Whispering Shadows

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  Paul called for the check and paid.

  They did not speak on the way home to Tai Ping. It seemed to Paul that each man was deep in his own thoughts. Zhang took a deep breath several times and seemed to be about to say something, but nothing came out.

  ———

  Paul lay under the mosquito net and concentrated all his attention on the silence. He had turned off the fan and opened the windows wide. He thought about the nighttime ferry ride and the short walk from the ferry point to the village; he thought about his walks on the Lo So Shing Beach and the sounds from his garden at night; the voices of the night, the smell of the sea, and the humidity of the air, which had him sweating even while having breakfast on the terrace in the morning. Without him really realizing it, he had grown fond of Lamma in the last three years. He was living a life that Justin knew nothing of, had never had the least idea of, and the longer he thought about it, the more it hurt him. He wished there were a way his son could be part of this. Paul decided to write him a letter—no, not just one, several, in which he would describe his life here in detail. Letters to Justin. It was a strange idea, one that probably nobody would understand, but it comforted him. So much so that he finally fell asleep.

  ———

  It was late morning by the time Paul woke. He heard Zhang’s voice in the living room. Did they have a visitor?

  Paul got up, knotted the mosquito net together, and had a shower. Even the cold water was too warm in this season, much too warm. He went downstairs and saw Zhang sitting at the long dining table in front of Paul’s open laptop, with a ballpoint pen in one hand and the phone in the other. Paul went into the kitchen, made himself a pot of jasmine tea, peeled a mango, and sat down on the terrace. Zhang soon came out to join him.

  “Good morning. How did you sleep?” Zhang wanted to know.

  “Not bad. Did you lie awake long?”

  “Yes. The lack of noise drives me crazy. I can’t sleep in this silence. I used the time to surf the Internet instead, to see if I could find anything on Lotus Metal.”

  “And?”

  “There’s not much, not on Google China or Baidu. But a friend who works in the Department of Commerce was able to help. Lotus Metal is a registered company that is owned by the Ministry of State Security. It has a factory in Shenyang and is one of the suppliers to a German car manufacturer that operates a plant there. Lotus Metal seems to have very ambitious expansion plans. A big factory near Shanghai is under construction and a second one is in the pipeline. Wang Ming is its CEO. I found a brief interview he gave to the China Economic Daily a couple of months ago on their website. Their questions were quite critical; they asked him why he was investing so much money when the Chinese car industry was clearly suffering from overcapacity. As a justification for the construction of the new factory, he mentioned a future joint venture partner who he was not allowed to name yet, but who had a great deal of experience in metal processing and had excellent contacts with big American firms. Some of the agreements had already been signed and the rest were practically on the table ready for signature.

  “Do you believe that?” Paul asked. “If I remember correctly, Richard Owen claimed that the name Wang Ming meant nothing to him and that Lotus Metal was a crazy idea of Michael’s that nothing ever came of.”

  “Maybe Mr. Owen is lying. Or maybe the negotiations didn’t get very far or they broke down, and Wang Ming only mentioned them in the interview as a public justification for his investment, or to intimidate his competitors.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “I’ll have more information from Beijing by this evening. My friend knows one of the top officials at the Ministry of State Security, who is responsible for industry and commerce. He will probably know the name of the joint venture partner and whether an agreement has been signed yet or not.”

  “I didn’t know that the Ministry of State Security had anything to do with industry,” Paul said, surprised.

  “It has a great deal to do with it. All unofficially, of course, but they boost their income with their dealings. Just like the army does.”

  “Do you think Victor Tang knew about Lotus Metal?”

  “I’m assuming he did. I can’t imagine Michael Owen would have been able to keep something like that from him. That would also explain the disagreement between Tang and him.”

  “But why should Michael Owen set up a second company that would compete with another firm in the group? Without Tang? From what we know Cathay Metal is a gold mine.”

  “Maybe. But maybe the figures weren’t quite right. Tang might have gone behind his back, or at least Michael must have believed he had been betrayed. Or Lotus Metal simply made him a better offer. You know how little contracts count for among us. We’ll have to find out, and fast. If Michael Owen wanted to change partners, that would be our potential motive for a murder.”

  Paul pushed his hair away from his face; his hair, nearly white now, had grown so long that he could almost have tied it back in a short ponytail. What Zhang was saying sounded strangely, almost unnervingly, familiar. Paul thought about his travels through almost all the Chinese provinces in the past three decades. Hubei, Shandong, Fujian, Gansu, Liaoning. Regardless of which part of the country he had been to, his experiences had often been similar. He thought about the American and European companies he had advised about their investments, the negotiations he had attended and translated, and, in a few cases, even led. There the American managers sat, opposite their Chinese business partners, and neither side could even pronounce each other’s names correctly. He had always marveled at how people who knew so little about each other managed to do business together. One side saw a simply inexhaustibly large market for its products and the other side thought it had found a kind of golden goose in a suit and tie, a never-ending source of gold for its companies. These illusions popped like soap bubbles, followed quickly by broken contracts, embezzlements, and the complete loss of trust and respect. What Zhang had just described was more than plausible; it was a realistic scenario. The only thing Paul had never heard of was a disagreement between Chinese and foreign business partners ending in a murder.

