Shaheen drew in a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Okay, boss. I'll take care of it."
Flynn Fain smiled broadly. Nothing pleased him more than getting exactly the response he wanted, without superfluous conversation.
"Our travel agency has got you booked on that United flight nonstop to Shanghai in the morning. Got you in seat 2A, the one you like. Jin Jin will meet you at the airport, as usual, and go with you and Wang Ching out to see the Minhang boys and translate for you. And,” he added pointedly, “Jin Jin will also get you anything you may need to take care of this matter."
Shaheen nodded. “Anything” meant, of course, a gun.
As Shaheen was about to leave, Fain stopped him.
"Roy, what do you know about a young lawyer named Ward? Dennis Ward."
"Not much. He works for a law firm that handles civil cases for Frank Pianeta.” Pianeta was another highly placed Outfit commissioner, responsible for illegal loan-sharking as well as numerous legitimate payday loan shops across the city.
"So he's strictly legit, just handling up-front business?"
"Far as I know,” Shaheen said. “Why, is he a problem for us?"
"No, no, nothing like that,” Fain waved the thought away. “I met him at one of Pianeta's big weekend barbecues at his place up in Wisconsin on the lake. Took the whole family up. Got Fiona to go, too, even though she hates stuff like that. Anyways, she and this Dennis Ward seemed to hit it off pretty good. Sat together a lot, talking, you know. Ward called me a couple of days later, wanted to know if I would object to him asking Fiona out. He was very respectful about it, said he wouldn't do it without my permission."
"So what did you tell him?” Shaheen asked, his mouth suddenly going dry. Personal conversations about Fiona made him distinctly uncomfortable.
Fain's voice turned soft, almost gentle. “You know how I feel about Fiona, Roy. After my son and his wife died in that terrible accident on the Dan Ryan Expressway, I'm all that Fiona's got left. She has her grandmother, of course, uncles, cousins. But no real father figure except me. I want to see her happy, married, settled down, having kids—but it's got to be with somebody that's a solid citizen, you know? I mean, there are quite a few grandsons of Outfit bosses who are legit: bankers, brokers, franchise owners—but indirectly they are still mob families. I don't want that for Fiona. I want her to be completely free and clear of family relationships with the Outfit. You understand what I mean, Roy?"
"Yeah, sure I do, boss,” Roy professed. “I mean, I was the one you sent to drive her home from that private suburban girls’ school for the weekends, remember? You didn't want her driving by herself because of some of the neighborhoods we had to go through to get back into the city. I know she's a very special young lady. She deserves the very best out of life and that's what you want for her, right?"
"Exactly,” Fain said. Rising, he came over from the desk and draped an arm around Shaheen's shoulders. “I knew you'd understand, Roy. We're a lot alike, you and me. I often think of you as if you were my own grandson. Anyway, I gave this Ward guy permission to ask Fiona out. She hasn't mentioned to me whether she's gone out with him yet, and I try not to pry into her personal life; she's touchy about that. I think she's seeing somebody, I just don't know who. But when you get back from Shanghai, I want you to look into the situation for me. Quietly, you know. I'll trust you to find out if there's anything going on that I should know about."
"Sure, I'll do that."
Fain led him to the door. “Have a good trip, Roy."
* * * *
Fiona was furious.
"I can't believe this! He just sent you to Shanghai a month ago! Why the hell doesn't he just open up a branch office over there?"
"He already has one, kind of,” Roy said. “A Chinese national named Jin Jin takes care of his everyday business over there. But this is a big problem, he wants it handled personally—"
"So it has to be you. Great!” Fiona's Irish temper was up.
She was a redhead with freckles that showed just below her neckline. Those freckles went, to Royal Shaheen's surprise the first time they made love, all the way down to her knees. “When the lights are low,” he told her once in bed, “you look like a mannequin with ants all over you.” The comparison did not amuse Fiona. In response, she had bitten his lower lip and he'd had to tell Flynn Fain and some of Fain's thugs that he'd got the fat lip when a racquetball hit him in the mouth.
"How long will you be gone?” Fiona asked peevishly.
