Dragon Day

Chapter Twenty

★

I take advantage of the walk back to Gugu’s set to call John. He picks up on the third ring.

“You are okay?” he asks.

“Fine. You?”

“Xing.” Good enough.

“Did you find out anything about who killed anybody?” I mean, I’m not picky at this point.

“A little. The girl, the second one, she died from some drug. Baifen.”

“Heroin?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“What about Inspector Zou? Have you seen him?”

A pause. “It is complicated.”

“Complicated, how?”

A longer pause.

“I think maybe Yang Junmin interferes with the case.”

I feel a prickle of cold sweat. Not that it’s a surprise. You’d expect a guy with his clout to try to control the investigation.

That’s not the part that’s got my heart thumping hard right now.

“Did you go to see Zou? Does he know who you are?”

Because you also have to figure that Uncle Yang’s keeping a close eye on things. That anyone coming around asking about the case is going to get noticed.

“No. I have some contacts in Beijing PSB. They cannot say who. Only they hear Zou Qishi no longer controls the investigation.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“I mean, that you didn’t see Zou.”

“I will speak to him when it’s time.”

I shouldn’t have to lay it out for him. If anyone knows this stuff, he does. But he’s the one who blew everything up that night at dinner, when he met Yang Junmin.

“John, look… you need to stay away from this.”

A snort. “That is a funny thing for you to say.”

“Yeah, hilarious. Okay, I don’t know what faction is what and who’s fighting who, or any of that. But I do know this guy’s a da motou, that there’s a leadership transition coming up, and if he finds out you’re with the DSD? That’s not stirring the pot, that’s throwing dynamite in a firecracker factory. Do you want that kind of shitstorm coming down on your head?”

Another pause.

“Not yet. I have to first line up the ducks.”

This just gets more awesome by the minute.

I recap in my head as I limp up the Qing Village street toward Gugu’s production.

John is on some crazy crusade to bring down Yang Junmin. Why, I don’t know, and I’m not sure I really care. What I do care about is my ass, and though he swore on a stack of Little Red Books that he’s going to fix my PSB problem, and I think he believes that he means it, the shit John’s stirring up could swamp both of us.

I’m going to have to handle this on my own somehow.

I look at it this way: Sidney asked me to investigate his kids. To find out if any of them are involved in a murder.

Sidney’s a powerful guy, and even if he can’t control Uncle Yang, he might have the pull to get me off the PSB’s list of convenient suspects.

So I’m doing what Sidney asked me to do. I’ll try to figure it out. If I do what he wants, then the way I look at it is, he owes me.

Okay, he’s sort of holding my mom as a hostage, and that was a total dick move. Or maybe he’s keeping her safe from Uncle Yang. I’m guessing it’s a combination of both.

But knowing Sidney, either way, if I help him, I think he’d be willing to do me the favor.

Speaking of.

I swap SIM cards and call him.

“We have a wonderful time! First today we golf.”

“Golf?” I don’t think my mom has ever played golf.

“Yes. Her friend likes to golf. Your mother give it a good try. It was very much fun. Tonight we can sing some karaoke and watch movies. My home theater is very nice.”

“That’s… great. Listen, I just want you to know, I’m with Gugu and Meimei now. So I’m doing what you asked me to do. Spending time with them.”

“What have you learned?”

Don’t snark at the homicidal billionaire kidnapper, I tell myself. “I just got here,” I say. “I’ll call you as soon as I find out something important.”

“What about Tiantian? Will you see him?”

“I, uh… yeah. I will. Soon.”

“Good.”

How I’m going to handle the whole Tiantian issue, I have no idea. I don’t want to go anywhere near him. Because with Tiantian comes his wife, Dao Ming. And with Dao Ming comes Uncle Yang.

My mom swears that everything’s fine. Golf was fun, “and tomorrow I guess we’re playing paintball.” She lowers her voice. “I think Sidney might be a little lonely.”

It’s possible, I guess. Though he could afford to buy himself as much company as he wants.

“How much longer do you think…? I mean, we’re having a nice time and all, but…”

“Soon,” I tell her. “I just need to… line up the ducks.”

