I log on to the Game, using a proxy. I figure I’d better not try using Chuckie’s anonymizer, not since the Suits got their hands on it.
Little Mountain Tiger is where I left her, sitting in front of the Yellow Mountain Monastery gate.
‘Hail, the Great Community.’
No one answers. I sit for a while. Listen to the wind howl through the peaks of the Yellow Mountains.
By the time I log out, it’s about five o’clock.
Out on the street, it’s as hot as it was before, and the wind has kicked up, carrying with it a haze of yellow dust. I walk a ways. I don’t know where I’m going. Mati Village, I guess. Eventually.
Where I am now, it’s all apartment blocks, office buildings, broad streets, and traffic.
I’m tired. My chest aches from breathing dust. I see a Mexican restaurant, the Sombrero Café, on the first floor of a new tower, a squat space with a thick, tinted Plexiglas window. It looks like it’s being crushed by all that weight above it.
In spite of that, I go inside. I’m thinking maybe I’ll try their fajitas.
But I’m not really hungry. I sit at the bar and order a beer.
It’s dark and cool in here, at least. Embroidered sombreros and piñatas dangle from the ceiling. The chips are passable, the salsa oddly spiced, and the bar is fake walnut.
I drink the beer down and order a second. I’m thinking about, I don’t know, cement rooms and lying on that hard mattress next to Creepy John.
I’m pretty spaced out. Disassociating again.
Which is why I sit there like an idiot when Suit #2 – the older, meaner one – slides onto the stool next to me.
‘Calm down, Doc,’ he says immediately. ‘I’m just here for a drink.’
He lifts his hand. ‘Tequila. Reserva de la Familia. Two.’
I unfreeze. ‘What the fuck do you want?’
‘Like I said.’
The bartender, a guy who actually looks Mexican, comes over with two shots of tequila.
Suit #2 – Carter – pounds his down. ‘Keep it coming,’ he says. He turns to me. ‘Come on, aren’t you gonna join me? All that time you spent in Arizona, I figure you must like tequila. And this is the good stuff.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘Shit. Considering I liberated your ass, the least you could do is have a drink with me.’
I should leave. I know I should. ‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘Listen, if it were up to Macias, you’d still be a PUC.’
Person under control.
I sip the tequila. It really is good.
‘Fucking cowboy,’ Suit #2 says, tossing back his second shot. ‘Guys like that, they just make everything harder.’
‘I don’t get it,’ I say. ‘Why did you help me?’
‘We don’t do that kind of shit to our fellow Americans.’ Then he snorts with laughter. ‘Much.’
The bartender comes over and refills our glasses.
‘You threatened me,’ I say. ‘You told me there’d be consequences.’
‘Yeah, well, I was trying to scare you, sweetie. See, that’s the thing. Most of the time, you let people know what they’re up against, they fold.’
‘And if they don’t?’
‘Well …’ Suit #2 contemplates his shot glass. ‘Well, that all depends on what’s at stake.’ He turns to me and smiles. ‘Hey, we’re the good guys, remember? Macias was just fucking with you. He probably would’ve let you go eventually.’
I drink more tequila. I’m feeling this energy. It might be rage.
‘I don’t get it,’ I say.
‘We can’t have people fucking with us,’ Suit #2 explains patiently. ‘We’re operating in a tough neighborhood. That means you gotta show you’re strong. Someone like you, maybe you think you can yank my chain and get away with it. But those aren’t the rules any more, okay? You fuck with us, we fuck you back, and it’s asymmetrical warfare, honey. The guns are on our side.’
It’s not like I don’t know this. It’s not like I didn’t see it, before. Except I was on the other side back then.
A gun doesn’t care what it shoots.
‘So why’d you help me?’ I ask again. ‘If you really did.’
‘Fucking Macias, he never knows where the line is,’ Suit #2 says, disgusted. ‘You fuck with an American citizen, that’s a whole clusterfuck, right? But Macias, he’s impatient. He’s gotta get what he wants right away.’
Suit #2 stares off at some point in the middle distance. There’s no way I want to know what he’s seeing.
