Afterburn: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  And what about his own goddamned little project? He gave the driver the address, and a minute or two later they entered Pudong’s manufacturing zone, passing huge buildings marked Kodak, Ericsson, Motorola, Seimens. Here it was, a walled site with a sign announcing in already-faded paint the factory’s completion one month hence, a goal now impossible. Lucky to make it in the next three. But don’t tell that to Marvin Noff or Mr. Ming.

  He asked the driver to wait while he got out. His back! He staggered out of the car in his wrinkled suit and hobbled toward the fenced construction driveway.

  “I help you,” said the driver, running up to him.

  He leaned on the man’s arm until they reached the fence. “Thank you,” Charlie said. “I appreciate that.”

  “Very bad back, I think so much,” said the driver, pointing.

  “Yes,” he breathed between spasms. “Will you take me to the friendship store?” Charlie remembered that the department store for foreigners usually had Western over-the-counter remedies for sale. “We can go there and then to the hotel.”

  “Friendship store closed now,” said the driver. “I take you better.”

  “I’ll go to the hotel’s doctor.”

  The driver laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Hotel doctor, many people die.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Hotel doctor good, traditional Chinese medicine very, very good. Number one.”

  “You sure?”

  “Very, very good, I promise. Medicine very good.”

  “Okay.” He clutched the fence in misery. “I’ll try anything.”

  The driver pulled out his phone and began to chatter in Chinese. Charlie turned to look at his factory, his dream. The building—five windowless stories, thirty thousand square feet on each floor—had progressed minimally since he’d seen it last. Stacks of copper piping and pallets of bricks stood in the same places they had before. No scaffolding. He could see a load of steel, edges starting to rust. Loose trash blew across the site, catching on the locked gate. He gripped its bars, imprisoned from without. But he could see enough to know the trouble he was in; the subcontractors were gone—no electricians, no climate-control people, no plumbers. He’d have to lie to Mr. Ming, fudging the factory’s progress reports in order to get the next installment of financing released. Such a fraudulent statement was grounds for termination of the loan. The thing was sinking him. Every day the plant was late getting on-line was a day less of revenue in the second quarter of the next year—a disastrous deficit, what with revenue streams from other products tapering down as they became obsolete or as Manila Telecom stole market share, chewing his feet off. If Marvin Noff knew how behind they were, he’d stick a knife in Teknetrix’s stock—URGENT SELL. I’m getting killed here, Charlie thought, killed big.

  “I take you very good medicine,” the driver said.

  Maybe it’s worth it, Charlie thought. I have to be in good form the next few days. A bad back is going to shut me down. He waved his hand. “Let’s go.”

  TEN MINUTES LATER they had entered old Shanghai proper, the driver threading the crowded streets, coming so close to the passing waves of bicyclists that Charlie could have reached out a hand and rung the bells on their handlebars with no difficulty. The riders wore bright Western clothes, but some of the older men pedaled by in vintage Mao jackets, as if unconvinced that the political and economic liberalizations of the last decade were permanent. The driver pulled up before a Chinese pharmacy with a male acupuncture mannequin in the window, tiny Chinese characters scattered across it asymmetrically, not a few of them clustered meaningfully around the mannequin’s discreetly molded organ of reproduction. Charlie didn’t feel hopeful. A few Chinese on the street noted his arrival with interest. The driver helped him inside, past rows of manufactured Chinese medicines, to a counter where an old woman stood mashing something with a mortar and pestle.

  The driver addressed her, and she looked at Charlie and asked some questions. The driver turned to Charlie.

  “She say how long your back hurt?”

  He sighed in discouragement. “A long time.”

  The driver repeated this to the woman. They spoke. The driver nodded. “How long in days and weeks?”

  The woman watched him expectantly, perhaps never having treated a white man before.

  “Twenty-seven years,” said Charlie. He glanced around the shop. A few Chinese were staring, then they smiled. They came closer.

