The Finder

4

It was a good hiding place but she hadn't slept well. Every hour or so she woke as a siren flew by, or someone hollered murderously in the street below, and she found herself hotly disoriented all over again, not sure whether to hang her head out the window and look down or wait soundlessly where she lay. Who would know about the building? A few people. But who would know she knew about this building? No one. No one in the world should know, Jin Li told herself. So why am I so nervous?

The night was warm, and thus the five-story building, one of a series of former factories on West Nineteenth Street, had become aromatized by the humidified essences of mold, dust, dead flies, cardboard, and dry-rotting wood-seemingly the layered odor of time itself expiring without end. The structure and six just like it had been built in the early part of the twentieth century; successive waves of real estate speculation had passed through and around these buildings, converting most to loft apartments, offices, showrooms, fancy restaurants that invariably failed, and the like. But a few remained unrenovated, and the reasons usually had to do with structural damage to the building, either from fire or water or, more often, because the building itself was a neglected holding long entangled in a lawsuit, estate matter, or family dispute.

Alone among the seven factories was the building where Jin Li sat up now in the half dawn, thinking she'd heard something. This building was notable for the implausibility of its continued existence; the place should have collapsed long ago. Why? All five floors were crammed with heavy useless matter, the creme de la creme of junk. The top floor was filled with claw-footed iron bathtubs and pedestal sinks, many of them tagged with information explaining their origin: "Hotel Edison, 1967 renovation," and so on. The fourth floor contained engine parts not only from vintage American cars and trucks of the 1930s, '40s, '50s, and '60s but, even more obscurely, utterly impossible-to-find motorcycles from early German, French, Italian, and British companies long defunct. The weight of these parts alone should have compromised the floor joists decades earlier. On the third floor could be found close to two million pairs of women's nylon stockings, still boxed, ranging in size from "petite" to "queen." The freight elevator was forever frozen on this floor, its bearings finally burnt out. Just to empty the building, either for demolition or renovation, would have required the replacement of the elevator, a considerable and demoralizing expense. Moving downward, the second floor contained thousands of boxes marked "Property of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development/New York City Regional Offices." These lost records documented the marginally successful attempt by the federal government to house hundreds of thousands of low-income residents in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx during the economic downturn of the early 1970s. And finally, the ground floor was piled with spools of obsolete fiber-optic cable, bought when the city was rewiring itself in the speculative fever dream of the 1990s.

From time to time people asked about renting cheap office space in the building and these inquiries were fielded by the custodian, a Russian man with strange, faded Cyrillic tattoos on his knuckles who did little more than sweep up the sidewalk once a week and remove flyers advertising art-house movies and new rock bands. He handed the prospective renters copies of the keys to the steel door to the building, told them to use the stairwell, and to go in the middle of the day for the power was off and no lights worked. "And please you drop key in mailbox." But whether the key was returned was a matter of character-as was whether the Russian custodian noticed. He generally didn't, for he noticed very little in life now. He followed the rankings of his favorite European soccer teams, he drank not vodka but four bottle-inches of Sambuca each night from the same crusty glass, and if asked whether he really cared about who came to and went from the cramped and dirty building on Nineteenth Street, he would have admitted he cared not at all.

Returning to that building by way of the stairwell to the second floor, one could easily discover that Jin Li had pushed around some of the boxes of federal housing records to create a small room within them; in this dim space was all she carried with her: an inflatable mattress, a fat wad of cash, her Chinese passport, a small green suitcase containing not only her blue CorpServe uniform but also one nice cotton dress (why she'd hastily packed this, she had no idea), a bag of toiletries, a cell phone now carefully turned off, and a Styrofoam ice box. On the mattress lay Jin Li, looking at the ceiling, thinking again she had heard something downstairs.

What? Anything?

She listened. Nothing- maybe.

At least she had planned ahead, Jin Li told herself, keeping the key that the Russian had given her when she'd come looking for cheap office space for CorpServe a few months earlier. The place had been all wrong for her purposes, but its obscurity and neglect had struck her as potentially useful in other circumstances. In China nowadays buildings like this were soon demolished and someone like her brother would put up a cheap apartment building three times higher. The Russian had never asked for the key back and so she'd kept it-in her purse and in the back of her mind as a place she could hide. No one would want to rent space in a firetrap that had no electricity or heat. But still she was anxious. She could have been followed-that was possible. The men at the beach in the big trucks had followed her, after all, had been looking for her and her alone. She was sure. The Mexican girls didn't know anything. How did the men identify Jin Li? She had been so careful. Did they plan on coming back? Were they still looking for her?