‘If you hadn’t called, I would’ve brought you in,’ he finally says. ‘But not like that. That was over the top.’
I almost laugh. ‘So … what? You felt sorry for me?’
He shrugs. ‘Big fucking drama for no reason. I got us what we needed my way.’
I don’t want to ask. But I have to. ‘Lao Zhang?’
‘Nah. He’s the Chinese government’s problem. Too bad. He’d be better off with us.’ He signals the bartender. ‘Just bring us the bottle, okay?’
There were two things they wanted. Lao Zhang was one.
‘The Uighur?’
‘Mmm-hmmm.’ Suit #2 tops off our shot glasses. ‘Thanks to you.’
‘Me? But … I didn’t know anything.’
‘’Course you didn’t. But I got a tip. From somebody who did know something. You know, it’s horse-trading.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I say. But I already do, at least part of it. Before he even says it.
‘I want something; my new buddy wants something. So, Macias grabbing you, that wasn’t totally wasted. He gave me something to trade. Something that was worth more to my new buddy than that poor pathetic son-of-a-bitch Uighur.’ He lifts up his glass in a mock toast. ‘Here’s to you, sweetie. The superior horse.’
The tequila I’ve had burns in my empty gut like acid.
‘Is this someone I know?’ I ask shakily.
‘You think I’m gonna tell you that?’
‘What about the Uighur?’
‘What about him?’
‘What happened to him?’
‘You really wanna know?’
I think about this. I stare at the shot glass. Fuck him, I think, and his stupid macho drinking contest. I take a sip. ‘Yeah. I do.’
‘Traded him to Uzbekistan,’ Suit #2 replies, almost merrily. ‘Poor ol’ Hashim’s an Uzbek national. Regime wanted him for subversion. Of course, it doesn’t take much to be a subversive in Uzbekistan. Nasty motherfuckers. You know they like to boil dissidents alive?’
‘I didn’t know they had Uighurs in Uzbekistan,’ I say stupidly.
‘Yeah. Lots of them.’
I just sit there. What am I supposed to say to this?
Finally, I come up with: ‘Why?’
‘Natural gas. Oil. Bases. You heard of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization?’
I shake my head.
‘Joint security and development group. China, Russia, and a bunch of the ’Stans: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, couple others I can’t remember. Lovely bunch of dictators and assholes, doing their best to cut us off from Central Asian energy markets. So, we run a counteroffensive, okay? Do these guys some favors. Cut them some deals. You want a quesadilla?’
I don’t get to answer this question, because Suit #2 has already signaled the bartender and ordered two quesadillas, along with a side of guacamole, before I can even open my mouth.
‘Couple of years ago, some of the liberals at State got their panties in a wad about Uzbekistan’s human rights violations,’ he continues. ‘Made a big public boo-hoo about it. We lost our military base there. We want it back. Thus, the Uighur. See, he’s their superior horse. We give them the Uighur as a gesture of good faith. They see we can deliver. They give us something back. Simple, right?’
‘You’re fucking sick.’
He laughs. ‘Like your hands are clean. C’mon, honey. You think I don’t know what you and your hubby did in the w
ar?’
If you’re going to get gut-punched, it might as well be while holding a shot of tequila. I drink.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ I say. I sound like a sullen kid.
‘Oh, that’s right. You just helped.’
‘I treated detainees. That’s it.’
‘A regular Suzy Nightingale.’
I let that go. ‘I was a medic. What was I supposed to do?’
‘You could’ve blown the whistle. You could’ve told someone.’
‘I got blown up, remember?’
Suit #2 shrugs. ‘You wanna tell yourself that, go right ahead.’
I think about what he’s said. But it’s not like I haven’t thought about it before.
‘I had a few weeks,’ I finally say. ‘Maybe a month between when I figured out what was going on and when I got hurt. I was confused. But I didn’t hurt anyone. I treated a few detainees. I did my job.’
Suit #2 laughs and pours us both more tequila. ‘You signed off on it, sweetie. You signed their reports. You gave them cover. “Injured during extraction.” Or maybe you didn’t do paper on a few of them at all. Right?’
