by Sheena Kamal
Lam’s face breaks out into a huge smile. “I like you. You don’t beat around the bush. All right, if you won’t be dissuaded.” He glances around, but apart from a bartender at the end of the room, minding his own business, we’re alone. “This isn’t exactly the place for candor, baby, but if you insist. The man in that photograph is Ray Zhang.”
I glance at Brazuca. He gives me a small shake of his head. “Of Zhang-Wei Industries?”
“That’s the one. He’s very old now and, rumor has it, very ill. Also, he doesn’t like to be photographed, so I’m very surprised he allowed that one to be taken.” He pauses here, and seems to come to a decision. “Ray Zhang is a back-channel man, always has been, and he’s built an empire from using subversive methods. Still, I doubt he has anything to do with your missing girl. Not really his style.”
“Is there anyone from Zhang-Wei here? Someone I could ask?”
Lam hesitates for a moment. “His daughter-in-law is doing the keynote this weekend. She represents the company now, but they have offices in both Hong Kong and Vancouver and she usually spends most of her time in Hong Kong. They’re mostly into resource and mineral extraction and, though I don’t recall the specifics, I remember hearing that they used to do business with Syntamar.”
“How long is she here for?”
“In the country? I have no idea. We’re not exactly friends. I wouldn’t advise approaching her unless you absolutely must. Jia Zhang does not care about missing girls. She will eat you alive, as she tried to do with my father’s company many times over.” He says this all lightly, as if we are on a golf course about to enjoy a few beers and tee off. There’s a certain amount of respect in his voice for the Zhangs, even if he doesn’t like them.
“It wouldn’t hurt to ask,” I tell him.
I feel like there is a thread that I’m not seeing. Zhang is connected to WIN, which, for some reason, has been looking for Bonnie. He is also somehow connected to Syntamar Industries, which Mike Starling was looking into just before he was murdered. So maybe Zhang is the horse’s owner, not James Whitehall or Lester Nyman.
“It might hurt to ask. With Jia, that’s a risk you take. She keeps a private security guard with her at all times when she’s in the country. His name is Dao. He is not one to take people who bother her lightly and he has . . . let’s just say he’s got a bit of a shady past and a reputation for brutality.”
I consider this for a moment. “So you’re talking triad?” Brazuca had mentioned the same thing when we spoke about Zhang.
Lam takes a sip of his cognac. He closes his eyes in pleasure. I imagine what it must feel like going down his throat and warming his belly, and suddenly it’s too hot in here. “There are rumors,” he tells me once his eyes are open again. “But I wouldn’t go sharing that opinion if I were you.”
Brazuca goes to the window and looks out at the snowcapped mountains. Lam notices for the first time the bruise on the back of his neck. “Jon! What happened to you?”
Brazuca’s voice is deliberately light. “A run-in with a tire iron, nothing to be concerned about.”
“I see.” Lam’s expression is grave. “So this is serious.”
“This is just a bump,” Brazuca says, glancing over at me. “I’ve had worse. Tell us about Ray Zhang. Does he have a thing for little girls?”
“Nobody knows that much about his personal life, but I would be shocked if he did. He just doesn’t seem the type.”
“But.”
“But I don’t really know. Almost everything about him is pure speculation. He’s a widower with one son and a grandson. I’ve met his son Kai once or twice. A spoiled brat—and I know a thing or two about that. He’s completely westernized but likes the idea of old-school gangsterism. Although I doubt he really has the capacity for it. Him I can see messing with little girls, though I doubt his leash is long enough for that these days.” Lam smirks to himself, enjoying some private joke. Now it’s Brazuca and I exchanging glances. “Jia, on the other hand . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if she was running a gang or two of her own, but I don’t see Ray Zhang giving her, or his son, much leeway in that department. He is ruthless about his company and won’t see anybody smear it.”
“Any idea where we can find him?”
