by James Church
The sudden move set back my vision, but I could make out what was at my feet. I looked down at Li. “What about him?”
“It never fails—he’s a talker, I should have known. Put a sock in his mouth.”
3
I was in the backseat of a car, trying to make the dizziness go away and not to vomit. There was ringing in my right ear, but the voice beside me was crystal clear.
“I’m on retainer, you might say. I do some work; I withdraw some funds. It’s all on the up-and-up.”
“Sort of like a lawyer,” I said, trying to be conversational.
“Yeah, you might say just like a lawyer.”
“Not a lot of lawyers threaten noodle shop owners with bodily harm.” What the hell, I wasn’t in polite company. No reason to be polite.
“Oh, you’d be surprised. They don’t eat noodles with their golden chopsticks, but they know that lots of other people do. There’s money in noodles if you know what you’re doing.” My memory clicked in, and so did the voice.
“You are the noodle racket king, I take it?”
“Take it any way you like.”
The driver laughed.
The dizziness cleared. I found myself wedged between Wong and the noodle king. When we emerged from the garage into the light, I could see that the area around Wong’s eyes was scarred from the boiling water the cook had thrown in his face. Up front, I saw two hands on the steering wheel. They must have ditched the man the cook had cleavered.
“You’ll notice you’re not handcuffed.” The noodle king had a way of sounding like he was granting big favors.
“I noticed.”
“Not gagged, either.”
I nodded, but kept my mouth shut.
“We want to drive out of town without anyone noticing; here we are, four businessmen on an outing. It would look odd with three of us in back, it might attract attention of a traffic cop, so Wong here is going to move up in front. First, he has a present for you.”
Before I could react, Wong jabbed a needle in my thigh. I watched him press the plunger, and then I wasn’t here, there, or anywhere. My vision was still good, and my hearing was fine, but I couldn’t make my muscles pay attention. It wasn’t paralysis. It was as if all will to move or speak had disappeared. My body felt like air.
Wong put his face in front of mine and looked into my eyes. “OK, it’s good for two hours.” He opened the door, climbed out of the car, then reached in to drag me over to where he had been sitting. “Comfortable?” He put my hands in my lap. I could only look straight ahead. When my head sagged, the noodle king propped it up again.
“What about the neck? They didn’t fix the neck thing yet, did they?”
Wong slammed the door, slid into the front seat, and we drove out of a fenced lot filled with shipping containers onto the street. The driver took a couple of quick turns; from the look of things I had the feeling he was heading for Aidan Road.
“We call it our velvet rope,” the noodle king said helpfully, like he was a docent and I was a paying visitor at his Museum of Triad Technology. “That medication doesn’t leave any marks. It’s better than terrycloth even, nothing to suggest a corpse has been bound and gagged. We tried tape, but tape is the worst; there’s always some sort of residue. No one wants residue.”
A little residue never hurt, I thought.
The driver looked at me in his rearview mirror. It was Miss Du’s chauffeur. He smirked. I would have smirked back if my mouth had been attached.
The noodle king kept up his end of the monologue. “Of course, getting the dosage right is tricky. You should have seen the first one. He drooled the whole way, no control over his functions at all. The chemist was mortified when we told him. You OK?” He poked me in the neck. Suddenly he screamed, “Pull over!”
The driver swerved and braked hard; Wong twisted around with concern on his face. “What?”
“You didn’t fasten his seat belt. Look at him!”
I’d been thrown against the rear window and then forward onto the back of the driver’s headrest before sliding off the seat. Since I couldn’t move, I figured I might spend my last moments staring at the floor mat.
With some difficulty, the noodle king lifted me back into a sitting position. “Where the hell is the buckle to his seat belt?” He fumbled around before finding it tucked behind the seat cushion. “Doesn’t anybody use these things?”
Wong paled slightly. “You sure you want to buckle that?”
“Don’t be an idiot. They wouldn’t touch this car. They need us more than we need them.” There was a loud click. After a brief eternity, Wong exhaled.