I don’t say anything. I can’t.
‘All you had to do was tell the truth,’ he says, like it was no big deal, like we’re talking about copping to a traffic ticket, ‘if you really gave a shit. Maybe you could have stopped it. Ever think about that?’
Like it was the easiest thing in the world.
‘Fuck you,’ I whisper. ‘I was nineteen years old.’
‘Sorry,’ he says, without an ounce of sympathy. ‘You don’t get a pass for that.’
I feel like I’m shrinking into myself again. Like I want to hide forever. Like I’ve felt for almost seven years.
I can’t feel this way any more.
‘Yeah, okay,’ I say. ‘I was young and stupid. But I’ve learned. So what’s your excuse?’
He grins. ‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you.’
Our food arrives. Believe it or not, I eat some. I figure I’d better.
‘What happened to John?’ I think to ask.
‘John?’ he says, between bites of guacamole-covered quesadilla.
‘Zhou Zheng’an. The guy I was with when your pals grabbed me. He got beat up really bad.’
‘Oh, that guy?’ He takes the salsa bowl and dumps a puddle on his quesadilla. ‘Shipped him off to Kabul.’
Then Suit #2 gives me that shit-eating grin and tops off my tequila. ‘Just kidding. They dropped him at some rathole hospital out in the boonies. He was alive when we left him there. Hopefully they didn’t kill him.’
After that, I don’t have much appetite. Suit #2 does, though. He finishes off his quesadilla, using the last wedge to wipe up the remains of the guacamole.
Then he slaps a stack of hundred-yuan notes on the bar. ‘Well, I’m outta here. I’ll try to keep Macias off your back. But you better be smart. You start acting stupid, there’s not much I can do.’
I nod. What can I say?
Then I think of something. ‘How’d you guys keep finding me?’
‘Trade secret,’ he says with a snort.
‘Give me a hint.’
He considers. ‘Well, we don’t depend on any one thing. Redundancy, right? So, we have our HUMINT, and we have our SIGINT – the high-tech stuff.’ He leans toward me, like he’s about to share a particularly juicy piece of gossip. ‘Take your passport. It’s got an RFID chip embedded in it. That chip’s got all kinds of personal information.’
I’ve actually heard of this. RFID chips are in a lot of stuff these days – passports, ID badges, keycards, cars, consumer goods. They track goods and people from one point to another.
‘But that only works at short range,’ I say. ‘The chip has to be within a couple of feet of a scanner.’
‘Unless it’s active, with its own power source. We can pick those up from satellites. How’s about that for Big Brother?’
He grins again and pats me on the shoulder. ‘Hey, I’m just giving you shit. Your passport doesn’t have one of those.’ He tops off my shot glass one last time. ‘Tequila’s on me. Enjoy.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I take the tequila with me – he’s right, it’s good stuff – and even after I pay the tab, I’ve got about nine thousand yuan left over. That’s pretty funny, I think. Like, a thousand bucks or whatever it is these days is some kind of bribe? What’s to stop me from going to some journalist and telling them everything that’s happened to me?
Aside from the fact that I have no proof of anything and it all sounds pretty crazy, that is.
The Suits know it. They’ve got nothing to worry about.
I use some of the money Suit #2 left on the bar and hire a cab to take me to Mati Village.
Lao Zhang’s place looks the same as I left it, like no one else has been here in the meantime. Who knows if that’s true?
I don’t do much my first night here – drink some beer, watch movies, surrounded by stacked canvases and the smell of paint thinner.
The next day, I wake up pretty early, fix myself a double espresso, find a notepad and a pen, and do some work.
I have no clear idea what I should do, but I figure I should start with an inventory, get an idea of what’s here. There’s a lot, I don’t know how many canvases stacked up against the walls of the main room and bedroom and kitchen, and then I remember that there’s a storeroom on the side of the house as well.
What I do is, I assign a number to each piece, starting with the ones in the bedroom, and I describe the subject and the size next to it. Lao Zhang made things a little easier for me by writing the date of each work under his signature. I have a vague memory of him doing this each time he finished a piece.