Lam hesitates and I sense he wants to evade the question somehow, but it is Brazuca who asked. There seems to be a bond between them that I don’t understand. “Rumor has it that a subsidiary of his company has permits to do survey work on Vancouver Island for a copper mine. I go fishing there every now and then. About two years ago, I heard from my real estate agent that Jia inquired about a cabin that I put on the market, near Tofino. She never bought it, it wasn’t big enough for her, but they were looking in the region. After that, Ray Zhang retired and I haven’t seen him since. Nobody has.”
“What’s the subsidiary for the copper mine? Syntamar?” I remember they had given up a project on Vancouver Island for Zhang-Wei’s help in the Congo.
“An operation called Lowell Metals. Small change, but if you’re in the mining business, you want as much real estate wrapped up in your name as possible. Lowell changed hands a couple times, from what I remember. Maybe it was owned by Syntamar at one point, but I can’t say for sure.”
Lam’s phone buzzes. He glances over at Brazuca apologetically. “Duty calls.”
“You’re a playboy,” Brazuca says. “You don’t have a duty. You don’t do real work.”
Lam laughs. “I’ve missed you, Bazooka, I really have. You’re absolutely right. I don’t have real work but I do have a real fiancée now, which is about the same thing as far as my father’s concerned.”
Brazuca raises a brow. “Oh really? Didn’t get an invitation to the engagement party.”
“I don’t have many friends in this world and I would never subject one of them to such mind-numbing boredom. Pity I had to be there myself. Like I said,” Bernard Lam says with a sigh, “I’m doing my duty.”
He downs the last of his cognac and picks up his phone with the energy of a man walking toward a noose. Some, myself included, might say that he is.
6
Brazuca pauses outside the lounge. We both need a minute to recover from being exposed to something so close to our personal heaven and hell. Back when I was drinking, it was vodka that I turned to. Brazuca admitted to me once that rum was his weapon of choice. The smoothness of it. But these preferences are only important at the beginning of one’s descent into hell. After a while, the kind of liquor ceases to matter, as does the quality.
“If I was drinking that, I couldn’t afford to be an alcoholic,” Brazuca says. “Maybe my wife wouldn’t have divorced me.”
“If you were drinking that, your wife would have just had less to take in the settlement.”
“That’s a little sexist of you. She made more money than I ever did.”
Hmm. I never imagined Brazuca with an executive for a wife. “In that case, you should have taken her for more, and then you might have been drinking the good stuff for the rest of your life.”
He smiles and I notice that he has no stubble. He has thrown caution to the wind and committed to a beard. The darkness of it makes his teeth look even whiter and I, once again, speculate at his dental care routine. “What do you say we give up this investigating stuff and go get smashed? You know, for old times’ sake.”
I wonder if he knows how tempting this is for me. How easy it would be to just throw caution to the wind and just this once, do the one thing that I’ve wanted so badly every single fucking day since I’ve been sober. The rub is, it’s never just this once. Just this once is not an option for an alcoholic.
Brazuca sees the look on my face and his smile vanishes. “Hey, I was just kidding.”
“We’ve never gotten smashed together.”
“How do you know? I don’t remember half of what I did or who I met when I was drunk.”
“You saying I’m not memorable?”
This time, he’s the one put off balance. “No, ah,
that’s really not what I—what I meant to say is that . . . oh, I see what you’re doing. Funny, I’ve never seen you smile before.”
Is that what I am doing? I stop.
“So, look. You’re not going to get away with being a night cleaner for very long. They’re going to figure it out sooner or later.” He hands me a plain white card with a magnetic strip on it. “My room. Just in case.”
I stare at the card. Printed on the back is his room number. I hadn’t really given a thought to where he was staying. “Bernard Lam got you this room?” He would never have been able to afford it on a cop’s salary.
“Nora, give it a rest, would you? I’m here to help you. Not everyone’s an asshole that you can’t trust.”
“A girl is missing, Brazuca. Maybe not everyone is an asshole, but it’s not like they’re going out of style, either.”