They’re shooting in a different place when I get back to the set, around the shops in the village street. The crew moves light stands and diffusers, checks makeup and wardrobe of the actors. I don’t see Marsh. Maybe he’s done being an evil imperialist for the day.

What I do see, up ahead in the “town square”: a parked black BMW sedan. Standing next to it is Tiantian.

I skid to a stop. Turn and walk as fast as I can without running until I reach the alley that goes alongside one of the “shops.” Turn the corner, hug the wall, and peek around it.

Tiantian’s talking to a guy with a clipboard. I look for Yang Junmin and Dao Ming, but I don’t see them.

I do see a guy by the driver’s side of the car: buzz cut, military vibe, plainclothes, doing a slow survey of the set.

I don’t know if he’s one of Uncle Yang’s helpers, but I can’t afford to assume that he isn’t. I scurry down the alley and then around a corner along the back side of the shops.

Now what?

I’m hiding out in one of the courtyards of the “Imperial Palace,” just inside a big hall with red columns and a gold-painted throne up on a dais, surrounded by carved screens, brass incense burners, and giant character signs. Tourists dressed in Qing costumes pose for photos-there are racks of costumes to the right of the throne and a small line of customers waiting to change and have their pictures taken.

Who narked me out to Tiantian? I figure his showing up here is no coincidence. I’m guessing Meimei-she’s the one who knew I was coming, who even made a joke about inviting Tiantian along.

But she might have called ahead. Marsh and Gugu didn’t seem surprised to see me. Either one of them could’ve called Tiantian.

If Tiantian’s brought Uncle Yang’s soldiers with him, there’s no way I can stay here.

But if I leave and I don’t have any answers for Sidney… that’s not going to go over very well.

Though I can’t exactly figure out what Sidney’s game is.

If I tell him that one of his kids is a murderer… what would he do with that information?

I watch a young guy slip a robe over his Paul Frank-branded jeans with the little monkey face on the back pocket.

Betty, I think. She knows something. If I can get her to tell me what it is, maybe that will be enough for Sidney.

I dig out my phone, the one I haven’t turned on since I left Uncle Yang’s place. I’m going to have to risk it to retrieve Betty’s number. I assume it’s been hacked, but I don’t really know what that means. If I turn it on, will he instantly know where I am?

If that’s one of his guys with Tiantian, then he already knows.

I turn it on, heart hammering as it boots up.

I grab a pen from my backpack and scribble the number on my palm.

Then I power off the phone and retrieve my backup. Punch in Betty’s number and text: this is ellie. you can talk to me or you can talk to the police or how about internal security? they’re looking into tiantian’s party. call me or i’ll give them your name.

A minute later she texts me back.

not safe to talk to you.

you’re not safe now, I type. look what happened to celine.

I wait for a return text. For a minute, nothing. I think maybe she isn’t going to bite.

Then: what happened?

you better come talk to me, I type back.

I’m sitting on a bench outside the hall wearing a gold Qing-dynasty robe over my jeans and T-shirt and a hat with an embroidered band, dangly beads, and a crown that’s a cloud of wispy feathers when Betty shows up.

She’s looking around and not spotting me. Which is good, because I don’t want to be spotted. I might not look Chinese, but at least I look like a tourist.

“Hey.” I lift up my hand.

She does a little double take. Lifts her own hand to her mouth and almost giggles before I guess she remembers there’s some serious shit going on here.

She approaches the bench, her fingers clasped in front of her, her feet turned slightly inward, wobbling a bit on her platform Converse sneakers. Stands in front of me. I can see the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, along the lower lids.

“You better sit down,” I tell her.

She does, on the bench next to me.

Now that she’s here, with her Ed Hardy baseball cap and skinny jeans and designer sequined T-shirt, I don’t know what to say. She looks like a kid. A little kid, on the verge of crying, her lower lip trembling. Like she knows she’s going to hear something bad, but she’s still hoping she’s wrong.

“Celine’s dead.” Because just get it over with. There’s nothing I can say that would make this news any better.

She squeezes her eyes shut and nods.

“They think it was heroin. Baifen,” I add. “Did she do drugs like that?”

Betty shakes her head, her eyes still squeezed shut. Then she says, “Maybe, sometimes. But not a lot.”