And then there was her brother, Chen. As soon as she'd called from a pay phone, he jumped on the first flight he could find to New York City and started asking around for her, making things worse. Usually it took forever to get a visa to visit the United States, but Chen knew people, was owed money and favors by men and women all over Shanghai and even in Beijing. He'd panicked when she'd called him-not over her, but that his clever international criminal enterprise was endangered. "What did you do?" he'd screamed at her in their family's Mandarin dialect. "How did you fuck up?"

It was a question Jin Li couldn't quite answer, though she'd thought about it constantly. CorpServe had been carefully created by Chen with one devious purpose in mind, but in order to appear to be a conventional company it contained three divisions, two of them legitimate business units operating in the open. The first division cleaned New York City offices at conventional rates, bidding for contracts with management companies and corporate operations people. This part of the company ran daily crews in thirty-two buildings, the number naturally fluctuating as contracts were won or lost upon expiration. The crews dutifully cleaned, collected, and hauled dry waste-paper, cardboard boxes, printed matter, coffee cups, and so on-down to the service bays where the refuse was loaded and removed by one of the city's private carting companies, another distinct business so cutthroat and residually mobbed up that one entered it only at great risk and with even greater connections. It would be a good two generations before anyone with a Chinese name operated such a company in midtown Manhattan.

The second part of CorpServe, which serviced seventeen buildings, both collected dry waste and provided onsite "chain-of-custody" document destruction. The company owned nine forty-four-foot mobile units, each of which was divided into a shredding equipment area and a payload space for storage of the shredded materials. Each unit could handle up to eight thousand pounds of paper per hour and could shred not just boxes, files, paper clips, and rubber bands but also CDs, DVDs, identity cards, hard drives, even uniforms. CorpServe provided shredding as high as the level five standard, used for commercially sensitive and top secret documents, which mandated a maximum particle size of 0.8? 12 millimeters. The mobile units generated their own elec trical power, and everything was shredded and baled in one simple operation, the bales then trucked away in volume to paper mills where the paper and extraneous matter were separated by particle-weight blowers and recycled. Each mobile CorpServe shredding unit was equipped with a New York State-certified scale that weighed the material to be shredded and came with a complete video system that recorded the actual shredding. After each night's work, the CorpServe technician provided the building services manager a copy of the scale tickets and a video of the shredding. This was usually a big selling point, but in truth these tickets and videos soon piled up and were eventually shredded along with everything else. Document destruction, just like office cleaning, was an incredibly boring business. There was no tangible product except a blur of confettied paper. The customer paid to make something into nothing, literally for the creation of emptiness. The mobile shredders were loud; no one wanted to watch them for very long. On long-term contracts, client oversight eroded away then vanished. The uniformed CorpServe crews-all of them Mexican, Guatemalan, and Chinese women-unfailingly showed up on time and did their jobs. Trying to get a handhold on America, the workers generally felt lucky to be employed, spoke English poorly, and affected a submissive mien, rarely even speaking to office personnel-not out of a quest for efficiency but on the assumption that no one had anything to say to them. Which was true. Faceless, nameless, they were more or less invisible.

From an organizational viewpoint, these two CorpServe divisions were remarkably "flat"; one person ran each, supervising the work crews and schedules from the company's run-down warehouse in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Jin Li had picked this location because it was cheap and out-of-the-way yet relatively close to Manhattan. No one much bothered with the CorpServe trucks coming and going there. Another person handled the bookkeeping and payroll for the two divisions. These operations were sufficiently profitable to justify the existence of CorpServe.

