The Finder

7

The Russian was coming back for her, climbing the stairs with a slow, ominous tread, and he pushed open the door that led to the room full of boxes. He carried a paper bag with him. Jin Li had moved her small bundle of things to another part of the second floor, far from the window, in case he came looking. And now she was glad she'd done that. She watched him through a crack in the wall of boxes. He was in his fifties with slicked-back hair and the strange tattoos on his hands. She didn't like the tattoos; they looked like bugs. He hoisted his pants and looked about.

"Yes, I know you are in here, Chinese girl," he called. "I know you are hiding. I know you understand English, all these things I say."

The Russian went directly to the spot where she'd been before, inspecting the boxes carefully. He stopped, bent over, and picked up something. "You left something, Chinese girl," he called. He seemed to be holding something between his fingers, but she could not see what it was from across the room. "I have it right here," he called tauntingly. "You left long very nice black hair."

Instinctively she touched her head, as if to feel the hair's absence.

"I like this hair," called the Russian. "It is beautiful thing. But not as beautiful as you."

These words sent a ripple of dread through Jin Li's stomach.

"You see, I remember you, Chinese girl. I remember when you looked at this building. Maybe something like four months ago. You were wearing fancy clothes and shoes. Big businesswoman clothes. You never give back key. I know that. For most people, okay. But I notice this thing. Of course I do! I notice it because never has pretty Chinese lady come to look at building. Now I know you are here and I know those men are look for you. They told me the place where they stay."

He sat on one of the boxes and lit a cigarette. "I think you need to talk to me. Those men will pay me to tell them you are here. They told me one thousand dollars if I tell them you are here. But they look like bad men to me. And you are pretty girl." He smoked contemplatively, holding the butt up as he spoke, as if he were speaking to the cigarette itself. "Why do they want to find you? There seems to be so much pressures with this Chinese man with the funny tape on his nose, you know? Why are they look for you? I ask myself this interesting question. So I think maybe you want to talk to me a little bit. Talk to lonely Russian man. Russian and Chinese people, it is good thing. I am kind Russian man, you will see." He opened his bag. "There is juice and bagels and apples in here," he said, setting down the bag. "This is good for energy. Help you think a lot. I want you to think about being friendly to lonely Russian man. If you are friendly to me just only one time, then I will tell Chinese man you are gone, you not here. This is good deal for you, I think. I think maybe you liked me a little bit before and so you will think yes, maybe this is good deal. Just one time. There is good mattress downstairs, I put blanket. I am going to come back in a little while, maybe one hour. This time I will lock the door downstairs. You cannot get out now."

She listened to the Russian leave the room, his heavy footsteps making the warped old boards creak. Did she dare to come out? Maybe he was waiting behind the door! How did he know she was hungry? Then she crept over and inspected the bag.

Apples, in a bag. Smelled good. Delicious. And yet the worst thing, too, the saddest thing…

