old man on a steel hook.

  "Oh!" cried Gloria, seeing that Ray held the drug pump. He handed it to her. "He's been so good, so brave. God has been helping him in this terrible hour."

  She plugged in the machine, keyed in the restricted access code, checked the drug supply, and quickly inserted a new intravenous line into his father's arm. The two other Chinese men appeared in the doorway.

  "You are the one who did this to my father?" Ray asked the guard.

  "He is old," said the guard.

  "Would you do this to your own father?" said Ray, smelling alcohol on the man.

  "Father never get old."

  "We are leaving now," said one of the others. He pointed at Ray and then at the front door. "You go first."

  He felt the three men behind him as he walked to the front door. As he passed through the cluttered hallway, Ray let his right hand trail to the side and find a spray can of rust-preventative paint. The left hand grabbed a pair of hedge clippers he'd dropped into the umbrella stand the day before.

  He popped the top off the paint, found the spray button with his finger, wheeled, and sprayed the first man behind him right in the eyes. The man screamed and clawed at his face. Ray clubbed him with the paint can and he went down.

  As the second man reacted, Ray grabbed the clippers with both hands and clipped savagely at the man's face, taking off the tip of his nose—he cried out and instinctively covered his face with his hands. Ray clipped again, this time sinking the blades into the man's fingers. The man fell to his knees, blood streaming onto the floor.

  The third man had his gun out now and fired wildly past Ray, shattering the light fixture. Ray clipped at the outstretched hand holding the gun, missed, then went low and tackled the man, pinning the gun with one hand. His other hand pulled down the hall table and he swept his fingers blindly through its contents. The man was punching Ray in the head with his free hand, grunting with the effort. Ray found a roll of cellophane tape. No good. Loose batteries, a box of tacks. Nothing he could use. He took several blows to the head. The guy was really hitting him. Then his fingers felt a narrow key used to open paint cans that the hardware store on Eighty-sixth Street gave away for free when you bought paint. Shaped like a curved screwdriver. This Ray jammed into the man's ear, the first time into the cartilage, the second time right into the auditory canal. He buried it to the hilt, pounded it with his palm. The pain of a burst eardrum was such that the man went slack, urinated, and began to weep. Ray pulled the gun from his hand, jumped up dizzily, and swept the gun at the three men, all of them balled up in pain.

  "No kill! No kill!" the one with the missing nose tip begged.

  Ray put the gun to the neck of the third guard. "You understand English?" he screamed.

  The man nodded.

  "Don't hurt my father! Do not ever hurt my father!"

  "Okay, boss, okay," the man coughed.

  Ray yanked the man to his feet, took the guns from the other two, and kicked them out the front door. The limo driver, a white man, no doubt hired with the car, stared ahead, studiously ignoring the injured men stumbling into it. Their wounds were not life-threatening, Ray knew. He'd seen nearly every kind of injury a human being could suffer, and these were not serious. A phone call would be made, a private doctor found, perhaps in Chinatown in Manhattan but just as likely in one of the enclaves of Chinese doctors in Queens or Brooklyn.

  Ray quickly retreated into the living room and saw that the Dilaudid had pulled his father into a deep sleep. Gloria looked up from her book, noticed the guns in his hands, then found his eyes. "I gave him double. He's fine now."

  "You?"

  She pointed at her Bible. "I got my reading."

  Ray checked the window. Two blocks away, the limo sped through a red light. Already the men would be calling Chen and Chen would be calculating his response, wondering if Ray's actions confirmed him for the task of finding Jin Li or whether such sudden violence suggested a reckless lack of judgment. In either case, Ray had revealed himself to Chen, and this in itself constituted Ray's first disadvantage, his first mistake.

  Stupid, he berated himself, you can't be so stupid and expect to survive.

  4

  It was a good hiding place but she hadn't slept well. Every hour or so she woke as a siren flew by, or someone hollered murderously in the street below, and she found herself hotly disoriented all over again, not sure whether to hang her head out the window and look down or wait soundlessly where she lay. Who would know about the building? A few people. But who would know she knew about this building? No one. No one in the world should know, Jin Li told herself. So why am I so nervous?

  The night was warm, and thus the five-story building, one of a series of former factories on West Nineteenth Street, had become aromatized by the humidified essences of mold, dust, dead flies, cardboard, and dry-rotting wood—seemingly the layered odor of time itself expiring without end. The structure and six just like it had been built in the early part of the twentieth century; successive waves of real estate speculation had passed through and around these buildings, converting most to loft apartments, offices, showrooms, fancy restaurants that invariably failed, and the like. But a few remained unrenovated, and the reasons usually had to do with structural damage to the building, either from fire or water or, more often, because the building itself was a neglected holding long entangled in a lawsuit, estate matter, or family dispute.