But it was the third function of CorpServe that both Chen and Jin Li fixated upon. This part, which generated no organizational paper work, and indeed was never mentioned or described in writing, combined select elements of the other two. The idea was simply to steal useful information. When the cleaning division worked in offices that generated wastepaper that looked potentially valuable to Jin Li, she tried mightily to underbid the shredding contract for that building, if there was one. Sometimes she was successful and thus gained legitimate access to the stream of desired waste information. This meant that her company not only removed the information but also controlled it after removal. Then it was a matter of segregating the material that should not be shredded. Of course sometimes she was not successful in underbidding the shredding contract and no information could be removed on a regular basis. One of Chen's principles was that no nonrefuse documents be stolen from offices, a directive she agreed with. That was too risky, would draw attention if discovered. Theirs was a quiet, subtle play in which companies were paying them to remove valuable information. If there were ever a question about a particular bag of waste, why it had not been shredded, then Jin Li could just say a mistake had been made, bags had gotten mixed up. But no mistake had ever been made.

Until now, that is. What was it?

Jin Li had supervised all three operations, only occasionally appearing at one or another of the legitimate cleaning or shredding locations, but five nights a week riding with mobile shredder #6 (a lucky number for the Chinese) as it appeared at the small number of locations she wanted to plunder for information. She always wore a baggy blue CorpServe uniform, removed her makeup, tucked her hair up under a cap, and presented her company ID if asked. The security officers in the buildings either recognized her as the supervisor or knew that cleaning company staffs had a lot of turnover and didn't bother to question a diminutive Chinese woman in uniform with an ID clipped to her breast pocket. Except for the driver of #6, the other CorpServe staffers didn't know her true role. She was just the shift supervisor who sometimes removed waste herself. The promising stuff made it into the "blue bags," as they were called, and these were set aside for careful scrutiny later. If any of the cleaners seemed too interested in Jin Li's activities, Jin Li quickly praised the woman on her excellent work, shifted her to one of the legitimate cleaning operations, and gave her a marginal raise.

As she prowled the target businesses at night, Jin Li moved with light-footed efficiency, for if you clean offices every day, you know a lot about them. Typically she received plans of the floors that CorpServe cleaned and made a point always to ask if there were any sensitive elements of the job, such as a CEO who stayed late, which offices needed to be vacuumed daily because of allergies, which vacuumed less frequently, etc. All in the guise of providing excellent service, which in fact CorpServe did. Very often the response by management pinpointed exactly which office or offices were most valuable. Jin Li had learned that secretaries and assistants had better trash than their supervisors, because they made drafts of responses, copied e-mail, and so on. But that was not all! CorpServe could also provide, if asked, another service: secure, lockable plastic bins marked TO BE SHREDDED, an assistance that companies liked, since it efficiently segregated sensitive documents away from the eyes of their own not-so-trustworthy employees. Of course these bins usually contained the very best information Jin Li most wanted, or, put another way, CorpServe's clients were paying it extra money to more efficiently steal the very information they most wanted destroyed. She had keys that fit all of the different makes of these bins, and it was a matter of quickly emptying them into a bag that she would later inspect. People were amazingly sloppy with paper, especially now that everyone used computers. Companies spent enormous sums on their internal and external computer security, hiring an endless string of geniuses, wizards, and solemn soothsayers to implement every manner of state-of-the-art antihacking protocols. Paper, however, was by definition superfluous, since every document and e-mail existed somewhere on a computer. And because things were not "saved" on paper anymore, they were less likely to be "filed" away. Paper had become the temporary, disposable manifestation of the electronic file, convenient for carrying around but not worth being careful with. You could always print out another copy.

All this was true from one office to the next. Some had security procedures, but these were rarely enforced with any regularity. People in New York offices were too busy, too pressured, too ambitious to worry about their wastepaper. It was someone else's problem.

Which was also to say it was Jin Li's opportunity. She had learned to avoid certain industries and to target others. Law firms had some value, especially if they had a mergers-and-acquisitions department, a fact easy enough to determine. But the short-term value of these papers was so obvious, not to mention subject to SEC security regulations, that the law firms generally went to great lengths to destroy their paper. Publishing and media companies, by contrast, had absolutely no value. Retail banking was useless. Insurance companies were useless too, except if they had a corporate liability department, which had the potential to be a gold mine if documents revealed a company facing huge undisclosed problems, such as product lawsuits. The companies underwriting corporate bonds had some value, since they evaluated the underlying creditworthiness of the companies whose debt they peddled. Pharmaceutical companies were good, when you could find one with interesting product research, but the best offices were financial services firms, which evaluated stocks, because what she wanted most was time-perishable information that immediately affected the price of a publicly traded company-stock prices generally reacting to information faster and more dramatically than do bonds. The information had to be so good, so privileged, that the analysts, journalists, stock pickers, inside leakers, and anyone else interested didn't already have it.