A pair of businessmen brush by us on their way to the lounge. One of them looks at me with mild distaste, as though I brushed into him.
“The horse is out of the barn,” I say, nodding to his zipper.
He looks down and his face reddens when he discovers that the horse is, in fact, still tucked safely inside the barn, where he put it. The men, both of them, glare at me and then disappear into the lounge.
“That was mature,” Brazuca says. But he’s smiling. I can feel myself smiling back, even though this kind of camaraderie I reserve only for Whisper. I have to admit, it is nice to share with a human once in a while. Brazuca’s smile disappears. “Nora, I have a bad feeling about all this. I think you should go back home and let me look into it from here.”
“That’s not an option.”
“Damn it! Is it because when you went missing, no one looked for you? Is that why you can’t let yourself trust anyone?”
And just like that, my good mood fades.
“Jesus,” he says. “Don’t look at me like that. I’ve read your story in the papers and I’ve seen your police reports, okay? I know there were no missing persons alerts out for you. I know you think the system is screwed up, but what you’re doing here isn’t the answer. You’re endangering yourself, can’t you see that? These aren’t people to play around with. Why would you . . . Is it because you regret giving her up? You want to find her so that you can be a part of her life?”
I refuse to answer this question. Some things can only be faced in the dark of the night, muttered into a pillow while Ray Charles plays in the background to muffle the sounds, and then shaken out again in the morning.
“Forget it,” he continues, when the silence has stretched on for so long that we both realize that we’re teetering on the edge of something big. “I already know. There’s only one reason you would. She’s your child. You must, somewhere inside of you, you must love her. Or at least care about her, even just a bit.”
Really? This kind of assumption makes me angry. I could have played that card a long time ago, because nothing is stronger than a mother’s love. But I’m not this child’s mother in any way other than lending out my womb and passing along some dubious genes. Bonnie’s mother is back in Vancouver, contemplating the end of her marriage. Surrounded by shirts that smell of perfume that she doesn’t wear.
“Maybe it’s responsibility,” I say. “Maybe no one else will take responsibility for her disappearance, at least not enough to do a damn thing about it.”
He looks at me sadly and for the first time I see myself in his eyes. A woman with so many demons she can hardly keep track of them. They have spilled out in every direction and are now out of my grasp. “What is love, if not responsibility?”
He turns away now, as if I have disappointed him greatly. As if I am the one who has opened up a raw, pulsing wound inside him and then stepped on it—and not the other way around. I could get into my complicated parentage. I could point out to him that my dubious genes are at least part indigenous from my father’s side and part something I don’t even know from my mother’s. Because she left when I was a child and I don’t know a thing about her, not even where she came from. What I do know is that I look somewhat like my father, and girls who look like me are more likely to go missing, and less likely to have their disappearances investigated.
And what if Bonnie has more of me than is healthy for her?
I could tell him all these things, but I don’t. I know he’ll understand, stare at me some more with pity in his eyes, and I don’t want any of it. After last night, it’s far too much, far too soon.
He pauses at the end of the hallway. “I’ll see what I can find out about Zhang. I’ll text you later.”
“My phone isn’t on.”
“Just check it every couple of hours. I’ll be in touch.”
He limps around the corner and disappears from sight. I think about the promise I made to Tommy. That I will find Bonnie and, when I do, she will be okay. Because that’s all my mind will allow me to consider. That at the end of this she will be safe, like she was supposed to be from the start.
7
I hide in my tiny room until it’s time to show up at the maintenance office for my shift. When I do, Carl comes in right behind me, covered in snow. “That drive is killing me,” he mutters.
“So why do you do it?”
He shrugs. “The wife.”
“Yeah, I hear you.”
He looks at me. “You got a wife?”
I’ve noticed that the other female employees wear skirts with tights and black kitten heels. But Carl has given me the male uniform. I think about being offended by this, but I have never in my life worn heels and teetering about does not seem to be the best way to get information about Bonnie’s disappearance.