"Counting travel time, four or five days. I think I can handle the problem over there pretty quickly, one way or another."
"What's that mean: ‘one way or another'?” she asked, frowning.
Roy checked himself. Fiona knew, of course, that her grandfather was involved in the Outfit to some degree, and she knew that Royal Shaheen was some kind of aide or assistant to him in the slot machine and pinball business, but she knew nothing of the true nature of the relationship, had not even a remote idea that, among other things, Royal Shaheen killed on command for Flynn Fain.
"What I meant,” Roy said easily now, “is that there are several solutions to the problem. All I have to do is decide which one is best.” He slipped his arms around her and changed the subject. “By the way, what's this I hear about you cheating on me with some shyster named Dennis Ward?"
"Who?” Fiona asked, pulling her face back.
"Dennis Ward. You met him at one of Frank Pianeta's barbecues."
"Oh, him! That nerd attorney who works for one of the law firms Uncle Frank uses.” To Fiona, all of her grandfather's business associates were “uncles.” “He's been calling me and asking me out, but I keep putting him off."
"I think your grandfather might like it if you started seeing him. He wants you to hook up with someone who's strictly legit."
"My grandfather wants a lot of things,” Fiona declared. “Mostly, he wants to run my life."
"Maybe you should go out with this guy a few times, just to keep the old man off your case. If he thinks you're seeing somebody he approves of, he might stop trying to check up on you."
"So you want me to cheat on you?” She pulled his arms down until his hands were on her buttocks. “You want me to sleep with him, maybe?"
"Why not? I could be in your closet, watching. Might be fun.” His hands began squeezing and she pushed herself against him.
"How'd you like me to bite your lip again?” she threatened.
"How'd you like me to bite something of yours?"
"Maybe I'd like it—"
They fell into a long, wet kiss then, and did no more talking for the next hour.
* * * *
The flight to Shanghai was tedious: fourteen and a half hours, which, even in first class with all its amenities, was wearisome to Shaheen, who was city born and bred and disliked enclosed places, like airplanes and jail cells. He wore a CHIonizer around his neck to feed pure oxygen up to his nostrils, and had a padded Bose headset to neutralize the hum of the jet engines. He brought his laptop with him and played Texas hold ‘em poker offline until his wrist began to ache. Then he read. He was a voracious reader, a holdover from his early teens when as an orphan runaway he would hide out in Chicago's huge main public library downtown. He had figured out that truant officers and juvenile cops looked for delinquents in pool halls, bowling alleys, and movie theaters, never libraries.
Mostly what Shaheen read was American history. He particularly liked the period from immediately after World War I until just before World War II. Often he wished he had been born decades earlier so that he could have lived during the Roaring Twenties. He could have worked for a real gangster like Dion O'Banion or Bugs Moran. Not some corporate mobster like Flynn Fain. It never occurred to him that he might have become something other than a hoodlum.
When he tired of reading on the long flight, Roy dozed or mulled over in his mind the situation with Fiona. Their relationship began innocently enough when Fain regularly sent Roy out to the all-girl Cath
olic college in the western suburbs to pick Fiona up and drive her to Fain's mansion on the North Shore for weekends. Over a four-year period, they got to be on a first-name basis, she in her mid-to-late teens, Roy in his mid twenties. On the drives they talked about current movies, music, fashion, novels that the church had banned, and what a shame it was about all the young men being sent to fight a war in some godforsaken place overseas. Once she asked anxiously whether Roy might have to go into the army, and he explained that even if a draft was started up her grandfather would be able to obtain a deferment for him because his business was contributing free pinball machines to military-base enlisted men's clubs.
The attraction between them came about gradually as Fiona changed from a girl to a woman, and Roy developed from a young assistant into a trusted lieutenant to Flynn Fain. It was on one of their drives that Roy mentioned he had leased a high-rise apartment that was actually above the clouds at times, and Fiona had asked him to show it to her. Roy knew what was going to happen, and so did Fiona. But they did it anyway.
They were three hours late getting Fiona home that day and her grandfather took Roy into his study and demanded to know why.