The global stock markets ran on the quaint theory that they were efficient, that is, that crucial information about publicly traded stocks was available very rapidly to any interested party; the reality, of course, was different. Companies lied, cheated, inflated profits, hid debts, booked phony business, and smilingly pretended that their exalted leaders were not dying or ineffective or irrevocably insane or, most typically, widely hated by insiders. Companies "smoothed" their data to appear more steadily profitable, developed products that bombed, suffered internal wars between personalities, between divisions, between the directors and management, between management and the rank and file, between stockholders and management. Internal disagreements could be mild, festering, explosive, litigious, even potentially violent. As one of Jin Li's professors at Harbin Institute of Technology had said, no matter how large and bureaucratized, no matter how rigid and repressive, corporations were ultimately just collections of human beings, subject to everything that both afflicted and elevated them-not unlike, the professor had reminded them, the collective farms created by Mao in the 1960s which, though meant to be efficiently productive, were disasters.

So what had been Jin Li's mistake? This was the question that had haunted her since she'd run through the rainy dawn away from the shit-flooded car and the two Mexican girls sprawled out next to it. Hurrying to the parkway and flagging down a cab on its way into Manhattan. Hunched in the back clutching her purse, terrified, smelling the excrement on her clothes and skin, trying to keep her sobbing quiet. Someone must have seen what she was doing. Who? This would take some analysis. Every night she received the blue bags culled from the night operations, each bag tagged by floor and company and day. These were trucked to the building in Red Hook, where by day Jin Li and three trusted other Chinese women separated them into their respective piles, arranged by company. One night's trash was usually useless, but as the record accrued, a context was revealed. Jin Li watched divisional struggles, executives attacking each other, results exceeding expectations, projects being canceled or accelerated-everything that happened in a corporation. As conflicts heightened, or as she became more fully aware of their possibilities, she focused the paper collection on the respective desk, office, or floor. Perhaps a dozen time-lapse narratives played out continuously on paper. Often there were gaps in information and she would have to infer what had happened. She kept notebooks on each company and updated these regularly, and included newspaper stories and chat room conversations that confirmed or conflicted with the inklings revealed in the corporate garbage days or weeks earlier.

A laborious process, this sifting for flecks of gold in a stream of data, but perhaps once or twice a month Jin Li found a genuine opportunity. In the ebb and flow of possibility, there inevitably arose companies that were approaching a merger, a new product launch, a phase of "restated" earnings, or quietly confronting a government investigation. She scanned all useful documents, along with her written commentary, onto an encrypted disc that each week was sent hidden in a fat bundle of last month's computer magazines that she bought in wire-wrapped bales at three cents a pound from a New York company that was paid handsomely to falsify circulation figures for glossy national magazines. Many of these magazines had promotional computer discs bound into them, and it was a simple matter to swap her disc into a certain issue, fold over the corner of the front cover, and send the entire wire-bound bale of magazines to her brother. The Chinese authorities generally smiled on any activity that created the free transfer of valuable information from the West to China and were happy to wave the computer magazines through. Of course it was easier, faster, and cheaper to send the information by e-mail, but her brother was rightly terrified of the American government's electronic surveillance programs, which sniffed phone and Internet chatter for keywords or word patterns. And then there were the filters that the Chinese used on all incoming e-mail. The people's government went through waves of greater and lesser repression of e-mail, but it was safe to say that Chen was not so well connected that he could be sure when the periodic tightenings would take place or how good the filters were. He had seen friends arrested for merely having the word "freedom" appear in their incoming e-mail.