  “We don’t have much time,” Zhang said. “The supposed murderer’s trial starts in two days. You have to try to find out something from Tang and Richard Owen, and, in the process, give as little away as possible about what we’ve discovered. Tang must not know that I’m involved or that we have spoken to the prisoner’s wife. As she is the alibi, she would certainly be in danger. Tang would not take long to find out where she is hiding.”

  Paul remembered that he had blithely mentioned the alibi to the Owens; he hoped they would keep that to themselves.

  “He invited you to dinner,” Zhang continued, “so he wants something from you. He will try to interrogate you. You must wait, be patient, and at some point you will be able to ask questions.”

  “By the way, Mr. Tang, your old friend Wang Ming asked me to send you his regards.”

  “Something like that. But I’m sure you’ll be able to do it more elegantly than that.”

  At last, his friend was smiling again.

  “Should I come back to Lamma after the dinner or should we meet somewhere in Shenzhen?”

  “Lamma is safer.”

  “The dinner starts at seven in the evening and the last ferry leaves at half past midnight. I should be able to catch that.”

  Paul watched a gray-green rat snake, slithering through the grass at the other end of the garden. It was long and thick and harmless. “Are you afraid of snakes?”

  “No,” Zhang replied. He had also noticed the snake, and he sat down on one of the chairs on the terrace as if to add emphasis to his reply.

  Paul got up, fetched him a cup, and poured him some tea.

  Shortly after, Christine rang and asked Paul if he could come slightly earlier. She had not been able to get an
yone to cover for her and was only free between one and two. Paul looked at the clock. If he hurried, he could still catch the express ferry at 12:15 PM. He quickly changed his clothes and tried to say good-bye to Zhang, but he was on the phone. Zhang put his hand over the receiver for a moment, whispered, “Someone I know in Shanghai” and “Good luck, be careful,” turned away again, and continued his conversation.

  ———

  Paul’s heart was beating fast when he climbed the stairs to Christine’s office. He wanted to put it down to the two flights of stairs, the heat in the stairwell, the high blood pressure that his father had suffered from, but he knew himself how foolish all that was. He was happy to see Christine, there was no other reason, and it was both a wonderful and a strange feeling. He could not remember the last time his heart had thudded so furiously in anticipation of seeing someone. Standing in the hall for a moment, he heard Christine’s voice through the door, a voice that sounded so energetic, businesslike, and decisive in the office, and so tender in his ears.

  He rang the bell, went in, and suddenly felt transformed into the shy young man he had once been, who had only been able to say a few sentences throughout an entire long evening in the presence of women.

  Christine took his hand as they walked downstairs. They crossed Johnson Road and cut through Southorn Playground and a few minutes later, they were sitting in a small, crowded coffee shop. Paul could hardly wait to tell her about the Owens and Anyi and how he had found Michael’s lover, but Christine ordered first, without consulting him: a portion of black sesame rice dumplings, a mango pudding, and two caffe lattes.

  “Is that okay?”

  Paul smiled and nodded. He would have chosen the same things. “Christine, you won’t believe this, but I found Michael Owen’s . . .”

  She interrupted him with a vigorous shake of her head. “Paul, please don’t be angry with me, but I don’t want to know.”

  “Why not?” He struggled to hide his disappointment.

  “Because I can’t help you.”

  “But I don’t expect you to help.”

  “Because I can’t share it with you. I didn’t sleep last night. I’m not exaggerating. I lay wide awake in bed, as if I had taken some kind of stimulant.”

  “There’s no reason . . .” He started contradicting her but stopped. After everything Zhang had said to him, he could not pretend to her that he was going to Shenzhen on some kind of leisure trip.

  “That doesn’t count at all. What you say and how I hear it are two totally different things, and nothing will change that. Everything that you tell me, every person you tell me about, will only make me more frightened for you. You have decided to help your friend. I respect that. When you go to China my thoughts are with you every minute—no, what am I saying—every second. I won’t ask you not to go any longer. I trust you, but nevertheless, or perhaps because I do, I don’t want to know what you do there. Can you understand that?”

  Paul was afraid he could not. If the situation had been reversed he would have behaved quite differently—he would want to know about everything, every detail, every meeting; he would want every conversation to be recounted as fully as possible. And even before that he would have asked her not to go—no, not just asked but put pressure on her, he would not have given her any peace until she gave in, and if she had not, he would have taken her refusal to consider his wishes as clear proof of her lack of affection for him.

  “I don’t know if I would be so understanding in your place.”

  “It’s not understanding.”

  “Then courageous.”

  “It’s not courageous either. I love you. That’s all.”

  He wanted to respond to her. The same three little words. I love you. He wanted to shout them out. I love you. Or to whisper them in her ear. But he could not. He couldn’t get a single sound out, and he did not know why. He knew what he ought to say, and it would not have been a lie, it would not have been a pretense, yet not a word passed his lips. It was as if he had forgotten how to speak. As though there was nothing but a gray, cold, and silent emptiness within him. She would surely ask, “Do you love me?” next. That’s what all women did in situations like this, and he had no answer for her apart from a sad, seemingly endless silence. His silence drove him crazy. She must doubt him. He tried to force himself. He opened his mouth, but she just gave a gentle shake of her head.