  “Years? You write number.”

  This he did and the slip of paper ended up in the old woman’s gnarled hands. She checked again with the driver.

  He nodded as they spoke. “She say do you pass waste easily?”

  “Yes.”

  They spoke. “Do you have pain in heart?”

  “No.”

  The woman nodded. “Do you have clean lungs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have bad dreams?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have pain in legs?”

  “Yes. But because they were hurt.”

  “Do you eat fungus?”

  “No.” I’ll ask the hotel for a doctor, he thought. Now four or five Chinese people stood watching, commenting among themselves.

  “Do you take any Chinese medicine?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have strong manhood?”

  Charlie grimaced. “You mean—do I—”

  The driver smiled. “Yes. Is strong or not so strong?”

  “Not strong,” Charlie said. “Weak.”

  The answer was repeated. The crowd nodded and hummed privately. The woman did not remove her gaze from Charlie’s face. She spoke.

  “Is your back ever sing or always cry?”

  “Always cry,” Charlie said.

  “She must see your hands.”

  The woman held Charlie’s hands, rubbing the knuckles, pulling on the fingers. She stared into his eyes and pushed a gray fingernail behind his ear. She looked at his tongue and pressed it with a spoon. This action drew approval from the onlookers, who now numbered at least a dozen, the small children in front. Then she put a piece of paper on her counter and visited many small drawers in her apothecary, dropping in what appeared to be pieces of bark, desiccated sea horses, herbs, dried flowers, pieces of bone or horn, and a number of red and yellow and brown powders. She changed her mind once or twice and returned substances to their containers. She muttered something to the driver.

  “She say she must smell.”

  “Okay.”

  The woman came around the side of the counter and pressed her nose to Charlie’s back.

  “She say please let her touch back.”

  He took off his coat and pulled out his shirt. The gathered people laughed nervously; this was better than their soap operas on television. The old woman lifted up Charlie’s shirt without hesitation, and when she saw his scars, she chattered angrily at the driver. She held his shirt up and the crowd talked excitedly.

  “What? What?”

  “She very mad.” The driver grinned in embarrassment. “She say no make very good medicine for you if she never see these bad skins.”

  The old woman traced the scars with her rough fingers. Then she spoke again.

  “She say let down pants, she needs to see.”

  This was ridiculous. “No,” Charlie said in misery.

  But she understood his reticence and stared at him, jabbering in Chinese, her face so close he could see her teeth were ground down to brown stumps.

  “She say you not honest with her, she want to help you! She say you not like her, you not think she make good medicine, you very insult.”

  “Let’s go to the hotel, for God’s sake.”

  The old woman understood and came up to Charlie, barely reaching his chest, chattering so angrily that he took a step back. She shook her fist as she talked, staring at him fiercely, as if she didn’t believe he didn’t understand her.

  “She say she
need to see.”

  “Right.” He glanced at the people in the shop, who now crowded all the way back to the door. They smiled and nodded helpfully. “Can you tell them to go?” he asked the driver.

  The driver hollered something in Chinese. No one moved.

  “This is pretty embarrassing,” said Charlie.

  The driver hollered again, but without conviction. More people came into the shop. What could he do? His back throbbed in every position. He could barely stand. He turned his back toward the crowd and provisionally loosened his pants. The old woman came around behind him and without warning yanked them down so that they dropped around his knees. He clutched the elastic of his underwear. “What is she—!”

  She pulled his shirttail up and his underwear down and inspected his pale, scarred buttocks, which now hung out sadly for all to see. The crowd murmured loudly. She poked the largest scar and proclaimed something in Chinese at the driver, then yanked up Charlie’s underwear.

  “She say she make you very good medicine.”