So better to smuggle information the old-fashioned way-physically. Each week Jin Li reserved space on an air cargo container that left JFK on Thursday night and arrived in Shanghai the next Saturday at dawn local time. Twenty-seven bales of the computer magazines, arranged in a cube, shrink-wrapped on a wooden pallet, went into the huge container. The container was off-loaded within an hour of arrival, and one of Chen's men would take possession of it. The bale containing the correct disc was always in the center of the pallet, and thus it was a simple matter to remove this bale, cut it open, and search the stack of magazines until the one with the folded-over cover was found. The plan was elegant in its simplicity. If for some reason another magazine cover had been folded over by accident, then the discs in the two magazines could easily be compared. The disc would be driven at high speed to Chen's apartment complex in one of the newest and most outrageously expensive high-rises where impoverished newcomers from the far provinces skulked around hoping to cadge errands from the smartly dressed Shanghai professionals too busy to pick up dry cleaning or polish their new cars. By Saturday morning, Chen had booted out whatever hookerish women he had entertained the night before and set to work, downloading the disc and following Jin Li's instructions as to what certain documents might reveal. He employed a small group of dedicated analysts, some of them trained by and stolen from the same large American and European venture funds and banks trying to spin money out of China, and they would collate the information against conventionally available research, sometimes deriving perception where she had not but mostly corroborating her judgment.

By Sunday evening Chen had selected the strategies and supporting documents that he found most useful, and on Monday, while seated in a private dining room in one of China's most elite banks, he would explain to a small group of investors what he had discovered. Sipping their turtle soup, they listened intently, nodding solemnly if the opportunity appeared especially promising. Chen was transparently motivated by a mix of greed, hedonism, and national pride; older men, especially those who had lived in the time of Mao, found him easy to read, since the satisfaction of all his desires required outward behavior. Every week or so Chen had a nugget to display, and when he didn't, the group reprised the week's news about the companies they followed, speculated upon, or manipulated. If they wanted to take action, their position on the globe helped them. Most American stocks traded thinly in the off-hours when the European and New York stock exchanges were closed, and it was possible to quietly take a sizable position before the main action began hours later on the other side of the globe. The fact that Chen was mining data directly out of New York City appealed to the nationalistic aggressions of his Chinese investors. To a man, they hated America, or said they did.

A most agreeable business, cheating the rule of law and the play-book of Western capitalism.

Chen and his coconspirators knew what they were doing, too. China had first allowed the public trading of stock in the nineties, and so the older men all had years of experience feeling the whims and drift and anxieties of markets. They had reached a level of intuitiveness that rested upon having had fortunes lost and larger ones won. In recent years stock market mania had reached deep into the Chinese middle class, and the opportunities to pump and dump stocks were now routine. The government's warnings and attempted restrictions on the frenzied trading of stocks had only served to embolden that same behavior, for the Chinese people knew that good times were often followed by bad. Life was luck-but you didn't wait around to be lucky, not when a thousand others wanted what you had. Thus did desire in the many create opportunity for the few. Very often Chen and his group determined how to first make money off a stock against the Western markets and then how to make money off it again, a second time, within the Chinese markets. Together they discussed the bets to be made, very often finishing the discussion with the ceremonial ringing of a small brass gong, a sound that reaffirmed their Chinese culture and mocked the opening bell that would start the trading on Wall Street hours hence.

After this moment, a great feast followed in one of the city's private clubs, at which drinking was accompanied by the attentions of the dozen or so girls brought in not only to help the men forget their anxieties about having just committed millions of hard-currency dollars but also to confirm their impression of themselves as masters of all they surveyed. There was one girl particularly skilled at manipulating the back of her throat and her tongue simultaneously. Jin Li had heard her brother discuss with great excitement this seemingly rare and remarkable ability. The girl, who had arrived in Shanghai penniless but quickly achieved significant wealth, was not particularly beautiful, but her services were highly sought after and the men had been known to bid drunkenly against each other until one man persevered past any reasonable limit and purchased his pleasure. The lucky fellow then retired to a private room with his consort.

Pigs, thought Jin Li, fucking pigs, all of them. And here I am, over in America, helping them do such things, and in trouble. She could hate herself for it-almost, except that, yes, she had agreed to her brother's proposition and had even explained to him how she was the best person to carry it off. She would do it for their family, she'd said, for their parents. And, to be fair, Chen had risked a great deal. As the Mexicans said, he had huevos, eggs-balls. The start-up money for the project required nearly $6 million and her brother had gone to a series of investors, describing the scheme-nothing on paper, of course-using terms either oblique or specific, depending on his audience. Yet the scheme had been quickly funded. So quickly, in fact, that Chen had worried that someone else might steal the idea and set up a competing operation-if not in New York, then in London or Paris or any other Western city where the Chinese did a great deal of business.