“Let’s move.” The driver sounded impatient. “I have to be back in Yanji by four o’clock.”
“Fancy that,” said Wong. “Can’t keep the lady waiting.”
“Shut up, the both of you. Wong, it’s not working; when does he get sleepy? He’s still awake.” The noodle king waved his hand in front of my eyes.
“Relax, it takes twenty minutes, more or less. By the time we’re on the highway, he’ll be out.”
Wong hadn’t impressed me as the scientific type, but for some reason he seemed to hold the group’s medical expertise.
The driver turned on Juzi Street, which goes out of the city to the highway. Miraculously, my sense of direction was still working. If we went left when we reached the highway, we’d be heading toward Changchun. A right turn would point us toward the town of Tumen, on the river. Now would be a perfect time to jump out of the car, but I knew it was an idle thought. I had no will to move a muscle. Worse, I could feel myself getting drowsy. Wong seemed to know his stuff. Just before I fell sideways against the door and into a deep sleep, I felt a right turn. Tumen! One thought shone like a neon sign against the darkness swallowing my consciousness: This is my chance to give Handout his walking papers.
4
A train whistle followed by the rumble of a locomotive pulled me back from wherever I had been. I was handcuffed to a metal bar bolted to the bare brick wall of a warehouse. On first glance, I was alone, but there were enough stacks of shipping crates piled five or six high that I couldn’t be sure if someone was hidden from view. The handcuffs were tight. They had already left marks on my wrists. A hopeful sign. The noodle king had said they were fussy about leaving marks on a corpse, so maybe I wasn’t corpse material.
From the far end of the room I heard voices. Two men appeared, the noodle king and someone I recognized from the WANTED photographs we kept on the wall near the duty desk in the office.
“Well, look who we have here!” the second man said. “A very big fish in our lovely net.” He moved closer and stared at my wrists. “Get those cuffs off him, they’re leaving marks.”
“Too late,” I said. “I have delicate skin, easily marred.”
“Tough. In that case, we’ll have to boil it in a vat of noodles until it slides off the bones.” The noodle king unlocked the handcuffs. “Wong knows better than to do something like this. I’ll talk to him, Doc.”
“Yes, talk to him.” The second man had a scar that went from his right eye down his cheek and disappeared under his jaw. His right ear was mangled, though you could barely see it because he wore his hair long, over to the right. “When you’re done talking, get rid of him.”
“Of Wong?”
“I heard what I said, and I only got one ear. What’s your problem? I’ll say it once more, and this time pay attention. Cut off his head or something.” He turned to me. “Any objections from the MSS contingent here?”
This second man went by a long list of aliases. The last time I’d looked at the file, he had taken to using “Mike,” or on occasion “Dr. Mike.” Apparently, he’d picked these up during his years in America running a prostitution ring supplemented by illegal snakefish sales to fancy restaurants in New York City. MSS Headquarters had sent messages wrapped in large-denomination dollar bills encouraging him to stay in the States, but he got greedy and ended up being deported around ten years
ago. His original territory had been in the south of China, but too many new gangs had established themselves there during his absence, so when he returned, he decided to move his operations to the northeast. He put out the word that he wanted “elbow room.” It didn’t take him long to regret that decision. People in the northeast weren’t devious enough for his taste. He was used to southerners, who smoothly said one thing and did another.
At the moment, he was standing half a meter away from me, blinking slowly as he examined my face. No one in MSS had been this close to Mike in years. Several operations had been launched to capture him, but he was good at disappearing at the last minute. Before Madame Fang had appeared on my doorstep, I’d been reading reports that he was moving in and around Tumen, scouting new opportunities. I’d been doubtful, but the source, whoever it was, obviously deserved a bonus. If I ever got out of here, I’d pay it from my own pocket.
“Mike,” I said conversationally, “I’ve been meaning to send you a note about the rules in my sector. There’s nothing too onerous. We can go over them at some point, whenever it’s convenient. I take it now isn’t good.”