  He hurriedly pulled up his pants, and the driver helped him with his jacket. The old woman returned to her concoction and subtracted and added several items, looking up at Charlie repeatedly like a quick-draw street portraitist. Then she mashed up the items into a rough powder, picked out a few extraneous bits of matter, blew softly on the pile, funneled the paper into a square envelope, sealed it, scrawled some Chinese characters on it, and handed it to Charlie. The crowd hummed its approval.

  “This is a tea. You drink morning and night. Five days,” the driver said.

  “I pour a little into hot water?”

  “Drink water, drink medicine, drink every bit.”

  He sniffed the envelope. It was foul. Probably poison. “What’s this called?”

  The driver asked the woman. She answered without looking up as she cleaned her counter.

  “Spring bamboo,” said the driver.

  THE PEACE HOTEL, a gloomy Art Deco pile, sat on the other side of the river. Outside the hotel, cabs and bicyclists streamed along Zhongshan Road, and money changers clustered furtively on the corners. Women selling postcards badgered anyone who looked foreign. A half dozen of the city’s million-odd construction workers slumped together in an alleyway, sleeping off their night shift, peasant boys from the far provinces who owned not much more than their tools, boys already hardened by labor and impossibly outclassed by the desirous young Shanghai girls with their American makeup and Japanese cell phones. The cab driver carried his bags inside the hotel.

  In his room, he ordered hot water to be delivered, and when it came, he spooned some of the old woman’s powder into a cup, poured in the hot water, stirred it, dumped in some sugar, drank it off in three horrid gulps, then lay down on the bed with the phone. It was 6:00 p.m. in Shanghai, 6:00 a.m. in New York. Too early for Towers, the investigator, to be in his office. He dialed anyway.

  The call was answered. “Towers? Charlie Ravich. I was going to leave a message.”

  “I get in early. We’re finishing that report on the three women.”

  Including Pamela Archer, the woman who lived on the farm, whom he had not finished interviewing because of Tom Anderson’s phone call. “Right,” Charlie said.

  “We’ll have that today. Sent to you.”

  “Fine,” he answered, not particularly interested. “Wait, don’t send it to my office. Send it to me here.”

  “Okay.”

  “I have one more name I need you to check out.”

  “Lay it on me.”

  “Melissa Williams. Lives in the city. Downtown, I think. In her mid-twenties, educated.”

  “You don’t have a Social Security number, I suppose.”

  “Not.”

  “It’s okay. We can get it in about a minute. What about her appearance?”

  “White, slender, dark hair, maybe five seven.”

  “Okay.”

  He got up off the bed and stood at the window. Across the river glittered the lights of Pudong. “How fast can you get back to me on her?”

  “I can have some information tomorrow. Won’t be much.”

  “I understand.”

  “Anything else?” asked Towers.

  “Yes, for God’s sake, don’t tell Martha about this last name.”

  “Technically I’m retained by her.”

  “Not on this one,” Charlie said. “Bill me directly.”

  “You want to pay?”

  “I want to pay.”

  He said goodbye, caught up on CNN’s baseball scores from the night before, then rose to go downstairs to meet Tom Anderson in the hotel’s French restaurant. In the elevator he tested his back. Maybe better. Anderson, a fleshy kid of thirty-five wearing a good suit, was waiting for him, and pumped Charlie’s hand confidently. “Great to see you, Mr. Ravich.”

  “I’m in a hell of a bad mood, Tom.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I’m not on the other side of the world,” Charlie went on as they sat down. “You think I am, but I’m not. I will hound you until you get this thing built, Tom. I will call your bosses and tell them what a completely shitty job you are doing. Your company has bids in on five other telecom factory construction jobs in Asia, Tom. They’re not direct competitors of ours. I know the CEOs of three of those companies personally. In twenty minutes I can call each of them. A lot of people have put a lot of trust in you, Tom, though I don’t know why. Now you need to pull something out of a hat. You need to fix a broken situation. Or I’ll hire someone else. It’ll cost more but might put us back on schedule. It’ll also mean that we will sue your company to recover those extra costs.” He paused, wondering what effect this had. “You’re understanding me now, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  They sat. The Chinese waitresses, edgy as sparrows in their silk uniforms, stayed back. Anderson smoked his cigarette down to the filter. Charlie watched him. Same age Ben would have been. He waited a few minutes more just to let the kid’s suffering ripen, and then he said, “Listen, I have a feeling I know what’s happening.”