But that was then and this was now. Which company had gotten wind of what she was doing? Which company had sent the two men and the big truck after her? Why had they also killed the two Mexican girls? I am partly responsible, she thought sadly, I endangered them. Who had claimed their bodies? Who would tell their families in Mexico? They would want to know why this had happened.

Could she have expected the attack? There were no complaints on file, and the accounts receivable were more or less up to date. Her company had been aggressively stealing information from eight firms in the last six months, and she could easily check the recent stock prices of them, but that would tell her almost nothing. Her brother and his cronies could be building a conventional position in a stock, they could have bet that it would fall, or they could be dealing with a company's competitors or suppliers. They could even be using her good information to sell disinformation. The one thing she did know was that they preferred smaller American companies for which the trading volume was low enough that they could move the price with their buying or selling.

The CorpServe ploy had been in business for four years now, and in that time it was fair to say they had been spectacularly successful. Her brother had purchased three large buildings in Shanghai, built himself a new house, bought an apartment in Hong Kong for one of his mistresses, and started getting his face massaged each morning.

And had Chen given Jin Li much in return? No, not enough. A good salary, by New York standards. By Chinese standards, a fortune. But no security. The opposite of security, even as he'd gotten rich. She was the one who could be prosecuted in the United States, thrown into federal prison or deported. The one the men had been after. Her brother needed to find her now, she knew, because his whole empire ran on the stream of information he received from her. No one else at CorpServe knew what to do, what to look for. No one else could be trusted to be loyal. Chen and his investors had taken huge speculative positions that required that Jin Li's hands and eyes be connected to their minds-to their money. A discarded scrap of paper on one side of the globe could conceivably be convertible to millions of dollars on the other side. Chen could not afford to lose touch with her, lose control of CorpServe, or have her disappearance known about. Her brother, she knew, was desperate now.

But maybe she didn't want him to find her. And maybe he would figure that out. Chen would call Mr. Ling, an old Hong Kong lawyer who still worked in a little office above Canal Street in Chinatown, and Mr. Ling would figure a way to get into Jin Li's apartment and find her bank statements, credit card activity. Well, let them do that. She had plenty of cash set Wait! A noise?

She crept to the window, slid it open higher. Did she dare look out? Someone gazing up would easily see her.

She hazarded a peek out of the window.

Nothing.

She glanced at her cell phone. She wanted to turn it on but knew not to. Chen would have called, just to see if she picked up. To talk, yes, but to continue their ongoing argument. That he had sex with Russian and Eastern European prostitutes meant nothing to him, but the fact that Jin Li preferred not to sleep with Chinese men was an insult to him. Why are Chinese men no good for you? he had screamed. She didn't have an answer. It was no one particular thing. She liked the whiskers on American and German men, she admitted it. She liked how they were taller and heavier than most Chinese men. You have a colonial mentality, her brother said, in your head. It is deep in your head, like one hundred years ago. Can you not see that? Her answer to her brother: Fuck you, you do not understand women. Not at all. She liked some of the American men and the European men because they did not know her Chineseness. They knew she was Chinese but that was all. When she said the word "father" or "mother" in English to them they did not know what she meant. They knew what the words meant in their languages but not hers. Their language did not have her pain in it, her heaviness. A strange thing, admittedly. I have a Chinese part of me and I have a me part of me, she told herself.

Was this why she liked Ray? Yes, among other reasons. He was like her in some ways, secretive and quiet. Most of the American men she'd dated wanted her to get to know them as soon as possible, as if that was a great honor they were bestowing. Not Ray. He spoke but somehow stayed reserved. He was "reticent," one of her newer vocabulary words. They had fun, walking down Broadway at night, going out for dinner. He knew the city; it was where he'd been born. She often had the feeling he was looking at the individual buildings but he never said why. Inspecting them somehow. Often they took a drive in his red pickup truck. She might have left a pair of yellow tennis shoes in the cab, she remembered sadly. She found the big scar on Ray's belly interesting, its little mountain ranges of swirling tissue, the squarish skin grafts like fields below. Strangely beautiful to her, though she would never say that. Because he wouldn't believe her. She knew that he had traveled a lot. She had poked through his papers and found his passport and seen the stamps from China, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sudan, Thailand, lots of countries. She noticed how good he was with chopsticks. Not careful with them, but bringing the bowl close to his mouth and flinging the food into his mouth like a peasant.