Well, that’s the way it goes with heroin, right? You don’t do it regularly, you don’t do it a lot, you encounter some good, relatively uncut shit, and you die.

“She died the night before last,” I say. “At a gallery in Caochangdi. Do you know anything about that?”

Betty gasps and chokes back a sob. Nods.

“You better tell me,” I say.

She looks around, like she’s making sure no one can hear us. There are a couple of other costumed tourists clowning around by a guardian-lion statue, taking pictures of each other. They aren’t paying any attention to us.

“Gugu and Marsh pick us up to go there,” she finally says. “Celine knows the owner. Sometimes she work there. We go because Gugu want to look at this new art. He say he want to learn about it. But he is already very tired.”

“Tired. You mean drunk?”

She hesitates and nods.

“What time?”

“Maybe ten.”

So after dinner. Yeah, Gugu was pretty drunk.

“Who else was there?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Some people. Like a little party.”

“So what happened?”

“We just… Gugu doesn’t want to stay. He is too tired. Celine and Marsh say they are having fun, so…” She sobs for real this time. “We just leave them there.”

Celine and Marsh.

She’s crying now. “I didn’t think… I didn’t think anything bad…”

“But something bad happened at Tiantian’s party. And you know about it.” Now I’m pissed off. “Come on, Betty. Don’t bullshit me.”

“I just… hear bad things,” she whispers.

What she tells me is this:

It got late. Most of the guests went home. A few men stayed. “They have girls for them,” Betty says.

“Where was this? Where in the siheyuanr?”

“I was in the front north house.”

The main house. Where the bigwigs were hanging out.

“I see a few of those men go across courtyard to that east house.”

Where Gugu was. Where I left Marsh.

“I want to leave, but I come with Gugu, and I don’t know where he is. If I can find Celine, I just leave. But I cannot find her. So I wait. Play games and watch video on my phone.”

“You were alone?”

She nods. “I think maybe I fall asleep for a while.” She squeezes her eyes shut. Shakes her head back and forth like she’s trying to shake the bad thoughts out of it.

I know how that goes.

“I hear screams,” she says, whispering again. “A girl’s screams. A man, shouting. He is angry.”

“Could you tell where it was coming from?”

“The back house, I think.”

Tiantian’s man cave.

“She keeps crying, but not so loud. She… she moans. Then I can’t hear her anymore.”

I have a sudden flash of those photos of the dead girl, of her battered, swollen face.

“Okay,” I say. “What happened next? What did you do?”

“I run,” she says. “I just run. I get to the gate of the siheyuanr, and I know if I am running, maybe the guards will stop me. So I walk.”

“And they let you out?”

“Yes.” She pauses to get a Kleenex out of her little Gucci purse. Wipes her nose. Not a country girl, no blowing her snot onto the pavement for this one.

“I just walk as fast as I can away from that place,” she says. “I get to Yonghegong, to a taxi, and then I think, Celine. I leave my friend behind. I am… terrible.”

“You were scared.”

Because I know what it’s like. I know how it is to be young and dumb and in over your head. And I’m still beating myself up for what I did.

For what I didn’t do.

“I call her,” Betty says. “She does not answer. I don’t know what to do. So…” She hangs her head. “I just go home.”

I’m sweating under the embroidered band and dangling beads and cloud of feathers of my goofy fake Qing hat. I take it off and lay it on the bench next to me.

“Did you talk to Celine after the party… about what happened?”

“Yes. She calls me. Very late, almost morning, but I am so glad to hear her voice.”

Betty’s crying again. She covers her face with her hands.

“She tells me yes. A bad thing happened. She tells me I should be very careful around the Caos.”

Now Betty’s doing a quick, nervous scan of the perimeter again. Searching for bandits.

She looks at me. “Especially Tiantian,” she says.

“Oh, well, that’s just great.” I throw up my hands. “So why are you here?”

Betty rolls her eyes like I am too impossibly stupid. “Gugu wants me to come.”

“You think if you stand by your man, he’s gonna marry you or something?”

She flinches at that. Bingo.

Anything’s possible, I guess.

“Look, I know you’re gonna do what you’re gonna do, but if I were you, I’d get out of here and I’d stay out of Beijing for a while. You don’t want to be in the middle of all this.”

“Gugu can protect me from his brother,” she says.