"We had a flat tire on the way back,” Roy lied, “and I had to call the roadside service to come change it. Then Fiona got hungry and insisted we stop at a joint out on the highway for burgers and fries. Then rush hour traffic got heavy—"
"You're not getting any funny ideas about my granddaughter, are you, boyo?” Fain asked.
"Definitely not, boss!” Roy declared. “I look on Fiona as a sister!"
"A sister? You mean a nun?"
"No boss, like a real sister, like I'm her big brother and I'm supposed to take care of her."
"Oh.” Flynn Fain calmed down. Roy felt like he'd had a death sentence commuted. Few people could lie to Flynn Fain and get away with it. Roy silently said a Hail Mary giving thanks that he was one of the few.
After that day when Roy showed Fiona his eightieth-floor apartment, nothing could keep them apart, in spite of the threat of what Flynn Fain would do if he found out about them. They took extreme care that he would not, and their passion for each other became unceasing, enduring, even though Roy knew it was a problem that would someday erupt violently.
* * * *
The plane landed at the futuristic, high-tech Pudong Airport, twenty-five miles east of Shanghai city, at two o'clock on a typically hazy afternoon. Jin Jin was waiting for him in the Immigration Court. She was easy to spot because, at five-ten, she was taller than all the women around her and most of the men. Wearing a dove-grey silk shantung slacks suit, her blackthorn hair in a single long braid that hung to the back of her slim waist, she gave him a dazzling smile as he walked up to her.
"Didn't expect to see you back so soon,” she said without preliminary.
"Didn't expect it myself,” he said.
Jin Jin led him, as usual, away from the long lines queuing up for passport examination, to a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in six languages. They entered without knocking and Jin Jin spoke in Mandarin to a stern-looking uniformed man at a desk, to whom she handed Roy's passport and an envelope. The officer put the envelope in a desk drawer and stamped Roy's passport and visa for a thirty-day stay. They then left through a second door that led through a corridor connecting to the Arrivals Court. At the curb, a black Bentley limousine with tinted glass was waiting, a handsome young Chinese man in a tailored grey suit waiting for them next to an open rear door.
"New driver?” Roy observed.
"My nephew, Kim. My sister Ling's oldest boy. You met her, remember?"
"Yes, I remember. The party at your apartment last year."
Jin Jin introduced the young man, who bowed politely and shook hands. Jin Jin took Roy's baggage-claim check and handed it to Kim, who trotted over to the driver of an airport van and with a few words passed it on to him. On Highway A20, which was the outer-ring expressway into the city, Jin Jin opened a refrigerated bar built into the back of the closed-off driver's seat. “You want a drink, Roy?"
"Just some lime water and ice,” he said.
She twisted the cap off a bottle of carbonated lime water and poured part of it into a crystal glass, dropping two small ice cubes after it.
"What's the problem out here with the ball bearings?” he asked, sipping the drink.
"Mother Nature started it,” Jin Jin said. She had a smooth Angie Dickinson kind of voice, velvety like, and spoke with an easy British accent. “About three weeks ago, a typhoon hit the south coast of Fujian Province. It wiped out a lot of factories along the Taiwan Strait. One of them was the Sansha Metal Works."
"What's that got to do with us?"
"Ordinarily it would have had nothing to do with us. Ordinarily Minhang Metals here in Shanghai would have supplied our slot-machine manufacturer with the ball bearings we needed. But in this case, Minhang Metals got an opportunity to manufacture the hood ornaments for a new North Korean luxury sedan called the Planet. The Chinese government is an equal partner with North Korea in the manufacture of this car. Minhang Metals was not tooled up to supply both our ball bearings and the new Planet's hood ornament. So rather than lose the Planet contract, Minhang outsourced the manufacture of our ball bearings to Sansha Metal Works down in Fujian Province. I'm told that the full order of our ball bearings was ready to be shipped when the typhoon hit. Our ball bearings are now at the bottom of the Taiwan Strait.” Leaning over, she took a sip of his drink. “Mother Nature,” she concluded, squeezing his knee.