  She did not ask questions. She just looked at him, stroked his mouth and his lips gently, and took his face in her hands as though she had never held something so precious before.

  “I love you,” she repeated, kissing him with such passion, so full of tenderness and desire that he felt as if he was fainting for a moment. “I love you.”

  XXIV

  It had been a mistake to go up to his bedroom to see Anyi one more time. She had just had a shower and was sitting on the bed with the remote control in one hand and a plate of rice crackers in the other, staring at the screen. Her skin was pale, barely distinguishable from the white silk sheets, so her black hair, dark-brown eyes, and plump, deep-red lips stood out all the more. Her bathrobe was a little askew. Tang could see the edge of an almost-pink nipple, and the sight aroused him so much in that instant that he lay down on the bed with her. She must have sensed his arousal, and clearly saw it as her duty to fan it and to give herself to him. She put the rice crackers and the remote control aside, leaned over him, and started unbuttoning his shirt. She trailed the tips of her fingers over his chest and unbuckled his belt.

  Before long, Victor Tang was lying half naked on the bed, with Anyi sitting astride him. She moved her hips rhythmically up and down, and he massaged her small, firm breasts with both hands, thinking about the Owens and Paul Leibovitz and wondering what his role was in all of this. Anyi breathed heavily and sighed out loud, but her orgasmic cries were too shrill and sounded too exaggerated to convince him of her ecstasy. The television was still on, and Tang saw from the corner of his eye, in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, that the stock market in Hong Kong had fallen.

  When she realized that, despite the distraction, he had come and was slowly getting limp, she got off him, lay down next to him, and reached for the remote control.

  She can’t have felt much. Tang did not kid himself, but this was not the time to think about Anyi’s pleasure. She was a mistress, an exceptionally intelligent and good-looking one, but still nothing more than a mistress, of which there were tens of thousands in Shenzhen.

  Until a few days ago she had been Michael’s, but now she belonged to him. He was supporting her. He would continue to pay the rent for the apartment, give her a generous allowance and, when he felt like it, spoil her with presents. In return, she had to be at his service at all times. That might not always be satisfying for her, but it was certainly better than packing plastic toys or lightbulbs into cardboard cartons on some conveyor belt for five hundred yuan a month and sharing a room with seven other young women. She knew that, so it would never occur to her to complain. Only people who were stupid or presumptuous did that, and she was not one of those. It was a temporary arrangement, a business relationship, if you like, based on a cost-benefit analysis like any business relationship, existing for as long as both parties benefited from it, and it would end the day one of the two parties found a better deal. It was the opposite of love.

  Why had that been so difficult for Michael Owen to understand? He had tried to learn Chinese history, read books in which the role of concubines in ancient China had surely been explained in detail. Why had he still not understood? When Tang had realized that things were becoming serious he had tried to explain the principle of the concubine and its renaissance in modern-day China to him. Michael had only stared at him in horror and grown terribly angry, saying that he had not the slightest idea what Anyi meant to him. She was different. She was not a concubine, she was his girlfriend. He loved her above all else and she loved hi
m, not his money or his citizenship—he did not doubt it for a second. She was learning English for him, and he was determined to marry her and take her back to America with him one day. This impulsive show of anger that did not accept any other point of view had troubled Tang. Michael’s outburst reminded him of the laughter of the students at Harvard when he had told them about his vision of China as the factory of the world. They had laughed at him; they did not understand this country and its culture, even if they, like Michael, tried to. They simply could not grasp how hungry the people here were. They did not know what it meant to have been deceived for decades of your life. Neither the Harvard students nor Michael, let alone his father, could understand how often people in China had been lied to, how much unlived life they were carrying around with them, and how strong the desire was to live it.

  But Tang had not forgotten Michael’s outrage. Michael Owen had been so convinced and spoken so convincingly that day that Tang had grown curious. What if he, Tang, was wrong? Perhaps this young woman was one of the rare exceptions. Tang wondered if he would be disappointed or delighted if that were so.

  The next time Michael traveled to Wisconsin for a few days, Tang invited Anyi to dinner. She certainly did not seem like one of the mistresses of Chinese businessmen; he had gotten to know many of them and they were so interchangeable that he could not remember a single one. She was different. More intelligent, more beautiful, and more confident. It was clear that she was proud not to have worked her way up from a factory conveyor belt to a karaoke bar to the bed of the first available rich man. She could afford to be choosy, but she obeyed the same rules the others did. He saw it in her eyes. He saw it in her face. He saw it in the way she moved. He smelled it, like a dog picking up the scent of a wounded animal. She could deceive Michael Owen but not him, Victor Tang. She had escaped the misery of her childhood and would not go back there for anything in the world. She knew that the economic reforms had produced many winners and at least as many losers. She had understood that on the free market everything was a matter of supply and demand in the end and that nowadays everyone had a price. Anyi too.