She had come such a long way, so far that she no longer remembered every step of the path, dared not think of the distances. Born in the arid plain, on her parents' farm. They did not have running water, only a town pump. Her father had grown up on the farm, never liking it. And he wasn't much of a farmer, either. The hogs got strange diseases that made their noses drip. Her grandfather was allowed to have three apple trees behind the barn. These he fertilized with chicken droppings he gathered from the road with a shovel. Her father had borrowed money from the town council and then had struck off for Shanghai and sold mealworms in the bird market for three years before sending for her mother. Then, a year later, after her mother had prospered selling mealworms and her father had built a little business hauling bamboo scaffolding from one building site to another, they sent for her and Chen. Her grandmother had wept and taken to her bed, saying she had been abandoned by everyone and it was time for her to join her ancestors. Her grandfather, whom she loved more than anyone, ever, more than anyone in the past and anyone she would ever love in the future (except for her children, of course-oh, how she hoped she'd have children someday), had taken Jin Li and Chen in the wagon down to the train station with a little sack full of his own apples, rice balls, and dried pork. He explained that they would be taking a very long train trip. Almost three days. He gave Chen some money-a handful of old bills-and told him that he would have to buy them water and sweets during the trip. Then her grandfather asked her brother to check to see if the train was coming, and when he ran excitedly to look, her grandfather showed her the new bills in his hand. Take off your shoe and sock, quick, he said, and he slipped the bills into her sock and pulled it back on. Do not let older brother know you have this money, he instructed gravely, or he will take it and lose it. I gave him the old bills for water and sweets. Give this new money to mother. If brother loses all his money and you need money, take only one bill out of your sock and tell him you found it. Do you understand? her grandfather asked, the skin folded over his old eyes. Yes, she said, eager to please him, anxious he know that she would do anything he asked of her. This is all the money that I have saved in my life. It is for you and for older brother and for kind mother. She nodded eagerly but did not want to leave him now. She felt suddenly scared. She saw what was happening. You are my little bird and you will fly far, he said, making a little cough. I will never see you again but you will always be my little bird. Then the train came and they rode hard-class on a bench seat for fifty-six hours. It was crowded and the people smelled. The train stopped and you had to go squat in the weeds. Her brother spent all the old bills on sweets and gum and water, but she did not pull out any of the new bills her grandfather had given her. Years later, when she had been a merit student at Harbin Institute of Technology, she had come to understand that each bite of the apples in the bag was the last she'd had of her grandfather. She'd never seen him again. And certainly he was dead now, it had been so long. That was the saddest thing and yet she would never cry about it, ever. She and her brother had lived in a little apartment in a crumbling block in old Shanghai, one room with mold on the window side, long since bulldozed to make way for an elevated highway now clogged with new cars, trucks, city buses. Her mother found work in a factory where she affixed a tiny piece of plastic lettering to the front of DVD players all day long. She used an electric hot-glue gun and had to do eighteen thousand pieces per twelve-hour day if she wanted to be paid at the end of the six-day workweek. About one piece every two seconds. Within two years, as Jin Li and her brother went to school, her father built up the scaffolding company enough that he was able to buy a small plot of ground and build a three-story apartment house. That same year Jin Li's mother became so tired and sick from the long hours of work and the smell of the glue that she fell asleep as she worked and the hot-glue gun shot a long wad of burning adhesive onto her cheek. She was fired from the factory and came home, and Jin Li took care of her. The wound became infected and a doctor they paid came and cut out the infection and cauterized it. It healed but left a jagged, rippling scar and nerve damage that made one side of her mother's mouth droop. Her mother retreated into their house and would not come out. Jin Li and her brother did the shopping. Her father chose to sleep in the fold-out bed in the front room and rarely spoke to her mother. He no longer let her cut his hair and meanwhile began to wear better clothes. Soon her father was dining out with minor government officials, sometimes taking Jin Li's brother to these meetings, where he began to learn the ways of business as it was done in the new China. Meanwhile, Jin Li learned English in school and studied as hard as she could, without passion, she saw now, but as a way of escaping-escaping something, everything. When she was fifteen she received the third highest score on the school tests in all of Shanghai District and that included the children of rich parents who had tutors who knew whom to pay to get a copy of the previous year's test. Her best score was in chemistry. Her mother came to the ceremony, but her father did not. Then came her proudest day: she was admitted to Harbin Institute of Technology, one of the finest universities in all of China, specializing in astronautics, mechatronics and automation, hot-working technology, communication and electronic systems, physical electronics, and optronics. Her team built the first plasma immersion ion implantation equipment in China! But in her third year her professors encouraged her to study American capitalism and information technology. We might need you for something different, Jin Li, they said. And of course her father and now her brother had been behind this, with his government connections. They wanted to use her to make money. Her English, her good looks, her ability to mix. Sometimes we send special people to work in America, they said. Very secret. So she studied American corporations, she read the history of New York City, she translated old copies of Time magazine, and she listened to radio broadcasts about traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Abraham Lincoln Tunnel. She read a funny, old-fashioned novel about New York called Bright Lights, Big City that made no sense to her. She learned about taxis and subways and the Chrysler Building and why Greenwich Village was famous. And then How exciting it had been to come to America! But so strange. With every passing day, every week, she had felt herself changing in ways she did not understand. America was much different from what she'd expected. People were so… so free. They had the freeness in them. She hated them at first, thought them foolish and weak. But then a few years went by. She began to make a lot of money-what Americans called "big money"-for her brother and his fellow pig-men investors. The government supervisor from the consulate who was supposed to check on her every two months seemed less interested in checking up on her. China was changing rapidly, and yet she was not supposed to return. I am so dislocated, Jin Li thought, so "disjointed"-another vocabulary term that maybe wasn't quite correct. I am not in my country, I am not in my own self. She read the newspapers relentlessly, finding the New York Post and Daily News easy enough, and then after a year moving on to the New York Times. Always she was careful, especially on the phone. She knew about the American government computers searching for information, listening to phone calls, seeking word patterns, filtering through e-mails and search strings, linking hundreds of variables to hundreds of other variables. That was cutting-edge, major league. Although China's population was much bigger than America's, and Shanghai much larger than New York, she understood financial scale better now, after sifting through all those pieces of corporate trash. The American companies were so large! They operated all over the world! How tiny was her brother's enterprise! So small it should not be noticed. But someone had noticed. Who?