I work all morning, and I realize that it’s going to take me a while to go through everything. Besides paintings, there are photographs, DVDs of performance pieces, and video art. Jesus. This is the work of someone’s life, and Lao Zhang’s no slacker. As I recall, he has a storage space at the Warehouse as well.
Around two in the afternoon, it occurs to me that I haven’t eaten anything other than a small bag of snack crackers I found in the kitchen, and I’m getting pretty hungry.
I decide to go to the jiaozi place.
It’s after the lunch rush, and the restaurant is pretty quiet, just a few young guys leaning back against the wall in one corner, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. I order some dumplings and green vegetables and a Yanjing beer. I have the strangest feeling, like if I sit here long enough Lao Zhang will walk in, dressed in some raggedy old T-shirt and skullcap, sit down and order up another round of jiaozi. He won’t talk much – he hardly ever does – but he’ll smile in that crooked way of his and every now and then look up, thick shoulders hunched over his plate, and try to explain to me what some painting or performance piece is really about. It used to be when he’d talk about stuff like that, I’d lean back in my chair and nod and drink my beer, and most of what he said would go right by me.
I’m thinking now, I’m ready to listen, and I could really use a few explanations.
I could use his company even more. Just having him sitting here, eating jiaozi with me.
I’m almost done eating when Sloppy Song and that Western woman, Francesca Barrows, walk in. The two of them scan the room, stopping when they see me. They seem surprised. Concerned, even.
‘Yili, hao jiu bu jian,’ Sloppy says.
Long time no see.
‘Ni hao. I’ve been a little busy.’ I gesture at the table. ‘Please join me.’
They sit. Sloppy tugs on her braid in a way that looks more pissed-off than distracted.
‘You’re at Lao Zhang’s place?’ Sloppy asks.
‘Yeah. Trying to do an inventory of his art.’ I watch her closely, thinking that she could easily be one of the players in the Game, and it’s not so much what she asks me as what she doesn’t.
‘Good. You going to the Warehouse?’
‘The Warehouse? I w
as going to do that last.’
‘Don’t wait,’ Francesca says. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘I’ve been out of town. Heard what?’
And at that, Sloppy bursts into a torrent of heavily accented Chinese, most of which I can’t understand, but I catch ‘government,’ ‘demolish,’ ‘vacation homes,’ and, I think, ‘auto dealership.’
‘Auto?’ I repeat.
‘Volkswagens,’ Francesca spits out. ‘Fucking bastards.’
‘Wait. What?’ I ask.
Sloppy tugs on my sleeve. ‘Better you see.’
We walk a block on Heping Street and turn the corner onto the street leading to the Warehouse.
For a moment, I don’t know where I am.
There used to be a bunch of outbuildings ringing the Warehouse: residences, little shops, a couple of restaurants, all decrepit and seeming on the verge of collapse. Now one side of this is gone, smashed into rubble. Migrants in tattered trousers and T-shirts pick through the piles, separating bricks from trash. Bulldozers are parked to the side, their toothed jaws slack and empty. Waiting for their next meal.
‘What happened?’ I ask.
‘The government’s seized the land around the Warehouse,’ Francesca says in clipped, bitter tones. ‘They’ve ordered it demolished to make way for vacation condominiums and a car dealership. They’re planning additional land seizures in Mati Village as well. The area where Lao Zhang lives, for one.’
Vacation homes I can kind of get. It’s pretty scenic around here, actually. But a car dealership? Do people buy cars when they’re on vacation?
‘What’s this really about?’ I ask.
Sloppy shakes her head.
It could be what Lao Zhang and I had talked about before. The government doesn’t like it when too many people get together with a common purpose. Even if that purpose is just making art.
Then there’s Lao Zhang. If the Suits were flipping out about him, god knows what the Chinese government’s doing.
Maybe this is their response. They can tear down what he helped to build.
‘Is there anything … ? I mean …’
Sloppy shakes her head again.
‘I’ve contacted a number of Western media outlets,’ Francesca says. ‘The Guardian and the LA Times are interested in doing stories. But that won’t stop this.’
Year of the Tiger Page 28