  Alone among the seven factories was the building where Jin Li sat up now in the half dawn, thinking she'd heard something. This building was notable for the implausibility of its continued existence; the place should have collapsed long ago. Why? All five floors were crammed with heavy useless matter, the crème de la crème of junk. The top floor was filled with claw-footed iron bathtubs and pedestal sinks, many of them tagged with information explaining their origin: "Hotel Edison, 1967 renovation," and so on. The fourth floor contained engine parts not only from vintage American cars and trucks of the 1930s,
'40s, '50s, and '60s but, even more obscurely, utterly impossible-to-find motorcycles from early German, French, Italian, and British companies long defunct. The weight of these parts alone should have compromised the floor joists decades earlier. On the third floor could be found close to two million pairs of women's nylon stockings, still boxed, ranging in size from "petite" to "queen." The freight elevator was forever frozen on this floor, its bearings finally burnt out. Just to empty the building, either for demolition or renovation, would have required the replacement of the elevator, a considerable and demoralizing expense. Moving downward, the second floor contained thousands of boxes marked "Property of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development/New York City Regional Offices." These lost records documented the marginally successful attempt by the federal government to house hundreds of thousands of low-income residents in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx during the economic downturn of the early 1970s. And finally, the ground floor was piled with spools of obsolete fiber-optic cable, bought when the city was rewiring itself in the speculative fever dream of the 1990s.

  From time to time people asked about renting cheap office space in the building and these inquiries were fielded by the custodian, a Russian man with strange, faded Cyrillic tattoos on his knuckles who did little more than sweep up the sidewalk once a week and remove flyers advertising art-house movies and new rock bands. He handed the prospective renters copies of the keys to the steel door to the building, told them to use the stairwell, and to go in the middle of the day for the power was off and no lights worked. "And please you drop key in mailbox." But whether the key was returned was a matter of character—as was whether the Russian custodian noticed. He generally didn't, for he noticed very little in life now. He followed the rankings of his favorite European soccer teams, he drank not vodka but four bottle-inches of Sambuca each night from the same crusty glass, and if asked whether he really cared about who came to and went from the cramped and dirty building on Nineteenth Street, he would have admitted he cared not at all.

  Returning to that building by way of the stairwell to the second floor, one could easily discover that Jin Li had pushed around some of the boxes of federal housing records to create a small room within them; in this dim space was all she carried with her: an inflatable mattress, a fat wad of cash, her Chinese passport, a small green suitcase containing not only her blue CorpServe uniform but also one nice cotton dress (why she'd hastily packed this, she had no idea), a bag of toiletries, a cell phone now carefully turned off, and a Styrofoam ice box. On the mattress lay Jin Li, looking at the ceiling, thinking again she had heard something downstairs.

  What? Anything?

  She listened. Nothing—maybe.

  At least she had planned ahead, Jin Li told herself, keeping the key that the Russian had given her when she'd come looking for cheap office space for CorpServe a few months earlier. The place had been all wrong for her purposes, but its obscurity and neglect had struck her as potentially useful in other circumstances. In China nowadays buildings like this were soon demolished and someone like her brother would put up a cheap apartment building three times higher. The Russian had never asked for the key back and so she'd kept it—in her purse and in the back of her mind as a place she could hide. No one would want to rent space in a firetrap that had no electricity or heat. But still she was anxious. She could have been followed—that was possible. The men at the beach in the big trucks had followed her, after all, had been looking for her and her alone. She was sure. The Mexican girls didn't know anything. How did the men identify Jin Li? She had been so careful. Did they plan on coming back? Were they still looking for her?

  And then there was her brother, Chen. As soon as she'd called from a pay phone, he jumped on the first flight he could find to New York City and started asking around for her, making things worse. Usually it took forever to get a visa to visit the United States, but Chen knew people, was owed money and favors by men and women all over Shanghai and even in Beijing. He'd panicked when she'd called him—not over her, but that his clever international criminal enterprise was endangered. "What did you do?" he'd screamed at her in their family's Mandarin dialect. "How did you fuck up?"

  It was a question Jin Li couldn't quite answer, though she'd thought about it constantly. CorpServe had been carefully created by Chen with one devious purpose in mind, but in order to appear to be a conventional company it contained three divisions, two of them legitimate business units operating in the open. The first division cleaned New York City offices at conventional rates, bidding for contracts with management companies and corporate operations people. This part of the company ran daily crews in thirty-two buildings, the number naturally fluctuating as contracts were won or lost upon expiration. The crews dutifully cleaned, collected, and hauled dry waste—paper, cardboard boxes, printed matter, coffee cups, and so on—down to the service bays where the refuse was loaded and removed by one of the city's private carting companies, another distinct business so cutthroat and residually mobbed up that one entered it only at great risk and with even greater connections. It would be a good two generations before anyone with a Chinese name operated such a company in midtown Manhattan.