“Nope. No wife for me.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean . . . well, I did, but it was just because—”
“We’re good, Carl.” I really don’t want any more insults to my lady parts. “I don’t have a wife yet. But maybe one day.”
In one of my survivor groups, a woman who used to share every week said that she couldn’t go back to men after what happened to her. She still had the urges, but her body automatically shut down if penetration was involved and mentally she would grow cold and distant. She turned to one of the other women in the group for comfort, though that kind of support was frowned upon in our support group. I’d seen them both at the grocery store about a year later and they looked happy. The woman who did not do penetration even winked at me at the checkout. Winked. Like we shared a secret. Maybe she and Carl know something I don’t.
“You see Lucy?” he says, turning away to take off his heavy snow boots.
I nod, which he catches in the small mirror on the wall.
“Paperwork all good to go?” He frowns, and his voice is oddly wooden.
I nod some more. At this point, I hesitate because I like Carl. We’ve bonded over cleaning detergents and, sometimes, that’s all it takes. Or so I think.
“That’s interesting,” he says, sounding disappointed. He faces me fully now. “Because I talked to Lucy on my way up and she said she hired a couple more replacements for swing shift and that new girl who didn’t make it is gonna be up in the morning. Imagine my surprise.”
We stare at each other for a moment. He reads the truth in my eyes. “I can explain.”
“Oh?” Carl crosses his arms and waits.
“Okay, I can’t really explain.”
“Just tell me the truth. You planning to kill one of those rich folks up there?”
“No.”
“Steal from them?”
“No.”
“You just needed a place to stay, right? And then I thought you were the cleaner from Abbotsford and opened my big mouth.” Carl shakes his head. “Can’t keep my trap shut. My wife warns me about it all the time . . . Look, I get it. You’re having some rough times—it’s okay. Been there myself. I hurt my back working the oil fields few years back. It wasn’t easy to get back on my feet. The wife . . . well, she really picked up the slack. Wouldn’t have made it without her. So, ye
ah, I understand why you lied. But you can’t stay, all right? I have no say in hiring and they’ll fire me if they knew I let somebody unauthorized come up here.”
“Can I leave in the morning?”
“Yeah, I’ll take you back down myself. Just keep to your chambers. I’ll clean up after you’re gone. And . . . you can keep the uniform. They got lots. They won’t miss it.”
He rummages through his wallet and pulls out three twenty-dollar bills. “For last night. It ain’t much, but it’s all I got on me.”
I take the money because it would have been suspicious if I didn’t. Last thing I need is for Carl to grow more of a conscience than he already has. To him, I’m a drifter. What he doesn’t realize is that I’m merely adrift.
At the door, I turn back to him. “Thanks, Carl.”
He nods. “You’re welcome. Just stay out of sight, will ya? And Nora?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to need your access key back.”
I reach into my pocket and hand him a white, rectangular swipe card. I still have Brazuca’s room key in my pocket, though. Just in case.
8
As much as I don’t want Carl to lose his job, I have other priorities. Instead of heading to the staff quarters out back, I turn toward the service elevator leading up to the second floor. The lounge is filled with men in wool slacks and cashmere sweaters, the real stuff. Two staff work the bar, pouring expensive liquor with smiles and receiving exorbitant tips in return. The light is so dim that almost everyone looks ten years younger and far more attractive than they did going into the meeting rooms this morning.
When the bartender at the far end of the bar turns away, I grab a tray and begin clearing tables on the other side of the room. There’s only one other woman here and, thankfully for me, she is sitting alone with a cup of tea, staring out the window. She sets her cup down gently on the table beside her and I pick it up.
“Finished with this, ma’am?”
She glances at me, her dark eyes like two polished marbles. I now understand what it’s like for people when they look into my eyes, but hers, somehow I sense that hers are different. They have absolutely no expression in them. “It’s only half-empty,” she says.