Here’s hoping. Assuming Gugu’s hands are clean and it’s not just Tiantian she needs to worry about.

That’s when I get one of those sudden drops in my gut, that sickening rush, because I’m the one who needs to worry, and I’ve been sitting here too long.

“Good luck with that.” I push myself to my feet, wait for my bum leg to stop spasming, just trying to breathe through it.

“Please think about what I said,” I say when I can.

She nods.

I pick up my fake Qing hat and start to walk away.

“Celine say something else.”

I stop. “What?”

“She won’t willingly let them just do this thing. She says she cause them trouble. She…” Betty ducks her head. “I don’t know how to say.”

“Tell me in Chinese.”

“It’s old-fashioned, what she says.” Betty clasps her hands together, like a schoolgirl sitting at a classroom desk, and recites: “Shanyou shanbao, eyou ebao, bushi bubao, shihou weidao.”

I remember this one.

Good will be rewarded with good, and evil with evil. If the reward is not forthcoming, then the time has not yet come.

I finish it: “Shihou yi dao, yiqie dou bao.”

When the time comes, you’ll get your reward.

“Yes.” She frowns. “But I think this is stupid.”

“Why?”

“Celine is good. She should get a good reward. But she does not.”

I’m walking as fast as I can to the exit. At least I hope that’s where I’m heading. The signs aren’t very good, and this place is huge. I’m close to the back of the complex, paralleling the high grey wall with guard towers that looks like it would encircle a Ming town. It’s close to 5:00 p.m., and I’m wondering what time they kick the tourists out. I’m not seeing anybody back here. No tourists. No film crews. No staff. It’s so quiet. That’s something you don’t get a lot of in China, silence. And it’s making me nervous.

I arrive at a metal signboard with a bunch of different destinations: ancient culture street. shaolin monks temple. ningbo cathouse.

And north gate exit. The arrow for that points in the same direction as the Shaolin Monks Temple.

The “temple” grounds are deserted, too.

They did a good job with the place, I think. Close up, I’m sure you could tell the difference, but from a small distance it looks like a typical Chinese temple complex: red walls and wooden shuttered doors, eaves painted blue and green and gold, green roof tiles. No Shaolin monks, though. No signs of life at all, except for a cawing of crows and the beating of their wings.

I walk through a gate and into a hall with painted wooden statues of gods and demons. I’ve never been too clear on which is which.

On the other side of that building is a courtyard, and at the back of that is a large towerlike pagoda on top a quadrangle of stairs. I exit the hall, doing my one-step-at-a-time routine down the nine flat steps, and head toward the pagoda.

I’m about halfway there when something tugs at my foot. I look down and see that my shoe’s untied on the bad-leg side and that my other foot’s stepping on the lace.

I prop my foot on a rock, boosting it up with an assist by locking my hands behind my thigh. Bend over and retie the shoe.

And hear an echo of footsteps.

I jerk upright, stumble a little as I step down on my bad leg, and run.

Yeah, maybe I panic. But given how bad I run, I don’t have the luxury to stop and look and see who it is.

I bolt down the path, jink left behind a giant fake iron incense burner, peek around it.

There’s a guy coming out of the first hall.

The light’s not that great, and I can’t really see much about him, just a guy, a little stocky, short hair, short work jacket, walking steadily down the stairs. Tiantian’s driver? I have no idea.

I’m not going to take a chance.

I don’t know if he’s spotted me yet. It didn’t seem like he had.

There’s a path that rises up and curves around to the left side of the pagoda, with some tree cover. The main path goes straight up the middle to the entrance.

Okay, I tell myself. Okay. Go left.

I run, Qing robe flapping.

If he’s chasing me, he’ll catch up. I need to find a crowd. I need to find the exit. Just get myself out of here.

I reach the pagoda. And see that behind the pagoda there’s a little more garden, some trees and giant rocks, and then there’s a temple wall.

The edge of the lot. No exit.

I turn to the pagoda.

At the base of the steps, I see something I don’t expect.

An entrance cut into the steps, rust-red iron gate swung open, stairs leading down. Framed like an Egyptian tomb, with a sign above saying guests stop! in English and something about no smoking in Chinese.

Well, what else can I do?

I head down.