“Yeah.” Mike smiled, which turned his scar into a coiled snake. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you. Meantime, I’m picking up rumors about a hard strike you been organizing against me and my associates.”
“Really? Who told you that?”
“Your boy Bo-ting, for one.” He turned to the noodle king. “He didn’t know?”
The noodle king shrugged uneasily. “It didn’t seem like a good idea to tell him. I thought about it, but there were complications.”
“Complications.” Mike frowned and ran a finger along the length of his scar. “You were supposed to make sure he was on board. Now I see him in handcuffs.”
“Yeah.” I held up my wrists to underline the point. “They left marks.”
“Shut up.” Mike suddenly raised his voice. He pulled a nasty-looking pistol from his belt. The file had said he had serious problems with anger management, something that wasn’t working in my favor at that moment. I could see the muzzle of the pistol was a few millimeters from my nose.
“It’s OK,” I said. “I’m not the one that double-crossed you.”
“Double-cross?” Mike swung the pistol away from me until it rested under the chin of the noodle king. “Meaning what?”
“Nothing, he’s blowing smoke. I wouldn’t double-cross you; you think I’m crazy? Wong might do something like that, but not me. Not me.”
Another train whistle sounded, this time with considerable insistence. Wong came running in, as if on cue. ““Come on, we’ve got to get him boxed up and on the train.” He pulled up short when he saw our friendly tableau. “Hi, Mike. Didn’t know you’d be here.”
Real fast, Wong’s cheek started to twitch.
“Why wouldn’t I be here? This is my territory, isn’t it? You work for me, don’t you? How come you’re putting him in a box? I thought he was on the payroll.”
“Complications.” Wong looked at the ground.
“You were planning on boxing him up? Killing an MSS chief, I’d say that’s complications. Killing an MSS chief is bad, but doing it without my say-so? Real bad.” He hit Wong across the face with the pistol. “Who’s paying you?”
Wong put his hand to his nose, which was bleeding, and took a step back. “Calm down, would you? No one is paying me. No one but you, I mean. We had to move fast, that’s all. This hard strike thing was about to get serious, and our friends across the river—”
“I don’t have any friends across the fucking river!” Mike was shouting. “Do you?” All at once, his voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “That’s interesting, Wong, if you have friends across the river. Me? I’m sick and tired of dealing with those Koreans.” He took out a handkerchief and handed it to Wong before continuing. “They’re trouble all the time, always gaming which way to move. Did they pay you to bundle this guy up and send him over to them? Or did they ask for his uncle, and you got the wrong goods?” He took a step back. “You got trouble with your cheek? It’s dancing across your face.”
The noodle king had moved to put a big packing crate between him and the pistol. “Take a pill or something, would you, Mike? Think calm thoughts. We’ll go and get a good dinner afterward. Maybe a sauna and a rubdown.”
“A good dinner? In this town? You kidding me? The skin on the dumplings around here is thick enough to choke a pig.” He jerked the pistol back in my direction. “I’m saying he doesn’t go across the river. Anyone object?”
The noodle king looked at Wong. Wong looked at me and then folded over as if he had been shot, which the near-simultaneous sound of a gunshot strongly suggested was the case. Mike disappeared without saying good-bye. The noodle king stood still, sort of like a statue about to wet its pants.
“I say we all take a little train ride to Rason.” Uncle O stood up from behind a crate, holding a small pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle.
“Uncle, what a pleasant surprise. How did you come by such a cute gun?”
“Mei-lin gave it to me as a present last night. It was our twenty-fifth anniversary.”
“You’re married?” I nearly choked on the image.
As he turned Wong over with his foot, my uncle laughed in a charming manner, completely unlike anything I’d ever seen from him. “No, twenty-five years since our first encounter. This man, incidentally, is completely dead. I thought I was aiming at his shoulder.” He pointed to the noodle king, who was still frozen in place. “What about that one? Let’s cuff him, to hell with the marks.”