But what else did she know about him? Even less than he knew about her. He lived with his father in Brooklyn, spent some time overseeing his father's rental houses. Caring for him until he died, but also waiting for something, waiting to be called away. Never talked about his work, either. She'd asked once, but he'd just smiled and shaken his head softly. But he wasn't "morose"-another vocabulary word-he was energetic and fun. He read a lot, she saw. Which she liked. Mostly philosophy and history, topics that didn't much interest her, though the fact that they interested him intrigued her. He had a physical regimen that he performed each day, like the old Chinese ladies exercising on the flat roofs of the apartment buildings in their cities, except tougher. He'd hung a long rope out of his father's top window, secured it, and then climbed straight up from the garden below to the window, feet flat against the clapboard siding, then rappelled downward and done it again. Five times a day he did this. No belts or harnesses, no rock climber's equipment. Fearless, and maybe stupid, yes, but she had been impressed. All arm strength. This explained his arms and shoulders. Rock hard, even a little scary. But he wore loose shirts, never showed himself off. How could a man be so strong like that? And more to the point, why? What dangerous exploit was he preparing himself for?

Jin Li had her suspicions but no answers. The closest she had come to learning had been a few weeks earlier, right before she'd broken it off. They had been walking along Fifth Avenue after eating when a fire truck had raced by. Like most New Yorkers, Jin Li had become inured to the sound of fire truck's sirens, seeing them as a noisy irritation as they passed. "Goddamned things," she'd muttered, then turned to Ray.

He'd looked at her, saying nothing, eyes cold.

"What?"

But he didn't answer. Stood there rigid, as if bracing for an attack. His teeth were set against each other, his eyes unblinking, feet spread apart. An instinctual response. She'd said something he found ignorant, and she sensed that whatever had happened to him-the scar, the unwillingness to say why he'd drifted around the third world for years-related to this very moment. She felt him capable of violence.

"Ray? What is it?"

He stared at her, traveling great distances in his mind.

"Don't look at me like that. Please!"

Then his face eased, blue eyes warm again. Ray had nodded to himself, the emotions put back in the safe place in his head where they'd been, and took a step along the sidewalk with her, as if the moment had never happened. But it had. She had seen into him. Finally, she knew that Ray A noise! This time for certain! A door opening downstairs.

She slipped over to the window again, looked out. Two Chinese men were standing on the street below, waiting.

Now she heard noises in the stairwell. Two sets of feet stomping upward. They passed her floor and continued higher. Searching from the top, she thought.

Jin Li gathered her small number of things into a pile, pushed a dozen boxes around, and created a tiny hiding hole within the expanse of crumbling cardboard. Here she squatted down into a cannonball position and waited, the smell of dry-rotted paper in her nose.

She did not have to wait long. The two men pushed through the door, the old floorboards creaking under their weight. The Russian custodian, from his voice. And another man, whom she watched through a crack between boxes. Another Chinese man. With a big bandage taped on the end of his nose.

"It is very big room," said the Russian. "Many boxes."

The Chinese man did not answer. She could no longer see him but she could hear him walking heavily along the floor. She smelled a cigarette and assumed the Russian was waiting while the other man finished his inspection. But then she noticed that the Russian had moved to the window behind her. She held her breath and twisted her head around. The Russian was casually sliding the window shut, his tattooed fingers gripping the frame. She'd forgotten to close it! She watched his face. A grimness there. The window was the old kind with iron sash weights that rattled in their tracks, but the man was deliberate and slow, easing the window down with minimal noise, his mouth pressed tight as if trying to hold its sound within him. When he was done, he let his hands drop to his sides. But they opened and closed and opened again expectantly, each hairy finger marked with a bluish spider of ink. Then he stepped forward quickly, making it appear that he had been standing elsewhere.

He knows, Jin Li realized, he knows I'm here.