  The second part of CorpServe, which serviced seventeen buildings, both collected dry waste and provided onsite "chain-of-custody" document destruction. The company owned nine forty-four-foot mobile units, each of which was divided into a shredding equipment area and a payload space for storage of the shredded materials. Each unit could handle up to eight thousand pounds of paper per hour and could shred not just boxes, files, paper clips, and rubber bands but also CDs, DVDs, identity cards, hard drives, even uniforms. CorpServe provided shredding as high as the level five standard, used for commercially sensitive and top secret documents, which mandated a maximum particle size of 0.8 × 12 millimeters. The mobile units generated their own electrical power, and everything was shredded and baled in one simple operation, the bales then trucked away in volume to paper mills where the paper and extraneous matter were separated by particle-weight blowers and recycled. Each mobile CorpServe shredding unit was equipped with a New York State–certified scale that weighed the material to be shredded and came with a complete video system that recorded the actual shredding. After each night's work, the CorpServe technician provided the building services manager a copy of the scale tickets and a video of the shredding. This was usually a big selling point, but in truth these tickets and videos soon piled up and were eventually shredded along with everything else. Document destruction, just like office cleaning, was an incredibly boring business. There was no tangible product except a blur of confettied paper. The customer paid to make something into nothing, literally for the creation of emptiness. The mobile shredders were loud; no one wanted to watch them for very long. On long-term contracts, client oversight eroded away then vanished. The uniformed CorpServe crews—all of them Mexican, Guatemalan, and Chinese women—unfailingly showed up on time and did their jobs. Trying to get a handhold on America, the workers generally felt lucky to be employed, spoke English poorly, and affected a submissive mien, rarely even speaking to office personnel—not out of a quest for efficiency but on the assumption that no one had anything to say to them. Which was true. Faceless, nameless, they were more or less invisible.

  From an organizational viewpoint, these two CorpServe divisions were remarkably "flat"; one person ran each, supervising the work crews and schedules from the company's run-down warehouse in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Jin Li had picked this location because it was cheap and out-of-the-way yet relatively close to Manhattan. No one much bothered with the CorpServe trucks coming and going there. Another person handled the bookkeeping and payroll for the two divisions. These operations were sufficiently profitable to justify the existence of CorpServe.

  But it was the third function of CorpServe that both Chen and Jin Li fixated upon. This part, which generated no organizational paperwork, and indeed was never mentioned or described in writing, combined sel
ect elements of the other two. The idea was simply to steal useful information. When the cleaning division worked in offices that generated wastepaper that looked potentially valuable to Jin Li, she tried mightily to underbid the shredding contract for that building, if there was one. Sometimes she was successful and thus gained legitimate access to the stream of desired waste information. This meant that her company not only removed the information but also controlled it after removal. Then it was a matter of segregating the material that should not be shredded. Of course sometimes she was not successful in underbidding the shredding contract and no information could be removed on a regular basis. One of Chen's principles was that no nonrefuse documents be stolen from offices, a directive she agreed with. That was too risky, would draw attention if discovered. Theirs was a quiet, subtle play in which companies were paying them to remove valuable information. If there were ever a question about a particular bag of waste, why it had not been shredded, then Jin Li could just say a mistake had been made, bags had gotten mixed up. But no mistake had ever been made.

  Until now, that is. What was it?

  Jin Li had supervised all three operations, only occasionally appearing at one or another of the legitimate cleaning or shredding locations, but five nights a week riding with mobile shredder #6 (a lucky number for the Chinese) as it appeared at the small number of locations she wanted to plunder for information. She always wore a baggy blue CorpServe uniform, removed her makeup, tucked her hair up under a cap, and presented her company ID if asked. The security officers in the buildings either recognized her as the supervisor or knew that cleaning company staffs had a lot of turnover and didn't bother to question a diminutive Chinese woman in uniform with an ID clipped to her breast pocket. Except for the driver of #6, the other CorpServe staffers didn't know her true role. She was just the shift supervisor who sometimes removed waste herself. The promising stuff made it into the "blue bags," as they were called, and these were set aside for careful scrutiny later. If any of the cleaners seemed too interested in Jin Li's activities, Jin Li quickly praised the woman on her excellent work, shifted her to one of the legitimate cleaning operations, and gave her a marginal raise.