Chapter Two
We were in a very large wooden shipping container, a cube maybe two and a half meters on a side, resting on a flatcar coupled to a freight train bound for Rason, or so my uncle said after checking with the freight office minutes before the train pulled out of the station. After crossing over the Tumen River bridge into North Korea, the tracks paralleled the river most of the way. Since there were four of us in the container—my uncle, myself, the noodle king, and Wong’s body—it was not the most pleasant train ride I’d taken, but my uncle, surprisingly, seemed not to mind. The noodle king, however, seemed uncomfortable, though whether because he was sitting close to Wong’s body or because he was bound and gagged was hard to tell.
“Too bad we don’t have a better view,” my uncle said, looking through a small crack in the boards of the container. He moved away and sat near a cloth bag he’d brought with him. “I’m sorry about Lieutenant Li.”
“How do you know about Li?”
“You were supposed to meet Mei-lin at Gao’s. You didn’t show up, so she phoned me. I called your office, and the Shanghai spider said you’d both gone out and hadn’t returned.”
“We went for a walk.”
“Sure, I do it all the time, walking in geometric patterns, doubling back, disappearing into buildings and coming out another entrance. It’s probably the healthiest way to walk, except in Li’s case, it didn’t turn out that way. I chatted with the people Li was trying to shake. They told me where they’d lost him, and from there it wasn’t hard to find the place. You’d just left, but Li was still there, dead.”
“Yeah, well, as of this moment that Mike character has become target number one for the hard strike. I’m not letting him out of my sights next time.”
“Mike had nothing to do with what happened to Li. He’ll probably lose his temper again when he finds out. That was Wong and the big noodle over there.” The noodle king was trying to say something, so I ripped the tape off his mouth.
“Yow!” was the first thing that came out. “Easy! That tape, take off that tape easy, would you?”
“It’s special,” I said. “It leaves marks, sorry. We’ll see about putting your lips back on when we get to where we’re going.”
“Listen, I didn’t have anything to do with Li, understand? That was totally Wong. Maybe I push people around, but I don’t go in for killing them. Wong acts—” He stopped and looked at th
e body. “Wong acted on impulse. It was always a bad trait.”
“What did Mike mean about your not telling me? What’s the secret?”
“I don’t know. Mike is funny sometimes.”
“You want to talk about funny? My uncle aimed at Wong’s shoulder and blew his brains out by mistake. Don’t press me. These train tracks are in terrible shape; his aim is liable to be even worse here. Take another stab at answering my question, why don’t you?”
“Sure, have it your way. Mike wanted us to bring you on board, that’s all there was to it. He had your deputy Li Bo-ting on the payroll part-time, but that wasn’t enough. Deputies don’t count, according to Mike. He already has the MSS chiefs in Changchun and Shenyang. He wanted a full house.”
“What about Harbin?” My uncle had to shout the question over the clatter of the wheels as we picked up a little speed.
“Harbin? You kidding? The chief there is a crook. We couldn’t convince him to come in with us, so we were going to have the Russian mob tap-dance on his head. Not that they do such a good job these days.”
I gave it a moment’s thought before I grabbed the noodle king’s neck. “Where’s Mike, and don’t tell me you don’t know where he hangs out or I’ll dangle you under the wheels of this train until you look like a plate of leftover tripe.”
“Here there couple of places he moves around let me think will you?” This was said in one unpunctuated nervous burst. At least I was getting through to him.
“Good, think about it.” I fastened the tape back over his mouth. “Just sit there and think. The next time I take this stuff off, you’d better have the right answer or I won’t think twice about turning you into tripe. We’re not on Chinese territory at the moment, we’re in North Korea. That means there aren’t any special rules weighing me down.”
My uncle motioned me over. “You wouldn’t really dangle him under the wheels, would you?”
“Sure I would. Wouldn’t you?”
Again my uncle looked out of one of the cracks. “I hate to say this, but I will anyway. It looks exactly like Mongolia.”