Now she heard shoes on the steps. The Russian, coming back, as he'd promised! She pulled her most precious items into the small green suitcase, as well as the bag of apples, and darted out the fire door and up the stairs. Third floor, fourth floor, fifth.

"Chinese girl!" came the Russian's voice behind her, this time deeper, with more of a breathy, slurry growl in it. "I know you are there on stairs, heh, I can hear you."

Jin Li reached the top of the steps. He was coming up behind her, his footsteps heavy but determined, his rising cigarette smoke reaching her first.

I am not scared of him, she decided, not very much.

"Chinese girl," came the voice, clearly drunk, "I am going to give you very good excellent Russian fucking." His wheezy cackling echoed in the stairwell. "I am going to give you good old Soviet… going upstairs, heh? Okay. I go faster."

She pushed open the door to the fifth floor and hurried around and through the iron bathtubs and pedestal sinks. Thousands of white people had washed themselves in these tubs and sinks, all of them now no doubt long dead. A room of naked ghosts soaping their crotches. She was looking for the wooden ladder that led to the roof hatch, and she found it, climbing easily, suitcase in one hand.

"Chinese girl, now is time you will have very good sex with me, heh," came the boozy, excited voice, confident of its own intentions, eager for satisfaction. "I am excellent at good fucking, you like to fuck, I can see it in your eyes and the Chinese man say you like to fuck white men, so now I will-"

The roof hatch had a blue wooden door kept shut with a heavy steel padlock. But the lock was held by old screws in boards that had been rained and snowed upon for almost one hundred years. And anyway, Jin Li, honor graduate of Harbin Institute of Technology, had quite cleverly pulled out those screws the night before, using the hard edge of her nail clippers, while making her silent investigations through the building. Now she pushed against the blue boards with her fingertips and the door sailed open, caught by an evening wind that carved over the uneven flat tops of the connected buildings. In an instant she was out on the tar-papered roof, lifting her dress as she scampered past the old brick chimneys, many crookedly bent as if they'd melted ever so slowly over the many decades. The sky was not quite dark yet, and she could see where to quickly place her feet, where to avoid the angled black vent pipes that jutted up like elongated metallic mushrooms as well as the other rooftop clutter of telephone wires, satellite TV dishes, rusted cans of roof cement. By the time the Russian man lurched into the open doorway of his roof hatch, Jin Li was many buildings away, hiding behind a chimney with her little green suitcase and bag of apples. She breathed easily, even feeling a bit of defiant triumph, dark eyes flashing, but she knew that he would tell Chen about her now, which was also to say that she was in more danger than ever.