  Anderson looked up. “You do?”

  “You’ve been in Shanghai what, six months, a year?”

  Anderson nodded miserably. “Ten months.”

  “It’s screwing you up?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s not the heat and the language and the crowding and the noise, though those things are all pretty bad.”

  “No.”

  “What’s that street with all the expat bars?” Charlie had been there—the places were full of Germans and Australians and Americans, three or four beautiful Chinese girls for every Westerner. “You’re having a little problem with the local culture?”

  Anderson nodded.

  “You’re married with young kids back home?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the Chinese women are—”

  “Everywhere,” Anderson interrupted. “Westerners are still rich by their standards.”

  “Your company doesn’t have a policy about Chinese guests in company apartments?”

  Anderson waved his hand. “I rented my own apartment.”

  “How many girls do you have in there?”

  Anderson hung his head. “Three.”

  “Cooking, cleaning, and everything else,” Charlie said. He remembered some of the American pilots in Thailand. Every few months one of the men would have a problem. Sometimes they thought it was love. Sometimes it was. “You’re tired all the time, you’re distracted, you hear the girls talking and you don’t know what they’re saying, whether they are laughing at you or not, you worry your money is being stolen, you’re drinking too much.”

  “Yes.” Anderson looked up. “How do you know?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I don’t care. I have no sympathy. I can’t. I have too many people depending on me. You either deliver or you’re gone. You can be living on a sampan and smoking opium for all I care. You’re at the corporate level now,
Tom. Either you deliver or you’re dead.”

  They sat in silence.

  “Now,” Charlie finally said, “tell me how to fix it.”

  Relieved, Anderson unburdened himself of the site’s problems. It was true, he admitted, that he had made some scheduling errors, which had slowed things down a bit, but there was time built into the schedule to catch up, especially since the Chinese were willing to work at night, if you paid them. The problem really did rest with the scaffolding company. As if they liked to cause problems. They wanted to renegotiate their contract because they said their costs were higher than expected. Normally the municipality would handle this, but the municipality was run by the cousin of the man who ran the scaffolding contracts, and he was unwilling to stand firm against the company’s request for more money. Anderson had recalculated their bid and compared it to comparable recent jobs he knew about, and as far as he could see, the scaffolding company men were blowing smoke, trying to jack up their price. In effect, then, the scaffolding company was standing with its hand out, waiting to be paid. They would not talk to Anderson; he was not senior enough. In fact, he had accidentally insulted the scaffolding company’s president, Mr. Lo, by suggesting that Mr. Lo negotiate with him directly. The last conversation had been tense and unproductive. But now Mr. Lo knew Charlie was coming, and Anderson had taken the liberty of scheduling an appointment with him for the next morning.

  “Good,” said Charlie, wondering how he would convince Mr. Lo to resume labor. Foreign companies usually employed a Chinese go-between, an expeditor hired as a consultant, who massaged difficult situations and presented bills that were never itemized. “Is Lo reasonable?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Anderson answered, and Charlie thought about this response, how much it might cost, how valuable it was.

  THE PEACE HOTEL was famous for its band of old musicians who played American jazz and show tunes each night. The men, most past sixty, had been so terrified by the excesses of the Cultural Revolution that they’d buried their trumpets and cellos and drums underground. Now, redeemed by history, they played “Moon River,” “Bésame Mucho,” and other mid-century standards from a song sheet each night to adoring American and German tourists in the hotel. Charlie sat and watched them, sipping a drink, reading the International Herald Tribune page by page, and picking at a piece of chocolate cake.