Royal Shaheen sighed a deep, weary sigh. A typhoon hits a factory in South China that ordinarily has absolutely nothing to do with anything related to him, and now thousands of patrons at a new Native American casino in Montana might be deprived of the insane habit of putting money into slot machines preprogrammed to beat them, and he, Royal Shaheen, was expected to straighten everything out for an old man who would have him killed if he knew Shaheen was sleeping with his granddaughter. Unbelievable.
"I'm guessing that no one has told Mr. Fain that his ball-bearings order was outsourced to another metal works, right?"
"Right. Wang Ching is terrified that Mr. Fain will find out about it and blame him for the problem. He has begged and pleaded with the Minhang people to postpone the hood ornament job and comply with their contract to produce the ball bearings, but they have flatly refused. The Planet hood ornament deal is supposed to be a very prestigious job that will win the firm great favor with both our government and the North Koreans."
"They had better be concerned about disfavor with Flynn Fain,” Roy said.
"I'm sure that's why you're here, Roy. The Minhang people have no idea who the middleman is in the slot-machine transaction. They obviously think that all they are doing is upsetting some American casino owner who can do nothing about it."
As their car got closer to the city, it traveled through a vast industrial district that looked as if it went on forever, as far as the eye could see from the elevated highway. Along the way were many billboards put up by the government: WHAT IS GOOD FOR INDUSTRY IS GOOD FOR YOUR FAMILY, and LET US ALL WORK TOGETHER FOR THE GOOD OF ALL, and others of similar slogan. Yet the sky above was filled with belching gray smoke from the factories.
"You want something to eat before we get to the hotel?” Jin Jin asked.
"When do you and I and Wang Ching go to see the Minhang people?"
"First thing in the morning."
"Okay, let's go somewhere and eat. That way I can dig in for the night at the hotel, take a steam bath, get a massage, sleep for ten hours, and be primed and ready for the Minhangs tomorrow."
Jin Jin pressed an intercom button next to the bar and spoke to Kim in Mandarin. The one word Roy recognized was “Taikang,” which told him that Jin Jin was taking him to a restaurant on Taikang Road, a gentrified avenue of cafes, gourmet dining venues, boutiques, and upscale hangouts for cosmopolitan Chinese to socialize with well-to-do foreigners. It was an area that Roy had in the past frequ
ented with Jin Jin, her sisters, and a clique of semi-legitimate achievers who lived on the edge of the Shanghai envelope.
The restaurant that Jin Jin took him to was up a flight of narrow stairs and dimly but adequately lighted in soft blue. All of the tables were in private cubicles with folding paper doors, and the servers were exquisitely pretty young Asian women wearing long cheongsam dresses slit up to mid thigh. Soft American pop music from the forties was piped in, and on a small half-circle dance floor in one corner several couples, possibly, even probably, in soft opiate worlds, were slow-dancing the afternoon away without shoes. Roy removed his own shoes and rested his feet on a velvet cushion that surrounded his club chair.
"You want anything special, Roy?” Jin Jin asked.
"No, whatever you're having."
Jin Jin ordered deep-fried chicken intestines marinated in ginger, pork wedges baked in roasted sesame seeds, freshwater shrimp in vinegar sauce, and a selection of cold lotus fruit.
"You want anything heavy to drink?"
"No, just Tsingtao.” That was Chinese rice beer, light and smooth, poured icy cold from large fat brown bottles like Dad's Old Fashioned Root Beer in the old days back home.
"You want anything else, Roy? A line or a tab of anything?"
"Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.” First he had to find out if he had to kill anyone on this trip.
"Dance?” she asked in a feathery voice.
"Sure."
Jin Jin slipped out of her spike-heeled shoes and they walked across plush carpeting to the dance floor, coming together there with an effortless familiarity that bespoke history. Tall, with an almost aqueous body, Jin Jin pressed herself close to him as they slow-danced to an old rendition of “As Time Goes By."
"My sisters are always asking me if I have slept with you yet.” She spoke quietly, close to his ear.
"What do you tell them?"
"The truth, of course. I cannot lie to my sisters. I tell them you find me too unattractive to take to bed."
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